Philip IV of France
Philip IV destroyed the Knights Templar, arrested a pope, and moved the papacy to Avignon. He came to the throne in 1285 at seventeen, was known as the Fair for his appearance rather than his conduct, and was described by a contemporary as neither a man nor a beast but a statue. His reign is the beginning of the French administrative monarchy: professional lawyers rather than nobles in the council, systematic record-keeping, and the first summons of an assembly of the three estates in 1302 — not to grant taxes but to endorse the king against the pope. Money is the theme of everything he did. He taxed the clergy, expelled the Jews in 1306 and confiscated their assets, arrested the Lombard bankers and did the same, and debased the coinage repeatedly. Boniface VIII forbade the clerical taxation, and the quarrel escalated into the bull Unam Sanctam asserting papal supremacy over kings; Philip's agents seized the pope at Anagni in 1303, and he died weeks later. The next French pope moved the curia to Avignon in 1309, where it stayed for sixty-eight years. The Templars were the last creditor. The order was arrested across France on a single morning in October 1307, its members tortured into confessions of heresy, and its property taken; the grand master was burned in 1314 and is said to have summoned Philip and the pope to judgement. Both died within the year. The Templar trial is also the origin of a great deal of nonsense. The confessions were extracted under torture and retracted, the order was suppressed for political rather than doctrinal reasons, and the papacy admitted in a document rediscovered in the Vatican archives in 2001 that the charges had not been proved.
- Lived: 1268 CE – 1314 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: leader, politician
