As Edward was demanding an amount well above the tenth offered by the clergy, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Winchelsey left it to every individual clergyman to pay as he saw fit.

[7] In August 1296 King Philip imposed an embargo forbidding export of horses, arms, gold, and silver, effectively keeping the French clergy from sending taxes to Rome and blocking a main source of papal revenue.

In September 1296 the pope sent a protest to Philip headed Ineffabilis Amor that declared that he would rather suffer death than surrender any of the rightful prerogatives of the Church.

[9] While threatening a papal alliance with England and Germany, the pope soothingly explained that his claims were not intended against the customary feudal dues, and that reasonable taxation of Church revenue would be permitted.

In the Albigensian Crusade, the suppression of the Cathar heresy had brought much of Languedoc under French royal control, but in the farthest south, heretics still survived, and Bernard Saisset, Bishop of Pamiers in Foix, was recalcitrant and insolent with king.

In the bull Ausculta Fili ("Give ear, my son"), he scolded Phillip: "Let no one persuade you that you have no superior or that you are not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, for he is a fool who so thinks."

Nobles, burgesses and clergy met to denounce the Pope and pass around a crude forgery, Deum Time ("Fear God"), in which Boniface supposedly claimed feudal suzerainty over France, an "unheard-of assertion".

As Matthew Edward Harris writes, "The overall impression gained is that the papacy was described in increasingly exalted terms as the thirteenth century progressed, although this development was neither disjunctive nor uniform, and was often in response to conflict, such as against Frederick II and Philip the Fair".

Gregory of Nazianzus also held that view but, with his father as an example, recognized men whose devout conduct anticipates their faith: by the charity of their life they were united to Christ, even before explicitly professing Christianity.

[16] In the 13th century, the canonists used the term plenitudo potestatis to characterize the power of the Pope within the church or, more rarely, his prerogative in the secular sphere.

[2] The bull also contained passages from the letters of Pope Innocent III, who mainly reasserted the spiritual power and the "plenitudo potestatis" of the papacy.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, on the margin of the text of the record, the last sentence is noted as its real definition: Declaratio quod subesse Romano Pontifici est omni humanae creaturae de necessitate salutis ("A declaration that it is necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff");[2] thus this phrase, like some in canonical scripture, may have moved from an original position as a marginal gloss to an integral part of the text as it has been accepted.

However, what made his claim "notorious" was that Boniface "insisted that the Pope wielded both the spiritual and secular sword, [...] the culminating blow in a propaganda war against the French crown.

The Pope's attendants and his beloved nephew Francesco all soon fled; only the Spaniard Pedro Rodríguez, Cardinal of Santa Sabina, remained at his side to the end.

In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara W. Tuchman stated that his close advisors would later maintain that he had died of a "profound chagrin".

Writers throughout Europe attacked the bull and Boniface's bold claims for the power of the papacy over the temporal, most notably the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, who expressed his need for another strong Holy Roman Emperor.