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But no vengeance lighted upon the new Pilate save the immortal curse of the wrathful Florentine. The mighty poet, driven from Florence by Philip's brother, Charles of Valois, whom Boniface himself, in his old love of the house of France, had called into Italy to smite the Ghibelins and to command the Guelfs; the woful wanderer, who, a born Guelf, had partaken that tenderness of Boniface for the Capets, and who, now stricken like the pontiff by that beloved race, felt towards it that deepest and fiercest of all hates-the hate that has once been love-fed his sick, angry heart with the hope of that delicious vengeance which never came, and was doomed to behold the unbroken triumphs and heightened prosperity of that Philip whom he so abhorred. The blow struck at Anagni not only remained unavenged and unreturned, but was altogether successful. It brought the papacy low, not only for a while but for ever; it was indeed a mighty stroke, from which the papacy never wholly recovered. The popedom has survived the outrage at Anagni five centuries and a half; but those centuries have been ages of degeneracy and decline, diversified by vehement revivals and violent relapses. Since then the Roman Church has put forth great energy, has won victories, has possessed considerable power; but weakness and disaster have been still more her portion; she has never since ruled the world. The omnipotence, temporal and spiritual, arrogated by Gregory VII. and exercised by Innocent III., fell with Boniface VIII. Never again, even for a brief while, has she realised her ideal, but has indulged in magnificent pretensions, more or less painfully belied by facts, and has clung to a theoretical position in unwelcome contrast with her actual

This furious malediction comes in during an enumeration of the misdeeds of the Capets. Bitter indeed must have been Dante's hatred towards Philip and his race to win from him words of reverence for that Boniface over whose crimes he dilates elsewhere, and for whom he provided a very unpleasant abode in hell with other evil pontiffs (Inferno, xix. 52-82; xxvii. 70-111). His tenderness for the popedom when stricken by Philip, is quite consistent with his wrath against the popedom when assailing the empire. In this passage Dante may have taken a hint from pope Benedict XI., the successor of Boniface, who, in a sermon preached the year after the outrage at Anagni, described it as an outrage upon Christ: Ipsum Christum a militibus Pilati spoliari asserens, captum, damnandum et tanquam remortuum planxit in carcere, velut in sepulchro, triduo a militibus custoditum' (Matthew Westm. lib. ii. p. 444). Philip is not the only French sovereign whose dealings with the papacy have won for him, with papal advocates or personal foes, a place beside Pontius Pilate. The uncle and nephew who enthroned and reenthroned the house of Bonaparte have had this fellowship with a Capet; and a French bishop, in 1861, drew out in Napoleon III. the likeness which Dante glanced at in Philip the Fair.

plight. The age of absolute power over flesh and spirit, over states and souls, over consciences and kings; the age of overwhelming excommunications and blighting interdicts; the age of boundless usurpations always triumphant, and of huge extortions always successful; the age wherein crowns were given and taken away, and nations made over to an enslaver or an exterminator at the good pleasure of the Roman See; the age which lives over again so vividly in the sombre and minute painting of the contemporary monk Matthew Paris; the age which the devotees of the papacy call its golden age, which they fondly linger over, and which they passionately wish back; the age which the foes of the popedom no less admit to be its golden age; this age passed away never to return. This glory and greatness, unseemly and repulsive as the ideal of an earthly polity, as the perfection of a kingdom of this world, but so utterly amazing and enormous as the ideal of the Church of Christ, as the culmination and consummation here below of the kingdom not of this world, went, and went for ever. The debasement and diminution of the leading personage closed the third act but in no way impaired the interest of the papal drama; varied scenes and striking incidents fill the two remaining acts into which the Reformation divides the story of the declining popedom.

BOOK V.

THE DEGRADATION OF THE POPEDOM.

The wretched woman, whose unhappy hour
Hath now made thrall to your commandement,
Before that angry heavens list to lour

And fortune false betrayed me to your power,
Was (O what now availeth that I was!)
Born the sole daughter of an emperor;

He that the wide West under his rule has,

And high hath set his throne where Tiberis doth pass.
Faerie Queen, i. ii. 22.

PHILIP THE FAIR had outraged the papacy in the person of Boniface; he went on to catch and tame it. The violence of Anagni was not enough of itself to make him master of the Roman See; but he followed it up with extraordinary vigour, perseverance and good fortune. Upon the death of Boniface, the Cardinals hastened to give him a successor in one of his most devoted partisans, who took the name of Benedict XI. The new pontiff, however eager to avenge his outraged benefactor, and vindicate the insulted dignity of the Roman See, felt at first too much terror-stricken at the enormity of Anagni to resent it, and undertake a struggle with its unscrupulous deviser. After a few months, however, he gathered courage to excommunicate its perpetrators and directors. Scarcely had he hurled his bolt when he himself was mortally stricken, dying suddenly and most suspiciously, from poison as it was supposed, conveyed in a basket of figs by a female emissary of the French king (1304). No voice was raised; no inquiry was made; the Roman Church, but just before so dauntless and all-defying, trembled before this terrible adversary; and in fear and trepidation the Cardinals came together at Perugia to elect a pontiff.

Raynaldus, an. 1304, passim.

The papal annalist hints at the crime, but does not insist upon it; in fact, hurries over all the dealings of Philip with the papacy, evidently a most unwelcome subject. Matthew of Westminster (lib. ii. p. 444) makes Benedict poisoned by his butler.

But they could come to no election; Philip had been unsparing of gold as of violence, and his partisans in the conclave counterbalanced the creatures of Boniface. Months rolled away, but no pontiff emerged. At length it was agreed that the friends of Boniface should nominate three Cardinals, from whom the French faction should choose a pope within forty days. Philip was straightway apprised that the papacy was in the gift of his partisans, and was counselled to make terms with one of the three nominees, Bertrand de Got, archbishop of Bordeaux, indirectly his own subject, though the immediate subject of Edward I. of England, as Duke of Acquitaine. Philip, the last man in the world to neglect such an opportunity, at once invited the archbishop to a conference. In a wood near St. Jean d'Angely, halfway between Paris and Bordeaux, the king and the priest met, and there concluded a compact which brought the priesthood low and inflicted on the popedom seventy years of vassalage to the French monarchy. Philip showed the archbishop that the papal chair was in his gift, and offered it to him on six conditions: his own full reconciliation with the Church, the absolution of the captors and the condemnation of the memory of Boniface, the restoration of the Cardinals Colonna to all their honours, the tithes of the French clergy for five years, and a sixth favour, unnamed as yet, but to be granted as soon as asked. The eager archbishop promised everything and to insure performance, the wary king exacted an oath upon the consecrated bread, and hostages from among the near kindred of de Got. The grateful prelate at once complied. The king's friends in the conclave were forthwith instructed to proceed to the election, and within thirty-five days from the conclusion of the agreement, the sworn servant of Philip became pope under the name of Clement V. The sovereign pontiff reigned by the grace of the king of France.2

Philip made the most of his bargain and improved his triumph to the utmost. He completely subjected the pope; he unscrupulously used the popedom. He degraded the papacy, so lately the master, the oppressor, and the destroyer, into the tool of his policy, and the minister of his passions. Never was there a more exacting and imperious master than the French monarch; never was there a more humble and devoted servant than the sovereign pontiff. Philip was very ambitious, very covetous, and very implacable, and Clement lent himself and the whole power

2 G. Villani, lib. viii. c. 80. Histoire du Différend, pp. 76, 77.

of the Roman Church to gratify every craving of that eager ambition, that insatiable cupidity, and that sleepless revenge. He enriched the king at the expense of the clergy, of whom he was the head. He replenished the coffers, aggrandised the family, absolved the agents, cursed the enemies, and anathematised the victims of his patron.3 Most men cease to hate a foe when once out of the way, and often relent towards an adversary dead and gone. But Philip hated Boniface with a peculiar and immortal hate. He had not forgiven the man whom he had arrested and done to death. To justify the outrage at Anagni before Christendom, and perhaps to ease his own conscience, he had to make his victim out to be a usurper and a monster. Accordingly, he formally accused him of every imaginable vice and crime, and required Clement to declare his pontificate an usurpation and his memory infamous, to annul his acts and disinter his bones.

The hapless Clement, loth to dishonour his old master and to disoblige his new master, loth to condemn the man who had made him cardinal and to incense the man who had made him pope, loth to disorganise the Church by annulling all the acts and blotting out the pontificate of Boniface, and to imperil himself by provoking the wrath of Philip, gave solemn hearing to the horrible charges brought against his predecessor, instituted a trial, examined witnesses, listened to prosecution and defence, but shrank from giving sentence. This grand scandal-this warfare waged against the memory of the Father of the Faithful by his eldest son was at last closed by a compromise, in the shape of a bull, which, while it saved the memory and recognised the pontificate of Boniface, proclaimed the innocence and magnified the motives of Philip, declared him to be a true son of the Church and the people of France an elect people, cancelled every act of the Roman See to the prejudice of the king and kingdom during the quarrel with Boniface, and directed every expression hostile or offensive to him to be obliterated from every document in the pontifical archives.5 Philip might well have been contented with such a compromise; but he more readily relinquished the full satisfaction of

* Raynaldus, an. 1305, n. 24; an. 1306, n. 1–10; an. 1307, n. 1–9; an. 1307, n. 15, 22. Baluzius, Vitæ Paparum Avenionensium, tom. i. pp. 3, 6.

4 G. Villani, lib. viii. c. 91. Raynaldus, an. 1307, n. 10, 11; an. 1309, n. 4; an. 1310, n. 37, 38.

5

Raynaldus, an. 1311, c. 25–51. Histoire du Différend, pp. 77–82.

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