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Biography

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Peter Thomas was a fourteenth-century French Carmelite friar, papal diplomat, and Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, later venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. Traditional accounts place his birth in 1305 in Périgord in southwestern France, of poor parentage in the diocese of Sarlat. The precise village is not fixed with complete certainty in the earliest sources; later writers have named Salles or the hamlet of Lebreil in the commune of Sainte-Alvère. As a young man he entered the Carmelite convent at Bergerac, showed aptitude for study, and was sent to pursue philosophy and theology, including at the University of Paris. Ordained a priest, he taught as a lector in Carmelite houses and gained a reputation for preaching, personal austerity, and devotion associated with the Carmelite tradition of honoring the Virgin Mary.

By the 1340s he had become procurator general of the Carmelite Order at the papal curia in Avignon, then the residence of the popes. His abilities brought him to the notice of Pope Clement VI, who employed him on diplomatic business in an age of Italian wars, strained relations with Byzantium, and repeated calls for a crusade. Under Innocent VI his responsibilities grew. In 1354 he was made Bishop of Patti and Lipari in Sicily, though episcopal administration was often secondary to his work as nuncio. He later held other Latin sees in the East, including Coron in the Peloponnese, reflecting the remaining Latin footholds in Greece after the Fourth Crusade. In 1363 he was named Archbishop of Crete (Candia).

In 1364 Pope Urban V appointed him Latin Patriarch of Constantinople and papal legate throughout the Christian East. That patriarchate was a Catholic title originating in the Latin Empire of the thirteenth century; it did not replace the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople. Peter Thomas was charged with promoting reunion of the Greek and Latin churches, reforming Latin clergy in the East, and rallying Christian powers against the Ottoman advance. He worked in the Byzantine sphere and especially in the Kingdom of Cyprus with King Peter I of Lusignan. In October 1365 he accompanied the king on the expedition that captured and sacked Alexandria in Egypt. He exhorted the crusaders, but the occupation was brief, the sack was notorious, and neither a lasting crusade nor church union followed.

After the return to Cyprus he fell gravely ill and died at Famagusta on 6 January 1366. He was buried in the Carmelite church there. His friend Philippe de Mézières, chancellor of Cyprus, wrote a contemporary vita portraying him as a model legate: poor in spirit, zealous for preaching, and consumed by the ideals of ecclesiastical union and recovery of the Holy Land. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and the Carmelites promoted his cult, observing his feast on 8 January. He was not the subject of a later-style formal papal canonization, but his veneration was accepted and he is honored as a saint of the Catholic Church.

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