Pope Innocent III. Born Lotario dei Conte di Segni, Innocent assumed the papacy on January 8, 1198, before his fortieth birthday, and ruled over the Church with all the force of his outsized personality until his death in 1216. He was a great Church reformer, the scourge of those monarchs (like King John of England) who did not fully respect the authority of the Holy See, and a wholehearted advocate of the Church’s militant mission in the East. Encouragingly for the Christians, Saladin died at dawn on March 3, 1193, following a “bilious fever” that lasted for around a fortnight.
