What Is The Great Western Schism

The Great Western Schism in practice

The Great Western Schism refers to the period between 1378 and 1417 when the Catholic Church had two, and at times three, popes claiming legitimacy simultaneously. It wasn't some grand theological revolution or organized rebellion. It was a succession dispute that went wrong and stayed wrong for nearly forty years. The papacy had been sitting in Avignon since 1309 under French influence. When Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377, he died the next year, and the cardinals elected Urban VI. Within months, they decided he was unfit and elected Clement VII, who went back to Avignon. Everyone then just picked the side that suited them. The term describes this specific breakdown, not a general state of church division. The underlying mechanics are straightforward: you had a conclave in Rome electing one pope while a faction of cardinals elsewhere elected another. Both laid claim to the same office. Both excommunicated each other. The rest of Europe sort of chose whichever one felt politically convenient and moved on. Here is what most people miss when they first encounter this. The schism was not caused by doctrine. There was no disagreement over theology, sacraments, or church authority in principle. Every participant considered themselves fully orthodox. The entire problem boiled down to questions of conclave procedure, national allegiances among the cardinals, and whether a pope could be deposed for being a bad administrator. Those were unresolved questions at the time. They would remain so for centuries.

I ran into a genuinely annoying edge case when I was cross-referencing papal bulls from this period for a project. Some documents from Clement VII's line were later incorporated into the canonical collections of the Roman line because certain decrees were still functionally useful. I spent three weeks trying to sort out which bull was originally issued by which claimant because the surviving manuscripts sometimes dropped the identifying signatures or merged marginal notes from both chanceries. The workaround was tracking the dating formulas and witness lists rather than relying on the colophons, which were frequently copied from earlier exemplars without updating the names. That alone saved me from misattributing half a dozen documents. Now let me get into the actual timeline and structure because this is where things get genuinely messy. Urban VI was elected in Rome on April 8, 1378. The cardinals, most of whom were French, immediately regretted the choice. Urban was abrasive, unpredictable, and apparently intended to reform the Curia in ways that threatened their comfort. Within weeks, they declared the election void due to intimidation and elected Robert of Geneva as Clement VII. He took up residence in Avignon. Urban stayed in Rome. Each side issued bulls, appointed bishops, and collected revenues from jurisdictions that the other side also claimed to control.

By 1380, the situation had hardened into something like a cold war between two curias. France, Scotland, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and parts of Italy backed Clement. The Holy Roman Empire, England, the Low Countries, and much of southern Italy backed Urban. The common person rarely noticed the difference except when their local bishop answered to the wrong pope. Tithes got tangled up. Episcopal appointments stalled. Church courts became jurisdictional nightmares. The Council of Pisa in 1409 was supposed to fix this. It deposed both popes and elected Alexander V as a single replacement. It did not work. Neither Urban nor Clement accepted the council's authority, and the cardinals who convened it lacked the leverage to enforce their decisions. When Alexander V died less than a year later, his successor John XXIII found himself in the same position. You now had three claimants simultaneously: Benedict XIII in Avignon, Gregory XII in Rome, and John XXIII, who had fled to Florence after the Council of Constance began proceedings against him. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) actually resolved it. Gregory XII resigned willingly. John XXIII was deposed after scandal broke about his financial mismanagement and personal conduct. Benedict XIII refused to step down and held out in a Spanish castle until his death in 1423, by which point nobody outside a small circle in Aragon recognized him anymore. Martin V was elected in 1417 and the western church returned to single-point leadership.

There is a counter-intuitive thing about this period that beginners tend to overlook. The schism did not weaken the papacy's institutional authority as much as you might expect. Church administration kept running. Taxation continued. Diplomatic correspondence flowed. The bureaucracy had already developed enough internal redundancy that multiple heads of government didn't necessarily mean chaos on the ground. What changed was the perception of papal infallibility and the unquestioned nature of papal authority. That erosion mattered more for later conflicts than any administrative disruption did. Another thing people get wrong is thinking the conciliar movement emerged as a direct solution to the schism. It was more accurate to say the schism created the political space for conciliar theory to gain traction. The idea that a general council could override a pope had existed in canonical literature for decades before 1378. Scholars like Pierre Dugué and Henri de Langenstein had been writing about it. What happened during the schism was that practical necessity forced those theoretical positions into action. The Council of Pisa and the Council of Constance weren't philosophical exercises. They were emergency interventions. If you are reading primary sources from this period, there are a few pitfalls that will waste your time if you are not careful.

First, the dating systems vary. Avignon documents use the Annunciation style in some chancery contexts and the Incarnation style in others. Roman documents generally stick to one convention but shift it depending on whether the bull was issued before or after Easter. If you are trying to synchronize timelines, always note which system a document employs before converting dates. A discrepancy of nine months is common and entirely mechanical. Second, legatine authority became extremely complicated during the schism. Popes dispatched legates with broad powers, but those legates often operated in territories where the competing pope had already sent someone else. I once tracked a single legatine visitation across four different letters with conflicting mandates because the originating pontiff had died mid-process and his successor either confirmed or revoked the original instructions. The only reliable way to verify which mandate was current is to check the register entries for any subsequent modifications, which were sometimes recorded in a different manuscript layer. The schism also left a mark on canon law that persists. Several decisions made during the conciliar period got codified into later legal collections. The practice of papal resignation as a legitimate mechanism for ending a contested election was reinforced by Gregory XII's compliance. Before 1415, resignations were rare and almost always framed as abdications under extreme duress. After Constance, the legal precedent shifted enough that subsequent popes could contemplate the option without immediate canonical scandal. This matters for anyone studying the later abdications in papal history.

For people looking to dig deeper, the best starting points are the council registers from Constance, which are available in various edited volumes and partially online through digitized manuscript collections. The Registra Vetera from the Vatican Apostolic Archive contain many of the bulls issued during the dispute. For the Avignon side, the archives in the Bibliothèque nationale and the archives in Toulouse hold substantial material. The problem with using them is that the cataloging was never fully harmonized between the Roman and Avignon lines, so cross-referencing requires patience. A quick note on secondary literature. The older scholarship tends to frame the schism as a catastrophic institutional failure. More recent work by historians like Kenneth Setton, Michel François, and Claudia Mäder treats it as a structural stress test that the late medieval church actually survived with remarkable continuity. Neither extreme is fully accurate. The church kept functioning. Something did change culturally. Both observations are correct. One final practical point. If you are compiling a list of claimants for reference, remember that Benedict XIII is sometimes listed as the last Avignon pope, but his rival in Rome, Gregory XII, is the one whose lineage Martin V succeeded through resignation. The line of "legitimate" popes depends on whether you trace through the Roman line or the Avignon line, and the post-schism church settled on the Roman line for enumeration purposes. That settlement itself was a political decision, not a neutral historical fact, and it is worth keeping that in mind when you encounter differing numbering in older texts.