still had unfinished business in the matter
of reform and the reconciliation of Catho-
lics and Protestants. When the Habsburg
emperor Charles V agreed to the Peace of
Augsburg that allowed Protestant princes
to establish the faith of their choosing in
their own domains, Paul threatened to de-
pose the emperor and replace him with
someone more loyal to the Catholic
Church.
Paul carried out war against the Span-
ish king Philip II in 1556. The forces allied
to the pope suffered a rout within a year,
and the heavy burdens the war placed on
the church, as well as his flagrant nepo-
tism in appointing his relatives to high
positions, made the pope widely unpopu-
lar. On his death in 1559, the people of
Rome rioted to show their displeasure at
his policies and burned the offices of the
Roman Inquisition.
SEEALSO: Index; Inquisition; Paul III; Ref-
ormation, Catholic
Pazzi Conspiracy ..............................
The Pazzi Conspiracy was an important
event in the history of the city of Florence,
a center of the Italian Renaissance. The
name comes from a wealthy banking fam-
ily of Tuscany who traced their lineage to
a famous eleventh-century crusader, whose
bold fighting style during a siege of Jerusa-
lem earned him the nickname of “Pazzo”
(the Madman). In honor of their illustri-
ous ancestor, each year the Pazzi struck a
light from a stone of the Basilica of the
Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday, the day
before Easter, to relight the altar candles in
the Duomo, the cathedral of Florence.
At a time when the Medici family ruled
Florence, the wealthy and ambitious Pazzi
were striving to usurp the Medici and take
control of the city for themselves. To this
end,theyalliedwithPopeSixtusIV,who
was at odds with the Medici over contested
territory between the Papal States of cen-
tral Italy and Tuscany, the region domi-
nated by Florence. A loan from the Pazzi
bank allowed the pope to purchase strate-
gic land and cities in exchange for grant-
ing the Pazzi a monopoly on valuable
mines. Furious by this arrangement,
Lorenzo de’ Medici took his revenge by
thwarting the pope’s efforts to appoint
Francesco Salvati, an ally of the Pazzi, as
an archbishop in Tuscany.
With the pope’s connivance, the Pazzi
then allied with Salvati and Girolamo
Riario, the pope’s nephew, to kill Lorenzo
and his brother Giuliano de’ Medici dur-
ing Sunday services in the Duomo. Fed-
erigo da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino,
was brought into the plot and promised to
bring a company of six hundred men to
Florence in support of the Pazzi. During
the solemn singing of Mass on the ap-
pointed day, April 26, 1478, a group of
men fell on Giuliano de’ Medici and bru-
tally stabbed him to death, while his
brother escaped to the sacristy of the
church. Unable to reach Lorenzo through
a locked door, the conspirators left the
Duomo and then attempted to capture the
Signoria (town hall) of Florence. They
were captured by an angry mob of Floren-
tine citizens and immediately lynched.
Salviati himself was hanged from the wall
of the Signoria, an execution captured in a
famous sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. In
revenge for the killing of the archbishop,
the pope forbade Mass to be held in Flo-
rence, and enlisted the king of Naples to
attack the city. Lorenzo de’ Medici, how-
ever, voyaged to Naples to surrender him-
self to the king and dissuade him from
this plan. The conspiracy resulted in the
exact opposite of what it intended, laying
low the Pazzi dynasty in Florence and in-Pazzi Conspiracy