Nogaret insults Boniface VIII.
Death of Boniface, 1303.
Nogaret, one of the chief legal advisers of the king, undertook to face the pope. He collected a little troop of soldiers in Italy and marched against Boniface, who was sojourning at Anagni, where his predecessors had excommunicated two emperors, Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II. As Boniface, in his turn, was preparing solemnly to proclaim the king of France an outcast from the Church, Nogaret penetrated into the papal palace with his soldiers and heaped insults upon the helpless but defiant old man. The townspeople forced Nogaret to leave the next day, but Boniface's spirit was broken and he soon died at Rome.
Clement V, 1305–1314, and his subservience to Philip the Fair.
The popes take up their residence at Avignon.
King Philip now proposed to have no more trouble with popes. He arranged in 1305 to have the Archbishop of Bordeaux chosen head of the Church, with the understanding that he should transfer the papacy to France. The new pope accordingly summoned the cardinals to meet him at Lyons, where he was crowned under the title of Clement V. He remained in France during his whole pontificate, moving from one rich abbey to another. At Philip's command he reluctantly undertook a sort of trial of the deceased Boniface VIII, who was accused by the king's lawyers of all sorts of abominable crimes. A great part of Boniface's decrees were revoked, and those who had attacked him were exculpated. Then, to please the king, Clement brought the Templars to trial; the order was abolished and its possessions in France, for which the king had longed, were confiscated. Obviously it proved very advantageous to the king to have a pope within his realm. Clement V died in 1314. His successors took up their residence in the town of Avignon, just outside the French frontier of those days. There they built a sumptuous palace in which successive popes lived in great splendor for sixty years.
The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.
113. The prolonged exile of the popes from Rome, lasting from 1305 to 1377, is commonly called the Babylonian Captivity[200] of the Church, on account of the woes attributed to it. The popes of this period were for the most part good and earnest men; but they were all Frenchmen, and the proximity of their court to France led to the natural suspicion that they were controlled by the French kings. This, together with their luxurious court, brought them into discredit with the other nations.[201]
The papal taxation.