Philip, just seventeen when he assumed the French throne in 1285, dreamed as avidly as his grandfather of eradicating the infidel. Like Louis, he too had visions of a Christian realm that would stretch from Paris to Jerusalem. But a deep temperamental difference distinguished the two men. Whereas Louis had placed both body and country at the service of the pope, Philip saw the Holy See as an obstacle to his ambitions rather than the inspiration for them. It was an attitude that always boded ill for relations between Paris and Rome, and at the end of 1294, the route to Christian harmony became rocky indeed. For the king who would be pope found himself confronted by a pope who would be king – Pope Boniface VIII.
Boniface was a worldly man, as pontiffs go. His fondness for the ladies was such that he married one and fathered another; while his affection for the men was so notorious that rumours of pederasty would follow him far beyond the grave. He assumed the papacy only after encouraging his predecessor, Celestine V, to resign – whereupon he installed the 81-year-old hermit, who had not wanted the job in the first place, into an oubliette to die. He was never going to take kindly to a whippersnapper like Philip, and the tensions began rising almost immediately. The French king, whose realm constantly teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, had begun to extort money from the country’s monasteries in order to finance a war with England, and in 1296 Boniface ordained that monarchs who taxed clerics and clerics who paid up were ipso facto excommunicated. The bull was meant as a shot across the bows and was reversed a year and a half later, but Boniface followed up by elevating Louis IX into St Louis, canonizing a French king for the first and last time in Christian history. Recognition of the grandfather was no honour to the grandson – and it was not meant to be.
Battle was about to begin – and the weapons of choice would be legal ones. Canonical law of the late thirteenth century was still Church property, its mysteries guarded by monks and arbitrated by bishops, and Boniface was regarded by many, not least himself, as the finest jurist of the age. Allegiances across Europe were switching from papacy to nation, however, and under the patronage of Philip, France’s lawyers were emerging as a distinct and powerful social class. The effect was that whereas Louis had borrowed the legal tools developed by the Church, Philip deployed them – and his target was the Holy See itself.
Skirmishes began when he sent Guillaume de Nogaret, the most trusted of all his legists, to attend a jubilee that Boniface held at Rome in 1300. Nogaret, a man of humble and possibly heretical origins who had several anti-papal chips on his shoulder, would prove himself a worthy champion. According to his own account, he took Boniface aside as soon as he arrived and warned him, sotto voce, that his simony and extortion – along, presumably, with several more or less unmentionable vices – had to stop for the sake of the Church’s good name. An outraged Boniface had challenged Nogaret to repeat his words before witnesses which, on the Frenchman’s own proud recollection, he promptly did. Philip himself increased tensions in the following year. Eager to reassert French control over the Languedoc, he had one of its key bishops charged with sexual and spiritual offences – and to compound the insult, informed Boniface that he had been driven to act because the cleric had defamed the pontiff by calling him Satan incarnate. Boniface returned fire with a bull in 1302, in which he ‘declare[d], announce[d] and define[d]’ that any ‘human creature’ who refused to submit to papal authority could expect to spend all eternity in hell. Lest there remain doubt about which human creature he meant, he then let it be known that his French ambassador was instructed to excommunicate the French king.
The thunder hung potential throughout the summer of 1303. Aware that a final conflict might be looming, Philip’s lawyers drew up an indictment against Boniface in June, packed with every charge that their hostile, fertile minds could generate – from diabolism and sodomy to materialism and the neglect of fasts. Boniface thereupon drafted a formal document of excommunication. If published, it would have released Catholics everywhere to perpetrate treason and war on the French monarch at their pleasure. But against the power to damn a man till the crack of doom, Philip possessed a weapon that was hardly less potent: Guillaume de Nogaret.
Boniface’s bull was due to be nailed to the doors of the cathedral at Anagni, a small hill town where he maintained a sumptuous palace, on 8 September. It was early on the morning of the seventh that Nogaret arrived. He was carrying his indictment – and was accompanied by 1300 men. As bells rang and dogs barked, the invaders stormed through the narrow alleys, but it was not until dusk that the heavy oak doors of Boniface’s inner chamber were finally broken down. A certain degree of confusion has come to surround the events that immediately followed. Some say that Boniface was found atop his throne in vestment, crucifix and triple-tiered tiara, defiant and ready to die for the honour of his office. Others suggest he was trembling like a human jelly. All agree, however, that Nogaret eventually strode through the splintered door to inform him that, having failed to mend his sodomitic ways, he was required to attend at Lyons for trial.
Boniface in fact survived to be escorted by his allies back to Rome, but the shock was all too much. The man who had once asserted supremacy over the entire human race shrank into a wraith and lived for just five more weeks. He died in his sleep, crumpled like a foetus with both fists in his mouth. Pursuant to legal theories that will be considered more closely in Chapter 5, Philip thereupon campaigned to have his body put on trial and burned at the stake.
The conflict exemplified by the struggle between Philip and Boniface would recur across western Europe. As inquisitorial methods were adopted by secular rulers, those rulers seized control of the system from its creators. Christianity and canonical law would continue to influence continental legal systems until the late eighteenth century, but kings and princes would already have gained the upper hand over papal inquisitors by the fifteenth. The fact that legal procedures were secularized would not, however, make them any more humane. Just as monks and canonists had redefined the law to pursue the Church’s war in the early 1200s, secular lawyers would reinvent it on behalf of their masters to justify use of the rack, the thumbscrew, and the strappado for centuries.
The question of evidence would generate some of the most inventive theories of all. In an era of trials by ordeal and compurgation there had been no need to consider how something should be proved, since the defining event – a miracle or the swearing of sufficient oaths – either took place or it did not. The rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest in the late eleventh century had, however, shown Europe’s lawyers that the Romans had differentiated between proofs and the verdict, and as witnesses entered the scene following the abolition of ordeals, the status of their testimony began to trouble the canonists. The primary problem was that, despite the rationalist aspirations of the age, no one possessed any systematic theory of how contradictory statements were to be weighed up. The Digest’s various recommendations – that judges pay heed to a witness’s social standing and manner of speech, for example – did not take matters very far. When lawyers then turned to chapters 17 and 19 of the Book of Deuteronomy – which required allegations to be proved by two respectable eyewitnesses – a new problem arose. Since the Bible said nothing about how to differentiate truth from lies, judges interpreted the two-witness rule literally. If two people swore to a fact, it was proved – conclusively. The injustice of that was apparent to many people even in the formality-obsessed thirteenth century, and dissatisfaction increased as inquisitors tried applying the rules to heresy. Eyewitnesses to disbelief were necessarily hard to find, and the most threatening heretics were in any event those who kept themselves to themselves. Proving their thought-crimes would require a theory more imaginative than one that depended on eyewitnesses.
The answer to the riddle would be the confession. Admissions have since become so routine a feature of Western criminal justice that it is hard to appreciate just how radical a shift took place during the mid thirteenth century, but the nature of that shift is well illustrated by Louis IX’s laws for southern France. Aware of the deficiencies