16

The Restored Papacy

Martin V, vigorous, able, and politically astute, lived relatively simply despite coming from one of the great baronial families of Rome. He nonetheless made ample, sometimes harsh use of his family’s prestige and power when it served his purpose. He was determined to return the papacy to Rome, his family seat, but, more important, the see of Blessed Peter. To many people the decision to return there was not a foregone conclusion. Rome, never easy to govern or protect, had been neglected and allowed to drift for a century. The infrastructure had eroded, churches and public buildings fallen into disrepair, and the surrounding countryside become the home of brigands. Moreover, the Papal States, which provided the first line of defense for the city, were controlled by local lords or, sometimes, upstart men of fortune such as Braccio da Montone, who dominated much of the territory. Rome itself was held by Neapolitan troops, which required Martin to negotiate his entry with Queen Joanna II.

With Martin begins the slow evolution of the conviction on the part of the popes that they can no longer rely on foreign princes to protect them. They had tried that many times, and many times it had failed—their protectors turned into their masters. They would now try to rely on themselves, by establishing firm control over the States and increasing the strength of their army. They would begin ever more to consider themselves and be considered by others as monarchs in the full sense of the term. This was not exactly new, but it was now more obvious, deliberate, programmatic, and successful.

Martin slowly made his way from Constance to Rome, negotiating and threatening, until finally on September 28, 1420, two years after he had closed the council, he entered the city. Before he could do much else he had to bring Braccion under control, which he did when his forces defeated him in 1424. Five years later he had to put down a serious revolt in the States led by Bologna. Meanwhile he turned his attention to rebuilding the city, which marks the beginning of Rome’s architectural renaissance. The restoration enterprise will be carried forward even more vigorously by Martin’s successors to give us by the middle of the seventeenth century the Rome we know today. Although the papacy continued to suffer many vicissitudes, it and the city of Rome were on their way to a new stability.

Martin showed his organizational skills in his management of the curia and in his appointment of able and upright men as cardinals. He kept a tight rein on them. Like a number of his predecessors he wanted to better relations with the Greek-speaking church and, though nothing came of it, he even agreed in principle to the holding of a council in the East. He supported the charismatic Franciscan preacher, Saint Bernardino of Siena, against his detractors. He denounced violent anti-Jewish preaching and forbade under pain of automatic excommunication the forced baptism of Jewish children. He did most of the right things, but he ruled with an iron hand, which his family’s wealth and connections enabled him to do. Martin in his turn favored his relatives with grants of land and other benefactions that fueled resentment against them and him.

Though elected by the council, he was as ardent a promoter of the traditional prerogatives of the papacy as any of his predecessors. He nevertheless considered himself bound by the decree Frequens. Precisely five years after the conclusion of Constance, he convoked a council for Pavia, near Milan, in April 1423. Plague forced the council to move to Siena. Martin, fearing antipapal sentiment, decided not to appear at it and, since attendance was poor, he was able to close it in February 1424, without its accomplishing much of anything. Bishops did not want to spend months away from home at meetings that had no urgency.

Before the Council of Pavia-Siena adjourned, however, it decreed that in conformity with Frequens another council was to meet in seven years, 1431, and it designated Basel as the site. Martin duly convoked the Council of Basel, but he died in February 1431, five months before the council opened. After his obsequies the cardinals gathered in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in the center of Rome and chose cardinal Gabriele Condulmaro, a Venetian, nephew of Pope Gregory XII, who took the name Eugene IV.

The new pope was to have a long and stormy pontificate (1431–l447). A devout churchman, favored by his uncle with early promotions up the ecclesiastical ladder of honors, he lacked the finesse of his predecessor in dealing with the complicated problems facing him. He also lacked Martin’s political base in Rome to back him in time of crisis. His pontificate ultimately ended well, but almost despite Eugene rather than because of him. Like Martin, he was extremely wary of councils, one of which had forced his uncle’s resignation. His pontificate would be defined, however, first unhappily by the Council of Basel and then happily by the Council of Florence.

Even as he began to deal with the Council of Basel hundreds of miles away, he took on the Colonna family in Rome. He heavy-handedly forced members of the family to surrender vast territories Martin had granted them, and he similarly tried to move against Colonna partisans in other ways. Although what he tried to accomplish may have been praiseworthy, he acted too soon, too harshly, and in too unconsidered a manner. The Colonnas and their allies were not pleased. They were powerful. They stirred up as much trouble for Eugene as they could, which was considerable.

Within two years of his election, Eugene’s position in Rome had become desperate. In May 1434, open rebellion against him broke out, and he tried to slip out of the city in such a clumsy disguise that he was recognized and pelted with stones and rotten fruit as he finally made a successful escape. He had already lost control of the Papal States, which were now overrun by the troops of Francesco Sforza working for Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan. Eugene could not, therefore, take refuge in papal cities like Viterbo and Orvieto, so he threw himself on the mercy of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence and was taken in as an honored refugee. He would reside in Florence for the next nine years, until 1443.

While these dramatic events were unfolding, Eugene was also running into problems with the council, whose necessity he did not see and whose potential for trouble-making he feared. He was, meanwhile, continuing Martin’s conversations with Constantinople, which again was looking to the West for aid against the Ottoman Turks threatening the city. When the council officially opened at Basel in July 1431, attendance was so poor that it could not do business. It was able to hold its first formal session only on December 14. The months of wheel-spinning had given Eugene the excuse he needed. On December 18 he dissolved the council and at the same time promised another in eighteen months in Bologna that the Greeks would attend and over which he would preside in person.

Eugene’s precipitous action backfired badly. It stunned the council and set off a howl of protest, which won support for the council in the world at large—support that it had hitherto lacked. Haec Sancta and Frequens gave those present at Basel a strong sense of their authority. The council refused to disperse. On the contrary, attendance increased. Eugene by this time had lost even the support of his cardinals, with only six out of twenty-one siding with him. He backtracked but in stages, which further inflamed resentment. He eventually received an ultimatum from the council threatening to start proceedings against him unless he appeared.

For a short while it looked as if another schism was in the making, which was averted only through the intervention and mediation with the council of emperor Sigismund. Eugene, now with his hands full with the problems in Rome and the Papal States, had his back to the wall. In the most humiliating terms, he had to acknowledge the council’s legitimacy and rescind his bull of dissolution. The council of Basel was moving rapidly into a radical Conciliarism: council supreme over pope.

Basel had won the first round, a victory that only increased its sense of power. Constance had taken reform of the church “in head and members, in faith and discipline” as one of its three major goals, but it had been able to address the reform only as the council was winding down in 1418. Basel now took it up with a vengeance. On June 9, 1435, it abolished throughout Christendom almost all papal taxes, including the annates, and forbade the exacting of fees for official documents issued by the curia—reform of “the head.” Eugene immediately denounced the measures and sent a solemn protest to the Christian princes.

The council and the pope were on a collision course. What ultimately divided them was the possibility of reunion with the Greek church. Eugene was in contact with emperor John VIII Palaeologus, but so was the council. On September 7, 1434, the council issued a decree, making known that the emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople had received envoys from the council and that the Greeks had appointed three emissaries to it. The emissaries came to Basel and expressed their desire for reunion. The council offered several cities as possible sites for a council of reunion but excluded Florence and Modena, because Eugene had proposed them. The Greeks, however, favored the papal choices—they were of easier access for them. More important, the Greeks realized that for the reunion to work it had to be effected under the auspices of the bishop of Rome.

With that Eugene’s moment had at last arrived. He transferred the council to Ferrara, an important city in the Papal States that was now under control, and the Greeks came. After six months, with pestilence spreading in the region and funds running out, Eugene transferred the council to Florence when Cosimo agreed to help fund it. He had struck a mortal blow to Basel. Although some bishops remained at Basel, it had lost its attractiveness. The prospect of a council of reunion, legitimately convoked by the pope, was appealing, and the prospect of another schism was horrifying. The still sizable remnant at Basel suspended Eugene in January 1438, declared him deposed the following year, and elected Felix V to succeed him. The French continued for a while to support Basel, but as Florence moved to its happy conclusion Basel sputtered almost into insignificance.

The Greeks arrived at Ferrara and then at Florence in full force, led by emperor John himself. He brought with him Joseph, the patriarch of Constantinople. The full delegation of bishops, theologians, notaries, and others numbered perhaps as many as seven hundred. Of those seven hundred “Greeks” about two hundred were not Greek. The delegation included, for instance, the metropolitan of Kiev and bishops from Georgia. With their exotic (to Western eyes) vestments and clothing and with their different liturgical forms and chant, they fascinated even the sophisticated Florentines.

In comparison the Latin representation seemed small and lackluster—only about two hundred bishops, supported of course by many theologians and hangers-on. But the pope was there, which gave the assembly its seal of authenticity. Both he and Joseph were present at the sessions, held in the cathedral, next to Giotto’s magnificent campanile, bell tower. Florence was aglow with the first brilliance of its literary and artistic renaissance.

The council had a profound cultural impact on the West by sparking a new enthusiasm for Greek literature and philosophy. Except for a few pockets here and there, knowledge of the Greek language had practically died out in the West. What medieval scholars knew of Greek learning they knew through Latin translation. That now began to change rapidly. Cosimo de’ Medici, for instance, commissioned the first translation into Latin of the works of Plato, a direct result of the impact the council had on him.

It was John, the emperor, who propelled the quest for reunion. As always, sincere piety was admixed with political exigencies. He desperately needed Western military assistance against the Turks. The Greek bishops felt the urgency less, but many of them, with the same mixed motives, wanted the council to succeed. Patriarch Joseph was old and in poor health. He died just as the council concluded and was buried in Florence. Although he provided weak leadership, the Greeks tried to hold their ground and were not ready for reunion at any price.

The council focused on four old issues: first, papal primacy—was it a primacy of honor or of jurisdiction; secondly, the filioque—did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and Son or from the Father through the Son; third, was there in the afterlife a state known as purgatory; fourth, in the Eucharist was leavened or unleavened bread to be used. On that last issue, which seems trivial but that carried centuries of symbolic weight, the council made the sensible and obvious compromise: the West could legitimately continue with unleavened, and the East with leavened. Purgatory was a teaching developed in the West in tandem with the development of indulgences and was undeveloped in the East. Nonetheless, the Greeks found sufficient basis in their own tradition to allow them to go along with it. The Greeks agreed with the teaching that the Spirit proceeded from both Father and Son according to the explanation of it provided in the decree.

The big sticking point of course was the authority of the papacy. Some of the Greeks were persuaded by arguments, some simply bowed to pressure. They in any case agreed to a remarkably strong statement: the pope had “full power of tending, ruling, and governing the whole church.” A moment of supreme triumph for Eugene! Finally, on July 6, 1439, the bull of reunion was published, Laetentur coeli—“Let the heavens rejoice!” The Greeks departed, but further reunions were negotiated, with the Armenians in 1439, with the Copts in 1442, with the Syrians in 1444, with the Chaldeans and Maronites in 1445.

The reunion with the Greeks came to naught. Even in Florence many Greeks supported the decree only tepidly, reluctantly, and perhaps with fingers crossed. When the delegation returned home, it was greeted especially by the monks with cries of shame and betrayal. The expected financial, political, and military aid from the West never arrived. Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, less than fifteen years after the council ended.

The tragedy of the fall of Constantinople was in the future, however, when Eugene returned to Rome in 1443, enabled to do so by the great boost to his prestige from the council and to a favorable shift in the politics of the kingdom of Naples. The crusade he launched that year to help the Greeks ended disastrously, but otherwise his last years were tranquil and successful, a striking contrast with his first. He died in 1447. Only to his successor, Nicholas V, did the anti-pope of Basel, Felix V, submit his resignation in 1449. Nicholas received the resignation graciously, named Felix a cardinal, and incorporated several of Felix’s cardinals into his college. He thus brought the schism to a quiet close.

Fortune smiled on Nicholas V. Elected as a compromise candidate, he proved to be just the adroit and conciliatory pontiff needed after stormy days. As a young man he acted as tutor to the children of some of the leading families of Florence, including the Medici, which gave him invaluable connections in that city. During the Council of Florence he made a favorable impression on Eugene, who created Nicholas a cardinal the year before he died. Nicholas owed the diplomatic and political success of his early years as pope partly to the fact that he had not been a cardinal long enough to get embroiled in the rivalries among them.

Nicholas declared 1450 a jubilee year. It was a great success, bringing thousands of pilgrims to the city, which pleased the merchants and helped fill depleted papal coffers. The single most celebrated event during the year was the canonization of Bernardine of Siena, which brought special jubilation to the Italian pilgrims who had heard him preach. The jubilee boosted the prestige of the papacy, which had been so badly damaged in the century leading up to the Council of Florence, and it also boosted the prestige of the city of Rome, now experienced by the pilgrims as something better than its reputation as a den of thieves and robbers. Funds from the jubilee provided the pope with money to repair an aqueduct. It brought water into Rome that later would flow into the famed Trevi Fountain. With Nicholas’s pontificate the city’s fortunes took a significant turn for the better, which would continue, not without setbacks, as the decades rolled on.

Nicholas is remembered most of all as a patron of culture. Deeply devout, he was also deeply and broadly learned. He had the papal library brought to Rome from Avignon. He invited scholars to his court to translate Christian and classical Greek authors into Latin. He was able therefore to add some 1,200 Greek and Latin manuscripts to the collection, which makes him the real founder of the Vatican Library. Elected on the feast of Thomas Aquinas, he initiated an annual liturgical celebration of the saint in the Church of the Minerva that grew to be the most solemn such event in Rome outside the precincts of the Vatican. At his behest Fra Angelico, the Florentine Dominican, frescoed a small chapel in the Vatican, an early sign that Rome would succeed Florence as a Renaissance city, par excellence.

Because the Lateran palace was in such a dreadful state of disrepair, Nicholas settled in the Vatican and set about restoring the Borgo, the area around it. His plans for that area for the most part remained plans, but he established a precedent. The Vatican displaced the Lateran as the popes’ habitual residence, a tradition that has persisted to the present day.

In 1452 Nicholas crowned Frederick III emperor in Saint Peter’s, the last imperial coronation ever to take place in Rome. It too was a triumph for the pope, but the next year he uncovered a plot to assassinate him, which revealed that underneath a surface calm in Rome unrest still seethed. The would-be assassin, Stefano Porcaro, dreamed of throwing off papal government of the city to establish a republic in its place. The fall of Constantinople that same year brought Nicholas further sadness. It ended for the papacy and the Christian church an era that began over a millennium earlier with the accession of Constantine the Great to the imperial throne and his transfer of the capital from Rome to the city on the Bosporus.