Paul IV (1476–1559)

Pope of the Catholic Church from 1555 until 1559. A zealous reformer of the church, Paul took the Papacy in a direction away from what he saw as the dangerous humanist secularism of the Renaissance. Born as Giovanni Carafa, in the town of Capriglio in the Campagna region, he belonged to a noble family that counted cardinals and high church officials among its members. He was trained in Latin and Greek but rejected the humanist teachings of the Renaissance, instead following the philosophies of medieval Scholasticism. He was ordained as a priest in 1505 and shortly afterward made bishop of the town of Chieti. He was appointed archbishop of Brindisi, a port town on the Adriatic Sea, in 1518, and in 1536 he was appointed as a cardinal. He became the archbishop of Naples in 1549 and in 1555 was elected pope as Paul IV.

Paul was a harsh disciplinarian who had poor relations with the Catholic rulers of Europe, including the Habsburg emperors and the king of Spain. He spared little effort in enforcing a strict and sweeping reform of the church. He had monks, priests, and cardinals tried for minor infractions and sentenced to prison and to slave galleys, and banished church officials from other towns who had taken up the easy court life in the city of Rome. He was fervently opposed to the presence of Jews in Rome and decreed in 1555 the building of the city's ghetto, a walled compound where Roman Jews were forced to live and work.

To prevent opposing opinion and heretical views from spreading to the public, he established in 1559 the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Forbidden Books, a list of volumes (including all books and tracts written by Protestants) that were henceforth banned to Catholics. Paul had little regard for the work of general church councils, however, and failed to convene the Council of Trent, which still had unfinished business in the matter of reform and the reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants. When the Habsburg emperor Charles V agreed to the Peace of Augsburg that allowed Protestant princes to establish the faith of their choosing in their own domains, Paul threatened to depose the emperor and replace him with someone more loyal to the Catholic Church.

Paul carried out war against the Spanish king Philip II in 1556. The forces allied to the pope suffered a rout within a year, and the heavy burdens the war placed on the church, as well as his flagrant nepotism in appointing his relatives to high positions, made the pope widely unpopular. On his death in 1559, the people of Rome rioted to show their displeasure at his policies and burned the offices of the Roman Inquisition.

See Also: Index; Inquisition; Paul III; Reformation, Catholic