| ### CHAPTER 4: FIFTY CRITICAL YEARS, 1420-1471 ###  |

| #### 1. THE MENACE OF HERESY AND SCHISM, 1420-1449 |

| #### #### THE task before Martin V was immense; [ ] his resources were scanty; the greatest of his difficulties were perhaps, as yet, scarcely known. Never was it to be more forcibly brought home to any pope that the pope's real power is a moral power. It was true that the Church was once more united in its acknowledgment of a single head. But bound up with this fact that Martin V was the universally acknowledged single head of the Church, were such other facts as those revolutionary proceedings at the late council in which, as Cardinal Odo Colonna, Martin V too had played his part; and from which council he had emerged as pope. The new pope's prestige was inevitably bound up with the proceedings at Constance. Some of the acts of that council no pope could accept and remain pope; and yet, any immediate blunt repudiation of them would probably have thrown Christendom back into all the chaos of the schism. Here was a first weakness bound to hamper the pope once he faced the task of rebuilding Sion. #### A second weakness derived from the inability of the recent reforming councils even to diagnose, much less prescribe for, the main evils that were eating away the vitality of religion. What was to be devised at Trent, a hundred and fifty years later- whether through drastic reorganisation such as to make the worst abuses simply impossible, or whether, through the invention of such new methods and institutions as the diocesan seminary, to do vital work which in all these centuries had never yet been done -- all this needed to have been done, given the times and the nature of the crisis, at Constance. #### But it was with the old machinery, the very machinery to whose defects the disaster of the schism had been largely due, that the popes after Constance had to do their work. Whatever their good intentions, their zeal, and their realisation that a reformation of Christian life was imperative, they were bound, under such conditions, in great part to fail. Things were to be very much worse, before they were ever given a real chance of becoming permanently very much better. #### Martin V knew that he must return to Rome and, somehow, bring it about that the Papal State was a stronghold for the security of the freedom of the popes in their government of the Church. He knew too that he must exorcise the new, radically anti-Catholic theory that popes are subordinate to General Councils; and yet he must contrive not to alienate the influential churchmen who had either invented this view, or adopted it as a way out of the long deadlock of the schism. He knew he must reform the general life of all Christians, clerical and lay. He probably did not realise, as yet, that the Turkish conquest of south-eastern Europe was imminent; nor of what immense consequence to Christendom that revival of letters was so soon to prove, the first beginnings of which he was now unconsciously patronising. Problem, then, of the new theories about General Councils; problem of the independence of the Papal States; problem of the reform of Christian life; problem of the Turks; problem of the Renaissance -- here, in rough summary, is the task before the popes in all the hundred years between Constance and Luther. #### The Council of Constance assembled for the last time on April 22, 1418, and Martin V, refusing the French suggestion that he should re-establish the papacy at Avignon, and Sigismund's offer of a Germany city, made his way towards Italy. He moved slowly and with the greatest caution, by way of Berne and Geneva and Milan. In five months he had got no further than Mantua, where he wintered, and in February 1419 he moved to Florence. The condition of the pope's own territory offered him little prospect, either of security or real freedom of action; Bologna was an independent republic; various other new "states" had been carved out by the successful condottieri; Benevento, and Rome itself, were held by the Neapolitans. Gradually the pope's diplomacy brought about the restoration of Rome, and also won over the actual ruler of central Italy, Braccio di Montone. Bologna was subdued by July 1420, and on the last day of September Martin V made his solemn entry into Rome a city of ruins, and deserted, grass-grown streets, into which the wolves came, unhindered, by night to ravish from the cemeteries the corpses of the newly-buried dead. #### But the recovery of his states was not the only critically urgent problem to harass the pope on the morrow of the great council; Catholicism was now fighting for its life in Bohemia, and the crusade against the new heretics was beginning to be a catastrophic failure. Bohemia, after Constance, was like Egypt after Chalcedon; a heretic had been condemned at the General Council and punished who was, at the same time, a national leader; and the reaction against the council, involving the cause of Czech culture against German imperialism, so shook the hold of the papacy on these lands that never again could the popes take their spiritual allegiance for granted. The event was a first demonstration -- had some gift of prophecy been granted the pope whereby to read the fullness of the sign -- of what could happen, and would henceforth happen repeatedly, when propagation of anti-Catholic doctrine was bound up with a people's ambition to assert itself as a nation or as possessed of a specifically national culture. This first Bohemian war of religion lasted for seventeen years (1419-1436). It ended in a compromise which, nominally, was to the advantage of the Catholics. But the memory of the long succession of national victories over the Catholic crusaders -- brought in from every part of Europe -- never died out; more than once, in the years between the settlement of 1436 and Luther, the war flared up again. Bohemia, for the generation to which Luther spoke, was a watchword, whether of warning or of promise, and down to our own day the memory of the heretic burnt at Constance, John Hus, [ ] has been the constant rallying point of all that is militant and revolutionary in the patriotism of the Czechs. #### What made the fortunes of the religious theories which Hus preached was the circumstance that his appearance as a religious leader coincided with the critical hour of a great national renaissance, fruit of the wise and capable rule of Charles IV (1347-1378). In the later fourteenth century, as to-day, the land of the Czechs, the kingdom of Bohemia and the margravate of Moravia, was a country where very varied influences -- national, social, cultural -- fought for mastery. Both the kingdom and the margravate, which were now united under the one ruler, were vassal states to the German king, and part of the Holy Roman Empire. Everywhere there were pockets of German settlers. Many of the native nobility had gladly surrendered to the influence of German culture; many of the traders were German too; and for centuries the sees of the kingdom had been subject to metropolitan sees in Germany. The Czech Catholics had, however, a strong anti-German tradition that went back for hundreds of years. Catholicism had originally come to them through missionaries of the Greek rite, the famous ninth-century saints, Cyril and Methodius. Later they had been "Latinised, " and from resentment of this -- it is said -- there was among them a certain anti-papal tradition, and an especial resentment of two reforms for which the medieval popes were responsible, their revival of the ancient discipline of clerical celibacy and the practice of administering the Holy Eucharist under the form of bread alone. #### Fourteenth-century Bohemia had all its share of the chronic ills of late medieval Catholicism, worldliness, simony and evil living among the higher clergy, and general slackness among the parochial clergy and in the monasteries; and the Waldensian heretics were more numerous here than in any other part of Europe outside their native mountain fastnesses. But from the time when the Emperor Charles IV -- Luxemburger by birth, French by upbringing -- made the development of his hereditary kingdom of Bohemia the central purpose of his life -- and so determined the Czech renaissance -- the country had seen a succession of vigorous and plain-spoken reformers of ecclesiastical life, most of them orthodox Catholics. As a reformer John Hus was, then, only in the tradition of his age. But where others had but talent he had genius, and in addition to all his religious and ascetic qualities he was a great Czech. He was also to prove himself a great heretic, and in the main his heresies were importations from the England of Richard II. The first begetter, indeed, of all these ideas which served to promote the long Bohemian wars was an Oxford theologian, a one-time scholar and Master of Balliol, John Wyclif. #### Wyclif belonged to the generation intermediary between Marsiglio and Hus, and his career as a reformer of Christian life and as a heretic was, like that of Marsiglio, bound up with a quarrel between his sovereign and the Holy See. When this dispute -- which involved no point of traditional Christian doctrine -- brought the English theologian for the first time into public life, he was a man just past his fortieth year. Parliament, in 1365, had passed a law protecting, against the pope's jurisdiction, suits about benefices, a matter in which the royal courts had always claimed jurisdiction. The pope, Urban V, retaliated by asking for the payment of the tribute due from England as a vassal kingdom of the Holy See -- but now thirty- three years in arrears -- and threatening, should this not be paid, to sue for the penalties provided in King John's surrender of his kingdom one hundred and fifty years before. The storm which this reply raised may be imagined. The whole country - - king, lords, commons, prelates and barons for once united -- joined to repudiate, and for ever, not only the arrears but the papal suzerainty itself. King John, they said, had acted without the consent of, the nation; his surrender therefore was void in law and fact. It was as a champion of the nation against the pope that Wyclif, on this occasion, entered literature and public life. Five years later, when a "cabinet" made up of ecclesiastics was displaced by a lay ministry, Wyclif was again to the fore, inspiring one of the earliest proposals to disendow the Church for the profit of the State; and when, in 1374, the long dispute with the papacy which had dragged on since the crisis of 1366 was settled by the Concordat of Bruges, Wyclif was one of the royal commissioners appointed to negotiate the treaty. #### These were the years when the long reign of Edward III was coming to its end in a misery of incompetence and scandal. The sins of churchmen did not escape the censure of this disillusioned and discontented time, as the bitter language of a petition of the House of Commons "against the pope and the cardinals" remains to show. In language which, to the very words, re- echoes what St. Catherine of Siena was saying at that very moment, it is there said, "The court of Rome should be a source of sanctity to all the nations, but the traffickers in holy things ply their evil trade in the sinful city of Avignon, and the pope shears his flock but does not feed it. " [ ] When the Prince of Wales -- the Black Prince -- died, June 8, 1376, the prospect of better days was indefinitely lessened, for now the chief person in the realm was his younger brother, the weak, blustering intriguer John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The duke was also the anti-clerical leader, and Wyclif now seemed likely to become a force in the national life. But he overplayed his hand, and his anti-clerical harangues in the London churches gave the Bishop of London an opportunity to cite him for trial (19 February, 1377). Wyclif appeared, with Lancaster to escort him. There was a bitter quarrel between the duke and the bishop and then the mob, friendly to Wyclif but hostile to the duke, broke up the assembly before the trial began. There, for the time, the matter ended. #### But in May, that same year, Gregory XI, to whom nineteen propositions taken from Wyclif's works had been delated -- by whom we do not know -- wrote a stern reproof to the Archbishop of Canterbury for his sloth and indifference in this vital matter. The pope condemned the propositions, and the primate was ordered to arrest Wyclif, to interrogate him about them, and to hold him prisoner until the pope's judgment on his answers was made known. However, by the time these instructions reached the primate, a great change had come over English life. In June 1377 Edward III had died; the new king was a boy of ten, and the new parliament decidedly anti-papal. Lancaster was, for the moment, all-powerful, and Wyclif safe. Then in the following March the pope died, and within a few months his successor, Urban VI, had the problem of the election of Clement VII to distract him from the question of Wyclif's heresies. But the English bishops, once William Courtney had been translated from London to succeed as primate the feeble Simon of Sudbury, [ ] pursued the heresiarch relentlessly. At a great council in May 1382 twenty-four of Wyclif's doctrines were condemned as opposed to Catholic teaching, [ ] he was expelled from the university and forbidden to teach. Whereupon he retired to his rectory of Lutterworth and gave himself to writing what was to be the most popularly effective of all his works, the Trialogus, and at Lutterworth he died of paralysis on the last day of 1384. #### It was Wyclif's thought which formed the mind of John Hus, and of a whole generation of Czech theological rebels. That thought had developed in the way the thought of most heretics develops who would, at the same time, be practical reformers of institutions. The new ideas are, in very great part, the product of exasperation at authority's indifference to serious abuses, and there is only a difference of detail between Gregory XI's condemnation of the nascent heresy in 1377 and Martin V's, of the finished heresiarch, forty years later. Gregory XI, in a letter to Edward III, drew special attention to the social mischievousness of the heresy, and to the bishops he noted how Wyclif repeated Marsiglio and John of Jandun. [ ] #### In the nineteen propositions condemned by Gregory XI in 1377, Wyclif, like Marsiglio, proposes as the ideal a Church which is no Church at all. Its sacramental jurisdiction is declared to be superfluous, its external jurisdiction is so hedged about that it ceases to be a reality, while all clerics are to be answerable to the lay power for the whole of their conduct; the clergy are to be incapable of ownership and the Church's ownership is to be at the discretion of the prince. Five years later Wyclif is explicitly stating that all sacerdotal sacramental powers disappear once a priest or bishop falls into mortal sin, and that the pope in such circumstances ceases to be pope; the Schism is now four years old and for Wyclif this is, he says so explicitly, the opportunity to abolish the papal office for ever. He has already emancipated the prince from the Church's jurisdiction, and now he does as much for the preachers. Also he declares that the religious orders are manifest and inevitable hindrances to salvation, and that the great saints who founded them are in hell, unless they died repentant of their life's work; for a friar to ask alms, for a layman to give to him, is damnation for both. But what struck Wyclif's contemporaries as the crowning wickedness was his revival of the old heresy of Berengarius, namely that in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist Jesus Christ is not really and corporally present. The Mass, he said, had no warrant in Holy Scripture, and Scripture -- this is a doctrine of his last years -- is the sole source and test of religious truth. All men can understand Scripture, for as they read it the Holy Spirit will make its meaning clear to them; and Wyclif's efforts to bring the Bible to the ordinary man have given him a well-known place in the history of Bible translators. Another doctrine of Wyclif's later years was fatalism -- all things happen as they do because they must so happen; yet another was a revival of the old heresy that oaths are always unlawful. Learning, he said, universities and university degrees were the invention of the devil; and again, that to the devil God must be obedient, for it is God who is the real author of our sins. [ ] #### In this year, 1382, which saw the great condemnation of the English heretic, the English king, Richard II, married the sister of the King of Bohemia -- the Emperor Wenzel -- the daughter of the late king and emperor Charles IV. One effect of the marriage was to bring into close contact the universities of Oxford and Prague, and thereby to introduce Wyclif's theories to Bohemia. It was not, however, until the first years of the new century that his main theological work, the Trialogus, reached Prague, [ ] and the man who, already familiar with Wyclif's philosophical writings and won over by his violent condemnation of clerical sins, was from this time on to prove himself Wyclif's second self. John Hus was now thirty-three years of age, rector of the university, and incumbent of the Bethlehem Church lately founded for the preaching of sermons in Czech, and already, through the sermons and lectures of Hus, "a university for the people. " Hus was not a particularly good theologian, but he was a great orator and preacher, a severe critic of the ways of his clerical brethren and a man of extremely austere life. Once he was won over to the English theories all Prague would soon be taking sides for or against them. #### The fight opened when, in the next year (1403), the ecclesiastical authority in the Czech capital condemned the twenty-four Wyclifite theses condemned at Oxford in 1382 and another twenty-one also extracted from his works. There was a second condemnation in 1405, at the demand of Innocent VII, and a third in 1408. Hus had accepted the condemnation of 1403, but five years of effort as a reformer had turned him into an extremist. The clergy's attachment to goods, he was now saying, was a heresy, and as for Wyclif -- who had thundered against it in much the same terms -- Hus prayed to be next to him in heaven. Hus was now suspended from preaching, but as the king continued to favour him he disregarded the prohibition. There was a schism in the university -- where the German, anti-Czech element was strongly anti-Wyclif -- and presently a solemn burning of Wyclifite literature. Hus was now excommunicated, first by the Archbishop of Prague and then by Cardinal Colonna [ ] acting for John XXIII, and Prague was laid under an interdict, so long as he remained there. In 1411 he appealed from the pope to a General Council; in 1412 a still heavier excommunication was pronounced against him; he began to organise his following among the Czech nobles, and when, at the king's request, he left Prague, it was to spread his teaching by sermons in the country villages and the fields. Prague, and indeed all Bohemia, were now in great confusion. The king still supported Hus and exiled his Catholic opponents, even putting two of them to death, and the crisis was the first topic to occupy the General Council summoned at Rome by John XXIII in 1413, from which came a fresh condemnation of Wyclifite doctrine. When it was announced by the emperor that a new council was to meet at Constance, Hus declared that he would appear before it, to defend the truth of his teaching, and on October 11, 1414, with a body of associates and an escort of Czech nobles, he set out from Prague. He reached Constance on November 3, two days after the solemn entry of John XXIII. For both of them the city was to prove a prison, but for Hus a prison whence he was to go forth only to his execution. #### The story of the trial of John Hus at the Council of Constance is too important in its detail to risk a summary history's distortion of it. His heresy was manifest and the longer the discussions continued the more clearly was it proved. He refused to abandon his beliefs, and, declared a heretic, on July 6, 1415, he was handed over for execution to the town authorities, and burnt at the stake that same day. One year later his associate, Jerome of Prague, a layman, after trial before the council, suffered the like fate. #### Death by execution of the capital sentence was, before the Victorian Age, the common lot of the malefactor everywhere. Thieves, forgers, coiners ended at the gallows then, as surely and as inevitably as do murderers with us. Nor was there much ado about the gravity of their fate. And heresy was, by universal consent, a crime of the worst kind. These were by no means the first executions which the fifteenth century saw for this particular offence, nor the last. But they were the first that ever caused, in any community, a general reprobation of the authority by which they were brought about. Their effect in Bohemia was amazing. Four hundred and fifty Czech nobles signed a protestation to the king, and a solemn league and covenant was sworn, by which it was agreed to defy the condemnation of the doctrines Hus had preached, to ignore the proscription of Hussite literature, and to defend against ecclesiastical authority the priests who were of the new way. To one point of ritual -- which, indeed, had never been a great consideration with Hus -- the party gave much importance, namely that Holy Communion should be administered under both forms, and this became with them the badge and the criterion and the shibboleth of Hussite orthodoxy; whence the general names of Calixtines and Utraquists. [ ] #### King Wenzel was personally hostile to all this movement, but, as ever, weak and incapable of action; his consort was strongly in its favour. The king had no children. His heir was his brother, the Emperor Sigismund, than whom none was more orthodox, and who would hardly bear it indifferently that his brother's impotence should now lose him a kingdom. But on August 16, 1419, Wenzel died, and in anticipation of Sigismund's repression the Hussites prepared for war. Unfortunately for the new king and for the cause of the Catholics, the Hussites had a general of genius, John Zizka, and Zizka did not wait to be attacked. Presently he was master of the capital. After centuries of foreign rulers the Czech race was master in its own land (1420). #### The epic of the Hussite wars must be read elsewhere; the story of how, first under Zizka and after his death under Procop, the Czechs successfully defied the Catholic-Imperialist coalition and brought to nothing the successive crusades organised under the authority of Martin V. After Zizka, in 1420, had compelled Sigismund to raise the siege of Prague (July to November) there was, indeed, an effort to reach agreement, to unite Hussites and Catholics and also to reconcile the factions into which, already, the Hussites were themselves dividing. The Four Articles of Prague -- proposed by the Hussites as a basis of agreement -- provided that in the Czech lands there should be full liberty of preaching, that all those guilty of mortal sin should receive due punishment, that the clergy should lose all rights of ownership, and that Holy Communion should be administered under both species. But though the papal legates were not to be inveigled into the labyrinth which these vague and ambiguous propositions concealed, the Archbishop of Prague accepted the articles, and a kind of national church was set up. Then a political revolution set a Lithuanian prince on the throne of Bohemia and soon the war was on once more. Within three months (October 1421-January 1422) Zizka had destroyed Sigismund's armies, [ ] and crippled the Catholic effort for the next few years. #### It was only the divisions among the Hussites that now kept the party from a permanent mastery of Bohemia. The quarrels between the moderates -- Catholic in all but their attachment [ ] to the use of the chalice in Holy Communion -- and the extremists, the Taborites, [ ] who had adopted the full Wyclifite creed and now showed themselves a species of pre- Calvinian Calvinists, developed into a bloody civil war. In this war the Taborites lost their great commander Zizka, but they found a second, of hardly less genius, the priest known as Procop the Great. In the hope of ending the dissensions, and in order to compel the Catholics to acquiesce in a settlement, Procop in 1426 took the offensive. Once more there were bloody defeats for the crusaders, and the Czechs invaded Hungary and Silesia, wasting and destroying countrysides and towns. Sigismund, to halt the advance, now offered to negotiate, but the Czechs would have none of it, and in December 1429 they invaded Germany itself. The main army ravaged Saxony, while flying columns carried the work of destruction and terror into the north. The imperial commander now accepted their terms, and in return for an indemnity, and the pledge of a settlement based on the Four Articles of 1420, Procop fell back on Bohemia (February 1430). But Martin V, far from accepting such terms, prepared a new crusade, and to organise it he sent to Germany the most capable man in his service, Giuliano Cesarini. [ ] The question now, it seemed, was not so much when the Czechs would be crushed, but rather whether all Germany would not soon be Hussite. Not since the days when Innocent III made a stand against the Albigenses had Catholicism faced such a possibility of catastrophe. #### Cesarini did his work well and presently a new army of crusaders was in the field. It invaded Bohemia in August 1431 and, almost immediately, it suffered one of the bloodiest routs of all, at Taussig, on August 14, when the Czechs again slew the fleeing Germans by the thousand. This was the end of the papal attempt to crush the heretics by force of arms. Orthodoxy, lacking commanders of military genius, will never -- except by a miracle -- triumph over heretics possessed of such commanders and leading troops passionately interested in victory. Cesarini, who had greatly distinguished himself on the battlefield by his brave endeavour to rally the panic-stricken host, seems to have realised to the full how strong the Hussites were, and why. From this time on he turned all his ingenuity to discover a means of arresting and containing their hostility by some scheme of concessions. The instrument he proposed to use was the General Council summoned by Martin V to meet at Basel in the very summer of the great defeat, and to preside over which Cesarini had been appointed at the same time that he was commissioned for the affairs of Bohemia. But Cesarini's plan was immediately complicated by a desperate crisis within this council itself. #### The anti-papal spirit that had so largely inspired the debates in the Councils of Pisa and Constance was once again in action at Basel. If Constance had been orthodox enough to burn John Hus, it had been as anti-papal as Hus himself when it decreed that the General Council is the pope's superior, with a right to punish his disobedience to its decrees; and at Basel the pattern and precedent of Constance would now be followed in every jot and tittle. From the beginning the council would show itself, if zealous against the heretics, determined to control the negotiations with them, and at the same time to control the papacy too. The crisis opened by the Hussites was to be turned, now, to something still more threatening, and the popes to be caught between the Wyclifite heresy, militant and successful, without, and the rebels within, sapping and mining the very basis of papal authority and of the unity which is the Church's life. The history of the Council of Basel, which tormented the popes for a good eighteen years (1431-1449), made clear beyond doubt the existence of the most subtle danger of all, namely the persistence of a mentality among theologians and canonists and bishops -- a mentality very welcome to princes -- which would transform the reality of the divinely organised primacy, while it left unchanged and unchallenged the outward appearance and reverence, and the mass of the traditional Catholic beliefs. #### The popes of the time -- Martin V and Eugene IV -- were well aware of the danger, and of the weaknesses in their position. To control and arrest the new development, on which the great assembly at Constance had conferred such prestige, was indeed the main anxiety of their reigns, the need urgent beyond all else, and because of which, in a structure that seemed to shake and totter uneasily with every speech, anything so challenging as the needed ruthless destruction of abuses must be indefinitely postponed. Neither of these popes was -- it is true -- a great man in any sense. Neither will, for example, stand comparison not only with such contemporary bishops as St. Antoninus [ ] or St. Laurence Giustiniani, [ ] but even with such contemporaries as the cardinals they created, with Cesarini, let us say, or Capranica or Albergati, the great Carthusian bishop of Bologna. Martin V and Eugene IV were, indeed, mediocre popes, but the ultimate reason for the apparent sterility of the thirty years after Constance, and for the apparent incompetence with which these two popes met the successive councils, was something far deeper than their own personal incapacity. #### At Constance, acceptance of the old Catholic idea that the pope was answerable to God alone for his rule of the Church had suffered badly. The relation of Pope and Church, as this gathering had set it out, no pope could accept. [ ] And in less than a month after the dissolution of the council the very pope it had elected made this clear. Martin V had not, while the council was still assembled, confirmed any of its acts except its condemnations of the Wyclifite heresies. This [ ] was his sole reference to the critical activities that had filled the last four years. But, on May 10, 1418, in public consistory, dismissing an appeal from the Polish ambassadors (against the decision that John of Falkenburg had not been condemned by the council), the pope declared, "It is not lawful for anyone to appeal against the judge who is supreme, that is to say, against the judgment of the Holy See, of the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Jesus Christ, nor to evade his judgments in matters of faith; these last, in fact, because of their superior importance, must be brought for judgment to the pope's tribunal. " [ ] #### Yet once again the phenomenon was seen how the most unlikely man, once elected pope, became a man of principle in matters of faith. Odo Colonna, created cardinal by a pope of the Roman line (Innocent VII), had in 1408 deserted the Roman pope Gregory XII and joined with the rebels from the Avignon camp to set up the Council of Pisa. There he had played his part in the " deposition " of Gregory XII, and in the " election " of Alexander V. He had also his share of responsibility for the "election" of John XXIII, and when Constance, five years later, put this pope in the dock, he had been a principal witness for the prosecution. What were the personal opinions of the cardinal Odo Colonna about the powers of General Councils over popes, and about the validity of these successive depositions in which he had played his part? Contemporaries describe him as a simple, amiable man, free from any spirit of intrigue, not at all self-opinionated or obstinate; the last man in the world, one would have said, to hinder the further evolution of the work in which he had played his own important part. #### Martin V did not, however, publish to the Church this manifestation of his mind made, publicly enough, in the consistory, at the very outset of his reign. [ ] He would not, he could not, accept the principle on which Constance had founded so much of its actrion. But, on the other hand, he did not refuse to be bound by its prescription that a new council should meet in 1423 and yet another in 1430. It was his policy to lie as low as he was let, and to say as near to nothing as was possible. And so the twelve years of his reign were no more than an uneasy truce. #### Martin V duly opened the General Council of Pavia (April 23, 1423), arranged and announced at Constance five years earlier (April 19, 1418). The legates appointed to preside (February 22, 1423) found awaiting them in the city of the council two abbots, from Burgundy. During the next two months four bishops arrived, two of them from England. Then in June the legates transferred the council to Siena -- the plague had broken out in Pavia, and the pope could come to Siena, whereas Pavia was a city in the territory of his enemy, the Duke of Milan. It was November before the first general session was held -- and even then no more than twenty-five bishops had appeared. But decrees were passed against the Hussites, and reprobating slackness in the pursuit and punishment of heretics. Then the handful of bishops came to the practical business of reform, and the storm began in earnest. The pope had given the legates the power to transfer the council from the city where it was convoked, and one party in the council now declared that such a grant was a violation of the law [ ] made at Constance. The French were demanding that the nations should have their say in the nomination of cardinals. The ghost of Benedict XIII (dead at last [ ] in the opening months of the council), appeared when the King of Aragon recognised his successor "Clement VIII" and intrigued with the Republic of Siena to secure recognition for him in the very city of Pope Martin's council. Then a friar preached before the council a strange sermon in which he explained that, like Our Lady, the Church had two spouses. There had been St. Joseph (who obeyed her) and the Holy Ghost whom Our Lady herself obeyed: so the Church, too, must obey the Holy Ghost but could command her other spouse, the pope. The months were going by without the Church in general showing any interest in the council, and the council was proving itself no more than a debating society on the solitary, but inexhaustible, topic of conciliar supremacy. There were, of course, those whom these debates bored, and presently they began to make their way home. The legates made their plans accordingly and announcing that the next council would meet at Basel in 1431, they dissolved the Council of Siena (March 7, 1424). #### The pope promised that he would himself reform the curia, and the decrees he published [ ] have been taken, not unnaturally, as the measure either of his inability to recognise wrongdoing when he saw it, or else of his indifference. For they are little more than pious generalities about the need for cardinals and their suites to set a good example to the rest of mankind, and a repetition, for the hundredth time, of ancient laws about their dress and ornaments. [ ] #### "The very word 'council’ filled Martin V with horror, " said a contemporary. There was every reason why it should; [ ] and as the time drew near for the council at Basel, to which he was pledged, placards appeared on doors of St. Peter's to remind him of his duty and threaten revolt if he failed in it. On February 1, 1431, he appointed the legate who was to preside, Giuliano Cesarini, and three weeks later Martin V was dead, carried off by apoplexy. #### The conclave was short, and its choice (March 3) was unanimous, the Venetian cardinal, Gabriele Condulmaro; he took the name Eugene IV. The new pope was forty-seven years of age, a Canon Regular, and greatly reputed for his austere life. He was a nephew of Gregory XII, and one of those four cardinals whose creation, in 1408, had been the occasion of Gregory's cardinals deserting him and of the subsequent Pisan extension of the schism. As a cardinal Eugene IV had stood loyally by Gregory XII until his abdication. Only then had he taken any part in the council at Constance. The Church had in him a pope whose action would not be hampered by any memories of a past in which he had patronised the new conciliar doctrines and used them as a whip to chastise unworthy popes. But while Eugene IV faced the approaching crisis with this undoubted advantage, he had unhappily inherited something of the vacillation which had ruined the career of his uncle, Gregory XII. And not only had he, like the rest of the cardinals, signed and sworn the pact drawn up in the conclave, [ ] but as pope he publicly renewed his promises, pledging himself thereby to increase the importance of the cardinals, and to give the Sacred College, as such, a real share in the direction of the Church, making it almost an organ of government. [ ] The curia was to be reformed in head and members; cardinals would only be chosen according to the decrees of Constance; the pope would ask their advice about the new General Council and would be guided by it; and, as well as guaranteeing them a half of the main papal revenues, he would not, without their consent, make treaties and alliances nor any declaration of war; finally, all vassals of the Holy See would henceforth, swear allegiance not only to the pope, but to the Sacred College too. #### Cesarini, it has been said, [ ] had been given a two-fold commission by Martin V. He was to preside at the council and also to organise, in Germany, the new crusade against the Hussites. The new pope confirmed both the commissions. Actually, the more urgent matter now was the Hussite invasion of Germany, and so while the fathers of the council made their slow way to Basel, and while the pope was beginning to turn his own thoughts to the new offers of reunion from the emperor at Constantinople, the legate to the council was busy preaching the Holy War in Germany and organising supplies for the army. On June 27 Eugene had sent word to him that the opening of the council might wait until the Hussites had been settled, but that settlement proved to be the disastrous defeat of Taussig. [ ] It was with this dreadful catastrophe still very fresh in his mind, and with a certitude about the fact and the nature of the crisis before the Church, that Cesarini, only three weeks after the battle, came to the council (September 9). #### The legate's first act was to begin a vigorous campaign to secure a better attendance. So far, in fact, it was the experience of Pavia and Siena all over again, a mere handful of prelates who could not conceivably be taken to represent anything but themselves. However, on December 14, after three months more of publicity, the legate held the first solemn general session. #### And now began the long story of misunderstanding and cross purposes, not only between the anti-papal majority at the council and the Holy See, but between the pope and his legate. For, nearly five weeks before this solemn opening, Eugene had despatched to Cesarini a new commission which, reciting with great detail all the hindrances that were making, and must make, this council such another miserable fiasco as Siena had been, gave the legate power to dissolve it, and to announce a new council to be held at Bologna in the summer of 1433, without prejudice to the council which Constance had decreed must meet round about 1440. This new commission did not, however, reach the legate until nine days after the opening session, at which the one piece of business accomplished had been to re-affirm the fundamental decree Frequens of Constance. Had the legate known it, a second, still more drastic, commission was already on its way to him. Even before Cesarini had received the first, Eugene IV, on December 18, had signed a bull dissolving the council, and giving as the determining reason the invitation which it had sent to the Hussites (on October 30), to attend and state their case. The second bull came to Cesarini's knowledge on January 10, 1432, and although he did not leave Basel he ceased from that date, to preside over the council. #### From the moment when Eugene IV, in 1431, decided to bring the council at Basel to an end, and thereby provided the advocates of the new conciliar theory with their opportunity to renew the attack on the traditional practice of the papal supremacy, all other questions sank into comparative insignificance -- even the question of a peace with the victorious, militant Hussites of Bohemia. The story of the council’s handling of the Bohemian crisis is, however, closely bound up with the still more involved story of its long duel with the pope; but the history may be more intelligible if the stories are told separately. #### The Council of Basel -- as will be told -- decided that it was its duty to ignore the pope's will and to continue in session; and when (February 10, 1432) the Hussites decided to accept its invitation, they were told that, despite the pope's instructions, the council would go on with its work. The next seven months were taken up with diplomatic preliminaries, and especially with the arranging for safe conducts for the Hussites, in which no loophole was left that would allow for their execution as heretics should they fail to convert the council to their way of thinking. In October deputies from Bohemia came to Basel to make the last arrangements, and in January 1433, three hundred Hussites arrived and the discussions began. They continued for more than three months (January 7-April 14), and they settled nothing at all, except the real meaning of the Four Articles of 1420 and the impossibility that any Catholic could accept them. The council proposed ammendments that would make the articles acceptable, and when the Hussites returned to Bohemia a deputation from the council went with them, to urge the council’s views at Prague. #### This mission -- it was the first of five -- remained in Bohemia for six months (June 1433-January 1434). Its great achievement was the Hussites' acceptance of the articles as the council had amended them -- the so-called Compactata of Prague (November 30, 1433). The Hussites had been divided now for years into mutually hostile sections; and this helped the council’s envoys. A further cause for their success -- wholly unconnected with the intrinsic reasonableness of their demands -- was the victory of the Bavarians over the Hussites on September 21, 1433, the first real military disaster which the party had suffered. The Compactata amounted, in the first place, to a treaty of peace. The war was to cease and all ecclesiastical censures on the Hussites to be lifted; they were to have full liberty to administer Holy Communion under both kinds if, in all other respects, they accepted the faith and discipline of the Church and returned to union with it, and it was agreed that priests so administering the Sacrament were to explain to the people that it was equally truly and as well received under the one kind as under both; the demand that those guilty of mortal sin should be punished was allowed, but it was stated explicitly that the power of inflicting punishment on the guilty belonged only to those who possessed jurisdiction over the guilty, and not to private individuals; as for liberty to preach, here again there was a restriction, preachers must first be approved by the appropriate authority; the fourth article, against the cleric's right to own, was also made more precise so that it was now admitted that the clergy could own what came to them by inheritance, or gift, that the Church could own also, and, finally, that while clerics were bound to administer ecclesiastical property like faithful stewards, the property itself could not be taken over by others without the sin of sacrilege. #### Obviously the articles so qualified were not the articles for which the enthusiasts had fought in Zizka's armies. They were no sooner signed than a party among the Hussites proposed to re-open the discussion. The envoys went back to Basel to report, and the rival factions among the Hussites began a civil war. On May 30, 1434, the more extreme party were badly defeated, at Lipau, and their great leader Procop was among the slain. #### The victors now approached Sigismund with offers of peace and recognition of him as King of Bohemia. The basis of the negotiations was the agreement made at Prague in the previous November, but when the Hussites met the emperor (Diet of Ratisbon, August 22-September 2, 1434), they demanded that the use of the chalice in the administration of Holy Communion should be compulsory. The council’s envoys, however, stood firm for liberty, and the Hussites had to yield. When these, however, came to make their report to the Bohemian Diet at Prague (October 23), the Diet put out for Sigismund's acceptance thirteen points, many of them altogether new; such for example, as that bishops in Bohemia should henceforth be elected by their clergy and people, and that the pope should exercise no jurisdiction over criminous Czech clerics. #### The council’s envoys refused to accept the novelties; war broke out once more between the Hussite factions; and then, when the moderates were again victorious, the council at Sigismund's request, sent yet another commission -- the fourth -- to try and negotiate a peace. The scene of the negotiations this time (July-August 1435) was Brno in Moravia. Here the Hussites stood stubbornly by their demand for the thirteen points, while the Basel legates asked how a party could expect further concessions which had not yet honoured the pledges solemnly given in the Compactata of 1433? The single result of the conference was that Sigismund -- weary after sixteen years' exclusion from his kingdom -- began to lean towards the Hussites, to whom he made, in great secrecy, the promise that he would somehow secure for them recognition of their thirteen points (July 6, 1435). [ ] The final breakdown came when the Hussites asked for a change in the wording of the article about Church property, and on September 16, after eight months' absence, the envoys returned to Basel. #### Seven weeks later they were taking the road once more. The peace party -- so Sigismund reported to the council -- had now triumphed at Prague. He was recognised as king, the council was to be accepted, but, the right of the Czechs to elect their bishops must be conceded. The envoys were, then, commissioned to attend the diet about to meet at Stuhlweissenburg, and to obtain first of all a guarantee that the obligations sworn to in the Compactata would be honoured, and also that there would be liberty for all to communicate as they chose; if driven to it the legates could accept the Hussite modification of the articles about Church property. The diet opened on December 20, 1435, and on December 28 the envoys bluntly put it to the emperor that he was playing a double game. The storm that followed raged for days and on January 1, 1436, the envoys demanded a written promise from the emperor that he would not interfere in matters of Church discipline. The Hussites strongly opposed them. A compromise was arranged -- Sigismund was to make the promise to the legates verbally, but there was to be no mention of it in the treaties. All was now ready for the solemn promulgation of the Compactata, but the act was deferred until a new diet should meet at Iglau. Here, in June 1436, the old controversy began all over again, but at long last, on July 5, the Compactata were published, and on August 14 Sigismund was recognised as King of Bohemia. #### The war was over at last, and a peace patched up by which the Hussites were recognised -- by the Council of Basel -- as Catholics. But the peace rested on pledges which no real Hussite ever, for a moment, intended to honour. On the very morrow of the great ceremony of reconciliation, the Archbishop of Prague publicly broke the agreement about the manner of administering Holy Communion, in the very city where the ceremony had taken place. #### A few weeks later there was another shift in the balance of the Hussite factions, and he fell from power. Once again a delegation left Prague to report the change to the council, but it arrived to find the fathers of Basel facing the most anxious hour of their history. The enforced long-suffering of the pope had at last reached its end. The council was under orders to transfer itself to Ferrara. None of its negotiations with the Hussites had as yet been submitted to the pope for his judgment, nor would they now ever be submitted to him. For the council was about to disobey the bull translating it, and so itself to incur an excommunication as real as any that had ever lain upon the Hussites. #### While the last scenes of the tragic farce were being acted at Basel, Sigismund died (December 9, 1437), and the lately pacified kingdom of Bohemia split yet once again into civil war, the prelude to years of anarchy. The danger to Christendom from militant Wyclifism was indeed over; but the Hussites remained, very much alive in Bohemia; and Bohemia was now a frontier province of Christendom, for the Turkish conquest of south-eastern Europe had begun, and the long Turkish occupation of the lands between the Adriatic and the Carpathians. #### When, in January 1432, it had come to the knowledge of the council at Basel that Eugene IV had issued a bull dissolving it, the council did not refuse to obey him, nor simply ignore his act, but in a solemn general session (February 15) it re- enacted the decree of Constance which laid it down that it is the pope's duty to obey a General Council, and the council’s duty to punish his disobedience, and that without its own consent a General Council cannot be dissolved nor transferred to another place. Eleven days later, the bishops of France came together (under the king's patronage) at Bourges; their meetings continued for six weeks, and they begged and exhorted the pope to continue the good work being done at Basel. The emperor, Sigismund, also intervened strongly on the council’s behalf, only to draw from the pope a curt reminder that this was an ecclesiastical affair. And the council pressed on to beg the pope to withdraw his decree of dissolution, and also to cite him to take his place at Basel. The cardinals too, were "invited" and given three months in which to appear. [ ] These citations were nailed to the doors of St. Peter's on June 6, and on June 20 the council made special regulations to provide for an election should the pope chance to die, and it also forbade the pope to create any new cardinals while the present misunderstanding continued. #### On August 20, 1432, the council was given the pope's reply. Eugene granted practically everything the council had demanded, but he did not grant it in the way they demanded. The council was allowed to continue its negotiations with the Hussites, and to plan the reformation of clerical life in Germany, and it could choose another city for the coming council instead of Bologna. But the council wanted an explicit withdrawal of the decree dissolving it, and an acknowledgment that without its own consent it could not be dissolved (September 3). General Councils alone, the pope was told, were infallible. At this moment the council consisted of three cardinals and some thirty-two other prelates, though the lower clergy (and especially the doctors) were there in great numbers. England too, however, had joined with France and the emperor to support the council, and -- what must have weighed very heavily indeed with a pope who recalled the crisis of 1408 -- out of the twenty-one cardinals only six were securely on his side. Then, in the last week of 1432, the council gave Eugene sixty days to withdraw his decree, and to approve, without any reservation, all it had enacted; and the council declared null all nominations made by him until he obeyed it. #### The sixty days went by, and Eugene did not surrender; but in a bull of December 14, 1432, he explained that the coming council at Bologna would really be a continuation of that at Basel, and that only in this sense did he intend to dissolve the Council of Basel. But this did not relieve the situation at all, and the council grimly persisted that the pope must acknowledge that what had been going on at Basel continuously since the beginning was a General Council, guided by the Holy Spirit. There were, again, long and impassioned discussions between the pope's envoys and the council (March 7-10, 1433), and then, on April 27, the eleventh general session published eight new decrees which completed the fettering of the papacy that Constance had begun. #### The pope next appointed new presidents for the council -- a tacit recognition that it still existed -- but the council would not recognise them: the pope must be explicit in his withdrawal of the decree of dissolution. The powers he gave the new legates were too wide for the council’s liking; and his act was, in fact, a reassembling of the Council. On July 13 the council took away from the Holy See for ever all right to appoint bishops and abbots, [ ] and decreed that all future popes must swear to obey this law before being installed. Eugene was threatened with punishment, and reminded how patient the council had been so far and he was now ordered to withdraw the decree and to announce solemnly his acceptance of all that the council had done. [ ] #### Eugene meanwhile prepared two bulls, the first of which annulled whatever had been done against the rights of his see (July 29), while the second (August 1) accepted the council as a lawful General Council and formally withdrew the decree of December 18, 1431, that had dissolved it. This still did not satisfy the council. It was not enough that the pope recognised it now, and as from now; he must say that his own decree had never any force, could never have had any force. On the very day that the council made this retort, [ ] Eugene, at Rome, was making his formal reply to the acts of July 13, quashing and reprobating this mass of anti-papal legislation. #### And now, political necessity cast its shadow over the isolated pope's defiance. The Milanese -- at war with Venice, the pope's homeland, and, because of that, the pope's ally -- invaded the Papal State in force. They won over the pope's own vassals and commanders and he was soon forced out of Rome, a fugitive. What relation there really was between the invaders and the council we do not know -- but they gave out that they came in its name to chastise the pope. Eugene now made a further concession to the council (December 15, 1433). He re-issued the bull of surrender of August 1, 1433, but with the changes which the council had demanded; he admitted now that he had decreed a dissolution in 1431, and that his act had been the cause of grave dissensions; he decreed that the council had been conducted in a canonical way ever since it opened and, as it were, now ordered it to continue its good work, and amongst other things, to reform the papacy. The dissolution then was null, and all sentences against the council are annulled; and the pope no longer demands that the council shall retract its anti-papal decrees. This bull was read in the council on February 5, 1434, and the council declared itself satisfied. #### The council now had the ball at its feet. Eugene was presently an exile, [ ] in Florence, and on June 26, 1434, at the eighteenth general session, the declaration of Constance was published once again, that a General Council derives its power immediately from God and that the pope is bound to obey it in all matters of faith and of the general reform of the Church, and that he is subject to its correction should he disobey. From the unhappy pope there came not a sign that he was aware of this dangerous impertinence. [ ] #### In silence, and with a newly acquired patience, Eugene IV waited until he could intervene without more loss to his cause than profit. Given a little more rope the council would in the end destroy itself. Month by month, through 1434 and 1435, it assumed to itself one after another of the administrative and executive and juridical functions of the papacy, repeating here the great mistakes made at Constance. Soon there was time for little else. The council occupied itself with the Jewish problem and closed the profession of medicine against the feared and hated race; it decreed a distinctive dress for them; and, with their conversion in view, it ordered that chairs of Hebrew should be founded in all the universities. [ ] Then, in January 1435, it turned to the problem how to reform the lives of Christians. It made a stringent decree against clerical concubinage from the terms of which it would not be unfair to deduce that this was common enough, [ ] and even a notorious feature of ordinary life; there are countries, says the new law, where bishops take bribes from the clergy to connive at misconduct of this kind. Such bishops must make over to charities the double of what they have so received. Bishops must also be less lavish in their sentences of interdict; these have indeed become so frequent as to be a real scandal. There is also a notable mitigation of the law that made excommunication infectious as it were, through communication with the excommunicated; and a fourth law to restrict vexatious appeals from the bishops' tribunals. [ ] #### Then, in the summer of that same year, [ ] the council made a clean sweep of all the papal taxes due on appointments to benefices, annates included, and enacted that any further attempt to levy them was simony. Should any pope disobey this canon, he is to be denounced to the next General Council and this will deal with him. All the papal collectors were bidden to send in their accounts to the council for examination, and to pay into the council the moneys they had received. [ ] #### It is important here to note to what extent the universal Church was in fact represented at Basel in this, the high noon of the council’s power. The legate Ambrogio Traversari, writing about this time, [ ] says that although there are between five and six hundred who take part in the proceedings, there are barely twenty bishops among them, and many of the great mass are not clerics at all. The truth of this is borne out by the recorded attendance at the general session of April 14, 1436 when there were present twenty bishops and thirteen abbots. [ ] #### When the council’s envoys brought to the pope the decree of June 9 that abolished all his main sources of revenue, they lectured him for his failure to give a good example by obeying the council, and they stiffened their lecture with threats. But Eugene merely acknowledged that he had heard them, and to the council he sent a reply that the pope is its superior, and that the Holy See cannot function without a revenue. #### The deadlock -- for such the situation had become -- was destined to be solved by the success of the pope in winning over the Greeks to discuss the proposed reunion with himself rather than with the council. For there had actually been rival embassies negotiating at Constantinople, from the pope and from Basel. As it became evident -- to both parties -- that the Greeks would disregard the council, the pope's defiance of its threats increased. The greater part of 1436 (April to December) went by in mere repetition of these threats, and it was not difficult for the pope to charge the council, before the princes of Christendom, with utter sterility save for its proposal to enlarge the authority of the bishops at the expense of that of the Roman See. #### With the new year, 1437, active preparations began for the reception of a host of Greek delegates and their suites. It was necessary to decide, once and for all, where the meeting of pope and emperor should take place. The pope, explaining that the Greeks preferred the convenience of a city in Italy, invited the council’s vote. But the council treated the Greeks with as little ceremony as it treated the pope. The Greeks had objected that Basel was too far away, and the council then proposed Avignon. These debates were the most heated of all. Venerable prelates had to be forcibly held back as their brethren replied to their speeches. Roysterers in a tavern, said a cynically-amused spectator, [ ] would have behaved more peaceably. Troops were brought into the cathedral [ ] to prevent bloodshed, where the Cardinal-Archbishop of Arles, the leader of the anti-papal majority, had been sitting on the throne, fully vested and mitred, since cockcrow, lest another should capture this point of vantage. Each side had its own decree ready, and once the cardinal began the mass they were read out, simultaneously, the rival bishops racing anxiously, each eager that his own side should first begin the Te Deum. The scene is indeed worthy of what the council had been for far too long, and not unrepresentative of all that the so-called "conciliar movement" ever really was. [ ] #### But the pope now felt himself master at last, and to yet another summons to appear before the council and answer for his disobedience, he replied by the bull Doctoris Gentium, September 18, 1437, which transferred the council to Ferrara and gave the assembly at Basel thirty days more to wind up its negotiations with the Czechs. When the legates left Basel, in December 1437, many of the bishops went with them. And while the little rump which remained now began the first formalities of the trial of Eugenius, the Greeks arrived at Ferrara, and there, on January 8, 1438, the first general session of the council took place. #### There seemed now no longer any real danger to Catholic unity in the West, whatever the lengths to which the handful of clerics at Basel might go; but in truth the crisis was by no means at an end. The Christian princes, even though they did not break with the pope, and probably, never intended to break with him, found the little council too useful an arm against the papacy for them to be willing to see the pope destroy it. For France, and for Germany, this was an opportunity to lay the beginnings of that blackmailing tutelage of the papacy which was not wholly to disappear until our own times. #### It is this last important aspect of the Basel activities that alone justifies the seemingly inordinate length at which the story has been told of an assembly so insignificant in numbers; and it is this which makes it necessary to tell the weary tale to the very end with the same detail. Here, in fact, we can observe, for the first time, not so much the new ideas about the royal control of Catholicism, but those ideas given political form, and that form blessed by the approbation of theologians, of canonists and of Catholic bishops, the local episcopate now showing itself quisling to the Holy See, despite the long tradition and despite the consecration oaths of personal fidelity to the pope. #### Much has been written about the "conciliar movement, " but does not the phrase itself do the thing too much honour? A general movement there was indeed, for a whole generation, to bring about the restoration of unity by means of a General Council. But when was there any general enthusiasm for the government of the Church through councils? Not even the tiny active minority of bishops, so ready to use the machinery of a council to control the Holy See, proposed to obey the existing laws which subjected them to meet in provincial councils for mutual correction and the good of religion. As for the "democratic" idealists among the lower clergy, who made up the mass of the demonstrators, what more did any of them want but a career? #### Again, what did those reforms amount to, of which it has been said so often that had not the papacy blocked them, they would have purified, and given new life to, the Church? What is there new in them beyond the liberation of episcopal incomes from the papal taxation? Nowhere do they provide remedies for the real troubles that were rotting away the bases of men's allegiance to the faith; the lack of any system to form and train a good parochial clergy; the need to reorganise of all the major monastic orders; the reorganisation of sees to make the needed contact of bishops and clergy possible; the de- secularisation of the episcopate -- which would make the bishops really shepherds of men's souls; the correction of what was wrong in the philosophical and theological schools; the relating of the religious life of the common man to the fundamental doctrines of the faith; the needed restoration of the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist (that is, as Holy Communion) [ ] to its proper place in Christian life. Of all these needs our reformers of Basel and Constance seem wholly unaware. Independence of the higher authority of Rome in the administration of their sees, and above all a tighter grasp on their revenues, such were the main considerations that moved the fathers of these assemblies when they turned from their novel speculations about the papal office to the practical work of reform. " It is the spirit which giveth life, " to the clerical reformer as to all other things Christian. The great historian of these times [ ] has, it would seem, said the last word about these men and their constructive work, and he does but re-echo the biting language already quoted from their contemporary Aeneas Sylvius. [ ] #### " [These zealous Gallicans] might have been still more persuasive, and more interesting, had they been as keen to promote those useful reforms which would not have put money into their pockets; if they had acknowledged the need for themselves to meet occasionally in provincial councils and synods; [ ] if they had adopted the praiseworthy custom of living in their sees. . . if, in a word, after having (according to the day's current phrase) reformed 'the Church in its Head, ' they had set themselves seriously to reform it 'in its members' -- in other words to reform themselves. " #### The miserable history shows, too, in what an anaemic condition the papacy came forth from the long ordeal of the Schism; and of how little support in Christendom it could be certain, when it had to take such notice, and for so long, of the crude impertinencies of such insignificance. Surely none but minds already formed in a tradition of opposition to the very idea of the papal supremacy could, with the facts before them, ever have exalted and glorified the proceedings of this wretched assembly, and seen in them the promise -- blighted, alas ! almost ere it was born -- of a new age when religion would be purified from tyranny and from the abuses which tyranny must breed. The story of the Council of Basel in the last eleven years of its existence (1438-1449), and of the opportunity it proved to the Christian princes, needs to be known well in all its concrete detail (and it is rarely told in more than vague generality) [ ] if the suspicion is to be understood which henceforward attached in the eyes of the Roman Curia to all who, wishing to reform the Church, spoke of a council as the obvious tool for the job. There is need, at any rate, to know exactly what the Council of Basel did, and exactly what it was that the popes reprobated in it, and exactly what those reforms were which the council proposed and whose development the popes arrested. The opportunity now (1438) offered to the Catholic princes -- and the history of the next eleven years is the story of their eager use of it -- lay in this that the Council of Basel reopened the Schism. The consequent crisis between the Roman Curia and these princes was over, in France, in less than two years; in Germany it dragged on for another seven. In both countries the crisis was ended by a compromise that left the princes stronger than before in their control of the Church. #### About a fortnight or so after the opening of the council at Ferrara, the assembly at Basel declared Eugene IV suspended from his functions as pope (January 15, 1438). Just a month later, to the day, Eugene replied by excommunicating his judges (February 15); and just a month later again the principle on which Basel had been acting for the last seven years, that no pope could transfer a council against its will, was declared by the little assembly to be an article of the Christian faith (March 15). At Frankfort, in these same weeks, the diet of the empire was assembled for the last formalities of the election of an emperor, and it declared -- what the new emperor, Albert II, [ ] confirmed -- that, as between Eugene and the council at Basel, Germany would be neutral, that a new (third) General Council ought to be called to reconcile the pope and the fathers of Basel, which council should meet in an imperial city, Strasburg, or Constance, or Mainz. The crisis, then, was to be prolonged and the settlement would be a German-influenced settlement. #### In France, on May 1, 1438, the king -- Charles VII -- called together a great assembly of prelates and notables at Bourges. Two questions were proposed for their opinion; what ought the king to do in this new conflict between the pope and Basel? what action should be taken about the Basel decrees for a reformation of Christian life? After six weeks of discussion, in which envoys from the pope were heard and envoys from Basel also, the first demanding that Charles withdraw all support from Basel and the second that he should support its condemnation of the pope, the assembly answered that the king ought to work for the reconciliation of Basel with the pope, and that he ought to accept the reform decrees, with some changes of detail. The second opinion was embodied in a royal edict that gave the reform decrees force of law in France -- the so- called Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, June 7, 1438. [ ] Without any reference to the pope, in defiance indeed of his known will, the Church in France was henceforth to be governed by the decrees of a "council" which the pope had just excommunicated. #### The new emperor, Albert II, reigned for only a short eighteen months, but long enough for the Diet of Mainz (March 26, 1439) to adopt the Instrumentum Acceptationis which was substantially the German equivalent of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. [ ] And now the various reforming princes and prelates set themselves, individually, to gather what privileges and favours they could, both from the council at Basel and from the pope; and German Catholicism began to split up; the same city, chapter and see being at times divided for and against the pope, and rival bishops appearing, here and there, to claim the same see. In support of the plan for a new council, an informal league of princes began to form, France, Castile, Portugal, Navarre, Aragon and Milan, in addition to the German princes bound by the decision of Mainz. #### Seven weeks after that decision the Basel prelates promulgated a "definition of faith. " It was declared to be a doctrine that all must believe, under pain of heresy, that General Councils are superior to the pope, also that the pope has no power to transfer a General Council against its will (May 16); and a month later the council deposed Eugene IV (June 25, 1439). On this momentous occasion there were present no more than twenty prelates and only seven of these were bishops; and the president had relics brought in from the churches and placed on the waste of vacant seats -- the pope, it should appear, was condemned by the saints as well. The Holy See -- in the eyes of these twenty prelates and their somewhat more numerous following of doctors -- was now vacant, and it remained vacant for another seven months, while the rest of Christendom, with Eugene IV, gave itself, at Ferrara and Florence, to the business of reuniting the Eastern Churches with Rome. But at Basel, throughout the summer, the plague was raging, sweeping away the inhabitants of the little town by the thousand. On September 17, however, the " fathers " defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, [ ] and on October 24 they approached the problem how to form a conclave for the election of the new pope. #### They had but one cardinal to support them, [ ] and they decided to add to him thirty-two electors chosen from the council, who must, all of them, at least be deacons ! Of the thirty-two, eleven were bishops, seven abbots, five doctors of theology, and nine doctors of law (canon or civil). Next there was a violent dispute, about who should have the best accommodation in the conclave, that nearly wrecked the whole affair. The bishops demanded first pick of the rooms, but they were persuaded to allow the more usual practice of drawing for them by lots. Then, on October 30, this miserable parody of Constance proceeded to its consummation and the conclave opened. From the beginning the favourite candidate (16 votes out of 33 in the first ballot) was the Duke of Savoy, Amadeus VIII. [ ] As he rose in successive ballots to within one vote of the required two-thirds, the opposition grew violent. He was a layman, it was argued, and a temporal prince; he had been married and four of his children were still alive. Sed contra, this was a time when the Church needed a pope who was rich, [ ] and well-connected. At last, on the fifth ballot (November 5), Amadeus was elected, with 26 votes out of 33. The council (on November 19) confirmed the election and on January 8, 1440, the duke accepted. He proposed to call himself Felix V. #### Never surely has there been so odd a choice. Cesarini reassured the council at Florence. Amadeus was so avaricious, he said, that he grudged to pay for food enough to keep himself alive; there would soon be open war between the anti-pope and his council. [ ] Truly enough, his first reply to the council’s offer was to ask how was he to live now that the council had abolished the annates? He had to support him his own state and Switzerland generally, Scotland too, and Aragon, with its dependencies Sardinia and Sicily. Eugene IV excommunicated Felix on March 23, 1440; Felix, however, went through with the sacrilegious farce, was ordained, consecrated and crowned on July 24. But the King of France, though not repudiating the act of 1438, protested against the election, and obliged his subjects to continue faithful to Eugene. Brittany followed suit, so did Castile. #### The only real additional anxiety which the election brought to Eugene was in Germany, where the Emperor Frederick III, [ ] although he did not acknowledge Felix, maintained the policy of neutrality, and continued to call for a new council in Germany. This was in the spring of 1441, by which time the first disputes between Felix and his council were well under way. They had refused, on principle, to accept the president he gave them; and their scheme for nuncios and legates to enlist the support of the princes had broken down when Felix refused to contribute to the expense. It was yet another grievance that he refused his newly-created Sacred College [ ] the half of the revenues to which they were entitled. In November 1442, and soon after his meeting with Frederick III -- who carefully avoided all dangerous occasions of implicit acknowledgement, and whose main concern was to marry off his widowed daughter to one of the pope's sons -- Felix left Basel, for ever. He had spent as much on the adventure as he proposed to spend, and he settled now at Lausanne. In that year, 1442, the council had held no public session and on May 16, 1443, it held its forty-fifth, and last. In June Alfonso of Aragon had returned to his allegiance, a most important gain to Eugene, for he was king now of Naples too, with a frontier coterminous with the Papal State on its southern and eastern sides; and with Alfonso there also returned his ally, the Duke of Milan. #### The whole interest henceforth lay in the fate of the Roman hold on Catholic Germany. Hussite zeal was still hot in the south below the deceptive agreement of 1436. How much of the country would the pope be able to hold to union with his see? In Germany little could be done during the next two years, for war broke out between the Swiss and Austria. The war left the princes of Germany still more divided, and it aggravated the differences between the partisans of the council and those who, with Frederick III, leaned towards Eugene. In January 1445 Eugene began to move against two of these pro-council princes, the Archbishop of Cologne and the Bishop of Munster, who were anti-imperialist also. There was a diplomatic exchange between pope and emperor -- Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini representing Frederick, and the Spanish canonist Juan Carvajal the pope; and out of this there emerged the foundations of a lasting settlement. But now the pope's habitual impetuosity nearly wrecked all. #### Feeling himself secure, Eugene deposed the archbishop-electors of Cologne and Treves (January 24, 1446) [ ] and caused thereby such a storm in Germany that barely a month after his legate had signed with the emperor the accord of Vienna (February 1446), the whole body of the prince-electors had formed a league to resist the pope and to compel the emperor to the same policy (March 21). The electors demanded, in fact, not only that the depositions should be revoked, but that the pope should accept the principles of Constance and Basel about his subordination to General Councils, should accept also the reforms decreed by these councils, as Germany had accepted them at Mainz in 1439, and should convoke a new council to meet in Germany. If Eugene accepted their terms the electors would recognise him provisionally as pope, that is until the council met: if he refused they would -- so they secretly decided -- go over to the Council of Basel. #### It was in July 1446 that the envoys of the princes delivered this ultimatum to the pope. Aeneas Sylvius accompanied them, sent by Frederick to warn Eugene of what awaited should he refuse. But the pope, for once, forbore to be rash and merely pledged himself to send a reply to the diet that was to meet at Frankfort on September 1. #### At Frankfort the critical discussions went on for three weeks (September 16 to October 5, 1446). The pope sent a strong team of diplomatists and canonists, Parentucelli (the future Nicholas V), Carvajal, Nicholas of Cusa (already the greatest German churchman of the time), and Aeneas Sylvius. Very skilfully they brought it about that what the diet discussed was not any reply of Eugene to their ultimatum, but the pope's acceptance of their terms as the pope had modified them. To the legates Eugene had indeed made very clear the limits beyond which he could not go. [ ] The diet, however, was far from satisfied, and it broke up without reaching any decision. The legates, in fact, had managed to divide the princes, and to form, secretly, and at the slight cost of some 2,000 florins, a bloc favourable to the pope. All parties now made for Rome and in the first days of the new year, 1447, Eugene received the envoys of the princes in public audience (January 12, 1447). Their demands -- the demands of 1446, but now more politely stated -- he referred to a commission of cardinals specially appointed, and a month later, in four documents, he gave his decision. The princes -- the majority of them -- accepted it. The pope was already seriously ill when the envoys arrived. During the next four weeks he rapidly grew worse, and it was actually kneeling round his deathbed that the princes swore their fidelity. Sixteen days later Eugene IV died (23 February, 1447). #### What, in the end, had he managed to save of the authority of his see? Against all likelihood he had preserved it intact, and had seen it acknowledged in all its integrity; but he had had to make large concessions. He had had to accept the princes' scheme for a new council to meet in Germany in two years' time; and he had had to make a show of accepting the new, unacceptable theories about the superiority of General Councils. It was, however, no more than a show, for the pope's acceptance did not admit any obligation to call such a council, nor that it was necessary to call councils, nor that it was useful to do so -- he even went out of his way to say that he did not believe it to be useful. Nor did he declare -- as the princes desired -- that it would be for the council to decide the disputed question whether he was really pope. As for recognition of anything done at the Council of Basel, the pope, now, never even referred to it. Moreover, a limiting clause, "in the way our predecessors have done, " destroyed any reality of submission which the clause might at first sight present, and where the princes demanded recognition of the "pre-eminence" of General Councils, the pope only acknowledged their "eminence. " And while the other matters in dispute were settled with the solemn finality of a bull, this, the most important of all, was set down in the comparative informality of a brief. As to the deposed elector-prelates, Eugene indeed promised to reinstate them, but only when they had sworn obedience to him as "true vicar of Christ. " #### Here was the main point at issue -- the pope's primatial authority over the whole Church, laity, clergy, episcopate, and over all these, it might be, united. And what the pope conceded here was something substantially different from what had been demanded with such noise and threatening. That the princes accepted without demur this singular and scarcely concealed transformation was due, of course, to the simple fact that they were really interested in something else, and in that alone -- in drawing to themselves as much as they could of the control of Church properties, and of the scores of ecclesiastical principalities that lay within the empire. And in this matter the pope's surrender was very great. He accepted the Basel statement of the German grievances, and the decrees by which that council had hoped to remedy them -- the statement, in fact, adopted by emperor and princes at Mainz in 1439. He ratified and validated all appointments to benefices, all sentences and dispensations granted during the ten years of the "neutrality, " even those made by prelates who had stayed on at Basel after he had transferred the council to Ferrara. There was, in fact, a general and unconditional lifting of all the sentences laid upon the members of the council and their adherents. After ten years the princes -- and especially the ecclesiastical rebels -- had won, in this more material field, all they had fought for; but they had only won it as a grant from the very authority which they had, for all that time and longer, professed to call in doubt, and which they had desired to cut down until it could scarcely exist at all. #### Ten days after the death of Eugene IV, Tommaso Parentucelli, the late legate to Frankfort, was elected in his place -- Nicholas V. He, of course, confirmed all that Eugene had sanctioned, and in July 1447 he sent the promised legate to discuss with the princes the indemnity which they had agreed should be paid the Holy See now that annates were abolished. The fruit of these discussions was the concordat of 1448. [ ] This agreement, repeating the concordat of 1418, set permanent limits to the pope's collation to benefices within the empire. Except in the special circumstances which the concordat carefully enumerates, appointments to vacant sees and abbeys are henceforth to be by election, the elect needing from the pope confirmation only. The pact also greatly restricted the pope's power to reserve to himself appointments to benefices in the future; and finally -- the principal object of the concordat -- in place of the tax called first-fruits which the pope has surrendered, it is agreed that the newly appointed bishop or abbot will pay a sum determined separately in each case. [ ] No see will be so taxed more than once in any one year, even though there be several successive bishops in that year; and arrears due on this account to the pope's treasury will, for the future, die with the debtor. #### Now that the pope and the princes of Germany were at one, the very days of the council at Basel were surely numbered. The emperor was at last able to bring pressure to bear on the city authorities, and in June 1448 they asked the council to find another meeting-place. On July 24 its members trekked as far as Lausanne, where their pope still abode. Switzerland and Savoy were, in fact, still loyal to him and to them. But the new pope, Nicholas V, had been secretly negotiating a surrender, and Felix now announced, with the consent of the council, that he was ready to resign. On January 18, 1449, Nicholas V lifted all the sentences and censures with which the anti-pope was loaded, and freed the council too, and all its supporters. On April 4 Felix was allowed to do the same for Nicholas V and for the dead Eugene, and to confirm all grants he had made and to announce his coming abdication. The great event took place three days later -- not a penitential submission in forma as "Clement VIII" had made to Martin V in 1429, and as the Franciscan "Nicholas V" had made to John XXII a hundred years earlier, but a formal abdication made to the council for the good of the Church, and ending with a prayer to the princes to take the act in a friendly spirit and to uphold the authority of General Councils. On April 16 the council met once more, to withdraw all the excommunications and deprivations it had decreed and then, on April 19, it solemnly elected as pope "Thomas of Sarzana, known in his obedience as Nicholas V"; the pattern of Constance was faithfully followed to the end. An end only reached five days later when the council, conferring on Felix, as legate and perpetual vicar, ecclesiastical jurisdiction over all the lands that had continued faithful to him to the last, granting him the first place in the Church after the pope, and the privilege of wearing the papal dress, decreed at last its own dissolution. #### Nicholas V, a humanist of cultivated wit as well as an admirable Christian, patiently tolerated these last ritualistic antics and then in June, the council now out of the way for ever, he created Felix a cardinal and gave him, for life, authority as legate over his old domain; and, what the ex-pope no doubt appreciated just as much, a handsome pension. [ ] Nicholas was generous also to the cardinal who for all these years had directed the anti-Roman activities at Basel, Louis Aleman. He re- accepted him as a cardinal and as Archbishop of Arles; [ ] and he also gave the red hat to three of the cardinals Felix had created. #### The indulgence shown by Nicholas V to the susceptibilities of these trans-alpine rebels, once they gave signs of submission, had gone very far -- farther than, from precedent, might have been expected. But here was a pope with the very unusual experience that he knew Germany personally. He also had at his side a great German ecclesiastic who was a scholar and a theologian and possessed by a truly apostolic zeal -- Nicholas of Cusa. The pope now determined to advance a step further the new reconciliation with Germany, in this hour when all was, presumably, love and joy, by sending Nicholas of Cusa [ ] as legate with full papal powers [ ] to put right all that he found wrong in the ecclesiastical life of the country. #### The legate's tour of Germany and the Low Countries lasted a whole twelve months (February 1451 to March 1452). In that time he visited all the chief cities from Brussels to Magdeburg and Vienna, and from the Tyrol to the Zuyder Zee. His own mode of life continued to be that of the scholarly ascetic. Everywhere he went he preached, and nowhere would he accept the magnificent presents offered him. For the ills which troubled religion he had two main cures to propose -- closer relations with the Holy See and a thorough reform of the greatly relaxed religious orders. At Salzburg, Magdeburg, Mainz and Cologne he held provincial councils; at Bamberg a diocesan synod. The commission he appointed at Vienna visited and reformed some fifty Benedictine houses of men and of women, and also the houses of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine. At Wurzburg the legate himself presided over a provincial chapter of seventy Benedictine abbeys, and here each abbot came to the high altar in turn, to bind himself by vow that he would introduce the reforms into his monastery. There was already at work in Germany the great reform associated with the abbey of Bursfeld; the pioneer of this movement was in the closest touch with the legate, and Nicholas of Cusa, at Wurzburg, urged the Bursfeld reform on the assembled abbots. #### The legate made a lengthy stay at the university town of Erfurt, and the commissioners he left behind spent seven weeks investigating, and amending, the lives of the monks and friars and nuns of the town. At Magdeburg, where there was a good archbishop, things were in better order, but the provincial synod enacted very rigorous legislation to correct the unreformed religious houses. At Hildesheim the legate deposed the abbot for simony, and at Minden -- where he found the diocese in a deplorable state -- another problem exercised him, the growing tendency for the pious laity to trust in the mere externals of religion for their salvation. The latest source of this danger was the confraternity spirit, and the legate forbade the founding of any more confraternities. #### Undoubtedly this missionary year, where the missionary was a cardinal and legate of the pope, brought about many changes for the better. But if the changes were to be permanent, return visits, and by legates of the same character as Nicholas, were called for; by legates, also, who were themselves natives of these countries. This great expedition stands out however, as a thing unique in the history of these last two hundred years before the Reformation -- as Nicholas himself is almost the unique German of these centuries to be given the prestige and the power for good that goes with the coveted honour of the cardinal’s hat. [ ] #### Another cardinal, Giulio Cesarini, legate in Germany twenty years before this, had written to Eugene IV that unless the German clergy amended the* ways of life their people would massacre them, as the Hussites were massacring the clergy in Bohemia. a The laity were, however, not so interested in the matter as the Italian cardinal seemed to think. Except for sporadic raids -- of which Nicholas of Cusa's expedition is the best example -- the clergy and churches of Germany remained untroubled in their chronic state of disorder, under their impregnable prince prelates, awaiting the ultimate inevitable day of doom, and the saving grace of the Jesuits and St. Peter Canisius. ####  |