Boniface VIII

Boniface VIII, born Benedetto Caetani into an established Roman noble family, trained as a canon lawyer before his election as pope in 1294, succeeding the reluctant hermit pope Celestine V, whose surprise resignation Boniface is recorded as having actively encouraged and whom he subsequently kept under guard for the remainder of his life. Learned in canon law and confident in the temporal reach of the papal office, Boniface used its authority more assertively than most of his predecessors, both in doctrine and in the ceremonial life of the church. In 1300 he proclaimed the church's first Holy Year, later called a Jubilee, promising a plenary indulgence to pilgrims who visited Rome's major basilicas within the year, a rite so successful in drawing crowds and revenue that the papacy has repeated it on a fixed cycle, later set at twenty five years, ever since. He also pressed papal authority over rival claims of national churches, most sharply against King Philip IV of France, who taxed French clergy without papal consent and later arrested a French bishop Boniface had specifically placed under the church's own jurisdiction, a direct challenge to the immunity Boniface considered essential to the office.

The dispute between Boniface and Philip IV of France culminated in one of the papacy's most sweeping doctrinal statements. Unam Sanctam, issued in 1302, declared that there is one holy church outside of which there is no salvation, that the church holds two swords, spiritual and temporal, and that submission to the pope is necessary for every human being's salvation, language later read as the high water mark of medieval claims to papal supremacy over secular rulers. Philip's response was not theological but physical. On 7 September 1303 his agent Guillaume de Nogaret, working with the hostile Roman noble Sciarra Colonna, led an armed force to Boniface's residence at Anagni, seized the elderly pope and reportedly struck or threatened him, holding him for several days before a local uprising freed him, an episode remembered as the Outrage of Anagni. Boniface returned to Rome but died within a month, and the humiliation is widely read by historians as marking a turning point after which the medieval papacy's claim to stand above kings never fully recovered its former force, a shift confirmed only a few years later when his successors relocated the papal court to Avignon under French influence for nearly seventy years.