Pope Boniface VIII
Pope Boniface VIII was born Benedetto Caetani in Anagni, a hilltop town southeast of Rome, and he died there too, in the most humiliating circumstances any medieval pope had ever endured. On the 7th of September 1303, soldiers in the pay of the French king smashed into his palace and held him captive for three days. A month later he was dead. Between that ignominious end and his election on Christmas Eve 1294 lies one of the most contested pontificates in church history. Boniface pushed the claim of papal supremacy further than almost any pope before or after him, insisting in his 1302 bull Unam sanctam that every human creature must be subject to the Roman pontiff. He fought kings, exiled poets, razed cities, and compiled a legal code that canon lawyers still consult. Dante Alighieri, who knew him personally and detested him, put him in Hell while he was still alive. What made a capable, educated churchman pursue power so relentlessly? And what does the wreckage of his reign reveal about the collision between medieval church authority and the rising power of nation states?
Benedetto Caetani's earliest recorded act was witnessing a document signed by Bishop Pandulf of Anagni on the 16th of October 1250. He was already embedded in a network of ecclesiastical patronage that few Italian families could match. His mother, Emilia Patrasso di Guarcino, was a niece of Pope Alexander IV, who was himself a nephew of Pope Gregory IX. Two successive popes within living memory were blood relatives. His father's family, the Caetani, held baronial lands across the Papal States. His elder brother Roffredo served as Senator of Rome from 1290 to 1292 and became the first Conte di Caserta in 1288.
Benedetto began his religious formation at the monastery of the Friars Minor in Velletri, placed under the care of his maternal uncle Fra Leonardo Patrasso. Pope Alexander IV granted him a canonry at Anagni's cathedral. In 1252 his paternal uncle Pietro Caetani became Bishop of Todi in Umbria, and Benedetto followed him there to begin legal studies. Pietro granted him a canonry in Todi's cathedral in 1260. Later in life Benedetto described Todi as the dwelling place of his early youth, the city which nourished him while still of tender years.
By 1264 he had entered the Roman Curia, probably as an advocate. That same year he was assigned as secretary to Cardinal Simon de Brion on a diplomatic mission to France involving negotiations over the Crown of Naples and Sicily with Charles of Anjou. On the 1st of May 1264 the cardinal was authorized to appoint two or three secretaries, and Benedetto was among them. The following year he accompanied Cardinal Ottobono Fieschi as part of the apostolic legation to England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. He served there until July 1268, helping suppress the remnants of Simon de Montfort's baronial rebellion while also serving as rector of St. Lawrence's church in Towcester, Northamptonshire. By the time he returned to the continent, the future pope had already spent years navigating the courts of France and England, acquiring seventeen benefices along the way. On the 12th of April 1281 Pope Martin IV made him cardinal deacon of Saint Nicholas in Carcere at Orvieto.
Boniface proclaimed 1300 a jubilee year, the first such Catholic jubilee to take place in Rome. The event drew crowds the city had never seen. On one particular day some 30,000 people were counted at the shrines. The chronicler Giovanni Villani estimated that roughly 200,000 pilgrims came to Rome over the course of the year. Food was plentiful and sold at moderate prices. Boniface and his aides managed the affair well. The practical motive may have been partly financial: French embargoes had blocked a major source of papal revenue, and pilgrims brought money.
In the field of canon law Boniface left a more enduring mark. The existing collections had been codified in the Decretales Gregorii IX, published under Pope Gregory IX in 1234. In the sixty years since, popes had issued a cascade of new legal decisions that sat uncollected and hard to use. In 1298 Boniface ordered these decisions compiled and published as a sixth volume, or Liber Sextus. It included 88 of his own legal rulings and a set of legal principles called the Regulae Juris. One of those principles reads, in Latin: Nemo potest ad impossibile obligari, meaning no one can be obliged to do the impossible. The Liber Sextus remains important source material for canon lawyers today. It was eventually incorporated into the larger Corpus Juris Canonici alongside the five earlier Decretales.
Boniface also founded the Sapienza University of Rome in 1303, the same year he died. He had the churches of Rome restored in preparation for the Great Jubilee, particularly St. Peter's Basilica, the Lateran Basilica, and the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. The jubilee year itself gave him the political standing he needed to press harder against his enemies in France and Florence.
In 1297 Cardinal Jacopo Colonna disinherited his brothers Ottone, Matteo, and Landolfo of their lands. The three brothers appealed to Boniface, who ordered Jacopo to restore the lands and hand over the family strongholds of Colonna, Palestrina, and other towns to the papacy. Jacopo refused. He and his nephew Pietro Colonna had also maintained questionable ties to James II of Aragon and Frederick III of Sicily, both enemies of the pope. In May of that year Boniface stripped Jacopo and Pietro from the College of Cardinals and excommunicated them and their followers.
The Colonna family responded by declaring Boniface's election invalid, arguing that the unprecedented abdication of Celestine V had not been lawful. Open warfare followed. Boniface appointed Landolfo Caetani, one of the three brothers who had sided with him, to command the papal army against his own relatives. By the end of 1298 Landolfo had captured Colonna and Palestrina and other towns. The cities had surrendered peacefully on the promise of being spared. Boniface broke that promise. Palestrina was razed, the plough driven through its ruins, and salt strewn over the ground. Only the cathedral survived. A new settlement called the Citta Papale was eventually built in its place.
Dante wrote about the fall of Palestrina in the Inferno, placing it in the mouth of the spirit of Guido of Montefeltro, who described the campaign as won by treachery through long promises and short performances. The Colonna destruction left Boniface's Sacred College depleted and gave Philip IV of France considerably more leverage, since without the Colonna faction the French king's influence over the college was diminished from one side and enlarged from another.
The conflict between Boniface and Philip IV of France began in 1296, when Philip imposed taxes on the French clergy to fund his wars with England and Flanders. Boniface issued a bull in February of that year forbidding lay taxation of the clergy without prior papal approval. The bull warned that emperors, kings, princes, or barons who seized property deposited in holy buildings would incur excommunication. Philip responded by banning the export of gold, silver, precious stones, horses, arms, and food from France to the Papal States. This cut off a main source of papal revenue and banished the papal agents who had been raising funds for a new crusade.
Boniface retreated in stages. By February 1297, he permitted voluntary clerical donations without papal approval during emergencies as the king defined them. On the 3rd of April 1297, seven French archbishops and forty bishops agreed to concede to Philip a fifth of their ecclesiastical revenues. By July 1297, in the bull Etsi de Statu, Boniface yielded entirely, conceding that kings could raise taxes on church property during emergencies without any prior papal approval. Philip rescinded his embargoes and accepted papal nuncios as arbitrators in his war with England. The 1303 Treaty of Paris restored Aquitaine to Edward I, though Edward had to come to France in person to do homage.
The truce did not hold. In 1301 Philip arrested the papal legate Bernard Saisset on a charge of inciting insurrection, tried him in a royal court, and handed him to the custody of Giles Aycelin, the Archbishop of Narbonne. Boniface responded in December 1301 with the bull Ausculta Fili, appealing to Philip to listen modestly to the Vicar of Christ. When the bull was presented at court, Count Robert II of Artois reportedly snatched it from the papal emissary and threw it into the fire. On the 10th of February 1302 it was officially burned at Paris before the king and a large crowd. Philip then summoned the first French Estates-General in history, at which nobles, clergy, and commons all wrote separately to Rome defending the king's temporal authority. Forty-five French prelates attended Boniface's council in Rome in October 1302 despite Philip's prohibition and the confiscation of their property. On the 18th of November 1302, Boniface issued the bull Unam sanctam, declaring that both spiritual and temporal power were under the pope's jurisdiction and that kings were subordinate to the Roman pontiff.
On Maundy Thursday, the 4th of April 1303, Boniface again excommunicated all persons impeding French clerics from traveling to the Holy See, adding the phrase in Latin that the order applied even to those who shone with imperial or royal dignity. He stopped short of naming Philip by name. Philip's chief minister, Guillaume de Nogaret, denounced Boniface to the French clergy as a heretical criminal. On the 15th of August 1303, Boniface suspended the right of all persons in the Kingdom of France to appoint anyone as Regent or Doctor, including the king himself, and reserved to the Holy See the provision of all vacancies in cathedral churches and monasteries until Philip came to the papal court to explain himself.
Nogaret did not wait. On the 7th of September 1303, he led an army in alliance with Sciarra Colonna against Boniface's palace in Anagni. The pope issued a bull on the 8th of September excommunicating Philip and Nogaret. The French chancellor and the Colonnas demanded that Boniface abdicate. He refused, saying he would sooner die. Colonna then allegedly struck him, an event remembered in Italian as the schiaffo di Anagni, the Anagni slap. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, who wrote a detailed account, described how Nogaret threatened to take Boniface bound to Lyon and have him deposed and condemned at a general council. According to Villani, no one dared actually touch the pope, and after three days the people of Anagni rose, drove out Sciarra Colonna and his followers with casualties on both sides, and freed Boniface and his household.
Boniface traveled to Rome immediately. When his body was accidentally exhumed in 1605, the Apostolic Notary Giacomo Grimaldi recorded that the corpse was unusually tall, measuring seven palms, was quite intact, and showed none of the signs of a man who had died gnawing at himself in a frenzy. The clothes were still identifiable: long stockings, a cassock, pontifical vestments of black silk, rings, and bejeweled gloves. He died on the 11th of October 1303, in full possession of his senses and in the presence of eight cardinals, after receiving the sacraments.
King Philip IV was not finished. After the papacy moved to Avignon, Philip pressured Pope Clement V into opening a posthumous trial of Boniface on charges of heresy. Clement signed the mandate at the Priory of Groseau near Malausene on the 18th of October 1309. The kings of Aragon and Castile immediately sent ambassadors to protest, calling the spectacle a scandal being poured into the ears of the faithful. Complaints came from Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands as well.
Preliminary examinations were held at the same priory in August and September 1310. The accusations included sodomy, though the source notes this was the standard charge Philip leveled against enemies, including the Knights Templar. On the 27th of April 1310 Clement pardoned Nogaret for his offences at Anagni, on the condition that Nogaret personally travel to the Holy Land and serve there in military service. The matter was eventually referred to the Council of Vienne, which opened on the 16th of October 1311 with more than 300 bishops in attendance. Three cardinals testified to Boniface's orthodoxy. No verdict against him was delivered. The council closed the case.
Dante had settled his personal score years earlier. In the Inferno, Boniface appears among the simoniacs in the eighth circle of Hell, placed there while still alive in the poem's narrative time. Pope Nicholas III, whom Dante meets headfirst in a pit, mistakes Dante for Boniface, surprised the pope has arrived ahead of schedule. The placement is deliberate: simony sits in the eighth circle of fraud, below sodomy in the seventh circle of violence, making it a graver offense in Dante's moral scheme. Dante also recalled, through Beatrice in the Paradiso, Boniface's feud with the Colonna family and his destruction of Palestrina. In Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, Boniface appears satirically as the pope who granted a priorate to the highwayman Ghino di Tacco. John Gower's Confessio Amantis repeated the rumor that Boniface died gnawing his own hands, though the 1605 exhumation at St. Peter's directly refuted that story. Boniface's body now lies in the crypt of St. Peter's, in a large marble sarcophagus inscribed BONIFACIVS PAPA VIII.
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Common questions
When was Pope Boniface VIII born and where did he spend his early youth?
Benedetto Caetani, later known as Pope Boniface VIII, was born in Anagni. He spent his early youth in Todi, which he described as the dwelling place of his early youth.
How did Pope Boniface VIII become pope and when was he elected?
Pope Boniface VIII was elected by ballot and accession on Christmas Eve, the 24th of December 1294. He was consecrated bishop of Rome in Rome by Cardinal Hugh Aycelin on the 23rd of January 1295.
What major legal work did Pope Boniface VIII publish in 1298?
In 1298, Boniface ordered publication of a new volume containing various papal decisions including some 88 of his own legal decisions. This material became known as Liber Sextus and includes a collection of legal principles called Regulæ Juris.
Who attacked Pope Boniface VIII at his palace in Anagni and when did this occur?
On the 7th of September 1303, an army led by King Philip minister Guillaume de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna attacked Boniface palace in Anagni. The event is historically remembered as the schiaffo di Anagni or Anagni slap.
When did Pope Boniface VIII die and what caused his death?
Pope Boniface VIII died violent fever the 11th of October 1303 after being released from captivity following three days of imprisonment. His grief hardened heart produced strange malady that gnawed him to death.