Kingdom of Arles
In March 1309, the entire papal court moved from Poitiers (where it had remained for 4 years) to the Comtat Venaissin, around the city of Avignon (which was not then part of France, but technically part of the Kingdom of Arles within the Holy Roman Empire, since 1290 held as an imperial fief by the king of Naples). This move, actually to Carpentras, the capital of the territory, was justified at the time by French apologists on grounds of security, since Rome, where the dissensions of the Roman aristocrats and their armed militia had reached a nadir and the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano had been destroyed in a fire, was unstable and dangerous. But the decision proved the precursor of the long Avignon Papacy, the "Babylonian captivity" (1309–77), in Petrarch's phrase.