page_title: Jacob Palaeologus
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Jacob Palaeologus / Life
caption_attribution_description: This file has been extracted from another file: El Greco 050.jpg
context_page_description: Jacob Palaeologus or Giacomo da Chio was a Dominican friar who renounced his religious vows and became an antitrinitarian theologian. An indefatigable polemicist against both Calvinism and Papal Power, Palaeologus cultivated a wide range of high-placed contacts and correspondents in the imperial, royal, and aristocratic households in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire; while formulating and propagating a radically heterodox version of Christianity, in which Jesus Christ was not to be invoked in worship, and where purported irreconcilable differences between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were rejected as spurious fabrications. He was continually pursued by his many enemies, repeatedly escaping through his many covert supporters.
  Palaeologus played an active role in the high politics of European religion and diplomacy over a period of twenty years before he lost imperial favour; and having been extradited to the Papal States, was executed for heresy by the Roman Inquisition.
context_section_description: Palaeologus was born at the Genoese colony on Chios, one of the Aegean Islands near the coast of Anatolia, of a Greek father and an Italian mother. Chios had been, since 1347, ruled by the Republic of Genoa and by the 16th century it was a fief of the Giustiniani family. The young man attached himself to Vincenzo Giustiniani (later Master General of the Dominican Order) and entered into the Dominican Order. He was educated in Dominican schools at Genoa and Ferrara, and later at the University of Bologna. He adopted the name "Jacob Palaeologus" and claimed kinship with the former Palaiologos emperors of Byzantium. Although in later life he repeatedly defended this claim, no independent sources survive that support it.
  By 1554, Palaeologus was back east in the Dominican convent of St Peter in Pera, the Latin Christian quarter of Istanbul, and it was here that he developed a lifelong adherence to antitrinitarian teachings of Michael Servetus, and composed a defence of Servetus' doctrines against their denunciation by John Calvin; in consequence of which Servetus had been condemned to death in Geneva in 1553. In 1556 Palaeologus returned to Chios and actively supported the secular Genoese commissioners and the agents of the Holy Roman Emperor against the authority of the bishop of Chios; this led to his being denounced to the Inquisition and arrested in Genoa in 1557. In 1558, he escaped to Istanbul, but was rearrested in Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and brought to the prison of the Roman Inquisition under the personal investigation of the Grand Inquisitor, Michele Ghislieri (a fellow Dominican friar, later Pope Pius V). For the rest of his life, Palaeologus maintained a fierce opposition to the Inquisition, and a particular enmity for Ghislieri.
  At the death of Pope Paul IV in 1559, the Roman mob looted buildings and burned records. Palaeologus escaped from prison when a mob stormed the headquarters of the Roman Inquisition and released inmates. Although evidence against him was destroyed, he was subsequently tried in absentia by a Roman Inquisition tribunal, convicted, sentenced to death in 1561, and burned in effigy. Palaeologus escaped initially to France, where, in 1562, he unsuccessfully petitioned Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, the papal legate, to have the Inquisition heresy conviction overturned. Then later in 1562, realising that he was also not safe or welcome among Reformed Protestants because of his virulent denunciations of Calvinism, he offered help to Andreas Dudith, Bishop of Knin and the imperial representative at the Council of Trent. Palaeologus advised Dudith in the presentation to the Council of the imperial arguments for permitting Utraquism, the distribution of both bread and wine to the laity at Holy Communion; and in exchange Dudith attempted to have Palaeologus' heresy conviction by the Inquisition overturned by the Ecumenical Council, stirring up in the process a major disruption to the Council's proceedings. Eventually in 1563, Palaeologus was granted imperial asylum in Prague; and when the new Emperor Maximilian II succeeded in 1564, Palaeologus advanced in the imperial favour. Following the example of his patron Dudith, Palaeologus renounced his religious vows, marrying the daughter of a leading Prague reformer. In 1569, Palaeologus was proposed to the emperor as the Utraquist candidate to the office of Archbishop of Prague. This was however blocked by Ghislieri, his sworn enemy, who was now pope; and who eventually contrived to have Palaeologus expelled from the imperial dominions to Poland in 1571, where he was reunited in Kraków with Dudith, who was now the imperial representative to the Kingdom of Poland. Palaeologus was openly advancing antitrinitarian views but became embroiled in a bitter controversy with Gregory Paul of Brzeziny and the Ecclesia Minor over the Polish antitrinitarians' condemnation of Christian service in the military.
  Having acquired enemies in Catholic Rome, Calvinist Geneva, and Arian Raków in Lesser Poland; Palaeologus sought in 1573 a more congenial home in the Unitarian Church of
caption: The Grand Inquisitor, Michele Ghislieri (later Pope Pius V); condemned Palaeologus to death in absentia, and remained his lifelong enemy
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