s on the 24th of
December 1294. Contrary to custom, the election was not made unanimous,
probably because of the hostility of certain French cardinals. Celestine
attempted to rule in extreme monastic poverty and humility; not so
Boniface, who ardently asserted the lordship of the papacy over all the
kingdoms of the world. He was crowned at Rome in January 1295 with great
pomp. He planned to pacify the West and then recover the Holy Land from
the infidel; but during his nine years' reign, so far from being a
peacemaker, he involved the papacy itself in a series of controversies
with leading European powers. Avarice, lofty claims and frequent
exhibitions of arrogance made him many foes. The policy of supporting
the interests of the house of Anjou in Sicily proved a grand failure.
The attempt to build up great estates for his family made most of the
Colonna his enemies. Until 1303 he refused to recognize Albert of
Austria as the rightful German king. Assuming that he was overlord of
Hungary, he declared that its crown should fall to the house of Anjou.
He humbled Eric VI. of Denmark, but was unsuccessful in the attempt to
try Edward I., the conqueror of Scotland, on the charge of interfering
with a papal fief; for parliament declared in 1301 that Scotland had
never been a fief of Rome. The most noted conflict of Boniface was that
with Philip IV. of France. In 1296, by the bull _Clericis laicos_, the
pope forbade the levying of taxes, however disguised, on the clergy
without his consent. Forced to recede from this position, Boniface
canonized Louis IX. (1297). The hostilities were later renewed; in 1302
Boniface himself drafted and published the indubitably genuine bull
_Unam sanctam_, one of the strongest official statements of the papal
prerogative ever made. The weight of opinion now tends to deny that any
part of this much-discussed document save the last sentence bears the
marks of an infallible utterance. The French vice-chancellor Guillaume
de Nogaret was sent to arrest the pope, against whom grave charges had
been brought, and bring him to France to be deposed by an oecumenical
council. The accusation of heresy has usually been dismissed as a
slander; but recent investigations make it probable, though not quite
certain, that Boniface privately held certain Averroistic tenets, such
as the denial of the immortality of the soul. With Sciarra Colonna,
Nogaret surprised Boniface at Anagni, on the 7th of September 1303, as