He had been born about 1160. His family were nobles of the Campagna, whose castles of Anagni and Segni dominated the “Appian Way,” the main Roman road between Rome and Naples. They early chose to make a priest of him. Accordingly he studied first at Rome, then at the Universities of Bologna where was the great law school, and finally at the University of Paris, the centre of theological study, the “queen science” of the Middle Ages. Paris he especially loved, like so many before and after him, and in the years of his power we shall see him make great play with the “French” (that is the North French, as we would say), those unequalled weapons ready to the hand of a thirteenth century pope. In 1190, when he was only 30, his uncle, Pope Clement III, made him cardinal—an example of favour promoting ability faster than it would rise by itself and thereby giving to the able man room for his powers, quite the reverse of the conventional use of favour to bolster up incompetence. Celestine III’s election forced the newly-made cardinal into retirement, for Celestine was of the Orsini family, hereditary enemies to Innocent’s mother’s people, the Scotti. In his retirement he wrote, first on “Despising the World” and the “Miseries of Mankind,” and second on mystic theological symbolism, with such rhetoric and such a jungle of quotations that his withdrawal from the administrative work of the Papal Curia rather increased his fame than lessened it, by giving him opportunity to exercise his pen on these mediæval stock themes. On the very day of Celestine’s death he was elected Pope while still only in deacon’s orders. Within two months after his consecration, already he had two agents in Languedoc to take action against the heretics there.