Avignon was near enough to France to claim her king’s protection, but far enough outside her boundaries to evade obedience to her laws. It stood in the County of Provence, part of the French estates of the Angevin House of Naples, but during her exile Joanna I, penniless and in need of papal support, was induced to sell the city, and it remained an independent possession of the Holy See until the eighteenth century. From the immediate advantages caused by the ‘Babylonish Captivity’, as these years of papal residence in Avignon were called, we turn to the ultimate disadvantages, and these were serious. Inevitably there was a lowering of papal prestige in the eyes of Europe. In Rome, that since classic times had been the recognized capital of the Western world, the Pope had seemed indeed a world-wide potentate, on whom the mantle both of St. Peter and of the Caesars might well have fallen. Transferred to a city of Provence he shrank almost to the measure of a petty sovereign. During the Hundred Years’ War, for instance, there was widespread grumbling in England at the obedience owed to Avignon. The Popes, ran popular complaint, were more than half French in political outlook and sympathy, so that an Englishman who wished for a successful decision to his suit in a papal law-court must pay double the sums proffered by men of any other race in order to obtain justice. What was more, he knew that any money he sent to the papal treasury helped to provide the sinews of war for his most hated enemies. The Papacy had been disliked across the Channel in the days of Innocent IV, when England was taxed to pay for wars against the Hohenstaufen: now, more than a century later, grumbling had begun to crystallize in the dangerous shape of a resistance not merely to papal supremacy, but to papal doctrine on which that supremacy was based. Thus Wycliffe, the first great English heretic, who began to proclaim his views during the later years of Edward III’s reign, was popularly regarded as a patriot, and his sermons denouncing Catholic doctrine widely read and discussed. In the thirteenth century it had been possible to suppress heresy in Languedoc; but in the fourteenth century there were no longer Popes like Innocent III who could persuade men to fight the battles of Avignon, and so the practice of criticism and independent thought grew, and by the fifteenth century many of the doctrines taught by Wycliffe had spread across Europe and found a home in Bohemia. [Sidenote: Rome] With the history of Bohemian heresy we shall deal later, but, having treated its development as partly arising from the change in papal fortunes, we must notice the effect of the Babylonish Captivity on Rome herself, and this, indeed, was disastrous.