Word: vii
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Beginning in 896, there was a veritable epidemic of papal brevity: four Popes in 20 months. Boniface VI, who died after 15 days, was a rascal who had been dismissed from several ecclesiastical offices. His successor, Stephen VI (or VII), had the decomposing body of his predecessor-but-one, Formosus I, disinterred, clothed in papal robes, and set on the throne in St. Peter's; whereupon Stephen called a synod to "depose" him, had the dead man's blessing forefinger cut off, and the corpse flung into the Tiber...
...backed candidates for the papacy with their own candidates, with disastrous results. Benedict V was deposed by the Emperor in 964 after a month. Benedict VI, the Emperor's papal candidate, was thrown into prison in 974 by the Crescentii. Then the family set up an antiPope, Boniface VII, who had Benedict strangled in prison...
...Marcellus II, who died 22 days after his election in 1555, it was said in his epitaph that "he was destined only to appear." Of all the short-lived Popes, Urban VII was most promising. Elected in 1590, he immediately began reforming the Papal States and promoting public works. But the day after his election Urban caught malaria and died in eleven days...
Fine actors, like fine singers, can be divided into recital artists and operatic rafter ringers. McCowen, 53, with his refined emotional pitch, his dryly witty intelligence and his meticulous craft, is one of the recitalists. He has had showpiece roles-notably the title role in Hadrian VII and the psychiatrist in the original London production of Equus-but even these called more for finesse than fire...
...author traces the tumult of the period by following the career of a great feudal lord, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, the seigneur of some 150 towns and villages in Picardy. He was born in 1340, and he died in captivity in 1397, having been made a prisoner by the Turks. Coucy was the best of his kind, an able diplomat, a shrewd military leader and a man of good luck. His campaigns took him to England (where he married King Edward's daughter), Tunisia, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary. He died at century's end, appropriately for Tuchman...