The only Portuguese pope was killed when his private study's ceiling collapsed
John XXI wanted peace and quiet for his medical studies, so he had a private apartment added to the papal palace at Viterbo. In May 1277, while he worked there alone, the ceiling came down. Dragged alive from the rubble, he died six days later, possibly one of the earliest recorded cases of crush syndrome.
He was born Pedro Julião in Lisbon sometime between 1210 and 1220, son of Julião Pais, chancellor to the first Portuguese kings, and Mor Mendes. After the cathedral school in Lisbon he studied at Paris, or perhaps Montpellier, taking in medicine, theology, logic, physics, metaphysics and Aristotle. He is traditionally identified with Peter of Spain, the logician and medical writer whose Summulae Logicales served as the standard university textbook of Aristotelian logic for some three hundred years. If the identification holds, he is the only physician ever to become pope.
Back in Portugal he advised Afonso III on church affairs, became prior of Guimarães and archdeacon of Vermoim, lost a bid to be bishop of Lisbon, and ran its cathedral school instead. He then became physician to Gregory X, who made him cardinal bishop of Tusculum in 1273 after he declined the archbishopric of Braga.
Elected on 8 September 1276 following the death of Adrian V, he quickly scrapped a rule from the Second Council of Lyon that locked cardinals away during papal elections and cut their food and wine if they dawdled. Cardinal Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, his eventual successor as Nicholas III, dominated much of the reign, but John still pursued a crusade, union with the Eastern church and peace among Christian kingdoms. He excommunicated Afonso III for meddling in bishops' elections and sent envoys to Kublai Khan.
Rumour after his death painted the scholar-pope as a necromancer, a slur often aimed at learned medieval pontiffs, and some claimed divine judgement had halted a heretical treatise. Dante nevertheless seated Pietro Spano among the great religious thinkers in the Sphere of the Sun in Paradiso. His tomb remains in Viterbo cathedral; in 2000 Lisbon's city council paid for a new monument in lioz stone topped with his original effigy.
Source: Pope John XXI
