NICHOLAS III. (Giovanni Gaetano), a member of the noble house of Orsini, succeeded John XXL as pope on November 25, 1277. Though his election was doubtless largely due to family influence, he was also personally a man of good endowments, and the record of his brief pontificate has more than one touch fitted to recall the grander manner of some of the greatest popes. In 1278 he extorted from the newly-elected and insecurely seated Rudolph of Hapsburg an absolute cession of the Romagna and of the exarchate of Ravenna, and in the same year he deprived Charles of Anjou of his vicariate of Tuscany; in the following year he compelled Charles to renounce his dignity of senator of Rome also, declaring himself perpetual senator, and his nephew Orso his vicar. He was understood to be planning with Rudolph an entirely new distribution of the thrones of the empire, by which the royal dignity was to be conferred on more than one member of the house of Orsini, when a stroke of apoplexy brought his career to a sudden close on August 22, 1280. Towards the beginning of his reign he repaired and strengthened the Lateran palace, and greatly enlarged the Vatican. For his simoniacal nepotism he has been placed by Dante in the third “bolgia” of the eighth circle of hell (Inf., xix. 31 sqf. The successor of Nicholas III. was Martin IV.