…Ikhtiyar Uddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji, a…

Pope Clement VII, his pontificate marked by indecision and miscalculation, has instituted no vigorous measures to meet the demands of the Protestant Reformation.

A patron of artists, including Cellini, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Clement VII is remembered for having ordered, just a few days before his death, Michelangelo's painting of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

Johann Widmanstetter (alternately spelled John Widmanstad), a secretary of Clement VII, had in 1533 explained the Copernican system to the Pope and two cardinals.

The Pope was so pleased that he gave Widmanstetter a valuable gift.

Towards the end of his life, Clement VII once more gives indications of a leaning towards a French alliance, which is averted by his death on September 24, 1534 in Rome.

It has been said that he died from eating poisonous mushrooms, but the symptoms and length of illness do not fit this theory.

In the words of his biographer Emmanuel Rodocanachi, "In accordance with the custom of those times, people attributed his death to poison."

His body is interred in Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

His successor, Alessandro Farnese, born in 1468 at Canino, Latium, Papal States, was the oldest son of Pier Luigi I Farnese, Signore di Montalto and his wife Giovanna Caetani, a member of the Caetani family which had also produced Pope Boniface VIII.

The Farnese family had prospered over the centuries but it is to be Alessandro’s ascendency to the papacy and his dedication to family interests that brings about the most significant increase in the family’s wealth and power.

Alessandro’s humanist education had been at the University of Pisa and the court of Lorenzo de' Medici.

Initially trained as an apostolic notary, he had joined the Roman Curia in 1491 and in 1493 Pope Alexander VI appointed him Cardinal-Deacon of Santi Cosma e Damiano.

Farnese’s sister Giulia was reputedly a mistress of Alexander VI and may have been instrumental in securing this appointment for her brother.

For this reason, he was sometimes mockingly referred to as the "Borgia brother-in-law," just as Giulia was mocked as "the Bride of Christ."

As bishop of Parma, he had come under the influence of his vicar general, Bartolomeo Guidiccioni.

This leads to the world-weary future pope breaking off the relationship with his mistress and committing himself to reform in his Parma diocese.

Under Pope Clement VII, he has became Cardinal Bishop of Ostia and dean of the College of Cardinals, and on the death of Clement VII in 1534, is elected as Pope Paul III.

Alessandro had been a notably dissolute young cleric, taking for himself a mistress and having three sons and two daughters with her.

By Silvia Ruffini, he had fathered Pier Luigi Farnese, whom he will soon create Duke of Parma; others include Ranuccio Farnese and Costanza Farnese.

The elevation to the cardinalate of his grandsons, Alessandro Farnese, aged fourteen, and Guido Ascanio Sforza, aged sixteen, displeases the reform party and draws a protest from the emperor, but this is forgiven, when shortly after, he introduces into the Sacred College men of the caliber of Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, Jacopo Sadoleto, and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, who will become Pope Paul IV.

Reginald Pole was born at Stourton Castle, Staffordshire, on March 12, 1500, to Sir Richard Pole and Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury, and was their third son.

His maternal grandparents were George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, and Isabella Neville, Duchess of Clarence; thus he was a great-nephew of kings Edward IV and Richard III and a great-grandson of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick.

His nursery is said to have been at Sheen Priory.

He matriculated in 1512 at Magdalen College, Oxford, and at Oxford was taught by William Latimer and Thomas Linacre, graduating on June 27, 1515 with a B.A.

His cousin King Henry VIII in February 1518 granted him the deanery of Wimborne Minster, Dorset; after which he was Prebendary of Salisbury in 1527 and Dean of Exeter.

He is also a canon in York, and has several other livings, although he had not been ordained a priest.

Assisted by Bishop Edward Foxe, he had represented Henry VIII in Paris in 1529, researching general opinions among theologians of the Sorbonne about the annulment of Henry's marriage with Catherine of Aragon.

Pole went in 1521 to the University of Padua, where he met leading Renaissance figures, including Pietro Bembo, Gianmatteo Giberti (formerly pope Leo X's datary and chief minister), Jacopo Sadoleto, Gianpietro Carafa (the future Pope Paul IV), Rodolfo Pio, Otto Truchsess, Stanislaus Hosius, Cristoforo Madruzzo, Giovanni Morone, Pier Paolo Vergerio the younger, Peter Martyr (Vermigli) and Vettor Soranzo.

The last three will eventually be condemned as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church, with Vermigli—as a well-known Protestant theologian—having a significant share in the Reformation in Pole's native England.

His studies in Padua had been partly financed by his election as a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, with more than half of the cost paid by Henry VIII himself on February 14, 1523, which allowed him to study abroad for three years.

Pole returned home in July 1526, when he went to France, escorted by Thomas Lupset.

Henry VIII had offered him the Archbishoing his support, Paul had gone into self-imposed exile in France and Italy in 1532, continuing his studies in Padua and Paris.

After his return, he held the benefice of Vicar of Piddletown, Dorset, between December 20, 1532, and about January 1535/1536.

Pole in May 1536 had finally and decisively broken with the King.

He had warned in 1531 of the dangers of the Boleyn marriage; he had in 1532 returned to Padua, and in December had received a last English benefice.

Chapuys had suggested to the Emperor Charles V that Pole marry the Lady Mary and combine their dynastic claims; Chapuys also communicated with Reginald through his brother Geoffrey.

The final break between Pole and Henry follows upon Thomas Cromwell, Cuthbert Tunstall, Thomas Starkey, and others addressing questions to Pole on behalf of Henry.

He answers by sending the king a copy of his published treatise Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione which, besides being a theological reply to the questions, is a strong denunciation of the king's policies, which denies Henry's position on the marriage of a brother's wife, and denies the Royal Supremacy; Pole also urges the Princes of Europe to depose Henry immediately.

Henry writes to the Countess of Salisbury, who in turn sent her son a letter reproving him for his "folly."

The incensed king, with Pole himself out of his reach, takes a terrible revenge on Pole's family.

Although Pole's mother and his elder brother had written to him in reproof of Pole's attitude and action, he does not spare them.

He has Pole’s brother executed on January 1539 and his mother imprisoned in the Tower of London and later beheaded.

Scholars attribute to the School of Fontainebleau “Diana the Huntress,” a painting executed around 1550 by an unknown artist and thought to be a portrait of Diane de Poitiers, Henry’s influential mistress.

Diane possesses a sharp intellect and is so politically astute that the king trusts her to write many of his official letters, and even to sign them jointly with the one name HenriDiane.

Her confident maturity and loyalty to Henry makes her his most dependable ally in the court.

Her position in the Court of the King is such that when Pope Paul III sent the new Queen Catherine the "Golden Rose", he did not forget to present the royal mistress Diane with a pearl necklace.

Within a very short stretch of time, she had begun to wield considerable power within the realm, in 1548 receiving the prestigious title of Duchess of Valentinois.

Pope Julius at the start of his reign had desired seriously to bring about a reform of the Catholic Church and to reconvene the Council of Trent, but very little will actually be achieved during his five years in office; apologists ascribe the inactivity of his last three years to severe gout.

At the request of the Emperor Charles V, he had consented in 1551 to the reopening of the council of Trent and entered into a league against the duke of Parma and Henry II of France (1547–59), but soon afterwards had made terms with his enemies and in 1553 suspends the meetings of the council.

Discouraged by his dealings with the emperor, Julius increasingly contents himself with interfering in Italian politics alone.

He has retired to his luxurious palace at the Villa Giulia which he had built for himself close to the Porta del Popolo.

From here he passes the time in comfort, emerging from time to time to make timid efforts to reform the Church through the reestablishment of the reform commissions.

He is a friend of the Jesuits, to whom he grants a fresh confirmation in 1550; and through a Papal Bull of August 1552 he had founded the Collegium Germanicum, and granted an annual income.

Catholicism during his pontificate is in 1553 provisionally restored in England under Queen Mary.

Julius sends Cardinal Reginald Pole as legate with powers that he can use at his discretion to help the restoration succeed.

The particular failures of Pope Julius III are his nepotism and favoritism.

One notable scandal surrounds his adoptive nephew, Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte, a thirteen- or fourteen-year old beggar-boy whom the future Pope had picked up on the streets of Parma some years earlier.

On being elected to the Papacy in 1550, Julius had raised the now seventeen-year old but still uncouth and quasi-illiterate Innocenzo to the cardinalate, appointed him cardinal-nephew, and showered the boy with benefices—Abbot commendatario of the abbeys of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, S. Zeno in Verona, June 1552, later of the abbeys of S. Saba, Miramondo, and of Grottaferrata, Frascati, and other appointments—to the point where his income approaches one of the highest in Europe.

Gossip calls the boy Julius's "Ganymede", and the Venetian ambassador reports that Innocenzo shares the pope's bedroom and bed.

The relationship is to become a staple of anti-papal polemics for over a century: it was said that Julius, awaiting Innocenzo's arrival in Rome to receive his cardinal's hat, showed the impatience of a lover awaiting.

In 1553 also, the reform-minded Julius, convinced that the Talmud attacks Christianity, burns thousands of volumes of the Talmud in Rome, …

The accession of Pope Paul IV heralds a return to stricter discipline in choral appointments, and Palestrina, as a married man, is obliged to vacate his post as director of the Julian Chapel Choir, taking charge of the choir at Saint John Lateran from 1555.

The disability imposed on a Jew engaged in legal contention with a Christian dates back to Emperor Justinian I, who in the early sixth century had decreed from Constantinople that neither Jews nor heretics should be admitted as witnesses against Christians; secular courts, however, did not recognize this disability.

Thus, in the safe conducts issued by the Carolingian kings in the ninth century, Jews and Christians were treated as equals, and consequently the testimony of the former, whether given under oath or not, was as admissible as the latter.

This is distinctly stated in the charter granted by Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to the Jews of Speyer in 1090.

The law of Duke Frederick II of Austria (1244), which served as a model for much other legislation on the Jews, merely required a Jew to swear "super Rodal" (by the Torah).

Similar laws exist in England, Portugal, and Hungary; Hungary had waived the requirement to swear on the Torah in trivial cases.

There were, however, some older laws that prescribed certain practices intended to mock Jews in court.

By the time Paul IV issues the papal bull requiring all Jews to live in ghettos and restricting economic relations with Christians to the selling of used clothes, the Oath More Judaico, or Jewish Oath, established a thousand years earlier, has become standardized throughout Europe.

A decidedly aggressive change takes place when, in 1555, the German imperial court procedure (Reichskammergerichtsordnung) prescribes a form of oath that, with some alterations, forms a model to subsequent legislation.

Horrible are the terms in which the swearer calls down upon himself all the curses of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the ten plagues of Egypt, the leprosy of Naaman and Gehazi, the fate of Dathan and Abiram, etc.

Paul issues a bull, cum nimis absurdum, on July 14, 1555, bringing religious and economic restrictions to the papal lands, requiring all Jews to live in ghettos and restricting economic relations with Christians to the selling of used clothes.

The ruling takes its name from its first words: "Since it is absurd and utterly inconvenient that the Jews, who through their own fault were condemned by God to eternal slavery..."

The bull renews anti-Jewish legislation and subjects Jews to various degradations and restrictions on their personal freedom.

Under the bull, Jewish males are forced to wear a pointed yellow hat, and Jewish females a yellow kerchief.

Jews are also forbidden to own real estate or practice medicine among Christians.

The bull also creates the Roman Ghetto, where the Jews of Rome, who have lived freely since antiquity, are segregated in a walled quarter with three gates that are locked at night.

Jews are also restricted to one synagogue per city, though in Rome alone there are five prayer communities with ethnic, linguistic and social differences.

Pope Paul, nursing a violent hatred of the Habsburgs and the Spanish, attempts to drive them from Naples by allying with France in December 1555, thus provoking war against Holy Roman Emperor Charles and his son Philip.

Spanish general and diplomat Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, third duque de Alba (also spelled Alva), made commander in chief of the imperial forces in Italy, serves here from 1555, distinguishing himself for his subtlety and generalship in the war against the Pope, in which Alba has been invested with unlimited power.

Success does not, however, attend his first attempts, and after several unfortunate attacks he is obliged to retire into winter quarters.

The wealthy Gracia Mendes Nasi had in 1553 moved to the Ottoman domains, and married her daughter to her nephew Joseph Nasi.

When in 1556 Pope Paul IV sentences a group of Marranos who had returned to Judaism in Portugal to death by fire, she responds by leading leading an unsuccessful economic boycott in 1556 against the port of Ancona in the Papal States, ...

...favoring trade with Pesaro, also in the Marche, which has accepted the Jewish refugees.

The plan fails due to internal divisions in the Jewish community over fear of further persecution.