On every Eastern battle-field, and at every assault and siege, the knights had fought with that fiery courage which has made their name a proverb down to the present day. In 1265, at Safed, three hundred had been butchered upon the ramparts in cold blood, rather than renounce their faith. At Acre, whose loss sealed the fate of Palestine, they held the keep at all odds until the donjon fell, burying Christians and Moslems in a common grave. But skill and valour avail nothing against nature. Step by step the Templars had been driven back, until Tortosa surrendered in 1291. Then the Holy Land was closed, the enthusiasm which had generated the order had passed away, and, meanwhile, economic competition had bred a new race at home, to which monks were a predestined prey. In 1285, as the Latin kingdom in Syria was tottering towards its fall, Philip the Fair was crowned. Subtle, sceptical, treacherous, and cruel, few kings have left behind them a more sombre memory, yet he was the incarnation of the economic spirit in its conflict with the Church. Nine years later Benedetto Gaetani was elected pope: a man as completely the creation of the social revolution of the thirteenth century as Philip himself. Trained at Bologna and Paris, a jurist rather than a priest, his faith in dogma was so scanty that his belief in the immortality of the soul has been questioned. A thorough worldling, greedy, ambitious, and unscrupulous, he was suspected of having murdered his predecessor, Celestin V. When Boniface came to the throne, the Church is supposed to have owned about one-third of the soil of Europe, and on this property the governments had no means of enforcing regular taxation. Toward the close of the thirteenth century the fall of prices increased the weight of debt, while it diminished the power of the population to pay. On the other hand, as the system of administration became more complex, the cost of government augmented, and at last the burden became more than the laity could endure. Both England and France had a permanent deficit, and Edward and Philip alike turned toward the clergy as the only source of supply. Both kings met with opposition, but the explosion came in France, where Clairvaux, the most intractable of convents, appealed to Rome. Boniface had been elected by a coalition between the Colonna and the Orsini factions, but after his coronation he turned upon the Colonnas, who, in revenge, plundered his treasure. A struggle followed, which ended fatally to the pope; but at first he had the advantage, sacked their city of Præneste, and forced them to fly to France. On the brink of this war, Boniface was in no condition to rouse so dangerous an adversary as Philip, and, in answer to Clairvaux’s appeal, he confined himself to excommunicating the prince who should tax the priest and the priest who should pay the impost.