A papal bull is a type of public decree, letters patent, or charter issued by a pope of the Roman Catholic Church. It is named after the leaden seal (bulla) that was traditionally appended to the end in order to authenticate it.
Pope Pius II, born Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini was Pope from 19 August 1458 to his death in 1464. He was born at Corsignano in the Sienese territory of a noble but impoverished family. His longest and most enduring work is the story of his life, the Commentaries, which is the only autobiography ever written by a reigning pope.
The Crusades were a series of religious wars sanctioned by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The most commonly known Crusades are the campaigns in the Eastern Mediterranean aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule, but the term "Crusades" is also applied to other church-sanctioned campaigns. These were fought for a variety of reasons including the suppression of paganism and heresy, the resolution of conflict among rival Roman Catholic groups, or for political and territorial advantage. At the time of the early Crusades the word did not exist, only becoming the leading descriptive term around 1760.
Pius issued the bull at the end of the Congress of Mantua and declared that on every Sunday at mass, God's help should be invoked to help the crusaders.[1] A plenary indulgence was granted to those who, for eight months, took part in the crusade and to those convents and religious orders that funded at their own expense one soldier for every ten of their members.[1]
The Council of Mantua of 1459, or Congress of Mantua, was a religious meeting convoked by Pope Pius II, who had been elected to the Papacy in the previous year and was engaged in planning war against the Ottoman Turks, who had taken Constantinople in 1453. His call went out to the rulers of Europe, in an agonized plea to turn from internecine warfare to face Christendom's common enemy.
In the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, an indulgence is "a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins". It may reduce the "temporal punishment for sin" after death, in the state or process of purification called Purgatory.
Pius also set 1 April 1460 as the date for the departure of the crusading expedition and declared:
...following the custom of our predecessors, who proclaimed general expeditions either to liberate the Holy Land, or against other unbelievers, we declare a general war and expedition against the very perfidious Turks, the most vicious of our God's enemies, a war that is to be taken up and fought by all Christ's faithful over a period of three years, and to which each and every Christian alike is summoned to contribute according to their ability.[2]
The Holy Land is an area roughly located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that also includes the Eastern Bank of the Jordan River. Traditionally, it is synonymous both with the biblical Land of Israel and with the region of Palestine. The term "Holy Land" usually refers to a territory roughly corresponding to the modern State of Israel, the Palestinian territories, western Jordan, and parts of southern Lebanon and of southwestern Syria. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all regard it as holy.
Notes
1 2 Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, Volume III (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1894), p. 98.
↑ Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 78.
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