Absolute Monarchs (31 page)

BEFORE GREGORY’S ELECTION
, each of the fourteen cardinals had sworn a personal oath that, if elected, he would immediately stand down in the event of the death or abdication of Pope Benedict in Avignon. Each had also promised that within three months of his election he would open negotiations with Benedict to decide on a place where the two popes might meet. Gregory kept his word and sent an embassy to his rival, and after long and occasionally acrimonious discussions it was finally agreed that the meeting should take place at Savona on September 29, 1407. Only after this decision was made did the old man begin to waver. The pressure came principally from King Ladislas of Naples, Doge Michele Steno of Venice, and the future Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, all of whom dreaded seeing the Papacy fall once more into French hands. Benedict went as far as Portovenere near La Spezia, but Gregory stopped at Lucca, where he firmly announced that he was no longer willing to meet his rival. Nor would he in any circumstances abdicate.

It was an astonishing volte-face, which lost Gregory much support. Now at last the Sacred Colleges of the two rival popes forgot their separate allegiances and gathered in June 1408 at Livorno, where they issued an appeal to both hierarchies, including the popes themselves, together with the princes of Europe or their representatives to meet at a General Council, to be held at Pisa on March 25, 1409. The popes refused, but the invitation to Pisa received a most gratifying response, being accepted by no fewer than 4 patriarchs, 24 cardinals, 80 bishops—102 others sent delegates to represent them—the heads of four religious orders, and an impressive number of distinguished theologians from universities and religious houses. The Council’s fifteen sessions lasted for over ten weeks. Both Gregory and Benedict were condemned as “notorious schismatics and heretics”—though there were many who inquired of just what heresies they had been guilty—and formally deposed. The cardinals then formed a conclave and elected the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Pietro Philarghi, who had started life as an orphaned beggar boy in Crete and was to end it as Pope Alexander V. But the Council had made one disastrous mistake. By calling the two rival popes to appear before it—and declaring them contumacious when they refused—it had implied its superiority over the Papacy itself, a principle which neither of the rival pontiffs could have been expected to endorse. Before long it became clear that its only real effect had been to saddle Christendom with three popes instead of two. But it was unrepentant, and when Pope Alexander died suddenly in May 1410 it lost no time in electing his successor.

Baldassare Cossa, who now joined the papal throng under the name of John XXIII,
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was widely believed at the time to have poisoned his predecessor. Whether he actually did so is open to doubt. He had, however, unquestionably begun life as a pirate; and a pirate, essentially, he remained. Morally and spiritually, he reduced the Papacy to a level of depravity unknown since the days of the pornocracy in the tenth century. A contemporary chronicler records in shocked amazement the rumor current in Bologna—where Cossa had been papal legate—that during his time there he had seduced two hundred matrons, widows, and virgins, to say nothing of an alarming number of nuns. His score over the three following years is regrettably not recorded; he seems, however, to have maintained a respectable average, for on May 29, 1415, he was arraigned before another General Council, meeting this time at Constance, the only such council ever to be held north of the Alps.

There was a certain irony here, since the Council of Constance had originally been Pope John’s idea. He had plenty of energy and intelligence, but in the circumstances he found it difficult indeed to put himself forward as a spiritual leader of men. His first synod had been a disaster—constantly interrupted, we are told, by an owl that flew into his face and screeched at him. (True or not, the very existence of the story is an indication of the contempt in which he was generally held.) To preside at a General Council would, he felt, give him the prestige he lacked, and there was plenty of work for it to do. First of all, there were his two rivals to be dealt with: Gregory and Benedict, who had refused to accept the authority of those gathered at Pisa to depose them. There was also an urgent need to investigate the teachings of John Wycliffe in England and Jan Hus in Bohemia. What he needed now was a powerful patron, and so, toward the end of 1412, he approached one of the leading figures on the European stage, Sigismund of Luxembourg.

Sigismund was now forty-four. The son of the Emperor Charles IV, King of Germany and—through his wife—of Hungary, he was the half brother of King Wenceslas of Bohemia (whose crown he was also to inherit seven years later) and was therefore much concerned by the influence of Hus, which was spreading rapidly across Europe. He conferred with Pope John personally at Lodi just before Christmas 1413, and it was jointly announced that the Council would meet at Constance on November 1 of the following year. In the ensuing discussions the two quickly reached agreement on all points except one: Sigismund made it clear that he expected to preside over the Council himself. To John, this was a serious blow. Had he been in sole charge of the proceedings, he could have steered them more or less as he wished. With Sigismund in control, however, the Council could well turn against him. It was thus with serious misgivings that, in early October 1414, he set out for Constance.

The attendance at Pisa had been impressive enough, but most of those present had been Italian or French. The Council of Constance, with the most powerful prince of Central Europe behind it, was on an altogether different scale. Altogether there were nearly 700 delegates, including 29 cardinals and some 180 bishops. Jan Hus was there in person, his security guaranteed—as he thought—by a letter of safe conduct from Sigismund, but he was arrested on the pope’s orders after only a preliminary hearing, handed over to the king when he arrived just before Christmas, and—still at Constance—burnt at the stake on July 6, 1415.

Pope John, meanwhile, had fled from his own Council. During the first weeks of the new year the mood had turned against him, and there were insistent demands that he should be put on trial for his countless crimes. He had one firm ally, Frederick of Habsburg, Duke of Austria; and on the night of March 20, when the duke had obligingly arranged a tournament in Sigismund’s honor, John disguised himself with some difficulty as a stable boy and slipped out of the city, heading first to Frederick’s castle at Schaffhausen and then, as he hoped, to the protection of the Duke of Burgundy across the Rhine. But it was to no avail. The Council having called without success for his immediate and unconditional abdication, Sigismund sent his soldiers to find and arrest him. Meanwhile he was tried in his absence, and duly condemned. As Edward Gibbon delightedly noted, “the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.” John spent the next four years in the custody of the Elector Ludwig III of Bavaria, from whom he eventually purchased his liberty for a vast sum. Returning to Italy, he was, somewhat surprisingly, forgiven, and his long career of debauch and depravity was rewarded by the bishopric of Tusculum and one of the grandest of early Renaissance tombs, the joint work of Donatello and Michelozzo, in the baptistery of Florence Cathedral.

It was at Constance that matters were finally settled. John XXIII and Benedict XIII—both now eighty-seven—were deposed; Gregory XII was prevailed upon to abdicate with honor, with the promise that he would rank second in the hierarchy, immediately after the future pope—a privilege that was the more readily accorded in view of the fact that, since he was now approaching ninety and looked a good deal older, it was not thought likely that he would enjoy it for long. Indeed, two years later he was dead, and with the election of Cardinal Oddone Colonna as Pope Martin V in 1417, the schism was effectively at an end.

AS THE SCHISM
ended, the Renaissance Papacy began, with Martin as its first representative. Although a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished Roman families, he could not immediately establish himself in Rome. The city was, as so often in the past, a battleground—this time being fought over by two warring soldiers of fortune—and it was not until three years after his election that he was finally able to enter it for the first time as pope. He was shocked by what he saw. Rome was in ruins, its total population having shrunk to some 25,000, hopelessly demoralized, and in many cases half starving. Foxes, even wolves, roamed the streets. The once-magnificent buildings stood roofless and untenanted. The restoration of the Vatican, set in train half a century before, had long since been suspended, and the pope even had difficulty in finding somewhere decent to live. Fortunately, one of his own family’s palaces was still up to a point habitable; there he was obliged to stay while the work was resumed and until it was eventually completed.

Meanwhile he got down to business. He took in hand the chaotic papal finances and initiated a hugely ambitious program of restoration and reconstruction of the whole city: the walls and fortifications, the bridges, the ruined basilicas and churches. He summoned three great painters from the North—Pisanello, Masaccio, and Gentile da Fabriano—for the redecoration of the Lateran alone. In the diplomatic field he succeeded, at least to a considerable degree, in bringing under his control the Church in France, which during the Avignon years had become quite impossibly arrogant and overbearing. He took the first significant steps in internationalizing the College of Cardinals, weakening the Italian and French elements and introducing numbers of Englishmen, Germans, and Spaniards. He got rid of the countless bands of brigands which were terrorizing the city and the surrounding countryside. Finally, he reestablished order in the Papal States.

His purpose behind all these achievements was to reassert the power and prestige of the Papacy after the chaos into which it had fallen during the schism. The two recent assemblies, at Pisa and at Constance, had asserted several worrying new principles. The pope, it appeared, was no longer supreme: he was now at the mercy of a General Council, which stood above him and could depose him at will. Now, according to the conciliarists, it was the Council, rather than the pope, which constituted the ultimate authority in the Church; the pope was its servant, bound to give it his obedience and to respect its decisions. Councils, it had been agreed, were to be held regularly. In short, the Papacy was now undergoing the process already familiar to most nations of western Europe: that of slow democratization, the gradual substitution of absolute monarchy by parliamentary government.

To these ideas Martin V was not entirely unsympathetic. The Council of Constance had, after all, rescued the Church from forty years of schism and, quite possibly, from ultimate disintegration; to it, indeed, he very largely owed his own crown. On the other hand, Councils were unwieldy things which met infrequently, spoke with many different voices, and took an eternity to reach any major decision. They were no substitute for a single strong hand at the helm, and that Pope Martin was determined—and well able—to supply. He made his own decisions, keeping both cardinals and Curia under his own strict personal control. When, for example, in September 1423 the time came for the next Council, to be held at Pavia, he announced that he would not be attending. In consequence of this and of a sudden outbreak of plague which necessitated the Council’s last-minute transfer to Siena, there were relatively few delegates present, and when their discussions turned to the question of further restrictions on papal power, he made the poor attendance a pretext for closing down the whole assembly. The Church would have to wait until the next Council, which was to meet in July 1431 in Basel.

As 1430 drew to its close, the sixty-two-year-old pope showed himself, if anything, still less enthusiastic about the Basel meeting than he had been about its predecessor. Once again he made it clear that there would be no question of his being there himself; in his stead he appointed Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini as its president, giving him authority to dissolve it at any moment if it threatened to tread on dangerous ground. In the event, he could not have attended even had he wished to do so; on February 20, 1431, he died of an apoplectic stroke. He had been, if not a great pope, at least an outstandingly good one; and he had restored peace and good government to his city. Once again Michelozzo and Donatello worked together on a papal tomb, but this time it stood in Rome rather than Florence, and its inscription,
TEMPORUM SUORUM FELICITAS
, was a testimonial of which, surely, any pope would have been proud.

THAT EPITAPH, HOWEVER
, is unlikely to have been suggested by the College of Cardinals. The cardinals had never liked Martin. They had resented his arrogance, his unwillingness to listen, his reluctance even to consult them, let alone take their advice. The conciliar spirit was in the air and to a greater or lesser extent had infected all of them. He had paid it lip service, up to a point; but as time went on he had become increasingly impatient with the whole idea. Now that the Basel Council was about to open, it was essential that the next pope, whoever he might be, should show himself to be in sympathy with the reforms that were to be proposed. Thus it was that the cardinals all undertook that whoever should be elected would give the Council his wholehearted support, working with the Sacred College, rather than in opposition to it, in the government of the Church.

Unfortunately, things did not turn out quite as they had planned. Their choice fell on Gabriele Condulmer, a Venetian—though not, like his uncle Gregory XII, an aristocrat—who had spent much of his early life as an Augustinian hermit on an island in the lagoon. His rise to power, first as Bishop of Siena and from 1408 as cardinal, had been unashamedly nepotistic; and whatever promises he may have made before the conclave, once reigning as Pope Eugenius IV, he showed little more goodwill toward the coming Council than Pope Martin had before him. Indeed, when the Council eventually opened on July 23, 1431, the attendance was so sparse—among the absentees was Cardinal Cesarini, appointed by Martin to preside—that after six months Eugenius attempted to dissolve it. This, however, proved a serious mistake. The delegates may have been comparatively few, but they were conciliarists to a man, and they absolutely refused to be dissolved. The pope, they claimed, had no authority to dismiss them. It was they, not he, who were supreme in the Church; and unless he presented himself before them and withdrew his Bull of Dissolution, it was he, not they, who would be dismissed.