Cosimo de Megliorati was born to a humble family in Naples around the year 1339. He was educated in several Italian cities, then went on to teach jurisprudence in Perugia and Padua before moving onto Rome. He was welcomed into the Curia by Urban VI soon afterward, who promptly sent him as a papal collector to England for the next decade. After returning, he was named Bishop of Bologna in 1386, then Archbishop of Ravenna a year later, a see which he held for the next 12 years. In the meantime, he was named Cardinal-Priest of Santa Croce (Holy Cross) in Jerusalem in 1389, and became renowned for his holiness and education.

Pope Innocent VII was elected on October 17, 1404 in the thick of the Western Schism. Prior to the election, all cardinals made a 15th-Century pinky swear to stop at nothing to resolve the pope-antipope situation, even if it meant resigning from office. Innocent took the oath as serious as anyone. He even took steps to convene a general council to sort things out, but the mess in Rome prevented any such thing from happening.

Soon after his election, a group of Romans revolted against the pope’s temporal authority, prompting Innocent to call King Ladislaus of Naples for help. Ladislaus was happy to help, but (surprise, surprise) wanted his palms greased in return. When Innocent’s offer wasn’t to his liking, the king, who really just wanted to rule over Rome and the pope’s other territories, tried a revolution of his own the next year. Heavy sigh. Ladislaus relented only after Innocent put him in ecclesiastical time-out, excommunicating him and his ilk in 1406. Innocent died in Rome just weeks after his two-year anniversary as pope.

Despite his short reign, Innocent VII’s love of the arts make him best known for wishing to restore Rome’s standing as the intellectual and cultural titan it once was. The Roman University, founded by Boniface VIII, had all but fallen apart in the tumultuous decades between Boniface and Innocent VII. So, in a bull dated just two months before his death, Innocent noted his intention to bring to town the best scholars in canon and civil law, medicine, rhetoric, philosophy, logic, and Greek language and literature, thus restoring the university and the city as a whole to much of its former glory.

The guiding light for his decision was the understanding that, “Every kind of wisdom and learning took birth in Rome, or was received in Rome from the Greeks. While other cities teach foreign sciences, Rome teaches only that which is her own.” When in Rome...

Fun Fact: Innocent VII had but one blemish on an otherwise respectable pontificate: He made the mistake of elevating his unruly nephew, Ludovico Migliorati, to the cardinalate. Thanks to his newfound red hat, Ludovico took matters into his own hands when the Romans rebelled against Uncle Innocent. As several key Roman leaders left a conference with the pope, Ludovico had them kidnapped and brought to his house, where he had them killed. Not great for business. Innocent, though definitely not at fault for his nephew’s brutal act, was forced to flee to Viterbo for several months as a result of the ensuing outrage. Somebody’s out of the will.

In a truly monumental occurrence, the first recorded consumption of whiskey happened in Ireland in 1405, where it had been distilled (fittingly) by Irish Catholic monks.