Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/519

Rh all previous monastic institutions. Until now the monk had sought cloistral solitude in order to escape from the world, and through penance and prayer and contemplation to work out his own salvation. In the new orders, the monk was to give himself wholly to the work of securing the salvation of others.

Again, the orders were also as orders to renounce all earthly possessions, and, " espousing Poverty as a bride," to rely entirely for support upon the alms of the pious. Hitherto, while the individual members of a monastic order must affect extreme poverty, the house or fraternity might possess any amount of communal wealth.

The new fraternities grew and spread with marvellous rapidity, and in less than a generation they quite overshadowed all of the old monastic orders of the Church. The Popes conferred many and special privileges upon them, and they in turn became the staunchest friends and supporters of the Roman See. They were to the Papacy of the thirteenth century what the later order of the Jesuits was to the Roman Church of the seventeenth (see p. 528).

Removal of the Papal Seat to Avignon (1309).—Having now noticed some of the most prominent circumstances and incidents that marked the gradual advance of the bishops of Rome to almost universal political and ecclesiastical sovereignty, we shall next direct attention to some of the chief events that marked the decline of their temporal power, and prepared the way for the rejection, at a later date, by a large part of Christendom, of their spiritual authority.

One of the severest blows given both the temporal and the spiritual authority of the Popes was the removal, in 1309, through the influence of the French king, Philip the Fair, of the papal chair from Rome to Avignon, in Provence, near the frontier of France. Here it remained for a space of about seventy years, an era known in Church history as the Babylonian Captivity. While it was established here, all the Popes were French, and of course all their policies were shaped and controlled by the French kings. "In