offices during the short reigns of Lucius III, Urban III, Gregory VIII, and Clement III, being ordained a Subdeacon by Gregory VIII and reaching the rank of Cardinal-Priest under Clement III in 1191. As a cardinal, Lotario wrote De miseria humanae conditionis (On the Misery of the Human Condition). The work was very popular for centuries, surviving in more than 700 manuscripts. Although he never returned to the complementary work he intended to write, On the Dignity of Human Nature, Bartolomeo Facio (1400–1457) took up the task writing De excellentia ac praestantia hominis. Election to the papacy Celestine III died on 8 January 1198. Before his death he had urged the College of Cardinals to elect Giovanni di San Paolo as his successor, but Lotario de' Conti was elected pope in the ruins of the ancient Septizodium, near the Circus Maximus in Rome after only two ballots on the very day on which Celestine III died. He was only thirty-seven years old at the time. He took the name Innocent III, maybe as a reference to his predecessor Innocent II (1130–1143), who had succeeded in asserting the papacy's authority over the emperor (in contrast with Celestine III's recent policy). Reassertion of papal power As pope, Innocent III began with a very wide sense of his responsibility and of his authority. During Innocent III's reign, the papacy was at the height of its powers. He was considered to be the most powerful person in Europe at the time. In 1198, Innocent wrote to the prefect Acerbius and the nobles of Tuscany expressing his support of the medieval political theory of the sun and the moon. His papacy asserted the absolute spiritual authority of his office, while still respecting the temporal authority of kings. There was scarcely a country in Europe over which Innocent III did not in some way or other assert the supremacy which he claimed for the papacy. He excommunicated Alfonso IX of Leon, for marrying a near relative, Berengaria, a daughter of Alfonso VIII, contrary to the laws of the Church, and effected their separation in 1204. For similar reasons he annulled, in 1208, the marriage of the crown-prince, Alfonso of Portugal, with Urraca, daughter of Alfonso of Castile. From Pedro II of Aragon he received that kingdom in vassalage and crowned him king at Rome in 1204. The Muslim recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 was to him