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| Pope Sixtus V |
August 27th marks the anniversary of the death of Pope Sixtus V, who was Pope of the Catholic Church from April 24, 1585 until his death in 1590.
Pope Sixtus V was born Felice Piergentile in Le Grotte (today Grottammare), a comune in the Marche region of Italy. His parents were Piergentile Peretti (nicknamed Peretto, meaning “little pear”) and Mariana da Frontillo, both from the region of Marche. At an early age, Sixtus became a Franciscan friar. He was ordained a priest in 1547 and in 1548 became a magister of the Franciscan order. In 1557 he was appointed Inquisitor of Venice and named Vicar General of the Franciscans in 1566. He was consecrated a bishop in 1567 and made a cardinal by Pope Pius V in 1570, before finally being elected pope on April 24, 1585. He died of malaria five years later on August 27, 1590.
Sixtus V is remembered as one of the most important popes of the Counter Reformation. During his reign as pope he revised the Latin Vulgate; reformed the College of Cardinals; founded the Vatican Printing House; renovated the Lateran Palace; built a hospice for the poor; constructed the first aqueduct in Rome since the end of the Roman Empire; opposed Protestantism; supported the Catholic League of France; strengthened the Inquisition; condemned astrology and magic; beatified St. Simon of Trent; and declared abortion to be an excommunicable crime punishable by death.
Aside from this, Sixtus V has become an important figure among Slavs, who have taken a personal interest in the pope due to his support of the Church of St. Jerome of the Illyrians (today St. Jerome of the Croats) and the College of St. Jerome of the Illyrians (today the Pontifical Croatian College). Sixtus had been the Cardinal Priest of St. Jerome of the Illyrians since 1570, and after he became pope he rebuilt the Church of St. Jerome, which was established as a church for the Dalmatian and Slavic refugees in Rome who had previously fled the Ottoman Turks and as the primary location of the Illyrian College.
Not surprisingly, these facts have led Slavic revisionists to forge history once again and claim that Sixtus V was a Slav, and not an Italian as is universally believed. Also not surprisingly, Serbian revisionists claim he was a Serb, while Croatian revisionists claim he was a Croat.
According to the first and official biography of Pope Sixtus V written by Antonio Maria Graziani (1537-1611), the secretary and original biographer of Pope Sixtus V, whose work was edited by Pope Sixtus himself, both parents of the pope were born in the Marche region of Italy (his father being from the village of Montalto; his mother being from the village of Frontillo), and therefore were of Italian origin. Unfortunately, this has not prevented certain prideful Slavs from creating their own version of history.
The claim that Pope Sixtus V was of Slavic origin is based on the later chronicle of Andrija Zmajevic (1624-1694), a 17th century Slavic writer who worked in the Republic of Venice. Zmajevic – writing several decades after the official papal biography – claimed that Piergentile Peretti, the father of the pope, was born to the Šišić family in the village of Kruševice near Bijela (San Pietro de Albis) in modern-day Montenegro; he supposedly fled to Italy during the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans and then changed his name to Peretti. There is zero historical evidence for any of these claims; the story was entirely unknown prior to the publication of this chronicle, and is the pure fanciful invention of Zmajevic.
Later Slavic revisionists, relying on Zmajevic's fables, adopted these same unfounded claims, adding their own twist and details to the story at whim. The 18th/19th century Serbian Orthodox priest Savo Nakićenović, for example, claimed that the father of Pope Sixtus was actually born to the Serbian Svilanović family, while other revisionists claim that Pope Sixtus himself was born in Montenegro and raised in the Eastern Orthodox religion before converting to Catholicism and moving to Italy (an entirely baseless claim without historical foundation or evidence).
These and countless other tales are the delusional fantasies of Slavic extremists and revisionists, who are painfully desperate to attach themselves to histories, accomplishments and personages which do not belong to them. Pope Sixtus V is yet another man in the long list of men who have fallen victim to Slavic revisionism, being kidnapped by the Slavs in their falsified rewriting of history.
See also:
Artists, Navigators, Popes, Scientists... “Croats”
Ivan Golub Claims Pope Sixtus V was “Croatian”
The Unfounded “Croatian” Origin of Pope Sixtus V
