The Papacy in the Late Middle Ages
Origins of the Conflict
The causes for the initial crisis, the one that led to the popes moving to Avignon, had a long history. At the root was the conflicting claims of monarchs and popes to authority over people and specifically to the taxes they paid. Popes and monarchs (not only emperors but also kings and sometimes various counts and dukes) had quarreled frequently about this sort of thing. There had been excommunications, denunciations, rebellions. But never had there been anything like what happened at the beginning of the thirteenth century. That events transpired as they did was not only due to the historical underlying causes but also to the personalities involved. The primary players were King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII. An important Secondary player was Pope Clement V, successor to Boniface. The story is worth telling in some detail because it illustrates well the interplay between long-term "structural" factors and short-term "incidental" factors like personality and happenstance.
King Philip IV
Philip IV was one of the most important of the medieval French kings. He was proud, arrogant, and determined that the king should have his way. He was no respecter of tradition or rights and was greedy and unscrupulous. He appointed men to his court who were well trained in Roman law and who believed in royal supremacy. They found the legal and historical precedents to justify his actions.
One of the great dangers to Philip's position and ambitions was the privileges of the Church in Rome. French bishops were powerful men who had command of large tracts of land and vast quantities of money, all of which were technically outside royal authority. In practice, any one bishop might be more under royal control while another one might be more loyal to Rome, with many sitting the fence and ready to go with whomever seemed likely to grant them the better position and favors. Who controlled the Church in France was therefore a very pressing matter indeed.
Over the course of the thirteenth century, the papacy had been trying to exert more control over bishops generally. This was a laudatory goal, for just as individual priests needed a bishop to supervise them and hold them to a high standard, so the bishops needed supervision themselves. This was especially true in those places where the local bishop was by tradition nominated by a powerful baron (which was the case in many places). The bishop of Rome had been trying to exert authority over bishops for centuries, but in the 1200s he was making pretty good progress. This was a trend that previous French kings had either agreed to (out of piety) or had been unable to oppose effectively. Philip was determined not only to oppose but to counteract and reverse the trend.
The issue of control over the Church in France was made even more pressing by war. France and England fought two wars in the early part of Philip's reign and war always created a serious financial burden. Philip saw assertion of royal authority over the French Church (sometimes called the Gallican Church, after Gaul, the old name for France) as at one and the same time a matter of royal dignity and a matter of pressing fiscal and national concern. Unfortunately, the Roman Church was at the same time asserting its rights and privileges with a new energy.
The specific issue that caused open conflict was clerical exemption from royal taxes. Where the clergy held non-Church lands, Philip argued they should pay royal taxes. Of course, the clergy sought diligently to have as much land as possible be considered as Church land. Even more, though, Philip claimed the clergy should also contribute to direct taxes—taxes paid as a direct donation to the royal purse—arguing that they were benefitting from royal protection from the English and so should contribute to the expense of that defense. It was a pretty good argument, bolstered by Philip's lawyers who appealed to Roman law. It was an argument raised, however, against a papacy that itself had plenty of lawyers and viewed matters in quite a different light.
Boniface was in some ways a man of similar temper and ambitions as Philip. He was stubborn, ambitious, intelligent, vain, and unscrupulous. He had an exalted view of the role of the pope as a kind of clerical monarch. He believed deeply that the pope was literally the vicar of Christ on Earth and that he held extraordinary powers. Anyone who opposed him opposed God and therefore must certainly be wicked. He had been trained as a lawyer and knew how to use the law as a weapon as effective as any sword to get what he wanted. And, like Philip, he wanted a very great deal.
Boniface also had a notorious temper and he specifically despised the French, saying that he would rather be a dog than a Frenchman. In one incident, he kicked a royal envoy in the head as the man bowed at the papal throne, because he was angry with him. His vanity can be seen in that he had statuettes of himself distributed through Rome. This was not the sort of fellow to sit by while the French king claimed novel and extensive powers over the Gallic Church.