| #### 4. THE SCHISM OF THE WEST, 1378-1409 i. The Two Conclaves of 1378. |

| #### #### "This is milk and honey compared with what is to come, " St. Catherine had said, [ ] when the news reached her, in 1376, of the general rebellion of the Papal State against Gregory XI. Already the saint foresaw the Schism, the forty years during which two -- and even three -- "popes" simultaneously claimed the allegiance of Catholicism, which thereupon split -- geographically -- into several "obediences. " #### Gregory XI died on March 27, 1378. Twelve days later the cardinals elected in his place Bartholomew Prignani, Archbishop of Bari -- Urban VI. Four months went by and then, on August 2, these same cardinals publicly declared that this election of Urban VI was no election; and on September 20 they proceeded to fill the alleged vacancy by electing as pope the cardinal Robert of Geneva -- Clement VII. Urban VI reigned until 1389; he was followed by Boniface IX (1389-1404), Innocent VII (1404-1406) and Gregory XII (1406-1415). Clement VII, meanwhile, reigned until 1394; and Benedict XIII, elected to succeed him, lasted for twenty-eight years more. Of these two lines, which were the real popes? To decide this we should first have to decide a question of historical fact; was Bartholomew Prignani, on April 8, 1378, really elected pope? or did the election take place in such a manner that it cannot be held a true election? #### It is all-important, if the history of the Church in the next forty years is to be understood at all, to realise not only the fact of the ensuing division in Christendom, but the sincerity of the doubts and hesitations on both sides, and also the apparent practical impossibility -- especially once the generation passed away of those who, by their double election, had made the division -- of determining by any investigation of facts where the truth of the matter lay, the truth, that is to say, about the election of Urban VI. [ ] #### There exists an immense mass of information about that election from contemporaries, many of whom were eye-witnesses and participants in the great event. But the greater part of this evidence was set down after the second election, that is, after the dispute had begun. Party spirit is already evidently active, and in these accounts flat contradiction about simple matters of fact is frequent. Nevertheless, despite the unsatisfactory nature of much of the material, it is possible to reconstruct with certainty [ ] the main events of the forty hours of crisis that began with the entry into the Vatican, for the conclave, of the sixteen cardinals [ ] then in Rome, on Wednesday, April 7, at about five in the afternoon. #### From the moment when Rome learnt of Gregory XI's death, one thought alone, seemingly, possessed the whole city; at all costs the cardinals must be brought to elect a pope who would not return to Avignon, a pope, therefore, who was Italian and not French. All through the next eleven days the excitement grew, and very soon Rome was wholly in the hands of those who could rouse and manoeuvre the mob of the city. The nobles were driven out; guards were set at the gates to prevent any electors from escaping while the see remained vacant; the shipping in the Tiber was stripped of sails and rudders. Thousands of peasants and brigands were brought in from the surrounding countryside, and armed bands paraded the streets, escorting the cardinals wherever they went, advising them of the best choice they could make, Romano lo volemo, o almanco Italiano. . And when the day at last arrived for the conclave to begin the cardinals had to make their way to the Vatican through a crowd as numerous as the very population of the city. [ ] #### The guardians of the conclave had been careless in their preparations, and they showed themselves weak and ineffective once the cardinals had arrived. Some of the mob, armed, to the number of seventy, made their way in with the cardinals, impressing upon them to the last, with coarse familiarity, the importance of making a right choice. When these were got rid of, there arrived the heads of the thirteen regions into which Rome at that time was divided (the Caporioni), with their escorts, demanding audience. They too were admitted, and once more the cardinals had to hear what, throughout the night, the mob continued to shout and chant, Romano lo volemo and the rest. The cardinals managed to be rid of the Caporioni without any definite answer, and after pillaging what they could they too left. #### The night was noisy. The mob had settled down to a kind of kermess, its revelling helped on by the feat of those who had broken into the wine cellars of the palace. Just before dawn the cardinals were summoned to the first of two masses they were to hear, and while the second was in progress the mob wakened up to fresh activity. Presently the tocsin was heard to ring, and the bells of St. Peter's to answer it. While the senior cardinal was formally opening the proceedings the governor of the conclave sent in an urgent message. " Haste, for God's sake; elect an Italian or a Roman, or you will be massacred." Stones were indeed beginning to come through the windows, and axes to be plied against the doors. #### Excitement flared high within the chapel where the cardinals, still isolated, were gathered. After half an hour they agreed to tell the mob that they would elect an Italian, and this was announced by the junior among them, James Orsini. On his return to the chapel this cardinal now suggested a mock election, of some Friar Minor who could be persuaded to play the part, be dressed in papal robes and presented to the mob -- what time the cardinals got away, to hold a real election elsewhere, later. But to this none would agree. And now it was that, within the conclave, the name of Bartholomew Prignani was first mentioned, [ ] by the Aragonese cardinal Pedro de Luna. A rapid consultation among the little group showed that two- thirds of them would vote accept him. The voting then began, by word of mouth, the Cardinal of Limoges casting the first vote for the future Urban VI. Three alone, of the sixteen, demurred; of whom, two, in the end, came to agree with the rest. Orsini alone held out to the last, declaring that in his opinion there was not sufficient freedom for the election to be valid. #### Thus was Urban VI elected, towards nine in the morning of Friday, April 8, 1378. But not only was the elect not a cardinal: he was not, at this moment, within the palace, and between him and the news of his destiny was a city at the mercy of an armed and hostile mob. Until the archbishop accepted the election it could not be announced; and the first hint to the mob outside that the election had been made was the command from the cardinals to half a dozen Italian prelates -- of whom Prignani was one -- to come immediately to the Vatican. #### It was, however, some hours before they came, and meanwhile the mob grew ever more violent and began to find its way into the palace. The six Italians arrived while the cardinals were at their midday meal. They, too, were given a meal by the guardians of the conclave, [ ] who joked with them about the probability that one of the six had been elected, and made mock petitions for favours; and then, before Prignani could be summoned to hear of his destiny, the strangest scene of all took place. #### Fear had now really invaded the minds of some of the electors -- fear that because Prignani was not a Roman the savages outside would resent the choice, and put the palace to the sack. When, after their meal, the cardinals met in the chapel, someone proposed that, since the mob now seemed less active, they should take advantage of the lull and re-elect Prignani. But "We all agree to him, don't we?" said a cardinal, and all present assented (thirteen of the sixteen who had taken part in the morning election). But by now the mob was at the end of its patience. It was the afternoon of Friday, almost twenty-four hours since the election had begun. This time nothing could halt the Romans, and by all manner of ways they poured into the palace and into the conclave itself, whose terrified guardians surrendered the keys. Some of the cardinals, the better placed, fled; others were arrested as they tried to leave. And to appease the mob -- supposedly enraged because a Roman had not been chosen -- other cardinals went through the farce of dressing up in papal robes the solitary Roman in the Sacred College, the aged Cardinal Tebaldeschi, hoisting him, despite his threats and curses, on to the altar and intoning the Te Deum. This exhibition lasted for some hours, and it was, seemingly, from the old man's protestations against this mockery - - "I am not the pope; it is the Archbishop of Bari " -- that Prignani, somewhere in the palace, and by this time hiding from a mob to whom all that savoured of prelacy was spoil, learnt that he had been elected. #### The palace was, indeed, thoroughly pillaged, and at last the mob went off elsewhere. Night fell, and in the Vatican there remained two only of the cardinals, and the man whom they had all, twice, agreed upon as the pope, but found no time to notify of the fact. #### Gradually, on the next day, Friday, April 9, the cardinals began to come in from their hiding-places in the city. It took the best part of the day to persuade the six who had gone to St. Angelo that they could safely emerge. By the evening there were twelve cardinals in the Vatican. They first met, themselves alone, in the chapel of the election, and immediately sent for the Archbishop of Bari. They announced to him his election. Me accepted it; and chose the name of Urban VI. Whereupon he was robed in the papal mantle, enthroned, and homage was done to him as pope by all, while the Te Deum was sung. #### Two days later was Palm Sunday. Urban presided at the great liturgy of the day, and all the cardinals received their palm at his hands. They took their traditional places by his side at all the Holy Week ritual. On Easter Sunday he was crowned in St. Peter's (April 18) and took possession as pope of his cathedral church of St. John Lateran. #### Urban VI at this moment was, to all appearances, as much the lawful pope in the eyes of the cardinals as ever his predecessor, Gregory XI, had been. How then did they come to abandon him, to denounce their own electoral act as invalid? and when did this movement begin? It is not easy fully to answer either of those questions. #### What does seem certain and beyond all doubt is that from the very first day of his reign -- the Monday after his coronation - - Urban began to act so wildly, to show himself so extravagant in speech, that historians of all schools have seriously maintained that the unexpected promotion had disturbed the balance of his mind. He had evidently made up his mind that his first duty was to cleanse the augean stable of the curia, to banish clerical worldliness and impropriety, and to begin this good work by reforming the cardinals and the other major prelates. The first signs of the new policy given to the world were violent general denunciations of whoever appeared before the pope to transact ecclesiastical business. When, for example, all the bishops present in Rome came to pay their homage, Urban rounded on them for hirelings who had deserted their flocks. An official of the Treasury came in to make some payments of moneys due and was met by an imprecation from Holy Writ, "Keep thy money to thyself, to perish with thee." [ ] The cardinals were rated in consistory as a body, for their way of life, and singled out for individual reprobation; one was told he was a liar, another was a fool, others were bidden hold their tongues when they offered an opinion. When the Cardinal of Limoges appeared, the pope had to be held down or he would have done him violence, and the noise of the brawl when the Cardinal of Amiens came to pay his first homage, filled the palace. Urban boasted that he could now depose kings and emperors, and he told the cardinals that he would soon add so many Italians to their body that the French would cease to count for ever. #### This extravagance of manner was the more disturbing because it was utterly at odds with the habits of a man who was by no means a stranger to any one of his electors. Urban VI was, at this time, a man close on sixty, and he had been one of the leading figures in the curia at Avignon for nearly twenty years. Urban V had, long ago, made him assistant to the vice- chancellor, perhaps the highest post that could be held by one who was not a cardinal; then, in 1364, the same pope had given him the see of Acerenza and when Gregory XI returned to Rome he had brought Bartholomew Prignani back with him to be, in all but name, his vice-chancellor. Urban VI, then, had been for the fourteen months preceding his election the chief personage of the curia after the pope himself; and among the cardinals he had enjoyed, very deservedly, the reputation of an extremely competent and serviceable official. He was learned, modest, devout; and, from his long life at Avignon, he was, so they thought, if not a Frenchman, as near to it as any mere foreigner could hope to be. This pope whom the cardinals now beheld, daily "breathing out threats and slaughter," was not the same man at all as the peaceable Archbishop of Bari. They were consternated; and so was all the curia with them. And whether Urban had indeed gone somewhat out of his mind, or whether this was merely the excessive noise of the explosion of a good man's disgust too long repressed, it seems certain that it is in these extravagances -- now the order of the day -- that the beginnings of the general breakaway are to be found. Had Urban shown ordinary tact and prudence there would never -- it seems certain -- have been the second conclave and election of 1378, whatever the doubts about the legality of his election that may have existed in the minds of some of his electors; or, at any rate, that second election would never have so impressed the world outside -- for its impressiveness, when it came, lay in the fact that it was the act of the whole college of cardinals. #### The chief architect of the Schism, so Urban VI declared, [ ] was the one-time Bishop of Amiens, Cardinal Jean de la Grange. This cardinal had not taken part in the momentous conclave; diplomatic business kept him at Sarzana during Gregory XI's last illness, and long before he could reach Rome Urban had been elected. When he arrived -- already enraged that his colleagues had chosen an Italian -- he had a violent, unfriendly reception from the new pope, who publicly called him a traitor to the Holy See for his activities at Sarzana. This was somewhere about April 25, and from now on the palace of Jean de la Grange was a kind of headquarters where all whom the pope's methods antagonised could meet and plot. One of the cardinal’s first associates was his colleague Robert of Geneva, the cardinal whom Gregory XI had made commander- in-chief, and who was responsible for the massacre of Cesena. Between them these two did much to encourage the French commander in St. Angelo not to hand over the fortress to Urban, and with it the papal treasure taken there, on the day of the election, by the camerlengo the Archbishop of Arles. #### One by one the cardinals now began to leave Rome for Anagni, the reason first alleged being the increasing heat of the Roman summer. The first two left on May 6, and by June 15 all the French cardinals were there together. On June 24 Peter de Luna, the Aragonese, and the ablest man in the whole college, joined them. From Anagni they called to their aid the Free Company of Gascons that had served Gregory XI. At Ponte Salario a body of Roman troops barred the way. There was a fight, but the Gascons won through, killing two hundred of the Romans (July 16, 1378). The cardinals, all the world could see it, were now a power beyond Urban's reach. #### The pope was seriously alarmed. He had already sent three [ ] of the Italian cardinals to offer terms, promising better treatment in the future. But the only result of this was to enable the whole college to meet away from any influence the pope might exercise. At that meeting momentous decisions were taken; the cardinals agreed that the election made on April 8, was void, and means were discussed to rid the Church of the "usurper." For a time these three Italian cardinals, indeed, strove to be neutral, but in the end they made common cause with their brethren, who, on August 2, had issued a manifesto stating that the election made in April was void by reason of the pressure exerted upon the electors, that Urban, therefore, was not pope, and inviting him to recognise the fact and to cease to exercise the papal office. One week later than this, after a mass of the Holy Ghost and a sermon, an encyclical letter of the cardinals was read aloud in which they solemnly anathematised Bartholomew Prignani as an usurper. From Anagni the cardinals moved, on August 27, to a refuge safer still at Fondi, just beyond the papal frontier, in the kingdom of Naples. Here the sovereign -- Queen Giovanna -- supported them, and it was now that their Italian colleagues, abandoning their neutrality, joined them. The address of the cardinals to the Christian world had gone out already, and their embassy to the King of France -- Charles V -- had won him to their view that the election made in April was null and void. The king's reply reached them on September 18. Two days later they went into conclave, and at the first ballot they chose as pope Robert of Geneva. He called himself Clement VII. [ ] The three Italian cardinals, although present in the conclave, did not vote; but they acknowledged Clement and did him homage at his coronation on October 31. #### For the next nine months the rival popes confronted each other in Italy, separated by a mere sixty miles and their own armed forces. Urban, on November 29, excommunicated Clement and some of his chief supporters; and Clement, in December, held his first consistory, creating six new cardinals and appointing legates to the various Christian princes. #### Clement's cause, indeed, at the beginning of the new year 1379, seemed the more promising of the two. If England stood by Urban, and most of Germany too, France was decidedly for the Frenchman, and the Spanish kingdoms had at any rate refused to accept Urban, while in Italy Clement had Sicily on his side and also the Queen of Naples. But the situation changed greatly once Urban managed to hire the army of the best Italian captain of the day, Alberigo di Barbiano. On April 27, 1379, the French garrison that still held out in Castel S. Angelo at last surrendered to Urban, and three days later Alberigo routed and destroyed Clement's army at the battle or Marino. Clement now made for Naples, where the Queen received him with great pomp (May 10). But the populace rose in indignation that, in Naples, a Frenchman should be preferred to a pope who was a Neapolitan, and three days only after his arrival Clement had to flee to save his life. If he was not safe in Naples he could be safe nowhere in Italy; his first -- and, as it happened, his main -- attempt to drive Urban from Rome had failed indeed; nine months to the day after his election Clement sailed for Avignon (June 20, 1379). ii. Discord in each ‘Obedience,’ 1379-1394. #### These tremendous events had not gone by without comment from St. Catherine. At the moment of Urban VI's election the saint was at Florence -- whither Gregory XI had sent her -- and she was still there when, in July 1378, she wrote her first letter to Urban. It was a strong plea that his first care should be to reform the Church, and a reminder that for such a task "You have the greatest need of being founded in perfect Charity, with the pearl of justice. . . letting the pearl of justice glow forth from you united with mercy," and so to correct "those who are made ministers of the blood." [ ] The cardinals were, by this time, already leaving Rome, and the next letter of the saint to the pope which we possess is dated September 18 -- the very day, had St. Catherine known it, when the cardinals went into the conclave that was to make Robert of Geneva Clement VII. #### When this news reached her the saint straightway wrote to Urban the warning that, more than ever, must he now be " robed in the strong garment of most ardent charity"; she also wrote to the Queen of Naples, and to the cardinals who had elected Clement. Already, when first the division between them and Urban was becoming known, St. Catherine had written to Pedro de Luna, then considered as Urban's main supporter and the principal cause of his election, reminding him above all "never to sever yourself from virtue and from your head. All other things -- external war and other tribulations -- would seem to us less than a straw or a shadow in comparison with this." How the saint wrote to the schismatic electors can be guessed, "men, not men but rather demons visible." It is not true, St. Catherine tells them, that it was through fear of death that they had elected Urban "and, if it had been, you were worthy of death for having elected the pope through fear of men and not with fear of God." Briefly, in a couple of sentences, the "case" of the cardinals is exposed and the real motives declared which had driven them to this new sin. "I know what moves you to denounce him. . . your self love which can brook no correction. For, before he began to bite you with words, and wished to draw the thorns out of the sweet garden, you confessed and announced to us, the little sheep, that Pope Urban VI was true pope." [ ] The saint was, likewise, under no illusion about Urban's own character as it was now showing itself. "Even if he were so cruel a father as to hurt us with reproaches and with every torment from one end of the world to the other, we are still bound not to forget nor persecute the truth." To the Count of Fondi, under whose protection Clement's election had taken place, the saint wrote of the cardinals, "Now they have contaminated the faith and denied the truth; they have raised such a schism in Holy Church that they are worthy of a thousand deaths." [ ] #### At the beginning of November 1378, in obedience to Urban VI's command, the saint came to Rome -- with her usual accompanying escort of disciples -- and for the short remainder of her life gave herself ardently to the tasks assigned to her, to mobilise "the servants of God" in the cause of the true pope and to write ceaselessly, burning and passionate letters, to all whom it was thought she could influence. When St. Catherine passed from this world, April 30, 1380, the cause of the Roman pope lost the one saint it had enlisted, and the pope's own vices the only human check they were ever to know. #### Once the great figure of St. Catherine disappears from the story of the Schism, it becomes, indeed, for many years no more, to all appearances, than the dreary, material strife of politicians, clerical and lay. Nowhere is the deterioration more marked, at this time, than in the character of the pope whom the saint had supported. Now that Clement had been forced away from Italy, it was an obvious move for Urban to strengthen his hold on the Holy See's vassal state of Naples, where alone in Italy his rival had found a sovereign to support him. So, in April 1380, Urban VI deposed the treacherous Queen Giovanna, and offered the crown to her kinsman, Charles, Duke of Durazzo. Charles -- flushed with recent victories in the service of his cousin, the Angevin -- descended King of Hungary, Lewis the Great -- came to Rome with his army in the August of that same year. Giovanna, anticipating the pope's move, had previously named as her heir a French prince, Louis, Duke of Anjou, a brother of Charles V of France (June 29, 1380). But her papal suzerain gave the crown to Charles of Durazzo (June 1, 1381), and, the following day, himself crowned the new king. [ ] #### To provide supplies and pay for Charles III's army, Urban strained every nerve, selling church plate and jewels and levying new taxes upon what clergy acknowledged and obeyed him as pope. The new king marched south and met with little opposition. His French rival was detained in France by the death of his brother, Charles V, whose heir, Charles VI, was a child of twelve. The Urbanist king took Naples in August 1381, and captured Giovanna also, whom, ten months later, he seemingly had murdered (or executed). He was then, already well established when Louis of Anjou crossed into Italy at the head of one of the finest armies the century had seen. Louis also had been crowned King of Naples, by the pope at Avignon (May 30, 1382). The fate of the rival obediences was once more, it seemed, to be determined by the conflict of armed forces. But Louis, if a good soldier, was a poor general. He made no attempt to capture Rome, but marched on the kingdom that was his objective by the circuitous route of Ravenna and the Adriatic coast. When at last (October 8) he arrived before Naples disease had already begun to destroy his army. His rival had no need to do more than harass Louis in a war of skirmishes. Long before Louis' own death, two years later at Bari (September 20, 1384), he had ceased to be a danger; and then the broken remnant of his troops made their way back to France. #### And also, long before this, Urban had fallen foul of his own chosen champion. History was repeating itself; the prince called in to protect the papacy by force of arms had no sooner conquered its foe than he openly gave all his energy to consolidate his own new position as king and, therefore, inevitably, to ward off any interference from his suzerain the pope. Indeed, by this time, the suzerain-vassal relation -- where the vassal was sovereign prince at least -- had become no more than a formality; and a suzerain so little experienced as to wish to make it a reality, risked, every time, the chance of serious war. Nor would the fact that this particular suzerain, being also the vassal’s spiritual ruler, was able to use against him such spiritual weapons as excommunication and interdict, ever again be a serious consideration in the politics of a prince politically strong. #### It was another grave weakness for the papacy that Urban VI did not go into this conflict with Charles III of Naples with an entire purity of intention. The pope had a nephew -- a worthless blackguard of a man -- for whom he was anxious to provide. Part of the price which Charles III had agreed to pay was to carve out a great principality for this nephew, to be held in fief of the King of Naples. In the summer of 1383 Urban, partly in order to press these claims of his nephew, set out with his court for Naples Six of his cardinals -- of the new cardinals, that is to say, created since the debacle of 1378 -- had, it seems, already opposed this scandalous piece of nepotism. Urban was careful to take his critics with him. When, in October, he arrived at Aversa, in Charles's dominions, the king greeted him with all conventional respect, but Urban found himself in fact a prisoner; and it was in a kind of extremely honourable captivity that, in great pomp, he entered Naples shortly afterwards. #### The war with the French claimant presently absorbed Charles III's energy, and Urban was allowed to go to Nocera. Here new trouble arose, with Charles's wife Margaret -- now acting as regent -- when Urban began to interfere with the government of the kingdom, alleging his rights as suzerain. Soon the pope found himself besieged in the castle of Nocera (summer of 1384). But the career of Louis of Anjou was now nearing its end, and Charles was free to give all his attention to the troublesome pope. He found willing allies in the six cardinals. They conspired, apparently, to hand over Urban to the king, or to have him placed under restraint, as incapable of ruling. But a traitor betrayed them. The pope had them horribly tortured to extract confessions of guilt, a Genoese pirate known for his hatred of priests being called in to organise the enquiry. And outside the torture-chamber Urban walked up and down reading his breviary and listening to their shrieks and cries. Amongst other things, the torture produced statements that the King and Queen of Naples were partners in the plot, whereupon Urban made the fatal mistake of citing Charles to appear for judgment. An unusually savage sentence of excommunication followed. But the king's only reply was to send an army to besiege the pope, upon whose head he set a price of 11,000 golden florins (January 31, 1385). The command of this army was given to one of Urban's bitterest enemies, and it is a comment on the hold which the world now had upon monasticism that this general was the Abbot of Monte Cassino. Urban held out, in the citadel, for five months after the town had fallen, going to the ramparts four times a day, with full liturgical attendance, to excommunicate anew Charles and all his supporters. #### In July 1385, however, at the approach of a new Angevin army, the abbot abandoned the siege, and Urban put the sea between himself and his dangerous vassal, sailing to Genoa on August 19. He took his unhappy prisoners with him. One, the Bishop of Aquila, he appears to have had killed on the road when he was no longer able to stand the pace of the journey. The six cardinals -- all but the Englishman, Adam Easton -- no one ever saw again. Officially they had " disappeared, " and Urban so spoke of them. Historians seem agreed that the pope had them thrown into the sea. #### Was Urban VI wicked or merely insane? We shall never know. He stayed at Genoa for over a year (September 23, 1385- December 16, 1386) and when the murder of Charles III, in Hungary, relieved him of his most dangerous enemy, he slowly made his way south once more. He was at Lucca for nine months and thence, in September 1387, he went to Perugia to prepare an expedition against Naples, now, since June, in the hands of Clement VII's party. But Urban's soldiers deserted because he had no money for their wages, and the pope got no further than Rome. Here, too, his life was not safe; and here, on October 15, 1389, death ended his unhappy career. #### During this first stage of the Schism (1379-1389) the observer has the impression of Christendom as made up of two spheres between which there is no contact save an occasional collision; and in each of the two spheres Catholicism, as all the fourteenth century had known it, continues in its habitual way. Such collisions were, for example, the Italian expedition of Louis of Anjou, while the struggle between Charles III and Urban was but a new instance of the troubles which any pope of the Middle Ages might expect at any time during his reign. And in the sphere from which Louis of Anjou's expedition set out, the sphere ruled from Avignon by the French pope Clement VII, the most prominent feature of the Church's public life was a renewal of the long-standing conflict in which the kings strove to subject the Church and make it an instrument of State policy, while the popes strove to resist them and to maintain the freedom of religion from State control. Sometimes - - as before now -- the popes were indeed ill advised in the methods they chose, and more than unfortunate in the spirit in which they waged the fight, but to fight against the stifling control of the State they never ceased. And this is as true of the French popes during the Schism -- whose legitimacy has never been more than doubtful -- as it was of the earlier popes whom all agreed were really popes; it is true, especially, of the second of these popes, Pedro de Luna (Benedict XIII), but it is true also of Clement VII. Whether Clement VII and his successor were popes or anti-popes, their public action -- in the principles that inspired it, in the forms it took, and even in its errors and its blunders -- has always about it, curiously enough, the authentic papal note: interesting and significant testimony that this division of opinion about who was pope did not affect the unity of faith about the authority of the papacy, nor occasion any revolutionary novelty in papal practice. #### Legend relates that when Charles V of France heard of the election of Clement VII he exclaimed, "Now, I am pope." If ever any such idea had possessed the mind of any of the princes who ruled France during the next forty years, they were surely soon disillusioned. This French papacy of the years of Schism was as much -- and as little -- under their control as had been the French papacy of 1305-1378, or the Italian papacy of the forty years before that. And not only did the Avignon popes of the Schism period act, always, with the traditional papal independence towards the king in all matters of principle, but from the very beginning of the Schism there was also active in France a strong and organised body of educated clerical opinion that was always independent of the crown and often in conflict with it. The consistent aim of these scholars and doctors, was not, ever, to establish successfully the claims of the Avignon line; but rather to bring to an end the terrible spiritual evil which the Schism was. The centre of this great body of opinion was the University of Paris, and its endeavours were ceaseless through all these forty years. No praise is too high for the long fidelity of these men. In very great measure they were the instruments of the subsequent reunion. But it is also the fact, unfortunately, that their theology was not equal to their good will; their zeal, because ill-instructed, produced new complications, and a legacy of new theories about the place of the papacy in the Church destined to harass religion for the next four hundred years, and to be, during the century that followed the Schism, a most useful arm for the Christian prince who wished to wring concessions from the Holy See. #### No one doubts that, as a matter of historical fact, it was the determination of France to support Robert of Geneva's claim to be the true pope which gave his party, at the critical moment, whatever chance of survival it ever possessed. Did Charles V support the cardinals against Urban VI, and pledge himself to whichever pope they should elect, because he really believed in their case, or was it mere State policy, the hope of power, which moved him? The question is still debated. #### When the first envoys of the cardinals came to his court (September 1378) [ ] Charles V called a meeting of ecclesiastics before whom they stated their case. There were present to hear them thirty-six archbishops and bishops, a number of abbots, doctors of theology and of canon law, with representatives of the universities of Paris, Angers and Orleans; and, at a second session, lawyers also from the parlement. Their advice to Charles was to wait for more information before coming to any decision. But Charles privately wrote [ ] the letter to the cardinals at Fondi which encouraged them to go forward with their plan. They elected their pope on September 20 and in October the six cardinals whom Gregory XI had left in charge at Avignon went over to Clement [ ] and proclaimed his election. On November 16 the king called a second meeting to discuss the matter. This was a very different affair from that of September; it was much smaller, and was made up largely of the king's own "household" clerics; nor was the University of Paris represented. The result of this meeting was the king's public recognition of Clement as pope, and a royal order that he should be proclaimed as pope in all the parish churches of the kingdom. And Charles now strove, through special embassies to the various states, to win over other princes to recognise Clement. #### The University of Paris was still not so sure. Two "nations," [ ] the English and the Picard, refused to recognise Clement, and the rector asked for more time. Six months after this, in April 1379, Clement sent as his legate, to win over the university, the Cardinal of Limoges, Jean de Cros, and it was now that the university definitely deserted Urban, the English and Picards still resisting. [ ] But they were not the only independent spirits. Charles V died in September 1380, and the university now approached the court to ask support for what it already thought to be the only way out of the impasse -- the calling of a General Council. But the court was hostile to the plan; the doctors who appeared before it were thrown into prison, and only released when the university agreed to recognise Clement VII as really pope. [ ] Four years later the university again approached the court, this time to beg the king to protect the clergy from the ruinous taxes levied by Clement VII to pay for the armies of Louis of Anjou. #### When Urban VI died (October 15, 1389), Clement VII immediately proposed to Charles VI that he should try, through diplomatic channels, to persuade the Roman cardinals to end the Schism by electing him, Clement VII. But the fourteen cardinals Urban had left behind moved too quickly for the Avignon pope. On November 2 they elected their pope, Pietro Tomacelli, a young man of thirty-three -- Boniface IX. Clement promptly excommunicated him; and Boniface excommunicated Clement. And Boniface also declared [ ] that the plan to end the division through a General Council was sinful. #### But from this moment the political aspect of the Schism changed, and contacts began once more to be made between the two "obediences." Boniface IX was tactful and kindly; he soon won back the Italian states which Urban VI had estranged politically (though they had remained faithful to the cause of the Roman pope); and he gradually conquered the last few strongholds that held out for Clement in the Papal State. #### In France, meanwhile, great plans were being worked out to bring down the cause of the Roman pope. Clement VII's plan centred round the heir of the ill-starred Louis of Anjou, a boy of twelve, another Louis. To finance a new expedition to Naples that should establish Louis II as king, Clement gathered the immense sum of 60,000 golden florins. On August 13, 1390, the little king and his army landed at Naples and for three years all went well, victory in the field, and town after town falling to the Angevins. Expenses of course mounted, as the months and years went by, and Clement tightened the financial screw. Boniface IX did the same on behalf of his own protege, Ladislas, the son of Charles of Durazzo. The King of France planned to lead a new expedition against Rome itself and so re-establish the unity of the Church by force of arms. Clement VII was to go with him, and the date for the assembly was already fixed (March 1391), when the diplomacy of Richard II of England was set in movement by Boniface, and it effectively halted the scheme. #### This was a serious blow to Clement. A second soon followed, a royal scheme for such a reorganisation of Italy that the French would control the whole country; Boniface IX would indeed be crushed, but the papacy installed at Rome with Clement would be more openly dependent on the lay power than at any time since the days of St. Gregory VII. One of the chief elements in this scheme had Clement himself for its unwitting first author. #### In the critical days of 1379, when there were still hopes of driving Urban VI from Rome, Clement, as a reward to Louis I of Anjou for his spontaneous offer of support, had carved out for him a kingdom in central Italy, that included almost the whole of the Papal State save Rome itself and the Patrimony, and to which he gave the name Adria. [ ] This kingdom was to be held in fief of the Holy See, and was never to be held by the ruler of the other papal fief to the south, the kingdom of Naples. Only a fortnight after this rash offer the battle of Marino put an end for years to Clement's chances of effectively shaping Italian kingdoms. And now, in 1393, the heir of the "King of Adria" was actually King of Naples. But the French court, none the less, now revived the scheme. #### It was proposed to Clement that he should confer Adria -- on the same conditions -- upon another French prince, a younger brother of the King of France, Louis of Orleans; this Louis was also the son-in-law of Galeazzo Visconti, the ruler of Milan. If Louis of Anjou maintained his hold on Naples, and the new scheme also went through, the French thus would dominate all Italy. To induce Clement to consent, the French pointed out how the task of maintaining order within the Papal State, and of keeping it independent of the neighbouring states, had been for centuries a burden far too heavy for the papacy to bear; and how this crushing burden permanently hampered the popes in their real work of promoting the interests of religion throughout the Catholic Church. All of which, however true, did not alter the fact that in an Italy so reorganised the papacy would, more than ever before, be the sport of the Catholic princes. Clement VII -- a much wiser man after fifteen years of responsibility -- fenced off the offer. For reply he submitted his own terms, and then the negotiations began to drag. #### And while, in the last months of Clement's life, he had thus to fight his less than disinterested protectors, the University of Paris, persisting in its view that the division of obedience was a scandal to be ended at all costs, began to renew its agitation; and in the statements it now put out [ ] the anxious Clement saw clearly, and was dismayed to see, the first signs of the university's unorthodox theories about the place of the pope in the Church, theories which it adopted in order to justify its determination to end the Schism even though, to do this, it had to bring to an end the careers of both the rivals, of the lawful and the unlawful pope alike. [ ] #### Clement VII's reign ended, then, just as a new movement was beginning which, without being in any way more favourable to his rival, threatened him even more seriously than did his rival; for its first principles were a denial of the fundamental tradition Prima sedes a nullo iudicetur. The only way out of the scandal, the university was now saying, was for both popes to resign, and whichever of them did not do so was to be judged by the very fact as obstinately schismatical and a heretic, and therefore no pope. To gather the opinion of the university world, a locked coffer was set in one of the churches of Paris; whoever among the graduates had a plan was invited to set it down in writing and place it in the chest. When the box was opened it was found that 10,000 graduates had submitted their views (January 1394). Fifty-four professors were set to read and classify the suggestions. For the most part, so it appeared, they came to this that there were only three ways to solve the problem -- the popes should both resign, or they should appoint a joint commission whose verdict they would accept as final, or they should summon a General Council and leave it to this to decide. Meanwhile there were great religious demonstrations in Paris, processions to ask the blessing of God on the movement for reunion, and in these the king and all the court and a small army of clerics took part. Clement VII was so far carried along by this new enthusiasm that processions were ordered at Avignon too, and he had a special mass composed for the peace of the Church. #### But the pope did his best to check the movement of new ideas before it could spread further. He invited some of its chiefs- Peter d'Ailly very notably -- to Avignon to put their case, an invitation they were careful not to accept; and he sent a special envoy to Paris to work the court and university away from these dangerous schemes. The university indeed held firm, but Clement won over the court. When the university next appeared to plead before the king, the atmosphere had changed, and the university found itself forbidden for the future to busy itself with the dispute between the popes (August 10, 1394). #### But, barely a month before this prohibition, the university had said its last word to Clement, a letter (July 17) that urged him to punish his legate at Paris, Peter de Luna, whose diplomacy, said the university, was wrecking the movement for reunion. The university also wrote to the cardinals, and the cardinals did not hide their sympathy with the doctors of Paris. Worst of all the cardinals began now to meet together, without the pope's leave, in order to discuss the new developments. No doubt Clement's mind went back sixteen years to the meetings at Anagni that had so speedily led to the conclave of Fondi. When the cardinals openly told him that the only thing to do was to adopt one of the schemes recommended at Paris, the pope fell into a kind of melancholy. Sometimes he spoke of resigning and then, as news reached him of the breach between the court and the university, he talked of a new expedition into Italy. The last weeks of his life were given up to this idea. But, on September 16, 1394, a fit of apoplexy carried him off. iii. Benedict XIII's Quarrels with the French, 1394-1403 #### The interregnum at Avignon was extremely short. Ten days only after the death of Clement VII his twenty-one cardinals unanimously elected Peter de Luna to succeed him; he chose to be called Benedict XIII. With the election of this Spaniard the conduct of the Schism rises at once from the misery of petty expediencies in which it had for so long been caught. Peter de Luna had been a cardinal since 1375, and he was now an old man of sixty-six. He was universally esteemed as a scholarly and experienced jurist, and a practised diplomatist; he was learned, eloquent, pious; a man of principle, indeed, and soon to show himself the most obstinate of mankind -- and the most unscrupulously ingenious -- in defence of the principle which he considered to matter most of all, namely that the pope has no master in this world and is answerable to God alone for his rule of the Church. The election of Benedict XIII was a most definite turning point in the long involved story of the Schism; from now on there is added to the conflict between the rivals who claim to be pope, a second conflict between Benedict and the crown of France in which the principles at stake, the rights and the claims, are manifestly fundamental. #### The action of the popes of the Avignon line, in the history of the Schism, as this is usually told, quite eclipses that of the Roman popes. It is no doubt inevitable that the towering ability of Benedict XIII plays all his rivals off the stage for years. It is also the fact that the records of the Avignon line are far more complete than those of the Roman popes. [ ] But, quite apart from these two very real considerations, the dramatic struggle between Benedict XIII and the French is of the very highest importance because it is now that the theories, the methods, and the spirit are developed which will one day produce the Councils of Pisa and of Constance, the "conciliar" theory and the baleful myth of the "liberties" of the Gallican Church. #### It is in Peter de Luna's relations with France -- with the court, the hierarchy and the university world -- that the chief interest lies of his long thirty years' career as Benedict XIII. For, very soon after his election a conflict began of practical policy, about the best way to end the Schism. It ended -- after nearly four years -- by the French "withdrawing" their "obedience" (July 5, 1398). This schism within a schism lasted for five years and two months -- until May 30, 1403; the French then "restored" their "obedience" to Benedict and they continued in it for another five years nearly -- until May 21, 1408; when they again withdrew it, absolutely this time, and for ever. #### The occasion of the breach between this second pope of the Avignon line and its royal French protector, was the oath by which each cardinal, in the short conclave of 1394, had bound himself, should he be elected, to resign if the Roman pope agreed to resign simultaneously, and also to be guided in this by the advice of the majority of his cardinals. All Benedict XIII's troubles arose from this oath. He had been extremely unwilling to take it, as he had been unwilling to accept elections as pope -- and as he had been extremely unwilling, sixteen years earlier, to take part in the conclave of Fondi. Once elected he declined to be bound by the oath, while the cardinals, and the French generally, endeavoured to hold him to it. Peter de Luna, however, did not begin by any explicit renunciation of his promise, by any declaration that promises of this kind were unlawful in themselves, and therefore could not bind, such as Innocent VI had published after his election in 1352. But with a patient, persistent wiliness unmatched in history, he raised objection after objection; he contrived endless delays, and he devised all manner of distinctions; ever careful on occasion to make private protest, in legal form, that he would not necessarily consider himself bound by the public engagement he was now about to contract, he so extended, for the peace of his own conscience, the principle that promises made through fear are not binding, that in the end he wore out the patience of all concerned and all men's belief in his own truthfulness. [ ] Benedict XIII has gone down to history as a prodigy of conscientious double-dealing and elaborate self-deception -- the inevitable penalty of such genius. #### The contest began when the King of France, in May 1395, begged the Avignon pope to communicate the actual text of the oath he had sworn in the conclave. Benedict kept the royal ambassadors dancing attendance on him for 120 days, and even then, though he did not hand over the text, he contrived not to express any disagreement with the scheme for a double resignation which Charles VI was urging on him. The king next turned to look for allies among the princes of Christendom in his effort to heal the division. His diplomacy produced, in June 1397, a joint Anglo-French mission which visited both Benedict and Boniface IX. But it won no concessions from either. #### Twelve months later Charles had induced the emperor, Wenzel, to plead with Benedict; and now, in May 1398, to the emperor's ambassadors, the Avignon pope spoke out his mind, denouncing the resignation scheme as sinful and utterly repudiating it. Whereupon the French court resolved to force the old man to consent to it. #### This new determination to try what force could do against Aragonese obstinacy was not due merely to zeal for religion. For a whole generation now -- since 1368 -- the kings of France had enjoyed, from the different popes, a permission to levy taxes on Church property for the nation's ordinary needs. This permission Benedict XIII had renewed, at first for two years only, and then for one. Latterly he had refused any further renewal. The crown urgently needed the money; the pope would not grant it; and if the clergy still acknowledged him as pope they could not be persuaded to defy him and vote the money without his leave. And so the crown came round to a plan which certain pillars of the University of Paris had devised, that the nation should withdraw its obedience from Benedict, as a kind of threat that he had better look to his election promises and begin to fulfil them. The withdrawal was to be done with the semblance of legal form -- through a council of the clergy, a full debate and a general vote. This council met at Paris, May 22, 1398, and it remained in session until the beginning of August. In some ways it is the most pregnant event in all the religious history of the two hundred years that separate Philip the Fair from Henry VIII -- both for what was done, and the way it was done. #### Forty-four archbishops and bishops took part in the council, with two delegates from the various cathedral chapters, two doctors from each university, and a great number of abbots -- some 300 voters in all. The first session was thrown open to the public, and the opening speeches were made before a huge audience of thousands. The presidency of the council was singular: [ ] five royal princes, the brother, [ ] uncles, [ ] and first cousin of the king, [ ] Charles VI, who was now once again out of his mind. The real guiding spirit in the affair was the royal chancellor, Arnauld de Corbie. [ ] #### It was explained to the council -- by the king's party -- that Benedict was a perjurer, for he had broken the oath sworn in the conclave; no one, therefore, need henceforth obey him. The Holy See was, in a kind of way, vacant and it was now the duty of the King of France, acting as its protector, to bring about Benedict's formal resignation. While the king could choose for himself how best to do this, he had nevertheless thought well to ask advice. Hence this council. The real source of Benedict's strength was financial. Let him once be deprived of taxes, and of the right to appoint to benefices, and he would presently be starved into surrender. #### The policy suggested was subtle. There was no open denial that Benedict was pope; and there was, of course, an abundance of reverential language about his office and the rights of the Holy See. But the pope's acts were for the future to be silently ignored. More than one speaker of the king's party pointed enviously to England where, with such statutes as Provisors and Praemunire, things of this kind at any rate were now so much better ordered than in France. It was also urged upon the prelates and clergy that this was the golden moment to recover the ancient liberties of the Gallican Church, and to force through the much-needed reforms so long held up, it was suggested, by papal indifference. #### Against the court prelates it was bluntly pointed out that what they proposed was in reality nothing less than an attack on the bases of the pope's position as pope. The corruption complained of in the papal administration would not come to an end through any mere change in the personnel who ran the machine. And moreover, it was asked, what authority had a merely local council, of one particular country, to sit in judgment on the head of the universal church, and declare him not to be the pope? #### The debate went on for days, and then, on June 11, the voting began. The system adopted was highly ingenious. Each member of the council gave his opinion in writing, and he handed it privately to the little group of the royal princes and the chancellor, who thereupon proceeded to argue the opinion if it did not favour their design of immediate total withdrawal of obedience from Benedict. The device avoided all chance of the council as a whole knowing how the voting was going; it also revealed to the government -- and to the government alone -- the exact views of all these leading ecclesiastics; and it gave to the government the best opportunity conceivable of influencing the vote, and of changing it, in the very moment it was to be cast. #### About the views of the University of Paris there was no secret whatever. On the day the voting in the council began it publicly declared for the policy that Benedict should be coerced by an immediate, total suspension of obedience. #### Then for four weeks there was a curious silence; and when, gradually, the council began to show its anxiety, the government explained that the classification of all these votes was naturally a slow business. However, on July 28, with a public of something like 10,000 looking on, the chancellor announced the result. For the government's plan there were no fewer than 247 votes, for all other schemes 53; a royal decree would "implement" the council’s advice. That decree was, of course, already prepared; it was, in fact, dated for the previous day, July 27, 1398. Its effect -- along with a complementary declaration from the prelates [ ] -- was to organise the Church in France after a fashion hitherto unknown among Catholics, as an autonomous body independent of all papal control. #### The king, advised by the council, orders by this decree that from now on none of his subjects are to render any obedience to Benedict XIII. Penalties are provided for any breach of the law. The pope's partisans are to be deprived of their benefices by the bishops, and the administration of such benefices is to pass to the king who will, of course, enjoy the profits while they remain vacant. Papal judges and commissaries engaged within the realm on suits against the king's subjects are immediately to terminate such proceedings under penalty of loss of goods and imprisonment. All bulls and letters of any kind from Benedict are to be surrendered to the king, and if they are bulls against this decree, those who have brought them into the kingdom will be imprisoned. #### The prelates in the council decreed that, until the end of the schism, [ ] elections of abbots in monasteries exempt from the jurisdiction of the bishops should henceforth be confirmed by the bishop of the diocese -- where, until now, it had been the pope who confirmed them. All promises of appointments made by Benedict were to be ignored. Marriage dispensations were to be granted by the bishops or the cardinals. Appeals that had once gone to the papal curia were now to be decided by the bishop of the diocese, the metropolitan of the province and, finally, by the annual provincial council. As for cases (whether of ecclesiastical penalties or of sins) where absolution was reserved to the pope, they were for the future to be sent to the penitentiaries of Avignon, if these had abandoned the pope; if they remained loyal to him the bishops were to absolve, under the condition that the penitent sought absolution later from the universally recognised pope, once such a pope was elected. First fruits, procurations, and all the taxes payable to the pope were abolished -- a reform intended by the council to be final and definitive. Any sentences Benedict might pass in reprisal were declared in advance null and void. Notaries were forbidden to style Benedict "pope" in the acts they drew up and finally, to quiet the anxieties of the scrupulous, the government declared that Catholics were bound in conscience to conform in these matters to what the king had decided. #### Here, on the face of it, was a great victory for the government of France; and it was the activity of Catholics that was thus victorious over the papacy, the activity of Catholic bishops and clergy -- no less than of Catholic laymen -- against the man whom all of them believed to be the lawful pope. The events of 1398 are important, ultimately, not because they compromised the fortunes of Benedict XIII, but because they laid the axe to the root of the tree and compromised the traditional Catholic teaching about the nature of the pope's authority in the Church of Christ. The material object of all this hostility may indeed be no more than an anti-pope, but formaliter, so to speak, this hostility is Catholic action -- action of the Catholic state, of the hierarchy, of the studium -- upon the papacy, as will be the action of the Council of Pisa, and of the still greater Council of Constance. The schism is now, in 1398, twenty years old. Twenty years of disunion, of discontent and unrest, have produced this collaboration of university and clergy with the crown, and its dire fruit. For yet another twenty years Christendom will more and more feed upon that fruit, and strange maladies thence develop, in more than one of its organs, to trouble the general body for centuries. #### Already the spirit is active in the University of Paris which, at Pisa, ten years from now, will sweep away the claims of Roman and Avignon pope alike, and elect a third claimant in their stead; already, in this very council of 1398, this very suggestion has been made. [ ] We can note other things too; how few open defenders there are of the rights of the Holy See among the bishops; how eager the bishops are to strip the Holy See of its power to appoint to ecclesiastical offices, and to tax appointments and the property of the Church; how easily in fact, the government finds, within the hierarchy, quisling prelates ready to betray the Holy See. After a demonstration of this kind, and experience of a regime where such anarchical doctrines are, for years, given every freedom, and even built into a system, how long will it be before France is again normally Catholic in its relations with the papacy? We are assisting, in 1398, at the birth of the notion that there exists a Gallican church with privileges in its own right, sometime ago " usurped " by the papacy, and to recover which rights or liberties all good French clerics will -- in the best interests of religion -- always unite with the crown against the papacy. The proceedings of this council of Paris in 1398 are surely momentous in the general history of the Church. #### There was to be, of course, a reaction in favour of Benedict, but before describing this it is important to notice how the French government in 1398 achieved its disconcerting success. For the decision was a carefully manipulated swindle, "a lie that has triumphed even down to our own times." [ ] The slips on which these 300 or more members of the council recorded their votes or views were not destroyed at the end of the month of arrangement and classification. Still in the canvas bags where the chancellor had then stored them after the event, they remained forgotten and unexamined down to recent years. M. Noel Valois set himself to study them and his conclusions are startling. The government did indeed win a majority of the council to its plan, but a majority of about 180 to 120 rather than 247 to 53; and of the episcopate and the greater prelates a half, at least, voted against the government. "So slender was the majority of those in favour of the suspension of entire obedience that we may ask whether the result of the council would not have been entirely different, had it not been for the pressure that the government brought to bear from the very first day." [ ] #### With parties so nicely balanced, reaction was bound to develop soon. #### On September 1, 1398, the French ambassadors arrived at Avignon with the official news of the royal decree. The immediate effect was a general flight to the king's side of all the Frenchmen in Benedict's service, led by eighteen of his cardinals. The townspeople, too, deserted the pope. Nothing was left him but five cardinals, a few personal friends and his troops, in the great fortress palace that Benedict XII had built sixty years before. To capture this, the eighteen cardinals now called in one of the local lords and his band of mercenaries, and a seven months' siege began. After four weeks of fruitless assaults, in which, more than once, storming parties were led by the military-minded cardinal, Jean de Neufchatel, the besiegers turned to the less costly tactic of starving out the garrison. #### While the siege continued, French diplomacy was busy in the courts of Benedict's supporters. The French claimant to Naples -- Louis II -- was won over to desert him, and the kings of Navarre and Castile also. But Martin I of Aragon, Benedict's own sovereign, remained his friend; [ ] and it was through Martin's good offices that, in the spring of 1399, the King of France came to the pope's aid. In return for a declaration by Benedict that he accepted the resignation scheme, and that he would discharge the troops of his garrison, the king undertook to protect the pope, and to compel the cardinals to raise the siege. It will be noted that no "restitution of obedience" was promised. The French merely pledged themselves that no harm should come to the pope or to his property (10 April, 1399); and the better to survey the activities of the pope (whom they did not trust in the least degree), as well as to ensure his protection, a commission of prelates and royal officials was now sent to Avignon. For the next four years Benedict was, to all intents and purposes, the French king's prisoner, and during all this time the Church in France was governed according to the decrees of 1398. #### It was not, of course, a happy time, either for the churchmen or for the cause of religion. The new freedom of chapters to elect the various bishops and abbots was never a reality. The king, the great nobles, the womenfolk of the king and great nobles, all had their candidates, and ample means to influence the electors. The university world complained bitterly that far less attention was paid to clerical learning and talent than under the oppressive papal regime, and in 1400, as a protest against the systematic appointment of ignorant and illiterate clerics to high places, the University of Paris suspended all lectures and examinations. It was a more general cause of complaint among the clergy that the burthensome papal taxes abolished by the council of 1398, continued to be levied -- but now by the king, in order (so it was explained), to pay the immense expenses of the royal action in liberating the Church; also, these taxes were now collected by the royal officials, and much more efficiently than of old. "The old truth was being proved yet once again that no church frees itself from the pope without falling under the heavier yoke of lay control." [ ] #### But the harsh treatment of the man whom all France believed to be the pope, was alienating the common people; the exploitation of church property and patronage was alienating the clergy and the universities; in the king's council there was a serious personal conflict about the treatment of Benedict between the king's brother, Louis of Orleans and his uncle the Duke of Burgundy; Benedict himself remained resolute on the vital point, he would not consent that any other mind than the pope's should decide for the pope how he ought to act in the matter of ending the Schism. Discontent in France, then, was steadily growing, and the government already greatly embarrassed, when, on March 12, 1403, the old pope [ ] broke the tension by escaping from his captivity. With seven attendants he got through a hole in the wall of his palace, and, in the night, made his way past sentinels and guards. By morning he was in safety, in the territory of the Count of Provence. [ ] #### And now the reaction in Benedict's favour was immediate. The leading personages of the tiny papal state came in to make their submission, and the eighteen cardinals sent a delegation begging to be received into the pope's favour. They came back on the pope's terms -- unconditional surrender indeed -- Benedict refusing to the last to pledge himself by oath even to show them ordinary good will, the cardinals kneeling before him and tearfully promising all manner of devotion for the rest of their lives (April 29). And just one month later, the negotiations for the restitution of obedience ended with Benedict's triumph over France too. An assembly of bishops at Paris (May 28), declared for the restitution, the king -- now for the moment lucid -- was eagerly of the same opinion. Benedict, without any new commitment -- except what might be inferred from promises made to the Duke of Orleans -- was, for the moment, victorious over all his foes. There was a great ceremony of thanksgiving at Notre Dame (May 30, 1403), at which Peter d'Ailly, now Bishop of Cambrai, preached and at the end of his sermon he read out the pledges Benedict had given to the trusting duke. iv. The Roman Popes, 1389-1406 #### These first nine years of the reign of the second pope of the Avignon obedience (1394-1403) were taken up almost entirely with the fight to maintain his independence against the French crown and the University of Paris. Benedict XIII had been left little leisure so far in which to plan any attack on the position of his Roman adversary, Boniface IX. But the Roman, too, had had his difficulties during these years, difficulties often of a like nature. There was not, indeed, among the princes loyal to Rome any one power so strong and so well placed, should it turn to oppress Boniface, as the French monarchy and its great academic ally. But all the princes of Christendom realised the weakness of the papal position, and there was scarcely one that did not, in his turn, make use of it to wring concessions from the Roman pope too. Boniface IX was never really free to profit from the embarrassments of Benedict XIII. And within less than eighteen months of Benedict's temporary victory over the French in 1403, Boniface had died; and with the election of Innocent VII in his place, the whole relation of the rival popes takes on a new colour. #### Throughout his reign of fifteen years (1389-1404), the double anxiety had never ceased to worry Boniface IX, where to find money and how to keep the different princes faithful to him. He had to suffer serious losses of territory in Italy, when Genoa went over to his adversary, and Sicily too. Then, in 1398, the emperor Wenzel -- whose support had brought to the Roman line a prestige that neutralised the French support of the Avignon obedience -- was won over by the French to declare himself neutral; and England, also influenced by France, began to show herself less partisan than before. From the danger of the empire's adherence to Benedict XIII the Roman pope was delivered by the revolutionary act of four of the prince electors who, in 1399, declared Wenzel deposed and elected in his place Rupert of Bavaria. But although Rupert declared for the Roman line, Boniface was for the moment too wary to recognise him as emperor-elect. It was doubtful whether the deposition of Wenzel was good in law, and Rupert was only acknowledged in the west of Germany. Moreover, warned by the fate of Benedict XIII, and by the beginnings of the like trouble among his own supporters, Boniface would not recognise Rupert unless he swore to leave entirely to the pope the business of bringing the schism to an end; and this pledge Rupert refused to give. #### Meanwhile, there were the beginnings of civil war in Germany between the partisans of Wenzel and Rupert. In 1401 Florence called Rupert into Italy to help in the war against pro-French Milan. But the emperor-elect was badly defeated (October 21, 1401), and in April 1402, he returned to Germany with barely enough troops for an escort. He still, however, steadfastly refused the pope's terms, and when, after his defeat, Boniface had made them stiffer still, Rupert's refusal had stiffened too. The princes of Germany supported his refusal, and in the autumn of 1402 Rupert began to negotiate with France and with England for united action to force both Boniface and Benedict to resign. Boniface IX was finding that the new emperor was no more his subject than the old. Then, in August 1403, the pope recognised the king who was his one real supporter, Ladislas of Naples, as King of Hungary also, to the great offence of a rival claimant -- Sigismund -- who was the emperor Wenzel’s brother. Whereupon Sigismund openly deserted the Roman cause, and Boniface, pushed by necessity, was driven to recognise Rupert as emperorelect without any of the special conditions upon which he had been insisting for the previous two years. #### This was in October 1403. Boniface's reign had, to the very day, just a year to run. His hold on the states that acknowledged him as pope could hardly have been feebler, and had Benedict XIII now been free to intervene in Italy the political fortunes of the Roman pope might have been brought crashing to the ground. But Benedict was once more involved in the old conflict with the French crown and with the University of Paris. Mission after mission was arriving at Avignon to remind him of his promises; but all in vain. The wily old man eluded the most practised of the diplomatists, and showed himself in his speeches more pious than the most pious of the bishops who bade him think only of the cause of religion. He steadily refused to recognise any of the ecclesiastical appointments made during the five years of the withdrawal of obedience; and he sent out collectors to demand the arrears of moneys due to him for that period. As the clergy had already paid their dues, but to the crown, they now turned to the king for protection against the pope, and this was solemnly guaranteed to them by a royal edict of January 10, 1404. [ ] #### Six months after this, Benedict re-opened negotiations with Boniface, interrupted now for nearly seven years. His ambassadors arrived at Rome in late September 1404, and Boniface IX granted them audience. But there were stormy scenes, the pope calling Peter de Luna a liar and a dissembler, and the ambassadors retorting that Boniface was a simonist. The pope was already failing in health, and this interchange ended fatally. On October 1, 1404, two days after the interview, the pope collapsed and died. #### Was Boniface IX indeed a simonist? For his latest biographer [ ] the charge is proved beyond all doubt, and the blistering phrase " the crooked days of Boniface IX " [ ] seems only too true a description. Like Urban VI -- the pope who made him a cardinal when scarcely out of his teens -- Boniface was a Neapolitan. He was a practical man, ignorant indeed in matters of professional clerical learning, but a realist, able to manage men, and to get things done, "the man the crisis called for," and he was young, little more than thirty when elected pope. Throughout the reign which followed -- fifteen years -- the pope was far too busy with the urgent political problem before him to have any leisure for religious affairs properly so called. His own life was, seemingly, correct; the immense sums he raised were not spent on pleasures, nor on his own personal artistic fancies. But the young pope's superficial mind misread the nature of the evil he confronted. That his view of the division of Christendom ruled out all possibility of seriously negotiating with Avignon, cannot indeed be held against him. But the pope stands charged with the dreadful error of treating this religious tragedy as a matter of politics, and in his anxiety to raise the money he needed, Boniface sank to the lowest levels. [ ] The papal collation of benefices now became a matter of simple marketing. Provisions and expectatives were given for cash down, and for prices which only the rich could afford, and without any guarantee that they would not be sold a second time to anyone who offered a higher price. Then, in 1402, Boniface annulled all grants made hitherto, unless the holders had them renewed within twelve months. Also the tax of annates was extended to all benefices worth more than twenty-four gold florins annual revenue. But the most mischievous wickedness of all was in the matter of indulgences. The pope multiplied, beyond all wisdom, the grants of indulgences ad instar -- indulgences, that is to say, whereby, in general terms, there was granted such a remission as might have been gained by doing other (and immensely more laborious) penances and good works, pilgrimage to the Holy Land for example or enlisting as a soldier in the crusades. For the jubilee of 1390, Boniface called in the bankers to organise the collection and despatch of the moneys to Rome. This jubilee was liberally extended to other cities outside Rome, but to gain it an offering of money was one condition needed, and the amount was fixed at the cost of a journey to Rome from the place where the indulgence was gained, plus the amount that would have been offered by the pilgrim at the different Roman shrines. Of the total taken, a half was to go to the banker as commission. "It seemed as though one could get the indulgence for cash down. It even happened that confessors gave absolution in exchange for money, without exacting any true repentance or reparation of the injustices done to others. Boniface, more concerned to demand that the preachers of the indulgence should send in accounts that were in good order than that they should explain the doctrine of indulgences correctly, assuredly bears the responsibility of the deformation of religious sense among the masses which was to result from such imprudences and from abuses on such a scale." [ ] In Germany especially there was great indignation, strong, violent and organised opposition indeed; and the German clergy made the reformation of this system a main point in the programme which they presented to the Council of Constance and Martin V a few years later. [ ] #### Sixteen days after the death of Boniface IX, the cardinals elected in his place the Bishop of Bologna, Cosmo Megliorati; he took the name of Innocent VII. As in 1389, all the electors had sworn that, if elected, they would do their utmost to bring the division to an end, even resigning the Holy See if necessary, and that immediately after the election they would call a General Council. This last pledge Innocent was prompt to fulfil and the council was summoned for 1 November, 1405. [ ] #### The envoys Benedict XIII had sent to Boniface returned to their master -- now at Genoa -- with a very strange tale (April 11, 1405). The Romans, they said, had looked on them as the murderers of Boniface IX; they had been imprisoned in Sant' Angelo, and had only been freed on payment of an enormous bribe. They had besought the Roman cardinals not to elect any new pope in a hurry, but to take this opportunity to consult Benedict XIII and so end the schism by an agreed election. The Romans had, however, rejected this offer. #### But about the same time that this account of the conclave reached the French court from Benedict, there came in another, very different, version sent by Innocent VII. According to this, the Roman cardinals, before the conclave opened, had offered to delay it until Benedict XIII had been told of their offer not to proceed to an election by themselves if the Avignon pope would now abdicate. To this the Avignon envoys had replied that Benedict would certainly never resign, and also that the resignation scheme was contrary to all law and right. #### This revelation, that only Benedict's now notorious determination to cling to his position had prevented the best chance of a settlement that had appeared in nearly thirty years, infuriated the influential parties in France with whom, for so long, he had been at war. A letter to Innocent from one of the royal princes brought a reply that strengthened belief in the Roman pope's first letter, and then, in September 1405, the University of Paris opened direct negotiations with the Roman pope. #### The result was to confirm the French suspicion of Benedict's good faith, and also to instil in the Roman pope unshakable mistrust of his rival. Benedict had, for some time now, really been planning a new assault on Italy. Barely six weeks after the election of Innocent VII, he had left France, and before Easter 1405, he was established at Genoa. His diplomacy was busy in Florence too, and at Lucca, and it seemed for the moment as though his loss of position in France would be balanced by gains in Italy. Pisa promised him recognition and Florence agreed to remain neutral. And all this time Benedict never ceased his demands for money, especially from the clergy of France and Spain. Even religious orders always exempted hitherto from such taxation were now subjected to it. Finally, from Castile, there came in the spring of 1406 a new plan to end the schism; but a plan which must entail the disappearance of Benedict. To work against the Castilian ambassadors he sent a special legate to the French court. All unknowingly he thereby set in motion a new anti-de-Luna movement that produced a new council of Paris, and a new withdrawal from his obedience -- a withdrawal that was, this time, to be permanent, and to meet which there would be a corresponding withdrawal of the cardinals of the Roman pope. #### When Benedict's legate, the Cardinal de Challant, appeared in Paris at Easter 1406, he was rudely told, "All that interests your master is money"; and when the university was admitted to state its case its orator, Jean Petit, immediately struck a note that was to be heard in all the debates of the next ten years. Pope Benedict, he said, has broken his sworn promises, and thereby he has lost all claim on men's obedience. In the great debate before the court called the Parlement de Paris (June 7 and 8, 1406), this was urged more passionately still, and the plight of the French church, bled white by Benedict, was set forth in detail; prelates pawning church property to pay the fees due to the curia on their nomination, the pope keeping benefices vacant in order to make their revenues his own, the high cost of absolution from censures to the unfortunate clerics too poor to pay the papal taxes. In the three years since France came back to Benedict's obedience he had gathered, it was said, no less than 1,200,000 francs from her clergy. The crown decided that a new council should meet at Paris to decide whether to continue in obedience to Benedict. #### This council met in November 1406, and its debates went on until the first weeks of the new year. It was not so much the creature of the crown as the council of 1398 had been; the dominating influence now was the University of Paris, to whose initiative the whole of this new movement against Benedict XIII was due. Each side selected a panel of speakers to thrash out the different points in dispute, and the anti-de-Luna party made no endeavour to hide their feelings. " For the sake of the ship," said Jean Petit, [ ] "let us throw both these quarrelsome, incompetent captains into the sea." Another doctor, Pierre Plaoul, set out the theory of the pope as the servant of the Church and as enjoying, thereby, an inferior kind of power to that possessed by kings. [ ] Benedict's supporters asked how, since not even Christendom itself had any authority to judge the pope, this council could so presume? No action on its part could possibly deprive him of "la puissance dez cles". And, in lighter vein, the Archbishop of Tours, arguing that to attack Benedict was not a practical policy, reminded the council that he came from a country world-famous for its mules. #### The long debates ended in a compromise. Benedict XIII was to be obeyed as the chief in spiritual matters, but his appointments to benefices were to be ignored and also his taxation of church property. It was these last two points, indeed, which now, as through all the next forty years, chiefly occupied the speakers of the anti-papal party; and when the question was raised how the pope could be brought to accept these restrictions, nine-tenths of the council voted that the king ought to compel his acceptance. Whereupon (January 3, 1407), the clergy petitioned Charles VI to make perpetual the edict of September 11, 1406, that had abolished first fruits, servitia, and procurations, and also to abolish the papal tithes and papal collations to benefices in France; and this the king consented to do, in a new decree of February 18, 1407. But this new decree was, almost immediately, suspended. Since the council of Paris began a new pope had been elected at Rome, and there seemed every hope that the schism was now really to be brought to an end. #### The very short, and very stormy, reign of Innocent VII had, in fact, ended just ten days before the council opened in Paris. The fourteen Roman cardinals had, thereupon, bound themselves by a pact more stringent than any yet devised; and after a seven-days' conclave they had chosen, unanimously, the Venetian cardinal, Angelo Corrario. [ ] This new pope Gregory XII -- was an old man of seventy, known for his austere life, and chosen for one reason only, that he seemed to live for nothing else but to work to heal the division. All the circumstances of his election seemed, indeed, to make him "less a pope than a proctor charged to abdicate the papacy in the interests of unity". Gregory XII was, before he finished, to prove the greatest disappointment of all, but the first seven months of his reign seemed the beginning of a new age, and it was in the first flood of these hopes that the King of France held up the decrees that would otherwise have engaged all the ecclesiastical energies of his people in a new war with Benedict XIII. They would now be better employed in negotiations with this unexpectedly helpful pope newly elected at Rome. #### The cause of all these hopes was the pact sworn to by Gregory XII before his election, and sworn to again immediately afterwards, and the care which the pope took to give the pact all possible publicity. The pope, in fact, had bound himself to abdicate if Benedict XIII should do the same or should chance to die -- provided that the cardinals of both obediences would agree to join for the election of the new pope; also he had promised that within a month of his election he would notify Benedict and his cardinals, the various Christian princes, and the bishops everywhere of this undertaking; also that he would send ambassadors, within three months, to arrange with Benedict a suitable meeting place for a personal interview; finally, Gregory XII promised not to create any new cardinals while these negotiations were in progress, unless to equalise his college with that of Benedict. [ ] From this pact the new pope swore, moreover, that he would not dispense or absolve himself. v. Benedict XIII and Gregory XII, 1406-1409 #### Gregory XII carried out to the letter all that he had promised. His envoys reached Paris in the last days of the council, and on January 21, 1407, a solemn service of thanksgiving took place at Notre Dame for the appearance in the church of such an apostolic spirit. Throughout France and Italy the rejoicing was universal. #### Benedict's answer was in much the same tone as the Roman letter, but those experienced in his ways -- the French bishops, for example -- did not fail to detect that his ingenuity had once more devised avenues of escape. And the King of France, on the very day that he suspended the decrees against Benedict, decided to send an embassy both to the Avignon and the Roman courts. About the same time that this embassy was commissioned, Gregory XII also despatched an embassy to his rival, and it was this embassy that reached Benedict first, who was now in residence at Marseilles. The chief business of the mission from Gregory XII was to arrange where the contending principals should meet, and the audience was as stormy as most audiences were in which any of these popes met the envoys of their rivals. But after nearly three weeks an accord was reached, the so-called Treaty of Marseilles (April 20, 1407), and it was agreed that Gregory and Benedict should meet at Savona by the feast of All Saints next following at the latest (November 1). #### The embassy from the King of France, a much more elaborate affair, took weeks to gather and to make its way to Marseilles. Long before it could arrive, the Italian embassy had finished its business, and meeting the Frenchmen was able to report what it had achieved. It is of interest that the Italians strongly advised the Frenchmen to handle Benedict gently if they wished for concessions. Finally, on May 10, Benedict received the French king's envoys, and in a most eloquent speech he accepted their point of view wholeheartedly. But when, the next day, the ambassadors begged him to publish his concessions in a bull, all the old trouble began anew. For a week the two parties wrestled, but without any result. Benedict refused absolutely to declare publicly that he, too, was willing to resign if Gregory would resign. We know, now, that he was moreover, at this very time, preparing an elaborate sentence of excommunication for all who had urged this resignation scheme; and the ambassadors knew, then, that, in order to resist any repetition of the siege of 1398, he was gathering men and arms. #### So the French embassy, leaving two of its members at Marseilles to keep watch on Benedict, now made its way to Rome. But by the time Rome was reached, July 18, 1407, a great change had come over Gregory XII. His family had worked him round to cling to the papacy -- as the family of Gregory XI had once worked round that pope to cling to Avignon; they had also infected the old man with the idea that Benedict planned to kidnap him when the two met; and, moreover, the Roman pope's chief political supporter, Ladislas, King of Naples, was strongly opposed to the plan of any meeting between the popes. From now on Gregory's court is the scene of intrigues as complicated and as obscure as any of Peter de Luna's feats; one series of these, it seems, was a hidden understanding with Ladislas, in virtue of which the king attacked Rome, and so provided Gregory with the best of reasons for not leaving the Papal State. #### Against this new mentality in the old pope, not all the efforts of the French could prevail. When they offered oaths as security, and armies, and hostages, he only reminded them how they had treated Benedict whom they believed to be the lawful pope. Could he, Gregory, really expect to be treated better? #### After nearly three weeks of sterile argument the French at last left Rome (August 4, 1407), certain that Gregory would now prove a second Peter de Luna, but certain of this also, that he had lost the confidence of his own cardinals. For the Roman cardinals had privately assured the ambassadors that whatever Gregory did, they at least would go to Savona, and also that should Gregory die they would not give him a successor. #### The news of the change in Gregory was, of course, highly welcome to Benedict. Assured in his mind that the Italian would never come to a meeting, Benedict now spoke about the plan with enthusiasm, and setting out with a great escort he was at Savona long before the appointed day. For the next seven months these two ancient men worked to outwit each other with the infinite pertinacity of the senile; with embassies passing constantly between the two; arrangements half-made, suggestions and new suggestions, discussed, accepted, and then questioned; with suggestions first to change the place of the meeting, and next about the conditions; until finally they wore out the patience of all but their own personal attendants. How could they meet, said the wits: the one was a land animal that dared not trust the water, and the other a sea monster that could not live on land. At one moment less than a day's journey separated the two, Gregory at Lucca and Benedict at Porto Venere. #### Then, on April 25, 1408, the King of Naples took Rome, without a blow struck in its defence. Gregory's joy -- and the joy of his family -- was undisguised. Ladislas demanded that whenever Gregory and Benedict met, he must be present. All hope of free action by the two was now at an end. The plan to end the schism by a double resignation died a natural death, and at the Roman court it was forbidden henceforth to preach sermons reminding Gregory of his famous oath. The pope also considered himself freed from his pledge not to create new cardinals, and his unusual preparations for the consistory fired the long smouldering discontent of the Sacred College. On May 4, in a palace packed with soldiery, [ ] Gregory -- first forbidding any comment or discussion -- told the cardinals that he proposed to add four to their number. They protested energetically, but the pope silenced them, and sternly forbade them to leave the city, or to meet, together without the pope, or to negotiate with either Benedict's ambassadors or those of the King of France The mild old man had suddenly shown himself terribile. Was he to be another Urban VI? Gregory XII already knew enough about the cardinals' opinion of his change of policy to fear that a repetition of the acts of 1378 was, indeed, in preparation. One week later the consistory was held and the names of the four new cardinals were announced; two of them were nephews of Gregory, Gabriele Condulmaro (the future pope Eugene IV), and Angelo Corrario, Gregory's chief adviser since his election and commonly held to be the chief cause of his apostasy from his election promises. #### That same night one of the cardinals fled to Pisa in disguise, and the next day six of the rest followed him [ ] (May 12, 1408). From Pisa the seven cardinals issued manifestos protesting against Gregory's restriction of their liberty, and appealing from the vicar of Christ to Christ Himself. They spoke of the dungeons Gregory had made ready for them, and declared that their conclave oath bound them to seek out the cardinals of Benedict XIII and to make common cause with these to bring the schism to an end. Finally, they appealed to all the Christian princes to support their efforts. They also sent an urgent invitation to Benedict to fulfil his promise and come as near to them as Leghorn. #### The Florentines, however, refused Benedict a safe conduct, and he sent to Leghorn four cardinals in his place. The Roman cardinals at Pisa delegated as many again, and the eight soon reached agreement on the principle that a joint council of both "obediences" should be summoned, at which both popes should simultaneously abdicate and a new pope be elected, whom the whole Church would then know to be the true successor of St. Peter. But Benedict's cardinals first explained the pact to their pope as a plan for a joint council where he would preside; and it was in this way that they won from him a kind of general approval of all they were doing to promote the union. He was eventually to be undeceived; but his treacherous legates were, by that time, free from any anxiety which the thought of his anger might bring. For, on June 5, they learned that a great ecclesiastical revolution had, a fortnight earlier, wrested France once more from its obedience to Benedict. The long malaise in the Aragonese pope's relations with Charles VI had ended in a most violent rupture, and in the same weeks when Gregory XII's feeble mismanagement was renewing the disaster of 1378, Benedict XIII was losing for ever the sole source of what real importance he had ever possessed. The French cardinals, now that their king was no longer behind Benedict, could desert him without fear of the future. #### Benedict's new misfortune had begun when, in the previous November (1407), the Duke of Orleans, his one really loyal supporter among the French princes, was murdered. [ ] On the 12 January following, Charles VI came to a decision -- unless by the feast of the Ascension next (May 24, 1408) unity of government in the Church had been restored, France would finally withdraw its obedience from the Avignon pope. Benedict was not, of course, to be moved by such threats. He received this declaration on April 18, and immediately sent a warning to the king that, unless he revoked the ultimatum, the bull which he now sent under cover would be published. This bull was a sentence, drawn up in May 1407, excommunicating all who suspended their obedience to the pope, or who appealed from him to a future council. The reaction of the French to this was violent in the extreme. [ ] The decrees of February 1407, abolishing all payments to the pope of first fruits and other taxes -- the decrees hitherto suspended -- were now published; Benedict's leading supporters were arrested, and an order was sent to seize the pope himself. At Paris, all the scenes that had marked the struggle between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII were renewed. There was a great public demonstration, [ ] where the king and the royal princes were present, with many bishops, the chief figures of the university, the lawyers of the parlement, and the chancellor of the kingdom. Speeches explained once more the king's duty as champion of religion against the schismatical and heretical pope, a perjurer and a persecutor of the Church; and then the bulls were brought out to be ceremonially ripped in pieces by all the notables, king, bishops, state officers and the dignitaries of the university, all lending a hand. On May 25 appeared the royal decree declaring that France, henceforward, was neutral as between Benedict XIII and Gregory XII, and imposing obedience to this policy on all the king's subjects. #### It was on June 5 that news of this change in their pope's fortunes reached Benedict's cardinals at Leghorn. He had taken the precaution of sending with them some of his personal friends [ ] to keep watch on their activities, and it was from these -- who remained faithful to him -- that on June 11, at Genoa, he learnt of his own danger. Very speedily he decided to leave for Perpignan, a town then within the frontiers of his native land. But on June 15, immediately before he sailed, Benedict issued a summons calling a General Council to meet at Perpignan on November 1, 1408. #### Both popes had now suffered the fate of Urban VI in 1378 -- each was deserted by almost all his cardinals. But the deserters had combined and on June 29, 1408, the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, the fourteen united [ ] cardinals published the agreement to which they had sworn, and appealed to the whole body of the faithful to support them. Each college -- it had been agreed -- would invite the prelates of its own pope's obedience to a council and the two councils would open simultaneously, if possible in the same city. Each college would do all in its power to induce the pope it acknowledged to be present in person at the council and to induce him to offer it his resignation. If the pope refused to abdicate, the council would depose him. Once Benedict and Gregory were out of the way -- whether by abdication or by such deposition -- the two colleges would unite and elect a pope and the councils would become one. #### The pact was announced to each of the popes by the cardinals of his own group, to the King of France also and to the University of Paris; and Gregory XII's cardinals now instructed all those who had so far acknowledged him to withdraw their obedience. #### The history of the next nine months (June 29, 1408-March 25, 1409) is unusually complicated, for there are now three centres from which instructions and commands go out to the Church. Thus, three days after this declaration by the independent cardinals, Gregory XII convoked a General Council, to meet at Pentecost 1409, in some city of north-eastern Italy, to be named later. Then, leaving Lucca, he made his way by Siena to Rimini, where Carlo Malatesta, one of the best captains of the day, and an admirable Christian, offered him protection. And the cardinals on July 14, twelve days after Gregory's summons, announced that the joint council they had in mind would meet at Pisa, on March 25, 1409. #### For the next three months it is in France that the most important events are happening, at the national council summoned by the king to meet in Paris in August. This council was called to organise support for the king's policy of neutrality, to punish those who supported Benedict XIII, to provide for the religious government of France until the schism was ended, and to arrange for the representation of France at the coming Council of Pisa. The council was not very well attended: there were, for example, never more than thirty-five bishops present out of the total of eighty-five. But there was, this time, no opposition to what the crown and the university proposed. The messengers who had brought in Benedict's letters, and the threat of excommunication, were pilloried with the maximum of Gallic contempt; [ ] and in official sermons or harangues, made to the populace in front of Notre Dame, the pope himself was most grossly reviled. [ ] He was declared to be a heretic, and so also were his leading French supporters. As in 1398 the supreme religious authority in France was to be, in each province, the annual provincial council. It is noteworthy that, for all the bitterness against this particular pope, and the drastic act of rebellion against his rule, there is nowhere any movement to destroy the papacy, neither to abolish the office, nor to organise religious life as though it would never reappear. The whole system now set up does indeed "smack of the provisional"; [ ] and there is no attempt to set up for religious affairs any single authority for the whole nation. The several ecclesiastical provinces retain their equal status, and their independence of one another; they are not formed into a new body under some single authority (ecclesiastical or lay), some new "Church of France as by law established." It was also by provinces that this Council of Paris voted; and the council decided that by provinces the Church in France should be represented at Pisa, twelve delegates to be sent from each province in addition to the bishops and other prelates who would, of right, be convoked individually. Also the council, before it separated, on November 6, chose these 130 delegates; and the king issued a decree commanding all those summoned to Pisa not to fail to attend #### Meanwhile, Benedict XIII had reached Perpignan in safety, with the three cardinals who remained true to him. On September 22, 1408, he created five new cardinals, and on October 22 he at last received the letters from his cardinals at Leghorn explaining what they had done, and inviting him to ratify it by coming to the Council of Pisa or by sending representatives. He sent, on November 7, the reply which they doubtless expected, denying them any power to call a General Council -- that is the prerogative of the pope alone -- and commanding them to appear at the council which he had summoned and which was now about to begin. Benedict opened his council in person just a fortnight later. [ ] He sang the inaugural high mass, presided at all the sessions -- stormy sessions many of them -- and with wonderful vigour, now an old man turned eighty, he argued and fenced, publicly and privately, with men as stubbornly skilful as himself -- for the vast majority of the fathers were of his own race. There was a small handful of prelates from Lorraine, Provence, and Savoy, but scarcely anyone from France, where Charles VI had closed the frontier. The mass of the council were Spaniards, in all something like 300 clerics of various ranks, [ ] to be argued with or persuaded. #### The pope found them unexpectedly independent. They acknowledged him, fully, to be the lawful pope; but they were most critical of his policy and, anxious above all else that the schism should be ended, they urged Benedict not to ignore the council that was to meet at Pisa; he should send a delegation at any rate, and give it the widest powers, powers even to offer the council his abdication; at least -- so the Spanish council thought -- Benedict might pledge himself to abdicate if at Pisa they deposed his rival. On every side Peter de Luna was receiving this same advice, even here "at the uttermost bounds of the earth." But he was still Peter de Luna, and he held stubbornly to his plan never to surrender his right to make decisions, never to commit himself, and never to give any answer that he could not later distinguish and sub-distinguish and thereby most veraciously evade. As the sterile weeks went by, the council grew weary, bishops, abbots, and delegates began to steal away to their homes, and by the end of February (1409) there was not a handful in attendance. It was this remnant who tendered to Benedict the council’s official advice: to be represented at Pisa, to make a definite pledge that he would abdicate, and to forbid his cardinals to elect a successor to himself should he chance to die. Benedict, of course, accepted in principle; and then adjourned the council for seven weeks, until March 26 #### Long before that day came -- it was the day following the triumphant, splendid opening of the council at Pisa -- the cause of Gregory XII had shrunk to far less even than that of Benedict. #### From Rimini, Malatesta had worked earnestly for an understanding with the cardinals at Pisa, but Gregory was now as stubborn as Benedict -- he, too, was a very old man, now seventy-three. Henry IV of England added his plea, but without any effect. Then, on December 24, 1408, England, too, deserted the Roman pope. Two days later Wenzel -- who had already gone over to the cardinals as King of Bohemia -- now gave them his support as emperor, while his rival Rupert put his miserable remnant of prestige at the service of Gregory. In the first days of the new year, 1409, Gregory excommunicated his rebellious cardinals, depriving them of all their dignities, their cardinalitial rank and rights. Then, January 26, Florence deserted him. The Roman pope had now none to acknowledge him but Malatesta, Venice and Ladislas of Naples. The vast bulk of the princes and bishops were wholeheartedly neutral, pinning all their hopes on the united cardinals and the council which they had summoned. ####  |