An Introduction to the History of Western Europe Part 33

Three great tasks confronted the council: (1) the healing of the schism, which involved the disposal of the three existing popes and the selection of a single universally acknowledged head of the Church; (2) the extirpation of heresy, which, under the influence of Huss, was threatening the authority of the Church in Bohemia; (3) a general reformation of the Church "in head and members."

[Sidenote: The healing of the schism.]

[Sidenote: The decree _Sacrosancta_, 1415.]

1. The healing of the long schism was the most important of the council's achievements. John XXIII was very uncomfortable in Constance.

He feared not only that he would be forced to resign but that there might be an investigation of his very dubious past. In March he fled in disguise from Constance, leaving his cardinals behind him. The council was dismayed at the pope's departure, as it feared that he would dissolve it as soon as he was out of its control. It thereupon issued a famous decree (April 6, 1415) declaring its superiority to the pope. It claimed that a general council had its power immediately from Christ.

Every one, even the pope, who should refuse to obey its decrees or instructions should be suitably punished.

A long list of terrible crimes of which John was suspected, was drawn up and he was formally deposed. He received but little encouragement in his opposition to the council and soon surrendered unconditionally.

Gregory XII, the Roman pope, showed himself amenable to reason and relieved the perplexity of the council by resigning in July. The third pope, the obstinate Benedict XIII, flatly refused to resign. But the council induced the Spaniards, who were his only remaining supporters, to desert him and send envoys to Constance. Benedict was then deposed (July, 1417) and in the following November the cardinals who were at the council were permitted to elect a new pope, Martin V, and so the Great Schism was brought to an end.

[Sidenote: John Huss.]

2. During the first year of its sessions the Council of Constance was attempting to stamp out heresy as well as to heal the schism. The marriage of an English king, Richard II, to a Bohemian princess shortly before Wycliffe's death, had encouraged some intercourse between Bohemia and England and had brought the works of the English reformer to the attention of those in Bohemia who were intent upon the improvement of the Church. Among these the most conspicuous was John Huss (b. about 1369), whose ardent devotion to the interests of the Bohemian nation and enthusiasm for reform secured for him great influence in the University of Prague, with which he was connected.

Huss reached the conclusion that Christians should not be forced to obey those who were living in mortal sin and were apparently destined never to reach heaven themselves. This view was naturally denounced by the Church as a most dangerous error, destructive of all order and authority. As his opponents urged, the regularly appointed authorities must be obeyed, not because they are good men but because they govern in virtue of the law. In short, Huss appeared not only to defend the heresies of Wycliffe, but at the same time to preach a doctrine dangerous alike to the power of the civil government and of the Church.

[Sidenote: The 'safe-conduct.']

Huss felt confident that he could convince the council of the truth of his views and willingly appeared at Constance. He was provided with a "safe-conduct," a doc.u.ment in which Emperor Sigismund ordered that no one should do him any violence and which permitted the bearer to leave Constance whenever he wished. In spite of this he was speedily arrested and imprisoned, in December, 1414. His treatment well ill.u.s.trates the mediaeval att.i.tude towards heresy. When Sigismund indignantly protested against the violation of his safe-conduct, he was informed that the law did not recognize faith pledged to suspected heretics, for they were out of the king's jurisdiction. The council declared that no pledge which was prejudicial to the Catholic faith was to be observed. In judging Sigismund's failure to enforce his promise of protection to Huss it must be remembered that heresy was at that time considered a far more terrible crime than murder, and that it was the opinion of the most authoritative body in Christendom that Sigismund would do a great wrong if he prevented the trial of Huss.

[Sidenote: Trial of Huss.]

Huss was treated in what would seem to us a very harsh way; but from the standpoint of the council he was given every advantage. By special favor he was granted a public hearing. The council was anxious that Huss should retract; but no form of retraction could be arranged to which he would agree. The council, in accordance with the usages of the time, demanded that he should recognize the error of all the propositions which they had selected from his writings, that he should retract them and never again preach them, and that he should agree to preach the contrary. The council did not consider it its business to decide whether Huss was right or wrong, but simply whether his doctrines, which they gathered from his books, were in accordance with the traditional views of the Church.

[Sidenote: Conviction and execution of Huss, July, 1415.]

Finally, the council condemned Huss as a convicted and impenitent heretic. On July 6, 1415, he was taken out before the gates of the city and given one more chance to retract. As he refused, he was degraded from the priesthood and handed over to the civil government to be executed for heresy, which, as we have seen, the state regarded as a crime and undertook to punish.[208] The civil authorities made no further investigation but accepted the verdict of the council and burned Huss upon the spot. His ashes were thrown into the Rhine lest they should become an object of veneration among his followers.

[Sidenote: The Hussite wars, 1419-1431.]

The death of Huss rather promoted than checked the spread of heresy in Bohemia. A few years later the Germans undertook a series of crusades against the Bohemians. This embittered the national animosity between the two races, which has even yet by no means died out. The heretics proved valiant fighters and after several b.l.o.o.d.y wars succeeded in repulsing the enemy and even invaded Germany.

[Sidenote: Opportunity of the council to reform the church.]

3. The third great task of the Council of Constance was the general reformation of the Church. After John's flight it had claimed the right (in the decree _Sacrosancta_) to reform even the papacy. This was a splendid opportunity at least to mitigate the abuses in the Church. The council was a great representative body, and every one was looking to it to remedy the old evils which had become more p.r.o.nounced than ever during the Great Schism. Many pamphlets were published at the time by earnest men denouncing the corrupt practices of the clergy. The evils were of long standing and have all been described in earlier chapters.[209]

[Sidenote: The failure of the council to effect any definite reforms.]

Although every one recognized the abuses, the council found itself unable to remedy them or to accomplish the hoped-for reformation. After three years of fruitless deliberations the members of the a.s.sembly became weary and hopeless. They finally contented themselves with pa.s.sing a decree (Oct. 9, 1417) declaring that the neglect to summon general councils in the past had fostered all the evils in the Church and that thereafter councils should be regularly summoned at least every ten years.[210] In this way it was hoped that the absolute power of the popes might be checked in somewhat the same way that the Parliament in England and the Estates General in France controlled the monarch.

[Sidenote: Abuses enumerated by the council.]

After the pa.s.sing of this decree the council drew up a list of abuses demanding reform, which the new pope was to consider with certain of its members after the main body of the council had returned home. Chief among the questions which the council enumerated for consideration were the number, character, and nationality of the cardinals, the benefices to which the pope had a right to appoint, what cases might be brought before his court, for what reason and in what manner the pope might be corrected or deposed, how heresy might be extirpated, and the matter of dispensations, indulgences, etc.

Aside from the healing of the schism, the results of the Council of Constance were slight. It had burned Huss but had by no means checked heresy. It had considered for three years the reformation of the Church but had at last confessed its inability to carry it out. The pope later issued a few reform decrees, but the state of the Church was not materially bettered.

[Sidenote: Council of Basel, 1431-1449.]

116. The st.u.r.dy resistance of the Bohemians to those who proposed to bring them back to the orthodox faith by arms finally attracted the attention of Europe and called forth considerable sympathy. In 1431 the last of the crusades against them came to an ignominious end, and Martin V was forced to summon a new council in order to consider the policy which should be adopted toward the heretics. The Council of Basel lasted for no less than eighteen years. At first its prestige was sufficient to enable it to dominate the pope, and it reached its greatest authority in 1434 after it had arranged a peace with the moderate party of the Bohemian heretics. The council, however, continued its hostility towards Pope Eugene IV (elected in 1431), and in 1437 he declared the council dissolved and summoned a new one to meet at Ferrara. The Council of Basel thereupon deposed Eugene and chose an anti-pope. This conduct did much to discredit the idea of a general council in the eyes of Europe.

The a.s.sembly gradually dwindled away and finally in 1449 acknowledged the legitimate pope once more.

[Sidenote: Council of Ferrara-Florence, 1438-1439.]

[Sidenote: Union of Eastern and Western Churches.]

Meanwhile the Council of Ferrara[211] had taken up the momentous question of consolidating the Eastern and Western Churches. The empire of the East was seriously threatened by the on-coming Ottoman Turks, who had made conquests even west of Constantinople. The Eastern emperor's advisers urged that if a reconciliation could be arranged with the Western Church, the pope might use his influence to supply arms and soldiers to be used against the Mohammedans. When the representatives of the Eastern Church met with the Council of Ferrara the differences in doctrine were found to be few, but the question of the heads.h.i.+p of the Church was a most difficult one. A form of union was, nevertheless, agreed upon in which the Eastern Church accepted the heads.h.i.+p of the pope, "saving the privileges and rights of the patriarchs of the East."

[Sidenote: Results of the Council of Ferrara.]

While Eugene received the credit for healing the breach between the East and the West, the Greek prelates, upon returning home, were hailed with indignation and branded as robbers and matricides for the concessions which they had made. The chief results of the council were (1) the advantage gained by the pope in once more becoming the recognized head of Christendom in spite of the opposition of the Council of Basel, and (2) the fact that certain learned Greeks remained in Italy, and helped to stimulate the growing enthusiasm for Greek literature.

No more councils were held during the fifteenth century, and the popes were left to the task of reorganizing their dominions in Italy. They began to turn their attention very largely to their interests as Italian princes, and some of them, beginning with Nicholas V (1447-1455), became the patrons of artists and men of letters. There is probably no period in the history of the papacy when the head of the Church was more completely absorbed in forwarding his political interests and those of his relatives, and in decorating his capital, than in the seventy years which elapsed between 1450 and the beginning of the German revolt against the Church.

General Reading.--CREIGHTON, _History of the Papacy_ (Longmans, Green & Co., 6 vols., $2.00 each), Vol. I, is perhaps the best treatment of the Great Schism and the Council of Constance. PASTOR, _History of the Popes_ (Herder, 6 vols., $18.00), Vol. I, Book 1, gives the most recent and scholarly account from the standpoint of a Roman Catholic.

CHAPTER XXII

THE ITALIAN CITIES AND THE RENAISSANCE

[Sidenote: Italy the center of European culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.]

117. While England and France were settling their differences in the wretched period of the Hundred Years' War, and the little German princ.i.p.alities, left without a leader,[212] were busied with their petty concerns, Italy was the center of European culture. Its cities,--Florence, Venice, Milan, and the rest,--reached a degree of prosperity and refinement undreamed of beyond the Alps. Within their walls learning and art made such extraordinary progress that this period has received a special name,--the _Renaissance_,[213] or new birth. The Italian towns, like those of ancient Greece, were really little states, each with its own peculiar life and inst.i.tutions. Of these city-states a word must be said before considering the new enthusiasm for the works of the Romans and Greeks and the increasing skill which the Italian artists displayed in painting, sculpture, and architecture.

[Sidenote: Map of Italy in the fourteenth century.]

The map of Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was still divided into three zones, as it had been in the time of the Hohenstaufens. To the south lay the kingdom of Naples. Then came the states of the Church, extending diagonally across the peninsula. To the north and west lay the group of city-states to which we now turn our attention.

[Sidenote: Venice and its relations with the East.]

Of these none was more celebrated than Venice, which in the history of Europe ranks in importance with Paris and London. This singular town was built upon a group of sandy islets lying in the Adriatic Sea about two miles from the mainland. It was protected from the waves by a long, narrow sand bar, similar to those which fringe the Atlantic coast from New Jersey southward. Such a situation would not ordinarily have been deliberately chosen as the site of a great city; but its very desolation and inaccessibility had recommended it to its first settlers, who, in the middle of the fifth century, had fled from their homes on the mainland to escape the savage Huns.[214] As time went on the location proved to have its advantages commercially, and even before the Crusades Venice had begun to engage in foreign trade. Its enterprises carried it eastward, and it early acquired possessions across the Adriatic and in the Orient.[215] The influence of this intercourse with the East is plainly shown in the celebrated church of St. Mark, whose domes and decorations suggest Constantinople rather than Italy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Scene in Venice]

[Ill.u.s.tration: St Mark's, Venice]

[Sidenote: Venice extends her sway on the Italian mainland.]

[Sidenote: The aristocratic government of Venice.]

It was not until early in the fifteenth century that Venice found it to her interest to extend her sway upon the Italian mainland. She doubtless believed it dangerous to permit her rival, Milan, to get possession of the Alpine pa.s.ses through which her goods found their way north. It may be, too, that she preferred to draw her food supplies from the neighborhood instead of transporting them across the Adriatic from her eastern possessions. Moreover, all the Italian cities except Venice already controlled a larger or smaller area of country about them.

Although Venice was called a republic, there was a strong tendency toward a government of the few. About the year 1300 all the townsmen except the members of certain n.o.ble families were excluded from the Grand Council, which was supposed to represent the people at large.