Commentary
On September 7, 1303, a French military force crossed into Italy and seized the pope at his summer palace at Anagni, south of Rome. The soldiers violently removed him from his throne, assaulted him, and imprisoned him with the intention of taking him back to France for trial. What led to this shocking turn of events?
In medieval Europe, there had been ongoing conflicts between the church and the state over jurisdiction, finances, and influence. By the year 1300, the papacy had managed to weaken the Holy Roman Empire but now faced challenges from powerful monarchs in England and France. These kings were eager to increase their revenues and saw taxing the Roman Catholic Church as a solution to their financial problems.
The church had historically resisted mandatory taxation, but had contributed to kings’ funds during times of war or crisis. Popes reminded the greedy rulers that the church played a vital role in providing social services and educational institutions in their countries. Catholic churches operated numerous charitable institutions such as hospitals, asylums, schools, universities, hostels, orphanages, and food programs for the less fortunate. Taxing the church would mean reducing funding for these essential services, yet King Edward I of England and King Philip IV of France seized church property as a source of revenue. (They also extracted wealth from Italian bankers, Jews, and the Knights Templar.)
The pope at the center of this event was
Boniface VIII, a man with ambitious goals who excommunicated his adversaries across Europe. In 1302, he issued a papal bull known as
Unam Sanctam, which asserted extreme papal authority. The decree declared that there is only one true church, salvation is only possible within its confines, and the religious power of the pope surpasses secular authority. Essentially, the pope held a higher rank than any emperor or king, and it was deemed necessary for all individuals to be subject to the Roman Pontiff for salvation.
Philip IV of France responded decisively. He convened a national assembly that accused Boniface VIII of various crimes, including infidelity, failure in the Holy Land, the murder of his predecessor, heresy, fornication, simony, sodomy, sorcery, idolatry, and even keeping a demon as a pet. In 1303, Philip sent a contingent led by his associate
Guillaume de Nogaret (who would later gain notoriety for his actions against the Knights Templar) to arrest and mistreat Pope Boniface. Although the pontiff was eventually rescued by townspeople, the damage had been done. The battered and humiliated pope returned to Rome, where he passed away shortly thereafter.
The pope’s authority had been challenged, and the strength of papal power was revealed to be fragile. In 1305, a French pope, Clement V, was elected. He avoided direct confrontation with royal authority, publicly burned Unam Sanctam, and commended Philip IV for his actions against Boniface. Clement relocated the papacy from Rome, its home for over a millennium,
to Avignon, a town in southern France.
For the next seventy years, every pope was of French descent, and the papacy was under the influence of the French monarchy. This era of decline in the church became known as the
Babylonian Captivity, drawing parallels to the captivity and exile of the Jews in the Old Testament. It diminished the reputation of the church beyond France and proved costly for believers who were heavily taxed by the popes to fund the construction of a new religious capital in Avignon. This period also weakened the church at a time when its influence was crucial, as the 14th century witnessed the onset of the Little Ice Age, the devastating Black Plague, widespread warfare, peasant uprisings, and theological divisions.
The repercussions of Boniface VIII’s arrest persisted. In 1378, the papacy briefly returned to Rome, only to face opposition from the French supporting a rival pope in Avignon. Europe became divided between nations backing the Roman pontiff and those supporting the Avignon claimant. The situation deteriorated further as Western Christendom experienced multiple rival popes in the early 1400s before the schism eventually ended. The ambitions of the papacy were thwarted, and the authority of national monarchs was firmly established.
