§ 96.21. =The Times of the House of Anjou down to Boniface VIII., A.D. 1288-1294.=--The papacy had emerged triumphantly from its hundred years’ struggle with the Hohenstaufens, and by the overthrow of this powerful house Germany was thrown into the utmost confusion and anarchy. But Italy, too, was now in a condition of extreme disorder, and the unconscionable tyrants of Naples subjected it to a much more intolerable bondage than those had done from whom they pretended to have delivered it. After the death of Clement IV. the Holy See remained vacant for three years. The cardinals would not elect such a pope as would be agreeable to Charles I. During this papal vacancy Louis IX. of France, A.D. 1226-1270, fitted out the seventh and last crusade (§ 94, 6), from which he was not to return. As previously he had reformed the administration of justice, he now before his departure introduced drastic reforms in the ecclesiastical institutions of his kingdom, which laid the first foundations of the celebrated “Gallican Liberties.” Clement IV. gave occasion for such procedure on the part of the monarch who was a model of piety after the standard of those times, by claiming in A.D. 1266 for the papal chair the _plenaria dispositio_ of all prebends and benefices. In opposition to this assumption the king secured by a Pragmatic Sanction of A.D. 1269 to all churches and monasteries of his realm unconditional freedom of all elections and presentations according to old existing rights, confirmed to them anew all privileges and immunities previously granted them, forbade every form of simony as a heinous crime, and prohibited all extraordinary taxation of church property on the part of the Roman curia.--At last the cardinals took courage and elected =Gregory X.=, A.D. 1271-1276, an Italian of the noble house of Visconti. The desolating interregnum in Germany was also put an end to by the election of =Count Rudolf of Hapsburg=, A.D. 1273-1291, as king of the Germans. At the =Second Lyonese or 14th Œcumenical Council of A.D. 1274=, the worthy pope continued his endeavours without avail to rouse the flagging enthusiasm of the princes so as to get them to undertake another crusade. The union with the Greek church did not prove of an enduring kind (§ 67, 4). The constitution, too, sanctioned at the council, which provided, in order to prevent prolonged vacancies in the papal see, that the election of pope should not only be proceeded with in immured conclaves in the place where the deceased pope last resided with the curia, but also (though this was again abrogated in A.D. 1351 by a decree of Clement VI.) should be expedited by limiting the supply of food after three days to one dish, after other five days to water, wine, and bread. Yet this completely failed to secure the object desired. More successful, however, were the negotiations carried