Gregory IX
Gregory IX (Anagni, ca. 1170 - Rome, August 22, 1241) was the 178th pope of the Catholic Church from 1227 to 1241.
Biography
Named Ugolino de Segni, he was a nephew of Pope Innocent III who successively named him papal chaplain, archpriest of Saint Peter, cardinal deacon of Saint Eustatius in 1198 and cardinal bishop of Ostia and Velletri in 1206.
In 1207, Innocent III sent him as papal legate to the Holy Roman Empire with the mission of mediating in the succession dispute that arose from the death of Henry VI.
In 1217, under the pontificate of Honorius III, he served as plenipotentiary delegate for Lombardy and Tuscany where he preached the Sixth Crusade.
Elected pope on March 19, 1227, after renouncing the tiara, Cardinal Conrad of Urach who had been chosen as the first option, adopted the name Gregory IX. He was fifty-seven years old at that time, and his pontificate lasted for fourteen years, until his death at seventy-one years of age.
Clash with the Holy Roman Empire
His first measure as pontiff was the excommunication of Emperor Frederick II for continued delays in his participation in the Sixth Crusade. This excommunication caused the emperor's supporters to rise up against Gregory IX, forcing him to leave Rome to take refuge in Viterbo and later in Perugia.
Frederick II decides then, to prove the injustice of his excommunication, to go to the Holy Land, where he leaves without the papal blessing, in 1228, at the head of a small army that, however, managed to conquer the island of Cyprus and be made, in 1229 through a diplomatic agreement, with Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.
Gregory IX does not respond with the acquittal of Frederick, but instead declares that the emperor's actions in the Holy Land cannot be qualified as holy war by continuing to be excommunicated, and proceeds to release the crusaders from the vow of obedience to the emperor, who He was forced to return when he learned that the Pope, together with the Lombard League, was invading his kingdom of Sicily.
After disembarking in Brindisi, Federico II manages to defeat the papal and Lombard forces, expelling them from the imperial territories and signing, in 1230, the Peace of San Germano whereby, in exchange for the pope revoking his excommunication, the emperor assured the Church of its territorial possessions.
The Peace of San Germano did not last long, since with the different ways of conceiving the papacy that Gregory IX and Federico II had, a new confrontation was unavoidable. The moment came in 1237, when the imperial troops defeated the Lombard league at the Battle of Cortenueva, and the pope found the appropriate excuse to excommunicate Frederick II again in 1239.
He immediately ordered a crusade against the emperor, tried unsuccessfully to get the German princes to elect a new king, and called a council in Rome to be held in 1241.
Frederick II for his part announced his total opposition to the holding of a council that, convened by the pope, had no other motivation than his deposition and substitution, for which reason he ordered his troops to arrest all those who traveled to Rome with the intention of participating in it.
The arrest and imprisonment of more than one hundred clergymen prevented the council from being held and, shortly after, on August 22, 1241, Gregory IX died at the age of seventy-one.
Other realizations
Gregory IX, through the publication in 1231 of the papal bull Excommunicamus, formally established the process of investigation and punishment that would be made of heretics, a process called the Inquisition, making it depend directly on the pontiff, naming the Dominicans as inquisitors and establishing that heretics be handed over to the secular arm for punishment.
Previously, he had negotiated a solution to the student strike that took place in 1229 at the University of Paris.
He was one of the best friends of Saint Francis of Assisi. So much so that he was named as the first protector of the Franciscan Order. All the friars turned to him for any need or problem. Saint Francis prophesied that he would be pope, even though he was a cardinal and bishop of Ostia.
He canonized Saint Francis of Assisi on July 16, 1228, Saint Dominic on July 8, 1234, and Saint Anthony of Padua in May 1232.
He granted the expedition of Conquest of Ibiza and Formentera company of Guillem de Montgrí and Bernat de Santa Eugenia de Berga the title of crusade in a bull dated April 24, 1235. And he promulgated another bull in February 1237, where it also gave the campaign against Valencia the character of a crusade.
In popular culture
The prophecies of Saint Malachy refer to this pope as Avis ostiensis (The Bird of Ostia), a quote that refers to the fact that he was Cardinal of Ostia before his election as pontiff and to the fact that a bird appears on his coat of arms.