(r. 1265-68). Pope. After Urban IV died in 1264, the conclave in 1265 elected one of his cardinals, Guy Foulques, to succeed him as Clement IV. The new pope was a native of Languedoc and the author of one of the earlier legal opinions on the Inquisition. He had served as a papal legate to England during a baronial rebellion against Henry III. As a subject of Louis IX of France and of his brother Alphonse, the Capetian count of Toulouse, the new pope favored the efforts of their brother, Charles of Anjou, to conquer the kingdom of Naples. Clement agreed to finance Charles’s campaign against Manfred, the illegitimate son of the emperor Frederick II; and he crowned Charles king of Sicily at the Lateran in 1266. After Manfred’s death, the brutality of the Angevin army moved the pope to protest to the king, but papal support of Charles continued during the war against Conradin, Frederick’s surviving grandson, to whose execution Clement gave tacit consent. Clement also rejected overtures from the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus, who was trying to avoid an Angevin attack on Constantinople. Papal financial support of Charles’s ambitions led Clement to expand the papacy’s claims to appoint to vacant benefices. His successor Gregory X (r. 1271-76) temporarily would reduce Angevin influence in the curia.
Thomas M. Izbicki
[See also: CHARLES I; LOUIS IX]
Jordan, Edouard, ed. Les registres de Clement IV (1265-1268): recueil des bulles de ce pape publiees ou analysees d’apres les manuscrits originaux des archives du Vatican. Paris: Thorin, 1893.
Nicolas, Cesar Augustin. Un pape Saint-Gillois: Clement IVdans le monde et dans l’eglise, 11951268. Nimes: Imprimerie Generale, 1910.
World History
