her duty of contributing towards the defence of the kingdom, and the chapter-general of the order of Citeaux wrote to Philip the Handsome himself, “On all grounds of natural equity and rules of law we ought to bear our share of such a burden out of the goods which God hath given us.” In every instance, the question had been as to the necessity for and the quota of the ecclesiastical contribution, which was at one time granted by the bishops and local clergy, at another expressly authorized by the papacy. There is nothing to show that Boniface VIII., at the time of his elevation to the Holy See, was opposed to these augmentations and demands on the part of the French crown; he was at that time too much occupied by his struggle against his own enemies at Rome, the family of the Colonnas, and he felt the necessity of remaining on good terms with France; but in 1296, Philip the Handsome, at war with the King of England and the Flemings, imposed upon the clergy two fresh tenths. The bishops alone were called upon to vote them; and the order of Citeaux refused to pay them, and addressed to the pope a protest, with a comparison between Philip and Pharaoh. Boniface not only entertained the protest, but addressed to the king a bull (called Clericis laicos, from its first two words), in which, led on by his zeal to set forth the generality and absoluteness of his power, he laid down as a principle that churches and ecclesiastics could not be taxed save with the permission of the sovereign pontiff, and that “all emperors, kings, dukes, counts, barons, or governors whatsoever, who should violate this principle, and all prelates or other ecclesiastics who should through weakness lend themselves to such violation, would by this mere fact incur excommunication, and would be incapable of release therefrom, save in articulo mortis, unless by a special decision of the Holy See.” This was going far beyond the traditions of the French Church, and, in the very act of protecting it, to strike a blow at its independence in its dealings with the French State. Philip was mighty wroth, but he did not burst out; he confined himself to letting the pope perceive his displeasure by means of divers administrative measures, amongst others by forbidding the exportation from the kingdom of gold, silver, and valuable articles, which found their way chiefly to Rome. Boniface, on his side, was not slow to perceive that he had gone too far, and that his own interests did not permit him to give so much offence to the King of France. A year after the bull Clericis laicos, he modified it by a new bull, which not only authorized the collection of the two tenths voted by the French bishops, but recognized the right of the King of France to tax the French clergy with their consent and without authorization from the Holy See, whenever there was a pressing necessity for it. Philip, on his side, testified to the pope his satisfaction at this concession by himself making one at the expense of the religious liberty of his subjects. In 1292 he had ordered the seneschal of Carcassonne to place limits to the power of the inquisitors in Languedoc by taking from them the right of having their sentences against heretics executed without appeal; and in 1298 he issued an ordinance to the effect that “to further the proceedings of the Inquisition against heretics, for the glory of God and for the augmentation of the faith, he laid his injunctions upon all dukes, counts, barons, seneschals, bailiffs, and provosts of his kingdom, to obey the diocesan bishops and the inquisitors deputed by the Holy See in handing over to them, whenever they should be requested, all heretics and their creed-fellows, favorers, and harborers, and to see to the immediate execution of sentences passed by the judges of the Church, notwithstanding any appeal and any complaint on the part of heretics and their favorers.”
Thus the two absolute sovereigns changed their policy and made temporary sacrifice of their mutual pretensions, according as it suited them to fight or to agree. But there arose a question in respect of which this continual alternation of pretensions and compromises, of quarrels and accommodations, was no longer possible; in order to keep up their position in the eyes of one another, they were obliged to come to a deadly clash; and in this struggle, perilous for both, Boniface VIII. was the aggressor, and with Philip the Handsome remained the victory.
On the 2d of February, 1300, Boniface VIII., who had much at heart the lustre and popularity of the Holy See, published a bull which granted indulgences to the pilgrims who should that year, and every centenary to come, visit the church of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome. At this first celebration of the centenarian Christian jubilee the concourse was immense; the most moderate historians say that there were never fewer than a hundred thousand pilgrims at Rome; others put the numbers as high as two hundred thousand, and contemporary poetry as well as history has celebrated this pious assemblage of Christians of every nation, language, and age around the tomb of their fathers in the faith. “The old man with white hair goeth far away,” says Petrarch (Sonnet xiv.), “from the sweet haunts where his life hath been passed, and from his little family astonished to find their dear father missing. As for him, in the last days of his age, broken down by weight of years and a-weary of the road, he draggeth along as best he may by force of willing spirit his old and tottering limbs, and cometh to Rome to fulfil his desire of seeing the image of Him whom he hopeth to see ere long up yonder in the heavens.” The success of the measure and the solemn homage of Christendom filled with joy and proud confidence the heart of the septuagenarian pontiff. He had three years before decreed to Louis IX., the most Christian of the Kings of France, the honors of canonization and the title of Saint. Being chosen as mediator, in 1298, by the Kings of France and England in a war which pressed heavily on both, the decree of arbitration which he pronounced, favorable rather to Philip than to Edward I., had been accepted by both of them; and the pope, on laying his injunctions upon them with some severity of language, had exhibited authority in a manner salutary for both kingdoms. Everything seemed at that time to smile on Boniface, and to invite him to believe himself the real sovereign of Christendom.
An opportunity for a splendid confirmation of his universal supremacy in the Christian world came to tempt him. A quarrel had arisen between Philip and the Archbishop of Narbonne on the subject of certain dues claimed by both in that great diocese. Boniface was loud in his advocacy of the archbishop against the officers of the king: “If, my son, thou tolerate such enterprises against the Churches of thy kingdom,” he wrote to Philip (on the 18th of July, 1300), “thou mayest thereafter have reasonable fear lest God, the author of judgments and the King of kings, exact vengeance for it; and assuredly His vicar will not, in the long run, keep silence. Though he wait a while patiently, in order not to close the door to compassion, there will be full need at last that he rouse himself for the punishment of the wicked and the glory of the good.” Nor did Boniface content himself with writing: he sent to Paris, to support his words, Bernard de Saisset, whom he, on his own authority, had just appointed Bishop of Pamiers. The choice of bishops was not yet, at that time, subject to any fixed and generally recognized rule: most often it was the chapter of the diocese that elected its bishop, with a subsequent application for the approbation of the king and the pope; sometimes the king and also the pope made such appointments directly and independently. Boniface VIII. had quite recently created a new bishopric at Pamiers in order to immediately appoint to it Bernard de Saisset, hitherto simple Abbot of St. Antonine in that city. Bernard, who was devoted to his patron, was, further, a passionate Languedocian and a foe to the dominion of the French kings of the North over Southern France; and he gave himself out as a personal descendant of the last Counts of Toulouse. On arriving in Paris as the pope’s legate, he made use there of violent and inconsiderate language; he even affirmed, it was said, that St. Louis had predicted the disappearance of his line in the third generation, and that King Philip was only an illegitimate descendant of Charlemagne. He was accused of having incessantly labored to excite revolts against the king in the south, at one time for the advantage of the local lords, at another in favor of foreign enemies of the kingdom. Being summoned before the king and his council at Senlis (October 14, 1301), he denied, but with an air of arrogance and aggression, the accusations against him. Philip had, at that time, as his chief councillors, lay-lawyers, servants passionately attached to the kingship. They were Peter Flotte his chancellor, William of Nogaret, judge-major at Beaucaire, and William of Plasian, Lord of Vezenobre, the two latter belonging, as Bernard de Saisset belonged, to Southern France, and determined to withstand, in the south as well as the north, the domination of ecclesiastics. They, in their turn, rose up against the doctrine and language of the Bishop of Pamiers. He was arrested and committed to the keeping of the Archbishop of Narbonne; and Philip sent to Rome his chancellor Peter Flotte himself and William of Nogaret, with orders to demand of the pope “that he should avenge the wrongs of God, the king, and the whole kingdom, by depriving
