The Renaissance
Sicily remained aloof from the Renaissance. She produced a few scholars like Aurispa, a few painters like Antonello da Messina, but they soon migrated to the wider opportunities of the mainland. Palermo, Monreale, Cefalù had great art, but only as the relic of Byzantine, Moslem, or Norman days. The feudal lords who owned the land preferred the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and lived in knightly scorn or ignorance of letters. The people whom they exploited were too poor to have any cultural expression beyond their colorful dress, their religion of bright mosaics and somber hope, their songs and simple poetry of love and violence. The lovely island enjoyed its own Aragonese kings and queens from 1295 to 1409; thereafter, for three centuries, it was a jewel in the crown of Spain.
Lengthy as this brief survey of non-Roman Italy has seemed, it has done scant justice to the full and varied life of the passionate peninsula. Consideration of morals and manners, of science and philosophy, may be deferred till we have spent some chapters with the Renaissance popes; but even in those cities that we have touched how many precious byways of life and art have escaped our eyes! We have said nothing of a whole branch of Italian literature, for the greatest novelle belong to a later period. We have inadequately visualized the major role that the minor arts played in the adornment of Italian bodies, minds, and homes. What deformed or inflated botches were majestically transformed by the textile arts! What would some of the grandees and grand dames glorified by Venetian painting have been without their velvets, satins, silks, and brocades? They did well to cover their nakedness and brand nudity as a sin. Wise it was of them, too, to cool their summers with gardens, even though so formal; to beautify their homes with colored tiles on roof and floor, with iron wrought into lacery and arabesques, and copper vessels gleaming smooth, and figurines of bronze or ivory reminding them how fair might men and women be, and woodwork carved and marquetried and built to last a thousand years, and lustrous pottery brightening table and cupboard and mantelpiece, and the miraculous embroidery of Venetian glass offering its fragile challenge to time, and the golden dies and silver clasps of leather bindings around treasured classics illuminated by happy bondsmen of the pen. Many painters, like Sano di Pietro, chose to ruin their eyesight with drawing and coloring miniatures rather than spread their subtle and intimate dreams of beauty crudely over panels and walls. And sometimes, weary of walking through galleries, one could sit gladly for hours over the illumination and calligraphy of such manuscripts as still hide in the Schifanoia palace at Ferrara, or in the Morgan Library at New York, or in the Ambrosiana at Milan.
All these, as well as the greater arts, and the labor and love, chicanery and statesmanship, devotion and war, faith and philosophy, science and superstition, poetry and music, hatreds and humor, of a lovable and volcanic people combined to make the Italian Renaissance, and to bring it to fulfillment and destruction in Medicean Rome.
BOOK IV
THE ROMAN RENAISSANCE
1378–1521
CHAPTER XIV
The Crisis in the Church
1378–1447
I. THE PAPAL SCHISM: 1378–1417
GREGORY XI had brought the papacy back to Rome; but would it stay there? The conclave that met to name his successor was composed of sixteen cardinals, only four of whom were Italians. The municipal authorities petitioned them to choose a Roman, or at least an Italian; and to support the suggestion a crowd of Romans gathered outside the Vatican, threatening to kill all non-Italian cardinals unless a Roman were made pope. The frightened conclave, by a vote of fifteen to one, hastily elected (1378) Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, who took the name of Urban VI; then they fled in fear of their lives. But Rome accepted the compromise.1
Urban VI ruled the city and the Church with impetuous and despotic energy. He appointed senators and municipal magistrates, and reduced the turbulent capital to obedience and order. He shocked the cardinals by announcing that he proposed to reform the Church, and to begin at the top. Two weeks later, preaching publicly in their presence, he condemned the morals of the cardinals and the higher clergy in unmeasured terms. He forbade them to accept pensions, and ordered that all business brought to the Curia should be dispatched without fees or gifts of any kind. When the cardinals murmured he commanded them to “cease your foolish chattering”; when Cardinal Orsini protested the Pope called him a “blockhead”; when the Cardinal of Limoges objected Urban rushed at him to strike him. Hearing of all this, St. Catherine sent the fiery Pontiff a warning: “Do what you have to do with moderation… with good will and a peaceful heart, for excess destroys rather than builds up. For the sake of the crucified Lord keep these hasty movements of your nature a little in check.”2 Urban, heedless, announced his intention to appoint enough Italian cardinals to give Italy a majority in the College.
The French cardinals gathered in Anagni, and planned revolt. On August 9, 1378, they issued a manifesto declaring Urban’s election invalid as having been made under duress of the Roman mob. All the Italian cardinals joined them, and at Fondi on September 20 the entire College proclaimed Robert of Geneva to be the true pope. Robert, as Clement VII, took up his residence at Avignon, while Urban clung to his pontifical office in Rome. The Papal Schism so inaugurated was one more result of the rising national state; in effect it was an attempt by France to retain the vital aid of the papacy in her war with England and in any furure contest with Germany or Italy. The lead of France was followed by Naples, Spain, and Scotland; but England, Flanders, Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Portugal accepted Urban, and the Church became the political plaything of the rival camps. The confusion reached a pitch that aroused the scornful laughter of expanding Islam. Half the Christian world held the other half to be heretical, blasphemous, and excommunicate. St. Catherine denounced Clement VII as a Judas; St. Vincent Ferrer applied the same term to Urban VI.3 Each side claimed that sacraments administered by priests of the opposite obedience were invalid, and that the children so baptized, the penitents so shriven, the dying so anointed, remained in a state of mortal sin, doomed to hell or limbo if death should supervene. Mutual hatred rose to a fervor equaled only in the bitterest wars. When many of Urban’s newly appointed cardinals plotted to place him in confinement as a dangerous incompetent, he had seven of them arrested, tortured, and put to death (1385).
His own death (1389) brought no compromise; the fourteen cardinals surviving in his camp made Piero Tomacelli Pope Boniface IX, and the divided nations prolonged the divided papacy. When Clement VII died (1394) the cardinals at Avignon named Pedro de Luna to be Benedict XIII. Charles VI of France proposed that both popes should resign; Benedict refused. In 1399 Boniface IX proclaimed a jubilee for the following year. Realizing that many potential pilgrims would be kept at home by the chaos and insecurity of the times, he empowered his agents to give the full indulgence of the jubilee to any Christian who, having confessed his sins and done due penance, should contribute to the Roman Church the sum that a trip to Rome would have cost him. The collectors were not scrupulous theologians; many of them offered the indulgence without requiring confession; Boniface reproved them, but he felt that no one could make better use than he of money so secured; even amid the acute pains of the stone, said his secretary, Boniface “did not cease to thirst for gold.”4 When some collectors tried to cheat him he had them tortured till they disgorged. Other collectors were torn to pieces by the Roman mob for letting Christians get the jubilee indulgence without coming to spend money in Rome.5 Amid the jubilee celebrations and solemnities the Colonna family aroused the people to demand the restoration of republican government. When Boniface refused, the Colonna led an army of eight thousand against him; the aging pope stood siege resolutely in Sant’ Angelo; the people turned against the Colonna, the rebel army dispersed, and thirty-one leaders of the revolt were jailed. One of them was promised his life if he would serve as executioner of the rest; he consented, and hanged thirty men, including his father and his brother.6
On the death of Boniface and the el
ection of Innocent VII (1404), revolt broke out again, and Innocent fled to Viterbo. The Roman mob, led by Giovanni Colonna, sacked the Vatican, smeared the emblems of Innocent with mud, and scattered papal registers and historic bulls through the streets (1405).7 Then the people, bethinking themselves that Rome without the popes would be ruined, made their peace with Innocent, who returned in triumph and, a few days later, died (1406).
His successor, Gregory XII, invited Benedict XIII to a conference. Benedict offered to resign if Gregory would do likewise; Gregory’s relatives dissuaded him from consent. Some of his cardinals withdrew to Pisa, and called for a general council to elect a pope acceptable to all Christendom. The King of France again urged Benedict to resign; when Benedict again refused, France renounced its allegiance, and adopted an attitude of neutrality. Deserted by his cardinals, Benedict fled to Spain. His cardinals joined with those who had left Gregory, and together they issued a call for a council to be held at Pisa on March 25, 1409.
II. THE COUNCILS AND THE POPES: 1409–18
Rebellious philosophers, almost a century before, had laid the foundations of the “conciliar movement.” William of Occam protested against identifying the Church with the clergy; the Church, he said, is the congregation of all the faithful; that whole has authority superior to any part; it may delegate its authority to a general council, which should have the power to elect, reprove, punish, or depose the pope.8 A general council, said Marsilius of Padua, is the gathered intelligence of Christendom; how shall any one man dare set up his own intelligence above it? Such a council should be composed not only of clergy but also of laymen elected by the people; and its deliberations should be free from domination by the pope.9 Heinrich von Langenstein, a German theologian at the University of Paris, in a tract Concilium pacis (1381), applied these ideas to the Papal Schism. Whatever logic there might be (said Heinrich) in the arguments of the popes for their supreme, God-derived authority, a crisis had arisen from which logic offered no escape; only a power outside the popes, and superior to the cardinals, could rescue the Church from the chaos that was crippling her; and that authority could only be a general council. Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, in a sermon preached at Tarascon before Benedict XIII himself, reasoned that since the exclusive power of the pope to call a general council had failed to end the Schism, that rule must be abrogated for the emergency, and a general council must be otherwise summoned, and must assume the authority to end the crisis.10
The Council of Pisa met as scheduled. In the majestic cathedral gathered twenty-six cardinals, four patriarchs, twelve archbishops, eighty bishops, eighty-seven abbots, the generals of all the great monastic orders, delegates from all major universities, three hundred doctors of canon law, ambassadors from all the governments of Europe except those of Hungary, Naples, Spain, Scandinavia, and Scotland. The Council declared itself canonical (valid in Church law) and ecumenical (representing the whole Christian world)—a claim which ignored the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church. It summoned Benedict and Gregory to appear before it; neither appearing, it declared them deposed, and named the Cardinal of Milan as Pope Alexander V (1409). It instructed the new Pope to call another general council before May, 1412, and adjourned.
It had hoped to end the Schism, but as both Benedict and Gregory refused to recognize its authority, the result was that there were now three popes instead of two. Alexander V did not help matters by dying (1410); his cardinals chose as his successor John XXIII, the most unmanageable man to occupy the papal throne since his predecessor of that name. Baldassare Cossa had been made papal vicar of Bologna by Boniface IX; he had governed the city like a condottiere, with absolute and unscrupulous power; he had taxed everything, including prostitution, gambling, and usury; according to his secretary, he had seduced two hundred virgins, matrons, widows, and nuns.11 But he was a man of precious ability in politics and war; he had accumulated great wealth, and commanded a force of troops personally loyal to him; perhaps he could conquer the Papal States from Gregory, and reduce Gregory to impecunious submission.
John XXIII delayed as long as he could to call the council decreed at Pisa. But in 1411 Sigismund became King of the Romans, and the uncrowned but generally acknowledged head of the Holy Roman Empire. He compelled John to call a council, and chose Constance for its seat as free from Italian intimidation and open to Imperial influence. Taking the initiative from the Church like another Constantine, Sigismund invited all prelates, princes, lords, and doctors in Christendom to attend. Everybody in Europe responded except the three popes and their retinues. So many dignitaries came, at their own dignified leisure, that half a year was spent in assembling them. When, finally, John XXIII consented to open the Council on November 5, 1414, only a fraction had arrived of the three patriarchs, twenty-nine cardinals, thirty-three archbishops, one hundred and fifty bishops, one hundred abbots, three hundred doctors of theology, fourteen university deputies, twenty-six princes, one hundred and forty nobles, and four thousand priests who were to make the completed Council the largest in Christian history, and the most important since the Council of Nicaea (325) had established the creed of the Church. Where normally Constance had sheltered some six thousand inhabitants, it now successfully housed and fed not only some five thousand delegates to the Council, but, to attend to their wants, a host of servants, secretaries, pedlars, physicians, quacks, minstrels, and fifteen hundred prostitutes.12
The Council had hardly formulated its procedure when it was faced with the dramatic desertion of the Pope who had convened it. John XXIII was shocked to learn that his enemies were preparing to present to the assembly a record of his life, crimes, and incontinence. A committee advised him that this ignominy could be averted if he would agree to join Gregory and Benedict in a simultaneous abdication.13 He agreed; but suddenly he fled from Constance disguised as a groom (March 20, 1415), and found refuge in a castle at Schaffhausen with Frederick, Archduke of Austria and foe to Sigismund. On March 29 he announced that all the promises made by him in Constance had been drawn from him through fear of violence, and could have no binding force. On April 6 the Council issued a decree—Sacrosancta—which one historian has called “the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world”:14
This holy synod of Constance, being a general council, and legally assembled in the Holy Spirit for the praise of God and for ending the present Schism, and for the union and reform of the Church of God in its head and its members… ordains, declares, and decrees as follows: First, it declares that this synod… represents the Church Militant, and has its authority directly from Christ; and everybody, of whatever rank or dignity, including also the pope, is bound to obey this council in those things that pertain to the faith, to the ending of this Schism, and to a general reform of the Church in its head and members. Likewise it declares that if anyone, of whatever rank, condition, or dignity, including also the pope, shall refuse to obey the commands, statutes, ordinances, or orders of this holy council, or of any other holy council properly assembled, in regard to the ending of the Schism or to the reform of the Church, he shall be subject to proper punishment… and, if necessary, recourse shall be had to other aids of justice.15
Many cardinals protested against this decree, fearing that it would end the power of the college of cardinals to elect the pope; the Council overrode their opposition, and thereafter they played but a minor role in its activities.
The Council now sent a committee to John XXIII to ask for his abdication. Receiving no definite answer, it accepted (May 25) the presentation of fifty-four charges against him as a pagan, an oppressor, a liar, a simoniac, a traitor, a lecher, and a thief;16 sixteen other accusations were suppressed as too severe.17 On May 29 the Council deposed John XXIII; and broken at last, he accepted the decree. Sigismund ordered him confined in the castle of Heidelberg for the duration of the Council. He was released in 1418, and found asylum and sustenance, as an old man, with Cosimo de’ Medici.
The Council celebr
ated its triumph with a parade through Constance. When it returned to business it found itself in a quandary. If it should choose another pope it would be restoring the threefold division of Christendom, for many districts still obeyed Benedict or Gregory. Gregory rescued the Council by an act at once subtle and magnanimous: he agreed to resign, but only on condition that he should be allowed to reconvene and legitimate the Council by his own papal authority. On July 4, 1415, the Council, so reconvened, accepted Gregory’s resignation, confirmed the validity of his appointments, and named him legate governor of Ancona, where he lived quietly the two remaining years of his life.
Benedict continued to resist, but his cardinals left him and made their peace with the Council. On July 26, 1417, the Council deposed him. He retired to his family stronghold near Valencia, and died there at ninety, still counting himself pope. In October the Council passed a decree—Frequens —requiring that another general council should be convened within five years. On November 17 an electoral committee of the Council chose Cardinal Oddone Colonna as Pope Martin V. All Christendom accepted him, and after thirty-nine years of chaos the Great Schism came to an end.
The Council had now accomplished its first purpose. But its victory on this point defeated its other purpose—to reform the Church. When Marrtin V found himself pope he assumed all the powers and prerogatives of the papacy. He displaced Sigismund as president of the Council, and with courteous and subtle address negotiated with each national group in the Council a separate treaty of ecclesiastical reform. By playing off each group against the others he persuaded each to accept a minimum of reform, couched in carefully obscure language which each party might interpret to save its emoluments and its face. The Council yielded to him because it was tired. It had labored for three years, it longed for home, and felt that a later synod could take up in sharper detail the problem of reform. On April 22, 1418, it declared itself dissolved.