e city's real
history is that of the Church political, a story of strange manners and
happenings, rather than a step in the vital evolution towards our own
time.

In the Middle Ages Carpentras was an episcopal city, the capital of the
County Venaissin, governed by wealthy, powerful, and ambitious Bishops,
who took no small interest in worldly aggrandisement. Passing by gift to
the Papacy, after the sudden death of Clement V it was selected as the
place of the Conclave which was to elect his successor. The members were
assembled in the great episcopal Palace, when Bertrand de Goth, a nephew
of the dead Pope, claiming to be an ally of the French prelates against
the Italians in the Conclave, arrived from a successful looting of the
papal treasury at Montreux to pillage in Carpentras. He and his
mercenaries massacred the citizens and burned the Cathedral. The
episcopal Palace caught fire, and their Eminences--in danger of their
lives--were forced to squeeze their sacred persons through a hole which
their followers made in the Palace wall and fly northward.

This unfortunate raid left Carpentras with many ruins and a demolished
Cathedral, deserted by those in whose cause she had unwittingly
suffered. The new Pontiff was safely elected in Lyons, and upon his
return to the papal seat of Avignon he administered Carpentras by a
"rector," and it continued as it had been before, the political capital
of the County. During the reigns of succeeding Popes it was apparently
undisturbed by dangerous honours, until the accession of the Anti-Pope,
Benedict XIII. So great was this prelate's delight in the city that he
reserved to himself the minor title of her Bishop, re-built her walls,
and was the first patron of the present and very orthodox Cathedral,
Saint-Siffrein. By a curious destiny, the church had this false prelate
not only as its first patron, but as its first active supporter; and in
1404 he sent Artaud, Archbishop of Arles, in his name, to lay its first
stone.

Wars and rumours of wars soon possessed the province. Benedict fled, and
through unrest and lack of money the work of Cathedral building was
greatly hindered. In the meantime the ruins of the former Cathedral seem
to have been gradually disintegrating, and in 1829 the last of its
Cloister was destroyed, to be replaced by prison cells; and now only the
choir dome and a suggestion of the nave exist, partly forming the
present sacristy. From these meagre remains and