Pope Boniface VIII

Benedetto Caetani reigned as pope from December 1294 until his death in October 1303, and pressed the claim of papal authority over secular rulers further than any pontiff before or since. He succeeded Celestine V, the hermit pope who had abdicated after five months, and had Celestine confined until his death, which shadowed the legitimacy of his own election for the rest of his reign. His pontificate was defined by a long confrontation with Philip IV of France over whether a king could tax the clergy without Rome's consent. The bull Clericis laicos of 1296 forbade it outright; Philip replied by banning the export of gold and silver from France, cutting off papal revenue at its source. In 1302 Boniface issued Unam Sanctam, which declared that submission to the Roman pontiff was necessary for salvation for every human creature — the most absolute statement of papal supremacy ever put in a bull. Philip's answer was force. In September 1303 the king's councillor Guillaume de Nogaret seized the pope at Anagni with a body of armed men, and Boniface, then in his late sixties, was held for three days before the townspeople freed him. He died in Rome a month later, and the papacy never recovered the ground he had claimed: within six years the popes had moved to Avignon and into a long dependence on the French crown. Boniface also proclaimed the first Jubilee year in 1300, which drew enormous crowds of pilgrims to Rome and proved far more durable than his political claims. Dante, who despised him, reserved a place for him among the simoniacs in the Inferno while he was still alive.

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