An Introduction to the History of Western Europe Part 32

[Sidenote: The jubilee of 1300.]

In spite of this setback, the pope never seemed more completely the recognized head of the western world than during the first great jubilee, in the year 1300, when Boniface called together all Christendom to celebrate the opening of the new century by a great religious festival at Rome. It is reported that two millions of people, coming from all parts of Europe, visited the churches of Rome, and that in spite of widening the streets many were crushed in the crowd. So great was the influx of money into the papal treasury that two a.s.sistants were kept busy with rakes collecting the offerings which were deposited at the tomb of St. Peter.

Boniface was, however, very soon to realize that even if Christendom regarded Rome as its religious center, the nations would not accept him as their political head. When he dispatched an obnoxious prelate to Philip the Fair, ordering him to free the count of Flanders whom he was holding prisoner, the king declared the harsh language of the papal envoy to be high treason and sent one of his lawyers to the pope to demand that the messenger be degraded and punished.

[Sidenote: The Estates General of 1302.]

Philip was surrounded by a body of lawyers, and it would seem that they, rather than the king, were the real rulers of France. They had, through their study of Roman law, learned to admire the absolute power exercised by the Roman emperor. To them the civil government was supreme, and they urged the king to punish what they regarded as the insolent conduct of the pope. Before taking any action against the head of the Church, Philip called together the representatives of his people, including not only the clergy and the n.o.bility but the people of the towns as well.

The Estates General, after hearing a statement of the case from one of Philip's lawyers, agreed to support their monarch.

[Sidenote: Nogaret insults Boniface VIII.]

[Sidenote: Death of Boniface, 1303.]

Nogaret, one of the chief legal advisers of the king, undertook to face the pope. He collected a little troop of soldiers in Italy and marched against Boniface, who was sojourning at Anagni, where his predecessors had excommunicated two emperors, Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II.

As Boniface, in his turn, was preparing solemnly to proclaim the king of France an outcast from the Church, Nogaret penetrated into the papal palace with his soldiers and heaped insults upon the helpless but defiant old man. The townspeople forced Nogaret to leave the next day, but Boniface's spirit was broken and he soon died at Rome.

[Sidenote: Clement V, 1305-1314, and his subservience to Philip the Fair.]

[Sidenote: The popes take up their residence at Avignon.]

King Philip now proposed to have no more trouble with popes. He arranged in 1305 to have the Archbishop of Bordeaux chosen head of the Church, with the understanding that he should transfer the papacy to France. The new pope accordingly summoned the cardinals to meet him at Lyons, where he was crowned under the t.i.tle of Clement V. He remained in France during his whole pontificate, moving from one rich abbey to another. At Philip's command he reluctantly undertook a sort of trial of the deceased Boniface VIII, who was accused by the king's lawyers of all sorts of abominable crimes. A great part of Boniface's decrees were revoked, and those who had attacked him were exculpated. Then, to please the king, Clement brought the Templars to trial; the order was abolished and its possessions in France, for which the king had longed, were confiscated. Obviously it proved very advantageous to the king to have a pope within his realm. Clement V died in 1314. His successors took up their residence in the town of Avignon, just outside the French frontier of those days. There they built a sumptuous palace in which successive popes lived in great splendor for sixty years.

[Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.]

113. The prolonged exile of the popes from Rome, lasting from 1305 to 1377, is commonly called the Babylonian Captivity[200] of the Church, on account of the woes attributed to it. The popes of this period were for the most part good and earnest men; but they were all Frenchmen, and the proximity of their court to France led to the natural suspicion that they were controlled by the French kings. This, together with their luxurious court, brought them into discredit with the other nations.[201]

[Sidenote: The papal taxation.]

At Avignon the popes were naturally deprived of some of the revenue which they had enjoyed from their Italian possessions when they lived at Rome. This deficiency had to be made up by increased taxation, especially as the expenses of the splendid papal court were very heavy.

The papacy was, consequently, rendered still more unpopular by the methods employed to raise money, particularly by the granting of benefices throughout Europe to the pope's courtiers, by the heavy contributions which were demanded for dispensations, for the confirmation of bishops, and for granting the pallium to archbishops, as well as the high fees for the trial of law suits.

[Sidenote: Pope's control of church benefices.]

Many of the church offices, such as those of the bishops and abbots, insured a more than ample revenue to their holders. It was natural, therefore, that the pope, in his endeavor to increase his income, should have tried to bring as many of these appointments as he could into his own hands. He did this by reserving to himself the filling of certain benefices so soon as they should become vacant. He then chose some one to whom he wished to do a favor and promised him the benefice upon the death of the one then holding it. Men appointed in this way were called _provisors_ and were extremely unpopular. They were very often foreigners, and it was suspected that they had obtained these positions from the pope simply for the sake of the revenue, and had no intention whatever of performing the duties connected with them.

[Sidenote: Statute of provisors, 1352.]

The papal exactions met with the greatest opposition in England because the popes were thought to favor France, with which country the English were at war. A law was pa.s.sed by Parliament in 1352 ordering that all who procured appointments from the pope should be outlawed, that any one might injure such offenders at will, and that the injured should have no redress, since they were enemies of the king and his realm.[202] This and similar laws failed, however, to prevent the pope from filling English benefices to the advantage of himself and his courtiers. The English king was unable to keep the money of his realm from flowing to Avignon on one pretext or another. It was declared by the Good Parliament, held in 1376, that the taxes levied by the pope in England were five times those raised by the king.

[Sidenote: John Wycliffe.]

The most famous and conspicuous critic of the pope and of the policy of the Roman Church at this time was John Wycliffe, a teacher at Oxford. He was born about 1320; but we know little of him before 1366, when Urban V demanded that England should pay the tribute promised by King John when he became the pope's va.s.sal.[203] Parliament declared that John had no right to bind the people without their consent, and Wycliffe began his career of opposition to the papacy by trying to prove that John's compact was void. About ten years later we find the pope issuing bulls against the teachings of Wycliffe, who had begun to a.s.sert that the state might appropriate the property of the Church if it was misused, and that the pope had no authority except as he acted according to the Gospels. Soon Wycliffe went further and boldly attacked the papacy itself, as well as indulgences, pilgrimages, and the worship of the saints; finally he even denied the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation.

[Sidenote: Wycliffe's 'simple priests.']

He did not, however, confine his work to a denunciation of what he considered wrong in the teaching and conduct of the churchmen. He established an order of "simple priests" who were to go about doing good and reprove by their example the worldly habits of the general run of priests and monks.

[Sidenote: Wycliffe the father of English prose.]

Wycliffe's anxiety to reach the people and foster a higher spiritual life among them led him to have the Bible translated into English. He also prepared a great number of sermons and tracts in English. He is the father of English prose, and it has been well said that "the exquisite pathos, the keen, delicate irony, and the manly pa.s.sion of his short, nervous sentences, fairly overmaster the weakness of the unformed language and give us English which cannot be read without a feeling of its beauty to this hour."

[Sidenote: Influence of Wycliffe's teaching.]

Wycliffe and his "simple priests" were charged with fomenting the discontent and disorder which culminated in the Peasants' War. Whether this charge was true or not, it caused many of his more aristocratic followers to fall away from him. But in spite of this and the denunciations of the Church, Wycliffe was not seriously interfered with and died peaceably in 1384. While his followers appear to have yielded pretty readily to the persecution which soon overtook them, his doctrines were spread abroad in Bohemia by another ardent reformer, John Huss, who was destined to give the Church a great deal of trouble.

Wycliffe is remarkable as being the first distinguished scholar and reformer to repudiate the headship of the pope and those practices of the Church of Rome which a hundred and fifty years after his death were attacked by Luther in his successful revolt against the mediaeval Church.[204]

[Sidenote: The papal court moves back to Rome, 1377.]

114. In 1377 Pope Gregory XI moved back again to Rome after the popes had been exiles for seventy years, during which much had happened to undermine the papal power and supremacy. Yet the discredit into which the papacy had fallen during its stay at Avignon was as nothing compared with the disasters which befell it after the return to Rome.

[Sidenote: Election of Urban VI, 1378.]

Gregory died the year after his return and the cardinals a.s.sembled to choose his successor. A great part of them were French. They had found Rome in a sad state of ruin and disorder and heartily regretted the gay life and the comforts and luxuries of Avignon. They determined therefore to select a pope who would take them back to the banks of the Rhone.

While they were deliberating, the Roman populace was yelling outside the conclave and demanding that a Roman be chosen, or at least an Italian. A simple Italian monk was accordingly selected, Urban VI, who it was supposed would agree to the wishes of the cardinals.

[Sidenote: Election of an anti-pope, Clement VII.]

The new pope, however, soon showed that he had no idea of returning to Avignon. He treated the cardinals with harshness and proposed a stern reformation of their habits. The cardinals speedily wearied of this treatment; they retired to the neighboring Anagni and declared that they had been frightened by the Roman mob into selecting the obnoxious Urban.

They then elected a new pope, who took the t.i.tle of Clement VII, returned to Avignon, and established his court there. Urban, although deserted by his cardinals, had no intention of yielding and proceeded to create twenty-eight new cardinals.

[Sidenote: The Great Schism.]

This double election was the beginning of the _Great Schism_, which was to last for forty years and expose the papacy to new attacks on every side. There had been many anti-popes in earlier centuries, set up usually by the emperors; but there had ordinarily been little question as to who was really the legitimate pope. In the present case Europe was seriously in doubt, for it was difficult to decide whether the election of Urban had really been forced and was consequently invalid as the cardinals claimed. No one, therefore, could be perfectly sure which of the rival popes was the real successor of St. Peter. There were now two colleges of cardinals whose very existence depended upon the exercise of their right of choosing the pope. It was natural that Italy should support Urban VI, while France as naturally obeyed Clement VII; England, hostile to France, accepted Urban; Scotland, hostile to England, supported Clement.

[Sidenote: The Church divided within itself and the consequences.]

Each of two men, with seemingly equal right, now claimed to be Christ's vicar on earth; each proposed to enjoy to the full the vast prerogatives of the head of Christendom, and each denounced, and attempted to depose, the other. The schism in the headship of the Church naturally extended to the bishoprics and abbeys, and everywhere there were rival prelates, each of whom could claim that he had been duly confirmed by one pope or the other. All this produced an unprecedented scandal in the Church. It emphasized all the abuses among the clergy and gave free rein to those who were inclined to denounce the many evils which had been pointed out by Wycliffe and his followers. The condition was, in fact, intolerable and gave rise to widespread discussion, not only of the means by which the schism might be healed, but of the nature and justification of the papacy itself. The discussion which arose during these forty years of uncertainty did much to prepare the mind of western Europe for the Protestant revolt in the sixteenth century.

[Sidenote: Idea of the supremacy of a general council.]

The selfish and futile negotiations between the colleges of cardinals and the popes justified the notion that there might perhaps be a power in Christendom superior even to that of the pope. Might not a council, representing all Christendom, and inspired by the Holy Ghost, judge even a pope? Such councils had been held in the East during the later Roman Empire, beginning with the first general or ec.u.menical council of Nicaea under Constantine. They had established the teachings of the Church and had legislated for all Christian people and clergy.[205]

[Sidenote: Question whether the pope or a general council is the supreme authority in the Church.]

As early as 1381 the University of Paris advocated the summoning of a general council which should adjust the claims of the rival popes and give Christendom once more a single head. This raised the question whether a council was really superior to the pope or not. Those who believed that it was, maintained that the Church at large had deputed the election of the pope to the cardinals and that it might, therefore, interfere when the cardinals had brought the papacy into disrepute; that a general a.s.sembly of all Christendom, speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was a higher authority than even the successor of St.

Peter. Others strenuously denied this. They claimed that the pope received his authority over the Church immediately from Christ, and that he had always possessed supreme power from the very first, although he had not always exercised it and had permitted the earlier councils a certain freedom. No council, they urged, could be considered a general one which was called against the will of the pope, because, without the bishop of the Roman or mother church, the council obviously could not lay claim to represent all Christendom. The defenders of the papal power maintained, moreover, that the pope was the supreme legislator, that he might change or annul the act of any council or of a previous pope, that he might judge others but might not himself be judged by any one.[206]

[Sidenote: The Council of Pisa, 1409 adds a third rival pope.]

After years of discussion and fruitless negotiations between the rival popes and their cardinals, members of both of the colleges decided in 1409 to summon a council at Pisa, which should put an end to the schism.

While large numbers of churchmen answered the summons and the various monarchs took an active interest in the council, its action was hasty and ill-advised. Gregory XII, the Roman pope, elected in 1406, and Benedict XIII, the Avignon pope, elected in 1394, were solemnly summoned from the doors of the cathedral at Pisa. As they failed to appear they were condemned for contumacy and deposed. A new pope was then elected, and on his death a year later, he was succeeded by the notorious John XXIII, who had been a soldier of fortune in his earlier days. John was selected on account of his supposed military prowess. This was considered essential in order to guard the papal territory against the king of Naples, who had announced his intention of getting possession of Rome. Neither of the deposed popes yielded, and as they each continued to enjoy a certain support, the Council of Pisa, instead of healing the schism, added a third person who claimed to be the supreme ruler of Christendom.[207]

[Sidenote: The Council of Constance meets, 1414.]

115. The failure of the Council of Pisa made it necessary to summon another congress of Christendom. Through the influence of the emperor Sigismund, John XXIII reluctantly agreed that the council should be held in Germany, in the imperial town of Constance. The Council of Constance, which began to a.s.semble in the fall of 1414, is one of the most noteworthy international a.s.semblies ever held. It lasted for over three years and excited the deepest interest throughout Europe. There were in attendance, besides the pope and the emperor-elect, twenty-three cardinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops, one hundred and fifty abbots, and one hundred dukes and earls, as well as hundreds of lesser persons.

[Sidenote: The three great objects of the Council of Constance.]