The Power Of The Popes Part 15

7 Urban V. when dying, expressed these words: "I firmly believe all that the Holy Catholic Church holds and teaches; and if I ever advanced doctrines contrary to the church I retract and subject them to its censure." Here is one pope, says Fleury, who did not think himself infallible.-Eccles. Hist. 1. 97, n. 18.

In 1378, the cardinals, a.s.sembled to give a successor to Gregory XI.

proclaimed Barthelemi Pregnano, who took the name of Urban VI., and they a few months after withdrew to Fondi, where they elected Robert of Geneva, or Clement VII.: they pretended that the election of Urban was but a formality to appease the fury of a people which wished to control their choice. Clement was installed in Avignon: France, Spain, Scotland and Sicily acknowledged him: the rest of Europe supported Urban, who resided at Rome, and published in England a crusade against France.

Urban died in 1389, and the cardinals of his party supplied his place by Peter Tomacelli or Boniface IX. On the other hand, Clement being deceased in 1394, the French cardinals raised to the pontificate Peter de Lune, a Spaniard, who was called Benedict XIII. Modes of reconciliation were proposed from all quarters; France especially evinced her anxiety to extinguish the schism: but neither of the pontiffs would lis-ten to relinquishing the tiara; and the spiritual arms directed by each pope against the other became harmless in their hands. What one did against the supporters of the other; what dangers they encountered; what cardinals, what kings, what cities, they excommunicated; how many threats, how many bulls, how many censures they published, we will not undertake to relate here: we shall only remark, that the Church of France, after useless efforts to reestablish concord, ended by withdrawing, in the year 1298, from obedience to either one or the other pontiff.:

"We," says Charles VI., "supported by "the princes of our blood, and by many others, and "with us the church of our kingdom, as well the "clergy as the people, we, altogether withdraw from "obedience to Pope Benedict XIII. as from that of "his adversary. We desire that henceforth no "person pay to Benedict, his collectors, or other "officers, any ecclesiastical revenues or emoluments: "and we strictly forbid all our subjects from obeying "him or his officers in any matter whatever."

Villaret7 adds, that Benedict having caused a report to be spread, that the French were desirous to withdraw from obedience to him in order to subst.i.tute a pope of their own nation, the king to do away such suspicions, declared, in his letters, that any pope would be agreeable to him, whether African, Arab or Indian, provided he did not dishonour by his pa.s.sions the chair of St. Peter.

The French profited by these events to repress the exactions of the pontifical court. The churches were restored the right of freely electing their prelates, and collators the disposal of other benefices.

Boniface IX. had perfected the art of enriching the Holy See; he had, as Fleury observed,74 doubly need of money, for himself, and, to support Ladislaus at Naples against the house of Anjou. We may read in Fleury,75 how the clergy, who possessed benefices at Rome, paid for the favour of being examined; how Boniface in the second and third year of his pontificate, dated as of the first the bulls for benefices; how he exacted compensation for this antedate; how he extended to prelacies the right of first fruits, that is, the reservation of the revenue of each benefice for the first year; how he kept couriers throughout Italy, to be apprised, without delay, of the sickness or death of prelates or other dignitaries, and in order to sell twice, or thrice, the same abbey or church; how, by clauses of preference, he revoked the reservation, and the survivorship, the price of which he had received: how he would even annul the preferences which paid a higher price; how in fine, this traffick, combining with the plague, and the consequent rapid mortality of the inc.u.mbents, brought into the treasury of the apostolic see, the innumerable contributions of all those who obtained, hoped for, or coveted, a rich or a poor ecclesiastical benefice.

7 Hist, of France, vol. xii. p. 270,271.

74 Eccles. Hist. 1. 99. n.-26.

75 Ibid. n. 26, 27,28.

It was, without doubt, impossible but that these scandalous abuses, multiplied and extended through the lapse of time from Hildebrand to Boniface IX. and Benedict XIII., should excite the indignation of upright minds and honest hearts. The French, much more christianized in the fourteenth century than the people of Italy or Germany, evinced, by this alone, more zeal in repressing the irregularities and excesses of the clergy. They had seconded Philip the Fair against Boniface VIII.; under Philip of Valois, Peter de Cugnieres had expressed their honourable wishes; and more than twenty years before their renunciation of Benedict XIII. as of Boniface IX. they had, under Charles V. enquired into the limits of ecclesiastical authority. A monument of this discussion has been preserved to us under the t.i.tle of "The Verger's dream, or Disputation between the clerk and the squire:"76 a work the author of which is not well known; but which we would attribute to John de Lignano, or to Charles de Louvieres, rather than to any other. The clerk in it claims for the successor of St. Peter, the t.i.tle of Vicar-General of Jesus Christ upon earth.-The squire distinguishes two eras in our Saviour's history, one of preaching and humility before his death, the other of power and of glory after his resurrection. St Peter, according to the squire and the pope as well as St. Peter, can represent but the poor and the modest: Jesus, preaching the gospel, and affecting over thrones and temporal things, no sort of pretension, acknowledging that his kingdom is not of this world, submitting himself to the civil power, and, in fine, rendering to Cesar, that which to Cesar belongs.

76 "The Verger's dream," one of the most ancient monuments of French literature and of the liberties of the Gallican Church, occupies the half of a folio volume, in the collection of proofs of, and treatises on these liberties.

CHAPTER VIII. FIFTEENTH CENTURY

FOUR great councils were held in the fifteenth century, all previous to the year 1460. The council of Pisa in 1409: it is not reverenced as an oec.u.menical one; it nevertheless, in deposing. Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII. elected Alexander III. to their place. This act did not extinguish the schism; on the contrary it occasioned at once three popes.

The council of Constance in 1414: this had greater authority; it caused John Huss and Jerome of Prague to be burned; further, it declared the superiority of general councils over the popes; a doctrine always disapproved of at Rome, and to which Martin V: did not adhere, though elected by this very council of Constance. But the church had no longer more than two heads, Martin V. and the obstinate Benedict XIII. Gregory XII. sent in his resignation; and John XXIII. the successor of Alexander V. was thrown into prison, from whence he did not come out until he had acknowledged Martin V. There is no vice, no crime, which contemporary historians and the council of Constance do not reproach John XXIII. with An act of accusation prepared against him, presented, they say, a complete catalogue of every mortal crime77 They a.s.sert that he had seduced three hundred nuns78 according to Theodoric de Nieve7? he kept at Bologna two hundred mistresses. These exaggerations discover calumny; and the friendship and hospitality with which the Florentines, especially the Medicis, a family at this period distinguished, honoured a pontiff so weakly established, would suffice to refute or weaken the accusations with which, his enemies and his misfortunes have loaded his memory. The weakness of his character stimulated the insults of his rivals, and his disgraces those of the historian. Stripped of his states by Ladislaus, king of Naples, betrayed by Frederick, duke of Austria, hunted by the emperor Sigismund, John used too liberally the sole resources which remained to him, simony and usury; he brought to perfection, even after Boniface IX. the traffic in benefices8 and we read8 that a note for one thousand florins would be pa.s.sed him where he lent eight hundred for four months.

77 Theodor, de Niem. ap. Vonder Hart. vol. ii. p. 389.

78 L'Enfant's Hist, of Coun. of Constance, 1. 2, p. 184.

7? Invect. in Joann. 1. 23. p. 6.

8 Fleury's Eccles. Hist. 1. 103, n. 46.

8 Theodor. Niem. Invect. p. 8.

The council of Basle in 1431: theologians declare it oec.u.menical to its twenty-fifth session only; it held forty-five. This council also humbled a good deal the papal authority; and its decrees on this head, as well as those of Constance, served to prepare in France the celebrated pragmatic sanction, to which we shall revert by and by. The fathers of Basle deposed Eugene IV., the successor of Martin V., describing the said Eugene as a disturber, a heretic, and a schismatic. Eugene excommunicated this third council, and held a fourth at Florence in 1459. In it the reconciliation of the Greeks was treated of: John Paleologus, emperor of the East, was at it, endeavouring to confirm by this re-union the throne upon which he tottered; but the priests of Constantinople persisted in the schism.

Louis III. of Anjou, had disputed the throne of Naples with Joan II., daughter of Charles Durazzo. Delivered from Louis by Alphonso V. king of Arragon, Joan adopted the Arragonese monarch, and her liberator was to become her heir. Subsequently some misunderstanding between Alphonso and Joan determined her to revert to Louis of Anjou, and to revoke in his favour the act of adoption obtained by Alphonso. Joan and Louis died: and, two compet.i.tors present themselves to reign over Naples, Alphonso and Reni, the brothers of Louis. Pope Eugene declares for Alphonso, precisely because Reni, more acceptable to the Neapolitans, and to Italy generally, would have been too formidable a neighbour for the Holy See.

This is the princ.i.p.al affair purely political in which the pontiff concerned himself. He however obliged Uladislaus, king of Poland and Hungary, to break a peace with the Turks, sworn to on the Evangelists and on the Koran. A rupture fatal as it was perfidious, and which drew after it, in 1444 near Varne, the defeat and death of Uladislaus.

Eugene retained to his death the t.i.tle of pope, although the counsel of Basle had conferred it on the duke of Savoy, Amadeus VIII. whose papal name was Felix V. This duke afterwards abdicated the tiara, and the church had at last but one head Nicholas V., the successor of Eugene; Nicholas, a pacific prelate; the friend of literature, and founder of the Vatican library, and one of the most generous protectors of the learned Greeks, who took refuge in Italy after Mahomet II. had taken Constantinople in 1446.

We have seen that during the first half of the fifteenth century, the priesthood, divided, had no means of very seriously threatening great empires. This opportunity ought to have been seized on for effecting those reformations, provoked by the corruptions which the false decretals had produced in the ecclesiastical discipline.

The ancient rules left to the clergy, to the people, and to the sovereign, an active part in the election of bishops, and the new law reserved to the pope the inst.i.tution of the inc.u.mbents.

Excommunications, formerly rare and confined to matters altogether spiritual, were multiplied after the tenth century against emperors and kings, whose power they shook. The popes of the eight first centuries never thought of enacting tributes from the newly elected bishops; now, the pope demands first fruits of them. Before the decretals, the ecclesiastics were in civil and criminal cases amenable to the secular tribunals: after the decretals, the pope wished to become, in all sorts of causes, the supreme judge of every member of the priesthood. In fine, dispensations, pardons, reservations and reversions, and appeals to the Holy See, were perpetual; the abuses, become excessive, wearied France in an especial manner.

After having withdrawn, as we have said, from obedience to both the candidates for the papacy, the Gallican church began to regulate itself agreeable to the primitive laws, and received with transport the decrees of the councils of Constance and Basle, which limited the power of the pope and subjected it to that of the united church. The council of Basle, when Eugene IV. had quitted it, sent its decrees to the king of France, Charles VII. who communicated them to the great n.o.bles of his kingdom, secular as well as ecclesiastical, met together for this purpose in the holy chapel of Bourges. The decrees of Basle and of Constance, approved and modified by this a.s.sembly, formed the pragmatic sanction, which was read and proclaimed as the king's edict, in the parliament of Paris, the 3d of July, 1439. It is determined by this edict, that general councils ought to be held every ten years, that their authority is superior to that of the pope, that the number of cardinals should be reduced to twenty-four, that the presentation to ecclesiastical benefices should be perfectly free, that the first fruits should no longer be demanded, and that neither reservations or reversions should be recognised.8 All orders of the state received this "pragmatic" with enthusiasm; and the whole course of history attests how dear it was to the French.

8 We must observe, said the president Henault, that in 1441 the king issued a declaration respecting the pragmatic sanction, implying that his design and that of the a.s.sembly at Bourges, was, that the arrangement made between Eugene IV. and his amba.s.sadors should take effect from the day of the date of this pragmatic, without any regard to the date of the Basle decree, issued before the date of the pragmatic; and from this it is concluded, that the decrees of general councils, as respects discipline, have no force in France until after they have received authority from the edicts of our kings.-Ab. Chron. of Hist, of France, ann. 1438.

In Italy the schism had gradually produced a revolution in their political views. Under doubtful and rival demi-popes; under the feeble influence of the emperors Robert, Sigismund, Robert II. Frederick III.

the Guelph and Ghibeline factions become almost extinct either from want of heads or of standards, or la.s.situde consequent on four or five centuries of madness and misfortune. The Visconti, become the chiefs of the Ghibelines, sunk and disappointed, replaced by the Sforza, a family just hatched and destined to combat for interests new as itself. The Medicis, less recent, laboured to calm the commotions which agitated Florence, and indulged the hope of seeing liberty, laws, and literature flourish, in the loveliest country they could make their abode.- Impelled also by the idea of their advances in the fine arts, other cities of Italy aspired to free themselves altogether from the German yoke, and to exercise an habitual influence over the people they had outstripped in civilisation. This national pride it was which reconciled them secretly to the papacy, disposed them to consider it as the centre of Italian power, and to mourn over the ancient splendour of this once dreaded focus. The middle of the fifteenth century, is the true era in which was confirmed, and propagated in Italy, the doctrine elsewhere denominated ultramontane, a doctrine which has since been but the mask of the political interests of this nation, well or ill understood by her. Since then, the Italians have generally abstained from seconding the resistance that the English, the Germans, the French, have not ceased to oppose to the pretensions of the Roman pontiff, to his worldly ambition, and abuse of his spiritual ministry. Already, in the councils of Constance and Basle, the Italian prelates were in general remarked for the lukewarmness of their zeal in the reformation of ecclesiastical irregularities. Terrified no doubt, by the rash boldness of Wickliffe and many other innovators, they did not perceive that propriety of manners and wise laws would be the most certain security against alterations in doctrine; or rather, the preservation of the faith was not what they most sincerely desired to secure. Behold then, in what disposition the successors of Nicholas V., found the clergy, the learned, the rulers, and consequently the people of Italy; and such were the points of support on which the pontifical levers went to work, in order to put it under way once more.

Six popes, after Nicholas V, governed the church during the second half of the fifteenth century: Calixtus III., from 1445 to 1458; Pius II. to 1464; Paul II. to 1471; Sixtus IV. to 1484; Innocent VIII. to 1492; and Alexander IV. for the following years.

Calixtus III. who vainly preached a crusade against the Turks established at Constantinople, shewed much more zeal still for the particular interests of his family. This pope had three nephews: he raised two of them to the cardinalat, which they disgraced by the open irregularity of their conduct. He heaped secular dignities on the head of the third: he made him duke of Spoleto, and general of the troops of the Holy See; he was desirous of making king of Naples, and thus terminate the rivalry existing between Ferdinand, the son of Alphonso, John, the son of Rene, and other candidates, whose object this kingdom was. Calixtus endeavoured to arm the Milanese against Ferdinand, and forbad this prince on pain of excommunication from taking the t.i.tle of king: but Calixtus reigned only three years, and his ambitious intentions had no durable consequence.

After him came Pius II., who before, under the name of Eneas Sylvius, was an author sufficiently distinguished: he had also been secretary to the council of Basle, and as such a zealous partisan of the supremacy of councils; but finally, when pope, an ardent defender of the omnipotence of the Holy See. He even formally retracted all that he had written at the dictation of the council; and, by an express bull, Pius II. condemns Eneas Sylvius.8 His bull 'Execrabilis,' anathematizes appeals to general councils, to one of which France appealed on this very bull.

Charles VII. still reigned; he maintained the pragmatic sanction; and observe in what terms the attorney general Douvet protests against this bull:84

"Since our holy father the pope, to "whom all power has been given for the building up "of the church and not for its destruction, wishes to "disturb and insult our lord the king, the ecclesi- "astics of the kingdom, and even his secular sub "jects, I, John Douvet, attorney general of his "Majesty, do protest such judgments or censures to "be null, according to the decrees of the sacred "canons, which declare void, in many cases, this "sort of decisions; submitting, nevertheless, all "things to the judgment of a general council, to "which our very Christian king purposes to have "recourse, and to which I, in his name, appeal."

8 "Never did individual," says Mezerai, "labour more to reduce the power of the popes within tbe limits of the canons than Eneas Sylvius; and never did pope endeavour more to extend it beyond the bounds of right and of reason, than the same man when he became Pius II."-Abr. Chron. vol. i. pt. 2, p. 436.

84 Proofs of the Liberty of the Gallican Church, vol. i. p. 2, pa.

40.

But Louis XI. succeeded Charles in 1461, and repealed the 'pragmatic'

yielding to the solicitations of Pius, who wept for joy at it, ordained public festivals, and caused the act of the a.s.sembly at Bourges to be dragged through the puddle of Rome. Louis had affixed two stipulations to his compliance; one, that the pope should favour John of Anjou and proclaim him king of Naples; the other, that a legate, a Frenchman by birth, should be appointed to invest the inc.u.mbents in France. Pius, who had made both these promises, fulfilled neither; but he composed verses in honour of the king, and sent him a sword, ornamented with diamonds, to fight Mahomet II.-Louis highly irritated, directed the parliament secretly to oppose the edict which rescinded the pragmatic. This opposition it was not difficult to secure, it was sufficient not to thwart it: the parliament embraced so rare an opportunity of testifying their obedience, by refusing to obey. Louis XI. armed not against the Turks; but while Pius II. thus stimulated the kings of Europe to combat the new masters of Constantinople, let us see what the holy father writes to Mahomet II. himself.85

"Do you "wish to become the most powerful of mortals?

"What prevents your becoming so to-morrow? a "mere trifle certainly, what may be found without "the seeking, some drops of baptismal water.

"Prince, but a little water, and we will declare you "emperor of the Greeks and of the East, of the "West also, if need be. In former times, freed "from Astolphus and Didier, by the good offices of "Pepin and of Charlemagne, our predecessors "Stephen, Adrian, and Leo, crowned their liber- "ators. Do you act like Charlemagne and Pepin, "and we shall do as Leo, Adrian and Stephen."

85 Pii secundi pontificis maximi, ad ill.u.s.trem Mahumetem Turcarum imperatorem, epistola. Tarvisii, Garard de Flandria. 1475, in 4to.

We read in fol. 4 and 3: "Parva res omnium qui hodie Vaint, maximum et potentissimum et cla-rissimum te reddere potest Quaeris quid sit? Non est inventa difficiles neque procul quaerenda; ubique gentium reperitur: id est, aquae parexillium quo baptizeris. Id si feceris, non erit in orbe princeps qui te gloria superet aut tequare potentia valeat. Nos te Graecoram et Orientis imperatorem appellabimus Et sicut nostri antecessories, Stephanas, Adrianas, Leo, ad versas Haistulphum et Desi-deritun, gentes Longobardae reges, Pipinum et Karolum Magnum accersiverunt, et liberati de manu tyrannica, imperium a Grcis ad ipsos liberatores transtulerunt, ita et nos in ecclesiae necessitatibus patrocinio tuo uteramur, et vicem redderemus beneficii accepti."

These are plain terms, we see, and disguise nothing of the pontifical policy.

To Pius II. succeeded Barbo, a Venetian, so handsome and so vain, that he was templed to a.s.sume the name of Formosa:86 he contented himself with that of Paul II. His efforts to league the Christian sovereigns against the Turks, and to have the abrogation of the pragmatic registered by the parliament of Paris, were equally unsuccessful; other interests occupied the former, and the parliament of Paris was obstinate. In vain Cardinal Balne obtained from Louis the deprivation of the solicitor general John de Saint Romain: the university united with the magistrates in an appeal to a future council. In the mean time letters are discovered which prove to Louis that he is betrayed by Balne. The cardinal is already cast into prison; but Paul pretends to be the sole legitimate judge of a prince of the church, and Balne, after a long detention in an iron cage, is finally liberated.

86 Art of verifying Dates, vol. i, p. 337.-' Formosus' implies 'handsome.'

Paul also vainly endeavoured to make himself master of Rimini: in vain he armed the Venetians against Robert Malatesti who occupied this place: Robert, aided by the Medicis, opposed a formidable army to the Venetians, and which, under the command of the Duke d'Urbino, put that of the pope to flight87 His holiness received such conditions as his conquerors dictated; he loaded the Medicis with invectives, and no longer made war but with men of letters;88 he condemned many of these to horrible tortures to extort from them the avowal of heresies which they never professed; and when their constancy in refusing to make false confessions, when all the evidence, all the witnesses proclaimed their innocence, the holy father declared they could not leave their dungeons until they had completed in them an entire year, having at the time of their arrest made a vow not to release them before the expiration of this term.

87 Muratori's Annals of Italy, vol., ix. p. 508.

88 Art of verifying Dates, vol. i. p. 327.

Platina, one of Paul's victims, has compiled a history of the popes in which, this pontiff is not spared: Platina is doubtlessly here a suspicious testimony; but as the reverend Benedictine fathers judiciously observe,: