The Blessed whose True Divination went wrong at the largest possible scale: before the Third Crusade (1441–46) he asked the Maker specific questions — and it is accepted that his questions led to the plans that depended on the Betrayer Queen, and so to the crusade’s failure at the Great Betrayal. (S7, per Church Rituals from a Secular Perspective by Felice D’Oiseaux)
Naming collision
Not Benedicto Malipiero — the Most Holy’s condemned brother lived ~300 years later (convicted ~1710). Two different men; the near-identical names are an accident the wiki refuses to build anything on.
Why He Matters
He is the precedent for what the party watched Estelle do. The party’s own analysis (S7): the Western Church likely holds divination-ritual knowledge similar to Estelle’s — specifically, similar to Benedict’s. A Church that can ask the Maker literal questions, and once planned a crusade off the answers, is also a Church that learned — at the cost of the Third Crusade — that true answers do not make plans safe. Compare the Order of the Phoenix’s divination in the Fourth Crusade — and note that Salemon Fouquier’s in the Fifth was, per the book, only the ordinary pro/con kind: Benedict remains the sole recorded practitioner of the full question-asking art. See The Faith of the Maker.
Speculation
Note what the failure actually was: the answers were presumably true, and the plans built on them still shattered on a human betrayal. That is either divination’s known limit — it answers questions, it does not vet queens — or the first recorded instance of someone’s answers being tampered with. The book takes the first reading. Nobody has taken the second out loud.
Appearances
- Session 7 — in Felice D’Oiseaux’s book, Balventia library.