Pope Martin IV

Simon de Brion reigned as Martin IV from 1281 to 1285 and was, more openly than most popes, the instrument of a king. He was a French cleric who had been chancellor to Louis IX and was made a cardinal in 1261. His election came after a six-month conclave that ended when Charles of Anjou, the French king of Sicily, had two obstructive cardinals arrested. Martin repaid him thoroughly: he made Charles Senator of Rome, abandoned his predecessor's careful balancing between French and Byzantine interests, and excommunicated the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos in 1281, which destroyed the reunion of the eastern and western churches agreed at Lyon seven years earlier. The reunion was never restored. He backed Charles's plan to reconquer Constantinople, which was overtaken in 1282 by the Sicilian Vespers - the rising in Palermo that massacred the French in Sicily and handed the island to Peter III of Aragon. Martin excommunicated Peter, declared a crusade against Aragon and offered its crown to a French prince, and the resulting war achieved nothing except the exhaustion of everyone involved. He was the last French pope to hold court in Rome. Dante put him in purgatory among the gluttons, for eels drowned in wine. His pontificate is usually treated as the point at which the papacy's claim to stand above the kings of Europe became difficult to maintain, since he so plainly did not. The Sicilian Vespers permanently divided the kingdom of Sicily from Naples, and the war of the Vespers ran for twenty years after his death.

• Lived: 1210 CE – 1285 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: pope, religious_leader