Clement V.

Avignon then became in truth a second Rome. John XXII. and Clement
VI. anointed her queen of luxury. The manners and customs of the
times made her queen of debauchery and indulgence. In place of
her towers, razed by Romain de Saint-Angelo, Hernandez de Heredi,
grand master of Saint-Jean of Jerusalem, girdled her with a belt
of walls. She possessed dissolute monks, who transformed the
blessed precincts of her convents into places of debauchery and
licentiousness; her beautiful courtesans tore the diamonds from
the tiara to make of them bracelets and necklaces; and finally
she possessed the echoes of Vaucluse, which wafted the melodious
strains of Petrarch's songs to her.

This lasted until King Charles V., who was a virtuous and pious
prince, having resolved to put an end to the scandal, sent the
Marechal de Boucicaut to drive out the anti-pope, Benedict XIII.,
from Avignon. But at sight of the soldiers of the King of France
the latter remembered that before being pope under the name of
Benedict XIII. he had been captain under the name of Pierre de
Luna. For five months he defended himself, pointing his engines
of war with his own hands from the heights of the chateau walls,
engines otherwise far more murderous than his pontifical bolts. At
last forced to flee, he left the city by a postern, after having
ruined a hundred houses and killed four thousand Avignonese, and
fled to Spain, where the King of Aragon offered him sanctuary.

There each morning, from the summit of a tower, assisted by the
two priests who constituted his sacred college, he blessed the
whole world, which was none the better for it, and excommunicated