Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 167 – The Great Western Schism (Part II), which is also episode 4 of season 9 “the Reformation before the Reformation”
When the Great Western Schism was finally resolved at Pisa and Constance, Christendom rejoiced.
Or so we have been told. But was it really such a devastating, catastrophic event that left the papacy mortally wounded, so impaired that it crumbled when next the power of the pope “to bind and to loosen” was questioned? Or was it just an affair, a temporary misunderstanding created by some drafting error in canon law that prevented the removal of an incapacitated pope?
Me thinks that is worth investigating even if it means diving deep into theology and canon law. But do not worry we will also do a spot of fiscal policy just to lighten things up a bit.
But before we start le me remind you that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too, either by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks so much to David W., Steven M., Kira V., Hanyu H., Marco C., Stephen and Anne Elise who have already taken the plunge
And with that, back to the show
Last week we looked at the sequence of events that made up the western schism up until and including the council of Pisa in 1409. But this is the same as looking at a bunch of revelers dancing on a suspension bridge. Yes, checking out their crazy moves and wild antics is entertaining, but the true story takes place underneath, in the vibrations that put the bridge into an uncomfortable motion, a motion that might or might not loosens the anchorages and weaken its structural integrity. Not much may be happening for weeks, months, even decades afterwards, but wait for the next time and the whole construction may collapse into the ravine…
That is what we are looking at today, the impact of the schism on the solidity and durability of the most powerful of medieval institutions, the church of Rome.
If you open up say the Encyclopedia Britannica or similar publication, you will find sentences like this quote: “The spectacle of rival popes denouncing each other produced great confusion and resulted in a tremendous loss of prestige for the papacy.” Wikipedia goes one step further and says: quote “this dissension and loss of unity ultimately culminated in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century”.
That is quite frankly what I always believed and have been taught in school. But reading modern scholars you will find a more restrained perspective. Donald Logan concludes in his Church in the Middle Ages Quote: “what happened then [i.e., in the 15th century] was not decay and decline, as often had been said, it was rather a period of unusual richness. A richness in which the church shared and to which it contributed”. Joelle Rollo-Koster a scholar who has spent a large chunk of her career on the Western Schism makes the point that for most peasants and burghers the schism was not a major source of anxiety. If they were living in the empire, they would have been told by their priest, their bishop and their king that the true pope was Urban VI and that the excommunicated usurper in Avignon was antichrist. And if you lived in France, you believed the same, just the other way around.
For most lay people there was no confusion. They weren’t asked to make a choice about either the obedience to follow or the content of the faith itself.
Even further on the “the schism did not matter” side is the Catholic Encoclypedia who calls it a “temporary misunderstanding…fed by politics and passions”. Well, they would, wouldn’t they. Or one of my favorites, the medievalist Walter Ullmann who reduces it to a “serious defect in the law of the church which provided no constitutional means of dealing with an obviously unsuitable pope”.
So, who is right, the ones who say the schism was a fatal blow to the papacy that became a major stepping stone to the Reformation or those who said it was an aberration that was repaired within a few decades, or are both sides right in their own way?
This is the History of the Germans Podcast, not the history of the papacy and certainly no seminar on canon law. So we have our limitations. But though we cannot get to the bottom of things, we can at least ask four fundamental questions which – at least in my view -determine whether something has fundamentally changed or not, namely:
- Did the constitutional role of the pope change due to the schism?
- Did the schism change role of the clergy?
- Did the perception of the church by lay people change due to the schism?
- Did the schism change the European political landscape?
Sounds fair? In which case, let’s dive right in.
Did the constitutional role of the papacy change because of the schism?
To answer that we need to first look at what the role of the pope had been before the schism. And that gets us straight back to pope Gregory VII, you know the one who had left emperor Henry IV to freeze outside the gates of Canossa for three days. If you are a very faithful and observant listener to the History of the Germans, you may remember that this Gregory VII had not only humiliated an emperor, but before doing so had put together 27 “statements of facts” about what a pope is and what he can do. Episode 32 if you want to go back.
And being a pope, Gregory VII conclusion was a little one-seded. A pope can do anything and anything he does is always right. He did elaborate a bit more and declared things like “That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet”, that he could depose bishops, kings and emperors and that “the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity”.
Gregory VII and after that his successors came to this conclusion based on Matthew 16:18 and 19. That is the passage in the bible where Jesus said: “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
From that canon law concluded that Peter was the immediate successor of Christ, his vicar on earth, the holder of the keys to heaven. He had practically the right to bind anyone on earth which must mean he had unlimited power over both spiritual and temporal matters. This power, said Gregory VII was then handed down undiminished along the line of Peter’s successors.
Having absolute power over all Christendom, Gregory concluded in his statement #19: “That he himself (i.e., the pope) may be judged by no one” and as #16 “That no synod shall be called a general one without his order”.
I am no theologian, but it might have helped Gregory to read on a further three verses in the same chapter where Jesus said to Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” But hey, who wants to read that bit…
Bottom line is that Gregory VII had declared the pope all powerful and the church infallible. And that view was repeated over and over again until it was in actual meaning of the word, gospel. Everybody had forgotten that 30 years before Gregory the emperor Henry III had deposed 3 popes, not for heresy but for simony. or that previous emperors had called and presided over church councils or that church councils had judged popes, like they had done at the famous cadaver synod of 897.
The great imperial popes of the 12th and 13th century filled Gregory VII’s premise of absolute power over Christendom with political reality when they smashed the Hohenstaufen emperors. Even though this external political power may have been significantly weakened by the move to Avignon, the notion that the pope was the absolute ruler of the church, cannot be judged by anyone and was the sole convener of a general council remained canon law.
Arguably during the time in Avignon administrative control of the papacy over the local churches tightened considerably, in particular under the leadership of John XXII and Benedict XII.
So by 1378, everybody agreed, the pope was the absolute lord over the church. He could not be judged for anything, well apart from heresy which would place him outside the community of the faithful. And nobody could convene a church council, but the pope. This approach had served the popes well for 300 years since Gregory first wrote down his 27 statements of fact, but would turn into a never ending nightmare when the schism of 1378 hit.
Le’s just recap how all this came about. In April 1378 the cardinals had elected the archbishop of Bari, Bartolomeo Prignani as pope Urban VI. 4 months later the cardinals changed their minds and the exact self-same voters who had elected Urban VI declared Urban’s election to have happened under duress and was therefore null and void. That done they elected cardinal Robert of Geneva as pope Clement VII.
In the subsequent legal debate scholars argued furiously about whether or not the Roman mob was indeed baying for the cardinals’ blood and whether that had influenced their decision. But that is the wrong question. Because that was not the reason the cardinals started the schism.
The reason was that they were regretting their choice. They did not like how Urban VI treated them, that he shouted at them, demanded they change their lifestyle and threatened them with dismissal or excommunication. And some, if not the majority had genuine concern about the mental state of the new pontiff and the impact this will have on the church as a whole.
If the church had been a parliamentary democracy, the problem would have been easy to resolve. Urban had lost the majority support in the decision making body and that would be the end of him.
Even in a presidential democracy this problem can be resolved through an impeachment or a declaration of mental incapacity under the 25th amendment. Well, at least in principle.
But the church was neither a parliamentary nor a presidential democracy. It was the exact opposite. The pope was an autocratic ruler whose legitimacy came from nobody else than from god. Jesus had said so himself.
Therefore the only way to remove a pope was to claim he was a heretic. But that was not a viable way the cardinals could go, since Urban VI was all sorts of things, but he wasn’t a heretic. Hence they resorted to the last remaining legal construct, the general principle that legal acts performed under duress are null and void, which is what got us this rather pointless debate over the bloodthirstiness of the Romans.
So the real question is, why did the cardinals not create a new legal framework that included a process for dismissal of a pope for mental weakness? Well, that is where the rubber hits the road.
If there could be some sort of court that could rule that Urban VI had lost his marbles, well that would be a judgement that was explicitly ruled out by Gregory VII’s statement #19 that the pope quote “may be judged by no one”.
Ok, so why did they not do away with just statement #19 and declared that uncanonical? That does not work either. Because Gregory VII had formulated these not as theses of opinions or doctrines, but as “statements of fact”. Hence dropping one of the statements means all the other statements could be changed too. And once you change these, the whole concept of the absolute power of the papacy crumbles into dust.
And nobody wanted that, not the cardinals, not the bishops and abbots, not the doctors of the university of Paris. Why, because if the most sacred of monarchs in the Christian world could be made to stand trial like any mere mortal, the medieval world would be turned upside down. The moment the pope was elected and crowned he ceased to be a normal human, but an embodiment of the church. The same was true for kings. Ernst Kantorowitz who you may remember from episode 93 had highlighted that there were two bodies of the king, the earthly, temporal man of flesh and blood and the spiritual embodiment of the kingdom itself.
What is at stake here is not just the question of whether Bartolomeo Prignani or Robert of Geneva, was the legitimate pope, but what it means to be a pope and what it means to be a king.
Figuring out how to end the schism had never been an intellectually difficult question. This was not an intractable conflict as we have them today between nation states or different kinds of religious or ethnic groups. Everybody agreed that there should only be one pope. And it was also clear that if the popes would not resign simultaneously that the way to move forward was a general church council. The two doctors Langenstein and Gelnhausen had proposed that as early as 1379. That was not the difficult part.
The difficult part was to decide to do it. Because by calling a general church council without a papal endorsement, and then empower the council with the right to judge and depose a pope, you tear apart Gregory VII’s statements of facts, the constitution of the Roman church they had adhered to for 3 centuries. It was a huge leap into the unknown which took 40 years and the exhaustion of all other possible avenues to a resolution before the cardinals were desperate enough to call the community of the faithful to Pisa for 1409.
What were they afraid of? One was simply that if a church council representing the community of the faithful could decide the fate of a pope, could a parliament or imperial diet representing the community of his subjects depose a king? Would all this result in a complete reassessment of medieval society?
Did it? Well what we do know is that in 1409 a general council of the roman church was called, not by either of the popes, and we know that this council was very well attended and that it decided to depose Benedict XIII and Gregory XII.
By doing so, the church had removed first statement #16 about the convocation of a council and statement #19 about judging the pope. And by doing so it had put into question not just these provisions, but the entirety of Gregory VII’s statements, the constitution of the papacy as it had existed until then.
So yes, the schism did change the constitutional role of the papacy. Later popes will work hard to roll back the conciliary movement, but the genie is out of the bottle. The successor of St. Peter is no longer the undisputed sole authority that can bind on earth what will remain bound in heaven. That is a big thing and another one of these doors we go through from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period.
Now let’s go to question #2, did the role of the clergy change in the wake of the schism?
Now I have been going on about lay piety as a huge driver of not just church politics but medieval politics in general. We should never forget that at this time the afterlife was something of crucial, daily significance to everyone. Crucial and daily. These people did not build cathedrals capable to hold double the city’s population just to keep up with the Joneses, but out of a deeply felt desire to get closer to god.
And because the afterlife was of such immediate urgency, laymen placed so much importance on the intermediaries they were told they needed to interact with the powers above. They wanted their monks and nuns to observe the brutally harsh rules of St. Benedict and the other monastic founders. They wanted their priests to be pious, well read, celibate and morally upstanding. Why, because these were their advocates before god who were to make their case that they should have a shortened time in purgatory and be ultimately admitted to Elysium. And who wants to have a mumbling, stumbling advocate who only got the job because his dad had bought it for him?
By 1378 the laity had been demanding all these things for 300 years and instead of things getting better, things had gotten even worse. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which date from between 1387 and 1400, right throughout the time of the schism are full of tales of drunk monks, dissolute priests and greedy papal officials. So are the stories in Bocaccio’s Decameron, written a bit earlier and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of Antoine de la Sale that were a little later.
What to do? Sure one could demand another wave of church reform as had happened in the 10th, the 11th and the 13th century bringing us the Cluniacs, the Cistercians and the Dominican and Franciscan friars. But all of these had become fat and lazy, maybe not all, but many. What guarantees that another attempt would finally yield the desired outcome? So radical alternative notions did gain traction.
The first of these alternative thinkers was abbot Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202). He was one of those preachers of the Apocalypse who predict the end of the world for a specific date. His date was the year 1260 which obviously passed without much incident. But what sets him apart from your run-of-the-mill doom-monger and left a lasting impact was his idea of how the apocalypse would unfold.
Joachim of Fiore predicted that antichrist would first return as an evil pope. And that after his fall an eternal gospel would be revealed that would completely replace the organized church. Humankind would be granted direct knowledge of god and his words and deepest meanings. There would hence no longer be the need to speak to god through a priest.
Despite these rather explosive predictions, the church did not condemn his views wholesale and his writings kept circulating long after his death. His idea that the organized church could be done away with completely was picked up by the next generation of non-conformist thinkers. William of Ockham (1287-1347) and Marsilius of Padua (1275-1342) openly questioned the all-encompassing power of the pope as we have already heard in episode 151.
Marsilius believed that all temporal power came from the “human legislator” who conferred its exercise to the prince through a process of election. In this construct there was no place for temporal power of the pope and his clergy. Their role was confined to the spiritual world. His concept of the powerless church goes so far that no bishop or priest should have any coercive jurisdiction over any clergyman or layperson, even if that person was a heretic.
For Marsilius the schism would have been a piece of cake. He even stated explicitly in his main works the “Defensor Pacis” or Defender of the Peace, that any bishop or prelate could excommunicate a pope who was in breach of divine law and could call a general council that represented the community of the faithful. Gregory VII would be spinning in his grave.
Marsilius’ comrade in arms, William of Ockham summarized the criticism of temporal papal power most succinctly when he said quote: “If Christ had so ordained and disposed matters that the pope possessed a fullness of power of such an order that as to extend under all circumstances, over everything…, the law of Christ would be a law of terrible slavery..” end quote
Though Marsilius and Ockham had both been excommunicated, their writing circulated widely and were incorporated into the academic discussion.
One of those who picked up where they had left off was John Wycliff (1328-1384), a true radical. He believed not only that the church had no temporal power, but that it did not even exercised control over the spiritual activity. According to his teachings, everybody was allowed to preach and everybody was allowed to administer the sacraments, without the need of a church license. The only source of inspired teaching was to be the bible. And, to top it off, he demanded that old chestnut, that the church should live in apostolic poverty. Wycliff was popular with the leading men of England at the time because he gave them license to raid the churchmen’s houses, the abbeys and cathedrals. Wycliff’s thesis were quickly banned by the church, but he did enjoy enough royal patronage that he could end his days in relative comfort.
We will talk a lot more about Wycliff and how his thoughts travelled to Bohemia in a separate episode.
The one strain I wanted to follow here though led to a man whose writings are today almost forgotten but had been the absolute bestseller of the early days of printing. I am talking of course of Thomas à Kempis, a preacher born in Kempen in the Rhineland who was most active in what is today the Netherlands.
Though Thomas and his adherents remained within the official church, his teachings about the importance of the clergy were not far off Wycliff’s. He had been a Brethren of the Common Life, a congregation of men and women who did not take monastic vows, but who committed themselves to living modest, even perfect lives. They were not necessarily anti-intellectual but they took the view that acts were more important than thoughts.
As Thomas a Kempis wrote: “It is not learned discourse but a life of virtue that brings you close to God. I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it”. His main works, the Imitation of Christ contains dozens and dozens of such straightforward suggestions about how to live a life that pleases god. It goes all out on “love thy neighbor” and “do not think of yourself as better than others, however obviously wicked they may seem”.
His works struck a chord with many lay people who were disappointed with the organized church and sought advice about what really mattered to their spiritual wellbeing.
As you know I am not a very spiritual, let alone an organized church person, but the more I read of Thomas a Kempis, the more I warm to him. His preferred place was apparently in “hoexkens ende boexkens” meaning in a nook with a book. A man after my heart!
So how does that tie back to the schism? Well it does in as much as the schism was resolved by a church council, a congregation of the faithful. This congregation of the faithful had deposed the highest representative of the clergy in Christendom, the pope. If that was not only possible but also canonical, then the collective of the believers acting as one must rank above the clergy. Which means the individual sinner can gain access to God without the intercession of a priest.
That does not mean that the schism did away with clergy for good, except for heretics like the followers of John Wycliff, but it has definitely opened up routes of interaction with the deity that were previously inconceivable.
Ok, we are nearly done. The next topic to discuss is #3/4: Did the perception of the church change due to the schism?
I must say that I found Joelle Rollo-Koster’s argument that most people did not care that much about the schism itself quite compelling. The fact that there are two popes is only a problem if one is expected to make a choice between the two. But hardly anyone had to make this choice. The choice was made for you by your king who had sided with one or other obedience.
Sure, the antics of these popes were most undignified and damaged the honor of the office. But there is no denying that papal behavior before the schism did not have much to commend itself. The move to Avignon, the submission under the French crown, the relentless persecution of the chosen emperor Ludwig the Bavarian, the loss of focus on church reform etc., etc., had already undermined the standing of the papacy before the schism had even begun.
But that does not mean the Schism had no impact. This impact did however not come through the propopagande machines, but rather prosaically through fiscal pressures. Yes, it is the money – again.
After the move to Avignon the church finances went through three main iterations.
When the popes first arrived, they had to urgently find a replacement for the revenues they used to draw from the papal states in Italy. These had not been very extensive to start with since the hold of the papal administartion over these places was at best pretty loose. But now, when they were hundreds of miles from Rome, they became non-existent.
The way they, specifically popes John XXII and Benedict XII made up for it was by creating a highly sophisticated administration that collected tithes, annates and all sorts of other church taxes across the christian world. There is a reason the palais de papes in Avignon grew to 15,000 square metres. That was not to accommodate the cardinals who lived in their splendid mansions in Avignon or across the river in Villeneuve. The space was needed to house the hundreds of scribes, notaries and archivists who kept the great ecclesiastical money extraction machine running.
In particular the papal archives were of huge monetary importance. Having a database of how much each archbishop in the German lands paid in tithes to Avignon helped to figure out who was trying to cheat the system. A set of accounts going back decades helped to determine the expected annate, that first year income a new bishop had to send back to the papal coffres. A well-oiled system of courts that could provide quick and reasonable judgements provided a source of generous court fees. And so on and so on.
In these first decades in Avignon papal finance not only rebounded but became a fountain of coin comparable to any of the great monarchs of the time.
Things got more challenging when Clement V came to the papal throne. He was a great noble, used to the finer things in life. So expenditure of the papal court went through the just recently rebuilt roof. If you go to Avignon and look at the beautifully frescoed rooms, that is all Clement V. At the same time the famines and ecological disasters of the 14th century deflated church incomes. Things got infinitely worse with the Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe’s population and created an agricultural depression.
Whilst the top line contracted, military expenditure spiraled upwards. On the one hand was the defense of Avignon itself that had become a preferred target of the mercenary companies. As a reward for their thievery the popes hired these same mercenary companies to help reconquering the papal states. War, as our old friend Karl IV kept saying, was by a country mile the most expensive activity one could undertake.
Therefore by the time Gregory XI made his less than triumphal entry into Rome in 1378, papal finances were already on their knees.
The schism, to say it mildly, did not help. The majority of the papal administrators and their archive had stayed behind in Avignon. Hence Clement VII could settle into an existing operational infrastructure. However, since his obedience was less than half of that of his predecessors had overseen and his expenses were roughly the same as before, his deficit snowballed.
But not quite as badly as that of his opponent in Rome. Urban VI and the Boniface IX had to recreate a whole papal administration from scratch without access to the expertise and crucial information left behind in Avignon. If that wasn’t enough, the political situation in Rome was infinitely more fragile than in Avignon. The Roman popes of the schism were involved in a constant military conflict with the kingdom of Naples meaning the papal court and all its administrators had to pack up their papers and desks and leave Rome on several occasions. That was the revenue side. On the cost side, the Roman popes had inherited the cost of controlling the papal states, meaning they had to foot the astronomical bill of the mercenaries.
Bottom line is that both the papacies were constantly broke, as was the third line of popes after the council of Pisa.
All these papal administrations had to squeeze their remaining sources of income ever harder. One was one was to declare a holy year for 1390 that brought almost 200,000 pilgrims to Rome, all spending freely and donating generously. That required a change of tack since Holy years were only supposed to take place every fifty years but by some ingenious calculation that was now 33 years which in an even weirder sort of mathematics gets us to 1390.
Calling a Holy Year outside the calendar is comparatively harmless. Where it got more problematic was when the papal administration demanded ever higher annnates. An Annate is the obligation to pay the first year’s income from a new benefice to the pope. That did not only go down badly with the new officeholder himself, but also with all his dependents who had to wait a year before the full benefit of the church income came to them. If a senior clergy on a collision course with the papacy wasn’t problematic in itself, it also encouraged the prelates to flog their flock hard to cover the shortfall.
And finally, there was the really big problem that really undermined the church, the indulgences. Indulgences were nothing new. They had first been used on a major scale to finance the first crusade in the 1090s. Many of the chivalric orders used indulgences as a means to fund their operations in the Holy Land.
The perceived benefit of indulgences relates to the concept of purgatory. Purgatory is a sort of holding pattern where the soul is being purified before it is admitted to heaven. This waiting period can be very long, thousands, if not millions of years. But help is at hand. You could drastically reduce the time in purgatory if you receive an indulgence, effectively a share of the treasury of merit the church had gathered through the great works of the saints. These indulgences were initially granted to the faithful who had undertaken good works, for instance had gone on crusade. But very quickly these efforts could be replaced by a simple monetary transaction. The church developed detailed tables where you could see how many years of purgatory relief one would buy for how much money, not in the 16th century but much earlier.
As we go through the 14th century the financial pressures on the church under the schism led to a huge expansion in the sale of indulgences. The church created a dedicated job, the pardoner, a sort of travelling salesman in indulgences.
Though clearly a lot of people bought indulgences and believed they worked, still the whole system became subject to ridicule. In Chaucer’s Canterbury tales the Pardoner, the indulgence salesman, gives an honest account of his business, quote:
"By this trick have I won, year after year,
An hundred marks since I was pardoner.
I stand like a clerk in my pulpit,
And when the ignorant people are set down,
I preach as you have heard before
And tell a hundred more false tales.
My hands and my tongue go so quickly
That it is joy to see my business.
Of avarice and of such cursedness
Is all my preaching, to make them generous
To give their pennies, and namely unto me.
For my intention is only to make a profit,
And not at all for correction of sin.” End quote.
There you have it, the fiscal pressures of the schism drove up a massive expansion in the use of indulgences, and we all know where that ended.
There we are, only one last and final topic left: Did the schism change the European political landscape?
One of the most astounding moments in the story of the schism is when the kingdom of France “subtracted” its obedience from Benedict XIII in 1398. This term subtracting basically means that the kingdom of France no longer recognized pope Benedict XIII nor did they recognize any other pope. The official reason they did that was to force the pig-headed Benedict XIII to resign and thereby open the possibility for a reunification of the church.
This was a seminal moment in as much as it left the kingdom of Frace without a pope. Effectively a break with Rome, even if it had always been intended to be only temporary. This break with Rome had many features that we will find in the actual Reformation. For instance during the subtraction the king of France claimed what used to be the papal income for himself. Some churches and monasteries were expropriated to cover the cost of the ongoing 100 Years’ war or to pay for the lavish court.
The subtraction did not stick though. The crown squeezed the peasants and burghers even harder for church taxes and tithes than the papal administration had done. And they did not provide much in exchange. The prelates were still incompetent and corrupt, if not more so, the market squares were awash with indulgences, and, worse of all, the country was in a state of sin having definitely broken with Christ’s Vicar.
The population rebelled against the subtraction, supported by a fraction inside the dysfunctional French court and France returned to obedience under Benedict XIII. They did it again to support the council of Pisa, but that was a much shorter interlude.
But the precedent was set.
And there was something else. The decades of the schism where France had a different pope to its neighbors in England and the Empire created an even deeper sense of unity amongst the French, mainly the Northern French people. I am still loath to talk about nationalism in the modern sense, but “nations” in a distinctly late medieval sense were becoming a source of identity during and because of the schism. And we see that not just in France but across Europe. Going back to the beginnings of the schism, it is the demand of the Roman people for a roman or at least an Italian pope and the opposition of Florence against a French pope that could be identified as signs of a beginning sense of national belonging.
At the council of Pisa the delegates sorted themselves into Nations similar to the nation concept you find at medieval universities. When we will talk about the council of Constance, the question what role these nations should play in the voting process will become crucial. There is clearly something afoot – which again is another step out of the Middle Ages into the early modern period.
That is it. Four out of four. The great Western Schism had changed the face of the church and the face of europe profoundly. It wasn’t just an affair, a temporary misunderstanding. It was a wild ride that loosened the anchorages of the medieval world. Not that the structure collapsed right away, but it was fatally weakened.
The schism was however not the only major event at this transition point. Once the imperial popes of the 12th and 13th century had crushed the emperors, they had inherited not just their rights, but also their obligations. And one of these obligations was to defend Christendom against foreign, specifically non-Christian invaders. That is what Otto I had done on the Lechfeld when he defeated the Magyars and what had won him the imperial crown.
Now it was the pope’s job to organize the resistance against the new threat from the east, the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans had crossed the Bosphorus in 1352 and had expanded rapidly across the Balkans, and by the time of the schism had surrounded Constantinople. The last Byzantines sent increasingly desperate messages to the west. In 1400 the emperor Manuel II Palaeologus came in person to Europe to ask for military assistance and even offered to bring Constantinople under the obedience of the bishop of Rome.
This Ottoman threat and how the king of Hungary, Sigismund of Luxemburg the son of Karl IV, half-brother of Wenceslaus the Lazy and future convener of the council of Constance deals with it will be the subject of next week’s episode. I hope you will join us again.
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