NICHOLAS III, Pope. - Giovanni Gaetano, son of Matteo Rosso Orsini and of Perna Caetani, cardinal deacon of St. Nicholas in Carcere. Born in the second decade of the 13th century, elected pope on 25 Nov. 1277 at Viterbo, successor of John XXI. He set out to keep the authority of the Roman Church high, holding it above the opposing factions that were tearing the Italian cities apart, and he aimed at conducting a national policy to give order and peace to the whole peninsula.
Because the interference of Charles of Anjou was a cause of rivalry, he arranged that the vicariate of Tuscany, which the latter held in the name of the Empire, be taken from him, and through Cardinal Latino Malabranca, his nephew, he established peace in Florence (1280). From Rudolf of Habsburg he obtained recognition of the rights that the Roman Church had over Romagna, and he sent there as rector his nephew Bertoldo Orsini. He favored the marriage between Charles Martel (cf. Dante, Paradiso, VIII, 49 ff.; IX, 1-12), nephew of Charles of Anjou, and Clementia, daughter of Rudolf of Habsburg, with the aim of eliminating every reason for jealousy between the two sovereigns. In order to establish stable order amid the conflicting tendencies of the Roman families and people, he willed that at the end of the decade the office of senator should not be renewed for King Charles, but that it should be conferred on himself, and he established that in the future it should be exercised by one or two senators each year (16 Sept. 1278). He loved to build both in the Vatican Basilica, where he had been archpriest, and at the Lateran, where he restored the patriarchate and rebuilt the chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum. His favor toward his own in distributing ecclesiastical and civil offices to them, in order to use them in carrying out his designs, brought him the accusation of nepotism and simony, of which Dante made himself an impartial echo (Inferno, XIX). He died of apoplexy at Soriano on 22 Aug. 1280.