A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

not believe in the immortality of the soul.) Then Philip sent off a kind of commando unit to Italy to
kidnap the pope. This was done with the aid of an Italian family that the pope had offended, the
Colonnas. The conspirators went to the pope’s town of Anagni, where he was spending the summer
of 1303. With the complicity of the townspeople - who also seem to have had their grudges - they
besieged him in his palace, and burst in as he was about to issue the bull excommunicating Philip.
During the next few days, it seems fairly certain that the pope was roughly handled by his captors,
although he refused to give way to their demands. They were prepared to drag him back to France
to stand trial when the townspeople of Anagni experienced a change of heart and rescued him. But
the sudden recognition of his own vulnerability had broken the pope’s will. He went back to Rome
- where he was made prisoner by some of his enemies - and died soon after.
What we can see - and what the vainglorious and arrogant Boniface was entirely unable to see - is
that he never stood the slightest chance of success in realising Hildebrand’s dream of papal
domination. He had not even noticed how much the world had changed. Frederick II might be dead,
but his spirit was alive and was transforming the world. It was against that spirit that Boniface had
broken his head - not against the arrogant stupidity of Philip the Fair. The whole of France was
behind Philip in telling the pope to keep his nose out of foreign affairs. And as the news of the
‘kidnapping’ and its sequel spread, the rest of Europe smiled sarcastically.
Philip’s rather underhand schemes continued to prosper. The next pope died - probably of poison -
within a year. And Philip made sure that his successor was a Frenchman - a Gascon, Clement V.
And Philip bribed or persuaded him not to go to Rome but to transfer the seat of the papacy to
Avignon. There he lived in a huge and luxurious palace. This ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the papacy
lasted for seventy-three years, during which time most of the popes thoroughly enjoyed themselves
- in fact, gave the papacy a bad name for self-indulgence - and, naturally, lent a sympathetic ear to
the demands of the French king.
With the pope in Avignon, Philip turned his attention back to the question of how to make money.
Somebody’s pocket had to be picked, and one obvious candidate was the wealthy order of knights
known as the Templars. They were very rich - they had often lent the king money - and very
powerful. Founded in the Holy Land after the success of the first crusade, they had originally been
housed in a wing of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The Holy Land was, as we have seen, a
dangerous place during the Middle Ages, and the Knights Templar had been decimated again and
again in battles with the Saracens and finally ejected by the sultan Baybars in 1303. Their immense
wealth had been bequeathed to them mainly by grateful crusaders whom they had nursed through
sickness or injury. Philip had applied to join them, and had actually been rejected. For a man of his
childish temperament, this was an insult that had to be avenged.
Ex-Templars were interrogated, and the king soon had a list of hair-raising accusations, such as
homosexuality, worshipping a demon called Baphomet (in the form of a wooden penis) and spitting
on the cross. The accusations were an imaginative compilation of the medieval ideas about black
magic and demons, complete with naked virgins, female demons and endless sodomy.
Secret orders went out, and at daybreak on 13 October 1307, the authorities swooped, and almost
every Templar in France was arrested. It was important to work fast, in case there was a public
outcry - a matter like this could so easily turn into a boomerang that would make Philip a laughing
stock. Disappointingly, there proved to be no documentary evidence of the abominations of which
they were accused, and the treasure of the Templars was not found either - it seems fairly certain
that they had advance warning and spirited it away. So Philip had the knights tortured horribly - so