Council of Vienne

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Council of Vienne
Date	1311-1312
Accepted by	Catholicism
Previous council	Second Council of Lyons
Next council	Council of Constance
Convoked by	Pope Clement V
Presided by	Pope Clement V
Attendance	20 cardinals, 122 bishops, 38 abbots (several more were barred by Philip IV of France)
Topics of discussion	Knights Templar
Documents and statements	Knights Templar disbanded, King Philip absolved of actions against Pope Boniface VIII, crusade declared (but never carried out)
Chronological list of Ecumenical councils

The Council of Vienne was the Fifteenth Ecumenical Council that met between 1311 and 1312 in Vienne. Its principal act was to withdraw papal support for the Knights Templar on the instigation of the King of France, Philip IV.

1 Background
2 Calling of the Council
3 The decisions taken
4 External links

[edit] Background

The Knghts Templar were founded after the First Crusade of 1096 to ensure the safety of European pilgrims to Jerusalem. In the following centuries the order grew in power and wealth. In the early 1300s, Philip IV of France needed money urgently to continue his war with England and so he accused the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques De Molay, of corruption. In 1307 Philip had all French Templars arrested, charged with heresies, and tortured by the French authorities until they allegedly confessed. This action released Philip from his obligation to repay loans from the Templars and allowed him to confiscate the Templar's assets in France.

The Pope, Clement V, was under the control of Philip. The Pope's predecessor, Boniface VIII, had claimed supremacy over Philip and had excommunicated him when Philip disagreed. However Boniface was seized at Anagni by a party of horsemen under the command of Philip's men. Though he was later released, the Pope died shortly after. Boniface's successor, Pope Clement, thereafter followed Philip's directions. Although ecumenical councils in the Catholic Church are summoned by the Pope, the Council of Vienne was in reality convened at Philip's behest to disband the Templars elsewhere.

[edit] Calling of the Council

Pope Clement V caused the council to meet by issuing a bull called Regnans in coelis on August 12, 1308. The city chosen was Vienne which is on the Rhône River and at the time was outside the direct control of Philip IV. The neutral setting was intended to give the impression of independent action.

The main item on agenda of council not only cited the Order of Knights Templar itself, but also "its lands", which indicated that further seizures of property were proposed. However the agenda also invited archbishops and prelates to bring proposals for improvements in the life of the Church.

Special notice were sent to the Templars directing them to send suitable defensores (defenders) to the council. The Grand Master Jacques de Molay and others had also been commanded to appear in person. However Molay was already imprisoned in Paris and trials of other Templars were already in progress. This delayed the opening of the council which finally convened in 16 October 1311. The attendees consisted of twenty cardinals, four patriarchs, about one hundred archbishops and bishops, plus several abbots and priors.

[edit] The decisions taken

The acts of the Council have disappeared, with the exceptions of a fragment in a manuscript in the National Library in Paris, and of the financial documents of the Templars that were requisitioned. The work of the Council was not done in plenary session, but a commission was appointed to examine these official records concerning the order, with a smaller committee of archbishops and bishops presided over by the Archbishop of Aquileia, which was to examine exhaustively the official records and the abstracts. The pope and the cardinals negotiated with the members of this commission respecting the matter. A commission of cardinals was also appointed in order to investigate grievances and proposals advanced on the subject of church reform.

A majority of the cardinals and nearly all the members of the commission were of the opinion that the Order of Knights Templar should be granted the right to defend itself, and that no proof collected up to then was sufficient to condemn the order of the heresy of which it was accused by Philip's ministry, without straining Canon law. The discussion of Knights Templar was then put in abeyance. The topic changed to the need for an expedition to the Holy Land and about the reform of ecclesiastical morals. The delegates of the King of Aragon wanted the city of Granada to be attacked to attack the Muslim's on the flank; others wanted a crusade to the east only.

In February 1312 envoys from the Philip IV negotiated with the Pope without consulting the Council, and Philip held an assembly in Lyon to put further pressure on the Pope and the Council. Philip IV went Vienne on 20 March. Clement was forced to adopt the expedient of suppressing the Order of Knights Templar, not by legal method (de jure), but on the grounds of the general welfare of the Church and by Apostolic ordinance (per modum provisionis seu ordinationis apostolicae). The Pope gave to the commission of cardinals for approval the bull to suppress the Templars in Vox in excelso dated 22 March 1312)

This bull was approved by the Council on 3 April 1312 and the Pope announced a future crusade. The bulls, Ad providam of 2 May and Nuper in concilio of 16 May confiscated Templar property. The fate of the Templars themselves was decided by the bull Considerantes of 6 May. In the bulls Licet dudum (18 Dec. 1312), Dudum in generali concilio (31 Dec. 1312) and Licet pridem (13 Jan. 1313) Clement V dealt with further aspects of the Templars' property.

In return Philip IV dropped the threatened charges of heresy against the late Pope Boniface VIII. Nevertheless, an earlier decree was renewed, whereby the King of France was absolved from all responsibility for whatever he had done against Boniface, though the notorious "Outrage" at Anagni was never actually mentioned.

At the third and final formal session, held May 6, a letter from the King of France was read aloud, in which he promised to take up the cross, together with his sons and large numbers of the nobility, and to begin the Crusade within six years. If he should die before this time his eldest son would undertake the expedition. The usual reaction to such a declaration was to lay a church tithe: the tax was levied throughout Christendom for six years for this purpose, but in France the revenues drawn from the six years of tithe were held by the king, who in fact used the funds to wage war against the Christians of Flanders. The Crusade never took place.

The written suggestions for discussion by the council as to the reform of the Church, did not aim to improve of morals, but instead tried to specify what constituted "poverty" for the clergy and to protect the Church's independence of action (an urgent question, in the circumstances). These matters were also dealt with in the third session of the Council by the approval of an unknown number of draft constitutions. These were revised and further constitutions were added after the Council had ended, but they were not finalised until after Pope Clement's death in 1314. They were published in 1317 by Clement's successor John XXII as the collection of canon law called the "Clementines".

Giovanni Villani discussed the Council of Vienne in his Chronicles, IX, XXII.