Pope Paul IV

About Pope Paul IV

Pope Paul IV, born Gian Pietro Carafa, was a formidable religious figure who served as Pope from 1555 until his death in 1559. His placement at #936 in MIT's Historical Popularity Index stems largely from his intense efforts to solidify the Counter-Reformation. A key contribution was the formal establishment of the Roman Inquisition to combat heresy and, notably, the creation of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a comprehensive list of banned books which exerted significant cultural control across Catholic Europe for centuries.

Despite this substantial historical footprint, Pope Paul IV currently experiences a clear attention gap in the digital age. In 2025, his Wikipedia page accrued only 89K annualized views. This figure is notably smaller when compared to other religious figures with similar historical rankings; for instance, Mahavira (#943) received 501K views, suggesting a relative underattention by a factor of nearly 3x (-3x gap).

Interestingly, while his overall profile is somewhat neglected, Pope Paul IV is seeing a recent spike in interest. His 2025 pageviews show a remarkable year-over-year growth of +72.4%, although this momentum cooled slightly in the latter half of the year with a -10% drop between Q1 and Q3 metrics.