Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The imperial troops in Italy—twenty thousand of them in all—split into Spanish, Italian, and German factions—were under the command of a general known as Charles, Duke of Bourbon, a French traitor who had gone over to the emperor after falling out with Francis

Meanwhile, the peninsula’s appeal as a hub for Renaissance artists lay in tatters. It could be argued with long hindsight that the height of the Italian Renaissance passed when Raphael died in 1520 (although Michelangelo was still working in the Sistine Chapel in the 1540s), but the psychological and financial trauma of the sack certainly helped ensure that there was not another late flourish of this wonderful movement.

For in the aftermath of Rome’s fall, a growing reform movement flourished from the 1530s onward, spurred by homegrown reformers like John Calvin. By mid-century, groups of protestants known as Huguenots began to pose serious problems for the French crown, and tensions eventually erupted in the French Wars of Religion, which were fought from the 1560s until the 1590s, cost tens of thousands of lives, and left religious wounds in French society that were still bleeding in the eighteenth century.

he eventually had his way. The painfully drawn-out Council of Trent, convened in several sessions between 1545 and 1563, fundamentally restated and redrew the doctrine of the Catholic church

indulgences were not banned, but their sale was eventually forbidden in 1567. Yet

The “Agnani Slap” was the melodramatic climax of a nasty feud between Philip IV and Boniface VIII. Its origin lay in the French king’s desire to tax the church in his realm, but its roots lay in the age-old issue of papal versus royal preeminence. Resistance to papal authority was traditionally the preserve of German kings and emperors (e.g., during the Investiture Controversy of 1075–1122 and the subsequent Guelph-Ghibelline wars, which persisted in Italy from the early twelfth century until the end of the fourteenth). But at the turn of the fourteenth century Philip IV briefly became chief papal tormentor. When Boniface opposed Philip’s attempts to assert royal supremacy, de Nogaret traveled to Italy, contracted a small private army loyal to the powerful Colonna family, and laid siege to the papal villa at Agnani, aiming to seize Boniface and remove him to France, where he might be put on trial. In the confusion of the siege, de Nogaret and his leading ally Giacomo “Sciarra” Colonna confronted Boniface. Sciarra slapped the pope in the face. They then imprisoned and seriously mistreated the pope for three days, before he was rescued by the people of Agnani. Boniface died soon afterward of a fever, during which it was said (inaccurately) that he went mad and chewed his own hands off.

In 1309 Clement officially moved the headquarters of the papacy from Rome to the city of Avignon, theoretically in the independent kingdom of Arles but in reality strongly influenced by France. Seven popes, all of them French, would reside there in what was known as “Babylonian captivity,” until Gregory XI returned the papal seat to Rome in 1376. A further two antipopes subsequently attempted to rule the church from Avignon between 1378 and 1410.