Out of the sullen hatred of the multitude, stirred of a sudden to white heat by the assault of a French soldier on a woman of Palermo, sprang the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, the rebellion and massacre of an Easter Monday night, when more than four thousand of the hated strangers, men, women, and children, were put to death and their bodies flung into an open pit. Charles of Anjou prepared a fitting revenge for this insult to his race, a revenge that he intended to exact to the uttermost farthing, for he had little of his brother’s sense of justice and tender heart; but while he made his preparations a Spanish prince, Peter III of Aragon, came to the rescue of the Sicilians with a large fleet. A fierce war followed, but in spite of defeats, treaties that would have sacrificed her to the interests of kings, and continuous papal threats, Sicily clung staunch to her new ally, gaining at last as a recognized Aragonese possession a triumphant independence of the Angevin kingdom of Naples. Rome, under a pope who was merely the puppet of Charles of Anjou, had hurled anathemas at Peter III; but his successors of more independent mind envied the Sicilians. It was of little use for Rome to throw off Hohenstaufen chains if she must rivet in their stead those of the French House of Anjou. This was the fear that made her look with cold suspicion on her once well-beloved sons the kings of France, whose relations of the blood-royal were also kings of Naples. [Sidenote: Boniface VIII] In 1294 Pope Boniface VIII, sometimes called ‘the last of the mediaeval Popes’ because any hopes of realizing the world-wide ambitions of a Hildebrand or of an Innocent III died with him, was elected to the Chair of St. Peter. His jubilee, held at Rome in 1300 to celebrate the new century, was of a splendour to dazzle the thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Europe who poured their offerings into his coffers; but its glamour was delusive. Already he had suffered rebuffs in encounters with the kings of England and France: for, when he published a Bull, _Clericis Laicos_, that forbade the clergy to pay taxes any longer to a lay ruler, Edward I at once condemned the English Church to outlawry, until from fear of the wholesale robbery of their lands and goods his bishops consented to a compromise that made the Bull a dead letter. Philip IV of France, on his part, was even more violent, for he retaliated by ordering his subjects to send no more contributions to Rome of any kind.