Boniface VIII

Italian pope (1294-1303)

• Born: c. 1235
• Birthplace: Probably Anagni, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: October 11, 1303
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Though pope for only nine years, Boniface VIII represents both the zenith and nadir of papal power. In his clash with the secular rulers of Western Europe, Boniface insisted on the ultimate earthly authority of the Papacy.

Early Life

Boniface VIII (BAHN-uh-fas), christened Benedict Caetani, was one of the younger sons of Roffred Caetani and his wife, Emilia, the niece of Pope Alexander IV. His family seems to have been moderately wealthy, owning some land, and well-connected to the Church. Very little is known of Benedict's life before 1275. In the 1250's and 1260', however, he apparently joined his uncle Peter, who had been made bishop of Todi in 1252, and studied civil law there with Master Bartolus, traveling on occasion to Spoleto to study with other masters. In 1263 or 1264, he probably studied law for a short time at the great law school in Bologna. At about the same time, Benedict embarked on his career in the Church, first working as a secretary of Cardinal Simon of Brie and, from 1265 to 1268, accompanying Cardinal Ottoboni Fieschi on a diplomatic mission to England. When Ottoboni became Pope Adrian V in 1276, Benedict was appointed to supervise the collection of certain papal taxes in France. Achieving this post marks the beginning of Benedict's rapid ascent through the ranks of the growing papal bureaucracy. From tax supervisor to papal notary to inquisitor's assistant, Benedict learned not only the complex workings of the Church's government but also the intricacies of canon law. When his old master Simon of Brie became Pope Martin IV in 1281, the new pope rewarded his former secretary by making him a cardinal the cardinal-deacon of Saint Nicholas in Carcere Tulliano.

A cardinal in the late thirteenth century could wield much power within the Church's bureaucracy, especially by managing the incomes of numerous benefices and overseeing delicate diplomatic negotiations. Medieval popes perceived themselves to be the peacemakers of Christendom, individuals who could nurture truces or settle disputes between warring secular powers or churchmen. They relied on their industrious cardinals or legates to aid in the maintenance of peace. To support the great business of the cardinals, the pope granted numerous benefices churches, canonries, and deaconries, each producing an annual income to his trusted officers. In addition, cardinals, such as Benedict, often received gifts and gold from kings, princes, bishops, and noblemen who sought the cardinals’ favors or political support. Throughout the 1280's and the early 1290', Cardinal Benedict served as a legate for Popes Martin IV, Honorius IV, and Nicholas IV, traveling to France and throughout Italy to aid in keeping the peace between often quarrelsome monarchs. Having gained much experience in the service of the Papacy, Benedict achieved even greater prominence in 1285 when Honorius IV appointed him chief examiner of bishops, an office that offered much prestige and permitted Benedict to establish political liaisons with many of the bishops appointed to dioceses across Europe.

Life's Work

When Pope Nicholas IV died in 1292, political rivalries between two great Italian families kept the papal election process from a speedy conclusion. After wrangling for twenty-seven months, the cardinals, including Cardinal Benedict Caetani, selected a hermit, Peter of Morrone, to be the new pope, Celestine V. The politically convenient solution of choosing a nonentity to be pope proved disastrous. Although the cardinals who had supported the rival factions in the college thought that a hermit pope would permit them to continue to jockey for power, Celestine turned out to be semiliterate, untrained in religious and doctrinal matters, and partial to rustic rather than courtly life. During the nearly four months that Celestine ruled, it became painfully obvious that he did not wish to be pope and that his performance of papal duties was unsatisfactory and irregular. On December 13, 1294, Celestine took the unprecedented step of announcing his abdication. Ten days later, the College of Cardinals reassembled to choose a successor and, on Christmas Eve, 1294, Benedict Caetani was elected pope, adopting the name Boniface VIII. In later years, suspicion was cast on this election because Cardinal Benedict had been one of the legal experts who provided advice on Celestine's resignation. Some were to argue that this advice had been self-serving.

Boniface's nine-year reign was one of the most controversial pontificates of the Middle Ages. As pope, he not only directly confronted the royal power of the English and French monarchs but also raised questions about his own faith (he believed in the power of amulets and magic) and the propriety of his defense of the Church.

Boniface's relationship with the secular monarchs of Europe focused on the question of precisely what powers a monarch could exercise over clergymen who lived within his or her kingdom. In the final years of the thirteenth century, the kingdoms of England and France once again found themselves engaged in conflict, and the monarchs of both kingdoms desperately needed funds to support their costly war efforts. The monarchs claimed the power to collect taxes not only from their lay subjects but also from their clerical ones, since all subjects, regardless of their status, received the benefits of royal protection within the kingdom. Boniface opposed the clerical payment of royal taxes, primarily because he himself desired to collect taxes from clergymen to finance his own struggles against the Colonna family in Italy and the Ghibellines, who advocated a strong, antipapal, imperial presence in papally dominated Italy. Furthermore, Boniface felt that by allowing monarchs to tax clergymen, the Church would be compromising its hard-won supremacy, fought for and defended for two centuries. In response to the taxation measures of Edward I of England and Philip IV the Fair of France, Boniface issued the bull Clericis laicos in 1296, in which he declared that, according to canon law, the clergy was composed of individuals who had special personal and property privileges not accorded to others. Because of this special quality, clergymen could be taxed only after the pope had given his authorization. Failure to obtain this authorization could result in the excommunication of anyone who collected tax revenues from the clergy.

Neither Philip nor Edward was intimidated by Boniface's declaration. Philip ordered an end to the export of money from France effectively ending the collection of taxes by the Papacy in France and Edward declared all clergymen who refused to pay taxes to be outlaws, thereby removing them from royal protection and subjecting them to banditry. In the face of this opposition, Boniface backed down in 1297, saying that in times of emergencies determined by the secular rulers clergymen could make voluntary “gifts” to monarchs, in lieu of tax payments. The pope's retreat, however, was not to last long.

Four years later, Philip arrested and tried Bernard Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, for crimes of treason, heresy, simony, and the uttering of offensive statements. Saisset was found guilty and imprisoned by his archbishop. The royal court asked Boniface to remove Saisset from his bishopric. Boniface refused the royal request, despite the facts of the case against Saisset, and demanded that the king have Saisset immediately released. More drastically, Boniface revoked all the privileges previously granted to the king for limited influence in church affairs. Boniface acted from his firm belief that the Church and the Papacy must be completely independent of secular control or interference. This uncompromising position was, perhaps, bolstered by the fact that as an Italian, deeply involved in interclan rivalries within Italy, Boniface seems to have harbored an anti-French bias.

Philip's response to Boniface's demand and revocation of privileges was powerful and unwavering. Beginning in 1302, his administration flooded France with antipapal propaganda, and royal officers drew up a list of twenty-nine accusations against the pope, charging him with blasphemy, simony, heresy, fornication, and the murder of the recently deceased Celestine V, whom Boniface allegedly had to kill in order to prevent Celestine from testifying to the French charge that Boniface had induced him to abdicate in 1294. Philip's government insisted that a council of cardinals, archbishops, and bishops from across Europe be held to determine the propriety of Boniface's actions and his suitability for the papal throne.

Boniface convoked a council in November of 1302, and the outnumbered French clergymen who attended were unable to prevent the council from approving of Boniface's actions. At the end of the meetings, Boniface issued a papal decree the boldest and most confident statement ever made in the history of the Church about the powers of the pope. The decree, Unam sanctam , contains a series of legal arguments dredged up from the archives of the Church and the writings of several twelfth century canon lawyers. Basically, the document describes Boniface's perception of Christian society: Christendom was a society in which there were two “swords,” the sword of secular monarchs and the sword of the pope. The secular monarchs used their swords to protect the Church physically, while the pope used his for spiritual defense. Boniface also argued that “every human creature must be subject to the Roman pontiff” if that individual wished to gain salvation. In the pope's mind, every human committed sins, and the Church, which the pope controlled, was the institution to which humans were required to turn to seek forgiveness of their sins. Thus, Unam sanctam declared that the pope was the single most powerful ruler of Christian society because he controlled all human ability to gain salvation.

King Philip fired the last shot in this ongoing conflict between the pope and a secular monarch. In June, 1303, the king assembled representatives of the clergy, nobility, and towns of France and, after much careful staging and intimidation, convinced them to pass a resolution demanding that Boniface VIII be tried by a church council on the twenty-nine accusations the French had made against him. With the delicately orchestrated show of popular resentment against Boniface, the French king felt obliged to respond to his people's demand. When Philip learned that Boniface intended to have him excommunicated, Philip sent a small band of French soldiers to the papal palace at Anagni, where Boniface VIII was captured on the night of September 7. Though the inhabitants of Anagni won the release of the pope two days later, Philip's message was clear: The pope could produce legal arguments that described and defended his supreme position in Christian Europe, but forceful military action ultimately determined who held real power in Christendom. Five weeks later, on October 11, Boniface VIII died at the palace in Rome, a broken man and a conquered pope.

Significance

Boniface VIII's pontificate marked the end of a 225-year phase of papal history, a period characterized by the Papacy's struggle to maintain itself as the premier political force in Christendom on the basis of complex legal and doctrinal arguments. Boniface, having received legal training and having worked his way through the ranks of the Church's bureaucracy, not only understood the functions and intricacies of the Church as an institution but also appreciated the political value of the claim to papal supremacy. His stubborn insistence on the complete independence of the Church from secular interference reveals his devotion to an old tradition within the Church, as well as a certain unawareness of the changing realities of early fourteenth century politics. While Europeans still piously believed in the importance of the Church in the gaining of salvation, their political support and devotion were gradually being courted and won by national monarchs who had their own ideas about power and the needs of Christian society.

Bibliography

Barraclough, Geoffrey. The Medieval Papacy. 1968. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. A handsomely illustrated, readable history of the Papacy as an evolving institution in Europe.

Boase, T. S. R. Boniface VIII. 1933. Reprint. Wilmington, Del.: International Academic Publishers, 1979. Though somewhat dated, this is still the most useful English-language biography of Boniface VIII. Boase traces Boniface’s life throughout his career, focusing especially on the factional problems of the Papacy and the various clashes with Philip IV.

Denton, Jeffrey Howard. Philip the Fair and the Ecclesiastical Assemblies of 1294-1295. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991. An account of the interactions between Philip IV the Fair and Boniface VIII. Indexes.

Ullmann, Walter. A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. 1972. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 2003. A careful survey of papal history from its development in the late Roman imperial period to the Protestant Reformation.

Wood, Charles T., ed. Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII: State vs. Papacy. 1967. Reprint. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971. Wood has collected several primary documents and historical interpretations of the struggle between Boniface and Philip, providing the reader with an overview of the papal and French perspectives of the crucial events of Boniface’s pontificate.