A vignon, however, was far from finished. The immense machine of the Papacy could not be dismantled and transported in a matter of weeks. The popes might be back on the Tiber, but many of the papal departments remained by the Rhône, together with the magnificent library and the bulk of the archives, which by now filled a whole wing of the palace. Among those departments was that which dealt with finance; for the fourteen months that remained of Pope Gregory XI’s pontificate, his entire expenses were met by regular shipments of gold from Avignon. In fact, of the innumerable papal staff it was only a comparatively small proportion, consisting mainly of the senior hierarchy, that had traveled with Gregory to Rome; the vast majority of the many hundred clerks, accountants, secretaries, and scribes had remained behind. Among them were even half a dozen cardinals, charged to continue the attempts to mediate between England and France. Avignon, in short, after the pope’s departure, was by no means the sad, abandoned city that might have been imagined—though no one could possibly have foreseen the whole new if slightly dubious lease on life that awaited it.
Away in Rome, Pope Gregory, though still only forty-eight, was aware that he was dying and was giving much thought to the question of his successor. Acutely conscious that the Church was still split down the middle, he knew that if the Papacy were now to remain in Rome for good, it must become Italian again—and that meant, in the first instance, an Italian pontiff. He in turn would appoint Italian cardinals, so the French influence in the Sacred College would gradually be reduced. When Gregory died on March 27, 1378, it was clear that the Romans agreed with him. They had by no means always treated their popes with particular affection or respect, but they were determined not to let them go again. “Romano lo volemo, o almeno italiano!”1 they shouted throughout the ensuing conclave, and—up to a point—they got what they wanted.
Bartolomeo Prignano, who took the name of Urban VI, was in many ways a surprising choice. He was not a Roman aristocrat but a member of the working class of Naples who had never lost his heavy Neapolitan accent. Though now titular (and absentee) Archbishop of Bari, he had spent virtually his whole adult life in the papal chancery and was a bureaucrat through and through: austere, efficient, conscientious. In other circumstances he might have made a perfectly satisfactory pope. But the years of being patronized and generally ordered about by the French cardinals had had their effect. No sooner had he assumed the supreme power than his character underwent a sea change; the quiet, competent civil servant turned overnight into a raging tyrant, hurling insults at the cardinals during the consistories and sometimes even physically attacking them.
Although several distinguished laymen were also the objects of the pope’s abuse—including the Duke of Fondi and even the ambassadors of Queen Joanna of Naples—it was perhaps inevitable that the thirteen French cardinals suffered the most. One by one they slipped away to Anagni, where on August 2 they made a public statement to the effect that Pope Urban’s election had taken place under the threat of mob violence and was therefore invalid; he must therefore abdicate at once. A week later, there still being no reaction from Rome, they moved to Fondi—within the Kingdom of Naples, where Joanna could give them protection—and declared Urban deposed. Then, on September 20, they elected Robert of Geneva as Clement VII. Each pope excommunicated the other, placing his supporters under an interdict. The Great Schism of the West had begun. It was to continue for nearly forty years.
If Urban had been a surprising choice for the Papacy, Clement was an astonishing one. True, the fact that he was neither French nor Italian may have counted in his favor, but his record in Italy had been one of barbaric brutality, and Urban had no difficulty in raising troops to oppose him. Clement first fled to Joanna in Naples; but though she personally supported him her subjects made no secret of their preference for Urban—who was, after all, one of their own—and Clement soon returned with his cardinals to Avignon. Urban, meanwhile, created a new College by appointing no fewer than twenty-nine new cardinals from all over Europe.
Western Christendom now faced a dilemma unique in its history. Antipopes were nothing new, but the present rivals had both been elected by the same cardinals, and though Urban’s election had been unquestionably canonical—no one took the accusations of intimidation too seriously—the manner of his deposition had been unprecedented: could popes be unmade by those who made them? On the other hand, Urban was clearly becoming ever more unbalanced. And so the continent was split down the middle: England, Germany, north and central Italy, and Central Europe remained loyal to Urban, while Scotland, France, Savoy, Burgundy, and Naples accepted the authority of Clement. So, after long hesitation, did Aragon and Castile.2
The Church had been able to tolerate a Papacy exiled to Avignon; but the existence of two rival popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, was too much for it to cope with. Two popes meant two colleges of cardinals, two papal chanceries, two appointments to a single see or abbey—and double the expenditure. In this last field Clement at Avignon had the advantage, since the departments in charge of finance had never properly moved back to Rome. He was able to create a court rivaling that of his namesake Clement VI for luxury and extravagance, from which he continued his struggle against his rival. But Urban too was busy. His most immediate enemy was Joanna of Naples, who courageously remained loyal to Clement. She would soon pay the price. Urban deposed her in 1380 and in her place crowned her cousin, the young Charles of Durazzo. Entering Naples the following year, Charles imprisoned her in the fortress of San Fele, near Muro, and there shortly afterward he had her suffocated.
All too soon, however, Urban found the new king just as intractable as Joanna had been. The pope had now become obsessed with obtaining valuable Neapolitan fiefs for his utterly worthless nephew, and when Charles refused to grant them he began interfering in the internal affairs of the kingdom. Now seriously paranoid, he moved with his cardinals to Nocera, where he heard that six of them were conspiring with Charles to create a council of regency that would effectively act for him. Flying into a fury, he excommunicated the king and had the cardinals brutally tortured. Charles now hastened to Nocera and put the city under siege; Urban and his entourage escaped to Genoa. There five of the six cardinals were put to death; the sixth, an Englishman named Adam Easton, was released only at the personal request of his sovereign, King Richard II. Not till 1386—a few weeks after Charles had been assassinated in Hungary—did the pope return to Rome, where he died the following year.
Pope Clement—technically he is now seen by the Church as an antipope, though he himself would have been horrified by the description—outlived his rival by seven years. Never for a second did he doubt the validity of his own election; and it was a bitter disappointment to him when, on Urban’s death, the ensuing conclave did not recognize him as the legitimate pope and so put an end to the schism once and for all. Instead, they insanely elected another Neapolitan, Pietro Tomacelli, as Boniface IX; and there was an alarming moment in 1391 when King Charles VI of France announced his intention of personally conducting Boniface to Rome, though fortunately nothing came of it. In his last years Clement, while still at Avignon, came under heavy pressure—largely from France and, in particular, the University of Paris—to agree to a solution whereby both popes should resign and open the way for a new conclave; but he, like Boniface, firmly rejected all such suggestions, and he was still stubbornly resisting when he died, of a sudden apoplectic attack, on September 16, 1394.
IT WOULD HAVE been so easy to end the schism; all that was required was that when one of the popes died his conclave should refuse to elect a successor, thus leaving the survivor in undisputed authority. But Rome had passed up the chance in 1387, and Avignon in 1394 did no better. Pope Boniface, apart from an unfortunate tendency to simony, was young and energetic, and Charles VI wrote letters to each of the twenty-one Avignon cardinals, begging them to accept him. But it was no use: on the grounds that they must on no account be swayed by outside influences, they left his letters unopened. Each of them, however, swore to work for the resolution of the schism; and each undertook, if elected, to abdicate if ever there were a majority decision that he should do so. They then proceeded to elect—unanimously—the Aragonese cardinal Pedro de Luna, who now took the name of Benedict XIII.
Benedict had an impressive record. He had been among the last of the original cardinals to abandon Pope Urban, but once he had finally become convinced of the legitimacy of Urban’s deposition he had given unwavering support to Clement, who had appointed him to the Iberian Peninsula as his legate. It was thanks to him that Aragon and Castile, Portugal and Navarre had all eventually given their support to the Avignon Papacy. In 1393 he had been transferred to Paris, where he had publicly championed the scheme of ending the schism by the abdication of both popes, declaring that he would certainly follow such a course in the event of his own election. Whether or not this attitude told in his favor at the conclave we shall never know, but on finding himself pope he instantly changed his mind. A proud and unbending Spaniard, he now made it plain that he and he alone was the rightful pontiff and that no power on Earth could persuade him to relinquish his responsibilities.
And he proved it. In May 1395 there arrived in Avignon an embassy consisting of three royal dukes sent by Charles VI; in June 1397 an Anglo-French mission; in May 1398 ambassadors from Germany. All of them implored the pope to remember his sworn oath and make his formal abdication. He remained immovable. Then, in June of that year, a French national synod decided to withdraw from his obedience. This came as a serious blow, since it deprived him of the all-important revenues from the Church in France; it also induced Navarre and Castile to follow the French example. Several panic-stricken cardinals also deserted him. But Benedict kept his nerve, allowing himself to be blockaded in his palace, confident that sooner or later the pendulum would swing back in his favor.
As indeed it did. The French Church had not gone over to Boniface; it had opted for independence and in doing so had made many of the hierarchy profoundly uneasy. The people, too, who had complained bitterly at paying taxes to the Papacy, were still more resentful at seeing these go straight into the royal coffers. One March night in 1403, with the aid of his most influential ally, the Duke of Orleans, Pope Benedict slipped out of his palace into Provence, where he was immediately and enthusiastically acclaimed. There was nothing to be done. France, Navarre, and even the errant cardinals all returned to the fold. Benedict had won that round, but he was still committed to working for the end of the schism, and in September 1404 he at last felt strong enough to send an embassy to Rome, proposing a meeting of both pontiffs, or at least their plenipotentiaries.
But alas, Boniface in Rome proved every bit as intractable as Benedict in Avignon; and anyway he died—of gallstones—on October 1. All in all he had been a competent pope, repairing much of the damage done by his predecessor, regaining the allegiance of Naples, and, perhaps most important of all, imposing his authority on Rome, putting an end to its republican independence and creating a new Senate—nominated by himself—to be responsible for the city’s administration. He had also undertaken a major reconstruction of the Castel Sant’Angelo. His principal fault was his unscrupulousness in financial affairs: indulgences, simonies, annates (the practice by which a year’s income from a benefice or see was paid directly to Rome)—it seemed that there was no abuse that he would not happily tolerate so long as it kept the gold flowing into his coffers. On the other hand, with the main treasury and the financial departments still at Avignon, it is not easy to see how he and his Curia would otherwise have survived.
Boniface’s successor, Innocent VII, similarly rejected proposals for a meeting; but he was nowhere near as adroit as his predecessor in his dealings with the Romans, and matters came to a head when eleven of the leading citizens, arriving at the Vatican for negotiations, were murdered by his idiotic nephew, who commanded the papal militia. At that the mob stormed the palace; Innocent and his cardinals were lucky to get out alive and make their way to Viterbo. Not until the spring of 1406 was it safe to return, and six months later the pope was dead—though not before he had established a chair of Greek at the Sapienza University, founded by Boniface VIII just a century before.
Why the Roman cardinals should now have chosen the Venetian Angelo Correr—Gregory XII—to succeed him is not immediately easy to understand. Gregory was certainly a distinguished churchman—for fifteen years he had been the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople—and he had long protested that his dearest wish was to see the end of the schism; but he was already eighty years old, and it seemed on the face of it unlikely that his wish would be granted. Since, as it happened, he was to live for another nine years, it very nearly was—though by no means thanks to him.
BEFORE GREGORY’S ELECTION, each of the fourteen cardinals had sworn a personal oath that, if elected, he would immediately stand down in the event of the death or abdication of Pope Benedict in Avignon. Each had also promised that within three months of his election he would open negotiations with Benedict to decide on a place where the two popes might meet. Gregory kept his word and sent an embassy to his rival, and after long and occasionally acrimonious discussions it was finally agreed that the meeting should take place at Savona on September 29, 1407. Only after this decision was made did the old man begin to waver. The pressure came principally from King Ladislas of Naples, Doge Michele Steno of Venice, and the future Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, all of whom dreaded seeing the Papacy fall once more into French hands. Benedict went as far as Portovenere near La Spezia, but Gregory stopped at Lucca, where he firmly announced that he was no longer willing to meet his rival. Nor would he in any circumstances abdicate.
It was an astonishing volte-face, which lost Gregory much support. Now at last the Sacred Colleges of the two rival popes forgot their separate allegiances and gathered in June 1408 at Livorno, where they issued an appeal to both hierarchies, including the popes themselves, together with the princes of Europe or their representatives to meet at a General Council, to be held at Pisa on March 25, 1409. The popes refused, but the invitation to Pisa received a most gratifying response, being accepted by no fewer than 4 patriarchs, 24 cardinals, 80 bishops—102 others sent delegates to represent them—the heads of four religious orders, and an impressive number of distinguished theologians from universities and religious houses. The Council’s fifteen sessions lasted for over ten weeks. Both Gregory and Benedict were condemned as “notorious schismatics and heretics”—though there were many who inquired of just what heresies they had been guilty—and formally deposed. The cardinals then formed a conclave and elected the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Pietro Philarghi, who had started life as an orphaned beggar boy in Crete and was to end it as Pope Alexander V. But the Council had made one disastrous mistake. By calling the two rival popes to appear before it—and declaring them contumacious when they refused—it had implied its superiority over the Papacy itself, a principle which neither of the rival pontiffs could have been expected to endorse. Before long it became clear that its only real effect had been to saddle Christendom with three popes instead of two. But it was unrepentant, and when Pope Alexander died suddenly in May 1410 it lost no time in electing his successor.
Baldassare Cossa, who now joined the papal throng under the name of John XXIII,3 was widely believed at the time to have poisoned his predecessor. Whether he actually did so is open to doubt. He had, however, unquestionably begun life as a pirate; and a pirate, essentially, he remained. Morally and spiritually, he reduced the Papacy to a level of depravity unknown since the days of the pornocracy in the tenth century. A contemporary chronicler records in shocked amazement the rumor current in Bologna—where Cossa had been papal legate—that during his time there he had seduced two hundred matrons, widows, and virgins, to say nothing of an alarming number of nuns. His score over the three following years is regrettably not recorded; he seems, however, to have maintained a respectable average, for on May 29, 1415, he was arraigned before another General Council, meeting this time at Constance, the only such council ever to be held north of the Alps.
There was a certain irony here, since the Council of Constance had originally been Pope John’s idea. He had plenty of energy and intelligence, but in the circumstances he found it difficult indeed to put himself forward as a spiritual leader of men. His first synod had been a disaster—constantly interrupted, we are told, by an owl that flew into his face and screeched at him. (True or not, the very existence of the story is an indication of the contempt in which he was generally held.) To preside at a General Council would, he felt, give him the prestige he lacked, and there was plenty of work for it to do. First of all, there were his two rivals to be dealt with: Gregory and Benedict, who had refused to accept the authority of those gathered at Pisa to depose them. There was also an urgent need to investigate the teachings of John Wycliffe in England and Jan Hus in Bohemia. What he needed now was a powerful patron, and so, toward the end of 1412, he approached one of the leading figures on the European stage, Sigismund of Luxembourg.
Sigismund was now forty-four. The son of the Emperor Charles IV, King of Germany and—through his wife—of Hungary, he was the half brother of King Wenceslas of Bohemia (whose crown he was also to inherit seven years later) and was therefore much concerned by the influence of Hus, which was spreading rapidly across Europe. He conferred with Pope John personally at Lodi just before Christmas 1413, and it was jointly announced that the Council would meet at Constance on November 1 of the following year. In the ensuing discussions the two quickly reached agreement on all points except one: Sigismund made it clear that he expected to preside over the Council himself. To John, this was a serious blow. Had he been in sole charge of the proceedings, he could have steered them more or less as he wished. With Sigismund in control, however, the Council could well turn against him. It was thus with serious misgivings that, in early October 1414, he set out for Constance.
The attendance at Pisa had been impressive enough, but most of those present had been Italian or French. The Council of Constance, with the most powerful prince of Central Europe behind it, was on an altogether different scale. Altogether there were nearly 700 delegates, including 29 cardinals and some 180 bishops. Jan Hus was there in person, his security guaranteed—as he thought—by a letter of safe conduct from Sigismund, but he was arrested on the pope’s orders after only a preliminary hearing, handed over to the king when he arrived just before Christmas, and—still at Constance—burnt at the stake on July 6, 1415.
Pope John, meanwhile, had fled from his own Council. During the first weeks of the new year the mood had turned against him, and there were insistent demands that he should be put on trial for his countless crimes. He had one firm ally, Frederick of Habsburg, Duke of Austria; and on the night of March 20, when the duke had obligingly arranged a tournament in Sigismund’s honor, John disguised himself with some difficulty as a stable boy and slipped out of the city, heading first to Frederick’s castle at Schaffhausen and then, as he hoped, to the protection of the Duke of Burgundy across the Rhine. But it was to no avail. The Council having called without success for his immediate and unconditional abdication, Sigismund sent his soldiers to find and arrest him. Meanwhile he was tried in his absence, and duly condemned. As Edward Gibbon delightedly noted, “the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.” John spent the next four years in the custody of the Elector Ludwig III of Bavaria, from whom he eventually purchased his liberty for a vast sum. Returning to Italy, he was, somewhat surprisingly, forgiven, and his long career of debauch and depravity was rewarded by the bishopric of Tusculum and one of the grandest of early Renaissance tombs, the joint work of Donatello and Michelozzo, in the baptistery of Florence Cathedral.
It was at Constance that matters were finally settled. John XXIII and Benedict XIII—both now eighty-seven—were deposed; Gregory XII was prevailed upon to abdicate with honor, with the promise that he would rank second in the hierarchy, immediately after the future pope—a privilege that was the more readily accorded in view of the fact that, since he was now approaching ninety and looked a good deal older, it was not thought likely that he would enjoy it for long. Indeed, two years later he was dead, and with the election of Cardinal Oddone Colonna as Pope Martin V in 1417, the schism was effectively at an end.
AS THE SCHISM ended, the Renaissance Papacy began, with Martin as its first representative. Although a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished Roman families, he could not immediately establish himself in Rome. The city was, as so often in the past, a battleground—this time being fought over by two warring soldiers of fortune—and it was not until three years after his election that he was finally able to enter it for the first time as pope. He was shocked by what he saw. Rome was in ruins, its total population having shrunk to some 25,000, hopelessly demoralized, and in many cases half starving. Foxes, even wolves, roamed the streets. The once-magnificent buildings stood roofless and untenanted. The restoration of the Vatican, set in train half a century before, had long since been suspended, and the pope even had difficulty in finding somewhere decent to live. Fortunately, one of his own family’s palaces was still up to a point habitable; there he was obliged to stay while the work was resumed and until it was eventually completed.
Meanwhile he got down to business. He took in hand the chaotic papal finances and initiated a hugely ambitious program of restoration and reconstruction of the whole city: the walls and fortifications, the bridges, the ruined basilicas and churches. He summoned three great painters from the North—Pisanello, Masaccio, and Gentile da Fabriano—for the redecoration of the Lateran alone. In the diplomatic field he succeeded, at least to a considerable degree, in bringing under his control the Church in France, which during the Avignon years had become quite impossibly arrogant and overbearing. He took the first significant steps in internationalizing the College of Cardinals, weakening the Italian and French elements and introducing numbers of Englishmen, Germans, and Spaniards. He got rid of the countless bands of brigands which were terrorizing the city and the surrounding countryside. Finally, he reestablished order in the Papal States.
His purpose behind all these achievements was to reassert the power and prestige of the Papacy after the chaos into which it had fallen during the schism. The two recent assemblies, at Pisa and at Constance, had asserted several worrying new principles. The pope, it appeared, was no longer supreme: he was now at the mercy of a General Council, which stood above him and could depose him at will. Now, according to the conciliarists, it was the Council, rather than the pope, which constituted the ultimate authority in the Church; the pope was its servant, bound to give it his obedience and to respect its decisions. Councils, it had been agreed, were to be held regularly. In short, the Papacy was now undergoing the process already familiar to most nations of western Europe: that of slow democratization, the gradual substitution of absolute monarchy by parliamentary government.
To these ideas Martin V was not entirely unsympathetic. The Council of Constance had, after all, rescued the Church from forty years of schism and, quite possibly, from ultimate disintegration; to it, indeed, he very largely owed his own crown. On the other hand, Councils were unwieldy things which met infrequently, spoke with many different voices, and took an eternity to reach any major decision. They were no substitute for a single strong hand at the helm, and that Pope Martin was determined—and well able—to supply. He made his own decisions, keeping both cardinals and Curia under his own strict personal control. When, for example, in September 1423 the time came for the next Council, to be held at Pavia, he announced that he would not be attending. In consequence of this and of a sudden outbreak of plague which necessitated the Council’s last-minute transfer to Siena, there were relatively few delegates present, and when their discussions turned to the question of further restrictions on papal power, he made the poor attendance a pretext for closing down the whole assembly. The Church would have to wait until the next Council, which was to meet in July 1431 in Basel.
As 1430 drew to its close, the sixty-two-year-old pope showed himself, if anything, still less enthusiastic about the Basel meeting than he had been about its predecessor. Once again he made it clear that there would be no question of his being there himself; in his stead he appointed Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini as its president, giving him authority to dissolve it at any moment if it threatened to tread on dangerous ground. In the event, he could not have attended even had he wished to do so; on February 20, 1431, he died of an apoplectic stroke. He had been, if not a great pope, at least an outstandingly good one; and he had restored peace and good government to his city. Once again Michelozzo and Donatello worked together on a papal tomb, but this time it stood in Rome rather than Florence, and its inscription, TEMPORUM SUORUM FELICITAS, was a testimonial of which, surely, any pope would have been proud.
THAT EPITAPH, HOWEVER, is unlikely to have been suggested by the College of Cardinals. The cardinals had never liked Martin. They had resented his arrogance, his unwillingness to listen, his reluctance even to consult them, let alone take their advice. The conciliar spirit was in the air and to a greater or lesser extent had infected all of them. He had paid it lip service, up to a point; but as time went on he had become increasingly impatient with the whole idea. Now that the Basel Council was about to open, it was essential that the next pope, whoever he might be, should show himself to be in sympathy with the reforms that were to be proposed. Thus it was that the cardinals all undertook that whoever should be elected would give the Council his wholehearted support, working with the Sacred College, rather than in opposition to it, in the government of the Church.
Unfortunately, things did not turn out quite as they had planned. Their choice fell on Gabriele Condulmer, a Venetian—though not, like his uncle Gregory XII, an aristocrat—who had spent much of his early life as an Augustinian hermit on an island in the lagoon. His rise to power, first as Bishop of Siena and from 1408 as cardinal, had been unashamedly nepotistic; and whatever promises he may have made before the conclave, once reigning as Pope Eugenius IV, he showed little more goodwill toward the coming Council than Pope Martin had before him. Indeed, when the Council eventually opened on July 23, 1431, the attendance was so sparse—among the absentees was Cardinal Cesarini, appointed by Martin to preside—that after six months Eugenius attempted to dissolve it. This, however, proved a serious mistake. The delegates may have been comparatively few, but they were conciliarists to a man, and they absolutely refused to be dissolved. The pope, they claimed, had no authority to dismiss them. It was they, not he, who were supreme in the Church; and unless he presented himself before them and withdrew his Bull of Dissolution, it was he, not they, who would be dismissed.
But Eugenius refused to budge, and the ensuing deadlock was broken by King Sigismund. As King of Germany and emperor-to-be, he needed the support of the pope to strengthen his position in North Italy and that of the Council in his struggle against the Hussites. In May 1433 he made his way to Rome, where he was duly crowned by Eugenius, and for the next six months he worked hard on both parties, persuading them to moderate their respective attitudes until, at the end of the year, the two reached an uneasy agreement. It was, in fact, rather more like a papal surrender. Eugenius was obliged to withdraw his Bull of Dissolution and to recognize—with all too few reservations—the primacy of the Council.
Seeing his humiliation, other enemies took full advantage. First were the Colonna. In the spring of 1434, furious at being ordered to return the Church treasures that they had acquired under their kinsman Martin V, they engineered a rising in the streets of Rome, and at much the same time the proconciliar Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan sent two condottieri to invade the Papal States. Then, when Eugenius found himself blockaded in the city, the Romans rose again and proclaimed a republic. For the luckless pope, it was all too much. Disguised as a monk but soon identified, and defending himself as best he could under a hail of missiles, he made his escape in a small boat down the Tiber to Ostia and thence transferred to a galley which took him to Pisa. June found him in Florence, where he was soon to be joined by the Sacred College and the Curia.
In Florence, as a guest of Cosimo de’ Medici, he remained for the next nine years, fighting a constant battle against the conciliarists in Basel, who—their numbers now greatly increased by legists and theologians from the universities—were becoming daily more radical and antipapal. For the moment there was little that he could do to resist them, though in the summer of 1436 he circulated a formal denunciation of their pretensions to all the princes of Christendom. On the other hand, he had considerable success in reestablishing his political position. In the Curia was an ex-soldier of long experience named Giovanni Vitelleschi; Eugenius singled him out, promoted him to bishop, and sent him off with a small force to Rome. Energetic and utterly ruthless, Vitelleschi showed no mercy on the rebels and quickly restored order in both Rome and the Papal States.
Basel, however, remained to be dealt with, and the deadlock might have dragged on indefinitely but for a single, immensely significant development: the arrival in the West of John VIII Palaeologus, Emperor of Byzantium.
FACED WITH THE remorseless advance of the Ottoman Turks, the Byzantine Empire was at its last gasp. Massive military assistance from Western Europe represented its only chance of survival, but all attempts to obtain it foundered on the same rock: the Eastern and Western churches were in schism. Only if that schism was ended could a united Christendom take up arms in the longed-for Crusade.
To John Palaeologus, the Council of Basel seemed to offer a ray of hope. Once again, representatives of all the Christian nations of the West were present; and although the ambassadors of his predecessor, Manuel II, had returned from Constance disappointed, much had happened in the past fifteen years, including a reluctant acceptance by the pope of what the Byzantines had never ceased to maintain: that true union could be achieved only by means of a Council of the whole Church, to be attended by representatives of both East and West. This time, perhaps, a Byzantine appeal might fall on more receptive ears.
But all this would mean a fresh start, and it was obvious that Basel was not the place. The past years had seen too much ill feeling and bitterness; if the new Council was to have any chance of success, a change of venue was essential. The more hidebound of the conciliarists naturally objected—in 1439 going so far as to declare the pope deposed and to elect an antipope in his stead—but this arbitrary renewal of the papal schism cost them what little prestige they had left, and one by one the Christian nations submitted to the authority of Pope Eugenius.
Ideally, John VIII would have liked the new Council to be held in Constantinople, but he was obliged to admit that in present conditions this was not practicable. He therefore willingly accepted the pope’s choice of Ferrara, confirming that he personally, together with his patriarch, would head the imperial delegation. Eugenius, hearing this welcome news, lost no time. By September 1437 his legates were already in Constantinople to work out the details, while others were negotiating with the Venetians for the hiring of a fleet to bring the Byzantine delegation to Ferrara in proper state. Thus it was that John Palaeologus left his brother Constantine as regent and on Wednesday, November 27, embarked on his historic journey, taking with him a party some seven hundred strong, among them the most distinguished group of Eastern churchmen ever to visit the West. There was the patriarch himself, Joseph II, nearly eighty years old, crippled by heart disease but beloved of all who met him; eighteen metropolitans, some of them representing his fellow patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem and also including the brilliant young Metropolitan Bessarion of Nicaea; and a dozen other bishops, including Isidore, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Demetrius in Constantinople, who had been promoted the previous year to Bishop of Kiev and All Russia.
On February 8, 1438, the party reached Venice, where the emperor was greeted by Doge Francesco Foscari and conducted with immense pomp and ceremony up the Grand Canal to the great palace of the Marquis of Ferrara.4 There he remained for the next three weeks, writing letters to all the European princes, urging them to attend the Council or at least to send representatives. Only at the end of the month did he leave on the last stage of his journey. Compared to his Venetian reception, his arrival in Ferrara was a lackluster affair, not improved by pouring rain. Pope Eugenius gave him a warm welcome, but even that was somewhat clouded when the emperor was informed that his patriarch, on his arrival a few days later, would be expected to prostrate himself and kiss the pontiff’s foot. Of this, he politely pointed out, there could be no question; and at last the pope was obliged to yield. Had he not done so, it is doubtful whether the Council of Ferrara would ever have taken place.
Even then, it got off to a bad start. John had stipulated that four months should pass before the formal discussions on doctrine were begun; one of his principal reasons for attending was to seek help from the other European princes, and he was determined that no important decisions should be taken before their arrival. But spring turned to summer, and no princes appeared. The Latins grew more and more impatient and the pope, who was responsible for the board and lodging of the entire Greek delegation, more and more concerned as his financial reserves fell ever lower.
With August came the plague. Strangely enough, the Greeks appeared immune—the emperor was in any case away from Ferrara most of the time, indulging in his favorite sport of hunting—but there was heavy mortality both among the Latin delegates and in the city as a whole. Meanwhile, the Latins grew even more irritated with their guests. The Greeks, too, were losing patience. They had been away from home for the best part of a year and had so far achieved nothing. Many of them were short of money, for the papal subsidies were becoming increasingly irregular. Finally it became plain that none of the European princes had any intention of showing up, so there was no point in waiting for them any longer. It was to everyone’s relief when deliberations began in earnest on October 8. For the first three months they were concerned almost exclusively with the filioque clause—a tricky enough point, having played a major part in the schism four centuries before,5 but now further complicated by linguistic problems. Few of the delegates spoke any language other than their own, and there were no qualified interpreters. The sessions ended on December 13 with agreement as far away as ever.
At that point the pope managed to persuade the delegates to move to Florence. He gave as his reason the continued presence of the plague in Ferrara, but his true motives were almost certainly financial: the Council had been sitting for eight months, it showed every sign of going on indefinitely, and it had already made alarming inroads on the papal treasury. In Florence, on the other hand, the Medici could be trusted to help out. But the move also proved beneficial in other ways. When the sessions were resumed toward the end of February 1439 the Greeks—tired, anxious, homesick, and quite possibly hungry—seemed distinctly readier to compromise than they had been the previous year. By the end of March they had agreed that the Latin formula according to which the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son meant the same as a recently accepted Greek formula, whereby it proceeded from the Father through the Son. It was soon after this breakthrough that Patriarch Joseph finally expired; but then, as one observer rather unkindly remarked, after muddling his prepositions what else could he decently do?
With the filioque at last out of the way, the other outstanding questions were quickly settled. The Greeks disapproved of the Roman dogma on Purgatory and the use of unleavened bread at the Sacrament. They also deplored the Latin practice of giving Communion in both kinds to the laity and of forbidding the marriage of nonmonastic priests. But on all these issues they put up only a token opposition. The question of papal supremacy might at other times have caused difficulties, but since the Council of Basel this had been a delicate subject and was consequently glossed over as far as possible. Thanks largely to the emperor himself, who employed persuasion and threats in equal measure to ensure the amenability of his subjects, agreement had been reached by midsummer on every major issue, and on Sunday, July 5, 1439, the official Decree of Union—little more than a statement of the Latin position, apart from one or two concessions permitting Greek usages—was signed by all the Orthodox bishops and abbots except the Metropolitan of Ephesus, who had given in on absolutely nothing but was forbidden by John to exercise a veto. The Latins then added their own signatures, and on the following day the decree was publicly proclaimed in Florence Cathedral, being recited first in Latin by Cardinal Cesarini and then in Greek by Metropolitan Bessarion of Nicaea. The Latin version began with the words “Laetentur Coeli”—“Let the heavens rejoice”—but the heavens, as it soon became clear, had precious little reason to do so.
POPE EUGENIUS HAD won a major victory. On paper, at least, he had brought the Orthodox Church back into the Roman fold.6 In doing so he had established his personal supremacy. The radical conciliarists at Basel were speechless with rage. First they suspended him, then they deposed him, and finally, on November 5, 1439, they elected an antipope—in the surprising shape of Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy. Amadeus was a deeply pious layman, the founder—and himself a member—of an order of knightly hermits on the Lake of Geneva. He accepted with great reluctance, calling himself Felix V, but he soon had reason to regret his decision, for no one took him seriously. The Council, too, had succeeded only in making itself look ridiculous. From that moment on it gradually dissolved, though it was to limp on until 1449.
After a nine-year absence, in September 1443 Pope Eugenius returned to Rome and set about countering the effects of the schism with the invaluable help of his friend Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. The future Pope Pius II, Piccolomini, although at this time still a layman, had been one of Antipope Felix’s most trusted advisers, but he had now transferred his allegiance, and it was thanks to his diplomatic skill that in 1447 the German princes declared as one man for Eugenius—and just in time, for within a week or two he was dead. His sixteen-year reign had not been easy; more than half of it had been spent in Florentine exile. But his long struggle with the Council of Basel had ended in victory; never again would papal supremacy be challenged from within the Church itself.
1. “We demand a Roman, or at least an Italian!”
2. “Even saints were confused about the rights and wrongs of the situation. St. Catherine of Siena supported Urban, St. Vincent Ferrer supported Clement” (Duffy, Saints and Sinners, pp. 168–9).
3. The circumstances of his election and subsequent deposition have denied him a place on the canonical list of popes. It was nonetheless mildly surprising that Cardinal Angelo Roncalli should have adopted the same name on his election to the Papacy in 1958. (See chapter 28.)
4. This thirteenth-century palace, restored with majestic insensitivity in the 1860s and—in consequence of its later history—known today as the Fondaco dei Turchi, still stands on the upper reaches of the Grand Canal, opposite the San Marcuola vaporetto station.
6. No one in the West could have foreseen that by the time the emperor returned to Constantinople in February 1440 Laetentur Coeli would already be dead in the water, repudiated by the three surviving patriarchs, its signatories condemned as traitors to the faith, castigated throughout the capital, and in some cases physically attacked.