BONIFACE VIII. (Benedetto Gaetano), pope from 1294 to 1303, was born of noble family at Anagni, studied canon and civil law in Italy and possibly at Paris. After being appointed to canonicates in both of these countries, he accompanied Cardinal Ottobuona to England in 1 265 for the purpose of reconciling Henry III. and the baronial party. Later he became advocate and notary at the papal court and in 1281 was made cardinal-deacon, and in 1291 cardinal-priest (SS. Sylvestri et Martini). After helping the in effective Celestine V. to abdicate, he was chosen pope at Naples on Dec. 24, 1294, and crowned at Rome in Jan. 1295. By his attempt to exercise his authority in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs, he involved the papacy in many controversies with leading European powers. 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 VIII. 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 by the retaliating ordinances of Philip, Boniface canonized the king's grandfather 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 Sept. 7, 1303, as the latter was about to pronounce the sentence of excommunication against the king. After a nine hours' truce the palace was stormed, and Boniface who had been saved by Nogaret from the vengeful Colonna, imprisoned for three days, until released by the citizens of Anagni. He was con ducted to Rome, only to be confined by the Orsini in the Vatican, where he died in Oct. 1303. Dante, who had become embittered against Boniface while on a political mission in Rome, calls him the "Prince of the new Pharisees" (Inferno, 27, 85), but laments that "in his Vicar Christ was made a captive," and was "mocked a sec ond time" (Purgatory, 20, 87 f.). Boniface patronized the fine arts, interested himself in the Vatican library and founded the University of Rome.