The Western Schism
While, by now, the papacy had officially relocated from the banks of the Rhone to the banks of the Tiber, St. Peter’s vast riches, library, and archives still mostly remained in Avignon. Throughout the latter months of Pope Gregory XI’s rule, the papacy spent large sums of money transporting its own treasures to Rome –a task which required scores of dutiful scribes and accountants. Despite being only forty-eight, and having been appointed pope in 1370, Pope Gregory was tragically not long for this life and with the end nearing, he realized that a house divided could not stand. With what little time he had left, he sought to re-orient the Sacred College away from its French branch and toward a decidedly more Italian pontiff. When Gregory died on March 27, 1378, the people of Rome could be heard shouting, “Romano lo volemo, o almeno italiano!” (or “we demand a Roman or at least an Italian!”). And the conclave agreed.
The new pope was to be Bartalomeo Prignano, a disagreeable working-class Neapolitan who served as a lifelong austere papal bureaucrat under the titular role of Archbishop of Bami. He took the name of Pope Urban VI. Upon assuming power, this quiet but efficient pope suddenly transformed into a “raging tyrant” and began hurling insults at all the cardinals (particularly the thirteen French cardinals), even physically attacking them on occasion. Unsurprisingly, the thirteen French cardinals quietly slipped away from Rome, and one by one they fled to Anagni where they publicly declared Urban an illegitimate pope because his election was made under the threat of “mob violence.” They were then given political protection in Fondi (in the Kingdom of Naples) under Queen Joanna before returning to Avignon. With little response from Rome, the recalcitrant cardinals then declared Urban deposed and elected Robert of Geneva as Pope Clement VII, a man known for his “barbaric brutality.” Both popes promptly excommunicated one another, dividing the papacy in half and leading to an era of conflict and confusion known as the “Western Schism.” It was to last for the next forty years, with one pope seated in Avignon and the other in Rome.
John Julius Norwich offers the following remarks on this troubled epoch:
“Western Christendom now faced a dilemma unique in its history. Antipopes were nothing new, but the present rivals had both been elected by the same cardinals, and though Urban’s election had been unquestionably canonical –no one took the accusations of intimidation too seriously—the manner of his deposition had been unprecedented: could popes be unmade by those who made them? On the other hand, Urban was clearly becoming even more unbalanced. And so the continent was split down the middle: England, Germany, north and central Italy, and central Europe remained loyal to Urban, while Scotland, France, Savoy, Burgundy, and Naples accepted the authority of Clement. So, after long hesitation, did Aragon and Castile” (229).
Clement VII quickly confiscated the remaining papal riches in Avignon and embarked on an extravagant binge of luxury and opulence (much like his namesake, Clement VI). Meanwhile, Urban VI had troubles of his own –Queen Joanna of Naples was his chief rival and so the pope had her quickly deposed and appointed his cousin, Charles Durazzo, in her stead. Joanna was later found suffocated and strangled to death while imprisoned. However, the new king of Naples proved to be just as difficult for the pope. Paranoid and eager to regain control of Neapolitan fiefs, Urban flew into a rage, he excommunicated Charles, and had six of his cardinals hideously tortured and killed (only one was saved –an Englishman who was granted permission to return home at the request of Richard II). Charles was to die in Hungary shortly thereafter, and Urban returned to Rome where he died the following year (in 1389).
“Pope Clement –technically he is now seen by the Church as an antipope, though he himself would have been horrified by the description—outlived his rival by seven years. Never for a second did he doubt the validity of his own election; and it was a bitter disappointment to him when, on Urban’s death, the ensuing conclave did not recognize him as the legitimate pope and so put an end to the schism once and for all. Instead, they insanely elected another Neapolitan, Pietro Tomacelli, as Boniface IX” (230).
Both sides in the schism refused to solve the conflict –Rome refused to moderate in 1387 upon the death of Urban VI, and Avignon likewise followed suit in 1394 upon the death of Clement VII. In the wake of Urban’s death in Rome, Pope Boniface IX was elected in Rome in 1389 –“apart from an unfortunate tendency toward simony, [he] was young and energetic”—and in Avignon, an Aragonese cardinal named Pedro de Luna was elected as Benedict XIII in 1394. Despite flirting with the idea of resigning his pontificate in order to resolve the schism, when he found himself seated in the papal chair, with all its power and prestige, he promptly tossed aside all sense of civic virtue in this respect and clung to power as long as possible. “A proud and unbending Spaniard, he now made it plain that he and he alone was the rightful pontiff and that no power on Earth could persuade him to relinquish his responsibilities” (231).
At least Boniface proved that rarest of pontiffs –a competent leader in Rome: “All in all he had been a competent pope, repairing much of the damage done by his predecessor, regaining the allegiance of Naples, and, perhaps most important of all, imposing his authority on Rome, putting an end to its republican independence and creating a new Senate –nominated by himself—to be responsible for the city’s administration. He had also undertaken a major reconstruction of the Castel Sant’Angelo. His principal fault was his unscrupulousness in financial affairs: indulgences, simonies, annates (the practice by which a year’s income from a benefice or see was paid directly to Rome) –it seemed there was no abuse that he would not happily tolerate so long as it kept the gold flowing into his coffers. On the other hand, with the main treasury and the financial departments still at Avignon, it is not easy to see how he and his Curia would otherwise have survived” (232).
Boniface died in October of 1404, suffering from gallstones, and he was replaced by Innocent VII, a pope who was seemingly unable to manage growing riots in Rome, especially after his “idiotic” nephew (leader of the papal militia) murdered eleven of the city’s leading citizens, leading to widespread unrest in the city and a violent mob storming the palace. Innocent and his cardinals were lucky enough to escape with their lives and they fled to Viterbo. After tempers died down, the pope returned to Rome in 1406 where he died.
Next, the Roman cardinals selected an eighty-year-old Venetian for pope, Angelo Correr, who took the name Gregory XII. However, still distraught over the schism in the West and exasperated over the existence of two living popes who jockeyed for power, at long last the cardinals of the two Sacred Colleges came together for a summit at Pisa in 1409 (both popes refused to attend) and the cardinals condemned both popes, Gregory and Benedict, as “notorious schismatics and heretics.” They formed a new conclave and elected yet another pope, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Pietro Philarghi, who began life as an orphaned beggar boy on Crete only to rise and become Pope Alexander V. However, like many popes before him, Alexander died shortly thereafter in 1410, and was replaced by yet another new pope, Baldassare Cossa, who took the papal name of John XXIII, a former pirate who was widely believed to have poisoned his predecessor. “Morally and spiritually, he reduced the papacy to a level of depravity unknown since the days of the pornocracy in the tenth century. A contemporary chronicler records in shocked amazement the rumor current in Bologna –where Cossa had been papal legate—that during his time there he had seduced two hundred matrons, widows, and virgins, to say nothing of nuns” (234). Plus, he still had his two chief rival pontiffs, Gregory and Benedict, to contend with and there was also need to investigate the new fiery teachings of John Wycliffe in England and of Jan Huss in Bohemia.
Having been summoned before a General Council at Constance (where an owl apparently entered the room and incessantly screeched in the pope’s face), Pope John was desperately in need of a powerful patron to secure his claim to the throne. This patron conveniently came in 1412 in the form Sigismund of Luxembourg, the forty-four-year-old son of Emperor Charles IV, King of Germany and Hungary (through his wife); he was also related to the King of Bohemia which made the teachings of Hus a paramount concern. Indeed, under false promises of safe passage, Jan Hus was summoned before the Council of Constance and immediately arrested by papal forces after only a preliminary hearing. As was so often the case throughout the history of Christianity, Jan Huss was accused of heresy and then remorselessly burnt at the stake on July 6, 1415 at Constance. Pope John then fled from his own council which sought to try the pope for his own crimes. When Frederick of Hapsburg, the Duke of Austria arranged a tournament in Sigismund’s honor, Pope John took great labors to disguise himself as a stable boy and he quietly slipped away. Making haste for Frederick’s castle at Schaffhausen, he eventually sought protection under the Duke of Burgundy across the Rhine. An irate council back in Constance called for the abdication of Pope John –he was duly tried and condemned in spite of his own absence at the council. Edward Gibbon later amusingly quipped, “the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest.” Pope John managed to purchased his own freedom for a hefty sum in Bavaria and, surprisingly, he was later granted permission to return to Rome where a magnificent early Renaissance tomb was constructed in his honor inside the cathedral at Florence, it was the work of Donatello and Michelozzo.
The matter of the schism was now finally resolved at Constance. The two remaining claimants to the papacy, John XXIII and Benedict XIII (both eighty-seven-years-old), were formally deposed and Gregory XII, now nearly ninety-years-old, was prevailed upon to abdicate the throne with dignity. Two years later, Gregory passed away and a new pope was elected –Cardinal Oddone Colonna as Pope Martin V in 1417. Thus concluded this strange little chapter in papal history.
The Early Renaissance Papacy
“As the schism ended, the Renaissance Papacy began, with Martin as its first representative. Although a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished Roman families, he could not immediately establish himself in Rome. The city was, as so often in the past, a battleground –this time fought over by two warring soldiers of fortune—and it was not until three years that he was finally able to enter it for the first time as pope. He was shocked by what he saw. Rome was in ruins, its total population having shrunk to some 25,000, hopelessly demoralized, and in many cases half starving. Foxes, even wolves roamed the streets. The once-magnificent buildings stood roofless and untenanted. The restoration of the Vatican, set in train half a century before, had long since been suspended, and the pope even had difficulty in finding somewhere decent to live” (236).
After finding refuge in one of his family’s palaces, the pope initiated an impressive process of restoration –refortifying the city, rebuilding bridges, reconstructing the crumbling basilicas and churches, and repainting the Lateran (with help from three skilled northern painters, Pisanello, Masaccio, and Gentile da Fabriano). Abroad, the pope found considerable success, as well. He subdued the insufferable remnants of the church in Avignon, he diluted both the French and Italian elements within the College of Cardinals by appointing many other diverse leaders like Englishmen, Germans, and Spaniards –and he helped restore order in Rome and the Papal States alike. Following the previous councils at Pisa and Constance, a new spirit of subtle democratization had emerged among the papal bureaucracy, however the pope had little taste for it and declined to attend a new council at Pavia. He was saved when a new outbreak of the plague struck which greatly reduced the numbers of those attending (the location was move from Pavia at the last minute). He declined to attend yet another council to be held at Basel and suddenly died of a stroke in 1431. Having restored order and a modicum of dignity to the papacy, a new tomb was constructed in his honor again by Donatello and Michelozzo, only this time in Rome –its inscription read TEMPORUM SUORUM FELICITAS (“the joy/felicity of his times”).
For all his victories, the cardinals mostly despised Martin because of his rejection of the newly emerging conciliar spirit of the age. Thus, they sought to elect a new pope who would respect the College of Cardinals, but alas their choice fell on an Augustinian hermit, a Venetian and former Bishop of Siena named Gabriele Condulmer who took the papal name of Eugenius IV. He proved to be as pig-headed toward his cardinals as his predecessor, claiming the unilateral power to disband the impending council at Basel and refusing to budge on this question –it had become a struggle between theocratic king and his council. As was almost universally the case, the enfeebled Christian papacy was in need of rescue by far more capable hands, in this case King Sigismund, King of Germany, who was recently crowned emperor by Pope Eugenius. Sigismund spent six months negotiated a compromise which ended in a humiliating surrender for the pope –Eugenius was forced to withdraw his dissolution and acknowledge the primacy of the council. Almost immediately, the pope’s enemies exploited the situation, smelling paplal weakness. There were riots in Colonna, and Rome returned to anarchy while the Duke of Milan invaded the Papal States. Finding himself blockaded within the city, the pope fled in disguise as a monk, but he was quickly spotted and assailed. He only narrowly escaped in a small boat down the Tiber which took him to Pisa and then onto Florence (as a guest of Cosimo de’ Medici) where the Sacred College and Curia would soon follow and remain for nine years amidst all the growing turmoil. Among the Curia was a former soldier, Giovanni Vitelleschi, a fierce defender of the papacy who was dispatched to ruthlessly regain balance in the Papal States and in Rome.
Laetentur Caeli
The conflict with the cardinals might have dragged on further if not for the sudden and momentous arrival of John VIII Palaeologus, Emperor of Byzantium. With the relentless march of the Ottoman Turks in the East, the Byzantine Empire was hanging by a thread. Still, there remained a lingering hope for unity in Christendom in the West (as well as a new Crusade, which the Christian Church had long lusted after). There was much fanfare at the Council of Ferrara (which was an ongoing council occuring from 1431-1449) –sophistic theological minutia was bickered over, such as the idea of “filioque” being added to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (a major sticking point in the schism which unfolded some four centuries earlier), and other issues at stake included the number of sacraments, the doctrine of Purgatory, and the unchallenged rule of the pope.
However, the crowning achievement came with the signing of a Decree of Union on July 5, 1439 which began with “Laetentur Caeli” (or “let the heavens rejoice!”). It was a major victory for Pope Eugenius, but unbeknownst to anyone involved, before the emperor could even return to Constantinople, the decree would be dead in the water and the heavens would have little reason to rejoice. The radical conciliarists were found to be outraged with the pope. The decree was soon repudiated and its signatories condemned as traitors (in some cases signatories were physically attacked). Pope Eugenius was quickly suspended and deposed, and on November 5, 1439, yet another antipope was elected –Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy, a deeply pious layman and founder of an order of hermits at Lake Geneva. Reluctantly, he accepted his papal appointment and took the name of Felix V, but he soon came to regret his decision as no one took him seriously. This silly little chapter was to foreshadow the end of the council’s power, though it managed to limp onward until finally dissolving in 1449.
By 1443, the true pope, Eugenius IV, had returned to Rome, after a long Florentine period of exile, and he set about extinguishing the last smoldering embers of the schism (with assistance from a former adviser of the antipope named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini). Eugenius’s eventful sixteen-year reign ended with his death in 1447, and with it vanished the threat of the Western Schism “…never again would papal supremacy be challenged from within the church itself” (244).
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.