Palais des Papes

The Palais des Papes in Avignon is the largest Gothic palace in the world — not by height but by volume: the building's 15,000 square metres of interior space, distributed across nine towers, multiple great halls, chapels, and residential apartments, make it the most substantial Gothic secular structure ever completed, and one of the defining architectural achievements of 14th-century Europe. It is also among the most geographically surprising: a building of this scale, erected at enormous expense over four decades of continuous construction, sits not in Rome or Paris but in Avignon, a market town on the Rhône that found itself, between 1309 and 1377, the seat of the most powerful institution in Europe.

The circumstances of the Avignon papacy — what the Italian poet Petrarch famously called the 'Babylonian Captivity of the Church' — began with the election of Clement V in 1305. A French pope elected amid the bitter conflict between the papacy and the French crown that had culminated in the arrest and humiliation of Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303, Clement preferred to remain in France rather than return to Rome's violent factional politics. The papacy settled in Avignon, then technically in the territory of the Kingdom of Arles (a papal fief, not directly under French sovereignty), and seven consecutive popes would rule from here over seven decades. The Avignon period produced not only this palace but much of the administrative structure of the modern Catholic Church: a centralised bureaucracy, a system of papal taxation, a college of cardinals that became a major force in European politics, and a tradition of papal engagement in secular governance that shaped European power structures for two centuries.

The palace was built in two clearly distinct phases. The Old Palace (Palais Vieux) was constructed by Pope Benedict XII between 1334 and 1342: a severe, almost military building in the Cistercian style, reflecting Benedict's own background as a Cistercian monk trained at Fontfroide Abbey. High blank walls, minimal ornament, functional towers, and a cloister of stark geometric elegance characterise his contribution. Benedict's building ethic was explicitly anti-luxurious. The New Palace (Palais Neuf), built by his successor Clement VI between 1342 and 1352, embodies a completely different papal sensibility. Clement (a Benedictine of French aristocratic background who reportedly said that his predecessors had not known how to be pope) spent lavishly, importing the Italian master Matteo Giovannetti from Viterbo to paint the palace's chapels and private apartments with fresco cycles that blend Italian influence with the local Avignon tradition. The contrast between the Old and New Palaces — visible in a single building — is one of the most readable architectural character debates in any medieval structure.

The frescoes are the palace's other major revelation. The Chapel of St. Martial retains the most complete cycle: a narrative presentation of the life of St. Martial with a compositional fluency and expressive range that was innovative for its date. The private apartments preserve fragments of a secular cycle — hunting and fishing scenes, deer in woodland, songbirds — that are strikingly unlike the religious iconography dominating most papal interiors and suggest a domestic sensibility quite different from Clement's public image. The whitewashing of the frescoes by the French army during the Revolutionary period paradoxically protected portions of what lay beneath; restoration since the 1960s has recovered these fragments, and the ongoing conservation work is still revealing new areas.

The palace's post-papal history is a story of successive indignities and recoveries. After Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome in 1377, Avignon became the seat of the 'Avignon Obedience' during the Great Western Schism (1378–1417), when antipopes sponsored by France and other powers contested the legitimate papacy. The last antipope, Benedict XIII (Pope Luna), fled in 1403. Avignon was formally ceded to France in 1791 during the Revolution; the palace was stripped of its furnishings, whitewashed, and converted into a military barracks and prison — a use that continued until 1906. The building that emerged from a century of military occupation was architecturally intact but artistically denuded. The restoration and museumification since 1906 has been one of the major French heritage projects of the 20th century, and the palace's UNESCO inscription in 1995 recognised both the building and the documentary heritage of the Avignon papal period.

The GYG guided walking tour (t53117, 4.8★, 234 reviews, Certified by GetYourGuide, ~$79, 3.5 hours) covers Avignon's historic centre on foot with an expert guide and includes priority entry to the Palais des Papes with approximately 2 hours of guided access inside, plus a glass of Côtes du Rhône wine at the end. The guide provides the construction sequence, political context, and fresco interpretation that a self-guided audioguide visit, while competent, does not fully supply. The audioguide included in basic entry (from €12) is available in multiple languages and is professionally produced — but the building is complex enough, and the political history behind it layered enough, that guided context repays the additional cost.