page_title: Pope Boniface VIII
section_title: Abduction and death
hierarchical_section_title: Pope Boniface VIII / Biography / Abduction and death
caption_attribution_description: English: Bonifacius VIII
context_page_description: Pope Boniface VIII was pope from 24 December 1294 to his death in 1303. Caetani was of baronial origin with family connections to the papacy.
  He succeeded Pope Celestine V, a Benedictine, who had resigned from the papal throne. Boniface spent his early career abroad in diplomatic roles. In the College of Cardinals, he discriminated not only against the Benedictines but also members of the Colonna family, some of whom had contested the validity of the 1294 papal conclave that elected him following the unusual resignation of Pope Celestine V. The dispute resulted in battles between troops of Boniface and his adversaries and the deliberate destruction and salting of the town of Palestrina, despite the pope's assurances that the surrendering city would be spared.
  Boniface VIII put forward some of the strongest claims of any pope to temporal as well as spiritual power. He involved himself often with foreign affairs, including in France, Sicily, Italy and the First War of Scottish Independence.
context_section_description: On Maundy Thursday, 4 April 1303, the Pope again excommunicated all persons who were impeding French clerics from coming to the Holy See, "etiam si imperiali aut regali fulgeant dignitati." This included King Philip IV, though not by name. In response, Guillaume de Nogaret, Philip's chief minister, denounced Boniface as a heretical criminal to the French clergy. On 15 August 1303, the Pope suspended the right of all persons in the Kingdom of France to name anyone as Regent or Doctor, including the King. And in another document of the same day, he reserved to the Holy See the provision of all present and future vacancies in cathedral churches and monasteries, until King Philip should come to the Papal Court and make explanations of his behavior.
  On 7 September 1303, an army led by King Philip's minister Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna attacked Boniface at his Palace in Anagni next to the Cathedral. The Pope responded with a bull dated 8 September 1303, in which Philip and Nogaret were excommunicated. The French Chancellor and the Colonnas demanded the Pope's resignation; Boniface VIII responded that he would "sooner die". In response, Colonna allegedly slapped Boniface, a "slap" historically remembered as the schiaffo di Anagni ("Anagni slap").
  According to a modern interpreter, the 73-year-old Boniface was probably beaten and nearly executed, but was released from captivity after three days. He died a month later. The famous Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote:
  And when Sciarra and the others, his enemies, came to him, they mocked at him with vile words and arrested him and his household which had remained with him. Among others, William of Nogaret, who had conducted the negotiations for the king of France, scorned him and threatened him, saying that he would take him bound to Lyons on the Rhone, and there in a general council would cause him to be deposed and condemned.... no man dared to touch [Boniface], nor were they pleased to lay hands on him, but they left him robed under light arrest and were minded to rob the treasure of the Pope and the Church. In this pain, shame and torment, the great Pope Boniface abode prisoner among his enemies for three days.... the People of Anagni beholding their error and issuing from their blind ingratitude, suddenly rose in arms... and drove out Sciarra della Colonna and his followers, with loss to them of prisoners and slain, and freed the Pope and his household. Pope Boniface... departed immediately from Anagni with his court and came to Rome and St. Peter's to hold a council... but... the grief which had hardened in the heart of Pope Boniface, by reason of the injury which he had received, produced in him, once he had come to Rome, a strange malady so that he gnawed at himself as if he were mad, and in this state he passed from this life on the twelfth day of October in the year of Christ 1303, and in the Church of St. Peter near the entrance of the doors, in a rich chapel which was built in his lifetime, he was honorably buried.
  He died of a violent fever on 11 October, in full possession of his senses and in the presence of eight cardinals and the chief members of the papal household, after receiving the sacraments and making the usual profession of faith.
caption: Depiction of the death of Boniface in a 15th-century manuscript of Boccaccio's De Casibus
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