A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [382]
At Pisa in 1409 the reform issue, eloquently sponsored by d’Ailly and Gerson, was suppressed while all energies were engaged in deposing both the Avignon and Roman popes and electing a single successor. This individual promptly died, to be replaced by a martial Italian, Baldassare Cossa, more condottiere than cardinal, who took the name of John XXIII. Since his two rival predecessors still clung to their Sees, the schism was now triple. In France’s difficulties, the initiative passed to Emperor Sigismund, who summoned the memorable Council that met at Constance on imperial territory from 1414 to 1418.
With historic consequence for the Church, Constance took upon itself a third issue, the suppression of heresy, meaning all the dissident strains which had risen out of the malaise of the last century. Vitality in religion had passed to the dissidents, mystics, and reformers, and, in a negative sense, to practices of sorcery and witchcraft, although the emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution. Denunciations, trials, and burnings increased, and in its tortures of supposed heretics the Inquisition was as savage and ingenious in cruelty as any infidel Turk or Chinese. Witch-hunting was to reach epidemic proportions in the second half of the century, marked by the famous treatise Malleus Maleficarum of 1487, an encyclopedia for the detection of demonology and its devotees.
Constance was concerned with the more fundamental heresy of Jan Hus, ideologically the successor of Wyclif. Summoned to explain and defend his doctrines at Constance, he was condemned and burned at the stake in 1415. He might well have claimed, anticipating Bishop Latimer, that the flames in which he died lit the candle that would not be put out.
The Council also managed after a series of dramatic struggles with John XXIII, to depose him on charges of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest (of which Gibbon remarks that the “most scandalous” charges were suppressed) and elect Cardinal Colonna of Rome as Martin V. The previous Roman Pope having been induced to resign, and the still obstinate Benedict of Avignon being effectively isolated, the schism was declared closed, although it was to revive briefly over the issue of reform. The greater struggle between Council and papacy for supremacy remained. Under Martin V, the Papal States and their revenues were recovered, and the material, if not spiritual, gain in strength enabled the papacy under Martin’s successor, Eugenius IV, to renew the conciliar contest at the Council of Basle. Like some wrestle of giants, this Council lasted for eighteen years.
Doctrinal controversies raged, groups seceded, rump councils convened, a rival Pope—no less than the reigning Count of Savoy, who could pay his own way—was elected as Felix V. Reforms and restrictions on the papacy were voted by one side and rejected by the other, while states and sovereigns were again divided by power politics. In the end, the reformers were defeated, Felix V resigned, and the Council of Basle was dissolved in 1449. The papacy, firmly Italian once more, acknowledged conciliar supremacy on paper but regained its primacy in fact. Its triumph, celebrated at the Jubilee of 1450, proved a phantom. The papacy was never again to be what it had been before the schism and the Councils. It had lost prestige in the first of these crises, and influence and control over the national churches in the second. In an expression of “Gallican liberties,” a French synod in 1438 adopted reforms independently and restricted