Gian Pietro Carafa was born near Benevento in 1476 to a powerful Neapolitan family. He became Bishop of Chieti in 1505 and in 1524, with Gaetano of Thiene, founded the Theatines, an order of strict priests named from the Latin name of his see. Merle d’Aubigné, who traced his early friendships with Italian evangelicals, summed up the man he became:

Caraffa, a violent and impetuous man, and afterwards, when pope, under the name of Paul IV., the restorer of the inquisition and of the strictest Roman-catholicism, had had his seasons of struggle and even of faith in the truth.¹ J. H. Merle d’AubignéHistory of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, bk. 7, ch. 20

Made cardinal in 1536, Carafa served on the reform commission that produced the Consilium of 1537, but he distrusted the conciliatory party of Contarini. After the failure at Regensburg in 1541 he persuaded Paul III to reorganize the Roman Inquisition under a commission of cardinals in 1542, and he led it with severity.

Elected pope in May 1555 at seventy-eight, he ruled as he had governed the Inquisition. He confined the Jews of Rome to a ghetto, imprisoned Cardinal Giovanni Morone on suspicion of heresy, and withdrew the legatine powers of Reginald Pole.² In 1559 he issued the first papal Index of Prohibited Books, which condemned the entire works of the Reformers and of Erasmus. When he died on August 18, 1559, the people of Rome broke open the prisons of the Inquisition and toppled his statue on the Capitol.

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