Boniface VIII Palace

Anagni sits on a rocky plateau above the Sacco valley, approximately 65 kilometres southeast of Rome, and the town's nickname — Città dei Papi, City of Popes — is not the kind of local promotional inflection that most Italian hilltop towns apply to themselves. It is, in this case, a checkable demographic claim: four medieval popes were born in Anagni. Innocent III, born around 1160 and elected in 1198, was the most institutionally ambitious pope of the medieval period: he organised the Fourth Crusade, asserted authority over the disputed German imperial succession, and convened the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Gregory IX, born circa 1167 and elected 1227, codified canon law in the Liber Extra and established the Papal Inquisition. Alexander IV, born circa 1199 and elected 1254, was less historically prominent but born here nonetheless. And Benedetto Caetani, born in Anagni around 1230, who became Pope Boniface VIII in 1294 and whose pontificate ended here in September 1303 in the most violent assault on a sitting pope in the entire medieval period.

The palace that Boniface VIII built in Anagni was constructed for his family, the Caetani, during his pontificate, with the main building datable to around 1296. It stands in the town's historic centre, a short walk from the cathedral whose 13th-century Romanesque crypt frescoes are a separate attraction of some significance. The building is Gothic in character — pointed-arch windows, heavy stone construction, the compact solidity that Lazio noble family palaces favoured in this period — and its scale is that of a powerful provincial family's urban residence, not a palace in the sense that the word implies ceremonial grandeur. The Caetani were wealthy and influential, and Boniface used both their wealth and his papal office to advance the family's interests in a way that was characteristic of medieval popes but which his contemporaries found unusually aggressive.

The conflict that brought armed men to Anagni in September 1303 began with a straightforward dispute over money. Philip IV of France, known as Philip the Fair, wanted to tax the French clergy to fund his wars against England and Flanders. Boniface, in the bull Clericis laicos of 1296, forbade secular rulers from taxing the clergy without papal consent. Philip responded by banning the export of gold and silver from France, cutting a significant source of papal revenue. The dispute escalated across the following years, with each side deploying increasingly absolute statements of their authority. In 1302 Boniface issued Unam Sanctam — the single most assertive declaration of papal supremacy ever published by a medieval pope, whose closing statement made explicit that subjection to the Roman pontiff is necessary for salvation. Read literally, the bull claimed that every secular ruler in Christendom was ultimately subject to papal authority. Philip IV found the claim unacceptable.

Guillaume de Nogaret was Philip's minister — a lawyer and political operative from the south of France, educated in canon law, and possessed of a personal grievance against the papacy that combined professional conviction with family history (his parents or grandparents had been condemned as Cathars). He organised the response with the efficiency of a man who understood legal procedures and their limits. In the autumn of 1303 Nogaret, in alliance with Sciarra Colonna — a member of the Roman noble family whose long feud with the Caetani gave him personal motivation — led an armed force to Anagni where Boniface was resident at the family palace. They seized the pope and held him captive for approximately three days.

The event entered history under the name Schiaffo di Anagni — the Slap of Anagni — from an account that Sciarra Colonna struck Boniface in the face during the confrontation. The historicity of the specific slap is disputed; the confrontation and captivity are documented. What is clear is that Boniface was physically seized in his family palace by agents of the French crown, that he was held there for several days, and that the townspeople of Anagni eventually drove Nogaret and Colonna out, freeing the pope. Boniface returned to Rome shortly after. He died in October 1303, approximately a month after the events in Anagni; the cause was given as illness, and the popular interpretation among contemporaries and subsequent historians has consistently been that he died of the shock and humiliation of the outrage.

The consequences were structural and long-lasting. Clement V, elected in 1305, moved the papal court to Avignon in 1309. The Avignon papacy lasted until 1377 — 68 years during which the popes resided in territory that, while nominally not French royal land, was under pervasive French political influence. Dante Alighieri, writing in the Divine Comedy in the years immediately following these events, placed Boniface VIII in Hell for simony and described the Avignon papacy as the Babylonian captivity of the church — a biblical analogy comparing the popes' residence in Avignon to the exile of the Jews in Babylon, which has been the dominant metaphor for the Avignon period ever since. The Great Schism that followed, in which multiple simultaneous claimants held different papal courts from 1378 to 1417, was the further consequence. The arc from Anagni in 1303 to the Council of Constance in 1417 that finally resolved the Schism is one of the defining crises of medieval church history, and the palace in Anagni's hilltop centre is where the arc began.

The GYG entry ticket (t537015, from $8) provides access to the palace interior, which preserves Gothic rooms and documentation of the Caetani family and the 1303 events. Anagni is reached from Rome by regional train to Anagni station (approximately one hour), with a 15-minute walk or local bus connection into the historic centre. The cathedral's frescoed crypt is a separate visit but within easy walking distance and worth combining in the same morning. Castel Gandolfo, already on this site, is the most natural companion destination — the baroque papal summer residence in the Alban Hills representing what the papacy's relationship with the Roman countryside looked like after the Avignon crisis had been resolved.