Bertrand de Got was born in 1264 at Villandraut in the Duchy of Gascony to a French Gascon noble family. Educated at the cathedral schools of Toulouse and Bologna, he became Bishop of Comminges (1295) and Archbishop of Bordeaux (1299–1305).
On the death of Pope Benedict XI (July 7, 1304), the conclave at Perugia remained deadlocked for eleven months between the French and Italian factions. On June 5, 1305, the conclave elected Bertrand de Got — a compromise candidate — as Pope, taking the papal name Clement V.
Clement V refused to travel to Rome for his coronation (citing the continuing violence in Rome and the Italian political situation) — instead being crowned at Lyon on November 14, 1305, and establishing the papal court at Avignon in Provence (within the County of the Comtat Venaissin, a papal territory since 1274) in 1309.
The Avignon papacy (1309–1377) — seven successive French popes residing at Avignon rather than at Rome — began with Clement V. The Avignon period produced the institutional-cultural developments of the Avignon papal court, including the construction of the Palais des Papes (the largest Gothic palace in Europe, built 1335–1364) and the elaboration of the papal administrative-bureaucratic apparatus.
Clement V's most controversial institutional act was the suppression of the Knights Templar. Under relentless pressure from King Philip IV the Fair of France (who coveted the Templar wealth and accused the Order of heresy, sodomy, and blasphemy), Clement V initially resisted, then acquiesced, issuing the papal bull 'Vox in Excelso' on March 22, 1312, suppressing the Knights Templar (without formal condemnation of the Order's doctrine, suppressing the Order on grounds of the impossibility of the Order's continuation).
The executions of the Templar leadership — most famously Grand Master Jacques de Molay and Preceptor Geoffroi de Charnay, burned at the stake at the Île aux Juifs in the Seine at Paris on March 18, 1314 — produced the famous legend of the 'Curse of Jacques de Molay': at the stake, Jacques de Molay summoned Pope Clement V, King Philip IV, and Guillaume de Nogaret (the royal chancellor) before the Divine Judgment within the year. Pope Clement V died just one month later on April 20, 1314; King Philip IV died on November 29, 1314; Guillaume de Nogaret died in April 1313 (the year before, though the legend includes him). The three simultaneous deaths within the year produced the famous medieval European Templar-vindication legend.
Clement V also convoked the Council of Vienne (October 1311 – May 1312), the fifteenth ecumenical council, that formally suppressed the Templars and addressed multiple reform questions of the late-medieval Catholic Church.
He died at Roquemaure in Provence on April 20, 1314, and was buried at his collegiate church at Uzeste in Gascony.