Fi«I AHÜCÜCO- Sixtus 11 Gives the Treasures of the Church to the Deacon St

Fi«i AHÜCÜCO- Sixtus 11 gives the treasures of the church to the deacon St. Lawrence ^detail) Frsi An^elico prohahly took Eugenius IV as his model for this fresco of Sixtus II, - .is lie took Nicholas V (at his command Iv executed these paintings) for the other papal iigure in the decoration of the chapel of Pope Nicholas in the Vatican. THE POPES THROUGH HISTORY edited hy RAYMOND H. SCHMANDT Loyola University, Chicago

Volume 1

;Eugenius IV

.Pope of Christian Union

by JOSEPH GILL, S. J. Professor of the Pontifical Oriented Institute, Rome

LONDON .URNS & OATES împnmi potest: ALPHONSUS RABS, S.J. February 8, 196Î Nihil Obstat: EDWARD A. CBRNY, S.S. Censor Librorum Imprimatur: FRANCIS P. KEOUGH, D.D. Archbishop of Baltimore October 10, 1961 The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal and moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the nihil obstat and imprimatur agree with the opinions expressed. Copyright © 1961 by THE NEWMAN PRESS Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-16572 Printed in the United States of America Introduction to the Series

IHIS VOLUME initiates a new series, "The Popes Through History/* a series consisting of biographies of the most important popes who reigned in times of particular crisis for the Church, Too many of the really significant popes are unknown outside of scholarly circles. Others are scarcely or inaccurately understood even by professional historians. Still others have fared so badly at the hands of apologists or of critics of the Papacy as a Catholic institution that the common view dis- torts them beyond recognition. This situation "The Popes Through His tory " seeks to remedy. Whatever one may think of the Papacy, surely the popes have played a prominent role in the dramatic formation and dissemination of Western Civilization. Weak men or strong, wise or foolish, simple or magnificent, they have moved across the stage of history decade after decade in unending succession. Each has left his individual mark, to the joy, pride, despair, or even contempt of subsequent generations. Each has influenced us modern men, living in the middle of the twentieth century, far more than we probably realize. In short, the popes deserve to be better known, not merely by vi INTRODUCTION the student of ecclesiastical history but by all who are genuinely concerned about the problems confronting contemporary Christian society. As with all eminent historical figures, the popes must be seen amid their own times, trials, and tribulations. Their reaction to their own age and its problems reveals their character and illustrates the perennial problem of the Christian man striving to come to grips with a world he did not fashion, but which he desires to redirect according to the precepts of the Gospels. Hence these volumes set the man against his background rather than isolate him from it—at least insofar as this can be done within a brief compass. The audience to which the Series appeals is the wide world of intelligent men and women who appreciate a significant tale well told. Biography seems a most apt medium for such purpose. Scholars who seek all the answers, and indeed all the questions too, will, it is anticipated, find at least some morsel here to merit their attention also. The authors are all experts in the period of their subject's life. While they write for those who wish an introduction to a group of complex and fascinating subjects, it is their hope that they will arouse their readers to penetrate beyond the limits of these small volumes.

RAYMOND H. SCHMANDT Department of History Loyola University, Chicago Preß ace

IN THE bibliography of the first volume of L Pastor's Lives of the Popes there is mention of a life of Eugenius IV—Albert, F. Ph., Papst Eugen IV. Ein Lebensbild aus der Kirchengeschichte des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts, i Lief., Mainz, 1884. When I was writing my book, The Council of Florence* I was anxious to consult that work, but though I looked for it in some of the richest libraries of Europe, in none of them could I find it. This much I discovered: that it was a doctoral dissertation that had not been printed. A few copies, presumably, had been made by some simple process of multiplication. It cannot, therefore, have had any great diffusion or have exercised any noteworthy influence on historical scholar- ship. That is the only reference that I have anywhere found to any special study on Eugenius, which means that his biography has not yet been published. From one point of view that is not surprising, because the whole of the fifteenth century has so far been inadequately studied. Some aspects, certainly, of its history, such as the development of Florentine art, have received much attention from scholars, and valuable collec- * Published by tîie Cambridge University Press, 1959. vii viii PREFACE tions of documents have been edited that can serve as the foundation of more general studies. But, compared with other centuries before it and after, the fifteenth remains relatively unexplored and its personalities unknown. On the other hand, one could justly have expected a biography of Eugenius before this, if not for what he did himself, at least for what he stopped others doing. He was Pope when the shadow of the Great Schism still hung over the Church and when good men were set on having general councils so often that they would have been virtually in permanent session, in order to replace the papacy as the highest authority and head of the Church on earth. Had the Conciliar Movement succeeded, not only Church history but the political history of all the nations would have been very different from what it has been. It did not succeed because Eugenius believed that it was wrong and at the cost of much suffering to himself opposed it with all his might. In other words, he turned the course of history by his action and on that account deserves to be better known. That is one reason why this biography has been written. Another reason is because Eugenius' Council of Florence brought the Emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople, procurators of the other three oriental patriarchates, and a group of about twenty metropolitans and bishops representing the Eastern Church into contact with the Latin Church. There resulted, after months of earnest discussion, union of the Eastern and Western Churches, a union that admittedly did not survive the fanatical opposition it encountered afterwards and the capture of Constantinople in 1453, but a union that was genuine while it lasted and permanent in some of its effects, because it was the fruit not of compromise but of harmony of principles. Schism again divided the Christian East from the Christian West within a few years after the council, as it had done before it That schism still continues. PREFACE ix Since the time of Eugenius no other great attempt has been made to heal it, though all good men deplore it. In our day there is among Christians a hunger for unity, as never before. This is signalized by the World Council of Churches whose origins go back to the years immediately following the first World War, and by the General Council summoned by Pope John XXIII. The Council of Florence offers guidance to the ecumenist of today. The Pope who convoked it, who nursed it, who brought it to its happy conclusion was Eugenius IV. That is another reason why his life should now be known. A third reason to justify this biography is the subject of it: the man Eugenius. If he was not a saint in the technical sense of the word, he was certainly a holy man, who managed to retain the contemplative spirit of the monastery in the bustle of public life, who was harassed by enemies and deserted by friends but in the end achieved his chief aims, who overawed people by his presence yet was easy of access, especially to the poor. There were more vicissitudes in his life than in the lives of most public men, and he bore them with fortitude. He was not perfect. He was somewhat undiscerning in his friendships, too easily assessing help received as worthiness of character. Some of his enemies he found it hard to forgive. His was a life of strong light and shade—more shade than light in his temporal fortunes, more light than shade in the qualities that made the man. Here are all the elements needed for an interesting biography. So, since in the course of my researches on the Council of Florence I had acquired much information about Eugenius and had come to regard him with respect and admiration, I set my hand to the task, with the.purpose not only of throwing a little more light on the history of the fifteenth century but also of making known the personal greatness and achievements of a worthy man.

JOSEPH GILL, S.J,

Contents

Preface vii chapter I The Background 3

chapter 2 Gabriel Condulmaro, Monk, Bishop, and Cardinal 15 chapter 3 Eugenius Fights a Losing Battle against J Basel 39 chapter ,φ The Tide Begins to Turn 69 chapter ζ The Council with the Greeks 99 chapter 6 Schism Again 133 chapter J Eugenius IV: The Man and His Work 169

chapter Ο Eugenius IV : His Lasting Achievements 203

Bibliography 213

Index 219

THE POPES THROUGH HISTORY Volume 1

Eugenius IV Pope of Christian Union

chapter T

The Background

JLJLISTORY, EVEN when referred to some particular person or episode, does not then begin; it goes on. The background against which the events of any one period take place is always the product of the age that has preceded it, and the more critical the age, the greater is its influence on what follows. Gabriel Condulmaro was born in 1383, was summoned to the papal court by his maternal uncle Pope Gregory XII in 1406, became a cardinal in 1408, was elected pope under the name of Eugenius IV in 1431, and died in 1447. The Cap- tivity of Avignon ended six years before his birth, and the Great Schism that split the Christian West for forty years (1378 to 1417) had already begun. He was destined to spend his life striving to undo the harm that those two catastrophes caused to the Church. In the course of the fourteenth century, during the seventy years between 1309 and 1377, seven popes, all of them French, lived not in Rome, but in Avignon in the south of France. Clement V (1305-14) was the only one of them who was really subservient to the King of France. He and his two immediate successors, John XXII (1316-34) and Benedict XII (1334-42), occupied the episcopal palace, but Benedict, a man of austere and saintly life, made the situation more permanent by building as the papal residence the massive 4 EUGENIUS IV castle—half fortress, half palace—that dominates Avignon even today. His successor, Clement VI (1342-52), bought the city from Queen Joan of Naples. Innocent VI (1352-62) and Blessed Urban V (1362-70) were both men whose private lives were above reproach and who did much to introduce necessary ecclesiastical reforms. Urban returned to Rome in 1367 but he found there such a spirit of anarchy and rebellion that he lost heart and retired again sadly to Avignon. His successor Gregory XI (1370-78) restored the papacy to Rome (1377). The harm that the Captivity of Avignon brought on the Church did not come from the fact that the popes of that time were "bad popes/' On the whole they were "good popes/' It came from a variety of factors, one of which was that the papacy seemed to have lost its supra-national character. Popes as popes belong to no nation. They are heads of a catholic, universal Church, and their concern is not a part of the world but the whole world. The first of the popes at Avignon was unduly influenced by the King of France. The rest were not but they were living practically on French territory, for Avignon was a little enclave surrounded by France. They were all Frenchmen and they created an overwhelmingly pre- ponderant number of French cardinals—Clement V twenty- two out of twenty-four. The fact was that the pope and his court were French and in Avignon and thus inevitably sensi- tive to French influence. The damage was that the rest of the Christian world looked upon them as only French and began to lose respect for the papacy as non-national and the arbiter of nations, and to resent its "intrusions" into their own local national life. Sentiment sought justification and action gave birth to theory. Lewis IV of Bavaria, claimant of the imperial German throne, disposed of all his rivals by force of arms and established himself as King. Pope John XXII, however, insisted on THE BACKGROUND 5 the recognised papal right of arbitrating in a disputed succession. Lewis refused to yield and was excommunicated. His court became the centré to which there gravitated those who were discontented with the papacy. The "Fraticelli"1 and Lewis, bound together by their common defiance of the pope, gave each other mutual support. Marsiglio of Padua and John of Jandun dedicated to him their Defensor facts, the work in which they proposed a new and subversive theory about the constitution of the Church: that its authority comes only from the Holy Scriptures; that the highest power in it is the Ecu- menical Council, to be convoked by the state and to consist of layfolk as well as of clerics; that the popes are merely the executive agents of such councils; and that supervision and direction of the local churches is the competence of the local princes. With his mind full of these ideas, Lewis went to Italy and was crowned at Milan by two excommunicated bishops. He was welcomed by many cities and used his army to stimulate a welcome from others. He entered papal Rome; the avowed enemy of the pope, he had himself elected senator and captain of the city; and, while Mass was being said by two excommunicated bishops in the Basilica of St. Peter's, he was crowned in the great piazza in front of the church, this time receiving the crown not from the hands of any cleric but from those of a representative of the people. He then excommunicated the Pope and had one of his "Fraticelli" .adherents elected as antipope, who renewed the excommunication. Such action was too strong meat for the stomach of even the turbulent Italy of those days, and many of the cities that had hailed Lewis on his coming execrated him as he withdrew. Excommunicated afresh and declared deposed from all his possessions and titles, Lewis, to strengthen his position by judicious matrimonial alliances, nullified a previous marriage of one of his daughters to give her anew to a more powerful 6 EUGENIUS IV prince; allied himself with England because it was at war with France; and declared that the German Electors had no need ever of papal approbation for their choice of monarch, as their power came from God. Excommunicated again by Clement VI, Lewis, a man in himself religious and pious, died un- reconciled with the Church, a victim of the Captivity of Avignon which had made him treat the papacy as only a political, French, power, and believe the theories which that Captivity seemed to justify. Lewis was not unique, but he acted on a massive scale. Others of lesser count applied the same principles in their minor spheres. The popes of Avignon had not renounced their claims to possession of the Papal States, but the longer they were out of Italy, the greater grew the disorders there and the greater the danger to their sovereignty from the rapacity of noble houses and neighbouring powers. They had, therefore, to provide costly mercenary armies to protect their rights. Clement V and Benedict XII brought the methods of the papal treasury for getting money to a remarkably high degree of efficiency and amassed thereby a considerable treasure, much of which was expended on the building of the sumptuous papal palace. Clement VI, whose only ambition was (so he said) to make all his subjects happy, soon emptied the treasury as Avignon became more and more the most luxurious and worldly of princely courts. It attracted, of course, all sorts of adventurers and careerists, and, as the century wore on, roving bands of unemployed mercenaries, who had to be bought off at great cost. The popes needed more money. They extended the application of customary taxes and multiplied their demands. Tenths were exacted more often. In 1306, Clement V claimed a year's revenue from all benefices throughout England and Scotland at that time vacant or falling vacant within a period of three years. A decade later, John XXII made a similar enactment, and so it went on. With increasing frequency the popes THE BACKGROUND 7 made "provisions" for bishoprics or benefices, i.e. claimed the right of appointing the incumbent when some determined see or benefice should next fall vacant, the rights of the cathedral chapters or of others notwithstanding. In that way they "provided" an income for a swarm of greater or lesser papal func- tionaries and friends who rarely, if ever, visited their charges. England suffered worse than other countries from "provisions." It was asserted in the Parliament of 1376 that there flowed annually into the papal coffers more than twenty thousand marks of good English money—five times as much as the royal revenues—which was then used in part to ransom back from England French prisoners taken in the war. The result was legislation by the English Parliament which weakened the tie between England and the Holy See. In 1351, the first statute of Provisors was passed to put a stop to papal "provisions," and in 1353 the first statute of Praemunire prohibited under severe penalties "drawing the king's subjects out of the realm" to the detriment of the English courts of justice—a measure to limit the number of cases called to the papal courts for decision, which, made more stringent in 1365 and again in 1393, was aimed at the popes and was vague enough to cover whatever the English crown wished, as Henry VIII proved at the time of the Reformation. England was not the only country to react against the avarice of the Avignon popes. Germany did as much. In 1367, for example, the Duke of Bavaria forbade his clergy to make payments to the pope, "because the pope has no right to give orders in your country." The popes had, of course, a right to receive money from all Christian countries, both for services rendered and in general for the upkeep of themselves and of the papal Curia, which was indispensable for the well-being of the Church. It was the excessive exactions, and exactions felt to be enriching France, that alienated the other nations. The greater part of papal revenues should, in any case, have come from the Papal 8 EUGENWS IV States, but in fact these were an expense rather than a source of income for they were all in revolt. Cola di Rienzo declared Rome a republic in 1347 and hoped that it might become the centre of a united Italy. The larger cities were trying to sub- jugate the towns and villages of the surrounding countryside and make themselves independent. The numerous princely families took possession of the areas dominated by their many castles. Everywhere there was petty war, raids, robbery. Milan, Genoa, Venice, and Florence were forever making and breaking treaties, each of them endeavouring to enrich itself at the expense of the others and particularly at the expense of the orphaned Papal States. Mercenary armies, made up as much of foreigners as of Italians, marched up and down the peninsula in the pay of whosoever had money, living on the country they passed through, supplementing their pay with booty, and in no hurry to end the campaigns that kept them employed. Whenever the papacy should return to Rome, it would be faced with the colossal task of restoring order within its States. It came back in 1377. Gregory XI, forced to leave Rome for Anagni for most of the year that he survived the return, nevertheless managed to die in the Eternal City (March 27, 1378). On April 8 of the same year there was elected his successor Urban VI and on September 20 an antipope, Clement VII. So began the Great Schism of the West which divided the Church for forty years and made the Papal States and in particular Rome the prize of contending parties and again the scene of war and anarchy. Urban VI, an Italian, was elected by the eleven French cardinals, the one Spaniard, and the four Italians of the conclave, because the French could not agree on a French candidate and Bartholomew Prignano, Archbishop of Bari and not a cardinal, was known to have been an efficient administrator in Avignon, a man of orderly and indeed saintly life, and of THE BACKGROUND 9 French sympathies. He was elected freely and he was elected validly and canonically, even though the Roman mob was howling frenziedly outside the conclave, demanding a Roman for pope. Afterwards all the cardinals, even the six Frenchmen who had never left Avignon, acknowledged the new Pope. Urban had one passion, reform, and he did not delay in letting it be known that he meant to transform the cardinals from worldlings into clerics, to combat simony at all costs even to refusing fees for services rendered, to abandon Avignon forever and stay in Rome, and to create enough non-French cardinals of high character to counteract the French pre- ponderance and to restore universality to the College by having all nations represented. Unfortunately, he propounded his aims without regard either for tact or for charity, in violent and abusive language, with personal insults and threats. As summer came on, the French cardinals slipped off one by one to Anagni and there on August 9, 1378, with the tacit approval of the other cardinals, they declared Urban's election invalid, because (they said) it was the result of fear instilled by the violence of the Roman mob. When King Charles V of France approved of their action, they elected the Frenchman, Robert of Geneva, as antipope with the name of Clement VII, who, unsuccessful in an attempt to capture Rome, took refuge in his natural home of Avignon (June 20, 1379). The rest of the Christian world, as it learnt the news, proceeded slowly and with great distress to decide to which of the rivals obedience should be given. To us, who have at our disposal documents from many archives, the choice is plain. Urban was unquestionably the validly elected Pope. In 1378, however, the question was obscure. The Roman mob had undoubtedly made a great and continual disturbance and had even broken into the palace of the conclave, but the election by then was already over. Yet so great had been the fear of the cardinals that, setting up old 10 EUGENÎUS IV Cardinal Tebaldeschi to receive the crowd's homage, they had pretended for the occasion that a Roman had really been elected, and in the confusion they had slipped out, four of them even leaving Rome. Later, all the cardinals who had taken part in the conclave acquiesced in the verdict of in- validity, and that within a few months. News travelled slowly in those days, and accurate news slower still. Urban did nothing to help himself. By his utter lack of restraint he had immediately alienated the sympathies of all the cardinals and just as quickly he had turned the Queen of Naples, hitherto friendly, for he was a Neapolitan subject, into his enemy. So Naples and France upheld the antipope; Savoy (Clement VII's native country), Scotland, Cyprus, after some hesitation Spain and Portugal, and on the receipt of a princely sum of money Austria—all favoured him too. Faithful to Urban were England, if for no other reason at least because France was Clementine; Charles IV, King of the Romans, and on his death (November 28, 1378) his son and successor Wenceslas; Hungary; Scandinavia; and Italy, except for Naples. In reality the picture was not as clear- cut as it sounds. Every country was to some extent divided on the question, as individuals and areas, whether for motives of honest conviction or for less worthy ones, made their own choice between the rivals. In Avignon, Clement did just what he was told by the French King and expended much ecclesiastical money on gifts to French nobles. In Rome, Urban created twenty-nine new cardinals, raged against Naples, excommunicated and deposed its Queen, appointed and crowned a successor who, once in possession, refused to implement the conditions the Pope had imposed. Against the advice of his cardinals, Urban went in person to browbeat the recalcitrant King Charles, but was soon besieged himself with his cardinals in the little town of Nocera where three or four times daily he appeared at a win- THE BACKGROUND II dow solemnly to excommunicate with bell, book, and candle Charles and the besieging army. Some of the cardinals entered into a plot against him, but he learnt of it, made them prisoners, and interrogated them under torture. He escaped to Genoa, had six out of the seven cardinal prisoners done away with, and returned to Rome to die there on October 15, 1389.

Roman Line Avignon Line Pisan Line Urban VI Clement VII Alexander V (1378-1389) (1378-1394) (1409-1410) Boniface IX Benedict XIII John XXIII (1389-1404) (1394-1417) (1410-1415) Innocent VII deposed 1417 (1404-1406) died 1422 Gregory XII (1406-1415)

Rival lines of popes (Roman Line) and antipopes (Avignon Line and Pisan Line) during the Great Schism

At Urban VTs death the Church was in a more pitiable state than ever. There were two Colleges of Cardinals; in many dioceses there were two bishops; in abbeys, two abbots; in parishes, two incumbents—one for one of the papal candidates, the other for the other. Religious orders were divided in their loyalties. The "popes" had to buy support by concessions dangerous for the independence of the Church and for the integrity of papal territory; Clement, the antipope, offered Louis of Anjou most of the Papal States on condition that he ejected Urban from Rome. Everywhere the State began to ^ssert itself over the Church, so that, for example, before a papal Bull could be promulgated it often needed the Placet of 12 EUGEN1US IV the local prince. Discipline both on the larger and the smaller scale was desperately weakened; everywhere there were factions, strifes, rivalries; the religious and the moral standards of the clergy fell very low.2 In such a soil heresy grew apace. In England Wyclif (tl384) and the Lollards produced the first serious case of heresy in English history. In Germany, the Waldensians increased rapidly in numbers and influence. In Bohemia, Hus took up some of WycliPs tenets and gave his name to a wide- spread movement. All these heresies had this in common, that they tended to separatism from the constitutional Church, that they put personal worth above sacramental power even for the conferring of sacramental grace, and that they leaned towards individualism and nationalism. It is not hard to see the influence of Avignon. To that city Clement VII returned after his election and the old life of luxury and extravagance continued. He spent money so freely—he expended not less than half-a-million florins between 1385 and 1393 in a fruitless attempt to establish French power in southern Italy—that he soon roused serious discontent among the clergy of his "obedience" from whom he was for ever making fresh demands for money. The result was a general desire to end the schism in any way that offered. The University of Paris, which had declared for Clement in 1378, was ready by 1390 for any remedy that would give peace to the Church. Checked for a time by Charles VI, who yet hoped by Clement's means to acquire Italy for the French crown, it expressed its mind on June 6, 1394, that the best way out of the impasse would be cessio, i.e. that both "popes" should abdicate; the next best, conven- tio, i.e. a compromise agreed to by both parties; or lastly, a general council. Neither Clement (tSeptember 16, 1394) nor big «successor, Benedict XIII? would contemplate tli£ THE BACKGROUND 13 method or seriously adopt the second. The third brought success, but only in 1417 after an unsuccessful attempt at Pisa in 1409. Urban VI was succeeded by Boniface IX (1389-1404), a man of excellent character and of peaceful disposition. He hastened to win the support of Naples, for he needed friends against France. He managed, too, to gain some control over the Papal States, by giving to various princes who had possessed themselves of papal territories the title of "papal vicar" in return for a nominal tribute. It was making the best of a bad job, for such "vicars" were very nearly independent possessors, but it was at least an acknowledgement of the principle of papal ownership. He even persuaded the Romans to abolish their republican constitution and admit pontifical sovereignty, but he also wisely fortified the Campidoglio, the Vatican, and Castel Sant' Angelo. With expensive wars and little revenue coming in from so many semi-independent cities, Boniface had recourse to dubious means for gaining money—-but not for himself. When he died in 1404, leaving a fortune of only one florin, he had not raised the prestige of the Church spiritually, though he had done much to restore it temporally. Clement VII was succeeded by Pedro de Luna, Benedict XIII, a hard and unyielding character who never relinquished his claim to legitimacy and died as antipope in 1422. Boniface was followed by Innocent VII (1404-6), gentle, peace-loving, and learned. He was the first of the humanist popes. In his day the infamous Poggio began his half-century of office as papal writer. Others, of better moral reputation, that Innocent employed were Leonardo Bruni, Coluccio Salutato, and Pietro Paolo Vergerio. Innocent did not reign long. At his death in 1406, Angelo Correr, a Venetian, at least seventy years old, was elected with the name Gregory XII. He was the maternal uncle of Gabriel Condulmaro, the future Eugenius IV, 14 EÜGENIUS IV NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1 "Fraticelli" was the name given to the more rigid section of the Friars Minor in the Franciscan family quarrel over the nature of evangelical poverty. When popes disagreed with them, they did not hesitate to brand them with the stigma of heresy. More than Franciscans were drawn into the quarrel, which did great harm for more than a century. 2 "Also avarice, ambition, simony, pride and luxury have taken possession of the clergy; application to study has gone by the board; monasteries and churches are falling into ruins; the worst subjects have become prelates to the great scandal of the faithful, many of whom today despise the clergy whom they regard as Antichrist."—From a speech by a German delegate in the Council of Constance, Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et ampUssima collection 27 (Paris, Leip- zig, 1903), 1156 C. chapter

Gabriel Condulmaro, Monk,

Bishop, and Cardinal

JiEW INDEED are they who are so obviously pre- destined from their earliest youth to greatness that the intimate history of their childish years is assiduously recorded. Fame, if it comes, comes with the maturity of age and brings with it public notice and the probability of written records of actions, wisely or unwisely performed. The biographer of such a one will not lack for material for the adult years of his subject, but he may be very hard put to it to glean a few authentic details about his youth, even if that youth belongs to the comparatively recent past. Gabriel Condulmaro was born in Venice about the year 1383, but because he achieved a certain fame later by becoming pope, brief biographies of him were written within a short time of his death, which preserved for posterity a little genuine information about his earlier years. He was one of the four children of Angelo of the well-to-do merchant family of Condulmaro, which was possibly of Neapolitan origin. Little is known about his two brothers, Simeon and Mark. His sister Polissena is more famous, for she married Nicholas Barbo, and one of the children of the union was later pope with the name of Paul II. Gabriel's father died when he was 15 16 EUGENIUS IV still quite young, leaving him an ample fortune. His uncle, Angelo Correr, was the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople and he obtained for another nephew, Antony Correr, the deanery of the church of Corone. Antony, a close friend of Gabriel's, prevailed on his ecclesiastical uncle to do something also for Condulmaro, who in due course was instituted into a canonry of the cathedral of Verona, when he could not have been much more than about fifteen years old. He must, however, already have made up his mind to embrace the ecclesiastical state, for he took his new dignity seriously and went to live at Verona. The consequences that followed are well told in the words of an eighteenth century writer.

Antony [Correr], then, having obtained by God's kindness so excellent a companion spent a whole year in Verona with Gabriel, in exercises of piety, in that house that still in our day bears the plaque with the inscription: Eugenii IV, Pont, opt, max,, felix domicilium. At the end of the year, however, their parents summoned them back to Venice, but they were so in love with solitude that they established for themselves an ordered religious life in their homes. Such was the force of their example that some young men of outstanding virtue and nobility wanted to join them in their way of life.

Francis Mauraceno was the first, then Marino Quirino and his nephew Laurence Giustiniano, later Matthew de Strata from Pavia, Luke d'Esté, John Picenardo of Cremona, and Francis Barbo, a Venetian and son of Mark Barbo.

All of these, impelled by the action of the Holy Spirit, were of one mind in forming a new society wherein they could serve God in common. First of all, therefore, they met in the private house of Antony Correr, not far from the parochial church of S. Blasio, where with assiduous prayers and fastings they determined to adopt a form of common life. Meanwhile Angelo, the Patriarch of Constantinople, had come to Venice from the Rome Curia and, full of admiration for the com- GABRIEL CONDULMARO 17 mendable way of life that his nephews and their companions had agreed upon, he gave them his counsel and also took them out of their restricted quarters into his own house. There, however, the constant coming and going of people made a life of solitude difficult, so with the Patriarch's consent, they removed to the ancient monastery of S. Nicolo on the Shore (di Lido), which during the war with Genoa had been turned into a military barracks. While, then, they were there engaged in spiritual practices and in continuous prayer, Louis Barbo, Francis's brother, who was prior of the monastery of S. Giorgio di Alga, which he held in commendam, was so attracted by their piety and their way of life that he spontaneously offered them the island entrusted to him as a more suitable dwelling. Louis had been given the administration of this priory [April 3, 1397] when he was twenty years old by Boniface IX,1 who had offered it without being asked, for he knew well the young man's virtue and learning. Barbo for his part immediately did all he could to turn the deserted and neglected spot into a place dedicated to the worship of God, and an abode of men of regular life.

So he seized the opportunity to urge the companions to exchange the monastery of S. Nicolo for that of S. Giorgio, which they did, and Louis petitioned for the Pope's approval. Boniface IX commissioned a bishop resident in Venice to make the requisite enquiries, and the upshot was that by a Brief of Innocent VII of October 30, 1404, the ancient statute was changed and there was established "the new state of a collegiate secular church of secular clerical canons, living, eating, and dwelling together, and together praising God with night as well as day offices." The bishop summoned Antony Correr and his companions, among whom by that time Mark and Michael Condulmaro were numbered, and instituted them and their successors as canons and brethren of the church of S. Giorgio di Alga, to form a collegiate chapter of the church, though the title of Prior as well as one-third of the revenues were reserved for Louis Barbo.2 18 EUGEN1US IV The rule of the new canons, a version of the rule of St. Augustine, must have been strict. At some time in the course of those years of formation, Condulmaro followed the gospel precept and gave his whole fortune of twenty thousand florins to the poor. His days were fully occupied in reciting divine offices, in reading, praying, or writing. He had an excellent knowledge of Latin and at this time made for himself a copy of the breviary, which he used in his recitation of the Divine Office for the rest of his life, Vespasiano da Bisticci (from whom these particulars are taken) adds that the canons spent a week in turn in the porter's lodge to act as guest-masters. Once when Gabriel was on duty, a mysterious hermit called, who, while he was receiving hospitality, prophesied that his host would become cardinal and pope and would reign for eighteen years. The prophecy is probably a later legend, but the events to which it refers were not long in coming to pass. The companions had been established in S. Giorgio's for only a few years when Angelo Correr, the Patriarch of Constantinople, became Pope Gregory XII (November 30, 1406), and gave the new canons (January 27, 1407) leave to wear a form of blue habit modelled on what the cardinals had at one time used in consistory; from this colour they came to be known as the Cerulini. Antony Correr, however, and Gabriel Condul- maro did not enjoy this new privilege, for already their uncle, the Pope, had summoned them to Rome. Their first act was to ask for confirmation of the charter of the College of Canons and the privilege, mentioned above, of the blue habit. Both were granted, but the respective Bulls were taken to Venice by the legates that had come to express that city's congratulation to Gregory, and the cousins, despite their reluctance, had to remain by the old Pope's side and share the vicissitudes of his troubled reign. When the cardinals had met to elect a successor to Inno- GABRIEL CONDULMARO 19 cent VII, they had all accepted and signed a declaration that, if elected pope, they would strive for unity within the Church. In particular they bound themselves by oath to abdicate willingly and without reserve if the antipope should abdicate or die, provided the cardinals of the other "obedience" would unite with them for the election of a successor; within three months of election to send an embassy to the rival to determine on a place where both should meet; and, except to equalise the number of cardinals in the one camp and the other, not to create new cardinals as long as negotiations about abdication were in progress, though, if unity was not obtained within fifteen months, this obligation was to cease. "The conditions were such that the elect seemed less a pope than a charge d'affaires with, the office of abdication from the papacy," is the comment of a well-known historian.3 Angelo Correr had been chosen unanimously as Pope because of his known zeal for unity. His action after his election did not belie his reputation. He confirmed the declaration he had already made; wrote letters in favour of unity to Benedict XIII, to his cardinals, to princes; spoke and exhorted and asserted that he would go to meet his rival "even if he had to make the journey on foot or to cross the sea in an open boat." Benedict replied in the same spirit, and all the world rejoiced for the schism seemed on the point of ending. In fulfilment of the declaration he had made, Gregory sent his nephew, Antony Correr, at the head of an embassy to Benedict in Avignon, to arrange a site for a meeting. By April ?0, 1407, agreement had been reached on the place—Savona on the Italian coast, northwest of Genoa and in Genoese territory, which at that time was in French hands—and on the various conditions of how many ships, soldiers, and the rest each could bring with him. The two "popes" were to be there by September 29, 1407, or at the latest by November 1. But when the time approached for Gregory to think of starting on 20 EUGEN1US IV the journey, he began to make difficulties. Ships had been provided for him by the Genoese—he could not trust them, for there French influence was too great; the journey by land was through Florentine territory—Florence was his enemy; besides he had no money; and Savona was also in French hands. It is generally held that his nephews, Antony and Paul Correr, who thought that a pope on half a throne would be more advantageous for the family fortunes than an ex-pope on no throne at all, and the Dominican Bishop of Ragusa, John Dominici, were chiefly responsible for this sudden change in the old Pontiff's.attitude. In this regard the name of Gabriel Condulmaro is never mentioned. Gregory did move, however, for in August, 1407, he had also another motive for leaving Rome, since the Colonnas in combination with Ladislas of Naples were threatening it, and he took refuge for a time with his court in Castel Sant* Angelo. He passed through Viterbo and reached Siena in September, where he remained till January, 1408, spending the time he should have passed in colloquy with Benedict in writing letters explaining why, in spite of the agreement, he was not doing so. Meantime Benedict had arrived with his ships at the rendezvous, and the more Gregory showed himself reluctant to go to the meeting, the more Benedict declared himself ready to make concessions, confident that he would never be called upon to implement them. Messengers and ambassadors of many States were at work to stimulate, cajole, even to force, the rivals to come together. The place of meeting was changed to Pietrasanta. Benedict went there; Gregory, unable to resist the pressure brought to bear on him, got as far as Lucca by January 28, 1408, but never went the last few miles, preferring from there to propose projects he knew his rival would reject and to reject those that were made to him. Benedict would not leave the sea far behind him (it was his line of retreat in an emergency), and Gregory would not approach the GABRIEL CONDULMARO 21 sea (he was afraid of being whisked aboard a ship and carried away). People began to talk of collusion between the two "popes" and to believe in the sincerity of neither:

Do you make an offer and I shall refuse; And I then shall proffer and you will reject. While Gregory rules o'er the land, Over the water is Benedict's reign. And so, by dividing between them the throne, The throne which they blandly but cleanly bisect Will feather the nests of them both And richly provide for the twain.

j By this time, more than a year and a quarter had passed since Gregory's election and, considering himself now no longer bound by the stipulation he had made not to create cardinals, he began to speak of a new creation, which was, of course, to include some of his nephews. Antony Correr, besides receiving various lucrative commendams, had already been appointed papal Camerarius (in charge of all finance), bishop of Methone, and then bishop of Bologna. Condulmaro had not been forgotten either. He had been made a Protonotary Apos- tolic, Treasurer (second in charge of finance), and had been given a canonry of the diocese of Corone in Greece. When the papal court was in Siena, Gregory nominated him the bishop of that city, dispensing him from the impediment of age (he was not yet twenty-five years old) and giving him permission to enjoy the revenues of the See even before the letters of appointment were ready. For a time the Sienese refused to accept him. They did not want over them a bishop of no experience and a "foreigner." They were not, however, annoyed for long, since Condulmaro resigned from the See within a year, when he became a cardinal. Pope Gregory appointed a successor on July 20, 1409. The nephews were useful to Gregory in another way also 22 EUGENIUS IV to help the family fortunes. When Angelo Correr became Pope, he did not relinquish his Sees of Constantinople and Corone. At the end of 1407 he empowered Antony Correr to appoint deputies to them and on June 13, 1408, he made him procurator general of Constantinople; on January 28, 1409, he appointed Condulmaro vicar of the same. The revenues from Constantinople and Crete were considerable. The suggestion of making new cardinals while the negotiations about unity were in progress, even though it was techni- cally not against the election agreement, roused strong opposition in Gregory's Curia; and for the moment the Pope desisted, but not for long. On May 12, 1408, after having tried in vain to intimidate the opposition, he made Antony Correr, Gabriel Condulmaro, James of Udine, and John Dominici cardinals. The same day most of his old cardinals left secretly for Pisa, and shortly afterwards they were meeting Benedict's official envoys in Leghorn. The two Colleges were soon agreed that both "popes" should abdicate and that a new one should be elected in a general council. Both "popes" replied by summoning general councils for themselves: Benedict's to meet in Perpignan in Spain on June 15, 1408 (and he set off with all speed to reach that place safely himself); Gregory's to meet somewhere in northeast Italy, and with five cardinals including Condulmaro he left Lucca on July 14 for Siena, where on September 19 he created ten more cardinals. From there he went to Rimini to be under the protection of his faithful vassal, Charles Malatesta. The cardinals at Leghorn announced the convocation of a general council at Pisa for March 25, 1409, and this duly opened on the appointed day with the goodwill of most of the Christian princes. Gregory and Benedict were invited to attend. Neither did. Charles Malatesta went there to assure the cardinals that if they would meet elsewhere, in territory where Gregory could feel safe, he would come himself and GABRIEL CONDULMARO 23 abdicate; but the cardinals had already been deluded by too many ill-founded promises and would not budge, especially since Gregory refused the suggestion that he should abdicate by proxy, as he easily could have done and as, a few years later, he actually did. Both "popes" were declared contumacious and both were deposed. The elevations they had made to the cardinalate of their partisans were declared null and void. In June, 1409, a new antipope, Alexander V, was elected and most countries gave him their obedience, even England and Angelo Correr's native city of Venice (August 22). This raised difficulties for Gregory XII, for he was then conducting his ghost of a council in Cividalej a town in the Patriarchate of Aquileia a little to the west of Udine. That patriarchate was a large, independent region to the north of Venice, which hostile republic therefore separated it from the area governed by Gregory's friends, the Malatestas. Besides, on May 29, 1409, in spite of the Pope's opposition, Aquileia had formally recognized as patriarch the candidate proposed by the Council of Pisa. Gregory realised his danger. On August 27, he announced that his permanent residence was Rome and with only two companions he escaped in disguise down the river to the sea, where there awaited him two ships of King Ladislas of Naples, which took him to Pescara. From there via Sulmona and San Germano he reached Gaeta in November. A servant of his, disguised as the Pope in flight, was captured, to the great jubilation of the Patriarch of Aquileia till he learnt of the deception. The papal insignia, however, were taken to Pisa to grace Gregory's latest rival. The rest of his suite, including presumably Condulmaro, joined the old Pope later. They had perforce been left behind in Cividale, but had been very courteously treated by the citizens, who some months later received a letter of thanks from the Pope. In Gaeta Gregory enjoyed a period of repose, when he could contemplate the spectacle of the Church now with 24 EUGENIUS IV three "popes": himself acknowledged by Naples and some other parts of Italy, by Rupert, one of the three rivals for the German throne, and by some of the German princes; Benedict XIII supported by Spain, Portugal and Scotland; and Alexander V who held the allegiance of the rest of western Christendom. His security was not of long duration. On May 19, 1411, his protector, Ladislas, was severely defeated by Louis of Anjou, who had been granted the kingdom of Naples by the Avignon line of "popes" and had been confirmed in it by Alexander V. Louis did not follow up his victory, which allowed Ladislas to escape total destruction. In his imminent danger, in June 1412, Ladislas was reconciled with John XXIII, who had succeeded Alexander (dead after a reign of less than a year), was acknowledged as King of Naples in spite of Louis's claims, and made standard-bearer of the Church. And, of course, he now supported the Pisan "obedience." So Gregory was forced to escape again. On October 31, 1412, two Venetian ships that happened to put in at Gaeta took him with the only three cardinals that then formed his Curia, Antony Correr, Gabriel Condulmaro, and Angelo Bar- badigo, all of them his nephews, to the Dalmatian coast. Other ships transported him thence to Cesano where the faithful Charles Malatesta awaited him and bore him safely to Rimini, which he reached on Christmas eve, 1412. The unnatural friendship between John XXIII and Ladislas did not last long. As soon as danger was removed, Ladislas again assailed Rome. John fled in confusion and, when the King of Naples threatened his refuge in Bologna, he appealed to Sigismund, the newly elected King of the Germans, who at that moment was making a parade of strength in northern Italy. Sigismund urged the convocation of a general council, and John reluctantly agreed. So the Church was summoned to meet in Constance on November 1,1414. With much foreboding John XXIII went to Constance, GABRIEL CONDULMARO 25 arriving on October 28. Gregory XII sent John Dominici as his representative, and towards the end of January other bishops and nobles of his obedience arrived. They were authorised to renew his offer of abdication, but not in a session îik which John XXIII might preside. Benedict XIII was willing to meet Sigismund in Nice. John XXIII soon sensed the general determination of the council to impose abdication on all three of the rivals with a veto against the re-election of any one of them. When he did not straightway fall in with this solution, there was talk of accusations and a legal process for past misconduct. So, yielding to the inexorable pressure, on March 1, 1415, he solemnly promised to abdicate. Instead, despite the vigilance of the guards, on March 20, he fled in disguise from Constance, still protesting his good will and determination to give unity to the Church. This deed induced the Council to put forward a principle that it had indeed already been acting on, but which so far had not been specifically formulated and sanctioned by a solemn enunciation, a principle fraught with serious and long- enduring consequences. The Council all along had been acting as if it were the chief authority in the Church. It had met with the intention of getting rid of all three "popes/' even of the "pope" of the Pisan line, John, whom it recognised as legitimate and almost as its own, since it was, according to its own profession, the continuation of the Council of Pisa. It had made doctors of theology and other sciences and representatives of princes the equals of bishops in voting, and indeed the equals of cardinals, for it took away from these the personal vote that each had and made them unprivileged members of their "nations," like any simple cleric or layman therein. Now, alarmed at John's escape, it felt the need of establishing for itself a solid juridical basis. So the principle of superiority was formulated and announced in the fourth session on March 30, 1415: "This synod, legitimately assembled in the Holy Spirit, 26 EUGENIÜS IV forming a general council and representing the universal Church, holds its power immediately from God, and everyone, no matter his office and dignity, even if he be pope, is bound to obey it in matters which pertain to the faith, to the eradica- tion of the said schism, and to the general reform of the Church of God, in head and members." Almost immediately afterwards the Council learnt that John had moved again and further away. On April 6, therefore, in the fifth session, it solemnly sanctioned the principle of the superiority of the council over the pope and exalted thereby an attitude imposed in a moment of emergency into a dogma that should be valid for all time. In any case, John's fate was sealed. He was several times cited to appear before the Council. A case was drawn up against him with seventy-two charges, later reduced to fifty- five. Since he did not present himself to answer, he was declared contumacious and, on May 29, 1415, in the twelfth session, he was deposed. He accepted the decision of the Council and submitted to be confined first at Gottlieben, then at Heidelberg, and later at Mannheim. Meanwhile Gregory had sent Charles Malatesta as his plenipotentiary. He arrived at Constance on June 15, 1415, and presented himself, not to the Council, which Gregory did not recognise because it had been convoked by the antipope John, but to Sigismund. In what was the fourteenth session of the Council, on July 4, Malatesta with Cardinal Dominici convoked the Council anew. Then with Sigismund presiding in place of the cardinals nominated for that purpose by John, it was agreed that the "obediences" of John and Gregory should henceforth form one, and so Dominici was accorded a place among the cardinals present, and the other cardinals created by Gregory were recognised as such. Thereupon Malatesta read out the brief document of Gregory's renunciation and a Te Deum marked the sincere thanksgiving of the GABRIEL CONDULMARO 27 assembly. Gregory was nominated Cardinal Bishop of Porto and perpetual legate of the March of Ancona. He died soon after on October 18, 1417. ; Some time after their uncle's abdication his nephews, the cardinals, went to Constance. The presence of Condulmaro is noted for the first time on November 21, 1415, at the twentieth session which confirmed the arrangements made for dealing with Benedict XIII, who was still reluctant to abdicate, though most of his supporters had by this time deserted him. In the subsequent sessions the name "Gabriel of Siena" appears with almost unfailing regularity in the list of those present, though he took no leading part in the proceedings. When, in the latter half of 1417, the Council was divided on whether the election of a new pope or legislation for the reform of the Church should have precedence, Condulmaro with Antony Correr sided with King Sigismund in favour of reform. He later changed sides, and Sigismund, now nearly isolated in his opinion, had to bow to the general will. Nevertheless the heads of reform that had already been agreed upon by the "nations" (i.e. the five groups into which the Council was divided for the purpose of voting) were promulgated in the thirty-ninth session on October 9, 1417. The first of these was destined to have greater resonance than the rest. It began with the word Frequens and enacted that general councils should be held regularly; the next one, five years after the close of that of Constance; the following one after another interval of seven years and thereafter every ten years, each council announcing the date and place of the next. Gabriel Condulmaro, like Otto Colonna, the future Martin V, who was elected Pope on November II, 1417, assented to this decree. The Council of Constance by its election of Martin achieved its main object: it had restored unity to the Church, for though Benedict XIII had not yet (and never would) 28 EU GEN WS IV abdicate, he had been deposed on July 26, 1417, and had very few adherents. The other purpose of the Council had not been accomplished: reform. Part of the reason was that each of the various nations was aiming at a reform that suited itself, and that the different grades in the Church, e.g., bishops and universities vis-a-vis each other, could not agree; in other words there was need of more study and far more altruism. Martin put out certain proposals and reduced some of these into regulations, but each nation made its own concordat privately with him. On April 19, the forty-fifth and last session was held, when, replying to a protest that was moved, the Pope ratified "all that here has been done, touching matters of faith, in a conciliar fashion, but not otherwise or after any other fashion Çconcïliariter . . . non aliter nec alto modo) " He left Constance on May 16 to make his way slowly towards Rome, and Condulmaro probably accompanied him. Martin's journey to Italy was leisurely, because he hoped to have some order introduced there before he arrived. During the schism there had been at least some "pope" present who claimed possession of the Papal States, but during the Council of Constance there had been no claimant. The local lords and, in particular, the condottieri had therefore made themselves masters of most of the chief towns with the areas they dominated, and Rome was in the hands of the Queen of Naples. Once Martin was elected, many of the usurping lords, knowing that the title they possessed to their properties was slender, began straightway to treat with him and were made vicars for a determined period paying a fixed annual census. Martin did not mean this to be a permanent solution, but it was the best he could do for the moment. At least it produced a certain stability and order that recognised papal sovereignty in principle, and it brought in a little revenue to the impoverished papal treasury. His chief problem was Braccio da Montone, a political GABRIEL CONDULMARO 29 exile from Perugia, who had become a most successful condottiero. Always in the pay of some "obedience" of the Church, he had acquired town after town, either by evicting an enemy of his patron and retaining the spoil or to offset arrears in the payment of his soldiers. By the time that Martin was elected, Braccio was master of a wide stretch of country running from Tuscia through Umbria into the March of Ancona, all papal territories, that cut off Rome and the Patrimony from the north. He had, too, the good will of Florence, for as long as he was strong he formed a bulwark against the power of Naples. There were various negotiations between him and the Pope, and pacts, with Martin making concessions he did not want to make in order to gain time till he would be strong enough to challenge his adversary by force of arms, which both sides knew was the only way that would finally settle their relations. Meantime the Pope steadily increased his influence by acting as arbitrator in disputes, by being conciliatory in the arrangements he made with the vicars of papal towns, and chiefly by favouring the growth of the power of Milan and its prince, Philip Maria Visconti, to counterbalance Braccio and his Florentine friendship. The papal court had left Constance on May 16, 1418. It reached Mantua on October 24, Ferrara on February 8, 1419, and Florence on the twenty-sixth of the same month, where it remained for the next year and a half till it was safe to go to Rome. Bologna was situated between Ferrara and Florence, and Bologna was a papal city, whereas Florence was not. Yet the Pope stayed in Florence, because Bologna would not have him. It was afraid that if he once entered the city he would stay there; and if he stayed, he was, of course, lord and master, whereas the Bolognese were set on managing their own affairs. John XXIII, before his election, had ruled Bologna for the •Church with a rod of iron. When he was deposed the city irevolted in favour of popular government. After Martin's elec- 30 EUGEN1US IV tion its ambassadors went to Constance, to Mantua, to Ferrara, to meet the Pope and to negotiate. They would grant the Church spiritual authority, not temporal, though they agreed to pay an annual census of ten thousand florins and the Pope either personally or through the bishop should choose one out of three names submitted to him for the fodestà. Martin was not satisfied with this agreement as a final solution, for Bologna was the richest city in the Papal States. In any case, it was not likely to be in force for long, because Bologna was also the most turbulent of cities and internal disruption would assuredly soon change the situation. Gabriel Condulmaro, Cardinal of the title of S. Clémente, usually called the "Sienese Cardinal/* was soon given employment. On June 5, 1419, with Cardinal Branda da Castiglione, he confirmed in the Pope's name the truce that had been arranged between Rodolfo Varano, a former ally of Braccio, and the town of Norcia. Shortly afterwards he was appointed legate, i.e. governor, of the March of Ancona (with an annual salary of four thousand florins though his predecessor had had six thousand) and left Florence on February 7, 1420. He took up residence in the bishop's palace next to the cathedral and shortly after his arrival summoned the magnates of the March to a parliament to take the oath of allegiance to the reigning pontiff. On January 26, 1420, there was an insurrection in Bologna occasioned by rivalry between family factions, which resulted in the self-appointment of a junta of sixteen reforma- tori to rule the city and in the renunciation of the treaty with the Pope. Martin sent ambassadors to demand his rights. Five signori of the largest cities of Romagna arrived to advise that they be given—which was a proof of the Pope's growing power and prestige. The Bolognese refused. The Pope laid an interdict on the city and called together the troops in his pay, including at the moment Braccio. Condulmaro accompanied the army as legate. Before long, the Bolognese realised that GABRIEL CONDULMARO 31 they would not be able to hold out against such odds. They treated with the papal legate and the result was a treaty which gave the city to the Pope, though the appointment to most of the civic offices still remained in the hands of the people. The Cardinal legate took possession in the Pope's name on July 21, and on August 20 Cardinal Alfonso Carillo arrived as papal governor. After this brief episode, Condulmaro returned to Ancona. Not much is recorded of his governorship there. He restored the church of S. Agnese and rebuilt the port that had been reduced to a poor condition by age and waves. He became involved in local family rivalries. During the schism, John XXIII had nominated a Ferretti as bishop of Ancona, and Gregory XII a Vigilanti. Under the new regime the Vigilantis charged the Ferrettis with disloyal sentiments, and the Car- dinal legate, prejudiced perhaps also by private feelings against old opponents, lent an ear to their accusations and threw Angelo Ferretti into prison. Friends of the accused appealed over the legate's head to the Pope, who appointed a commission of enquiry. This commission ordered Angelo's release. Later Condulmaro made an amende honorable by being particularly gracious to the Ferettis at a public function. The legate visited various parts of his area; he was in Macerata in the summer of 1421. In the same year he acted as arbitrator between Ancona and Fermo. Nevertheless government of the Marches at that time must have been particularly difficult. Pope Martin had returned to Rome on September 28, 1420, but shortly afterwards his relations with Braccio worsened. Against the will of Queen Joan of Naples, he renewed the Angevin claim to the succession to the Neapolitan throne. Joan riposted by inviting Alfonso of Aragon to be adopted as her son and heir, and he was not long in arriving (June) in person so as not to let so happy an opportunity slip. Before long, Braccio had accepted a condotta from him. Martin was 32 EUGENIUS IV thus faced by an overwhelming combination, He hired troops where he could and urged all his governors to raise money by loans, by gifts, by anticipating taxes—Condulmaro was to find six thousand florins—for he had to send reinforcements to the condottiero Sforza, who held certain papal towns that barred the entrance to the Kingdom of Naples from the north and so could prevent Braccio's army from entering Naples. From early in 1421, a state of war had in practice existed between the Pope and Braccio, and Braccio—himself or his lieutenants —was intermittently raiding papal territories. The March suffered regularly; in November, 1421, even Ancona was under siege at the hands of Jacopo of lesi. Braccio went south through the heart of the Papal States and passed within a few miles of Rome. The Florentines began mediation between Rome and Naples, and an accord was reached. Sforza, who hitherto had been on Martin's side, went over to Alfonso. Braccio returned through the Abruzzi and the March. Con- dulmaro, fearing an attack, concentrated his forces near Ancona, but fighting was not necessary, for an agreement was reached in Rome, consigning enough papal towns to the condottiero to pacify him for the moment. The position of the Pope was delicate. South of the Papal States there was a hostile Naples. Straddled across them to the north of Rome and commanding the routes north and east to the papal Romagna and the papal March of Ancona, lay Braccio. Florence was friendly to Braccio, who was too powerful and useful a neighbour to antagonize, and friendly to Martin, though ready to take possession of papal cities if the occasion offered, particularly in the contiguous Romagna. Ever since his election Martin had cultivated good relations with Milan, the inveterate enemy of Florence and Venice, so as to offset the power of Braccio and tepid Florence, even though he well knew that Visconti coveted his papal Romagna. Bologna lay in the middle between Florence, Milan, and GABRIEL CONDULMARO 33 Venice, and between Milan and the greater part of Romagna. It was, then, a key position and it behoved its governor to follow a nicely balanced policy, which the Pope intended should be one of neutrality. Alfonso Carillo, Cardinal of S. Eustachio, had been appointed apostolic legate in Bologna, after Condulmaro had arranged the treaty of 1420. Alfonso governed the city and its surrounding area wisely and firmly. In 1421, he approached Florence with an offer of alliance and, when that was refused, turned to Milan (February, 1422). The Florentines were annoyed at this, and their irritation grew when Visconti of Milan occupied Forli on the death of its own Signore. They complained to the Pope that Carillo was favouring their enemy too much, and Martin, in pursuit of his policy of neutrality, contented the Florentines by recalling him, and did not antagonise Visconti, by accepting his promise to restore the papal property in some future contingency. Gabriel Con- dulmaro was appointed in Carillo's place and arrived in Bologna on August 16, 1423, in the midst of a severe=visitation of the plague. He ordered a procession of supplication by all the citizens with a fine for those who did not take part, and "for this reason there went a very great throng; and he had this done so that our Lord God should show mercy, but all the same the plague did not cease—indeed more people died than ever, and a few days after it the administrator of the said legate died and was buried in St. Peter's." In September, 1423, the smouldering enmity between Florence and Milan became open war. The Florentines approached Condulmaro for a treaty, but he, protesting his instructions from the Pope to remain neutral, openly refused their request, while secretly coming to an understanding with them. Visconti had by now occupied Imola as well as Forli in Romagna, and Condulmaro was afraid of a similar coup against Bologna, so he introduced a contingent of Florentine 34 EUGEN1ÜS IV troops into the city. This could not escape the knowledge of Visconti, who also learnt about the secret agreement. Seeing his communications cut between his forces in Romagna and Milan, he protested against the breach of neutrality to the Pope, who ordered his legate to break off his alliance with Florence and preserve a strict neutrality. Condulmaro obeyed the letter but not the spirit of his instruction. He dismissed the Florentine soldiers and forbade passage through Bolognese territory to the troops of both belligerents. This did not bother the Florentines in the slightest as they had no commitments beyond Bologna, but it left Milan with its communications still cut. Martin V, at the renewed instance of the Duke of Milan, rebuked his legate and, when Condulmaro, a Venetian, refused in effect to modify his policy, he was relieved of his office (June 9, 1424) and left Bologna. In the rest of Martin's reign he seems to have received no other administrative appointment. In the course of his uncle's pontificate, as well as in that of Martin V, so as to enable him to live reasonably according to his cardinal's estate, Condulmaro must have received a number of commendams, i.e. benefices of various sorts·— abbacies, canonries, etc.—whose revenues he received without fulfilling in person the obligations they imposed, which were executed, if necessary, by a paid vicar.4 But he does not seem to have accumulated commendams so as to enrich himself, for he resigned several in favour of his old monastery of S. Giorgio, for which he ever retained an affection. In Septem- ber, 1407, from Siena he gave to it the benefice of the secular priory and collegiate church of S. Agostino outside of Vicenza together with the priory of SS. Firmo and Rustico, retaining at first for himself three hundred florins annually, but the next year (December 15, 1408) he surrendered the three hundred florins also. In 1424, he handed over to his Order the monastery of S. Gregorio in Bologna, freed from GABRIEL CONDULMARO 35 various servitudes that had impoverished it. Into these monasteries offered by the Sienese Cardinal, as well as to others given by Antony Correr, the Order sent its monks to recon- stitute the strict observance of monastic life, and this was part of the large indirect current of reform that was going on in the Church at the time. All his life Gabriel Condulmaro favoured and furthered reform among the monks and the canons. The Order he founded with Correr was a first manifestation of his zeal. His gifts of commendams to his monastery was another. Other churches and monasteries that came into his hands he entrusted to the Canons Lateran. They received from him the monastery and church of S. Salvatore in Venice (1427), but shortly after gave it up as not suitable to their way of life. His uncle had put St. PauFs-outside-the-Walls (Rome) into his care, at that time in a very sad state with its roof fallen in and its monks dispersed. Under Martin V he put it into repair (1425) and called in to serve its religious needs the Louis Barbo who had given S. Giorgio's to his Order and who later was made prior of S. Giustina's of Padua, which under his inspiration became the focal point of a large Benedictine reform. To the same Barbo he entrusted S. Giorgio Maggiore's in Venice to restore its discipline, while he himself retained his commendatory abbacy for some years after his election as Pope, to ensure that the reform should be stable, for the old monks at first had been recalcitrant. Another constant preoccupation with him was the question of the union of the Eastern and Western Churches. There h^d been Greeks present at the Council of Constance who discussed union with Martin V immediately after his election, in so optimistic a way that the Pope appointed successively two cardinals to go as legates to Constantinople to effect it? since he was convinced that the Greeks were willing to heal the schism by conforming their faith and discipline to those of 36 EUGEN1US IV the Latin Church. That was far too rosy a view of the situation, as Martin learnt from a letter of the Emperor of Con- stantinople, John VIII, in 1422. He did not, for all that, let his zeal for union slacken, though henceforward he aimed at a council in Italy and not in Constantinople. In all these endeavours Condulmaro supported and encouraged the Pope, as he himself over and over again asserted later in the various Bulls dealing with the question of union that he promulgated as Pope. Indeed he claimed to have been the main cause why Martin so consistently followed every path that led towards the desired union, and he declared that he had approved the last step his predecessor was destined to take in that direction, the draft agreement, according to which the Greeks, seven hundred strong, with Emperor, Patriarch, the other oriental patriarchs, and a representative body of prelates should come to a council of union to be held in some maritime city of the eastern seaboard of Italy at the Pope's expense. Martin died before the agreement was put into effect (February 20, 1431). Condulmaro, elected his successor, became heir to that and to all the other policies, both good and bad, that his predecessor had initiated. Martin's settlement of the Papal States, his attitude to Naples, his calling of a general council in obedience to the decree Frequens of the Council of Constance, the question of the union with the Greeks—these problems will determine almost every activity of Eugenius IV (as Condulmaro chose to be called as Pope), with the added complication of the intense hostility towards him of Visconti of Milan, a relic of his short tenure of office as governor of Bologna. He inherited also the disabilities that had resulted from the schism. On the ecclesiastical side, it had given rise to the Conciliar Theory, which denied supreme authority to a pope and which reached the peak of its development in the Council of Basel that Martin had just convoked. On the secular side: GABRIEL CONDULMARO 37 The pretensions of temporal princes, the revenues abandoned under the reform decrees at Constance, the further revenues lost under the Concordats, and the general debility of the papal power engendered by the schism—all combined to reduce papal income perhaps to one-third of its former amount. Nor was it likely that the level of the "spiritual" revenues would ever be restored; on the contrary, they were destined to continue to shrink for over a century. It, therefore, became vital that the revenues of the State of the Church should expand in order to supply the deficit.5

Eugenius was to see the Papal States embroiled in perpetual wars and a source of expense rather than of revenue.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO * He was in reality only fifteen or sixteen years old, since he was born in 1381 or 1382. 2 Flaminius Cornelius, Ecclesiae Venetae antiquis monwnentis nunc etiam primum editis illustratae ac in decades distributae (Venetiis, 1749), VI, pp. 59 seq. 8C. J. Hefele—H. Leclercq, Histoire des Conciles, vol. VI, 2 (Paris, 1915), p. 1305. 4 Some commendams were benefices without obligation; others had practically become such through either the laxity or the death of past holders. Originally all had implied positive obligations of either prayer or work. 8 P. Partner, The Papal State under Martin V (London, 1958), p. 193.

chapter 2

Eugenius Fights a Losing

Battle against Basel

VJN MARTIN'S death, the fourteen cardinals who were in Rome went into conclave in the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva to elect a successor. Dominic Capranica, who had been secretly raised to the purple by Martin in 1426 and publicly announced only in 1430, arrived late. The majority of the cardinals refused him entry, alleging a fictitious point of law, that he had not been given the red hat (he was out of Rome on papal business on the suitable occasion), in order to disguise their real reason of not wanting in the conclave too many members or connections of the Colonna family that had been over-favoured by the late Pope, Otto Colonna. Martin V had been somewhat of a tyrant towards his cardinals. As a reaction, at the beginning of the new election these drew up a."capitulation" which they all agreed on oath to observe if they should be elected pope. It was designed to safeguard the rights of the Sacred College and laid down that only with the consent of the majority of the cardinals should and could the pope reform the Roman Curia (he should reform the rest of the Church without further formality), transfer the Curia elsewhere or fix the time and place of a new council, and it enacted that one half of all revenues should go 39 40 EUGENIUS IV to the College. Gabriel Condulmaro signed the statement before his election on March 3, and Pope Eugenius IV renewed this acceptance on the day of his coronation, March 12, 1431. Shortly afterwards he took possession of St. John Lateran's and then held a public consistory in the Vatican, where under the weight of the great crowd the floor began to give way and the Bishop of Senigallia was crushed to death in the panic that ensued. One of Eugenius' first acts was to confirm Martin's appointment of Cardinal Julian Cesarini as president of the council summoned to meet in Basel. Cesarini was also papal legate in Germany, engaged in raising an army to.fight the Hussites, who were beginning to spread their heresy into neighbouring countries, Eugenius hinted to Cesarini that in Rome enthusiasm for the council was waning. Since Cesarini was devoting all his energies to his military commitments, he too had little interest in it for the moment, in the first place because he was strongly disinclined to be its president, and then because he was afraid that it might be used as an excuse for not prosecuting his crusade with energy. His fears on this score were soon allayed, for, when the council should have opened (March, 1431), there had arrived only the Abbé of Vézelay, who a month later had been joined by only one bishop, one abbot, and three representatives of the university of Paris. However, on July 23, John of Ragusa, O.P., and John of Palomar, in Cesarini's name, officially opened the Council of Basel. On August 14, Cesarini's army was ignominiously defeated and he himself barely escaped being taken prisoner. He was then free to direct the council and arrived in Basel on September 9. Meantime Eugenius was having an unfortunate start for his reign. Martin V, to some degree as a part of his policy of regaining control of the Papal States, but chiefly because of his excessive nepotism, had given possession of many castles EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 41 and estates to the various branches of the Colonna family, so that they dominated Campania at his death and had large properties also in Maritima, which meant that they had a stranglehold on all the area that lay between Rome and Naples. Their enrichment was chiefly at the expense of the Church, but partly also to the loss of other families, like the Orsini and the Conti, who consequently viewed them with hostility. Eugenius, too, was apprehensive of their power, which was too strong and too close to Rome for security. He was told that his predecessor had amassed ecclesiastical money with a view to a war on the Turks and to the council with the Greeks, and he asked Martin's treasurer for an account of it. This touched off a revolt. The Colonnas attacked Rome, which they entered (April 23), but had to retire when the people gave them no support, though they held one of the gates of the city for a month. A conspiracy to poison Eugenius, engi- neered, so it was said, by the Colonnas, was discovered in time, and the would-be assassin was executed on the last day of June. Rebellion spread. All over the Papal States were princes awaiting only an opportunity to make themselves independent. The "Prefect of Rome/' James di Vico, in the Patrimony (the area north of Rome) thought he saw his chance, and the Montefeltri of Urbino tried to occupy Città di Castello in the north of Umbria. The Queen of Naples came to Eugenius' rescue. She sent troops to the defence of Rome under her condottiero, Caldora, but he was bought over by the Colonnas. There was a plot to procure the surrender to the rebels of Castel Sant' Angelo, Rome's interior fortress, but it was discovered in time. Caldora was diverted from Rome because Queen Joan attacked his Neapolitan properties. Eugenius began hiring condottieri. From April 14 to October 31, 1431, he had taken fifteen of them into his pay with forces ranging from sixty footsoldiers and two lances (three men with three horses) to three-hun- 42 EUGEN1US IV dred foot and four-hundred and fifty lances. The period of hire was usually six months and the rate of pay three florins for a footsoldier and nine for a lance per month, with cor- respondingly higher rates for officers, according to their rank, and a sum in proportion to his force to the captain of the band. By August, 1431, the Pope was paying 13,105 florins monthly for the rank and file, with whatever else was due to their officers in addition. Besides the fifteen condottieri noted above, his chief captain was Nicholas da Tolentino, with whom he associated John Vitelleschi of Corneto, and these two, with the willing help of the Orsini and the Conti, soon made the Colonnas see that they were not going to win. Peace was arranged with some of the Colonna brothers. They received absolution from the excommunications fulminated against them (12 September), paid seventy-five thousand ducats to the papal treasury, restored to the Church some of the towns that their uncle had given to them, and awaited a better opportunity to get them all back again. But the head of the house, Antonio, Prince of Salerno, did not make peace, and preparations were begun for a campaign against him. In the midst of all this fighting round Rome, Eugenius was stricken with apoplexy. For many months his life was in danger and, though he did not die, he was left with his right arm and eye paralysed for some time. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1431, a large number of appointments were made, of podestà (local governors of towns—mayors), treasurers, etc., in many papal towns; it was the pope's right and at the moment a necessity in order to assert his determination to rule. In early September there arrived the secretary of the Em- peror John VIII of Constantinople to sound the dispositions of the new Pope with regard to the union of the Churches and to the agreement which at the time of his death Martin had been on the point of ratifying. The report he carried back was wholly favourable, as he and Eugenius had agreed tentatively EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 43

on Bologna as the site of the meeting of the Churches. But he had witnessed also the anarchy round Rome and that delayed further action from Constantinople. On November 2, John Beaupère, sent from Basel to press Eugenius to give all the support he could to the council, painted such a black picture of the situation there—thin attendance, local wars, doubtful faith of the citizens—that Eugenius, influenced also by the state of his own health and the prospect of a meeting with the Greeks, conceived the idea of proroguing the council and transferring it to Bologna. In the Bull Quoniam alto, dated November 12, alleging the above reasons as his motives, he transferred the council to Bologna to reopen after eighteen months. He sent the Bull to Cesarini leaving it to his discretion whether to put it into execution or not. It was signed by Cardinal Orsini for Eugenius (doubtless because the Pope could not yet write owing to his paralysis) and ten cardinals. In those troubled times it took months for letters to reach their destination, and before this Bull arrived in Basel the Pope had both issued and promulgated another copy of Quoniam alto (December 18) this time transferring the Council unconditionally, because he had heard that the Fathers of Basel had invited to the council the Hussites, though they had been condemned as heretics at Constance. The same ten cardinals signed it, but there were others who were openly or secretly opposed to the measure. This Bull Cesarini was to proclaim in Basel and then leave the city. . ' · · But the Council of Basel was not the Council of Siena that Martin V had got rid of so rapidly. Indeed some of those at Basel had been at Siena and, in their ardour for reform, were determined not to let themselves be robbed of a second chance of action. At the mere rumour of dissolution, the council was up in arms. Cesarini wrote begging Eugenius to defer any decision, because the council had by then held a first session 44 EUGENÎUS IV and it offered the only way of winning back the Hussites now that force had failed and of saving Germany, which would become Hussite and anticlerical unless reform were rapidly introduced. The Fathers of Basel, he wrote, were at the time very favourably inclined to the Pope's person, but they would certainly resist any attempt at dissolution. The reaction of the council was to send a circular letter round the Christian West asserting its determination to continue in being and its belief that the Pope would concur in that. It was at this juncture that there came to Basel the Bull of December 18. The council would not listen to it. From that time on relations between Pope and council progressively worsened. On February 15, in its second session, the council affirmed as its own the principle of superiority of council over pope that had been enunciated at Constance, and it declared that it could not therefore be transferred or adjourned even by the Pope and that no one could legitimately be hindered from attending it. In its third session of April 29, it politely but firmly summoned the Pope to retract his dissolution and to be present in person or by proxy, otherwise "the council itself would provide for the necessities of the Church, according to justice and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit/* and cardinals were to go to Basel within three months under threat of penalties. That "the threat was no mere idle boast seemed proved by an ominous sign of power. On June 6, a copy of their decree was affixed to the doors of St. Peter's in Rome itself, and the papal Curia fell into a panic. The situation was becoming serious for Eugenius. The council stood for reform, and all good Christians knew how sadly reform was needed in the Church after the ravages of Avignon and the schism. Sympathies, therefore, were on the whole with the council, and bishops, abbots, and representatives of princes and universities began to flow into Basel. By EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 45

April 9, 1432, these numbered eighty-three including nine bishops and sixteen abbots. The cardinals, some perhaps from conviction, most for fear that Basel was winning and would impose its threatened sanctions, began their defection. Capra- nica appealed to the council against Eugenius and arrived in person on May 16, 1432. He gave an additional handle to the Fathers to use against the Pope, for he claimed that his exclusion from the conclave of 1431 invalidated Eugenius' election, because Martin V had imposed the penalty of excommunication and loss of rights on any cardinal who did not recognise and allow his full participation in all the privileges of his rank. Branda arrived on August 18; Dominic Ram sent his secretary (August 22); and a group of five in Rome, when the Pope would not let them leave, drew up a document of adherence on July 25. Six alone out of twenty-one cardinals remained still faithful to Eugenius. The council grew not only in strength but also in courage. Eugenius had appointed his nephew Mark Condulmaro to govern Avignon and district at the death of the previous governor. Mark was incompetent. Whereupon the Fathers took it on themselves to appoint (June 20) Cardinal Carillo, who was then resident in Avignon, to supplant Condulmaro in the government. Eugenius replied by nominating the efficient Cardinal Peter de Foix who by force of arms eventu- ally drove Carillo out and ruled the area firmly and wisely for the Pope (July 8, 1433). This incident is instructive. It is the beginning of the council's arrogating to itself any and every papal office and function that occasion offered, and it was a small triumph to Eugenius in the midst of a depressing period of general defeat. It meant, too, the adherence to his side of another cardinal, de Foix. At that time Eugenius needed consolation, for his prospects were becoming very sombre. As soon as the campaign against the Colonnas had been brought to an end (September, 1431), 46 EUGENIUS IV Vitelleschi moved against one of their allies, the Count of Vico, who was too active a marauder to leave the area round the papal city of Viterbo in peace. He was driven out of his territories and took refuge in Siena. In April, 1432, however, Eugenius made Vitelleschi governor of the March of Ancona which needed a firm hand, but no sooner had he gone from the Patrimony than Vico returned, retook most of his old cities and had to be evicted again by force of arms. One of the papal condottieri employed this time against him was Nicholas della Stella, usually called Fortebraccio, who, claiming that his payment was in arrears, retained for himself as recompense the towns he captured and, to forestall reprisals, allied himself with the Colonnas. The Pope thereupon hired Michelotto Attendolo. In the same year another condottiero, the Spaniard Sanchez Carillo, brother of the cardinal, was raiding the north of the March at the instigation of Sigismund, the King of the Germans, but he was not very effective. Sigismund wanted to be crowned Roman Emperor, which could be done only by the Pope. Carillo's campaign was designed to impress Eugenius with the candidate's importance. Sigismund, who had played such a large part in the Coun- cil of Constance, now declared himself protector of the Coun- cil of Basel, and as such had a frequent correspondence with the Pope, who by this time was in two minds about him. He was more than suspicious of him for his friendship with Philip Maria Visconti of Milan, for these two had the common bond of hostility to Venice, Eugenius' native city. Visconti was also the enemy of Florence, which was urging the Pope to send a force to prevent the German King's passage south (he did, but it arrived late), and he nurtured a bitter feud against the person of Eugenius, which he satisfied on every possible occasion. On the other hand, Sigismund, as protector of the council, could be extremely useful, particularly at that time when Eugenius was trying to withdraw from his previous EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 47

intransigence without any sacrifice of principle or too much loss of face. As part of Eugenius* new attitude he agreed to allow the council to treat with the Hussites and he sent four envoys who should settle on the spot what else should be said to fall within the council's competence. Yet when the envoys arrived near Basel, they were kept waiting six weeks while the Fathers debated whether the form of address employed in their letters of credence to designate the council was adequate. When at last they were heard, the papal concessions they carried— Eugenius' agreement to their treating with the Hussites and providing for reform in Germany; to their dealing with questions of faith, peace, and reform in general; the advancing of the date for the opening of the council in Bologna—were unavailing, because the Fathers insisted on a preliminary acceptance of the principle of the superiority of a council over a pope. When the envoys demurred, ominous reference was made to the case of Capranica and the threat it contained against the validity of Eugenius' election. Before the envoys left on September 10, they were present at the sixth session of the council, when three times from the steps of the high altar of the cathedral and three times from the porch two bishops demanded: "Is there anyone here authorised to speak for his lordship the Pope, accused of contumacy?" The cardinals, who had not yet submitted, were also cited by name. It was three months to the day after the summons to appear had been affixed to the doors of St. Peter's. Then the envoys ire- traced their steps to Rome to recount to the Pope what they had seen and heard in Basel: the conscious triumph of the council that now had the adherence of more than three quarters of the cardinals, and of the kings of the Romans, France, England, Scotland, Castile, and of the Dukes of Burgundy and Milan, whose numerous delegations were either, already in Basel or on their way there. 48 EUGEN1US IV Eugenius realised that his situation was becoming desperate, and ambassadors from friends and foes alike kept arriving at his court to tell him so and to press him to come to terms with the council at all costs. Sigismund by this time was in Siena. In the spring of 1431, he had arrived in Milan where he was crowned with the iron crown on December 27, and he had then spent some time in Lucca where he came into conflict with Eugenius' allies, the Florentines. He moved to Siena on July 8, 1432, protesting by frequent letters his good intentions and readiness to defend the Holy See. The Pope had so few friends left he could not afford to spurn any offer, so he became less suspicious of Milan's ally. But the process of change was slow, and Sigismund did not leave Siena for Rome till April 25, 1433, to be assured of a monthly pension of five thousand florins and, what he coveted most, to have the crown of gold put on his head by Eugenius to make him Roman Em- peror. That was done with great ceremony before the high altar of St. Peter's on May 31, 1433. Meanwhile the Fathers of Basel continued their repressive measures against the Pope, culminating in decrees of Decem- ber 18, 1432 (the anniversary of the publication of the Bull Quoniam alto) that flatly demanded the withdrawal of that Bull within sixty days, limited the Pope's powers of conferring benefices, and condemned beforehand his projected council in Bologna; members.of his Curia, great and small, who should stand by a recalcitrant Pope after the sixty days' time limit would automatically lose all their benefices. Before, however, the Pope learnt of these measures and before his curial officials became thoroughly demoralised by the threats hanging over them (they demanded almost en masse leave to depart and had to be harangued and cajoled by two of his few faithful cardinals [January 24, 1433]; on Feb- ruary 28 the gates of the city had to be closed to keep them in, but it did not prevent many of them from leaving), Eugenius EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 49 offered more concessions. The council, for it was now allowed to be a council, should be transferred, but not necessarily to Bologna; any other Italian city, outside of Milanese territory, could be chosen; it could continue in Basel for some time yet, under Cesarini, treating of the question of the Hussites (De- cember 14, 1432); the transferred council need not be held v$ Italy, it could meet in Germany (January 18, 1433); indeed it need not be transferred at all, it could continue in Basel under presidents that the Pope would send, "such is our wish, our decision, our command" (February 14). It was a year too late. At the same time Eugenius adopted another tactic: to urge as many bishops as possible to go to Basel, in the hope of creating for himself a powerful party within the council. For that purpose he sent messengers to all countries and, to pay the expenses of the prelates who might respond, he imposed a special "tenth" on Naples and the Papal States (March 28, 1433). He nominated also four cardinals to preside in his name, one of whom, however, Cardinal Albergati, had been away for some time trying to arrange a peace between England and France, and another, Peter de Foix, was fully engaged in the Avignon affair. The council was impressed neither by his concessions nor by his strategy. On April 27, 275 Fathers, including six cardinals and forty-four prelates, renewed their strictures: papal presidents needed the approval of two-thirds of the whole number of cardinals before they could be acceptable; penalties were imposed against infractions of the laws of the council; the Pope was to be deposed unless he amended within two months. They proceeded then to interpret the decree Frequens in a stricter sense, that a pope cannot prorogue or dissolve a council without its own consent, and that even a council needs a two-thirds majority to do it. They met Eugenius' efforts to get supporters within the council by imposing an oath on all new members "to labour faithfully in the 50 EUGENIUS IV interests and for the honour of the council and to maintain and defend its decrees • . . and not to depart without leave/' The Bull of February 14, was presented by Eugenius' envoys on June 5. It did little to conciliate the Fathers, for it implied no recognition of their past decisions—just the opposite—and under the suavity of its diction it let it be understood that by permission of the superior authority of the Pope the council could then begin its labours. A timid defence of the papal prerogatives attempted by one of Eugenius' envoys was met by the rejoinder from Cesarini that popes had been deposed before that. By this time the council mustered in Basel 7 cardinals, 2 (Latin) patriarchs, 42 bishops, 30 abbots, 311 doctors of various sorts—that is, 117 more members than on April 27. Of the princes represented there, some—England, the Duke of Burgundy, and Sigismund who arrived.in person on October 11, 1433—were stoutly opposed to the deposition of the Pope though not particularly concerned about his prerogatives. All the princes feared a new schism and, as they were less conversant with theology than with politics, a general letter from their delegates in Basel was addressed to Eugenius telling him firmly that unless he acknowledged the council and all its decrees they would not answer for the consequences. The Fathers refused to be held back by the princes' hesita- tions. In the twelfth session of June 13, 1433, they passed two decrees. The one repeated the famous principle of the Council of Constance, again bade Eugenius withdraw his Bull of dissolution unconditionally within sixty days and allowed his Curia an extra thirty days to leave him if he refused, because after that all cases of all sorts that normally depended on the Pope would be settled by the council. The other restored freedom of election to bishoprics and benefices in such a way as to deprive the Pope of almost all of the reservations he previously enjoyed. Besides, the Capranica episode was submitted EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 51 to a commission and the validity of Eugenius' election again called in doubt. While Sigismund had been in Rome in May, 1433, envoys from the Emperor of Constantinople had been there too. They had arrived probably late in the previous year and so had witnessed the ΡορΛ growing difficulties with the council. But they had seen too the imposing ceremony at the high altar of St. Peter's that was so like the sacramental coronation of their own emperors in the great church of St. Sophia. Eugenius, Sigismund, and the Greeks talked of a council of union and, though nothing was definitely settled, the Greeks gave their preference for Ancona as its site. Meanwhile the Council of Basel too had turned its attention to the question of union. Without previous consultation with the Pope, though earlier it had asked him to invite the co-operation of Byzantium, in the spring of 1433, it sent two envoys to Con- stantinople. In July of the same year, Christopher Garatoni also went to Constantinople but in the Pope's name, presumably to follow up the conversations with the Greek envoys. He, however, had a different mission : to arrange for a council, not in Ancona or even in Italy at all, but in Constantinople itself, where the Latin Church would be represented by a papal legate and a suitable group of prelates and theologians. Clearly it was an idea to appeal to the Greeks, for that is what they had always been trying to arrange with Martin V. Garatoni must have been in Constantinople when the two messengers from Basel were there, for these went back home, one of them on November 28, 1433, the other accompanied by three Greeks as delegates of the Emperor and the Patriarch in the beginning of the month of January, 1434. The oriental legates were to arrange with the council about a meeting with the Greeks on the lines of the past proposals of Martin V, and so they must have been completely ignorant of the purpose of 52 EUGENIUS IV Garatoni's visit. Perhaps he disclosed that purpose only after their departure. Whenever he did it, it was well received and he returned to Rome to report, going again to Constantinople in July, 1434, to settle the arrangement definitively. Why had the Pope, who knew all about his predecessor's efforts with the Greeks and his change of front on the question of a council in Constantinople, suddenly decided on this reversal of policy? He himself gave reasons in a letter he wrote to Basel on November 15, 1434; the Greeks very much preferred a site in their own country; the Patriarch of the Armeni- ans could thus take part; a meeting in the West would be less likely to be crowned with success; and the expenses of trans- porting seven hundred Greeks for an event whose issue was uncertain would be excessive, whereas a meeting in Constan- tinople would be much more economical. One suspects, however, that there were other reasons that he could not openly avow to Basel. With the constant fighting in and about the Papal States, Italy was not a safe place for a council and at that moment Eugenius had not the money to pay for one. But if he did not keep the Greeks within his sphere of influence, the Council of Basel might attract them into its, and the combination of the Latin upholders of the Conciliar theory and the Greek defenders of ecclesiastical independence arrayed against the papacy, in what would have had all the appearances of t a really ecumenical council, would have certainly resulted in Eugenius' defeat and deposition. Whichever of Pope or council effected the union of Christendom would gain enormous prestige. Eugenius could not accomplish that in Italy at that time; he might be able to do so in Constantinople. At least a council in Constantinople would not be in Basel and would not be an additional source of strength for his adversaries. While such motives probably counted for something with Eugenius, they should not be exaggerated. Eugenius was an Italy In The Fifteenth Century 0 • MILES 100

EUGËNIUS FIGHTS BASEL 53

idealist who all his life long aimed at three things—reform within the Church, the union of Christendom, and the preser- vation of the traditional state of the Church. These things ranked for him above his own person. In the same letter to Basel in whichjhe had enumerated the advantages of his plan for the Greeks, he accepted the council's arrangements with them instead of his own and wrote that, provided union with the Greeks was achieved, "it matters little to Us in what way or by what method that end is reached," and there is no good reason for doubting his word. When Eugenius sent Garatoni to the East in July, 1433, he had not yet heard of the unfavourable reception accorded by the council in the beginning of June to the concessions he had made in February, and therefore he thought that the situation between himself and the council had been eased. So he began to try to build upon this supposed new situation, and on July 1 he issued a Bull recalling to the Roman Curia the settlement of everything apart from questions touching on reform, the extirpation of heresy, and peace between princes, for which he had authorised the council. But his day-dream could not have lasted long, for there soon arrived a kind of ultimatum from Basel, a formula embodying a flat withdrawal of his Bull of dissolution and an approval of whatever the council had already enacted, which he was to issue as a papal Bull in his own name. Emperor Sigismund, whose authority counted for something with the council, was still in Rome and pledged to defend the rights of the Holy See. Eugenius discussed the formula with him and with his approval modified its phraseology, writing instead of the dictated decernimus et declaramus ("We decree and declare") the words volumus et contentamur ('We wish and acquiesce"), which in curial language changed a firm determination into a grudging acceptance. So the Bull Dudum sacrum, dated August 1, 1433, was sent to Basel by the hand of a legate. It was a hauling down of 54 EUGENÎUS IV the papal flag o£ resistance, but not completely—only to half- mast. Eugenius had not surrendered yet, for at about the same time he was producing another Bull, dated July 29, to quash all penalties against himself and the cardinals and curial officials still faithful to him and to cancel grants of benefices and nominations made by the council. When he heard of the proceedings of the twelfth session (June 13), his anger showed itself in a Bull of September 11, in which "with the plenitude of his power" he annulled the decrees of that session, forbade that anyone should be affected by it, and excommunicated whoever should accept a benefice already in the possession of one of his followers. While this rupture with the Fathers was coming to a climax, Eugenius was harassed afresh by civil war. Fortebrac- cio, intent on extending his hold on papal cities, put himself in the pay of Milan. His depredations assumed a gradual crescendo till at the end of August, 1433, with the aid of James di Vico and others he invaded Rome itself, gaining possession of four of its gates and so controlling its traffic. The Campagna lay at his mercy and he raided it at will. Vitelleschi hastened from the March to reinforce the papal condottiero, Attendolo, and between them they regained some of the papal cities; but no sooner had Vitelleschi departed than Fortebraccio occupied Subiaco, Genazzano, and on October 7 Tivoli. The Colonna family profited by the occasion to try to lay hands on some of the places they had had to yield before. Eugenius, not thinking the Vatican safe, had retired to S. Lorenzo in Damaso and from there he excommunicated the three Colonna brothers (one of them a cardinal) for their hostilities to the Church. The crisis was extreme, so much so that the Pope called out all the levies that the cities directly governed by the Church or governed by the Church through vicars were bound to provide on demand in time of war. From the towns EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 55 of Sabina, Tuscia, Umbria came groups of infantry, ranging in numbers from the seven of Foglia (in Sabina) to the three hundred of Rieti. These were to strengthen the forces led by the papal condottieri, many of whom seemed to have been in nearly permanent service with the Holy See, because there was always need of them in the wars that continued unceas- ingly. The Orsini and the Colonnas were in perpetual strife and Eugenius favoured the Orsini. Various Signori, seeing their opportunity in the difficulties that beset the papacy, were trying to possess themselves of towns and castles to enlarge their estates—Charles Malatesta attacked Pesaro; Montefeltre surprised Città di Castello, etc. Towns thus possessed rebelled and put themselves under papal protection, preferring the mild government of the Church to the exactions of a Signore, e.g. Fossombrone and Pesaro (1431), Città di Castello (1432), Caldarola (1434). But in most of these cases the newly gained freedom was shortlived, because the Pope in an ever increasing need of money to pay the troops he had to retain under arms and to limit to some degree his dependence on them, was constrained to restore the towns to the Signori for a price. Fortebraccio had given himself out as the agent of the Council of Basel. The council had, in fact, on August 21, 1432, requested Philip Maria Visconti of Milan to protect its supporters. Visconti kept that letter till the Pope's situation had become critical and then he produced it to give colour to his war of revenge. Another who was, in Visconti's name,; "taking under the protection of the council" papal cities and populations was James di Lonato, operating in the area of Umbria. That was not all. The most famous of the condottieri of the day was Francis Sforza, the son of a warrior father. Earlier, in the pay of Venice and Florence, he had defeated Visconti disastrously. Visconti, therefore, followed the usual tactic with victorious condottieri—whom you can't beat, you can buy. He oifered Sforza adoptive sonship and the hand of 56 EUGENIUS IV his eight-year old daughter in marriage (Sforza was 29) in return for his services, and Sforza, since Visconti had no son of his own to succeed him, accepted. The peace between Milan, Venice, and Florence, made in Ferrara on April 1, 1433, left Sforza free. To pass (so he said) to his estates in Puglia he asked the Pope's permission to traverse Romagna and the March, and Eugenius, though with much misgiving, could find no ready excuse for refusing. In autumn 1433 Sforza left Lombardy, went peacefully through Romagna, passing by Rimini with three thousand horse on November 28; but once well into the March, in a swift campaign of three weeks he made himself master of the whole province, which was ready in any case to react against the stern government of Vitelleschi. In justification of his action he gave out copies of the letter sent by the council to Visconti. On December 5, two captains of his, Italiano Furlano and Antonello da Sena, with one thousand horse passed through Rimini to attack Umbria. By the end, then, of 1433, a broad belt of papal territory stretching from the Adriatic Sea to the Tyrrhenian was occupied by Eugenius' enemies, the eastern part by Sforza, the western by Fortebraccio, James di Vico and the Colonnas— and this in the name of the council, which, if it had not authorised them to do it, at least did not disapprove of what was so in harmony with its own behaviour and, in spite of requests from the Pope and the Emperor of the Romans, did not disown its "agents." In the midst of all these military disasters, news reached Eugenius, who had left S. Lorenzo for S. Crisogono in Tra- stevere as being more secure, that the Fathers had rejected out of hand his Bull Dudum sacrum and demanded that he should accept without change the text they had dictated and should totally withdraw the other Bulls he had issued in July and September. Earlier, Eugenius had written to his stalwart supporter, the Doge of Venice: "We shall have renounced the EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 57 tiara and abandoned this life before being the cause of the papal office being subordinated to the council, against all the canons. It is what no one of Our predecessors ever did/'1 Now he was being persuaded by that same Doge, by Sigismund, by all the princes, and exhorted by St. Frances Romana repeating messages received in prayer, to submit to the council's demand for the sake of the Church. With his territories being taken from him in the name of the council, with his exchequer empty from paying everlastingly for troops to defend them and from the insufficiency of his revenue, as the council sapped one source of it and the loss of his cities robbed him of the other, almost without friends and isolated in his opposition to the council, an ill man, he yielded to the universal demand. On December 15, 1433, from a sick bed he issued afresh the Bull Dudum sacrum, this time with the text that his masters imposed.

Earlier the sacred general Council of Basel . . . begun for the extirpation of heresy, the peace of the Christian people, and the general reformation of the Church in both head and members and for whatever else pertains to these, was dissolved by Us. But since on account of that dissolution serious dissensions have arisen and more serious ones can yet arise . . . We decree and declare Çdecernimus et declaramus*) that the said general council from the time of its inception has been and is being legitimately carried on, that it ought to be carried on ... for the aforesaid ends and what pertains to them, just as if no dissolution had ever been made; indeed We declare the aforesaid dissolution invalid and of no effect . . . and We continue and purpose to continue the sacred Council of Basel without reserve or condition, with energy and all devotion and favour.2

This second Dudum sacrum then proceeds to revoke the Bulls of July 19 and September 11, and also a third document which had appeared under Eugenius* name, an outspoken defence of the papal prerogatives and a condemnation of the 58 EUGENIUS IV pretensions of Basel, for which, nevertheless, the Pope dis- owned responsibility, but which he now in obedience to the wish of the council annulled as a precautionary measure against a possible future misuse. Dudum sacrum was signed by Eugenius and the three cardinals who still remained with him. It was, as far as the written document goes, a complete surrender. Eugenius withdrew his dissolution unconditionally and pronounced the gathering in Basel a legitimate council from its very start. But he had not changed his mind on the relative positions of council and pope, and no one really believed that he had.3 The Bull was the result of the continuous and universal pressure brought to bear on him, and it was not quite so final and fool-proof a document as its authors imagined. As later defenders of Eugenius, with his approval, pointed out, his general approbation of the council did not necessarily imply a particular approbation of all and every one of its enactments—before a pope could consci- entiously do that, he must have the opportunity of examining each point in detail with time to weigh and consider, and only then could he be justified in sanctioning the different elements in a conciliar decision. Harried as he was on all sides and ill, Eugenius certainly had never had such a possibility, and in his view conciliar decisions needed papal confirmation for validity. Besides (and this too was put forward by Eugenius later), the bull Dudum sacrum states the three purposes for which the council was opened—to deal with heresy, peace, and reform—and approves the prosecution, past, present, and future, of the council "for the aforesaid ends and what pertains to them/' and for nothing else. The Fathers had repeatedly stated and confirmed the principle propounded at Constance of the superiority of a general council over a pope, and it was the acceptance of that principle, which was the whole foundation of their claims, that they were determined to extort from EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 59 Eugenius. That to him was not the extirpation of heresy, but the promulgation of heresy, and so the direct opposite of what the council had been convoked for and of the purpose for which he himself had approved it—an interpretation that presses the letter of the law as far as it will go, but all the same a legitimate interpretation and one assuredly justified for Eugenius, bereft of all other support except the law. The Venetian ambassador set off on that same December 15 with a copy of the Bull and was followed a little later by the Pope's official messengers, the Archbishop of Taranto, John Berardi da Tagliacozzo, and the Bishop of Cervia, Christopher da S. Marcello. Report of their mission went before them. When they arrived at Basel, even Sigismund was outside the walls to meet them. The Bull was read in a general assembly of the council on February 4, the papal envoys and the Venetian Donato emphasising Eugenius' benevolent dispositions. Cesarini thanked God, the Pope, the envoys, everybody for the event. Next, in a solemn session, in the presence of Sigismund, the Roman Emperor, who was decked out with all the pomp of the imperial insignia, the Bull was approved and the Te Deum chanted to the sound of the bells of Basel pealing joyously. "Never was a more striking victory gained since the birth of Christianity," wrote one of the German members of the council.4 The council was at the peak of its fortunes. The city of Basel was thronged with strangers, for cardinals and bishops had their secretaries, their chaplains, their theologians, their servants, their ostlers; there were hundreds of doctors of theology, of law, of other branches of knowledge, representing princes, bishops, or universities, and all of these were members of the council. Numerous other clerics were there, intent on gaining some personal advantage by an appeal lodged with the council against bishop or Pope or in the hope of a benefice or other office. Besides those immediately connected with the 60 EUGENIUS IV council, many others had been attracted to Basel by the occasion, merchants to make quick profits or mendicants for more generous alms. Every nation of the Christian world was represented and every tongue heard among the three thousand or so foreigners who had flocked to the city. By 1434, those officially enrolled as members of the council numbered about five hundred and included seven cardinals, three (Latin) patriarchs, fifty or so bishops and as many abbots—an imposing array in a conciliar procession. But in comparison with the whole number of "Fathers" of the council, the bishops were very few; yet all the members, divided into four large "deputations," had an equal voice in the decisions of the council, which, now that it had triumphed, meant to maintain its victory and to perpetuate the Pope's surrender. Yet that very surrender had to a certain degree altered the attitude of some of the Fathers. Though Cesarini and other cardinals and bishops would still speak very strongly against Eugenius and challenge every word or gesture that seemed to contradict the council's supremacy, nevertheless a certain sympathy for him began to soften the minds more of the prelates than of the rest, a sympathy that would increase slowly as the opposition of the council at large became even more unyielding and its self-confidence developed into tyranny. Mean- time, instead of proceeding resolutely with the reformation of the Church, which everyone desired and of which the Fathers themselves were the chief, and sincere, advocates, they wasted time scrutinising every act of the Pope, cross-examining his envoys, and acting as judges in a thousand and one trifling appeals of minor local importance which otherwise would have gone to one of the departments of the Roman Curia. For, in their eyes, the council was the Church and had all power for all purposes. So Cesarini, among other things, was authorised to issue certain matrimonial dispensations. One of the chief complaints against the Roman Curia EUGEN1US FIGHTS BASEL 61 concerned the various taxes and dues, annates and "tenths," that it exg^ted. There was some justification for the general dissatisfaction. But the council too found that it could not maintain courts, send legations, or even maintain itself, with no income. Representatives of princes and universities should be supported by their principals. Bishops could take money from their dioceses and received conciliar authority to do so. But that was not enough, and the council ordered the Pope's collectors to forward to Basel the money they received. On February 8, 1434, it was forced to have recourse to what it most condemned in papal financial methods, to levy a "tenth" from the whole Church. On the cardinals and the religious orders, it imposed only a half-tenth, just as it undercut papal rates of taxes by demanding only two-thirds of what the Roman Curia levied for the services involved in granting dispensations and other legal decisions. On February 5, in their joy at the Pope's acceptance of their demands and their belief that peace was now again restored to the Church, so that they could without let or hindrance proceed rapidly to achieve all the purposes they aimed at, the Fathers were full of benevolence towards Eugenius. It seemed to be the propitious moment for the five presidents, whom the Pope had nominated as far back as February 15 of the previous year, to present their credentials to the council so as to assume their office. They did this on February 15, but by this time the general good will had waned somewhat and the Fathers scrutinised the papal Bulls, drawn up in the days when Eugenius still let it appear that he was the highest authority in the Church and that the council depended on his approval. On March 1, Sigismund was informed that only two of the five cardinals nominated were acceptable: Albergati (who for most of the life of the council had been engaged in negotiating peace between England and France, and so was thought to be less in the confidence of the Pope) and Cesarini, 62 EUGENIUS IV whose faithful support was not yet questioned. Of the other cardinals, Orsini was too intransigent, de Foix had taken Rome's part on the affair of Avignon, Foschi was of too light a character. The Emperor was angry. The papal presidents proved recalcitrant, but under pressure they made more concessions than were justifiable. When, however, the council wanted them to accept that the presidency of the senior prelate was as good as theirs who held their nomination from the Pope, they struck. In the end the four papal nominees in Basel,5 other than Cesarini, weakened so far as to take the conciliar oath as private individuals, but not as presidents, and to promise to defend the decrees of the council, even those that were based on the Council of Constance—this last an ampli- fication of the usual form of the oath added particularly for their benefit. They had yielded under strong pressure in the hope that, by accepting the lesser evil, they might escape the greater. Even so, when on June 26, the council renewed still again the controversial decree of Constance, these presidents, though advised that the assembly awaited their presence, refused to attend, and Cesarini presided alone. By June 26, 1434, however, Eugenius IV had already been four days in Florence, a fugitive from the rebellious city of Rome. That unfortunate capital had been the centre of fighting for more than three years. The wars with the Co- lonnas had been followed by the attacks of Fortebraccio, begun in the autumn of 1433 and continuing through the spring of the next year. The citizens had lived in continual fear and hardship, ever liable to attack, with food supplies and the crops in the Campagna always threatened and often destroyed, and income from taxes and dues reduced because of diminished traffic. "That war was the cause of great calamity to the Pontiff and the Church, for no one could enter the city, no EUGENIUS FIGHTS BASEL 63 one could leave it with safety, unless escorted by a large company of soldiq^"6 The beginning of 1434 brought new dangers. Sforza, not content with the March, pushed on into Umbria and even beyond, into the Patrimony. Nicholas Piccinino, one of Eugenius' condottieri paid by the papal treasury right up till December, 1433, in the beginning of the next year got possession of Orvieto, one of the largest papal towns in the Patrimony and then announced his intention of supporting Fortebraccio and Milan. The Pope, faced with this invincible combination, at the suggestion of the Florentines bought off its most formidable member, Sforza. The price was high, but there was little in the way of an alternative. Sforza, who a few months before had been issuing regulations as from the "Master of Fermo, in spite of Peter and Paul," became the Marquis of the March of Ancona (i.e. complete owner) and vicar of the places he had taken in Umbria and the Patrimony, and for such a price he was willing to relinquish his title of "Captain of the Council's Forces'* and to assume that of "Great Standard-bearer of the Church." He immediately detached a force to face Fortebraccio whom he defeated and prevented the astute Piccinino from joining up with him. The immediate menace to Rome was averted, but at a cost. Sforza's troops, now papal troops, had to be paid by the Pope at something more than ten thousand florins per month. Other condottieri were also demanding their hire. Eugenius ι was unable to meet all his debts and had perforce to yield territory instead, and that meant yielding also revenue. The history of Rainuccio Farnese is instructive in this respect. On September 4, 1431, Eugenius acknowledged a debt of four thousand florins, half of which had been incurred by his predecessor. Unable to pay, the Pope gave Farnese the governorship of Marta indefinitely. On June 11, 1432, still unable 64 EUGEN1US IV to pay, he made him provisional owner of that city for five years, to become absolute owner if at the end of that period the debt was still unsettled. Needless to say, the debt was not paid and Farnese acquired Marta. Between October, 1431, and the end of September, 1433, 13,491 florins went to Rainuccio for his force of one hundred infantrymen and two hundred "lances," but that still left a debt of 11,900 florins. Eugenius promised to pay and tried to do so, but the situation made it impossible and another slice of papal territory, Montalto and its environs, fell to Farnese for three years. In 1436, with his total income only half of what his predecessor had enjoyed ten years before, Eugenius confessed his continued inability to pay and Farnese added Montalto to his possessions. There were other similar, though less striking, cases. The Orsini were given land in the Patrimony in 1431 and again in 1435-6 from the estates of the defeated Count of Vico. The Mazzatosti bought the fortified town of Orchia for one thousand florins (March 27, 1432); the Baglioni that of Mugnano for twelve hundred florins (June 4, 1432) and acquired S. Pietro and GrafEgnano to cancel a debt incurred by Eugenius for troops (April 20, 1431). Ancona in 1433-4 lent seven thousand florins so that Piccinino could be paid to oppose Sforza in his depredations on the March. It was one thing to pay debts in kind, but another to get money; and the more the property given in grant and the privileges conceded as regards taxes (another way of extinguishing debts), the less was the papal revenue. One method of raising funds was to impose taxes and in 1434 that was done in Rome and gave the occasion for the revolt. Francis Condulmaro, the papal treasurer, though he was actually engaged at that moment in arranging a truce with Fortebraccio to allow the harvest round Rome to be got in, answered a deputation of the citizens, who had come to lament their lot and complain about the new tax, with rough and unsympathetic words. On May EUGENWS FIGHTS BASEL 65 24, the people revolted to the cry: "Peace. Long live liberty." Cardinal Conti managed to take refuge in Castel Sant* Angelo. Cardinal Orsini fled to his estates. Eugenius was so closely guarded in his residence of S. Calisto in Trastevere that he was really a prisoner. His nephew, Cardinal Francis, was arrested in his presence and taken off to the Campidoglio. The condottiere* Amendola moved towards Rome but effected nothing by the manoeuvre except to leave Fortebraccio free to continue his campaign in the Patrimony unmolested. Sforza, intent on retaining his possessions whoever came out on top, did nothing so well that he allowed Piccinino to approach Rome and the Romans to make a five years* treaty with him and his master, Visconti of Milan. Eugenius preserved his tranquillity of mind, though his every movement was watched. When, on Friday, June 4, one of his officials met by chance a compatriot with a boat on the Tiber, come to get provisions for a ship lying at the mouth of the river, he immediately accepted the suggestion that this chance offered of a possibility of escape. He and his official put on monastic habits, slipped out during the siesta hour, reached the river and the boat safely, and began the slow journey against the wind towards the sea. Too soon his absence was noticed. The news of his escape spread. Angry groups of citizens chased along the banks of the river after him; raced on in front, shortcutting the many curves and turnings to meet him with stones and weapons when he arrived; or got hold, of boats and followed hard behind. A vessel was directed into the channel ahead to block his passage and drew away only at the last minute when the Pope's boat would have rammed it and his rowers seized lances and bows to repel attackers. Finally, after many dangers, the Pope reached the ship at Ostia, on the fourth day of June. From this port Eugenius went to Civita Vecchia, and after two days' rest a Florentine galley took him to Leghorn (June 66 EUGENÎUS IV 12). Pisa received him with jubilation: the people with their officials went out to meet him; children with flowers and laurels sang to him; the chief citizens of the town led his horse by the bridle; others held a canopy over him as he went first to offer thanks in the cathedral and then to the episcopal palace. There he met with Cardinal Casanova who, disgusted with Basel, was on his way to seek reconciliation with him. His reception in Florence, on June 22, was even more moving for one who had seen few signs of loyalty over the three years of his pontificate. He had left Pisa on June 20 and moved by easy stages.

When he was approaching the gates of the city, which were opened wide to their great full span, the whole of the nobility came to meet him and all the clergy with their banners, every age, both sexes, every social class were crowding all the streets so that the Pope could hardly move in any direction and it was necessary to scatter coins in whatever street he went through, so that the people would desist a little from pressing on.him while they picked them up. Almost all the roofs, the windows, could hardly accom- modate the spectators. Women, matrons, maidens, all of woman- kind seated in elevated places, added lustre to the spectacle—the city on that occasion indeed beheld its citizens truly at one. He was conducted with all that pomp through the more notable streets to the cathedral church and thence, after praying for some time, with the same popular acclamation and festivity, to the place of his residence, attired in his pontifical robes and borne by a white horse richly caparisoned, all of which had been presented to him by the Commune before ever he entered the city.7

They had given more than that; a cross ornamented with emeralds, gift of the Six of the Merchandise; a canopy of cloth of gold and a cope adorned with gold and pearls; and, most of all, they had given him their hearts in a spontaneous and genuinely affectionate welcome, and that is what he then stood most in need of. Eugenius* flight from Rome marks the nadir of his for- EUGEN1US FIGHTS BASEL 67 tunes. But even Eugenius did not then know how low they had sunk. He had still to learn that a week before the revolu- tion in Rome Bologna, the second largest city of the papal States and his most treasured possession in the north, had revolted too. He had made his nephew Mark, who had failed as governor of Avignon, governor of Bologna, and he had entered the city on February 8, 1433. Mark succeeded no better there and became a prisoner in the hands of the Cane- doli faction, who called in Milanese troops to strengthen their revolt. He was not a prisoner long—in that more fortunate than the other nephew, Cardinal Francis, the papal Camera- uns. The Roman Republic gave its adherence to the council and offered to Eugenius to release the Camerarius in return for the surrender to them of Castel Sant' Angelo and some other fortresses. Eugenius refused, so they paid Fortebraccio three thousand florins to rid them of the nuisance of Castel Sant' Angelo, whose garrison under Baldasare da Offida was carrying on an active war against them and had captured several of their leading citizens by a ruse. Fortebraccio came on August 18 and left with their three thousand florins on September 8, having accomplished nothing. Visconti of Milan, with Bologna in revolt and some of his troops ensconced in the city, was jubilant. He sent twenty-five hundred soldiers through it to reinforce his garrison in Imola, which he still held in the papal Romagna, and he brought Piccinino with all his force north from Rome to join jthem. Vitelleschi, who had escaped from the March when Sforza mastered it, had been made governor of Bologna on July 9, 1434, to replace Mark Condulmaro. With contingents from Venice and Florence to augment his forces he moved towards Bologna to find his way blocked by the Milanese army at Imola. On August 28 the battle took place. The papal forces were disastrously defeated; several of the better condottieri were among the thousands of prisoners that were taken. Vis- 68 ÉUGENWS IV conti wrote to the council on August 30: "As my success is yours also and that of the holy Church of God, I must let you share in all the good fortune that befalls me."8 The grim possibility emerged that Florence might have to come to terms with Milan. One condition would certainly have been the expulsion of Eugenius.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 10. Raynaldus, Annales ecclesiastici, IX (Lucca, 1752), p. 151. 2 Monumenta Conciliorum generalium, II (Vienna, 1873), p. 565. Hereafter referred to as M.C. 8 "Would that it were engraved within on his heart, as well as without in the letters of the screed," quoted by N. Valois, Le pape et le concile (Paris, 1909), I, p. 330, n.l. 4 Quoted by Ν. Valois, Op. cit., I, p. 309. 5 With Albergati; the Archbishop of Taranto, John. Berardi; the Bishop of Padua, Peter Donato; and the abbot of S. Giustina of Padua, Louis Barbo; nominated on December 16, 1433, to replace tem- porarily the cardinal presidents engaged elsewhere. eFlavio Biondo, Historiae decades (Venice, 1483), III, lib. V. 'Ambrogio Traversari, Itinerarium, in A. Dini-Traversari, Ambrogio Traversari e i suoi tempi, appendix pp. 136—137. 8 E. Martène and U. Durand, Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum historicorum, dogmaticorum, moralium amplissima collectio (Paris, 1724-33), VIII, 737. chapter A

The Tide Beams to Turn

IHE FLORENCE that gave asylum to the refugee Pope was then one of the greatest commercial cities of the world. By the fifteenth century it had come to be dominated, not by its noble houses and their factions, but by its merchant families who had turned bankers. When Eugenius went there in 1434, the Albizi family had lately managed to secure the exile of its chief rival Cosimo de' Medici. The Pope was unwittingly instrumental in his return, for an armistice that he arranged between the contending parties in the city was abused to evict the Albizi, and the reproaches of Eugenius were unavailing to undo the injustice. The Medicis remained supreme for the rest of the century. Cosimo took no special title and all the established machinery of government remained and apparently functioned freely, but in practice dependently on him. He may, as some say, have been the worst kind of patriot, on the grounds that he took away true liberty from the citizens. Be that as it may. In fact he brought the city a long period of stability and pros- perity which, with the lavish support he gave, made possible one of the most astounding artistic developments in history. Its spirit was the spirit of the new humanism, A passionate interest in the Latin language and its literature had been growing for some time. To that was added the discovery of 69 70 EUGENÎUS IV classical Greece, and Florence was the first western city to initiate Greek studies, when in 1396 it invited Manuel Chrysoloras to lecture in its Studio. The artistic achievement showed itself primarily in architecture, dedicated for the most part to secular service, to provide the banking families with buildings whose imposing exterior would correspond to a commodious interior. So there arose the Medici palace, the Pozzi palace, the Pitti palace, the Strozzi palace, the Rucellai palace, edifices on a square plan with internal cortile and colonnade, the ground floor still heavy and forbidding and reminiscent of the old fortress style, the upper floors more spacious with large windows and elegant and delicate mural paintings. The harmonious division of the wall surfaces, the restraint of the various architectonic elements, the graciousness of the decoration, the balanced dis- tribution of the apartments round the bright cortile, the friendliness of the stone bench that usually ran round the walls, gave to the fifteenth century palaces an air of welcoming hospitality and of serene dignity. Filippo Brunelleschi was the leader of this florescence of architecture. His genius extended also to ecclesiastical architecture. The churches of S. Lorenzo, S. Spirito, S. Marco, and the hospital of the Innocenti were his work in whole or in part. His name, however, is most closely associated with the cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore which had been begun in 1294 and which he completed by adding the cupola. Pope Eugenius was there at the time and delighted the city by himself con- secrating the finished church. The Commune rose to the occasion. A wooden platform, two armsMength high and four broad, was built all the way to the cathedral from the church of S. Maria Novella where the Pope lodged and this was covered underfoot with carpets and overhead with a tent-like roof of rich material. Along that the Pope and his cortège passed to and from the ceremony, in full sight of all the TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 71 spectators, yet unhampered by the pressing throng. The mag- nificence was so impressive that all the chroniclers of Florence and not a few also of other cities record this event of 1436 in glowing descriptions. Every other form of art also flourished. Indeed not infrequently the same man excelled in several of its branches— he was goldsmith, sculptor, painter, architect. Lorenzo Ghiberti was such. He designed the reliefs on the massive bronze doors of the baptistry, a work spread over many years, and in 1442 he executed a sumptuous tiara for Eugenius. Delia Robbia, best known for his terracottas, was architect also and sculptor of vivacious groups of youthful singers. The sculptor, Donatello, in this first half of the fifteenth century was producing his strong statues with progressive freedom from restraint. Massaccio, who died at the age of twenty-six (c. 1428), was a painter of genius, caught up in the classical spirit, examples of whose art are now found in galleries all over the world. Fra Angelico, whose name reflects the delicate mysticism of his brush, was adorning the cloisters and cells of S. Marco, and later he would be invited to Rome by Eugenius to beautify the Vatican. Paolo Uccello, striving to depict perspective in his paintings, only partially succeeded himself but blazed a trail for his successors. This list of artists of genius, roughly contemporaries, is nothing like complete, but it is enough to bring home some realisation of the ferment of creative life that effervesced within the walls of Florence when Eugenius went there in 1434. To these names should be added those of the literary humanists, collectors of manuscripts, creators of libraries, themselves writers and orators in the Latin language, men steeped in Roman history and mythology, and more recently in the Greek of the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, of the historians and the tragedians. When the Patriarch and the Emperor of Constantinople went to Florence, they were 72 EUGEN1US IV welcomed by speeches in Greek delivered by Leonardo Bruni, the chancellor of the city. Niccolo Nicoli amassed some eight hundred manuscripts which he bequeathed to the Commune, thereby creating the first modern public library. Ambrose Traversari, Camaldolese monk, reformer of his Order, writer and speaker of Greek, was an assiduous letter-writer in fault- less Latin, whose letters, collected and published later, portray not only the man but also his epoch. Even though Florence, like all the other cities of Italy of that day, was rarely free from war, it was nevertheless a haven of peace for Eugenius compared with the Rome he had just left. Its buildings were magnificent compared with the deca- dence of Rome's ill-cared for structures; its citizens, even the γογοίο minutOj were all of them affluent in comparison with the harassed population of Rome. A Roman, writing about a year after Eugenius' flight, described the situation in the eternal city in these words:

In this year 1435 there was a great famine and poverty because of the departure of the Pope, and a measure of corn cost eight, nine or ten florins and at times it became so bad that bread could not be got in Rome and many a man went to bed at times, I think, without any supper. This was the result of the lack of order because in the country roundabout there was plenty, but there was no way of getting at it, and so the barons and their vassals who had it sold just as much as they wished, and when it did come it was very difficult to get because of the throng of people. It continued from January till the end of May.1

Eugenius had written to Basel to tell them of his flight. The council sent two envoys to Florence to watch over and direct future papal action and two to Rome to negotiate conditions of peace. The latter on their way home were captured by one of Rome's captains and had to buy back their freedom. Rome indeed returned to papal obedience, not, however, because of the action of the envoys but because its citizens TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 73 "saw that they were much worse governed by their own people than they had been by the Pope." The Colonna and the Orsini factions divided the city. On October 15, 1434, a plot was discovered to overthrow the popular government. The next day Orsino Orsini in combination with the garrison of Castel Sant' Angelo tried to penetrate the defences round the Borgo. When he failed, he raided the Trastevere area and carried off all its cattle. A week later, papal troops made another sally into the Borgo but had to retire again. On Octo- ber 27, when they again advanced, the people opened the gates to them. Francis Condulmaro was released, and he in turn set at liberty the Roman citizens imprisoned in Castel Sant* Angelo before joining his uncle the Pope in Florence on December 23. The series of disasters that had befallen him had not robbed Eugenius of his peace of mind. He was still unshaken in his belief that the Church by Christ's ordinance had one head only, and that the pope. He would, when he could, openly reassert his belief and act on it; but meantime, while the council had the upper hand, he was determined to live at peace with it, yielding to its impositions when necessary and lawful in the hope of restraining it from too exaggerated excesses. In a letter of June 23, 1434, he assured the Fathers: "We desired peace, we desired the reformation of the Church; for its sake We not only gave way to you, but acceded by Our letters to your decree, just as you dictated it. ... Again We repeat, this is Our intent, this Our wish, to love you as sons, to respect you as brothers, and in the benediction of sweetness to be bound to you in the bond of charity."2 But it was not easy to put this spirit of accommodation into practice. The council complained if anyone appealed to the Pope against a decision of its own courts, though it readily admitted appeals from the Pope's. It passed reforming legislation, sound in principle, that the elections by the Chapters to 74 EUGENIUS IV bishoprics and abbacies should not be set aside to please either pope or prince, but inveighed bitterly against Eugenius for his support of the canonically elected candidate for the See of Lausanne against its own nominee. It ordered papal collectors to pay their money to itself. Not to be outdone by the papal mediator between France and England who was a legate a later e, it made its own envoy a legate a latere too; even Cesarini demurred at that (May, 1434). The negotiations with the Greeks were another occasion of friction. With the three Greek envoys sent by the Emperor in 1434, the council had made an agreement on the lines of the convention that Martin V had been on the point of ratifying at his death. The arrangement was that the encounter between Greeks and Latins would take place in the West, the council paying all expenses of transport, maintenance, and reinforcements for the garrison of Constantinople, besides depositing in that city fifteen thousand florins for use in a possible emergency in the Emperor's absence. John VIII should come himself with the Patriarch, the other eastern patriarchs, if possible, bishops, and theologians—in all to the number of about seven hundred Greeks. The site of the meeting should be some suitable town in Italy, Buda, Vienna, or at the furthest, Savoy. This pact was embodied in the decree Sicut fia mater which was solemnly ratified by the council on September 7, 1434. The Greek delegates promised on oath to implement it and insisted by word with the council, as their principals had done by letter, that the Pope must at all costs be present at the meeting. Two days before this decreee was passed, the Fathers had received a letter from Eugenius informing them of the return of Garatoni to the East to make the final arrangements for a council to be held in Constantinople. Conscious, however, of having been "instituted specially for the return of the oriental Church," the council had decided to ignore the information TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 75 and to go its own way. It informed the Pope of its decree Sicut για mater and required his acquiescence. Eugenius, in a letter of November 15, gave his assent. He recounted briefly the history of the negotiations with the Greeks, stressing that they had hitherto all been managed by the Popes, his predecessor and himself, and that Garatoni's mission was their natural climax. It would be a ridiculous situation, he wrote, if Garatoni succeeded with a proposal that would be more con- genial to the Greeks and promised greater hope of a successful issue, while the council was pledged to another method. How- ever, though he was convinced that a meeting in Constan- tinople was preferable, as a meeting in the West would be expensive and open to many difficulties, nevertheless he would abandon his own plan if the Fathers insisted and approve of theirs, for "it matters little to Us the way or the means by which the end is reached." Of course the Fathers insisted, and of course Garatoni succeeded, and of course the ridiculous situation forecast by Eugenius arose. John VIII wrote in haste to his ambassadors at Basel bidding them suspend further negotiations, but his letter went astray; it would have arrived too late in any case. Garatoni set off for Italy with two more envoys, reaching Florence on January 21, 1435. Their arrival created a situation of great delicacy, but Eugenius handled it with much pru- dence. He did not yield to the urgent insistence of the Greek delegates to confirm the new arrangement forthwith, and cancel that of Basel, but he sent the Greeks with Garatoni to the council since they would be the best advocates of a meeting in Constantinople, and he informed it that he would abide by its decision. A council in Constantinople naturally would have meant the dissolution or at least the transference of that of Basel, a thing the Fathers would not hear of. Accordingly they told the Greeks that any meeting in Constantinople could rank 76 EUGENIUS IV only as a local synod; if they considered a general council necessary for the settlement of the question of union, they must abide by the conditions of the decree Sicut fia mater. Since for the Greeks a general council was an essential condition for discussion of union, the Constantinopolitan project was abandoned. The council hastened to send messengers to the Pope to inform him of that and appointed three legates to return with the Greek envoys to Constantinople to put the agreement of September 7, 1434, into execution as far as in them lay, as well as to persuade the Emperor and the Patriarch, if they could, to accept Basel itself as the seat of the council of union. The messengers sent to Florence found that Eugenius once more had a papal court, even if on a modest scale. The cardinals who had deserted him the year before were coming back. Giordano Orsini, Antony Casini, and Lucido de' Conti, with his nephew Francis, had remained always faithful to him. Nicholas Albergati had been on constant missions but was then in Florence with Cervantes, sent by the Council. Casanova had joined Eugenius in Pisa in 1434. Peace had been made with Capranica who reached Florence in June, 1435. Peter de Foix was governing Avignon in the Pope's name. Before the end of the year Rochetaillée, Branda da Castiglione, and even Prosper Colonna would be in Florence. The conciliar messengers were not even prelates. They were two doctors, John Bachenstein and Matthew Ménage, and they had hard things to say to the Pope, which they said in a hard way. One of their missions was to transmit to the Pope the council's letter of May 5, 1435, rejecting Constantinople as the site for the meeting with the Greeks. Eugenius was prepared for that, so it caused no surprise. Another message, however, that they carried was more of a shock. The council, once it had got the arrangements for the Greeks well · settled, had TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 77 begun to think of the means to put them into effect. If they were going to keep themselves in being as a council and at Basel,3 they had to bring the Greeks there. For that end they instituted a voluntary collection of money among themselves and raised nearly twelve thousand ducats, but that seems to have been by way of a loan, not as a gift. They claimed to have expended some sixteen thousand ducats on the Greeks by May, 1436; that, however, was not nearly enough. Other means, therefore, had to be devised and they thought of an indulgence. Their first idea was to proclaim the indulgence and to tell the Pope afterwards, but milder counsels prevailed. The council would proclaim the indulgence in its own name but would ask Eugenius for his support, among other things by his withdrawing all other concessions of indulgences to leave the field open for theirs. The messengers had still other announcements to deliver. They had to tell the Pope that the council disapproved of his receiving appeals from its judgements, of his encouraging the return of officials of the Roman Curia who had gone to Basel, and of his not observing the recently passed regulations in respect of canonical elections to benefices. These admonitions from the mouth of a doctor of law to the Pope were grievous enough. But they were only an introduction. The main point of Bachenstein's message was that the council had abolished annates (the tax of half-a-year's revenues that each new bishop or other beneficiary was held to pay on receiving -His benefice) and that it expected Eugenius humbly to obey its decree; if he did, the council would consider some form of compensation for his loss of revenue. That decree had been passed in the twenty-first session on June 9 when, with the exception of Cesarini, all the papal presidents left the council- chamber in protest, together with the English delegates and some others. The Fathers of Basel could not really have thought that the Pope would accept their enactment without 78 EUGEN1US IV demur. When between March 30 and August 28, 1434, they fiercely debated a similar measure in respect to what bishops could exact in their dioceses, the prelates were strongly in favour of making no change in established custom and the doctors were all loud in urging the council to fulfil its mission of reform—and nothing at all was the outcome of it. Now at one blow they were all, prelates and doctors, fully agreed to deprive the Pope and the College of Cardinals of one of their chief sources of income and to render the functioning of the papal court and the Curia impossible. Eugenius, of course, had no intention of acquiescing, but there was not much he could do overtly except play for time. He returned a very non-committal answer to Ménage and Bachenstein, which displeased them for they felt themselves slighted as messengers of the council, and promised to convey his more considered reply by envoys of his own. So the con- ciliai* messengers took back to Basel a bad impression of the papal Curia in Florence, especially since, when they had asked for the pallium for the new bishop of Rouen, Cardinal Conti had demanded that they guarantee payment of three hundred florins, the annates prohibited by the decree of June 9. The council granted the pallium on December 11. On July 22/23, Antony da S. Vito and Ambrose Traver- sari, the learned General of the Camaldolese, were appointed to go to Basel in the Pope's name, but curiously they seem to have had no precise instructions. On arrival they did their best to spin out time till their instructions came—the Duke of Milan may have been the cause of the delay, for all messengers to Basel had to traverse his domains—trying to justify the continuation of the payment of annates and to dissuade the Fathers from granting an indulgence. When the Pope's directions did come they were not such as to mollify the council very much. Clothed in a great deal of polite verbiage, the message was in effect that Eugenius was disinclined either TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 79 to withdraw present indulgences or to proclaim a fresh one in favour of the Greeks, until it was quite certain that they would come to the West; that he had always had a good reason for the few occasions when he seemed to contravene the council's enactments; and in regard to the decree about the abolition of the annates, that he respectfully protested against its sudden imposition and the lack of any alternative means being provided for the necessary expenses of the Roman Curia, whose functioning was essential for the peace and well-being of the Church. The Fathers considered their reply for a month. On November 5, they gave their decision in writing: they saw no good reason to change their legislation. The words Traversari had uttered in public session had not been very effective. What he said in private was in the long run more fruitful. He worked hard confirming the attach- ment to the Pope of certain valiant papalists like John of Montenero and John of Torquemada, both excellent Domini- can theologians; like Peter de Versailles, Bishop of Digne, and other prelates; and he did his best to draw many others toward Eugenius. If at the end of 1435 the papal court was aug- mented by the arrival of several cardinals, that was due in part at least to Traversari's influence. His greatest efforts, however, he expended on Cesarini, whom on August 23 he described in a letter from Basel to the Pope as /'this outstanding man, almost unique and most useful to the Church of God"4 who, he said, was very hard at first but later softened considerably in his attitude. From Basel, Traversari went to the court of Emperor Sigismund, who some time before had left Basel in disgust, and there also he continued his persuasions in favour of the papacy. Eugenius still persisted in trying to arrange a modus vivendi with the council, and the council still persisted in introducing new legislation to limit papal freedom of action— to the neglect of the larger questions of reform that the whole 80 EUGENÎUS IV Church was crying out for. In the early months of 1436, the Fathers modified the oath to be imposed on newly elected popes (not for the first time); they limited the size of the College of Cardinals and made regulations for their conduct in conclaves; they outlined a way of life to be followed by popes which defined among other things what dignities they could grant members of their families; they became active again in drawing up a monitorium (or list of complaints) against the Pope, which was also a threat of sanctions to be enforced against him. For his part Eugenius on March 1, 1436, appointed Cardi- nals Nicholas Albergati and John Cervantes, who the year before had been sent by the Fathers as his supervisors, to go to the council "as angels of peace" and to represent his views. Ten other cardinals, besides the Pope, signed the letters of credence and the letters authorising the legates for their special mission. Albergati, however, carried no strikingly new message. The Pope would respect canonical elections; he would accept the suppression of annates as soon as some compensation had been provided; he welcomed the work of union with the Greeks and urged the council to fix on some city for the meeting where both the Greeks and he could come—he offered fifty thousand ducats and four ships for the journey if the place should be within the Papal States; he would proclaim an indulgence in his own name and would add "with the approval of the sacred council." The phrase, "with the approval of the sacred council" was for the Fathers a denial of principle. They insisted on proclaiming an indulgence in their own name, and on April 14, 1436, although three out of the four papal presidents then in Basel refused to attend the session when the decision was taken and Cesarini alone presided, the indulgence was proclaimed in favour of the Greeks and was to be preached throughout the Church. Their reply to the other parts of the legates' proposals was not more TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 81

conciliatory and, on May 21, the Archbishop of Taranto and the Bishop of Padua, who as papal presidents had been the harassed upholders of the papal cause in the council for more than two years, left Basel in company with Cardinal Albergati. Cervantes stayed behind and took part in some sessions. He even presided on one occasion, though he had never been authorised for that by the Pope. Of the officially nominated presidents there remained only Cesarini. While Eugenius was thus continually engaged in diplomatic skirmishes with the council from which he was steadily emerging stronger, he was also continually engaged in military operations to stabilise his hold on the Papal States; and here too his position slowly improved. At that time Italy was in an almost perpetual state of war. Page after page of the laconic accounts of the chronicles, written to recount the history of Rome, Bologna, Florence, Venice, Milan, and of other cities —and these chronicles are very numerous—contain nothing else but records of the campaigns of condottieri, of revolts, of battles, of the sacking of cities, of deaths by violence, of pacts made and soon broken. Venice and Florence, with whom the Pope was in league, were permanently at war with Milan, except for rare and short-lived truces. Alfonso of Aragon and the Pope's nominee, René of Anjou, were rivals for the vacant throne of Naples. Various noble families over the length and breadth of the country, if they were not fighting minor wars on their own account, were engaged as hired condottieri in the quarrels of others. Cities revolted against their lords, against their vicars, against the Church; and Church, vicars, or lords took up arms to suppress the revolts. To gain some idea of what Eugenius had to contend with at this time, his anxieties, his preoccupations, it will not be necessary to describe in detail the various campaigns of the many condottieri. An almost bare chronological list of battles fought and cities taken will convey a sufficient picture of the 82 EUGENIUS IV situation. After the revolt of Bologna in 1434, Piccinino, the Milanese condottiero, occupied many positions round that city. On March 22, 1435, James Orsini made peace with the Church as did Battista Savelli five days later; so there was tranquillity for a time in part of the Patrimony. On March 28, however, a plot was discovered in Rome to restore a republican government, and only the prompt arrival of Orsino Orsini saved the situation. On May 16, peace between the Church and the outside supporters of the plot—Pontedera, and certain Savelli and Colonnas—was made, which left the papal troops free for other tasks. On April 3, the Bolognese destroyed the fortress of Galliera built by the popes to control the city. On June 20, Tivoli returned to the Church. On May 23, Vitelleschi came to the Patrimony as its commissary. James de Vico had reoccupied his old castle of Vetralla on January 2. Vitelleschi with de Vico's local enemies as allies besieged him there, took the castle and its turbulent owner on August 31 and beheaded him on September 28. In early 1435, a plot was discovered to take the Pope prisoner, as he was resting in the monastery of S. Antonio just outside Florence; general report attributed the attempt to Visconti of Milan, On June 20, Francis Sforza in Romagna moved his troops to prevent Nicholas Piccinino from reaching Milan, but a month later Nicholas defeated and captured Sforza's brother. On August 23, Fortebraccio, for so long the scourge of Rome, was defeated in battle in Umbria and died of his wounds. On August 10, peace was made between Venice, Florence, and the Pope on the one side and Visconti of Milan on the other, with the Marquis of Este as arbitrator. This was an event of the first importance for Eugenius, because by its terms Visconti surrendered all the papal cities that he held in Romagna and automatically withdrew his protection from Bologna. As a consequence, on September 23, that city submitted unconditionally and on October 6, Daniel Scotti, TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 83 bishop of Concordia, entered it as papal governor. In the same month of September, Antony Ordelaffi paid fifteen thousand florins to renew the vicariate of Forli, but his rule did not last long for the town revolted on July 11, 1436, and on the fourteenth of the same month Sforza took it for the Church. By the end, then, of 1435, the Pope's political position was much sounder, and the new year saw a further improvement. A group of Roman citizens visited him in Florence on Feb- ruary 2 to petition him to return, but they went back home "without hope that the Pope would come to Rome, but all his intention was to go to Bologna." Eugenius on August 19, 1435, had in fact intimated to the Bolognese his wish to take up residence in the city and "that therefore he wanted complete authority over the city as over his own property." The following day the Consiglio replied thanking him for lifting the interdict (August 10) and affirming their desire for peace throughout Italy, "but as regards the city, seeing that he had given his word to the Duke of Milan [in the truce of August 10] not to enter on any negotiations without his knowledge, it seemed to be their duty to refer his request to the Duke"— a not too diplomatic way of refusing. But on November 3 they sent ambassadors to Eugenius at Florence "to invite him to come to Bologna, for they understood that he was very in- conveniently situated in Florence." He left Florence on April 18, 1436, and arrived in Bologna on the twenty-second. Rome was the scene of another plot when again the Sa- velli, Pontedera, and the Colonnas tried, but unsuccessfully, to get possession. Vitelleschi marched from Tuscany, paused on his way near Rieti to capture a castle that belonged to Francis Savelli, and reached Rome on March 26. Within a few weeks he took and sacked Castelgandolfo and Marino with some seven other strongholds belonging to the Savelli family and Antony di Pontedera. He next reduced Civita Vecchia and on May 15, met a strong combined force which 84 EUGENÎUS IV he defeated, taking prisoner Francis Savelli, Onorato Gaetani, and Pontedera. He had Pontedera hanged. He then moved against the Colonnas and between May 23 and August 18, with the aid of some of the Orsini (Orsino Orsini had entered the service of the hostile Alfonso on March 16) and Everso d' Anguillaro, he took castle after castle, including the chief of their strongholds, Palestrina. He returned to Rome on August 29 and was given a triumphal entry by the citizens, with arches and baldachino and an offering of twelve hundred ducats presented in a gold cup worth one hundred ducats. He was, however, on the move again on September 2, this time to Aquila to repress a rebellion, and returned only on December 17 to the great content of the Romans. The reason for their feeling of satisfaction is plain. For the first time in many years the Romans felt secure, and they thoroughly approved of the execution of di Vico, Pontedera, and others. They welcomed the total destruction of Palestrina, when Vitelleschi sent "on March 20 [1436] twelve masons from each rione of Rome to have it burnt, levelled, pulled down, dismantled, and rendered completely uninhabitable; and so it was done. . . . This operation went on through the whole of April and many of them came to Rome to live." The writer was the Roman Paolo di Lello Pétrone who was certain that "it was allowed by God that that place should end badly/' That Eugenius could leave Florence and take up residence in the second largest city of the Papal States was a sign of the change in his fortunes, as also was the fact that he was accompanied by eight cardinals with four others arriving a few days later. For this he really had to thank Basel. If the Fathers, in respect of the annates, the indulgence, and the multifarious curial functions that they had arrogated to themselves, had shown some spirit of Christian peace and sweet reasonableness instead of an implacable hostility, and had applied their reforming spirit to themselves as well as to the papal Curia, they Τ y r r h e η i a

The Papal States At Mid-I5th Century 0 MILES 60

TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 85 would not have frightened the princes and the more pacific of the ecclesiastics with the spectre of a new schism in the Church. This for the non-fanatically minded of those days was the worst evil that could be imagined, especially after the all too recent experience. The fanaticism of the Fathers and their fear that the old papacy would revive made them determined, once they had, as they thought, reduced it to submission, to keep it subordinate, and they spent time which should have been devoted to more general problems of the Church on their feud against the Pope, with the result that, as Eugenius himself and many a prince declared to them, little was enacted for the reform of the Church. A consequence was that cardinals and others drifted back piecemeal to the papal court and that the princes lost some of their sympathy for the council, which by 1436 was entering on the sixth year of its existence. After the Council's flat rejection of his not unreasonable offers with regard to the annates, to the expenses of the Greeks, and to the granting of the indulgence and after the departure from Basel of all his presidents except Cesarini, in despair of any fruitful action there Eugenius realised that there was little likelihood of finding any acceptable stable relation between himself and the Fathers. He was also well aware of the change of atmosphere in the secular courts, and he determined to try to take advantage of the growing disgust of the princes to wean them away from the council and to attach them more firmly to himself. In approximately June, 1436, therefore, Eugenius prepared a very long memorandum for the use of internuncios to be sent to all the princes. It was an indictment of the council, which was accused of denying that the pope was head of the Church or St. Peter head of the Apostles, thereby changing the age-old constitution established by Christ and making instead two heads, a situation which could result only in 86 EUGENIUS IV schism; it had become the refuge of ecclesiastical malcontents and rebels; it had turned itself into a vast tribunal completely absorbed in petty trials, instead of attending to the serious business of reform for which in six years it had done almost nothing; it had abolished the annates, proclaimed an indulgence, created legates a latere, all in spite of the Pope and his reasonable offers; it had made a conciliar seal for itself, a complete innovation, since previous councils had used that of the reigning pontiff; it had made simple clerics the equal of prelates in voting, so that the bishops had abandoned Basel in disgust, for of the one hundred and fifty "mitres" there, when the council was confirmed in December 1433, barely twenty-five remained in 1436, and only one cardinal; the taxes the council forbade the Pope, it collected itself; it imposed tenths and semi-tenths and ordered papal collectors to forward their money to Basel; though the Greeks insisted on a place for the forthcoming meeting of easy access and on the presence of the Pontiff, the Fathers dilly-dallied about making a decision, pressing meantime, though senselessly, the claims of Basel; a pope could not, so declared Eugenius, abdicate the office he held in favour of any council or approve blindfold all its decisions; the princes should understand that and should help him to preserve the ancient customs and form of the Church and to render the danger of schism as remote as possible by recalling From Basel the delegations they had there. The internuncios to the different countries were to be briefed also about the peculiar local conditions so as to have answers ready in case of need. How many princes did in fact receive these internuncios is not known. Information is forthcoming about one only, the King of England, who had less need of exhortation than most others, for England, even though it had sent a delegation to Basel, had steadily supported Eugenius against the council. There were, however, at least two princes to whom Eugenius TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 87

would not have sent his appeal, Philip Maria Visconti of Milan and Alfonso V of Aragon and Sicily. Annoyed by the domineering ways of Alfonso, Joan II of Naples had re- scinded her adoption of him as heir and, in 1433, had selected instead Louis III of Anjou. Louis, however, died on Novem- ber 15, 1434, and the queen put his brother René in his stead even though at the time he was a political prisoner of Philip of Burgundy. Joan herself died on February 2, 1435, and the succession to the throne, since Naples was a papal fief, depended on Eugenius, who, faithful to the policy of his predecessor Martin V and to the will of Joan, (also, it must be admitted, in the hope of winning for himself the support against Basel of the powerful Charles VII of France), did not repudiate the claim of René. Alfonso was not the kind to submit easily or to be scrupu- lous in the means he adopted to gain his ends. With the con- nivance of an Aragonese party in Naples he landed, took possession of Capua, and besieged Gaeta. At the same time he tried to win Eugenius* support by an offer of one hundred thousand ducats (with ample gifts for the papal entourage) and the promise that the influential embassy he was contemplating sending to Basel would be employed there solely in the Pope's interests. The situation seemed to be simplified when, on August 5, 1435, Alfonso was defeated in a naval battle by the Genoese, and the prince with all his leading supporters was taken prisoner. The Genoese, at that time under the suzerainty of Milan, handed over their captives to Philip Maria, who to their consternation and indeed rage, for they were thus deprived of rich ransoms, freed them all on October 8. Visconti had found a kindred spirit in Alfonso, animated by a hostility to Eugenius that rivalled his own. Eugenius had not yet delivered the Bull investing René with the fief. First he wanted an assurance that Charles VII would instruct his French delegation at Basel to desist from 88 EUGENIUS IV antipapal activity, would use his influence to obtain the choice of a town suitable for the Greeks and himself for the council of union, and would allow the continued payment of annates in his kingdom. Charles agreed. The Bull was entrusted to Cosimo de' Medici to be delivered to René after the French King had promised in writing to approve any dissolution or translation of the Council of Basel that Eugenius wished to effect, and after René had paid one thousand golden florins down and promised thirty thousand more. With success Eugenius was raising the price. Alfonso for the moment lost hope of winning Eugenius over, so he embarked on a policy of intimidation: raids on Rome and its environs through allies found among the local barons, which was the occasion of Vitelleschi's successful campaign ending in the sack of Pales- trina; the despatch to Basel of the Archbishop of Palermo, Nicholas Tudeschi ("Panormitanus"), and Louis Pontano, two of the best canonists of the day, with orders to hound the Pope to the uttermost; and instructions to the bishops of Aragon, Sicily, and Sardinia to repair to Basel. He offered also to Cesarini and a few others to undertake the pious task of conquering Rome and the Papal States in the name of the council. If Eugenius had won the reluctant support of the King of distant France, he had made an implacable enemy of his unscrupulous neighbour. Alfonso's ambassadors presented themselves at the council on December 1, 1436, and found it in the earlier stages of the controversy over the site of the future meeting with the Greeks. The decree Sicut για mater, passed on September 7, 1434, and confirmed with the assent of the two parties of Greek delegates in the summer of 1435, had been taken to Constantinople by the three envoys of the council, John of Ragusa O.P., Heinrich Menger, and Simon Fréron, who in autumn accompanied the Greeks back home. Their mission was not only to recommend the decree but in one important TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 89

respect to persuade the Greek Emperor and the Patriarch to modify it. Sicut για mater laid down an exclusive list of places for the encounter with the Latins: "Calabria, Ancona, or other maritime location; Bologna, Milan, or some other Italian city; outside of Italy, Buda in Hungary, Vienna in Austria, or at the most Savoy/' Ragusa and his companions were instructed to persuade the Emperor and the Patriarch to accept Basel, but, try as they might, they could not succeed. The Greeks insisted that the necessity of having as short a voyage as possible for the aged prelates (the Patriarch was an octo- genarian) and the extreme desirability of facilitating the presence of the Pope precluded all distant places. The Fathers at Basel, however, blandly ignored the firm insistence of the Greeks and in the course of 1436 let it be known that any city that by January, 1437, fulfilled the conditions of lending seventy thousand florins for the expenses of the Greeks would be considered. Offers flowed in, those of Florence and Avignon among the most generous. No city in the province of Venice, or Florence, or, as far as that goes, no city in Italy stood much chance of being chosen, for the mind of most of the Fathers was expressed by the Bishop of Albenga of the province of Milan: "It was not expedient that the Pope should be personally present in the council, where he would have pre-eminence and authority, and that (he said) both for the good of the subsequent reform and for the observance of the decrees, as well as for the security and liberty of the members of the council." Most of the Fathers, therefore, began to support the claims of Avignon together with those of Basel. Nicod de Menthon of Avignon was commissioned to provide and lead the fleet to fetch the Greeks and he was solemnly presented with the council's banner, blessed on November 19. In the session of December 5, by 242 votes out of 355 the order of choice was fixed as Basel, Avignon, Savoy, but neither the papal president Cesarini nor the papal legate Cervantes 90 EUGEN1US IV was among the majority, and they refused to ratify the vote as contrary to the council's own decree. Cardinal Aleman, whose influence among the Fathers had been increasing in proportion as Cesarini's waned, without any papal authority whatever assumed the duties of president and announced the result. So far Avignon had only promised the stipulated sum of money, it had not paid it in full; and this fact enabled the more moderate party in the council to have the execution of the vote of December deferred. John Dishypatus, the ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople, had his formal protest against the contravention of the council's solemn agreement with his master read out in a public session and officially registered, but it was all of no avail. On February 23, the papal section managed to impose on the Avignonese a time limit of thirty days with twelve extra days for the news to travel. If they had not paid the full amount by then, another city was to be elected. An embassy left Basel in haste for Avignon, thence to go to Constantinople; Dishypatus refused the invitation to join it. Eugenius sent one of his presidents, the Archbishop of Taranto, back to Basel, to reject in his name the council's choice as contrary to the decree Sicut για mater, to the express determination of the Greeks, and to his own wish. On February 11, the exact day of the expiration of the time limit for the Avignonese, as the full sum of money had not yet been paid, Taranto demanded a fresh election and was upheld by Cesarini and Cervantes. Three of the heads of the four Deputations (i.e. commissions set up within the council to study and prepare specific subjects for the general sessions) sided with Cesarini, and the Deputations split. The council had become two factions, each claiming to be the true council, the larger one in favour of Basel, Avignon, or Savoy as the city of choice; the smaller one, which called itself the TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 91 "healthier part/' electing on April 23 Florence, Udine, or whatever other Italian city first fulfilled the required conditions. Negotiations to restore unity failed. Feeling was such that it needed the armed vigilance of the citizens of Basel to prevent bloodshed. On May 7, both "parts'" simultaneously read out in the cathedral church their decrees, shouted Placet and intoned the Te Deum, the "healthier part" finishing first because its decree was the shorter. Three of the leading members of the minority, Peter, bishop of Digne, Antony, bishop of Oporto, and Nicholas of Cusa, accompanied by the two Greeks who were still in Basel, John Dishypatus and Manuel Boullotes, left on May 20 to take their decree to the Pope at Bologna. There, on May 24, the two Greeks addressed the Pope in a general consistory, recounting their rejection of the choice of the majority of the council, and requesting the Pontiff to acknowledge the decision of the minority and to put it into effect without delay. They claimed to have authorisation to defer the departure of the ships at least for a short time. They received a definite reply on May 30 in Eugenius* Bull Salvatoris et Dei nostri which, after briefly recounting the history of the controversy about the choice of a site for the council and repeating word for word the protest that John Dishypatus had made in Basel, ended: "We accept and confirm the election of Florence or Udine or some other place for the celebration of the aforesaid universal ecumenical council as is contained in the decree." Thereafter Eugenius wasted no time. He sent off to Venice to hire ships and have them made ready for the voyage; appointed Antony Condulmaro his Captain General of the fleet; nominated Mark Condulmaro, Archbishop of Taren- taise, as legate a latere and Christopher Garatoni as Nuncio Apostolic to go to Constantinople with the three representatives of the Baseler minority and the two Greek envoys. The latter on July 4 agreed to the prorogation of the date of de- 92 EUGENÎUS IV parture till July 15 and also accepted that the site of the council should be named only on the arrival of the Greeks in Italy. Letters were sent to the Western princes to inform them of the agreement; others were prepared for the Emperor and the Patriarch of the Greeks accrediting the conciliar and the papal envoys. The legate was empowered to excommunicate any envoys of the Baseler majority who might try to prevent the execution of their commission, but only if their interference should bring the whole enterprise of union into jeopardy. If the Greeks in Constantinople were to prefer to accept the city designated by the majority of the council, Eugenius enjoined on his envoys to respect their will and indeed to help them to effect it. Writing to Amadeus of Savoy on April 10, 1438, the Pope quoted the instructions he had given his ambassadors:

If by chance the ships carrying the envoys from Nice . . . should arrive before us in Constantinople or should come into rivalry, let them deal with the Greeks and do not in any way interfere with them. And if they can bring it about that the Greeks go to the places they have named, be patient and make no objection, so that all may understand that it is not our purpose to interfere with their envoys and that we are engaged in this enterprise with a right intention, for this is the truth. For we desire and seek nothing else except that this holy work should not come to nothing, especially with dishonour to the Church. But if they cannot achieve that, then, so that the holy union may not be impeded and so that the council also may not seem to fail in its obligations, let us implement our choice and try with all diligence to bring the Greeks with you, since there is every hope that, if we meet together in an ecumenical council, union would follow. If, as was said before, those envoys come into rivalry with us in Constantinople, let there be no altercation, abuse or strife, but with all moderation, patience, and meekness execute your lawful commission in the name of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, who, We pray, may help you safely on your journey there and back again. TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 93

The letter continues:

The said envoys were not forgetful of these instructions while they were in Constantinople and gave the Greeks freedom of choice to sail either in our ships or in those of Avignon or in their own or in a combined fleet, provided they ended up in some place within the Latin Church.5

The possible friction that the Pope had foreseen did in fact occur. The bishops of Digne, Oporto, and Corone (Gara- toni) left Venice in a fast vessel on July 26, put in at Crete on August 15 to arrange for the hire of the three hundred crossbowmen required by the Greco-Latin agreement, and finally entered port at Constantinople on September 4. The heavier ships with the other envoys and the soldiers arrived on Sep- tember 24. The representative of the council, John of Ragusa, the only one left of the three who had disembarked in Septem- ber, 1435 (for Menger had returned to Basel and Fréron had died), though puzzled by the composition of the embassy and its bearing letters both from the Pope and the council, nevertheless rejoiced greatly at the prospect of a meeting of the Greeks with a united Latin Church, the goal of all his endeavours. Sad disillusionment followed, for on October 3 the fleet of the Baseler majority arrived and the disunion of the Western Church was only too manifest. There followed weeks of interviews, protests, challenges, but the Greeks did not really hesitate. For them the Western Church and the Pope were synonymous, and they knew that a council without the Pope would have no permanent and certain value. That is why they had throughout the negotiations with Basel insisted on the approval of Eugenius for any arrangement made and on arrangements that would render his physical presence in the council possible. So they made their choice and went on board the papal fleet. 94 EUGEN1US IV Fortune was not quite so benevolent to Eugenius elsewhere as in Constantinople. Alfonso of Aragon had been making liberal offers for papal recognition of his claims to the throne of Naples from early in 1437. The Pope, however, not only did not respond favourably but even managed to secure from Philip of Burgundy the liberation of René of Anjou. Vitelleschi campaigned so vigorously in favour of Rene's wife, Isabel, who had come to Naples to uphold her husband's rights, that Eugenius thought for a moment that he was master of the kingdom. Unfortunately that was not the case, and a doubly irate Alfonso combined with Visconti of Milan to make Florence impossible of access as a site for the council and incited his envoys at Basel to a greater and greater activity against the Pope. He even issued a proclamation from Gaeta dated September 22, 1437, offering to deliver Rome and the Papal States to any member of the council who should present adequate credentials. It did not really need the incitement of the Bishop of Palermo, Alfonso's chief representative at Basel, to make the Fathers take action against the Pope after the revolt of the "healthier part." In spite of Cesarini's continued remon- strances and of protests on the part of others, both ecclesiastics and delegates of the princes, on July 31 the council approved a monitorium of twenty-five charges against the Pope, from whom it demanded a reply within sixty days. Copies were sent throughout the West, one even reaching Constantinople with the council's fleet. Eugenius showed no sign of the "amendment" enjoined on him by the Fathers. Vitelleschi, the rough and cruel but highly successful condottiero, who should have remained purely a soldier but who had been consecrated Bishop of Recanati on April 16, 1431, raised to be Patriarch of Alex- andria on February 21, 1435, and Archbishop of Florence on October 12, 1435, the Pope created Cardinal of S. Lorenzo in TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 95 Lucina on August 9, 1437, and thereby doubly irritated the Fathers. He had disobeyed their decree forbidding the creation of new cardinals during the lifetime of the council, and he had bestowed the highest ecclesiastical dignity on an unworthy subject. That act of Eugenius ignored the council and its enactments; his next, a new tactic, showed that he had advanced from the defensive to the offensive in his relations with Basel. Without waiting for news about the reception of his fleet in Constantinople, Eugenius on September 18 transferred the Council of Basel to Ferrara by the Bull Doctoris Gentium.6 That document was very long, for it recorded again the history of the negotiations with the Greeks and of the acrid controversy in Basel about the site of the new council, the right of the "healthier part" to act as the council, the unjust reprisals taken against the Bishop of Taranto and his procurator. It recounted, too, all the details about the monitorium, the protests and expedients of Cardinals Cesarini and Cervantes, of Sigismund's orator, and of others in number to defeat or at least to defer it, and noted that:

They [the members of the council] would have concurred indeed in the reasons, in the eminently sensible petitions and urgent protests of our legates, had not a few of those of highest rank, whom the throng of underlings follows, in part corrupted by the pestilence of ambition, in part from servile obedience to the insane fury of a few dominating princes or cajoled by their flat- teries or impelled by threats and fear, made themselves leaders and sponsors of these innovations under the specious name of 'reform* and kept everything that they had against us for this crucial time when the ecumenical council is imminent.

The council, so the Bull asserted, in its six years of life had produced strife rather than reform and it wantonly jeopardised the project of union to the scandal of the faithful and the dishonour of the Church. The Pope, then, had to take up the 96 EUGENIUS IV task betrayed by the council and to fulfil its solemn engage- ments. Therefore, after deliberation and with the consent of the cardinals "by our apostolic authority and certain knowledge and in the plenitude of our power, as the site of the transferred council We name, designate and depute . . . the city of Ferrara, which as from now We choose for the future ecumenical council; a place agreeable to the Greeks, convenient for business, suitable and pleasing to all the kings and secular princes and prelates, secure and free, included in the decree of the Greeks, all of whose stipulations in favour of the Greeks are fulfilled and ordered/* The Fathers were bidden to proceed there but were permitted to tarry at Basel for not more than thirty days to treat with the Bohemians about Com- munion under both kinds, but about that only. The Bull concluded with an urgent summons to all to come to Ferrara and with threats against any who should try to conduct any council elsewhere. It was signed by Eugenius and eight cardinals. Copies of it, with an accompanying letter explaining and dilating upon the iniquities and shortcomings of the council, were sent within the next few weeks to princes, bishops, and universities, and the Religious Orders were required to send a determined number of theologians. The citizens of Basel received a letter from the Pope protesting that the Bull, motivated solely by the good of the Church, implied nothing against them. The gage was down.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1 Paolo di Lello Pétrone, La Mesticanza, ed. F. Soldi (Raccolia degli Storiciitaliani XXIV, II) (Citta di Castello, 1910), p. 14. 2M.C, II, p. 714. 8 "It had indeed been the intention of many that, by means of the TIDE BEGINS TO TURN 97 decree about union with the Greeks, the council should remain stable": M.C., II, 784.

* Ambrosii Traversari epistuhe, ed. L. Mehus (Florence, 1771), no. 11.

6Epistolae pontificiae ad Concilium Florentinum spectantes, ed. G. Hofmann (Roma, 1940-6), doc. 137. Hereafter referred to as E.P.

β Ε.Ρ., doc. 88. chapter f~

The Council with the Greeks

Indeed, when We were yet of lower station, We were ever very distressed and saddened by the division between the Eastern and Western Churches and by the sight of the incalculable evil and harm that proceed therefrom to the Christian faith, and We used all our endeavours with great insistence to bring it to an end, first in the Council of Constance, then with Pope Martin V, our predecessor of happy memory, and We laboured greatly that, with the wall of division removed, union of the two Churches might ensue. When, therefore, raised to the height of the apostolate, We perceived that to this holy desire there was added duty, imposed on Us from on high by the office of our pastoral care, We undertook the task with ardent zeal and unhesitating alacrity.1

IHESE WORDS form the introduction to the Bull Doc- torts gentium by which Pope Eugenius transferred the Coun- cil of Basel to Ferrara. It was not the first time he had used them or words completely similar, nor would it be the last. We know little about his activity in regard to union either at Constance or under Martin V. About his zeal to end the schism when he was pontiff, however, there is no doubt, and that is a sufficient guarantee that what he said of his earlier aspirations was true. The schism was the division between the Western and the Eastern Church. The Western Church of Latin rite was a compact whole almost coterminous with Europe. The Eastern Church meant to most Latins of that 99 100 EUGENWS IV day the Greek Church, and in particular that part of the Greek Church that depended ecclesiastically upon Constan- tinople. There were other independent parts of the Greek Church, such as the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, at that time, it is true, reduced to very small pro- portions from their once flourishing state; and there were sec- tions of the Greek Church depending ecclesiastically on Con- stantinople that were outside the bounds of the civil power of Constantinople. These included the provinces under the Turks in Asia Minor, the areas in present-day Albania and the Balkans, the Churches in Georgia and Greek Trebizond. Russia, too, was then ecclesiastically dependent on the Greek capital, for its metropolitan, who was head also of all oriental Christians in Poland, Lithuania, and north west Europe, was appointed by Constantinople and consecrated by the ecumenical Patriarch, but the language of its liturgy, like that of other Slav countries, was Slav. All these were either Greeks or had received their Christianity and their rite from the Greek Church, and their separation from the Latin Church came about for the same reasons and at roughly the same time. Greeks and Latins were not the only Christians in schism. The Armenians, situated of old between pagans on the East and Christians on the West and alternately overrun by both, had been divided from the rest of the Christian world since the Council of Chalcedon (451). By 1438, they had ceased to possess a territory of their own and were grouped in large colonies in various places, notably Egypt, Pera (across the Golden Horn from Constantinople), and Caffa in the Crimea, these last two places under Genoese rule. Eugenius' zeal for union took in the Armenians also. When Garatoni went to Constantinople in 1433, he was commissioned to treat not only with the Greeks but personally also with the Armenians, to invite and encourage those Christians also to participate in the council of union. Garatoni did not himself visit the COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 101

Armenian Patriarch, for the Emperor John VIII urged him to hasten back to Rome to expedite the council in Constan- tinople. He did not, however, altogether neglect his instructions. He met the Armenian bishop Isaias in Constantinople, in both 1433 and 1434, spoke with him about union and delivered to him the papal letters addressed to the Armenian Patriarch, which, translated into Armenian, were forwarded to their destination. Isaias on November 1, 1434, wrote to thank the Pope and to assure him that "nothing could be dearer to me than to be able in my day to behold a thing so excellent and so very pleasing to God [as union with the Roman Church]/' The Greek King of Trebizond, who also had received letters from the Pope dated from Rome and Florence, and so presumably carried by Garatoni on his missions of 1433 and 1434, replied on October 18 in a like spirit. Once his fleet had safely left Venice, Eugenius seems not to have had the slightest doubt that it would bring the Greeks back with it. His Bull of September 18, 1437 transferring the council to Ferrara was a token of his confidence. Not only that. He seems to have been convinced also that, if the Greeks came, union would certainly follow. It is true that in the safe- conduct that he issued for them on July 6, 1437, there was a clause guaranteeing their return at papal expense even if the council failed in its purpose, but that was inserted so as to fulfil the conditions established by the decree Sicut για mater and to pacify them. His own mind was better disclosed by a letter he wrote to Amadeus of Savoy on February 18, 14^8, when the Greeks were still in Venice: "Soon the Greeks will come from Venice, viz. the aforesaid Emperor and the Patri- arch with all their following, procurators also of the Armenians and some others, so that we seem to hold that most holy union already in our hands."2 He had to think also of the expense. Most of the money, that was deposited in Constantinople in virtue of the agreement and that was used for the hire of the 102 EUGEN1US IV fleet, had been borrowed and would have to be repaid. Basel, against Eugenius' will, had promulgated its indulgence to raise money precisely for the expenses of a council of union. Eugenius, by a letter of December 4, 1437, insisted that money given for union should not be diverted to any other purpose and, under pain of censures, enjoined on all authorities that the money already contributed and deposited should be "frozen" and ultimately delivered to none but to accredited papal agents. Eugenius was clearly not bothering any longer to preserve even a façade of peaceful relations with Basel. Neither for their part were the Basel Fathers with him. Before ever they learnt of his Bull of translation of September 18, they had formally declared him "contumacious'' (October 1, 1437). In vain Cesarini sought a delay of a few days as a mark of recognition of his past services to the council, and if he did not leave Basel straightway, it was because he had still not lost all hope of stemming, with the help of Sigismund and the delegates of some other of the princes, the subversive flood which he had done so much to loose and which he saw would end in another ruinous schism. The Fathers, who on October 12 had annulled Doctoris gentium, agreed to allow the Pope another sixty days to reply to their accusations. Emperor Sigismund, whose influence had always been towards moderation, died on December 9. Cesarini * on December 20 appealed to the Fathers, arguing that now that the Greeks were actually on their way to the West, if they really had the well-being of the Church at heart, they should be willing to abide by the decision of the Greeks as regards the place of the council. "Per- suade them," he urged, "if you can, to come to Avignon or Savoy, but if you fail, join them in a council of union wherever they go and press on with reform." Cardinal Aleman brought the minds of the council back from the heights of Cesarini's altruism to the depths of Eugenius' misdeeds; COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 103 Nicholas Tudeschi, Alfonso's representative, declared that to acquiesce in the translation of the council by the Pope would be the rejection of Constance and Basel; Cesarini was even accused of being the real cause of schism by his too soft attitude towards the Pope. He spoke once again in Basel, two days after Christmas, to stress the Christmas message of peace, and then with Cardinal Cervantes left on January 9 for Ferrara. The Fathers of Basel were too relieved at his departure to remember to accuse him of going without permission. When a light ship bringing the advance party of the Greeks had reached Venice, Eugenius renewed his decision to translate the Council of Basel, this time without any condition, in the Bull Pridern ex justis, which announced also the day of the re-opening of the council as January 8. Cardinal Albergati was to be president till the Pope arrived in person, and the council had the same purposes as that of Basel: peace and the reformation of the Church, and besides, the union of Christendom. Ferrara was a happy choice as the site. It lay in the midst of fields and woods that were rich in grain, cattle, and game, and the river Po and canals provided fresh-water fish and Lake Comacchio salt-water fish, so victuals would not be lacking. It was a papal city of Romagna, for which the Marquis of Este paid an annual tribute of five thousand florins, receiving one thousand back as a pension, and it had kept itself free from entanglements in the enmities of Milan against Venice and the League. , Florence almost certainly would have had the council from the start, if Visconti of Milan and Alfonso of Aragon, supported in this also by Sigismund, had not been too menac- ing. Bologna hoped for the honour, and the commercial advantage, and submitted to extra taxation to raise thirty thousand florins for the expenses. Its citizens were not unnaturally irritated when Eugenius slipped away quietly, with their thirty thousand florins, on January 24, 1438. A chroni- 104 EUGENIUS IV cler of the city says that he went to the fortress Galliera, which he had rebuilt during his residence in Bologna, as if to inspect it, and after passing the night there, went off secretly by water to Ferrara. It is, however, hard to believe that his plans were not generally known. Nicholas d'Este had been visiting him and had bought three fortresses from him: the Bolognese contribution would not be nearly enough to cover his expendi- ture for the Greeks. The Bull of December 30 had named Ferrara for the council, and on January 3 Cardinal Francis Condulmaro had issued a general notice that the papal Curia would move to Ferrara on the eighteenth of the month but would continue to conduct its usual business till then. Eugenius passed the night of January 24 in the monastery of S. Antonio outside Ferrara and made his solemn entry into the city three days later in a snow storm that ruined all the bright brocades that bedecked the road from the cathedral to the palace where he was to lodge. The day, January 24, is notable also because on that day Basel declared Eugenius suspended and deprived of all power both spiritual and temporal, and itself assumed the direction of the Church for as long as the suspension should last. The council had opened in Ferrara on the appointed day with a session in the cathedral church, when the Bulls were read that gave it juridical existence and authorised Albergati to preside. Other sessions followed in which any measures taken by Basel against the new assembly and its members were declared null The Pope presided at a session on February 8 and on the fifteenth of the same month there was a plenary session in his presence with seventy-two "mitres" taking part, when the Bull Exposcit debitum was promulgated. This re- viewed the events that had led up to the summoning of the council in Ferrara; repeated the penalties enacted against the recalcitrant Basel faction if they did not quit that city within thirty days, and against the citizens of Basel if after that period COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 105

they did not evict them; but also promised pardon and immunity to all who should repair to Ferrara. By this time the Greeks had reached Venice. Their journey had been very protracted (the Venetians, writing to Cesarini, had forecast their arrival for about Christmastime). Having set out on November 26, owing to long waits in various ports, they put in at Venice only on February 8, 1438. When news of their arrival came to Ferrara, the Marquis hastened to Venice to welcome them in the name of his city, and Cardinal Albergati with an imposing group of prelates was sent by Eugenius to offer them his salutations and to invite them to proceed to Ferrara for the council. There was some little hesitation. The Patriarch consulted the Doge privately and was assured that by far the greater part of the Church supported the Pope. The Emperor, the Patriarch, and a small group of advisers discussed the matter and, as both the Emperor and the Patriarch were very much in favour of the Pope's council, the question was settled. Because there were not enough small vessels available to carry all the seven hundred or so Greeks who formed the whole party, the Emperor and the Patriarch made the sea and river journey to Ferrara separately, arriving on March 4 and 8 respectively. The meeting between the Pope and the Emperor was friendly. "The most holy Pope was seated in his palace with all the clergy— that is, cardinals, metropolitans, bishops, priests, and other ecclesiastics—and many nobles and barons, to receive. the Emperor. And when the head of the cavalcade arrived, some of the courtiers were on foot, as also was the Despot [Prince Demetrius, the Emperor's brother], and these entered through the great gate into the palace where the Pope was. But they conducted the Emperor on horseback through another gate. When the Pope learnt that the Emperor was near the gate, he rose and began to walk to and fro, and so the Emperor found him already on his feet. And when he wished to genuflect, 106 EUGEN1US IV the Pope did not let him but took him to his bosom and offered his hand to the Emperor to be kissed, and he seated him on his left hand with the cardinals arrayed at his feet/'3 and after some time spent in conversation the Emperor was escorted to the palace, called "Paradise," that had been got ready for him. The meeting with the Patriarch was not quite so harmonious because it gave rise to one of the several incidents when there was friction on a point of principle. Eugenius, like all other Latins, believed that the Greek Church was schismatical and, in the last resort, also heretical, and in his view the council was to "bring back" the erring daughter Church to the bosom of the forgiving mother Church. Joseph II, the Patri- arch, like all other oriental Christians, believed that the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople were equal and independent, and that, if either of the two Churches was schismatical and heretical, it was the Latin Church. The first meeting of the heads of the two Churches would bring these attitudes into open expression and the submission by either head to the pretensions of the other could be taken, or mistaken, as acquiescence in the claim implied. This is what occurred. As the Patriarch was approaching Ferrara in the state barge, he was informed by a messenger from the Emperor that the Pope expected him to follow the western custom of salutation by kissing the papal foot. Joseph was surprised and shocked. He had taken it for granted that he and Eugenius would meet as equals and embrace. He refused absolutely to kiss the Pope's foot and after he arrived at Ferrara, though a deputation of cardinals and other prelates and curial officials was waiting to escort him to the papal residence, he did not budge. All day long messengers came and went to persuade him to consent. He refused and instead threatened to return forthwith to Venice, if the Pope insisted. Finally Eugenius COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 107 yielded and agreed to forgo the foot-kissing. Next day he received the Patriarch and his prelates, but without any ceremony—Joseph without head-dress and staff, the prelates in groups of six—and as soon as the formal salutations were over, he had them shown to their lodgings. Eugenius did not act from pique. He did not insist on the foot-kissing so as not to wreck the council of union before ever it had begun, but, like the Patriarch, he would not allow a type of reception that could be interpreted as a denial of his principles. It was an unfortunate start to the council, but it was the kind of embarrassment that was bound to arise when people of different outlooks were meeting for the first time, and it ended with a mutual concession which pleased neither party. Eugenius, in accepting the obligations of the agreement Sicut για mater that the Council of Basel had made with the Greeks, had undertaken to provide their board and lodging and whatever else might be necessary for them during their stay. His Treasurer, Cardinal Francis Condulmaro, had made all arrangements with the Marquis of Este, and the contracts had been signed on January 16 and 17. The Latins too had to be housed and fed during the council, though the cardinals and many of the prelates were accommodated in religious houses. Palaces and dwellings were allotted to the Greeks, and prices were fixed for rents and food-stuffs to prevent unfair advantage being taken of the situation. Food was to be provided in kind, but when the Greeks had been in Ferirara a short time they raised strong objections to that method of maintenance and, the Emperor supporting their complaints, a new arrangement was made whereby a monthly allowance was to be paid in money, thirty florins for the Emperor, twenty- five for the Patriarch, twenty for the Despot Demetrius, and three or four for the rest according as they had been invited by name (prelates, theologians, etc.) or not. That meant that the Pope had to find about seventeen hundred florins monthly 108 EUGEN1US IV in ready money for the upkeep of the Greeks in Italy alone. He had borrowed money for the preliminary expenses, and in the early part of 1438 he was still paying off that debt. In a letter of April 9, 1438, he asserted that he had already dis- bursed eighty thousand florins for the council and that the expenses for the Greeks in Italy and the ships and archers in Constantinople came to about five thousand florins a month. These were not his only commitments. He was paying for troops in the never-ending war of attrition going on around him with the indefatigable condottiero of the Duke of Milan, Nicholas Piccinino, a past master in the art of quick movement, thrusting, and attacking in the most unexpected places. In this year, 1438, Piccinino's son after he suborned Sforza's ally, Taliano Furlano, with better pay, took Ascoli, which Sforza relieved, and then, let in by the treachery to the Church of the Abbot of Casino, its governor, captured and sacked Spoleto. Sforza then moved to Umbria, took Assisi and Norcia and defeated the Trinci, lords of Foligno, before going to Naples to support Queen Isabel against Alfonso of Aragon. Bologna, always hankering after complete independence and at that time irritated by the Pope's having located his council elsewhere, began intriguing with Visconti. Pic- cinino was sent ostensibly to the Milanese conquests in Romagna, but at a given sign he presented himself on May 18 at the gates of Bologna, which were opened to him by the plotters, and the governor, seeing resistance useless, left. Siege was laid to Galliera which when no help was forthcoming surrendered (June 1), and Piccinino, and not, to their disgust, the Bolognese, put in the new garrison. The revolt of Bologna was the signal to others. Imola and Forli followed suit, and Ordelaffi re-entered the latter, but Piccinino retained command of the castle. The Ravenna area was the next locality to admit him, and on August 26 Borgo S. Sepulcro submitted. All this time the Duke of Milan, since in theory he was at COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 109 peace with the Pope, was disclaiming responsibility and declaring that his condottiero was acting without orders. Not unjustly Ludovico Antonio Muratori, the famous editor of the great collection of Italian chronicles, Rerum italicarum serif- tores, wrote of him: "Philip Maria Visconti was a prince with a strange policy. He promised today, to be faithless to his word tomorrow."4 With all these expenses for wars and for the council, with responsibility also for the regular upkeep of his court and Curia and for the support of not a few Latin theologians, and with so much of his normal revenue curtailed by the action of Basel and the turbulent conditions obtaining in the Papal States, Eugeriius was soon in financial straits. He renewed therefore the sequestration of the money of the indulgence proclaimed by Basel and he appointed special collectors in some countries to deal with it. Even so his payments to the Greeks became irregular, the first of them dated April 2, the second May 30, the next June 20, the next October 21, and the last one in Ferrara was made in the beginning of January, 1439, on the eve of the transfer of the council to Florence. The Greeks were not making his financial task easy. He had been responsible for the pay of his fleet from the time he hired it in early July, 1437, and he had not been relieved of the burden till early February, 1438, because the Greeks had been so leisurely on their journey. Then they had spent a month in Venice, partly, it is true, as the guests of the Vene- tians. When finally they did reach Ferrara, the Emperor John insisted on allowing time for the arrival of the Western princes or their delegates, for he was most anxious to meet them so as to obtain help for his threatened country. As a condition therefore of the solemn inauguration of the council in Ferrara, he stipulated that there should be no discussion about the chief differences that divided the Churches for a period of four months, and the Pope had perforce to accept. 110 EUGENÎUS IV The solemn inauguration took place on April 9 and was another occasion of friction on a point of principle. In the arrangement of the thrones (the session was to be held in the cathedral), Eugenius wanted his to be placed centrally before the altar and the Latins and Greeks to be in front of him on his right and left. The Greeks objected, declaring that if any throne should be central it should be that of the Emperor as convener of the council. After much talking and arguing between committees, a compromise was reached. In the centre would be the book of the gospels. The Latins would be arrayed along the north side of the church, first the Pope's throne, a little more elevated than the next one to it which was the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor (vacant because the Emperor was dead), and then the thrones of the cardinals, the Latin patriarchs, bishops, and so on. The Greeks had their thrones along the south side, the Greek Emperor's immediately opposite the Latin Emperor's and exactly similar to it in height, size, and decoration; then the Patriarch's, followed by those of the metropolitans and the rest. Again no one was really satisfied, but no principle was sacrificed. The four months' interval was very irksome to the Latins. The Pope wanted to hasten things on from a variety of motives—to demonstrate the constructive activity of his council as opposed to the procrastination of Basel, to attract supporters, and to limit expense. The Latin bishops also chafed at the waste of time and they kept up pressure on the Pope either to set the council in motion or to let them return to their dioceses. Eugenius kept trying to persuade the Greek Emperor to agree to discussion of some kind and finally succeeded. In May, committees of ten on each side met to decide what subject might be ventilated without contravention of the stipulation. Cesarini, speaking for the Latins, was persuasive in suggesting that they could explore the ground of the dogma of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, leaving the formal debate COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 111 till the regular conciliar sessions; but John VIII firmly rejected the proposal. In the end it was decided to discuss the doctrine of Purgatory, still within the limits of the committees. The meetings went on till at least July 16 without any more agreement at the end than there had been at the beginning; indeed with less, for Mark Eugenicus, who was the chief exponent of the Greek views, became more intransigent with each debate. Meantime Pope Eugenius had another important preoccupation. Charles VII of France, in accordance with the promises he had given in order to secure papal approval for the candidature of his kinsman, René of Anjou, to the throne of Naples, had indeed made a show of trying to get from Basel some compensation for the anna tes they had abolished. But he had done little else. He had not withdrawn from Basel his permanent delegation, which had always been the spearhead of the attacks on the papacy, and he had done all he could to favour the semi-French Avignon as the site of the future council. Indeed so annoyed was he at his hopes being frustrated in that regard that on January 23, 1438, he declared openly for Basel and forbade his subjects to go to Ferrara. Nevertheless, when he heard that the Basel Fathers were contemplating the suspension of the Pope, the fear of a new schism made him beg them to help "the languishing Church with a milder medicine." While Charles was thinking that Basel was still preparing a decree, it had actually passed it on January 24 and the embassy that he sent, first to them and then to Eugenius, was too late to intervene. Divided thus between the rival claims, he summoned the French clergy to meet in Bourges on May 1, 1438. It was of first importance to Eugenius to secure the support of one of the most powerful monarchs of the day; it would not only enhance the prestige of his council but, if the French delegation were withdrawn from Basel, would practically bring that assembly to an end. He sent, therefore, 112 EÜGENIUS IV an imposing embassy to Bourges to assert the legitimacy of the Council in Ferrara, to urge the sending of French representatives to it, and to press for the condemnation of the supposed suspension of himself by Basel and for the withdrawal of the Frenchmen present there. An equally strong delegation from Basel made diametrically opposite demands. The "Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges" was signed by Charles on July 7 and was in general more favourable to Basel than to Eugenius, though it made no clear-cut decision for either. It accepted the principle of the superiority of a council over a pope, approved a number of reforms decreed by Basel, but modified them to suit French interests, and insisted firmly on the payment of the tenth to reimburse the Avignonese for their abor- tive expedition to Constantinople. What it really meant was that France was neutral and independent and would run the Church in France for the French. Basel was not satisfied to see its decrees arbitrarily changed. Eugenius was less satisfied, but did not give up hope of improving the position by diplomatic conversations. Charles VII used the "Sanction" or recognised the rights of the Pope, according as it proved more convenient for his own interests. In the summer of 1438, many towns in North Italy such as Genoa, Florence, and Bologna were visited by the plague, as they were most years. Ferrara too suffered and. there was great mortality. None of the Greeks fell victim, though some of the Russian contingent that reached Ferrara in mid-August with Isidore, the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia, were stricken and died. There was a general panic. The well-to-do citizens left the town for the healthier countryside. The Em- peror went to reside in a monastery some six miles away. Many of the Latin ecclesiastics were given leave of absence, but the Pope, the Patriarch, and the Greek clerics, not without fear and trepidation, remained in the town all the summer. There was question even of transferring the council, and Traversari COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 113

asserted in a letter to Cosimo de* Medici, 'The Greeks almost to a man demand it." Eugenius, hesitating as to the best course to follow, sounded out the Doge of Venice about the wisdom of moving the council and about a site in Venetian territory, but the Signoria replied, deprecating any change of place before the council had really got down to work at all, for that would create a very bad impression. One good, at least, came from the plague. The Greeks became anxious to get on with the council and to depart. By September they had been ten months away from home. The council so far had done nothing worth while, and at that rate they would be in Italy forever. Their interest and curiosity in a new country were being submerged in a nostalgia for their own. Time lay heavy on their hands, with nothing to do. The irregularity of the Pope's payments caused at times no little inconvenience and even hardship. They began, therefore, to press the Emperor and the Patriarch to arrange for discussion of the fundamental difference that divided the Western and Eastern Churches, for that was the reason why they had come to Ferrara. The Pope was ready enough. So on October 8 the council really started its true business, when in the great hall of the papal palace Latins and Greeks, with the same arrangement of thrones as in the cathedral, began to discuss the legitimacy of the addition to the Nicene Creed of the words, "From the Son" (J?ilioque). The choice of subject was the Greeks'. , The four months' interval imposed by John VIII had proved quite useless, though, of course, he could hardly have foreseen that when he first made the stipulation. France had adopted the "Pragmatic Sanction." Germany in the Diet of Frankfort, which on March 18 elected Albert, Duke of Austria, as King of the Germans, had made a formal declaration of neutrality as between Pope and council, and at later Diets it showed scant honour to the papal delegates sent there 114 EUGENIUS IV and much more respect to those of Basel. Poland, seeing both France and Germany paying neither papal Curia nor the Baseler "Curia," approved so convenient an example and also "froze" collections. England, however, was anti-Basel for several reasons, the chief of which was its unswerving loyalty to Eugenius as Pope. It decreed imposing delegations, one to represent the King and the Province of Canterbury, the other the Province of York, but the clergy, impoverished by the plague, famine, and the long drain on resources caused by the prolonged war with France, refused to vote the expenses. Of the Western princes only René of Anjou and Philip of Bur- gundy sent delegations to Ferrara, the one incorporated on April 1, the other on November 27, 1438. Burgundy's delegation of November 27 caused a minor incident. When it entered the council hall it went straight to the Pope, passing the Emperor by without ceremony, for it had letters only to Eugenius, and it directed all its words to him. John VIII was very angry and refused to allow the Greeks to take any further part in the council till amends had been made, which was done by the presentation to him of fictitious letters purporting to be from the Duke. Only Visconti of Milan and Alfonso of Aragon were positively hostile to Eugenius, but even they hesitated before plunging the Church into schism; Basel at times witnessed the strange spectacle of Tudeschi and other Neapolitan and Milanese representatives, who were normally the most vociferous against the papacy, arguing for procrastination in the formulation of the case against Eugenius that was meant to result in his deposition. From October 8 till December 13, there were fourteen public sessions in Ferrara concerned with the legitimacy of the addition of the Filioque to the Creed. Mark Eugenicus, metropolitan of Ephesus, opened the Greek case, squarely putting the blame for the schism on Latin shoulders in so far as he claimed that the addition of the Filioque clause to the COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 115 Creed had been an arbitrary action of the Latin Church in contravention of the prohibition of the Council of Ephesus (431), which forbade any and every change of the Creed, even in word or syllable, for all time. No sooner had he made this initial statement than Andrew of Rhodes rose to reply. Mark claimed the right of first giving his reasons. Andrew insisted on speaking after each proposition of Mark. The best part of two sessions was frittered away in squabbling about procedure, till the Pope decided to gratify the Greeks by letting them have their own way. Also, Mark wanted to have read out the definitions and other relevant parts of all previous general councils to show the practice of the Church. The Latins objected that this was unnecessary and a waste of time, but the Greeks threatened to retire if it were not allowed. Once more Eugenius acceded to their demand, though against the wishes of many of the Latins. The Emperor, too, upset proceedings because, as the hall was arranged, Byzantine court etiquette could not be followed for his entrance. The second session had to be postponed till a special door had been made near his throne to allow him to come in as he wished. Apart from one long speech of Bessarion that occupied two sessions, all the arguments of the Greeks were put forward by Mark Eugenicus, who based his case immovably on the prohibition of 431. Various Latin speakers presented the Latin case that the prohibition of Ephesus referred only to the faith of Nicaea and not to its mere formulation but, though jthey influenced others among the Greeks, they could not prevail over Eugenicus' impenetrability. So the fourteen sessions in Ferrara brought no agreement. Meantime the plague still showed signs of life; Eugenius, with his exchequer nearly exhausted, at the end of the sessions owed the Greeks some four months' maintenance money; and Piccinino, in control of Bologna and other towns of Romagna, was fully capable of making one of his lightning raids even on Ï16 EUGENÎUS IV Ferrara. It was small wonder that there was a general sense of defeatism and disillusionment. The Greeks wanted to go home. Eugenius planned to move the council to Florence whose Commune promised lodgings and generous loans. He persuaded the Emperor and the Patriarch of the necessity of the change, and John VIII in his turn, though with some difficulty, prevailed on the Greek prelates to go to Florence and there to discuss, not the legitimacy of the addition to the Creed, but the orthodoxy of the doctrine implied by that addition. They accepted on condition that their stay in Florence should not exceed four months, that they should be paid what was owing to them, and that there they should not depend on the papal treasury for their maintenance grants, but on a "bank," i.e. on the Commune. The agreement was made for the Florentines were willing to accept the conditions. Eugenius was already in serious debt to them. He had borrowed ten thousand florins from the Medicis in April and these now advanced the money to pay the arrears due to the Greeks and the expenses of the journey from Ferrara. The Pope had tried to raise money by sequestrating the collections made under the Baseler indulgence. On September 1, 1438, he had imposed the "tenth" that Basel had earlier authorised in favour of the meeting with the Greeks and on the twenty- fourth of the same month he proclaimed an indulgence for the same object. He sold various cities also, probably getting more from this source than from any other, since so many nations had adopted a policy of neutrality and had forbidden the sending of money to either Ferrara or Basel. The Bull transferring the council was promulgated in a solemn session held in the cathedral on January 10, 1439. The Pope was the first to depart. In the late afternoon of January 15, he proceeded to the monastery of S. Antonio outside the city and near the river, with the apparent intention of em- COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 117 barking next day on the boats that already held his baggage and of travelling to Florence by water and on horseback via Lugo, Faenza, and the Valley of the Lamone. That was the route followed by the rest of the council. But there was a rumour afloat of a plot to take him prisoner, and certainly Faenza was friendly to Piccinino. What he did, therefore, was to move with a strong escort at daybreak on January 17 by horse towards Modena and thence crossing the Pistoese Alps to approach Florence more from the north, arriving there on January 24. He entered the city three days later, when all the officials came in procession to accompany him first to the cathedral and thence to his lodgings in the Dominican monastery of S. Maria Novella, and the shops were all shut to free the citizens to join in the general welcome. The rest of the council followed. Isidore of Russia was the first of the Greeks to arrive. Patriarch Joseph, who had embarked at Ferrara on January 26, reached the outskirts of Florence on February 7 completely exhausted. He made his formal entry only four days later, to be greeted with a speech in Greek by the Chancellor, one of the many Florentines enamoured of Greek learning. Emperor John VIII, accompanied by Cardinal Cesarini and bringing with him a few of the less robust Greek prelates, came on February 14 and entered the gates on the next day. The Chancellor welcomed him too in Greek, and Florence at its gayest (it was Carnival time) was preparing to accompany him to his lodgings with all the city guilds and the Arti parading, when there Was a sudden downpour of rain that scattered the host of sightseers and left the official escort with the Emperor "full of water," going the nearest way and hurriedly to the palace assigned to him. Once the Emperor had arrived, business was soon begun. Apparently in the conversations between him and Eugenius before leaving Ferrara, a suggestion had been made that the 118 EUGENIUS IV doctrinal discussions on the orthodoxy of the Filioque could best be conducted between committees and that perhaps a formula or way of union could be found that would render even discussion unnecessary. The first meeting between Greeks and Latins in Florence was of committees of forty a side. It was concerned with those suggestions, Cesarini declaring that, as they had emanated from the Greeks, the Greeks should provide the formula or new method, and the Emperor denying responsibility and insisting that the whole council, both Latins and Greeks, should help to devise a solution. The upshot was that no new formula and no new way were forthcoming, and so the Pope insisted that the age- approved method of disputation in full session should be followed. Eight such sessions were held between the second and the twenty-fourth of March to see if agreement could be reached between the Churches on the doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Spirit. The Latin Church taught that within the Blessed Trinity the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son (ex Patre Filioque). The Greek Church had consecrated by use a very large number of phrases, e.g. that the Holy Spirit "comes forth," "springs forth/5 "pours forth," "from the Father," "from the Father and the Son," "from the Father through the Son," or even "proceeds from the Father through the Son/' In the last centuries before the meeting in Florence, its doctrine had crystallised, under the influence of its anti-Latinism, into "from the Father only," though no Doctor of the Church, whether Latin or Greek, with the possible exception of St. John Damascene, whose words, however, are not difficult to explain, ever made such a statement. Mark of Ephesus, who was the only speaker for the Greeks in all these sessions, was a convinced upholder of "from the Father only." He had, therefore, lively debates with John of Montenero, the Provincial of the Lombard Province of the COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 119 Dominicans, who propounded the Latin arguments. Five out of these eight sessions were expended on discussion about a few texts from St. Basil and St. Epiphanius. In the sixth, after some altercation about procedure which the Pope settled in favour of the Greeks, Mark gave a complete exposition of his arguments to support his understanding of the dogma, and in the seventh and eighth John of Montenero did the same for the Latin case, quoting abundantly not only Latin Fathers but also Greek Fathers, and unquestionably thereby greatly im- pressing his Greek hearers. But he did not persuade the majority of them and the sessions in Florence on the Proces- sion ended in stalemate, as had those in Ferrara about the addition. Pope Eugenius was absent from none of the sessions either in Ferrara or in Florence, though his name appears in the records only when appeal was made to him to settle some point in dispute, which he invariably did in favour of the Greeks. At the same time he must have had very many more things to attend to. His Curia was still functioning under his supervision. He was still following with the closest attention events in France, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and sending ambassadors to courts and Diets. He never lost his desire to promote reform within the Church and took what occasions offered to press it at the local level, which was perhaps the only feasible method at that time. He dared not neglect the rump-Council of Basel and its propaganda. The wars, that involved his States still went on, and the League between himself, Venice, and Florence was renewed on February 18, 1439, with Sforza as general of the combined forces. René, his nominee for the throne of Naples, was holding his own against the King of Aragon, but only with the greatest difficulty. Occasionally in Florence Eugenius functioned at a papal ceremony. The eighth anniversary of his election was celebrated with some pomp on March 3, and he took part in 120 EUGENÎUS IV the services of Holy Week, blessing and distributing the twigs of olive on Palm Sunday, and himself solemnising the Mass of Easter Sunday. On the last three days of Holy Week his throne was set on the loggia of the church of S. Maria Novella and from there he blessed the crowd assembled in the square in front—it was the next best thing to the blessing urbi et orbi that the popes give from the loggia of St, Peter's on Easter Sunday. The memory, perhaps, of that Easter blessing prompted Vespasiano da Bisticci to write as follows:

Pope Eugenius . . . was tall, very handsome to look at, thin and serious in appearance, and he inspired reverence to such a degree that no one could look him in the face because of his aspect of authority. He embodied in a marvellous way the papal dignity. While he was in Florence he did not show himself or leave his residence, S. Maria Novella, except at Easter and for the solemn feasts, and such was the impression of veneration he produced that few who beheld him could restrain their tears. ... I remember that several times the Pope was with the cardinals on a dais near the gate leading into the cloisters of S. Maria Novella, and that not only the square in front but all the streets giving on to it were packed, and such was the awe of the people who were there, that they stood open-eyed at the sight of him and no one spoke, but all had their eyes fixed on him; and when he began the ac- customed Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini, all the square was filled with sobs and lamentations as the people begged God to have mercy on them, for the great reverence they had at the sight of His Holiness: it seemed that those people beheld not only the Vicar of Christ, but the divinity of Christ Himself. His Holiness stood there with very great devotion and all the cardinals, who surrounded him, all of them men of great worth, did the same. Of a truth, at that time he seemed to be indeed the em- bodiment of what he represented.5

By the end of the sessions on the Procession, the Greeks were very dispirited. They had been by then more than a year in Italy and had listened to torrents of words in both COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 121 Ferrara and Florence without result. They were both fas- cinated and repelled by the eloquence of the Latins, for, no matter what the arguments they put forward, the Latins found half-a-dozen answers. By the end of March, 1439, they had come to at least one decision, to take part in no more public discussions, for these led nowhere. When, therefore, after the ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter, as April was drawing to a close, Eugenius pressed them to give an answer to Montenero's long exposition, either accepting his conclu- sions or indicating their objections and vindicating them in debate, they presented an ultimatum as their reply: no more public discussions; let the Latins find some other way of reaching concord, for they (the Greeks) were content to abide by the ancient Fathers and the seven councils. They repeated the same a few days later. That was the beginning of a period of searching for expedients to lead to union. There were meetings between committees of ten, but without avail. The Latins presented a carefully worded statement on the Procession; the Greeks changed it subtly and returned it. The Emperor visited the Pope time and again to hear the Pontiff exhort him to bring his ecclesiastics either to enter on more discussions of the doctrine or to clarify their ambiguous statement. John excused his refusal by the ignorance and conservatism of some of the prelates; and the metropolitans themselves, harangued by cardinals sent by Eugenius, returned the old answer: "Do you find some solution of the problem, or we go home." The Greeks would do nothing. Eugenius was near despair. The union that as cardinal and Pope he had striven for over so many years and that at one time he had optimistically thought he already had within sight seemed doomed. The council he had spent so much on, and still owed so much for, was likely to be a complete failure, and the Basel rivals, with his opponents in France and Germany, with Visconti of Milan and Alfonso of 122 EUGENÎUS IV Aragon, were going to proclaim to the world in strident tones how much he had bungled the whole business. At a loss to find any other remedy for the desperate situation, he finally arranged with the Emperor to address the Greek synod. On May 27, therefore, the Greeks in Florence with the exception of the Emperor and the sick Patriarch assembled with nine cardinals and the Latin members of the council to hear his words:

Venerable brethren of the Oriental Church, it was not for any material advantage or worldly gain that I set my hand to this holy enterprise of the union of the Churches, but it was because I was afire with a zeal inspired by the Holy Ghost that I undertook this most laborious task. You indeed know full well my endeavours from first to last for this end. I hoped that you too would make a like effort. For when I saw your enthusiasm and the magnitude of the dangers you faced at the cost of so much fatigue, on land and sea, in your zeal to bring union to the Church of God, I began to nourish the highest hopes. But now, faced with your remissness, I do not know what to think. I sympathise, indeed, with you as I recall your absence from your native land, your separation from your families, the loss of your churches. But what good will come of your remissness? Or what benefit will accrue if we do not unite the Church of God? For my part, no sooner had you arrived than I tried my best to start the discussions and, after the inauguration of the ecumenical synod, I pressed hard for the examination of the dogmas. But you, why I do not know, were always putting it off. We were a full year in Ferrara and there were not even twenty-five dogmatic sessions. But I bore it all with great patience, referring it all to the sacred purpose of union, and whatever you asked for I conceded to you generously because of my hopes for union. By common consent we came to Florence, and I never ceased inciting you to discussion, at one time with some little irony, at another by reminding you of the agreement made in Ferrara to have discussions three times a week, no matter what happened, and if Emperor, Patriarch, or speaker fell sick, still the discussion should not lapse, and if it coincided with a political crisis or ecclesiastical feast, the meeting and discussion should COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 123 take place the next day, and under no circumstances should it be omitted or let slide. But you—I am not sure whether you have come to as many as five or six meetings and more than that you refused, but asked to have meetings between committees to find a method of union. In this too we fell in with your desire. And here too you failed us again. You then asked us to give you a written statement of our doctrine, an action hardly befitting the Church of Rome, for you know how great honour the Orientals have always paid to the Church of Rome and how much submission. Yet in this also we indulged your wish, for we drew up a statement and sent it to you. But this occasion, too, was let slip. You sent to us a screed of ambiguous meaning and when we asked you to explain it you would not. What am I to say? I see division everywhere before my eyes and I wonder what use division will be to you. Still, if it shall be, how are the western princes going to look on it? And what grief will you yourselves have? Indeed how are you going to return home? Union, however, once achieved, both the Western princes and all of us will be greatly rejoiced and will provide generous help for you. And our aid will be a source of great alleviation to the Christians dwelling in the East, and to those in the power of the infidel. I exhort you then, brethren, following the precept of Our Lord Jesus Christ, let there not be division in the Church of God, but be urgent, be vigilant, let us give glory to God together. Our union will produce abundant help to the soul; our union will give great honour to the body; our union will bring dismay to our enemies both corporeal and in- corporeal; our union will cause rejoicing among the saints and the angels, and gladness in heaven and on earth.6

The dignity, indeed pathos, of the Pope's words asi his speech disclosed his growing disillusionment and his high hopes declining before repeated disappointments, combined with the feeling of veneration that his presence inspired in his audience, made a deep impression on the Greeks. After the discourse they began to study the ancient Fathers with fresh energy and the seed sown by Montenero's abundant quota- tions rapidly grew into a flourishing plant. Greek saints and Latin saints, just because they are saints and filled with the 124 EUGENIUS IV Holy Spirit, must agree in the faith. If they express their beliefs differently, it must be a difference of words, not of substance. So the vaguer and varied phrases used by the Greek Doctors about the relation of the Holy Spirit to the other two Persons of the Blessed Trinity must mean what the Latin Doctors mean by their Filioque. That is, Eastern and Western faith was one, though its verbal formulation had hitherto been different. Therefore, not only was there no sound reason against union of the Churches, but there was an impelling obligation to unite, for the faith of the two Churches was substantially one, and difference of faith alone could justify division. At this conclusion, accepted by all the Greek prelates except two or three, the Emperor sent off Isidore to the Pope (June 1) to get him to specify what help he would furnish for Constantinople and on what conditions, which Eugenius willingly did. The Patriarch was for holding a triumphal session of union straightway and going home, but that Eugenius could not agree to, for the Latin Church could not forget the other doctrinal differences and also the need of an agreed formula about the Procession itself. It was not satisfied with the not very precisely worded formulation of the Greeks. The last point was settled first but, before the other differences could be ventilated, Patriarch Joseph died and Eugenius allowed his burial, as of a member of the Church, within the walls of S. Maria Novella. The funeral was hardly over when Eugenius summoned four of the leading Greek prelates to urge the examination without delay of the four outstanding differences—Purgatory, the Eucharist, papal primacy, and that peculiarly Greek doctrine concerning the relation of man to God in the process of sanctification that is associated with the theology of Gregory Palamas. The last point had been, and to some extent still was, à controversial question within the Greek fold, and the prelates fought shy of it. COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 125 Eugenius, it should be noted, was transparently honest with respect to union. After so many months of endeavour and argument and disappointment, with his hopes almost miracu- lously rescued from complete shipwreck (as the Latin Andrew of S. Croce wrote apropos of the agreement on the Procession: "Suddenly the minds of all were rejoiced, declaring that an affair already despaired of and shipwrecked had been brought by a miracle of God to the saving harbour of truth"7), Eugenius must have been tempted to adopt the Patriarch's shorter-sighted attitude: thank God for union and finish. He did not. He insisted on all points of difference being investi- gated in common. He even made the situation harder by bringing forward questions that otherwise would have been left aside. Palamism had cropped up in one of the debates between Montenero and Eugenicus, and Eugenicus, remembering the acrimonious arguments it had aroused in Constantinople, had with the Emperor's full support refused to debate it. Eugenius now proposed that it should be discussed. He had heard, too, that the Greeks considered that the invocation of the Holy Spirit, the efidesis, which in their Liturgy followed after the narrative of the Last Supper, was the prayer that effected the presence of Christ in the elements. He proposed that that also should be debated. In this way he risked having his project of union upset all over again, for in the discussions that resulted from his insistence more than once things came to a complete standstill, and John VIII demanded ships to be got ready for his immediate departure home. One such crisis was overcome by the help of a meeting of four delegates from each Church. No minutes of that meeting are preserved, but succeeding events give an indication of what was decided. Since the Greeks assured him that their Church had always agreed with his on the essential elements of Eucharistie theology, Eugenius did not insist on any reference to the efidesis controversy being included in the final 126 EUGEN1US IV decree of union, but he exacted the condition that a declaration should be made publicly by the Greeks that it is the words of Our Lord that are the effective form of the sacramental rite. He accepted a Greek suggestion that in the definition of the beatific vision there should be a phrase indicating degrees of beatitude proportionate to differences of merit, and also that there should be added to the statement on the papal primacy the traditional order of the patriarchates. But complete agreement on the primacy had not yet been reached. It was not till some time later that the Greek prelates announced that they accepted papal privileges, though with two restrictions. Eugenius, to their great dismay, rejected their statement with its restrictions, and only after consultation with his synod did he agree to their next, unrestricted, and, as they said, their last statement on the subject of the primacy. As the formulae of the different doctrines under discussion were drawn up, the Pope submitted them to the Latin synod for approval. When, therefore, the Greeks had at long last been brought to accept them, they were ready for in- corporation into the decree of the council. The Latin synod met again under the Pope's presidency, and Cardinal Cesarini gave a brief review of the negotiations and their results. The next step was to put the decree into its final form. For this twelve Latins met a committee of as many Greeks. The Bull was written and submitted to the Pope and the Emperor. John immediately detected two fatal flaws. The first was that neither he nor the Greek Church was mentioned in the preamble, but only the Pope; the second, that where the papal prerogatives were being defined, the Pope was conceded privileges "according to the sacred Scriptures and the words of the saints/' To remedy the first defect the Emperor insisted on reference both to himself and to the Greek Church being made in the opening words of the decree; and in regard to COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 127 the second, he ruled out "the words of the saints" as being dangerously vague. On the first point Eugenius met his wishes without much difficulty, but he stood fast on the second. John, however, was adamant and so in the end the Pope gave way and changed the offending words into "according to the ecumenical councils and the sacred canons/' The Bull, thus emended, was copied out again. This time it was the turn of the Pope to raise an objection. Somehow the word "all" had crept in before "privileges of the patriarchs" in the Greek text, and Eugenius wanted it erased. The Emperor refused and the Pope finally acquiesced and the Bull was written out a third time with "all" introduced also into the Latin text, as it was essential that both the texts should correspond exactly. Eugenius had at last reached the goal of his hopes. The council had been held "free and unforced," that is, it had been "lawful for everyone freely to express his judgment, without hindrance or undue pressure from any one," to use the words of the decree Sicut fia mater, and the Greeks had agreed with the Latins on all the points of difference that had divided the Churches. On July 5, 1439, the Bull was signed, first by the Emperor John VIII, all the Greek prelates but two—one was Mark Eugenicus—the Russian bishop, the monk Gregory as procurator of the See of Alexandria, the five Staurophoroi and seven monks who were abbots or representatives of their convents; then by Eugenius ("I, Eugenius, bishop of the universal Church thus defining sign"), eight cardinals, two Latin patriarchs, eight archbishops, fifty-two bishops, four heads of religious orders, forty-one abbots and the archdeacon of Troyes as one of the envoys of the Duke of Burgundy. On the next day, this decree of union, Laetentur caeli, was solemnly promulgated, Florence had a holiday, and all its citizens flocked to the cathedral, filling both the church and the square outside. Eugenius had gone in procession to the 128 EUGENIUS IV episcopal palace the evening before; when, on the morning of the sixth, the Emperor with his courtiers arrayed in their richest garments and his ecclesiastics attired in their most colourful vestments had taken up position on the thrones prepared for them on the epistle side of the cathedral, he entered with all the long procession of cardinals, bishops, abbots, and doctors vested for the ceremony. On arriving at his throne, he changed the rich cope that he was wearing for a chasuble. Then all the bishops, both Latin and Greek, came up, two by two, and saluted him as he sat there, kissing his knee and his hand. In the Mass that followed three oriental laymen represented their Church, Philanthropinus bearing the towel and water for the washing of the Pope's hands at the beginning, a Russian from Isidore's suite doing the same at the Offertory, and George Dishypatus performing a like function at the end. The Mass over, the papal faldstool was placed in the centre in front of the altar and, after the chant- ing of the Litanies and of the Veni Creator Spiritus, Eugenius sat and listened to what to him was a sweeter music, the voices that proclaimed from the pulpit the decree of union of the Western and Eastern Churches and the acclamations of the Fathers of the council who approved it. Cardinal Cesarini read out the Latin text, and Eugenius was the first to exclaim Placet. The Metropolitan of Nicaea, Bessarion, recited the decree in Greek, and the Orientals present cried their agreement. It was a music he had worked and waited for over years and it gladdened his heart at last. The occasion over, Eugenius wasted no time in advising the world of the happy issue. Copies of the decree were en- grossed by the hundred. Four or five of them he had signed by all the original signatories to be delivered to the Emperor and the oriental patriarchs. The rest, signed by more or less of the prelates as was convenient, were distributed to the princes, bishops, universities, cathedral Chapters, and per- COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 129 sonages of the Latin Church, accompanied by a letter in which the Pope stressed the magnitude of the achievement of union after more than four centuries of division, the further prospects opening up with the arrival of the Ar- menians, the obligation of thanking God for the mercy He had shown the Churches, and the necessity of fulfilling the undertaking to provide the military help promised to the Greeks. The Pope's sentiments were shared at least by Eng- land. His collector, Peter da Monte, writing from London informed him:

Great manifestations of joy and gladness were ordered. Public prayers in procession were instituted especially in this royal city, which is the chief and most important of this realm. All the clergy and the people went in procession to the churches, the quarters of the city and the public squares according to custom, and returned generous thanks to God with hymns and chants and solemn ceremonies.8

That quality in a Christian, called firmness before an ecumenical council, afterwards becomes contumacy. Mark Eugenicus had refused union with the Latins before the proclamation of the decree; he continued to reject it also after. Eugenius wanted some action to be taken against him, as had been done in the cases of Eutyches, Nestorius, and others who in the past had refused to submit themselves to conciliar decrees. He himself spoke with Eugenicus but, failed to persuade him to change. He urged the Emperor to action, but without success. John VIII also refused another of his requests, that before the Greeks left Italy a successor should be elected to Joseph II; the Pope no doubt wished to favour the choice of a friend of union. Other questions also were mooted, Eugenius demanding why the Greeks allowed divorce and being put off with a vague answer which was in effect a refusal to enter into the matter; and the Greeks urging 130 EUGENÎUS IV that, since there was then one Church and not two, the Pope should withdraw Latin bishops from places where the older established Greek dioceses had their oriental bishops. For this the Pope, it is said, suggested a compromise, that the longer- lived of two such bishops should retain the diocese for himself and his successors. As is usual at the end of a successful enterprise, rewards were distributed. On October 2 the bill was paid for "110 yards of Alexandrine damask ... 2 florins per yard, for making seven suits to be given to several of the courtiers of the Emperor of the Greeks: also for 45 yards of peacock-blue material of Tyrana . . . for five suits . . . for five nobles of the suite of the said Lord Emperor . . . at Y¥i florins a yard/' The Pope paid also for the gold that went into the Emperor's seals on the copies of the Bull. To Bessarion, as a reward for his labours for union, he gave a pension of three hundred florins annually if he were in Constantinople or six hundred if at the papal court, and Dorotheus of Mitylene received three hundred florins annually. The extremely competent and hardworking interpreter, Nicholas Sagundino, was made an apostolic secretary. Nathanael, the Greek bishop of Rhodes, was given a vacant church in commendam. Isidore was nominated apostolic legate for Russia, but that was more of an office than an honour. In Eugenius' first general creation of cardinals on December 19, 1439, Isidore and Bessarion figured, to show that, as the Churches were one, members of each part of it should share in its highest honours. With the union completed the Greeks could satisfy their nostalgic longing for home. In July, Eugenius had arranged for a loan of six thousand florins from the Medicis to be used for preparing ships in Venice for their return. They left Florence in groups, the first on July 21, the last with the Emperor on August 26, and sailed from Venice on October 19 to set foot once more in Constantinople on February 1, 1440. COUNCIL WITH GREEKS 131 NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

1Doctoris gentium, E.P., doc. 88.

Έ.Ρ., doc. 122. 3 Quae supersunt actorum graecorum Concilii Florentini, ed. J. Gill, (Roma, 1953), p. 7. * Annali d'ltalia (Rome, 1787), vol. IX, p. 246.

5 Virorum illustrium CHI . . . vitae, in Spicilegium Romanum, torn. I, ed. A. Mai (Rome, 1839), pp. 18-19. 6 Synopsis made by a Greek metropolitan, Quae supersunt actorum graecorum Concilii Florentini, pp. 422-4.

7 Andreas de Santa Croce, advocatus consistorialis. Acta latina Concilii Florentini, Ed. G. Hofmann (Roma, 1955), p. 244. 8G. Hofmann, "Briefe eines päpstlichen Nuntius etc." in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, V, (1939), p. 431.

chapter

Schism Again

IHE UNiONisTic IDEALS of Pope Eugenius IV had never been confined to the Greeks alone. As long ago as 1433, he had commissioned Garatoni to visit personally the Patriarch of the Armenians and had rebuked him for not doing it. In June, 1438, a certain "Brother Antony" brought him news of the ardent Christianity of the Emperor of Abys- sinia, and Eugenius seized the opportunity to send back a letter to the Negus in which he informed him of the presence of the Greeks in Italy and suggested to him the ideal of a union of all Christians with the Church of Rome. When, then, the union of the Greeks was an accomplished fact, he set about the business of union with the other Churches more systematically. On July 26 Eugenius wrote a letter to the Patriarch of the Copts, resident in Cairo, presenting to him the bearer of the letter, his Apostolic Nuncio, Albert da Sarteano, O.F.M., and telling him the good news about the Greeks and about the expected arrival of the Armenians. The letter ended with an invitation:

Since then, Venerable Brother, you behold so many signs of the divine goodness, We do not doubt that your mind, on fire with Christian piety, has been moved to give most sincere thanks to God with Us, and that you desire most earnestly that the Catholic Church, spread over the surface of the whole earth, should be 133 134 EUGENIUS IV one, should think and feel the same, and should become one flock under one shepherd, so that the faith of all may be unvaried though expressed in a variety of tongues, in order that with one mind and with one mouth we all may glorify God and the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ.1

A month later he made Albert da Sarteano "Commissary Apostolic" "in the eastern countries of India, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Jerusalem" with powers over the Franciscans working there equal to those of the General of his Order, and he gave him letters of recommendation to present to John, the Em- peror of the Ethiopians, and Thomas, Emperor of the Indians, in case he should manage to reach them. The Armenians arrived in Florence before the last of the Greeks had left. There were only two of them, representatives nominated by the Armenian Patriarch Constantine, and they came, accompanied by James of Primadizzi, O.F.M., with Fra Basil, O.F.M., to act as interpreter and a monk (perhaps a Dominican) Narses. They were transported in Genoese ships, for the Genoese had been most solicitous in bringing this encounter about. Not long after their arrival, one of them addressed the Pope, probably when they presented their credentials, in words which already showed their will for union: "You are the Vicar of Christ in the See of the Apostles. We have come to You, our Head. We have come to our shepherd. You are the foundation of the Church."2 Meetings took place "nearly every day" in the church of S, Maria Novella between the delegates and a group of Latin theologians. The result was the proclamation on November 22 in solemn session of the Bull Exultate Deo, usually called the "Decree for the Armenians." It was a long document that included the decree of union with the Greeks, to which it added a variety of items, such as the ecumenicity of the Coun- cil of Chalcedon and the authority of Pope St. Leo I, that had a particular significance for the Armenians. It was read out SCHISM AGAIN 135

first in Latin and then Narses read it in Armenian. Fra Basil thereupon assured the Pontiff and the assembly that the text had been carefully "expounded and explained word for word in our language and it met then with our complete agreement as it does now/' and, to prove his words, he gave a resume of the Bull. Eugenius signed it: Ego, Eugenius, catholice ecclesie episcopus ita decernens subscript, and after him eight cardinals, two patriarchs, five archbishops, thirty-five bishops and twenty-five abbots for the Latins, and Serchis and Thomas for the Armenians. News of this second union was sent round the Western world and Henry VI of England wrote to say that he had ordered prayers of thanksgiving everywhere in his realm. The union with the Greeks was not the end of relations with them but a new beginning. Everybody, both Greek and Latin, was well aware that one of the motives that had brought the Greeks to the West was the hope, indeed the necessity, of obtaining help for Constantinople ever threatened by thé Turks. The many months of frustration in Ferrara and Florence had deferred but not destroyed that hope, and, as soon as union seemed to be really in sight, John VIII, striking while the iron had for the first time become somewhat hot, sent Isidore (June 1) to induce the Pope to make some detailed offer. Isidore brought back three cardinals who gave certain specific promises. Presumably they wrote nothing, for on September 23, when John was already in Venice with the Greeks, Eugenius addressed to him a letter telling him that in his zeal to eject the Turks from Christian territories he willingly bound himself to provide a fleet of ten ships and to stimulate Albert, the King of the Romans, Hungary, and Bohemia, and the Albanians to activity on land. He added also the other obligations that the cardinals who had visited the Emperor on June 1 had accepted in his name. That was not an empty promise, for he had already begun 136 EUGENIUS IV to urge the western princes to action. In the letter to an- nounce the success of the discussions with the Greeks, written on July 7, 1439, the day after the proclamation of the union, copies of which were sent to most if not all of the princes, Eugenius made known his purpose:

Already, by the inspiration of God, it is our intention to prepare sea and land forces next spring, in the confidence that He Who hath begun in Us a good work will perfect it, and by these Our endeavours will be propitious and merciful to snatch the Catholic flock from the yoke of miserable servitude. We trust indeed that this enterprise will meet with an easy and happy success by your aid and labour and those of the other Christian princes,3

No fleet or land force was ready in the next spring, or for another four years, but the reason was not a lack of willing- ness on the part of Eugenius. The premature death of King Albert and the dynastic quarrel that resulted from it were the cause of the delay. What was at hand to do, the Pope did. He sent Garatoni as Nuncio Apostolic to Constantinople with the returning Greeks and provided him with twelve thousand ducats payable by the house of Medici in Constantinople, to be used for the upkeep of the ships and the crossbowmen who at papal expense had .been added to the defences of the city during the Emperor's absence and who were to be maintained there still. Security for the loan was given in a document, dated October 9, 1439, promising the half of all revenues coming into the papal treasury in whatever form, to be paid to the creditor "each month or even from day to day" till the debt was extinguished. Two days before, Eugenius had recom- mended the cause of the Greeks to the whole Church in a letter which extolled the mercy of God in granting union after so long an interval and invited the faithful to subscribe to the expenses involved in the council and in the help to be SCHISM AGAIN 137 given to Constantinople; the letter proclaimed a plenary indulgence under the usual conditions of penitence and confession. While Eugenius' attention was of necessity divided between so many diverse interests—union with the Greeks, invitations to other Orientals, debts, wars of defence, the situation in Naples, the multifarious problems of peace between nations, the encouragement of his own supporters, the lessening of the hostile neutrality of France and Germany, and the rest—the rump-Council of Basel was concentrating all its energies on one thing only: its reduction of a "contumacious" Pope. In the course of 1439, it was held back by the insistence of the princes who were afraid of the growing breach between Basel and Eugenius—held back, but not persuaded of the unwisdom of the step it contemplated. Nothing could have persuaded Cardinal Aleman of that, and it was his determination that kept together the small group of "Fathers" whose numbers were steadily diminishing but whose zeal for the triumph of the principle of Constance remained unabated. The legal process which had been matur- ing against Eugenius over years was reduced to eight propositions, of which the first three declared that the principle of superiority of council over pope was a truth of Catholic faith; that it was also a truth of Catholic faith that a general council representing the Church and convened to deal with matters of faith, heresy, or reform could not be dissolved, prorogued, or transferred without its own consent; that anyone who denied either of the above was a heretic. The other five propositions applied these "truths" to Eugenius. The plague visited Basel and began to take its toll of the already reduced number of its members. Aleman pushed the acceptance of the "truths." Tudeschi and many other delegates of princes tried every means to hinder the measure and, when they saw that they were not going to prevail over the 138 EUGENÎUS IV Cardinal's steely determination, they clamorously left the council chamber. Aleman was a man of resource. On May 16, he collected relics of saints from the city's churches and arranged them on the vacant seats, and then, with nineteen "mitres" only and his relics to support him, he declared the first three "truths" accepted by the council. On June 24, as the plague increased its ravages, the other five propositions were approved, and on June 25, seven consecrated bishops with some thirty other "mitres" and a horde of more than two hundred and fifty doctors declared that:

this same holy synod . . , pronounces, decrees, and declares that Gabriel, formerly named Eugenius IV, Pope, was and is noto- riously and manifestly contumacious, disobedient to the com- mands and precepts of the universal Church, continuing in open rebellion, a persistent violator and contemner of the holy canons of the councils, a destroyer of the peace and unity of the Church, a notorious source of scandal to the universal Church, a notorious practiser of simony, a perjurer, an incorrigible schismatic, erring in the faith . . . The same holy synod, therefore, declares and pronounces that he is ipso jure deprived of the papacy and the Roman pontificate, and removes, deposes, deprives, and dismisses him from them. . . .4

News of this drastic step, together with the text of the eight propositions voted on June 15 and 24, was conveyed to the Christian world in a long encyclical letter, and assent and obedience were demanded. Florence received the document on July 12, six days after the promulgation of the union. The Greeks must have heard of it, but it seems to have made no impression on them whatsoever, for never once is reference made to it in the spate of polemical literature that appeared in Constantinople after their return. Eugenius, however, could not ignore it. To reassure his supporters he quashed all measures taken or to be taken against them by Basel and on September 4 in a solemn ses- SCHISM AGAIN 139 sion in the church of S. Maria Novella, in the presence of at least a hundred "mitres," of Isidore of Kiev and a dozen Orientals, and of the Armenian delegates, he promulgated his answer to the Baseler "truths" and the Baseler "deposition." That was the Bull Moyses vir Dei, which was not a mere negative rebuttal of an unwarrantable audacity but the beginning of a positive refutation of the theology of the. Conciliar Movement. The first stages of the papal answer had, of course, been that part of the decree of union with the Greeks that dealt with the primacy, where it was defined that: "the holy apostolic See and the Roman Pontiff himself is the successor of St. Peter, prince of the apostles and true vicar of Christ and head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christians: to him in St. Peter full power of feeding, ruling and governing the universal Church was delivered by our Lord, Jesus Christ, as is contained in the acts of the ecumenical councils and in the sacred canons."5 That definition, made probably with an eye on the aberrations of the Basel gathering as much as on the reticences of the Greeks, plainly asserted that the Pope is head of the whole Church both as regards jurisdiction and doctrine, and that he is such because he is successor of St. Peter who had been prince, that is, head, of the apostles. The Bull Moyses vir Dei carried the argument against Basel further, attacking their interpretation of the famous principle of the superiority of council over pope enunciated at Constance, which wasl the foundation of all their pretensions. The Bull began by likening the rebel councillors to Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, punished for their rebellion. The history of Basel had been a history of unnecessary difficulties in the way of union; a history starred by the Monitorium of 1437 and lately by the "truths," the first three of which, quoted above, were repeated verbatim in the Bull. The authors of these "truths" were a very small group of men of no great 140 EUGENIUS IV position in the Church; they declared indeed that they were justified because they were basing their stand on the Council of Constance, but the decree of Constance to which they appealed was passed during the schism, when in the council only one "obedience" (i.e. one of the three factions into which the Church was then divided) was present and when the head of that "obedience," John XXIII, had fled; and in any case these imitators in Basel had twisted and. changed the meaning of that original decree. Not content with that, they had dared to perpetrate a crime too detestable to mention (i.e. the "deposition of the Pope"), again, as far as in them lay, wantonly destroying the unity of the Church. Therefore all the penalties previously imposed are renewed; any and every sanction the Basel fragment may try to enact is quashed; and the "truths" quoted earlier, understood "according to the perverse meaning given them by the Basel Fathers themselves, which is in fact the obvious meaning of the propositions, since they are contrary to the sound understanding of the sacred Scriptures, of the holy Fathers, and the Council of Constance itself," together with the "deposition," are condemned and their upholders are declared schismatics and heretics. The second part of Eugenius' answer, then, was that the decree of Constance was the work of only one "obedience" and of an "obedience" without a head, and so not of a general council, and that the Council of Basel had unjustifiably changed the sense even of that. The Pope was not content, however, only with the Bull of September 4. Such was the honour in which the Council of Constance was held (it had restored unity to the Church after forty years of schism) and such therefore the reflected prestige of the Council of Basel which claimed authority precisely because öf Constance, that probably many of those who surrounded Eugenius in Florence still felt that the question that rent the Latin Church was not SCHISM AGAIN 141 yet finally solved. It needed more than a general definition in the decree of union with the Greeks and a not quite frontal attack on the principle of Constance in a Bull to reassure them completely. It is, besides, noteworthy that at no time did Eugenius (dare to?) deny flatly that principle of superiority. He asserted the opposite, which he wholeheartedly believed himself, as often as he stated that St. Peter had been head of the Church and that he himself was head in his own day. But whenever he mentioned the Council of Constance, he went no further than to cast doubts on the ecumenicity of its early sessions and to say that the Basel assembly had distorted and added to its famous principle, which should be interpreted by the sound norms of the tradition of the Church, as the Fathers of Constance also had intended, and that what they had enunciated for a particular emergency in the history of the Church the Basel extremists were making into a truth uni- versally valid. Yet it can hardly be doubted that Eugenius really thought the principle quite false, and even so, though he faced situations courageously and, as some said, even fool- hardily, he fought shy of openly assailing the Council of Constance. This is a tribute to the influence which that council still exercised over mens* minds. Eugenius was afraid of the outcry even from his own supporters which an open attack would have caused. To remove, then, any lurking doubts in the minds of the Latins in Florence that the "truths" said by Basel to have the authority of Constance and the deposition, decreed against him on the strength of them, might have some validity, he staged a debate on the theology of the Conciliar Movement. It was a very wise step. He had the perfect debaters at hand, Cardinal Cesarini, who for so many years had in absolutely good faith been spokesman to the world of the Council of Basel and a most ardent and convinced advocate of the conciliar principle, and John of Torquemada, O.P., who even in 142 EUGENIUS IV Basel had defended the papal prerogatives and was a theologian of outstanding merit. There was no fear that the debate would be rigged. All who knew Cesarini were aware that he was an excellent theologian, a very acute mind, and a man of complete honesty of character who would put the conciliar case as well as it could be put. Unfortunately the minutes of the discussion, which took place some time in September or October, 1439, are not preserved. Torquemada, however, wrote up his discourse into a treatise that mentions, indeed quotes, the heads of the arguments advanced by Cesarini, and so it is possible to reconstruct the debate. Torquemada's Oratio synodalis de frimatu is very long. It can be synopsised as follows. The decree of Constance was passed, not by a general council, but by one "obedience" of the Church belonging to a doubtful pope who had in point of fact fled, and so it gives no sure basis for the claims of Basel. In any case a general council depends on a pope, who is at all times the supreme authority in the Church. St. Peter alone received supreme power from Christ, as is proved by a multitude of arguments (developed at length by Torquemada, who also rebuts possible objections). A pope is not inferior to a council in matters of faith, but if, per impossthile., a pope should be in opposition to the unanimous mind of a council in a matter of faith, the council should be upheld; in matters of reform he is not under it at all: an heretical pope is automatically outside the Church and so can be judged and deposed. Basel began legitimately and went on for some time legitimately but was not always certainly legitimate, as e.g. when it rejected papal presidents and acted without them. Its decrees have not been approved by the Pope and without such approval they have no authority, as appears from the Scrip- tures, the Fathers, and the practice of the Church. A pope's authority is not included in that of a council as a part of a greater, since a pope is not a part; he has the totality of power. SCHISM AGAIN 143 John of Torquemada's excellence as a theologian and his unwavering fidelity to the Holy See were rewarded with the cardinals hat, when on December 18, 1439, Eugenius created seventeen new cardinals. Nearly all of them were his supporters in his struggle with Basel, with one to placate Poland and one for Hungary. Henry VI of England was gratified, for the archbishops of York and Rouen received the hat. York's elevation started a quarrel about precedence, for both Canter- bury and York were the Sees of primates, though Canterbury ranked as primate "of all England/' Kemp of York, as cardinal, claimed superiority. Chichele of Canterbury challenged his right. Eugenius was appealed to and replied by the letter Non mediocri declaring that the cardinals "as parts of his body" ranked above all others. This letter is still quoted in discussions about precedence. , A year and a half later (April-May, 1441), Eugenius sent a very long Bull to all the chief universities descanting on the old theme of relations between pope and council, Etsi non dubitemus, after a long diatribe against Basel, declares that there is only one authority in the Church, whether of the faithful scattered over the surface of the globe or of the Church united in council, the authority given first to St. Peter which "without increase or diminution lasts in his successors to the end of time. What Peter could do, that also Sylvester, that Leo, that all the other pontiffs could do; and what they could do, We can do also/' They convened, ruled, approved, disapproved synods, whether held in the East or in the West. The Basel Fathers strove to curtail and mutilate a power exercised in the Church for fourteen hundred years, for what more were we doing (so wrote the Pope) in translat- ing the council from Basel to Ferrara than what Leo had done in substituting the Council of Chalcedon for that of Ephesus? Indeed in our case the Council of Basel itself, the "healthier part" united with the papal presidents, had already decreed 144 EUGEN1US IV the transfer. Further, the authority of the Council of Con- stance on which the Basel radicals preen themselves, needs examination. The faith of every part of the Church is one. 'If then the decree put out by the Fathers of the obedience of John XXIII at a time of schism in Constance contains truth, it must perforce be in harmony with the Gospel, the holy Doctors, and the councils; it must therefore take its meaning from them and be set on them as on an immovable foundation." The tradition of the Church is solid in proclaiming Peter as supreme pastor with plenary power by Christ's appointment. That decree, then, to be sound, must teach what the Church has ever taught: the Catholic truth. "But if it is strained to a meaning that clashes with that truth, as the Baselers in their wickedness strive to strain it, every meaning of such a sort must be held false and contrary to Catholic truth." The Baseler representatives should not feed their vanity with the name "council," for not every gathering in the Church is a council, since heretics of all kinds have made the same claim. The decree of the fifth session of the Council of Constance was the decision of only one "obedience." The fact that Constance put an end to the schism does not of itself validate all its acts; peace could have been brought to the Church without its decrees. Even general councils cannot place limits on the authority of a pope—only Christ the Lord can do that—especially as councils are, as recent experience had shown only too well, the victims of human pets and passions. And so no council can forbid the transfer of a council, and indeed the Council of Constance did not enact that but laid down a general principle deprecating the translation of councils, without however excluding the opposite in cases of necessity or of obvious utility.6 It was vitally important for Eugenius to win support for the doctrine that he advocated in these Bulls. That is why he SCHISM AGAIN 145 sent copies of Moyses vir Dei with an accompanying letter to all the princes and why he was particularly insistent in his correspondence with Charles VII of France, for the French in Basel were the most active among his opponents. It was equally important for the Basel faction to refute the arguments of the Pope, and so on October 7 they approved a long letter analysing and replying to the Bull Moyses vir Dei, and on October 30, 1439, they condemned it. Likewise, after the Bull Etsi non dubitemus, they composed and distributed a lengthy letter that quoted the papal document paragraph by paragraph and to each paragraph they appended their counter-reasoning. On November 5, they took the step that logically completed their gesture of deposing Eugenius. They elected an antipope. As Aleman was the only cardinal in the "council," a "college," made up of one archbishop, ten bishops, seven abbots, five masters of theology, eight doctors, and one licensed in law, was added to him. After a conclave of six days they elected Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy, a layman and a widower with four sons, astute and wealthy, who for many years had been living with a few companions as a sort of hermit, without, however, relinquishing either the ulti- mate control of his territories or the possession of his wealth. After an edifying show of humble refusal and a less edifying stipulation that, as he was not going to allow the "papacy" to batten on the Savoy purse, compensation should be forthcoming for the anna tes forbidden in 1435, he graciously accepted the dignity. He endured the loss of his handsome beard on December 24, handed over the government of Savoy to his eldest son on January 6, created four new cardinals (against the decree of 1432; only one, however, was allowed by his sovereign to accept), entered Basel on June 24, and was consecrated and crowned with the name of Felix V on July 24, 1440. He is the last antipope in the Church's history. Eugenius of course was bound to condemn this action of 146 EUGENÎUS IV the Basel remnant. On March 23, 1440, in a public session held in the church of S. Maria Novella, a Monitorium was promulgated calling on Amadeus and his supporters to repent and threatening further penalties if they refused. Needless to say they did not repent, and so on May 27 the Monitorium was repeated and applied, stigmatising them as heretics, schismatics, and traitors. The next day Aleman, as the 'leader and master" of the conventiculum in Basel, was excommunicated by name and deprived of his dignity of cardinal, of his arch- diocese of Aries, and of every other benefice he held. The attitude of the princes became more than ever important. There was another meeting of the French clergy in August, 1440, at which both Eugenius and the Basel schismatics had strong deputations. Charles VII, pressed by other business, could give but little time to the ecclesiastical question. The result was a compromise: he was ready to obey the Church legitimately assembled, but could not be sure that the few prelates at Basel were enough to constitute a legitimate assembly, especially for so drastic a step as the deposition of one pope and the election of another. On this point he would take counsel and act accordingly. The German attitude was not dissimilar, and France and Germany combined to press a solution of the schism on the opposing parties: dissolve both the existing councils in favour of a third to be convened in Metz, Basel showed no enthusiasm for such a cutting of the Gordian knot. Eugenius, while being more tactful in disguis- ing his dislike for the plan, took advantage of discord that arose later between the French and German monarchs in regard to the place to be designated for the third council to refuse with courtesy the proposals of both. Poland and Lithu- ania began openly to support Felix and Basel. Henry VI of England answered the envoys of the antipope by the mouth of Archbishop Kemp of York: "nor will we hold, consider, or accept the same Felix as the supreme vicar on earth of Christ SCHISM AGAIN 147 or Supreme Pontiff, but only our above-mentioned lord Eugenius and his successors canonically appointed/'7 The political situation in Italy was even less bright than the ecclesiastical. Cardinal Vitelleschi, the condottiero cardinal bishop, was murdered in Rome on May 4, 1440, but whether with or without the approval of Eugenius is a question that is still debated and which will be discussed in the next chapter. One effect, at least, of his death was that various cities which he had gained for the Pope and held for himself returned almost automatically to the Church. Sforza was leading Venetian troops against the Milanese, and Piccinino was ranging in lightning raids over Tuscany and Umbria, but on June 29, faced with a combined Florentine and papal army at Anghiari, Piccinino was disastrously defeated. Borgo S. Sepulcro, which he had helfl, returned to the Pope; and the allied force, advancing into Romagna, brought back several other centres to their ecclesiastical allegiance. In the south Alfonso was keeping up a desultory siege of Naples and gaining ground elsewhere. Rene's chief condottiero, the young Caldoro, who had succeeded his father in that post, sold himself to Alfonso and was instrumental in twice defeating forces that Sforza had sent to defend his property in the kingdom of Naples. A large papal army, some ten thousand strong, gathered together at great expense and with much difficulty, marched against Alfonso, wasted a deal of time, and retired again with nothing achieved, because the Cardinal of Ta- ranto, who was papal legate with it, made a truce with the Spanish King. A small Genoese fleet, hired by the Pope, was equally inactive and useless. Meanwhile the Venetian-Milanese war, energetically pursued by Sforza, had turned very decidedly in favour of the Signoria, and Visconti induced the Marquis of Este to start negotiations for a peace. Venice was favourable to the proposal, but Sforza was not, so Visconti again produced his 148 EUGENWS IV daughter Bianca, who had been promised to the successful condottiero years before. She was escorted with great pomp to Ferrara on February 26, 1440, only to return again to Milan on April 5, when the negotiations fell through. In February, 1441, Piccinino, to occupy his men, persuaded Visconti to let him open a new campaign and he quickly recaptured most of the places lost in the previous year. Sforza took the field in June, defeated Piccinino on the twenty-fifth of that month and then, as talk of peace was again in the air, marked time instead of following up his victory. Visconti, then aged about fifty and with no male heir, a treacherous man himself, who in his timidity scented treachery everywhere round about him (he is said never to have passed a whole night in the same bed for fear of assassins), turned his mind again to peace and set his hopes of security in Sforza, since his various condottieri were already beginning to lay claim to those parts of his territories that they would grab on his death. On August 1, 1441, a truce was arranged; on November 20, peace was made, and Sforza married Bianca. The Duke of Milan had been in touch with antipope Felix, his father-in-law, ever since his election. He had offered to capture the Papal States for him, at a price; the bargain was about to be made, and Piccinino had been nominated Grand Standard Bearer of the Church by Felix, when Visconti seems to have been attacked by a fit of jealousy of Sforza, his son-in- law. René of Anjou had appealed to the latter for help and help was going to be given, for Alfonso had seized some of Sforza's Neapolitan possessions. Alfonso in alarm urged Vis- conti to restrain his son-in-law, and Visconti in his turn insinuated to Eugenius that it was time he took steps to recover the March of Ancona and the other places that the condottiero had been given, admittedly to the detriment of the Church, as a condition of his service. Sforza was moving towards Naples when Piccinino, now Grand Standard Bearer SCHISM AGAIN 149 of the Church by the appointment of Eugenius, who had stripped Sforza of the title, entered Bologna in the name of the Church, i.e. of Eugenius, and proceeded to invest Todi, one of Sforza's towns. Sforza's march towards Naples was halted, and his army turned to deliver Todi. On June 2, 1442, Alfonso, undistracted by any relieving force, managed to enter and to possess himself of Naples. The capture of his one important base spelt final defeat for René. On his way to France, never to return, he passed through Florence, where for the first time he received actual possession of the document of investiture of the fief of Naples. Eugenius obviously had never meant to alienate from the Church forever the whole of the March of Ancona and several other very important papal towns when he bought a respite from war in 1433, but why he chose that particular time of 1442 to recover his territories is hard to understand. He may have been afraid that, if Sforza once became master of Milan while still being Count of the March, the Church would never get them back; and so, especially as Visconti seemed ready to lend support, he may have decided to act while there was yet time. About his change of front there was no disguise. On April 13, 1442, he had renewed Sforza's contract to provide six thousand horse and one thousand foot for a year. On August 3, of the same year he issued a Bull lamenting various supposed injuries at the hands of Sforza, releasing all papal cities from the obligations of the oaths they had taken towards him, and declaring him excommunicate as long as he retained any papal property. The immediate consequences were very nearly disastrous. Sforza, the best general of those days in Italy, became Eugenius' enemy, and Florence and Venice, his old and faithful allies, were rendered suspicious and hostile by the sudden friendship with Milan. Immediately Sforza turned to Basel and opened negotiations with Felix promising, in return 150 EUGEN1US IV for the confirmation of the titles and properties bestowed on him earlier by the papacy, to deliver Eugenius and the Papal States to him within two months. The attack by Piccinino that diverted Sforza from Naples had relieved Alfonso from fear and allowed him not only to bring his siege of Naples to a successful issue but also rapidly to conquer the rest of the kingdom, it left him still the envenomed enemy of Eugenius, like Sforza intriguing with Basel to secure the triumph of the antipope in return for recognition of his territorial claims. Again Sforza moved against Naples, but Piccinino attacked his towns in his rear—Assisi was captured and sacked on November 30—and so Alfonso was left unchallenged. As long as René of Anjou had remained in Naples and stood a chance of making his claims good, Eugenius was staunch in his support, even though he knew that recognition of Alfonso would have removed some of his most redoubtable adversaries from Basel and gained for him a valuable military ally against his other enemies. To continue in that attitude when René had irretrievably lost his kingdom would have been the acme of quixotry. In April, 1443, Cardinal Scarampi negotiated with the King of Aragon and signed a peace in Eugenius' name on June 14. Alfonso received the investiture of the kingdom of Naples and promised help against the Turks and four thousand horse and one thousand foot for the reconquest of the March from Sforza. Two of Felix's cardinals thereupon abandoned his court and left their red hats behind, one of them, the canonist Tudeschi, simple Archbishop of Palermo again, as his parting advice counselling the assembly to disband while it could still be done with some show of dignity. Since, some little time previously, the Milanese delegation also had left Basel, the gathering there was much reduced, whereas Eugenius was then better situated militarily at any rate than ever before. His new attitude to Sforza, however, had strained his relations with the Commune of Flor- SCHISM AGAIN 151 ence, which looked on the condottiero as its chief strength against Milan. Eugenius began to think of returning to Rome. At first the Florentines were inclined to restrain him so as to have him, as a potential enemy, under their control, but wiser counsels prevailed. The transference of the council was promulgated on February 24, 1443. On March 7 with fifteen cardinals, Eugenius moved from Florence and on March 11 he entered Siena, where the venerable Cardinal Albergati died on May 9. The papal court reached Rome on September 24 and the next day went in procession to St. Peter's. In the midst of all these political and ecclesiastical preoccupations, Eugenius had not lost his zeal for the unity of Christendom. Shortly after the agreement with the Greeks he had sent Albert of Sarteano, O.F.M., to Egypt to invite the Patriarch of the Copts to union. Albert was graciously received and returned to Rome with Abbot Andrew of Egypt and three monks from the Ethiopian monastery of Jerusalem who, since communication with Ethiopia was well-nigh impossible, could represent only their abbot and their monastery. They made up a group of about forty Orientals, some of them wearing turbans, which delighted the Florentine eye. After a preliminary session to present credentials, they went off to Rome on a pilgrimage. On their return long meetings were held, though discussion with the Latin theologians was difficult because of the scarcity of interpreters. Yet the visitors were not only questioned on their faith but also instructed,1 since the Coptic Church, besides retaining vaguely some doctrinal errors dating from the time of Dioscorus and the council of Ephesus, had adopted certain practices copied from the Jews and the Old Testament. The fruit of the discussion was the Bull of union, Cantate Domino, promulgated in solemn session on February 4, 1442, a very, very long document which, besides mentioning what was peculiar to the Copts of Egypt, repeated the complete texts of the decrees of union 152 EUGENÎUS IV with the Greeks and the Armenians. Eugenius signed it: Ego Eugenius catholice ecclesie episcopus suhscri'psi, the first of sixty-four Latin signatories; Andrew signed it for the Copts, The monk Peter did not sign on behalf of Ethiopia, because he had no authorisation for that; yet Eugenius tried to have a copy of the Bull conveyed to Prester John, the Negus of Abyssinia, and may have succeeded. A hundred years later, at any rate, the Ethiopian monarch, David III, wrote to Pope Clement VII that a "letter and book" from Eugenius were to be found in the royal archives. The union of the Greeks which had seemed so promising in July, 1439, had met with a mixed reception in Constanti- nople. Emperor John VIII had been greeted on his return with news of his wife's death. For months he remained inactive in official court-mourning and deep personal grief, which gave Mark Eugenicus time and opportunity to confirm in their opposition to the union the monks and the populace of Con- stantinople, who were naturally inclined to look on recognition of Latin orthodoxy as a betrayal of their ancient faith. However, in May, 1440, the unionist metropolitan of Cyzicus, Metrophanes, was elected Patriarch to succeed Joseph II who had died in Florence. Garatoni wrote of the bishops and clerics, of the courtiers and citizens, who were present at his first solemn Liturgy as Patriarch on the feast of Pentecost. Eugenicus, however, and the Metropolitan of Heraclea had secretly left the capital to avoid having to assist, and other, minor clerics were beginning to boycott unionist functions and unionist churches. Both the new Patriarch and Garatoni wrote to the Pope, but their letters are lost. Eugenius' reply to Garatoni, however, is extant, and from it both the gist of their letters can be divined and a revealing insight obtained into the Pope's mind. Indeed so few are the quasi-private documents of this period that have survived that this one is almost unique and there- SCHISM AGAIN 153 fore deserves to be described at length, Eugenius was annoyed by the long time that the voyage back to Greece had taken, not so much because he had to foot the bill for the ships as for the fact that it allowed rumour to forestall the return. He was even more annoyed, because after the return the union had not yet been promulgated in Constantinople (the papal letter is dated August 25, 1440), and this, he wrote, was being attributed by the citizens to a change of heart on the part of the Emperor. The commemoration, however, of his own name in the diptychs was, he agreed, something at least. Garatoni should not be too generous with papal money for the defence of the city as long as the imperial lethargy in regard to union continued, but should give more or less in proportion to the zeal shown, and should also retain more or less of the crossbowmen in service according to the degree of danger at the various times. The death of Albert, King of the Romans, had upset papal plans for the expedition against the Turks, but Eugenius hoped for a dynastic settlement by the next spring and he had already obtained promises of ships for the fleet from Venice, Genoa, and Rhodes and had arranged with Genoa for two of their galleys, one at Mitylene, the other at Chios, to be at Garatoni's disposal in case of need. Garatoni ought to have gone to Georgia, Trebizond, and the northern regions with the Venetian fleet to stabilise the union there; Eugenius is clearly disappointed that he had not done so. If John VIII should persist in his inaction, Garatoni could return to Rome, but not abruptly; he should find some specious reason to justify his departure. The rest of the letter refers to Metrophanes and local church conditions. The new patriarch had addressed the Pope as "supreme Pontiff and father and lord" and then had called himself "ecumenical Patriarch and co-minister and co-servant" of the Pope and also, in letters to them, of the cardinals, which to Eugenius was outrageous. "In what way he wants 154 EUGENIUS IV him whom he has declared to be Supreme Pontiff and father and lord afterwards to be his co-minister, We do not understand ... so he should give up such ways of thinking and writing and call himself Patriarch of Constantinople and, as we all ought to be, the least of the servants of God/' If he did that, Eugenius would relieve his poverty generously, either by benefices or at least from the papal purse. The revenues, however, of the Church of Negroponte (Euboea) attached to the Latin patriarchate of Constantinople could not be assigned to him, as he had apparently asked, because that would not be allowed by the Venetians who had made them over with other benefices in Crete to the first such patriarch who was a Venetian. But when the present Latin patriarch should in any way vacate the See, the change would be made. Eugenius would write to Constantine, John VIIFs brother, to confirm him in his good dispositions and, in view of the reported poverty of the "Chapter" and clerics of the church of S. Sophia, would willingly grant them two hundred ducats annually, but on condition that they should recite the office regularly in choir, payment to be made to individuals, as in Latin Chapters, according to their attendance.8 Three impressions remain after reading this very long papal letter: that Eugenius did not understand the Greek mentality and circumstances, which is not to be wondered at, for very few Latins at that time did or could; that he looked on the Church of Constantinople not only as "second after Rome" but as a local church not very different from any of the more important Latin metropolitan churches; that he was intent on fulfilling his promise to organise a crusade to free Constantinople from the Turkish menace as soon as circumstances permitted. He took another step to pursue his project of the crusade when on March 1, 1442, he appointed Cardinal Cesarini legate a latere in Hungary to reconcile the conflicting dynastic SCHISM AGAIN 155

interests and to persuade the princes to unite against the Turk. In this the cardinal did not succeed till the death on December 24, 1442, of Queen Elizabeth, mother of the infant prince, Ladislas, whose claims to the throne of Hungary she was defending, removed one of the protagonists and left the way open for the election of Ladislas, King of Poland, to be also King of Hungary. The new monarch willingly accepted the message of Cesarini, but the choice of the Pole alienated Frederick of Austria. On January 1, 1443, to provide the means of the holy war, Eugenius imposed a tenth on the universal Church. Appeals, he wrote, have come in, one after another, from Constantinople, Cyprus, Rhodes, the Pélopon- nèse for help against the Turks; there was need of both land and sea forces; he himself, to set the example of willing payment of the tenth imposed, had assigned the fifth of all his ecclesiastical revenues to the crusade, besides what else he had meant to give; and the cardinals had freely offered a tenth of all their benefices. On May 8, Francis Condulmaro was made legate for the fleet to arrange with Venice for the preparation of ten ships. Venice itself supplied another eight and Philip of Burgundy had ten vessels fitted out. Alfonso of Naples promised a naval contingent, but it never materialised. The crusade indulgence was extended to cover helpers of the prince of Epirus at war with the Turks (October 5, 1444). The prohibition of trading with the infidel in anything useful for war was repeated (October 7, 1444). Eugenius was taking all the measures he could to make his crusade effective and to help any other effort against the Turk. In the latter half of 1443, John Hunyadi, leading Hun- garian forces and helped by the Serbian Prince George, conducted a successful campaign against the Turkish Sultan which greatly encouraged the Christians. Murad II asked for a truce; negotiations were held and perhaps successfully con- eluded. Ladislas, who^s said to have made the peace, pro- 156 EUGEN1US IV claimed the resumption of hostilities for September 1, 1444. Meantime Murad had crossed to Asia Minor to deal with a revolutionary movement there, and the papal fleet had reached Constantinopolitan waters. The Christian army moved on September 22. The task of the fleet was to prevent the Sultan getting back to Europe. Hindered from crossing the Dar- danelles, he moved to the Bosphorus. There violent winds in the narrow channel immobilised the fleet and he was able to make the passage, it is said, in Christian boats. With very superior forces he met Ladislas, John Hunyadi, and Cesarini at Varna on November 10 and after a bitter battle defeated them. Ladislas and Cesarini were killed; Hunyadi only just escaped. It was the end of Eugenius' hopes for thrusting the Turks out of Europe, for he could not expect to be able to raise an army and a fleet on that scale again. It was also, in reality, the beginning of the end of Christian Constantinople and of the union with the Greeks. The unionist party in the Greek capital, to whom the liberation from the Turkish yoke by papal arms would have given enormous prestige and to whom the prospects of it had but lately seemed so rosy, were very cast down; on the contrary, the anti-unionists were strengthened by the defeat. Thereafter they could point the finger of scorn at the vaunted papal aid, knowing that there would not be any more. In thinking that there would be no more papal aid, at least on a large scale, they were, of course, right. But if Eugenius could have done more, he certainly would have; and John Hunyadi was equally determined. Before news had reached Rome of the disaster of Varna, Eugenius had appealed for help for Rhodes for which, he said, he wanted to provide a fleet, since year after year it was assaulted by the Sultan of Cairo with ever-growing forces. On July 8, 1445, having learnt that John Hunyadi had again taken up arms against the Turk, he proclaimed a plenary indulgence under SCHISM AGAIN 157 the usual conditions for those who helped him in his enterprise, and he had his secretary, Poggio, write a personal letter to Cardinal Beaufort in England urging him to emulate the zeal of the Duke of Burgundy who had provided a fleet for the late unhappy expedition. In the midst of all the anxieties of the crusade, Eugenius still pursued his aim of union of the Churches. At the end of 1441, he had written to the Nestorians inviting them to follow the example of the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Copts in seeking union. Those great missionaries, the Franciscans, were his messengers. They, too, it probably was who led to Rome the archbishop of Edessa, Abdala, sent to represent the Syrian Church, who after long discussion accepted union with the Latin Church and signed the Bull Multa et admirabilia which promulgated that union in the basilica of St. John Lateran on September 30, 1444. A little less than a year later, on August 7, 1445, delegates of some Nestorian Chaldeans and Maron- ites of Cyprus renewed in Rome a profession of faith they had previously made in Nicosia and on behalf of their Churches accepted the Bull Benedictus sit Deus and union with Rome. That is the last known activity of the Council of Florence. No document to prorogue or close it is extant, and one can only presume that it had a formal ending of some kind, unless Eugenius, afraid that the closure of his council might give a fictitious new life to the gathering at Basel, let the council drag on indefinitely. In that case it must merely have petered out, for it certainly was never formally closed under any of Eugenius' successors. The rump-Council of Basel, however, with its antipope Felix, still went on. It was much less of a threat than formerly, but as long as it existed it was a focus of potential danger, for it was a rallying point for all who were dissatisfied with Eugenius for any reason, whether they were individuals or nations. Alfonso of Naples, Visconti of Milan, Count Sforza 158 EUGEN1US IV had each been the self-appointed champion of the council for a war against Eugenius and each had offered to sell his services to Felix for a price. By the year 1443, however, Alfonso was the Pope's ally and was being given almost everything he asked for: remission of a debt to the Church of 50,000 marks (September 4, 1443), the vicariate of Benevento and Ter- racina (September 24, 1443), permission to levy 140,000 florins on the clergy of Aragon (October 1, 1443), and much more. Visconti of Milan was another papal confederate, and Sforza, the one-time Gran Gonfaloniere of the Church, was now the Pope's chief enemy, excommunicated, to be harried by the new allies. Eugenius' endeavours to bring the Papal States back under the control of the Church continued till his death. In 1444, Sforza fought a successful campaign in the March and re- covered most of it, forcing the Pope to make a peace on October 10 that left the successful general in possession of all the places he had regained. Next year, however, when the detestable Sigismondo Malatesta started a war against Sforza, Eugenius allied himself with this insurgent. Alfonso, irritated because some of his towns in revolt had put themselves under Sforza's protection, joined in the fray. Milan, to implement a treaty he had made with the Pope on May 4, 1445, to recover for the Church the· rebellious Bologna, moved troops against the city, and this led the Venetians and the Florentines to send aid to the Bolognese. Ascoli rebelled against Sforza, and city after city did the same, submitting themselves to the government of the Church and being immediately succoured by the papal-Neapolitan troops on the spot. At the end of the year, in the March of Ancona only lesi was still in the Count's hands. Such a situation did not please Florence. Cosimo de* Medici therefore urged Sforza to attack Rome and so to force the Pope to accept peace. Towns like Todi, Narni, and Orvieto would, so it was said, rebel in his favour as he approached. For SCHISM AGAIN 159 his part, Eugenius pressed Alfonso (April 23, 1446) to fulfil his duty as a vassal of the Church by attacking Florence, since it would be impossible to bring Sforza to account as long as Florence helped him. In 1446 Sforza, again excommunicated, began his campaign, but the towns did not rise and, because of lack of support and scarcity of provisions, he had to turn back when he reached Viterbo. The papal-Neapolitan forces, summoned from the March to oppose him, thereupon were diverted to Ancona, which had allied itself with Venice against Eugenius, and took it. Pesaro and other cities fell easily to them, and Sforza was compelled to take refuge behind the walls of Urbino. His father-in-law, Visconti, saw his chance to çccupy Cremona which had been ceded to the Count on his marriage, thereby breaking also the treaty of peace with Venice and Florence. War ensued. Visconti was defeated and begged his son-in-law to help him. With Floren- tine troops Sforza took the field against the papal forces in the March but was not very successful. A truce between him and the Pope put a temporary halt to the hostilities. Force of arms was an argument quickly appealed to in those tumultuous days when nearly everyone was at war. Basel had never done anything to disown or restrain Visconti of Milan and his condottieri who had constantly harried the Papal States in its name. Felix was ready to employ Piccinino, Sforza, or Alfonso when these had a grievance against the Pope. An attempt was made to take Avignon by surprise on September 15, 1443. Hugolin, the brother of Cardinal Ale- man, took part, and no one doubted that the cardinal was cognisant of the plot, since his brother had been the administrator of the temporals of his diocese till René of Anjou, returned from Naples, put into execution the deprivation of the cardinal imposed by Eugenius on May 28, 1440. The plot failed and Cardinal de Foix, the papal governor, exacted vengearjpe from the prisoners taken, though Hugolin Aleman 160 EUGENIUS IV escaped, and Eugenius, as late as January 28, 1445, still urged the strict punishment of those implicated in the attempt. Eugenius, too, thought for a moment that he could employ the argument of arms to defeat Basel. Louis, the Dauphin of France, in a lull in the fighting with England, decided to answer the appeal of Frederick of Austria for help against the Swiss and in that way to occupy some of the mercenary soldiers who, because of the truce, were out of work and a menace to the peaceful population. The campaign would take him to Basel, and that gave rise to an idea, though whether that idea came from him in the first place or from Eugenius is not clear. Whosesoever it was, it was very profitable to Louis, for he was made Gran Gonfaloniere of the Church (August 25, 1444) with a stipend of fifteen thousand florins. He fought round Basel and defeated the Swiss forces on August 26. But he did no more than make a reconnaissance of the city, receive deputations from the burghers and the "Fathers," and in the treaty he made on October 28, 1444, with the Helvetic League promise them letters of safe-conduct. Yet Eugenius cannot have given up hope of solving the conciliar problem by means of the Dauphin, for the banner of the Pope and the banner of the Church were solemnly presented to Louis on March 25 of the next year, but all that he ever gave in return for this -honour and for the much more palpable benefit of being allowed to impose a levy on the clergy to defray his expenses as "Standard-Bearer" was to forbid his subjects to recognise Felix. The Council of Basel, though weakened, was not yet dead and could easily come to new life again. Most people, however, even those who earlier had been its supporters, were thinking by 1445 that it was time it was dead, so that the schism might end with it too. Felix V was the difficulty; what to do with him? The initiative came from his son, Louis, who approached King Charles of France, by now no longer hanker- SCHISM AGAIN 161 ing after a third council but convinced that peace should be given to the Church by supporting Eugenius. An arrangement was worked out—recognition of Eugenius, a fitting title and pension for Amadeus, mutual annulment of censures, another council once spirits were calmed. When wind of this scheme reached Aleman, he hastened to bring Felix back to Basel. For the last three years or so Felix had been living at Lausanne, for he had found permanent contact with the "Fathers" in Basel too wearing, Eugenius also would not hear of it; it paid too much deference to the antipope. Nothing, therefore, came of this first essay at unity. Basel was soon to lose more ground. Frederick III of Austria, under the persuasion first of Cardinal Cesarini, then of Cardinal Carvajal, Eugenius' legates, and irritated by the refusal of Basel to accept his nominee for the See of Frei- sing, was becoming more inclined towards Rome. From the beginning of 1445, the greatest influence in that direction was his secretary and poet laureate Aeneas Sylvius Picco- lomini, who, after having taken an active part at Basel for years and having been secretary of Felix V till 1442 when he took service under Frederick, had been reconciled with Eugenius. Frederick aspired to be Holy Roman Emperor. Eugenius agreed to crown him and besides made him various other concessions including a large sum of money. In consequence Frederick made open profession of obedience to Eugenius in February, 1446, and most of Bohemia immediately did the same. At this stage Eugenius apparently thought that he was master of the situation and that he could pass openly to the offensive in respect of Basel. He deposed the archbishops of Cologne and Trier, two of the German prince Electors, who were inclined to side with Felix V, and replaced them by relatives of his faithful ally Philip, Duke of Burgundy. The immediate result was that all the German Electors united in 162 EUGEN1US IV support of the two archbishops and in opposition to Eugenius, They met at Frankfort on March 21, 1446, and produced an ultimatum: withdrawal of his measures of repression; confirmation of those Basel reforms that had been adopted in Germany; convocation of a new council within three months in one of five German towns mentioned; acceptance of the principle of Constance and Basel about the superiority of a council; Eugenius was to submit his agreement before Sep- tember 1 on each of these points by accepting the formulae dictated to him, which he was to issue in the form of Bulls; otherwise all the Electors would give their allegiance to Basel. Eugenius returned an evasive reply to the actual bearers of the ultimatum. The answer he delivered by his Nuncios, Carvajal and Nicholas of Cusa, at the Diet of Frankfort in September dealt with all the points of the ultimatum except one. It said nothing about the reinstatement of the two archbishops, probably because he was already negotiating it, but secretly and with the utmost diplomacy so as not to ο if end his friend the Duke of Burgundy. His answer, however, was carefully phrased so as to draw the sting out of the German conditions. He would accept the Basel reforms applied in Germany, but against a compensation; he would convoke a new council, but within a reasonable though undefined period and subject to the consent of the other Christian princes; he admitted the decrees of the Council of Constance and Basel, insofar as the latter council was to be accounted an ecumenical council. The Diet was divided. Frederick III, whose authority was involved since he had declared openly for the Pope, did all he could by persuasion and by bribes to break the unity of the Electors, and his representative, Aeneas Sylvius, the eloquent advocate for his views, won over two of the Electors. The result was that the conditions of the ultimatum were reduced. They were mitigated in tone and not necessarily to be issued SCHISM AGAIN 163 as Bulls. The Diet broke up without coming to any decision about Basel. It even rejected the "Bulls" by which that assembly had accepted all the conditions of the ultimatum and which Cardinal Aleman presented, though late in the day, as the climax of his fervid persuasions to bring the Diet to an open recognition of his council. Messengers of both the Diet and the Emperor carried the new demands to Rome. Eugenius, to ensure added support among the cardinals, for they were not all in favour of more concessions to Germany, created four new ones, including two of his legates at Frankfort, Thomas of Sarzana and John of Carva/jal. Thus fortified he received the messengers who arrived on January 7, 1447. Aeneas Sylvius was spokesman and put before the Pope the new conditions for peace: the convocation of a new council; the written acceptance "of the power, the authority, and the pre-eminence of general councils that represent the Catholic Church militant; redress for the German complaints; revocation of the deposition of the two archbishops. If Your Holiness accepts these conditions, an oath of obedience will be given/' Eugenius referred the demands to a commission of cardinals. He himself, now a sick man, was not at all inclined to agree without reserve to every demand made. In the end he issued three Bulls and one letter. In two of the Bulls, dated February 5, he agreed to the retention of the reforms in Germany, until such time as he sent a legate to settle the question of Church discipline as a whole. For the sake of peace he agreed to reinstate "the former archbishops of Cologne and Trier, if, returning to Us and the Church, they declare themselves in Our favour . . . , make an oath of faithful obedience to Us and recognise Us as the true Vicar of Christ/' Benefices conferred during the period of neutrality were confirmed by another Bull on February 7. There was no soft yielding to pressure in any of these documents, all of which 164 EUGENWS IV treated not of doctrine but of discipline. The Pope re-asserted his rights and, as regards the "former" archbishops, he made repentance a condition of restoration to their Sees. The doctrinal points were touched on, rather than treated of, not in the solemn form of a Bull, but in the letter addressed on February 5 to Frederick and the two friendly Electors. The Pope, to please them, so it said, would summon a council and that within ten months and in one of the designated cities if the other Christian princes agreed, though he thought that "there were other means better adapted for dealing with the affairs of the Church than the convocation of a council." "The general Council of Constance, the decree Frequens and its other decrees, like the other councils representing the Catholic Church militant, their power, authority, honour, eminence, We, like our predecessors from whose steps We purpose in no wise to depart, receive, accept, and revere." This answer is eloquent in its reticence. It does not even mention the Council of Basel. It recognises one decree of Constance by name, the decree Frequens that Martin V had approved, and leaves quite open the question of when Constance was a general council and when it was not, and which of its decrees should be said to be of a general council. Also the appeal to "our predecessors" implies the principle he had already often enunciated, that the decree of the fifth session of Constance should be interpreted by Christian tradition. Moreover the "pre-eminence" of the councils, mentioned in the German conditions, has dwindled into "eminence." The German and royal representatives (four of the Elec- tors were not represented) hesitated to carry their mission through to a conclusion, not because they were unwilling to admit the Bulls as meeting their demands but because Eugenius was so ill that he was thought to be dying, in which case it might have been wiser and more profitable for them to SCHISM AGAIN 165

bargain with the new pope. But Eugenius rallied and his fever subsided. He was still, however, in his sick bed when on February 7 they made their submission, kneeling round him while Aeneas Sylvius said: "Since Your Holiness has deigned to accede to our petitions, behold now, in virtue of our commissions, we offer you obedience and recognise you as Roman, universal, and unchallenged pontiff, without mental restrictions." He answered: "You have done well," and put the documents of the agreements into the hands of Aeneas.9 The same evening in a public consistory the act of submission was repeated with greater solemnity, and the next day Rome rejoiced with the peal of bells, whilst from the basilica of St. Mark to that of the Lateran there went a solemn procession of thanksgiving, in which there was carried the mitre which Constantine had given to Pope Sylvester. Eugenius, however, was not altogether easy in mind. He was haunted by the fear that he had perhaps conceded too much. On February 5, the same day that he signed the two Bulls and the letter to the King, he signed also a secret document to put his real intention on permanent record. The need, he wrote, of winning the German Electors and the King to obedience to the Roman Church had in some sense forced his hand; yet he did not wish to approve anything against the faith of the Fathers or prejudicial to the Holy See. Owing to his illness he had not had time and power to reflect and enquire as much as the gravity of the case demanded; therefore he declared quashed anything in his concessions that might prove to be harmful to the faith or derogatory to the authority of the Roman Pontiff.10 Eugenius from the beginning of this illness was convinced that it would prove to be his last. One of his chaplains, in a letter written immediately after the Pontiff's death, recalls some of the incidents of the last few weeks. Not long after the 166 EUGEN1US IV arrival of the German envoys, the Pope had told his at- tendants: 'The doctors give me hope of renewed health. But I do not think I can get over this illness. As is the will of heaven, so be it. I have often spoken without restraint and acted without moderation, and so I have not been a good example. I beg that you will forgive me/'11 Basel, among its other measures had made decrees about papal elections. To ensure that there should be no doubt about the procedure to be followed and to avoid subsequent controversy and possible schism because of a challenged election, Eugenius on January 24 renewed the regulations enacted by Gregory X in the Council of Lyons and by Clement V in that of Vienne. On February 14, he appointed the Cardinal of S. Lorenzo in Damaso, his Camerarius, to govern the Papal States in the name of the Sacred College during the interregnum after his death. People who visited him said they would pray for the restoration of his health. "Not so, not so/' he replied, "but pray only that God will perform His will. We have often begged in our prayers for what it would have been better not to have prayed. ... I do not desire to live long, but to die well quickly and that my soul may return to God." At an early stage in the illness St. Antoninus, the Arch- bishop of Florence, had suggested administering to him the last sacraments; the Pope bade him wait a little, for he still felt strong; his time would come. It came on February 20 in the evening. On Wednesday, February 22, the feast of St. Peter's Chair and Ash Wednesday, Eugenius felt the end approaching and asked to be taken from his bed and laid on the ground. "The next night towards day, as the sun was rising, between the tenth and the eleventh hours, the sun of the world set/' St. Antoninus read the prayers for the dying. "Then, while the litanies were being read as is the Christian practice, when they had come to the place, 'Go forth, Ο Chris- tian soul,' as if he wished to sleep and take his repose, so lain SCHISM AGAIN 167 at rest in a tranquil peace, he went to sleep in Christ Jesus, Our Lord, in Whom all things live. To Him be glory for ever and ever/'12 The day was Thursday, February 23, 1447.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX 1 E.P., doc. 195. 2Orientalium documenta minora, ed. G. Hofmann (Roma, 1953), doc. 35. 3 E.P.'doc. 182. *M.C, III, p. 326. 6 E.P., doc. 176. «E.P., doc. 248. 7 A. Zellfelder, England und das Basler Konzil (Berlin, 1913), His- torische Studien Hft. 113, p. 363. 8E.P., doc. 243. 9Pius II, De rebus gestis stante et dissoluto concilio commentarius, in C. Fea, Pius II Pont. max. a calumniis vindicatus (Roma, 1823), p. 104. 10Raynaldus, Op. du, IX, pp. 490-L 11L. Muratori, Herum italicarum scriptores, III, 2, 903. 12 Ibid., 904. chapter

Eugenius IV: the Man

and His Work

J\ ENEAS SYLVIUS, Frederick Ill's envoy to Rome, on his return to his sovereign after the death of Eugenius and the election of his successor, Nicholas V, described the dead Pope in these words:

With difficulty will you find a Pontiff who has experienced both success and failure on a larger scale. He convoked a council and dissolved it; he waged very many wars—he won and he lost; he endured a sentence of deposition passed in the name of a council; he deposed his deposers. He had an adversary and a rival in the papacy. Neutrality raised its head in his pontificate, an innovation hitherto unknown. He lost Germany and regained it. The Greeks he brought back into union; to the Copts seeking the Gospel he gave a standard of faith. He directed a fleet against the Turks and with Julian as his legate built up a force against the Hus- sites. The Emperor Sigismund he first attacked and then crowned. Archbishops and bishops were deprived of their rank; even cardinals and Electors of the Empire were not left immune. He canonised St. Nicholas of Tolentino. In Rome he was made prisoner; he escaped; he returned. He lost and regained the March. When Braccio of Montone was in the field, he excommunicated him; when dead, he absolved him. He exalted John Vitelleschi; Vitelleschi, later his prisoner, died in chains. He regained Bologna and he lost it. He was enemy of the King of 169 170 EUGEN1US IV Aragon and later he settled a kingdom on him. He was earlier the friend of the Venetians; then he was held by them in suspicion* He was a man of great heart. But there was no greater defect in him than that he lacked moderation and essayed to do, not what he could, but what he wanted.1

Most of the contrasts, noted by the man who later became Pope Pius II, have already been abundantly illustrated in the previous pages. They are very striking and far-reaching, yet they do not give a full account of Eugenius IV. For one thing, they themselves need explanation—what was the character of the man, the Pope, who was responsible for them—-and for another, Eugenius IV achieved far more than what these contrasts alone would suggest. Only when they are seen against the larger background of general history and in combination with the manifold activities of the Pope and the motives that instigated them, do they conduce to a sound assessment of the man Eugenius and his work. It is noteworthy that all who lived in intimate contact with Eugenius were full of admiration and indeed veneration for him. The letter of one of his chaplains that was quoted earlier begins, admittedly rhetorically: "If all the parts of our body were turned into tongues, still we should hardly be able to recount the virtues and merits of the blessed, holy, ever to be invoked memory of that Godlike man, Eugenius IV, Su- preme Pontiff."2 St. Antoninus, however, in his Chronica was not rhetorical: "He was tall of stature, pleasing in appearance and not less so in mind, most bountiful to the poor, generous in gifts for the repair of churches; he cherished God-fearing religious with an affection that was as practical as it was genuine; he was an outstanding promoter of divine worship and the spread of the Christian religion . . . Eugenius unjustly endured many persecutions and plots against his life, which he bore with patience/'3 Vespasiano da Bisticci, who opened his Lives of 103 Illustrious Men of the Fifteenth THE MAN AND HIS WORK 171 Century with the life of Eugenius, would be far too long to quote, for he is lyrical about his subject from the beginning to the end of the nineteen pages that he devotes to him; the information, however, that he gives will be utilised in the appropriate places. Eugenius began his early life as a religious with a real vocation, and in spite of his elevation to be cardinal and pope, he never forgot that he was a religious, trying in the very different circumstances of the papal court to retain as much as he could, not only of the spirit, but also of the practice of monastic life. When he was in Florence and later in Rome, he had four religious and one secular priest as chaplains. With these he regularly recited the Divine Office, as far as possible at the suitable times of the day and night, standing erect for Matins. His entourage was modest in numbers and his way of life was simple. He drank no wine; very rarely did he eat meat, preferring vegetables and fruit; usually he had but one meal a day, to which he freely invited others so as by conversation to learn of local current events. In his public appearances he gave a deep impression of sanctity of life, which was not belied by his private behaviour. All the accounts of him stress his generosity to the poor. Bisticci called him "a most liberal and constant giver of alms, who gave to whoever asked, did not make a hoard of money or set any value on it; he was always in debt because he kept nothing"; he illustrated his eulogy with numerous examples. It was easy to have audience with him, he narrates, and on one occasion a Florentine came to beg help. The Pope had a bag of florins brought, proffered it to his petitioner and told him to help himself. When timidly the man took only a few coins, Bugenius bade him have more courage and take as many as he could hold in both hands. The papal secretaries tried to salvage something from this prodigality of alms. One of them hid a bag of money in the Pope's bed and, to his own 172 EUGEN1US IV great embarrassment and Eugenius' indignation at seeming to be a miser, had to fetch it out under the Pope's eye to meet some demand. A Roman chronicler sings the same song: "He made many alms to poor people and to others, and. gave to poor girls for their marriage/' i.e. provided them with the necessary dowry to be able to make an honest marriage. The same chronicler goes on to say: "He was, however, guilty of ingratitude'' in that among the cardinals that he made there was no member of the Orsini family, although (so the writer holds) he owed his throne to them. The Orsini certainly were on the whole faithful allies in the defence of Rome against the Colonnas and Fortebraccio, but in that they were working off also their own hostility against the Colonna family and in part regaining for themselves territory previously lost: even so, Eugenius was perhaps somewhat ungracious in their regard. Many considered Eugenius obstinate, and certainly, if he once adopted an attitude, he would not easily change. What is called obstinacy, however, is not always a vice. Call it tenacity of purpose or fidelity and it becomes virtue. "He was a man of great heart and most tenacious of friendships. Lucky was the man whom he once loved."4 René of Anjou experienced this aspect of Eugenius' obstinacy. So did the Greeks, for the help promised in Florence was forthcoming in the crusade of 1444. The history of his relations with Francis Sforza, in spite of appearances, is only another illustration of his tenacity of purpose. Eugenius made Sforza Grand Stand- ard-Bearer and Count of the March in 1433 and turned against him with ecclesiastical and military weapons in 1442. Probably no one was surprised at this volte face, least of all Sforza. He was a condottiero like the rest, and they were all of them out for pay and plunder and, though they usually fulfilled the terms of their contracts, they had no particular loyalty to their patrons. Sforza had received honours and em- THE MAN AND HIS WORK 173 ployment in the Church to buy him off from fighting (too well) for Milan. Eugenius, like his predecessor, Martin V, in his similar relations with Braccio da Montone, could not acquiesce forever in abandoning so large a part of the Papal States. Like Martin V, he had to wait to act till he was strong enough and when that moment came neither he nor Sforza nor anyone else doubted that he would take back what he had once unwillingly conceded. But if obstinacy in friendship with the good is a virtue, obstinacy in friendship with the bad is a vice; Eugenius was not immune from this aspect of the quality, even though his fidelity here was founded on gratitude and a demand for security. Two names (there are also others, but of less weight) spring immediately to the mind, John Vitelleschi and Balda- sare da Offida. Of the many descriptions of Vitelleschi to be found in the various mediaeval Italian chronicles and histories, the only one that speaks well of him is the Roman La Mesti- canza, whose author was very grateful for the peace and security, after years of war and misery, that Vitelleschi's local victories and strong rule brought to the eternal city. Vitelleschi was a successful condottiero and should have remained as such; instead he became also priest, bishop, and cardinal. That, however, would not have shocked his contemporaries overmuch. Besides being a successful general, he was also as cruel as the average condottiero of the day, perhaps more so. The sacking of captured cities was a regular practice with them all; it was one of the chief purposes of their careers. Vitelleschi, however, did not follow the rules of the game. When one condottiero and his force were defeated and captured by another, the usual custom was that the captains were imprisoned till they paid for their liberty with a handsome ransom, the men were deprived of horses and arms and set free. Vitelleschi, however, hanged a number of prisoner- captains and thereby put an end, once and for all, to their 174 EUGENIUS IV possibility of causing trouble to the Church, which they certainly would have done again after recovering their freedom. He was ruthless also in destroying enemy strongholds—the salient example was Palestrina which, first the town, then the citadel, was literally taken to bits stone by stone—once again mercilessly effective. Paolo di Lello Pétrone, the author of La Mesticanza, approved of this policy wholeheartedly and lent a hand, for he had suffered too long from the raids of the Colonnas from Palestrina to have any sentiment left about it. But Basel made it one of their charges against Eugenius. That the Pope should have rewarded such action by ecclesiastical and sacred orders certainly is reprehensible. That, on being given some respite from the attacks of his enemies, he should to some degree have shared the sentiments of Paolo di Lello Pétrone is not unreasonable. That he ordered or approved beforehand the individual measures of Vitelleschi is most improbable, even though he wrote to his captain on May 8, 1434: 'Tor they are not to be treated with clemency, by whom no rights of peace or war have been observed in our regard/* Certainly he was not responsible for the destruction of the town of Palestrina, for on May 3, 1437, he appointed an administrator of the goods of the church and gave directions to the Chapter and others, two months after they had ceased to be. Vitelleschi died a violent death in circumstances that have not yet been fully explained. What happened was that, setting off with his troops on a new campaign, he was retained talking by Antonio Rido, governor of Castel Sant* Angelo. When the troops had passed by, Rido grasped the bridle of Vitelleschi's horse to force him into the castle. Vitelleschi drew his sword to defend himself and threw Rido to the ground; the gates of the castle were closed with them inside, and some of Rido's soldiers, to help their master, wounded Vitelleschi in three places. He was held a prisoner and was well cared for (so Rido THE MAN AND HIS WORK 175 afterwards wrote), but died fourteen days later on April 2, 1440. Rumour spoke of poison and connected with the incident both the Pope's name and, much more, that of the city of Florence. Rido wrote to Florence (not to the Pope) on March 19, the very day on which the event occurred, to explain that he had taken strong action, because Vitelleschi had often tried to get possession of the castle and was operating to the detriment of the Church, and "although I have acted without permission of His Holiness on account of not having had time to inform him, I feel certain that he will be grateful for what I have done." A year later, Eugenius absolved Rido from whatever ecclesiastical censures he had incurred (Vitel- leschi had been, of course, an archbishop and a cardinal) in a letter that repeats the account of the event as Rido had nar- rated it in his supplication and that seems to accept that account without challenge. It is clear, at least, that the manner of Vitelleschi's capture could not have been premeditated, and there is no proof that Eugenius was privy to Vitelleschi's death even if, as was said, he was murdered in prison. {Contemporary writers were convinced that Vitelleschi had been in treacherous correspondence with Piccinino for a combined attack on Florence. Flavio Biondo, that mild writer of history and geography, took Vitel- leschi's death very easily and considered it deserved, because he had amassed great wealth at the expense of the Church, he was imperious and domineering, he was abominated by the rest of the Curia, he thought he could dominate Eugenius, and he had an eye on the tiara for himself. Another person whose closeness to the Holy See damaged the Pope's reputation was Baldasare da Offida. He had defended Castel Sant' Angelo valiantly and cunningly during the rebellion of Rome and for that he was given a monthly pension of twenty-five florins and was knighted in the presence of the cardinals and a great gathering (December 31, 176 EUGEN1US IV 1434). He was made Podestà of Bologna and without cause or trial put to death some of the leading citizens, for which crime he was not removed from office. In the summer of 1436, while campaigning in Romagna he plotted, so it was said, with Piccinino to take Sforza prisoner and assassinate him. Sforza acted first and captured Offida, who after torture wrote a letter confessing his guilt but naming Eugenius as instigator. The Pope disclaimed any knowledge of the plot; Sforza accepted his word and after some time hanged his would-be assassin. Once again there is no proof of Eugenius* complicity, but his name was tarnished by association with a man of such doubtful character. Other reproaches are levelled against Eugenius. He is said to have been unforgiving, and the name of Capranica is brought forward as proof. For some time, certainly, in the early years of his reign, he was hostile to him, chiefly, it would seem, because Capranica was a connection of the then dangerous Colonna family. Yet Capranica was one of the first to return of the cardinals who had gone to Basel. Cesarini, who more than any other by his reputation, his conviction, and his often bitter invective set the Council of Basel on a firm foundation, was never disliked by Eugenius (which is a marvellous tribute to Cesarini's character), but was welcomed back, when the papal cause was in the ascendant and when the Pope could with impunity have made him feel his dis- pleasure. Even Cardinal Colonna, young and not a little foolish, who had been the occasion of the outbreak of hostilities between the Pope and the Colonna family in 1431, was received back in 1434 without reproach. The Bishop of Novara in Lombardy was the self-confessed instigator of a plot to take Eugenius prisoner, when he had gone for a rest to the palace of S. Antonio just outside the walls of Florence; he was forgiven at the prayer of St. Antoninus, but that did not stop him using his liberty to support Basel against the Pontiff. THE MAN AND HIS WORK 177 There was no love lost, however, between Eugenius and Aleman, the moving spirit of the assembly in Basel, at least after the cardinal had not responded to the last papal appeal after the election of Felix V. There is some excuse for Eu- genius* feeling that the small group of men, however worthy in many respects, who persisted in the schism were "hardened in sin" and that almost any means were legitimate to get rid of them. Even so, there was perhaps an element of vindictiveness in his attitude towards them. Once his cause was in the ascendant, he would brook no compromise with them. He obviously intended that the Dauphin and his troops should scatter them to the four winds and, though disappointed when Louis left them in peace on that first occasion, presumably he did not give up hope of later drastic action, for he continued paying the generous pension to his Gran Gonfaloniere. Similarly, when in 1446 suggestions were made that would have allowed Felix and his supporters to have surrendered on terms, Eugenius was obdurate (and so was Aleman). He demanded unconditional surrender, so the schism went on till the time of his successor, when it was settled on the lines that Eugenius had rejected. The case, however, of Nicholas d'Acciapaccio, Cardinal Archbishop of Capua, was not an example of vindictiveness, though Aeneas Sylvius suggested that it was: "When, however, many were pressing that the Cardinal of Capua should be recalled from exile, they could not obtain their wish and \ people judged this fact unfavourably, for they said that it was altogether unfitting that a Roman Pontiff at the very point of death should harbour hatred/'5 Aeneas makes a trite re- mark in defence, which gives no explanation. The truth is that Nicholas had been an ardent supporter of René of Anjou, and Alfonso had made his exile a condition of peace with the Pope after Rene's defeat. Nicholas was perhaps the victim of injustice then, but when Eugenius was dying Alfonso was 178 EUGENÎUS IV encamped with a large and increasing army within fifteen miles of Rome, and no one knew whether he was on his way against Florence or whether he had come to take the eternal city and to impose his candidate for the tiara. In point of fact he did nothing to interfere with the city or the conclave, but Rome had been put as far as it rapidly could into a state of defence in case of an emergency. Eugenius would have been most unwise to have provoked Alfonso or to have given him an excuse to meddle. An enemy, or at least a potential enemy, at the gates of Rome was indeed a fitting accompaniment of Eugenius' death, for never a year of his pontificate passed that was not marked by a war in which he was engaged. The question is, could he have avoided it? Blame was freely laid on him for having provoked the war against the Colonnas in the very first months of his reign, and he probably was precipitate in so soon trying to get possession of the papal treasure accumulated by Martin V. On the other hand, it would quickly have evap- orated if not secured. Sooner or later there would have had to be a day of reckoning with the Colonna family, because their situation and power, increased by Martin V at the expense of the Church, was too great a danger to Rome and the Papal States, as well as to other local families like the Orsini. The whole question of the wars of Eugenius must be viewed in its historical setting. Italy at that time was seething with condottieri whose business and pastime it was to keep wars going. A chronicler of the time describes a speech of Nicholas Piccinino, when on one occasion, surrounded by a number of hostile condottieri, he was in a hopeless position: "If you defeat me, you will all be out of a job, for I keep the kettle on the boil." They let him escape. Even if the words are imaginary, the sense of them was true. The condottieri did not lack employment, for there was perpetual rivalry between the great cities, Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples; all of these THE MAN AND HIS WORK 179 would have swallowed up part or all of the Papal States if they could. Also many of the condottieri were aiming at acquiring territory for themselves and were not particular at whose expense. The Papal States were the easiest to dis- member because so many of their cities were partly independent, or ruled by ambitious vicars, or in revolt; during the Avignon Captivity and later during the schism, control from the centre had been relaxed. Eugenius was, therefore, inevitably involved in wars to defend the Papal States, for he, as much as any pope, regarded it as his imperative duty to preserve to the Church its possessions. At least one, however, of Eugenius' Curia, a functionary of the Apostolic Camera, did not agree with him about the need of territorial independence. L. Therunda, in a politely worded memorial (he sent another, less sweetly worded, to Basel), told him that the Donation of Constantine was false and that temporal power was the ruin of the papacy; he should then abandon the Papal States to the secular princes and give all his attention tcTguiding the fragile barque of Peter. But could he? Even in these days of international good manners and the "Rights of Man," the popes insist on being and (what is almost as important) on seeming to be free agents, and for that end claim territorial independence. In the fifteenth century that motive was a hundred times stronger, A "free city" of Rome, with Neapolitans, Milanese, Florentines, Venetians, in conflict about its walls, squabbling for possession of the Campagna and the Patrimony, and with Frenchmen or Germans or Spaniards or Austrians set on conquering the whole of the peninsula, is so fantastic as to be unthinkable. The history of the city of Rome, both before the Council of Florence and after, demonstrates its absurdity. The pope would have been the prisoner, the nominee, perhaps occasionally the martyr, of whatever power held the area at any given moment and he could not have ruled the Church with equity. 180 EUGENÎUS IV At that time and for long afterwards, if he was to have any freedom in the government of the Church, he had to have Papal States extensive enough and rich enough to enable him to defend his liberty against all potential enemies. To do that he needed not only money and troops, but allies. Visconti's hostility to him personally and his own Venetian origin settled who they would be. He entered a League with Florence and Venice, in which Venice paid two thirds and Florence one third of the costs (Venice taxed the Jews of Crete for it, "who are many and rich"), and the Gran Gonfaloniere, whom he had bought at the expense of the March and of many towns, became the captain of their combined forces. Alfonso of Aragon decided the question of Eugenius* commitments in Naples by conquering the kingdom and relieving the Pope of an enemy to the south. With Alfonso's help he then tried to recover the March from Sforza, which he had to do; but it kept war going. Besides the incessant fighting in Italy there was the war he encouraged against the Turks. If Eugenius could, he would have had all Europe mobilised for that war, and it was not his fault that only Poland and Hungary and ten ships of Philip of Burgundy were engaged with his own galleys and those supplied by the Republic of Venice. Though involved in so many conflicts, he was constant in his efforts to bring England and France to peace and he sent embassy after embassy to the belligerent princes, but without success. He was, nevertheless, instrumental in reconciling Burgundy with France, which was a blow to the English. Though he unquestionably regarded peace between Christians as the ideal and was persistent in his efforts to put that ideal into practice, yet one of his arguments and purposes in his peace negotiations was to unite the Christians so that they would join the crusade against the Turk. Most of the Christian princes, however, were too intent on their own interests to listen, and the days THE MAN AND HIS WORK 181 were past when an appeal in the name of the Holy Land would rouse sufficient enthusiasm to lead to unselfish action on a large scale. The crusade against the Turk, the independence of the Papal States, ecclesiastical reform, the unity of Christendom, and the integrity of the Church which in the circumstances of those days meant in particular the authority and supremacy of the Holy See—these were the aims which in an ascending order of magnitude Eugenius pursued tenaciously throughout his reign. Aeneas Sylvius turned this tenacity into a fault; that he tried to achieve "not what he could, but what he would." Rather he tried to accomplish what his conscience bade him do, and that explains why he was so inflexible of purpose in circumstances of the utmost difficulty and of personal suffering. Yet he was not inflexible in the means he adopted. He was slow, certainly, to adapt himself to the situation produced by the opposition of Basel, and his concessions till the apparently final surrender of Dudum sacrum were always too late to be of any use. But after Dudum sacrum he tried to suit himself to the new modus vivendi, for he was as conciliatory as he could be, as regards, for example, the rejection of his presidents, the withdrawal of the annates, the declaration of the indulgence, the site for the council of union—in all these important cases he yielded a great deal and as much as he could, but unavailingly. That he was genuinely conciliatory and not merely biding the opportune moment to reopen hostilities is shown by his instructions to his legates at Constantinople in 1437: if the Greeks preferred to go to Basel in the conciliar ships, they were not to raise objections but to co-operate. All the same, when experience showed that agreement with the council was impossible, Eugenius took the opportunity offered by the split vote about the site for the new council, acted with amazing speed, and won. 182 EUGENWS IV Another of his steady aims was union of the Christian world. In various Bulls he noted that his enthusiasm for this began in the Council of Constance, when probably he met the problem for the first time. When he was governor of the March of Ancona, he began to learn Greek, but whether from a desire to share in the new humanism or for unionistic motives is uncertain. He claimed to have been largely instrumental in keeping Martin V's zeal for union glowing. Certainly, as the preceding pages abundantly show, his own efforts for union during his reign as Pope never slackened in spite of all his other ecclesiastical and political preoccupations, and those efforts were as vast as the known world, embracing Eastern Christians from India to Russia—Greeks, Copts, Syrians, Nestorians. He promoted the crusade that ended at Varna to relieve them of the Turkish yoke. He had encouraged the princes of Albania, Epirus, and Serbia in continued resistance to Turkish attacks and had rejoiced at the conversion of the King of Bosnia from the Manichaean heresy and his reconciliation with the Roman Church (1443). Earlier he had protected the natives of the Canary Islands, lately converted, by insisting in several Bulls (1434) that they should pay no more taxes than any other Christians, and he had blessed a crusade of the Portuguese princes in North Africa, which, however, failed miserably. Though Eugenius was aiming at uniting with the Church of Rome in so many mass movements all the various Churches that were separated from it, he did not hesitate to encourage the conversion of individuals from among the Eastern Chris- tians. There is extant a letter of his to a certain Gregory, Archbishop of Moldo-Wallachia, himself a convert, "who in times past professed the rite of the Roman Church ex- pressly with all its articles and was confirmed in obedience to Us and the said Roman Church by the unction of chrism, THE MAN AND HIS WORK 183 which you came and devoutly received in Our presence/' Him the Pope authorised to receive into the Church, after suitable instruction, other converts who professed the true faith, absolving them from censures, imposing a penance, receiving from them an oath not to relapse into their former errors and "confirming them by the unction of chrism." (March 10, 1436).6 He had given a similar faculty to the Greek convert Andrew Chrysoberges, Latin Archbishop of Rhodes, on May 21, 1432, exhorting him to "bring back the Greeks established under your rule . ... to the rite of the Roman Church and the knowledge of the truth" by instruction, penance with the usual abjuration, and the oath customary on such occasions/ What did Eugenius mean by "rite"? Did Archbishop Gregory and any converts that he or Andrew Chrysoberges might have received forsake their oriental rite and adopt the Latin rite? They very probably did, because organised "unia- tism" was unknown in those days and because they might have had no meqjcis of public worship except in Latin churches, though perhaps they continued to frequent the Eastern Liturgy on occasions even after their conversion. But the word "rite" in Eugenius' thought meant "faith." So no argument can be drawn from the use of this word for the practice of the converted Christians. Gregory had accepted "the rite of the Roman Church in all its articles." The Bull Quoniam alto of December 18, 1431, alleged as a reason foi: dissolving the assembly at Basel the hope of bringing back "the Greek Church to the rite of the Roman and universal Church." The accompanying letter to Cesarini had a similar phrase. Even after the Bull of union with the Greeks that solemnly proclaimed unity of faith and diversity of rite (in the narrower sense) of the Eastern and Western Churches, Eugenius wrote on September 5, 1444, rejoicing that the 184 EUGEN1US IV

Greeks and many oriental peoples "for so many centuries at variance with the rite of the Roman Church . , . are united with us under the same truth of the divine law/'8 Within the Latin Church Eugenius' zeal was directed to reform, which was another of the persistent aims of his life. He had been not only a member but a co-founder of a new religious institute, and so he had inspired and shared in the first fervour of its strict observance. At the Council of Con- stance he had favoured reform. He had urged Martin V ef- fectively to convene the Council of Siena and had commented adversely on its rapid dissolution. Later he had pressed the convocation of the Council of Basel and had been instrumental in the nomination of the well-known fanatical reformer, John of Ragusa, as assistant to the president, Cesarini. One of his earliest acts as Pope was to promulgate through Cardinal Francis Condulmaro an almost savage prohibition of con- cubinage for clerics and laymen in his service (March 27, 1431). Not long afterwards an effort was made to curtail abuses in the collation of benefices, and on November 17, 1431, he issued an order forbidding under the severest penalties the penitentiaries from demanding anything but their established fees. Then, in the beginning of 1432, the Vicar General of Rome put out in the name of the Pope a long instruction regulating the conduct of the Roman clergy (February 23). Besides, as was reported later in Basel, "from the beginning of his pontificate he took a firm stand against granting expectative favours [i.e. the promise of the next benefice to fall vacant or a benefice at the death of the present incumbent], because of the extravagance and the multitude of abuses that, he said, are inherent in them and their execution."9 It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that Cesarini, writing from Basel on January 13, 1432, to persuade Eugenius THE MAN AND HIS WORK 185 to delay the dissolution of the council, assured him that he need not be apprehensive of hostility from the Fathers gathered there, and could add: "Also if there is any reformation still to be done in the Curia, let Your Holiness complete it, as You have so praiseworthily begun."10 The reform of the Curia "so praiseworthily begun" might have progressed most satisfactorily if there had not been the lamentable split between the reforming Pope and the reforming council. The reformation advocated by the council developed into an attack on the papacy and a concentration on the Roman Curia to the exclusion of all else. The council threatened cardinals and officials, who for fear of the penalties deserted in numbers. It was not a propitious time to impose restrictions on the rest, yet on May 18, 1434, when he was virtually a prisoner in Rome, Eugenius issued very stringent regulations against simony. The council went on to forbid annates and various other forms of papal revenue, without offering any kind of even partial compensation. But the same council, though it tried at least once, could not prevail on its own episcopal members to accept a similar measure of diocesan reform that touched them and their revenues. Everyone with anything to lose was ready to reform the rest of the world; no one, himself. Eugenius showed signs of being willing to reform the Curia —in 1438 he regulated the number of officials in the papal Camera and in 1444 he repeated and broadened the measure. —though whether he would spontaneously have gone as far as he ought and could in respect of provisions for benefices and similar things is very doubtful. It should, however, be noted that at a time when he could ill afford to alienate his friends (1435), he refused demands from the kings of Eng- land and Portugal for bishoprics for candidates under the canonical age, defended Portuguese and Scottish clergy 186 EUGENIUS IV against unwarrantable interference from the State, and would not allow the Portuguese king the right of veto on episcopal appointments. The princes were clamant that the Pope should be strictly limited in providing to benefices, but they would yield nothing of their own supposed rights and, if any circumstances such as "neutrality" stopped the Pope from exercising his prerogatives, they took the chance to increase their own claims, as Charles VII did in France after the Pragmatic Sanction. Bishops would forgo nothing; universities complained that the bishops refused them a fair share of benefices; the secular clergy would have confined the religious orders to their cloisters, and the religious paraded their privileges. Aeneas Sylvius, writing of the reforming efforts of the Council of Basel, used these words:

In the reform of the Church, the start should be made with the head, they said .... Besides, there was no general agitation about morals, religion, justice, the conduct of the clergy and of the people. Whatever seemed to damage the Apostolic See was readily undertaken. Nothing could be initiated against other bishops. Plurality of benefices could never be forbidden, because it affected many. The only reform that seemed holy was to leave the Apostolic See denuded.11

In such circumstances it is more than probable that a general reformation of the Church was impossible, because no single category of people was ready to embrace it as apply- ing to itself. But there were groups, found in all the religious orders, which were exceptions; the fact that these managed to survive the opposition of the main bodies of the orders and to thrive and, in some cases, like the "little leaven" of the Gospel to leaven the whole mass, was due to the firm support given by the popes, notably by Martin V and much more by Eugenius IV. Eugenius saw in these groups the spirit that THE MAN AND HIS WORK 187 had impelled him to give his inheritance to the poor and join the Cerulini of Alga, a spirit that he had never lost and which he delighted to encourage and spread. The reformed monks went by the name of Observants. There was an Observant movement among the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Benedictines, the Camaldolese, and many others. All have had their historians who, one after another, have extolled the part that Eugenius played in the establish- ment of their reforms. "Eugenius IV desired the reform of the Church. . . . He was, from that very fact, the avowed protector of the Observants," wrote the historian of the Masters Genera] of the Dominicans.12 "The Pope, entirely dominated by the principles of the Observance," guided its steps among the Franciscans, reports whe biographer of Saint John Cap- istrano.13 The latest historian of the Benedictine Order, in his account of the reform that radiated from the abbey of S. Giustina in Padua, wrote of Eugenius: "The interest he had taken in the beginning (i.e. as a cardinal) of the reform is well known. In the See of Peter he will give it all his care, to such a degree that he can be considered as the co-founder of the Congregation/'14 The method that Eugenius followed was simple; he gave his full support to the endeavours for reform within the Order by authorising the foundation of Observant monasteries, by appointing Observant Visitors of existing monasteries and giving them wide powers, and by attaching the authority ofi a papal Bull to certain measures that the Observants felt were essential if they were to survive. Among the Dominicans and the Franciscans, where authority over the whole Order was vested in the hands of one superior, the Master General or the Minister General, this gave rise to the appointment of Vicars General, independent of the local Provincials, to govern the Observants. The danger of creating an Order within an Order and of schism was 188 EUGENÎUS IV obvious. It was obviated among the Dominicans whose Masters General held office for life and who were fortunate in having to govern them such long-lived Observants as the Blessed Raymond of Capua (1380-1400) and Fr. Bar- thélémy Texier (1426-49). Among the Franciscans, whose Ministers General changed more rapidly and were steadily Conventuals (i.e. non-Observants), the appointment of Vicars General was made—imposed—so as to limit the power of the Ministers General over the Observants and to give these more opportunity of expansion and freedom from restraint. The office ultimately led to the division of St. Francis's family into two branches, and it was Eugenius who by a Bull of January 11, 1446, sanctioned that division by authorising the Observants to hold their own separate general Chapters (he himself presided over the first), to elect two Vicars General, one for the Cisalpine, the other for the Transalpine area, whom the Minister General was obliged to confirm in office within three days of the election. Eugenius* interest in the Benedictine reform was more personal and intimate, for its initiator was none other than the Louis Barbo who had given S. Giorgio di Alga to his own Religious Congregation and with whom he was connected by the marriage of his sister. The Benedictine abbey of S. Giustina in Padua had fallen on very evil days. Barbo was sent by Gregory XII to revive it; he became a Benedictine and abbot (February 16, 1409). After a short time novices arrived in numbers, whom he later used to found new houses, priories dependent on himself as abbot, and to infuse new life into old ones. Within ten years there had come into existence a complex of priories, all subject to S. Giustina, to which three older monasteries, ruled by abbots, had affiliated themselves. To avoid too great a centralisation in the hands of one man, Barbo obtained from Martin V (January 1, 1419) a constitution creating a general Chapter to meet an- THE MAN AND HIS WORK 189 nually for the purpose of appointing Visitors and delegates in whom all authority was vested. Slowly the three abbots of the affiliated monasteries, while retaining their titles, became, like the priors, no more than delegates of the Chapter, with the consequence that in 1429 they withdrew from the Congrega- tion. This new expression of Benedictine life—supreme authority in the general Chapter to be held annually, seven definitors to represent the Chapter, five or six Visitors to exercise the authority, all heads of monasteries to be nominated by the definitors—was stabilised as the juridical constitution of the Congregation by Eugenius in four Bulls of 1432 and 1434, and in another of 1435 he enacted that no monastery of the Congregation^could be given in commendam. That indeed was the purpose of this innovation in Benedictine monasticism—to eliminate the abbot elected for life who could dissipate the monastic property and, even more, to render impossible the gift of a monastery to a non-Benedictine cleric or to a layman who could take the revenues without supporting the monks. For now no monastery was a separate entity with individual authority, but it was a part of a large Congregation whose highest authority was a corporation, the Chapter, in which the ownership of all the monasteries was vested. The Congregation of S. Giustina of Padua made rapid progress in Italy and by the time of Eugenius' death (and largely with his aid and authority) it had taken possession of some of the biggest and most renowned abbeys of the peninsula: S. Benedetto of Palerone (1417); St. Paurs-outside-the- Walls, Rome (1426, introduced by Eugenius as Cardinal Condulmaro); S. Giorgio of Venice (1429); S. Severino of Naples (1434); S. Pietro of Perugia (1436); la Badia ("The Abbey") of Florence (1437); and it would later gain still more. 190 EUGENÎUS ÎV Likewise the Dominican Observants were introduced into non-Observant convents or into other monasteries where a few recalcitrant monks of some Order refused reform. In that way they came into possession, for example, of S. Marco in Flor- ence on the ejection of the Silvestrines. The Franciscan Ob- servants also both opened new convents and took over old ones under the reforming impulse of the Pope, who, for example, evicted the Conventuals from Araceli, the habitation of the Franciscan Minister General in Rome, and gave it to the Observants, The value of the Observants for the renovation of the spiritual life of the Church is manifest from the number of famous preachers who toured up and down Italy and travelled also to other countries (where they preached in Latin), not a few of whom, with St. Bernadine of Siena (tl444), St. John of Capistrano (tl456), St.. James of Marchia (tl476), St. Peter Regalatus (tl456), St. Didacus Ct 1463) and more than a dozen Blesseds (to mention only Franciscans), enjoyed a reputation for sanctity. Vespasiano da Bisticci gives a long list of houses of men and of women in and around Florence that Eugenius reformed while he was there, and St. Antoninus in his catalogue of reformed monasteries adds still more names. Rome, Bologna, Venice, Ferrara, Sicily, Naples—the histories of all these places tell tales of the monastic reformations accomplished by the Pope in their localities, and other smaller towns had a like experience. He sent Dominican and Franciscan Visitors to check on and reform monastic life in Jerusalem, in Caffa, in Pera and Constantinople and gave them powers equal to those of the Generals of their Orders to effect what changes they deemed useful and necessary. Eugenius promoted reform in other orders also. It was he who in 1431 insisted on the meeting of the General Chapter of the Camaldolese that deposed the General of the Order (Cardinal Cervantes presided with precise instructions from THE MAN AND HIS WORK 191 the Pope) and elected the saintly Ambrose Traversari who subsequently visited all their monasteries in Italy. Silvestrines, Cistercians, Augustinians; houses of men and houses of women (the Poor Clares were put under the Franciscan Ob- servants in 1447), all felt his zeal; and Bulls are extant whereby he legislated for their betterment. He ordered a general Chapter of the Basilian monks of the Sicilies (of oriental rite) to be held in Rome and had a Visitor appointed with plenary powers to effect reform in their monasteries. When, after the union, he offered to help the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople, he made it a condition that the recipients öf his bounty should perform their choir duties regularly. In Florence during the first period of his exile, he founded a choir-school^for small boys with the double purpose of improving the church services and of fostering good voca- tions to the priesthood. When Eugenius returned to Rome in 1443, he found the city nearly as desolate as had Martin V in 1420, and he was faced with a similar problem of restoration. The city was in such a state that people went about its filthy streets in long country-capes and knee-boots and grazed their cattle, oxen, sheep, and goats there, since "owing to the absence of the Pope [Rome] had become like a land of cowherds, because they kept their sheep and cows where today are the shops of the merchants." The old monuments were being burnt to get lime. The Leonine city (i.e. around St. Peter's) was in such a tumbledown state that men hesitated to pass through it to the basilica for fear of injury from falling masonry. S. Stefano had no roof; S. Pancrazio and S. Maria in Domnica were in a state of collapse; and most of the other churches were sadly in need of repair. The citizens were poor and demoralised. Eugenius had to re-establish the regular government of the city and to regulate, with an eye on the purses of the poor, the dues payable on stuffs brought in from outside. When, for 192 EUGENÎUS ÎV example, on his return to Rome in 1443, he passed in procession to the Vatican, he was greeted with sullen faces by the populace because the taxes had been increased and a new one had been imposed on wine. He restored the good humour, by himself announcing, before ever he reached his palace, the reduction of the taxes. On the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, 1445, to help the officials of the city dress according to their rank, he presented the heads of the thirteen civic districts with an attire of purple woollen material and seventy-nine others with silken clothes. Crime had increased in the days of anarchy. For instance, in 1438 a canon of the Lateran with two other beneficiaries stole a number of jewels that ornamented the reliquaries con- taining the heads of Sts. Peter and Paul. They were discovered, defrocked, exposed for four days in cages in the Campo dei Fiori and for a fortnight on the Campidoglio before being executed. When Eugenius returned he instituted the custom of the visita graziosa, i.e. that twice a month certain magistrates and lawyers of the poor should visit each of the inmates of the various prisons. From this there resulted many a settlement of debt that was the reason for an imprisonment, many alleviations of sentences, and even the liberation of the detained. The sick also benefited from the action of the "father of the poor and the sick." The big hospital of the Holy Spirit had suffered materially and financially from the wars and the banditry of the times. Eugenius put it into repair, and by a Bull of April 10, 1446, he reconstituted the Archconfraternity that supported it and himself joined it with a promise of a fixed annual donation. His signature is followed by those of all the cardinals: "The above- and under-signed cardinals became members of the foresaid confraternity today, April 10, 1446; with their own hands they inscribed themselves in the presence of the aforementioned Lord Pope at the same time THE MAN AND HIS WORK 193 as he became a member and inscribed himself with his own hand." What is more, with the example of the Pope before them and under his eye, they all guaranteed a yearly sub- scription to the charity. He aided hospitals, not only in Rome but elsewhere too, that had suffered from the protracted wars. There are extant well over thirty Bulls of his in which by spiritual and temporal means he came to the assistance of French hospitals, and innumerable others to regulate and often help parishes, monasteries, and charitable institutions in France that had fallen on evil days. These have been collected and published. A similar collection could probably be made for other countries also, illustrative of Eugenius* catholic charity. When so much time and money were needed to repair the dilapidated edifices of Rome, the Pope could not be expected to launch out into many new constructions. He did, however, build a mint near St. Peter's and an ornate door of the neighbouring palace, and he paved the square there and the chief roads in the city. At the Lateran he rebuilt the palace that was then practically uninhabitable because of its ruinous state, and added to it a monastery in which he installed (Feb- ruary 12, 1446) Canons Regular of St. Augustine (his monks of S. Giorgio di Alga) to replace the secular Canons, "who were citizens of [Rome]." Most of his attention, however, was necessarily given to restoration. Civic buildings, gates, the walls round the Leonine city, the bridges connecting the Isola Tiberina with the banks (which he also paved with Tiburtan stone), Castel Sant' Angelo were all rendered serviceable again. In 1445, he had the aisles of St. Peter's and their roofs repaired, but not the nave which had roof-tiles of metal, and he provided new furniture for divine service. St. Paul's, St· Mary Major's, S. Maria sopra Minerva, S. Maria in Tras- tevere, S. Spirito in Sassia, the cemetery of S. Callisto with the church of S. Sebastiano, and other churches were repaired. 194 EUGENIUS IV He had masses of earth and an agglomeration of shanties removed from around the Pantheon to reveal the full length of its columns, which disclosed as well the figures of two lions and a sarcophagus, and he had the roof repaired, turning the ancient edifice into an imposing church with a newly paved square in front of it. These ancient monuments, particularly the Colosseum, were being used as quarries by any would-be builder. Eugenius forbade under heavy penalty the removal of any, even the least, stone from any of them, for that would be "to diminish the dignity of the city and of the terrestrial globe." Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century was hastening to the full development of its stupendous artistic achievement. Eugenius had witnessed the multiplication there of masterpieces of architecture, painting, and sculpture. He was not uninfluenced by that ferment, but the conditions of the time made it impossible for him to turn Rome into another Florence. However, "Eugenius IV was not unmindful of the interests of art and artists; in fact, he gave them every encouragement possible in those troublous days/' is the judgement of L. Pastor.16 In any case he survived his return to Rome by only four and a quarter years which did not give him much time both to repair and to build. At least he opened the way to his successors and he himself invited to Rome Donatello, Victor Pisanello, the mystic Fra Angelico, and John Foucquet who painted his portrait—a "speaking like- ness" so it was said, now unfortunately lost. He commissioned a Dominican monk of Viterbo, Antonio Michèle, to make wooden doors for the side entrances of St. Peter's. These were ornamented with figures in relief of Our Lord, Our Lady, Sts. Peter and Paul and scenes of their martyrdoms, and of Eugenius; and there were portrayed outstanding events of Eugenius' reign such as the crowning of the Emperor Sigis- mund and his passage through Rome with his suite, the union THE MAN AND HIS WORK 195 of the Greeks and the Latins, and the entry of the Ethiopians. These wooden doors, not unnaturally, have not survived. Doors, however, for the central entrance, which were cast in bronze, are still in position today. To execute these he chose the Florentine Antony Averulano, "Filarete," unhappily not an artist of the first flight. Unlike the wooden doors, these doors of bronze typify in a certain way the spirit of the early fifteenth century and reflect the attitude of the humanists, for they combine the traditional religious with the mythological pagan. Yet the subjects of the reliefs are almost the same as those of the wooden doors. In the chief panels of the left door are Our Saviour and St. Paul; in those of the right door, Our Lady and St. Peter giving ^the keys to Eugenius. Other panels portray the martyrdoms of the two Apostles and scenes from the history of Eugenius* reign—the arrival of the Greeks and of the Copts, the proclamation of union, the coronation of the Emperor Sigismund. These are surrounded by acanthus leaves with busts of Roman Emperors, nude nymphs and divinities, various gods, and Leda (well-covered) with the swan. The taste is deplorable, but it was the taste of an age when some, not all but too many, humanists imitated not only the Latin literary style of their classical models but their morals also. Among the papal secretaries was a number of Latinists of that sort, who yet remained undisturbed under several popes. Typical of them was Poggio Bracciolini, a brilliant stylist, but really a pagan, who wrote scathingly of the Church and particularly of the monks and Observants as "work-shy." He was immoral, licentious, a master of the most scurrilous invective, a member of a kind of club whose amusement was the manufacture of stories of double-meaning and even blasphemy. He was, with but slight interruption, "writer" to the popes for half-a-century till 1453. It seems unintelligible that 196 EUGENIUS IV popes of high character—Martin V and Eugenius IV at least —should have tolerated the presence of such men, for he was not the only one in their service. They probably did not fully realise their character, but they cannot have been in complete ignorance of it. To retain them in their employment was un- justifiable, but the reason why they did so is not far to seek. Every little court in those days had its humanist secretaries; the popes had to be able to frame their replies in a style that would not draw down ridicule. The humanists of the day had a power out of all proportion to their value. Philip Maria Visconti, who knew only too well what paid, remarked that a letter of Coluccio Salutato could do more damage than a thousand Florentine cavalry. In contrast to Poggio was Flavio Biondo, a humanist and a real Christian, who wrote not only good Latin but was a student of history. He delighted to trace the story of the monuments of ancient Rome but, unlike Poggio in a similar work, he did not exclude the Christian shrines and churches. He always remained faithful to Eugenius in the days when many deserted him for what seemed to be the ascendant star of Basel, and Eugenius for his part was not only grateful to him but was also his close friend. Biondo wrote much on Rome and on Italy, history and historical description, and dedicated it to Eugenius without the florid eulogies customary at the time, because probably they would have displeased his patron. There were other Christian humanists too of this pattern in the papal service who used their knowledge not only to earn a livelihood but also to further the service of God. Eugenius himself, who possessed a library of three hundred books, a respectable number for those days, even if he (in the words of Biondo) "gave his mind to the particular acquisition of neither a skill nor a branch of knowledge, nevertheless read assiduously all the books of the Doctors of the Church and the THE MAN AND HIS WORK 197 Latin orators and historians and, owing to his acute intel- ligence, understood them perfectly/' Another reason for the tolerance of the pagan humanists was the fact that they could become bitter and virulent enemies capable of devastating lampoons. None of them, however, nor any of his opponents, whether in Basel or elsewhere, ever had a word to say against Eugenius' private life. It was above reproach. He was said to be obstinate and to some degree he was. He was accused of alienating ecclesiastical territories, and of course he had done so to Sforza, to the Este family, and to others, to secure immunity from attack or to get money for the many expensive operations—-wars, union, pensions to Sigismund and others—that he had to undertake, but no on6 suggested that he was ever trying to enrich himself or his family. His predecessor had not been avaricious for himself either, but he had overstepped the limits in his nepotism, partly doubtless to ensure for himself reliable supporters in troublous times, but largely also from motives of sheer family aggrandise- ment. Eugenius was not without this defect, but he had it in moderation; he was, perhaps, fortunate in not belonging to a noble family with territorial aspirations, or a poor family with a multitude of relatives. In Florence among a large number of exiles of various sorts whom he maintained in his household, he kept also Peter and Paul Barbo, his sister's sons. Francis Condulmaro, his cousin, he made a cardinal in the first year of his reign and he used him assiduously during the rest of it, for Francis was one of the very few cardinals who remained faithful to him in his blackest years. Mark Condulmaro was made governor of Avignon, of Bologna, bishop of Tarentaise, legate to Greece in 1437, He was not, it would seem, very competent but presumably he was of worthy life, for he had been one of the first members of the reformed canons of S. Giorgio di 198 EUGEN1US IV Alga, Eugenius' first love. Antony Condulmaro was captain of the fleet that went to fetch the Greeks. Peter Barbo was created cardinal in 1440 at the age of twenty-three; later he was elected pope and took the name of Paul IL For those days this was a meagre list of family appointments, and even the Basel assembly, on the look-out for grievances, thought nothing of it, especially as none of Eugenius' nephews brought disgrace on the family name and, if they were not men of high talent, they seem to have been, what is more essential to the Church, men of high character. From this wealth of detail and complex pattern of events emerge the character and personality of Eugenius. His most marked quality was, perhaps, his simplicity of outlook—not common in those days. This led him in the first place to embrace the religious life in a reformed order whose spirit he never lost and whose rule he continued to practise as far as his changed circumstances allowed. It was typical of him that the breviary he copied out in his monastic. days remained in his constant use till his death. It led him to see the problems before him clearly and to settle his course of action; so clearly that sometimes he did not sufficiently weigh correlated issues, or the consequences of his policy, or the adequacy of his resources to achieve it—any of which might have modified the purposes of another man. Certain aims his conscience imposed on him and those he strove steadily to attain. They all derived from his position as Sovereign Pontiff and regarded the well-being of the Church that was committed to him. None was for his own personal advantage. The greatness of Eugenius lies in this, that he would allow nothing to deter him from performing what he thought was his duty. He paid dearly for such steadfastness, as he became more and more isolated. His cardinals deserted him, even Antony Correr, the friend of his youth; his officials melted away to Basel; the princes and courts, including his THE MAN AND HIS WORK 199

native Venice, were pressing the council's claims; he was an exile, surrounded by enemies. In all this, with diminishing forces, he fought a rear-guard action, retreating step by step, always hoping to have fruitful parleys with the enemy before he was forced into his citadel. In the end, with no resources but himself, he had to surrender, but he surrendered honoura- bly, retaining his arms. He had in no way abandoned his rights; only now he would preserve them by other means. He was not narrow- minded or inflexible. He frequently modified his plans and adapted himself graciously and with much patience to others to allow for their point of view; not infrequently by persuasion and openness of mind he gained his end. We have seen his change of attitude, owing ft) the turn of events, in his relations with Basel, Sigismund, Philip Maria Visconti of Milan, and Alfonso of Aragon. With the Greeks he was remarkably ac- commodating; he esteemed the ideal of Christian unity so highly that he was prepared to sacrifice almost all other con- siderations to achieve it. It is true that as a matter of principle he insisted as much as possible on the ceremonial observances due to the successor of St. Peter—on the Patriarch's kissing his foot and on his having his throne separate from the rest, but even on these points he compromised. Often he yielded to Greek determination, e.g. on the method of discussions in Ferrara, to the annoyance of some of the Latin Fathers; on several occasions during the debates in Florence when Mon-. tenero and Eugenicus could not agree; on minor points of phraseology in the decree of union, Laetentur caelL His judgement of when to take action was usually sound, but he made some mistakes. He was not to blame for his original decision to dissolve the Council of Basel in the first months of its existence, for there were many reasons in favour of a dissolution and only one against: the temper of the small gathering in Basel, which only those on the spot could gauge. 200 EUGEN1US IV His volte-face, however, in respect of Sforza was not so much well-judged as fortunate, in that shortly after it he unex- pectedly had the support of Alfonso of Naples. All the same he left the Papal States intact to his successor. His deposition of the two archbishop electors of Germany was a mistake, made in his haste to clinch a triumph and to strip the rump- Council of Basel of some of its last supporters. He gave way, but as one laying down conditions, not accepting them, when he agreed to reinstate the "former" archbishops if they acknowledged his rights. Constancy of purpose in stark adversity, tempered by a certain suppleness in the means employed, is no small element of greatness of character. Eugenius possessed that element and combined it with other, more gentle qualities, which had been his from his youth and which were not diminished, but rather emphasised, by his position, that could so easily have suffocated them altogether. He retained his equability of temperament and peace of mind; virtues that many another, overwhelmed by discouragement and bitterness, would have lost in circumstances like his. He was still most accessible to all men, but especially the poor. As he had given away his patrimony in his youth, so he continued to give in his mature age. He maintained ever the same simple way of life. In spite of his Venetian origin he was completely devoid of the Vene- tian commercial spirit and he either suppressed or was not much taken by the Venetian love of lavish display. His one extravagance on personal attire was the very ornate tiara that he commissioned the Florentine artist Ghiberti to make for him in 1441, which contained fifteen pounds* weight of precious stones, and was valued at thirty-eight thousand florins. Later he is said to have pawned it for forty thousand florins to raise money for some immediate necessity. In 1431 for his coronation he had paid only forty-nine and a half THE MAN AND HIS WORK 201 florins for a tiara, but 7,05 3Yi florins were expended on a baldachino and hangings. He began life as a monk. He loved monks and himself preserved in an amazing degree the spirit of the monastery. The impression of reserve, of withdrawal from this world, of sanctity, that he made on men like Bisticci, reflected qualities that he had, the expression of a contemplative spirit seared by a too rude contact with the world. Bisticci asserts that as he lay dying he regretted that he had ever left the life of the monastery: Ό Gabriel, how much better for the good of your soul would you have lived, if you had never been either cardinal or pope, but had died as a monk. How miserable we all are! We ge^ to know ourselves at death." The purpose of life whether as monk, cardinal, pope, or layman is one: to love God and our neighbour. That purpose Gabriel Condul- maro never forsook, but he pursued it with a steady aim till his last hour.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN 1 Mura tori, Return Italicarum Serif tor es, III, 2, 890. 'Ibid., 902. 3 Tertia pars, (Lyons, 1586), p. 519. 4 Sermon of Aeneas Sylvius, in Muratori, op. cit., Ill, 2, 881-2. 'Ibid., 889. 9 Raynaldus, op. cit., IX, p. 227. Έ.Ρ., doc. 33. 8 Raynaldus, op. cit., IX, p. 427. •M.C., III, pp. 18-19. "Μ.α,Π,ρ. 104. 202 EUGENIUS IV 11 Pius II, De rebus gestis, pp. 61-2. 12 R. P. Mortier, Histoire des Maîtres Généraux de l'Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs, IV (Paris, 1909), p. 161. 13 J. Hofer, Giovanni da Capestrano, trans, from German by Giacomo di Fabbro (Aquila, 1955), p. 250. 14 P. Schmitz, O.S.B., Histoire de l'Ordre de Saint-Benoît, III (Mared- sous, 1948), pp. 159-60. 15 History of the Popes, Sixth edition (London, 1938), I, p. 358. chapter W

Eugenius IV: His Lasting

Achievements

WHILE MUCH of Eugenius* activity was designed to meet only the needs of the moment, some of his achievements not only were, but were meant by him to be, of permanent effect in shaping the destinies of the Church. Not all of them were as lasting as he hoped. What seemed to be the great triumph of his reign, the union of the Latin Church with the various Oriental Churches, especially the Greek Church, endured only until the Turks captured, one after another, the areas where the united Christians lived. Constantinople fell in 1453, and the union came to an end (it had been very insecure for some time before that); Genoese rule in the Crimea ceased with the conquest of 1461, after which date nothing more is known of the union of the Armenians; (the Copts of Egypt were still in friendly relations with Rome in 1450; the history of the united Syrians is unknown to us; the union persisted in Cyprus, though it had its difficulties, till at least 1489, when it was suffocated by the latinising policy of the Venetians who had gained possession of the island. If that were the sum total of the fruits gathered from so much enthusiasm and labour for union in the early fifteenth century, it should still be said to have been worth while, even 203 204 EUGENÎUS IV though it was disappointing. The results, in fact, were much more durable. The principle established in the Council of Florence for the union of Churches is valid for all time. The unions effected by Florence came to an end, but other unions embodying that principle were later made with other Churches, and these have endured and flourish still. The Council of Florence established the broad foundation of all ecclesiastical unions—unity of faith and diversity of rite. It was for those days a very "advanced" principle. No one, indeed, doubted the need for unity of faith. The Council of Florence, however, did more than say that unity of faith was essential. It defined what that faith was, at least as regards the points in controversy between East and West, and decreed that the traditional formulae of both Churches about the Procession of the Holy Spirit were correct and acceptable as meaning that the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father and Son, yet as from one principle and by one spiration—and this definition and explanation are true for all time. The acceptability, however, of diversity of rite was not so obvious. Few in the Latin Church of that day thought that the Oriental rite was as good as the Latin rite. Reichenthal's comment on the failure of the mission of Gregory Cambiale and his companions, the Ruthenians, who with their long black hair and beards and their picturesque Oriental rite brightened the scene for a few months at the Council of Constance, is illuminating: "It was thought that a complete union would be brought about. But the Council did not wish to allow them to remain so all their lives/' The Council of Florence, however, by declaring that, "The Body of Christ is truly effectuated in unleavened and leavened wheaten bread, and priests should effectuate the very Body of the Lord in one of these; each, that is, according to the custom of his Church whether Western or Eastern," had established the principle that the rites are equal and that neither is either better or HIS LASTING ACHIEVEMENTS 205

worse than the other. Isidore of Kiev perceived the importance of that principle. In the encyclical letter that he issued from Buda while on his journey back to Russia to introduce and recommend the union there, he laid great stress on it and made it concrete by exhorting Latins to assist and communi- cate at the Oriental Liturgy and Orientals to do the same at the Latin Mass, because henceforth there was one Church with one worship celebrated in a double rite. Neither Church, however, found the principle easy to assimilate. The rites were very different ceremonially, and they had been one of the more obvious signs of separation in the past. Some Latins, rather than mix rites, preferred to adopt the Oriental rite permanently, and Eugenius' successor, Nicholas V, felt it necessary to forbid such a change. When the union seemed dead, after its rejection by the Russian Church and the fall of Constantinople, the policy of unifica- tion of Christians that was followed at least in Poland-Lithu- ania was the conversion of the Orientals to the Latin rite, for the feeling prevailed that the Oriental rite was inferior: it was the religion of a subject race who acquired civic equality with its rulers only by accepting the rite of the rulers. Indeed rite was taken as a synonym for faith, so that difference of rite implied difference of faith. Poland-Lithuania was that rare country where there was frequent contact between Latins and Orientals, and Poland-Lithuania had never supported Eugenius but had favoured Basel. The influence of the Coun- cil of Florence, therefore, in those parts was not very great in the first decades after the union, even though for many years nearly all the Ruthenian dioceses were filled with unionist bishops who looked first to Isidore, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia, as their head and later to Gregory, Archbishop of Kiev, the Greek monk who had been Isidore's faithful companion. It was, nevertheless, on the soil of Poland-Lithuania that 206 EUGENIUS IV the first abundant fruit of union grew. In 1595, a large section of the Ruthenians of Oriental rite formally united with Rome on the principle of the Council of Florence—-unity of faith and diversity of rite. The united Church survived the difficulties of its first years and grew to maturity with over five million faithful, a hierarchy, thousands of clergy both secular and regular, and all the other signs of vitality, till 1946 when the conquest of the country by atheist Russia gave the Com- munists the opportunity to "liquidate" it by persecution and to "restore" it to its "Mother Church" of Moscow. It is not, however, dead. At least abroad, especially in Canada and the United States, it survives and still flourishes. Similar unions elsewhere applied the wisdom of Florence. In 1646, Rutheni- ans in Carpathia, in 1700 Rumanians of Transylvania, and others down the centuries till in our own time (1930) the Malankarese of India united with Rome retaining their rites and customs. Those within the satellite countries have suffered the same fate as the Ruthenian Church, but the unions survive still, at least among refugees. Whatever the fate of the Churches resulting from union, the principle of union established by the Council of Florence still holds—an imperishable guide to all who seek the true unity of Christendom. When by his Bull Doctoris gentium Eugenius transferred the Council of Basel, he declared that it would strive in Fer- rara for those ends for which the council had been first summoned in Basel, and in particular for the union of the Churches. Union the new council effected. But it failed, it did not even try, to attain the other great purpose of Basel, the reform of the Church. The subject was never introduced; possibly the word was not even pronounced in any of the sessions of Ferrara or Florence. The Council of Basel, on the other hand, spent most of its time, at least in theory, on reforming the Church. It was certainly not without sincere and ardent men who wanted nothing so much as to restore ecclesi- HIS LASTING ACHIEVEMENTS 207

astical discipline and order. They, however, found their task difficult for no one of those who most needed it wanted reform for himself—the princes and bishops were too well represented in Basel to let anything* be enacted that touched themselves closely; the Pope and his Curia, the easiest target and one needing reform as much as any other, would not co-operate. The result was that, in the seven years from 1431 to 1438, few reform measures were decreed, which gave occasion to the Pope and the princes to complain, not without some justice, of the inactivity and ineffectiveness of the council. When Eugenius had his own council at which nearly all the cardinals were gresent, he had, it would seem, a unique opportunity to do, with moderation and adequate safeguards for the essential constitution of the Church, what good men had been urging for many years, and what Basel had tried to do but too savagely: the reform of the Church in its Head. Yet, in spite of his reputation for reforming zeal, his great energy in fostering Observant movements in the religious orders, and his restoration of discipline in many a decadent monastery and convent, he took no conciliar action for reform. This is a fact that calls for explanation. The reasons for it are doubtless manifold. In those days, reform in the Head meant almost exclusively curtailing papal exactions of money, whether they were anna tes, taxes for cases called to Rome, taxes for other services, claims to appoint bishops, abbots, and other dignitaries either in anticipation of a vacancy or at a vacancy, commendams and other similar uses and abuses. There were unquestionably genuine grievances against the papacy in regard to these. On the other hand, princes were as blameworthy in respect of appointments, commendams, and other business connected with benefices; and within dioceses bishops imitated on a minor scale the behaviour of their higher authorities. Not all the income produced by papal "exactions," however, reached the popes. 208 EUGEN1US IV According to the "Capitulations" agreed to by Eugenius at his election, "the half of all and every census, right, revenue, income, and emolument whatsoever of the Roman Church" was to go to the College of Cardinals. Besides, each official of the papal administration was entitled to his percentage of what his office dealt with. To reform the "Head," the Pope would have had to prevail on his Curia to accept his measures, for the first stipulation of the "Capitulations" was that reform of the Curia should begin only when the cardinals demanded it. The cardinals were very powerful as a College, more powerful at this period than at many others, and though most of Eugenius' cardinals were worthy men, they were expected to, and for the most part did, keep up big households and were consequently loath to diminish their revenues, which then were below their usual level because of the iniquity of the times. For his part, Eugenius was faced with enormous expenses for the Greeks, for his wars, for the restoration of Rome, for continual embassies, and during most of his reign he was not receiving the revenues he was entitled to and was living on borrowed money. The ecclesiastical situation was not yet stable even at his death. He had a bare hold on the Papal States; Basel still sat and threatened; France was neutral and several of the German Electors favoured the antipope; Poland-Lithuania was pro-Basel. He never had the chance that a lasting peace would have afforded him of making a fair bid to reform his Curia. One cannot, of course, affirm that he would have tried to do so, even if he had had the chance, although at the beginning of his reign and again towards the end he did introduce a few measures of reform. However that may be, the important point for subsequent history is that the Council of Florence did nothing to further the needed reform of the Church and, by supplanting Basel, it did much to neutralise the little that Basel had effected. Some of that little, however, was retained. HIS LASTING ACHIEVEMENTS 209 The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, which had applied to France what France wanted to adopt of the reforms of Basel, remained in force till 1462. The agreement made with Fred- erick III of Austria and the German Electors in 1447, modified and confirmed by Nicholas of Cusa, the legate sent to Ger- many by Eugenius' successor, perpetuated the reforms that Germany had applied. But however much was done, it was not much to represent the efforts of three councils, Constance, Siena, and Basel-Florence, all set on reforming the Church. One is tempted to wonder what would have been the effect on history if a real reform had been brought about in the fifteenth century, whether^it would have led the Hussites back into the Church (the heresy of Wyclif and Hus had a large reforming basis) and, with that focus of unrest removed, so have conditioned men's minds that they would not have rallied easily to Luther's cry of "Justification by faith alone"—if, indeed, Luther would then have been moved to raise the cry at all. Eugenius' successful opposition to the Council of Basel checked the impetus for reform within the Church and silenced the voices, not certainly of all reformers because the Observants also were reformers who had started by reforming themselves, but of those who would have reformed others by conciliar action. Reform, however, of every kind was needed, and the failure to impose generally the more moderate of the reforms of Basel was a loss for the Church. It would, however, have suffered a greater loss if the Council of Basel had succeeded, not because the reforms decreed by Basel were all excessive and unjust, but because Basel pressed them un- reasonably with the purpose of reducing, not the Pope, but the papacy to subservience to a council and of depriving Eugenius of resources to such a degree that he should not be able to defend the imperilled papal prerogatives. Some, in this age of democracy, may deplore that Eugenius 210 EUGEN1US IV was so successful in defeating the aims of the Council of Basel; they may regret that, when so fair an opportunity offered, the Church was not rendered more democratic. The democratic Church, however, that would have been consti- tuted by Basel would not have been the same Church that had existed till then. Till then, the opinion of East and West was unanimous and, whatever was held about the position of the pope, was in no doubt that the magisterium, the teaching authority, of the Church resided in the bishops, not in the faithful. At Basel the bishops were vastly outnumbered at all times by doctors of various sorts and theologians. In the days when Cardinal Aleman imaginatively distributed relics of saints over the vacant episcopal seats, the bishops were in a minority of about one in twenty of those who there exercised the right to vote about the essential faith of the Church. Basel's success would presumably have canonised the Con- ciliar theory and perpetuated the practices that from the Council of Pisa (1409) till that of Basel (1431-47) were becoming more and more developed and radical.

In the old days bishops, full of the fear of God, the zeal of religion, and the fervour of faith used to settle the affairs of the Church. Now the matter is in the hands of the common herd; for scarcely out of five hundred members, as I saw with my own eyes, were there twenty bishops; the rest were either the lower orders of the clergy, or were laymen; and all consult their private feelings rather than the good of the Church . . . Where everyone seeks his own interest, and the vote of a cook is as good as that of a legate or an archbishop, it is shameless blasphemy to claim for their resolutions the authority of the Holy Ghost.1

Further, a democratic Church on the style of Basel would not have been the Church founded by Christ. He gave it from the start not even an oligarchical structure but a monarchical one, when he made St. Peter head on earth. The Latin Church took that truth for granted. St. Leo I vindicated the HIS LASTING ACHIEVEMENTS 211

pre-eminence of the Sees of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria precisely by their petrine origin. The Conciliarists, particularly those of Basel who carried the theory to its utmost limits in order to affirm that a council is by Christ's ordinance the supreme authority in the Church, were constrained to deny that St. Peter was ever head of the Church. That was a conclusion new to the West, born of the crisis of the Great Schism. The Conciliarists wanted to make it permanent and to provide it with the machinery of action. If their ideas had prevailed, the world would have seen the spectacle of general councils summoned every ten years and being to all intents and purposes in permanent session, not only guiding the faithful in what to believe but directing the day-to-day business of curial offices. As a theory it was a novelty that would have turned the constitution of the Church upside-down. As a system, it would not have lasted long, for it would soon have been torn to bits by national rivalries and personal intrigues. What would have followed, who knows? It did not come to that. A Catholic would say that it could not, because the Church is indefectible. There is, however, no need to debate the theoretical point here. The historical fact is that Basel and its ideas were defeated. The person responsible was Eugenius IV, because, never admitting himself beaten, he pertinaciously and patiently strove to preserve the Church as he had received it. The means of his success was the Coun- cil of Florence. It had very many more "mitres" than Basel; it had more cardinals; it had the Greeks; it had the Pope. It was (to use a classification common in those days) not merely a general council, it was also ecumenical in that it brought East and West together. After a long period of frustration and of probable failure, it succeeded in achieving union, a triumph that Eugenius lost no time in broadcasting over Europe. Florence resulted in unity; Basel in a new schism. So Florence won the day and Basel lost. 212 EUGENIUS IV Florence had declared that the pope, as successor of St. Peter, is supreme head and authority among men in the Church on earth. Henceforth that is the official, defined doctrine. It will meet with future development and clarification, but the principle was firmly established that the teaching of St. Leo is right and that the Conciliarists were wrong. The Church remained a monarchy. It was not turned into a kind of democracy at a time when democracies were neither known nor valued in any other department of life, and when it would most probably have failed signally within the Church. The Council of Florence, convened and guided by Eugenius IV, was responsible for that and, no matter whether that effect is deemed to have been beneficial or harmful to posterity, that was its most important contribution to history.

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT 1 Ambrosii Traversari epistulae, n. 176, as translated by M. Creighton in A History of the Papacy from the Great Schism to the Sack of Piome, vol. II, (London, 1897), pp. 277-8. Bibliography

GENERAL WORKS All histories of the Church will treat of this period. The best known and the most thorough are: L. Pastor, The His- tory of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, English translation edited by F. I. Antrobus (it has many editions and the first two volumes treat of the fifteenth century); and C. J. Hefele-H. Leclercq, Histoire des conciles, vol. 7 (Paris, 1916). Of these the former is a general history of the period, giving a broad picture and written rather as an introduction to the Popes of the Renaissance. The latter is a very detailed \ history of the councils, which includes also much correlated matter. The chief sources for the period will be mentioned below, where Eugenius' activity is divided into phases. One source, however, is common to all its phases, particularly in respect of the councils, viz. Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, edited by J. D. Mansi (vols. 28 to 32, published in Paris-Leipzig from 1901-4, refer to our period). 213 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY PARTICULAR WORKS THE COUNCILS, GENERAL. A very good general account cov- ering our period is given by M. Creighton, A History of the Papacy from the Great Schism to the Sack of Rome (London, 1897), which is a new edition of the same author's A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation (Lon- don, 1882) (vol. II of each edition deals with Eugenius). N. Valois, Le Pape et le Concile (1418-1450) 2 vols. (Paris, 1909), tells the story from the end of the Council of Con- stance to the close of the Council of Basel, drawing on much unpublished material from various archives. The only full account that there is of the Council of Florence is J. Gill, The Council of Florence (Cambridge, 1959), founded on a careful study of all the published sources, to which refer- ences are made in abundance; this enables the student if he so wishes both to delve deeper into the history of the council and to assess for himself the basis of the statements made in the text. SOURCES OTHER THAN MANSI. For the Council of Con- stance there are two important collections of documents: H. van der Hardt, Magnum œcumenicum Constantiense concilium, 4 vols. (Helmstadt, 1669) and H. Finke, Acta concilii Constanciensis, 4 vols. (Münster, 1896-1928). These with Mansi are necessary for a full knowledge of this council. The documents on which the history of the Council of Basel must be founded are contained in two publications. The first, Monumenta conciliorum generalium saeculi XV (Vienna, 1857-86), consists of three folio volumes (and an index) of the very detailed and accurate account of the council from its beginning to the year 1441, written by John of Segovia, O.P., one of the most active and loyal of its members. This edition has not been finished, but the part not yet published, dealing with the last years of the council, is of lesser importance. The BIBLIOGRAPHY 215

second great source is the collection of documents, Concilium Basiliense. Studien und Dokumente (Basel, 1896-1936) edited by J. Haller and others, which contains official minutes, diaries, and letters, with learned and not altogether impartial introductions. The chief sources for the Council of Florence are three: (1) what remains of the authentic Greek Acts, with which there have been combined most valuable extracts from a general account of the council written by a participant Greek archbishop; (2) the so-called Latin Acts which are a faithful record of the speeches made in the dogmatic sessions with the addition of a few other, most welcome, items of information; and (3) the Memoirs of a Greek deacon which record the unofficial activity among the Greeks rather than the public acts of the Council. New editions of the first two of these have appeared in the collection Concilium Florentinum, documenta et scriptures, edited respectively by J. Gill, Quae swper- sunt actor urn graecorum Concilii Florentini (Roma, 1953) and G. Hofmann, Andreas de Santacroce, advocatus consistorialis. Ada latina Concilii Florentini (Roma, 1955). Earlier editions of both of these sources can be found in Mansi and in most of the great collections of councils. A new edition of the third source is in preparation for the series Concilium Florentinum, documenta et serif tor es. The old edition, produced by R. Creyghton under the title Vera historia unionis non verae (Hagae-Comitis, 1660) is somewhat rare (but1 essential for the history of the council); only the Greek text, however, should be consulted, for the Latin translation of the editor is so garbled that it is historically unsound. Other useful documents can be found in other volumes of the series Con- cilium Florentinum etc., in Mansi, and Migne, Patres Graeci, volumes 159-161. LIVES OF EUGENIUS IV. There are three lives of Pope 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY Eugenius IV dating from the fifteenth century. Vespasiano da Bisticci, who was a boy in Florence during the Council, opened his "Lives of 103 Illustrious Men Who Lived in the Fifteenth Century/' edited by A. Mai in Spicilegium Ro- manum, vol. I (Rome, 1839), with an account of Eugenius IV which gives a sympathetic portrait of the Pope based on his personal knowledge of a variety of incidents. There is an English edition, The Vespasiano Memoirs, trans. W. George and E. Waters (London, 1926). A life by another contemporary, this one anonymous, also very trustworthy, is to be found in L. Muratori, Rerum italicarum scriptores, T.III, Part II, 868-78 (Milan, 1731). A third life, written by Bar- tholomew Sacchi, called "II Platina," (1421-81), utilised data from the anonymous life and adds other details taken from various literary sources and probably also from enquiries from the contemporaries of Eugenius. ADMINISTRATION AND WARS. Information about the political side of Eugenius* life and his many wars is to be sought primarily in the chronicles, diaries, contemporary histories, and biographies. A large and most precious collection of these was edited in the first half of the eighteenth century by L. Muratori, Rerum italicarum scriptores, 19 vols., and these are in the process of being re-edited by a number of scholars in the Raccolta degli storici italiani. Muratori himself wrote also a general history of Italy, drawn from the chronicles he had edited, under the title, Annali d'Italia, of which vol. IX (Rome, 1787) deals with Eugenius. A more modern and less detailed history of this whole century is P. Paschini, Roma nel Rinascimento (Bologna, 1940). Studies on the financial and administrative aspects of the lifetime of Eugenius, besides the more general work of A. Gottlob, Aus der Camera Apostolica des IS. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1889), are: P. Partner, The Papal State under BIBLIOGRAPHY 217 Martin V (London, 1958) (a close examination of Martin's restoration of the Papal States); and J. Guiraud, L'État pontifical après le Grand Schisme. Étude de géographie politique (Paris, 1896) (a detailed description of the Papal States in Eugenius' day).

Index

Armenians, Patriarch of, 52, 133 Abdala, Archbishop of Edessa, 157 Attendolo, Michelotto, 46, 54 Abyssinia, Emperor of, 133 Augustinians, 191 Acciapaccio, Nicholas d', 177 Averulano, Antony, 195 Albenga, Bishop of, 89 Avignon, Captivity of, 3fT., 179 Albergati, Nicholas, Cardinal, 49, 61, 76, 80, 103-105, 151 Β Albert, Duke of Austria, King of Bachenstein, John, 76, 77, 78 the Germans, 113 Baglioni, the, 64 Albert, King of the Romans, 135, Barbadigo, Angelo, 24 136, 153 Barbo, Francis, 16 Albert of Sarteano, 151 Barbo, Louis, 17, 35, 188 Albizi, 69 Barbo, Mark, 16 Aleman, Cardinal, 90, 102, 137- Barbo, Nicholas, 15 138, 145-146, 159, 161, 163, Barbo, Paul, 197 177, 210 Barbo, Peter, 197, 198 Alexander V, antipope, 11, 23, 24 Basel, Council of, 36, 39, 40, 43- Alfonso V of Aragon, 31, 81, 84, 47, 48, 49, 50-53, 55, 56-62, 87-88, 94, 103, 108, 114, 121, 66, 72, 73, 75-80, 81-86, 88-90, 147-150, 155, 157-159, 177, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 102, 103, 180, 199, 200 107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 116, Alfonso of Naples, 155, 157-159 119, 137-147, 150, 157, 159- Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy, 92, 162, 174, 176, 181, 184, 196, 101, 145-146 198, 199, 200, 206 ff.; envoys of, Amendola, 65 to Constantinople, 51; and Hus- Anagni, 8, 9 sites, 43; and relations with Andrew of Egypt, Abbot, 151-152 Eugenius IV, 44-62, 73-74, 102- Andrew of Rhodes, 115 103; and relations with Greeks, Andrew of S. Croce, 125 52-53, 74-76; transferred to Fer- Anguillaro, Everso d', 84 rara, 99-101. See also Dudum Antonio, Prince of Salerno, 42 sacrum, Eugenius IV, Quoniam Antony, bishop of Oporto, 91, 93 alto, Sigismund Aquileia, Patriarchate of, 23 Basilian monks of the Sicilies, 191 Armenians, 100, 203; in Florence, Beaufort, Cardinal, 157 134-135; see also Florence, Beaupère, John, 43 Council of Benedict XII, 3, 6 219 220 INDEX Benedict XIII, antipope, 11, 12, 19, 94-95, 102-103, 105, 110, 117- 20, 24, 25, 27 118, 126, 128, 141-142, 156, Benedictines, 187-189 161, 176, 184; as legate in Benedictus sit Deus, 157 Hungary, 154 ff.; as president of Bessarion, 115, 128, 130 the Council of Basel, 43, 49, 50, Biondo, Flavio, 175, 196 59, 60, 61, 62, 77, 79, 80-81, 85, Bisticci, Vespasiano da, 18, 20, 120, 89-90 170-172, 190 Chakedon, Council of, 100, 134, Bologna, 29-31 143 Boniface IX, 11, 13, 17 Charles IV, King of the Romans, 10 Bosnia, King of, 182 Charles V, King of France, 9 Boullotes, Manuel, 91 Charles VI, King of France, 12 Braccio of Montone, 169 Charles VII, King of France, 87-88, "Brother Antony," 133 111-112, 145, 146, 160 ff., 186 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 70 Chrysoberges, Andrew, 183 Bruni, Leonardo, 13, 72 Chrysoloras, Manuel, 70 Cistercians, 191 Clement V, 3, 4, 6, 166 Cairo, Sultan of, 156 Clement VI, 4, 6 Caldoro, condottiero of Queen of Clement VII, 152 Naples, 41 Clement VII, antipope, 8, 11, 12 Caldoro, condottiero of René, 147 Colonnas, 20, 39, 41-42, 45, 46, Camaldolese, 187, 190-191 54, 55, 56, 62, 73, 82-84, 172, Camblak, Gregory, 204 174, 176, 178 Camera, papal, 185 Colonna, Otto, 27, 39; see also Campidoglio, 13 Martin V Canedoli, the, 67 Colonna, Prosper, Cardinal, 76 Canons Regular of St. Augustine, Conciliar Theory, 36, 52, 141-144; 193 defeat of, 208 ff. Cantate Domino, 151 Condottieri, 28, 178 ff.; see also Capranica, Dominic, Cardinal, 39, Attendolo, M.; Caldoro; Carillo, 45, 47, 50, 76, 176 S.; della Stella, N.; da Tolentino, Cardinals, College of, 11, 39, 78, N.; Fortebraccio; Piccinino, N.; .80, 208 Sforza, F.; Vitteleschi, J. Carillo, Alfonso, Cardinal, 31, 33, Condulmaro, Antony, 91, 198 45 Condulmaro, Francis, Cardinal, 64, Carillo, Sanchez, 46 65, 67, 73, 104, 107, 155, 184, Carvajal, Cardinal, 161, 162 197 Casanova, Cardinal, 66, 76 Condulmaro, Gabriel, 3, 13; Bishop Casini, Anthony, Cardinal, 76 of Siena, 21; canon, 18; cardinal, Castel Sant' Angelo, 20 22, 24; at Council of Constance, Castiglione, Cardinal Branda da, 30, 27, 28; early life of, 15-17; his 45, 76 commendams, 34, 35; his reform Cerulini, the, 18 of monks, 35; Prothonotary Apos- Cerulini of Alga, the, 187 tolic, 21; Treasurer, 21; vicar of Cervantes, Cardinal, 76, 80, 95, Constantinople, 22; Supreme 103, 190; as papal legate, 89-90 Pontiff, see under Eugenius IV Cesarini, Julian, Cardinal, 40, 88, Condulmaro, Mark, 15, 17, 197; as INDEX 221 governor of Avignon, 45; as da Offida, Baidasare, see Offida, governor of Bologna, 67; as legate Baldasare da to Constantinople, 91 da Sarteano, Albert, see Sarteano, Condulmaro, Michael, 17 Albert da Condulmaro, Polissena, 15 da Sena, Antonello, see Sena, An- Condulmaro, Simeon, 15 tonello da Constance, Council of, 24-28, 46, da S. Marcello, Christopher, see San 50, 57, 62, 99, 103, 137, 140, Marcello, Christopher da 141, 144, 162, 164, 182, 184, da S. Vito, Antony, see San Vito, 204, 209 Antony da Constantine, Armenian Patriarch, da Tagliacozzo, John Bernardi, see 134, 154, 165 Tagliacozzo, John Bernardi da Constantinople, fall of, 203 David, III, of Abyssinia, 152 Constantinople, Patriarch of, 71, 74, de' Conti, Cardinal Lucido, see 100-101, 105-107 Conti, Cardinal Lucido de Conti, the, 41, 42 de' Conti, Francis, see Conti, Conti, Cardinal Lucido de, 65, 66, Francis de 76 de Luna, Pedro, see Luna, Pedro de Conti, Francis de, 76 de' Medici, Cosimo, see Medici, Conventuals, 190 Cosimo de Copts, 151-152, 169, 203 de Menthon, Nicod, 89 Copts, Patriarch of, 133, 151 Demetrius, Prince, 105, 107 Correr, Angelo, as Latin Patriarch Defensor pacts, 5 of Constantinople, 16 if.; as Pope de Foix, Cardinal Peter, see Foix, Gregory XII, 13, 18-27; see also Cardinal Peter de Gregory XII d' Este, Luke, see Este, Luke d' Correr, Antony, 16 ff., 35, 198; as d' Este, Nicholas, see Este, Nicholas hishop of Bologna, 21; as bishop d' of Methone, 21; as cardinal, 22, de Strata, Matthew, see Strata, 24; at Council of Constance, 27; Matthew de as Papal Camerarius, 21; as pro- Diet of Frankfort, 113 curator-general of Constantinople, de Versailles, Peter, see Versailles, 22 Peter de Correr, Paul, 20 di Lello Pétrone, Paolo, see Lello Pétrone, Paolo di D di Lonato, James, see Lonato, James, d' Acciapaccio, Nicholas, see Acci- di appacio, Nicholas d' Dioscorus, 151 da Bisticci, Vespasiano, see Bisticci, di Rienzo, Cola, see Rienzo, Cola di Vespasiano da Dishypatus, John, 90-91, 128 da Castiglione, Cardinal Branda, di Vico, James, see Vico, James di see Castiglione, Cardinal Branda Doctoris Gentium, 95-96, 99, 102, da, 206 d' Anguillaro, Everso, see Anguil- Doge of Venice, 56, 105, 113 laro, Everso d' Dominicans, 187-190 da Monte, Peter, 129 Dominici, John, Bishop of Ragusa, da Montone, Braccio, see Montone, 20, 22, 25, 26 Braccio da Donatello, 71, 194 222 INDEX Donation of Constantine, 179 Felix V, antipope, 145, 146, 148- Donato, of Venice, 59 150, 157-161, 177 Dorotheus of Mitylene, 130 Ferrara, Council of, 103, 112-116, Dudum sacrum, 53, 56, 57-59, 181 199, 206 Ferretti, Angelo, 31 Filioque, 113-118, 123-124 Ecumenical Council, 5 Florence, Council of, 69-72, 116- Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary, 155 121, 151, 157, 179, 199, 204, Ephesus, Council of, 115, 151 205, 206, 208 Este, Luke d\ 16 Foix, Cardinal Peter de, 45, 49, 62, Este, Nicholas d', 104, 107 76, 159 Este, family, 197 Fortebraccio, 46, 54-56, 62-65, 67, Etsi non dubitemus, 143-144, 145 82, 172 Eugenius IV, 43, 73, 99, 101, 110; Foucquet, John, 194 the achievements of, 203-212; Foschi, Cardinal, 62 and the Armenians, 100; backed Fra Angelico, 71, 194 by Western monarchs, 114; Fra Basil, 134-135 character of, 170-200; and Franciscans, 157, 187 Charles VII, 111-112; and the Frankfort, Diet of, 162-165 Colonnas, 41-42; and the Copts, "Fraticelli," the, 5 151-152; and the Council of Frederick of Austria, 155, 160-164, Basel, 47-51, 53-54, 56-62, 72- 169, 209 74, 76-81, 94-96, 102-105, 137- Vrequens, decree of the Council of 147; and the Council of Florence, Constance, 36, 49, 164 69-73, 121-130; death of, 166; Fréron, Simon, 88, 93 description of, 120, 169; and the Furlano, Italiano, 56, 108 Diet of Frankfort, 162-165; and the Greeks, 52, 72-76, 91-93, 135-137, 152-154; financial dif- Gaeta, 23 ficulties of, 109; meeting with the Gaetani, Onorato, 84 Patriarch, 105-107; moves Coun- Garatoni, Christopher, 51, 53, 74, cil to Florence, 116-118; and the 75, 91, 93, 100-101, 133, 136, Nestorians, 157; and the Papal 152, 153 States, 45-46, 54-5-6, 62-68, 81- George, Prince of Serbia, 155 85, 147-151, 158-160; as a re- Georgia, Church in, 100 former, 184 if.; and the throne of Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 71, 200 Naples, 87-88; and union with other Christians, 133-134; and Giustiniano, Laurence, 16 the use of intemuncios, 85-87. Great Schism of the West, 3, 8 See also Condulmaro, Gabriel. Greek Church, the, 100, 106 Eugenicus, Mark, 111, 114, 125, Gregory X, 166 127, 129, 152, 199 Gregory XI, 4, 8 Eutyches, 129 Gregory XII, 3, 11, 31, 188 Exposcit debitum, 104 Gregory, Archbishop of Moldo^Wal- Exultate Deo, 134 lachia, 182 Gregory, Archbishop of Kiev, 205 Gregory, procurator of the See of Farnese, Rainuccio, 63-64 Alexandria, 127 INDEX 223 H Helvetic League, 160 Ladislas of Naples, 20, 23, 24 Henry VI, King of England, 135, Ladislas, King of Poland, 155 if. 143, 146 Laetentur caeli, 127, 199 Henry VIII, King of England, 7 La Mesticanza, 173 Heraclea, Metropolitan of, 152 Lausanne, See of, 73 Hugolin, 159 Leghorn, 22 Hunyadi, John, 155 ff. Lewis IV of Bavaria, 4 ff. Hus, 12, 209 Lello Pétrone, Paolo di, 174 Hussites, 40, 43, 44, 47, 49, 209 Lollards, 12 Lonato, James di, 55 Louis, Dauphin of France, 160, 177 Innocent VI, 4 Louis II of Anjou, 11, 24 Innocent VII, 11, 13, 18; brief of, Louis III of Anjou, 87 17 Lucca, 20, 22 Isaias, Armenian bishop, 101 Luna, Pedro de (Benedict XIII, Isabel, Queen of Naples, 108 antipope), 13 Isabel, wife of René of Anjou, 94 Luther, 209 Isidore of Russia, 112, 117, 124, Lyons, Council of, 166 130, 135, 139, 205 M J Malatesta, Charles, 22, 24, 26, 55 Jacopo of Iesi, 32 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 158 James of Udine, 22 Manichaean heresy, 182 Joan, Queen of Naples, 4, 31, 41, Mark of Ephesus, 118-119 87 Maronites, the, 157 John VIII, Emperor of Constan- Marsiglio of Padua, 5 tinople, 36, 42, 74, 75, 101, 109, Martin V, 27-36, 39, 40, 43, 45, 111, 113, 114, 116-130, 135, 51, 74, 87, 99, 164, 173, 178, 152-154 182, 184, 186, 188, 191, 196 John XXII, 3, 4, 6 Massaccio, 71 John XXIII, antipope, 11, 24-26, Mazzatosti, the, 64 29, 31, 140, 144 Medici, 69, 116, 130 John of Carvajal, 163 Medici, Cosimo de, 69, 88, 113, 158 John, Emperor of the Ethiopians, Ménage, Matthew, 76, 78 134 Menger, Heinrich, 88, 93 John of Jandun, 5 Metrophanes, Patriarch of Constan- John of Montenero, 79, 118-119, tinople, 152-154 121, 123, 125, 199 Michèle, Antonio, 194 John of Palomar, 40 Monasticism, Eugenius IV's reforms James of Primadizzi, 134 of, 184 if. John of Ragusa, 40, 88-89, 93, 184 Monitorium (1437), 139 John of Torquemada, 79, 141-143 Monitorium (1440), 146 Joseph II, Patriarch of Constan- Montefeltri, the, 41 tinople, 106, 117, 124, 129, 152 Montefeltre, 55 Montone, Braccio da, 28-32, 173 Κ Moyses vir Dei, 139-142, 145 Kemp of York, 143, 146 Multa et admirablia, 157 224 INDEX

MuradII, 155 ff. Philanthropinus, 128 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 109 Philip of Burgundy, 87, 94, 114, 155, 161, 162, 180 Ν Piccinino, Nicholas, 63-65, 67, 82, Narses, 134-135 108, 115, 117, 147-150, 159, Nathaneal, Greek bishop of Rhodes, 175, 176, 178 130 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius, 161- Nestorians, the, 157 165, 169, 177, 181, 186 Nestorius, 129 Picenardo, John, of Cremona, 16 Nicene Creed, 113 Pietrasanta, 20 Nicholas V, 169, 205 Pisa, Council of, 22-24, 210 Nicholas of Tolentino, 42, 169 Pisanello, Victor, 194 Nicholas of Cusa, 91, 162, 209 Pius II, 170 Nicoli, Niccolo, 72 Poggio, 13, 157, 195 Nocera, 11 Poland-Lithuania, effects of Florence Novara, Bishop of, 176 on, 204 ff. Pontano, Louis, 88 Ο Ponterdera, 82-84 Poor Clares, the, 191 Observants, 187-190 Pope Sylvester, 165 Offida, Baidasare da, 67, 173, 175- Praemunire, 7 176 "Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges," Oratio synodalis de primatu, 142 112, 186, 209 Ordelaffi, the, 108 Prester John, 152 Ordelaffi, Antony, 83 Pridem ex justis, 103 Orsini, 41, 42, 55, 64, 172, 178 Prignano, Bartholomew, 8 Orsini, James, 82 Provisors, first statue of, 7 Orsini, Orsino, 73, 82-84 Orsini, Cardinal, 43, 62, 65, 76

Queen of Naples, 28 Padua, Bishop of, 81 Quirino, Marino, 16 Palamas, Gregory, 124 Quoniam alto I, 43 Palamism, 125 Quoniam alto II, 43, 183 Palermo, Bishop of, 94 " R Papal States, 6, 8, 11, 13, 158-160, 179, 200; and conflict between Ram, Dominic, 45 Martin V and Braccio, 28-33; Raymond of Capua, 188 and the diplomacy of Eugenius Reichenthal, Ulrich von, 204 IV, 81-85 Rene of Anjou, 81, 87-88, 94, 111, Paris, University of, 12 114, 119, 147-150, 159, 172, 177 Patriarch, Armenian, 101 Rido, Antonio, 174 ff. Paul II, 15, 198 Rienzo, Cola di, 8 Perpignan, 22 Rite, Eugenius IV's ideas of, 204 ff. Peter, bishop of Digne, 91, 93 Rimini, 22, 24 Peter, monk, 152 Robert of Geneva (Clement VII, Pétrone, Paolo di Lello, 84 antipope), 9 ff. INDEX 225 Rochetaillée, Cardinal, 76 Emperor, 48, 50, 51, 53, 57, 59, Rome, 64-65, 191-194 79, 102, 103, 169, 194, 197, 199 Rupert, rival for the German throne, Silvestrines, 190, 191 24 Staurophoroi, 127 Ruthenians of Oriental rite, 206 Strata, Matthew de, 16

Sagundino, Nicholas, 130 Tagliacozzo, John Bernardi da, 59 St. Antoninus, 166, 170, 176, 190; Taranto, Archbishop of, 81, 90, 95, Chronica of, 170 147 St. Augustine, rule of, 18 Tebaldeschi, Cardinal, 10 St. Basil, 119 Texier, Barthélémy, 188 St. Bernardine of Siena, 190 Therunda, L. 179 St. Didacus, 190 Thomas, Emperor of the Indians, St. Epiphanius, 119 134 St. Frances Romana, 57 Thomas of Sarzana, 163 St. James of Marchia, 190 Traversari, Ambrose, 72, 78, 79, St. John Capistrano, 187, 190 112, 191 St. John Damascene, 118 Trebizond, Church in, 100 St. Leo I, 134, 210 Trinci, 108 St. Nicholas of Tolentino, 42, 169 Troyes, archdeacon of, 127 St. Peter Regalatus, 190 Tudeschi, Nicholas, Cardinal, 88, Salutato, Coluccio, 13, 196 103, 114, 137, 150 Salvatoris et Dei nostri, 91 Turks, 100, 135, 180 San Giorgio di Alga, monastery of, 17, 34 U San Lorenzo in Damaso, Cardinal Urban V, Blessed, 4 of, 166 Urban VI, 8 ff., 11 San Marcello, Christopher da, 59 Uccello, Paolo, 71 San Nicolo, monastery of, 17 San Vito, Antony da, 78 V Sarteano, Albert da, 133-134 Varano, Rodolfo, 30 Savelli, Battista, 82-84 Varna, Batde of, 156 Savona, 19 ff. Vatican, the, 13 Scarampi, Cardinal, 150 Vergerio, Pietro Paolo, 13 Scotti, Daniel, 82 Versailles, Peter de, 79 Sena, Antonello da, 56 Vézelay, Abbé of, 40 Senigallia, Bishop of, 40 Vico, Count of, 46, 64 Sforza, Francis, 32, 55, 56, 63-67, Vico, James de, 41, 54, 56, 82-84 82-83, 108, 119, 147-151, 157- Vienne, Council of, 166 159, 172, 176, 180, 197,200 Vigilanti, 31 visita graziosa, 192 Sicut pia mater, 74-76, 88-90, 101, Visconti, Bianca, 148 107, 127 Visconti, Philip Maria, 29, 46, 55, Siena, Council of, 43, 184, 209 56, 65, 67, 82-83, 87, 94, 103, Sigismund, 24-27, 46; at Council 108-109, 114, 121, 147-149, of Basel, 61-62; as Holy Roman 157-159, 180, 196, 199; hostility 226 INDEX of, to Eugenius IV, 36; relations w W of, with Martin V, 32-34 Waldensians, 12 s, 12 Vitelleschi, John, 42, 46, 54, 56, 67, Wenceslas, 10 10 82-84, 88, 94, 147, 169, 173- Wyclif, 12, 209 209 175 A NOTE ON THE TYPE

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