The marriage of Alfonso and Urraca was declared null by the Pope, as they were second cousins, in 1110, but he ignored the papal nuncio and clung to his liaison with Urraca until 1114.

The papal nuncio usually solicits names from the bishops of a country, and then selects three to be forwarded to the Holy See.

In the following year he went to Germany to be present as papal nuncio at the coronation of Emperor Charles V, and was also present at the Diet of Worms, where he headed the opposition to Martin Luther, advocating the most extreme measures to repress the doctrines of the reformer.

After the close of the Diet, the papal nuncio went to the Netherlands, where he instigated the executions of two monks of Antwerp due to their embrace of the Reformation, resulting in their being burnt in Brussels.

The head of state accredits ( i. e. formally validates ) his or her country's ambassadors, High Commissioners or rarer equivalent diplomatic mission chiefs ( such as papal nuncio ), through sending formal Letter of Credence to other heads of state and, conversely, receives the letters of their foreign counterparts.

Under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, a papal nuncio is an ambassador like those from any other country.

However, the Vienna Convention allows the receiving state to grant seniority of precedence to the papal nuncio over others of ambassadorial rank accredited to the same country, and may grant the deanship of that country's diplomatic corps to the nuncio regardless of seniority .< ref >

Before election to the papacy, Pacelli served as secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio to Germany ( 1917 – 1929 ), and Cardinal Secretary of State, in which capacity he worked to conclude treaties with European and Latin American nations, most notably the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany.

Historian Walter Bussmann argued that Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State, dissuaded Pope Pius XI – who was nearing death at the time – from condemning the Kristallnacht in November 1938, when he was informed of it by the papal nuncio in Berlin.

As a deacon, Boniface had impressed Pope Gregory I, who described him as a man " of tried faith and character " and selected him to be apocrisiarius ( legate, essentially the papal nuncio ) to the court of Constantinople in 603.

During the reign of Pope Innocent X ( 1644 – 55 ), who was hostile to the Barberini and their adherents, Rospigliosi continued his appointment as papal nuncio to the court of Spain.

" In 1760, Pombal sent home the papal nuncio and recalled the Portuguese ambassador.

Under Clement VIII he himself was made protonotary and nuncio to the French court ; Paul V also employed him in a similar capacity, afterwards raising him, in 1606, to Cardinal-Priest of S. Pietro in Montorio and appointing him the papal legate to Bologna.

The warlike tendencies of the Tartars also concerned the Pope, and he sent a papal nuncio to the Mongol Empire in an attempt to strike an agreement.

Pope Pius V ( 1566 – 1572 ) sent him as papal nuncio to Venice in 1566 to further the papal alliance with Spain and Venice against the Turks, which ultimately resulted in the victory of Lepanto in 1571.

Louis XIV retaliated by taking possession of the papal territory of Avignon, imprisoning the papal nuncio and appealing to a general council.

From 1697 to 1710 he acted as papal nuncio to the Kingdom of Portugal, where he is believed to have formed those unfavourable impressions of the Jesuits which afterwards influenced his conduct towards them.

The bulls were easily acquired because the papal nuncio was under orders from Rome to please the English in an effort to avert a final breach.

A further papal bull of 15 June 1520, Exsurge Domine or Arise, O Lord, condemned forty-one propositions extracted from Luther's teachings, and was taken to Germany by Eck in his capacity as apostolic nuncio.

The pope had repeatedly used the rich northern benefices to reward members of the Roman curia, and towards the close of the year 1516 he sent the impolitic Arcimboldi as papal nuncio to Denmark to collect money for St Peter's.

King Christian II took advantage of the growing dissatisfaction of the native clergy toward the papal government, and of Arcimboldi's interference in the Swedish revolt, to expel the nuncio and summon Lutheran theologians to Copenhagen in 1520.

* November 20 – Karl von Miltitz, papal nuncio ( b. c. 1490 )

In the meantime, Lambert and his mother Ageltrude travelled to Rome to receive papal confirmation of his imperial succession, but Formosus, still desiring to crown Arnulf, was imprisoned in Castel Sant ' Angelo.

He was buried in a mausoleum on the western bank of the Tiber, in Rome, a building later transformed into a papal fortress, Castel Sant ' Angelo.

As appears from the papal Bulls, the followers of Angelo established themselves in Central Italy, i. e., in the province of Rome, Umbria, and the March of Ancona, and also in Southern Italy ( Campagna, Basilicata, and Naples ).

Image: Mastro Titta. jpg | Giovanni Battista Bugatti, papal executioner between 1796 and 1865 offering snuff to a condemned prisoner in front of Castel Sant ' Angelo

Maury retired to Rome, where he was imprisoned in the Castel Sant ' Angelo for six months for his disobedience to the papal orders.

* Angelo Massarelli, conclavist to Cardinal Cervini during the papal conclave, 1549 – 1550

While Berengar occupied Pavia, Lambert and Ageltrude travelled to Rome to receive papal confirmation of his imperial title, but Pope Formosus wanted instead to crown Arnulf and was imprisoned in the Castel Sant ' Angelo.

Following the papal conclave of 1492, the new pope, Alexander VI, made Castro prefect of the Castel Sant ' Angelo.

When the negotiations began, his quarrel with the king of France was temporarily in abeyance, and he had no intention of reviving it so long as there was hope that French money would come to pay the troops who, under Charles of Valois, the papal vicar of Tuscany, were so valuable in the crusade against the Colonna cardinals and their Sicilian allies.

The Aragonese took Ramiro out of a monastery and made him king, marrying him without papal dispensation to Agnes, sister of the Duke of Aquitaine, then betrothing their newborn daughter to Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, who was then named Ramiro's heir.

Cam., also referred to as Ambrose of Camaldoli, ( 1386 – October 20, 1439 ) was an Italian monk and theologian, who was a prime supporter of the papal cause in the 15th century.

In 1008, after long negotiations with the Bishops of Würzburg and Eichstätt, who were to cede portions of their dioceses, the boundaries of the new diocese were defined, and Pope John XVIII granted the papal confirmation in the same year.

In early times the privilege of papal election was not reserved to the cardinals, and for centuries the pope was customarily a Roman priest and never a bishop from elsewhere ; to preserve apostolic succession the rite of consecrating the pope as a bishop had to be performed by someone who was already a bishop.

Almost all of the prominent priests who were elevated to the cardinalate as cardinal-deacons were near or over the age of 80 when elevated, and so would not have participated in a papal conclave.

It closed with a series of ritual acclamations honouring the reigning Pope, the Popes who had convoked the Council, the emperor and the kings who had supported it, the papal legates, the cardinals, the ambassadors present, and the bishops, followed by acclamations of acceptance of the faith of the Council and its decrees, and of anathema for all heretics.

On the return trip to Spain, the two brethren met with a group of papal legates who were determined to triumph over the Manichean menace.

The inscription declares, citing a 12 November 1548 papal bull of Pope Paul III, that God inflicts " maledictions and excommunications " on all who abandon a child of theirs whom they have the means to rear, and that they cannot be absolved unless they first refund all expenses incurred.

The Council sought to: ( a ) bring an end to the practice of the conferring of ecclesiastical benefices by people who were laymen ; ( b ) free the election of bishops and abbots from secular influence ; ( c ) clarify the separation of spiritual and temporal affairs ; ( d ) re-establish the principle that spiritual authority resides solely in the Church ; ( e ) abolish the claim of the emperors to influence papal elections.

The greatest resistance was seen in France and was led by Guido, who still held the office of the papal legate.

Whether and how far the council was confirmed by Pope John VIII is also a matter of dispute: The council was held in the presence of papal legates, who approved of the proceedings, Roman Catholic historian Fr.

His knowledge of the Italian language and his affability and good humor, however, often helped in mediating between the papal regime and the British government, and he was able on many occasions to offer advice and protection for British visitors who found themselves in awkward scrapes.

In Rome, the papal collections were brought together by Pope Nicholas V, in separate Greek and Latin libraries, and housed by Pope Sixtus IV, who consigned the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana to the care of his librarian, the humanist Bartolomeo Platina in February 1475.

The modern interpretation, following that of Louis Duchesne, who compiled the major scholarly edition, is that the Liber Pontificalis was gradually and unsystematically compiled, and that the authorship is impossible to determine, with a few exceptions ( e. g. the biography of Pope Stephen II ( 752 – 757 ) to papal " Primicerius " Christopher ; the biographies of Pope Nicholas I and Pope Adrian II ( 867 – 872 ) to Anastasius ).

Duchesne and others have viewed the beginning of the Liber Pontificalis up until the biographies of Pope Felix III ( 483 – 492 ) as the work of a single author, who was a contemporary of Pope Anastasius II ( 496-498 ), relying on Catalogus Liberianus, which in turn draws from the papal catalogue of Hippolytus of Rome, and the Leonine Catalogue, which is no longer extant.

This instrument also found its way to parts of Italy that were under Spanish domination ( especially Sicily and the papal states under the Borgia pope Alexander VI who brought many Catalan musicians to Italy ), where it was known as the viola da mano.

The term " Old Catholic " was first used in 1853 to describe the members of the See of Utrecht who did not recognize any claimed " infallible " papal authority.

The office-holder is Pope Benedict XVI, who was elected in a papal conclave on 19 April 2005.

A similar warning against papal hubris made on this occasion was the traditional exclamation " Annos Petri non videbis ", reminding the newly crowned pope that he would not live to see his rule lasting as long as that of St. Peter, who according to tradition headed the church for 35 years and has thus far been the longest reigning pope in the history of the Catholic Church.

Although the description " servant of the servants of God " was also used by other Church leaders, including St. Augustine and St. Benedict, it was first used extensively as a papal title by Pope St. Gregory the Great, reportedly as a lesson in humility for Patriarch of Constantinople John the Faster, who had assumed the title " Ecumenical Patriarch ".

True to the practice observed in preceding papal elections, the German court nominated another candidate, Cadalus, bishop of Parma, who was proclaimed Pope at the council of Basel under the name of Honorius II.

Leo aroused the hostility of Rome's nobility, who saw the papal post as reserved only for noble candidates.