4. BONIFACE VIII, 1294-1303

Celestine V had renewed the law of the conclave. [ ] This excellent measure brought it about that the vacancy was soon filled, for the election was over in a single day. At the first ballot Matteo Orsini was elected. He refused the office. The second ballot was inconclusive. At the third, the cardinals chose Benedict Gaetani, December 24, 1294. He took the name Boniface VIII.

Not the least of the difficulties that awaited whoever succeeded Celestine was the primary duty of neutralising the harm produced by the scandalous exploitation of the hermit pope's inexperience. And whatever the personal character and disposition of that successor, it would be only too easy to distort, for the generality of men, his restoration of the ordinary routine of a pope's life after the idyllic episode of Celestine -- the pope who rode upon an ass to Aquila for his coronation, and who had lived in a hut of rough planking set up in the splendid hall of the royal palace at Naples.

Boniface VIII was not the man to be turned, for a moment, from his obvious duty by any such anxieties as these. Indeed -- and this is one of the weaknesses in his character -- it is doubtful if they would occur to him as causes for anxiety. He had a firstrate intelligence, highly trained, and a first-hand acquaintance with every aspect of the complex problem before him, and with most of the leading personalities whom any attempt to solve it must involve. His own speciality was Law, and as a papal jurist Boniface was to close, not unworthily, the great series of popes that began with Alexander III, just over a hundred years before him. He was himself the nephew of Alexander IV, and was thereby kin to the great Conti family whence had also come Innocent III and Gregory IX. For many years the various popes had made use of him in diplomatic missions, and one of these, in 1268, had brought him, in the suite of Cardinal Ottoboni, [ ] to the London of Henry III, in the turbulent years that followed the Barons' War. The French pope, Martin IV, had created him a cardinal, and Boniface, in the Sacred College, seems to have been what, as pope, he described himself, always a strong friend to the interests of France and of Charles of Anjou. Certainly in his great mission to France in 1290 -- the peak of his diplomatic career -- he had not given signs of anything like a militant independence of the lay power as such. Indeed he had been all that was tactful and conciliatory towards Philip the Fair. In the conclave at Perugia he had shown himself amused and sceptical about the move to elect Celestine V, [ ] and for some time had kept aloof from the regime which followed. When finally he had rejoined his colleagues it had been to watch, somewhat disgusted, the uncontrolled plunder of rights and property that was the order of the day, and then, with his firm advice -- once this was asked -- to point the only way out of the scandal.

The nine-years reign of Boniface VIII was to be one of the most momentous in all Church history; it is, indeed, generally regarded as marking the end of an epoch, and the beginning of the new age when the popes and religion gradually cease to be taken into account as factors in the public life of the Christian nations. And from its very beginning the reign was one long crisis for the pope -- a crisis which, for by far the greater part, was not of his making and which arose from the convergence, brought about by a master adversary, of forces which had plagued the Holy See for years. The chronic problem of the Sicilian revolt; the active Ghibellinism of central and northern Italy; the anti-papal hostility among the Spiritual Franciscans; the determination of the French to maintain and increase their hold upon the Holy See; the renaissance of the wild theories associated with the prophecies of Abbot Joachim; the prevailing talk about the speedy coming of anti-Christ -- these were elements of trouble for which Boniface VIII was in no way responsible. Nor were the new elements his invention; the carefully fostered rumours, for example, that he was not lawfully elected, the jealous hatred of the Colonna cardinals, the libel that he was a heretic (this derived from Charles II's anger at his influence with Celestine and was heard from the very outset of his reign), the associated libel that he had first procured the invalid resignation of Celestine and then his murder -- all these elements were rapidly combined and used in the business of making the pope a tool of French policy.

On the other hand, Benedict Gaetani continued to be his old, violent self, too well aware of his own splendid talent, of the great successes of his public career. He was jealous of his authority, impatient of contradiction, his self-control easily shaken by evidences of malevolent opposition, of treachery, of blackmail -- and these were all to come in plenty. As a cardinal he had had the opportunity of improving his family's fortunes, [ ] and he had used it to build up a really considerable feudal lordship in the countryside whence he came, the Lepini mountains and the valley of the Sacco, the neighbourhood of Anagni and Segni. He had not succeeded without making bitter enemies of those he had managed to dispossess. From among them the great clan of the Colonna, whose rivalry he had thereby challenged, would one day recruit willing assistants for the great raid on Anagni that brought the pope's life to an end. It had been a great career for thirty years or so, and it had brought Boniface many, many enemies. He knew well the general duty that lay before him, to deliver the Holy See from the toils in which the events of the last twenty-five years had enmeshed it. Once free of these it would resume its natural place, and lead Christendom as in the great days of Urban II, of Alexander III and Innocent III.

The new pope was confident, and a new strong tone would be evident from his first acts, but there would not be anywhere that reality of strength which only comes from new, generously conceived solutions; from solutions devised by the rare mind which, at a turning point of history, has divined that the actions of men in a long-drawn crisis have ceased to be merely the fruit of political expediency, and that they are now the signs and proof of fundamental change in their whole view of life. It was to be the pope's greatest misfortune -- and the misfortune of religion -- that he remained unaware of the nature of what was now happening, and hence had no more resource with which to meet a real revolution of the spirit than those political and legal combinations in which his genius excelled. The time needed a saint who was also a political genius: it was given no more than an extremely competent, experienced official. [ ]

The new pope, immediately, so acted as to prove the freedom of his see from all royal influence. He solemnly rebuked and degraded the senior cardinal who had been Charles II's first and principal instrument in the enslavement of Peter of Murrone; he instantly (as requested by Celestine) [ ] revoked all dispensations, grants, appointments, pensions, exemptions, incorporations, the whole mass, indeed, of what were now described as varia minus digne inordinata et insolita, made by his predecessor; also all promissory grants of benefices made since the death of Nicholas IV, Celestine's predecessor; he suspended all bishops and archbishops nominated by Celestine without the advice of the cardinals; he dismissed the laymen whom Celestine had appointed to curial posts; he dismissed from his household all the officials and chaplains appointed under Celestine; and he ordered the papal court to leave for Rome, forbidding any official business to be transacted as from Naples, or any letters to be issued until he had been crowned in Rome and had established the curia there in manifest independence. It was the height of the winter for that fearful journey over the mountains, the last days of the old year, but Boniface forced the pace, and Charles II was forced to accompany the caravan: the king, this time, in the suite of the pope. On January 23, 1295, Boniface was crowned, with all possible pomp, as though to drive home the lesson that the Church by no means refuses, in its mission, to make use of that world it is appointed to save by ruling it.

The first task was to bring together the kings of France and England, now furiously at war. For his legate to France Boniface chose his one-time adversary, the cardinal Simon de Beaulieu. It was misplaced generosity. Simon's rancour had survived, and his mission to the court of Philip the Fair (May 1295) was one starting-point of the schismatical manoeuvres that were the French king's most ingenious instrument to lever the pope into submission. Cardinal Simon laid bare to the French all the weaknesses in the pope's position: the discontent of some of the cardinals at this would-be Innocent III's ambition for his own family, the theories that he was not lawfully elected, the possibilities of the Colonna coming out in opposition to him, the latent menace of the innumerable followers of Abbot Joachim; in brief, the welcome news that at Rome all the material for a control of the pope lay to hand for whoever could organise it. Philip's response was to despatch to Rome the Prior of Chezy, to sound the disaffected and weld them into a party.

While the Prior of Chezy was busy at Rome undermining the new pope's position, reports and complaints were beginning to come in from France of taxes levied on the clergy without their consent, and of sequestration of Church property when payment was not made. The war with England had already drained the meagre resources of the crown, and knowing well the uselessness of asking Rome to grant Church moneys for a merely national war against another Christian prince, Philip the Fair defied immemorial custom, and his own pledge given in 1290, and imposed one tax after another upon Church properties. The like necessity was, at this very time, forcing Edward I of England to adopt similar measures, and the English king also was meeting with opposition from the clergy. [ ] The bishops of France, indeed, made no protest, but from the clergy and the religious orders bitter complaints now went to Rome that evil counsellors were misleading the king, but "no royal judgment," it was urged, "can destroy canonical rights." The bishops were showing themselves dumb dogs that had forgotten how to bark, and "no one any longer dares freely to defend the Church against the powers of this world." Will not the pope come to their aid?

As in England and in France, so also was it in Italy, and the petition from France found Boniface already considering the problem. His interest was not lessened by a new turn of events in Sicily, [ ] and the certainty of an active renewal of the war and therefore of the Holy See's needing all the ecclesiastical revenues it could gather in.

To levy taxes on all the inhabitants of a country has been, for generations now, one of the most obvious rights of all states; and taxation is a permanent feature of public life everywhere. There is never a time when every citizen is not paying taxes regularly, and as a matter of course, to the government of his country. It is only with an effort that we can realise that this is a comparatively recent institution, that for our ancestors the normal thing was that governments paid their way without need of such permanent assistance from the general body of the people, and that taxes were only lawfully levied when some extraordinary crisis -- a just war, for example -- arose. Moreover, taxes were the outward sign of servitude. Nobles were in many cases immune from them; so too were the clergy. A new theory of taxation was indeed beginning to be heard at this very time, namely that equity demands that all shall contribute to the cost of what profited all [ ]. But, as yet, this was a new and novel idea. the pope only followed the then classic opinion that related taxes to servitude when, in answer to the complaints of the clergy of France and elsewhere, he published his new law. This is the bull Clericis Laicos (February 24, 1296). It is written in challenging confident style, without any attempt to argue the reasonableness of the now violated clerical immunity, or to make allowance for the possibility that this was at times abused. The laity -- so it opens -- it is well known, have always hated the clergy. Here is a new proof of this, in the extraordinary new financial oppression of the Church. So the pope, to protect the Church against royal rapacity, enacts the new law. Unless the Holy See had authorised the king to levy it no cleric must pay any state tax levied on church revenues or property. Those who pay such unlawful taxes are to be punished by suspension and, if they are bishops, by being deposed. Rulers who levy such taxes without leave of the pope, are to be excommunicated and their kingdoms placed under interdict. [ ]

The law appears all the more severe when it is studied through the storm of conflict which it provoked. But there is every reason to think that the opposition was a surprise to Boniface, and that nothing gave him more genuine and painful surprise than that the opposition came from Philip the Fair. It was a general law, and Boniface had not in mind a particular attack on any prince -- least of all on the King of France. For what now occupied the pope, almost to the exclusion of all else, was the war in Sicily. No prince was at this moment more necessary to him than Philip, and throughout the following months favours continued to descend upon the French king from Rome, while the papal diplomacy was active in restraining the emperor from joining in the French war as Edward I's ally.

Nor did Philip the Fair, for months, give any sign of displeasure at the bull. He first learned of the bull when the Archbishop of Narbonne begged not to be pressed for taxes due, since a new law made by the pope forbade him to pay them (April 1296). The king was in no condition to begin a campaign against Boniface; the war with England was going against him. So, for the moment, he merely noted the fact and was content not to force the archbishop to pay. Later on, in that same year, he came to an arrangement with the emperor which saved him any need of papal protection on his eastern frontier and he now began to work upon the French bishops to petition the pope to withdraw the bull. The king's anger was such, they wrote to Rome, that the most terrible things would happen to the Church in France if he were not appeased.

And then (August 17, 1296) as part of the emergency regulations called for by the war, Philip did something that touched the pope vitally. This was to enact a law forbidding the export of munitions of war, horses, gold and foreign exchange, and expelling all the foreign bankers from France. This was done at the very moment when certain funds belonging to the Holy See, but actually in France, were about to be transferred to Spain, to pay the expenses of the King of Aragon's at last arranged visit to Rome. This, of course, was no ceremonial journey but a highly important move in the papal diplomacy. For the king was going to Rome in order to persuade, or force, his brother, the King of Sicily, to come to an arrangement with the pope. And much diplomacy, it may be understood, had had to be used to bring the King of Aragon to consent. Now, at this crucial moment -- and not without knowledge that the moment was crucial -- the King of France had given his answer to the pope's new law about clerical taxation. It is one of the oddest coincidences that so far was Boniface, even yet, from suspecting this enmity that, on the very day almost of Philip's edict, he wrote to France ordering the legate now to publish the bull. And he wrote on the same day the like instructions to the legate in England. The benevolence to France still continued. This last act was part of it. To publish the bull in France and in England, simultaneously, would be to cut off supplies from both the contending parties, and thereby end a war that was running against Philip. On the same day the pope wrote a third letter to support his pro-French intervention, to the emperor this time, warning him not to attack the French.

The whole action of Boniface during all these months does indeed prove "the confidence with which the alliance with France inspired him." [ ] His bitterness when the news of the French edict undeceived him was all the greater. It took shape in the letter Ineffabilis Amoris, [ ] a menacing if fatherly lecture addressed to the king, telling him that Clericis Laicos is a law which Philip, as a good Catholic, must obey. How foolish of him to choose such a moment as this to quarrel with Rome, when everywhere in Europe the French are hated ! The pope is the king's one friend. Let him dismiss his evil counsellors, the real authors of that aggressive policy that has antagonised all the Christian princes. Will he now, in a final blunder, force the pope to become their ally, or make the Holy See his principal enemy? Let him disregard the lie that the pope's new law is meant to forbid the clergy to help the state in its necessities. This was not ever the pope's meaning, as the pope has already made clear to the king's ambassadors.

This letter was known in France by the November, and in the next two weeks two very noteworthy commentaries on it began to circulate, the Dialogue between a Knight and a Clergyman and the tract which begins Antequam essent clerici. Both were anti-papal, shrewdly conceived, [ ] well written, the work of the lay scholars in the king's entourage. To make his reply to the pope, Philip sent to Rome once more the Prior of Chezy; part of that "reply" was to work up the Colonna and "soften" the pope's defences in preparation for a new French aggression.

The winter months of 1296-7 were, in fact, a critical time for Boniface. The King of Naples -- a principal ally in the Sicilian business -- had taken up the case which the Colonna were preparing. These last were not the only cardinals dissatisfied with the pope's Italian policy, and the great rival of the Colonna, Napoleone Orsini, was hoping, through the King of Naples, to persuade Philip the Fair to undertake the salvation of the Church from the pope ! Then the King of Aragon's visit was a failure. He agreed to the plans proposed, but his ideas about the money that would be needed seemed to Boniface astronomical. The pope had not anything like such sums -- unless he could recover his money from France and also what the Cistercians and Templars (also in France) were willing to give.

And then gradually, slowly, the pope began to yield to the King of France. A new letter went to Philip [ ] that was a milder version of the Ineffabilis Amoris and still more explicit in its statement that Boniface had in no way meant to control the king's right to take all necessary measures for the safety of the realm. But Philip should be more careful and precise in the terms of his edicts, lest he chance to infringe on the rights of others. The lines of the compromise are already evident, the formula to be devised to save face on both sides when both return to the status quo ante. A second, private, letter of the same date promised Philip a continuance of the old favours, and new ones also. The cause of Louis IX's canonisation was now complete -- the ceremony would be a pleasant ending to the contest. And a third bull, Romana Mater, also of the same date, practically suspended the Clericis Laicos so far as it concerned France. The principle of that bull, indeed, remained untouched; but a system of general exceptions to the law was announced. Its most important feature was that it was now left to the king to define what was a national necessity, and so a lawful occasion for imposing taxes on the Church without consulting the Holy See.

At the same time the legates in France were notified that, should Philip not allow the transfer of the pope's moneys out of France for the Sicilian war, they were publicly to declare him excommunicated. Boniface had not, by any means, wholly surrendered. And he gave signs of this in another, public, declaration only a few weeks later. This was a letter to the bishops of France allowing them to vote subsidies from Church moneys to the king, now in the first crisis of the revolt of Flanders. The pope is lavish in expressions of sympathy for France. He is most willing that the bishops should aid the king, and he gladly allows them to do so. But it is evident, from the letter, that the pope interprets the petition from France as an acceptance of the principle behind the Clericis Laicos, the right of the Holy See to decide whether church revenues shall be used to aid the state.

The French king was, however, very far from any such surrender as this and, as if to show it, he now worked upon the University of Paris to debate the question, already so much canvassed wherever Boniface had enemies in Italy, whether a pope could lawfully resign; and to publish its decision that he could not do so. As Celestine V was dead it followed that there was now no pope, and this declaration from what was the most influential centre of Christian learning, was an immense encouragement to the various enemies of Boniface.

The chief of these were, by now, the Colonna, and the pope's policy of checking them by increasing the power of his own kinsfolk drove the Colonna, in May 1297, to open rebellion. One of the clan attacked a convoy and captured papal treasure en route for Rome. The pope gave the cardinals of the family four days in which to restore the money, to surrender all the family fortresses and submit themselves. They ignored the command and were thereupon deposed from their rank. Whereupon, a day later, from their stronghold of Longhezza, they issued a manifesto denouncing the crimes of "Benedict Gaetani who styles himself the Roman Pontiff". Celestine V had no power to resign, they declared, and the election of Boniface was no election; a council must meet to put things right, and meanwhile the pope should be considered as suspended from his office. To this they added the accusation that Boniface had murdered his predecessor.

The pope was by no means to be intimidated. He excommunicated the whole faction of the Colonna as schismatic, and made a solemn declaration of the validity of his own election which, for three years nearly, the Colonna cardinals (who had voted for him) had fully and freely recognised. This was a telling blow; and it gained force when all the other cardinals set their signatures to a special statement which told the story of the conclave that elected Boniface, and declared that they wholly concurred in the excommunication of the rebels. The answer of the Colonna was to appeal to their allies in the University of Paris (15 June). Again they demanded a General Council, and denounced Boniface as a man whose sole aim was to amass a fortune. Bishops everywhere, they said, were appointed for a price, and the idea behind this centralisation of power was a hierarchy so dependent on Boniface that they would not dare to question his legitimacy.

It was with Italian affairs in this critical state that Philip the Fair now sent to the pope a mission headed by the chief of his professional lay counsellors, the legist Pierre Flotte. The Colonna had appealed to Philip to keep the promises of support made through the Prior of Chezy and now, on his way to Orvieto, Flotte assured them that his business there was to denounce the pope's crimes and solemnly publish the appeal to the General Council that should judge him: in which, as will be seen, Flotte lied -- but successfully, for, because of his assurance, the Colonna remained in the field and, prolonging the crisis, secured for the French that atmosphere of anxiety and alarm at the papal court in which they could best wring from Boniface the new concessions they had in mind.

In the diplomatic duel now engaged, the Frenchman, from the beginning, had the upper hand. For Boniface was in a weak position; the Colonna were still active and evidently confident, the French possibly willing to aid them, and, what was infinitely more serious, threatening to support a movement that denied him to be pope at all, and so initiate a schism. The danger here was deadly, and under the threat of it the pope gave in at point after point. The surrender was set out in a series of bulls -- sixteen in all. It amounted to a wholesale withdrawal of Clericis Laicos, a very serious modification of the clergy's immunity from arrest and trial in the king's courts, and grants of church money; and a well-timed threat of excommunication to the King of Aragon should he fail in his word to France. "In exchange for the imaginary document which had kept the Colonna in rebellion and Boniface in a crisis of anxiety, the ambition of Philip had won immensely important advantages, positions for future development." [ ] From now on, for the best part of four years, Boniface VIII would be no longer the independent chief of Christendom but "an obliging agent for the schemes of Philip the Fair". [ ] It was at the conclusion of these negotiations, and as a final gesture of good will to Philip, that the pope published the already decided canonisation of the king's grandfather, Louis IX. Through what a world of revolution had not French -- and papal -- policy passed since the saint's death, twenty-seven years before.

The history of the three years that followed the pope's capitulation at Orvieto to Pierre Flotte, makes the least pleasant reading of the reign. During the rest of that summer of 1297, and the autumn, the war continued to go well for the French in Gascony, in Brittany and in Flanders; while Edward had to face a new leader in Scotland, William Wallace, to suffer defeat from him and then find his own barons resolutely opposed to the whole war policy. It was as one result of a constitutional crisis at home that Edward, in the closing weeks of the year, sought a truce, and when it was made a condition that he should agree with Philip to submit the whole difference to the pope's arbitration he gladly agreed (18 February, 1298).

The French king knew well what he was about, and that he could count on having the pope, by the time the peace talks began, in such a position that France would control the decision The months that had seen the French position grow so strong while Edward's so weakened, saw Boniface VIII ever more feeble in face of the Colonna rebels and Sicily. The rebels still flouted his demands for unconditional surrender, and with the aid of such brilliant lampoonists as Jacopone da Todi they kept up a very successful anti-papal propaganda among the many friends of the Franciscan Spirituals, the visionaries, and the Ghibelline politicians of the towns. When they proposed a league with the King of Sicily, the pope was at the end of all his resources. His only hope lay in the Kings of Naples and Aragon; these would not move without a certainty of money supplies, and Boniface was all but bankrupt.

As a last alternative to surrendering to rebels and schismatics Boniface now proclaimed a crusade against the Colonna (27 November, 1297). To fight against them was as good an action -- and as munificently rewarded in spiritual favours -- as to travel to Jerusalem and fight the Turk. Everywhere legates were sent out to preach the crusade and to gather in alms. But response was slow, and the pope's anxiety had hardly lessened when, towards the end of March 1298, the Flemings and the English came into Rome for the arbitration.

The French followed some weeks later, and from the moment they arrived they had it all their own way. First they refused to take for arbitrator the pope as such: he must judge the case as Benedict Gaetani merely. And the pope agreed to this. Then they hinted to the pope that the English and the Flemings stood to them as the Colonna stood to Boniface -- they were rebellious feudatories. And Boniface, only a few weeks ago so grateful to the Flemings for their wholehearted support, now deserted them. And when the Flemings consulted their English allies-pledged not to make terms without them -- these advised them heartily to accept whatever the pope had in store for them. The English indeed had not much more to expect. The arbitrator's sentence was published on June 30, 1298. It carefully refrained from any decisions on the matters that had caused the war; it established a peace between the two kings, to be confirmed by a double marriage, and it provided for a mutual restoration of captured goods; the territorial questions were postponed. The whole decision had been inspired by one thing only, the pope's desire to please the King of France.

The papal arbitration of 1298 seems a singular mockery of the high claim to supervise the affairs of princes in the interests of justice. It marks the very nadir of the international action of the medieval papacy. But the same months which saw Benedict Gaetani so lend himself to the French king's game, were also those in which Boniface VIII, in the tradition of the greatest of the canonist popes, promulgated a great measure of law reform, completing and bringing up to date the first official code published in 1234 by Gregory IX.

The sixty years since that great event had seen the two General Councils of Lyons, both of them notable for a mass of new legislation. They had seen the reigns of a dozen popes, among them Innocent IV, "the greatest lawyer that ever sat upon the chair of St. Peter", [ ] and Clement IV, one of the great jurists of his day. Boniface himself was no unworthy successor to such popes in professional competence as a lawyer. A host of new laws had been made, some to meet special emergencies, others for permanent needs. Until some official collection and arrangement was made of all this mass the law must, in very many matters, remain doubtful and uncertain. Nowhere was the harm of this state of things better understood than at Bologna, the university which was, for Law, what Paris was for Theology. Boniface was no sooner crowned than Bologna besought him to remedy the disorder.

The pope immediately set himself to the task in masterly professional fashion. Four canonists [ ] were named and given extensive powers to review the whole mass of legislation since 1234, to suppress what was temporary or superfluous, to resolve contradictions, to abridge, to modify, to correct and to make whatever additions were needed to make the law's meaning clear beyond doubt. Their work was not to be incorporated in the five existing books of Gregory IX's arrangement; but to form a separate, sixth book of decretals -- hence its name, the Sext. In its own framework the Sext -- in its divisions and subdivisions, and in the headings for all these -- is a replica of Gregory IX's book. Thus the Sext is first divided into five "books", each corresponding to and bearing the same name as the several books of the larger collection. In each "book" of the new work, in the same order and under the same headings, are the chapters (capita) which represent the laws of the intervening sixty years. In all the Sext contains 359 chapters arranged under 76 titles, the greater part of these new laws (251) taken from the decretals of Boniface himself. As an appendix there are the Regulae Iuris, 88 in number. The commission took three years to complete its task, and on March 3, 1298, it was officially despatched to Bologna, with the bull promulgating it, as law for the schools and for the courts. This, and this alone, of the legislation enacted between 1234 and 1294 was henceforth law. In its opening words the bull declares once more the traditional divinely-given primacy of the Roman See over the whole Church of Christ, and it does so with that easy serenity that never deserts the bishops of that see whenever they refer to this fundamental truth: Sacrosanctae Romanae Ecclesiae quam imperscrutabilis divinae providentiae altitudo universis, dispositione incommutabili, praetulit ecclesiis, et totius orbis praecipuum obtinere voluit magistratum regimini praesidentes. . .: [ ] it also makes an unmistakable reference to the pope's claim to be really, on earth, King of Kings.

At last the tide of war began to turn in Boniface's favour. In October (1298) the Colonna lost their last stronghold, their own "home-town" of Palestrina, to the papal army. And then the rebels gave themselves up. The two cardinals appeared before the pope; kneeling before him, they abjured their wicked manifesto of Longhezza, and acknowledged him as the lawful pope. "Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee," said the older cardinal to Boniface, "I am not now worthy to be called thy son."

It was at Rieti that Boniface received their submission, and he was still resident there when the famous earthquakes of Advent Sunday, 1298, shook the little town to its foundations, and set the whole population in flight to the fields and hills around. The pope had been about to begin a solemn pontifical mass, surrounded by all his court, when the shock occurred. He seems to have behaved with the coolness which all stories of him indicate as a leading characteristic and, with the impatience that was no less characteristic, he snubbed the suggestion of a pious cleric standing by, that perhaps this was the beginning of the end of all.

There were, however, hundreds of pious folk for whom the earthquake was a special revelation of the divine opinion about Boniface and his policies. Rieti lay in a district where every valley had its hermitage of Franciscan Spirituals. Not so far away was Greccio, hallowed for all time by its memories of the great Christmas night when St. Francis set up there the first crib. Down to this time it had continued to be a chief centre of the Spiritual movement. There, for more than thirty years, almost to the time of Boniface's election, had been the refuge of John of Parma, the great Spiritual who had been general of the order until St. Bonaventure displaced him (1257), and who, at the very end of his life, [ ] barely ten years ago, had been summoned out of his retirement to advise the cardinal James Colonna. In no part of Italy was there more pious resentment against Boniface, and the coincidence that the pope was sojourning in the midst of it when a thing so unheard of as the earthquake happened, was the clear judgment of God on the surrender of the protectors of the Spirituals to the false pope who had persecuted these holy men.

To the Spirituals Boniface was no pope at all, for he had been elected in the lifetime of the last lawful pope, and the only pope to befriend their movement, Celestine V: and, his succession to Celestine apart, the party had known Boniface for years as a leading enemy. The election of Celestine had, in fact, followed very closely upon the return to Italy of a group of leading Spirituals, allowed by a rare Minister-General of the order who favoured the party to go as missionaries to Armenia. They presented themselves to the hermit pope, explained that they were the only true followers of St. Francis, that they desired only to live according to his rule and spirit (which they alone interpreted faithfully) and to be freed from persecution by the Franciscans now living a bogus Franciscan life according to a caricature of his rule. Celestine saw in them nothing more than men whose way of life recalled his own ideal. He seems not to have realised that, impliedly, to accept this version of the complicated disputes was to call in doubt a whole chapter of his predecessors' legislation; nor to have been aware of the heretical, Joachimite, strain that affected the whole of the Spiritual movement. Without any investigation, or qualifications, he accepted their story and allowed them to form themselves into a new order with Peter of Macerata at its head. They would, however, not be called Friars Minor but "The poor Hermits of Celestine V". [ ]

Never had the hopes of this exalte revolutionary party been so high as at this pontifical decision. Peter of Macerata marked well how it could be interpreted when he changed now his religious name and called himself Fra Liberato. From all parts the zealots flocked in to join his order. And it was, seemingly, the realisation what an immense service Celestine had unwittingly rendered to the prestige of the heretical fantasies of these poor fanatics, that brought Benedict Gaetani to abandon his isolation at Perugia and join the pope at Aquila in the September of 1294.

For Benedict Gaetani knew all that was to be known about the great Franciscan question. He was an expert authority on all its phases since the time when, in 1279, Nicholas III had called him to take part in the long discussions out of which came the bull Exiit qui Seminat that gave an authoritative ruling about the Franciscan way of life; it was Benedict Gaetani, indeed, who had written the text of that famous decretal. In those weeks during which Nicholas III and his experts, and the leading Franciscans, had set aside all other business to find a solution for these troubles, the future Boniface VIII learned what he never thenceforward forgot, the invariable tendency in those who clung to the Spirituals' interpretation of the Franciscan ideal to cling no less firmly to the mad theories of Joachim of Flora. [ ]

It is not surprising that, once elected pope, he revoked Celestine's rash concession to the Spirituals, nor that he removed from his high office Raymond Gaufredi, the Minister-General of the Minorites who had favoured them, and imposed on the order a superior of his own choice who would resolutely track down these zealots. A last touch to this unpleasant work of correction was a bull [ ] that denounced the Spirituals as heretics and listed their several errors and offences. Henceforward it would be for the Inquisition to deal with them.

Nothing was, then, more natural than that the story of the earthquakes at Rieti, as the Spirituals interpreted it, should spread rapidly throughout Italy. The pope was soon threatened with a new crisis. [ ] His reaction was to set the Inquisition to work, and soon there was a steady exodus of the Spirituals towards the Adriatic coast and across the sea to Greece and to that church of Constantinople which Joachimite prophecy pointed out as the last refuge of true spirituality. One tiny group - - five men and thirteen women -- passing through Rome, and finding themselves conveniently in St. Peter's, elected one of their number pope.

There was one leading centre of this anarchic religiosity where for years the pope's writ had ceased to run, namely the island of Sicily; and one effect of this latest revival was to stiffen Boniface still further in his determination to expel the Aragonese and to re-establish normal relations with this most important fief of the Holy See. The pope's latest ally, the King of Aragon, had for five months been vainly besieging his brother Frederick in Syracuse, and in his demands for money he outdid even Philip the Fair. Boniface, driven to the last extremity, had to put himself into the hands of the Florentine bankers and the Jews; and as he descended to these humiliations, his rage against the Colonna, to whose patronage he attributed the latest Franciscan ebullition, poisoned his judgment. They were still at Rieti, interned, with all the misery of an indeterminate fate hanging over them, and when the pope now (June 1299) ordered the total destruction of their town of Palestrina as a warning to all future time, and commanded the very site to be ploughed up and sown with salt, despair seized on the Colonna, and breaking out of prison, they fled across the frontiers, to be active centres of opposition as long as Boniface lived, and to nurse a revengeful hatred that would afflict his memory for many years after he was dead. The King of Aragon chose this moment to desert (I September, 1299) and the pope's sole support now was Florence.

It was now that the complicated manoeuvres of papal and anti-papal factions in the Tuscan capital brought into conflict with Boniface the greatest man of all this generation, one of the world's supreme poets, Dante Alighieri. In his verse, Boniface was to live for ever, the object of undying hate as a man and as a ruler, and, then for his last broken hours, the object of Dante's pity as a symbol of that defeat of the spiritual by its own which is the eternal tragedy of the history of the Church. The great poem still lay in the distant future, but in this crisis of papal history Dante set his talents as scholastic and legist to a vigorous attack on that theory of the supremacy of the spiritual power in temporal affairs which had long been current in official ecclesiastical circles, the theory of which Boniface was about to show himself a most uncompromising exponent. [ ]

While Pierre Flotte had been successfully exploiting his hold on the pope to the advantage of France abroad, he had used these same years of what we may perhaps call the pope's servitude to consolidate at home the royal victory over ecclesiastical jurisdiction. There was not any attempt to enact anti-clerical laws: the crude mistake of our own Henry II enforcing the Constitutions of Clarendon was carefully avoided. But the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the layman was fettered as much as possible, hindered by every restraint which administrative genius could devise; and everywhere the lay lord was encouraged when he came into conflict with an episcopal suzerain. Soon there were bitter fights in many French sees. And Flotte was planning a new attempt to restore the Latin empire in the East, with a French prince reigning at Constantinople, with Venice and Genoa (reconciled at last and in alliance) supporting him. Italy too would be remodelled, after the plan accredited to Nicholas III, but this time with French princes on both the new thrones of Lombardy and Arles. It was to be a French dominated Christendom, of the kind Pierre Dubois was about to describe in his famous memorandum and, the pope playing his part, Tuscany and Florence would be added to the papal state.

The year which followed the pope's arbitration between the kings of France and England was hardly a time when Boniface VIII could flatter himself that it was principally his ideas and will that regulated the public life of Christendom. The year was to end, however, with a great demonstration of the role of the papacy in the interior life of its subjects, in the system of the believer's relations with God; a demonstration at once of the pope's understanding of his spiritual power and of the Church's faith in it and eagerness to see it exercised.

As the new year 1300 approached there was, to a very unusual degree, all that popular interest which greets the coming of a new century, the usual vague expectation of coming good fortune, but this time heightened -- no doubt very largely through the recent revival and popularisation of the prophecies of Abbot Joachim.

The numbers of the pilgrims bound for Rome began to increase, and when they arrived they showed themselves clamorous for the expected, extraordinary, spiritual favours. Once every hundred years, some of them were saying, by a special act of the divine mercy, not only were a contrite man's sins forgiven, but (upon appropriate penance done) the punishment his guilt deserved was also remitted. Boniface VIII does not, by any means, seem either to have created this spirit of expectation or to have exploited it at all in the service of his public policy. [ ] Apparently he did little more than fulfil what, spontaneously, Christian piety was expecting of the Roman See when, by the bull of February 22, 1300, he instituted the Holy Year of Jubilee. It is, in effect, a grant "to all who, being truly penitent, and confessing their sins, shall reverently visit these Basilicas [of St. Peter and St. Paul] in the present year 1300. . . and in each succeeding hundredth year, not only a full and copious, but the most full pardon of all their sins." [ ]

The news of the great concession brought pilgrims to Rome by the hundred thousand, and from every part of Christendom, as a mass of contemporary literature testifies; [ ] and this novel and unmistakable evidence of what the papacy's spiritual power meant to the Christian millions seems greatly to have affected Boniface VIII.

To the pope too, it has been argued, the Jubilee was a year of special graces. The spring of this Jubilee year saw a joint embassy to Boniface from Philip the Fair and the new emperor Albert of Habsburg, and it saw also an anti-papal revolution at Florence: events that were the occasion, and the opportunity, for a reawakening in Boniface of his natural spirit of independence. But the enthusiasm of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims did more than put new heart into the pope mall now approaching his seventieth year. This concrete demonstration of universal faith in his supernatural office recalled to him in overwhelming force his first duty to be the father and shepherd of all Christian souls -- so it is argued. [ ] The whole burden of Benedict Gaetani's case against Celestine V had been that the pope was too weak to defend the Church's freedom against the princes. But what else had Boniface VIII done, for years now, but surrender to princes? [ ]

At the audiences given now to the French ambassador, the pope made no secret of his suspicions of Flotte's designs. Tuscany, he declared, was the pope's by right. The very empire itself was the creation of the Holy See, "All the Empire's honour, pre-eminence, dignity, rights" being, as he wrote at this time to the Duke of Saxony, "derived from the liberality, the benevolence and gift of this see." As popes have set up, so they can tear down. Tuscany is a centre of discontent and hate, and so "for the honour of God, peace of Christendom, of the Church, of his vassals and subjects," the pope has determined to bring it once more under the rule of the Church. The authority of the apostolic see suffices for this. The Florentines were reminded of the same truths. The pope is the divinely appointed physician of all men's souls and sinners must accept his prescriptions. To hold any other theory is folly, for any other theory would mean that there are those in this world whom no law binds, whose crimes may go unpunished and unchecked.

Full of this new strength, Boniface brushed aside now the attempt of the French ambassadors to bully him with tales of what his enemies were saying about his private life and his faith, and taking up the complaints that came in from France about the attacks on the jurisdiction of the bishops, he sent to the king the letter Recordare Rex Inclyte (July 18, 1300). [ ] This is a remonstrance after the style of the letter -- Ineffabilis Amoris -- which had so roused the king in 1296. Boniface, as though that storm -- and the defeat it brought -- had never been, now told the king roundly that his usurpation of jurisdiction was seriously sinful, and that God would surely punish him for it did he not amend. The pope had, indeed, shown himself patient, but he could not be dumb for ever. In the end he must, in conscience, punish the king if the wrongdoing continued; and the tale of that wrong -- doing is mounting up in the files. As for Philip's advisers, these are false prophets: it is from God's grace alone that his eternal salvation will come.

From the stand taken in this letter Boniface never retreated, though it was to bring him within an ace of violent death.

Philip was too busy with the last preparations for the conquest of Flanders to make any retort, but when Flotte went to Rome in the following November (1300), the atmosphere of the court was very different from what it had been at Orvieto three years earlier. "We hold both the swords," Boniface is reported as saying, and Flotte as replying, "Truly, Holy Father: but your swords are but a phrase, and ours a reality." But there was no break of relations, and the French sent Charles of Valois into Italy to help in the double task of subduing Florence and Sicily. What brought the break was Philip's arrest of the Bishop of Pamiers in the summer of 1301. Serious charges were of course made against the prelate; he was lodged in the common prison, then taken under guard to Paris to stand his trial before the king's court. But his innocence or guilt was a detail beside the real issue, the right of the king to try him, and the fact that the king could trample down with impunity the most sacred of all clerical rights in public law. There is no doubt that this was a deliberately engineered cause celebre, whose success would mark a new era for the expanding royal jurisdiction, and greatly discredit the ecclesiastical world before the nation. [ ] And mixed up with the charges against the bishop there was a quarrel about the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, in which prominent Franciscan Spirituals attacked the Dominican inquisitors, and in which it was made very evident that in Languedoc the Albigensian movement was still a power under the surface of life. It is one of the several ways in which Philip the Fair recalls our own Henry VIII that now, while leading a life of blameless Catholic orthodoxy, he was secretly patronising and encouraging these heretics and rebels against the Church as an obvious move in the business of bringing pressure to bear on the pope.

Dom Leclercq, also, notes how "the analogy between the methods employed in the trials of Boniface, of the Bishop of Pamiers, of the Templars and of Guichard de Troyes, reveals a single manoeuvring mind at work. . . [features that] give a family likeness to a set of trials which, actually, are very individual things. Another trait in which they are alike is that, in all cases, it is difficult to bring legal proof that the charges are false. The crimes faked in Nogaret's imagination are all crimes done in secret." H.-L., VI, pt. i (1914), p. 578.

It was late October (1301) before the trial of the Bishop of Pamiers came on. It went well for the king until, in November, the Archbishop of Rheims made a strong, formal protest, in a Provincial Council, held at Compiegne, against the whole business of the bishop's arrest. The council, indeed, laid an interdict on all who, in contravention of the canon law, arrested a cleric. If a cleric so arrested should be transported to another diocese, the diocese in which he was arrested was "interdicted", and the domains of the authority responsible for the arrest. A certain amount of skilful juggling by the king's legists and the more subservient of the French bishops did indeed soon find a way through this law. But the moral effect of the declaration of Compiegne was very great, and nowhere was it more welcome than at Rome. It was indeed the first real check to the king from the French bishops for many years, the first unmistakable sign to the pope that there were bishops in France on whom he could rely.

But Boniface had not waited for this sign before taking the offensive. Flotte had written him a lying account of the trial, [ ] but it crossed a packet from the pope with a whole batch of strong, decisive letters for France. The revelations in the Pamiers case that the king was backing the Spirituals and the Albigenses, attacking the Inquisition, and that the mass of the French bishops were looking on indifferently at a most spectacular attack on the rights of their order, lifted the pope above the mere diplomatic game. From now on his action has the grave, apostolic quality of Hildebrand himself.

In these letters, written in the first week of December 1301, the pope demands that the Bishop of Pamiers be set free and allowed freely to make his way to Rome. [ ] He suspends all those privileges granted to Philip in the matter of clerical taxation and church property. [ ] He summons all the bishops of France to a council, to be held in Rome (in November 1302) where the whole question of the state of religion in France, and of the king's government of the country, will be examined; to this council the king is also invited, either to come in person or be represented there. [ ] Finally there is a letter, a confidential letter, for the king. This is the bull Ausculta Fili, 5 December, 1301, [ ] which as handled by the French, played a most important part in the events of the next eighteen months.

In many ways this letter hardly differs from the remonstrances which Boniface had already sent to the king. It tells him that his sins, as a Catholic ruler oppressing the rights of the Church, are notorious and a bad example to all Christendom. It lists these acts of usurpation and adds the crime of debasing the coinage. It again warns the king against his advisers, and points out that the whole of France is restive under their harsh, oppressive rule. The king cannot make the ministers an excuse for his sins: and the pope urges him to take part in the coming council. If he does not appear, its business will go forward without him. But all this somewhat familiar lecture acquires a new gravity from the opening passage of the letter, in which there is an extremely clear statement of the king's subject-status in relation to the pope, a statement in which we may read yet a further contribution to the controversy now engaged in which Dante, Pierre Dubois and the two great Augustinian theologians, Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo, are playing leading parts. The Church has but a single head, Boniface reminds the king, and this head is divinely appointed as a shepherd for the whole flock of Christ. To suggest, then, that the King of France has no earthly superior, that he is not in any way subject to the pope is madness, is indeed, the prelude to infidelity. This doctrinal note is to appear again, and still more strikingly, in the controversy.

Ausculta Fili was not a manifesto nor a public state paper, but a confidential letter sent privately to the king: and therein lay Flotte's opportunity. The bull was no sooner read than destroyed, and a tendentious summary of it drawn up, to be the basis of a most effective, national, anti-papal campaign. This summary -- called Deum Time from its opening words -- Flotte first submitted to a conference of theologians and legists. It adapted the teaching and claims of the first part of Boniface's letter to cover power and jurisdiction in the temporal sphere. The pope is now skilfully made to appear as claiming to be, because pope, the king's feudal overlord; the pope's consent is needed, then, for the validity of all such acts as sub-infeudation, and all the grants made so far for centuries must be invalid; also the king, as vassal to the pope, is liable for aids to the pope in all his wars.

This preparatory work done, it now remained to ask the nation's opinion on the papal claim as thus stated. The setting for this was the famous church of Notre Dame in the capital where, on April 10, 1302, representatives of the clergy, the nobles and the towns came together in the presence of the king. Flotte made a great speech, in the king's name, expounding the thesis of Deum Time, adding that the pope's citing the king to appear before him at Rome was a sample of what all had now to expect, the crown of all those usurpations of the Church of Rome on the Church of France under which, for years now, true religion had been withering away. The King of France had no superior as a temporal ruler; he stood out as the real champion of religion. And Flotte ended with an appeal to the nation to support Philip.

In the debate which followed, the suggestion was made that Boniface was a heretic and the nobles set their seals to a letter which, ignoring the pope, recounted to the college of cardinals all the charges made against Boniface, to whom they only referred as "he who at the moment occupies the seat of government in the church"; and, an incendiary statement surely, they say that "never were such things thought of except in connection with anti-Christ." Unanimously the laity pledged their support to the king.

The clergy were not so ready. They first asked for time to think it all over. It was refused them; they were told that opposition would only prove them the king's enemies. So they promised obedience to the king as vassals and asked leave to obey the pope, as they were bound, and to go to the Roman council. This also was refused them. And then they wrote to the pope, an anxious letter telling him that never had there been such a storm in France, never had the Church been in such danger, and begging the pope to abandon the plan for a council.

It was not until ten weeks later (24 June, 1302) that the delegates from the national assembly reached the pope with these letters. They were received in full consistory at Anagni, and two addresses were made to them, one by the Cardinal Matthew of Acquasparta and the other by the pope himself. The cardinal explained that the Ausculta Fili was the outcome of many weeks' deliberation between the pope and the cardinals, and he denied absolutely the interpretation put upon it in France. It was a purely pastoral act of the pope who makes no claim in it to be the king's superior judge in temporal matters but who, all men must allow, is the judge whether those whose office it is to exercise temporal power do so in accordance with morality or not.

The pope spoke most vigorously. He reprobated the chicanery which, evidently, had falsified for the public his message to Philip. He denounced Flotte by name as the real author of the mischief and with him Robert of Artois and the Count of St. Pol; they would, he prophesied, come to a bad end. Once again he gave warning that the French were hated everywhere; all Europe would rejoice when the hour of their defeat arrived. The king seemed not to realise it, but the facts were that he was on the brink of disaster. As for the council -- this to the clergy -- it must take place and, severely rebuking the cowardice of the bishops, the pope threatened the defaulters with deposition from their sees. [ ]

The cardinals sent a written reply to the letter from the nobles and in it they severely reproved their neglect to give the pope his proper style, and their reference to him by "an unwonted and insolent circumlocution".

Drama was never lacking at any stage of this long-drawn-out controversy, but now it touched the heights. While all France was being rallied to the support of the king against the pope, the French invasion of Flanders had begun. Philip had now to meet, however, not merely the feudal levies of his rebellious vassal the Count, but the enraged craftsmen of the towns. And before the envoys to Boniface had returned with the news of the pope's lurid warnings, barely a fortnight after the scene in the consistory, the French army suffered one of the greatest defeats Or its history, outside the walls of Courtrai, at the hands of Peter de Koninck and his weavers (Battle of the Golden Spurs, 11 July, 1302). And among those slain were the three men whom the pope had singled out by name, Flotte, Robert of Artois, and the Count of St. Pol.

Philip the Fair was now in full retreat, and not alone from Flanders, now lost to the French crown for ever. He no longer sounded defiance to the pope, but allowed the bishops to explain, apologetically, that they could not leave their sees at such a national crisis; and he sent an embassy to represent him at the council, an embassy which made full recognition of Boniface as pope (October 7, 1302).

Of what passed at the council we have no knowledge, but nearly half of the French bishops took part in it (39 out of 79). The pope had so far softened towards the beaten king that there was no repetition of the events at Lyons, sixty years before, when a council had tried and deposed the emperor Frederick II. There was no trial of Philip the Fair in 1303, nor sentence or declaration against him. The solitary outcome of the proceedings was a general declaration to the whole Church, the most famous act of Boniface's career, the bull Unam Sanctam (November 18, 1302). But there was not, in this, any reference to the points at issue with France, such as the list in the Ausculta Fili a twelve month before; these difficulties were now to be dealt with privately, through diplomatic channels, and as his envoy to Philip the pope chose a French cardinal, Jean Lemoine

"The dramatic context" of the bull Unam Sanctam [ ] says Boase, [ ] "gave it pre-eminence over all statements of papal power," and, we may think, has been largely responsible for the extraordinary interest in the bull ever since. For the more that is known of the detailed history of the struggle between Boniface and the French king, the less dramatic does the famous bull really appear. Two distinct -- though related questions have been in hot dispute for now nearly two centuries, namely the canonist's question about the pope's authority as pope over the temporal affairs of the world, and the theologian's question of his authority as pope to correct what is morally wrong in a ruler's conduct of temporal affairs. The bull deals chiefly with the second of these, but it also touches on the other. Throughout the dispute with Philip the Fair, Boniface VIII has denied that he is putting into force any claim to interfere with the king as a temporal ruler, ill the way for example that the king's suzerain (were there such) would have had the right to interfere. One thing alone has moved the pope throughout -- it is Boniface's constant assertion -- namely his duty to warn the king of sins he has committed in the exercise of his kingly office.

From this point of view Unam Sanctam does but continue the series in which Ineffabilis Amoris and Ausculta Fili have their place. But, unlike these, this last declaration is not addressed to the French king at all. It makes no mention of any particular ruler, but exposes the pope's case in general terms, reminding the Church in general of the nature of the pope's authority over all its members, and of the superiority which an authority of this kind must inevitably possess over every other kind of authority. And, after a certain amount of citation from Holy Writ -- none of it new -- and from Christian writing, to confirm the theory as it is explained, the document ends with the solemn definition, that for every human being it is part of the scheme of salvation that he be subject to the authority of the pope.

The general theme of the bull is that there is but one Church of Christ, a single body with but one head, Christ and his own vicar, Peter first and then Peter's successor. This scheme of things is not a human invention. It was God Himself who so arranged, when He commissioned Peter to feed God's sheep -- not these sheep, or those sheep, but all the sheep. It is by God's will that over His flock there is but a single shepherd. As for those who say they are not placed under the rule of Peter and his successor, they only confess thereby that they are not of Christ's flock, for there is but this one flock of Christ.

At the disposition of this one Church of Christ there are two kinds of power -- two swords, as the Gospel teaches us -- spiritual power and material; and the pope explains, following traditional lines, how the Church herself wields the spiritual authority, and when necessary calls upon kings and soldiers to wield on her behalf the material power. Of these two powers, the spiritual is the superior, in this sense that it is the business of the spiritual to call the material authority into existence, and to sit in judgment upon it should it go astray. Whereas the spiritual power -- in its fullness, that is to say (i.e. as realised in the papacy) -- is not subject to any judge but God. For although those who wield this spiritual power are but men, the power itself is divine, and whoever resists it strives against God. Whence it follows that to be subject to the Roman Pontiff is, for every human being, an absolutely necessary condition of his salvation: which last words -- the sole defining clause of the bull -- do but state again, in a practical kind of way, its opening phrases, "We are compelled by the promptings of faith to believe and to hold that there is one holy Catholic Church, and that the apostolic church; and this we do firmly believe and, unambiguously, profess, outside which church there is no salvation, nor any remission of sins. . . "

The bull Unam Sanctam then is a document which contains a definition of the pope's primacy as head of the Church of Christ; it is a reply to the claim, made by all parties to the anti-papal coalition, that their opposition is religious and Christian; it is a re-statement of the reality of the Church's divinely-given right to correct the sins which kings commit as kings; but the bull does not set out this right in detail, nor, though it states the right in the forms common to similar papal documents for now a hundred years and more, does it define this right in those forms, or indeed define it at all, except in so far as it is included in the general definition with which the bull ends.

The ultimatum sent through the legate to Philip -- for it was nothing short of this -- was dated November 24, 1302. It appears to have been delivered during the national assembly called for February-March of the new year. Philip's reply is embodied in his edict of March 18, 1303. The pope had noted that, seemingly, Philip was already excommunicated and the legate was given power to absolve him if he made amends. The misdeeds noted in Ausculta Fili were recalled once more. Should the king disregard this last admonition, the worst would certainly follow. The king was too shrewd to ignore the message; nor, though diplomacy had greatly improved his position since the disaster of Courtrai, did he make any sign of open defiance. He preferred to say now that his actions had been misinterpreted; and where he did not deny the charges he was evasive. If the pope was not satisfied with the answer, the king would willingly re-examine the case. It was hardly the kind of reply that would suit the pope in his new mood, nor did it at all convey the king's real mind. This public ordonnance, indeed, masked the greatest scheme yet of violence and blackmail.

While the king was playing before the assembly the part of the misunderstood champion of right, William de Nogaret, who since Flotte's death seems to have been the chief of his counsellors, was given a vague and all-embracing commission for some secret work in Italy (7 March, 1303). On March 12 he appeared before the king and his council and made a striking protestation. Boniface VIII was no pope but a usurper; he was a heretic and a simonist; he was an incorrigible criminal. Nogaret formally demanded that the king call upon the cardinals and bishops to assemble a council which, after condemning this villain, should elect a pope. Meanwhile Boniface, being no pope at all, should be put under guard, and this should be the king's care and duty; and the cardinals should appoint a vicar to rule the Church until it had once more a real pope. The king listened to this impassioned harangue with all due attention, and then solemnly consented to take on himself this serious duty. And Nogaret left to play his part in the scheme in Italy!

While he was busy there, knitting together all the forces and interests that hated Boniface, the public duel between pope and king went forward. For the pope did not leave unnoticed Philip's reply to the ultimatum. He wrote to his legate that it was equivocal, evasive, insulting, contrary to truth and equity, and sent a new summons to Rome to the regalist bishops. On both sides the decks were being cleared for action. Boniface at last recognised Albert of Habsburg as King of the Romans and emperor-elect and authorised the princes of the middle kingdom to do him homage. Most significantly of all, the pope brought to an end the long twenty-years-old Sicilian war by confirming the peace, made nine months before, [ ] between Charles of Naples and his Aragonese rival, in which the Aragonese conquest of the island was recognised. And Philip made peace with England.

When Boniface's letters and instructions to the legate reached France, the king held them up and, once again, summoned the whole nation to hear his case against the pope. It was at the Louvre that they met, bishops, nobles, commons (13 June, 1303) and the scenes of the Easter meeting of the previous year were repeated. This time the mask was fairly off and the language more violent. The pope, it was said, was a heretic, an idolator, a man who worshipped the devil. There was something to suit each of the many interests represented, and the assembly called out for a council which should judge Boniface and demanded that the king see to its summoning. And Philip, with a great protestation of love and respect for the Holy See, accepted the task. Of the twenty-six bishops present all but one set their names to the protestation and appeal. Just a week later the doctors of the University of Paris came together in the king's presence and made common cause with him, and on June 24 there was yet a third meeting, for the whole populace of Paris, in the gardens of the king's palace. The king was present, and his sons, the ministers, the bishops, the clergy. There was a harangue by the Bishop of Orleans, another by a Dominican and a third by a Franciscan; and with enthusiastic shouting and cheering, the people acclaimed the royal policy of emancipating religion from the rule of Boniface. There followed a purge of the foreign religious who stood firm for the pope, and commissioners were presently touring the whole of France, summoning everywhere meetings after the model of Paris, where the king's case was put and signatures gathered in support of it. Everywhere this organised propaganda of schism succeeded; nowhere did anyone oppose it.

In all these three months no news had come from Nogaret and on August 15 the Prior of Chezy was despatched on the last of his sinister missions to Italy. He was to find Nogaret and commission him to publish, to the pope's face if possible, the charge of heresy and the appeal to a General Council. But, by the time he reached his man, all was over.

The news of all the exciting events in Paris had leaked through the king's censorship and, on the very day the Prior of Chezy received his instructions, the pope replied to the king's attack in five letters which suspended, until Philip had submitted, all elections to vacant sees, all nominations to benefices, and the conferring of all degrees by any university. The Archbishop of Nicosia, the chief of the ecclesiastical traitors, was put under interdict, and finally there was a blistering manifesto that at last exposed the king, and defended to the world the reasonableness of the pope's action.

The French king, Boniface noted, [ ] had never questioned the pope's orthodoxy while papal favours were lavished on him. His present criticisms arose from resentment that the pope had dared to remind him of his sins. This is the whole reason for his charges against the pope. The king makes them in bad faith, hoping to escape the need of amendment by blackmailing the superior whose duty it is to correct him. The pope cannot submit to this. "What will become of the Church, what value will remain to the authority of the popes, if kings, princes and other powerful personages are allowed such a way out as this? No sooner will the pope, successor of St. Peter and charged with the care of all the flock, propose to correct some prince or magnate, than he will be accused of heresy or taxed with notorious, scandalous crime. Redress of wrong will be altogether impossible, the supreme power will be wholly overthrown." How could the pope possibly grant this French demand that he summon a General Council and submit himself to its judgment? How could a pope lend himself to the spread of such a demand? Far from assenting to it, says Boniface, the pope will, in his own time, and despite any such disingenuous appeal, proceed against the king, and his supporters too, unless they repent their now notorious crimes.

Boniface immediately proceeded to that further action he threatened, and began to draft the bull solemnly excommunicating Philip and threatening his deposition if, within a fixed time, he had not submitted and sought absolution. It was arranged that the bull should be promulgated in the cathedral at Anagni, where Boniface then was, on September 8. Nogaret learnt of what was in preparation. He realised that, at all costs, the publication of the sentence must be prevented. With a mixed troop of soldiery, gathered from half-a-dozen neighbouring towns hostile to the pope, with one of the Colonna at his side, and the standard of Philip the Fair in the van, he made for Anagni. On the eve of the appointed day he arrived before the little hillside city. Treason opened a gate for his force and after a short, sharp battle, he and his men, to the shouts of "Colonna! Colonna!" were in the papal palace and presently in the papal presence. They found the old pope prepared for them, robed and clasping his crucifix. Nogaret demanded that he withdraw the excommunication and surrender himself for judgment. He replied that he would rather die. Sciarra Colonna offered to kill the pope. The cooler-headed Frenchman held him back. Then Colonna struck the old man in the face.

The outrage was the end of Nogaret's success, however. While he parleyed with the pope, and while the Italian soldiery plundered the palace -- all they wanted and were fit for, Nogaret noted -- the fighting began again in the town, and shouts of "Death to the French!" filled the streets. It would have ruined the French monarchy to kill the pope; it was not practicable to carry him a prisoner to France through an aroused Italy. Indeed, unless Nogaret speedily fought his own way out of Anagni, he would hardly survive to tell France what he had accomplished. Within twenty-four hours he and his band were well away on the road to the north.

But the shock of this terrible Sunday was more than the pope could endure. His rescuers found a broken old man, muttering desires and threats, incapable now of thought or decision. The cardinals persuaded him to return to Rome, and within three weeks he was dead (October 20, 1303).