Earle Cairnes, Ph.D.: Christianity through the Centuries: Ch. 21--Zenith...

Innocent III (1161-1261) followed similarly. Innocent puts France under the interdict in 1200. He also put the interdict on King John and England in 1208 over a candidate for the ABC, but John buckled making England a paying vassalage and feudatory to Rome—paying 1000 marks annually. Innocent II also gins up the 4-5^th Crusades, the conquest of Constantinople, the Albigensian massacres, and the 4^th Lateran Council of 1215 (bread-magic and mandatory auricular confession). When he dies, Boniface VIII fleets up and has the notorious struggle with Philip, King of France, issuing the Unam Sanctum—a disastrous bull that has never been repealed and which Papes hide. Clement V follows and so does the removal of the Pape’s seat in Rome to Avignon, with the loss of “tremendous moral and temporal power that it had during the pontificate of Innocent III” (237).