A wiser man than Boniface might have realized from his failures that the growth of nationality was proving too strong for any theories of world-government, whether papal or imperial; but, old and stubborn, he could not set aside his Hildebrandine ideals. When one of his legates, a Frenchman, embarked on a dispute with Philip IV, Boniface told him to meet the King with open defiance, upon which Philip immediately ordered the ecclesiastic’s arrest, and that his archbishop should degrade him from his office. Boniface then fulminated threats of excommunication and deposition, to which the French king replied by an act of open violence. The agent he chose to inflict this insult was a certain Nogaret, grandson of an Albigensian heretic who had been burned at the stake, and this man joined himself to some of the nobles of the Roman Campagna, who had equally little reverence for the Head of Christendom. Heavily armed, they appeared in the village of Anagni, where Boniface VIII was staying, and demanded to see him. Outside in the street their men-at-arms stood shouting ‘Death to the Pope!’ Boniface could hear them from his audience-chamber, but though he was eighty-six his courage did not fail him. Clad in his full pontifical robes, his cross in one hand, his keys of St. Peter in the other, he received the intruders. Nogaret roughly demanded his abdication. ‘Here is my head! Here is my neck!’ he replied. ‘Betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like Him I will at least die Pope.’ At this one of the Roman nobles struck him across the face with his mailed glove, felling him to the ground, and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered. It was the Provençal’s mission to intimidate rather than to murder, and while he argued with the Italians a hostile crowd assembled to rescue their Vicar, and the French agents were forced to fly. The proud old man survived the indignities he had suffered only by a few weeks, and his successor, having dared to excommunicate those who took part in the scene at Anagni, died also with mysterious suddenness. No definite suspicion attached to Philip IV, but rumour whispered the fatal word ‘poison’, and the conclave of cardinals spent ten uneasy months in trying to find a new pope. At last a choice emerged from the conclave, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, with the title of Clement V. He was crowned at Lyons, and never ventured into Italy, choosing as his residence the city of Avignon in Provence. Here for just over seventy years, during the ‘Babylonish Captivity’ as it was usually called, a succession of popes reigned under French influence, having exchanged the imperial yoke for one still more binding. Philip IV at once made use of this French Head of Christendom to condemn the Order of Templars, which from their powerful organization and extensive revenues he had long regarded with dislike and envy.