century, when France and then Spain invaded the peninsula and put an end to Italian independence for over three centuries, they were both merely restating claims which had developed gradually out of that initial interest. In this sense the events of the late thirteenth century were both the antecedent and a sort of dress rehearsal for the transformation that was to befall Italy later.
For the papacy, too, the alliance was momentous and fateful. A powerful ally was indispensable if the popes were not to fall completely victim to the pressures of the Roman and central Italian aristocracy; yet papal involvement in the continuous military programme of the alliance involved considerable expense. The papacy became one of the first European powers to experience the sharp rise in the cost of warfare that characterized the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The administrative reforms, and the extension of papal control over the Church, initiated by Innocent III, were soon put severely to the test. One solution was the definition of such wars as crusades, which gave them moral standing and propaganda value, and also entailed the right to raise taxes from the clergy. The preaching of crusades against Christians who had opposed the papal will was not new, but the custom developed above all in the context of the papal-Angevin alliance. It laid the popes open to charges of perverting the crusading movement. A more serious consequence of the alliance was that it made the popes increasingly dependent on France, both in the sense of dependence on the French king, the power behind the Angevins in Italy, and in that it brought the French closer to the curia itself. Urban IV, who invited the Angevins into Italy, and who was himself French, created enough French cardinals to ensure that a new factional element was added to the natural instability of papal elections.
All these factors came together in a critical manner in the pontificate of Boniface VIII. Benedict Caetani succeeded the unworldly Celestine V, who had resigned the office, in 1294, the twelfth pope to be elected in forty years. An Angevin candidate, and an old but vigorous, not to say stubborn, politician, Boniface soon demonstrated an attentiveness to personal and dynastic interests which went beyond what the
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