Jacques Pantaléon, having attracted the attention of…

Jacques Pantaléon, having attracted the attention of Innocent IV at the first Council of Laon, had undertaken for the papacy two missions in Germany, one of which had been to negotiate the Treaty of Christburg between the pagan Prussians and the Teutonic Knights.

Created bishop of Verdun in 1253, Alexander IV had made him Patriarch of Jerusalem two years later.

Pantaléon had returned from Jerusalem, which is in dire straits, and had been at Viterbo seeking help for the oppressed Christians in the East when Alexander IV died, and after a three-month vacancy Pantaléon is chosen by the eight cardinals of the Sacred College to succeed him, on August 29, 1261, taking the name of Urban IV.

Elected a couple of weeks after the Greeks’ recapture of Constantinople as the one-hundred-and-eighty-second pope, Urban endeavors without success to stir up a crusade to restore the Latin Empire.