Pope Callixtus III

Alonso de Borja reigned as Callixtus III from 1455 to 1458, and was the first Borgia pope. He was a Valencian professor of law at Lleida who served the kings of Aragon as a diplomat, tutored Alfonso V's illegitimate son Ferdinand, and was made Bishop of Valencia after reconciling Alfonso with Pope Martin V. Eugene IV made him a cardinal in 1444. He was elected pope at seventy-seven as a compromise candidate whom nobody expected to reign long. He had one overriding purpose. Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans two years earlier, and he vowed to recover it, selling papal property and even parts of his own library to fund a crusade that the princes of Europe declined to join. The one success came at Belgrade in 1456, where John Hunyadi and the friar John of Capistrano broke an Ottoman siege. Callixtus had ordered the bells rung at midday across Christendom to call for prayers for the defenders, and the noon bell is still rung in many places because of it. He also reopened the trial of Joan of Arc at the request of her mother and, in 1456, annulled the verdict that had burned her twenty-five years earlier. His nepotism was as notable as his piety: he made two nephews cardinals, one of whom became Alexander VI, and so began the Borgia presence in Rome that shaped the next half-century. A persistent story that he issued a bull condemning Halley's Comet during the crusade appears to be an eighteenth-century invention, though he did order prayers against the Turkish advance while the comet was visible in 1456. He died in Rome in August 1458 with the crusade unrealised.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history