er of St. Louis, that he
should have the crown, on terms. Manfred fell in battle against him at
Beneventum, and with him all real chance of a Hohenstaufen recovery. Not
three years after, young Conradin, in a desperate venture after his
legitimate rights, was captured and put to death by Charles of Anjou.

A temporary pacification of Western Christendom was the work of Gregory
X.; his aim was a great crusade. At last an emperor was elected, Rudolph
of Hapsburg. But Gregory died. Popes followed each other and died in
swift succession. Presently, on the abdication of the hermit Celestine,
Boniface VIII. was chosen pope. His bull, "Clericis laicos," forbidding
taxation of the clergy by the temporal authority, brought him into
direct hostility with Philip the Fair of France, and though the quarrel
was temporarily adjusted, the strife soon broke out again. The bulls,
"Unam Sanctam" and "Ausculta fili," were answered by a formal
arraignment of Boniface in the States-General of France, followed by the
seizure of the pope's own person by Philip's Italian partisans.

_IV.--Captivity, Seclusion, and Revival_

The successor of Boniface was Benedict IX. He acted with dignity and
restraint, but he lived only two years. After long delays, the cardinals
elected the Archbishop of Bordeaux, a subject of the King of England.
But before he became Clement V. he had made his pact with the King of
France. He was crowned, not in Italy, but at Lyons, and took up his
residence at Avignon, a papal fief in Provence, on the French borders.
For seventy years the popes at Avignon were practically the servants of
the King of France.

At the very outset, Clement was compelled to lend his countenance to the
suppression of the Knights Templars by the temporal power. Philip forced
the pope and the Consistory to listen to an appalling and incredible
arraignment of the dead Boniface; then he was rewarded for abandoning
the persecution of his enemy's memory by abject adulation: the pope had
been spared from publicly condemning his predecessor.

John XXII. was not, in the same sense, a tool of the last monarchs of
the old House of Capet, of which, during his rule, a younger branch
succeeded in the person of Philip of Valois. John was at constant feud
with the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, and also, within the ecclesiastical
pale, with the Franciscan Order. Louis of Bavaria died during the
pontificate of Clement VI., and Charles of Bohemia, already empero