During the first half of the thirteenth century, they fought with the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and Sicily (most notably the emperor Frederick II). That dispute rolled into the long-running Guelph-Ghibelline wars, which plagued Italy’s city-states well into the fifteenth century. At the same time, Boniface VIII’s violent clash with Philip IV of France during the 1290s and early 1300s culminated not only in Boniface’s death but also with the wholesale removal of the papacy from Rome to Avignon, where popes sat for sixty-seven years in the orbit of the French crown—a time Petrarch called
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