Boniface had to uphold the sacredness of the feudal contract at all costs, for it was only as suzerain of Sicily and of the Patrimony of Peter that he had any justification for his Italian wars, but in the English-Scottish-French triangle it was almost impossible for him to recognize the claims of any one of the contestants without seeming to invalidate those of the other two.

He says relatively little about the achievements of Mercia and Wessex, omitting, for example, any mention of Boniface, a West Saxon missionary to the continent of some renown and of whom Bede had almost certainly heard, though Bede does discuss Northumbrian missionaries to the continent.

The Colonna family ( aside from the three brothers allied with the Pope ) declared that Boniface had been elected illegally following the unprecedented abdication of Pope Celestine V three years previously.

* 1294 – Pope Boniface VIII is elected Pope, replacing St. Celestine V, who had resigned.

The town is first mentioned in 742 under the name of " Erphesfurt ": in that year, Saint Boniface writes Pope Zachary to tell him that he had established three dioceses in Thuringia, one of which " in a place called Erphesfurt, which for a long time has been inhabited by pagan natives.

Thenceforth the great abbeys and episcopal seats that Saint Boniface and his successors had established in southwestern Germany had a monopoly on temporal office in Franconia, on a par with the counts of lands further west.

Pope Boniface VIII his extraordinary shortness of stature led the pope to believe he was kneeling, and to ask him three times to rise, to the immense merriment of the cardinals ; and that he had a daughter, Novella, so accomplished in law as to be able to read her father's lectures in his absence, and so beautiful, that she had to read behind a curtain lest her face should distract the attention of the students.

Boniface had Mellitus take two papal letters back to England, one to Æthelbert and his people, and another to Laurence, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

His first official act was to burn, in the presence of the assembled clergy, the anathema which Boniface II had pronounced against the latter's deceased rival Dioscurus on a false charge of simony and had ordered to be preserved in the Roman archives.

When Otto II sent an imperial representative, Count Sicco, to secure his release, Crescentius I and Cardinal-Deacon Franco Ferrucci, who would subsequently become Boniface VII, an antipope, had Benedict murdered while still in prison.

However, upon being elected Pope at the papal conclave of 1303, he released King Philip IV of France from the excommunication that had been laid upon him by Boniface VIII, and practically ignored Boniface's bull Unam sanctam, which asserted papal supremacy over secular rulers.

Nevertheless, on 7 June 1304, Benedict excommunicated Philip IV's implacable minister Guillaume de Nogaret and all the Italians who had played a part in the seizure of Boniface VIII at Anagni.

Meanwhile, on the Saturday after Eulalius had been elected, a majority of the priests of the church elected Boniface, who had previously been a councilor of Pope Innocent, and was also ordained on 29 December at the Church of Saint Marcellus in the Campus Martius.

Boniface was chosen by his predecessor, Pope Felix IV, who had been a strong adherent of the Arian king, and was never elected.

For a time, Boniface served as Pope in competition with the Antipope Dioscorus, who had been elected by most of the priests of Rome.

As a deacon, Boniface had impressed Pope Gregory I, who described him as a man " of tried faith and character " and selected him to be apocrisiarius ( legate, essentially the papal nuncio ) to the court of Constantinople in 603.

Boniface himself is thought to have insisted on the elections being free and fair and may have refused to take up the papacy until convinced that they had been.

Boniface had converted his own house into a monastery, where he retired and died.

To this point, Boniface the Seventh had spent nine years in Byzantium, but he still was striving for the papal throne.

With the help of Crescentius ’ sons, John and Crescentius II, along with his Greek followers, Boniface had Pope John XIV imprisoned in Castel Sant ’ Angelo.

He became pope on 27 October 625, two days after the death of his predecessor, Boniface V. The festival of the Elevation of the Cross is said to have been instituted during the pontificate of Honorius, which was marked also by considerable missionary enterprise.

Due to the lack of information on this whole time period in Roman history, there has not been much further research on Antipope Boniface VII.

After hearing of the work that had been done so far, in 722 Gregory summoned Boniface back to Rome to answer rumours concerning Boniface ’ s doctrinal purity.

Gregory also promoted the Church in northern Europe ; he supported the continuing mission of Saint Boniface in Germany, elevating him to the rank of archbishop of Germany in 732, and after a personal visit to Rome from Boniface in 737, where he was meant to attend a synod which does not appear to have been held, Gregory made Boniface a Papal legate in Germany, and asked him to reorganize the Episcopal sees in Germany.

Boniface had been under the protection of Charles Martel from 723 on.

Æthelred was succeeded by Cœnred son of Wulfhere, and both these kings are better known for their religious activities than anything else, but the king who succeeded them ( in 709 ), Ceolred, is said in a letter of Saint Boniface to have been a dissolute youth who died insane.

Pope Boniface IV, in about the year 600, seems to have been the first who made a connection between these this era and Anno Domini.

In a letter addressed to Pope Boniface VIII, King Edward I ( r. 1272 – 1307 ) remembered a certain Eric ( Yricius ) as having been a king of Scotland subject to the English king.

In 1244, Boniface rejected Robert Passelewe, who had been selected as Bishop of Chichester, on the grounds that Passelewe was illiterate.

Along with his rival Count Boniface, he has often been called " the last of the Romans ".

** The letter to King Geraint of Dumnonia, was supposed to have been destroyed by the Britons ( William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, p. 361 ), but was discovered with others of Aldhelm's in the correspondence of St Boniface, archbishop of Mainz.

St. Boniface Catholic Church has been in St. Bonifacius for 150 years.

As well as these events, the influence of Edwin's half-Merovingian Queen cannot be ignored, and the letters which Bede reproduces, sent by Pope Boniface V to Edwin and Athelburg, are unlikely to have been unique.

The last decree ( Senatus consultum ) which the Roman Senate is known to have issued, passed under Boniface II, was directed against simony in papal elections.

The Pope, however, did not live long enough to complete these negotiations, which finally resulted in a peaceful settlement of the Aragonese as well as the Sicilian question in 1302 under Pope Boniface VIII.

Despite these official acts, violence broke out between the two groups, and Boniface was seized by the Prefect's police and taken to a lodging outside the walls where he was detained under the surveillance of the Prefect's agents.

His remains were three times removed — in the tenth or eleventh century, at the close of the thirteenth under Boniface VIII, and to the new St. Peter's on 21 October 1603.

The quarrel with the Colonnas culminated in Boniface VIII ordering the destruction in 1298 of their family city Palestrina after it surrendered peacefully under Boniface's assurances that it would be spared.

Boniface also placed the city of Florence under an interdict and invited the ambitious French Count Charles of Valois to enter Italy in 1300 to end the feud of Black and White Guelphs, the poet Dante being in the party of the Whites.

A second was addressed to the nobles and people of Germany, urging them to obey Boniface, while a third to the bishops in Alamannia and Bavaria confirmed Boniface ’ s status as the papal vicarus, and ordered them to assemble in a council twice a year at Augsburg under Boniface ’ s authority.

The university founded by Boniface VIII in 1303, had a good many students under the French popes, drawn there by the generosity of the sovereign pontiffs, who rewarded them with books or benefices.

Four months later, on August 20, 984, John XIV died in his prison either due to starvation, poison, or under order from Boniface VII.

After the assassination in 1398 of Biordo Michelotti, who had made himself lord of Perugia, the city became a pawn in the Italian Wars, passing to Gian Galeazzo Visconti ( 1400 ), to Pope Boniface IX ( 1403 ), and to Ladislaus of Naples ( 1408 – 14 ) before it settled into a period of sound governance under the Signoria of the condottiero Braccio da Montone ( 1416 – 24 ), who reached a concordance with the Papacy.

In 1258 and 1259, Boniface was a member of the Council of Fifteen, which conducted business for Henry III under the Provisions of Oxford.

Their real Christianisation took place, alongside the ecclesiastical organisation of their territory, during the early and mid 8th century under Boniface, who felled their " sacred oak " at Geismar in 724, abolishing the vestiges of their paganism.

This was in part the continuation of a policy begun under his grandfather, Pippin of Herstal, and continued to under his father, Charles Martel, who erected four dioceses in Bavaria ( Salzburg, Regensburg, Freising, and Passau ) and gave them Boniface as archbishop and metropolitan over all Germany east of the Rhine, with his seat at Mainz.

It functions under the direction of the Hispanic Ministry Committee as part of the outreach program at St. Boniface Parish in Cold Spring, Minnesota.

At last, under the auspices of Pope Boniface VIII, James concluded a shameful treaty, by which, in exchange for being left undisturbed in the rest of the territories belonging to the Crown of Aragon and promised possession of Sardinia and Corsica, he gave up Sicily to the Church, for whom it was to be held by the Angevins ( Treaty of Anagni, 10 June 1295 ).

The new Pope Boniface VIII, elected in 1294 at Naples under the auspices of King Charles, mediated between the latter and James, and the dishonourable Treaty of Anagni was signed: James was to marry Charles ’ s daughter Bianca and was promised the investiture by the pope of Sardinia and Corsica, while he was to leave the Angevin a free hand in Sicily and even to assist him if the Sicilians resisted.

After the death of Radbod in 719, Willibrord returned to resume his work, aided by Boniface, and under the protection of Charles Martel.

The feast of All Saints became established in the West after 609 or 610 under Pope Boniface IV ; its observance on 1 November dates from the time of Pope Gregory III ( died 741 ).

In 739 Archbishop Boniface, nuntius of Pope Gregory III, completed the work of Saint Rupert and raised Salzburg to a bishopric, placed under the primatial see of the Archdiocese of Mainz.