France's King Philip the Fair sought to destroy the chivalric order to obtain its financial wealth, while the Knights' strongest defender was Pope ClementV.
But within a few years of Boniface's death in 1303, Pope ClementV, his successor, moved the papacy to Avignon, France, repudiated Boniface and quickly began canonization proceedings for the soon-to-be St.
Pope Clement VII's 1530 bull approving the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V might seem an assertion of papal supremacy until one notes that it followed the 1527 sack of Rome by Charles's mutinous troops, many of them German Lutherans.