Celestine III

Giacinto Bobone had been a cardinal deacon for forty-seven years without ever being ordained priest, and he was around eighty-five when the cardinals elected him in April 1191. He had a long memory: as a young man at the council of Sens in 1141 he had spoken up for Peter Abelard against Bernard of Clairvaux, and he had served as legate in Spain, where he did more lasting work than he ever managed as pope.

He was ordained priest, consecrated, and the next day crowned Henry VI emperor, with a German army outside the walls and no realistic alternative. Henry then took Sicily, uniting the kingdom of the south with the empire of the north and encircling the papal states, exactly the outcome three popes had fought to prevent.

Worse followed. Richard I of England, returning from the Third Crusade, was seized in Austria and handed to Henry VI, who held a crusader under papal protection for over a year and extracted an enormous ransom. Celestine excommunicated Duke Leopold and threatened France with interdict, but he never brought the emperor to book, and contemporaries thought him feeble for it.

He died on 8 January 1198, in his nineties. The cardinals elected a thirty-seven-year-old canon lawyer, Lotario dei Conti di Segni, the same day.