Western Schism beginning in 1378

The Western Schism beginning in 1378 divided Christendom into two warring camps, each led by a rival pope, one in Rome and the other in Avignon. In the book’s account, this was not merely a dispute at the summit of the Church: it made a landscape already devastated by war and plague seem bereft of shared spiritual authority, and tied religious division directly to the struggle between England and France.

The division of Christendom

The schism’s defining circumstance was the existence of rival papal leadership in Rome and Avignon. The account presents the division as a crisis of religious unity unfolding amid France’s wider calamities. Its placement after images of Death as a shrouded skeleton with a scythe and of black warning flags flying above plague-stricken villages gives the rupture a stark meaning: in a country already enduring repeated catastrophe, even the Church appeared divided against itself.

The schism and the war in France

The book emphasizes the political force of that division by describing the Roman pope as blessing England’s war of conquest in France. English clerics, in turn, preached a new crusade and sold indulgences to finance the fighting. The language of holy war recast the conflict as a religious cause, presenting the French as heretics even as the campaign brought slaughter to their country. The account thus places papal division not at a distance from the Hundred Years’ War but within the machinery of its justification and financing.

Significance in the book’s account

The schism sharpens the contrast between religious claims and the violence carried out in their name. With rival popes leading opposing camps, and the Roman pope’s blessing lending authority to England’s invasion, the supposed defense of faith becomes entangled with conquest. The episode contributes to the book’s portrayal of France as beset not only by armies and plague but by a fractured religious order that offered no unified refuge from the crisis.