A heavy blow was struck at the overweening claims of the papacy by Philip IV's attack upon Boniface VIII, and, as it has been said, 'the drama of Anagni is to be set against the drama of Canossa.'[121] But worse humiliations were to follow, when the papacy was brought under French tutelage by the 'Babylonish Captivity' of Avignon. Worse still, to the humiliation was added infamy. The corruption at the new papal court speedily became notorious. It surpassed all previous bounds, and the cost of its luxury and prodigality was defrayed by unparalleled extortion and simony.[122] More powerful than ever, therefore, became the denunciation of the ugly materialism and spiritual decadence of the papacy. The scandal of Avignon was followed by one more deplorable still--the Schism. Christendom was presented with the unedifying sight of successive rival pontiffs, each anathematizing the other and reviling him in terms of vulgar scurrility.[123] No mystic halo could remain undimmed, no sense of reverence unimpaired by a spectacle so profane. The resistance of princely prerogative, the emotion of national resentment against caste privilege and exemption were reinforced by a general consciousness of the violence done to men's ordinary sense of fitness, a consciousness mirrored in the literature, and particularly the polemics, of the day.
If disgust with the papacy led Dante in his 'De Monarchia' to find a solution of the world's troubles in a revival of the universal empire, of an effective imperial authority, his vision being one of a golden age in the past, in this respect he stood alone, and other writers looked forward to a radical alteration and amendment in the ecclesiastical polity. It was indeed a radical innovation, but it was not so conceived by its authors, who regarded it as the true practice of the Church and were in some cases ready to denounce the Pope as a heretic for disregarding it. The pulpits of the Grey Friars resounded to denunciations of John XXII as a heretic because he clave to earthly possessions and repudiated the doctrine of the poverty of Christ and His Disciples. But indeed the arguments of John's opponents were often so startling that it is in no way surprising that he with all honesty perceived in _them_ the heretics. Michael of Cesena, in a tract against the errors of the Pope, treated John as a mere heretic, and appealed from him to a General Council representative of the Catholic Church, since a Pope might err both in faith and in conduct, as indeed many had erred before, while the Catholic Church was infallible, and its representative, a General Council, was necessarily endowed with the like infallibility.[124]