Note 708 — CANTO XXVII.

For Christian, etc.: The foes of Boniface, here spoken of, were the Cardinals Peter and James Colonna. He destroyed their palace in Rome (1297) and carried the war against them to their country seat at Palestrina, the ancient Præneste, then a great stronghold. Dante here bitterly blames Boniface for instituting a crusade against Christians at a time when, by the recent loss of Acre, the gate of the Holy Land had been lost to Christendom. The Colonnas were innocent, too, of the crime of supplying the Infidel with munitions of war—a crime condemned by the Lateran Council of 1215, and by Boniface himself, who excluded those guilty of it from the benefits of the great Jubilee of 1300.