The earlier heresies of the Middle Ages were of importance for their own day and generation only, leaving no permanent imprint on history. The Church was on the whole very successful in combating them, actually securing the destruction of the Albigenses and throughout western Europe generally keeping the danger well in check by the activities of the Holy Office. The story of the Spiritual Franciscans, on the other hand, has a deeper significance, for it is intimately connected with momentous events which betokened the overthrow of the mediæval order, the rooting up of certain fundamental ideas associated with the matured conception of the _Civitas Dei_. The one feature common to Waldensianism, Catharism and the other early mediæval heresies, which gives them any lasting importance, was their anti-sacerdotalism. Clerical, and in particular papal, pretensions tended to increase after the fall of the Hohenstaufen, which left the papacy triumphant as the result of its long struggle with the empire. The high-water mark of those assertions was reached in 1300, when Boniface VIII declared himself to be not only Pope but also Caesar.[117] By two most important bulls Boniface sought to put his claims into practice, _Clericis laicos_, which defined the rights of the clergy to immunity from secular taxation, _Unam sanctam_, which declared unequivocally the absolute supremacy of the pope over the lay power, over every human creature in all respects. The same uncompromising spirit was shown a little later on by John XXII, the oppressor of the Spirituals, an old man of immense vigour and a range of view which embraced even the minute concerns of the secular states of Europe.[118] Unhappily for itself, the setting forth of the papacy’s highest pretensions was coincident with the maturing of certain forces which tended to render those pretensions null and void. The most important of these was the force of nationality, the growth of nation-states, in particular under the strong royal houses of the Capets and the Angevins respectively in France and England. In such nation-states the papacy was to find a more formidable obstacle to the realization of its temporal ambitions than the Empire had ever presented, especially as they had no such tradition of alliance with the papacy as was the heritage and indeed the technical origin and justification of the Holy Roman Empire.[119] The distinction between the relation of the Pope to the Emperor and the relation of the Pope to the King of France is brought out forcibly in a work entitled ‘An Enquiry touching the Power of the Pope,’ by Peter du Bois, who in the year 1300 published a very remarkable treatise which advocated a modest proposal for uniting the whole of Europe under French sovereignty. The Emperor was dependent upon the Pope, because he had to be confirmed in his office and crowned by the Pope. No such necessity existed in the case of the French King.[120]