peech. 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town of Anagni, to which the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon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

Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked the
mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious orders
of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in Jerusalem. The Templars,
having found their warfare hopeless, had abandoned the Holy Land and had
dwelt for a generation inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized
the leading members of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and
confiscated all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles
throughout France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the
extermination of the entire order and the torture and execution of its
chiefs. Whether the ch