Pope Urban VIII

Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in August 1623 and spent twenty-one years trying to expand papal territory through warfare and political maneuvering. He poured Church wealth into the arts — Bernini worked under his patronage — and into military campaigns that drained the Vatican's coffers so badly his successors couldn't recover the papacy's old political weight in Europe. In the midst of the Thirty Years' War, he also fought the Copernican model of the universe: the Galileo affair ended with the astronomer tried for heresy. He died in July 1644, the last pope to take the name…