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"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.
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