Diseases and causes of death among the Popes
By Francois Retief and Louise P. Cilliers
Acta Theologica, Vol.26:2 (2006)
Abstract: The causes of death of popes are reviewed in the light of existing knowledge, and analysed in terms of four periods: First Period (64-604) Early Middle Ages (604-1054), Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (1054-1492), and Post-Renaissance (1492-2000). Among those who died of natural causes, multi-disease pathology was commonly present as is to be expected in an older population group, and acute terminal febrile illnesses, malaria, stroke, severe heart disease, gout or poly-arthritis, terminal kidney disease, gallstones, cancer, dysentery, the plague, lung infection, gangrene of a leg, abscesses, depression or debilitating psychiatric illness. Unnatural causes comprise inter alia assassination, death in prison or in exile, casualties of war or public violence, poisoning and stoning during street violence. This study covers the time period up to the year 2005.
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17 Aug 2010
Tags: Medicine, Papacy
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The Relationship between the Papacy and the Jews in Twelfth-Century Rome: Papal Attitudes toward Biblical Judaism and Contemporary European Jewry
By Marie Therese Champagne
PhD Dissertation, Louisiana State Univesity, 2005
Abstract: The relationship of the papacy to the Jews in the Middle Ages, which had developed under the influences of Patristic writers, Roman law, and papal precedent, was marked in the twelfth century by toleration and increasing restriction, but also by papal protection. Between the First Crusade massacres of Jews and the restrictions and persecutions of the thirteenth century, the twelfth century is set apart as a unique era in the lives of European Jews. As Eugenius III (1145-1153) and Alexander III (1159-1181) extended their protection to the Jews of Rome and perhaps all of Christendom through the papal document Sicut Judaeis, and simultaneously proclaimed Christianity’s doctrinal superiority over Judaism, the Roman Jews also acknowledged the pope as their temporal lord and ruler in Rome through their presentation of the Torah. Other motivations for that contractual relationship perhaps existed, including the popes’ need for financial backing. Eugenius III and Alexander III lived in exile through much of their reigns and struggled to maintain control of the Patrimony, a major source of papal revenues.
During the same era, Eugenius III and Alexander III publicly promoted the Church’s inheritance of biblical Judaism in the claim that the Treasures of the Temple of Herod existed in the Lateran basilica. Lateran texts, special liturgical rituals, and papal processions through Rome reinforced that claim. At the same time, the attitudinal influences of the Cistercians Nicolaus Maniacutius and Bernard of Clairvaux on Eugenius, and the Jewish steward Jechiel in the papal household on Alexander, cannot be measured definitively but suggest a paradoxical relationship with the Jews. The history of continuing papal conflicts with the Roman Commune and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa confirms that Eugenius and Alexander unceasingly sought to establish their authority and power over Rome, the Patrimony, and Christendom throughout their papacies, and used popular perceptions that the Church possessed the Temple Treasures to buttress that authority. The popes’ emphasis on biblical Judaism and actions toward the Roman and European Jews reflects a multi-faceted mosaic of papal attitudes toward the Jews and biblical Judaism between 1145 and 1181.
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16 Aug 2010
Tags: Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Italy, Papacy, Twelfth Century
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Heresy and Sanctity at the Time of Boniface VII
By J.H. Denton
Toleration and repression in the Middle Ages (2002)
Introduction: Personal attacks upon political and religious leaders, in whatever age they have taken place, may help us to understand the kinds of behaviour not tolerated in that age. But the evidence surrounding such attacks is rarely easy to interpret. A campaign of vilification against Boniface VIII, pope from 1294 to 1303, emerged very soon after he ascended the papal throne. It began in the papal court with the disaffected cardinals, James and Peter Colonna, and it quickly spread to the French court, where William Nogaret became the leading anti-papal protagonist.
During his life and after his death, over a period of thirteen years, Boniface was accused of many misdemeanours in detailed sets of complaints. He was publicly maligned in large meetings held in Paris in 1303, and, as the first stage in an abortive posthumous trial, depositions of witnesses were taken in 1310 and 1311. The evidence concerning this extraordinary attack upon the pope has recently been meticulously edited by Jean Coste in a major work which, in respect of the texts specifically relating to the sets of complaints, supersedes the time-honoured collection of Pierre Dupuy.
Taken as a whole the accusations seem to present a very detailed picture of beliefs and practices judged unacceptable. Do they provide direct evidence of what contemporaries found intolerable in a religious leader? The pope was charged with crude, insulting and menacing behaviour, with hypocrisy, sacrilege, blasphemy, idolatry, demonolatry, black magic and necromancy. In the government of the Church he was accused of oppressing Christians, working as an enemy of peace for the destruction of the Church and of the faith and the perdition of souls. His personal morality was exposed as scandalous: he was accused of sodomy, with adults as well as with children, and of keeping male concubines, and of adultery and incest.
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8 Jun 2010
Tags: Ecclesiastical History, Italy, Papacy
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Acta Theologica, Vol.26:2 (2006)
