Pope clement v: Did you mean...?

Statue of St. Gregory the Great in the Oratory of St. Barbara on the Caelian Hill, Rome.

The Council of Clermont in central France was held in November 1095 and witnessed Pope Urban II's (r. 1088-1099) historic call for the First Crusade (1095-1102) to capture Jerusalem for Christendom from its Muslim occupiers. The Pope's speech...

The Donation of Constantine (Donatio Constantini or the Donatio) is a medieval forgery dated to the 8th century purporting to be an original 4th-century document in which the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (r. 306-337) granted supreme...

The Diet of Worms (January-May 1521) was the assembly convened by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor to address, among other issues, the works of the reformer Martin Luther (l. 1483-1546) who openly criticized the Church. Luther was told to recant...

The Unam Sanctam (1302) was a papal bull issued by Pope Boniface VIII (served 1294-1303) requiring the complete submission of all people, including kings, to the authority and dictates of the pope. As the Church was understood as holding...

Pope Francis is facing calls to rescind a centuries-old policy called the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ stemming from a series of edicts, known as papal bulls, dating back to the 15th century, which states that white European nations "discovered"...

Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan al-Fasi al-Granati, 1485-1554) was a diplomat, merchant traveller and scholar who famously voyaged from Timbuktu to the Niger River and wrote 'The Description of Africa' (La Descrittione...

Henry VIII of England ruled as king from 1509 to 1547. The second Tudor king after his father Henry VII of England (r. 1485-1509), Henry had inherited a kingdom which enjoyed both unity and sound finances. Famous for his six wives as he searched...

Saint Thomas Aquinas (l. 1225-1274, also known as the "Ox of Sicily" and the "Angelic Doctor") was a Dominican friar, mystic, theologian, and philosopher, all at once. Although he lived a relatively short life, dying at age 49, Thomas occupied...

Saint Cyril (aka Kyrillos and Constantine the Philosopher, d. 867 CE) was a Byzantine linguist, teacher, scholar and missionary who famously preached Christianity to the Slavs in Moravia with his brother Methodius during the 9th century CE...