(r. 1261–64). Pope. After the death of Alexander IV in 1261, the eight surviving cardinals were unable to elect one of themselves pope. At last, they selected Jacques Pantaléon, titular patriarch of Jerusalem, who was on a mission to the Holy Land. Jacques, of low birth but a protegé of Innocent IV, had wide experience but no ties to Italian politics. As Pope Urban IV, he gained control of the papal states and rebuilt the Guelf alliance against the Hohen-staufen.
Urban created a substantial French bloc in the College of Cardinals and renewed his ties with Louis IX of France. Although the king refused to campaign against Manfred, the illegitimate son of Frederick II, he permitted Urban to approach a younger brother, Charles of Anjou. This was the first step toward Angevin domination of the papacy. Urban’s successor, Clement IV, would support Charles’s wars against the Hohenstaufen with all of the papacy’s resources. Urban neglected the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire; but he negotiated with Emperor Michael VIII Paleologus, who had recaptured Constantinople from the Latins, for recognition of the Roman primacy. Urban, who had been exposed to the feast of Corpus Christi in the north, attempted to extend the feast to the entire western church, thus reaffirming the doctrine of transubstantiation; and the name of Thomas Aquinas is associated with the office for that feast, which only later became universally popular, and only later would the story of a miracle at Bolsena be used to explain Urban’s effort.
