Pope Gregory XI was born with the given name of Pierre Roger de Beaufort in the year 1329 A.D., and died in 1378 A.D. He began his reign as Pope in the year 1370 A.D. and ended his reign in the year 1378 A.D., during the Late Middle Ages. Gregory XI was from France, and his papal number is: 201 out of 267 officially recognized Roman Catholic Popes.
Summary: Pope who definitively returned the papacy to Rome before the Great Schism.
Biography:Gregory XI ended the long Avignon residence by bringing the papacy back to Rome in 1377, an act urged by many voices, including Saint Catherine of Siena. His decision restored the Roman seat of Peter but did not end the institutional tensions that Avignon had created.
He died soon after the return, and the fragile conditions surrounding papal government in Rome contributed directly to the election crisis that produced the Western Schism. Thus his pontificate stands at a hinge of restoration and new division.
Gregory XI’s legacy is inseparable from the return to Rome, one of the decisive moves in later medieval papal history.
