The crafty king, however, had determined on other means of revenge than decrees, accusations, and burning bulls; he devised a plot to kidnap Boniface and fetch him prisoner to France. One William Nogaret, once a professor of law in a French university, now deep in the king's counsels, went to Italy, met a vindictive member of the Colonna family, Sciarra Colonna, and the two arranged the details of the plot. There were many conspirators, for not only the Colonnas were eager to revenge themselves, but numerous nobles, dispossessed to make room for the Pope's relations, were ready to lend a hand. The unsuspecting Boniface, now an old man of eighty-six years, was at Anagni (a little fortified town not far from Rome), his native place, but nevertheless honeycombed with treason; here, from the pulpit of the cathedral where Emperors had been excommunicated, he proposed to excommunicate the King of France. Two days before the day set for the excommunication, Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, with a troop of soldiers, entered the city which had been opened by traitors; many of the townsmen ranged themselves under the French banner. The conspirators broke into the episcopal palace, where they found the valiant old man seated on a throne, in his pontifical garments, with the tiara on his head, and a cross in his hand. Sciarra Colonna dragged him down and would have stabbed him with his dagger but that Nogaret withheld him by main force. The Pope was made prisoner and the palace sacked; but in a few days sympathy turned, papal partisans stormed the palace, rescued Boniface, and carried him to Rome. Here the Orsini, pretending to befriend him, kept him shut up in the Vatican, half crazed by fright and fury, till death happily released him (October 11, 1303). Then men remembered an old prophecy uttered concerning him: "He shall enter like a fox, reign like a lion, and die like a dog." Thus dramatically the hollowness of papal power was revealed. France did not rest content with this insolent act. A year or two later, a Frenchman of Gascony, the archbishop of Bordeaux, was made Pope by the French king's influence. This Pope, Clement V (1305-14), never went to Rome, but took up his abode at Avignon, a little city on the Rhone, not very far from its mouth. The place was under the overlordship of the Angevin kings of Naples, but really under the influence of the kings of France. Here the Papacy stayed for nearly seventy years, practically a dependency of France. A series of French Popes succeeded one another. They built on the bank of the Rhone a gigantic fortress, regarded Rome, the source of their greatness, as a dismal and dangerous out-of-the-way place, and believed that they had transferred the seat of the Papacy permanently. This period of exile was regarded by the Italians as a Babylonish captivity.