Pope Urban VIII

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Urban VIII
Image:UrbanVIII.jpg
Birth name	Maffeo Barberini
Papacy began	August 6, 1623
Papacy ended	July 29, 1644
Predecessor	Gregory XV
Successor	Innocent X
Born	April 1568 Florence, Italy
Died	July 29, 1644 Rome, Italy
Other Popes named Urban

Pope Urban VIII (April 1568 – July 29, 1644), born Maffeo Barberini, was Pope from 1623 to 1644.

He was born in 1568 to an important Florentine family. Through the influence of an uncle, who had become apostolic protonotary, he, while still a young man, received various promotions from Sixtus V and Gregory XIV. By Clement VIII he was himself made protonotary and nuncio to the French court; Paul V also employed him in a similar capacity, afterwards raising him to the cardinalate and making him the papal legate to Bologna. On 6 August 1623, he was chosen successor to Gregory XV.

His pontificate, covering as it did twenty-one years of the Thirty Years' War, was an eventful one, and the ultimate result of that great struggle was largely determined by Urban's policy, which was aimed less at the restoration of Catholicism in Europe than at such an adjustment of the balance of parties as might best favour his own independence and strength as a temporal power in Italy. In 1626 the duchy of Urbino was incorporated into the papal dominions, and in 1627 when the direct male line of the Gonzagas in Mantua became extinct, he favoured the succession of the Duke of Nevers against the claims of the Habsburgs, whose preponderance he dreaded.

He was the last Pope to extend the papal territory, and fortified Castelfranco on the Mantuan frontier. In Rome he greatly strengthened the castle of Sant'Angelo. For the purpose of making cannon and Vatican decoration, massive tubular girders of bronze were pillaged from the portico of that rare intact surviving temple from Roman empire, the Pantheon, leading to a famous quote quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini, "what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did." He also established an arsenal in the Vatican, as well as an arms factory at Tivoli, and fortifying the harbour of Civitavecchia. It was during his pontificate that Galileo was summoned to Rome in 1633 to recant his beliefs. On the other hand, he expended vast papal funds to bring polymaths like Athanasius Kircher to Rome, and patronized art on a grand scale, including painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, architects Bernini and Borromini who helped build the Palazzo Barberini, the college of the Propaganda, the Fontana del Tritone in Piazza Barberini, the Vatican cathedra and other prominent structures in the city. Pietro da Cortona embellished the gran salon of his family palace with an apotheotic allegory of the triumph of the Barberini.

Image:Urbano VIII.jpg

Styles of Pope Urban VII
Image:Emblem of the Papacy.svg
Reference style	His Holiness
Spoken style	Your Holiness
Religious style	Holy Father
Posthumous style	none

He was the last to practice nepotism on a grand scale: various members of his family were enormously enriched by him, so that it seemed to contemporaries as if he were establishing a Barberini dynasty. He canonized Elizabeth of Portugal and Andrew Corsini and issued the Papal bull of canonization for Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, who had been canonized by his predecessor, Gregory XV. Urban VIII was a clever writer of Latin verse, and a collection of Scriptural paraphrases as well as original hymns of his composition has been frequently reprinted. His death (July 29 1644) is said to have been hastened by chagrin at the result of the First War of Castro, a war he had undertaken against Odoardo Farnese, the Duke of Parma. Because of the costs incurred by the city of Rome to finance this war, Urban VIII became immensely unpopular. On his death, the bust of Urban that lay beside the Conservator’s Palace on the Capitoline Hill was rapidly destroyed by an enraged crowd, and only a quick-thinking priest saved the sculpture of Urban belonging to the Jesuits from a similar fate.<ref> Ernesta Chinazzi, Sede Vacante per la morte del Papa Urbano VIII Barberini e conclave di Innocenzo X Pamfili, Rome, 1904, 13.</ref> He was succeeded by Innocent X.