Boniface VIII

Boniface VIII
(Benedetto Caetani)
c1235-1303, Italian ecclesiastic: pope 1294-1303.

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orig. Benedict Caetani

born с 1235, Anagni, Papal States
died Oct. 11, 1303, Rome

Pope (1294–1303).

Born into an influential Roman family, Caetani studied law in Bologna and rose through the papal government to become cardinal-deacon (1281) and pope. In 1296 his attempt to end hostilities between Edward I of England and Philip IV of France became embroiled in the issue of taxation of clergy without papal consent. When Boniface issued a bull forbidding such taxation, Philip fought back with economic measures. They clashed again in 1301 over control of the clergy when Philip had a French bishop tried and imprisoned. Eventually, hearing that Boniface planned to excommunicate Philip, Philip's supporters captured the pope; though rescued two days later, he died shortly thereafter.

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pope
Introduction
original name  Benedict Caetani  
born c. 1235–40
died Oct. 11, 1303, Rome
 pope from 1294 to 1303, the extent of whose authority was vigorously challenged by the emergent powerful monarchies of western Europe, especially France. Among the lasting achievements of his pontificate were the publication of the third part of the Corpus Juris Canonici, the Liber Sextus, and the institution of the Jubilee of 1300, the first Holy Year.

Early life and election to the papacy.
      Benedict Caetani was born of an old and influential Roman family. He studied law in Bologna and then for many years held increasingly important functions in the papal government. Martin IV made him cardinal-deacon of St. Nicholas in Carcere Tulliano in 1281; under Nicholas IV he became cardinal-priest of St. Martin in Montibus in 1291. As papal legate to a church council in Paris from 1290 to 1291, he succeeded in delaying the outbreak of renewed war between France and England and in bringing about peace between France and Aragon. It was Cardinal Benedict Caetani who confirmed the unhappy pope Celestine V (Celestine V, Saint) in his wish to resign and then, after he had succeeded him as Boniface VIII, found it advisable to intern the old man in the castle of Fumone, where he soon died. Although Celestine died of natural causes, the death was open to suspicion and incriminating aspersions by Boniface's enemies. Among those who carried on the propaganda and opposition against Boniface were many of the Franciscan “Spirituals” (members of the order founded by St. Francis of Assisi who followed a literal observance of his rule of poverty), including the poet Iacopone da Todi, some of whose poems were written during his imprisonment by Boniface.

      The two principal international conflicts that existed from the beginning of Boniface's pontificate were that between France and England concerning Guyenne and Flanders, and that between the kingdoms of Naples and Aragon concerning the island of Sicily, which, after much provocation, had broken away from the Neapolitan king, disregarding papal feudal overlordship. Boniface finally, though unwillingly, accepted the independence of the island kingdom under Frederick of Aragon. His attempts to stop hostilities between Edward I of England and Philip IV of France, however, became enmeshed with another important problem, the increasing tendency of these warring monarchs to tax the clergy without obtaining papal consent. Although the desire of the late-medieval rulers to tax the wealth of their clergy has been defended and can perhaps be understood, the practice was unquestionably contrary to the canon law (ecclesiastical law) of the time. That Boniface refused to look on inactively while the struggle between France and England, which he was trying to terminate, was being financed at the cost and to the prejudice of the church and the papacy is not surprising. In 1296 he issued the bull Clericis Laicos, which forbade under the sanction of automatic excommunication any imposition of taxes on the clergy without express license by the pope. This bull had some effect in England, chiefly because of its support by the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsey; but in France there was no strong defender of papal prerogative against the concerted action of the King and his civil lawyers. His bull Unam Sanctam (1302) proclaimed the primacy of the pope and insisted on the submission of the temporal to the spiritual power.

Conflicts with Philip IV of France.
      Philip IV countered or even forestalled the publication of Clericis Laicos with an order forbidding all export of money and valuables from France and with the expulsion of foreign merchants. Although these measures were a serious threat to papal revenues, they alone probably would not have forced Boniface to the far-reaching concessions that he had to grant the French king within the year, concessions that almost amounted to revocation of Clericis Laicos. The necessity of coming to terms was primarily the result of an insurrection against Boniface by a section of the Colonna Family, a powerful anti-papal Roman family that included two cardinals, culminating in the armed robbery of a large amount of papal treasure in May 1297. A year of military action against the Colonna followed, which ended with their unconditional surrender. They were absolved from excommunication but were not reinstated in their offices and possessions; they therefore rebelled again and fled; some of them went to Philip, with whom they had conspired, perhaps, even before the issue of Clericis Laicos.

      Boniface's first conflict with the French king was followed by an apparent reconciliation, which was emphasized by the Pope's canonization of Philip's holy ancestor Louis IX. A second conflict, which broke out in 1301 around the trumped-up charges against a southern French bishop, Bernard Saisset (Saisset, Bernard) of Pamiers, and his summary trial and imprisonment, proved to be irreconcilable. Now the King threatened and meant to destroy one of the most fundamental gains that the papacy had made and maintained in the great struggles of the last two centuries: papal, rather than secular, control of the clergy. The Pope could not compromise here, and in the bull Ausculta Fili (“Listen Son”) he sharply rebuked Philip and demanded amends, especially the release of the Bishop, who had appealed to Rome. Instead, the King's chancellor, Pierre Flotte, was allowed to circulate a distorted extract of the bull and thus to prepare public opinion for the great assembly of the States General (the legislative body of France) in April 1302, in which nobles and burghers enthusiastically, and the clergy reluctantly, supported the King.

      Boniface, nevertheless, appears to have had good reason to hope for a favourable termination of the conflict, because Philip's army was shortly afterward disastrously defeated by a league of Flemish townspeople and because the German king and prospective emperor, Albert I of Habsburg, was ready to give up his French alliance if the Pope would recognize the contested legitimacy of his rule. This recognition was granted early in 1303 in terms that exalted the ideal and traditional, though rarely realized, harmonious relationship between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. This empire now was said by the Pope to possess—under ultimate papal supremacy—an overlordship over all other kingdoms, including France. In November 1302 Boniface had issued an even more fundamental declaration concerning the position of the papacy in the Christian world, the bull Unam Sanctam (“One Holy”), which has become the most widely known of all papal documents of the Middle Ages because of its allegedly radical and extreme formulation of the content of the papal office. The bull as a whole is indeed a strong but not a novel invocation of the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power. Nevertheless, the old Gelasian doctrine that both powers are distinct and both are from God is clearly stated, and in the final dogmatic sentence the Pope speaks not of the temporal power but of the human creature as the object of the papal plenitude of power, submission to which is said to be necessary for salvation.

      Meanwhile in France, Philip IV's councillor Guillaume de Nogaret (Nogaret, Guillaume de) had taken Flotte's place as the leader of an actively anti-papal royal policy. Philip was supported in this policy by other enemies of the Pope, including the legate whom Boniface had dispatched to France in these critical months and who betrayed his master, the French cardinal Jean Lemoine (Johannes Monachus). Many unjustified accusations against Boniface, ranging from unlawful entry into the papal office to heresy, were raised against him at a secret meeting of the King and his advisers held in the Louvre at Paris; these accusations were to be taken up and elaborated upon later during the posthumous trial against the Pope pursued by Philip IV. Shortly after the Louvre meeting, at which Nogaret had demanded the condemnation of the Pope by a general council of the church, Nogaret went to Italy to stir up, if possible, rebellion against the Pope.

Boniface's capture
      He was unsuccessful in this attempt, but when he learned that Boniface was about to publish a new bull announcing Philip's excommunication, Nogaret, with the assistance of Sciarra Colonna—a bold member of the powerful family—and with the connivance of some of the cardinals, decided to capture the Pope at Anagni, where the Pope was spending the summer. In this he succeeded through the momentary complicity of the local leaders of the city of Anagni, who, however, after two days changed their minds, rescued the Pope, and thus frustrated whatever further plans Nogaret may have had. During these two days Boniface, whom Sciarra Colonna would have killed but for Nogaret's wish to drag the Pope before a council, was probably physically ill-treated. He bore everything with great courage and patience. Boniface returned to Rome physically and mentally broken and died soon after.

      During his reign, the so-called Liber Sextus (“Sixth Book”) of the Corpus Juris Canonici (Corpus of Canon Law) was published. The Jubilee Year of 1300 was commemorated in a painting by Giotto, a fragment of which still survives in the basilica of S. Giovanni in Laterano. Boniface's sepulchre came from the workshop of Arnolfo di Cambio; his sarcophagus with his reclining statue is in the Vatican grottoes. Of the numerous memorial statues erected in his honour by himself or others—and later used by his enemies to brand him as an idolater—several still survive. They are visual evidence for the fact, known also from other sources, that Boniface VIII extended the height of the papal tiara and increased the number of crowns that circle the tiara from one to two and perhaps to three, which is their number in modern times.

Assessment.
      The violent attack on Boniface VIII marks the first open rejection of papal spiritual dominance by the rising national monarchies of the West and, above all, by France. Boniface's assertions of papal plenitude of power did not go beyond those of his predecessors in the 13th century. They were in fact more moderate than, for instance, those of Innocent IV and were in any case well within the range of the opinions gradually elaborated in the schools of theology and canon law in the period between the age of Gregory VII, the great 11th-century reformer, and that of Boniface. Boniface's failure was not caused by any novelty of his views or claims but by changed circumstances, by his inability or unwillingness to gauge their significance adequately, and, last but not least, by his own character: conscious of his superior intellect and at the same time tormented by illness, he was impulsive to the point of imprudence and short-tempered to the point of uncharitableness. It was his exaggerated harshness against the Colonna—whose hatred for the Caetani pope was largely the result of conflicting interests of the two families—as well as his shortsighted underestimation of the ruthlessness of Philip IV of France and his helpers that led to the coalition of these two disparate forces and to the Pope's downfall. Boniface VIII's personal failings, however, can in no way exculpate Philip IV the Fair and his ministers, who used forgery, defamation, intimidation, and finally violence against the Pope.

Gerhart B. Ladner

Additional Reading
An excellent biography is T.S.R. Boase, Boniface VIII (1933). The following studies are concerned specifically with Boniface's quarrel with the French king Philip IV: A.P.M.F.J. de Lévis-Mirepoix, L'Attentat d'Anagni: Le conflit entre la papauté et le roi de France, 7 Septembre 1303 (1969); Jean Rivière, Le Problème de l'église et de l'état au temps de Philippe le Bel (1926); Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France (1960; reissued 1982; originally published in French, 1942); and Charles T. Wood (ed.), Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII, 2nd ed. (1971). Boniface's correspondence and promulgations may be studied in Les Registres de Boniface VIII, ed. by Georges Digard, Maurice Faucon, and Antoine Thomas, 4 vol. (1884–1939).

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Universalium. 2010.

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