Then, at the crest of his position as `father of kings… ruler of the world', in order to demonstrate his power over princes, Boniface forbade the King of France to tax the French clergy.
The French king took this stricture so badly that he in turn forbade the export of all money to the pope. He forbade foreigners to live in France, which excluded members of the curia. Warming to his task, he called an estates-general to charge the pope with infidelity, loss of the Holy Land, the murder of Celestine V, heresy, fornication, simony, sodomy, sorcery and idolatry in a list of twenty-nine charges -all of them the sort employed when some faction wants to rid the Church of a pope, many of them quite- valid. The only weapon Boniface had was the solemn excommunication of the King of France, which would release the French people from their allegiance to the king. The publication of this fatal bull was planned for 8 September 1303 from Agnani, the pope's summer palace.
The bull had to be stopped. It could have stirred up cataclysmic turmoil in France. The king sent William of Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna into Italy, where 2000 troops had been raised to storm Agnani and to drag Boniface to France to be tried.
Agnani was the capital of the Gaetani family's domain, as Palestrina had been the home and capital of the Colonna' s. Somebody inside the city opened the gates to Sciarra Colonna and 200 men. With drawn sword, Colonna raced into the papal palace to find Boniface, now almost eighty, seated on his throne clad in his robes, with the three tiered tiara on his head, cross in one hand and keys to St Peter's in the other. If Sciarra was shaken by this serenity, lie did not show it. He told his men to strip Boniface naked. Sciarra jammed the tiara down over the pope's eyes and, knocking him down, had his men drag him by the feet across the stones, down a granite stairway, to be flung into a narrow, lightless dungeon where Sciarra ordered the men to urinate on him. They left him locked in there to fight off the rats. Two nights later, the people of Agnani expelled the French and rescued Boniface. It was six days before he could travel. He reached, the Vatican on 18 September and died twenty-four days later. The Church was never the same again, thank God. Benedict X was elected pope but he died within ten months. A relentless bargaining conclave followed, which took months to elect Clement V he was Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, a man who had never set foot in Italy and as it turned out, never would. He was controlled by the King of France:
Clement V was crowned at Lyons in November 1305 but there were a lot of bad omens. During his procession he was thrown from his horse, a wall fell on him and w rare jewel in his crown was lost. One of his brothers and ten barons lost their lives under that wall. He settled at Avignon, finally, in 1309, and was succeeded by six French popes who, at the will of the French king, remained in France. The Church was still under a single papacy, three quarters of a century away from the schism, but it wasn't until 1377, sixty-eight years later, that the papacy returned to Rome, when Gregory VI went to Italy to save the papal states for the Church; he died suddenly in Rome, probably poisoned.
Of the sixteen cardinals in his college, eleven were French, four were Italian, and one was Spanish. The city magistrates warned the cardinals that their lives would be at stake if an Italian pope were not elected. The Romans were desperate lest the papacy should return to France. They had become poor people in an Italian country town which had grass growing in its streets since their big business had been moved to Avignon. They had missed out on the profits from about two million pilgrims to Rome since Clement V was elected and the French had got all that money. As the cardinals entered the upper. storey of the building to hold their conclave a prodigious electrical storm came on. The wild-eyed Roman mob; stirred up by the thought of the money they might lose for ever if the papacy remained outside Rome, pressed upon the cardinals on their way into the building, screaming for an Italian pope, chanting, Romano; Romano, volemo la papa, o almanco.Italian!" There were thousands of them and, while the conclave deliberated, it, must have been able to hear the mob bellowing outside. Drunken rioters forced their way into the lower room and set fire to it. They shoved lances through the ceiling into the conclave room above and, when three cardinals came out to parley; they were threatened with being torn to pieces if they didn't elect a Roman or at least, an Italian.
The conclave chose the safest-pope – Archbishop Bartolomeo Prigano of Bari, a Neapolitan who had been vice chancellor at the University of Avignon. He was a small, fussy man who disapproved of everything, but most of all he disapproved of French curial extravagances. At Avignon, he would fling inkwells at the walls in frustration, yelling that the cardinals were turning the Church into a pawnshop. Prigano took the name of Urban VI. When this petty bureaucrat realized that the awesome, unknowable duties of the papacy had fallen upon him, his sanity slipped its leash. Total madness came only a short time later. The cardinals had chosen him swiftly but there are some Church histories which say that Prigano had been forced upon them by the murderous mob. That was not so. Prigano had been one of their curia through the old days at Avignon, When he was consecrated, all of them gave, him homage and got many favours from him. The guardian at Sant' Angelo had strict orders not to give up the keys to the new pope until six cardinals still at Avignon consented, and those six ordered that the keys be placed in Urban's hands. There was not a single objection or hesitation or dissatisfaction with the election of Urban VI until he held his first consistory and attacked the cardinals with ferocity, screaming at them in street Neapolitan, venting the spleen accumulated over all of his years in the chancery at Avignon against their simonies: He told them there would be no more shares in the sevitia for them, an impossible condition for cardinals because it attacked their right to an assured unearned income. The servitia was equal to one third of the income of all of the bishops in Christendom. At the first consistory he singled out each cardinal in turn, reviling him individually and by name. He cited the instances of their corruption. He limited their food and drink. He forbade their acceptance of pensions, provisions and gifts of money.
Of course, he doomed himself. One by one, the cardinals left Rome and assembled at Agnani; a fated and fateful city for the papacy. The same college of cardinals which, had just elected Prigano now met and voted the election null and void on the ground that they had been coerced into electing him in fear of the violence of the Roman mob.
It seems hard to believe but they elected in his place a brute named Robert, Cardinal of Geneva – he who was called. the Butcher of Cesena because he had ordered his troops to put 3000 women and children to the sword when they objected to the rape of sixty women by his transient soldiers. The Butcher took the name of Clement VII, whereupon Urban VI excommunicated him, then he excommunicated Urban, and the great schism of the Church had begun. There were two popes; who ruled Christendom simultaneously: – Urban in Rome, Clement at Avignon. The Cossa family's advocate, Piero Tomacelli, succeeded Urban as Boniface IX. To restore the weakened Church Boniface undertook the sale of
offices and benefices. As I have said before, much money was needed. The ordinary income, such as Peter's Pence, was grossly insufficient. Papal expenses' were higher than they had ever been. In addition to a pope's usual duties-fixing points of doctrine and discipline, granting dispensations, confirming, benefices and maintaining manifold external relations with foreign courts Boniface had an immense amount of work to do as the ultimate spiritual and temporal court of appeal.