Celestine III., Giacinto Bobone Orsini, of that noble race, was elected Pope 30th March 1191, being then only a deacon, received priest’s orders on the 13th of April, ruled the church six years, nine months, aad nine days (though believed to have been ninety when elected), died 8th January 1193, and was buried at the Lateran. He crowned the Emperor Henry VI. on the day after his election with a ceremonial symbolizing his absolute supremacy, as described by Roger Hoveden, who is believed (more reasonably as it would seem) by Baronius, but discredited by Natalis Alexander. He subsequently excommunicated the same Henry for wrongfully keeping Richard of England in prison. In 1192 he confirmed the statutes of the Teutonic Order of Knights. He would have resigned the Papacy, and recommended a successor shortly before his death, bat was not suffered to do so by the cardinals.

Celestine IV., Godfrey Castiglioni of Milan, a nephew of Urban III., became a monk at Hautecombe in Savoy, there wrote a history of Scotland, and was elected Pope by seven cardinals only, in the midst of troubles caused by the vicinity and violence of the Emperor Frederick IL, on the 22d September 1241. He occupied the throne only seventeen days, died, before consecration, on the 8th October 1241, and was buried at the Vatican.

Celestine V. was known before his election as Peter di Morone. Born in 1215, the son of a peasant in the Neapolitan district, named Angelario, he became a Benedictine m >nk at Faifoli in the diocese of Benevento when he was seventeen. He showed from the first an extraordinary disposition to asceticism and solitude, and in 1239 retired to a solitary cavern on the mountain Morone, whence his name. Five years later he left this retreat, and betook himself, with two companions, to a similar cave on the Mountain of Majella in the Abruzzi, where he lived as strictly as was possible according to the example of St John the Baptist. Terrible accounts are given of the severity of his penitential practices. While living in this manner he founded, in 1244, the order subsequently called after him Celestines. (See Celestines.) The cardinals assembled at Perugia after the death of Nicholas IV., and after long dissensions and difficulties agreed as a means of escaping from them to elect the hermit Pietro di Morone. When sent for he obstinately refused to accept the Papacy, and even, as Petrarch says, attempted flight, till he was at length persuaded by a deputation of cardinals accompanied by the kings of Naples and Hungary. Elected 7th July 1294, he was crowned in the city of Aquila in the Abruzzi, 29th August. He issued two decrees,—one confirming that of Gregory X., which orders the shutting of the cardinals in conclave; the second declaring the right of any Pope to abdicate the Papacy,—a right he, at the end of five months and eight days, proceeded himself to exercise at Naples on the 13th December 1294. He did one other thing which may be noted, because it seems to be the only instance known to the church in which such a thing occurred. He empowered one Francis of Apt, a Franciscan friar, to confer priest’s orders on Lodovico, son of Charles, king of Sicily,—a fact which seems to have escaped the notice of Bingham, who says that such a thing was never done. In the formal instrument of his renunciation he recites as the causes moving him to the step, “the desire for humility, for a purer life, for a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquillity of his former life;” and having divested himself of every outward symbol of dignity, he retired to his old solitude. He was not allowed to remain there, however. His successor, Boniface VIII., sent for him, and finally, despite desperate attempts of the late Pope to escape, got him into his hands, and imprisoned him in the castle of Fumone near Ferentino in Campagna, where, after languishing for ten months in that infected air, he died on the 19th May 1296. He was buried at Ferentino, but his body was subsequently removed to Aquila. Many Dantescan commentators and scholars have thought that the poet stigmatized Celestine V. in the enigmatical verse which speaks of him “Che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto.” Recent opinion on the point more reasonably rejects this interpretation. Celestine V., like the first of the name, is recognized by the church as a saint.

After the death of the founder the order was favoured and privileged by Benedict XI., and rapidly spread through Italy, Germany, Flanders, and France, where they were received by Philip the Fair in 1300. Subsequently the French Celestines, with the consent of the Italian superiors of the order, and of Pope Martin V. in 1427, obtained the privilege of making new constitutions for themselves, which they did in the 17th century in a series of regulations accepted by the provincial chapter in 1667. At that time the French congregation of the order was composed of twenty-one monasteries, the head of which was that of Paris, and was governed by a Provincial with the authority of General. Paul V. was a notable benefactor of the order. But in consequence of later political changes and events the order has been dissolved.

According to their special constitutions the Celestines were bound to say matins in the cfioir at two o’clock in the morning, and always to abstain from eating meat, save in illness. The specialities of their rule with regard to fasting would be long and tedious to recount. It cannot ba said that they are more severe than those of sundry other congregations, though much more so than is required by the old Benedictine rule. But in reading their minute directions for divers degrees of abstinence on various days, it is impossible to avoid being struck by the conviction that the great object of the framers of these rules, beyond the general purpose of ensuring an ascetic mode of life, was to create a speciality, to make a distinguishing difference between what “our” order does and what others do.

The Celestines wore a white woollen cassock bound with a linen band, and a leathern girdle of the same colour, with a scapulary unattached to the body of the dress, and a black hood. It was not permitted to them to wear any shirt save of serge. Their dress in short was very like that of the Cistercians. But it is a tradition in the order that in the time of the founder they wore a coarse brown cloth. The church and monastery of St Pietro in Montorio originally belonged to the Celestines in Rome; but they were turned out of it by Sixtus IV. to make way for Franciscans, receiving from the Pope in exchange the Church of St Eusebius with the adjacent mansion for a monastery.

The order of Celestines has had its special historians, as Becquet, author of a history of the Celestines of France (Paris, 1719), and in the great collection of the Bollandists, vol. iii., under the month of May. But the order does not seem to have been fruitful of men of much mark; nor has it ever attained in the annals of Europe, or even of the church, a position of such importance as most of its rival societies have reached.