Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/221

 THE CLOSE: MIDDLE EUROPE 209 Boniface was a man of great determination, a consummate intriguer, and inordinately ambitious. He carried the papal pretensions so far that he roused both Philip the Boniface VIIL, Fair of France and Edward 1. of England to defy 1294-1303. his authority j and the kings were stoutly supported at least by their lay subjects in their attitude. It had become a question of the purse, when the pope forbade the secular authorities to tax the clergy in their own realms without his permission. The laity were fully determined that the Church should bear at least its fair share of the burdens of the state. The English king practically ignored the pope, and compelled the clergy to pay, by placing them outside the protection of the civil law so long as they were recalcitrant. The French king went further, and summoned the council called the States General, which solemnly declared that France was independent of the pope. Boniface replied by a bull or papal injunction, declaring the entire subjection of all temporal authorities to the pope. He deposed the French clergy who supported the king; and he was on the verge of deposing the king himself when he was attacked in his own palace, and so roughly handled that he died very shortly afterwards. After a brief interval the French procured the election of a Frenchman to the papal throne. Clement v., instead of going to Rome, established himself at Avignon in The p opes at Provence, which was not actually French territory, Avignon, but belonged to the King of Naples, the Angevin 1305 - 1377 - monarch, who was himself a member of the Capet family. For some seventy years the popes remained at Avignon in inevitable subserviency to the French king. The mere fact was sufficient to shake the popular belief in the pope's authority, and the prestige which attached to him as the successor of St. Peter — according to tradition the first bishop of Rome. In the popular mind, in fact, the city of Rome and the spiritual primacy of Christendom were indissolubly associated. It was all the easier for Lewis of Bavaria and the German Diet to claim completely to disregard papal intervention in the German elections when the right of intervention was asserted not from Rome but from Avignon. Charles iv. was friendly to the o