Unam Sanctam - Political Context

Political Context

The furious reaction of Philip IV, King of France and his ministry cannot be understood outside the context of a conflict between the increasing power of secular rulers in France and England (who had come to blows) with attempts to tax the clergy to support warfare that was no different from some of the "crusades" that had been authorized during the thirteenth century — against the king of Aragon for instance — save that the warfare had not been authorized by the Pope and the taxes were also to be levied on the clergy. Known for his very impulsive interference in international affairs, Boniface's stringent reaction was the fierce bull Clericis laicos of 1296.

In England, Edward I withdrew the protection of the English Common Law from the clergy, an action with fearful possibilities. Philip's ministers reacted with their own typical methods: they banished all non-French bankers from France and forbade the export of bullion from the King's territories, without exception. The supply of French money to the Roman curia dried up completely. The royal ministers and their allies circulated open letters asserting the sovereignty of the king within his realm and the duty of the Church to help in the defense of the realm.

Boniface made the tactical error of backing down from some positions. In September 1296, he sent an indignant protest to Philip headed Ineffabilis Amor, declaring that he would rather suffer death than surrender any of the rightful prerogatives of the Church; but he explained in conciliatory terms that his recent bull had not been intended to apply to any of the customary feudal taxes due the King from the lands of the Church.

Then came the Jubilee year of 1300, that filled Rome with the fervent masses of pilgrims and made up for the lack of French gold in the treasury. The following year, Philip's ministers overstepped their bounds. Bernard Saisset, the Bishop of Pamiers in Foix, the farthest southern march of Languedoc was recalcitrant and difficult. There was no love between the south, that had suffered so recently with the Albigensian Crusade, and the Frankish north. Pamiers was one of the last strongholds of the Cathars. Saisset made no secret of his disrespect for the King of France. Philip's ministry decided to make an example of the bishop. He was brought before Philip and his court, on 24 October 1301, where the chancellor, Pierre Flotte, charged him with high treason, and he was placed in the keeping of the archbishop of Narbonne, his metropolitan. Before they could attack him in the courts, the royal ministry needed the Pope to remove him from his See and strip him of his clerical protections, so that he could be tried for treason. Philip IV tried to obtain from the pope this "canonical degradation". Instead, Boniface ordered the king in December 1301 to free the bishop to go to Rome to justify himself. In the Bull, Ausculta Fili ("Give ear, my son") he accused Philip of sinfully subverting the Church in France, and not in terms that were conciliatory:

"Let no one persuade you that you have no superior or that you are not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, for he is a fool who so thinks."

At the same time, Boniface sent out a more general bull Salvator mundi that strongly reiterated some of the same ground of Clericis laicos.

Then, at the end of the year, Boniface, with his customary tactlessness having criticized Philip for his personal behavior and the unscrupulousness of his ministry (that being an assessment with which many modern historians would agree), summoned a council of French bishops for November 1302, intended to reform Church matters in France — at Rome. Philip forbade Saisset or any of them to attend and forestalled Boniface by organizing a counter-assembly of his own, held in Paris in April 1302. Nobles, burgesses, and clergy met to denounce the Pope and pass around a crude forgery titled Deum Time ("Fear God"), which made out that Boniface claimed to be feudal overlord of France. The French clergy politely protested against Boniface's "unheard-of assertions". Boniface denied the document and its claims, but he reminded them that previous popes had deposed three French kings.

This was the atmosphere in which Unam sanctam was promulgated weeks later. Reading of the "two swords" in the Bull, one of Philip's ministers is alleged to have remarked, "My master's sword is steel; the Pope's is made of words."