France
Philip and the Templars
The conflict with the papacy had been expensive, as had the war with the English in the previous decade, and Philip needed money.
To raise it, he expelled the Jews in 1306, confiscating their property and repudiating debts. In 1311 he expelled the Lombards (Italian bankers). Royal debts to them were cancelled, while other debts owed to them were collected for the crown. At the same time, he was moving against the Templars.
Originally a Crusading order, with the loss of the Holy Land, they had become little more than bankers. The Templars had been financial agents to the French crown for most of the 13thc, and they owned vast estates as the result of two centuries of pious donations. They were one of the wealthiest institutions in France and Philip was heavily in debt to them.
In moves reminiscent of his actions against Boniface, Philip's lawyers laid claims of heresy, murder, torture, and sodomy. The king moved against the order on the same night all across France, in a display of administrative coordination rarely seen in the Middle Ages. At one blow, the Order was broken.
The trial began in 1307. Confessions were extorted by trickery and even torture. A flood of propaganda propped up the case in the public's eyes. The pope was won over through a combination of pressure and persuasion (remember, this was Clement V, the newly-installed French pope).
The charges were never proved, but the pope in 1312 suppressed the order. The Grandmaster was executed, as were a number of other leaders. The actual money collected was nowhere near as much as Philip had hoped, however, which is the source for persistent legends of some sort of undiscovered Templar treasure. The plain fact is that the Order was over-extended by the early 1300s, and the trial further depleted their resources.
Taken together, these actions show that the French monarchy was easily the strongest in Europe. At the same time, they show the limits of that monarchy. For all his power, Philip was still forced to extreme measures to raise enough money, simply because a reliable system of taxation had yet to be developed. He still could not undertake an extended war without ruining the country. And much of what he accomplished was, in an old medieval model, largely due to the man himself rather than to inherent institutional strengths. What he accomplished would persist only if subsequent kings were as strong as he.