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