Pavia
Pavia is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy, northern Italy, 35 kilometres south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It has a population of c. 73,000. The city was the capital of the Kingdom of the Lombards from 572 to 774. Pavia is the capital of the fertile province of Pavia, known for agricultural products including wine, rice and dairy products. Although there are a number of industries located in the suburbs, these tend not to disturb the peaceful atmosphere of the town, it is home to the ancient University of Pavia, which together with the IUSS, Ghislieri College, Borromeo College, Nuovo College, Santa Caterina College and the EDiSU, belongs to the Pavia Study System. Pavia is the episcopal seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Pavia; the city possesses many artistic and cultural treasures, including several important churches and museums, such as the well-known Certosa di Pavia. The Central Hospital of Pavia is one of the most important hospitals in Italy.
Dating back to pre-Roman times, the town of Pavia known as Ticinum, was a municipality and an important military site under the Roman Empire. It was said by Pliny the Elder to have been founded by the Laevi and Marici, two Ligurian tribes, while Ptolemy attributes it to the Insubres; the Roman city most began as a small military camp, built by the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio in 218 BC to guard a wooden bridge he had built over the river Ticinum, on his way to search for Hannibal, rumoured to have managed to lead an army over the Alps and into Italy. The forces of Rome and Carthage ran into each other soon thereafter, the Romans suffered the first of many crushing defeats at the hands of Hannibal, with the consul himself losing his life; the bridge was destroyed, but the fortified camp, which at the time was the most forward Roman military outpost in the Po Valley, somehow survived the long Second Punic War, evolved into a garrison town. Its importance grew with the extension of the Via Aemilia from Ariminum to the Po River, which it crossed at Placentia and there forked, one branch going to Mediolanum and the other to Ticinum, thence to Laumellum where it divided once more, one branch going to Vercellae - and thence to Eporedia and Augusta Praetoria - and the other to Valentia - and thence to Augusta Taurinorum.
It was at Pavia in 476 AD that the reign of Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire ended and Roman rule ceased in Italy. Romulus Augustulus, while considered the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was a usurper of the imperial throne. Though being the emperor, Romulus Augustulus was the mouthpiece for his father Orestes, the person who exercised power and governed Italy during Romulus Augustulus's short reign. Ten months after Romulus Augustulus's reign began, Orestes's soldiers under the command of one of his officers named Odoacer and killed Orestes in the city of Pavia in 476; the rioting that took place as part of Odoacer's uprising against Orestes sparked fires that burnt much of Pavia to the point that Odoacer, as the new king of Italy, had to suspend the taxes for the city for five years so that it could finance its recovery. Without his father, Romulus Augustulus was powerless. Instead of killing Romulus Augustulus, Odoacer pensioned him off at 6,000 solidi a year before declaring the end of the Western Roman Empire and himself king of the new Kingdom of Italy.
Odoacer's reign as king of Italy did not last long, because in 488 the Ostrogothic peoples led by their king Theoderic invaded Italy and waged war against Odoacer. After fighting for 5 years, Theoderic defeated Odoacer and on March 15, 493, assassinated Odoacer at a banquet meant to negotiate a peace between the two rulers. With the establishment of the Ostrogoth kingdom based in northern Italy, Theoderic began his vast program of public building. Pavia was among several cities that Theodoric chose to expand, he began the construction of the vast palace complex that would become the residence of Lombard monarchs several decades later. Theoderic commissioned the building of the Roman-styled amphitheatre and bath complex in Pavia. Near the end of Theoderic's reign the Christian philosopher Boethius was imprisoned in one of Pavia's churches from 522 to 525 before his execution for treason, it was during Boethius's captivity in Pavia that he wrote his seminal work the Consolation of Philosophy. Pavia played an important role in the war between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogoths that began in 535.
After the Eastern Roman general Belisarius's victory over the Ostrogothic leader Wittigis in 540 and the loss of most of the Ostrogoth lands in Italy, Pavia was among the last centres of Ostrogothic resistance that continued the war and opposed Eastern Roman rule. After the capitulation of the Ostrogothic leadership in 540 more than a thousand men remained garrisoned in Pavia and Verona dedicated to opposing Eastern Roman rule; the resilience of Ostrogoth strongholds like Pavia against invading forces allowed pockets of Ostrogothic rule to limp along until being defeated in 561. Pavia and the peninsula of Italy didn't remain long under the rule of the Eastern Roman Empire, for in 568, a new people invaded Italy; this new invading people in 568
Santa Maria in Traspontina
Santa Maria in Traspontina is a Carmelite church in Rome, Italy. The shrine lies on the main road of the Rione Borgo; the church was established as a cardinalitial titulus by Pope Sixtus V on 13 April 1587. The current Cardinal of Santa Maria in Traspontina is the former Archbishop of Quebec, Marc Ouellet, a supporter of Opus Dei, now the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops in the Roman Curia. Pope Alexander VI demolished an ancient Roman pyramid on the same site for the construction of the first church; this church was demolished during the pontificate of Pius IV to clear the line of fire for the cannons of the Castel Sant' Angelo, who wished to exercise shooting on the Gianicolo Hill, which otherwise would have been hidden behind the church. Designs by Giovanni Sallustio Peruzzi for a replacement church were in place by 1566, though the papal artillery officers insisted that its dome be as low as possible to avoid a recurrence of the previous problem — for this reason this is the only church in Rome whose dome does not lie on a drum.
The new church was erected along the North side of Borgo Nuovo, at that time - and until its destruction in 1937 - the main road of Borgo. The inscriptions found in Santa Maria in Traspontina, a valuable source illustrating the history of the church, have been collected and published by Vincenzo Forcella; the church has four chapels on each side of the nave. The first on the right, is dedicated to Saint Barbara; this chapel has an altarpiece of Santa Barbara by Cavalier d'Arpino, with frescoed scenes from the life of the saint by Cesare Rossetti. The second chapel has an Ecstasy of S. Canuto by Daniele Seyter, with frescoed ceiling and lunettes by Alessandro Francesi; the fourth chapel has a Madonna & St. John Evangelist by Cesare Conti with frescoes of the Passion by Bernardino Gagliardi; the fifth is dedicated to S. Alberto and the frescoed stories were by Niccolò Circignani; the crossing to the right, has an Apparition of the Trinity and 3 saints by Giovanni Domenico Cerrini. The main altar was designed by Carlo Fontana, has a medieval icon.
The statues around the altar are by Alessandro Rondoni, Giacomo Antonio Lavaggi, Vincenzo Felici, Michel Maille. The chorus has canvases by Angelo Papi, while the ceiling of the left crossing was frescoed by Biagio Puccini; the fifth chapel to the left has an altarpiece by Giovanni Battista Ricci of Preaching by San Angelo Martire and stories of the saint. In the fourth chapel, a painting of the Ecstasy of Santa Teresa by Antonio Gherardi while the third has a Flagellation of Saints Peter and Paul by Ricci, the second Santa Elia with St Anthony Abbot and the blessed Franco da Siena painted by Giacinto Calandrucci. One chapel contains the two columns to which Peter and Paul were said to have been bound prior to their martyrdom in the circus of Nero nearby. Rendina, Claudio. Enciclopedia di Roma. Rome: Newton & Compton
Pope Gregory XVI
Pope Gregory XVI, born Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 2 February 1831 to his death in 1846. He had adopted the name Mauro upon entering the religious order of the Camaldolese. Conservative and traditionalist, he opposed democratic and modernising reforms in the Papal States and throughout Europe, seeing them as fronts for revolutionary leftism. Against these trends Gregory XVI sought to strengthen the religious and political authority of the papacy. In the encyclical Mirari vos, he pronounced it "false and absurd, or rather mad, that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of conscience." He condemned the slave trade. However, his harsh repression, financial extravagance and neglectfulness left him unpopular domestically, he is the most recent pope to take the pontifical name "Gregory", the most recent non-bishop to become pope. Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari was born at Belluno in the Republic of Venice, on 18 September 1765, to an Italian lower noble family.
His parents were from a small village named Pesariis, in Friuli. His father was a lawyer. At the age of eighteen Bartolomeo Cappellari joined the order of the Camaldolese and entered the Monastery of San Michele in Murano, near Venice, he was ordained a priest in 1787. As a Camaldolese monk, Cappellari gained distinction for his theological and linguistic skills, was assigned to teach philosophy and theology at San Michele in 1787, at the age of twenty-two. In 1790, at the age of twenty-five, he was appointed censor librorum for his Order, as well as for the Holy Office at Venice, he went to Rome in 1795 and in 1799 published a polemic against the Italian Jansenists titled II Trionfo della Santa Sede, which passed through various editions in Italy and was translated into several European languages. In 1800 he became a member of the Academy of the Catholic Religion, founded by Pope Pius VII, to which he contributed memoirs on theological and philosophical questions. In 1805, at the age of forty, he was appointed abbot of the Monastery of San Gregorio on Rome's Caelian Hill.
When the army of the French Emperor Napoleon took Rome and arrested and deported Pius VII to France in 1809, Cappellari fled to Murano, where he taught in the Monastery of S. Michele of his Order, where he had first become a monk. From there he and a group of monks moved their little college to Padua in 1814. After Napoleon's final defeat, the Congress of Vienna re-established the sovereignty of the Papal States over central Italy and Cappellari was called back to Rome to assume the post of vicar general of the Camaldolese Order, he was appointed as Counsellor to the Inquisition, promoted to be Consultor and on 1 October 1826, Prefect of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, which dealt with all missionary work outside of the Spanish Empire, including missions to the non-Catholic states in Europe. Twice he was offered a bishopric and twice he refused. On 21 March 1825, Cappellari was created cardinal in pectore by Pope Leo XII, shortly afterwards he was asked to negotiate a concordat to safeguard the rights of Catholics in the Low Countries, a diplomatic task which he completed successfully.
He negotiated a peace on behalf of Armenian Catholics with the Ottoman Empire. He publicly condemned the Polish revolutionaries, who he thought were seeking to undermine Russian Tsar Nicholas I's efforts to support the Catholic royalist cause in France by forcing him to divert his troops to suppress the uprising in Poland. Cappellari was most familiar with Venice and Rome, he spoke Italian and Latin fluently, but no other European languages, did not understand European politics. However, he was proficient in Armenian, Haruti'iwn Awgerian's 1827 Venice edition of works attributed to Severian of Gabala and translated into Armenian was dedicated to him. On 2 February 1831, after a fifty-day conclave, Cappellari was unexpectedly chosen to succeed Pope Pius VIII, his election was influenced by the fact that the cardinal considered the most papabile, Giacomo Giustiniani, was vetoed by King Ferdinand VII of Spain. There arose a deadlock between the other two major candidates, Emmanuele De Gregorio and Bartolomeo Pacca.
What drove them to make a decision was a message from the Duke of Parma notifying them that revolt was about to break out in the northern Papal States. To resolve the impasse, the cardinals turned to Cappellari, but it took eighty-three ballots for the canonically required two-thirds majority to be reached. At the time of election, Cardinal Cappellari was not yet a bishop: he is the most recent man to be elected pope prior to his episcopal consecration, he was consecrated as bishop by Bartolomeo Pacca, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia and Velletri and dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, with Pietro Francesco Galleffi, Cardinal Bishop of Porto e Santa Rufina and sub-dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Tommasso Arezzo, Cardinal Bishop of Sabina, acting as co-consecrators. The choice of Gregory XVI as his regnal name was influenced by the fact that he had been abbot of the Monastery of San Gregorio on the Coelian Hill for more than twenty years, in honour of Gregory XV, the founder of the Congregation for the Propaganda.
The Monastery of S. Gregorio was the same abbey from which Pope Gregory I had dispatched missionaries to England in 596; the revolution of 1830, which overthrew the House of Bourbon, had just inflicted a severe blow on the Catho
July Revolution
The French Revolution of 1830 known as the July Revolution, Second French Revolution or Trois Glorieuses in French, led to the overthrow of King Charles X, the French Bourbon monarch, the ascent of his cousin Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who himself, after 18 precarious years on the throne, would be overthrown in 1848. It marked the shift from one constitutional monarchy, under the restored House of Bourbon, to another, the July Monarchy. Supporters of the Bourbon would be called Legitimists, supporters of Louis Philippe Orléanists. Upon Napoleon's abdication in 1815, continental Europe, France in particular, was in a state of disarray; the Congress of Vienna met to redraw the continent's political map. Many European countries attended the Congress, but decision-making was controlled by four major powers: the United Kingdom, represented by its Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh. France's foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand attended the Congress. Although considered an enemy state, Talleyrand was allowed to attend the Congress because he claimed that he had only cooperated with Napoleon under duress.
He suggested that France be restored to her "legitimate" borders and governments—a plan that, with some changes, was accepted by the major powers. France was returned to its 1791 borders; the House of Bourbon, deposed by the Revolution, was restored to the throne in the person of Louis XVIII. The Congress, forced Louis to grant a constitution, La Charte constitutionnelle. On 16 September 1824, after a lingering illness of several months, the 68-year-old Louis XVIII died childless. Therefore, his younger brother, aged 66, inherited the throne of France. On 27 September Charles X made his state entry into Paris to popular acclaim. During the ceremony, while presenting the King the keys to the city, the comte de Chabrol, Prefect of the Seine, declared: "Proud to possess its new king, Paris can aspire to become the queen of cities by its magnificence, as its people aspire to be foremost in its fidelity, its devotion, its love."Eight months the mood of the capital had worsened in its opinion of the new king.
The causes of this dramatic shift in public opinion were many, but the main two were: The imposition of the death penalty for anyone profaning the Eucharist. The provisions for financial indemnities for properties confiscated by the 1789 Revolution and the First Empire of Napoleon—these indemnities to be paid to anyone, whether noble or non-noble, declared "enemies of the revolution."Critics of the first accused the king and his new ministry of pandering to the Catholic Church, by so doing violating guarantees of equality of religious belief as specified in La Charte. The second matter, that of financial indemnities, was far more opportunistic than the first; this was because, since the restoration of the monarchy, there had been demands from all groups to settle matters of property ownership: to reduce, if not eliminate, the uncertainties in the real estate market both in Paris and in the rest of France. But opponents, many of whom were frustrated Bonapartists, began a whispering campaign that Charles X was only proposing this in order to shame those who had not emigrated.
Both measures, they claimed, were nothing more than clever subterfuge meant to bring about the destruction of La Charte. Up to this time, thanks to the popularity of the constitution and the Chamber of Deputies with the people of Paris, the king's relationship with the élite—both of the Bourbon supporters and Bourbon opposition—had remained solid. This, was about to change. On 12 April, propelled by both genuine conviction and the spirit of independence, the Chamber of Deputies roundly rejected the government's proposal to change the inheritance laws; the popular newspaper Le Constitutionnel pronounced this refusal "a victory over the forces of counter-revolutionaries and reactionism."The popularity of both the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies skyrocketed, the popularity of the king and his ministry dropped. This became unmistakable when on 16 April 1827, while reviewing the Garde Royale in the Champ de Mars, the king was greeted with icy silence, many of the spectators refusing to remove their hats.
Charles X "later told Orléans that,'although most people present were not too hostile, some looked at times with terrible expressions'."Because of what it perceived to be growing and vitriolic criticism of both the government and the Church, the government of Charles X introduced into the Chamber of Deputies a proposal for a law tightening censorship in regard to the newspapers. The Chamber, for its part, objected so violently that the humiliated government had no choice but to withdraw its proposals. On 17 March 1830, the majority in the Chamber of Deputies passed a motion of no confidence, the Address of the 221, against the king and Polignac's ministry; the following day, Charles dissolved parliament, alarmed the Bourbon opposition by delaying elections for two months. During this time, the liberals championed the "221" as popular heroes, whilst the government struggled to gain support across the country as prefects were shuffled around the departments of France; the elections that followed returned an overwhelming majority.
This came after another
Kingdom of Italy (Napoleonic)
The Kingdom of Italy was a kingdom in Northern Italy in personal union with France under Napoleon I. It was influenced by revolutionary France and ended with his defeat and fall, its governance was conducted by his step-son and viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais. The Kingdom of Italy was born on March 17, 1805, when the Italian Republic, whose president was Napoleon Bonaparte, became the Kingdom of Italy, with the same man as King of Italy, the 24-year-old Eugène de Beauharnais his viceroy. Napoleon I was crowned at the Duomo di Milano, Milan with the Iron Crown of Lombardy, his title was "Emperor of the French and King of Italy", showing the importance of this Italian Kingdom for him. Though the republican Constitution was never formally abolished, a series of Constitutional Statutes altered it; the first one was proclaimed two days after the birth of the kingdom, on March 19, when the Consulta declared Napoleon as king and established that one of his natural or adopted sons would succeed him once the Napoleonic Wars were over, once separated the two thrones were to remain separate.
The second one, dating from March 29, regulated the regency, the Great Officials of the kingdom, the oaths. The most important was the third, proclaimed on June 5, being the real constitution of the kingdom: Napoleon was the head of State, had the full powers of government; the Consulta, Legislative Council, Speakers, were all merged in a Council of State, whose opinions became only optional and not binding for the king. The Legislative Body, the old parliament, remained in theory, but it never summoned after 1805; the fourth Statute, decided on February 16, 1806, indicated Beauharnais as the heir to the throne. The fifth and the sixth Statutes, on March 21, 1808, separated the Consulta from the Council of State, renamed it the Senate, with the duty of informing the king about the wishes of the most important subjects; the seventh Statute, on September 21, created a new nobility of dukes and barons. In 1812, a Court of Accounts was added; the government had seven ministers: Minister of War was at first General Augusto Caffarelli General Giuseppe Danna for a year, from 1811, General Achille Fontanelli.
The Kingdom consisted of the territories of the Italian Republic: former Duchy of Milan, Duchy of Mantua, Duchy of Modena, the western part of the Republic of Venice, part of the Papal States in Romagna, the Department of Agogna with Novara as its capital. After the defeat of the Third Coalition and the consequent Treaty of Pressburg, on May 1, 1806, the Kingdom was given by Austria the eastern and remaining part of the Venetian territories, including Istria and Dalmatia down to Kotor if it had to give Massa and Carrara to Elisa Bonaparte's Principality of Lucca and Piombino; the Duchy of Guastalla was annexed on May 24. With the Convention of Fontainebleau with Austria of October 10, 1807, Italy ceded Monfalcone to Austria and gained Gradisca, putting the new border on the Isonzo River; the conquered Republic of Ragusa was annexed in spring 1808 by General Auguste de Marmont. On April 2, 1808, following the dissolution of the Papal States, the Kingdom annexed the present-day Marches. At its maximum extent, the Kingdom was composed by 2,155 communes.
The final arrangement arrived after the new defeat of Austria: Emperor Napoleon and King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria signed the Treaty of Paris on February 28, 1810, deciding an exchange of territories involving Italy too. On rewards in Germany, Bavaria ceded southern Tirol to the Kingdom of Italy, which in its turn ceded Istria and Dalmatia to France, incorporating the Adriatic territories into newly created the French Illyrian Provinces. Small changes to the borders between Italy and France in Garfagnana and Friuli came in act on August 5, 1811. In practice, the Kingdom was a dependency of the French Empire; the Kingdom served as a theater in Napoleon's operations against Austria during the wars of the various coalitions. Trading with the United Kingdom was forbidden; the kingdom was given a new national currency, replacing the local coins circulating in the country: the Italian lira, of the same size and metal of the French franc. Mintage being decided by Napoleon with an imperial decree on March 21, 1806, the production of the new coins began in 1807.
The monetary unit was the silver lira, 5 grams heavy. There were multiples of £2 and £5, precious coins of £20 and £40; the lira was divided in 100 cents, there were coins of 1 cent, 3 cents, 10 cents, but following the tradition, there was a division in 20 soldi, with coins of 1 soldo, 5 soldi, 10 soldi, 15 soldi. The army of the kingdom, inserted into the Grande Armée, took part in all of Napoleon's cam
Marche
Marche, or the Marches, is one of the twenty regions of Italy. The name of the region derives from the plural name of marca referring to the medieval March of Ancona and nearby marches of Camerino and Fermo. Marche is well known for its shoemaking tradition, with the finest and most luxurious Italian footwear being manufactured in this region; the region is located in the Central area of the country, bordered by Emilia-Romagna and the republic of San Marino to the north, Tuscany to the west, Umbria to the southwest and Lazio to the south and the Adriatic Sea to the east. Except for river valleys and the very narrow coastal strip, the land is hilly. A railway from Bologna to Brindisi, built in the 19th century, runs along the coast of the entire territory. Inland, the mountainous nature of the region today, allows little travel north and south, except by twisting roads over the passes; the Umbrian enclave of Monte Ruperto is surrounded by the Province of Pesaro and Urbino, which constitutes the northern part of the region.
Urbino, one of the major cities of the region, was the birthplace of Raphael, as well as a major center of Renaissance history. Marche extends over an area of 9,694 square kilometres of the central Adriatic slope between Emilia-Romagna to the north and Umbria to the west, Lazio and Abruzzo to the south, the entire eastern boundary being formed by the Adriatic. Most of the region is mountainous or hilly, the main features being the Apennine chain along the internal boundary and an extensive system of hills descending towards the Adriatic. With the sole exception of Monte Vettore, 2,476 metres high, the mountains do not exceed 2,400 metres; the hilly area covers two-thirds of the region and is interrupted by wide gullies with numerous – albeit short – rivers and by alluvial plains perpendicular to the principal chain. The parallel mountain chains contain deep river gorges, the best known being those of the Furlo, the Rossa and the Frasassi; the coastal area is 173 kilometres long and is flat and straight except for the hilly area between Gabicce and Pesaro in the north, the eastern slopes of Monte Conero near Ancona.
Climate is temperate. Inland, in the mountainous areas, is more continental with cold and snowy winters. Precipitation varies from 1000–1500 mm. per year inland and 600–800 mm. per year on the Adriatic coast. Marche was known in ancient times as the Picenum territory; the Picens or Picentes were the Italic tribe. Many artefacts from their time are exhibited in National Archaeological Museum of the Marche Region in Ancona. In the fourth century BC, the northern area was occupied by a tribe of Gauls; the Battle of Sentinum was fought in Marche in 295 BC. Ascoli was a seat of Italic resistance during the Social War. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was invaded by the Goths. After the Gothic War, it was part of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna. After the fall of the Exarchate, it was in the possession of the Lombards, but was conquered by Charlemagne in the late eighth century. In the ninth to eleventh centuries, the marches of Camerino and Ancona were created, hence the modern name.
Marche was nominally part of the Papal States, but most of the territory was under local lords, while the major cities ruled themselves as free communes. In the twelfth century, the commune of Ancona resisted both the imperial authority of Frederick Barbarossa and the Republic of Venice, was a maritime republic on its own. An attempt to restore Papal suzerainty by Gil de Albornoz in the fourteenth century was short-lived. During the Renaissance, the region was fought over by rival aristocratic families, such as the Malatesta of Rimini, Pesaro and the house of Montefeltro of Urbino; the last independent entity, the Duchy of Urbino, was dissolved in 1631, from on, Marche was part of the Papal States except during the Napoleonic period. This saw the short lived Republic of Ancona, in 1797–98. After Napoleon's defeat, Marche returned to Papal rule until 4 November 1860, when it was annexed to the unified Kingdom of Italy by a plebiscite. After the referendum of 2006, 7 municipalities of Montefeltro were detached from the Province of Pesaro and Urbino to join the Province of Rimini on 15 August 2009.
The municipalities are Casteldelci, Novafeltria, San Leo, Sant'Agata Feltria and Talamello. Towns in Marche were devastated by the 2016 Central Italy earthquake which occurred on 24 August 2016. Prior to the 1980s, Marche was considered a rather poor region, although economically stable in some sectors, thanks to its agricultural output and to the contribution of traditional crafts. Today the contribution of agriculture to the economy of the region is less significant and the gross value generated by this sector remains above the national average. Marche has never suffered from the extremes of fragmented land ownership or'latifondo'. Diffused in the past, the sharecropping never produced an extreme land fragmentation; the main products are cereals, animal products and grapes. Truffle hunting is popular.
Pope Celestine IV
Pope Celestine IV, born Goffredo da Castiglione, was Pope from 25 October 1241 to his death on 10 November of the same year after a short reign of sixteen days. Born in Milan, Goffredo or Godfrey is referred to as son of a sister of Pope Urban III, but this claim is without foundation. Nothing is known of his early life. Pope Gregory IX made him a cardinal on 18 September 1227 with the diocese and benefice of San Marco, in 1228–29 sent him as legate in Lombardy and Tuscany, where the cities and communes had remained true to the Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, he was dispatched in an attempt to bring these territories around to the papal side, but without success. In 1238 he was made cardinal bishop of Sabina; the papal election of 1241 that elevated Celestine to the papal chair was held under stringent conditions that hastened his death. The papal curia was disunited over the violent struggle to bring the Emperor and King of Sicily Frederick II to heel. One group of cardinals favored the ambitious schemes of the Gregorian Reform and aimed to humble Frederick as a papal vassal.
Frederick, controlled as his unwilling guests in Tivoli two cardinals whom he had captured at sea, in Rome Cardinal Giovanni Colonna was his ally because the curia was in the hands of the Colonna archenemy, the senator Matteo Rosso Orsini. The latter held the consistory immured under his guards in the ramshackle palace of the Septizodium, where rains leaked through the roof of their chamber, mingled with the urine of Orsini's guards on the rooftiles. One of the cardinals died. One group of cardinals, which included Sinibaldo de' Fieschi backed a candidate from the inner circle of Pope Gregory IX expected to pursue the hard line with Frederick II. Another group advocated a moderated middle course, not allies of the Hohenstaufen, but keen to reach an end to the Italian war. Overtures to Frederick II, were met with the impossible demand that if they wished the cardinals in his hands to return to Rome, they must elect as Pope Otto of St. Nicholas, an amenable compromise figure. Matteo Orsini's candidate, Romano da Porto, who had persecuted scholars at the University of Paris, was considered unacceptable.
The cardinal bishop of Sabina was elected Pope Celestine IV by the required two-thirds majority, seven cardinals out of ten, only on 25 October 1241. He occupied the throne for only seventeen days, his only notable papal act being the timely excommunication of Matteo Rosso Orsini, he was buried in St Peter's. List of popes Reardon, Wendy J.. The Deaths of the Popes: Comprehensive accounts, including funerals, burial places and epitaphs. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. ISBN 978-0-7864-1527-4. Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. New York: Oxford University Press. P. 352. ISBN 978-0-19-508040-7. Lexikon der Mittelalters, vol. iii, part 7. Bagliani, Agostino Pallavicini. Cardinali di curia e familiae cardinalizie dal 1227 al 1254. Italia Sacra vols 18–19. Padua, Italy: Antenore. OCLC 2205084. A standard account
