More important even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous vitality, were to supersede the old. In that same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto was at work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was building the famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his still more famous bell-tower. Here surely was artistic wakening enough. If we look further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another scene tragically expressive of the changing times. The French King, Philip the Fair, so called from his appearance, not his dealings, had bitter cause of quarrel with the same Pope Boniface VIII who had held the great jubilee of 1300. Philip's soldiers, forcing their way into the little town of Anagni, to which the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon his holiness. If measured by numbers, the whole affair was trifling. So few were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck--beaten, say not wholly reliable authorities--and so insulted that rage and shame drove him mad, and he died. Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr. Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but the next Pope, venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died within a few months under strong probabilities of poison; and the next Pope, Clement V, became the obedient servant of the French King. He even removed the seat of papal authority from Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years the popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power of the Church was sudden, terrible, complete. INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE