Boniface had burdened himself with many nephews to allay his agony as a spiritual ruler, which was although the papal range was greater than any king's that he was denied the right to transmit his power and his possessions to his children. He acquired rich cities and contiguous, territories in the name of Gaetani. One quarter of the revenue of his reign was poured into buying these. His dynastic ambitions began to shove the great families to one side. Inevitably, he had to confront the Colonna, who ruled their domain from the hilltop city of Palestrina, twenty-two miles east of Rome.

The Colonna took their case against Boniface to the common people, instilling the belief that his election could not have been legal because it had been secured by the people's loss of heaven on earth when Pope Celestine, chosen of the Holy Ghost, had been usurped by him. They might have won with that argument, but Stephen Colonna raided and sacked a column of the pope's gold which was being sent to Caserta to buy yet another city for the Gaetani dynasty. Boniface, almost insane with rage, jailed two of the Colonna cardinals.

The Colonna offered to return the gold but Boniface wanted not only revenge on Stephen Colonna: but to install garrisons inside the chief Colonna cities. To the Colonna, papal garrisons would be Gaetani garrisons. At dawn the next day, Colonna heralds posted manifestos attacking the legitimacy of Boniface's election all over Rome, leaving one tacked to the high altar of St, Peter's. That evening, Boniface issued the bull In excelso throno, which expanded savagely upon the injuries the papacy had received at Colonna hands. It excommunicated the two imprisoned Colonna cardinals and every member of the cardinals' branches of the family unto the fourth generation. He charged them with heresy and, by putting them beyond the law, identified them as legitimate prey for all who could overcome them. By mid-August he had extended this to include all Colonnas. In November, he proclaimed a religious crusade against the Colonna, using money from all over Europe which had been intended to finance the Crusades in the Holy Land to buy the Knights Templar to crush the Colonna strongholds, The Colonna women and children: were thus to be killed or sold into slavery. By the summer of 1298, all the Colonna cities had fallen except Palestrina. Boniface offered a pardon for everyone it they would yield the city. When the Colonna agreed and surrendered, Boniface destroyed Palestrina. It was not a token destruction such as the demolition of a short section of the city's wall; Palestrina was razed to the ground, and the hideous Roman ritual of the plough and the salt was re-enacted to leave the place eternally barren. The Colonna went to France in exile.

Then, at the crest of his position as `father of kings… ruler of the world', in order to demonstrate his power over princes, Boniface forbade the King of France to tax the French clergy.

The French king took this stricture so badly that he in turn forbade the export of all money to the pope. He forbade foreigners to live in France, which excluded members of the curia. Warming to his task, he called an estates-general to charge the pope with infidelity, loss of the Holy Land, the murder of Celestine V, heresy, fornication, simony, sodomy, sorcery and idolatry in a list of twenty-nine charges -all of them the sort employed when some faction wants to rid the Church of a pope, many of them quite- valid. The only weapon Boniface had was the solemn excommunication of the King of France, which would release the French people from their allegiance to the king. The publication of this fatal bull was planned for 8 September 1303 from Agnani, the pope's summer palace.

The bull had to be stopped. It could have stirred up cataclysmic turmoil in France. The king sent William of Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna into Italy, where 2000 troops had been raised to storm Agnani and to drag Boniface to France to be tried.

Agnani was the capital of the Gaetani family's domain, as Palestrina had been the home and capital of the Colonna' s. Somebody inside the city opened the gates to Sciarra Colonna and 200 men. With drawn sword, Colonna raced into the papal palace to find Boniface, now almost eighty, seated on his throne clad in his robes, with the three tiered tiara on his head, cross in one hand and keys to St Peter's in the other. If Sciarra was shaken by this serenity, lie did not show it. He told his men to strip Boniface naked. Sciarra jammed the tiara down over the pope's eyes and, knocking him down, had his men drag him by the feet across the stones, down a granite stairway, to be flung into a narrow, lightless dungeon where Sciarra ordered the men to urinate on him. They left him locked in there to fight off the rats. Two nights later, the people of Agnani expelled the French and rescued Boniface. It was six days before he could travel. He reached, the Vatican on 18 September and died twenty-four days later. The Church was never the same again, thank God. Benedict X was elected pope but he died within ten months. A relentless bargaining conclave followed, which took months to elect Clement V he was Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, a man who had never set foot in Italy and as it turned out, never would. He was controlled by the King of France:

Clement V was crowned at Lyons in November 1305 but there were a lot of bad omens. During his procession he was thrown from his horse, a wall fell on him and w rare jewel in his crown was lost. One of his brothers and ten barons lost their lives under that wall. He settled at Avignon, finally, in 1309, and was succeeded by six French popes who, at the will of the French king, remained in France. The Church was still under a single papacy, three quarters of a century away from the schism, but it wasn't until 1377, sixty-eight years later, that the papacy returned to Rome, when Gregory VI went to Italy to save the papal states for the Church; he died suddenly in Rome, probably poisoned.

Of the sixteen cardinals in his college, eleven were French, four were Italian, and one was Spanish. The city magistrates warned the cardinals that their lives would be at stake if an Italian pope were not elected. The Romans were desperate lest the papacy should return to France. They had become poor people in an Italian country town which had grass growing in its streets since their big business had been moved to Avignon. They had missed out on the profits from about two million pilgrims to Rome since Clement V was elected and the French had got all that money. As the cardinals entered the upper. storey of the building to hold their conclave a prodigious electrical storm came on. The wild-eyed Roman mob; stirred up by the thought of the money they might lose for ever if the papacy remained outside Rome, pressed upon the cardinals on their way into the building, screaming for an Italian pope, chanting, Romano; Romano, volemo la papa, o almanco.Italian!" There were thousands of them and, while the conclave deliberated, it, must have been able to hear the mob bellowing outside. Drunken rioters forced their way into the lower room and set fire to it. They shoved lances through the ceiling into the conclave room above and, when three cardinals came out to parley; they were threatened with being torn to pieces if they didn't elect a Roman or at least, an Italian.

The conclave chose the safest-pope – Archbishop Bartolomeo Prigano of Bari, a Neapolitan who had been vice chancellor at the University of Avignon. He was a small, fussy man who disapproved of everything, but most of all he disapproved of French curial extravagances. At Avignon, he would fling inkwells at the walls in frustration, yelling that the cardinals were turning the Church into a pawnshop. Prigano took the name of Urban VI. When this petty bureaucrat realized that the awesome, unknowable duties of the papacy had fallen upon him, his sanity slipped its leash. Total madness came only a short time later. The cardinals had chosen him swiftly but there are some Church histories which say that Prigano had been forced upon them by the murderous mob. That was not so. Prigano had been one of their curia through the old days at Avignon, When he was consecrated, all of them gave, him homage and got many favours from him. The guardian at Sant' Angelo had strict orders not to give up the keys to the new pope until six cardinals still at Avignon consented, and those six ordered that the keys be placed in Urban's hands. There was not a single objection or hesitation or dissatisfaction with the election of Urban VI until he held his first consistory and attacked the cardinals with ferocity, screaming at them in street Neapolitan, venting the spleen accumulated over all of his years in the chancery at Avignon against their simonies: He told them there would be no more shares in the sevitia for them, an impossible condition for cardinals because it attacked their right to an assured unearned income. The servitia was equal to one third of the income of all of the bishops in Christendom. At the first consistory he singled out each cardinal in turn, reviling him individually and by name. He cited the instances of their corruption. He limited their food and drink. He forbade their acceptance of pensions, provisions and gifts of money.