Bartolomeo Prignano, who took the name of Urban VI, was in many ways a surprising choice. He was not a Roman aristocrat but a member of the working class of Naples who had never lost his heavy Neapolitan accent. Though now titular (and absentee) Archbishop of Bari, he had spent virtually his whole adult life in the papal chancery and was a bureaucrat through and through: austere, efficient, conscientious. In other circumstances he might have made a perfectly satisfactory pope. But the years of being patronized and generally ordered about by the French cardinals had had their effect. No sooner had he assumed the supreme power than his character underwent a sea change; the quiet, competent civil servant turned overnight into a raging tyrant, hurling insults at the cardinals during the consistories and sometimes even physically attacking them.
Although several distinguished laymen were also the objects of the pope’s abuse—including the Duke of Fondi and even the ambassadors of Queen Joanna of Naples—it was perhaps inevitable that the thirteen French cardinals suffered the most. One by one they slipped away to Anagni, where on August 2 they made a public statement to the effect that Pope Urban’s election had taken place under the threat of mob violence and was therefore invalid; he must therefore abdicate at once. A week later, there still being no reaction from Rome, they moved to Fondi—within the Kingdom of Naples, where Joanna could give them protection—and declared Urban deposed. Then, on September 20, they elected Robert of Geneva as Clement VII. Each pope excommunicated the other, placing his supporters under an interdict. The Great Schism of the West had begun. It was to continue for nearly forty years.
If Urban had been a surprising choice for the Papacy, Clement was an astonishing one. True, the fact that he was neither French nor Italian may have counted in his favor, but his record in Italy had been one of barbaric brutality, and Urban had no difficulty in raising troops to oppose him. Clement first fled to Joanna in Naples; but though she personally supported him her subjects made no secret of their preference for Urban—who was, after all, one of their own—and Clement soon returned with his cardinals to Avignon. Urban, meanwhile, created a new College by appointing no fewer than twenty-nine new cardinals from all over Europe.
Western Christendom now faced a dilemma unique in its history. Antipopes were nothing new, but the present rivals had both been elected by the same cardinals, and though Urban’s election had been unquestionably canonical—no one took the accusations of intimidation too seriously—the manner of his deposition had been unprecedented: could popes be unmade by those who made them? On the other hand, Urban was clearly becoming ever more unbalanced. And so the continent was split down the middle: England, Germany, north and central Italy, and Central Europe remained loyal to Urban, while Scotland, France, Savoy, Burgundy, and Naples accepted the authority of Clement. So, after long hesitation, did Aragon and Castile.2
The Church had been able to tolerate a Papacy exiled to Avignon; but the existence of two rival popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, was too much for it to cope with. Two popes meant two colleges of cardinals, two papal chanceries, two appointments to a single see or abbey—and double the expenditure. In this last field Clement at Avignon had the advantage, since the departments in charge of finance had never properly moved back to Rome. He was able to create a court rivaling that of his namesake Clement VI for luxury and extravagance, from which he continued his struggle against his rival. But Urban too was busy. His most immediate enemy was Joanna of Naples, who courageously remained loyal to Clement. She would soon pay the price. Urban deposed her in 1380 and in her place crowned her cousin, the young Charles of Durazzo. Entering Naples the following year, Charles imprisoned her in the fortress of San Fele, near Muro, and there shortly afterward he had her suffocated.
All too soon, however, Urban found the new king just as intractable as Joanna had been. The pope had now become obsessed with obtaining valuable Neapolitan fiefs for his utterly worthless nephew, and when Charles refused to grant them he began interfering in the internal affairs of the kingdom. Now seriously paranoid, he moved with his cardinals to Nocera, where he heard that six of them were conspiring with Charles to create a council of regency that would effectively act for him. Flying into a fury, he excommunicated the king and had the cardinals brutally tortured. Charles now hastened to Nocera and put the city under siege; Urban and his entourage escaped to Genoa. There five of the six cardinals were put to death; the sixth, an Englishman named Adam Easton, was released only at the personal request of his sovereign, King Richard II. Not till 1386—a few weeks after Charles had been assassinated in Hungary—did the pope return to Rome, where he died the following year.
Pope Clement—technically he is now seen by the Church as an antipope, though he himself would have been horrified by the description—outlived his rival by seven years. Never for a second did he doubt the validity of his own election; and it was a bitter disappointment to him when, on Urban’s death, the ensuing conclave did not recognize him as the legitimate pope and so put an end to the schism once and for all. Instead, they insanely elected another Neapolitan, Pietro Tomacelli, as Boniface IX; and there was an alarming moment in 1391 when King Charles VI of France announced his intention of personally conducting Boniface to Rome, though fortunately nothing came of it. In his last years Clement, while still at Avignon, came under heavy pressure—largely from France and, in particular, the University of Paris—to agree to a solution whereby both popes should resign and open the way for a new conclave; but he, like Boniface, firmly rejected all such suggestions, and he was still stubbornly resisting when he died, of a sudden apoplectic attack, on September 16, 1394.
IT WOULD HAVE been so easy to end the schism; all that was required was that when one of the popes died his conclave should refuse to elect a successor, thus leaving the survivor in undisputed authority. But Rome had passed up the chance in 1387, and Avignon in 1394 did no better. Pope Boniface, apart from an unfortunate tendency to simony, was young and energetic, and Charles VI wrote letters to each of the twenty-one Avignon cardinals, begging them to accept him. But it was no use: on the grounds that they must on no account be swayed by outside influences, they left his letters unopened. Each of them, however, swore to work for the resolution of the schism; and each undertook, if elected, to abdicate if ever there were a majority decision that he should do so. They then proceeded to elect—unanimously—the Aragonese cardinal Pedro de Luna, who now took the name of Benedict XIII.
Benedict had an impressive record. He had been among the last of the original cardinals to abandon Pope Urban, but once he had finally become convinced of the legitimacy of Urban’s deposition he had given unwavering support to Clement, who had appointed him to the Iberian Peninsula as his legate. It was thanks to him that Aragon and Castile, Portugal and Navarre had all eventually given their support to the Avignon Papacy. In 1393 he had been transferred to Paris, where he had publicly championed the scheme of ending the schism by the abdication of both popes, declaring that he would certainly follow such a course in the event of his own election. Whether or not this attitude told in his favor at the conclave we shall never know, but on finding himself pope he instantly changed his mind. A proud and unbending Spaniard, he now made it plain that he and he alone was the rightful pontiff and that no power on Earth could persuade him to relinquish his responsibilities.
And he proved it. In May 1395 there arrived in Avignon an embassy consisting of three royal dukes sent by Charles VI; in June 1397 an Anglo-French mission; in May 1398 ambassadors from Germany. All of them implored the pope to remember his sworn oath and make his formal abdication. He remained immovable. Then, in June of that year, a French national synod decided to withdraw from his obedience. This came as a serious blow, since it deprived him of the all-important revenues from the Church in France; it also induced Navarre and Castile to follow the French example. Several panic-stricken cardinals also deserted him. But Benedict kept his nerve, allowing himself to be blockaded in his palace, confident that sooner or later the pendulu
m would swing back in his favor.
As indeed it did. The French Church had not gone over to Boniface; it had opted for independence and in doing so had made many of the hierarchy profoundly uneasy. The people, too, who had complained bitterly at paying taxes to the Papacy, were still more resentful at seeing these go straight into the royal coffers. One March night in 1403, with the aid of his most influential ally, the Duke of Orleans, Pope Benedict slipped out of his palace into Provence, where he was immediately and enthusiastically acclaimed. There was nothing to be done. France, Navarre, and even the errant cardinals all returned to the fold. Benedict had won that round, but he was still committed to working for the end of the schism, and in September 1404 he at last felt strong enough to send an embassy to Rome, proposing a meeting of both pontiffs, or at least their plenipotentiaries.
But alas, Boniface in Rome proved every bit as intractable as Benedict in Avignon; and anyway he died—of gallstones—on October 1. All in all he had been a competent pope, repairing much of the damage done by his predecessor, regaining the allegiance of Naples, and, perhaps most important of all, imposing his authority on Rome, putting an end to its republican independence and creating a new Senate—nominated by himself—to be responsible for the city’s administration. He had also undertaken a major reconstruction of the Castel Sant’Angelo. His principal fault was his unscrupulousness in financial affairs: indulgences, simonies, annates (the practice by which a year’s income from a benefice or see was paid directly to Rome)—it seemed that there was no abuse that he would not happily tolerate so long as it kept the gold flowing into his coffers. On the other hand, with the main treasury and the financial departments still at Avignon, it is not easy to see how he and his Curia would otherwise have survived.
Boniface’s successor, Innocent VII, similarly rejected proposals for a meeting; but he was nowhere near as adroit as his predecessor in his dealings with the Romans, and matters came to a head when eleven of the leading citizens, arriving at the Vatican for negotiations, were murdered by his idiotic nephew, who commanded the papal militia. At that the mob stormed the palace; Innocent and his cardinals were lucky to get out alive and make their way to Viterbo. Not until the spring of 1406 was it safe to return, and six months later the pope was dead—though not before he had established a chair of Greek at the Sapienza University, founded by Boniface VIII just a century before.
Why the Roman cardinals should now have chosen the Venetian Angelo Correr—Gregory XII—to succeed him is not immediately easy to understand. Gregory was certainly a distinguished churchman—for fifteen years he had been the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople—and he had long protested that his dearest wish was to see the end of the schism; but he was already eighty years old, and it seemed on the face of it unlikely that his wish would be granted. Since, as it happened, he was to live for another nine years, it very nearly was—though by no means thanks to him.
BEFORE GREGORY’S ELECTION, each of the fourteen cardinals had sworn a personal oath that, if elected, he would immediately stand down in the event of the death or abdication of Pope Benedict in Avignon. Each had also promised that within three months of his election he would open negotiations with Benedict to decide on a place where the two popes might meet. Gregory kept his word and sent an embassy to his rival, and after long and occasionally acrimonious discussions it was finally agreed that the meeting should take place at Savona on September 29, 1407. Only after this decision was made did the old man begin to waver. The pressure came principally from King Ladislas of Naples, Doge Michele Steno of Venice, and the future Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, all of whom dreaded seeing the Papacy fall once more into French hands. Benedict went as far as Portovenere near La Spezia, but Gregory stopped at Lucca, where he firmly announced that he was no longer willing to meet his rival. Nor would he in any circumstances abdicate.
It was an astonishing volte-face, which lost Gregory much support. Now at last the Sacred Colleges of the two rival popes forgot their separate allegiances and gathered in June 1408 at Livorno, where they issued an appeal to both hierarchies, including the popes themselves, together with the princes of Europe or their representatives to meet at a General Council, to be held at Pisa on March 25, 1409. The popes refused, but the invitation to Pisa received a most gratifying response, being accepted by no fewer than 4 patriarchs, 24 cardinals, 80 bishops—102 others sent delegates to represent them—the heads of four religious orders, and an impressive number of distinguished theologians from universities and religious houses. The Council’s fifteen sessions lasted for over ten weeks. Both Gregory and Benedict were condemned as “notorious schismatics and heretics”—though there were many who inquired of just what heresies they had been guilty—and formally deposed. The cardinals then formed a conclave and elected the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Pietro Philarghi, who had started life as an orphaned beggar boy in Crete and was to end it as Pope Alexander V. But the Council had made one disastrous mistake. By calling the two rival popes to appear before it—and declaring them contumacious when they refused—it had implied its superiority over the Papacy itself, a principle which neither of the rival pontiffs could have been expected to endorse. Before long it became clear that its only real effect had been to saddle Christendom with three popes instead of two. But it was unrepentant, and when Pope Alexander died suddenly in May 1410 it lost no time in electing his successor.
Baldassare Cossa, who now joined the papal throng under the name of John XXIII,3 was widely believed at the time to have poisoned his predecessor. Whether he actually did so is open to doubt. He had, however, unquestionably begun life as a pirate; and a pirate, essentially, he remained. Morally and spiritually, he reduced the Papacy to a level of depravity unknown since the days of the pornocracy in the tenth century. A contemporary chronicler records in shocked amazement the rumor current in Bologna—where Cossa had been papal legate—that during his time there he had seduced two hundred matrons, widows, and virgins, to say nothing of an alarming number of nuns. His score over the three following years is regrettably not recorded; he seems, however, to have maintained a respectable average, for on May 29, 1415, he was arraigned before another General Council, meeting this time at Constance, the only such council ever to be held north of the Alps.
There was a certain irony here, since the Council of Constance had originally been Pope John’s idea. He had plenty of energy and intelligence, but in the circumstances he found it difficult indeed to put himself forward as a spiritual leader of men. His first synod had been a disaster—constantly interrupted, we are told, by an owl that flew into his face and screeched at him. (True or not, the very existence of the story is an indication of the contempt in which he was generally held.) To preside at a General Council would, he felt, give him the prestige he lacked, and there was plenty of work for it to do. First of all, there were his two rivals to be dealt with: Gregory and Benedict, who had refused to accept the authority of those gathered at Pisa to depose them. There was also an urgent need to investigate the teachings of John Wycliffe in England and Jan Hus in Bohemia. What he needed now was a powerful patron, and so, toward the end of 1412, he approached one of the leading figures on the European stage, Sigismund of Luxembourg.
Sigismund was now forty-four. The son of the Emperor Charles IV, King of Germany and—through his wife—of Hungary, he was the half brother of King Wenceslas of Bohemia (whose crown he was also to inherit seven years later) and was therefore much concerned by the influence of Hus, which was spreading rapidly across Europe. He conferred with Pope John personally at Lodi just before Christmas 1413, and it was jointly announced that the Council would meet at Constance on November 1 of the following year. In the ensuing discussions the two quickly reached agreement on all points except one: Sigismund made it clear that he expected to preside over the Council himself. To John, this was a serious blow. Had he been in sole charge of the proceedings, he could have steered them more or less as he wished. With Sigismund in control, however, the Council c
ould 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.
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