He became canon and sacristan of the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux, then vicar-general to his brother Bérard de Got, the Archbishop of Lyon, who in 1294 was created Cardinal-Bishop of Albano and papal legate to France.

[2] As Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Got was a subject of the King of England,[3] but from early youth he had been a personal friend of Philip the Fair.

[citation needed] The contemporary chronicler Giovanni Villani reports gossip that he had bound himself to King Philip IV of France by a formal agreement before his elevation, made at Saint-Jean-d'Angély in Saintonge.

On Friday, 13 October 1307, hundreds of the Knights Templar were arrested in France, an action apparently motivated financially and undertaken by the efficient royal bureaucracy to increase the prestige of the crown.

Philip IV was the force behind this move, but it has also embellished the historical reputation of Clement V. From the very day of Clement V's coronation, the king charged the Templars with usury, credit inflation, fraud, heresy, sodomy, immorality, and abuses, and the scruples of the Pope were heightened by a growing sense that the burgeoning French State might not wait for the Church but would proceed independently.

[10] Meanwhile, Philip IV's lawyers pressed to reopen Guillaume de Nogaret's charges of heresy against the late Boniface VIII that had circulated in the pamphlet war around the bull Unam sanctam.

The Pope abolished the order anyway, as the Templars seemed to be in bad repute and had outlived their usefulness as papal bankers and protectors of pilgrims in the East.

False charges of heresy and sodomy set aside, the guilt or innocence of the Templars is one of the more difficult historical problems, partly because of the atmosphere of hysteria that had built up in the preceding generation (marked by habitually intemperate language and extravagant denunciations exchanged between temporal rulers and churchmen), partly because the subject has been embraced by conspiracy theorists and quasi-historians.

In April 1305, the Mongol Ilkhan ruler Öljaitü sent an embassy led by Buscarello de Ghizolfi to Clement, Philip IV of France, and Edward I of England.

[1] 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.

In 1310, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII entered Italy, established the Visconti as vicars in Milan, and was crowned by Clement V's legates in Rome in 1312 before he died near Siena in 1313.

He refused to use his full influence in favour of the candidacy of Charles of Valois, brother of Philip IV, lest France became too powerful; and recognized Henry of Luxemburg, whom his representatives crowned emperor at the Lateran in 1312.

[16] Other remarkable incidents of Clement V's reign include his violent repression of the Dulcinians in Lombardy, which he considered a heresy, and his promulgation of the Clementine Constitutions in 1313.