March 12, 417: Pope Innocent I dies. His claims for the Roman see's supremacy went farther than any of his predecessors, as he asserted Rome's reach extended to the whole church.
March 12, 604: Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604, dies. Setting a high mark for the medieval papacy, he defended the primacy of the chair of Peter against even the smallest slight. He is also one of the four great Latin doctors of the church (along with Ambrose,Augustine, and Jerome), and upon his death, he was named a saint by popular acclaim.
March 12, 1088: Odo of Lagery is elected pope and takes the name Urban II. Though he had some trouble taking his office (Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV supported an antipope, Clement III), he made a name for himself by proclaiming the first Crusade in 1095. His phrase "God wills it" in that proclamation became the battle cry for Christendom (see issue 40: The Crusades).
March 12, 1455: Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini (who would later become Pope Pius II) writes a letter to Cardinal Juan Carvagal of Spain, reporting "a marvelous man seen at Frankfurt" (Johannes Gutenberg) who was allegedly producing printed Bibles. Gutenberg was working on producing the first complete printed Bible, the famous 42-line "Gutenberg Bible." Piccolomini did not report seeing a finished product yet, but he was very impressed with them, calling the script "very neat and legible, not at all difficult to read—your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses."
March 12, 1685: Anglican bishop and philosopher George Berkeley is born in Ireland. As mechanistic science began to gain converts, Berkeley argued that the "natural" laws and processes are simply the mental phenomena of God and are not produced by an independent material reality like matter, force, space, and time. Berkeley was also a strong proponent of missions to the American colonies.
