The period in the fourteenth century during which the Papacy was based north of the Alps is one which has long invited comment and controversy. From contemporaries such as the scholar and author Petrarch and the Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo down to our own day, the lengthy absence of the Holy See from its traditional home in the Eternal City has often been regarded as an aberration, an episode in papal history which was neither constructive nor justifiable. But the exile of the bishop of Rome in distant Avignon was not undertaken lightly; it was a consequence of the endemic political and inter-familial strife in much of Italy and of the threat to the pope's personal security which this occasioned. At the turn of the century the lordly and antagonistic Boniface VIII had played his part both in the factional struggles of the Italian cities and in arousing controversies in which the respective powers of church and state had been debated anew; he was ultimately to be assaulted in his own residence at Anagni by a force which included agents of the king of France as well as representatives of Italian families who had suffered at the hands of the pope. As Dante said, Christ was made captive in the person of his Vicar.