Pope Clement Vii Quotes

Unfortunately for Henry, Pope Clement VII was at the time imprisoned and under the direct control of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was Queen Catherine’s nephew and unsurprisingly was ardently opposed to Henry’s attempt to dissolve the marriage with his aunt. Henry was now compelled to ask Wolsey to effectuate a solution, and Wolsey obliged by convening an ecclesiastical court to resolve the annulment question. It remains unlikely that the papal legate ever was empowered by the Vatican to grant the annulment. The Pope rejected the authority of such a court to grant Henry his annulment and ruled that a decision would be given only in Rome, where Henry’s hand-picked jury could not pre-ordain a result in his favor. But before the Pope issued such a decision, Queen Catherine’s polite, respectful, formidable and defiant plea before the court secured for itself a place in the legends.  She played deftly the part of a woman wronged and scorned by a philandering, lying husband. It also earned Catherine permanent isolation from the King and her daughter Mary. Henry VIII’s means of extortion were that only if Catherine would accept that her marriage to the King was invalid, she might regain her access to Mary and vice versa. Both refused. Catherine died in 1536, probably of cancer.

A few contemporaries referred to his mother’s slave status, but thanks to chance and contingency Alessandro was able to trump his illegitimate status and rise to the highest level of society, just as his relative Giulia de’Medici, Pope Clement VII, had done before him.

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

Even the Vatican, probably the second most active center of cryptanalysis, would send Soro seemingly impenetrable messages that had fallen into its hands. In 1526, Pope Clement VII sent him two encrypted messages, and both were returned having been successfully cryptanalyzed.

She was looking for a certain toxin Leng had been fascinated with, found in the death cap mushroom, Amanita phalloides. The toxins of that infamous species of mushroom were thermostable: they could be cooked yet remain deadly. In addition, the mushroom had a pleasant taste resembling beef broth, allowing food to be heavily laced with it yet take on no bitter or unusual flavor. But what primarily attracted Leng was the fact that the mushroom’s deadly effects took days to appear—much too late to purge the stomach with an emetic. By the time you felt sick enough to realize something was seriously wrong, you were already a dead person. You could ingest a fatal dose and remain unaware of it for as long as two weeks—until your liver began inexorably to fail. For this reason, the death cap had been used as a poison for thousands of years, playing a role in the demise of, among others, the Roman emperor Claudius, Pope Clement VII, and the Austrian emperor Charles VI. Once the poison finally manifested, it made itself felt in a most unpleasant manner indeed. An antidote was not developed until some time into the twenty-first century. Prior to that, nothing could save the victim except immediate liver transplantation.