Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/453

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

PAUL 431 patron of learning, was versed in science, and had an especial weakness for judicial astrology. The arts also owed much to him. Michelangelo s Last Judgment and other works of the first rank were completed under his auspices, and he greatly improved and beautified the city of Rome. Julius III. was his successor. PAUL, IV., Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, pope from 1555 to 1559, born 28th June 1476, was the nephew of Car dinal Oliviero Caraffa, by whose interest he became at an early age chamberlain to Pope Alexander VI., and subse quently, though contrary to his own inclination, archbishop of Chieti. He was afterwards nuncio in England and Spain, both of which missions he discharged with credit ; but in 1524, under the influence of strong religious im pressions, he resigned his archbishopric, distributed his goods among the poor, and retired from the world to direct the monastic order of Theatins, founded by himself. In 1536 the fame of his sanctity induced Paul III. to call him to his court and confer the dignity of cardinal upon him, notwithstanding his own reluctance. He now be came the head of the reactionary party at Rome, bent on crushing all tendencies to religious innovation, while in sisting on reforms in discipline and moral deportment. Such was unquestionably the policy required by the times from the exclusive point of view of the interests of the church, and it was thoroughly incarnate in Caraffa, in whom the spirit of the Dominican exterminators of the Albigenses seemed to revive. Having taken an important part in two conclaves, he was himself unexpectedly elected pope on 23d May 1555, after the death of Marcellus II., notwithstanding his personal unpopularity and the positive veto of Charles V. Raised to the pontifical throne, Paul showed himself a man of extreme counsels in every respect. He endeavoured to efface the prejudice against his former austerity by excessive magnificence. He rushed into politics, and evinced himself as rash in his partisanship as his predecessors had been dexterous and ambiguous. His open espousal of the cause of France brought upon him a Spanish invasion which would have destroyed his temporal sovereignty but for the superstition of Philip II. and his general Alva, who embraced the first opportunity of making peace. He called his nephews to court and trusted them with blind confidence, but unhesitatingly disgraced them when convinced of their unworthiness. He refused to acknowledge Ferdinand as emperor of Germany, maintain ing that Charles had no right to abdicate or Ferdinand to succeed without his own permission. Amid all these agitations he never lost sight of the main purpose of his life : he struggled incessantly against heresy, and was the first pope to issue a full official Index Librorum Prohibit- orum (see vol. xii. p. 730). He died, on 18th August 1559, recommending the Inquisition to the cardinals with his last breath, and leaving the character of a pope of rare energy of body and mind, upright in all his thoughts and actions, but intoxicated with fanaticism and the pride of office, and more perverse, obstinate, and impracticable than any occupant of the papal chair since Urban VI. His memory was so detested by the Roman people that the hawkers of glass and earthenware were compelled for a time to discontinue their usual cry of " carafe " and cry " ampolle." He was succeeded by Pius IV. PAUL V., Camillo Borghese, pope from 1605 to 1621, was born in Rome, 17th September 1552, of a noble family. He followed the study of canon law, and after having filled various important offices was made a cardinal in 1596. He succeeded Leo XI. on 16th May 1605, after an unusually long and stormy conclave, the vicissitudes of which are dramatically narrated in Mr T. A. Trollope s Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar. No one, till the last moment, had thought of Borghese, who owed his election to his supposed inoffensiveness and the inability of the leaders of the factions to agree upon any other man - Scarcely had he been elected ere he gave convincing proof that his character had been very much mistaken. He showed himself harsh, domineering, impatient of advice, fanatical in his devotion to the secular as well as the spiritual prerogatives of the church, and inflexible in his resolution to uphold them. He began by successfully re pressing numerous encroachments of the civil power in various Roman Catholic countries, and thus became tempted to embark in a contention with the republic of Venice, which inflicted a deeper wound on Rome than anything that had taken place since the Reformation. The dispute was occasioned by the claim of the Venetians to try eccle siastical culprits before the lay tribunals, and by the ex tension of old laws forbidding the unauthorized formation of religious corporations and the acquisition of property by ecclesiastics to the entire territory of the republic. Paul protested and menaced (October 1605), and, when the Venetians refused to yield, he launched (April 1606) a bull of excommunication against them, and placed the whole republic under an interdict. The Venetians set him at defiance, forbidding their clergy to pay the least attention to the papal censures, and banishing those who disobeyed from their dominions. A vehement literary controversy arose, in which the famous Father Sarpi, the chief coun sellor of the Venetian senate, especially distinguished him self. Paul found himself impotent, and, disappointed in his expectations of material aid from Spain, was thankful to escape from the difficulty by the mediation of France, whose representative, Cardinal Joyeuse, negotiated a com promise in April 1607. The Venetians made some nominal concessions, but gained every substantial point at issiie ; the main result of the contention, however, was to demon strate the inefficacy of the spiritual weapons on which Rome had so long relied, and the disrepute into which papal pretensions had fallen even among Catholic nations. Throughout the remainder of his long pontificate Paul acted with comparative moderation, maintaining, never theless, the character of a zealous pontiff intent on combat ing heresy, and especially active in his encouragement of foreign missions. He ranks among the popes who have contributed most to the embellishment of Rome ; the nave, fa5ade, and portico of St Peter s were completed by him ; he also erected the sumptuous Borghese chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, and greatly benefited the city by improv ing streets and constructing public fountains. He died on 28th January 1621, and was succeeded by Gregory XV. (R. G.) PAUL (1754-1801), emperor of Russia, son of Peter III. and of Catherine, was born on the 2d of October 1754. During the early part of his life he was treated with great harshness by his mother, who had usurped the throne and did not allow him to take any part in the government. There is little doubt that she did not intend him to succeed, but her will was burnt by one of Paul s adherents. His days were spent in retirement, with the exception of a tour which he made in the west of Europe in the year 1780. He was twice married, first, in 1773, to Augusta, princess of Hesse Darmstadt, who died three years afterwards, leaving no issue ; secondly, in 1776, to Dorothea Sophia, princess of Wiirtemberg, who was received into the Greek Church as Maria Feodorovna. Paul Petrovich ascended the throne on the death of his mother Catherine, 17th November 1796. One of his first acts was to cause the body of his father to be exhumed from the Nevski monastery and buried with the empress his wife in the Petropavlovski church among the rest of the czars. Orloff and the other persons implicated in Peter s assassination were compelled to follow the coffins,