Volume 3, Chapter 3

THE RETURN OF ST. PETER TO ROME, 1362-1420

Section 1: INFELIX ITALIA, 1305--1367

Section 2: THE POPES LEAVE AVIGNON, 1362-1378

Section 3: CHRISTIAN LIFE, MYSTICS, THINKERS

Section 4: THE SCHISM OF THE WEST, 1378-1409

Section 5: THE CHURCH UNDER THE COUNCILS, 1409-1418

INFELIX ITALIA, 1305--1367

WITH the death of Innocent VI in 1362 and the election of Urban V to succeed him, a new stage begins in the history of the "Avignon Captivity." There now comes to an end the only time when the papacy can really be said to have seemed stably fixed there. At no time was it any part of the policy of these Avignon popes to establish the papacy permanently outside of Italy. What had kept the first of them -- Clement V -- in France throughout his short reign was a succession of political accidents and crises. His successor, John XXII, strove for nearly twenty years -- as will be shown -- to make Italy a safe place for popes to return to and to dwell in. But he failed disastrously. And it was upon that failure that there followed the long central period of the Avignon residence -- the reigns of Benedict XII, Clement VI and Innocent VI -- when for the popes to return to Italy was something altogether outside the range of practical politics. It is this period, [659] of enforced stable acquiescence in the exile, which the election of Urban V brings to an end. For with this pope the idea of the return to Rome now begins once again to inspire papal policy, and in 1367 Urban V actually realised the idea.

Now, whatever the personal preference of any of these popes for residence in his own country, and whatever the pressure exercised over their choice by the various French kings, there was another, permanent, factor, beyond any power of the popes to control, which, throughout the period, was, time and again, a final deciding consideration against any movement to return. This factor was the political condition of Italy. The anxious dilemma which these popes had to face was not of the* making, although -- it can hardly be denied -- by every year of the* absence from Italy they increased the difficulties that stood in the way of the* return. It was, in essence, the dilemma as old as the Papal State itself, and indeed older still. How was the central organ of the Christian religion -- the papacy -- to be securely independent of every other power in the exercise of its authority as teacher and spiritual ruler of the Christian Church? The papacy would not be regarded as free in its action ii the popes were subjects of any particular prince. Therefore the popes must themselves be sovereigns. But once the popes are sovereigns, there is not only created a state where the ruler is elected but -- because of that state's geographical situation -- an elective sovereignty whose policies have a vital effect on all that international Mediterranean life which, in those days, is the Western world's very centre. Control of the papacy, once the pope is sovereign, is indeed a prize; and inevitably, with the establishment of the Papal State, the competition begins among the noblesse of the Papal State to capture the prize for their own families. Inevitably, too, one extra-Italian power, the emperor, is never indifferent to this competition. Constantly he intervenes -- to protect the papacy from its barons, and to seize the prize for himself, in order to make the papacy an organ of his own government. Never, for nearly three hundred years after the first establishment of the Papal State (754), are the popes so strong as temporal rulers that they can control their own barons without that assistance from the emperor for which they, yet, must pay by some new surrender of freedom.

Then the great series of monk -- popes, of whom Hildebrand -- St. Gregory VII -- is the most famous, finds a way out of the dilemma. In a spirit of wholly unworldly zeal for the restoration of the spiritual, these popes denounce the protecting emperor's encroachment on their spiritual jurisdiction as a sin; they reject it, and defy him to do his worst. Thence come the first of the mighty wars between empire and papacy that fill the next two centuries (1074-1254).

These popes of the Hildebrandine restoration are first of all monks and apostles; and, because they are men of holy life, moved to action by horror at the universal degradation of Christian life, they manage to use the temporal arm without prejudice to the wholeness of their own spirituality, and without any such scandal emerging as the encouragement of clerical ambition disguised as zeal for the gospel. [660] Their successors, if good men and fighting for the best of causes, are yet not saints. They are not sufficiently careful about the purification of the means they needs must use -- law, diplomacy, the military arts, their financial system, their own characters, the characters of all their subordinates, and of their allies. And by the time when they too achieve victory over the would-be temporal lord of the world of religion, the ecclesiastical character shows evident signs of grave deterioration.

The most serious sign of this in the papal action would seem to be that, as though the Church were a great temporal state, it is in the natural, political and military arts that the popes now chiefly put their trust. There is a difference in kind between the spirit at work in the wars of St. Gregory VII against Henry IV, and in those of Boniface VIII against Philip the Fair, or those of John XXII against Lewis of Bavaria. The golden key to the eternal dilemma, found by St. Gregory VII, has indeed, by these later successors, been dropped in the dust; and once more the Church suffers because the popes are victims of the dilemma. Are they to go back into Italy and to Rome? Then they must be certain that they can live there safe from the rebellion of their own barons and the Roman mob, and so be strong that no foreign prince will think of assailing them. There must be security that Anagni will not be repeated. The Papal State must, for the future, be something like what all states are from now on to be, a strong kingdom, in every part of which the prince really rules. Before the pope can go back to Rome a whole world of anti-papal Italian turbulence must first be conquered. There is now no other way in, but by a victorious war.

At the time when the election of Clement V began the series of Avignon popes (1305), it was more than eight hundred years since Italy had been effectively united under a single political authority. The name was, quite truly, no more than a geographical expression. The island of Sicily formed, since 1302, the kingdom officially styled Trinacria; the southern half of the peninsula was the kingdom called, now and henceforth, Naples; an irregular central Italian territory formed the Papal State, over the greater part of which the papal rule had never been much more than a name; the rest -- Tuscany, Lombardy, Liguria, the ancient March of Verona -- was, for the most part, still the territory of a multitude of city states. Some of these communes were still republics, the great trading and maritime states of Venice, Genoa and Pisa for example, Florence again and Lucca; others had already become the prize of those great families whose names are household words, at Verona the della Scala, at Milan the Visconti, at Ferrara the Este, at Mantua the Gonzaga; and these last states were despotisms, where the princes' whims were indeed law. In the north-west corner a group of states survived of the kind more general in western Europe, feudal in their organisation, the marquisate of Montferrat, the marquisate of Saluzzo and a border state -- as much French as Italian -- the county of Savoy.

The history of the relations of the exiled papacy to the seething political life of an Italy so divided is far too complex to be intelligible, unless the story is told in a detail which the scale of this book altogether forbids. Briefly it may be said that Sicily and Naples play very little part in that history; the King of Naples is, usually, the pope's more or less inactive ally throughout. The main problem for the popes is, first, to recover control of the Papal State that has, in effect, fallen into a score of fragments, each the possession now of the local strong man, or of some lucky adventurer; and then, simultaneously with this, to regain the old papal influence in the leading small states to the north of the Papal State, most of which are now dominated by the anti-papal, Ghibelline faction. So long as the papal faction is not dominant in these city states (whether they are still republics or, like Milan, ruled by a "tyrant") the popes can never hope for peace in their own restless frontier provinces, and especially in Bologna, the most important of all their cities after Rome.

The turning point of the story that begins with Clement V, in 1305, is the despatch to Italy, as legate, of the Spanish cardinal Gil Albornoz in 1353. Until that great man's appearance on the Italian scene, the story is one long tale of incompetence and disaster. It is Albornoz who makes all the difference. It is the ten years of his military campaigns, and of his most statesmanlike moderation as ruler, which at last make it possible for the popes to return to Rome as sovereigns.

The tale of disaster is simple enough to tell, in its essentials. The first chapter is the military action of Clement V in defence of his rights over the city of Ferrara and its surrounding hinterland. When his vassal, Azzo d'Este, died in 1308, it was found that the dead man had bequeathed the succession to his natural son. But Azzo had two brothers, and they disputed this son's right. Whence came a civil war and an appeal, by both sides, to "the foreigner": to Padua by the brothers, to Venice by the son. The son was victorious and Padua, deserting the brothers, went over to him. The brothers appealed to their overlord the pope. Clement thought he saw his chance to recover the old direct hold over Ferrara, always a highly important strategic point in Italian affairs, and now not unlikely to become more a Venetian possession than papal. Venice had, in fact, already won a concession of territory from her Ferrarese protege and ally. So, in August 1308, a war began between the pope and Venice which was to last for a good five years. The pope was finally victorious, and, it is important to note, in the war he used the spiritual arm at least as effectively as the temporal. For he excommunicated the Venetians, put their lands under interdict, and declared the war against them to be a crusade; all who joined in against Venice were, by the fact, enriched (supposing, of course, true contrition for their sins and reception of the necessary sacraments) with all those spiritual favours once only to be had by the toilsome business of fighting the Saracens in the Holy Land. The small states that for years had hated and feared the great republic eagerly joined the alliance. Soon Venetian commerce began to feel the effect of the boycott, and a peace movement began. But the pope inexorably demanded unconditional surrender, and at last Venice had to yield. The republic gave up all the rights it had acquired over Ferrara, agreed to pay the costs of the war, and to surrender many of the commercial advantages and treaty rights which had been one great source of its power in the north.

The pope had won -- and now he had to provide for the government of a singularly turbulent city. The chronic weakness of these French popes showed itself immediately. Clement would trust none but the French -- until, after four years of bloodily inefficient rule under French administrators, the state of affairs at Ferrara compelled him to withdraw them and to offer the rule of the city to the King of Naples. This semi-French administration fared no better than the other; and in three years the Ferrarese had driven out the Neapolitans and recalled the Este. Except for the huge cost of the war to the papal finances, and the huge mass of anti- papal hatred in Ferrara, things were now, in 1317, where they had been before the war started.

Clement V was as ill-advised in beginning the war of Ferrara as he was ill-starred in his victory. But at least he had for a reason the solid fact that a valuable possession of the Church was threatened -- something that was actually his, and valuable from the point of view of the independence of the Papal State. The next war, however -- of John XXII in Lombardy and Emilia -- originated in a claim of the pope that since there was no emperor he had the rights of the emperor, and so the right to interfere in the internal affairs of Milan (that was never a papal city at all), and to demand of its anti-papal ruler, Matteo Visconti, that he surrender to the pope the one-time pro-papal ruler of Milan whom he had long ago displaced and since held in prison. The demand was refused, and there followed eighteen years of war.

The pope looked round for allies but, this time, they were not forthcoming. Then he declared the war against the Visconti a crusade (1322), and presently Milan -- which the pope had laid under an interdict [661] -- forced out its excommunicated leader. Next, when John seemed on the point of victory, Lewis of Bavaria intervened on the Visconti side (1324), as has been told already. [662] In 1327, however, the pope was once more master of Bologna, and he planned to make this his headquarters, and to transfer the curia from Avignon. But first the Ghibelline hold upon northern Italy must be really destroyed. The King of Bohemia [663] now, in 1330, came to the pope's aid, and John XXII, taking up a great scheme that went back to the days of Nicholas III, [664] proposed to carve out for him in Lombardy a new hereditary kingdom, to be held in fief of the Holy See. The Sicilian experiment was now to be renewed in the north, Italians again to be ruled by a foreigner under the papal suzerainty, for the benefit of the Papal States and the freedom of the Church (1331). But upon the news of this new combination, all parties, Guelfs and Ghibellines in all the cities, came together. Twice in the one year (1333) the papal armies were defeated; the King of Bohemia abandoned the enterprise; Bologna revolted and drove out the papal government and then, in March 1334, John's legate, at the end of his resources after these many years of struggle, fled the country. With his return to Avignon, in the spring of 1334, the last hope for John XXII's great scheme disappeared. "The return of the Holy See to Italy, bound up so closely with the annihilation of the Ghibellines, remained, for the time, all but impossible." [665] And the war had absorbed the totality of the very high papal revenue of John's long reign. [666]

Pope John did not long survive this last of his Italian catastrophes. His Cistercian successor, Benedict XII, was wholly a man of peace. There was no attempt to reinforce the papal armies, nor to renew the war. The pope explicitly declared that not even to recover his states would he go to war. Peace -- of a sort -- was indeed achieved; but it was the local tyrants who, everywhere, really reaped its fruits and now consolidated their usurpations. The rot continued all through the next reign also, city after city in Romagna and the Marches falling into the hands of such powerful -- and notorious -- families as the Malatesta.

Then, at the eleventh hour, Clement VI intervened (1350), and once more a papal army marched across Italy to assert the papal rule over the last of what remained to the pope of the Romagna. The expedition failed, as badly as such expeditions had ever failed. The Visconti, from Milan, took a hand and, in October 1350, Bologna received them as its masters. Next the pope's general, failing to receive from Clement the money to pay his troops, disbanded the army. Whereupon the Visconti immediately hired it. As of old, excommunications and interdict were decreed against the Milanese ruler, but this time they were totally ignored. Clement applied to Florence for aid, but Florence was not to be moved. Whereupon the pope reversed the policy of generations of popes, and, in a mood of anger against Florence, admitted the Visconti claims, acknowledged him as the lord of Bologna and planned with him a league against Florence, September 1352. Where this terrible series of blunders would have led no man can say, but luckily the death of the pope (December 6, 1352) ended the crisis.

The next pope, Innocent VI, had this great advantage over his predecessors, that his own personal glory was in no way bound up with the fortunes of the Italian War. Also the Visconti was, first of all, alarmed by the possibility that the Emperor Charles IV might enter the field, and he was eager to make peace with Florence to leave his hands free for a projected attack on Venice. It was not difficult for the papal diplomacy to reconcile Florence and Milan, and Florence and the Holy See. Within four months of his election Innocent VI, by the Treaty of Sarzana (March 31, 1353), had skilfully extricated his cause from a really dangerous entanglement. And, for the task that still remained, of recovering his hold upon the states of the Church, the pope found to hand, at Avignon, the ideal agent -- churchman, statesman, and soldier at once -- the Spanish cardinal Albornoz.

Gil Alvarez Carillo Albornoz, the greatest ecclesiastical figure of his generation, was at this time a man in the early fifties. He was a Castilian, and descended from the two royal families of Leon and Aragon. From an early age he had been destined for a career in the Church and, his university studies ended, he was named to a post at the court of Alfonso XI of Castile (1312-1350). In 1338, while still on the young side of forty, Albornoz became Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain, and Chancellor of Castile. He showed himself, as archbishop, a capable and intelligent reformer of Christian life. When the war against the Saracens of Andalusia was renewed he was appointed papal legate to organise the crusade, and in a critical moment of the great battle of Tarifa (1340) it was Albornoz who rallied the wavering army of crusaders and turned defeat into victory. This was the beginning of a new career. He played a great part in the siege of Algeciras in 1342, and in the siege of Gibraltar seven years later. Then, in 1350, Alfonso XI died. His son, Peter the Cruel, promptly disgraced all his father's friends and Albornoz left Castile for Avignon. Clement VI received him generously, and at the consistory of December 1350 created him cardinal.

Albornoz was commissioned as legate just three months after the Treaty of Sarzana was signed, and on August 13, 1353, he left Avignon for Italy. For the next ten years all turns on his action; and the result of that long activity -- though compromised more than once by the weakness of the sovereign he served -- was to make the popes' authority over their state more of a reality than it had ever been before. It was at last possible for the popes to feel secure from violence within their own frontiers. Not even the long crisis of the Schism that was to come, so shook the work of Albornoz that it needed to be done anew. To few of its servants has the papacy been more indebted than to this great Spaniard, who, very truly, was the second founder of its temporal power. [667]

Albornoz entered Italy with the design of recovering territories long lost, in hard fact, to the popes. His first care was to secure that no Visconti hostility should either block his communications with Avignon or sow fresh trouble by knitting alliances between the defiant usurpers of papal territory and the host of petty tyrants along the neighbouring frontiers. His diplomacy at Milan was entirely successful, and in 1354 he passed on to the first part of his task, the recovery of Rome and the province called the Patrimony, [668] the centre and first nucleus of the popes' state. Here conditions were worse -- politically -- than in any other part of Italy. The French officials whom the French popes had obstinately continued to send as their agents, had been tyrannous, corrupt, and incompetent. Civil war between the various cities was continual, a Ghibelline was master of Rome and busy with the conquest of the rest of the province. The war went on until June 1354, when the Ghibelline, Giovanni di Vico, yielded and by the Treaty of Montefiascone (June 5, 1354) accepted the legate's terms. The Patrimony was henceforward undisputed papal territory. Albornoz proceeded to reclaim the Duchy of Spoleto, and by the end of the year, here too he had been successful.

In 1355 he crossed the Apennines to face the more difficult work of subduing the ever-restless cities of the Marches and Romagna. There was a victory in the field in April at Paderno, and a great siege of Rimini. Fermo too was taken, and Ancona. The chief of the tyrants -- Galeotto Malatesta -- made his submission and the Parliament of Fermo, June 24, 1355, marked the definitive pacification of the Marches.

But now Albornoz came up against the greatest difficulty so far -- Ordolaffi, the tyrant of Forli in the Romagna. Here, in July, the papal army was beaten in a pitched battle. A crusade was proclaimed against Ordolaffi, and in the first months of 1356 reinforcements of supplies and men came in to Albornoz. Nevertheless, he still failed to take his enemy's stronghold of Cesena, and through the rest of 1356 Ordolaffi successfully held his own.

And now the cardinal began to suffer something worse than checks from the enemy. The great successes of these last two years had roused the fears of the Visconti. The hold they had established, in Clement VI's time, on Bologna was in danger; and soon, at the papal court, they were busy undermining the pope's confidence in his greatest man. Already there had been serious differences between Innocent VI and his lieutenant. The pope thought Albornoz dealt too leniently with the rebels he overcame. For the cardinal -- far more of a statesman than the pope, a realist who knew men where the pope remained in many respects what he had been most of his life, a professor of canon law -- strove always to ensure that his late enemy should become his ally, and the faithful servant of the papacy. Never did he utterly crush any of them. When they surrendered, and abandoned all their claims, Albornoz appointed them to govern, as papal officials, a part at least of the territories they had once claimed for their own.

The intrigues of the Visconti were, in the end, only too successful. Albornoz received orders to negotiate with the rebel in Bologna the cession of the city to the Visconti. This, giving his reasons, he refused to do, and in March 1357 the Abbot of Cluny was sent out to supersede him. The abbot's diplomatic manoeuvres at Bologna failed, as Albornoz had known they must fail, and when it was clear that the pope's policy was to reinstate the Visconti in this key city, the cardinal asked to be recalled. Innocent was sufficiently disturbed to beg him to remain until Ordolaffl -- now besieged in Forli -- had been subdued. In June Cesena was taken at last, but Ordolaffi still held out, and in August Albornoz handed over his powers and sailed for Avignon. The last great act of his administration was the promulgation, at the Parliament of Fano (29 April-1 May, 1357), of the Constitutiones Aegidienses which were to remain for nearly five hundred years [669] the law of the Papal State.

Twelve months of disaster under the incompetent Abbot of Cluny determined the pope to reappoint Albornoz, and in the last days of 1358 the cardinal once more made his appearance in the Marches. Within six months he had overcome the formidable Ordolaffi, whom he treated with his habitual generosity. He visited the Patrimony to arrest the beginnings of new trouble, and then, in 1360, he approached once again the problem of regaining Bologna. Again the Visconti marched to its assistance, and for a good four years the steady duel was maintained. Albornoz took it; the Visconti besieged his conquest (1360); at the approach of an army of Hungarian crusaders they raised the siege, only to renew it the next year (1361). In June 1361 the Visconti forces were heavily defeated at Ponte Rosillo, and what was left of their army fled to Milan. But Albornoz realised that this was an enemy altogether too strong for his resources. He therefore negotiated an anti-Visconti league, in which the della Scala, Este, Gonzaga, and Carrara joined forces with him, and 1362 saw the war renewed more hopefully.

And then, September 12, 1362, came the death of Innocent VI, to throw the alliance into momentary confusion and uncertainty. No one could tell which of the cardinals would be elected -- it so happened that none of them were, for the new pope was chosen from outside the Sacred College -- nor what a new pope's policy would be. The Visconti, naturally, were ready at Avignon to persuade whoever was elected, that peace, at any price, was a pope's first duty. But Innocent's successor -- Urban V -- resisted the intrigues, and, for the first year of his reign, gave Albornoz strong support. A new crusade was preached against the Visconti; they were once more defeated in battle at Solaro (April 6, 1363); and when the vanquished sought again to win by intrigue what they had failed to hold by force, the pope again stood firm. But this holy pope was no match for the wily Visconti leader. Urban V's great ideal was the renewal of the Holy War against the Turks, masters, by this, of all the Christian lands in Asia Minor and now, for the first time, possessed of a territory in Europe also. [670] The pope dreamed of uniting against them the hordes of savage mercenaries -- the free companies -- who, no longer employed in the Hundred Years' War, were now ravaging at will through France and Italy.

It was easy to persuade such a man that the needed first condition for the crusade was peace in Italy, and that it could not be bought too dearly. Albornoz was superseded (November 26, 1363) at the very moment when such strong forces from Germany, Poland and Hungary were coming in to him that the final victory seemed certain. Three months later -- March 3, 1364 -- the Visconti restored to the pope all the cities and fortresses they had occupied in his states, and the pope, in return, agreed to pay them the immense indemnity of half a million florins.

The treaty was a signal victory for the wily Visconti over the political simplicity of Urban V. All the fruits of Albornoz's diplomacy and military skill through four hard years were thrown away. The pope had more confidence in the word of his treacherous enemy than in his own legate and general. Once more the incompetent Abbot of Cluny was named legate for the north of Italy, and Albornoz -- who had asked to be recalled -- was urgently begged to remain in Italy as legate to the Queen of Naples. Cut to the heart by the pope's disastrous failure to support the real interests of the Holy See in his own dominions, Albornoz yet continued his work for the suppression of the free companies. He fell seriously ill at the end of 1365 and then Urban, accepting as true charges of corrupt handling of public moneys, without hearing the cardinal, deprived him of his authority in the Romagna. Again Albornoz demanded his recall; accusations of this sort, the multitudinous hates amid which he was living, he said, were too much for him in his old age (he was now well over sixty) and he had a strong desire for more leisure for the care of his soul.

But he was much too useful to the papacy in Italy for the pope to be willing to agree. Publicly, in the consistory of January 30, 1365, Urban declared him innocent of all these calumnious charges, and he besought the cardinal to continue as legate in Naples. Luckily for the pope, and for the papacy, the great cardinal rose above the immense disappointment of seeing his work scrapped for the profit of the Church's enemies. He remained at his post, and it was his continued skilful diplomacy, and military success against the companies, which, by the end of 1366, made at least the Patrimony of St. Peter and Rome a territory to which the pope and the curia might safely return.

THE POPES LEAVE AVIGNON, 1362-1378

The conclave of 1362 that followed the death of Innocent VI [671] was one that produced many surprises. There were twenty cardinals to take part in it and the strongest group was that of the Limousins, compatriots of the last two popes. They were not indeed a majority, but the remainder had nothing to unite them except their determination that there should not be a third Limousin pope. The first vote was taken before there had been time for any prearrangement; and, in the hope of delaying the election until some profitable combination had been devised, each cardinal followed his own instinct to vote for the least likely man. But these chance-inspired votes happened to fall, in the required two- thirds majority, on the same cardinal; he was a Limousin; and the brother of the last pope but one, Clement VI. The disappointment of the cardinals was general, and unconcealed. But the pope-elect, the cardinal Hugues Roger, preferred to decline the high office, and thence onwards, in the ballots that followed, the cardinals were so careful about their votes that it soon became evident that no one of them stood any chance of gaining the votes of as many as two-thirds of his colleagues.

It was, then, upon the name of an outsider that agreement was at last reached (September 28, 1362), and the cardinals elected the Benedictine monk Guillaume de Grimoard, Abbot of St. Victor at Marseilles; a man fifty-two years of age, and at the moment papal nuncio in the kingdom of Naples. He was a man of very holy life, whose monastic spirit high offices, and years of external employment as nuncio, had never in any way diminished. He reached Avignon a month after his election, chose the name Urban V, and was crowned on November 6, privately, in a purely religious ceremony, within the walls of his palace, resolutely putting aside all the apparatus of secular magnificence that was now the rule. As pope he contrived to lead the life of a monk, never wearing any dress but his religious habit, and keeping faithfully all the monastic fasts and austerities.

Urban V was a most industrious worker, and scholarship owes him many acknowledgments. Like all these Avignon popes, he was a very real patron of learning. He founded new universities at Orange, at Cracow and at Vienna, and a school of music at the existing university of Toulouse. He restored his own university of Montpellier, and he found the means to support as many as fourteen hundred students in different universities. It was made a reproach to him at the time, and it has been held against him since, that his liberality and charities were a serious burden on the papal resources. For, as has been said, [672] the finances had now settled down into something like chronic bankruptcy. But, it will be admitted, there have been less deserving reasons for financial embarrassment, and it was ever Urban V's own justification to his critics that to promote true learning -- whether the student persevered in his clerical calling or returned to secular life -- was the best investment any pope could make who regarded the Church's future. [673]

It has also been laid against Urban V that he had little skill in the arts of ruling, and was too easily the victim of political roguery, and that he failed as a religious reformer. But all these defects -- very real, of course -- shrink beside the double glory that he continued to live his own holy life in surroundings of which St. Catherine of Siena could say that they stank like hell, [674] and that, at the first opportunity, he left Avignon, and, despite all the opposition, took the papacy back to Rome.

It was in September 1366 that Urban V made known his intention. Immediately, and from all sides, good reasons to the contrary rained upon the pope. The King of France sent special embassies to explain that nothing but the presence of the pope could heal the feuds that were destroying his kingdom. Was the pope to show himself a hireling, by flight? The cardinals, all but unanimously, opposed him. Albornoz, of course -- still in Italy -- welcomed the decision. He considered that the return of the pope, at this moment, when in Rome and the Patrimony his authority was secure and order re-established, would consolidate the work of restoration.

Urban held firmly to his resolution. He disregarded a last threat from his cardinals that they would leave him to make the voyage alone, and on April 30, 1367, left Avignon. By May 6 he had reached Marseilles; there was a long wait for favourable weather, and then the great fleet, the papal galleys and an escort provided by all the maritime states of Italy, made its leisurely way along the coasts of Provence and Liguria. Toulon, Genoa, Pisa and Piombino in succession saw the convoy that bore such precious auguries. On June 3 the pope landed, in his own states, at Corneto. Albornoz was there to meet him. Thence he passed to Viterbo, where he remained for four months, and here he had the great misfortune to lose Albornoz, for the great cardinal died on August 22. [675] And at Viterbo the old rioting now broke out again. For three days the city was in the hands of the mob, and there were cries of "Death to the Church, long live the people. " But the pope remained unmoved, and on October 16 he at last entered Rome.

For a time all went well. The return of the papal court was a beginning of new prosperity for the city. There were visits from reigning princes -- the Queen of Naples and the Emperor Charles IV -- that brought crowds of visitors, and once again new trade and wealth. The ruined churches began to be restored, and the old permanent traffic between Christendom and its natural centre took up its wonted course. For the hot Roman summer the pope went to live at Montefiascone, forty miles to the north, on the shores of Lake Bolsena. It was during his stay there, in 1370, that the papal city of Perugia rose in rebellion, and the Romans came to its aid. Urban took refuge at Viterbo and there he was presently besieged by the rebels, who had now hired one of the most notorious of the "free companies" led by the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood. The pope had no choice but to surrender the town. And now the forces of the Visconti crossed into Tuscany, making for the Patrimony. Urban appealed for help to the emperor, and to the King of Hungary. But they were deaf to his needs, and, finally, he decided to return to Avignon. Though the Romans outdid all former shows of loyalty, and though St. Bridget of Sweden prophesied to the pope's face that his return would be followed by a speedy death, Urban was now as resolute to depart from Italy as he had previously been resolute to leave Avignon. On September 5, 1370, he sailed for France. He arrived at Avignon on the 27th and there, three months later, as had been foretold to him, he died (December 19, 1370). [676]

But the unfortunate ending of the great venture attempted by Urban V did not -- as might have been expected -- sterilise, for yet another generation or so, the ideal which inspired it. His successor, Gregory XI, made it clear, from the beginning of his reign, that it was his intention also to take the papacy back to Rome.

Gregory XI was one of those rare popes elected unanimously by a conclave that lasted only a matter of hours (December 30, 1370). This last Frenchman among the popes -- Pierre Roger de Beaufort -- was a Limousin, the nephew of Hugues Roger, who had been elected eight years before but had declined, and of Clement VI, elected in 1342. It was this papal uncle who had made Pierre Roger a cardinal, at the age of nineteen. The young prelate had shown immediately the manner of man he was, when he deserted the splendid opportunity of worldly fortune and enjoyment thus opened to him, and returned to his study of law at Perugia, then the centre of a real transformation of legal learning, with the great Bartolo teaching Roman law as the development of principles and thereby founding a new science, and with his pupil Baldo de Ubaldis infusing a like new life into the understanding of the canon law. Under such masters the youthful cardinal became an accomplished canonist, with a really deep knowledge of law and with great gifts of judgment. And he grew up to be a man of prayer. Gregory XI was not yet forty-two when he was elected pope, but his health was frail, and he was already tending to be a permanent invalid.

From the first winter of his reign the new pope had determined that, with him, the papacy would return to Rome. And from Rome itself there now came, to urge this upon him as his first duty, the voice of that veteran admonitrix of the popes, St. Bridget. Through her, so she now declared to the pope, Our Lady sent him a message that was at once a command, a promise and a warning. Gregory was to go to Rome by April 1372, and if he obeyed, his soul would be filled with spiritual joy. Should he fail, he would assuredly feel the rod of chastisement; and his young life would be cut short. The pope, who had stood at his predecessor's side when, only twelve months before this, St. Bridget had prophesied to Urban V that his return to Avignon would be followed by a speedy death, was sufficiently moved to order his legate in Italy to ask further explanations of her. What the saint told the legate is not recorded, but we do know the message she sent for the pope's own ear. "Unless the pope comes to Italy at the time and in the year appointed, the lands of the Church, which are now united under his sway and obedience, will be divided in the hands of his enemies. To augment the tribulations of the pope, he will not only hear, but will also see with his own eyes that what I say is true, nor will he be able with all the might of his power to reduce the said lands of the Church to their former state of obedience and peace. " [677]

This message was apparently sent to the pope in the first months of his reign. Nearly two years later, on January 26, 1373, the saint had a second vision that she was bidden transmit to him. This time it was Our Lord who appeared to her, and told her that the pope was held back by excessive attachment to his own kinsfolk, and coldness of mind towards Himself. Our Lady's prayers for the pope would, in the end, the saint was told, overcome these obstacles and Gregory would, one day, return to Rome.

Then, in February of that same year (1373), came a new vision, in which St. Bridget beheld the pope standing before Christ in judgment, and heard the Lord's terrifying speech to his vicar. "Gregory, why dost thou hate me?. . . Thy worldly court is plundering My heavenly court. Thou, in thy pride, dost take My sheep from Me. . . . Thou dost rob My poor for the sake of thy rich. . . . What have I done to thee, Gregory? I, in my patience, allowed thee to ascend to the supreme pontificate, and foretold to thee My will, and promised thee a great reward. How dost thou repay Me?. . . Thou dost rob Me of innumerable souls; for almost all who come to thy court dost thou cast into the hell of fire, in that thou dost not attend to the things that pertain to My court, albeit thou art prelate and pastor of My sheep. . . . I still admonish thee, for the salvation of thy soul, that thou come to Rome, to thy see, as quickly as thou canst. . . . Rise up manfully, [678] put on thy strength, and begin to renovate My Church which I acquired with My own blood. . . . If thou dost not obey My will, I will cast thee down from the Court of Heaven, and all the devils of hell shall divide thy soul, and for benediction thou shalt be filled with malediction -- eternally. . . . If thou dost obey me in this way, I will be merciful to thee, and will bless thee, and will clothe thee with Myself, so that thou wilt be in Me and I in thee, and thou shalt possess eternal glory. [679]

Gregory was sufficiently shaken to send his legate yet once again to ask the saint for some definite sign. In July 1373, a few days only before her death, [680] St. Bridget sent her last word to him, and it was a word of practical counsel about the latest difficulty that had arisen to hinder Gregory's departure -- the new war with the Visconti. The pope is bidden to make peace at all costs "rather than so many souls perish in eternal damnation. " He is to place his trust in God alone and, heedless of the opposition, to come to Rome for the establishment of peace and the reformation of the Church; and he is to come by the following autumn. [681]

And now, soon after the death of the Swedish saint, Gregory XI made his first contact with a still more wonderful woman, Catherine Benincasa, the child of a dyer of Siena, sister of penance in the third order of St. Dominic. St. Catherine of Siena -- for it was she -- was at this time in her twenty-seventh year, and since her very babyhood not only had she been, manifestly, a child of special graces and divine attentions, but one around whom the marvellous and the miraculous flowered as though part of her natural course through life. Prayer; a life of charitable activity; corporal austerity; solitude without churlishness in the midst of a busy family life -- a family where she was the twenty- fourth child; a refusal of marriage, but no desire for the life of a nun; the direction of the friars of the neighbouring Dominican church; visions; colloquies with the saints, the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord; the great wonder of her mystical marriage in sign of which He set on her finger the ring she thenceforward never ceased to see there; the stigmata; and the great vision in which -- so she always believed she had really died, and been sent back to life for the purpose then divinely made known to her; such was the saint's life through all these years, in which she had never left her native town and hardly even her father's house, or her own little room in it. But never was any saint to fulfil more exactly in the Catholic Church the role assigned to the prophets of old, to appear suddenly in the public life of the time, to correct rulers -- the highest ruler of all, the very pope -- and, divinely commissioned, to offer them guidance back to God; and never did any saint offer better illustration of the doctrine traditional in her order since St. Thomas Aquinas, that in the highest form of contemplation the activity flows over into a charitable apostolate and care for all mankind. Already, in Siena, Catherine was a power, and the radiance of her unearthly personality had gathered around her a most extraordinary band of followers, men and women, friars, tertiaries, poets, artists, noble and plebeian, married and single, the most of whom she had converted, all of whom she instructed, and who were one great means of the apostolate of peace that was now her life.

It was, of course, in the midst of war that St. Catherine of Siena's life was passed; of the bitterest wars of all, the bloody feuds that were the life of all the fourteenth-century city states in Italy. In Siena, as in Florence and in a host of lesser towns, there was blood everywhere, as the never-ceasing cycle turned of revolution and counter-revolution; oppression, conspiracy, arrests, torture, executions, revolts, a new regime and then oppression and the rest yet once again; an age of horrible cruelties, of which the terrible savagery that accompanied our own Wars of the Roses is only a pale reflection. And in St. Catherine's many letters, and in her great mystical book of Christian teaching, the Dialogue, -- it is not surprising -- the thought of the Blood, and the word is rarely absent from a single page, of the Blood of Christ shed in love to save sinful man.

St. Catherine had already, early in 1372, written to Gregory's legate at Bologna, Cardinal d'Estaing, bidding him make charity the foundation of all his acts, "Peace, peace, peace! Dearest father, make the Holy Father consider the loss of souls more than that of cities; for God demands souls more than cities. " [682] This was to be the keynote of her apostolate to the popes. When Gregory himself sent to ask her advice, the saint had no other message but that he should turn from his nepotism, his tolerance of bishops who were "wolves and sellers of the divine grace, " and reform the Church: "Alas, that what Christ won upon the hard wood of the Cross is spent upon harlots. " [683]

The pope, however, continued in his own way, pressing the Visconti hardly in the field, diplomatically waiting for the opportune moment to do the will of God as he saw it, and especially waiting for the Visconti to be conquered before finally defying the universal opposition at Avignon and setting his course towards Italy and Rome. It is a nice question -- hardly a historian's question -- what ought Gregory XI to have done, or, better, what did he think God wanted him to do? The messages from St. Bridget had clearly left him uneasy. But, so far, his neglect of them and his use of the natural means, of arms and diplomacy, and his preoccupation with the affairs of France and England, had not brought upon him the judgments which St. Bridge. had seemed to foretell. On the contrary, the pope's good offices, for which the two kings had begged, and for the sake of which they had both besought him to delay his journey to Rome, had resulted in the Truce of Bmges (June 27, 1375) and a year's truce with the Visconti, made in that same month, seemed about to bring peace to Italy too. All was now ready for the voyage to Rome, but the pope's innumerable relatives won new delays from him. Twice within a month the decision to sail was countermanded, and then, on July 28, the expedition was put off until the spring of the next year (1376).

But, in the autumn of 1375, the storm broke in central Italy. and all that St. Bridget had foretold was speedily fulfilled to the letter. At the heart of the storm was Florence's fear of what a papal-Visconti alliance, with a French pope again at Rome, French legates and governors through all the papal cities along her frontiers, might hold in store for her. The summer was busy with efforts to knit together an anti-papal league. A general rebellion was successfully engineered in the pope's own territory. By the end of the year (1375) eighty of his cities had gone over to the league. In March 1376 Bologna, too, joined it. This was about the time that Gregory had finally hit upon for his journey to Rome. Instead, he was once more caught up in the full business of war, and on March 31, putting aside all Catherine's counsel to rely on love, to work for peace alone, and her pleas for leniency, the pope put Florence to the ban. Interdict, excommunication, and a general command to Catholics everywhere to join in the war against her -- if only by confiscating Florentine property wherever found. So began the most bitter struggle of the pontificate.

" Sweet Christ on earth," St. Catherine now wrote to Gregory, "let us think no more of friends and kinsmen, nor of temporal needs, but only of virtue and of the exaltation of spiritual things." And in June the saint made her appearance at the pope's court, envoy of the Florentines, driven near to desperation by the losses to their commerce and the ruin that seemed at hand. But a change of government in Florence destroyed the saint's usefulness as an intercessor. "Believe me, Catherine," the pope said to her, "the Florentines have deceived and will deceive thee. . . if they send a mission it will be such that it will amount to nothing." [684] In part he was right; but it was also true that the pope's own excessively harsh terms held up the negotiations. It was hard for the saint to ask mercy for the Florentines, now, as repentant children, when they had disowned her in order the better to prepare a new campaign.

Catherine turned to the greater matter of the pope's return to Rome. In one of her first audiences she spoke openly of the wickedness in the curia, and of Gregory's tolerance of it, and when the pope asked for her advice about the matter of Rome the saint finally convinced him that she spoke in God's name, for she told him what none but himself knew, how, in the conclave of 1370, he had secretly vowed to God that, if elected, he would return to Rome.

From about this time (July 17, 1376) preparations really began to be made for the voyage, and then for two months the saint fought the cardinals for the soul of the pope, one only of them all -- d'Estaing -- supporting her. They used all weapons against her, among them the very subtle one of a "revelation" through a holy man that contradicted Catherine's own message. But this time there were no further delays, and on September 13, 1376, the last of the French popes left the great palace by the Rhone, stepping manfully over the last obstacle of all, his old father, who threw himself down at the threshold in a last desperate argument.

The voyage was stormy and disastrous. At Genoa there was even a consistory to discuss whether it was not now obviously God's will that Gregory should stay at Avignon. But Catherine also was at Genoa; and the pope, too fearful of his cardinals to receive her publicly, went to her by night, in disguise, to be strengthened in his purpose. On October 29 he sailed from Genoa and, at long last, on January 17, 1377, the pope landed from his galley in the Tiber before the great basilica where lies the body of St. Paul.

"Come like a virile man, and without any fear. But take heed, as you value your life," the saint had once written to Gregory XI, " not to come with armed men, but with the Cross in your hand, like a meek lamb. If you do so, you will fulfil the will of God; but if you come in another wise, you would not fulfil but transgress it." [685] Side by side with the preparations for the great return, however, preparations had also gone forward for the renewal of the war against Florence. A papal army -- mercenaries from Brittany and England in part -- was raised, and set under the command of the cardinal Robert of Geneva. As part of the campaign against the great key city of Bologna they ravaged and burnt right up to the city walls. Then (July 1376) they were defeated at Panaro. Bologna still held firm. Next -- a fortnight only after Gregory's arrival in Rome, and a week after his refusal to lower his terms to Florence -- there took place the horrible massacre of the civilian population at Faenza, for which Robert of Geneva must bear the blame. All through the summer of 1377 the negotiations for peace dragged on, and the war of skirmishes continued. The pope rejected St. Catherine's plans "useful for the Church if they had been understood," [686] -- but, at his wits' end for money to pay his troops, he again sent the saint to Florence in the hope of inducing a surrender. Florence too was desperate, and presently a congress had been assembled at Sarzana to discuss a settlement. It had hardly begun its work when the news came of Gregory's death, March 27, 1378. He was still two years short of fifty.

Twelve days later the cardinals chose to succeed him an Italian, Bartolomeo Prignani, Archbishop of Bari, who took the name of Urban VI (April 8, 1378). Six months later these same cardinals, who had been steadily drifting away from Urban since a fortnight or so after his election, declared him no pope, and in a new conclave, at Fondi, elected Robert of Geneva. He took the name of Clement VII. The division of Christendom into two allegiances, to the popes of rival lines at Rome and at Avignon, which then began, lasted for close on forty years.

CHRISTIAN LIFE, MYSTICS, THINKERS

The names of St. Bridget of Sweden and of St. Catherine of Siena, coming upon every page of the critical story of the last two popes, are a reminder -- should we need one -- that, beneath that history of the Church which we see as a dramatic pageant, there lies another history, the real and truly vital history of the Church, the history of the inner life of each of the millions of Christian souls. To the actuality, and to the paramount importance indeed, of this other history the saints are, at all times, the standing witness, and it is never an idle criticism of any account of Christian history to ask "Where are the saints?" The presence of saints in the public life of the Church, and the reception given to them, is indeed a kind of touchstone by which we may judge the tone of that life in any particular age.

In this interior history of the Church -- in its fullness known only to God -- there is no distinction or rank, save that which comes from the use of opportunities accorded. Here all are equal. Popes, bishops; religious, clergy; kings, nobles; scholars, merchants; peasants, townsfolk, beggars -- what more are any of these but souls equal in their need of salvation, equal in their utter inability to achieve salvation by any power of their own? And all the vast apparatus, at once as simple and as complex as man himself, of theology, of ritual, the divinely-founded Church, nay the sacred humanity itself of God the Saviour, what are all these but means to that single end, the salvation of man, the return of the rational creature to his Creator for the Creator's greater glory?

Although we cannot ever know more than mere fragments of such a history as here is hinted, this history is a fact never to be lost count of as the more obvious maze of visible activity is explored and all that it holds assessed. For example, the one sole business for which popes and bishops and clergy exist is to lead man back to God Who is man's sole happiness. All popes have known this, all bishops, all clergy; and therein lies, not only the basis of the most terrible judgment that can ever be passed upon them, but the reason for the horror which failure on the grand scale in this primary pastoral duty caused to the serious-minded among the contemporaries of such sinners, and also the source of our own incredulity, as, to-day, reading much of their history, we remind ourselves with an effort that these men were indeed popes, bishops, religious, priests.

What has chiefly occupied this history, so far, is the story of the ruling of religion, of the administration of the bona spiritualia, and the care of the ruling authority to defend the greatest of these, the freedom of religion, from forces that would destroy it in the interest of civil government; it has been, also, a history Or thinkers, of priests and of religious. Something has been told of the success of all these eminent personages; of their mistakes also; of their failings and their sins; and of their never-ceasing struggles. It has been very largely the history of the Church teaching and ruling, rather than of the Church taught and ruled, the story of the shepherds rather than of the flock; and when the flock has been glimpsed it has been, very often, at a moment when in hostile reaction against its shepherds. For with whom else, in this constant battle, are the popes ever engaged but with Catholics, their own spiritual children? It is important to see history from the point of view of these also at whose expense history is made. Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi, and Church History, too, has its Greeks; of whose lives we do not by any means, as yet, know nearly enough to be able to call our story complete. What of their spiritual history in these years of continual warfare between the sacerdotium and the imperium? Much of it is written -- sometimes indeed between the lines -- in the lives of the contemporary saints.

It must already be evident, even from the summary account which is all that a general history can attempt, that during the hundred years between Gregory X and Gregory XI (1276-1370) the pastoral sense in high ecclesiastical authority had suffered grievously. From the point of view of that internal history of which we have been speaking this might seem the most important fact of all. But it is not the only fact; and against it we need to set all that can be reconstructed of that inner history. "It is the spirit that giveth life" and, lest we falsify by omission, something needs to be said of those for whom attendance on the Spirit is the main business even of earthly life. For this century, that saw in the public life of the Church so many victories of the world over the gospel, is also the century of the first great attempt to popularise the mystical life by a literary propaganda that describes its joys and analyses its processes; it is the century of Eckhart and Tauler and Suso, of Ruysbroeck and Gerard Groote, of St. Luitgarde and St. Lydwine, of Angela of Foligno as well as of Angelo Clareno, of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden, of our own Richard Rolle, of "The Cloud of Unknowing" and of Mother Julian of Norwich; it is the century also of the "Theologia Germanica", of heretical mystical Beghards, Beguines, and others innumerable; and it is the century in which one of the greatest of English poets set out in his Vision of Piers Plowman the whole theory of the life with God as St. Thomas Aquinas had elaborated it, an achievement complementary to that of Dante, and comparable with it. [687]

What then of the saints of the time? Who were they, and in what corps of the militant Church did they come to sanctity? What of the role of these many celebrated pioneers of the literature of mysticism? And what other new manifestation of the spirit does the century offer, whether in religious orders, or devotional practice? [688]

Dunng the hundred and four years which this book has so far covered (1274-1378) there appeared, in one part of Christendom and another, some 130 of those holy personages whom the popes have, in later times, found worthy of public veneration, 27 as saints and 103 as beati. [689] Sixteen of the 130 were bishops, (four of these popes); fourteen came from the old monastic orders; five were secular priests; twenty-one were laymen; and seventy-four belonged to the new orders founded since the time of Innocent III. The share of the new orders is really greater still, for of the sixteen bishops eleven were friars, and of the twenty-one layfolk sixteen were members of the various third orders. It would, no doubt, be rash to say that the number of canonised, and recognisably canonisable, personages alive at any given epoch is an index of the general tone of the life of the Church. There are, it may be supposed, many more souls, whose holiness is known to God alone, than there are those whose repute brings them to the ultimate testimony of canonisation. On the other hand, sanctity, in the technical sense, involves the practice of all the virtues in the heroic degree and this is not only a marvel so rare that it can hardly long escape recognition, but it is the fruit of such extraordinary supernatural action in the soul that it may almost be taken for granted that the subject of that action is meant by God to be recognised as such. Without, then, any desire to propose a few comparative statistics as a new, rapid and infallible guide by which to assess in any given age the force of the mysterious tides of grace given to man, we can perhaps agree that there are times when saints abound and times when they are rare, and examine with something more than curiosity the distribution of these 130 personages over the century or so in which they "flourished. "

The richest period of all is the first third of this century, the last generation to be born in what has been called, with some excuse, "the greatest of the centuries. " [690] Between the second Council of Lyons (1274) and the election of the first Avignon pope (1305) we can note as many as eighty-eight "saints. " [691] In the next generation (1305-1342) they are fewer; thirty-seven of these eighty-eight have died, and only seventeen new " saints " appear to fill the gap. In the thirty years that follow next the lifetime of St. Catherine of Siena -- the "saints" are fewer still; of the sixty-eight "saints" active between 1305 and 1342, forty-five have died and only twelve new " saints" appear. These thirty years, from just before the Black Death to the Schism of 1378, are, in fact, the most barren age of all. The actual period of the Schism -- the forty years 1378-1418 -- reveals itself however, as a time of revival; twenty-three of the thirty-five "saints" of the previous generation have died by 1378, but they are replaced by no fewer than thirty-five new "saints"; more new "saints, " in fact, in forty years than in the previous seventy.

If we examine the list of those new " saints " whose appearance relieves the sombre history of the disastrous fourteenth century so far as we have traced it -- they are twenty-nine in all -- we notice among them three bishops (one a Benedictine, [692] two Carmelite friars [693] ); there are two others from the older orders, namely the canon regular, John Ruysbroeck and a second Benedictine; [694] and there are eleven more friars [695] and the founder of a new order, the Jesuati. There are, also, six nuns (who came, all of them, from the new orders), one layman and five laywomen. The high direction of ecclesiastical affairs is, evidently, no longer a nursing ground for saints, nor do saints any longer appear among the princes of Christian thought. The most striking changes, by comparison with the figures for the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, are the greatly lowered number of saints among the bishops, [696] and the reduction to vanishing point of the saints from the old monastic orders, from the Benedictines and the Cistercians especially.

It is the spirituality of the new orders of friars that gives to the sanctity of this period its special characteristics; and the special character of the vocation of the friars, and the new way of religious life which they have constructed in order to carry out their special work, are far-reaching indeed in their effect upon the whole interior life of the Church. The friar is, almost by definition, a religious who lives in a town. The life of the vows, with its foundation of the divine office chorally celebrated, its discipline of fasts, vigils, enclosure and other austerities, was now brought before the daily notice of every Catholic. And as with the friars -- whose foundations ran easily into tens of thousands by the beginning of the fourteenth century -- so was it with the new orders of women associated with the friars from the very beginning; their convents, too, were in the towns. And around these numerous new town churches -- Dominican, Franciscan, Augustinian, Carmelite and Servite churches -- whose very raison d'etre was the sermon, churches of a new architectural type, great preaching -- halls in fact, [697] there speedily grew up the great militia of the orders of penance: associations of layfolk who really formed part of the new religious order, who continued to live their ordinary life in the world, but in the spirit of the order, according to a definite rule and under the guidance of the order's priests. St. Dominic's new invention of the priest-religious who was an active missionary, and for whom the monastic life was but the designed means to this apostolic end, transformed the whole business of the management r of a Christian life; and in nothing did this show so powerfully as in the sudden appearance of a whole new literature treating | of this matter, a literature in which, for the first time, the most I learned of theologians and the most mystical of contemplatives said their say in the vulgar tongue. The life of devotion -- la vie devote -- now became the main business of thousands and thousands of lay men and women also, and the immediate consequence was a great multiplication of pious books. The Bible especially -- in translations -- was the popular devout reading, book of this multitude, such classics too as St. Augustine's City of God, St. Bernard's sermons, St. Gregory's collection of the marvellous lives of the saints of old, and the meditations on the ' Life of Our Lord still -- and for centuries yet to come -- ascribed to St. Bonaventure, meditations in which the imaginative art of the writer developed, above all else, the terrible reality of the human agony of the divine Redeemer. Such a book -- well in the new, Franciscan tradition and the kindred works of the Dominican Ludolf of Saxony, [698] gave new life (and a new direction) to the popular devotion to the sacred Humanity; and these books were among the main sources of those many forms of prayer to Our Lord in His passion which are the best-known feature of the last two centuries of medieval piety. In the statues and the painted windows and the pictures of the time there is, from now on, no subject more frequent, nor any more lovingly wrought. The same influence is to be seen in the countless brotherhoods spontaneously formed to foster and to practise these devotions, and it received a powerful aid in the Book of Revelations written by St. Bridget of Sweden about the detail of the sacred passion, and in the sermons and writings of the German Dominican, B. Henry Suso.

Of new religious orders there is but one of any importance, that founded by St. Bridget. This was an order for men and women, consecrated to devotion to the passion of Our Lord. The nuns were strictly enclosed, but the monks were preachers, itinerant missionaries. The monasteries were subject to the bishop of the diocese where they were founded, and, in honour of the Blessed Virgin, they were ruled by an abbess. The first foundation was at Vadstena, in Sweden, in 1371. The order grew slowly. By 1515 there were twenty-seven houses, thirteen of them in Scandinavia. [699] But everywhere the spirit of Christian charity is seen active in foundations, now, of hospitals and refuges of various kinds, in the organisation of companies of nursing sisters and brothers, a movement that is summed up in the great figure of St. Roch, the patron of the poor and needy sick, whose cult, from the day of his death in 1350, has never ceased.

The outstanding feature of all this new birth of the spirit is the avidity for news about the life with God -- unmistakable everywhere, in all ranks of society -- and the literature which this need created. From this literature we may gather some notion of the perfect life as it was presented to the Catholics of these last generations before the catastrophe of the Schism unchained the forces of anarchy; and we may also read there signs of future development and, alas, of future disintegration. For the life of devotion is not a thing antithetical to the life of Christian thought, but, rather, closely dependent on it. Mysticism and scholasticism are not alternative ways of arriving at the one goal; [700] and in some of the new spiritual exercises now devised, and proposed to Christians as the way to union with God, we meet the last, and the most ruinous consequence, so far, of the failure of the Catholics of this century to rally to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.

To-day the word "mystic" is used for so many purposes that it has almost ceased to have any recognisably definite meaning beyond that of emotional sensitiveness to the non-material. But for our purpose the mystic is the man whose main interest and care in life is to unite himself in mind and will with God. It is for men and women of this kind that the monastic life was devised, as providing the ideal setting for those activities to which they had chosen to devote themselves. And now, in the fourteenth century, the kind of people we thus call mystics had, largely through the activity of the various orders of friars, come to be a very notable element of the public life of the Church. The new literature of mysticism had developed in order to provide this new mystical public with matter for its prayerful meditation, and with advice about the pitfalls of this high adventure; but it also studied the happenings of the mystical life so as to offer the mystic some means of checking his course, and from this it was an obvious next step to discuss the nature of mysticism, and especially the nature of the mystic's union with God, and the role and importance of the unusual happenings with which the lives of the mystics were, from time to time, studded. The mystics whose needs called forth this new literature were, as has been said, very largely the spiritual children of those new religious orders, and it was these orders which also had created the new scientific theology we call scholastic. That these corps of professional theologians should be attracted to the study of mysticism for its own sake, as one of the normal features of Christian life, was inevitable. Soon, the discussions about the nature of the mystical fact became a commonplace in theological literature. The solutions -- like the advice offered to mystics and the practical recipes -- varied as the theological colour of the different orders varied. There were to be controversies between the different schools about mystical questions, as there were controversies about so many other questions.

There are then, from this time, two kinds of mystical writing, that written for the use and help of the mystics themselves, and that written to analyse and explain what mysticism is and how it all comes about. Among the writers of both types of book not only theologians are to be found, but others too, with minds not trained perhaps to orderly thought, or the saving niceties of technical correctness, but with a tale to tell of experiences that have transformed their lives, and driven by an apostolic charity to convey the glad news to whoever will hear it.

Who these first pioneers of popular mystical literature were, what story they had to tell, the different points of view from which they told it, the variety of explanations they offered, and the sources which -- often enough unconsciously -- influenced their mystical outlook, may be read in the well-known book of M. Pourrat, who has collected a list of some sixty or more writers active between the time of St. Thomas and Luther's revolt. [701] What a general history, it would seem, needs to signalise as especially important in all this development, is the emergence of a really new school, after nearly a century and a half of the influence of the Friars; a school whose influence continued and developed until the very end of the period this volume studies. This is the school which produced the so-called Devotio Moderna and, as cautiously as may be, [702] something needs to be said of the way in which some of its leading adepts regarded, not so much the theologians of their time, as the role of the theologian and the place of theology in the life of the spirit. And something must be said, too, of the way in which, ever since Ockham, theologians had been moving still further away from St. Thomas's conception that there is necessarily a harmony between faith and reason. For these two contemporary developments have the effect, ultimately, of converging forces.

The simplest way in which to understand what is meant by the Devotio Moderna is to take up again, and devoutly read, the Imitation of Christ: for this is the classic production of the school. What is there modern about it? how is it new? and who were the men that made up the school whence came the Imitation and many other works, now perhaps forgotten, of like character?

The Devotio Moderna was a product of the country we to-day call Holland, and the pioneer in the movement was a native of Deventer, Gerard Groote (1340-1384). He was a man of considerable education, bred in the schools of his native town, of Aachen and in the universities of Cologne and Paris. He never seems to have proceeded beyond his mastership in arts, nor was he a priest; and for some years he led an ordinary worldly kind of life until, when he was about thirty-five, he was converted through his friendship with the greatest of all the Flemish mystics, B. Jan Ruysbroeck.

In the last few years of his life Gerard, [703] who died an early death in 1384, gathered round him, in his native town, a group of like-minded associates and together they formed the " Brotherhood of the Common Life" (1381). The associates were not bound by any vows, but they met for regular exercises of prayer, and they gave their lives to copying pious books -- forming the equivalent, in that age, of a religious press association. [704] A later development was the foundation and direction of schools for poor boys; the most famous of these, that at Zwolle, came to number 1,200 scholars. In their youth Thomas a Kempis, Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, and Luther too, came under the influence of the brothers in their schools. From Deventer some of the brethren passed to make a new foundation at Windesheim, but this group definitely went over to the religious life in the technical sense of the word, becoming canons-regular of the Augustinian type. The congregation of Windesheim flourished, and next eighty years (1384-1464) it came to number eighty-two priories. At Windesheim, and in the other priories, the spirit of Gerard Groote inspired all, and the priories also continued to be centres for the spread of spiritual books. The best known of all these Windesheim canons is the German, Thomas of Kempen, [705] the most likely candidate for the signal honour of being the author of the Imitation; and known to his contemporaries as a calligrapher of unusual skill.

It was not in the minds of the pioneers of this movement that the brethren should themselves be authors. But gradually books began to grow out of the little addresses with which, within the seclusion of these Dutch cloisters, they exhorted one another to perseverance in virtue and prayer and recollection, and in fidelity to the life of withdrawal from the world and its occasions of sin. And all these books -- collections of sayings, or sermons, or set treatises on special topics -- bear an extremely close resemblance to each other. There is little sign anywhere of the diversity of personalities among the authors. But what is everywhere evident -- and immediately evident -- to the reader is that the author is a man in whose life the loving communion with God is scarcely ever interrupted. And the reader can always understand what is written directly he reads. For the treatment of the great theme is concrete, and practical. With a most finished, albeit unconscious, artistry the writers set out their instructions in maxims, simply stated, with all the finality of proverbs or axioms; [706] and always, the guidance offered is so perfectly related to what every man knows the better side of himself craves for, that as he reads, it seems rather as though he were actually listening to his own better self. From time to time the flow of the maxims in which the reader sees the better things, and once again professes them, is broken by touching colloquies between the soul and Christ Our Lord.

Once these books composed by the new religious began to appear, they made headway rapidly -- there was, of course, at work here, besides the quality of what was offered, the new immense advantage that to propagate such literature was the congregation's main activity. The earliest manuscript of the complete Imitation that has survived is of 1427; in another forty years the book was known, and used, and loved, all over Europe.

Criticism is always an ungracious task, and never more so, surely, than when the critic is set to examine coldly the elements of a work inspired by the love of God, and stamped in every line with generous dedication of self to God's service. The Imitation of Christ, for example, is a work that all humanity has agreed to call golden. This makes the historian's task hard, but nonetheless necessary. For this Devotio Moderna was not all-sufficient; and once it had passed beyond the cloisters where it was born, and had begun to flourish in a different setting, its insufficiency might, and did indeed, tell increasingly.

The most notable insufficiency was that almost nowhere, in the literature of this school, was piety related to doctrine, [707] which is as much as to say that about much of it there is nothing specifically, necessarily, Catholic. It is a piety which, taken by itself, is, in the modern phrase, very largely undenominational; and, as everyone knows, the chef d'oevre of the school [708] has for centuries been used as extensively by those outside the Church as by those within. The absence of any care to relate piety to those revealed doctrines which the Church was divinely founded to set forth, is the more serious because it was deliberate. Not, of course, that these writers were indifferent to Catholic doctrine or hostile to it. They were, all of them, excellent Catholics, as whole in faith as in charity or in zeal; they would presuppose a dogmatic foundation, known and accepted. But they were Catholics in violent reaction against the fashionable spirituality of their time -- or rather, against its excesses -- and this had been a learned spirituality, very much occupied with theories about the mystical life, concerned to elaborate systems based on its theories, and interested, in some cases perhaps over-interested, in theological subtleties.

The great figure of this earlier movement had been the German Dominican Eckhart; and the Dominican priories and the convents of Dominican nuns in the Rhine provinces were the centres where it chiefly flourished. John Tauler and Blessed Henry Suso, also Dominicans, masterly theologians and great mystics, preachers and writers too, were the leading figures in the world of mysticism during the generation in which Gerard Groote grew up. Eckhart -- who had taught theology at Paris during the years when Scotus taught there, and who was involved in the controversies around the Franciscan's teaching -- was indeed a theologian of the very first class. [709] But over the end of his long and active life there lies the shadow of the condemnation of many of his doctrines -- after his death -- as heretical. [710] About the exact meaning of that condemnation scholars are now divided. The texts of Eckhart's work, as they have been known for the last three centuries, are far from trustworthy. It is only in the last few years, indeed, that any critical work has been done on his Latin writings. But whether Eckhart, the real Eckhart, was orthodox or not -- the gravest charge is that he was, in fact, a pantheist -- he is in these texts extremely obscure. This is by no means true of Tauler and Suso. Tauler was a master of spiritual direction, as learned in the workings of the human personality as in the ways of the Spirit, who had the rare gift of bringing home to the most workaday congregation the real importance of ideas. Henry Suso, no less learned in theology, and no less faithful, like a true Dominican, to the duty of associating piety with what can only be apprehended by the intelligence, namely truth divinely revealed, was a more passionate soul. In burning words he preached to all comers devotion to the divine intelligence, to the eternal wisdom of God. It was around this love for the second Person of the Blessed Trinity that all spiritual life turned for Suso; and to the propagation of this devotion he brought -- what obviously the task requires -- deep and sure theological learning. Above all others his master is St. Thomas Aquinas, whose calmly-argued ideas break into flame once they make contact with Suso's ardent mind.

The effect of Christian doctrine preached in this fashion had been to produce a host of mystics of rare quality in the Rhineland, and especially among the nuns of the order from which these preachers chiefly came. The movement was not, however, confined to friars and nuns; for it was one of the special characteristics of this Dominican school to teach that the life of the mystic is open to every Christian; that it is not, in kind, a new life which is the special privilege of contemplative monks or nuns, but a simple extension of, and an intensification of, that Christian life inaugurated in every soul by baptism. Hence the care of these German Dominicans, as of Ruysbroeck, to preach -- and also to write -- in their native tongues; and hence also, what has often caused surprise, their preaching about these high themes to the ordinary congregations who filled their churches.

It is not hard to understand that, once out of the hands of men really masters of their task, really theologians as well as holy men, such an apostolate could easily go astray. The subtle explanations of the soul's mystical union with God could, and did, give rise to idle and mischievous debates among the less learned and the half-learned; the delicate business of the practical relation of the workaday moral virtues to the high theological virtues could be neglected, and men and women, who visibly reeked of pride, insubordination, injustice and intemperance of every sort, could ignore their sins while they busied themselves with the higher prayer. And, of course, the movement will not have been spared its host of camp followers, many times larger than the army of disciples -- infinitely noisier and much more in evidence -- whose main occupation was to exchange gossip masked in the phrases of high theological learning, to turn these into party slogans, and, in the devil's eternal way, accomplish to perfection all the complicated manoeuvres of the religious life while their hearts were wholly unconverted, their wills obstinately unrepentant.

The reaction of the brethren of Deventer and Windesheim against what has been called [711] the speculative school of spiritual teaching, was, no doubt, very largely a reaction against the dangerous humbug into which this particular way of the interior life had tended to degenerate. But it was a reaction that went much further than a protest against abuses. For example, it was not merely the abuse of learning that was now decried in many sayings of the Devotio Moderna, but the idea that learning had any necessary part to play in the interior life: "Henceforward," wrote Gerard de Groote in his rule of life, [712] "no more benefices, no more learned titles, no more public disputations. . . . The learning of learning is to know that one knows nothing. . . the one research that matters is not to be sought out oneself." " Do not spend thy time," he also said, [713] " in the study of geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, dialectic, grammar, songs, poetry, legal matters or astrology; for all these things are reproved by Seneca, and a good man should withdraw his mind's eye therefrom and despise them; how much more, therefore, should they be eschewed by a spiritually-minded man and a Christian. . . the purpose of a degree is either gain or preferment, or vain glorification and worldly honour, which latter things if they lead not to the former are simply useless, empty and most foolish, being contrary to godliness and all freedom and purity." Only the carnal-minded could, he thought, be happy in a university.

Nearly a hundred years later than Gerard Groote the same spirit can be seen in one of the greatest teachers associated with the movement, [714] John Wessel Gansfort (1420-1489), a friend of Thomas a Kempis and a pioneer in the business of systematic meditation. [715] "There is a strong and weighty argument against universities to be drawn from the fact that Paul secured but little fruit at Athens, accomplishing more in the neighbouring city of Corinth and in Thessaly, which was then almost barbarous, than in the Attic city, at that time the fountain of Greek philosophy. It goes to show that liberal studies are not very pleasing to God." [716]

There is a sense in which the Imitation, too, can be called "a late medieval protest against the vanity of all philosophy," [717] and indeed the best known of such, and the most influential. All the world knows the passages in the opening pages of the Imitation, "What doth it profit thee to discuss the deep mystery of the Trinity, if thou art from thy lack of humility displeasing to the Trinity. . . . I would rather choose to feel compunction than to know its definition. . . . Vanity of vanities, all is vanity save to love God and serve Him only. . . . Have no wish to know the depths of things, but rather to acknowledge thy own lack of knowledge. . . ." That goodness matters more than learning, that it is the mistake of mistakes " to prefer intellectual excellence to moral" [718] no one will ever contest; nor that the learned may need, even frequently, to be reminded of this. But of all forms of goodness truth is the most fundamental, and yet, while learning is the pursuit of truth, it is hardly deniable that the author of the Imitation -- and others of this school with him -- do continually suggest, at least, an opposition between advance in virtue and devotion to learning, even to sacred learning; and certainly the tone of such admonitions is far removed from the teaching of St. Thomas that learning -- even the study of letters -- is a most suitable ascetic discipline for religious. [719] With these authors, however, learning, it is suggested, is for most men the highroad to pride and vanity -- "the greater part in knowledge than in virtuous living" -- and he who gives himself to the pursuit of holiness is in better case if he is not handicapped by any desire to know. "Quieten thy too great desire for learning, for in learning there is discovered great distraction and much deception." As for the learned generally: "those who are learned gladly choose to be regarded, and to be hailed as wise men. . . . Would that their life were in accordance with their learning, then would they have read and studied well." Again: "Happy is the man whom Truth instructs through itself, not through passing images and words, but as itself exists. . . . And wherefore should we be anxious about genera and species? He to whom the Eternal Word speaks, is set free from the multitude of opinions." Learning -- this is definitely said -- is not, in itself, blameworthy, that is to say "simple notions about things": it is indeed good, and part of God's scheme of things, but a good conscience and virtuous living is always to be preferred to it.

The facts are, however, that to all but a very select few, knowledge, even of truths about supernatural reality, only comes through the ordinary natural channels -- faith is by hearing. It is the natural human intelligence [720] that must lay hold of the truths of faith and make the judgment that these are things it must believe. [721] It is no part of Christian perfection to neglect the ordinary means of making contact with these truths -- namely the teaching of those already learned in them -- and to trust for a knowledge of them to the possibility of the extraordinary favour of a special personal revelation. And although it is most certainly true that theological learning is by no means a prerequisite for sanctity, such learning remains, nevertheless, a necessary instrument for those whose lot it is to journey towards sanctity by guiding others thither. Hence when good men begin to suggest that the world of piety can manage very well -- if not, indeed, very much better -- without the presence of theologians acting upon it, there is surely something wrong; and when priests write books about holy living which suggest that the theologians are more likely to go to the bad through learned vanity than to save their souls through the deeper knowledge of divine truth that is theirs, there is something very wrong indeed. Once more we are brought up against the all-important role of theological learning as the salt that keeps Christian life healthy. And what theology is to piety, metaphysical truth is to theology; for it is the natural condition, the sine qua non of healthy intellectual certitude in the mind of the theologian. [722] Once the direction of so delicate a thing as the Devotio Moderna passes into the hands of those unlearned in theology, all manner of deviation is possible. It can become a cult of what is merely naturally good, a thing no worse -- but no more spiritual - - than, say, the cult of kindness, courtesy, tidiness and the like. And what the master, unwittingly, is soon really teaching is himself; he is the hero his disciples are worshipping; there are, in the end, as many Christianities as there are masters, and chaos begins its reign.

Once it ceases to be recognised that there must exist an objective rule by which to judge the whole business -- theory and practice, maxims, counsels, exhortations, ideals, and criticism of other ways -- of the inner life and the business of the director with the directed, and that this objective rule is the science of the theologian, substitute rules will be devised to fill the absent place, rules which, there is every chance, will be no more than the rationalisation of a man's chosen and preferred activities. Someone, somewhere, must be interested in compunction's definition, or it will soon cease to be understood that there can be, and is, a certainty about what compunction is and what it is not; and if that certainty goes, very strange things indeed will begin to wander about, claiming the name of compunction in the lost land that once was Christendom. [723]

Let us turn from the defects, now so easy to be seen, in the Devotio Moderna, recalling only -- what will occupy us more hereafter -- how it is into one of the priories of the Windesheim congregation that, some eighty years ahead of the date our survey has reached, a pupil of the Brothers of the Common Life, and now an unhappy lad of eighteen, will be thrust to become, in spite of himself, a canon-regular, Erasmus Or Rotter (lam: in his career we shall surely see the shortcomings of the system hampering the greatest Catholic scholar of his generation, at a time when Catholicism is fighting for its very life. Let us leave the thought that Erasmus is the greatest witness to what the Devotio Moderna lacked, and consider now another group of pious men who, in this same late fourteenth century, are diligently sapping the foundations of men's intellectual certitude about the saving faith -- though of this they are utterly unconscious. These are the new theologians, products of the Via moderna, and they are, professedly, defending the faith. But their faith has gone awry; in this fact -- that they are wrongheaded and are fashionable -- as in the deficiencies of the spirituality of the pious Hollanders, we can read signs that are ominous. At the moment when certain mystics were beginning to hint that those who wished to advance in virtue had best leave theological problems alone, since ability to discuss them would lead inevitably to pride and vainglory, certain theologians were beginning to say that these same problems were insoluble, since no one could know anything at all with certainty, and that the only safe thing, for a Christian, was to cease to think about divine truths and to content himself with a faithful acceptance of them and a life of prayer. The influence of the mysticism that despaired of the theologian's salvation, was to be reinforced by that of theologians who now despaired of theology, and this because they had come to despair of reason itself.

There is, for instance, the revealing story of Nicholas of Autrecourt, a Parisian theologian, who has been called the Hume of the fourteenth century, [724] in whose work Ockham's principles reach their last extreme consequences. Nicholas used the new dialectic to examine Aristotle, and he finds thereby that Aristotle did not really know -- that is to say possess certitude about -- any one of the basic metaphysical truths on which his thought is built: for these truths -- if truths, and they may be truths -- are not things that can be known. We do not know, and it can't be known, that there are such things as substances, causes, ends, and the like. There is, says Nicholas, no "evidence" for their existence. "Evidence" is one of his favourite terms; "probable" is another, and this word "probable" sums up increasingly the mentality of the fourteenth-century thinkers. No philosophical truth is any longer certain: probability is all that human reason can attain. For example, Nicholas asks whether matter is eternal, and he answers that we cannot say with certainty that it is; but that it is eternal is more likely than not; it is probable. It is of course now, at this moment, that this is probable; what it will be, hath not yet appeared, and Nicholas, a devout ecclesiastic, conscious that thought (if this is all that thought really is) cannot offer itself as a way to truth, whether to Christians or to others, can only warn Christians of this and exhort them to stick more closely to the teachings of faith. He has, of course, if only by implication, suggested thereby to the Christian that reason and faith tend to contradict each other, that they can be in permanent opposition, [725] after which it seems a poor way out, indeed, to advise the Christian to stick to the one rather than the other. For what is faith but an assent of the reason? and with what other reason can the Christian give his assent but with that which has already been described by Nicholas as necessarily incapable of certitude?

To study Aristotle is also, therefore, pure waste of time; and Nicholas says so, expressly. Then what of the great doctors whose minds fed so largely on him? St. Thomas, for example, and Duns Scotus. It is barely thirty years since Scotus died, and not yet twenty since John XXII canonised St. Thomas with the most resounding eulogy of his work; but for Nicholas (and the many whom he will influence) the mass of all this writing is but so much lumber. Advancing a stage from his great discovery, "scared," says Gilson, "by the conclusions to which his logic has brought him," this philosopher who is a good Catholic looks for a remedy, and finds it; and here his solo voice anticipates what a whole chorus of superficial simpletons [726] will presently be bawling. What is needed, he tells us, are "spiritual men who will not waste their whole time in logical argument or the analysis of Aristotle's obscure propositions, but who will give to their people an understanding of God's law." [727] It is the old final-wisdom- seeming sophistry of the "practical" minded that is still with us. And this first of such prophets is a man whose theories of knowledge "cut us off from the only ways by which we can come to God." [728]

Nicholas of Autrecourt was a good man [729] who proposed to make the world a safe place for Faith by showing the utter impossibility of thought. It was not long before this tragic aberration brought him to the notice of the authorities, and after Clement VI had condemned eighteen of his leading theses, [730] he made a humble submission. [731] Nicholas may seem an obscure personage, but the most astonishing part of the story is this, that forty years later a personage who was by no means obscure, a chancellor of the university of Paris, and one of the two brightest ornaments of the world of Christian thought in that day, was explaining that the real reason for the condemnation of 1346 was jealousy, and offering as proof of this the fact that these theses were now publicly taught in the universities. Such is Peter d'Ailly's superficial comment on this grave affair. [732] The other glory of Paris, and of France and of Christendom, in this generation was d'Ailly's pupil and successor as chancellor, Jean Gerson, one of the holiest men of his time (1363-1429). He too was an Ockhamist, and he too sought in the cult of the interior life an escape from these difficult and urgent intellectual anxieties. " Lorsque la foi desespere de la raison, c'est toujours vers l'intuition mystique et la vie interieure qu'elle se retourne pour s'y chercher un plus solide fondement." [733]

The Christian mind, then, unable to think itself out of the impasse to which "thought" brought it, and mortally uneasy at the now unresolved fundamental contradiction that the teachings of Faith and the findings of reason may be incompatible, is bidden for its salvation resolutely to ignore the contradiction, to stifle reason, and to seek God in the interior life; again, to seek Him with what? With a mind accepting on Faith what it knows may be impossible? The eternal lesson recurs, that we cannot manage our religious affairs without true philosophy, however elemental; that true religion does not survive healthily unless philosophy flourishes. For without philosophy, or with a philosophy that is false, the educated mind [734] turns to scepticism -- theoretical or practical; and assents to religious truth made by a mind that is sceptical about natural truth, produce in the end superstition: and from the educated mind the poison seeps down, until in time it corrupts the faith of the whole community. [735]

For the popular and fashionable philosophers and theologians Aristotle was now, at the end of the fourteenth century, finished; and the famous Thomistic alliance of thought and faith at an end. A further blow was dealt to the prestige of that older school -- a prestige bound up inevitably with the prestige of Aristotle -- by the appearance in these same years of the first non-Aristotelian physicists, of the critical work of Jean Marbres [736] and, especially, of Nicholas of Oresme, [737] Bishop of Lisieux. It was theological speculation that set these clerics to their radical reconstruction of Aristotle the physicist, Oresme writing, perhaps all the more damagingly, in his native French -- yet another of the many signs that a new age is at hand. From the Bishop of Lisieux' work came ultimately three great discoveries linked to three better known names, Copernicus' hypothesis of the movement of the earth, Galileo's theory of the law of falling bodies, and Descartes' invention of analytical geometry. Here are far-off medieval origins of important elements in our modern scientific knowledge; in the circumstances in which they appeared they served to give the coup de grace to Aristotle as a force to be reckoned with in the university world. And that world, in the fourteenth century, was in process of a remarkable extension. Nine new universities were founded in northern Europe between the years 1348 and 1426, [738] and another nine [739] between 1456 and 1506. In the better part of these it was the Via moderna that dominated the philosophical outlook.

And now it is that there befalls the Church one of the most fearful calamities of all its long history, the so-called Great Schism of the West -- a forty years wandering in a wilderness when no one knew with certainty who was the head of the Church, a forty years in which the unity of belief was indeed marvellously preserved, but in which administrative chaos reigned and in which there sprang up an abundance of new anarchical theories about the nature of the papacy and its role. That catastrophe came at the end of a century when the whole strength of the politicians had been exerted to compel the Church to retire from all concern with temporal affairs; in an age when thinkers would have had it retire from the field of thought, and mystics would divorce its piety from the pursuit of truth; the trader, too, will be pleased if religion will now abandon its claim to regulate the morality of exchanges, and Marsiglio's ideal is only slumbering that will satisfy all of these by making religion a matter of rites alone and of activities within a man's own soul. [740]

THE SCHISM OF THE WEST, 1378-1409

i. The Two Conclaves of 1378.

"This is milk and honey compared with what is to come, " St. Catherine had said, [741] when the news reached her, in 1376, of the general rebellion of the Papal State against Gregory XI. Already the saint foresaw the Schism, the forty years during which two -- and even three -- "popes" simultaneously claimed the allegiance of Catholicism, which thereupon split -- geographically -- into several "obediences. "

Gregory XI died on March 27, 1378. Twelve days later the cardinals elected in his place Bartholomew Prignani, Archbishop of Bari -- Urban VI. Four months went by and then, on August 2, these same cardinals publicly declared that this election of Urban VI was no election; and on September 20 they proceeded to fill the alleged vacancy by electing as pope the cardinal Robert of Geneva -- Clement VII. Urban VI reigned until 1389; he was followed by Boniface IX (1389-1404), Innocent VII (1404-1406) and Gregory XII (1406-1415). Clement VII, meanwhile, reigned until 1394; and Benedict XIII, elected to succeed him, lasted for twenty-eight years more. Of these two lines, which were the real popes? To decide this we should first have to decide a question of historical fact; was Bartholomew Prignani, on April 8, 1378, really elected pope? or did the election take place in such a manner that it cannot be held a true election?

It is all-important, if the history of the Church in the next forty years is to be understood at all, to realise not only the fact of the ensuing division in Christendom, but the sincerity of the doubts and hesitations on both sides, and also the apparent practical impossibility -- especially once the generation passed away of those who, by their double election, had made the division -- of determining by any investigation of facts where the truth of the matter lay, the truth, that is to say, about the election of Urban VI. [742]

There exists an immense mass of information about that election from contemporaries, many of whom were eye-witnesses and participants in the great event. But the greater part of this evidence was set down after the second election, that is, after the dispute had begun. Party spirit is already evidently active, and in these accounts flat contradiction about simple matters of fact is frequent. Nevertheless, despite the unsatisfactory nature of much of the material, it is possible to reconstruct with certainty [743] the main events of the forty hours of crisis that began with the entry into the Vatican, for the conclave, of the sixteen cardinals [744] then in Rome, on Wednesday, April 7, at about five in the afternoon.

From the moment when Rome learnt of Gregory XI's death, one thought alone, seemingly, possessed the whole city; at all costs the cardinals must be brought to elect a pope who would not return to Avignon, a pope, therefore, who was Italian and not French. All through the next eleven days the excitement grew, and very soon Rome was wholly in the hands of those who could rouse and manoeuvre the mob of the city. The nobles were driven out; guards were set at the gates to prevent any electors from escaping while the see remained vacant; the shipping in the Tiber was stripped of sails and rudders. Thousands of peasants and brigands were brought in from the surrounding countryside, and armed bands paraded the streets, escorting the cardinals wherever they went, advising them of the best choice they could make, Romano lo volemo, o almanco Italiano. . And when the day at last arrived for the conclave to begin the cardinals had to make their way to the Vatican through a crowd as numerous as the very population of the city. [745]

The guardians of the conclave had been careless in their preparations, and they showed themselves weak and ineffective once the cardinals had arrived. Some of the mob, armed, to the number of seventy, made their way in with the cardinals, impressing upon them to the last, with coarse familiarity, the importance of making a right choice. When these were got rid of, there arrived the heads of the thirteen regions into which Rome at that time was divided (the Caporioni), with their escorts, demanding audience. They too were admitted, and once more the cardinals had to hear what, throughout the night, the mob continued to shout and chant, Romano lo volemo and the rest. The cardinals managed to be rid of the Caporioni without any definite answer, and after pillaging what they could they too left.

The night was noisy. The mob had settled down to a kind of kermess, its revelling helped on by the feat of those who had broken into the wine cellars of the palace. Just before dawn the cardinals were summoned to the first of two masses they were to hear, and while the second was in progress the mob wakened up to fresh activity. Presently the tocsin was heard to ring, and the bells of St. Peter's to answer it. While the senior cardinal was formally opening the proceedings the governor of the conclave sent in an urgent message. " Haste, for God's sake; elect an Italian or a Roman, or you will be massacred." Stones were indeed beginning to come through the windows, and axes to be plied against the doors.

Excitement flared high within the chapel where the cardinals, still isolated, were gathered. After half an hour they agreed to tell the mob that they would elect an Italian, and this was announced by the junior among them, James Orsini. On his return to the chapel this cardinal now suggested a mock election, of some Friar Minor who could be persuaded to play the part, be dressed in papal robes and presented to the mob -- what time the cardinals got away, to hold a real election elsewhere, later. But to this none would agree. And now it was that, within the conclave, the name of Bartholomew Prignani was first mentioned, [746] by the Aragonese cardinal Pedro de Luna. A rapid consultation among the little group showed that two-thirds of them would vote accept him. The voting then began, by word of mouth, the Cardinal of Limoges casting the first vote for the future Urban VI. Three alone, of the sixteen, demurred; of whom, two, in the end, came to agree with the rest. Orsini alone held out to the last, declaring that in his opinion there was not sufficient freedom for the election to be valid.

Thus was Urban VI elected, towards nine in the morning of Friday, April 8, 1378. But not only was the elect not a cardinal: he was not, at this moment, within the palace, and between him and the news of his destiny was a city at the mercy of an armed and hostile mob. Until the archbishop accepted the election it could not be announced; and the first hint to the mob outside that the election had been made was the command from the cardinals to half a dozen Italian prelates -- of whom Prignani was one -- to come immediately to the Vatican.

It was, however, some hours before they came, and meanwhile the mob grew ever more violent and began to find its way into the palace. The six Italians arrived while the cardinals were at their midday meal. They, too, were given a meal by the guardians of the conclave, [747] who joked with them about the probability that one of the six had been elected, and made mock petitions for favours; and then, before Prignani could be summoned to hear of his destiny, the strangest scene of all took place.

Fear had now really invaded the minds of some of the electors -- fear that because Prignani was not a Roman the savages outside would resent the choice, and put the palace to the sack. When, after their meal, the cardinals met in the chapel, someone proposed that, since the mob now seemed less active, they should take advantage of the lull and re-elect Prignani. But "We all agree to him, don't we?" said a cardinal, and all present assented (thirteen of the sixteen who had taken part in the morning election). But by now the mob was at the end of its patience. It was the afternoon of Friday, almost twenty-four hours since the election had begun. This time nothing could halt the Romans, and by all manner of ways they poured into the palace and into the conclave itself, whose terrified guardians surrendered the keys. Some of the cardinals, the better placed, fled; others were arrested as they tried to leave. And to appease the mob -- supposedly enraged because a Roman had not been chosen -- other cardinals went through the farce of dressing up in papal robes the solitary Roman in the Sacred College, the aged Cardinal Tebaldeschi, hoisting him, despite his threats and curses, on to the altar and intoning the Te Deum. This exhibition lasted for some hours, and it was, seemingly, from the old man's protestations against this mockery -- "I am not the pope; it is the Archbishop of Bari " -- that Prignani, somewhere in the palace, and by this time hiding from a mob to whom all that savoured of prelacy was spoil, learnt that he had been elected.

The palace was, indeed, thoroughly pillaged, and at last the mob went off elsewhere. Night fell, and in the Vatican there remained two only of the cardinals, and the man whom they had all, twice, agreed upon as the pope, but found no time to notify of the fact.

Gradually, on the next day, Friday, April 9, the cardinals began to come in from their hiding-places in the city. It took the best part of the day to persuade the six who had gone to St. Angelo that they could safely emerge. By the evening there were twelve cardinals in the Vatican. They first met, themselves alone, in the chapel of the election, and immediately sent for the Archbishop of Bari. They announced to him his election. Me accepted it; and chose the name of Urban VI. Whereupon he was robed in the papal mantle, enthroned, and homage was done to him as pope by all, while the Te Deum was sung.

Two days later was Palm Sunday. Urban presided at the great liturgy of the day, and all the cardinals received their palm at his hands. They took their traditional places by his side at all the Holy Week ritual. On Easter Sunday he was crowned in St. Peter's (April 18) and took possession as pope of his cathedral church of St. John Lateran.

Urban VI at this moment was, to all appearances, as much the lawful pope in the eyes of the cardinals as ever his predecessor, Gregory XI, had been. How then did they come to abandon him, to denounce their own electoral act as invalid? and when did this movement begin? It is not easy fully to answer either of those questions.

What does seem certain and beyond all doubt is that from the very first day of his reign -- the Monday after his coronation -- Urban began to act so wildly, to show himself so extravagant in speech, that historians of all schools have seriously maintained that the unexpected promotion had disturbed the balance of his mind. He had evidently made up his mind that his first duty was to cleanse the augean stable of the curia, to banish clerical worldliness and impropriety, and to begin this good work by reforming the cardinals and the other major prelates. The first signs of the new policy given to the world were violent general denunciations of whoever appeared before the pope to transact ecclesiastical business. When, for example, all the bishops present in Rome came to pay their homage, Urban rounded on them for hirelings who had deserted their flocks. An official of the Treasury came in to make some payments of moneys due and was met by an imprecation from Holy Writ, "Keep thy money to thyself, to perish with thee." [748] The cardinals were rated in consistory as a body, for their way of life, and singled out for individual reprobation; one was told he was a liar, another was a fool, others were bidden hold their tongues when they offered an opinion. When the Cardinal of Limoges appeared, the pope had to be held down or he would have done him violence, and the noise of the brawl when the Cardinal of Amiens came to pay his first homage, filled the palace. Urban boasted that he could now depose kings and emperors, and he told the cardinals that he would soon add so many Italians to their body that the French would cease to count for ever.

This extravagance of manner was the more disturbing because it was utterly at odds with the habits of a man who was by no means a stranger to any one of his electors. Urban VI was, at this time, a man close on sixty, and he had been one of the leading figures in the curia at Avignon for nearly twenty years. Urban V had, long ago, made him assistant to the vice-chancellor, perhaps the highest post that could be held by one who was not a cardinal; then, in 1364, the same pope had given him the see of Acerenza and when Gregory XI returned to Rome he had brought Bartholomew Prignani back with him to be, in all but name, his vice- chancellor. Urban VI, then, had been for the fourteen months preceding his election the chief personage of the curia after the pope himself; and among the cardinals he had enjoyed, very deservedly, the reputation of an extremely competent and serviceable official. He was learned, modest, devout; and, from his long life at Avignon, he was, so they thought, if not a Frenchman, as near to it as any mere foreigner could hope to be. This pope whom the cardinals now beheld, daily "breathing out threats and slaughter," was not the same man at all as the peaceable Archbishop of Bari. They were consternated; and so was all the curia with them. And whether Urban had indeed gone somewhat out of his mind, or whether this was merely the excessive noise of the explosion of a good man's disgust too long repressed, it seems certain that it is in these extravagances -- now the order of the day -- that the beginnings of the general breakaway are to be found. Had Urban shown ordinary tact and prudence there would never -- it seems certain -- have been the second conclave and election of 1378, whatever the doubts about the legality of his election that may have existed in the minds of some of his electors; or, at any rate, that second election would never have so impressed the world outside -- for its impressiveness, when it came, lay in the fact that it was the act of the whole college of cardinals.

The chief architect of the Schism, so Urban VI declared, [749] was the one-time Bishop of Amiens, Cardinal Jean de la Grange. This cardinal had not taken part in the momentous conclave; diplomatic business kept him at Sarzana during Gregory XI's last illness, and long before he could reach Rome Urban had been elected. When he arrived -- already enraged that his colleagues had chosen an Italian -- he had a violent, unfriendly reception from the new pope, who publicly called him a traitor to the Holy See for his activities at Sarzana. This was somewhere about April 25, and from now on the palace of Jean de la Grange was a kind of headquarters where all whom the pope's methods antagonised could meet and plot. One of the cardinal's first associates was his colleague Robert of Geneva, the cardinal whom Gregory XI had made commander-in-chief, and who was responsible for the massacre of Cesena. Between them these two did much to encourage the French commander in St. Angelo not to hand over the fortress to Urban, and with it the papal treasure taken there, on the day of the election, by the camerlengo the Archbishop of Arles.

One by one the cardinals now began to leave Rome for Anagni, the reason first alleged being the increasing heat of the Roman summer. The first two left on May 6, and by June 15 all the French cardinals were there together. On June 24 Peter de Luna, the Aragonese, and the ablest man in the whole college, joined them. From Anagni they called to their aid the Free Company of Gascons that had served Gregory XI. At Ponte Salario a body of Roman troops barred the way. There was a fight, but the Gascons won through, killing two hundred of the Romans (July 16, 1378). The cardinals, all the world could see it, were now a power beyond Urban's reach.

The pope was seriously alarmed. He had already sent three [750] of the Italian cardinals to offer terms, promising better treatment in the future. But the only result of this was to enable the whole college to meet away from any influence the pope might exercise. At that meeting momentous decisions were taken; the cardinals agreed that the election made on April 8, was void, and means were discussed to rid the Church of the "usurper." For a time these three Italian cardinals, indeed, strove to be neutral, but in the end they made common cause with their brethren, who, on August 2, had issued a manifesto stating that the election made in April was void by reason of the pressure exerted upon the electors, that Urban, therefore, was not pope, and inviting him to recognise the fact and to cease to exercise the papal office. One week later than this, after a mass of the Holy Ghost and a sermon, an encyclical letter of the cardinals was read aloud in which they solemnly anathematised Bartholomew Prignani as an usurper. From Anagni the cardinals moved, on August 27, to a refuge safer still at Fondi, just beyond the papal frontier, in the kingdom of Naples. Here the sovereign -- Queen Giovanna -- supported them, and it was now that their Italian colleagues, abandoning their neutrality, joined them. The address of the cardinals to the Christian world had gone out already, and their embassy to the King of France -- Charles V -- had won him to their view that the election made in April was null and void. The king's reply reached them on September 18. Two days later they went into conclave, and at the first ballot they chose as pope Robert of Geneva. He called himself Clement VII. [751] The three Italian cardinals, although present in the conclave, did not vote; but they acknowledged Clement and did him homage at his coronation on October 31.

For the next nine months the rival popes confronted each other in Italy, separated by a mere sixty miles and their own armed forces. Urban, on November 29, excommunicated Clement and some of his chief supporters; and Clement, in December, held his first consistory, creating six new cardinals and appointing legates to the various Christian princes.

Clement's cause, indeed, at the beginning of the new year 1379, seemed the more promising of the two. If England stood by Urban, and most of Germany too, France was decidedly for the Frenchman, and the Spanish kingdoms had at any rate refused to accept Urban, while in Italy Clement had Sicily on his side and also the Queen of Naples. But the situation changed greatly once Urban managed to hire the army of the best Italian captain of the day, Alberigo di Barbiano. On April 27, 1379, the French garrison that still held out in Castel S. Angelo at last surrendered to Urban, and three days later Alberigo routed and destroyed Clement's army at the battle or Marino. Clement now made for Naples, where the Queen received him with great pomp (May 10). But the populace rose in indignation that, in Naples, a Frenchman should be preferred to a pope who was a Neapolitan, and three days only after his arrival Clement had to flee to save his life. If he was not safe in Naples he could be safe nowhere in Italy; his first -- and, as it happened, his main -- attempt to drive Urban from Rome had failed indeed; nine months to the day after his election Clement sailed for Avignon (June 20, 1379).

ii. Discord in each 'Obedience,' 1379-1394.

These tremendous events had not gone by without comment from St. Catherine. At the moment of Urban VI's election the saint was at Florence -- whither Gregory XI had sent her -- and she was still there when, in July 1378, she wrote her first letter to Urban. It was a strong plea that his first care should be to reform the Church, and a reminder that for such a task "You have the greatest need of being founded in perfect Charity, with the pearl of justice. . . letting the pearl of justice glow forth from you united with mercy," and so to correct "those who are made ministers of the blood." [752] The cardinals were, by this time, already leaving Rome, and the next letter of the saint to the pope which we possess is dated September 18 -- the very day, had St. Catherine known it, when the cardinals went into the conclave that was to make Robert of Geneva Clement VII.

When this news reached her the saint straightway wrote to Urban the warning that, more than ever, must he now be " robed in the strong garment of most ardent charity"; she also wrote to the Queen of Naples, and to the cardinals who had elected Clement. Already, when first the division between them and Urban was becoming known, St. Catherine had written to Pedro de Luna, then considered as Urban's main supporter and the principal cause of his election, reminding him above all "never to sever yourself from virtue and from your head. All other things -- external war and other tribulations -- would seem to us less than a straw or a shadow in comparison with this." How the saint wrote to the schismatic electors can be guessed, "men, not men but rather demons visible." It is not true, St. Catherine tells them, that it was through fear of death that they had elected Urban "and, if it had been, you were worthy of death for having elected the pope through fear of men and not with fear of God." Briefly, in a couple of sentences, the "case" of the cardinals is exposed and the real motives declared which had driven them to this new sin. "I know what moves you to denounce him. . . your self love which can brook no correction. For, before he began to bite you with words, and wished to draw the thorns out of the sweet garden, you confessed and announced to us, the little sheep, that Pope Urban VI was true pope." [753] The saint was, likewise, under no illusion about Urban's own character as it was now showing itself. "Even if he were so cruel a father as to hurt us with reproaches and with every torment from one end of the world to the other, we are still bound not to forget nor persecute the truth." To the Count of Fondi, under whose protection Clement's election had taken place, the saint wrote of the cardinals, "Now they have contaminated the faith and denied the truth; they have raised such a schism in Holy Church that they are worthy of a thousand deaths." [754]

At the beginning of November 1378, in obedience to Urban VI's command, the saint came to Rome -- with her usual accompanying escort of disciples -- and for the short remainder of her life gave herself ardently to the tasks assigned to her, to mobilise "the servants of God" in the cause of the true pope and to write ceaselessly, burning and passionate letters, to all whom it was thought she could influence. When St. Catherine passed from this world, April 30, 1380, the cause of the Roman pope lost the one saint it had enlisted, and the pope's own vices the only human check they were ever to know.

Once the great figure of St. Catherine disappears from the story of the Schism, it becomes, indeed, for many years no more, to all appearances, than the dreary, material strife of politicians, clerical and lay. Nowhere is the deterioration more marked, at this time, than in the character of the pope whom the saint had supported. Now that Clement had been forced away from Italy, it was an obvious move for Urban to strengthen his hold on the Holy See's vassal state of Naples, where alone in Italy his rival had found a sovereign to support him. So, in April 1380, Urban VI deposed the treacherous Queen Giovanna, and offered the crown to her kinsman, Charles, Duke of Durazzo. Charles -- flushed with recent victories in the service of his cousin, the Angevin -- descended King of Hungary, Lewis the Great -- came to Rome with his army in the August of that same year. Giovanna, anticipating the pope's move, had previously named as her heir a French prince, Louis, Duke of Anjou, a brother of Charles V of France (June 29, 1380). But her papal suzerain gave the crown to Charles of Durazzo (June 1, 1381), and, the following day, himself crowned the new king. [755]

To provide supplies and pay for Charles III's army, Urban strained every nerve, selling church plate and jewels and levying new taxes upon what clergy acknowledged and obeyed him as pope. The new king marched south and met with little opposition. His French rival was detained in France by the death of his brother, Charles V, whose heir, Charles VI, was a child of twelve. The Urbanist king took Naples in August 1381, and captured Giovanna also, whom, ten months later, he seemingly had murdered (or executed). He was then, already well established when Louis of Anjou crossed into Italy at the head of one of the finest armies the century had seen. Louis also had been crowned King of Naples, by the pope at Avignon (May 30, 1382). The fate of the rival obediences was once more, it seemed, to be determined by the conflict of armed forces. But Louis, if a good soldier, was a poor general. He made no attempt to capture Rome, but marched on the kingdom that was his objective by the circuitous route of Ravenna and the Adriatic coast. When at last (October 8) he arrived before Naples disease had already begun to destroy his army. His rival had no need to do more than harass Louis in a war of skirmishes. Long before Louis' own death, two years later at Bari (September 20, 1384), he had ceased to be a danger; and then the broken remnant of his troops made their way back to France.

And also, long before this, Urban had fallen foul of his own chosen champion. History was repeating itself; the prince called in to protect the papacy by force of arms had no sooner conquered its foe than he openly gave all his energy to consolidate his own new position as king and, therefore, inevitably, to ward off any interference from his suzerain the pope. Indeed, by this time, the suzerain-vassal relation -- where the vassal was sovereign prince at least -- had become no more than a formality; and a suzerain so little experienced as to wish to make it a reality, risked, every time, the chance of serious war. Nor would the fact that this particular suzerain, being also the vassal's spiritual ruler, was able to use against him such spiritual weapons as excommunication and interdict, ever again be a serious consideration in the politics of a prince politically strong.

It was another grave weakness for the papacy that Urban VI did not go into this conflict with Charles III of Naples with an entire purity of intention. The pope had a nephew -- a worthless blackguard of a man -- for whom he was anxious to provide. Part of the price which Charles III had agreed to pay was to carve out a great principality for this nephew, to be held in fief of the King of Naples. In the summer of 1383 Urban, partly in order to press these claims of his nephew, set out with his court for Naples Six of his cardinals -- of the new cardinals, that is to say, created since the debacle of 1378 -- had, it seems, already opposed this scandalous piece of nepotism. Urban was careful to take his critics with him. When, in October, he arrived at Aversa, in Charles's dominions, the king greeted him with all conventional respect, but Urban found himself in fact a prisoner; and it was in a kind of extremely honourable captivity that, in great pomp, he entered Naples shortly afterwards.

The war with the French claimant presently absorbed Charles III's energy, and Urban was allowed to go to Nocera. Here new trouble arose, with Charles's wife Margaret -- now acting as regent -- when Urban began to interfere with the government of the kingdom, alleging his rights as suzerain. Soon the pope found himself besieged in the castle of Nocera (summer of 1384). But the career of Louis of Anjou was now nearing its end, and Charles was free to give all his attention to the troublesome pope. He found willing allies in the six cardinals. They conspired, apparently, to hand over Urban to the king, or to have him placed under restraint, as incapable of ruling. But a traitor betrayed them. The pope had them horribly tortured to extract confessions of guilt, a Genoese pirate known for his hatred of priests being called in to organise the enquiry. And outside the torture-chamber Urban walked up and down reading his breviary and listening to their shrieks and cries. Amongst other things, the torture produced statements that the King and Queen of Naples were partners in the plot, whereupon Urban made the fatal mistake of citing Charles to appear for judgment. An unusually savage sentence of excommunication followed. But the king's only reply was to send an army to besiege the pope, upon whose head he set a price of 11,000 golden florins (January 31, 1385). The command of this army was given to one of Urban's bitterest enemies, and it is a comment on the hold which the world now had upon monasticism that this general was the Abbot of Monte Cassino. Urban held out, in the citadel, for five months after the town had fallen, going to the ramparts four times a day, with full liturgical attendance, to excommunicate anew Charles and all his supporters.

In July 1385, however, at the approach of a new Angevin army, the abbot abandoned the siege, and Urban put the sea between himself and his dangerous vassal, sailing to Genoa on August 19. He took his unhappy prisoners with him. One, the Bishop of Aquila, he appears to have had killed on the road when he was no longer able to stand the pace of the journey. The six cardinals -- all but the Englishman, Adam Easton -- no one ever saw again. Officially they had " disappeared, " and Urban so spoke of them. Historians seem agreed that the pope had them thrown into the sea.

Was Urban VI wicked or merely insane? We shall never know. He stayed at Genoa for over a year (September 23, 1385-December 16, 1386) and when the murder of Charles III, in Hungary, relieved him of his most dangerous enemy, he slowly made his way south once more. He was at Lucca for nine months and thence, in September 1387, he went to Perugia to prepare an expedition against Naples, now, since June, in the hands of Clement VII's party. But Urban's soldiers deserted because he had no money for their wages, and the pope got no further than Rome. Here, too, his life was not safe; and here, on October 15, 1389, death ended his unhappy career.

During this first stage of the Schism (1379-1389) the observer has the impression of Christendom as made up of two spheres between which there is no contact save an occasional collision; and in each of the two spheres Catholicism, as all the fourteenth century had known it, continues in its habitual way. Such collisions were, for example, the Italian expedition of Louis of Anjou, while the struggle between Charles III and Urban was but a new instance of the troubles which any pope of the Middle Ages might expect at any time during his reign. And in the sphere from which Louis of Anjou's expedition set out, the sphere ruled from Avignon by the French pope Clement VII, the most prominent feature of the Church's public life was a renewal of the long-standing conflict in which the kings strove to subject the Church and make it an instrument of State policy, while the popes strove to resist them and to maintain the freedom of religion from State control. Sometimes -- as before now -- the popes were indeed ill advised in the methods they chose, and more than unfortunate in the spirit in which they waged the fight, but to fight against the stifling control of the State they never ceased. And this is as true of the French popes during the Schism -- whose legitimacy has never been more than doubtful -- as it was of the earlier popes whom all agreed were really popes; it is true, especially, of the second of these popes, Pedro de Luna (Benedict XIII), but it is true also of Clement VII. Whether Clement VII and his successor were popes or anti-popes, their public action -- in the principles that inspired it, in the forms it took, and even in its errors and its blunders -- has always about it, curiously enough, the authentic papal note: interesting and significant testimony that this division of opinion about who was pope did not affect the unity of faith about the authority of the papacy, nor occasion any revolutionary novelty in papal practice.

Legend relates that when Charles V of France heard of the election of Clement VII he exclaimed, "Now, I am pope." If ever any such idea had possessed the mind of any of the princes who ruled France during the next forty years, they were surely soon disillusioned. This French papacy of the years of Schism was as much -- and as little -- under their control as had been the French papacy of 1305-1378, or the Italian papacy of the forty years before that. And not only did the Avignon popes of the Schism period act, always, with the traditional papal independence towards the king in all matters of principle, but from the very beginning of the Schism there was also active in France a strong and organised body of educated clerical opinion that was always independent of the crown and often in conflict with it. The consistent aim of these scholars and doctors, was not, ever, to establish successfully the claims of the Avignon line; but rather to bring to an end the terrible spiritual evil which the Schism was. The centre of this great body of opinion was the University of Paris, and its endeavours were ceaseless through all these forty years. No praise is too high for the long fidelity of these men. In very great measure they were the instruments of the subsequent reunion. But it is also the fact, unfortunately, that their theology was not equal to their good will; their zeal, because ill-instructed, produced new complications, and a legacy of new theories about the place of the papacy in the Church destined to harass religion for the next four hundred years, and to be, during the century that followed the Schism, a most useful arm for the Christian prince who wished to wring concessions from the Holy See.

No one doubts that, as a matter of historical fact, it was the determination of France to support Robert of Geneva's claim to be the true pope which gave his party, at the critical moment, whatever chance of survival it ever possessed. Did Charles V support the cardinals against Urban VI, and pledge himself to whichever pope they should elect, because he really believed in their case, or was it mere State policy, the hope of power, which moved him? The question is still debated.

When the first envoys of the cardinals came to his court (September 1378) [756] Charles V called a meeting of ecclesiastics before whom they stated their case. There were present to hear them thirty-six archbishops and bishops, a number of abbots, doctors of theology and of canon law, with representatives of the universities of Paris, Angers and Orleans; and, at a second session, lawyers also from the parlement. Their advice to Charles was to wait for more information before coming to any decision. But Charles privately wrote [757] the letter to the cardinals at Fondi which encouraged them to go forward with their plan. They elected their pope on September 20 and in October the six cardinals whom Gregory XI had left in charge at Avignon went over to Clement [758] and proclaimed his election. On November 16 the king called a second meeting to discuss the matter. This was a very different affair from that of September; it was much smaller, and was made up largely of the king's own "household" clerics; nor was the University of Paris represented. The result of this meeting was the king's public recognition of Clement as pope, and a royal order that he should be proclaimed as pope in all the parish churches of the kingdom. And Charles now strove, through special embassies to the various states, to win over other princes to recognise Clement.

The University of Paris was still not so sure. Two "nations," [759] the English and the Picard, refused to recognise Clement, and the rector asked for more time. Six months after this, in April 1379, Clement sent as his legate, to win over the university, the Cardinal of Limoges, Jean de Cros, and it was now that the university definitely deserted Urban, the English and Picards still resisting. [760] But they were not the only independent spirits. Charles V died in September 1380, and the university now approached the court to ask support for what it already thought to be the only way out of the impasse -- the calling of a General Council. But the court was hostile to the plan; the doctors who appeared before it were thrown into prison, and only released when the university agreed to recognise Clement VII as really pope. [761] Four years later the university again approached the court, this time to beg the king to protect the clergy from the ruinous taxes levied by Clement VII to pay for the armies of Louis of Anjou.

When Urban VI died (October 15, 1389), Clement VII immediately proposed to Charles VI that he should try, through diplomatic channels, to persuade the Roman cardinals to end the Schism by electing him, Clement VII. But the fourteen cardinals Urban had left behind moved too quickly for the Avignon pope. On November 2 they elected their pope, Pietro Tomacelli, a young man of thirty- three -- Boniface IX. Clement promptly excommunicated him; and Boniface excommunicated Clement. And Boniface also declared [762] that the plan to end the division through a General Council was sinful.

But from this moment the political aspect of the Schism changed, and contacts began once more to be made between the two "obediences." Boniface IX was tactful and kindly; he soon won back the Italian states which Urban VI had estranged politically (though they had remained faithful to the cause of the Roman pope); and he gradually conquered the last few strongholds that held out for Clement in the Papal State.

In France, meanwhile, great plans were being worked out to bring down the cause of the Roman pope. Clement VII's plan centred round the heir of the ill-starred Louis of Anjou, a boy of twelve, another Louis. To finance a new expedition to Naples that should establish Louis II as king, Clement gathered the immense sum of 60,000 golden florins. On August 13, 1390, the little king and his army landed at Naples and for three years all went well, victory in the field, and town after town falling to the Angevins. Expenses of course mounted, as the months and years went by, and Clement tightened the financial screw. Boniface IX did the same on behalf of his own protege, Ladislas, the son of Charles of Durazzo. The King of France planned to lead a new expedition against Rome itself and so re-establish the unity of the Church by force of arms. Clement VII was to go with him, and the date for the assembly was already fixed (March 1391), when the diplomacy of Richard II of England was set in movement by Boniface, and it effectively halted the scheme.

This was a serious blow to Clement. A second soon followed, a royal scheme for such a reorganisation of Italy that the French would control the whole country; Boniface IX would indeed be crushed, but the papacy installed at Rome with Clement would be more openly dependent on the lay power than at any time since the days of St. Gregory VII. One of the chief elements in this scheme had Clement himself for its unwitting first author.

In the critical days of 1379, when there were still hopes of driving Urban VI from Rome, Clement, as a reward to Louis T of Anjou for his spontaneous offer of support, had carved out for him a kingdom in central Italy, that included almost the whole of the Papal State save Rome itself and the Patrimony, and to which he gave the name Adria. [763] This kingdom was to be held in fief of the Holy See, and was never to be held by the ruler of the other papal fief to the south, the kingdom of Naples. Only a fortnight after this rash offer the battle of Marino put an end for years to Clement's chances of effectively shaping Italian kingdoms. And now, in 1393, the heir of the "King of Adria" was actually King of Naples. But the French court, none the less, now revived the scheme.

It was proposed to Clement that he should confer Adria -- on the same conditions -- upon another French prince, a younger brother of the King of France, Louis of Orleans; this Louis was also the son-in-law of Galeazzo Visconti, the ruler of Milan. If Louis of Anjou maintained his hold on Naples, and the new scheme also went through, the French thus would dominate all Italy. To induce Clement to consent, the French pointed out how the task of maintaining order within the Papal State, and of keeping it independent of the neighbouring states, had been for centuries a burden far too heavy for the papacy to bear; and how this crushing burden permanently hampered the popes in their real work of promoting the interests of religion throughout the Catholic Church. All of which, however true, did not alter the fact that in an Italy so reorganised the papacy would, more than ever before, be the sport of the Catholic princes. Clement VII -- a much wiser man after fifteen years of responsibility -- fenced off the offer. For reply he submitted his own terms, and then the negotiations began to drag.

And while, in the last months of Clement's life, he had thus to fight his less than disinterested protectors, the University of Paris, persisting in its view that the division of obedience was a scandal to be ended at all costs, began to renew its agitation; and in the statements it now put out [764] the anxious Clement saw clearly, and was dismayed to see, the first signs of the university's unorthodox theories about the place of the pope in the Church, theories which it adopted in order to justify its determination to end the Schism even though, to do this, it had to bring to an end the careers of both the rivals, of the lawful and the unlawful pope alike. [765]

Clement VII's reign ended, then, just as a new movement was beginning which, without being in any way more favourable to his rival, threatened him even more seriously than did his rival; for its first principles were a denial of the fundamental tradition Prima sedes a nullo iudicetur. The only way out of the scandal, the university was now saying, was for both popes to resign, and whichever of them did not do so was to be judged by the very fact as obstinately schismatical and a heretic, and therefore no pope. To gather the opinion of the university world, a locked coffer was set in one of the churches of Paris; whoever among the graduates had a plan was invited to set it down in writing and place it in the chest. When the box was opened it was found that 10,000 graduates had submitted their views (January 1394). Fifty-four professors were set to read and classify the suggestions. For the most part, so it appeared, they came to this that there were only three ways to solve the problem -- the popes should both resign, or they should appoint a joint commission whose verdict they would accept as final, or they should summon a General Council and leave it to this to decide. Meanwhile there were great religious demonstrations in Paris, processions to ask the blessing of God on the movement for reunion, and in these the king and all the court and a small army of clerics took part. Clement VII was so far carried along by this new enthusiasm that processions were ordered at Avignon too, and he had a special mass composed for the peace of the Church.

But the pope did his best to check the movement of new ideas before it could spread further. He invited some of its chiefs- Peter d'Ailly very notably -- to Avignon to put their case, an invitation they were careful not to accept; and he sent a special envoy to Paris to work the court and university away from these dangerous schemes. The university indeed held firm, but Clement won over the court. When the university next appeared to plead before the king, the atmosphere had changed, and the university found itself forbidden for the future to busy itself with the dispute between the popes (August 10, 1394).

But, barely a month before this prohibition, the university had said its last word to Clement, a letter (July 17) that urged him to punish his legate at Paris, Peter de Luna, whose diplomacy, said the university, was wrecking the movement for reunion. The university also wrote to the cardinals, and the cardinals did not hide their sympathy with the doctors of Paris. Worst of all the cardinals began now to meet together, without the pope's leave, in order to discuss the new developments. No doubt Clement's mind went back sixteen years to the meetings at Anagni that had so speedily led to the conclave of Fondi. When the cardinals openly told him that the only thing to do was to adopt one of the schemes recommended at Paris, the pope fell into a kind of melancholy. Sometimes he spoke of resigning and then, as news reached him of the breach between the court and the university, he talked of a new expedition into Italy. The last weeks of his life were given up to this idea. But, on September 16, 1394, a fit of apoplexy carried him off.

iii. Benedict XIII's Quarrels with the French, 1394-1403

The interregnum at Avignon was extremely short. Ten days only after the death of Clement VII his twenty-one cardinals unanimously elected Peter de Luna to succeed him; he chose to be called Benedict XIII. With the election of this Spaniard the conduct of the Schism rises at once from the misery of petty expediencies in which it had for so long been caught. Peter de Luna had been a cardinal since 1375, and he was now an old man of sixty-six. He was universally esteemed as a scholarly and experienced jurist, and a practised diplomatist; he was learned, eloquent, pious; a man of principle, indeed, and soon to show himself the most obstinate of mankind -- and the most unscrupulously ingenious -- in defence of the principle which he considered to matter most of all, namely that the pope has no master in this world and is answerable to God alone for his rule of the Church. The election of Benedict XIII was a most definite turning point in the long involved story of the Schism; from now on there is added to the conflict between the rivals who claim to be pope, a second conflict between Benedict and the crown of France in which the principles at stake, the rights and the claims, are manifestly fundamental.

The action of the popes of the Avignon line, in the history of the Schism, as this is usually told, quite eclipses that of the Roman popes. It is no doubt inevitable that the towering ability of Benedict XIII plays all his rivals off the stage for years. It is also the fact that the records of the Avignon line are far more complete than those of the Roman popes. [766] But, quite apart from these two very real considerations, the dramatic struggle between Benedict XIII and the French is of the very highest importance because it is now that the theories, the methods, and the spirit are developed which will one day produce the Councils of Pisa and of Constance, the "conciliar" theory and the baleful myth of the "liberties" of the Gallican Church.

It is in Peter de Luna's relations with France -- with the court, the hierarchy and the university world -- that the chief interest lies of his long thirty years' career as Benedict XIII. For, very soon after his election a conflict began of practical policy, about the best way to end the Schism. It ended -- after nearly four years -- by the French "withdrawing" their "obedience" (July 5, 1398). This schism within a schism lasted for five years and two months -- until May 30, 1403; the French then "restored" their "obedience" to Benedict and they continued in it for another five years nearly -- until May 21, 1408; when they again withdrew it, absolutely this time, and for ever.

The occasion of the breach between this second pope of the Avignon line and its royal French protector, was the oath by which each cardinal, in the short conclave of 1394, had bound himself, should he be elected, to resign if the Roman pope agreed to resign simultaneously, and also to be guided in this by the advice of the majority of his cardinals. All Benedict XIII's troubles arose from this oath. He had been extremely unwilling to take it, as he had been unwilling to accept elections as pope -- and as he had been extremely unwilling, sixteen years earlier, to take part in the conclave of Fondi. Once elected he declined to be bound by the oath, while the cardinals, and the French generally, endeavoured to hold him to it. Peter de Luna, however, did not begin by any explicit renunciation of his promise, by any declaration that promises of this kind were unlawful in themselves, and therefore could not bind, such as Innocent VI had published after his election in 1352. But with a patient, persistent wiliness unmatched in history, he raised objection after objection; he contrived endless delays, and he devised all manner of distinctions; ever careful on occasion to make private protest, in legal form, that he would not necessarily consider himself bound by the public engagement he was now about to contract, he so extended, for the peace of his own conscience, the principle that promises made through fear are not binding, that in the end he wore out the patience of all concerned and all men's belief in his own truthfulness. [767] Benedict XIII has gone down to history as a prodigy of conscientious double-dealing and elaborate self- deception -- the inevitable penalty of such genius.

The contest began when the King of France, in May 1395, begged the Avignon pope to communicate the actual text of the oath he had sworn in the conclave. Benedict kept the royal ambassadors dancing attendance on him for 120 days, and even then, though he did not hand over the text, he contrived not to express any disagreement with the scheme for a double resignation which Charles VI was urging on him. The king next turned to look for allies among the princes of Christendom in his effort to heal the division. His diplomacy produced, in June 1397, a joint Anglo-French mission which visited both Benedict and Boniface IX. But it won no concessions from either.

Twelve months later Charles had induced the emperor, Wenzel, to plead with Benedict; and now, in May 1398, to the emperor's ambassadors, the Avignon pope spoke out his mind, denouncing the resignation scheme as sinful and utterly repudiating it. Whereupon the French court resolved to force the old man to consent to it.

This new determination to try what force could do against Aragonese obstinacy was not due merely to zeal for religion. For a whole generation now -- since 1368 -- the kings of France had enjoyed, from the different popes, a permission to levy taxes on Church property for the nation's ordinary needs. This permission Benedict XIII had renewed, at first for two years only, and then for one. Latterly he had refused any further renewal. The crown urgently needed the money; the pope would not grant it; and if the clergy still acknowledged him as pope they could not be persuaded to defy him and vote the money without his leave. And so the crown came round to a plan which certain pillars of the University of Paris had devised, that the nation should withdraw its obedience from Benedict, as a kind of threat that he had better look to his election promises and begin to fulfil them. The withdrawal was to be done with the semblance of legal form -- through a council of the clergy, a full debate and a general vote. This council met at Paris, May 22, 1398, and it remained in session until the beginning of August. In some ways it is the most pregnant event in all the religious history of the two hundred years that separate Philip the Fair from Henry VIII -- both for what was done, and the way it was done.

Forty-four archbishops and bishops took part in the council, with two delegates from the various cathedral chapters, two doctors from each university, and a great number of abbots -- some 300 voters in all. The first session was thrown open to the public, and the opening speeches were made before a huge audience of thousands. The presidency of the council was singular: [768] five royal princes, the brother, [769] uncles, [770] and first cousin of the king, [771] Charles VI, who was now once again out of his mind. The real guiding spirit in the affair was the royal chancellor, Arnauld de Corbie. [772]

It was explained to the council -- by the king's party -- that Benedict was a perjurer, for he had broken the oath sworn in the conclave; no one, therefore, need henceforth obey him. The Holy See was, in a kind of way, vacant and it was now the duty of the King of France, acting as its protector, to bring about Benedict's formal resignation. While the king could choose for himself how best to do this, he had nevertheless thought well to ask advice. Hence this council. The real source of Benedict's strength was financial. Let him once be deprived of taxes, and of the right to appoint to benefices, and he would presently be starved into surrender.

The policy suggested was subtle. There was no open denial that Benedict was pope; and there was, of course, an abundance of reverential language about his office and the rights of the Holy See. But the pope's acts were for the future to be silently ignored. More than one speaker of the king's party pointed enviously to England where, with such statutes as Provisors and Praemunire, things of this kind at any rate were now so much better ordered than in France. It was also urged upon the prelates and clergy that this was the golden moment to recover the ancient liberties of the Gallican Church, and to force through the much- needed reforms so long held up, it was suggested, by papal indifference.

Against the court prelates it was bluntly pointed out that what they proposed was in reality nothing less than an attack on the bases of the pope's position as pope. The corruption complained of in the papal administration would not come to an end through any mere change in the personnel who ran the machine. And moreover, it was asked, what authority had a merely local council, of one particular country, to sit in judgment on the head of the universal church, and declare him not to be the pope?

The debate went on for days, and then, on June 11, the voting began. The system adopted was highly ingenious. Each member of the council gave his opinion in writing, and he handed it privately to the little group of the royal princes and the chancellor, who thereupon proceeded to argue the opinion if it did not favour their design of immediate total withdrawal of obedience from Benedict. The device avoided all chance of the council as a whole knowing how the voting was going; it also revealed to the government -- and to the government alone -- the exact views of all these leading ecclesiastics; and it gave to the government the best opportunity conceivable of influencing the vote, and of changing it, in the very moment it was to be cast.

About the views of the University of Paris there was no secret whatever. On the day the voting in the council began it publicly declared for the policy that Benedict should be coerced by an immediate, total suspension of obedience.

Then for four weeks there was a curious silence; and when, gradually, the council began to show its anxiety, the government explained that the classification of all these votes was naturally a slow business. However, on July 28, with a public of something like 10,000 looking on, the chancellor announced the result. For the government's plan there were no fewer than 247 votes, for all other schemes 53; a royal decree would "implement" the council's advice. That decree was, of course, already prepared; it was, in fact, dated for the previous day, July 27, 1398. Its effect -- along with a complementary declaration from the prelates [773] -- was to organise the Church in France after a fashion hitherto unknown among Catholics, as an autonomous body independent of all papal control.

The king, advised by the council, orders by this decree that from now on none of his subjects are to render any obedience to Benedict XIII. Penalties are provided for any breach of the law. The pope's partisans are to be deprived of their benefices by the bishops, and the administration of such benefices is to pass to the king who will, of course, enjoy the profits while they remain vacant. Papal judges and commissaries engaged within the realm on suits against the king's subjects are immediately to terminate such proceedings under penalty of loss of goods and imprisonment. All bulls and letters of any kind from Benedict are to be surrendered to the king, and if they are bulls against this decree, those who have brought them into the kingdom will be imprisoned.

The prelates in the council decreed that, until the end of the schism, [774] elections of abbots in monasteries exempt from the jurisdiction of the bishops should henceforth be confirmed by the bishop of the diocese -- where, until now, it had been the pope who confirmed them. All promises of appointments made by Benedict were to be ignored. Marriage dispensations were to be granted by the bishops or the cardinals. Appeals that had once gone to the papal curia were now to be decided by the bishop of the diocese, the metropolitan of the province and, finally, by the annual provincial council. As for cases (whether of ecclesiastical penalties or of sins) where absolution was reserved to the pope, they were for the future to be sent to the penitentiaries of Avignon, if these had abandoned the pope; if they remained loyal to him the bishops were to absolve, under the condition that the penitent sought absolution later from the universally recognised pope, once such a pope was elected. First fruits, procurations, and all the taxes payable to the pope were abolished -- a reform intended by the council to be final and definitive. Any sentences Benedict might pass in reprisal were declared in advance null and void. Notaries were forbidden to style Benedict "pope" in the acts they drew up and finally, to quiet the anxieties of the scrupulous, the government declared that Catholics were bound in conscience to conform in these matters to what the king had decided.

Here, on the face of it, was a great victory for the government of France; and it was the activity of Catholics that was thus victorious over the papacy, the activity of Catholic bishops and clergy -- no less than of Catholic laymen -- against the man whom all of them believed to be the lawful pope. The events of 1398 are important, ultimately, not because they compromised the fortunes of Benedict XIII, but because they laid the axe to the root of the tree and compromised the traditional Catholic teaching about the nature of the pope's authority in the Church of Christ. The material object of all this hostility may indeed be no more than an anti-pope, but formaliter, so to speak, this hostility is Catholic action -- action of the Catholic state, of the hierarchy, of the studium -- upon the papacy, as will be the action of the Council of Pisa, and of the still greater Council of Constance. The schism is now, in 1398, twenty years old. Twenty years of disunion, of discontent and unrest, have produced this collaboration of university and clergy with the crown, and its dire fruit. For yet another twenty years Christendom will more and more feed upon that fruit, and strange maladies thence develop, in more than one of its organs, to trouble the general body for centuries.

Already the spirit is active in the University of Paris which, at Pisa, ten years from now, will sweep away the claims of Roman and Avignon pope alike, and elect a third claimant in their stead; already, in this very council of 1398, this very suggestion has been made. [775] We can note other things too; how few open defenders there are of the rights of the Holy See among the bishops; how eager the bishops are to strip the Holy See of its power to appoint to ecclesiastical offices, and to tax appointments and the property of the Church; how easily in fact, the government finds, within the hierarchy, quisling prelates ready to betray the Holy See. After a demonstration of this kind, and experience of a regime where such anarchical doctrines are, for years, given every freedom, and even built into a system, how long will it be before France is again normally Catholic in its relations with the papacy? We are assisting, in 1398, at the birth of the notion that there exists a Gallican church with privileges in its own right, sometime ago " usurped " by the papacy, and to recover which rights or liberties all good French clerics will -- in the best interests of religion -- always unite with the crown against the papacy. The proceedings of this council of Paris in 1398 are surely momentous in the general history of the Church.

There was to be, of course, a reaction in favour of Benedict, but before describing this it is important to notice how the French government in 1398 achieved its disconcerting success. For the decision was a carefully manipulated swindle, "a lie that has triumphed even down to our own times." [776] The slips on which these 300 or more members of the council recorded their votes or views were not destroyed at the end of the month of arrangement and classification. Still in the canvas bags where the chancellor had then stored them after the event, they remained forgotten and unexamined down to recent years. M. Noel Valois set himself to study them and his conclusions are startling. The government did indeed win a majority of the council to its plan, but a majority of about 180 to 120 rather than 247 to 53; and of the episcopate and the greater prelates a half, at least, voted against the government. "So slender was the majority of those in favour of the suspension of entire obedience that we may ask whether the result of the council would not have been entirely different, had it not been for the pressure that the government brought to bear from the very first day." [777]

With parties so nicely balanced, reaction was bound to develop soon.

On September 1, 1398, the French ambassadors arrived at Avignon with the official news of the royal decree. The immediate effect was a general flight to the king's side of all the Frenchmen in Benedict's service, led by eighteen of his cardinals. The townspeople, too, deserted the pope. Nothing was left him but five cardinals, a few personal friends and his troops, in the great fortress palace that Benedict XII had built sixty years before. To capture this, the eighteen cardinals now called in one of the local lords and his band of mercenaries, and a seven months' siege began. After four weeks of fruitless assaults, in which, more than once, storming parties were led by the military-minded cardinal, Jean de Neufchatel, the besiegers turned to the less costly tactic of starving out the garrison.

While the siege continued, French diplomacy was busy in the courts of Benedict's supporters. The French claimant to Naples -- Louis II -- was won over to desert him, and the kings of Navarre and Castile also. But Martin I of Aragon, Benedict's own sovereign, remained his friend; [778] and it was through Martin's good offices that, in the spring of 1399, the King of France came to the pope's aid. In return for a declaration by Benedict that he accepted the resignation scheme, and that he would discharge the troops of his garrison, the king undertook to protect the pope, and to compel the cardinals to raise the siege. It will be noted that no "restitution of obedience" was promised. The French merely pledged themselves that no harm should come to the pope or to his property (10 April, 1399); and the better to survey the activities of the pope (whom they did not trust in the least degree), as well as to ensure his protection, a commission of prelates and royal officials was now sent to Avignon. For the next four years Benedict was, to all intents and purposes, the French king's prisoner, and during all this time the Church in France was governed according to the decrees of 1398.

It was not, of course, a happy time, either for the churchmen or for the cause of religion. The new freedom of chapters to elect the various bishops and abbots was never a reality. The king, the great nobles, the womenfolk of the king and great nobles, all had their candidates, and ample means to influence the electors. The university world complained bitterly that far less attention was paid to clerical learning and talent than under the oppressive papal regime, and in 1400, as a protest against the systematic appointment of ignorant and illiterate clerics to high places, the University of Paris suspended all lectures and examinations. It was a more general cause of complaint among the clergy that the burthensome papal taxes abolished by the council of 1398, continued to be levied -- but now by the king, in order (so it was explained), to pay the immense expenses of the royal action in liberating the Church; also, these taxes were now collected by the royal officials, and much more efficiently than of old. "The old truth was being proved yet once again that no church frees itself from the pope without falling under the heavier yoke of lay control." [779]

But the harsh treatment of the man whom all France believed to be the pope, was alienating the common people; the exploitation of church property and patronage was alienating the clergy and the universities; in the king's council there was a serious personal conflict about the treatment of Benedict between the king's brother, Louis of Orleans and his uncle the Duke of Burgundy; Benedict himself remained resolute on the vital point, he would not consent that any other mind than the pope's should decide for the pope how he ought to act in the matter of ending the Schism. Discontent in France, then, was steadily growing, and the government already greatly embarrassed, when, on March 12, 1403, the old pope [780] broke the tension by escaping from his captivity. With seven attendants he got through a hole in the wall of his palace, and, in the night, made his way past sentinels and guards. By morning he was in safety, in the territory of the Count of Provence. [781]

And now the reaction in Benedict's favour was immediate. The leading personages of the tiny papal state came in to make their submission, and the eighteen cardinals sent a delegation begging to be received into the pope's favour. They came back on the pope's terms -- unconditional surrender indeed -- Benedict refusing to the last to pledge himself by oath even to show them ordinary good will, the cardinals kneeling before him and tearfully promising all manner of devotion for the rest of their lives (April 29). And just one month later, the negotiations for the restitution of obedience ended with Benedict's triumph over France too. An assembly of bishops at Paris (May 28), declared for the restitution, the king -- now for the moment lucid -- was eagerly of the same opinion. Benedict, without any new commitment -- except what might be inferred from promises made to the Duke of Orleans -- was, for the moment, victorious over all his foes. There was a great ceremony of thanksgiving at Notre Dame (May 30, 1403), at which Peter d'Ailly, now Bishop of Cambrai, preached and at the end of his sermon he read out the pledges Benedict had given to the trusting duke.

iv. The Roman Popes, 1389-1406

These first nine years of the reign of the second pope of the Avignon obedience (1394-1403) were taken up almost entirely with the fight to maintain his independence against the French crown and the University of Paris. Benedict XIII had been left little leisure so far in which to plan any attack on the position of his Roman adversary, Boniface IX. But the Roman, too, had had his difficulties during these years, difficulties often of a like nature. There was not, indeed, among the princes loyal to Rome any one power so strong and so well placed, should it turn to oppress Boniface, as the French monarchy and its great academic ally. But all the princes of Christendom realised the weakness of the papal position, and there was scarcely one that did not, in his turn, make use of it to wring concessions from the Roman pope too. Boniface IX was never really free to profit from the embarrassments of Benedict XIII. And within less than eighteen months of Benedict's temporary victory over the French in 1403, Boniface had died; and with the election of Innocent VII in his place, the whole relation of the rival popes takes on a new colour.

Throughout his reign of fifteen years (1389-1404), the double anxiety had never ceased to worry Boniface IX, where to find money and how to keep the different princes faithful to him. He had to suffer serious losses of territory in Italy, when Genoa went over to his adversary, and Sicily too. Then, in 1398, the emperor Wenzel -- whose support had brought to the Roman line a prestige that neutralised the French support of the Avignon obedience -- was won over by the French to declare himself neutral; and England, also influenced by France, began to show herself less partisan than before. From the danger of the empire's adherence to Benedict XIII the Roman pope was delivered by the revolutionary act of four of the prince electors who, in 1399, declared Wenzel deposed and elected in his place Rupert of Bavaria. But although Rupert declared for the Roman line, Boniface was for the moment too wary to recognise him as emperor-elect. It was doubtful whether the deposition of Wenzel was good in law, and Rupert was only acknowledged in the west of Germany. Moreover, warned by the fate of Benedict XIII, and by the beginnings of the like trouble among his own supporters, Boniface would not recognise Rupert unless he swore to leave entirely to the pope the business of bringing the schism to an end; and this pledge Rupert refused to give.

Meanwhile, there were the beginnings of civil war in Germany between the partisans of Wenzel and Rupert. In 1401 Florence called Rupert into Italy to help in the war against pro-French Milan. But the emperor-elect was badly defeated (October 21, 1401), and in April 1402, he returned to Germany with barely enough troops for an escort. He still, however, steadfastly refused the pope's terms, and when, after his defeat, Boniface had made them stiffer still, Rupert's refusal had stiffened too. The princes of Germany supported his refusal, and in the autumn of 1402 Rupert began to negotiate with France and with England for united action to force both Boniface and Benedict to resign. Boniface IX was finding that the new emperor was no more his subject than the old. Then, in August 1403, the pope recognised the king who was his one real supporter, Ladislas of Naples, as King of Hungary also, to the great offence of a rival claimant -- Sigismund -- who was the emperor Wenzel's brother. Whereupon Sigismund openly deserted the Roman cause, and Boniface, pushed by necessity, was driven to recognise Rupert as emperorelect without any of the special conditions upon which he had been insisting for the previous two years.

This was in October 1403. Boniface's reign had, to the very day, just a year to run. His hold on the states that acknowledged him as pope could hardly have been feebler, and had Benedict XIII now been free to intervene in Italy the political fortunes of the Roman pope might have been brought crashing to the ground. But Benedict was once more involved in the old conflict with the French crown and with the University of Paris. Mission after mission was arriving at Avignon to remind him of his promises; but all in vain. The wily old man eluded the most practised of the diplomatists, and showed himself in his speeches more pious than the most pious of the bishops who bade him think only of the cause of religion. He steadily refused to recognise any of the ecclesiastical appointments made during the five years of the withdrawal of obedience; and he sent out collectors to demand the arrears of moneys due to him for that period. As the clergy had already paid their dues, but to the crown, they now turned to the king for protection against the pope, and this was solemnly guaranteed to them by a royal edict of January 10, 1404. [782]

Six months after this, Benedict re-opened negotiations with Boniface, interrupted now for nearly seven years. His ambassadors arrived at Rome in late September 1404, and Boniface IX granted them audience. But there were stormy scenes, the pope calling Peter de Luna a liar and a dissembler, and the ambassadors retorting that Boniface was a simonist. The pope was already failing in health, and this interchange ended fatally. On October 1, 1404, two days after the interview, the pope collapsed and died.

Was Boniface IX indeed a simonist? For his latest biographer [783] the charge is proved beyond all doubt, and the blistering phrase " the crooked days of Boniface IX " [784] seems only too true a description. Like Urban VI -- the pope who made him a cardinal when scarcely out of his teens -- Boniface was a Neapolitan. He was a practical man, ignorant indeed in matters of professional clerical learning, but a realist, able to manage men, and to get things done, "the man the crisis called for," and he was young, little more than thirty when elected pope. Throughout the reign which followed -- fifteen years -- the pope was far too busy with the urgent political problem before him to have any leisure for religious affairs properly so called. His own life was, seemingly, correct; the immense sums he raised were not spent on pleasures, nor on his own personal artistic fancies. But the young pope's superficial mind misread the nature of the evil he confronted. That his view of the division of Christendom ruled out all possibility of seriously negotiating with Avignon, cannot indeed be held against him. But the pope stands charged with the dreadful error of treating this religious tragedy as a matter of politics, and in his anxiety to raise the money he needed, Boniface sank to the lowest levels. [785] The papal collation of benefices now became a matter of simple marketing. Provisions and expectatives were given for cash down, and for prices which only the rich could afford, and without any guarantee that they would not be sold a second time to anyone who offered a higher price. Then, in 1402, Boniface annulled all grants made hitherto, unless the holders had them renewed within twelve months. Also the tax of annates was extended to all benefices worth more than twenty-four gold florins annual revenue. But the most mischievous wickedness of all was in the matter of indulgences. The pope multiplied, beyond all wisdom, the grants of indulgences ad instar -- indulgences, that is to say, whereby, in general terms, there was granted such a remission as might have been gained by doing other (and immensely more laborious) penances and good works, pilgrimage to the Holy Land for example or enlisting as a soldier in the crusades. For the jubilee of 1390, Boniface called in the bankers to organise the collection and despatch of the moneys to Rome. This jubilee was liberally extended to other cities outside Rome, but to gain it an offering of money was one condition needed, and the amount was fixed at the cost of a journey to Rome from the place where the indulgence was gained, plus the amount that would have been offered by the pilgrim at the different Roman shrines. Of the total taken, a half was to go to the banker as commission. "It seemed as though one could get the indulgence for cash down. It even happened that confessors gave absolution in exchange for money, without exacting any true repentance or reparation of the injustices done to others. Boniface, more concerned to demand that the preachers of the indulgence should send in accounts that were in good order than that they should explain the doctrine of indulgences correctly, assuredly bears the responsibility of the deformation of religious sense among the masses which was to result from such imprudences and from abuses on such a scale." [786] In Germany especially there was great indignation, strong, violent and organised opposition indeed; and the German clergy made the reformation of this system a main point in the programme which they presented to the Council of Constance and Martin V a few years later. [787]

Sixteen days after the death of Boniface IX, the cardinals elected in his place the Bishop of Bologna, Cosmo Megliorati; he took the name of Innocent VII. As in 1389, all the electors had sworn that, if elected, they would do their utmost to bring the division to an end, even resigning the Holy See if necessary, and that immediately after the election they would call a General Council. This last pledge Innocent was prompt to fulfil and the council was summoned for 1 November, 1405. [788]

The envoys Benedict XIII had sent to Boniface returned to their master -- now at Genoa -- with a very strange tale (April 11, 1405). The Romans, they said, had looked on them as the murderers of Boniface IX; they had been imprisoned in Sant' Angelo, and had only been freed on payment of an enormous bribe. They had besought the Roman cardinals not to elect any new pope in a hurry, but to take this opportunity to consult Benedict XIII and so end the schism by an agreed election. The Romans had, however, rejected this offer.

But about the same time that this account of the conclave reached the French court from Benedict, there came in another, very different, version sent by Innocent VII. According to this, the Roman cardinals, before the conclave opened, had offered to delay it until Benedict XIII had been told of their offer not to proceed to an election by themselves if the Avignon pope would now abdicate. To this the Avignon envoys had replied that Benedict would certainly never resign, and also that the resignation scheme was contrary to all law and right.

This revelation, that only Benedict's now notorious determination to cling to his position had prevented the best chance of a settlement that had appeared in nearly thirty years, infuriated the influential parties in France with whom, for so long, he had been at war. A letter to Innocent from one of the royal princes brought a reply that strengthened belief in the Roman pope's first letter, and then, in September 1405, the University of Paris opened direct negotiations with the Roman pope.

The result was to confirm the French suspicion of Benedict's good faith, and also to instil in the Roman pope unshakable mistrust of his rival. Benedict had, for some time now, really been planning a new assault on Italy. Barely six weeks after the election of Innocent VII, he had left France, and before Easter 1405, he was established at Genoa. His diplomacy was busy in Florence too, and at Lucca, and it seemed for the moment as though his loss of position in France would be balanced by gains in Italy. Pisa promised him recognition and Florence agreed to remain neutral. And all this time Benedict never ceased his demands for money, especially from the clergy of France and Spain. Even religious orders always exempted hitherto from such taxation were now subjected to it. Finally, from Castile, there came in the spring of 1406 a new plan to end the schism; but a plan which must entail the disappearance of Benedict. To work against the Castilian ambassadors he sent a special legate to the French court. All unknowingly he thereby set in motion a new anti-de-Luna movement that produced a new council of Paris, and a new withdrawal from his obedience -- a withdrawal that was, this time, to be permanent, and to meet which there would be a corresponding withdrawal of the cardinals of the Roman pope.

When Benedict's legate, the Cardinal de Challant, appeared in Paris at Easter 1406, he was rudely told, "All that interests your master is money"; and when the university was admitted to state its case its orator, Jean Petit, immediately struck a note that was to be heard in all the debates of the next ten years. Pope Benedict, he said, has broken his sworn promises, and thereby he has lost all claim on men's obedience. In the great debate before the court called the Parlement de Paris (June 7 and 8, 1406), this was urged more passionately still, and the plight of the French church, bled white by Benedict, was set forth in detail; prelates pawning church property to pay the fees due to the curia on their nomination, the pope keeping benefices vacant in order to make their revenues his own, the high cost of absolution from censures to the unfortunate clerics too poor to pay the papal taxes. In the three years since France came back to Benedict's obedience he had gathered, it was said, no less than 1,200,000 francs from her clergy. The crown decided that a new council should meet at Paris to decide whether to continue in obedience to Benedict.

This council met in November 1406, and its debates went on until the first weeks of the new year. It was not so much the creature of the crown as the council of 1398 had been; the dominating influence now was the University of Paris, to whose initiative the whole of this new movement against Benedict XIII was due. Each side selected a panel of speakers to thrash out the different points in dispute, and the anti-de-Luna party made no endeavour to hide their feelings. " For the sake of the ship," said Jean Petit, [789] "let us throw both these quarrelsome, incompetent captains into the sea." Another doctor, Pierre Plaoul, set out the theory of the pope as the servant of the Church and as enjoying, thereby, an inferior kind of power to that possessed by kings. [790] Benedict's supporters asked how, since not even Christendom itself had any authority to judge the pope, this council could so presume? No action on its part could possibly deprive him of "la puissance dez cles". And, in lighter vein, the Archbishop of Tours, arguing that to attack Benedict was not a practical policy, reminded the council that he came from a country world-famous for its mules.

The long debates ended in a compromise. Benedict XIII was to be obeyed as the chief in spiritual matters, but his appointments to benefices were to be ignored and also his taxation of church property. It was these last two points, indeed, which now, as through all the next forty years, chiefly occupied the speakers of the anti-papal party; and when the question was raised how the pope could be brought to accept these restrictions, nine-tenths of the council voted that the king ought to compel his acceptance. Whereupon (January 3, 1407), the clergy petitioned Charles VI to make perpetual the edict of September 11, 1406, that had abolished first fruits, servitia, and procurations, and also to abolish the papal tithes and papal collations to benefices in France; and this the king consented to do, in a new decree of February 18, 1407. But this new decree was, almost immediately, suspended. Since the council of Paris began a new pope had been elected at Rome, and there seemed every hope that the schism was now really to be brought to an end.

The very short, and very stormy, reign of Innocent VII had, in fact, ended just ten days before the council opened in Paris. The fourteen Roman cardinals had, thereupon, bound themselves by a pact more stringent than any yet devised; and after a seven-days' conclave they had chosen, unanimously, the Venetian cardinal, Angelo Corrario. [791] This new pope Gregory XII -- was an old man of seventy, known for his austere life, and chosen for one reason only, that he seemed to live for nothing else but to work to heal the division. All the circumstances of his election seemed, indeed, to make him "less a pope than a proctor charged to abdicate the papacy in the interests of unity". Gregory XII was, before he finished, to prove the greatest disappointment of all, but the first seven months of his reign seemed the beginning of a new age, and it was in the first flood of these hopes that the King of France held up the decrees that would otherwise have engaged all the ecclesiastical energies of his people in a new war with Benedict XIII. They would now be better employed in negotiations with this unexpectedly helpful pope newly elected at Rome.

The cause of all these hopes was the pact sworn to by Gregory XII before his election, and sworn to again immediately afterwards, and the care which the pope took to give the pact all possible publicity. The pope, in fact, had bound himself to abdicate if Benedict XIII should do the same or should chance to die -- provided that the cardinals of both obediences would agree to join for the election of the new pope; also he had promised that within a month of his election he would notify Benedict and his cardinals, the various Christian princes, and the bishops everywhere of this undertaking; also that he would send ambassadors, within three months, to arrange with Benedict a suitable meeting place for a personal interview; finally, Gregory XII promised not to create any new cardinals while these negotiations were in progress, unless to equalise his college with that of Benedict. [792] From this pact the new pope swore, moreover, that he would not dispense or absolve himself.

v. Benedict XIII and Gregory XII, 1406-1409

Gregory XII carried out to the letter all that he had promised. His envoys reached Paris in the last days of the council, and on January 21, 1407, a solemn service of thanksgiving took place at Notre Dame for the appearance in the church of such an apostolic spirit. Throughout France and Italy the rejoicing was universal.

Benedict's answer was in much the same tone as the Roman letter, but those experienced in his ways -- the French bishops, for example -- did not fail to detect that his ingenuity had once more devised avenues of escape. And the King of France, on the very day that he suspended the decrees against Benedict, decided to send an embassy both to the Avignon and the Roman courts. About the same time that this embassy was commissioned, Gregory XII also despatched an embassy to his rival, and it was this embassy that reached Benedict first, who was now in residence at Marseilles. The chief business of the mission from Gregory XII was to arrange where the contending principals should meet, and the audience was as stormy as most audiences were in which any of these popes met the envoys of their rivals. But after nearly three weeks an accord was reached, the so-called Treaty of Marseilles (April 20, 1407), and it was agreed that Gregory and Benedict should meet at Savona by the feast of All Saints next following at the latest (November 1).

The embassy from the King of France, a much more elaborate affair, took weeks to gather and to make its way to Marseilles. Long before it could arrive, the Italian embassy had finished its business, and meeting the Frenchmen was able to report what it had achieved. It is of interest that the Italians strongly advised the Frenchmen to handle Benedict gently if they wished for concessions. Finally, on May 10, Benedict received the French king's envoys, and in a most eloquent speech he accepted their point of view wholeheartedly. But when, the next day, the ambassadors begged him to publish his concessions in a bull, all the old trouble began anew. For a week the two parties wrestled, but without any result. Benedict refused absolutely to declare publicly that he, too, was willing to resign if Gregory would resign. We know, now, that he was moreover, at this very time, preparing an elaborate sentence of excommunication for all who had urged this resignation scheme; and the ambassadors knew, then, that, in order to resist any repetition of the siege of 1398, he was gathering men and arms.

So the French embassy, leaving two of its members at Marseilles to keep watch on Benedict, now made its way to Rome. But by the time Rome was reached, July 18, 1407, a great change had come over Gregory XII. His family had worked him round to cling to the papacy -- as the family of Gregory XI had once worked round that pope to cling to Avignon; they had also infected the old man with the idea that Benedict planned to kidnap him when the two met; and, moreover, the Roman pope's chief political supporter, Ladislas, King of Naples, was strongly opposed to the plan of any meeting between the popes. From now on Gregory's court is the scene of intrigues as complicated and as obscure as any of Peter de Luna's feats; one series of these, it seems, was a hidden understanding with Ladislas, in virtue of which the king attacked Rome, and so provided Gregory with the best of reasons for not leaving the Papal State.

Against this new mentality in the old pope, not all the efforts of the French could prevail. When they offered oaths as security, and armies, and hostages, he only reminded them how they had treated Benedict whom they believed to be the lawful pope. Could he, Gregory, really expect to be treated better?

After nearly three weeks of sterile argument the French at last left Rome (August 4, 1407), certain that Gregory would now prove a second Peter de Luna, but certain of this also, that he had lost the confidence of his own cardinals. For the Roman cardinals had privately assured the ambassadors that whatever Gregory did, they at least would go to Savona, and also that should Gregory die they would not give him a successor.

The news of the change in Gregory was, of course, highly welcome to Benedict. Assured in his mind that the Italian would never come to a meeting, Benedict now spoke about the plan with enthusiasm, and setting out with a great escort he was at Savona long before the appointed day. For the next seven months these two ancient men worked to outwit each other with the infinite pertinacity of the senile; with embassies passing constantly between the two; arrangements half-made, suggestions and new suggestions, discussed, accepted, and then questioned; with suggestions first to change the place of the meeting, and next about the conditions; until finally they wore out the patience of all but their own personal attendants. How could they meet, said the wits: the one was a land animal that dared not trust the water, and the other a sea monster that could not live on land. At one moment less than a day's journey separated the two, Gregory at Lucca and Benedict at Porto Venere.

Then, on April 25, 1408, the King of Naples took Rome, without a blow struck in its defence. Gregory's joy -- and the joy of his family -- was undisguised. Ladislas demanded that whenever Gregory and Benedict met, he must be present. All hope of free action by the two was now at an end. The plan to end the schism by a double resignation died a natural death, and at the Roman court it was forbidden henceforth to preach sermons reminding Gregory of his famous oath. The pope also considered himself freed from his pledge not to create new cardinals, and his unusual preparations for the consistory fired the long smouldering discontent of the Sacred College. On May 4, in a palace packed with soldiery, [793] Gregory -- first forbidding any comment or discussion -- told the cardinals that he proposed to add four to their number. They protested energetically, but the pope silenced them, and sternly forbade them to leave the city, or to meet, together without the pope, or to negotiate with either Benedict's ambassadors or those of the King of France The mild old man had suddenly shown himself terribile. Was he to be another Urban VI? Gregory XII already knew enough about the cardinals' opinion of his change of policy to fear that a repetition of the acts of 1378 was, indeed, in preparation. One week later the consistory was held and the names of the four new cardinals were announced; two of them were nephews of Gregory, Gabriele Condulmaro (the future pope Eugene IV), and Angelo Corrario, Gregory's chief adviser since his election and commonly held to be the chief cause of his apostasy from his election promises.

That same night one of the cardinals fled to Pisa in disguise, and the next day six of the rest followed him [794] (May 12, 1408). From Pisa the seven cardinals issued manifestos protesting against Gregory's restriction of their liberty, and appealing from the vicar of Christ to Christ Himself. They spoke of the dungeons Gregory had made ready for them, and declared that their conclave oath bound them to seek out the cardinals of Benedict XIII and to make common cause with these to bring the schism to an end. Finally, they appealed to all the Christian princes to support their efforts. They also sent an urgent invitation to Benedict to fulfil his promise and come as near to them as Leghorn.

The Florentines, however, refused Benedict a safe conduct, and he sent to Leghorn four cardinals in his place. The Roman cardinals at Pisa delegated as many again, and the eight soon reached agreement on the principle that a joint council of both "obediences" should be summoned, at which both popes should simultaneously abdicate and a new pope be elected, whom the whole Church would then know to be the true successor of St. Peter. But Benedict's cardinals first explained the pact to their pope as a plan for a joint council where he would preside; and it was in this way that they won from him a kind of general approval of all they were doing to promote the union. He was eventually to be undeceived; but his treacherous legates were, by that time, free from any anxiety which the thought of his anger might bring. For, on June 5, they learned that a great ecclesiastical revolution had, a fortnight earlier, wrested France once more from its obedience to Benedict. The long malaise in the Aragonese pope's relations with Charles VI had ended in a most violent rupture, and in the same weeks when Gregory XII's feeble mismanagement was renewing the disaster of 1378, Benedict XIII was losing for ever the sole source of what real importance he had ever possessed. The French cardinals, now that their king was no longer behind Benedict, could desert him without fear of the future.

Benedict's new misfortune had begun when, in the previous November (1407), the Duke of Orleans, his one really loyal supporter among the French princes, was murdered. [795] On the 12 January following, Charles VI came to a decision -- unless by the feast of the Ascension next (May 24, 1408) unity of government in the Church had been restored, France would finally withdraw its obedience from the Avignon pope. Benedict was not, of course, to be moved by such threats. He received this declaration on April 18, and immediately sent a warning to the king that, unless he revoked the ultimatum, the bull which he now sent under cover would be published. This bull was a sentence, drawn up in May 1407, excommunicating all who suspended their obedience to the pope, or who appealed from him to a future council. The reaction of the French to this was violent in the extreme. [796] The decrees of February 1407, abolishing all payments to the pope of first fruits and other taxes -- the decrees hitherto suspended -- were now published; Benedict's leading supporters were arrested, and an order was sent to seize the pope himself. At Paris, all the scenes that had marked the struggle between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII were renewed. There was a great public demonstration, [797] where the king and the royal princes were present, with many bishops, the chief figures of the university, the lawyers of the parlement, and the chancellor of the kingdom. Speeches explained once more the king's duty as champion of religion against the schismatical and heretical pope, a perjurer and a persecutor of the Church; and then the bulls were brought out to be ceremonially ripped in pieces by all the notables, king, bishops, state officers and the dignitaries of the university, all lending a hand. On May 25 appeared the royal decree declaring that France, henceforward, was neutral as between Benedict XIII and Gregory XII, and imposing obedience to this policy on all the king's subjects.

It was on June 5 that news of this change in their pope's fortunes reached Benedict's cardinals at Leghorn. He had taken the precaution of sending with them some of his personal friends [798] to keep watch on their activities, and it was from these -- who remained faithful to him -- that on June 11, at Genoa, he learnt of his own danger. Very speedily he decided to leave for Perpignan, a town then within the frontiers of his native land. But on June 15, immediately before he sailed, Benedict issued a summons calling a General Council to meet at Perpignan on November 1, 1408.

Both popes had now suffered the fate of Urban VI in 1378 -- each was deserted by almost all his cardinals. But the deserters had combined and on June 29, 1408, the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, the fourteen united [799] cardinals published the agreement to which they had sworn, and appealed to the whole body of the faithful to support them. Each college -- it had been agreed -- would invite the prelates of its own pope's obedience to a council and the two councils would open simultaneously, if possible in the same city. Each college would do all in its power to induce the pope it acknowledged to be present in person at the council and to induce him to offer it his resignation. If the pope refused to abdicate, the council would depose him. Once Benedict and Gregory were out of the way -- whether by abdication or by such deposition -- the two colleges would unite and elect a pope and the councils would become one.

The pact was announced to each of the popes by the cardinals of his own group, to the King of France also and to the University of Paris; and Gregory XII's cardinals now instructed all those who had so far acknowledged him to withdraw their obedience.

The history of the next nine months (June 29, 1408-March 25, 1409) is unusually complicated, for there are now three centres from which instructions and commands go out to the Church. Thus, three days after this declaration by the independent cardinals, Gregory XII convoked a General Council, to meet at Pentecost 1409, in some city of north-eastern Italy, to be named later. Then, leaving Lucca, he made his way by Siena to Rimini, where Carlo Malatesta, one of the best captains of the day, and an admirable Christian, offered him protection. And the cardinals on July 14, twelve days after Gregory's summons, announced that the joint council they had in mind would meet at Pisa, on March 25, 1409.

For the next three months it is in France that the most important events are happening, at the national council summoned by the king to meet in Paris in August. This council was called to organise support for the king's policy of neutrality, to punish those who supported Benedict XIII, to provide for the religious government of France until the schism was ended, and to arrange for the representation of France at the coming Council of Pisa. The council was not very well attended: there were, for example, never more than thirty-five bishops present out of the total of eighty- five. But there was, this time, no opposition to what the crown and the university proposed. The messengers who had brought in Benedict's letters, and the threat of excommunication, were pilloried with the maximum of Gallic contempt; [800] and in official sermons or harangues, made to the populace in front of Notre Dame, the pope himself was most grossly reviled. [801] He was declared to be a heretic, and so also were his leading French supporters. As in 1398 the supreme religious authority in France was to be, in each province, the annual provincial council. It is noteworthy that, for all the bitterness against this particular pope, and the drastic act of rebellion against his rule, there is nowhere any movement to destroy the papacy, neither to abolish the office, nor to organise religious life as though it would never reappear. The whole system now set up does indeed "smack of the provisional"; [802] and there is no attempt to set up for religious affairs any single authority for the whole nation. The several ecclesiastical provinces retain their equal status, and their independence of one another; they are not formed into a new body under some single authority (ecclesiastical or lay), some new "Church of France as by law established." It was also by provinces that this Council of Paris voted; and the council decided that by provinces the Church in France should be represented at Pisa, twelve delegates to be sent from each province in addition to the bishops and other prelates who would, of right, be convoked individually. Also the council, before it separated, on November 6, chose these 130 delegates; and the king issued a decree commanding all those summoned to Pisa not to fail to attend

Meanwhile, Benedict XIII had reached Perpignan in safety, with the three cardinals who remained true to him. On September 22, 1408, he created five new cardinals, and on October 22 he at last received the letters from his cardinals at Leghorn explaining what they had done, and inviting him to ratify it by coming to the Council of Pisa or by sending representatives. He sent, on November 7, the reply which they doubtless expected, denying them any power to call a General Council -- that is the prerogative of the pope alone -- and commanding them to appear at the council which he had summoned and which was now about to begin. Benedict opened his council in person just a fortnight later. [803] He sang the inaugural high mass, presided at all the sessions -- stormy sessions many of them -- and with wonderful vigour, now an old man turned eighty, he argued and fenced, publicly and privately, with men as stubbornly skilful as himself -- for the vast majority of the fathers were of his own race. There was a small handful of prelates from Lorraine, Provence, and Savoy, but scarcely anyone from France, where Charles VI had closed the frontier. The mass of the council were Spaniards, in all something like 300 clerics of various ranks, [804] to be argued with or persuaded.

The pope found them unexpectedly independent. They acknowledged him, fully, to be the lawful pope; but they were most critical of his policy and, anxious above all else that the schism should be ended, they urged Benedict not to ignore the council that was to meet at Pisa; he should send a delegation at any rate, and give it the widest powers, powers even to offer the council his abdication; at least -- so the Spanish council thought -- Benedict might pledge himself to abdicate if at Pisa they deposed his rival. On every side Peter de Luna was receiving this same advice, even here "at the uttermost bounds of the earth." But he was still Peter de Luna, and he held stubbornly to his plan never to surrender his right to make decisions, never to commit himself, and never to give any answer that he could not later distinguish and sub-distinguish and thereby most veraciously evade. As the sterile weeks went by, the council grew weary, bishops, abbots, and delegates began to steal away to their homes, and by the end of February (1409) there was not a handful in attendance. It was this remnant who tendered to Benedict the council's official advice: to be represented at Pisa, to make a definite pledge that he would abdicate, and to forbid his cardinals to elect a successor to himself should he chance to die. Benedict, of course, accepted in principle; and then adjourned the council for seven weeks, until March 26

Long before that day came -- it was the day following the triumphant, splendid opening of the council at Pisa -- the cause of Gregory XII had shrunk to far less even than that of Benedict.

From Rimini, Malatesta had worked earnestly for an understanding with the cardinals at Pisa, but Gregory was now as stubborn as Benedict -- he, too, was a very old man, now seventy-three. Henry IV of England added his plea, but without any effect. Then, on December 24, 1408, England, too, deserted the Roman pope. Two days later Wenzel -- who had already gone over to the cardinals as King of Bohemia -- now gave them his support as emperor, while his rival Rupert put his miserable remnant of prestige at the service of Gregory. In the first days of the new year, 1409, Gregory excommunicated his rebellious cardinals, depriving them of all their dignities, their cardinalitial rank and rights. Then, January 26, Florence deserted him. The Roman pope had now none to acknowledge him but Malatesta, Venice and Ladislas of Naples. The vast bulk of the princes and bishops were wholeheartedly neutral, pinning all their hopes on the united cardinals and the council which they had summoned.

THE CHURCH UNDER THE COUNCILS, 1409-1418

i. Pisa, 1409

The Council of Pisa opened on the day appointed, March 25, 1409. If judged by the number who came to it, and by the variety of countries from which they came, the council was a huge success, the most splendid gathering certainly that Europe had seen for two hundred years. All its twenty-three sessions were held in the nave of the cathedral, the last of them on August 7 of this same year. It seems not to have been easy for contemporaries to say exactly how many ecclesiastics took part in it. The numbers varied, of course, from one session to another, and seemingly they were at the maximum in the important sessions in which Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were judged and deposed -- when something more than 500 fathers attended. These would include the twenty-two cardinals and eighty-four bishops who came (102 other bishops were present by proxies), the eightyseven abbots (200 more were represented by proxies), the forty-one priors, the four generals of the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites and Augustinians, the three representatives of the military orders (the Hospitallers, the Holy Sepulchre and the Teutonic Knights), the hundred deputies from cathedral chapters, the deputies from thirteen universities, and the 300 or so doctors of theology and law -- these last a new and significant element in a General Council's composition, for they were given a voice in its judgments. Moreover, seventeen foreign princes also sent ambassadors -- the kings of France, England, Bohemia, Poland, Portugal, Sicily and Cyprus; the dukes of Burgundy, Brabant, Holland, Lorraine and Austria; the prince- bishops of Liege, Cologne and Mainz; the rulers of Savoy, Thuringia and Brandenburg: the whole body of Christian princes in fact, save those of Scandinavia and Scotland, of Spain and of Naples.

The council was a marvellously unanimous body. There was little or no discussion in its main sessions. All were agreed on the business that had brought them together, and the council had little to do beyond giving a solemn assent to the decisions as the cardinals and its own officials had shaped them. If any nation was predominant it was the Italian; fifteen of the twenty-two cardinals present were Italian, and so were ten of the fourteen chief officials, though the presidency was given to the French, and first of all to the sole survivor among the cardinals of the college of Gregory XI, the last pope before the schism, sole surviving cardinal, too, of those who had elected Urban VI in April 1378 and then, five months later, elected Clement VII. This was Guy de Malesset.

The key-note speech of the council was made by the Archbishop of Milan -- Peter Philarghi, an ex-cardinal of Gregory XII's obedience -- who on March 26 excoriated Gregory and Benedict alike, for their crimes and their treason to the cause of religion. Meanwhile, before proceeding to any juridical consideration of the position of these rivals, the council solemnly summoned both to appear before it -- a ceremony five times repeated in the first month of its sittings.

While the fathers were awaiting the expiration of the time allowed for the popes' appearance, they had to meet the practical problems set by two embassies that now arrived, the one from the Emperor Rupert [805] (denying them any right to be considered a General Council) and the other from Gregory XII, inviting them to abandon Pisa and join him at Rimini in a council where he would preside.

It was on April 15 that the imperial ambassadors were received in audience. They presented a lengthy memorandum in which Gregory XII's case against the cardinals who had left him was well set out, and the traditional doctrine that the General Council is subject to the pope in its convocation, its proceedings, and the ratification of its acts, was well argued against the new theories by which the united cardinals had publicly justified their action. Much of this criticism was unanswerable. Gregory had, at one time, undoubtedly been acknowledged as pope by these cardinals who had elected him. When, asked Rupert's envoys, had he ceased to be pope? The universal Church had not condemned him; he had not been convicted of heresy. To convoke a General Council is a prerogative that belongs to popes alone, and, in point of fact, Gregory XII -- they said -- had long ago actually convoked one, that would meet within a few weeks. Moreover, if the popes of the Roman line were really popes, the popes of the Avignon line were not -- if the cardinals of the Roman line were really cardinals, the Avignon cardinals with whom they were now joined were not cardinals at all. What then was their value as a basic element of this new union? The ambassadors therefore proposed a meeting between the council and Gregory XII. That pope would then carry out his election promises; and if he refused, Rupert would support the cardinals in their move to elect a new single pope -- a curiously illogical conclusion, surely, to the arguments made in his name !

The council heard the lengthy argument, and appointed a day for the answer. But the argument, and the way it was presented, seem thoroughly to have annoyed the council. The ambassadors realised how hopeless were their chances of persuading the fathers, and on April 21, without awaiting the formality of any official refutation, they left Pisa, secretly, leaving behind a public appeal [806] from this assembly to a true General Council when this should meet.

Gregory XII's own champion -- Carlo Malatesta -- had no better fortune with the council, although he managed to carry on the discussion in a friendly spirit. The cardinals appointed to meet him gave forty reasons why they could not abandon the work begun at Pisa; Gregory XII ought to abdicate and the best service that Malatesta could do the Church was to persuade -- or coerce -- him to come to Pisa and there lay down his authority. There was much discussion about the compensation to be given Gregory (and his relatives) if he consented; Malatesta seems to have raised a general laugh when he twitted the ambitious Philarghi with his known willingness to bear the terrible burden of the papacy; and the cardinals agreed to meet Gregory at Pistoia or at San Miniato for a conference. On April 26 Malatesta went back to Rimini and reported to Gregory that this was all he had been able to achieve. The old man wept, explained again his dilemma -- that if he went back to his first policy he would be deserting his present supporters, Rupert, for example, and Ladislas -- and finally he refused to meet the cardinals elsewhere than at Rimini.

These embassies had distracted the council for weeks from completing even the preliminaries of organising itself. But now, on May 4, the fathers declared the union of the cardinals lawful, and that this was a lawfully convoked council, a true General Council with sovereign rights to judge Gregory XII and Benedict XIII; and by appointing a commission of nineteen cardinals and prelates to examine witnesses, the council began what, in effect, was a trial of the popes. That Ladislas of Naples was now besieging Siena -- only sixty miles away -- evidently making for Pisa, and that Gregory was subsidising him, no doubt stiffened the council's resolution.

The lengthy enquiry about the rival popes at last came to an end; a sentence was prepared, and the council made it its own. On June 5, 1409, the council solemnly declared that both Angelo Corrario and Peter de Luna, once called Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, were notorious heretics, and perjurers, ipso facto excommunicated and incapable in law of ruling as popes; and as such it deposed and excommunicated them. [807] All nominations they might make were declared null; all Catholics were forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to obey them or give them any support; if necessary the secular authority would be used against them and their adherents; their censures against members of the council were declared null and void; and the cardinals they had created since the cardinals now legislating deserted them were no cardinals at all.

How contradictory this was of all tradition -- and of tradition explicitly set forth at the very threshold of that Canon Law which so many of the council professed (to say nothing of theology) -- let two texts from Gratian witness: (I) Cunctos iudicaturus, ipse a nemine est iudicandus, nisi deprehenditur a fide devius; [808] (2) Aliorum hominum causas Deus voluit per homines terminari, sedis autem Romanae praesulem, suo, sine quaestione, reservavit arbitrio. [809] By what steps had so many, and so famously learned, ecclesiastics come to such a revolutionary position as to vote the mischiefs of the Schism, the opportunity which it provided for strange novelties to develop in the doctrine de Romano pontifice, and indeed to be developed as part of any zealous Christian's duty to restore peace and harmony to the Church.

Since the time of John of Paris, whose De Potestate Regia has been described as part of the contest between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, [810] there had been in circulation two new ideas which appear in that work. First of all, there should function under the pope, an advisory council for the whole Church, of delegates elected by each ecclesiastical province; thus the faithful might have a share in the administration of the Church. Next there is a theory that justifies the deposition of a pope for heresy, on the ground that, besides the supreme papal power there is in the universal Church a latent supremacy exceeding the pope's power, which comes into play in just such an emergency. In that case orbis est maior urbe, says the Dominican. That a pope is answerable to the Church for the orthodoxy of his own belief was no new invention of John of Paris. The quotation from Gratian just given is one earlier evidence of the idea; and John the Teutonic adds two other causes for which popes may be judged, notorious sin and public scandal. This author says explicitly that in matters of faith the Council is superior to the Pope, and that it is for the Council to judge a disputed papal election. A third writer previous to the Schism, the Cardinal Bertrand, also considers that a bad pope -- although not a heretic -- is answerable to the General Council, and that should he refuse to summon it and take his trial, the right to convoke it passes to the cardinals.

These three writers are, all of them, eminently respectable Catholics -- which is more than can be said of the three most revolutionary theorists on the matter which the century produced, Marsiglio of Padua, Michael of Cesena and Ockham. Marsiglio's theory of the General Council has no roots at all in canonist tradition. His idea of the pope as the Church's delegate and servant (to which Pierre de Plaoul was to give dramatic utterance in a famous council at Paris [811] ) is of Marsiglio's own devising. Ockham is less simple -- more aware of the depths of the problem he is trying to solve. But for him the source of all authority is representation. Sovereignty lies in the Church as a whole, and the council's power comes from this alone that it is the Church's agent. Since the man in whom the divine authority to rule the Church as pope is invested, receives it through an agency that is human -- since only the authority is divine, and not either the mode of its devolution or the detail, why not then, if it should prove convenient, two popes at once, or three, or indeed one for each country?

It was not, however, to the theories of any of these ingenious revolutionaries that the canonists turned, once the election of Robert of Geneva had brought about the state of schism. They went where men ex professo so conservatively minded must go, to the canonists. Prior to the question whether Urban VI's election was valid was that other, who had the power to determine this question juridically? Was it within the competence of a General Council? This was the main pre-occupation of the earliest writers who studied the matter once the Schism was a fact, Conrad of Gelnhausen, for example and Henry of Langenstein. The conclusion to which they came was that it was for the General Council to decide, and this, not because the Council is the pope's superior, but because this is the exceptional case that falls within the Council's special competence.

It is only later on, with the second generation of the Schism, when the feeling grows that the case is desperate, that the desperate remedies appear in the shape of the new conciliar theories. It is now that we have Francis Zabarella, the leading canonist of his generation, declaring plainly that the pope is but the first servant of the Church, that his power derives from the Church and that the Church cannot so delegate its power to him that it retains none itself. Peter d'Ailly is no less extreme, and if Zabarella has read Ockham so too, it would seem, has the Bishop of Cambrai. The Church alone, he says, is infallible. That the General Council is infallible is no more than a pious belief, and that the pope is infallible is wholly erroneous. The papal authority is only a matter of expediency, a practical device to ensure good government. General Councils may judge the pope not only for heresy, and for obstinacy in sin, but also for opposition to the Council. Gerson's famous sermon at Constance [812] does not say more. The Pope, for Gerson, is merely the executive organ within the Church, the legislative power remains with the General Council.

Such is the intellectual and academic hinterland that has bred the men now to function, not only as reformers of Catholic life, but as the architects of reunion, the saviours of the papacy from schism. [813]

Nine days after this "crowning mercy" of the council, an embassy arrived from the King of Aragon, escorting the envoys whom Benedict XIII had sent, in fulfilment of his pledge to his own council at Perpignan three months earlier.

Out of respect for the king the council appointed a commission to meet Benedict's legates. The news of their arrival in Pisa had been the signal for a great riot, and noisy crowds, bent on mischief, surrounded the church where they were received by the commissioners. The negotiations never went beyond this first meeting. It was explained to Benedict's party that their safety could not be guaranteed, so violent was the anger of the people against Peter de Luna at this moment when the cardinals were about to enter the conclave and, by electing a pope, bring the schism to an end; and that night the ambassadors left by stealth, happy to escape with their lives. They had previously approached the cardinal legate of Bologna -- Baldassare Cossa -- for a safe conduct which would take them to Rimini and Gregory XII; but he only swore that he would burn alive any of them who came into his hands.

The embassy had indeed arrived at the least lucky moment of all, when the council's creative act was, men believed, about to give the Church the pope of unity. On June 13 a conciliar decree had ordered the cardinals to proceed to the election of a pope, authorising them to unite for this purpose, although they had been created cardinals by rival popes who mutually denied each other to be pope; for this once they would elect the man they chose by an authority deriving from the council. And the cardinals swore only to elect the candidate who gained two-thirds of the vote of each of the two groups. The conclave lasted eleven days, and on June 26 it was announced that Peter Philarghi, Archbishop of Milan, had been chosen unanimously -- Alexander V.

Alexander V -- pope by the authority of the Council of Pisa, was, like Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, a veteran of these ecclesiastical wars, and now seventy years of age at least. He was Greek by birth, a foundling whom the charity of an Italian Franciscan had rescued from the streets of Candia. He had later become a Franciscan, and a theologian of sufficient merit to fill chairs at Paris and at Oxford. One of the Dukes of Milan had found him a valuable counsellor; he had been given -- the see of Piacenza, thence promoted to Novara and, in 1402, to Milan. Innocent VII had created him cardinal and he had taken part in the conclave that elected Gregory XII. When Gregory's first fervour declined, Philarghi had been one of the most active, and effective, of his opponents. His nationality -- not Italian, nor French, nor Spanish -- made him a most "available" candidate in this first conclave for generations in which Italians and French men divided the votes. Guy de Malesset is credited with the proposal to elect him, and Baldassare Cossa -- late the strong man of the Roman obedience -- with the negotiations that won over to Philarghi the partisans of other candidates. It was Cossa who was to be all powerful in the short ten months' pontificate which is all that fate allowed Alexander V.

The first thought of the electors and supporters of Peter Philarghi was the personal profit they could draw from his elevation. Even before his coronation the hunt after spoils was in full cry; and sees, abbeys and benefices were showered on all lucky enough to be near the new pope. [814] And from Alexander V's willingness to make men happy the whole of his obedience gained. In the twenty-second session of the council -- July 27, 1409 -- a great comprehensive decree validated all manner of appointments and dispensations lately made without due reference to the papal authority, and the pope generously forgave all arrears due, on various accounts, to the papal treasury and lifted all sentences of excommunication and the like that lay upon defaulters. He also surrendered his claim to revenues that had accrued, from the estates of dead bishops and prelates, during the vacancy of the Holy See, and he asked the cardinals to follow his example and give up the half of what payments were due to them. Also, it was decreed that a new General Council should meet in April 1412, at a place to be determined later. Finally, in the closing session, August 7, 1409, the first preparations for this next council -- whose work was to be the reform of Christian life -- were outlined; local councils were to be summoned -- provincial and diocesan synods, chapters of the various monastic orders -- where matters calling for reform were to be discussed and schemes prepared. Then, with Alexander's blessing, and a last sermon, the fathers dispersed.

At Cividale, meanwhile, seventy miles to the north-east of Venice, the council summoned by Gregory XII was all this time still struggling to be born. It had been convoked months before, and the place announced on December 19, 1408. But when it opened, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, 1409 -- the day after Gregory had been sentenced at Pisa -- almost no one had arrived. On June 20 the letters of convocation were renewed, and a second session took place on July 22, Gregory XII presiding. A declaration was then made that this was a true General Council, and also that the popes Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII and Gregory XII were true popes: Clement VII, Benedict XIII and Alexander V being sacrilegious usurpers. The Emperor Rupert continued to support Gregory, who rewarded him by lavish powers to take over the revenues of all bishops and clerics in the empire who supported the anti-popes. Ladislas of Naples, too, remained faithful to Gregory XII: by now he was master of almost the whole of the Papal States. But Venice -- Gregory XII's own. native state -- upon whose territory the Council of Cividale was held, was wavering. The deed accomplished at Pisa, and the immense support given to it by all the princes, were not without effect upon this most politically-minded of all states. The Pisan council soon opened negotiations with the most serene republic, and on August 22, by sixty-nine votes to forty-eight, Venice went over to Alexander V. Gregory realised his danger, and announced his departure for Rome. But before he left he held a third session of his council (September 5). In this he announced that, as always, he was most anxious to bring the long division to an end. But now that Alexander V had appeared, what would his resignation and that of Benedict avail? However, if both Benedict and Alexander would resign, and their cardinals would promise to join with his to elect a single pope, Gregory XII would resign too. Also he would submit to the wishes of a new council if Benedict and Alexander would do likewise. Next day he left for Latigiana, and dropped down the Tagliamento to the coast where the galleys sent by Ladislas were waiting to take him to Pescara. Thence, with an escort provided by the king, the pope crossed the Abruzzi, and in November 1409 he took up his residence at Gaeta.

There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the splendid position of Alexander V, the elect of this great parliament of the Christian nations, with seventeen princes, bishops innumerable, and thirteen universities supporting him, and the miserable condition of Gregory XII, now reduced to a single faithful supporter, Carlo Malatesta, for Venice had now deserted Gregory for Alexander, and Ladislas of Naples was serving his cause only so long as this served himself. There could hardly have been any greater contrast, except perhaps between the Pisan papacy's prestige now and what it would be in a short two years. All this grandeur was, indeed, of its nature, transient. For it rested on nothing more enduring than the opinions of scholars and the good will of princes, the novel opinions of scholars about the right of the Church to control the papacy, to set up popes and to pluck them down in appropriate season. Here was the source of all its power, and no papacy thus conceived could long continue to hold men's allegiance.

Alexander V reigned for less than a year. [815] The reign began with a military expedition against Ladislas of Naples -- excommunicated and deposed by Alexander on November 1, 1409 -- in which the French claimant to Naples, Louis of Anjou, and the warlike cardinal-legate of Bologna, Baldassare Cossa, joined forces. On the first day of the new year they recovered Rome. But the pope to whom they restored the shrine of St. Peter did not live to take possession. Before his death he had, once more, solemnly excommunicated Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and by a bull in favour of the mendicant orders [816] -- Alexander was himself a Friar Minor -- he had managed to rouse the hostility of the University of Paris. This squabble came to nothing, for Alexander's successor rescinded the bull, but it is a squabble of more than passing interest, for the university, as by a habit now become second nature, while speaking of Alexander with the utmost respect, and in no way denying his authority, declared that the bull had been obtained from him by misrepresentations; it could therefore be disregarded, and from the pope misinformed the university would appeal to the pope truly informed; also the king's aid was sought, and Charles VI forbade the parochial clergy to allow any Franciscan or Augustinian to preach or administer the sacraments in the parish churches of France.

The successor of Alexander V was Baldassare Cossa, elected on May 17, 1410, after a short three days' conclave held in the castle of Bologna. He took the name of John XXIII. About the events of that conclave we have no certain knowledge. It is known that Malatesta moved to delay the election, in the hope of reconciling the cardinals with Gregory XII. Cossa replied that this would be tantamount to a surrender of the Pisan position; moreover, were there any delay in providing a successor to Alexander his curia would disperse.

Was the election of John XXIII vitiated by simony? The charge has been made, and very generally believed. Those who hold Gregory XII to have been the true pope in all these years can afford to be impartial about Cossa's character. He has indeed come down in the history books as a finished blackguard. But most of the atrocious stories are from the memories of men who had good cause to hate him, and when John XXIII came to take his trial at the next great council only a very small fraction of the charges made against him figured in the sentence of deposition. The first great patron of his ecclesiastical career had been Boniface IX -- a fellow Neapolitan -- who made him a cardinal in 1402 in reward for his practical service of finding badly-needed sums of money, and appointed him as legate to rule Bologna. For the next six years Cardinal Baldassare Cossa was the strong man on the Roman side, and after the surrender of Gregory XII to his relatives he was that pope's chief opponent, and luridly characterised as such in Gregory's later bulls.

Historians have noted how, as his reign went on, all John XXIII's wonted political sagacity seemed to desert him. The truth is that his position was, from the beginning, simply impossible; and, after a time, every month that went by showed this more clearly. At first, indeed, his cause seemed to prosper. Malatesta and Ladislas of Naples continued the war on behalf of Gregory XII, but John retained Rome and occupied the city in April 1411. Ladislas was next beaten in the field, re-excommunicated by John, and a crusade preached against him; and in June 1412, brought for the moment to his knees, he opened negotiations with John and on October 16 acknowledged him as pope. Whereupon Gregory XII -- who was still at Gaeta -- fled, lest Ladislas should arrest him and hand him over to John. So far all had gone well; and the election as King of the Romans on July 21, 1411, of the ex-emperor Wenzel's brother, Sigismund, had also been a gain to John, for Sigismund had been Gregory XII's enemy ever since that pope had supported Ladislas against him in Hungary. But this was the last of John's good fortune, and Sigismund -- for the moment his greatest support -- was soon to become the chief instrument in the pope's ruin.

This Pisan line of popes was bound, by its pledges to the council of 1409, to summon a new council which would promote reforms, not later than 1412. The place where it should meet had not been determined, and when John XXIII convoked it to come together in Rome there was great dissatisfaction in France and Germany. John however, more confident perhaps since the submission of Ladislas, held firm and in the last days of 1412 the council opened. It was poorly attended; indeed, the delegates from France and Germany did not arrive until all was over, for on March 11, 1413, John prorogued the council until the following December. The solitary permanent achievement of the council was its condemnation of John Wyclif, [817] but in John XXIII's personal history it figures as the beginning of the movement among his own supporters to make an end of him. .

To some of his own newly -- created cardinals [818] -- Peter d'Ailly notably -- the council was an opportunity to rebuke John to his face for his evil life, and the chief effect of the meetings between the pope and the various delegations was to spread far and wide the belief that John XXIII was indifferent to the cause of reform, and only interested in the papacy as a means of personal power.

The reformers were, of course, far from being a united party. As always, side by side with the idealists, there were others chiefly interested in changes for the personal profit they might be made to produce. From France and from Germany there came, very generally, loud demands yet once again for the abolition of papal taxes on Church property and revenues. But the University of Paris, fresh from its recent experience of how little bishops were disposed to encourage ecclesiastical learning by promoting learned men to benefices, was now strongly opposed to any movement that would limit the pope's power to collate universally to benefices. The Roman Curia had been much more friendly to learning than the local episcopate; and so now the university expressed itself as shocked and horrified at the anti-papal tendencies [819] -- although, in its turn, it was bitter with John XXIII when he chose Rome as the meeting place for the council.

Here, then, was a first serious division among the reformers. The action of the King of France produced a second. The only reform in which he was interested was that the pope should give him vast new rights of nomination to benefices of all kinds; and his ambassadors warned the pope that were this refused him the king might make common cause with the university, and champion its theory of the liberties of the Gallican Church -- or perhaps follow the example of the Kings of England and enact, for France also, an anti-papal statute of Provisors. [820]

These disturbing embassies from France and Germany had scarcely left Rome when Ladislas suddenly broke his treaty with the pope. In May 1413 his armies invaded the Marches, and on June 8 he took Rome -- which made no resistance whatever. John XXIII fled to Florence, and appealed urgently for aid to Sigismund, and the emperor in reply demanded that a new General Council be summoned. John sent two cardinals to him at Como -- the Savoyard diplomatist de Challant and the great canonist Francesco Zabarella. With the emperor they decided on the place and the time for the council, the German city of Constance for November 1, 1414. John XXIII was now at Bologna (November 8, 1413). The prospect of a General Council in a territory where he was not the civil ruler dismayed him. He had no choice, however, but to accept; the initiative had, by his own act, passed to Sigismund. Pope and emperor now came together (November 1413 to January 1414), and on December 9 John published a bull convoking the council for the time and at the place the emperor had chosen.

Ladislas, meanwhile, carried all before him in the Papal State, sacking Rome a second time in March 1414. Then he made for Bologna, and John; but the Florentines turned him back, and on August 6 death brought to an end this last meteoric fifteen months of his career. Their one lasting achievement had been to put John entirely into Sigismund's power. On October 1, 1414, the pope, reluctant to the end, and his plan to return to Rome thwarted by the cardinals, left Bologna for the council and on October 28 he made his solemn entry into Constance, very apprehensive about his own fate, and about that only.

ii. Constance, 1414-1418

The great Council of Constance is the closing, transformation scene of the medieval drama, if the Middle Ages be considered as a time when the mainspring of all public action was western Europe's acceptance of the spiritual supremacy of the pope. Not, indeed, that the moment has arrived when that supremacy is rejected by large parts of Christendom; nor that there are, as yet, signs not to be mistaken of that coming revolution. But after Constance things are never again the same; the ecclesiastical system -- the Catholic Church built on the divine right of the popes to rule it -- has suffered a shock, and there has been a settlement. The intangible has been struck and to the ordinary man it has seemed to stagger if not to crack up. The great scandal of the attack at Anagni has now, a hundred years later, been evidently renewed. Rough hands have again been laid on the ark; and again the assailants have survived their sacrilege -- the harm done is none the smaller for the fact that the assailants are in good faith, invincibly ignorant and unaware of the sacrilege.

The hundred years that lie between Constance and the first movements of the coming revolution, these last hundred years of a united Catholic Christendom, are a transitional period, in which a new order of things is struggling to be born, socially, politically, culturally, philosophically; they are a period in which it is not only the way in which popes exercise their power that is more and more generally questioned, but their very right to exercise it; the very existence, as well as the nature, of their spiritual authority over the Church of Christ. Ideas which are of their nature noxious, and even fatal, to the traditional theories and beliefs about the papacy, had already been given a kind of public recognition at Pisa. Now they were to be recognised again, by a much more imposing kind of council, a council itself recognised -- at one time or another -- by two of the three claimants to the papacy, and a council through whose activity came the pope whose legitimacy the whole Church was to acknowledge. No council ever sat so continuously for so long a time as did this Council of Constance; and no council ever changed so often its character -- if by character we mean its authority as canon law and theology define a council's authority.

In certain of its widely different phases this council enacted decrees that were as contradictory of fundamental Catholic practice as anything any heretic who appeared before it for judgment had ever held. The theologian who to-day studies the acts of the council has no difficulty in distinguishing between the value of the decisions to which it came in one or another of these phases. Nor had the popes of the united Christendom any difficulty at the time. But the new harmony of Christendom achieved in the council -- its great achievement indeed, because of which historians have been loth to speak harshly even of its really serious shortcomings -- was too frail a thing, on the morrow of the council, for all ambiguity to be stripped away from the council's proceedings, the ambiguity which made it possible for the untrained mind of the ordinary observer to see Constance as an authoritative consecration of the revolutionary doctrine of Pisa that the General Council is the supreme authority in the Church of Christ; the ambiguity which, from now on, could be exploited by chauvinistic theologians, everywhere, in the interests of their princes whenever popes were enmeshed in any crisis of political or religious revolt.

The history of the Council of Constance cannot ever be too closely studied. [821] If it was the occasion of the disappearance of all controversy which of the men who then claimed to be pope was really the pope, controversy that had troubled the Church for forty years, its proceedings were also the cause of a survival of ideas -- materially heretical -- that harassed religion and sorely debilitated it for another four centuries and more. For example, the grave anxiety -- henceforth chronic -- arising from the fact that influential Catholics clung to theories that would make the pope the Church's servant and not its ruler, and that such Catholics only awaited a new chance to put them again into action, was to be not only a good excuse for lazy popes and weak popes and bad popes to ignore the clamant need for a spiritual restoration - - only to be brought about with the aid of a General Council -- but, much more tragically, it became a valid reason whereby good popes too hesitated, really fearing lest with the abundance of tares they would root up the little wheat that remained. These theories did much to bring it about that the popes of the next four hundred years were no longer so much the master in their own household as their medieval predecessors had been -- unless a pope knew that his primatial authority over the whole Church was unquestioned, in practice and in theory, he could hardly proceed to the drastic house-cleaning that was called for. Saints perhaps would have gone ahead, and in the name of God dared all; but the average pope was no more than an average in his own kind, and spiritual mediocrity was unable to surmount the general habitual feebleness which consciousness of divided opinion on this vital matter did so much to produce.

The Council cf. Constance was in continuous session for three years and five months, [822] and perhaps the most convenient way to study briefly what it accomplished is to disregard the timetable of events, and to set out the problems which it faced and the solutions it found for them. These problems were, in the main, the three matters of the Schism, the new heresies in England and Bohemia, and the reform of Christian life; the second of these will be more conveniently dealt with in the next chapter, where Wyclif's heresy, the work of Wyclif's disciple, John Hus, and the significance of the Hussite wars will be treated together.

But before problems could even be stated, the council must organise its own procedure, and in these preliminary discussions, which went on all through December 1414 and the first weeks of the new year, traditional serious divisions showed immediately. The first to offer an agenda (December 7) were the Italians. To them this new council was but a continuation of the Council of Pisa. It should decree stricter censures than ever on Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and their supporters, and call on the Christian princes to put an end to the dissensions by force of arms; John XXIII's position being thus strengthened, the council could then be dissolved, to be followed by another General Council in ten, or perhaps twenty-five, years. The impudent naivety of this programme provoked a tough reply from the leader of the French delegation, Peter d'Ailly. His main thought, as always, was to heal the divisions of Christendom, and he now proposed that every effort should be made to conciliate the popes deposed at Pisa and to win them over to take part in the new council; and, thanks in great part to his effort, it was agreed that if Gregory and Benedict sent cardinals as envoys these should be received as such, and allowed the insignia of their rank. This was a first defeat for the friends of John XXIII, a clear indication that he was not to be any more the master of the council than was Gregory or Benedict.

The English arrived on January 21, 1415, and some days later the Germans. Both joined the anti-Italian forces; and the Germans, in their plan for the council, made the revolutionary demand that not bishops and mitred abbots alone should have a defining vote, but also the proxies of absent bishops and abbots, the delegates of cathedral chapters also, and of universities; and that masters of theology and doctors, and the envoys of princes should also be allowed a vote. If all this were allowed, the band of supporters which John XXIII had brought from Italy -- in numbers almost half of the bishops so far present -- would be swamped at every vote.

By what succession of controversy and compromise, of offers and of threats, John XXIII and his supporters were brought to surrender does not appear. It was, however, agreed that all these various classes of clerics and laymen should share in the council's work, but not by voting as individuals in the General Sessions where the decrees were solemnly enacted. They should have their vote in the preliminary discussions on the decrees, and for these discussions the council was divided into "nations," after the fashion of the University of Paris. There were four of these nations, the Italian, German, French and English. When, by separate discussions, a solution had been agreed upon in each nation, it was to be adopted in a General Congregation of deputies from all four, and then reported to the General Session of the Council and officially voted. Each nation, whether represented at the council by hundreds or by single units, would thus have equal power whenever there was a conciliar vote.

The political genius behind the scheme is evident; it was an innovation, and it succeeded. But such a system destroyed all possibility of the council's being reckoned one of the General Councils in the traditional sense of the word, for in these the function of the bishops is to speak and vote, not as contributing to the general fund the quota of their own personal learning and wisdom, but as witnesses testifying to the belief of the churches they rule. Peter d'Ailly's argument that learned doctors of theology were of greater importance in a General Council than ignorant bishops, was beside the point altogether. The assembly he had in mind was no more than a congress of Christian learning; it was not a gathering of the teaching Church witnessing to the faith held everywhere by the faithful.

The Council of Constance was well attended, if not by bishops, by doctors of theology and law, by the clergy generally, by princes, by statesmen, by nobles and laity of all ranks and of all degrees of virtue. The numbers varied largely during the three and a half years it was in session. At its maximum attendance there were 29 cardinals, 186 bishops, [823] more than 100 abbots, 300 and more doctors either of theology or of law, 11 ruling princes -- the Emperor Sigismund at their head, and ambassadors from twelve other Christian princes. With their suites -- the elaborate suites of the princes and the great prelates -- and the huge spontaneous inflow attracted by the chances of profit which such a gathering must offer, the little city of Constance saw its normal population of 6,000 many times multiplied, over the long period of nearly four years.

John XXIII had journeyed to Constance as to a doom that was certain; and, indeed, the immediate question in the minds of most of the prelates making the same journey was how to disembarrass Christendom of its latest scandal, a pope who was notoriously an evil liver. In the ten weeks between the first and second general sessions of the council, the opinion gained ground that John must go. A well-written pamphlet, of anonymous authorship, that set out his misdeeds and called for an enquiry by the council, was brought to John's notice sometime in February 1415. Whatever plans he had made to brazen out his position crumbled; he asked advice of cardinals he could trust, and they all urged him to abdicate, to spare the Church the scandal of a trial where the pope must be proved guilty of crime. John yielded, and at the mass with which the second general session opened (March 2, 1415), his solemn pledge to abdicate was publicly read. The pope was himself the celebrant of the mass, and at the words "I swear and vow" he left his throne to kneel before the altar in sign of submission. But he speedily changed his mind, and while the details of the resignation were being worked out, in the night of March 20, he fled from Constance in disguise, hoping to bring about the dispersal of the council.

For a moment the pope's flight produced its intended effect, and the council seemed about to break up in a general confusion. But the vigorous action of the emperor saved the day, and he won from the cardinals a pledge that they would carry on. There was, naturally, a most violent outbreak of anti-papal feeling and the nations, trusting neither the pope nor the cardinals, forced on the third session, March 26, at which only two cardinals -- d'Ailly and Zabarella -- attended. This session is the turning point of the council's history, the moment when it awakens to the opportunity before it and boldly takes the revolutionary step of decreeing that whether the pope returned or not the council's authority remained sovereign and intact; that it would not dissolve until the Church had been fully reformed, the papacy and the Roman Curia no less than the general body; and that the council could not be transferred elsewhere without its own consent.

To the envoys whom the council sent to him in his refuge at Schaffhausen, John gave a shifty answer, that only provoked at Constance a demand for strong action and for a new general session. In preparation for this, the English, French and Germans combined (March 29) to secure the enactment of four decrees that would officially establish the doctrine that in the Catholic Church the General Council is the pope's superior. But, only a few hours before the council met, the cardinals won over the emperor to support an alternative scheme, and he persuaded the nations to accept it; at the general session (March 30) it was this that was passed. The excitement in the city was, by this time, at its height; the divisions within the council were known, the Italians it seemed were still loyal to John, and also a party among the cardinals, several of whom had gone to join him; the emperor was gathering troops for an attack on the pope's protector, Frederick of Hapsburg, Count of Tyrol. At this moment came the news that the pope had moved still further into Germany, after revoking and annulling all he had conceded. Opinion now hardened rapidly against him, and at the next [824] general session -- April 6 -- as a legal basis for operations against the pope, the council voted the original four articles of March 29.

These most famous articles [825] declared that this council, lawfully assembled, was an oecumenical council representing the whole Church Militant and that it derived its authority directly from God; that the whole of the world, therefore, the pope included, owed it obedience in all that concerned the faith, the extinction of the schism, and reform; whoever, then, obstinately refused to obey its decrees, or the decrees of any other General Council lawfully assembled, made with reference to the matters mentioned, was liable to the council's correction and to the punishment it ordered, even were that person the pope himself; the flight of John XXIII was an act of scandal, entailing the suspicion that he was fostering the schism and had fallen into heresy; within the council, it was stated, the pope -- and indeed, all the fathers -- had enjoyed full freedom of action.

As the emperor's troops moved out from Constance, the cardinals who had joined the pope returned to the council and John sent in an offer to abdicate -- at a price. He was to remain a cardinal, to be named legate for life for Italy, to be given the Avignon territories of the Holy See and the sum of 30,000 ducats in cash. All this the council ignored; it was now busy constructing a formula of abdication in which there would be no loopholes. Then, on April 30, John's protector surrendered to the emperor. The crisis was over. The pope could now be rounded up whenever the council needed him.

On May 2 John's trial was officially demanded in the council on six general charges, namely notorious heresy, complacency in schism, simony, dilapidation of Church properties, misconduct and incorrigibility. While he continued, for the next four weeks, to fence with the successive citations to appear and take his trial, a special commission heard the witnesses and sorted out their charges as a preliminary to drawing up a formal indictment. Officials of the curia, bishops, and cardinals too, appeared to tell the story of John's misdeeds, ever since he was a disobedient and incorrigible boy in his own home. On May 17 the pope was arrested at Freiburg-in-Breisgau and brought to the castle of Radolfzell, near Constance. All the fight had now gone out of him; he wept and asked only for mercy, surrendered his seal to the council and wrote that he would, if they chose, abdicate, or accept and ratify any sentence of deposition they chose to pass. When the fifty-four charges, proved to the council's satisfaction in the session of May 25, were read over to him, he had no reply to make save that he put himself in the council's hands; it was holy and could not err, he said. He did not accept the offer to defend himself, but again begged only for mercy. Two days after this, on May 29, in the twelfth general session, sentence of deposition was passed on him and on May 31 John formally accepted it and ratified it and with an oath swore never to call it in question. And then he was taken off to the prison where, under the guard of Lewis of Bavaria, he was to spend the next three years. [826]

Just five weeks after Baldassare Cossa so meekly accepted the council's sentence, the fathers met to receive the solemn abdication of Gregory XII. He was in fact, and to the end he claimed to be in law, the canonically elected representative of the line that went back to Urban VI, the last pope to be acknowledged as pope by Catholics everywhere. [827] The abdication was arranged and executed with a care to safeguard all that Gregory claimed to be; and this merits -- and indeed, requires -- much more detailed consideration than it usually receives. [828]

Gregory XII sent to Constance as his representatives his protector Carlo Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini, and the Dominican cardinal, John Domenici -- to Constance indeed, but not to the General Council assembled there by the authority, and in the name, of John XXIII. The envoys' commission was to the emperor Sigismund, presiding over the various bishops and prelates whom his zeal to restore peace to the Church had brought together. To these envoys -- and to Malatesta in the first place -- Gregory gave authority to convoke as a General Council -- to convoke and not to recognise -- these assembled bishops and prelates; [829] and by a second bull [830] he empowered Malatesta to resign to this General Council in his name.

The emperor, the bishops and prelates consented and accepted the role Gregory assigned. And so, on July 4, 1415. Sigismund, clad in the royal robes, left the throne he had occupied in the previous sessions for a throne placed before the altar, as for the president of the assembly. Gregory's two legates sat by his side facing the bishops. The bull was read commissioning Malatesta and Domenici to convoke the council and to authorise whatever it should do for the restoration of unity and the extirpation of the schism -- with Gregory's explicit condition that there should be no mention of Baldassare Cossa, [831] with his reminder that from his very election he had pledged himself to resign if by so doing he could truly advance the good work of unity, and his assertion that the papal dignity is truly his as the canonically elected successor of Urban VI.

Malatesta then delegated his fellow envoy, the cardinal John Domenici, to pronounce the formal operative words of convocation; [832] and the assembly -- but in its own way -- accepted to be thus convoked, authorised and confirmed in the name "of that lord who in his own obedience is called Gregory XII". [833] The council next declared that all canonical censures imposed by reason of the schism were lifted, and the bull was read by which Gregory authorised Malatesta to make the act of abdication [834] and promised to consider as ratum gratum et firmum, and forever irrevocable, whatever Malatesta, as his proxy, should perform. The envoy asked the council whether they would prefer the resignation immediately, or that it should be delayed until Peter de Luna's decision was known. The council preferred the present moment. It ratified all Gregory XII's acts, received his cardinals as cardinals, promised that his officers should keep their posts and declared that if Gregory was barred from re-election as pope, this was only for the peace of the Church, and not from any personal unworthiness. Then the great renunciation was made, [835] ". . . renuncio et cedo. . . et resigno. . . in hac sacrosancta synodo et universali concilio, sanctam Romanam et universalem ecclesiam repraesentante"; and the council accepted it, [836] but again as made "on the part of that lord who in his own obedience was called Gregory XII". The Te Deum was sung and a new summons drawn up calling upon Peter de Luna to yield to the council's authority.

The work of Pisa was now almost undone, and by this council which, in origin, was a continuation of Pisa. It had suppressed the Pisan pope -- John XXIII. It had recognised as pope the Roman pope whom Pisa, with biting words, had rejected as a schismatic and no pope. One obstacle alone -- the claims of Peter de Luna -- now stood between the council and its aim of giving to the Church a pope who would b., universally accepted. To some of the nations who made up the Council of Constance Benedict XIII had been, for six years now, no more at best than an ex-pope, deposed by a General Council for perjury, schism and heresy; for others he had never been pope at all. Yet the promoters of the council, in their desire to remove all possible causes of future discord, had in 1414, by an agreement that was unanimous, disregarded consistency and invited him to take part in the discussions. Benedict had consented at any rate to send an embassy, and his envoys were received in audience on January 12 and 13, 1415. But the business of the embassy was really with the emperor, whom they were commissioned to invite to a meeting with their master and the King of Aragon in the coming summer, when means to re-establish unity would be discussed. It was nearly two months before they were answered, and then, at the urgent request of all parties, envoys, cardinals and the nations, Sigismund agreed (March 4). By the time he was free to leave Constance, however, the situation had been immeasurably simplified (for the council) by the disappearance of both Benedict's rivals. Benedict alone now stood before Christendom claiming its spiritual allegiance, and if behind him he had only Scotland and the Spaniards, he had also the prestige of twenty-one years' exercise of the papal authority and a long life unstained by any of the vices that stained most of the personages of the high ecclesiastical world, nepotism, simony, and undue regard for the favour of princes.

Emperor and council took leave of each other in the general session of July 14; by the Feast of the Assumption, a month later, Sigismund had reached Narbonne, and on September 18 he entered Perpignan, where the King of Aragon awaited him and Benedict. The negotiations that now began, dragged on until the last day of October. Benedict -- now eighty-nine years of age -- was as ready to resign as ever he had been, but, as always, on carefully thought-out conditions which, somehow, could not but leave him victorious. The latest safeguard he had devised was a proviso that the pope to be elected after his resignation must be canonically elected -- an innocent phrase indeed, but whose inner meaning was that it must be left to Benedict to choose him, for, Benedict explained, he alone was certainly a cardinal, the single surviving cardinal created by a pope whom the whole Church had acknowledged, Gregory XI.

Sigismund wasted no time in rebuttal of such subtleties as this, but simply repeated his demand that Benedict should abdicate; whereupon the conference broke up. But while the emperor was at Narbonne, on his return from Perpignan, the King of Aragon with envoys of the other princes of Benedict's obedience begged him to make yet another attempt on the old man's obstinacy, pledging themselves that if this failed they would renounce him and go over to the council; Benedict was to be asked to abdicate in the same forms that had been used by Gregory XII. The emperor's envoys found the old man in the impregnable rock fortress of his family at Peniscola. Again he refused; he announced the convocation of a new council, and he sent word to the princes at Narbonne that he would deprive them of their kingdoms if they dared to withdraw their obedience. This message put an end to their last doubts, and after a fortnight's discussion the details were settled [837] of an accord with the council. Benedict's cardinals were to go over to the council, and to be received as colleagues by the other cardinals; the council thus fully representative was next to come to a decision about Benedict (i.e. to depose him) before electing the desired new pope, the sentence of Pisa being tacitly ignored, and the business done over again. All sentences against those obedient until now to Benedict, by whomsoever decreed, were to be declared null by the council, and also all Benedict's sentences against the council and its supporters. Also, the council would confirm all grants and favours and dispensations made by Benedict up to the day of his last refusal to the princes. Should Benedict die, his cardinals would not elect a successor, and if they did so the Spanish kings would give such successor no recognition.

The council ratified this treaty two months after it was signed (February 4, 1416), but it was many more months before it began to go into effect, before the Spaniards arrived at Constance -- where they formed a new, fifth, nation -- and the new trial of Benedict XIII could begin. The first to arrive were the Aragonese, in October 1416, and the preliminaries to the trial began in the twenty-third general session, November 5, when a commission was named to enquire into Benedict's responsibility for prolonging the schism. He was cited on November 28 to appear before the council, and its envoys then had to make the long journey to Spain to deliver the summons. It was March 1417 before they had returned. Then came the consideration of his refusal to appear, a decree that he was contumacious, a new commission to examine the evidence against him, its report May 12, 1417), and finally, on July 26, [838] sentence of deposition was given. No one had ever sinned more -- the sentence declared -- against the Church of God and the whole Christian people, by fostering and encouraging disunion and schism. Peter de Luna is declared a perjurer, a scandal to the whole Church, schismatical, and a heretic notoriously and manifestly; and thence it is that the council declares him deprived of all right to the papacy and excommunicates him; and Sigismund sent trumpeters through the streets of the little city to proclaim the great news that this ancient nuisance was no more.

The Christian world was now once more united in its acceptance of a single spiritual authority, the council at Constance. It only remained to elect a pope. But the question now became urgent, who should vote in the election? As the law had stood for three hundred and fifty years [839] none could be pope whom the cardinals did not elect. On the other hand the council did not trust the cardinals. Feeling ran high on both sides, and to serious men it must have seemed that there was again every chance of an election whose legality must be questionable. The problem had been for a long time in the minds of all when it was publicly raised by the Castilian ambassadors to the council in the April of this year 1417. They had then been told that the council would decide the procedure once all the signatories to the Treaty of Narbonne had joined it, and from this moment the election problem became the chief subject of debate among the nations. It was complicated by a second division of opinion as to whether the council should elect a pope now or, first of all, enact a scheme of general reforms. The emperor was anxious that reforms should first be dealt with; the cardinals [840] and the Latin nations gave priority to the election; the English and German nations supported the emperor.

Various schemes were drafted, and the discussions grew so violent that, in June 1417, it seemed as though the council was about to break up. The deadlock between the cardinals and their party on the one side, and the party in the council whom the emperor supported on the other, lasted until July 13, when it was agreed to allow the council to discuss the reformation of the papacy and curia before proceeding to elect a new pope; and a fortnight later the council, free at last from the incubus of the trial of Benedict XIII, turned to the question of reform.

It was soon evident that there were as many plans for reform as there were sections in the council, and that, without such leadership as a pope alone could provide, the stress of the reform discussions must dissolve the council into a mass of petty factions. The cardinals again raised the question whether it would not be wiser to elect the pope immediately. They had the French on their side, and now only the German nation gave wholehearted support to the emperor's determination that the new pope should inherit an authority reformed and trimmed by the council, that the papacy should be reformed, without consultation or consent, while the Holy See lay vacant. Presently the two parties were in open public conflict and accusations of heresy flew from each side to the other. New quarrels -- equally bitter -- about precedence also developed between Castilians and Aragonese. The cardinals asked for their passports. The emperor spoke of putting their leaders under arrest. They swore an oath to stand firm until death itself.

It was an Englishman who, in the end, brought all parties together, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, uncle of the English king, Henry V. He had arrived at Constance less than a month after the death of his fellow countryman the Bishop of Salisbury, Cardinal Hallum, [841] who had been the emperor's chief supporter in the council, and while the English there were still suffering from this sudden loss of their leader. Beaufort proposed a compromise -- and both sides accepted it; the council would first decree that after the election of a pope the question of reforms was to be seriously undertaken, and then immediately publish decrees for reform in all matters where agreement had already been reached, while, thirdly, a commission would at the same time be set up to decide how the pope was to be elected. This was at the beginning of October 1417, and by the end of the month an agreed procedure for the election had been worked out, which the council adopted in the general session of October 30. [842] To the twenty-three cardinals there were to be added, for the purpose of this election only, six delegates from each of the five nations; the pope to be elected must secure, not only two-thirds of the cardinals' votes (as the law had required since 1179), but also two-thirds of the votes of each of the five nations; all these electors were to be bound by the conclave laws already in force, and the conclave was to begin within ten days of this decree.

The carpenters and masons of Constance rose to the occasion nobly. By November 2 they had prepared fifty-three cells and accommodation for the electors' attendants in the great merchants' hall of the city. The emperor isolated the building with a cordon of troops -- there was to be no chance of any repetition of the events of 1378 -- and after a solemn session of the council on November 8, at which the names of the chosen electors were published, the conclave began. It was surprisingly short, and on St. Martin's Day, November 11, at 10. 30 in the morning, the announcement was made that the Cardinal Odo Colonna had been chosen by a unanimous vote, and had taken the appropriate name of Martin V. [843]

The election of Martin V -- the first pope for forty years whom all Catholics acknowledged as pope -- is, no doubt, the high-water mark of the work of the Council of Constance. It was not only an end accomplished but the means to further accomplishment, a means to ensure that reformation of Christian life throughout the Church, which, for many of the fathers, was the most important question of all. A very strong party had, indeed, only consented to give priority to the settlement of the papal question when experience brought it home to them that, without the leadership of a pope, the council would never agree on reforms.

Of many practical matters that called for attention, the first and most important, so it seemed to all, was to bring about a better understanding between the papacy and the local ordinaries everywhere. Until a pope universally recognised had been elected, the council could not seriously hope to reach any agreement on reform that would be effective, and until, under the pope's leadership, the grievances of the episcopate against the Roman Curia had been frankly discussed, it was just as hopeless to expect that immense united action of pope and bishops through which alone could come the wholesale reformation which all openly acknowledged to be everywhere urgently needed. When, during the opening weeks of the council, the different delegates came in to Constance, each had brought its own plan of reforms -- even those Italians who had come in order to support John XXIII through thick and thin, had their proposals for a restoration of virtuous living among clergy and laity.

The council was, from the first, in its own mind and intention, a body assembled largely for the purpose of reform, and its desire for reform is the expressed motive for the revolutionary theory of a General Council's powers set forth in the decrees of its third and fifth sessions. The council here proposes, in fact, to reform the Roman Curia and the papacy, and no papal obstruction, it is stated, can lawfully withstand the council so acting. Until its task is finished it retains its sovereign authority despite all papal declarations to the contrary. Again, its power being from God directly, the pope is bound to obey the council's decrees just as other Catholics are; and if he is disobedient the council can correct and punish him.

Once the council had thus corrected, and punished, the pope who had called it into being (John XXIII), it set up a special commission of thirty-five members to prepare the needed reformation decrees. This commission immediately turned its attention to the highly centralised control of the universal Church which the popes of the last hundred and fifty years especially had so largely develop. d -- that control, through taxation of church property and through appointments, which has already been described in its main lines. [844] The question was now raised whether the practice of papal provisions should not be entirely abolished. The bishops favoured the proposal but -- a first serious division in the ranks of the reform party -- the universities preferred the new system; the popes, said the delegates from the university of Vienna, repeating what the university of Paris had said already, had more thought for learning than the bishops, in those to whom they gave appointments. About the next great source of general complaint, the taxes payable on appointments of bishops and abbots, there was also a marked division of opinion. To zealots who sought the total abolition of these fees it was objected that the pope and his curia must have some fixed source of revenue in the universal Church in order to pay the expenses of a universal administration.

These discussions occupied the commission for the next seven or eight months, and meanwhile Sunday by Sunday, the best preachers in Europe (many of them bishops) never ceased to tell the assembled council the tale of the sins -- the clerical sins especially -- which afflicted the Church, to point out that episcopal simony and the simony of the Roman Curia were the chief cause of the decay of Christian life, and to exhort the fathers to pass from talking to action. [845]

But between the appointment of this special commission and the appearance of reform decrees in a session of the council, two years and more were to elapse. There were many reasons for this delay; it was not by any means mere clerical supineness. For one thing, since there was now no pope (for all but the Spaniards and Scotsmen, still faithful to Benedict XIII), there had devolved upon this heterogeneous assembly the all but impossible task of the day-to-day administration of the universal Church. This parliament now had to function as a cabinet, and a general department of state, and this at a time of long drawnout crisis. It had to consider and provide for affairs like the trials of John Hus and of Jerome of Prague for heresy, for the civil war in Bohemia that began after their execution, for nominations to vacant sees, for the arrest of the wicked Bishop of Strasburg, for the trial of the crimes of Frederick of Tyrol against Church jurisdiction; there was the great case of John Petit's defence of tyrannicide and Gerson's great attack on this theory, a case beneath which burned the great question of Burgundy against Armagnac that had set all France ablaze with civil war. Later the collapse of Benedict XIII's hold on Spain slowed down the whole activity of the council, for the Spaniards had been invited to the council in such a way that only after they had come to take part in it could it continue as a General Council; and it was more than a year after the Treaty of Narbonne before the last of the Spaniards had come in. Then, too, in June 1416, the emperor (now in England negotiating an alliance with Henry V, lately victorious at Agincourt) sent an urgent petition that the council would halt its plans for reform until his return; and he did not return to Constance for another seven months. And before he had returned, in November 1416, the trial of Benedict XIII had opened that was to take up the most of the council's time for the next nine months nearly. Nor did this last great event proceed against any background of monastic calm. The English invasion of France, their alliance with the anti-royalist faction in the French civil war, and their victories, were an inevitable cause of the most bitter strife within the council. There were ever-recurring disputes about right and precedence between other nations too; and presently, as has been told, in the summer of 1417, the old question of the relation between the papacy and the council came to life again in the violent discussions about the way the new pope should be elected.

Such were the causes and occasions of the delay in producing and enacting schemes of reform. When the council was at last free to attend to the problem of reform, it set up a new commission to draft decrees, and now the old controversies broke out afresh, and during August, September and October of 1417 they raged most violently. What the fathers were now actually debating was whether the Roman See should continue sovereign in the Church, or whether the Church should for the future be ruled by an aristocracy of its bishops, and university dignitaries. Were the cardinals, it was asked, of any real value to religion, or would it not be best to abolish the Sacred College as a permanent hindrance? The cardinals, offering to reform what was amiss in their organisation, stood firm for the traditional rights of the Roman See, and the Italians and Spaniards supported them. It was from France and Germany and England that the proposals came for radical changes; but even here opinion was not unanimous in each nation.

It has been told how the Bishop of Winchester reconciled these warring factions, and there was now sufficient agreement among them for the council to enact five decrees of reform in its public session of October 5, 1417. [846] The first of these -- the famous decree Frequens -- opens with the statement that General Councils are the chief instrument for the tillage of God's field and that neglect of them is the chief reason for the decay of religion. Therefore, within five years at most of the conclusion of this present council, another General Council shall be summoned, and a third council within seven years from the end of the second, and after that there shall be a General Council every ten years for all time. The pope shall consult each council about the place where its successor is to meet and this shall be announced before the council disperses; if the Holy See happens to fall vacant the council shall choose the place. The Church will, for the future, live from one General Council to the next.

Then there comes a decree which provides a remedy against future schisms, and this decree, apart from the ingeniously minute procedure it enacts, [847] a is interesting evidence that it was the mind of the council that not only this particular Council of Constance but the General Council as such is the pope's superior. The third decree provides a new profession of faith to be made by future popes the day they are elected. The fourth states that religion has suffered greatly from the practice of translating bishops from see to see, and that the fear of being translated has been used to coerce the freedom of bishops; to protect future popes, ignorant perhaps of the facts, from assenting to translations promoted by crafty and importunate self seekers, and also from any careless use of the papal power, the council decrees that bishops shall not be translated against their will, unless after the case has been heard by the cardinals and their consent obtained. Finally, there is a decree about the burning question of the pope's rights to spolia and procurations. [848] Papal reservations of these are no longer to hold good, but such procurations and spolia are to belong to those to whom they would have gone had this papal custom never been introduced.

There was, it may be remembered, a second clause about reforms in the Bishop of Winchester's settlement or pact, by which both the cardinals and the nations agreed to vote, in a general session of the council, a pledge that, after the new pope's election, the work of reform would be seriously undertaken. This pledge was given in the first decree of the fortieth general session held on October 30, 1417, three weeks after the voting of the five reform decrees just described. In this decree the council ordains that the pope to be elected must, in union with the council or with deputies chosen by each nation, reform the Church in its head and in its members and the Roman Curia also, before the council is dissolved; and the matters to be reformed are then set out in the decree under eighteen heads. But the commissioners of the five nations still failed to come to any practical measure of agreement about the detail of the reforms, and the Germans then suggested that two schemes should be prepared, the one of general reform, for the whole Church, and the other of reforms to meet the particular needs of the several nations; and that these last should be set out, not in decrees of the council, but in specially drawn agreements between the various nations and the pope -- the so-called first concordats.

The Germans presented to the new pope, in the first days of January 1418, a list of eighteen suggested reforms; the French and Spaniards did likewise; and on January 20, Martin V sent to the nations for their study a draft of eighteen decrees based on the eighteen points of the council's decree of October 30. It is worthy of note that the pope takes up all the topics which the council recommended, save one only: he makes no mention at all of the council's thirteenth point namely, How popes shall be corrected and deposed for crimes other than heresy. It was from the discussions of this draft within the various nations, that there finally emerged the seven decrees of universal reform published ill the forty-third session (March 20, 1418), and also the text of the several concordats.

These seven decrees deal almost entirely with the long-standing conflict between Rome and the bishops about papal taxation of benefices. By the first decree Martin V, with the approval of the council, revokes all privileges of exemption from the jurisdiction of the local ordinaries [849] granted since the death of Gregory XI (1378), by whatever personages -- says the decree -- who acted as though they were popes; [850] and he promises that, for the future, no such exemption shall be granted without the bishops' opinions being heard. All unions of benefices and incorporations made since Gregory XI's death are to be revoked if the parties concerned desire this, provided there has not been true and reasonable cause for the amalgamation. The pope surrenders all rights to the revenues of vacant sees, monasteries and benefices. As to simony, no law, says the pope, has yet succeeded in really extirpating this vice, so he now proposes one "with teeth in it". Those ordained simoniacally are ipso facto suspended from the exercise of the order thus received. Elections where simony has intervened are null and void, and they confer no right of any kind. Those who, so elected, make their own any revenues or profits attaching to the office to which they have been elected are bound to restitution. [851] Both those who give, and those who receive, in simoniacal transactions are by the fact excommunicated, and this even though they be cardinals or the pope himself. The fifth decree abolishes a kind of papal dispensation whose very existence is surely evidence of immense decay in the religious spirit of the high ecclesiastical world, dispensations that is to say, which allow men to hold sees without ever being consecrated, to hold abbeys without receiving the abbatial blessing, to hold parishes without being ordained priest. All such dispensations are now revoked, and those who hold them are, under pain of losing the benefice to which their dispensations refer, to receive the appropriate order or blessing within the time the existing law appoints. The burning grievance of the papal tithe is next reformed, and the sixth decree gave some hope of relief to the sees of Christendom which had for so long been tithed by the popes, systematically, at every crisis of the fortunes of their own state and of the states of their allies among the Christian princes. For Martin V now revived the old law that only the pope could tithe and tax sees and ecclesiastical revenues, and he pledged the Holy See never to tax the whole body of the clergy except for some extraordinary cause that affected the whole Church, and even then only with the written consent of the cardinals and of what bishops could be consulted; nor would special tithes or taxes be levied on any particular country or province without the consent of the majority of its bishops; and such tithes, if levied, would not be collected except by ecclesiastics using only the authority of the Holy See. The last - - seventh -- decree deals with the needed reform of clerical life. It has nothing to complain of but that priests and bishops tend to dress like nobles, and that they even dare to appear thus clad, with only a surplice thrown over the " deformity ", to celebrate the divine office in their churches. The new law provides the new penalty of loss of a month's income for such unseemliness.

These seven decrees, it may be thought, are slender fruit indeed after four years of conference between priests and prelates from every part of Christendom, reputedly zealous for the reform of Christian life. They are not, of course, the whole programme, but even the several concordats [852] do not contain much more than prohibitions in restraint of the more glaring financial abuses. Nowhere is there any sign of constructive thinking, and it is surely a notable failure that nowhere is there any care to provide for the formation and the better education of the parochial clergy. The chief subjects, yet once again, are the claims of the bishops against the new papal control of the benefice system, and their complaints about the Roman Curia.

The pope promises -- in all the concordats -- that there will not for the future be so many cardinals that these will be a burden to the Church, or that the dignity will be held cheaply. The maximum number is fixed at twenty-four, and it is promised that the cardinals shall be chosen proportionately from all parts of Christendom. They will be men distinguished for their learning, their way of life and experience, and will be doctors of theology or law -- unless they are of the kin of reigning princes for whom competens litteratura will suffice. None shall be created cardinal who is brother or nephew to a cardinal already created, nor shall more than one cardinal at a time be chosen from any one of the mendicant orders. The cardinals, moreover, are to be consulted as a body about new creations.

Two nations speak for their own special interests in the curia; the German concordat recognises that in the present condition of the affairs of the Roman Church there is no other way to provide subsistence for the pope and cardinals but by the old method of granting them benefices and through the payment of the servitia communia. [853] But no cardinal, the principle is laid down, is to enjoy a revenue of more than 6,000 florins from church revenues. Rules are made that the cardinals shall provide suitable priests to act for them in benefices which they hold, and that they shall not let out such monasteries or benefices to laymen, and that they shall not cut down the number of monks, and so increase their own profits. If, through the negligence of the cardinal's deputies, the monastery falls into decay, and if the cardinal ignores the injunctions of the monastery's religious superiors, the Holy See is to be approached; and if the pope does not remedy the evil, the superiors are to bring action against the cardinal's deputies as though they were the abbot and monks in whose hands the property once lay. The special concession to the English was simpler -- that Englishmen too, should be employed in the different posts of the Roman Curia.

In all the concordats, except that with the English, there was also a clause restricting the number of suits to be heard in the Roman Curia. It would no longer, for example, be possible in Germany for suits that in no way touched on Church business to be taken to the pope for judgment simply because the suitor was a crusader; or (in Italy, France and Spain) to take to Rome matrimonial suits for a hearing in first instance. Penalties were also provided for litigants who interjected appeals to Rome that were judged to be frivolous. There are five clauses which reform the law and practice of clerical appointments, three of them applying everywhere but to the English, one applying to the English alone, and one universally. First, by whom are appointments to be made -- the question of Provisions? The pope, henceforth, will not reserve to himself the appointment to any benefices except those vacated apud sedem apostolicam; [854] or by the deposition, deprivation, papal translation, or defective election of the late holder; or where the late holder was an officer of the Roman Curia. The other benefices to which the popes had been used to appoint would, for the future, be filled alternately by the pope and the proper collator. Secondly, to whom might benefices be given? The concordats restrict the papal practice of giving them in commendam. To no one -- not even to a cardinal -- is any abbey to be given in commendam which has a community of more than ten monks, [855] nor any major dignity in a cathedral chapter, nor any parish, nor any hospital or hospice, nor any benefice worth less than fifty florins annual net revenue. These last two clauses do not appear in the English concordat, but this contains, like all the others, a clause by which the pope promises certain restrictions in the use of his dispensing power. For the future, no one will be dispensed from the need to be of the canonical age in order to receive the episcopate, [856] or an abbey or a parish, 9 by more than three years: except in especially rare cases, and here the cardinals will be previously consulted. To the English the pope promises still more. The law already provides that more than one benefice shall never be granted to the same person (unless he is of noble birth or of outstanding learning), and the present custom by which lords (both temporal and spiritual) obtain dispensations from this law is to cease, and the rule be observed. Again, in England, the Holy See has of late years granted an unusual number of dispensations to allow beneficed clerics not to proceed to the needed holy orders and still keep their benefices, to the great scandal of the Church. All these dispensations are now revoked, and those who hold them must obey the common law in this matter and seek ordination, if they are otherwise suitable for ordination. Also, in England, it has been a serious obstacle to the cure of souls, and a cause of contempt for the bishops' administration, that papal dispensations have allowed beneficed clerics to live away from their posts and archdeacons to make their visitations by proxy. For the future such dispensations are not to be granted without reasonable cause which must be expressed in the dispensations; all dispensations granted so far without such cause are revoked, and it is left to the bishop to determine which these are. Likewise the pope revokes all faculties by virtue of which religious in England have obtained benefices, except in cases where the religious has actually been put in possession. For the future no such faculties will be conceded.

The beneficiary, once appointed and installed, pays to the Roman Curia, as a tax, one year's revenue -- annates. This was now fixed as the amount for which the benefice was inscribed in the papal tax books under the heading servitia communia. [857] If this is not a just amount the beneficiary's case will be heard, and a new assessment made, due account being taken of such special circumstances as a country's poverty at a particular time. Annates, also, will only be asked once in any one year, even though there is more than one change in the incumbency during that time; and an incumbent is no longer to be liable for his predecessor's arrears of annates. To France, then ravaged by the invasion of Henry V and the civil war, Martin V made the special concession that only half the annates would be asked for the next five years. To England the pope made the concession that there should, for the future, be no appropriations of parish churches [858] unless the bishop of the diocese has satisfied himself that religion will really benefit from them. All appropriations made during the schism are annulled.

The sole remaining changes of general importance are the regulations about indulgences. While in France, Spain and Italy the pope decided to make no changes, to the bishops of Germany he promised to be more careful for the future in granting indulgences, "lest they became cheapened, " and he revoked all those granted since 1378 in imitation of previous indulgences. [859] To England also he gave a special pledge. Here the numerous indulgences granted by the Holy See to those who visited certain shrines or made offerings to them, and the special faculties enjoyed by those administering to such pilgrims the sacrament of penance -- together with the collectors [of alms for pious objects], of whom, it is stated, there are far too many in England -- are for many people, the concordat states, an occasion of sin. These people scorn their own parish clergy, and desert their parish churches for the shrines where these indulgences and absolutions can be had, and they take thither the tithes and offerings due to their parish churches. The bishops are given power to enquire into these scandals and to suspend the indulgences and the special faculties of confessors, and they are to report the matter to the pope that he may revoke these privileges.

The concordats were only to run for five years -- perhaps because, in accordance with the decree Frequens, the General Council would then reassemble? -- but the English concordat is noted as binding for all time. [860]

Endnotes

659: 1334-1362 [back]

660: Libido dominandi St. Bernard styles it, warning his disciple Pope Eugene m against the insidious temptation [back]

661: December 1317. [back]

662: cf. supra, p. 137 [back]

663: John of Lwcemburg, son of the Emperor Henry VII (1308-1313); killed sixteen years after this at Crecy, fighting against the English [back]

664: cf. supra, p. 25 [back]

665: MOLLAT, op. cit., p. 142. [back]

666: cf. supra, p 167 [back]

667: cf. J. WURM, Cardinal Albornoz der zweite Begrunder des Rirchenstaates, Paderborn, 1892 [back]

668: e. of St. Peter. [back]

669: Until Pius VII abrogated them in 1816 [back]

670: For this cf. infra, pp. 342-3 [back]

671: September 12, 1362 [back]

672: cf. supra, pp. 166-7. [back]

673: MOLLAT, op. cit., p. 110 and note 3 [back]

674: The saint's words to Urban's successor, as recorded by Bl. Raymund of Capua, her director and biographer; cf. Acta Sanctorurn of the Bollandists, April, t. III, p 891 [back]

675: He was buried, temporarily, in the Franciscan church of that city but in 1371 in the cathedral of his see, Toledo. cf. MOLLAT, Albornoz in D. H. G. E. I (1912) [back]

676: Urban V was beatified by Pius IX in 1870 the last pope to be so honoured. [back]

677: Revelationes S. Birgittae IV, 139, 140; translation from GARDNER, St. Catherine of Siena p. 102. [back]

678: " Manfully " is the word ever on the lips of St. Catherine of Siena, too, when she is exhorting Gregory XI. [back]

679: GARDNER, op. cit., 103-5, abridged and slightly modified: text is same as in previous note [back]

680: July 23 [back]

681: GARDINER op. cit., 105: Revelationes IV, 143. [back]

682: GARDNER, 106 [back]

683: Ib., 110 [back]

684: Ib., 179. [back]

685: Ib., 177. [back]

686: So Blessed Rayrnund of Capua, her director, later Master- General of the Dominicans and a great reformer [back]

687: More and more does the study of Langland appear as a main key to the understanding of this critical age. He sees it as a man, and as a man theologically instructed nor does his passionate concern for the fortunes of Christ's gospel ever distort his sense of proportion, any more than it impairs the orthodoxy of his belief. There is no better introduction to this most important witness than Mr. Christopher Dawson's essay, Piers Plowman, in Medieval Religion (1934) and for those making their first acquaintance with the great poem, the alliterative modern verse rendering by Henry W. Wells, The Vision of Piers Plowman (1935); see also R. W. CHAMBERS Man's Immortal Mind. [back]

688: The evidence of the art of the period is a question too specialised (and too elaborate) for me to discuss it here in the summary fashion of this section of the book. A very useful introduction is provided in the lectures of Louis Gillet given at the Institut Catholique of Paris and published (1939) as L'histoire artistique des Ordres Mendiants; cf. also L. BREHIER, L'Art Chretienne [back]

689: Canonisation is " the final and definitive sentence of the pope by which a servant of God is declared to have been received into the Church Triurnphant and is set forth for the veneration of the whole Church. " (PESCH, Praelectiones Theologicae I, 547.) " Is set forth ": that is to say, " all Catholics are bound to accept the personage as undoubtedly a saint, i.e. as someone worthy of a public cult " so Benedict XIV, De Servorum Dei Peatificatione et Canonizatione 1, 38, 14-15, quoted PESCH, ib. it is in the final and definitive character of the sentence, and in the universality of the cult commanded to be rendered, that canonisation differs from beatification. (Benedict XIV, op. cit., I, 39, 14 in PESCH, ib.) [back]

690: cf. the well-known book of DR. JAMES WALSH, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries [back]

691: The word " saints " printed in inverted commas indicates a personage canonised or beatified; the word is not used to make or suggest or anticipate any judgment of the Church about these beatified personages [back]

692: B. Urban V. [back]

693: St. Andrew Corsini and St. Peter Thomas [back]

694: The lay brother, B. Thomas Corsini [back]

695: Five Dominicans, three Franciscans, three Augustinians [back]

696: In the period 1049-1270 there are no fewer than seventy-four bishops subsequently canonised, 1270-1370 four of the bishops canonised, 1370-1520 three [back]

697: cf. LOUIS GILLET Histoire Artistique des Ordres Mendiants, Paris, 1939, pp. 34-61, Les eglises des Mendiants [back]

698: He later became a Carthusian, and it is as Ludolf the Carthusian that he is best known; he died in the charterhouse of Strasburg, 1370; for a description of his work cf. POURRAT II, pp. 485-8; it was his life of Our Lord which, 150 years later, played such a part in the conversion of St. Ignatius Loyola: for the role of the Dominicans as producers of all manner of auxiliary religious literature cf. Vol. II of this work, ch. IX, II. [back]

699: cf. DEBOGNIE C. SS. R., in D. H. G. E., t. X (1937), 727 and following [back]

700: cf. LOUIS CHARDON, O.P.: " Je ne sais qu'une theologie, la circonstance de la rendre affective ne detruit pas sa nature: elle la perfectionne. La connaissance de Dieu sans la charite n'a pas de vie; l'amour est son centre. Sans la dilection elle est hors de son ordre. Par ce moyen, je ne separe pas la theologie scolastique d'avec la mystique; elles seront les deux hommes de l'embleme: celle-ci servira de pieds et de bras pour atteindre et pour embrasser le bien que celle-la decouvre de ses yeux et ou elle sert de guide, sans quoi elle ne saurait eviter de tomber dans les precipices de l'erreur." La Croix de Jesus (1647). Preface, edition of 1937, p. 9. [back]

701: La Spiritualite Chretienne (ed. Paris, 1928), Vol. II, pp. [back]

702: cf. the warning hint of Albert Dufourcq: " L'histoire de la vie interieure n'est encore que grossierement ebauchee." L'Avenir du Christianisme (4th ed., 1925), Vol. VII, p. 208, note B. For those who already know all the main facts of Church History there is perhaps no more stimulating work than this a production of genius [back]

703: " He was probably the greatest popular preacher that has ever appeared in the Low Countries," great and popular by " the capacity for speaking directly to each individual in his congregation." JACOB, Essays, Ch. VII, The Brethren of the Common Life, p. 122, q.v. [back]

704: " If he shall not lose his reward," wrote Thomas a Kempis, " who gives a cup of cold water to his thirsty neighbour, what will not be the reward of those who, by putting good books into the hands of those neighbours, open to them the fountains of life eternal? Blessed are the hands of such transcribers." Quoted JACOB, op. cit., p. 152. [back]

705: Near Cologne. [back]

706: ". . . a cogent simple latinity of personal reflection." JACOB op. cit., 148. For the Imitation cf. JACOB op. cit., 139-54 and POURRAT II, 389-401, 455-80 [back]

707: cf. POURRAT II, 461, discussing the characteristics of the Devotio Moderna. " Ce qu'on ne trouve presque jamais, ce sont des considerations, purement doctrinales "; and also (ib. 503): " Ce que la piete desirait alors, c'etait moins d'etre eclairee que d'etre emue." [back]

708: We should bear in mind the title under which the four little books we know as the Imitation first appeared together, viz. Admonitiones ad spiritualem vitam utiles. Our name for it derives from the title of the first chapter of the first of the books [back]

709: " Au seuil de toute etude de la mystique a cette epoque, l'historien se heurte a Maitre Eckhart comme a un probleme." VIGNAUX, op. cit., 177. He was born at Hochheim, near Gotha, about 1260; possibly a pupil of St. Albert the Great, taught at Paris 1300-1302; then returned to Germany, where he had a great career as a preacher and as lecturer in the University of Cologne. It was in 1326 that he appeared before the Bishop of Cologne to answer charges against his teaching. He appealed to the pope but died (1327) before the appeal was judged [back]

710: The twenty-eight propositions condemned are in DENZINGER, nos. [back]

711: By Pourrat for example [back]

712: Quoted POURRAT II, 384. [back]

713: JACOB, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch, p. 141 [back]

714: JACOB op. cit., 129. [back]

715: POURRAT III, 22-4 [back]

716: Wessel quoted in JACOB, op. cit., 131. Luther was later to say of Wessel, " If I had read his works earlier my enemies might think that Luther had absorbed everything from Wessel, his spirit is so in accord with mine." Ibid. [back]

717: GILSON, Reason and Revelation p. 88. [back]

718: NEWMAN, Apologia, Ch. I (p. 14 of standard edition). [back]

719: cf. Summa Theologica 2-2ae, q. 188 a. 5. " Whether a religious order ought to be founded for the purpose of study? " St. Thomas here argues the usefulness of study to religious who are contemplatives: it enlightens their minds, he says, and it removes errors " which frequently happen in the contemplation of things divine to those who are ignorant of the Scriptures." If the order is one whose mission is to preach the need of study is evident. But to all kinds of orders study is a most valuable ascetic aid (ad id quod est omni religioni commune). The hard work of study tames the insubordination of the instinct of sex, it takes away the lust for riches and it is a means to learn obedience. This is by far the more common Catholic teaching about the necessity for sacred learning. Like much else it was largely obscured in this age of general religious degeneration. To the share which clerical indifference to sacred learning had in the ultimate catastrophe, we have the interesting evidence of a Doctor of the Church who later, spent his life amid the ruins St. Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva. " Priests who occupy themselves with works that hinder them from study are like men who refuse their stomach the food it needs for nourishment. . . . Ignorance in priests is more to be feared than sin. . . knowledge in priests is the eighth sacrament of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the Church's greatest misfortunes have come from this that the ark of knowledge has passed from the Levites into the keeping of others. If Geneva has wrought such terrible havoc among us, it is because, in our idleness we did no more than read our breviaries without any care to make ourselves more learned.". . . HAMON, Vie de S. Francois de Sales I, p. 499. For the natural role of all knowledge in man's quest for the divine, cf. Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, the great Master- General of the Order of Preachers, a contemporary of Erasmus. He was the first, and perhaps the greatest, of the commentators on the Summa Theologica, and he is reputed to have said that the Dominican who did not spend four hours a day in study was guilty of mortal sin. Cajetan, commenting on St. Thomas's teaching about the vice called Curiositas (2-2, q. 167 a. I), says, " For the knowledge of created reality constitutes, by its nature, a step in the ascent to the knowledge of God. And therefore he who desires to study the knowledge that is about creatures, desires by that very fact a step that leads to the knowledge of God: unless, by a perverted inclination, he scorns that tendency and embraces the negation of that relation to the knowledge of God which exists in the very step of knowing created reality." [back]

720: Which remains a natural understanding even when perfected by the supernatural virtue of Faith, and the gifts of Understanding, Wisdom, Knowledge, and Counsel. [back]

721: cf. ST. THOMAS, Summa Th. 2-2ae-8-6. [back]

722: 'The tradition of St. Thomas and the other scholastic doctors of the greater age survived in the great preachers of this time whom the Church has since canonised. The Dominican St. Vincent Ferrier (1350-1419), the Franciscan Observants St. Bernadine of Siena (1380-1444) and St. John Capistran (1385-1456), perhaps the three greatest popular preachers the Latin Church has ever known, were all accomplished theologians and their sermons show it. St. Vincent was also a writer, and his Treatise on the Spiritual Life is, roughly speaking, contemporary with the Imitation. Describing it, M. GORCE, O.P., " insists on its virility and clear-cut intellectuality in opposition to the faintly sentimental and feminine spirituality of the Imitation. . . . [St. Vincent] leaves no place for the nebulous, the fanciful. . . He presupposes a clearly seen theology, an exact view of the realities of life, an inflexible vigour of thought "; cf. HENRI GHEON, St. Vincent Ferrier, London, 1939 p. 24. The contrast is greater still between this " approach " and that of the Theologia Germanica, a product of this same time and destined, in a later age, to play its part in the formation of Erasmus and of Luther. [back]

723: I should like to quote here three modern scholars with rare special knowledge of this vitally important question. The first is Paul Vignaux, already quoted so often in these pages: " However speculative a thing theology may appear to be, it remains that it is the science of salvation." (La Pensee au Moyen Age, p. 200.) Gilson says: ". . . this is the place to note that when we come to the question where is the axis around which Christian thought revolves, it is not alone the heroes of the internal life who need to be consulted. Nay, it can be even dangerous to consult them without checking them by that Christian dogma to which they themselves refer, and which alone allows us to estimate in its true light the nature of their activity." (L'Esprit de la Philosophie medievale I, 112.) Finally M. J. Chenu, O.P.: " Theology treated as a dialectic, is only a wretched verbalism to escape which faith promptly runs for refuge to a ' pure perception.' The mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries offer us the spectacle of such a distress. But that is the fault of theologians (not of Theology itself). . . . This fault, by an inevitable swing of the pendulum leads to that of the false mystics who despise concepts and formulas and sometimes pay a heavy price for throwing aside these poor instruments of human thought which remain indispensable even when God's revelation has taken place." (Revue des Sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 1935, p. 239.) [back]

724: cf. GILSON, La Philosophie medievale, 270, and VIGNAUX, D.T.C. XI [back]

725: As Luther will one day explicitly declare is, at times, the case, cf. DENIFLE-PAQUIER III 226-9. [back]

726: Philosophice dicitur [back]

727: Prologue to the Exigit Ordo Executionis; quoted VIGNAUX, 189 [back]

728: GILSON La Philosophie au Moyen Age, p. 275. [back]

729: Not at all the same type as, for example, the Averroist Jean of Jandun, Marsiglio's philosophical guide, a secret infidel whose portrait Gilson draws vividly. " Every time, in his commentaries on Aristotle he reached one of those critical points where his philosophy was at variance with the conclusions of Christian theology, John never failed to restate his complete submission to religious orthodoxy, but he usually did it in a rather strange way. . . cracking some joke which makes it difficult for his readers to take seriously his most formal professions of faith. ' I do believe that this is true; but I cannot prove it. Good luck to those who can.' And again: 'I say that God can do that, but how I don't know, God knows '. . . ' Let it be added that creation very seldom happens there has never been but one and that was a very long time ago '." Gilson notes " the slight touch of Voltaire In Jean of Jandun's irony." GILSON, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, pp. 61-3 [back]

730: DENZINGER, nos. 553-570; the condemnation takes note of Nicholas's provision of a way out of the impasse through faith, and styles it " a foxy excuse." GILSON, op. cit., p. 277. [back]

731: In 1348 [back]

732: Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, p. 280; Vignaux's warning needs to be ever borne in mind, " There are too many gaps in our knowledge [of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century nominalist theologians] for it to be possible to mark with a really sure line the essential diversities among them." op. cit., 176, written 1939 [back]

733: GILSON, op. cit., 281; cf. also VIGNAUX, op. cit., 182. " Encore un nom celebre qui pose de nouvelles questions, mal etudiees: rapports du nominalisme et de la mystique. . . . Aux difficultes speculatives se trouvent lies dans ces esprits les problemes pratiques de reforme religieuse." [back]

734: i.e. the mind brought the appointed way i.e. by knowledge - - towards the perfection its nature demands, towards the perfection which is its own divinely intended natural end [back]

735: The lesson is " eternal "; cf. Gilson's great exposition of this theme, The Unity of Philosophical Experience. And what but this has been the history, in the nineteenth century, of English Protestantism's hold on the national life? [back]

736: In his Commentary on the VIII Books of the Physics he writes: " The natural philosophy taught by Aristotle is erroneous, and it is insufficiently taught"; cf. VIGNAUX, op. cit., p. 193 [back]

737: Student of theology at Paris, 1348 Grand-Master of the College de Navarre, 1356 Master of Sacred Theology, 1362 Bishop of Lisieux, 1377 died, 1382 cf. ib., 193 and following pages, for description of this revolution among the physicists [back]

738: Prague 1348, Vienna 1365, Heidelberg 1386, Cologne 1388, Erfurt 1393, Wurzburg 1403 Leipzig 1409, Rostock 1419, Louvain 1426 [back]

739: Griefswald 1456, Freiburg 1457, Basel 1460, Treves and Ingoldstadt 1472, Mainz and Tubingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502, Frankfort on the Oder 1506 [back]

740: The effect of John Wyclif is considered in Chapter IV [back]

741: To Raymund of Capua; Legenda, quoted GARDNER, op. cit., 151. [back]

742: The valuable testimony of the Dominican Archbishop of Florence, St. Antoninus, may be cited. He was born in 1389 ten years after the Schism had begun he lived to see it brought to an end, and to see the years of confused thinking among theologians and canonists that were its legacy. In his history of his own times he says, about the disputed point which of the two lines of popes was the true line, " There were many discussions about this matter and many books were written in defence of both sides. Through all the time that the division lasted both parts (or obediences) could count among their supporters men exceedingly learned, both in theology and canon law, and also men of most holy life and (what is more striking still) outstanding by the miracles they wrought; yet it was never possible so to decide the question that no doubts remained in the minds of the majority of men." Chronicorum III, tit. 22; quoted GARDNER, op. cit., 252 [back]

743: The best account is still GARDNER, op. cit., 252 and following. Dr. W. Ullman is about to publish a book on The Origins of the Great Schism. [back]

744: Four were Italian, one Aragonese the rest eleven were French there were also seven cardinals who took no part in the election, i.e., the six left at Avignon in charge of the territory by Gregory XI, and the legate sent to the peace conference at Sarzana [back]

745: The population of Rome in 1378 has been reckoned at 17,000; under Innocent III (1198-1216) it was 35.000; cf. PAPENCORDT Cola di Rienzo, pp. 14, 37. [back]

746: It had, apparently, already been put forward in informal discussions before the conclave began: SALEMBER, 37, and GARDNER, 255-60. [back]

747: Guillaume de la Voulte, O.S.B., Bishop of Marseilles, Philip de Rufinis, O.P. Bishop of Tivoli; and Stephen Palosius Bishop of Todi and the acting spiritual ruler of Rome as papal vicar. The first went over to the French side in 1378, the others stood by Urban, who created them cardinals in 1378 and 1385. [back]

748: Acts viii, 20. The words of St. Peter to the father of simony. [back]

749: cf. H.-L. VI, pt. ii, 1055. This cardinal was a Benedictine, Bishop of Amiens since 1373, and cardinal since 1375 [back]

750: The fourth, the aged Tebaldeschi, was at this time seriously ill. He died at Rome, August 20 or September 9, 1378 [back]

751: Clement was no more than 36 years of age. The youthfulness of popes is one of the features of this age Gregory XI in 1370 was 42. Boniface IX in 1389, 34 [back]

752: GARDNER, pp. 243-4, 291 [back]

753: GARDNER, pp. 281-2, 312. Oct. 8, 1378 [back]

754: Ib., pp. 282-3, 313 [back]

755: Giovanna a many times married lady, one of the most notorious royal " promiscuists " of the Middle Ages, more than suspect of having murdered one of her husbands had no children. Charles was the husband of her nearest relative, her niece Margaret: he had also some claim in his own right, for he was the only descendant in the male line of the ancestor common to himself and Giovanna, Charles II of Naples through whom she inherited. [back]

756: i.e., before the election of Clement VII [back]

757: Had already written [back]

758: They had previously acknowledged Urban and publicly proclaimed him. [back]

759: The university was organised in four groups called " nations ": the French, Picard, English and German [back]

760: This was the occasion of Peter d'Ailly's first appearance in the great affair a simple bachelor of theology charged to convey the university's demands to Clement VII [back]

761: Upon which many doctors went over to Urban VI- H.-L. VI, pt. ii, p. 1118. [back]

762: March 1, 1391 [back]

763: April 17, 1379 [back]

764: VALOIS, Schisme II, 416-17, H. L., op. cit., 1148, note [back]

765: " L'Universite confondait desormais les deux papes dans une meme reprobation." VALOIS, ut sup. [back]

766: For the years 1378-80, 1383-86 there is not a single document surviving of Urban VI, and we only possess any archives of Boniface IX for five out of the fourteen years of his reign i.e. 1389-94. All the accounts have disappeared and the greater part of the register of bulls [back]

767: The story needs to be read in all its fullness to realise what legal expertise can achieve when the legist pushed to extremity is, at the same time, the acknowledged supreme ruler of his opponents; cf. VALOIS, Schisme III, pp. 213-22, or the resume in H.-L. VI, pt. ii, 1238-40 [back]

768: Whence the protest of the Bishop of Le Puy against its authority, a council "in quo Ecclesia vel viri ecclesiastici non president," H.-L. XI (pt. 2), 1212 [back]

769: Louis, Duke of Orleans [back]

770: The Dukes of Berry, Burgundy and Bourbon. [back]

771: King Charles III, of Navarre [back]

772: For the debates and the manoeuvres of this important council cf. VALOIS op. cit., III, 150-185, of which Dom Leclercq gives a very useful summary in H.-L. VI pt. ii, 1210-26 [back]

773: August 8 [back]

774: i.e. not merely until such time as Benedict had surrendered to the French crown [back]

775: cf. H.-L. VI, pt. ii, page 1216 (quoting VALOIS, op. cit., III, page 159, note 3); Pierre Flurie, a Master of Theology, is of the opinion that the King of France has the power, and should use it, " par soy ou par autres, les deux contendans du papat bouter hors sans delay, le plus tost que bonnement faire se pourra, et faire que les cardinauls des deus contendans qui seront de ceste opinion assembles en certain lieu eslissent un tiers pape universel. . . et punir les autres comme scismatiques ". It is almost the very programme of Pisa. [back]

776: LECLERCQ in H.-L. VI, pt. ii, 1226. [back]

777: H.-L. VI, pt. ii, 1226. It was the votes of the lower clergy that turned the scale, the first victory of that turba whose will was to be such a power at Pisa (1409) Constance (1414-18) and Basel (1431-49). [back]

778: As did King of Scotland [back]

779: Leclercq in H.-L. VI, pt. ii, 1259-60 [back]

780: Now 75 years old [back]

781: This was Louis II of Naples; since May 1401 his state of Provence had returned to its obedience to Benedict [back]

782: cf. VALOIS, Schisme III, 366. " One might well have thought that the days of 'the withdrawal of obedience' had returned." [back]

783: E. VANSTEENBERGHE article, Boniface IX in D.H.G.E. IX (1937), 909-22 [back]

784: E. F. JACOB, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (194.0), p. 28 [back]

785: "La pire reputation," says Vansteenberghe [back]

786: VANSTEENBERGHE op. cit., 919 [back]

787: cf. infra. p. 304 [back]

788: Innocent VII to Florence, letter of February 1, 1405, in VALOIS op. cit., Vol. III, 388 n. [back]

789: A theologian of the university, and one of the day's great orators. He had been a prominent figure now for years, since in 1392 he had written his Complainte de l'Eglise in the coming years he was to be a supporter of that Duke of Burgundy who had had Louis d'Orleans murdered, and to write an early theological justification of tyrannicide [back]

790: "Le roi a autre habitude a son peuple que n'a le pape a l'Eglise. Le roi est seigneur de ses subgez, mais le pape n'est pas seigneur de l'Eglise, mais menistre. . . le pape est subget a l'Eglise, car il est par election et non par succession." H.-L. VII, pt. i, 1285 note; VALOIS, Schisme III, 430-431. cf. Nicholas of Cusa at Basel (1439) "libertas electionis est radix per quam omnis ordinata potestas constituitur. . . in populo omnes potestates tam spirituales in potentia latent quam etiam temporales. . ." [back]

791: November 30, 1406 [back]

792: But this last obligation would cease if, through Benedict's fault, the union was not established within fifteen months. [back]

793: The bishop's palace at Lucca [back]

794: And a great part of the papal court went with them. [back]

795: This murder was the prelude to years of civil war in France, the war which "let in" the English armies of Henry V [back]

796: For all this cf. H.-L. VI pt. ii, 1345-7, or VALOIS, op. cit., III, 610-13. [back]

797: May 21, 1408 [back]

798: One of these was a cardinal, Antoine de Challant. [back]

799: cf. H.-L. VI, pt. ii, 1362-3. Six of Benedict XIII's cardinals signed the agreement (the other three remained loyal to him), and eight of Gregory XII's (two by proxy); for text of the pact cf. MANSI, t. XXVII, col. 140 [back]

800: ". . . deux tombereaux a ordures amenaient du Louvre. . . les messagers " to the pillory, and after the exhibition " les memes tombereaux les ramenerent au Louvre " H.-L. VI (pt. 2), 1351, or VALOIS, op. cit., III [back]

801: cf. the Trinitarian Friar a doctor in theology saying " quod anum sordidissimae omasariae osculari mallet quam os Petri." Ibid [back]

802: "Ce regime, quoi qu'on dise, sentait le provisoire." VALOIS, op. cit., IV (or in H,-L. VI (pt. 2), 1356), the whole story of this council should be read, in Valois, IV pp. 21-41 or, summarised from Valois, in H.-L., ut. sup. 1349-57 [back]

803: H.-L., VI (pt. 2), 1370-4. VALOIS, op. cit., IV, 47-53 [back]

804: 8 archbishops, 33 bishops, 83 abbots, 4 generals of religious orders, proxies of 10 other bishops and of 40 abbots, of as many cathedral chapters, of four universities and 80 monasteries. H.-L. ib., 1371-2. [back]

805: His rival Wenzel had recognised the council, not only as King of Bohemia, but also as emperor or rather as emperor-elect [back]

806: Fixed to the doors of the cathedral [back]

807: cf. the full text in H.-L. VII, pt. i, pp. 46-8. " Sancta et universalis synodus, universalem ecclesiam repraesentans. . . et pro tribunali sedens. . . [declarat]. . . omnia et singula crimina. . . fuisse vera et esse, atque notoria, ipsosque Angelum Corrarium et Petrum de Luna. . . schismaticos. . . nec non notorios hereticos. . . et ex dignitate etiam papali. . . fore ipso facto abiectos et privatos, ac etiam ab ecclesia praecisos; et nihilominus ipsos Petrum et Angelum et eorum utrumque per hanc sententiam definitivam in his scriptis privat, abiicit, praescindit. . " [back]

808: C. Si papa dist. 40 [back]

809: C. Aliorum causa 9 q. 3. [back]

810: cf. supra pp. 108-9 [back]

811: cf. supra p. 261 [back]

812: July 21, 1415. For d'Ailly and Ockham JACOB. Essays 93 quoting A. E. Roberts. [back]

813: These last paragraphs are greatly indebted to an admirable series of articles by Fr. Joseph Lecler, S.J., in Etudes, October 1935 [back]

814: "Tous ces bons et utiles electeurs emportaient chacun pied ou aile" so the mordant wit of Dom Leclercq, H.-L. VII, pt. I, 60 n [back]

815: June 26, 1409-May 3, 1410 [back]

816: 12 October, 1409 [back]

817: . For whom cf. infra, pp. 309-12 [back]

818: John XXIII created eighteen cardinals. Eight of them were Italians. Among the French were Peter d'Ailly, Bishop of Cambrai, and Guillaume Filastre, Dean of Reims. Two of the number were Englishmen, Robert Hallum. Bishop of Salisbury, and Thomas Longley, Bishop of Durham. (EUBEL I, 31-2.) [back]

819: H L. VII, pt. I, pp. 93-4. [back]

820: VALOIS, Schisme IV, 202-16 [back]

821: Perhaps only now since the publication of FINKE'S great work Acta Concilii Constanciensis (1896-1928) is it beginning to be possible to study it with any finality. [back]

822: There were forty-five sessions in all, the first November 16, 1414, the last April 22, 1418 there was one session in 1414, nineteen in 1415, six in 1416, sixteen in 1417, three in 1418 the problem of John XXIII is resolved by May 29, 1415, that of Gregory XII by July 4, and that of John Hus by July 6 of the same year the council is thenceonward fairly free to consider reforms and to elect a new pope, and until he is elected (two years and nine months after the resignation of Gregory XII), the council is its own master Gregory XII's acknowledgment of the council gives it, for Catholics, whatever claim it has to be a General Council, and Martin V's ratification of its decrees gives them whatever claim these have on the acceptance of Catholics; in only the last four sessions (which alone the papacy controlled) is Constance regarded as an oecumenical council. [back]

823: i.e. Patriarchs, archbishops and bishops. [back]

824: The fifth [back]

825: For the text cf. MANSI, XXVII, 590-591: cf. BETTENSON, 190 for the most important of them Sacrosancta (translation only). [back]

826: It is interesting to notice that the sentence which recites the reasons for the deposition, makes no mention of heresy the only act of a pope for which, according to the general opinion of canonists hitherto, he must forfeit his authority. All that the sentence declares proved against him are the flight from the council described as a thing manifestly harmful to the peace of the Church his notorious simony, and his abominable life, both before and since his election, which last, it is declared has scandalised the whole Christian world [back]

827: i.e. for the few weeks of 1378 that intervened between his election and his electors' repudiation of the election [back]

828: The documentation can be found in MANSI, Vol. XXVII, cols. 730-46 [back]

829: Terrenas Affectiones, March 13, 1415, MANSI, XXXII, col. 733 [back]

830: Cum ad laudem of same date; ib. col. 733-4. [back]

831: Remota tamen omnino dicti Balthassaris praesidentia et praesentia; MANSI, col. 733. The powers granted in the commission are stated to have reference to " congregationem ipsam, in quantum per dictam serenitatem regiam, et non Balthassarem, sese nuncupari facientem Joannem XXIII vocatum. . . " Gregory XII nowhere speaks of John XXIII's "obedience". [back]

832: The schedule, Quia sanctissimus dominus noster: which begins by describing the assembly. . . celebris fama huius sanctae congregationis pro generali concilio Constantiensi. . . congregatae: the vital words are given Ego, Joannes. . . istud sacrum concilium generale convoco et omnia per ipsum agenda auctorizo et confirmo: MANSI, ib., col. 734 [back]

833: MANSI, ib. col. 735 [back]

834: Divina gratia dirigente dated from Rimini, March 10, 1415; MANSI, ib., col. 737 [back]

835: The schedule, Ego Carolus de Malatestes, MANSI, ib., col. 744 [back]

836: "Admittit, approbat et collaudet ", ib., col. 745 [back]

837: December 13, 1415 [back]

838: The thirty-seventh general session [back]

839: Since 1059 [back]

840: All but two [back]

841: For Robert Hallum, Bishop of Salisbury, cf. E. F. JACOB, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (1943), Ch. IV, English Conciliar Activity 1395-1418, esp. pages 76-84 [back]

842: Fortieth session. [back]

843: The new pope Cardinal Deacon of S. George in Velabro (the title given centuries later to John Henry Newman) was only a subdeacon: he was ordained deacon the day after his election, priest on the 13th and consecrated bishop on the 14th, on which day he also said his first mass. On the following Sunday November 21st, he was solemnly crowned in the courtyard of the palace of the B}shop of Constance. [back]

844: cf. supra., pp. 159-68 [back]

845: This aspect of the council is treated in PAUL ARENDT, Die Predigten des Konstanzer Konzils (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1933). [back]

846: Thirty-ninth session [back]

847: The detail of this second decree of the thirty-ninth Session, Si vero, is also interesting as an accidental commentary on the double conclave of 1378. Should it ever again happen (the decree begins) that two or more act as pope, the General Council already convoked is to come together within one year of the day when the rival popes began to reign. To this council all those bound to attend General Councils must go without awaiting any formality of invitation, the emperor and the christian princes also, tamquam ad commune incendium extinguendum, for the love of Jesus Christ. Each of the contending popes must also, under pain of losing all his rights and claims, convoke the council within one month of the day when he hears his rival has assumed power, he must notify his rival of the council and cite him to appear before it, he must himself attend the council in person, and not depart from it until the schism is ended. Neither of the popes is to preside at the council, and from the moment it meets, the jurisdiction of both is suspended and none is to give either obedience. For elections said to be made through fear, special regulations are provided. The election if made through fear is null, and it cannot be validated by any later election, even though, when this second election takes place, the fear has ceased to exist. But the cardinals are not to proceed to any kind of second election (unless the one elected through fear has resigned or died) until the General Council has passed judgment on the first election. If the cardinals ignore this law any election they hold is void and both the man they elect, and the cardinals who take part in the election, lose for ever all rank and privileges and the right of ever being elected; those who obey a pope so elected are to be considered as fostering schism. Should the General Council decide against the election made through fear, and should the cardinals, in violation of the law, have made an invalid second election. it is the Council that must elect to the vacant see. The decree then sets out what, after an election made through fear, the cardinals may or must do as soon as they can move without danger to their lives they are to make their way to a safe place, and there publicly make known, on oath, and before witnesses of substantial character, the fear they allege as invalidating the election, and all the circumstances of the election, and they must cite to the next General Council (which must now meet within a year) the man whom they have elected. To this council all must go (as before) even though the man whom they elected pope through fear refuses to convoke it. Once the council meets, the elect is suspended from his office; in no case may he preside at the council, nor any obedience be given him. Heavy penalties are provided for all who transgress this law, and it is enacted that it is to be read anew at the end of every General Council. [back]

848: For these cf. supra., pp. 165, 166 [back]

849: i.e. chiefly, the diocesan bishops [back]

850: Per quoscumque pro Romanis Pontificibus se gerentes. Martin V, who had begun life as an adherent of the Roman line of popes, who had received his red hat from one of these (Innocent VII), had helped to elect another (Gregory XII), had then deserted the Roman line, and played his part in inaugurating the Pisan line, who had as a cardinal of the Pisan pope come to this council of Constance and, until the last moment of the eleventh hour, had stood by this Pisan pope (John XXIII) could understand, as well as any other man, that this first decree to be issued by the first pope of the newly restored unanimity must not risk a renewal of the divisions through any official attempt to distinguish between the legality of the three lines so lately contending; we may also note the still more careful reference in the opening sentence of the decree, which yet saves the position that somewhere, in all these forty years, there was a true and lawful pope, Attendentes, quod a tempore obitus felicis recordationis Gregorii papae XI (i.e. 1378) praedecessoris nostri, nonnulli Romani pontifices, aut pro Romnanis pontificibus se gerentes, et in suis diversis obedientis reputati. . . [back]

851: i.e. as though they were thieves and in possession of stolen goods [back]

852: With Germany (May 2, 1418 H.-L. VII, pt. i 536-549 for text) - - with Italy France and Spain, (same date, ib. 549-560); with England (July 12, 1418, ib., 560-565 [back]

853: cf. supra. p. 164: servitia communia is the name of the tax, one third of the assessed annual revenue of the see or abbey, paid to the papal treasury on appointment as bishop or abbot [back]

854: i.e. By the death of the beneficiary while at the Roman Curia [back]

855: Or eight in France, Italy, Spain. [back]

856: Thirty years 'Twenty-five years [back]

857: cf. supra, p. 164. This amount is printed in Eubel's great work at the head of the list of bishops for each see [back]

858: An arrangement whereby a religious corporation a college or an abbey became the parish-priest and entitled to the revenues: such corporations were bound to provide a vicar, who worked the parish, to whom they paid out of the revenues a salary agreed by the bishop [back]

859: Ad instar alterius indulgentiae [back]

860: One last word about the English concordat, it included a special promise that the pope would not concede to abbots and minor prelates the privilege of using at mass the episcopal insignia such as the mitre and the sandals [back]