should make known to him that the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Goth, was the candidate in respect of whom they could agree.  He was a subject of the King of England and a late favorite of Boniface VIII., who had raised him from the bishopric of Comminges to the archbishopric of Bordeaux.  He was regarded as an enemy of France; but Philip knew what may be done with an ambitious man, whose fortune is only half made, by offering to advance him to his highest point.  He, therefore, appointed a meeting with the archbishop.  “Hearken,” said he:  “I have in my grasp wherewithal to make thee pope if I please; and provided that thou promise me to do six things I demand of thee, I will confer upon thee that honor; and to prove to thee that I have the power, here be letters and advices I have received from Rome.”  After having heard and read, “the Gascon, overcome with joy,” says the contemporary historian Villani, “threw himself at the king’s feet, saying, ’My lord, now know I that thou art my best friend, and that thou wouldest render me good for evil.  It is for thee to command and for me to obey:  such will ever be my disposition.’” Philip then set before him his six demands, amongst which there were only two which could have caused the archbishop any uneasiness.  The fourth purported that he should condemn the memory of Pope Boniface.  “The sixth, which is important and secret, I keep to myself,” said Philip, “to make known to thee in due time and place.”  The archbishop bound himself by oath taken on the sacred host to accomplish the wishes of the king, to whom, furthermore, he gave as hostages his brother and his two nephews.  Six weeks after this interview, on the 5th of June, 1305, Bertrand de Goth was elected pope, under the name of Clement V.

It was not long before he gave the king the most certain pledge of his docility.  After having held his pontifical court at Bordeaux and Poitiers he declared that he would fix his residence in France, in the county of Venaissin, at Avignon, a territory which Philip the Bold had remitted to Pope Gregory X. in execution of a deed of gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse.  It was renouncing, in fact, if not in law, the practical independence of the papacy to thus place it in the midst of the dominions and under the very thumb of the King of France.  “I know the Gaseous,” said the old Italian Cardinal Matthew Rosso, dean of the Sacred College, when he heard of this resolution; “it will be long ere the Church comes back to Italy.”  And, indeed, it was not until sixty years afterwards, under Pope Gregory XI., that Italy regained possession of the Holy See; and historians called this long absence the Babylonish captivity.  Philip lost no time in profiting by his propinquity to make the full weight of his power felt by Clement V. He claimed from him the fulfilment of the fourth promise Bertrand de Goth had made in order to become pope, which was the condemnation of Boniface VIII.; and he revealed to him the sixth, that “important and secret one which he kept to himself to make known to him in clue time and place;” and it was the persecution and abolition of the order of the Templars.  The pontificate of Clement V. at Avignon was, for him, a nine years’ painful effort, at one time to elude and at another to accomplish, against the grain, the heavy engagements he had incurred towards the king.