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Updated: June 4, 2025
He collected a little troop of soldiers in Italy and marched against Boniface, who was sojourning at Anagni, where his predecessors had excommunicated two emperors, Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II. As Boniface, in his turn, was preparing solemnly to proclaim the king of France an outcast from the Church, Nogaret penetrated into the papal palace with his soldiers and heaped insults upon the helpless but defiant old man.
In his childhood he was sent to Anagni. There it must be supposed that he acquired his knowledge of Latin from a country priest, and there he lived that early life of solitude and retirement which, with ardent natures, is generally the preparation for an outburst of activity that is to dazzle, or delight, or terrify the world.
The business at Anagni had only been effected spendendo molta moneta; the disastrous battle of Courtrai and the inglorious Flemish wars had exhausted the royal treasury; and the debasement of the coinage availing nought, Philip turned his lustful eyes on a once powerful lay order, whose chief seat was at Paris and whose wealth and pride were the talk of Christendom.
Of such stuff were the Pope's enemies. Nor could he crush them. Boniface was of Anagni, a city of prehistoric walls and ancient memories which belonged to the Caetani; and there, in the late summer, he was sojourning for rest and country air, with his cardinals and his court and his kinsmen about him. Among the cardinals was Napoleon Orsini.
The king's court begins to rule the land; and proud of its young strength it enters the lists against Boniface VIII, the great prophet of the Church Universal, who proclaimed that every human creature was subject to the Roman pontiff. The collapse of Boniface at Anagni in 1303 is the traditional date of the final defeat of the mediaeval papacy.
Again, in the comment on Canto XX. of the "Purgatory," where Benvenuto gives account of the outrage committed, at the instigation of Philippe le Bel, by Sciarra Colonna, upon Pope Boniface VIII., at Anagni, the translator omits the most characteristic portions of the original. Sed intense dolore superante animum ejus, conversus in rabiem furoris, coepit se rodere totum.
So few were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck beaten, say not wholly reliable authorities and so insulted that rage and shame drove him mad, and he died. Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr.
When at length Boniface was worsted in his quarrel with Philip the Fair, a widespread reaction began on the part of the laity against ecclesiastical assumptions, and the great dramatic act by which, under Hildebrand, the papacy first displayed its power had its counterpart in the manner of its decline. "The drama of Anagni is to be set against the drama of Canossa."
The Cardinal Benedict Gaetano was at once elected his successor and took the style of Boniface VIII. The son of a noble house of the neighbourhood of Anagni, a canonist, a politician, and a zealot, the new pope had made personal acquaintance with Edward and England from having attended Cardinal Ottobon on his English legation, and was eager to appease discord between Christian princes in order to forward the crusade.
Gaetani began immediately to seize the adjacent castles in Campania, and invited the cardinals to his stronghold at Fondi. The Archbishop of Arles, chamberlain of the late Pope, leaving the castle of St. Angelo under the guard of a commander who long refused all orders from Pope Urban, brought to Anagni the jewels and ornaments of the papacy, which had been carried for security to St. Angelo.
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