Hello and welcome to the History of The Germans, episode 173, the end of the Schism, which is also the Council of Constance Part 3. And it's also episode 10 of season 9, the Reformation. Before the Reformation, we have talked about church reform for almost four years. The Council of Constance talked about church reform through about the same amount of time. And Luther will talk and write about church reform until he did no longer believe the Church could be reformed. But what is church reform?
Or more specifically, what did the delegates and Constans mean when they debated church reform? Why did they fail to implement much, even though they held off electing a Pope and the voting system was very much set in favor of the national churches and against central papal authority? All this we will discuss in this episode. Plus we'll hear some angelic voices that made even the most hard nosed church politician kneel in prayer. Before we start the usual thank yous.
I will be brief because Christmas is coming up and all you need to do is tell your loved ones that what you really, really want is two first, an advertising free podcast, and second, another year without Dirk singing O Tannenbaum. And we should all be eternally grateful to William M. Jen, Philip H. Thomas Z. Linus, depay, and Bo W. Who are so valiantly protecting us against these evils. And with that, back to the show.
Now, last week we talked about what the 20 to 30,000 delegates at the General Council of the Church in Constance did once they had realized there would be marooned and cramped bed sits in a small German town for the foreseeable future. The week before we discussed why they had come there in the first place. And this week we will discuss why they stayed there for so long. Because that seems at first glance unnecessary.
The Council's work could have been wrapped up quickly, with delegates returning home after having resolved the most pressing disputes. Just look at the timeline. The council started in November 1414 and ten months later, by. By the end of September 1415, one of the competing Popes was deposed, another one had retired, and the third one had made clear he would never, ever resign.
The natural next step would have been to depose the last holdout, then elect a new Pope, one that would be universally recognized, and thereby bring the Great Western Schism to its much desired end. But they did not do that before late autumn 1417. There would have been two years after the failed meeting in Perpignan with Pope Benedict xiii. For all these two years there was no widely recognized Pope. So why leave the Church without a lead?
This was still, the Middle Ages, and leaving a major center of power, a kingdom, a principality or major bishopric, without its head, was a deeply worrying state of affairs. These hierarchical institutions needed someone at the top who made all the decisions. Otherwise, they simply did not work. So if the General Council left the Holy Mother Church rudderless for such a long time, they needed a very good reason to do that.
And that reason was that they wanted to kick off long overdue reform of the Church. Not that I'm counting, or, well, actually, I am counting. I'm counting the word reform. And it had appeared 322 times in the show so far, and even that barely does justice to its importance. It's not unreasonable to say that for the 500 years before 1400, whoever controlled the process of church reform controlled Western Europe.
From Charlemagne to Henry iii, it was the empress who led the efforts to bring the Church closer to the apostolic ideal. The people expected their anointed ruler not just to provide peace and justice, but also to ensure that they would receive instruction and sacraments from competent and viable intermediaries. And the early emperors did exactly that. Charlemagne required the clergy to become literate and started a whole industry of book production.
Otto III displayed piety on a level normally reserved to actual saints. And Henry II cleaned up misbehavior in monasteries. And all these efforts converted into tangible political power in two ways. For one, the Church infrastructure became the main pillar of imperial administration, something that is known as the imperial Church system.
And the other was simply the prestige and the authority that came with the role as the Vicar of Christ, a title the emperors, by the way, used for themselves long before the popes nicked it. And we've also seen what happened once the lead in the church reform shifted to the popes, to the Leo IX and Gregory vii.
Imperial power was eroded and eventually wiped out as the papacy established itself as the supreme moral authority in Christendom, and then leveraged the internal tensions in the empire and the conflict with the Italian communes into temporal power, becoming the imperial papacy of Innocent III in the process.
And then finally, we saw the swing back, when the papacy moved to Avignon and focused less on dispensing divine grace and more on collecting cold, hard cash, abandoning even the pretense of following in the footsteps of the apostles and replacing it with aggressive money grabbing and interference in the local church. That eroded the Pope's moral authority and finally, temporal authority.
Because once nobody expected the papal administration to sort things out anymore, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian could safely ignore excommunications and papal interdicts raining down from Avignon, he passed the Declaration of Rheims, which paved the way for full emancipation from papal oversight. That was finally achieved. So the golden bull of 1356 episodes 150, 151 and 160.
If you want to double check now, before you think caring so much about the afterlife and the state of the Church was just one of those weird medieval things, remember that Christianity was not just core to the culture at the times, it was the culture. Living in a world dominated by culture wars, as we do now, we should not be surprised that whoever led the debate on the most important spiritual and cultural norms of a society was also in charge politically.
This long winded story will hopefully explain why there was no papal election for two years. Because as long as there was no Pope, the sole authority in charge of church reform was the General Council. And if control of church reform meant political power over Western Europe, well, who would want to give that up? The delegates at the Council feared that should they elect a Pope, well, that Pope would immediately dissolve the council.
And once the Pope was back in control, he may or may not continue with the church reform, but he would take credit for it either way. So what areas of much needed reform did the delegates of Constance discuss over these two years? In the High Middle Ages, when people talked about church reform, they talked about how to make the clergy better intermediaries with the divine. That meant, in particular, how can we ensure that the vicar knew his Bible and wasn't just telling any old tale?
And then it was important that whatever advice was issued from the pulpit was going to help in smoothing the way in the afterlife. And finally, the performance of the sacraments had to be effective. The correct liturgy observed and the priest that performed it must not be tainted with sin to an extent that invalidated the act. If these were the objectives, the important heirs to address, therefore were first, the recruitment of the clergy.
It should be on merit and not on nepotism, or worse than that through bribery, which is called the sin of simony. Then it was important that the priest who was selected was actually going to show up for the job, rather than send an understudy while staying at home and collecting the benefice. And third, there had to be standards of behavior set and adhered to. By the early 15th century, the church needed reform across all of these dimensions.
It is hard to say whether things were much worse than they had been in earlier periods, but judging by the number of tales in Chaucer and Boccaccio of monks living the high life and nuns seducing gardeners. At least by now things seem to have deviated sharply from the asceticism of our old, not quite friend of the podcast Bernard of Clairvaux. And then we hear regularly about archbishops being elected as teenagers.
And Jan Hus himself admitted that what he had hoped for was a benefice that would pay but not require him to go and do the actual job. So did the Council of Constance address these issues? Not really. They discussed simony in general terms and a ban on concubinage in a bit more detail.
This proposed law on concubinage stated that clergy, including nuns and monks, could be deprived of their benefices, AKA their income, for a total of three months, if they continue to openly live with a partner after having received a cessation notice. So this is not a ban on having sexual relations as such, just one on having a lasting attachment. And it required an official notice before the sanction was going to bite. That is no notice, no salary card.
So what this really is about is to stop the clergy from procreating. Nothing to do with the standards of morality, but all to do with land, money and power. If priests, bishops and popes had children out of real relationships, even if those were formally illegitimate, their father would still try to pave their way in the world either into another church benefice or a temporal position.
And that would then create a church aristocracy that would block the path for the second sons of the existing aristocrats. So to say it plainly, if the Archbishop of Mainz placed his illegitimate son into pole position to succeed him, then the second son of the Margrav of Brandenburg could no longer become archbishop. And if he did not become archbishop, what would he do? Well, he would fight his brother over the margraveyard, and that would then destroy the precarious equilibrium of the empire.
But what the second son of the mark, Ralph of Brandenburg, gets up to in his bedchamber once he's archbishop, well, who cares? He never got the job for his piety in the first place. Now, if the Council did not discuss real church reform, what did they discuss? The first complex of issues they focused on was was about who controlled key appointments in the dioceses and abbeys.
The Avignon popes had pulled more and more decision power into the curia, a process that had enraged local cathedral chapters, who were used to select their bishops and abbots amongst themselves. And they now found themselves saddled with external interlopers with good connections at the papal court. The second, probably largest topic was the question how much of the income of the local church was to be sent to Rome?
In the preceding decades, popes had come up with ever more elaborate provisions. For instance, if a seat was vacant, the income was going to Rome. Once a new bishop was elected, his first year income was going to Rome, additional general taxes were going to Rome, the proceeds from indulgences were going to Rome. And the papal administration played the system hard and hard for money.
For example, if a bishop died, they would refuse to appoint a successor, thereby extending the period when the seat was vacant. And then once someone was appointed after all, and had given up his first year salary, the pope would move him to another seat, which would create one vacancy and another first salary obligation in one fell swoop. So no wonder the local church grew exasperated and refused to obey these orders, as it did in the German lands pretty much ever since Ludwig the Bavarian.
And finally there was the excessive use of excommunications and interdicts, mostly for political and sometimes even simply for debt collecting purposes. And what do we conclude from that? Church reform at Constance was not about piety and helping the flock to ascend to heaven, but about controlling the church's vast resources and political influence.
The delegates at the council were split on all these subjects, because on the one hand you have the bishops and abbots who were representing the interests of the local church against an overbearing central papal administration. But on the other side of that vaide were the cardinals and the members of the curia, the lawyers and scribes that made up the self same central administration. And whose jobs were on the line.
The princes, the representatives of the European monarchs and the Emperor Sigismund himself were backing up the local demands. They had used the weakness of the popes during the schism to establish national churches, churches they could control and that were somewhat independent from Rome. The French had moved furthest down that road. But there are other places, like for example, Bohemia, that were also quite far in the process. So did any of these church reforms get agreed?
Well, the answer to that, very little. The council could not even pass the watered down ban on concubinage, let alone any of the far reaching constraints on papal power. The failure to pass any of the laws constraining papal authority was still surprising, given the unique voting system that had been established for the Council of Constance.
Council decisions weren't taken either on the basis of seniority, which would have given the cardinals the lead, nor by headcount, which would have given the Italians a majority, but by nations. And these nations were designed along the lines of the nations of the medieval universities, that is, as a mixture of political significance, compass orientation and language. There were in the end, five nations.
There was Italica, Gallicana, Germania, which included Scandinavia, Poland, Lithuania, Croatia, Hungary and Bohemia. Anglica, which was England, Scotland and Ireland, and Iberica, which comprised the various Spanish kingdoms and Portugal. Each of these nations had one vote, and the cardinals in aggregate also had only one vote. Add to that that there wasn't a Pope yet, and the supporters of a powerful, centralized papal administration were very much on the back foot.
But still the great decentralization of the Church did not happen. It seems the nations could not agree on a joint position on any of the proposals above. The only thing they could agree on was that they, AKA the general Church council, should continue to be the supreme authority of the Church. They had made that first point in the decree Hec Sancta in the early days of the Council when they moved on John xxiii.
In this document, the Council declared that it derived its authority directly from Christ and was hence the supreme authority of the Church, able to overrule and even depose popes, and not just heretic popes, but any pope. The next groundbreaking decree came out closer towards the end, in October 1417. This document, entitled Frequens, stated that frequent celebration of general councils is the best method of cultivating the vineyard of the Lord Almighty.
Specifically, it stipulated that the next council should take place five years after the end of the Council of Constance and should be held in Pavia. The next one after that was to be scheduled for five years later, with subsequent councils convened every 10 years. And to avoid the Pope wriggling out of it, each subsequent council had to be called a month before the end of the previous one. If the pope refused to set a date or location by that time, the Council itself would set such a date.
And once a council is called, it cannot be cancelled, only move to a different location should there be war or pestilence. These decrees turned the papacy from an absolutist monarchy into a constitutional one. The Pope and his decisions were now subject to review by the General Council, and the council could constitute itself, even if the Pope refused to call it. Making monarchic rule dependent on the consent of the ruled was very much in line with the spirit of the times.
I come back to Marsilius of Padua, who had stated this as a God given fact. And this is also the time when the parliament in England flexed its muscles and where princes from the Teutonic Knights to the counts of Wurtemberg had to recognize local assemblies, power over taxation and war. But still, the Pope was, after all, the supreme leader of Christendom. And finding him tied down by a gathering of prelates and doctors of theology was a huge change.
If that change was to become permanent, the council needed to keep the lead in the church reform, which, as we know, is the key to political power. Once the decree frequents had passed, the shift in power balance between the Pope and the council looked settled. And since it was settled, the election of a pope could no longer threaten its position or its ability to initiate reform. At least that is what the council members thought. And so, as a consequence, the mood changed.
With the risk of a return to the imperial papacy seemingly banished, the delegates could no longer close their ears to the rising chorus of voices demanding the return of the Pontifex Maximus. And maybe the delegates were dreaming of going home too. By the autumn of 1417, so that three years after Baldassarre Cossa and his umbrella had entered the city, the council agreed to proceed with the election of a new pope. But what was the procedure for this election going to be?
Traditionally, a pope was elected by a qualifying two thirds majority of the cardinals. But that is not the way the council nations would let things play out this time. If they had the right to depose a pope, well, then they should as well have the right to elect one. So this election was going to be by nations, not by number of cardinals, which then created a logistical challenge.
Some of the nations had thousands of delegate members, and there was no way they could all discuss and decide on a papal candidate. Electing a pope is difficult at the best of times, but venting the advantages or disadvantages of individual candidates in an open forum, susceptible to interference by a mob, well, that was outright impossible. So it was decided that each nation was to select six members who would go and join the conclave representing the main facets of their nation.
Let me give you the names of the 6 representatives of the Germanica nation, because it nicely illustrates how it worked. There was the Archbishop of Riga, Johannes Wallenrode. He was a member of the Teutonic Order, had been Bishop of Liege before, and was originally from Franconia. The next member was the Archbishop of Inesno, Nicholas Straba, who led the Polish delegation. That was the same delegation that had accused the Teutonic Knights of atrocities and heresy.
The third member was the Bishop Simon de Dominici from Trogia in Dalmatia. I could not find much about him, but given where his bishopric was, he was likely representing the interests of The Kingdom of Hungary. Number four, Lambert del Sache, was a prior of a Cluniac monastery in what is today Belgium and was a highly regarded theologian. The fifth member, Konrad Kohler von Zost, was a professor at the University of Heidelberg and had been involved in the negotiations with Benedict xiii.
He had also acted as a representative of the Elector Palatinate. The sixth and last member was Nicolaus von Dinkelspuhl, a professor from the other recently founded university in the empire, the University of Vienna. He had been an envoy of the Habsburg Duke Albrecht of Austria. So that was a fairly mixed bag linguistically. There were probably three who spoke Middle High German, two spoke French and one Polish, and one either Italian or Croatian. Politically, they weren't necessarily aligned.
Some, like the Archbishops of Riga and Gnezno, were even direct political opponents. Only one may be acting on behalf of the Emperor Sigismund. The rest had primary allegiances to other kings and princes. Assuming these medieval nations represented the views of a specific monarch or country is therefore inaccurate and anachronistic. The nations were a stepping stone to the concept of modern nationhood. But that is still a long way from the real thing.
So you have the six members of the nation who amongst themselves need to find a 2/3 majority. Then all five nations and the cardinals have to agree, not by majority, but unanimously on one candidate. That meant in practice that three voters inside one nation could veto any selection indefinitely. So the voting system was extremely demanding, as had been shown by the inability of the council to pass meaningful church reform for two years.
With the complex voting process agreed, focus shifted to choosing an appropriate location for the conclave. The cathedral, where all previous council sessions had been held would not be suitable. A conclave needed privacy. Nobody outside was to know what was going on until the white smoke comes out. Nor should anyone be able to influence the voters with bribes or threats whilst the election was underway.
You may remember that the whole Great Western schism started because in 1378 it seemed as if the election had been influenced by an outside mob. And finally, there was a justifiable concern that we would get a rerun of the Conclave of Viterbo that lasted three years and only ended when the roof of the papal palace was removed and the cardinals were reduced to bread and water.
So what was needed was a place where the supply of food could be controlled and where the removal of a roof would not be too expensive. That is why the conclave was moved from the cathedral to the newly constructed Kaufhaus, a very large counting house. The Kaufhaus was both A storage facility and a space for foreign traders to present their wares. Its doors could be locked and windows shuttered, so nobody could get in or out to smuggle food or information.
The conclave began on November 8, 1417, when the 53 voters, 23 cardinals and 30 representatives of the nations entered the Kaufhaus. After the first round of voting, it was clear the pessimists had a point. Six names had been pulled out of the Cardinal O'Donne Colonna, the cardinal bishops of Ostia, Saluzzo and of Venice, the bishops of Geneva and of Winchester. The next day, the list was down to four still Odone, Colonna, the bishops of Ostia, Saluzzo and Geneva.
O'Dona Colonna was technically in a good position, with support across multiple nations, but consensus still seemed a long way away. Meanwhile, outside the Caufoss, the people waited and prayed that the electors would choose someone who could be recognized by every nation and every monarch, and that the schism would finally and permanently be over. Part of the prayer rituals was a boys choir that led a procession around the Kaufau, singing hymns in particularly one Vini Creatus Spiritus.
Come, O Creator Spirit. The sound of the boys singing passed through the walls and shuttered windows and had a huge impact on the electors. Many fell on their knees and prayed quietly. They thought that they heard angels sing, calling on them to come to a decision quickly and unanimously. And so they did. Just minutes after the singing started, the electors chose O'Donne Colonna to become pope.
The French nation who was most opposed to the election of an Italian, gave in under the impact of the celestial voices. And so did the remaining holdouts. The story of the angels voices is confirmed by multiple sources, so it's almost certainly true and it makes sense. Just take into account the stress these electors were under. Apart from the cardinals, none of them had ever expected to have to make such a decision. They knew how much hinged on their choice.
If they went for someone who would lose the support of one or other of the nations later on, the schism could return. Or if they chose a frail contender, he could die soon after and be replaced by another piratical pope like Baldassarre Cosa. Plus the isolation, the dim lighting and the unfamiliar surroundings, you can see why people heard angels. The newly elected pope took the name Martin, having been elected by divine intervention on the day of Saint Martin.
Choosing the name of a man famous for cutting his coat in half seems ironic for a pope tasked with uniting the church. But what do I know? About papal naming traditions. And Pope Martin V did what the reform oriented council members had always feared. He passed some half hearted rule changes and signed concordats with some of the kingdoms present in Constance, and then called the whole thing off. He left the city on May 29, 1418 and began a three year long journey to Rome.
This was a possession, a taking charge of the papal lands and authority. That had not happened for a long time. He traveled down the Rhone valley and through northern Italy, reestablishing the successor to St Peter as the sole head of the Church after a long absence.
Once arrived in the Eternal City, the focus of his pontificate lay more in regaining control of the Papal States and the rebuilding of the city of Rome, the Lateran Basilica and the Vatican palace, rather than in pushing church reform. He did call a council in Pavia as promised, but moved it to Siena when plague had broken out. That council again did not pass much in terms of church reform. In line with the decrees passed in Constance. Martin V then called a next council to take place in Basel.
This time he was already quite reluctant to call a council. But the Council of Basel lasted for, depending on how you count it, for 18 years, from 1431 to 1449. This was supposed to be the council that would finally bring about this long delayed reform of the Church. It was to conclude the work that had begun in Constance. But it wasn't off to a good start. On the opening day, there was only one delegate in the city.
It took a few months in heavy marketing by the presiding cardinals to get the ball rolling. Once there was a quorum, the council did pass a few measures to rein in on misbehaving clergy, including the famous ban on concubinage. But very quickly, the political differences between the council and the pope took precedence over questions of spiritual and pastoral care.
As you can imagine, the new pope, Eugene iv, who had succeeded Martin V, did not like the idea of the Church as a constitutional monarchy. And in particular, not that the council was actually going to pass the rules they actually wanted to pass, AKA cutting the papacy off from the money back in the bishoprics and abbeys. We may or may not go into the back and forth of these debates at a later stage as it will impact Sigismund and the Hussites.
But for this episode, it's enough to point out that the relationship soured rapidly. Eugene IV asked the council to come to Florence, which some did, and other members refused. The refuseniks then passed a number of ambitious reform decrees, and when this fell on deaf ears, they elected their own pope, a layman, the Count of Savoy. His antipope called himself Felix V and lasted a few years and then stepped down. The Council of basel ended in 1449.
With it, the project to turn the Church into a constitutional monarchy petered out. Councils are still the Congregation of the Faithful and formerly above the Pope. But it's now in the Pope's discretion whether or not to call one. And no Pope calls a council unless he's 100% certain of the outcome.
The other, even more important outcome was that reform of the Church, and I mean proper reform, all about spirituality and pastoral care, did not materialize, neither sponsored by the Council nor pushed through by the papacy. Had Constance or Basel succeeded in its ambition, Luther may not have had as much as 95 individual items to complain about. And even if he had, he would not have had as successful a time of it as he ultimately did.
So despite being the greatest gathering of minds in the late Middle Ages, in its stated objectives, the Council of Constance had been a failure. And in one very specific way, it made things a lot worse for the Catholic Church. And these most fateful decisions are the ones we will talk about next week. The convictions of Jan Hus and Hieronymus of Prague that led straight to the first Prague defenestration. I hope you will join us again.
And in the meantime, if you want to brush up on the rise of the papacy from pornocracy to universal moral authority, go to episodes 28, 32 and on the decline of the Papacy. Have a listen to the episodes 150 and 151. And now before I go, just a very quick one. If you want to help the show to keep going, go to historyofthegermans.com support where you can make a one time donation or sign up for a monthly contribution. Thank you all for listening and supporting the show. Sa.