Late Middle Ages

The Church in Crisis: Schism and Disorder

The three articles gathered here examine the deepest institutional crisis in the history of the medieval papacy: the seventy years between the election of the first French pope at Lyon in 1305 and the dissolution of the Council of Basel in 1449. They do so in three movements. The first article sets the stage with the Avignon Papacy (1309–1376) and the Babylonish Captivity that Petrarch and other curialists denounced from the 1330s onward. The second article traces the Western Schism from the disputed election of Urban VI in April 1378 to the resignation of the Avignon claimant Benedict XIII in 1423, with the line of Roman, Avignon, and Pisan popes that, for nearly forty years, split the obedience of Catholic Europe. The third article follows the conciliar attempt to resolve the crisis at Pisa (1409), Constance (1414–1418), and Basel (1431–1449), and the slow recovery of papal authority under Martin V, Eugenius IV, and Pius II. The section engages with the long-running debate, opened by Walter Ullmann and Brian Tierney in the 1950s and 60s and continued by Francis Oakley and Antony Black, over whether the conciliar movement was a constitutional moment that might have reformed the church from within, or the last gasp of a medieval politics of representation.

The Avignon Papacy and the captivity of the popes

The first article follows the seven French popes who ruled from the Rhône between 1309 and 1377: Clement V, the archbishop of Bordeaux who never set foot in Italy; John XXII, the money-changer from Cahors whose bulls on the visio beatifica (1331–34) divided the schools; Benedict XII, the former Cistercian from Saverdun who built the enormous papal palace at Avignon; Clement VI, who bought the city from Queen Joanna I of Naples in 1348; the humanist Innocent VI; Urban V, the only Avignon pope to return briefly to Rome in 1367–70; and Gregory XI, who re-crossed the Alps in 1377 and died in Rome the following year. The article explains the centralization of the papal curia, the creation of a sophisticated system of papal provisions, annates, and reservates; the rise of the camera apostolica and the financial reforms of the treasurer Guillaume Durand; and the building programme, financed by the jubilee of 1350, that turned Avignon into a kind of second Rome. The political backdrop — the long conflict with Emperor Louis IV, the Hundred Years’ War, the loss of the papal states to the Visconti of Milan — is set out in detail. The article draws on the archival work of Bernard Guillemain and on Guillaume Durand’s Speculum iudiciale, with critical attention to the older polemic of Petrarch’s Epistolae sine titulo (c. 1352).

The Schism of 1378 and the politics of obedience

The second article opens with the death of Gregory XI in March 1378, the mob pressure on the sixteen cardinals meeting in Rome, and the contested election of Bartolomeo Prignano as Urban VI on 8 April. It follows the seceding French cardinals to Fondi, the election of Robert of Geneva as Clement VII in September 1378, the slow emergence of a line of Urban’s successors in Rome (Boniface IX, Innocent VII, Gregory XII), the parallel line at Avignon (Clement VII, Benedict XIII), and the spread of the schism through the diplomatic map of Europe — France, Scotland, Castile, Aragon, and Naples on the Avignon side; England, the Empire, most of Italy, Hungary, and Poland on the Roman side. The article makes sense of the so-called Via cessionis — the constitutional argument, advanced by the cardinals at Cambrai in 1381 and the theologians of Paris in 1382, that both popes should resign — and of the politics of subtraction of obedience, when the French church withdrew from Benedict XIII in 1398 and again in 1403. It draws on the chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet and the conciliarist tracts edited by Johann Pruckner and Jedin.

Pisa, Constance, and the failure of the conciliar movement

The third article follows the council of Pisa, which deposed the two existing claimants and elected Alexander V in June 1409 only to leave the church with three popes; the great Council of Constance (1414–1418), summoned by the Pisan pope John XXIII, which deposed him, accepted the resignation of Gregory XII, condemned the haeretica pravitas of Jan Hus on 6 July 1415 and of Jerome of Prague the following year, and elected Oddone Colonna as Martin V on 11 November 1417; and the Council of Basel, opened under Martin V and his successor Eugenius IV, which eventually collapsed in 1449 after the failed papal counter-council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445). The article reads the Haec sancta decree of 6 April 1415, the Frequens decree of 9 October 1417 that mandated regular councils, and the Execrabilis of Pius II (1460) that ended the conciliar claim. It concludes with a discussion of the historiographical debate over the counciliar movement: Tierney’s reading of it as the medieval birth of constitutionalism, Oakley’s caution against Whig anachronism, and the revisionist position of scholars like Thomas Prügl and Michele Maccarrone.

What this section covers

Articles in this chapter