Pope Innocent IV

Sinibaldo Fieschi, son of a Ligurian noble merchant family, was elected pope in June 1243 and ruled until his death in December 1254. He studied at Parma and Bologna and was regarded in his own lifetime as one of the finest canon lawyers in Europe, a reputation that brought him to the Curia under Honorius III and a cardinal's hat under Gregory IX, who made him governor of Ancona in 1235. His pontificate was consumed by the struggle with Frederick II, the Hohenstaufen emperor whose lands surrounded the Papal States on both sides. Finding Rome unsafe, Innocent escaped to Genoa and then to Lyon, beyond imperial reach, where in 1245 he convened the First Council of Lyon and formally deposed Frederick, declaring him excommunicate and his subjects released from their oaths. It was a claim of jurisdiction over the empire itself. He spent the following decade financing a war to make it stick, promoting rival candidates for the German throne and pursuing Frederick's heirs; the emperor's death in 1250 finally allowed Innocent to return to Rome after six years abroad. As a jurist he was among the most consequential of medieval popes: his commentary on the Decretals shaped canon law for centuries, and his argument that non-Christians held genuine natural rights of dominion over their own lands became a foundation of later debate about conquest and legitimate title. That same legalism had a darker application: in May 1252 he issued the bull Ad extirpanda, which authorised the use of torture against suspected heretics by equating them with ordinary criminals. He also opened formal contact with the Mongols, sending the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine to the Great Khan in 1245 to ask why Christian lands had been attacked; the reply demanded his own submission. His long war against the Hohenstaufen drained papal finances and left the papacy dependent on taxing clergy across Europe, a dependence that bred resentment for generations.

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