(1765); Ranke, Popes (Eng. trans, by Austin), ii. 330 seq., iii. 72 seq.; V. Reumont, Gesch. der Stadt Rom, iii. 2, 605 seq.; Brosch, Gesch. des Kirchenstaates (1880), i. 351 seq. The Venetian version of the quarrel with the pope was written by Sarpi (subsequently translated
into English, London, 1626); see also Cornet, Paolo V. et la repub. veneta (Vienna, 1859); and Trollope, Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar (London, 1860). An extensive biography will be found in Herzog-Hauck, Realencylkopädie, s.v. “Paul V.”
(T. F. C.)
PAUL I. (1754–1801), emperor of Russia, was born in the Summer Palace in St Petersburg on the 1st of October (N.S.)—the 20th of September by the Russian calendar—1754. He was the son of the grand duchess, afterwards empress, Catherine. According to a scandalous report his father was not her husband
the grand duke Peter, afterwards emperor, but one Colonel
Soltykov. There is probably no foundation for this story
except gossip, and the cynical malice of Catherine. During
his infancy he was taken from the care of his mother by the
empress Elizabeth, whose ill-judged fondness is believed to
have injured his health. As a boy he was reported to be
intelligent and good-looking. His extreme ugliness in later
life is attributed to an attack of typhus, from which he suffered
in 1771. It has been asserted that his mother hated him,
and was only restrained from putting him to death while he was
still a boy by the fear of what the consequences of another
palace crime might be to herself. Lord Buckinghamshire,
the English ambassador at her court, expressed this opinion
as early as 1764. In fact, however, the evidence goes to show
that the empress, who was at all times very fond of children,
treated Paul with kindness. He was put in charge of a trustworthy
governor, Nikita Panin, and of competent tutors.
Her dissolute court was a bad home for a boy who was to be
the sovereign, but Catherine took great trouble to arrange
his first marriage with Wilhelmina of Darmstadt, who was
renamed in Russia Nathalie Alexéevna, in 1773. She allowed
him to attend the council in order that he might be trained
for his work as emperor. His tutor Poroshin complained of
him that he was “always in a hurry,” acting and speaking
without thinking. After his first marriage he began to engage
in intrigues. He suspected his mother of intending to kill
him, and once openly accused her of causing broken glass to
be mingled with his food. Yet, though his mother removed
him from the council and began to keep him at a distance,
her actions were not unkind. The use made of his name by the
rebel Pugachev in 1775 tended no doubt to render his position
more difficult. When his wife died in childbirth in that year
his mother arranged another marriage with the beautiful Sophia
Dorothea of Württemberg, renamed in Russia Maria Feodorovna.
On the birth of his first child in 1777 she gave him an estate,
Pavlovsk. Paul and his wife were allowed to travel through
western Europe in 1781–1782. In 1783 the empress gave
him another estate at Gatchina, where he was allowed to
maintain a brigade of soldiers whom he drilled on the Prussian
model. As Paul grew his character became steadily degraded.
He was not incapable of affection nor without generous impulses,
but he was flighty, passionate in a childish way, and when
angry capable of cruelty. The affection he had for his wife
turned to suspicion. He fell under the influence of two of
his wife’s maids of honour in succession, Nelidov and Lapuknin,
and of his barber, a Turkish slave named Koroïssov. For
some years before Catherine died it was obvious that he was
hovering on the border of insanity. Catherine contemplated
setting him aside in favour of his son Alexander, to whom she
was attached. Paul was aware of his mother’s half-intention—for
it does not appear to have been more—and became increasingly
suspicious of his wife and children, whom he rendered
perfectly miserable. No definite step was taken to set him
aside, probably because nothing would be effective short of
putting him to death, and Catherine shrank from the extreme
course. When she was seized with apoplexy he was free to
destroy the will by which she left the crown to Alexander, if
any such will was ever made. The four and a half years of
Paul’s rule in Russia were unquestionably the reign of a madman.
The excitement of the change from his retired life in Gatchina
to omnipotence drove him below the line of insanity. His
conduct of the foreign affairs of Russia plunged the country
first into the second coalition against France in 1778, and then
into the armed neutrality against Great Britain in 1801. In
both cases he acted on personal pique, quarrelling with France
because he took a sentimental interest in the Order of Malta,
and then with England because he was flattered by Napoleon.
But his political follies might have been condoned. What
was unpardonable was that he treated the people about him
like a shah, or one of the craziest of the Roman emperors. He
began by repealing Catherine’s law which exempted the free
classes of the population of Russia from corporal punishment
and mutilation. Nobody could feel himself safe from exile
or brutal ill-treatment at any moment. If Russia had possessed
any political institution except the tsardom he would have been
put under restraint. But the country was not sufficiently
civilized to deal with Paul as the Portuguese had dealt with
Alphonso VI., a very similar person, in 1667. In Russia as in
medieval Europe there was no safe prison for a deposed ruler. A
conspiracy was organized, some months before it was executed,
by Counts Pahlen and Panin, and a half-Spanish, half-Neapolitan
adventurer, Admiral Ribas. The death of Ribas
delayed the execution. On the night of the 11th of March
1801 Paul was murdered in his bedroom in the St Michael
Palace by a band of dismissed officers headed by General
Bennigsen, a Hanoverian in the Russian service. They burst
into his bedroom after supping together and when flushed with
drink. The conspirators forced him to the table, and tried
to compel him to sign his abdication. Paul offered some
resistance, and one of the assassins struck him with a sword,
and he was then strangled and trampled to death. He was
succeeded by his son, the emperor Alexander I., who was
actually in the palace, and to whom Nicholas Zubov, one of
the assassins, announced his accession.
See, for Paul’s early life, K. Waliszewski, Autour d’un trône (Paris, 1894), or the English translation, The Story of a Throne (London, 1805), and P. Morane, Paul I. de Russie avant l’avènement (Paris, 1907). For his reign, T. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands unter Nikolaus I. (Berlin, 1904), vol. i. and Die Ermordung Pauls, by the same author (Berlin, 1902).
PAUL OF SAMOSATA, patriarch of Antioch (260–272), was, if we may credit the encyclical letter of his ecclesiastical
opponents preserved in Eusebius’s History, bk. vii. ch. 30,
of humble origin. He was certainly born farther east at
Samosata, and may have owed his promotion in the Church
to Zenobia, queen of Palmyra. The letter just mentioned is
the only indisputably contemporary document concerning
him and was addressed to Dionysius and Maximus, respectively
bishops of Rome and Alexandria, by seventy bishops, priests
and deacons, who attended a synod at Antioch in 269 and
deposed Paul. Their sentence, however, did not take effect
until late in 272, when the emperor Aurelian, having defeated
Zenobia and anxious to impose upon Syria the dogmatic
system fashionable in Rome, deposed Paul and allowed the
rival candidate Domnus to take his place and emoluments.
Thus it was a pagan emperor who in this momentous dispute
ultimately determined what was orthodox and what was not;
and the advanced Christology to which he gave his preference
has ever since been upheld as the official orthodoxy of the Church.
Aurelian’s policy moreover was in effect a recognition of the
Roman bishop’s pretension to be arbiter for the whole Church
in matters of faith and dogma.
Scholars will pay little heed to the charges of rapacity, extortion, pomp and luxury made against Paul by the authors of this letter. It also accuses him not only of consorting himself with two “sisters” of ripe age and fair to look upon; but of allowing his presbyters and deacons also to contract platonic unions with Christian ladies. No actual lapses however from chastity are alleged, and it is only complained that suspicions were aroused, apparently among the pagans.
The real gravamen against Paul seems to have been that he clung to a Christology which was become archaic and had in Rome and Alexandria already fallen into the background.
