Pope Benedict XVI has appointed a new, young commander of the Swiss Guard, the colourful and historic papal protection force.

Daniel Rudolf Anrig, a senior police officer from the Swiss canton of Glarus and a former lecturer in civil and church law at Freiburg University, is 36. He replaces Elmar Theodor Maeder, who has headed the world's smallest army since 2002.

Maeder is reported to have turned down a second mandate in protest after some of the Guards' duties were handed to the Holy See's second - and larger - protection service, the Vatican Gendarmerie. There are 120 Swiss Guards, and 180 Vatican gendarmes, commanded since Benedict's election in 2005 by by Domenico Giani, 44, a former officer in the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police.

Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, suggested that despite the long standing rivalry between the two forces, Anrig and Giani would find co-operation easier because they were "of a similar age", thanks to Pope Benedict's policy of promoting younger men and women. Anrig, who is married with four children, served in the Swiss Guards as a trooper from 1992 to 1994.

The Swiss Guards, who celebrated their 500th anniversary in 2006, are noted for their yellow and blue striped Renaissance uniform, widely believed to have been designed by Michelangelo - though this is almost certainly a myth. When first recruited to protect the Pope they were mercenaries.

Their finest hour, recalled in an annual ceremony, was the Sack of Rome in 1527, when 147 Guards died protecting Pope Clement VII from the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. They are still recruited from the Swiss towns and villages which have provided Guards for centuries. They must be single - apart from the commander - and at least 1.74m tall, have completed military service in Switzerland and be practising Catholics ''of stainless character''.

In 1998 the then Swiss Guards commander, Alois Estermann, his wife Gladys and Cedric Tornay, a corporal, were found shot dead in the commander's apartments. A Vatican inquiry swiftly concluded that Tornay, who allegedly had a brain tumour and had taken drugs, had shot the commander and his wife and then turned the gun on himself in "a fit of madness" after being passed over for a service medal.

However Tornay's mother, Muguette Baudat, has refused to accept the Vatican version. A series of books has suggested either that Estermann was murdered after Vatican officials discovered that he had been a spy for the East German Stasi secret police in the 1980s, or that Estermann and Tornay had a secret homosexual relationship.