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In 1482 the Turkish Prince Cem, younger son of Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, presented himself before the Knights of St John at Rhodes. Naively, he asked their help in overthrowing his brother Bayezit, who had succeeded Mehmet II. Instead of helping him, the Knights negotiated a deal with Bayezit, who paid handsomely to have his dangerous brother kept under lock and key. In 1486 Innocent VIII placed Cem under papal protection (having bought the prisoner from the Grand Master of the Knights of St John by making the latter a cardinal), and three years later established him in some style in the Castel Sant’ Angelo.
The Pope now became chief gaoler to the Sultan. Bayezit sent Innocent a gift of 120,000 crowns (almost equal to the total annual revenue of the papal state), and the relic of the Holy Lance which had pierced Christ’s side on Calvary. A special shrine was built for it in St Peter’s. Thereafter the Pope received an annual fee of 45,000 ducats to keep Cem in custody.
Gregory’s pontificate represents the highest point of papal aspiration to dominion over the secular world. Paradoxically, he achieved startlingly little in concrete terms. Most of the bishops he excommunicated and deposed remained tranquilly in office, Henry long outlived him, and the papal reform changed direction after him, away from the attempt to rule the rulers, and towards the strengthening of its hold over the Church itself. Yet, if he was defeated in the short term, the spirit of papal reform owed everything to him, for after him the papacy never receded from its claims to freedom from secular and political control in spiritual matters.
As pressure on the Italian Jewish community mounted, Roman religious houses were opened as places of refuge – 5,000 Jews were sheltered there and in the Vatican itself. Historians have recently questioned the pope’s direct involvement in these relief measures, but at the time he was widely credited with having saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives, and after the war, the chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic and took the baptismal name Eugenio.
From 1931 the new Republican regime in Spain was increasingly hostile to the Church. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 hostility turned to active persecution, and refugees flooded into Rome with accounts of Communist atrocities. The Nationalist opposition, by contrast, though also guilty of atrocity, and not originally noted for their piety, increasingly saw the Church as integral to their vision of Spain. They received the endorsement of all but one of the Spanish bishops in a joint pastoral in 1937, and despite General Franco’s murderous acts of repression, the papacy backed him.
Mussolini had not merely resolved the Roman question; he had also suppressed the Church’s enemies, the Italian Communists and the Freemasons. In the first flush of enthusiasm, and against Gasparri’s advice, Pius spoke publicly of Mussolini as ‘a man sent by Providence’. In the elections of March 1929, most Italian clergy encouraged their congregations to vote Fascist.
Executed by the Romans as a pretender to the throne of Israel, Jesus' death and resurrection were interpreted by reference to the stories and prophecies of the Jewish scriptures, and much of the language in which it was proclaimed derived from and spoke to Jewish hopes and longings.
The Gregorian Calendar caused widespread anger and fear among Protestants, many of whom saw it as a device of Antichrist to subject the world to the devil. Gregory’s coat of arms included a dragon, and this was seized on by opponents of the calendar reform as an omen. The Pope, it was claimed, was trying to confuse calculations of the imminent end of the world, so that Christians would be caught unprepared.
It was outlawed in Denmark, Holland, and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and in many German Protestant states the civil authorities prevented the Catholic clergy from using it. England, where anti-papal feeling was particularly strong, did not accept the new calendar till 1752, and Sweden not until 1753.