Philip IV of France - Drive For Income

Drive For Income

In the shorter term, Philip arrested Jews so that he could seize their assets to accommodate the inflated costs of modern warfare, expelling 100,000 of them from his French territories on 22 July 1306 (see The Great Exile of 1306). At this point in his reign Philip was faced with extensive financial liabilities, partially inherited from his father's war against Aragon and partially incurred by the cost of his own campaigns against the English and their allies in Flanders. His financial victims also included rich abbots and the Lombard merchants who had earlier made him extensive loans on the pledge of repayment from future taxation. Like the Jews, the Lombard bankers were expelled from France and their property expropriated. In addition to these measures Philip debased the French coinage by measures which by 1306 had led to a two-thirds loss in the value of the livres, sous and denirs in circulation. This financial crisis led to rioting in Paris which forced Philip to briefly seek refuge in the Paris Temple - headquarters of the Knights Templar.

Philip was condemned by his enemy, Pope Boniface VIII in the Catholic Church for his spendthrift lifestyle. When he also levied taxes on the French clergy of one half their annual income, he caused an uproar within the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, prompting Pope Boniface VIII to issue the Bull Clericis laicos, forbidding the transference of any church property to the French Crown and prompting a drawn-out diplomatic battle with the King. In order to condemn the pope, Philip convoked an assembly of bishops, nobles and grand bourgeois of Paris, a precursor to the Etats Généraux that appeared for the first time during his reign, a measure of the professionalism and order that his ministers were introducing into government. Philip emerged victorious, after having sent his agent William Nogaret to arrest Boniface at Anagni, when the French archbishop Bertrand de Goth was elected pope as Clement V and the official seat of the papacy moved to Avignon, an enclave surrounded by French territories.