AFTER GRAND MASTER Tibald de Gaudin had sailed away from Sidon to Cyprus, promising to return with supplies and reinforcements he had made no effort to keep his word. He had provided no leadership in the Templars’ blackest hour, so no one missed him when he died the following year. It was a crucial time and called for a strong leader.
There were two principal candidates. First was Hugh de Peraud, the Templar treasurer and a consummate politician, who had developed a good personal relationship with King Philip IV of France, including loans to Philip from the Templar treasury. He was favored by the Templars from the south of France, who had grown to be the majority within the order. The northern French Templars were uncomfortable with their southern brothers; they had the easier style of their countrymen, with an interest in books and poetry, which had no place in the life of a fighting man. The northeners backed a Templar from the lower nobility of Burgundy who had been a Templar knight for all of his adult life. He had served well on the battlefield and just as well in administration during his term as the master of Templars in England. His name was Jacques de Molay.
The contest was close and grew so heated that the Templars sought the unusual recourse of asking the grand master of the Hospitallers to help them arrive at a rational settlement of their differences. With his help, grand chapter met again with the result that Jacques de Molay became the twenty-third and last grand master of the Knights of the Temple.
As the new grand master looked around him, there was not much good to see. With the Holy Land gone, the Templars were based at Cyprus, but they were not welcome in the island kingdom they had once had all to themselves. Had they hung onto it, they would now be the masters of this kingdom, but having sold away their rights to the Lusignans, they were simply unwelcome guests.
Just how unwelcome was made clear when King Henry of Cyprus informed de Molay that the king was the sole and supreme commander of all of the military forces in his kingdom, which most definitely included the Knights Templar. In response, the grand master informed the king that the Templar grand master was the sole and supreme commander of the Knights Templar, no matter where they were located, and that the Templar grand master took orders from no man on earth except the supreme pontiff in Rome, and that further the Knights Templar were not subject to the laws of Cyprus or any decrees of its monarch. A very high-level shouting match went on whenever they met, and their attitudes began to seep down to their followers. Finally, to avoid open clashes, it was agreed to put the dispute to Pope Boniface VIII. The pope ruled in favor of the grand master, admonishing King Henry that he should be grateful to have the valiant Templars in his island kingdom because of the added protection in the event of a Muslim invasion.
The grand master reveled in the papal decision and earned a begrudging measure of respect from some of the Templars who didn’t like de Molay’s style of leadership. The morale of the Templars was miserably low when de Molay took command, and he was of the military school that believes morale is directly tied to discipline. No wonder morale was so low, he told them, with their Rule subject to sloppy enforcement or none at all. He bombarded his men with corrective measures and saw to it that they were obeyed. Templars’ effects were searched, and all written matter was seized, whether a letter from home or a page of scripture. Illiterate himself, de Molay had never found it necessary to read anything. If there were letters or orders or even papal decrees, there were brother clerics to read them out loud. If a knight received a letter, it was read to him in front of his commander and not given up to him. Items of non-official clothing or equipment were ordered to be disposed of. All religious duties were to be performed exactly as prescribed by the Rule. The dining hall rules were reinforced, and the laxity removed from the stables, the shops, and the training ground. De Molay was getting ready for the next Crusade.
Without another Crusade to recover the Holy Places, the Knights Templar had no purpose, no reason to continue to exist. They were dedicated and experienced, but too few to accomplish anything alone. That had become clear in the total failure of an attempt to retake the castle of Tortosa and an abortive expedition with local barons to try to capture Alexandria. The only answer was for the pope at Rome to call a full Crusade supported by all the Christian monarchs of Europe. The Knights Templar would take their honored place in the vanguard to lead the army of God to put the Holy Cross back on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The grand master spent all of his spare hours working on the grand plan, apparently with no knowledge or appreciation of the events back home that were working against his vision of renewed glory.
In the months following the loss of Acre and the Holy Land, Pope Nicholas IV had died, and the rivalry within the Curia had caused the cardinals to ignore the strict rules regarding the election of a new pope. Had they not, they would all have starved to death, because a year and a half later they were still debating and maneuvering. The problem was the Roman perception of the role of the pope. To the rest of the Christian world, he was the pope, first and last. To the Roman people, he was first the bishop of Rome. As the bishop of the diocese of the Blessed St. Peter, he was entitled, as the successor to Peter, to be the pope. Since he was their bishop, the Romans felt that they had the right to name the man to fill the seat, as people in other lands often picked their own bishops.
Over the years, power had gradually evolved into major factions led by two Roman families, the Colonna and the Orsini, each of which could claim great wealth, partially attributable to their constant presence as priests, bishops, cardinals and popes. The deceased pope had been of the Orsini clan, who did not want to relinquish their profitable power center. The Colonna were determined to regain that power for themselves. At the time, two of the nine cardinal-electors were Colonna.
After one more long and weary day of haggling, the dean, Cardinal Malabranca, told the others that he had received a letter from the holy hermit on Mount Morrone in the Abruzzi, prophesying severe divine vengeance on all of them if they delayed any longer in selecting a pope. Pietro of Morrone conjured up remembrances of the ancient hair-shirted, self-flagellating hermits of the Egyptian desert. He starved himself, whipped himself, and abandoned all human pleasures, and so was perceived as a very holy man. Pilgrims traveled to see him, and followers gathered to the point of establishing a new order around him dedicated to the Holy Spirit, whose members called themselves the Spirituals. It was an apt name because Pietro let them have no pleasures other than the spiritual. He wouldn’t even let them laugh, pointing out that although Scripture said that “Jesus wept,” it never said that He laughed. It was an easy rule to follow, because under Pietro’s stern discipline they had almost nothing to laugh about. To get further from the world, Pietro had moved his flock deeper and deeper into the mountains, until he now occupied a cell in a cave high up on Mount Morrone.
To the assembled cardinals, the most interesting thing about the ascetic hermit was that he was over eighty years of age. His frail, underfed body couldn’t possibly hold out for much longer. They decided to do what cardinals had done before and would do again: They would postpone the solution to their political dilemma by naming a pope who had little time to live, no program of change of his own, and no allegiance to any faction. Cardinal Malabranca articulated their solution with, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I nominate brother Pietro of Morrone.” He was elected on the first ballot, much to the relief of Benedetto Gaetani, perhaps the most ambitious of all the cardinals, who had struggled for months to find a basis on which he could have the papal tiara, the object of all his yearnings. This election gave him time to plan better for the next election. He was twenty years younger than Pietro, so he was certain that his time would come.
The delegates who had to make the five-day journey south into the mountains to bring the new pope to Rome were surprised to find King Charles of Naples already there. Charles stated that he was there to personally salute a pope who was a subject of his southern kingdom. It didn’t take the delegates long to learn the true purpose of the royal visit. After they finally talked down the old man’s objections to being the pope and convinced him that he could not oppose God’s will, they brought him down off the mountain expecting to take the new pope to Rome. Instead, King Charles took the new pontiff under his own protection as his entourage took the road home to Naples.
Pietro’s coronation, at which he took the papal name of Celestine V, took place on August 29, 1294. About six weeks later he shocked the already confused hierarchy with the announcement that Naples, not Rome, would henceforth be the seat of the papacy. King Charles established him in the lofty Castello Nuovo (“New Castle”) that still majestically guards the harbor at Naples. The pope’s first order was that a small wooden cell be built for him inside the regal palace.
All of the Church administrators, politicians, and hangers-on hurried to Naples to reap the blessings of God conveyed by this senile old man who signed every document put in front of him, perhaps partly because he could not read the Latin language in which they were all written. Soon Church benefices, appointments, and lands were being dispersed among the greedy gathering. Some even offered for sale formal orders carrying the signature and the seal of the pope, with the top left blank for the purchaser of the document to fill in according to his own ambitions. The French king Charles of Naples was a bit more farsighted than most, and much more ambitious. He planned to get control of the Church away from the Italians permanently. He had Celestine V appoint thirteen new cardinals, of whom three were his own Neapolitan subjects and seven were French prelates selected with advice from his royal cousin, Philip IV of France. As the son of Charles of Anjou, he was eager to maintain a strong alliance with the French royal house from which he had sprung. Packing the college of cardinals was not done for the purpose of effecting an attack on the Knights Templar, but without it that attack might never have come.
There was just one document the pope could sign that would please Benedetto Gaetani, and that would have been his own abdication. Later, the Colonna would spread the story that Gaetani had made a small hole in the wall of Celestine’s wooden cell, which he used at night to tell the aged pope, in a low, spooky voice, that this was the voice of an angel sent by God to inform Celestine that he must resign or face the fires of Hell. During the day the apparently kind, concerned Gaetani sympathized with the pope, who yearned for the peace and quiet of his isolated monastic home in the mountains. As a skilled lawyer, Gaetani was able to advise the pope on the various legal and traditional issues involved in contemplating the extraordinary prospect of papal abdication. During the time he spent away from the pope, Gaetani took every opportunity to ingratiate himself with King Charles.
The feast day of Santa Lucia on December 13 was a festive occasion for Neapolitans, who turned the nativity of their patron saint into a day of carnival. It was in the midst of that celebration that Celestine V called his last consistory of cardinals to announce his abdication. He had spent less than four months on the Throne of Peter.
The Orsini and the Colonna were as determined as ever to keep each other’s candidates away from the papal throne, but now there was a larger faction, the French. The French cardinals were willing to elect an Italian pope, but only one approved by the French monarchs at Naples and Paris. Charles of Naples had been persuaded to favor Benedetto Gaetani, and since he was not a Colonna, the Orsini went along. The Colonna disagreed, but were defeated. The election process took just four days, after which Gaetani was crowned as Pope Boniface VIII. Within the month he had moved the papacy back to Rome. He had planned to take Celestine V back with him, but friends of the former pope advised him that his life was in danger, and William d’Estanard, the constable of Naples, secretly arranged his escape.
For five months the troops of the papacy and of Charles of Naples searched for the old man. They finally found him on the other side of Italy trying to escape across the Adriatic Sea. He was brought back to Rome in chains, where Boniface VIII ordered that he be confined in the papal prison of Fumone outside the city. The continued veneration of the imprisoned pope was a source of growing anger for Boniface VIII. More and more people were attracted to the principle that no man could simply resign from God’s grand design. To them, Celestine V was still the true pope, and an imposter now sat on the Throne of Peter. On May 19, 1296, Boniface arranged to have that principle, and the aging pope, laid to rest. When the executioners came to his cell, the half-starved eighty-six-year-old martyr had no strength to resist. A cushion was pressed against his face until his breathing stopped forever.
The idea that Celestine V was the true pope did not die with him, evoking rage from Boniface, especially when the preservation and promulgation of that idea was traced to the House of Colonna. He attacked the Colonna cardinals, whose calm response was to demand that he step down from the throne that he had gained through fraud and trickery. To teach them who was in charge, Boniface stripped the two Colonna cardinals of all of their revenues and privileges as princes of the Church. They responded by publishing a list of the crimes of Boniface: fraudulent claim to the papacy, theft of Church funds, and a list of irregularities.
The charges of theft were true. Boniface was draining off incredible wealth to enrich his own family, acquiring such vast tracts of land and towns that the holdings of his own family soon rivaled those of the Orsini and Colonna. To him, the Church and its pope were one: What belonged to the Church belonged to the pope. No amount of criticisms or accusations could curtail the rape of the papal treasury.
One who decided to curtail it by himself was Stephen Colonna. He waited in ambush in the hills near Rome on May 3, 1297. The secret information that had brought him here with a group of Colonna mounted soldiers proved to be correct, as a well-protected caravan of mules came through the valley. They were loaded with Church gold being carried off to purchase more lands and towns for the pope’s family. The Colonna cavalry rode to the attack, and a few minutes later left the field with the pope’s gold.
Boniface’s reaction was predictable. Even after Stephen’s family pressured him to return the gold, Boniface demanded that the young man be delivered to him for personal punishment, but the Colonna refused. Boniface excommunicated them, with no effect. The common people and a handful of devout nobles might think that the excommunication by the pope would affect God’s attitude toward them, but the growing sophistication of secular leaders had convinced them that the excommunication process was simply a papal weapon used to gain a point. More effective was a list of accusations against Boniface nailed to the door of every church in Rome. A copy was even delivered by some Colonna hero to the sacred precinct of the high altar at St. Peter’s. The long list of crimes included the murder of Celestine V.
Off on Cyprus, the Templar grand master had been dictating one letter after another beseeching Boniface VIII to call a Crusade, and now the pope did just that. It was not, however, a Crusade against the infidel, but an official holy Crusade against the Colonna family. There was no need for anyone to spend the time and the money to go all the way to the east to earn the spiritual rewards of total remission of sins and an eternity in paradise, because they were available in Italy. And taking up arms in the service of God in this Crusade could well be profitable, since this saintly pope had announced that he wanted nothing for the papacy or the Church: All of the loot taken from the cities and palaces of the Colonna could be kept by the Crusaders who took it. They were free to kill members, friends, followers, or tenants of the Colonna family, regardless of age or sex, or to sell into slavery any of them who might be judged to be more valuable alive than dead. Those who could not come to the great slaughter could earn their own remission of sins by sending a suitable cash contribution to help defray the expenses of the war. And of course, since this was a formal Crusade called by the Holy Father himself, that august leader could now dip both hands into the treasure that had accumulated in Rome from gifts, fines, and penances to finance the next Crusade. As the nobles of Europe watched the pope mount a holy war against his political rivals, Boniface VIII dragged the very concept of the Crusade down into the sewers.
Philip of France stayed away from the pope’s Italian Crusade, perhaps as part of the negotiations that had led to Boniface’s agreement to the canonization of Philip’s grandfather, the crusading King Louis IX. As the descendent of a saint of the Church, Philip had fresh support for his contention that God had chosen him to be king of France.
The rapacious, the ex-soldiers with no jobs, the freebooters, however, answered the call, led by the enthusiastic Orsini, who were delighted to take the lead in wiping out their ancient enemy. E.L. Chamberlain says that Boniface invited the Knights Templar to participate, but there appears to be no record that any of them ever did, nor were they needed. The predatory horde moved across the Colonna territories killing, raping, stealing, and earning their spiritual rewards, until the Colonna were cut down to one remaining property, their ancient city of Palestrina. The city was almost as old as Rome itself and filled with art and treasures from the old Roman empire. The heads of the family were gathered in their last outpost, led by the fierce general Giovanni Colonna, whose lifetime of aggression had earned him the nickname of Sciarra, “The Quarreler.” He was prepared to fight to the death, but he lost the city to the most effective siege engine of all—treachery.
Boniface assured the Colonna that in exchange for their public apology and their public submission to the papal supremacy, their lives would be spared, as would their remaining property. A papal throne surrounded by all the palatial pageantry of the Church was set up outside the wall of the nearby town of Rieta, to which the Colonna walked as penitents, halters around their necks, to throw themselves at Boniface’s feet, saying the words of submission in which they had been instructed. Now, with all of the leaders out of the city, the papal promise could be disregarded and Palestrina could be destroyed. Church historian Malachi Martin wrote that in October 1298, the result was to have “every man, woman, child and animal killed, and every building—except the cathedral—flattened in the town of Palestrina.” One of the buildings taken down was the magnificent palace said to have been built by Julius Caesar.
The Colonna went into exile, which led in Sciarra’s case to his being captured by Mediterranean pirates. Sciarra was surprised and pleased when his ransom was paid by Philip IV of France, who invited him to Paris. The events of recent years assured a warm welcome at the French court for any sworn enemy of Boniface VIII.
Popes would come and go, but one thing never changed for King Philip IV, called “the Fair” (for his beauty, not for his sense of justice). For all of his adult life Philip had been at war with King Edward I of England, a redoubtable, resourceful enemy with whom a stalemate might be counted as a victory. Edward’s tenacious defense, and even extension, of his French lands on the continent cost Philip a never-ceasing outward flow of money. He taxed, borrowed, and confiscated every penny he could, but it was never enough. He even borrowed heavily from the Knights Templar. His envy of the Church in France turned to anger as he saw the bishops and abbots, who controlled a third of the land surface of his kingdom, constantly amassing revenues which they shipped off to Rome. In 1296 Philip decided that they should contribute to the defense of the kingdom off which they were living so well, so he imposed a 10 percent tax on all Church properties and revenues in France.
To Boniface, the tax was a blow to both his authority and to his purse, either one of which could stir up his wrath. He ordered the clergy of France to ignore the unauthorized tax. Philip responded by prohibiting any export of gold or silver from France without his specific written authority. The French clergy could continue to collect its revenues, but it couldn’t send them to Rome. If the pope felt that he couldn’t live with a 10 percent decrease in money from France, let him try to live without any of it. For once in his life Boniface had to compromise, but that didn’t mean that he would forget the insult.
In that same year Philip completed arrangements for a peace treaty with Edward I, a treaty that the English king had sought with unusual vigor, because he had a problem of his own that until recently had had nothing to do with Philip. Although he, too, had spend a good part of his life at war with France, Edward also had a running battle with his northern neighbors in Scotland.
His latest campaign into Scotland had been a victory so complete that he had put the Scottish question out of his mind. He had forced every nobleman in Scotland to get on his knees and swear allegiance to the English crown, and to drive the point home he had taken away the sacred Stone of Scone, the ancient coronation stone of the Scottish kings that legend said had been a headrest for St. Columba. He had carpenters make a shelf under the seat of his own throne at Westminster, so now when he sat on the throne of England he was also sitting on the throne of Scotland. The battles to accomplish that end had been so brutal that not one single nobleman in Scotland would dare to raise his hand to Edward of England.
Now word had come that a young Scot from an obscure family, with no military experience whatsoever, had dared to defy the English rulers of his native country. His name was William Wallace.
Starting with two dozen friends behind him, Wallace’s guerilla raids aroused the fervor of the common people, who came to him in droves. Soon he was a general in command of tens of thousands of angry Scots who exulted in every minute of their leader’s campaign to drive out the hated English overlords. With incredible military genius, Wallace took one town and castle after the other, until even the reluctant nobility recognized his supreme leadership. This Scottish hero was the problem Edward had to deal with now, but he must first have an ironclad treaty with Philip the Fair before he could turn his back on France.
The agreement reached was that the widowed Edward would marry Philip’s sister Margaret, while his son Edward, the first Prince of Wales, would marry Philip’s daughter Isabella. One thing that stood in the way of the final agreement: the betrothal of Princess Isabella to Prince Edward called for a substantial dowry payable in cash, and Philip didn’t have the money. He turned to his friend Hugh de Peraud, the treasurer of the Knights Templar. Brother Hugh was happy to dip into his order’s overflowing coffers to make another loan to Philip, under the very mistaken impression that only good things could come from having the king of France deeper in debt to the Knights of the Temple. He did not detect Philip’s deep resentment that the French Templars had more cash than their king. His debts to the Templars were getting heavy, and Philip began to think through a plan whose success would mean that those debts need never be paid.
Traveling back to England, Edward I could be skeptical about the major thrust of his treaty with Philip. The idea behind the betrothal of the Prince of Wales to Isabella of France was that a son from that marriage could inherit both crowns to unite the kingdoms of England and France into one great invincible empire. The problem was that by now it was obvious that Prince Edward was an enthusiastic homosexual. Edward was not at all certain that his son could be encouraged to participate in the unwelcome activities necessary to produce an heir.
In London Edward sent for the master of the Knights Templar in England, Brian de Jay. He told the master of his plans to chastise the upstart William Wallace in Scotland and asked that the Templar Knights go with him to fight for England. The Templar master saw no barrier to committing his knights in a totally secular war that had nothing to do with religion or the True Cross. It had been years since the fighting men of the Temple had had anyone to fight. The calls for men and money no longer came from the headquarters in the East; they had no need for them. No monarch they knew in Europe was going to go on a Crusade, if even the pope should call it, which he wouldn’t because the pope had something much more important on his mind. Boniface VIII had come up with a way to increase the papal treasury, a way that could come only once in a hundred years. The following year of 1299 marked the turn of a century, and Boniface would turn the usual secular celebration into a jubilee of joy for all Christians. Now there would be new pathways to the total remission of sins much easier than going off on Crusade. Full absolution was offered to any pilgrim who would come to Rome for fifteen days with his offering for the Church.
Even at his most optimistic, the pope had not foreseen the flood of pilgrims that would bring new prosperity to Rome. The local merchants and innkeepers were delighted with the business generated by almost two million pilgrims. Two priests stood all day and night behind the altar at the Church of St. Paul using rakes to drag away the steady stream of gold and silver offerings placed there by pilgrims who pushed their way through the mob to leave their gifts.
Boniface VIII was ecstatic. He remembered the words said to him as the papal crown had been placed on his head: “Take the tiara, and know that thou art the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the vicar on earth of our Savior Jesus Christ.” Now he indeed felt like the “ruler of the world” as he staged a regal pageant. He put on the dress and the insignia of the ancient Roman emperors and went out into the streets with two swords held high in front of him, indicating his supreme authority over both the secular and the spiritual worlds, with heralds crying out, “Behold! I am Caesar!”
With the Jubilee Year behind him, Boniface VIII turned to the problem of the proper discipline for Philip of France. Philip had offended God and the papacy by giving shelter to the excommunicate Colonna and by seizing Church lands and funds, so now Boniface called a council of clergy in Rome to deal with the insubordinate French king. Philip responded with a council of his own, which for the very first time included the third estate, the commoners. Heretofore the councils had included only the first and second estates, the clergy and the nobles, but Philip wanted to be certain of universal support in France. The nobles and commoners quickly asserted their support for the king’s contention that he held his crown directly from God, and not from the pope, as Boniface claimed. They exhorted the French cardinals and bishops to rebuke the pope and to stand behind their king. The French clergy were in a terrible bind. They swore their loyalty to the king but pleaded that they also owed loyalty to the Holy Father and must obey his orders to attend his council. Philip absolutely forbade any French prelate to attend a council called to denigrate his king. To disobey would be to risk all his property in France.
The anger of Boniface VIII boiled over to produce one of the most famous and controversial papal bulls in the long course of Christian history. Against the advice of several of his cardinals, Boniface issued the bull Unam sanctam, the strongest claim of worldwide papal supremacy ever issued before or since. The bull expressed the pope’s position of control over every king and emperor in the world and over every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth, emphasizing that “it is a condition of salvation that all human beings should be subject to the Pontiff of Rome.” There could be no stronger statement of the control of one man over all others; it made him unquestionably “the ruler of the world,” at least in his own mind.
There is a great difference, of course, between asserting authority and enforcing it. Unam sanctam caused many a monarch to raise his eyebrows, but none to drop to his knees. Philip of France stood by his assertion that his right to rule came directly from God and didn’t pass through Rome. In response to threats of papal discipline, he called another council, prepared by an unusual man named William de Nogaret, a loyal servant to Philip as lawyer, agent, negotiator, and finally as chancellor. His parents had been burned at the stake as Cathar heretics during the Albigensian Crusade, and the orphaned boy had been turned over to the Church, which saw to his education. The priests who taught him probably thought that they were rescuing a soul for God, but to de Nogaret his religious education was a kind of Know-Your-Enemy course. He went all the way through university training in law, most of which was Church law. Any chance to strike back at the demons from Rome who had condemned his mother and father to the agonizing deaths of being burned alive would help to satisfy a lifelong craving for vengeance.
The eloquent de Nogaret, a master of oratory, stood up at the king’s council and explained why Boniface VIII should be universally recognized as unfit to sit on the papal throne. He explained that the Church had been legally married to Pope Celestine V, so that Boniface had committed an unforgivable act of adultery by stealing away the bride of Celestine V while he still lived. The French council agreed. Thus encouraged, de Nogaret came back to them a few months later with twenty-nine charges against the pope, including blasphemy, sodomy, heresy, revealing the secrets of the confessional, stealing Church property, the murder of Celestine V, and even a charge to appeal to the commoner’s fascination for sorcery and magic, the allegation that Boniface had secret sexual relations with a filthy demon that lived in his ring.
Dozens of scribes copied the list of charges for dissemination throughout all of Philip’s kingdom and to the other Christian monarchs. It brought no response from outsiders, but it had the full support of the French people. It was not surprising that most of the nobility supported de Nogaret’s call for papal impeachment, but it was very much a surprise that about twenty bishops agreed as well. Equally surprising was the stand of the Knights Templar of France. The English Templars had agreed to fight for one Christian king against another, but now the French Templars supported the call to impeach their papal commander.
Boniface reacted with his primary spiritual weapon, excommunication of the French king. To his intense frustration, the response in France was to stir up anger toward the pope and sympathy for their king. He then drew his next spiritual weapon, announcing that on September 8, 1303, he intended to formally put the entire kingdom of France under interdict. That would mean the closing of every church, no Holy Communion, no baptism, no marriage, no Christian burial—an entire nation condemned to the fires of hell. There was no way to predict the reaction of the people, but it was not improbable that the ultimate effect could be outbreaks of violence, perhaps even a revolution. Boniface had to be stopped, and Philip had no better man for the job than William de Nogaret. To recruit a partner who was as eager for revenge as he was himself, de Nogaret invited Sciarra Colonna to join him, an invitation that was met with gratitude and enthusiasm.
Boniface was to make the decree from the palace at his ancestral home in Anagni. Colonna and de Nogaret hurried to Florence to meet with enemies of the pope, including Colonna exiles and sympathizers. Liberally dispersing the French gold that Philip had given them for this mission, they assembled an armed force of about fifteen hundred men and moved on Anagni. They found the palace virtually undefended and simply walked in to take the elderly pope as their prisoner. Sciarra Colonna took out his dagger to end the old man’s life, and it took all of de Nogaret’s strength and powers of persuasion to stop him. Instead, they held Boniface for three days, degrading him and abusing him, even to the point, as the pope claimed later, that Sciarra Colonna struck him in the face several times with a fist covered in chain mail. While they humiliated the pope, their little army looted and vandalized the papal palace.
On the fourth day the people of Anagni finally got up their courage to rescue their pope. He went back to Rome, thoroughly shaken in mind and body. He died a few weeks later, some said in an act of suicidal madness as he bit flesh off his arms and beat his head against the stone wall of his room. Others reported that his skull had been split open, with his brains on his shoulders and on the floor, much too great a blow to be called suicide. Paintings, drawings, and wholesale excommunication preserved the Church’s memory of the face-bashing remembered as the Crime of Anagni, but gave no official notice to the fact that a pope had had his brains beaten out in the papal palace, undoubtedly because the crimes were perpetrated by two different sets of criminals, one outside and one inside.
The interdict was forgotten, the council to discipline Philip of France didn’t happen, and no Christian monarch voiced a single criticism of Philip’s actions. With a minimum of fanfare, the cardinals took just ten days to elect a pro-French Italian, Niccolo Boccasini, as Pope Benedict XI on October 22, 1303. He began with a pleasant enough relationship with Philip IV, but he surprised the king when he firmly rejected the king’s call for the posthumous impeachment of Boniface VIII. From his home in Perugia Benedict XI defended the papacy, formally condemned the Crime of Anagni, and ordered the excommunication of everyone associated with it. He was becoming a problem, but not for long.
In July 1304, after just nine months on the papal throne, Benedict XI was murdered in Perugia by means of a plate of poisoned figs. There were those who had no doubt that Philip of France, or his trusted agent, was responsible. Others said that the murder had been effected by agents of the Italian prelates at Rome, who would most certainly kill to return the papacy to the control of the Romans. Pope Benedict XI had fled to Perugia in fear of his life, and it had been that fear that had caused him to switch from friendly relations with France to the condemnation of the Crime of Anagni. Any French pope or any pope who favored France was in grave danger in Rome.
That was the situation that made it so difficult to select a new pope. The Italians, though dedicated to regaining the control of the Church, were not united. The Colonna, now restored to influence, were more embittered than ever against their ancient enemies of the house of Orsini, so that the Italian cardinals could not speak with one voice. Now established as a firm and powerful third faction, the French cardinals were not in the majority. The result was a deadlock that once more ignored the rules laid down for papal election set by the Second Lateran Council.
After a year of arguments and accusations, the French cardinals persuaded the Italians to agree to a unique concept. First, they should all agree to select a pope who was not a cardinal, so that no elector would be pushing for himself, but would look only to the best interests of the Church. Second, the French faction would take no more than forty days to select the pope from among three nominees to be chosen by the Italians.
The idea had come from Philip the Fair and was probably the brainchild of William de Nogaret. Philip totally controlled the French cardinals, all of whom had lands and revenues in France. The trick would be for Philip to identify a probable candidate of the Italians and to exchange the all-important final selection for a menu of promises the candidate would make to the French crown. The man they decided on was Bernard de Goth, the archbishop of Bordeaux. He was a likely candidate because he had sided with Boniface VIII against Philip and had been loud in his public condemnations of the French king. Also, de Goth owed no fealty to Philip because Bordeaux, although a part of France, was an English possession. Philip would not appear to have any political or economic power over him. He was attractive to Philip because if there was one great consuming fire burning in the belly of Bernard de Goth it was his intense desire to have the wealth, the honors, and the power that came with the papal tiara. He would do anything, agree to anything, to become the pope. Publicly, he continued to criticize the French king. Privately, he sat in secret meetings, cutting a deal.
An especially important reason for controlling the next pope was Philip’s plan to get his hands on the wealth of the Knights Templar in France. The plan being worked out by de Nogaret promised several substantial benefits. The ease with which the Templars had produced the gold loaned to Philip for his daughter’s dowry spoke to the probability of a substantial horde of wealth at the Templar commanderies, which would mean a very welcome prize of ready cash. Then there would be the relief of Philip’s heavy debts to the Templar order. If charges of heresy could be established, the extensive Templar properties in France could be seized, then sold to raise cash or operated for future revenues. The Templars reported only to the pope and they existed on the basis of their charter from the Church, so charges of heresy would have to be brought before ecclesiastic tribunals. There was no body of evidence to back up the charges to be brought, so the answer would be to turn to the Inquisitors to apply their expert techniques to force confessions. Taken altogether, any plan to suppress the Knights Templar would require the approval and cooperation of the new pope.
Archbishop de Goth agreed that Philip would have the right to impose a tax on the clergy of France to the extent of 10 percent of its gross revenues for a period of five years. He agreed to remove all excommunications and other papal sanctions against the Colonna family and to restore their properties or compensate them for their losses (a side deal that assured Bernard de Goth would be named by the Colonna to be one of the three Italian nominees). He also agreed to cancel all the decrees and bulls of Boniface VIII against Philip of France, to call for a posthumous impeachment of the dead pope, and to remove all excommunications brought on by the Crime of Anagni, including those of William de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna. (There is said to have been one more covenant, kept secret, that de Goth would cooperate in the suppression of the Knights Templar and in the confiscation of their treasury and property.)
Once Bernard de Goth was named as one of the three candidates from whom the pope would be selected, he could envision himself draped in the papal robes with the whole world at his feet. But he had to live with one final condition that summarized Philip’s feelings about the archbishop’s trustworthiness. In addition to his sacred oath to keep his part of the bargain, Philip required that de Goth deliver up his brothers and two nephews, to put their lives on the line as hostages to guarantee the agreement. Archbishop de Goth agreed, and Philip delivered on his promise. On November 14, 1305, Bernard de Goth was unanimously elected to occupy the Throne of Peter, taking the papal name of Clement V.
Grand Master de Molay, waiting patiently for news of the election of a pope, was apparently unaware of the machinations that had led to that election. He had no idea of the plans being set for his order by Philip of France. He did not even suspect that the words being spoken as the papal tiara was placed on the head of Pope Clement V were the death knell of the Order of the Temple.
De Molay’s only prayers about the papal election were to ask that God select a pope who would call a new Crusade to retake the Holy Land and so restore the lost glory of the Knights Templar. It could only have been with joy and excitement that he received the summons from Clement V to come to the papal court at Poitiers to discuss plans for a new Crusade. He was happily ignorant of the fact that waiting for him in France were whips, chains, and humiliations that would end only when he would be burned at the stake for defending the honor of his order.