To deal with the devil

Part of transcript of a meeting between Pope Boniface VIII and the envoys of Edward I at the Curia, August 1300.

The meeting was part of the complex negotiations over Edward’s duchy of Gascony, invaded and partially conquered by the French in 1294. After three years of fighting both sides agreed to lay their claims before the pope. Boniface informed the English that he favoured their claim, and that Philip was guilty of wrongfully detaining the duchy. However, he could not give an award in Edward’s favour, because the French would simply ignore it:

“We cannot give you an award. If we pronounced in your favour the French would not hold to it, and could not be compelled, for they would make light of any penalty. We have, however, a hold over their king by reason of his wrongful detention of the land.”

Boniface also remarked that ‘to deal with the French is to deal with the Devil’. At about the same time he fired off an angry letter to Edward, asking the king to whom he expected to answer on the Day of Judgement, if he continued to regard Scotland as his fief? The pope thus favoured Edward’s case for Gascony but frowned on his case for Scotland. An impartial witness might say Boniface was correct on both counts, but this was politics.