Pope John XIV
?–984 CE · Pavia
John XIV, born Pietro Canepanova, was bishop of Pavia and chancellor to Emperor Otto II, who installed him as pope. When Otto died in 983, John lost his imperial protector. The antipope Boniface VII, returning from Constantinople with Byzantine backing, seized Rome, imprisoned John in the Castel Sant'Angelo, and let him die there in 984—whether by starvation or violence is unclear. His brief, tragic pontificate exemplifies how thoroughly the tenth-century papacy had become a prize contested between imperial and Roman aristocratic factions, the pope often powerless before them.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →
Pavia
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Pavia
Pavia, on the Ticino in Lombardy, northern Italy, was the Roman town of Ticinum and served as capital of the Lombard kingdom from 572 to 774. Its church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro is said to hold the tombs of St Augustine and of the philosopher Boethius, who according to tradition was imprisoned and executed near the city around 524. The university, founded in 1361 under the Visconti, became a long-standing centre of medicine and science. German Jewish families settled in Pavia from 1389, and the jurist Joseph Colon spent his last years and died there around 1480; the community was ordered out of the city in 1597.
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Pope John XIV’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Pope Gregory VI, Pope John XIX, Pope Sergius IV, Pope John XVIII, Pope John XVII, Pope John XV, Pope Benedict VII
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Pope John XIV’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.