Chapter 4: FIFTY CRITICAL YEARS, 1420-1471

THE MENACE OF HERESY AND SCHISM, 1420-1449

THE task before Martin V was immense; 861 his resources were scanty; the greatest of his difficulties were perhaps, as yet, scarcely known. Never was it to be more forcibly brought home to any pope that the pope's real power is a moral power. It was true that the Church was once more united in its acknowledgment of a single head. But bound up with this fact that Martin V was the universally acknowledged single head of the Church, were such other facts as those revolutionary proceedings at the late council in which, as Cardinal Odo Colonna, Martin V too had played his part; and from which council he had emerged as pope. The new pope's prestige was inevitably bound up with the proceedings at Constance. Some of the acts of that council no pope could accept and remain pope; and yet, any immediate blunt repudiation of them would probably have thrown Christendom back into all the chaos of the schism. Here was a first weakness bound to hamper the pope once he faced the task of rebuilding Sion.

A second weakness derived from the inability of the recent reforming councils even to diagnose, much less prescribe for, the main evils that were eating away the vitality of religion. What was to be devised at Trent, a hundred and fifty years later- whether through drastic reorganisation such as to make the worst abuses simply impossible, or whether, through the invention of such new methods and institutions as the diocesan seminary, to do vital work which in all these centuries had never yet been done — all this needed to have been done, given the times and the nature of the crisis, at Constance.

But it was with the old machinery, the very machinery to whose defects the disaster of the schism had been largely due, that the popes after Constance had to do their work. Whatever their good intentions, their zeal, and their realisation that a reformation of Christian life was imperative, they were bound, under such conditions, in great part to fail. Things were to be very much worse, before they were ever given a real chance of becoming permanently very much better.

Martin V knew that he must return to Rome and, somehow, bring it about that the Papal State was a stronghold for the security of the freedom of the popes in their government of the Church. He knew too that he must exorcise the new, radically anti-Catholic theory that popes are subordinate to General Councils; and yet he must contrive not to alienate the influential churchmen who had either invented this view, or adopted it as a way out of the long deadlock of the schism. He knew he must reform the general life of all Christians, clerical and lay. He probably did not realise, as yet, that the Turkish conquest of south-eastern Europe was imminent; nor of what immense consequence to Christendom that revival of letters was so soon to prove, the first beginnings of which he was now unconsciously patronising. Problem, then, of the new theories about General Councils; problem of the independence of the Papal States; problem of the reform of Christian life; problem of the Turks; problem of the Renaissance — here, in rough summary, is the task before the popes in all the hundred years between Constance and Luther.

The Council of Constance assembled for the last time on April 22, 1418, and Martin V, refusing the French suggestion that he should re-establish the papacy at Avignon, and Sigismund's offer of a Germany city, made his way towards Italy. He moved slowly and with the greatest caution, by way of Berne and Geneva and Milan. In five months he had got no further than Mantua, where he wintered, and in February 1419 he moved to Florence. The condition of the pope's own territory offered him little prospect, either of security or real freedom of action; Bologna was an independent republic; various other new "states" had been carved out by the successful condottieri; Benevento, and Rome itself, were held by the Neapolitans. Gradually the pope's diplomacy brought about the restoration of Rome, and also won over the actual ruler of central Italy, Braccio di Montone. Bologna was subdued by July 1420, and on the last day of September Martin V made his solemn entry into Rome a city of ruins, and deserted, grass-grown streets, into which the wolves came, unhindered, by night to ravish from the cemeteries the corpses of the newly-buried dead.

But the recovery of his states was not the only critically urgent problem to harass the pope on the morrow of the great council; Catholicism was now fighting for its life in Bohemia, and the crusade against the new heretics was beginning to be a catastrophic failure. Bohemia, after Constance, was like Egypt after Chalcedon; a heretic had been condemned at the General Council and punished who was, at the same time, a national leader; and the reaction against the council, involving the cause of Czech culture against German imperialism, so shook the hold of the papacy on these lands that never again could the popes take their spiritual allegiance for granted. The event was a first demonstration — had some gift of prophecy been granted the pope whereby to read the fullness of the sign — of what could happen, and would henceforth happen repeatedly, when propagation of anti- Catholic doctrine was bound up with a people's ambition to assert itself as a nation or as possessed of a specifically national culture. This first Bohemian war of religion lasted for seventeen years (1419-1436). It ended in a compromise which, nominally, was to the advantage of the Catholics. But the memory of the long succession of national victories over the Catholic crusaders — brought in from every part of Europe — never died out; more than once, in the years between the settlement of 1436 and Luther, the war flared up again. Bohemia, for the generation to which Luther spoke, was a watchword, whether of warning or of promise, and down to our own day the memory of the heretic burnt at Constance, John Hus, 862 has been the constant rallying point of all that is militant and revolutionary in the patriotism of the Czechs.

What made the fortunes of the religious theories which Hus preached was the circumstance that his appearance as a religious leader coincided with the critical hour of a great national renaissance, fruit of the wise and capable rule of Charles IV (1347-1378). In the later fourteenth century, as to-day, the land of the Czechs, the kingdom of Bohemia and the margravate of Moravia, was a country where very varied influences — national, social, cultural — fought for mastery. Both the kingdom and the margravate, which were now united under the one ruler, were vassal states to the German king, and part of the Holy Roman Empire. Everywhere there were pockets of German settlers. Many of the native nobility had gladly surrendered to the influence of German culture; many of the traders were German too; and for centuries the sees of the kingdom had been subject to metropolitan sees in Germany. The Czech Catholics had, however, a strong anti-German tradition that went back for hundreds of years. Catholicism had originally come to them through missionaries of the Greek rite, the famous ninth-century saints, Cyril and Methodius. Later they had been "Latinised, " and from resentment of this — it is said — there was among them a certain anti-papal tradition, and an especial resentment of two reforms for which the medieval popes were responsible, their revival of the ancient discipline of clerical celibacy and the practice of administering the Holy Eucharist under the form of bread alone.

Fourteenth-century Bohemia had all its share of the chronic ills of late medieval Catholicism, worldliness, simony and evil living among the higher clergy, and general slackness among the parochial clergy and in the monasteries; and the Waldensian heretics were more numerous here than in any other part of Europe outside their native mountain fastnesses. But from the time when the Emperor Charles IV — Luxemburger by birth, French by upbringing — made the development of his hereditary kingdom of Bohemia the central purpose of his life — and so determined the Czech renaissance — the country had seen a succession of vigorous and plain-spoken reformers of ecclesiastical life, most of them orthodox Catholics. As a reformer John Hus was, then, only in the tradition of his age. But where others had but talent he had genius, and in addition to all his religious and ascetic qualities he was a great Czech. He was also to prove himself a great heretic, and in the main his heresies were importations from the England of Richard II. The first begetter, indeed, of all these ideas which served to promote the long Bohemian wars was an Oxford theologian, a one- time scholar and Master of Balliol, John Wyclif.

Wyclif belonged to the generation intermediary between Marsiglio and Hus, and his career as a reformer of Christian life and as a heretic was, like that of Marsiglio, bound up with a quarrel between his sovereign and the Holy See. When this dispute — which involved no point of traditional Christian doctrine — brought the English theologian for the first time into public life, he was a man just past his fortieth year. Parliament, in 1365, had passed a law protecting, against the pope's jurisdiction, suits about benefices, a matter in which the royal courts had always claimed jurisdiction. The pope, Urban V, retaliated by asking for the payment of the tribute due from England as a vassal kingdom of the Holy See — but now thirty-three years in arrears — and threatening, should this not be paid, to sue for the penalties provided in King John's surrender of his kingdom one hundred and fifty years before. The storm which this reply raised may be imagined. The whole country — king, lords, commons, prelates and barons for once united — joined to repudiate, and for ever, not only the arrears but the papal suzerainty itself. King John, they said, had acted without the consent of, the nation; his surrender therefore was void in law and fact. It was as a champion of the nation against the pope that Wyclif, on this occasion, entered literature and public life. Five years later, when a "cabinet" made up of ecclesiastics was displaced by a lay ministry, Wyclif was again to the fore, inspiring one of the earliest proposals to disendow the Church for the profit of the State; and when, in 1374, the long dispute with the papacy which had dragged on since the crisis of 1366 was settled by the Concordat of Bruges, Wyclif was one of the royal commissioners appointed to negotiate the treaty.

These were the years when the long reign of Edward III was coming to its end in a misery of incompetence and scandal. The sins of churchmen did not escape the censure of this disillusioned and discontented time, as the bitter language of a petition of the House of Commons "against the pope and the cardinals" remains to show. In language which, to the very words, re-echoes what St. Catherine of Siena was saying at that very moment, it is there said, "The court of Rome should be a source of sanctity to all the nations, but the traffickers in holy things ply their evil trade in the sinful city of Avignon, and the pope shears his flock but does not feed it. " 863 When the Prince of Wales — the Black Prince — died, June 8, 1376, the prospect of better days was indefinitely lessened, for now the chief person in the realm was his younger brother, the weak, blustering intriguer John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The duke was also the anti-clerical leader, and Wyclif now seemed likely to become a force in the national life. But he overplayed his hand, and his anti-clerical harangues in the London churches gave the Bishop of London an opportunity to cite him for trial (19 February, 1377). Wyclif appeared, with Lancaster to escort him. There was a bitter quarrel between the duke and the bishop and then the mob, friendly to Wyclif but hostile to the duke, broke up the assembly before the trial began. There, for the time, the matter ended.

But in May, that same year, Gregory XI, to whom nineteen propositions taken from Wyclif's works had been delated — by whom we do not know — wrote a stern reproof to the Archbishop of Canterbury for his sloth and indifference in this vital matter. The pope condemned the propositions, and the primate was ordered to arrest Wyclif, to interrogate him about them, and to hold him prisoner until the pope's judgment on his answers was made known. However, by the time these instructions reached the primate, a great change had come over English life. In June 1377 Edward III had died; the new king was a boy of ten, and the new parliament decidedly anti-papal. Lancaster was, for the moment, all-powerful, and Wyclif safe. Then in the following March the pope died, and within a few months his successor, Urban VI, had the problem of the election of Clement VII to distract him from the question of Wyclif's heresies. But the English bishops, once William Courtney had been translated from London to succeed as primate the feeble Simon of Sudbury, 864 pursued the heresiarch relentlessly. At a great council in May 1382 twenty-four of Wyclif's doctrines were condemned as opposed to Catholic teaching, 865 he was expelled from the university and forbidden to teach. Whereupon he retired to his rectory of Lutterworth and gave himself to writing what was to be the most popularly effective of all his works, the Trialogus, and at Lutterworth he died of paralysis on the last day of 1384.

It was Wyclif's thought which formed the mind of John Hus, and of a whole generation of Czech theological rebels. That thought had developed in the way the thought of most heretics develops who would, at the same time, be practical reformers of institutions. The new ideas are, in very great part, the product of exasperation at authority's indifference to serious abuses, and there is only a difference of detail between Gregory XI's condemnation of the nascent heresy in 1377 and Martin V's, of the finished heresiarch, forty years later. Gregory XI, in a letter to Edward III, drew special attention to the social mischievousness of the heresy, and to the bishops he noted how Wyclif repeated Marsiglio and John of Jandun. 866

In the nineteen propositions condemned by Gregory XI in 1377, Wyclif, like Marsiglio, proposes as the ideal a Church which is no Church at all. Its sacramental jurisdiction is declared to be superfluous, its external jurisdiction is so hedged about that it ceases to be a reality, while all clerics are to be answerable to the lay power for the whole of their conduct; the clergy are to be incapable of ownership and the Church's ownership is to be at the discretion of the prince. Five years later Wyclif is explicitly stating that all sacerdotal sacramental powers disappear once a priest or bishop falls into mortal sin, and that the pope in such circumstances ceases to be pope; the Schism is now four years old and for Wyclif this is, he says so explicitly, the opportunity to abolish the papal office for ever. He has already emancipated the prince from the Church's jurisdiction, and now he does as much for the preachers. Also he declares that the religious orders are manifest and inevitable hindrances to salvation, and that the great saints who founded them are in hell, unless they died repentant of their life's work; for a friar to ask alms, for a layman to give to him, is damnation for both. But what struck Wyclif's contemporaries as the crowning wickedness was his revival of the old heresy of Berengarius, namely that in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist Jesus Christ is not really and corporally present. The Mass, he said, had no warrant in Holy Scripture, and Scripture — this is a doctrine of his last years — is the sole source and test of religious truth. All men can understand Scripture, for as they read it the Holy Spirit will make its meaning clear to them; and Wyclif's efforts to bring the Bible to the ordinary man have given him a well-known place in the history of Bible translators. Another doctrine of Wyclif's later years was fatalism — all things happen as they do because they must so happen; yet another was a revival of the old heresy that oaths are always unlawful. Learning, he said, universities and university degrees were the invention of the devil; and again, that to the devil God must be obedient, for it is God who is the real author of our sins. 867

In this year, 1382, which saw the great condemnation of the English heretic, the English king, Richard II, married the sister of the King of Bohemia — the Emperor Wenzel — the daughter of the late king and emperor Charles IV. One effect of the marriage was to bring into close contact the universities of Oxford and Prague, and thereby to introduce Wyclif's theories to Bohemia. It was not, however, until the first years of the new century that his main theological work, the Trialogus, reached Prague, 868 and the man who, already familiar with Wyclif's philosophical writings and won over by his violent condemnation of clerical sins, was from this time on to prove himself Wyclif's second self. John Hus was now thirty-three years of age, rector of the university, and incumbent of the Bethlehem Church lately founded for the preaching of sermons in Czech, and already, through the sermons and lectures of Hus, "a university for the people. " Hus was not a particularly good theologian, but he was a great orator and preacher, a severe critic of the ways of his clerical brethren and a man of extremely austere life. Once he was won over to the English theories all Prague would soon be taking sides for or against them.

The fight opened when, in the next year (1403), the ecclesiastical authority in the Czech capital condemned the twenty-four Wyclifite theses condemned at Oxford in 1382 and another twenty-one also extracted from his works. There was a second condemnation in 1405, at the demand of Innocent VII, and a third in 1408. Hus had accepted the condemnation of 1403, but five years of effort as a reformer had turned him into an extremist. The clergy's attachment to goods, he was now saying, was a heresy, and as for Wyclif — who had thundered against it in much the same terms — Hus prayed to be next to him in heaven. Hus was now suspended from preaching, but as the king continued to favour him he disregarded the prohibition. There was a schism in the university — where the German, anti-Czech element was strongly anti-Wyclif — and presently a solemn burning of Wyclifite literature. Hus was now excommunicated, first by the Archbishop of Prague and then by Cardinal Colonna 869 acting for John XXIII, and Prague was laid under an interdict, so long as he remained there. In 1411 he appealed from the pope to a General Council; in 1412 a still heavier excommunication was pronounced against him; he began to organise his following among the Czech nobles, and when, at the king's request, he left Prague, it was to spread his teaching by sermons in the country villages and the fields. Prague, and indeed all Bohemia, were now in great confusion. The king still supported Hus and exiled his Catholic opponents, even putting two of them to death, and the crisis was the first topic to occupy the General Council summoned at Rome by John XXIII in 1413, from which came a fresh condemnation of Wyclifite doctrine. When it was announced by the emperor that a new council was to meet at Constance, Hus declared that he would appear before it, to defend the truth of his teaching, and on October 11, 1414, with a body of associates and an escort of Czech nobles, he set out from Prague. He reached Constance on November 3, two days after the solemn entry of John XXIII. For both of them the city was to prove a prison, but for Hus a prison whence he was to go forth only to his execution.

The story of the trial of John Hus at the Council of Constance is too important in its detail to risk a summary history's distortion of it. His heresy was manifest and the longer the discussions continued the more clearly was it proved. He refused to abandon his beliefs, and, declared a heretic, on July 6, 1415, he was handed over for execution to the town authorities, and burnt at the stake that same day. One year later his associate, Jerome of Prague, a layman, after trial before the council, suffered the like fate.

Death by execution of the capital sentence was, before the Victorian Age, the common lot of the malefactor everywhere. Thieves, forgers, coiners ended at the gallows then, as surely and as inevitably as do murderers with us. Nor was there much ado about the gravity of their fate. And heresy was, by universal consent, a crime of the worst kind. These were by no means the first executions which the fifteenth century saw for this particular offence, nor the last. But they were the first that ever caused, in any community, a general reprobation of the authority by which they were brought about. Their effect in Bohemia was amazing. Four hundred and fifty Czech nobles signed a protestation to the king, and a solemn league and covenant was sworn, by which it was agreed to defy the condemnation of the doctrines Hus had preached, to ignore the proscription of Hussite literature, and to defend against ecclesiastical authority the priests who were of the new way. To one point of ritual — which, indeed, had never been a great consideration with Hus — the party gave much importance, namely that Holy Communion should be administered under both forms, and this became with them the badge and the criterion and the shibboleth of Hussite orthodoxy; whence the general names of Calixtines and Utraquists. 870

King Wenzel was personally hostile to all this movement, but, as ever, weak and incapable of action; his consort was strongly in its favour. The king had no children. His heir was his brother, the Emperor Sigismund, than whom none was more orthodox, and who would hardly bear it indifferently that his brother's impotence should now lose him a kingdom. But on August 16, 1419, Wenzel died, and in anticipation of Sigismund's repression the Hussites prepared for war. Unfortunately for the new king and for the cause of the Catholics, the Hussites had a general of genius, John Zizka, and Zizka did not wait to be attacked. Presently he was master of the capital. After centuries of foreign rulers the Czech race was master in its own land (1420).

The epic of the Hussite wars must be read elsewhere; the story of how, first under Zizka and after his death under Procop, the Czechs successfully defied the Catholic-Imperialist coalition and brought to nothing the successive crusades organised under the authority of Martin V. After Zizka, in 1420, had compelled Sigismund to raise the siege of Prague (July to November) there was, indeed, an effort to reach agreement, to unite Hussites and Catholics and also to reconcile the factions into which, already, the Hussites were themselves dividing. The Four Articles of Prague — proposed by the Hussites as a basis of agreement — provided that in the Czech lands there should be full liberty of preaching, that all those guilty of mortal sin should receive due punishment, that the clergy should lose all rights of ownership, and that Holy Communion should be administered under both species. But though the papal legates were not to be inveigled into the labyrinth which these vague and ambiguous propositions concealed, the Archbishop of Prague accepted the articles, and a kind of national church was set up. Then a political revolution set a Lithuanian prince on the throne of Bohemia and soon the war was on once more. Within three months (October 1421-January 1422) Zizka had destroyed Sigismund's armies, 871 and crippled the Catholic effort for the next few years.

It was only the divisions among the Hussites that now kept the party from a permanent mastery of Bohemia. The quarrels between the moderates — Catholic in all but their attachment 872 to the use of the chalice in Holy Communion — and the extremists, the Taborites, 873 who had adopted the full Wyclifite creed and now showed themselves a species of pre-Calvinian Calvinists, developed into a bloody civil war. In this war the Taborites lost their great commander Zizka, but they found a second, of hardly less genius, the priest known as Procop the Great. In the hope of ending the dissensions, and in order to compel the Catholics to acquiesce in a settlement, Procop in 1426 took the offensive. Once more there were bloody defeats for the crusaders, and the Czechs invaded Hungary and Silesia, wasting and destroying countrysides and towns. Sigismund, to halt the advance, now offered to negotiate, but the Czechs would have none of it, and in December 1429 they invaded Germany itself. The main army ravaged Saxony, while flying columns carried the work of destruction and terror into the north. The imperial commander now accepted their terms, and in return for an indemnity, and the pledge of a settlement based on the Four Articles of 1420, Procop fell back on Bohemia (February 1430). But Martin V, far from accepting such terms, prepared a new crusade, and to organise it he sent to Germany the most capable man in his service, Giuliano Cesarini. 874 The question now, it seemed, was not so much when the Czechs would be crushed, but rather whether all Germany would not soon be Hussite. Not since the days when Innocent III made a stand against the Albigenses had Catholicism faced such a possibility of catastrophe.

Cesarini did his work well and presently a new army of crusaders was in the field. It invaded Bohemia in August 1431 and, almost immediately, it suffered one of the bloodiest routs of all, at Taussig, on August 14, when the Czechs again slew the fleeing Germans by the thousand. This was the end of the papal attempt to crush the heretics by force of arms. Orthodoxy, lacking commanders of military genius, will never — except by a miracle — triumph over heretics possessed of such commanders and leading troops passionately interested in victory. Cesarini, who had greatly distinguished himself on the battlefield by his brave endeavour to rally the panic-stricken host, seems to have realised to the full how strong the Hussites were, and why. From this time on he turned all his ingenuity to discover a means of arresting and containing their hostility by some scheme of concessions. The instrument he proposed to use was the General Council summoned by Martin V to meet at Basel in the very summer of the great defeat, and to preside over which Cesarini had been appointed at the same time that he was commissioned for the affairs of Bohemia. But Cesarini's plan was immediately complicated by a desperate crisis within this council itself.

The anti-papal spirit that had so largely inspired the debates in the Councils of Pisa and Constance was once again in action at Basel. If Constance had been orthodox enough to burn John Hus, it had been as anti-papal as Hus himself when it decreed that the General Council is the pope's superior, with a right to punish his disobedience to its decrees; and at Basel the pattern and precedent of Constance would now be followed in every jot and tittle. From the beginning the council would show itself, if zealous against the heretics, determined to control the negotiations with them, and at the same time to control the papacy too. The crisis opened by the Hussites was to be turned, now, to something still more threatening, and the popes to be caught between the Wyclifite heresy, militant and successful, without, and the rebels within, sapping and mining the very basis of papal authority and of the unity which is the Church's life. The history of the Council of Basel, which tormented the popes for a good eighteen years (1431-1449), made clear beyond doubt the existence of the most subtle danger of all, namely the persistence of a mentality among theologians and canonists and bishops — a mentality very welcome to princes — which would transform the reality of the divinely organised primacy, while it left unchanged and unchallenged the outward appearance and reverence, and the mass of the traditional Catholic beliefs.

The popes of the time — Martin V and Eugene IV — were well aware of the danger, and of the weaknesses in their position. To control and arrest the new development, on which the great assembly at Constance had conferred such prestige, was indeed the main anxiety of their reigns, the need urgent beyond all else, and because of which, in a structure that seemed to shake and totter uneasily with every speech, anything so challenging as the needed ruthless destruction of abuses must be indefinitely postponed. Neither of these popes was — it is true — a great man in any sense. Neither will, for example, stand comparison not only with such contemporary bishops as St. Antoninus 875 or St. Laurence Giustiniani, 876 but even with such contemporaries as the cardinals they created, with Cesarini, let us say, or Capranica or Albergati, the great Carthusian bishop of Bologna. Martin V and Eugene IV were, indeed, mediocre popes, but the ultimate reason for the apparent sterility of the thirty years after Constance, and for the apparent incompetence with which these two popes met the successive councils, was something far deeper than their own personal incapacity.

At Constance, acceptance of the old Catholic idea that the pope was answerable to God alone for his rule of the Church had suffered badly. The relation of Pope and Church, as this gathering had set it out, no pope could accept. 877 And in less than a month after the dissolution of the council the very pope it had elected made this clear. Martin V had not, while the council was still assembled, confirmed any of its acts except its condemnations of the Wyclifite heresies. This 878 was his sole reference to the critical activities that had filled the last four years. But, on May 10, 1418, in public consistory, dismissing an appeal from the Polish ambassadors (against the decision that John of Falkenburg had not been condemned by the council), the pope declared, "It is not lawful for anyone to appeal against the judge who is supreme, that is to say, against the judgment of the Holy See, of the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Jesus Christ, nor to evade his judgments in matters of faith; these last, in fact, because of their superior importance, must be brought for judgment to the pope's tribunal. " 879

Yet once again the phenomenon was seen how the most unlikely man, once elected pope, became a man of principle in matters of faith. Odo Colonna, created cardinal by a pope of the Roman line (Innocent VII), had in 1408 deserted the Roman pope Gregory XII and joined with the rebels from the Avignon camp to set up the Council of Pisa. There he had played his part in the " deposition " of Gregory XII, and in the " election " of Alexander V. He had also his share of responsibility for the "election" of John XXIII, and when Constance, five years later, put this pope in the dock, he had been a principal witness for the prosecution. What were the personal opinions of the cardinal Odo Colonna about the powers of General Councils over popes, and about the validity of these successive depositions in which he had played his part? Contemporaries describe him as a simple, amiable man, free from any spirit of intrigue, not at all self-opinionated or obstinate; the last man in the world, one would have said, to hinder the further evolution of the work in which he had played his own important part.

Martin V did not, however, publish to the Church this manifestation of his mind made, publicly enough, in the consistory, at the very outset of his reign. 880 He would not, he could not, accept the principle on which Constance had founded so much of its actrion. But, on the other hand, he did not refuse to be bound by its prescription that a new council should meet in 1423 and yet another in 1430. It was his policy to lie as low as he was let, and to say as near to nothing as was possible. And so the twelve years of his reign were no more than an uneasy truce.

Martin V duly opened the General Council of Pavia (April 23, 1423), arranged and announced at Constance five years earlier (April 19, 1418). The legates appointed to preside (February 22, 1423) found awaiting them in the city of the council two abbots, from Burgundy. During the next two months four bishops arrived, two of them from England. Then in June the legates transferred the council to Siena — the plague had broken out in Pavia, and the pope could come to Siena, whereas Pavia was a city in the territory of his enemy, the Duke of Milan. It was November before the first general session was held — and even then no more than twenty-five bishops had appeared. But decrees were passed against the Hussites, and reprobating slackness in the pursuit and punishment of heretics. Then the handful of bishops came to the practical business of reform, and the storm began in earnest. The pope had given the legates the power to transfer the council from the city where it was convoked, and one party in the council now declared that such a grant was a violation of the law 881 made at Constance. The French were demanding that the nations should have their say in the nomination of cardinals. The ghost of Benedict XIII (dead at last 882 in the opening months of the council), appeared when the King of Aragon recognised his successor "Clement VIII" and intrigued with the Republic of Siena to secure recognition for him in the very city of Pope Martin's council. Then a friar preached before the council a strange sermon in which he explained that, like Our Lady, the Church had two spouses. There had been St. Joseph (who obeyed her) and the Holy Ghost whom Our Lady herself obeyed: so the Church, too, must obey the Holy Ghost but could command her other spouse, the pope. The months were going by without the Church in general showing any interest in the council, and the council was proving itself no more than a debating society on the solitary, but inexhaustible, topic of conciliar supremacy. There were, of course, those whom these debates bored, and presently they began to make their way home. The legates made their plans accordingly and announcing that the next council would meet at Basel in 1431, they dissolved the Council of Siena (March 7, 1424).

The pope promised that he would himself reform the curia, and the decrees he published 883 have been taken, not unnaturally, as the measure either of his inability to recognise wrongdoing when he saw it, or else of his indifference. For they are little more than pious generalities about the need for cardinals and their suites to set a good example to the rest of mankind, and a repetition, for the hundredth time, of ancient laws about their dress and ornaments. 884

"The very word 'council' filled Martin V with horror, " said a contemporary. There was every reason why it should; 885 and as the time drew near for the council at Basel, to which he was pledged, placards appeared on doors of St. Peter's to remind him of his duty and threaten revolt if he failed in it. On February 1, 1431, he appointed the legate who was to preside, Giuliano Cesarini, and three weeks later Martin V was dead, carried off by apoplexy.

The conclave was short, and its choice (March 3) was unanimous, the Venetian cardinal, Gabriele Condulmaro; he took the name Eugene IV. The new pope was forty-seven years of age, a Canon Regular, and greatly reputed for his austere life. He was a nephew of Gregory XII, and one of those four cardinals whose creation, in 1408, had been the occasion of Gregory's cardinals deserting him and of the subsequent Pisan extension of the schism. As a cardinal Eugene IV had stood loyally by Gregory XII until his abdication. Only then had he taken any part in the council at Constance. The Church had in him a pope whose action would not be hampered by any memories of a past in which he had patronised the new conciliar doctrines and used them as a whip to chastise unworthy popes. But while Eugene IV faced the approaching crisis with this undoubted advantage, he had unhappily inherited something of the vacillation which had ruined the career of his uncle, Gregory XII. And not only had he, like the rest of the cardinals, signed and sworn the pact drawn up in the conclave, 886 but as pope he publicly renewed his promises, pledging himself thereby to increase the importance of the cardinals, and to give the Sacred College, as such, a real share in the direction of the Church, making it almost an organ of government. 887 The curia was to be reformed in head and members; cardinals would only be chosen according to the decrees of Constance; the pope would ask their advice about the new General Council and would be guided by it; and, as well as guaranteeing them a half of the main papal revenues, he would not, without their consent, make treaties and alliances nor any declaration of war; finally, all vassals of the Holy See would henceforth, swear allegiance not only to the pope, but to the Sacred College too.

Cesarini, it has been said, 888 had been given a two-fold commission by Martin V. He was to preside at the council and also to organise, in Germany, the new crusade against the Hussites. The new pope confirmed both the commissions. Actually, the more urgent matter now was the Hussite invasion of Germany, and so while the fathers of the council made their slow way to Basel, and while the pope was beginning to turn his own thoughts to the new offers of reunion from the emperor at Constantinople, the legate to the council was busy preaching the Holy War in Germany and organising supplies for the army. On June 27 Eugene had sent word to him that the opening of the council might wait until the Hussites had been settled, but that settlement proved to be the disastrous defeat of Taussig. 889 It was with this dreadful catastrophe still very fresh in his mind, and with a certitude about the fact and the nature of the crisis before the Church, that Cesarini, only three weeks after the battle, came to the council (September 9).

The legate's first act was to begin a vigorous campaign to secure a better attendance. So far, in fact, it was the experience of Pavia and Siena all over again, a mere handful of prelates who could not conceivably be taken to represent anything but themselves. However, on December 14, after three months more of publicity, the legate held the first solemn general session.

And now began the long story of misunderstanding and cross purposes, not only between the anti-papal majority at the council and the Holy See, but between the pope and his legate. For, nearly five weeks before this solemn opening, Eugene had despatched to Cesarini a new commission which, reciting with great detail all the hindrances that were making, and must make, this council such another miserable fiasco as Siena had been, gave the legate power to dissolve it, and to announce a new council to be held at Bologna in the summer of 1433, without prejudice to the council which Constance had decreed must meet round about 1440. This new commission did not, however, reach the legate until nine days after the opening session, at which the one piece of business accomplished had been to re-affirm the fundamental decree Frequens of Constance. Had the legate known it, a second, still more drastic, commission was already on its way to him. Even before Cesarini had received the first, Eugene IV, on December 18, had signed a bull dissolving the council, and giving as the determining reason the invitation which it had sent to the Hussites (on October 30), to attend and state their case. The second bull came to Cesarini's knowledge on January 10, 1432, and although he did not leave Basel he ceased from that date, to preside over the council.

From the moment when Eugene IV, in 1431, decided to bring the council at Basel to an end, and thereby provided the advocates of the new conciliar theory with their opportunity to renew the attack on the traditional practice of the papal supremacy, all other questions sank into comparative insignificance — even the question of a peace with the victorious, militant Hussites of Bohemia. The story of the council's handling of the Bohemian crisis is, however, closely bound up with the still more involved story of its long duel with the pope; but the history may be more intelligible if the stories are told separately.

The Council of Basel — as will be told — decided that it was its duty to ignore the pope's will and to continue in session; and when (February 10, 1432) the Hussites decided to accept its invitation, they were told that, despite the pope's instructions, the council would go on with its work. The next seven months were taken up with diplomatic preliminaries, and especially with the arranging for safe conducts for the Hussites, in which no loophole was left that would allow for their execution as heretics should they fail to convert the council to their way of thinking. In October deputies from Bohemia came to Basel to make the last arrangements, and in January 1433, three hundred Hussites arrived and the discussions began. They continued for more than three months (January 7-April 14), and they settled nothing at all, except the real meaning of the Four Articles of 1420 and the impossibility that any Catholic could accept them. The council proposed ammendments that would make the articles acceptable, and when the Hussites returned to Bohemia a deputation from the council went with them, to urge the council's views at Prague.

This mission — it was the first of five — remained in Bohemia for six months (June 1433-January 1434). Its great achievement was the Hussites' acceptance of the articles as the council had amended them — the so-called Compactata of Prague (November 30, 1433). The Hussites had been divided now for years into mutually hostile sections; and this helped the council's envoys. A further cause for their success — wholly unconnected with the intrinsic reasonableness of their demands — was the victory of the Bavarians over the Hussites on September 21, 1433, the first real military disaster which the party had suffered. The Compactata amounted, in the first place, to a treaty of peace. The war was to cease and all ecclesiastical censures on the Hussites to be lifted; they were to have full liberty to administer Holy Communion under both kinds if, in all other respects, they accepted the faith and discipline of the Church and returned to union with it, and it was agreed that priests so administering the Sacrament were to explain to the people that it was equally truly and as well received under the one kind as under both; the demand that those guilty of mortal sin should be punished was allowed, but it was stated explicitly that the power of inflicting punishment on the guilty belonged only to those who possessed jurisdiction over the guilty, and not to private individuals; as for liberty to preach, here again there was a restriction, preachers must first be approved by the appropriate authority; the fourth article, against the cleric's right to own, was also made more precise so that it was now admitted that the clergy could own what came to them by inheritance, or gift, that the Church could own also, and, finally, that while clerics were bound to administer ecclesiastical property like faithful stewards, the property itself could not be taken over by others without the sin of sacrilege.

Obviously the articles so qualified were not the articles for which the enthusiasts had fought in Zizka's armies. They were no sooner signed than a party among the Hussites proposed to re-open the discussion. The envoys went back to Basel to report, and the rival factions among the Hussites began a civil war. On May 30, 1434, the more extreme party were badly defeated, at Lipau, and their great leader Procop was among the slain.

The victors now approached Sigismund with offers of peace and recognition of him as King of Bohemia. The basis of the negotiations was the agreement made at Prague in the previous November, but when the Hussites met the emperor (Diet of Ratisbon, August 22-September 2, 1434), they demanded that the use of the chalice in the administration of Holy Communion should be compulsory. The council's envoys, however, stood firm for liberty, and the Hussites had to yield. When these, however, came to make their report to the Bohemian Diet at Prague (October 23), the Diet put out for Sigismund's acceptance thirteen points, many of them altogether new; such for example, as that bishops in Bohemia should henceforth be elected by their clergy and people, and that the pope should exercise no jurisdiction over criminous Czech clerics.

The council's envoys refused to accept the novelties; war broke out once more between the Hussite factions; and then, when the moderates were again victorious, the council at Sigismund's request, sent yet another commission — the fourth — to try and negotiate a peace. The scene of the negotiations this time (July- August 1435) was Brno in Moravia. Here the Hussites stood stubbornly by their demand for the thirteen points, while the Basel legates asked how a party could expect further concessions which had not yet honoured the pledges solemnly given in the Compactata of 1433? The single result of the conference was that Sigismund — weary after sixteen years' exclusion from his kingdom — began to lean towards the Hussites, to whom he made, in great secrecy, the promise that he would somehow secure for them recognition of their thirteen points (July 6, 1435). 890 The final breakdown came when the Hussites asked for a change in the wording of the article about Church property, and on September 16, after eight months' absence, the envoys returned to Basel.

Seven weeks later they were taking the road once more. The peace party — so Sigismund reported to the council — had now triumphed at Prague. He was recognised as king, the council was to be accepted, but, the right of the Czechs to elect their bishops must be conceded. The envoys were, then, commissioned to attend the diet about to meet at Stuhlweissenburg, and to obtain first of all a guarantee that the obligations sworn to in the Compactata would be honoured, and also that there would be liberty for all to communicate as they chose; if driven to it the legates could accept the Hussite modification of the articles about Church property. The diet opened on December 20, 1435, and on December 28 the envoys bluntly put it to the emperor that he was playing a double game. The storm that followed raged for days and on January 1, 1436, the envoys demanded a written promise from the emperor that he would not interfere in matters of Church discipline. The Hussites strongly opposed them. A compromise was arranged — Sigismund was to make the promise to the legates verbally, but there was to be no mention of it in the treaties. All was now ready for the solemn promulgation of the Compactata, but the act was deferred until a new diet should meet at Iglau. Here, in June 1436, the old controversy began all over again, but at long last, on July 5, the Compactata were published, and on August 14 Sigismund was recognised as King of Bohemia.

The war was over at last, and a peace patched up by which the Hussites were recognised — by the Council of Basel — as Catholics. But the peace rested on pledges which no real Hussite ever, for a moment, intended to honour. On the very morrow of the great ceremony of reconciliation, the Archbishop of Prague publicly broke the agreement about the manner of administering Holy Communion, in the very city where the ceremony had taken place.

A few weeks later there was another shift in the balance of the Hussite factions, and he fell from power. Once again a delegation left Prague to report the change to the council, but it arrived to find the fathers of Basel facing the most anxious hour of their history. The enforced long-suffering of the pope had at last reached its end. The council was under orders to transfer itself to Ferrara. None of its negotiations with the Hussites had as yet been submitted to the pope for his judgment, nor would they now ever be submitted to him. For the council was about to disobey the bull translating it, and so itself to incur an excommunication as real as any that had ever lain upon the Hussites.

While the last scenes of the tragic farce were being acted at Basel, Sigismund died (December 9, 1437), and the lately pacified kingdom of Bohemia split yet once again into civil war, the prelude to years of anarchy. The danger to Christendom from militant Wyclifism was indeed over; but the Hussites remained, very much alive in Bohemia; and Bohemia was now a frontier province of Christendom, for the Turkish conquest of south-eastern Europe had begun, and the long Turkish occupation of the lands between the Adriatic and the Carpathians.

When, in January 1432, it had come to the knowledge of the council at Basel that Eugene IV had issued a bull dissolving it, the council did not refuse to obey him, nor simply ignore his act, but in a solemn general session (February 15) it re-enacted the decree of Constance which laid it down that it is the pope's duty to obey a General Council, and the council's duty to punish his disobedience, and that without its own consent a General Council cannot be dissolved nor transferred to another place. Eleven days later, the bishops of France came together (under the king's patronage) at Bourges; their meetings continued for six weeks, and they begged and exhorted the pope to continue the good work being done at Basel. The emperor, Sigismund, also intervened strongly on the council's behalf, only to draw from the pope a curt reminder that this was an ecclesiastical affair. And the council pressed on to beg the pope to withdraw his decree of dissolution, and also to cite him to take his place at Basel. The cardinals too, were "invited" and given three months in which to appear. 891 These citations were nailed to the doors of St. Peter's on June 6, and on June 20 the council made special regulations to provide for an election should the pope chance to die, and it also forbade the pope to create any new cardinals while the present misunderstanding continued.

On August 20, 1432, the council was given the pope's reply. Eugene granted practically everything the council had demanded, but he did not grant it in the way they demanded. The council was allowed to continue its negotiations with the Hussites, and to plan the reformation of clerical life in Germany, and it could choose another city for the coming council instead of Bologna. But the council wanted an explicit withdrawal of the decree dissolving it, and an acknowledgment that without its own consent it could not be dissolved (September 3). General Councils alone, the pope was told, were infallible. At this moment the council consisted of three cardinals and some thirty-two other prelates, though the lower clergy (and especially the doctors) were there in great numbers. England too, however, had joined with France and the emperor to support the council, and — what must have weighed very heavily indeed with a pope who recalled the crisis of 1408 — out of the twenty-one cardinals only six were securely on his side. Then, in the last week of 1432, the council gave Eugene sixty days to withdraw his decree, and to approve, without any reservation, all it had enacted; and the council declared null all nominations made by him until he obeyed it.

The sixty days went by, and Eugene did not surrender; but in a bull of December 14, 1432, he explained that the coming council at Bologna would really be a continuation of that at Basel, and that only in this sense did he intend to dissolve the Council of Basel. But this did not relieve the situation at all, and the council grimly persisted that the pope must acknowledge that what had been going on at Basel continuously since the beginning was a General Council, guided by the Holy Spirit. There were, again, long and impassioned discussions between the pope's envoys and the council (March 7-10, 1433), and then, on April 27, the eleventh general session published eight new decrees which completed the fettering of the papacy that Constance had begun.

The pope next appointed new presidents for the council — a tacit recognition that it still existed — but the council would not recognise them: the pope must be explicit in his withdrawal of the decree of dissolution. The powers he gave the new legates were too wide for the council's liking; and his act was, in fact, a reassembling of the Council. On July 13 the council took away from the Holy See for ever all right to appoint bishops and abbots, 892 and decreed that all future popes must swear to obey this law before being installed. Eugene was threatened with punishment, and reminded how patient the council had been so far and he was now ordered to withdraw the decree and to announce solemnly his acceptance of all that the council had done. 893

Eugene meanwhile prepared two bulls, the first of which annulled whatever had been done against the rights of his see (July 29), while the second (August 1) accepted the council as a lawful General Council and formally withdrew the decree of December 18, 1431, that had dissolved it. This still did not satisfy the council. It was not enough that the pope recognised it now, and as from now; he must say that his own decree had never any force, could never have had any force. On the very day that the council made this retort, 894 Eugene, at Rome, was making his formal reply to the acts of July 13, quashing and reprobating this mass of anti-papal legislation.

And now, political necessity cast its shadow over the isolated pope's defiance. The Milanese — at war with Venice, the pope's homeland, and, because of that, the pope's ally — invaded the Papal State in force. They won over the pope's own vassals and commanders and he was soon forced out of Rome, a fugitive. What relation there really was between the invaders and the council we do not know — but they gave out that they came in its name to chastise the pope. Eugene now made a further concession to the council (December 15, 1433). He re-issued the bull of surrender of August 1, 1433, but with the changes which the council had demanded; he admitted now that he had decreed a dissolution in 1431, and that his act had been the cause of grave dissensions; he decreed that the council had been conducted in a canonical way ever since it opened and, as it were, now ordered it to continue its good work, and amongst other things, to reform the papacy. The dissolution then was null, and all sentences against the council are annulled; and the pope no longer demands that the council shall retract its anti-papal decrees. This bull was read in the council on February 5, 1434, and the council declared itself satisfied.

The council now had the ball at its feet. Eugene was presently an exile, 895 in Florence, and on June 26, 1434, at the eighteenth general session, the declaration of Constance was published once again, that a General Council derives its power immediately from God and that the pope is bound to obey it in all matters of faith and of the general reform of the Church, and that he is subject to its correction should he disobey. From the unhappy pope there came not a sign that he was aware of this dangerous impertinence. 896

In silence, and with a newly acquired patience, Eugene IV waited until he could intervene without more loss to his cause than profit. Given a little more rope the council would in the end destroy itself. Month by month, through 1434 and 1435, it assumed to itself one after another of the administrative and executive and juridical functions of the papacy, repeating here the great mistakes made at Constance. Soon there was time for little else. The council occupied itself with the Jewish problem and closed the profession of medicine against the feared and hated race; it decreed a distinctive dress for them; and, with their conversion in view, it ordered that chairs of Hebrew should be founded in all the universities. 897 Then, in January 1435, it turned to the problem how to reform the lives of Christians. It made a stringent decree against clerical concubinage from the terms of which it would not be unfair to deduce that this was common enough, 898 and even a notorious feature of ordinary life; there are countries, says the new law, where bishops take bribes from the clergy to connive at misconduct of this kind. Such bishops must make over to charities the double of what they have so received. Bishops must also be less lavish in their sentences of interdict; these have indeed become so frequent as to be a real scandal. There is also a notable mitigation of the law that made excommunication infectious as it were, through communication with the excommunicated; and a fourth law to restrict vexatious appeals from the bishops' tribunals. 899

Then, in the summer of that same year, 900 the council made a clean sweep of all the papal taxes due on appointments to benefices, annates included, and enacted that any further attempt to levy them was simony. Should any pope disobey this canon, he is to be denounced to the next General Council and this will deal with him. All the papal collectors were bidden to send in their accounts to the council for examination, and to pay into the council the moneys they had received. 901

It is important here to note to what extent the universal Church was in fact represented at Basel in this, the high noon of the council's power. The legate Ambrogio Traversari, writing about this time, 902 says that although there are between five and six hundred who take part in the proceedings, there are barely twenty bishops among them, and many of the great mass are not clerics at all. The truth of this is borne out by the recorded attendance at the general session of April 14, 1436 when there were present twenty bishops and thirteen abbots. 903

When the council's envoys brought to the pope the decree of June 9 that abolished all his main sources of revenue, they lectured him for his failure to give a good example by obeying the council, and they stiffened their lecture with threats. But Eugene merely acknowledged that he had heard them, and to the council he sent a reply that the pope is its superior, and that the Holy See cannot function without a revenue.

The deadlock — for such the situation had become — was destined to be solved by the success of the pope in winning over the Greeks to discuss the proposed reunion with himself rather than with the council. For there had actually been rival embassies negotiating at Constantinople, from the pope and from Basel. As it became evident — to both parties — that the Greeks would disregard the council, the pope's defiance of its threats increased. The greater part of 1436 (April to December) went by in mere repetition of these threats, and it was not difficult for the pope to charge the council, before the princes of Christendom, with utter sterility save for its proposal to enlarge the authority of the bishops at the expense of that of the Roman See.

With the new year, 1437, active preparations began for the reception of a host of Greek delegates and their suites. It was necessary to decide, once and for all, where the meeting of pope and emperor should take place. The pope, explaining that the Greeks preferred the convenience of a city in Italy, invited the council's vote. But the council treated the Greeks with as little ceremony as it treated the pope. The Greeks had objected that Basel was too far away, and the council then proposed Avignon. These debates were the most heated of all. Venerable prelates had to be forcibly held back as their brethren replied to their speeches. Roysterers in a tavern, said a cynically-amused spectator, 904 would have behaved more peaceably. Troops were brought into the cathedral 905 to prevent bloodshed, where the Cardinal-Archbishop of Arles, the leader of the anti-papal majority, had been sitting on the throne, fully vested and mitred, since cockcrow, lest another should capture this point of vantage. Each side had its own decree ready, and once the cardinal began the mass they were read out, simultaneously, the rival bishops racing anxiously, each eager that his own side should first begin the Te Deum. The scene is indeed worthy of what the council had been for far too long, and not unrepresentative of all that the so-called "conciliar movement" ever really was. 906

But the pope now felt himself master at last, and to yet another summons to appear before the council and answer for his disobedience, he replied by the bull Doctoris Gentium, September 18, 1437, which transferred the council to Ferrara and gave the assembly at Basel thirty days more to wind up its negotiations with the Czechs. When the legates left Basel, in December 1437, many of the bishops went with them. And while the little rump which remained now began the first formalities of the trial of Eugenius, the Greeks arrived at Ferrara, and there, on January 8, 1438, the first general session of the council took place.

There seemed now no longer any real danger to Catholic unity in the West, whatever the lengths to which the handful of clerics at Basel might go; but in truth the crisis was by no means at an end. The Christian princes, even though they did not break with the pope, and probably, never intended to break with him, found the little council too useful an arm against the papacy for them to be willing to see the pope destroy it. For France, and for Germany, this was an opportunity to lay the beginnings of that blackmailing tutelage of the papacy which was not wholly to disappear until our own times.

It is this last important aspect of the Basel activities that alone justifies the seemingly inordinate length at which the story has been told of an assembly so insignificant in numbers; and it is this which makes it necessary to tell the weary tale to the very end with the same detail. Here, in fact, we can observe, for the first time, not so much the new ideas about the royal control of Catholicism, but those ideas given political form, and that form blessed by the approbation of theologians, of canonists and of Catholic bishops, the local episcopate now showing itself quisling to the Holy See, despite the long tradition and despite the consecration oaths of personal fidelity to the pope.

Much has been written about the "conciliar movement, " but does not the phrase itself do the thing too much honour? A general movement there was indeed, for a whole generation, to bring about the restoration of unity by means of a General Council. But when was there any general enthusiasm for the government of the Church through councils? Not even the tiny active minority of bishops, so ready to use the machinery of a council to control the Holy See, proposed to obey the existing laws which subjected them to meet in provincial councils for mutual correction and the good of religion. As for the "democratic" idealists among the lower clergy, who made up the mass of the demonstrators, what more did any of them want but a career?

Again, what did those reforms amount to, of which it has been said so often that had not the papacy blocked them, they would have purified, and given new life to, the Church? What is there new in them beyond the liberation of episcopal incomes from the papal taxation? Nowhere do they provide remedies for the real troubles that were rotting away the bases of men's allegiance to the faith; the lack of any system to form and train a good parochial clergy; the need to reorganise of all the major monastic orders; the reorganisation of sees to make the needed contact of bishops and clergy possible; the de-secularisation of the episcopate — which would make the bishops really shepherds of men's souls; the correction of what was wrong in the philosophical and theological schools; the relating of the religious life of the common man to the fundamental doctrines of the faith; the needed restoration of the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist (that is, as Holy Communion) 907 to its proper place in Christian life. Of all these needs our reformers of Basel and Constance seem wholly unaware. Independence of the higher authority of Rome in the administration of their sees, and above all a tighter grasp on their revenues, such were the main considerations that moved the fathers of these assemblies when they turned from their novel speculations about the papal office to the practical work of reform. " It is the spirit which giveth life, " to the clerical reformer as to all other things Christian. The great historian of these times 908 has, it would seem, said the last word about these men and their constructive work, and he does but re-echo the biting language already quoted from their contemporary Aeneas Sylvius. 909

" [These zealous Gallicans] might have been still more persuasive, and more interesting, had they been as keen to promote those useful reforms which would not have put money into their pockets; if they had acknowledged the need for themselves to meet occasionally in provincial councils and synods; 910 if they had adopted the praiseworthy custom of living in their sees. . . if, in a word, after having (according to the day's current phrase) reformed 'the Church in its Head, ' they had set themselves seriously to reform it 'in its members' — in other words to reform themselves. "

The miserable history shows, too, in what an anaemic condition the papacy came forth from the long ordeal of the Schism; and of how little support in Christendom it could be certain, when it had to take such notice, and for so long, of the crude impertinencies of such insignificance. Surely none but minds already formed in a tradition of opposition to the very idea of the papal supremacy could, with the facts before them, ever have exalted and glorified the proceedings of this wretched assembly, and seen in them the promise — blighted, alas ! almost ere it was born — of a new age when religion would be purified from tyranny and from the abuses which tyranny must breed. The story of the Council of Basel in the last eleven years of its existence (1438-1449), and of the opportunity it proved to the Christian princes, needs to be known well in all its concrete detail (and it is rarely told in more than vague generality) 911 if the suspicion is to be understood which henceforward attached in the eyes of the Roman Curia to all who, wishing to reform the Church, spoke of a council as the obvious tool for the job. There is need, at any rate, to know exactly what the Council of Basel did, and exactly what it was that the popes reprobated in it, and exactly what those reforms were which the council proposed and whose development the popes arrested. The opportunity now (1438) offered to the Catholic princes — and the history of the next eleven years is the story of their eager use of it — lay in this that the Council of Basel reopened the Schism. The consequent crisis between the Roman Curia and these princes was over, in France, in less than two years; in Germany it dragged on for another seven. In both countries the crisis was ended by a compromise that left the princes stronger than before in their control of the Church.

About a fortnight or so after the opening of the council at Ferrara, the assembly at Basel declared Eugene IV suspended from his functions as pope (January 15, 1438). Just a month later, to the day, Eugene replied by excommunicating his judges (February 15); and just a month later again the principle on which Basel had been acting for the last seven years, that no pope could transfer a council against its will, was declared by the little assembly to be an article of the Christian faith (March 15). At Frankfort, in these same weeks, the diet of the empire was assembled for the last formalities of the election of an emperor, and it declared — what the new emperor, Albert II, 912 confirmed — that, as between Eugene and the council at Basel, Germany would be neutral, that a new (third) General Council ought to be called to reconcile the pope and the fathers of Basel, which council should meet in an imperial city, Strasburg, or Constance, or Mainz. The crisis, then, was to be prolonged and the settlement would be a German- influenced settlement.

In France, on May 1, 1438, the king — Charles VII — called together a great assembly of prelates and notables at Bourges. Two questions were proposed for their opinion; what ought the king to do in this new conflict between the pope and Basel? what action should be taken about the Basel decrees for a reformation of Christian life? After six weeks of discussion, in which envoys from the pope were heard and envoys from Basel also, the first demanding that Charles withdraw all support from Basel and the second that he should support its condemnation of the pope, the assembly answered that the king ought to work for the reconciliation of Basel with the pope, and that he ought to accept the reform decrees, with some changes of detail. The second opinion was embodied in a royal edict that gave the reform decrees force of law in France — the so-called Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, June 7, 1438. 913 Without any reference to the pope, in defiance indeed of his known will, the Church in France was henceforth to be governed by the decrees of a "council" which the pope had just excommunicated.

The new emperor, Albert II, reigned for only a short eighteen months, but long enough for the Diet of Mainz (March 26, 1439) to adopt the Instrumentum Acceptationis which was substantially the German equivalent of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. 914 And now the various reforming princes and prelates set themselves, individually, to gather what privileges and favours they could, both from the council at Basel and from the pope; and German Catholicism began to split up; the same city, chapter and see being at times divided for and against the pope, and rival bishops appearing, here and there, to claim the same see. In support of the plan for a new council, an informal league of princes began to form, France, Castile, Portugal, Navarre, Aragon and Milan, in addition to the German princes bound by the decision of Mainz.

Seven weeks after that decision the Basel prelates promulgated a "definition of faith. " It was declared to be a doctrine that all must believe, under pain of heresy, that General Councils are superior to the pope, also that the pope has no power to transfer a General Council against its will (May 16); and a month later the council deposed Eugene IV (June 25, 1439). On this momentous occasion there were present no more than twenty prelates and only seven of these were bishops; and the president had relics brought in from the churches and placed on the waste of vacant seats — the pope, it should appear, was condemned by the saints as well. The Holy See — in the eyes of these twenty prelates and their somewhat more numerous following of doctors — was now vacant, and it remained vacant for another seven months, while the rest of Christendom, with Eugene IV, gave itself, at Ferrara and Florence, to the business of reuniting the Eastern Churches with Rome. But at Basel, throughout the summer, the plague was raging, sweeping away the inhabitants of the little town by the thousand. On September 17, however, the " fathers " defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, 915 and on October 24 they approached the problem how to form a conclave for the election of the new pope.

They had but one cardinal to support them, 916 and they decided to add to him thirty-two electors chosen from the council, who must, all of them, at least be deacons ! Of the thirty-two, eleven were bishops, seven abbots, five doctors of theology, and nine doctors of law (canon or civil). Next there was a violent dispute, about who should have the best accommodation in the conclave, that nearly wrecked the whole affair. The bishops demanded first pick of the rooms, but they were persuaded to allow the more usual practice of drawing for them by lots. Then, on October 30, this miserable parody of Constance proceeded to its consummation and the conclave opened. From the beginning the favourite candidate (16 votes out of 33 in the first ballot) was the Duke of Savoy, Amadeus VIII. 917 As he rose in successive ballots to within one vote of the required two-thirds, the opposition grew violent. He was a layman, it was argued, and a temporal prince; he had been married and four of his children were still alive. Sed contra, this was a time when the Church needed a pope who was rich, 918 and well-connected. At last, on the fifth ballot (November 5), Amadeus was elected, with 26 votes out of 33. The council (on November 19) confirmed the election and on January 8, 1440, the duke accepted. He proposed to call himself Felix V.

Never surely has there been so odd a choice. Cesarini reassured the council at Florence. Amadeus was so avaricious, he said, that he grudged to pay for food enough to keep himself alive; there would soon be open war between the anti-pope and his council. 919 Truly enough, his first reply to the council's offer was to ask how was he to live now that the council had abolished the annates? He had to support him his own state and Switzerland generally, Scotland too, and Aragon, with its dependencies Sardinia and Sicily. Eugene IV excommunicated Felix on March 23, 1440; Felix, however, went through with the sacrilegious farce, was ordained, consecrated and crowned on July 24. But the King of France, though not repudiating the act of 1438, protested against the election, and obliged his subjects to continue faithful to Eugene. Brittany followed suit, so did Castile.

The only real additional anxiety which the election brought to Eugene was in Germany, where the Emperor Frederick III, 920 although he did not acknowledge Felix, maintained the policy of neutrality, and continued to call for a new council in Germany. This was in the spring of 1441, by which time the first disputes between Felix and his council were well under way. They had refused, on principle, to accept the president he gave them; and their scheme for nuncios and legates to enlist the support of the princes had broken down when Felix refused to contribute to the expense. It was yet another grievance that he refused his newly- created Sacred College 921 the half of the revenues to which they were entitled. In November 1442, and soon after his meeting with Frederick III — who carefully avoided all dangerous occasions of implicit acknowledgement, and whose main concern was to marry off his widowed daughter to one of the pope's sons — Felix left Basel, for ever. He had spent as much on the adventure as he proposed to spend, and he settled now at Lausanne. In that year, 1442, the council had held no public session and on May 16, 1443, it held its forty-fifth, and last. In June Alfonso of Aragon had returned to his allegiance, a most important gain to Eugene, for he was king now of Naples too, with a frontier coterminous with the Papal State on its southern and eastern sides; and with Alfonso there also returned his ally, the Duke of Milan.

The whole interest henceforth lay in the fate of the Roman hold on Catholic Germany. Hussite zeal was still hot in the south below the deceptive agreement of 1436. How much of the country would the pope be able to hold to union with his see? In Germany little could be done during the next two years, for war broke out between the Swiss and Austria. The war left the princes of Germany still more divided, and it aggravated the differences between the partisans of the council and those who, with Frederick III, leaned towards Eugene. In January 1445 Eugene began to move against two of these pro-council princes, the Archbishop of Cologne and the Bishop of Munster, who were anti-imperialist also. There was a diplomatic exchange between pope and emperor — Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini representing Frederick, and the Spanish canonist Juan Carvajal the pope; and out of this there emerged the foundations of a lasting settlement. But now the pope's habitual impetuosity nearly wrecked all.

Feeling himself secure, Eugene deposed the archbishop-electors of Cologne and Treves (January 24, 1446) 922 and caused thereby such a storm in Germany that barely a month after his legate had signed with the emperor the accord of Vienna (February 1446), the whole body of the prince-electors had formed a league to resist the pope and to compel the emperor to the same policy (March 21). The electors demanded, in fact, not only that the depositions should be revoked, but that the pope should accept the principles of Constance and Basel about his subordination to General Councils, should accept also the reforms decreed by these councils, as Germany had accepted them at Mainz in 1439, and should convoke a new council to meet in Germany. If Eugene accepted their terms the electors would recognise him provisionally as pope, that is until the council met: if he refused they would — so they secretly decided — go over to the Council of Basel.

It was in July 1446 that the envoys of the princes delivered this ultimatum to the pope. Aeneas Sylvius accompanied them, sent by Frederick to warn Eugene of what awaited should he refuse. But the pope, for once, forbore to be rash and merely pledged himself to send a reply to the diet that was to meet at Frankfort on September 1.

At Frankfort the critical discussions went on for three weeks (September 16 to October 5, 1446). The pope sent a strong team of diplomatists and canonists, Parentucelli (the future Nicholas V), Carvajal, Nicholas of Cusa (already the greatest German churchman of the time), and Aeneas Sylvius. Very skilfully they brought it about that what the diet discussed was not any reply of Eugene to their ultimatum, but the pope's acceptance of their terms as the pope had modified them. To the legates Eugene had indeed made very clear the limits beyond which he could not go. 923 The diet, however, was far from satisfied, and it broke up without reaching any decision. The legates, in fact, had managed to divide the princes, and to form, secretly, and at the slight cost of some 2,000 florins, a bloc favourable to the pope. All parties now made for Rome and in the first days of the new year, 1447, Eugene received the envoys of the princes in public audience (January 12, 1447). Their demands — the demands of 1446, but now more politely stated — he referred to a commission of cardinals specially appointed, and a month later, in four documents, he gave his decision. The princes — the majority of them — accepted it. The pope was already seriously ill when the envoys arrived. During the next four weeks he rapidly grew worse, and it was actually kneeling round his deathbed that the princes swore their fidelity. Sixteen days later Eugene IV died (23 February, 1447).

What, in the end, had he managed to save of the authority of his see? Against all likelihood he had preserved it intact, and had seen it acknowledged in all its integrity; but he had had to make large concessions. He had had to accept the princes' scheme for a new council to meet in Germany in two years' time; and he had had to make a show of accepting the new, unacceptable theories about the superiority of General Councils. It was, however, no more than a show, for the pope's acceptance did not admit any obligation to call such a council, nor that it was necessary to call councils, nor that it was useful to do so — he even went out of his way to say that he did not believe it to be useful. Nor did he declare — as the princes desired — that it would be for the council to decide the disputed question whether he was really pope. As for recognition of anything done at the Council of Basel, the pope, now, never even referred to it. Moreover, a limiting clause, "in the way our predecessors have done, " destroyed any reality of submission which the clause might at first sight present, and where the princes demanded recognition of the "pre-eminence" of General Councils, the pope only acknowledged their "eminence. " And while the other matters in dispute were settled with the solemn finality of a bull, this, the most important of all, was set down in the comparative informality of a brief. As to the deposed elector-prelates, Eugene indeed promised to reinstate them, but only when they had sworn obedience to him as "true vicar of Christ. "

Here was the main point at issue — the pope's primatial authority over the whole Church, laity, clergy, episcopate, and over all these, it might be, united. And what the pope conceded here was something substantially different from what had been demanded with such noise and threatening. That the princes accepted without demur this singular and scarcely concealed transformation was due, of course, to the simple fact that they were really interested in something else, and in that alone — in drawing to themselves as much as they could of the control of Church properties, and of the scores of ecclesiastical principalities that lay within the empire. And in this matter the pope's surrender was very great. He accepted the Basel statement of the German grievances, and the decrees by which that council had hoped to remedy them — the statement, in fact, adopted by emperor and princes at Mainz in 1439. He ratified and validated all appointments to benefices, all sentences and dispensations granted during the ten years of the "neutrality, " even those made by prelates who had stayed on at Basel after he had transferred the council to Ferrara. There was, in fact, a general and unconditional lifting of all the sentences laid upon the members of the council and their adherents. After ten years the princes — and especially the ecclesiastical rebels — had won, in this more material field, all they had fought for; but they had only won it as a grant from the very authority which they had, for all that time and longer, professed to call in doubt, and which they had desired to cut down until it could scarcely exist at all.

Ten days after the death of Eugene IV, Tommaso Parentucelli, the late legate to Frankfort, was elected in his place — Nicholas V. He, of course, confirmed all that Eugene had sanctioned, and in July 1447 he sent the promised legate to discuss with the princes the indemnity which they had agreed should be paid the Holy See now that annates were abolished. The fruit of these discussions was the concordat of 1448. 924 This agreement, repeating the concordat of 1418, set permanent limits to the pope's collation to benefices within the empire. Except in the special circumstances which the concordat carefully enumerates, appointments to vacant sees and abbeys are henceforth to be by election, the elect needing from the pope confirmation only. The pact also greatly restricted the pope's power to reserve to himself appointments to benefices in the future; and finally — the principal object of the concordat — in place of the tax called first-fruits which the pope has surrendered, it is agreed that the newly appointed bishop or abbot will pay a sum determined separately in each case. 925 No see will be so taxed more than once in any one year, even though there be several successive bishops in that year; and arrears due on this account to the pope's treasury will, for the future, die with the debtor.

Now that the pope and the princes of Germany were at one, the very days of the council at Basel were surely numbered. The emperor was at last able to bring pressure to bear on the city authorities, and in June 1448 they asked the council to find another meeting- place. On July 24 its members trekked as far as Lausanne, where their pope still abode. Switzerland and Savoy were, in fact, still loyal to him and to them. But the new pope, Nicholas V, had been secretly negotiating a surrender, and Felix now announced, with the consent of the council, that he was ready to resign. On January 18, 1449, Nicholas V lifted all the sentences and censures with which the anti-pope was loaded, and freed the council too, and all its supporters. On April 4 Felix was allowed to do the same for Nicholas V and for the dead Eugene, and to confirm all grants he had made and to announce his coming abdication. The great event took place three days later — not a penitential submission in forma as "Clement VIII" had made to Martin V in 1429, and as the Franciscan "Nicholas V" had made to John XXII a hundred years earlier, but a formal abdication made to the council for the good of the Church, and ending with a prayer to the princes to take the act in a friendly spirit and to uphold the authority of General Councils. On April 16 the council met once more, to withdraw all the excommunications and deprivations it had decreed and then, on April 19, it solemnly elected as pope "Thomas of Sarzana, known in his obedience as Nicholas V"; the pattern of Constance was faithfully followed to the end. An end only reached five days later when the council, conferring on Felix, as legate and perpetual vicar, ecclesiastical jurisdiction over all the lands that had continued faithful to him to the last, granting him the first place in the Church after the pope, and the privilege of wearing the papal dress, decreed at last its own dissolution.

Nicholas V, a humanist of cultivated wit as well as an admirable Christian, patiently tolerated these last ritualistic antics and then in June, the council now out of the way for ever, he created Felix a cardinal and gave him, for life, authority as legate over his old domain; and, what the ex-pope no doubt appreciated just as much, a handsome pension. 926 Nicholas was generous also to the cardinal who for all these years had directed the anti-Roman activities at Basel, Louis Aleman. He re-accepted him as a cardinal and as Archbishop of Arles; 927 and he also gave the red hat to three of the cardinals Felix had created.

The indulgence shown by Nicholas V to the susceptibilities of these trans-alpine rebels, once they gave signs of submission, had gone very far — farther than, from precedent, might have been expected. But here was a pope with the very unusual experience that he knew Germany personally. He also had at his side a great German ecclesiastic who was a scholar and a theologian and possessed by a truly apostolic zeal — Nicholas of Cusa. The pope now determined to advance a step further the new reconciliation with Germany, in this hour when all was, presumably, love and joy, by sending Nicholas of Cusa 928 as legate with full papal powers 929 to put right all that he found wrong in the ecclesiastical life of the country.

The legate's tour of Germany and the Low Countries lasted a whole twelve months (February 1451 to March 1452). In that time he visited all the chief cities from Brussels to Magdeburg and Vienna, and from the Tyrol to the Zuyder Zee. His own mode of life continued to be that of the scholarly ascetic. Everywhere he went he preached, and nowhere would he accept the magnificent presents offered him. For the ills which troubled religion he had two main cures to propose — closer relations with the Holy See and a thorough reform of the greatly relaxed religious orders. At Salzburg, Magdeburg, Mainz and Cologne he held provincial councils; at Bamberg a diocesan synod. The commission he appointed at Vienna visited and reformed some fifty Benedictine houses of men and of women, and also the houses of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine. At Wurzburg the legate himself presided over a provincial chapter of seventy Benedictine abbeys, and here each abbot came to the high altar in turn, to bind himself by vow that he would introduce the reforms into his monastery. There was already at work in Germany the great reform associated with the abbey of Bursfeld; the pioneer of this movement was in the closest touch with the legate, and Nicholas of Cusa, at Wurzburg, urged the Bursfeld reform on the assembled abbots.

The legate made a lengthy stay at the university town of Erfurt, and the commissioners he left behind spent seven weeks investigating, and amending, the lives of the monks and friars and nuns of the town. At Magdeburg, where there was a good archbishop, things were in better order, but the provincial synod enacted very rigorous legislation to correct the unreformed religious houses. At Hildesheim the legate deposed the abbot for simony, and at Minden — where he found the diocese in a deplorable state — another problem exercised him, the growing tendency for the pious laity to trust in the mere externals of religion for their salvation. The latest source of this danger was the confraternity spirit, and the legate forbade the founding of any more confraternities.

Undoubtedly this missionary year, where the missionary was a cardinal and legate of the pope, brought about many changes for the better. But if the changes were to be permanent, return visits, and by legates of the same character as Nicholas, were called for; by legates, also, who were themselves natives of these countries. This great expedition stands out however, as a thing unique in the history of these last two hundred years before the Reformation — as Nicholas himself is almost the unique German of these centuries to be given the prestige and the power for good that goes with the coveted honour of the cardinal's hat. 930

Another cardinal, Giulio Cesarini, legate in Germany twenty years before this, had written to Eugene IV that unless the German clergy amended the* ways of life their people would massacre them, as the Hussites were massacring the clergy in Bohemia. a The laity were, however, not so interested in the matter as the Italian cardinal seemed to think. Except for sporadic raids — of which Nicholas of Cusa's expedition is the best example — the clergy and churches of Germany remained untroubled in their chronic state of disorder, under their impregnable prince prelates, awaiting the ultimate inevitable day of doom, and the saving grace of the Jesuits and St. Peter Canisius.

THE RETURN OF ISLAM, 1291-1481

The submission of the Council of Basel to Nicholas V in 1449 brings to fulfilment, after nearly ninety years of effort and strife, the determination of the popes to re-establish themselves at Rome. Never again, until the French Revolution, will the pope be forced out of Rome, and never again will there be an anti-pope. In the face of the many evident defeats which the popes sustained during their ninety years of effort, it is well to establish these two facts firmly and in all their high significance. But from that precariously won victory Nicholas V turned to find, confronting the Christian hope, the menace of an imminent Mohammedan conquest of all that remained of the Christian East. The ninety years which had seen the papacy's recovery had also seen the rise of a new power in the world of Islam, the Ottoman Turks.

At the time when the loss of St. Jean d'Acre, the last Latin stronghold on the mainland of Syria, had plunged the West into a stupor of despair (1291), the Ottomans were no more than a petty tribe in the service of the Sultan of Iconium, a Moslem state in central Asia Minor. By the time Clement V had suppressed the Templars (1312), they had acquired a small, strategically placed, territory of their own, that ran from the Sea of Marmora to the Black Sea, behind the strip of Asiatic shore where the Byzantine Empire still held the ancient cities of Nicea and Nicomedia. Then, in the next generation, under their sultan Ourkhan (1326-1359), the organisation began that was to make the Ottomans, for the next two hundred years, an all but unconquerable scourge: the nation turned itself into a drilled and disciplined professional army, the cream of which was the corps of Janissaries recruited from Christian European children, sometimes given as hostages, sometimes kidnapped. From the middle of the fourteenth century everything fell before this new, most formidable engine of conquest. The Ottomans made themselves the first power in the Mohammedan world and they also conquered, without any great difficulty, all that remained to the emperor of his territories in Asia Minor.

In 1356 the rivalry of a Byzantine prince, John Cantacuzene, with the emperor, gave the Turks their first footing in Europe; they became masters of Gallipoli. Nine years later they took Adrianople. And, at last, the Christian princes were roused to action. Peter I of Cyprus, with the active support of Pope Urban V, gathered a fleet which, in 1367, raided several of the Syrian ports, destroying arsenals and stocks of munitions and supplies, and thereby halting the Turks for some years. But the great princes of western Europe held aloof. From Edward III of England and Charles V of France, exhausted both of them by the first long bout of the Hundred Years' War, the pope had a flat refusal; to the maritime states of Italy, Genoa and Venice, their own commercial interests in the East were of greatest importance, and, if these called for it, Genoa and Venice would even side with the Ottomans against the crusaders.

Yet upon these states — and upon Venice especially — there already lay a great deal of the responsibility for the weakness of the Christian position in the East, and for the policy of appeasement which was the only defence that the Byzantines could now contrive whenever the Ottomans increased the pressure. Venice had been the inspiration, and the chief director, of the great act of piracy which, in 1204, had virtually destroyed the Eastern empire; and, with Genoa, it had, ever since, clung desperately to the valuable territories which it had then been able to wrest from the empire. Never again, after that fatal date, was there any power in the East capable of holding off a new Mohammedan offensive should such occur. The modern country of Greece was henceforward in the hands of a medley of Latin princes, Dukes of Athens, Princes of Achaia, Counts of Cephalonia and the like; the Serbs rose to found an empire of their own on the ruins of the power of the hated Greeks; the Bulgarians, too, established themselves as independent. The territory of the empire at the time when Michael VIII negotiated with Gregory X the reunion of 1274 was, then, only a tiny fraction of that which the Latins had conquered seventy years earlier. By the time that Michael's successors, in the fifteenth century, were once more planning a union with the West, their power had shrunk to little more than the capital and its immediate hinterland (1423). The Serbs had gone down at the bloody defeat of Kossovo (1389), and the Turks were masters of Greece and Bulgaria too. Constantinople, thirty years before its fall, was already isolated from the West. The last joint crusade to relieve it — a great host of French, Germans and Hungarians led by Sigismund, King of Hungary 931 — had ended in yet another catastrophe at Nicopolis (1396), and it was only the appearance of a rival Mohammedan power, taking away the Ottomans to defend their own capital, which now saved the empire from the coup de grace.

It is very easy to list the causes of the chronic Christian disasters; 932 they were as evident to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as they are to us, and they were as much discussed. An abundance of writers agreed that there was no hope until the Christian princes put aside their own jealousies and vanities; until the crusading armies consented to accept some form of discipline; until there re-appeared, what had been lost for a century and more, the old religious fervour; and until the Italians could be persuaded to forgo their lucrative trade with Islam. The missionaries — the most practical men of all — had no hope whatever that the way of war would succeed. The sole solution for the problem of the Turks was, they held, to convert them to Christianity.

As to practical measures, here again there was general agreement about what ought to be done, and almost never was any of it done. Egypt was the vital centre of the Mohammedan world. Egypt lived by its commerce. So let a blockade of Egypt be proclaimed, and an international fleet be formed to enforce it; especially let Venice and Genoa be forbidden the* traitorous trade. Thus it was that, so early as 1291, Nicholas IV put a ban on the trade and raised a small fleet of twenty galleys to enforce it; and Clement V made this blockade the special business of the Knights-Hospitallers.

But these were gestures far too slight to have any permanent effect. The popes were, already, almost alone in their understanding how truly Christendom was a unity, that no one part of it could look on indifferently while an alien civilisation and cult made itself master of another part. They were alone in their anxiety, and the Turks established themselves in Europe, to be for four hundred years and more an unmitigated curse to the millions whom they misgoverned, and, when finally expelled, to leave behind them within the very heart of those peoples, a degrading, if inevitable, legacy of feuds and pride and hate, of cruelty and treachery, the legacy which still threatens to plunge the East back into anarchy and barbarism. From the moment when the Ottomans first established themselves on European soil the popes, unhesitatingly and instinctively, in what was perhaps the most critical hour their own rule had known for a thousand years, set themselves to organise the defence of Europe against Islam. A writer of the time, one day to be pope himself, and to die at Ancona after years of exertion in this business, as the fleet he had painfully assembled sailed into the harbour of that ancient city, has vividly described their impossible and thankless task. "The titles of pope and emperor, " he says, "are now no more than empty words, brilliant images. Each state has its own prince, and each prince his own special interests. Who can speak so eloquently as to persuade to unity under a single flag so many powers, discordant and even hostile? And even should they unite their forces who will be so bold as to undertake to command them? What rules of discipline will he lay down? How will he ensure obedience? Where is the man who can understand so many languages that differ so widely, or who can reconcile characters and customs that so conflict? What mortal power could bring into harmony English and French, Genoese and Aragonese, Germans, Hungarians and Bohemians? If the holy war is undertaken with an army that is small, it will be wiped out by the unbelievers; if the army is of any great size, it will court disaster just as infallibly through the insoluble problems of manoeuvre and the confusion that must follow. To whatever side one turns, one sees the same chaos. Consider only, for example, the present state of Christendom. " 933

One effect of the Ottoman conquests after their victory of Nicopolis (1396) was to convince Venice, at last, that her only chance of survival lay in making herself feared. From the beginning of the fifteenth century Venice shows a new spirit of independence in its dealings with the Ottomans; the republic was now all for a crusade, and all for a reunion of the churches which would bring to an end the most bitter of all the differences that hindered joint Christian action against the common foe. It was then by no means coincidence, or accident, that the election of a Venetian as pope — Eugene IV — in 1431, brought the possibility of reunion into the sphere of urgent practical affairs, nor that to this pope, from the first weeks of his reign, the Eastern question was the principal question. His plans were simple and grandiose: to reunite Constantinople and Rome and to preach a general crusade that would sweep out the Turks for ever. Here, if anywhere, is the positive intent of the pope who fought the long duel with the assembly at Basel, here is the real Eugene IV. That council was, from the beginning, wholly taken up with its scheme to make the papacy, for the future, the servant of the clerical element in the Church; and that the pope had to spend years fending off this peril was an immense distraction from the no less urgent business of the menace to the Christian East. It was not the only way in which the council hampered his action, for independently of the pope, and in a kind of competition with him, the prelates at Basel also began to negotiate a reunion scheme with the Eastern emperor and his bishops.

These negotiations began with the council's invitation to the Greeks to take part in its proceedings (January 26, 1433). In the end, after nearly four years, they broke down completely, partly because the council was unable to find the money to pay the expenses of the Greek delegation, and unwilling to remove to some Italian city more convenient to the Greeks. But the principal cause of the breakdown was the Greek determination not to recognise any synod as oecumenical unless the pope (as well as the other patriarchs) took part in it. It might be hazardous to negotiate a reunion with the West at all, but to discuss reunion with a council that was permanently at loggerheads with its own patriarch — and him the pope — would be an obvious waste of time.

Meanwhile the pope had been extremely active. He had not only begun discussions with the emperor, but with the Christian rulers of Trebizond and Armenia too. His nuncios had penetrated to Jerusalem, and they were, ultimately, to negotiate not only with the Orthodox Churches but with the Monophysites of Syria and Ethiopia, and with the Nestorians also. By the year 1437 Eugene felt himself strong enough to risk all that the enmity of Basel could effect, and, as we have seen, on September 18 of that year he transferred the council — reunion now its main business — to Ferrara.

It is interesting to note how completely the precedents of the reunion council of 1274 were now disregarded. This time the theological questions at issue were to be discussed in the council itself, and the reunion was to be the act of a council in which Greeks and Latins sat together, under the presidency of the pope. And the General Council was preceded by a synod at Constantinople in which the Greeks chose the. delegates who were to represent them at Ferrara, bishops and other leading ecclesiastics. It was a small army of some seven hundred which in the end set out, and at its head was the emperor himself, John VIII. The Patriarch of Constantinople — who, if the reunion were accomplished, would be, by virtue of Innocent III's decree, the first personage in the Church after the pope — was the only one of the four Eastern patriarchs to attend in person; but the other three — Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem — were represented by proxies to whom they had given unlimited powers.

The Greeks sailed from Constantinople in November 1437, and after a ten weeks' voyage, on February 8, 1438, they reached Venice. There the Doge and the papal legate received them in a scene of dazzling splendour. On March 4 the emperor entered Ferrara and on April 9 Greeks and Latins assembled in the cathedral for the first joint session, and agreed on a first decree recognising the council as truly oecumenical.

Then the difficulties began to appear. The emperor's one anxiety was that nothing should now mar the prospect of a firm military alliance to drive out the Turks, and since the discussion of theological differences (all alleged by many of his bishops to be differences about the Faith) would be the speediest way to disturb the momentary harmony, he made every possible effort to put off the discussions. Apparently he would have preferred some act of accord in as general terms as could have been devised, to be ratified and consecrated by whatever gestures of reverence the pope cared to ask for; and the Greek bishops showed themselves, in this, the emperor's faithful and obedient subjects. It took all the tact of the Latin diplomatists — and here, as at Basel, the principal role fell to Cesarini — and all the good will of the pope, to keep the peace while the Greeks were slowly compelled to come to the point, to say, that is, why they thought the Latins heretics, and to listen to the Latin explanations of the Latin formularies that must — if understood — convince them of Latin orthodoxy.

The four main differences were the Latin teaching about the relation of the Holy Ghost to the other two Persons of the Blessed Trinity, the Latin use of unleavened bread in the Mass (the Greeks using ordinary bread), the Latin teaching about Purgatory, and the primacy of the Roman See over the whole Church of Christ. The pope proposed that a preliminary commission — ten Greeks and ten Latins — should be set up to discuss these four questions. The emperor, however, would not hear of any discussion except upon the third topic; and it was only after some time that he would agree even to this. But at last the discussions on Purgatory began, and they went on steadily for two months (June-July 1438). On July 17 the Greeks agreed that what the Latins believed was not different from what they, too, believed. And then nothing more was accomplished for another three months.

However, by October, the emperor was brought to allow that the alleged diversities in the doctrine about the Blessed Trinity night be considered, and so there began a long nine months' theological discussion. 934 It ended, on June 8, 1439, 935 by the Greeks accepting that the Latin doctrine that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son is not heresy, and that the Latins did not sin in adding to the creed the word Filioque to express this doctrine. Then, after another week of hesitation, the emperor once more showing great reluctance to renew the debates, the most delicate question of all was attacked — the claim of the pope to a universal primacy in the Church. But the debates, this time, were surprisingly soon over. By June 27 agreement had been reached, and after another week's work the text of the reunion decree had been drafted. It was signed on July 5 by 133 Latins and 33 Greeks and solemnly published in a general session of the council, July 6, 1439. 936

The decree is in the form of a bull, Laetentur Coeli, and published both in Latin and in Greek. While, at the earlier reunion council of Lyons in 1274, the only theological difference determined by the council was the controversy about the orthodoxy of the Filioque, now, at Florence, the council reviewed the whole position. The bull is, in form, a definition of faith made by the pope with the approval of the council (hoc sacro universali approbante Florentino concilio diffinimus) The pope, then, explicitly defines, as a truth to be held by all Christians, that the Holy (Ghost proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, and that the addition of the word Filioque to the creed, made for the sake of greater clearness in expressing this truth, was lawful and reasonable. He defines, also, that it is indifferent to the validity of the consecration in the mass whether the bread used be leavened or unleavened; and that it is Catholic doctrine that all the souls of those who die in charity with God but before they have made satisfaction for their sins by worthy penances, are purged after death by purgatorial pains, from which pains they can be relieved by the pious acts of the faithful still alive, by prayer for example, by almsdeeds and by the offering of masses. Finally there is a detailed definition about the fact and the nature of the Roman primacy. This part of the decree calls for the council's own words, or a translation of them. "We define, in like manner, that the holy Apostolic See and the Bishop of Rome, have a primacy (tenere primatum) throughout the whole world, and that the Bishop of Rome himself is the successor of St. Peter the prince of the Apostles, and that he is the true vicar of Christ, and the head of the whole Church, and the father and teacher of all Christians; and that to him in St. Peter there was committed by Our Lord Jesus Christ full power to pasture, to rule and to guide the whole Church; as is also contained in the acts of the General Councils and in the sacred canons. " Here, without any reference to the new theories of the last sixty years, without any reference to those decrees of the assemblies at Pisa, at Constance and at Basel, which attempted to give the new theories a place in Catholic belief, the tradition is simply and clearly stated anew. And it is also worthy of notice that, although various Greek bishops opposed the definition of Florence in its preliminary stages, for various reasons, no one of them ever urged against the papal claim the theories set forth so explicitly at Constance and at Basel. 937

The union of East and West once more established, the Greeks left Florence with their emperor (August 26, 1439). To John VIII it had been a disappointment, which he did nothing to disguise, that the council had been so purely a theological conference, that none of the great princes of the West had appeared, and that it had not, in the manner of the famous council of 1095, been the starting point of a great military effort.

But the Council of Florence did not break up when the Greeks departed. Its later history is indeed not very well known to us; all the acts of the council, the official record of its proceedings, have disappeared, and when the most interesting events were over the contemporary historians lost interest in the council. It continued, in fact, for another six years or so, at Florence until 1442 and in its final stages at Rome. It is not known how or when it actually ended; 938 But in the years while it was still at Florence the council was the means for other dissident churches of the East — some of them heretical bodies — to renew their contact with the Roman See, to renounce their heresy and to accept again its primatial authority. Thus in 1439 the Monophysite churches of Armenia, led by the Patriarch Constantine, made their submission; 939 in 1441 the Monophysites of Ethiopia (Jacobites) did the same 940 and the Monophysites of Syria too; in 1445 the Nestorians (Chaldeans) of Cyprus came in, and also the Maronites.

The Council of Florence is perhaps chiefly important to us as the General Council which, of all the long series, was most visibly representative of Greeks and Latins, where the differences which for so many centuries had sundered them were discussed in all possible detail, and at great length, through eighteen successive and eventful months; a council whence there emerged a detailed agreed statement about the supreme earthly authority in the Church, so explicit and so all-embracing that, after five hundred years, it still retains all its practical usefulness. 941 But to the pope, as well as to the Greeks, the council was an assembly of Christians met to cement a new unity under the menace of imminent catastrophe. The Greeks had come from a city that seemed doomed; it was to a land fighting its last battles against an invader that they went back. The year in which the Greeks appeared at Ferrara, Transylvania was invaded and Belgrade attacked. In 1442 there was a second invasion of Transylvania, and from its bloody scenes there at last appeared a great military commander on the Christian side, the Hungarian nobleman John Hunyadi. For a time the Turkish advance was halted, and their armies defeated. The pope again deputed Cesarini to organise a crusade, and in 1443 the combination of the great cardinal, John Hunyadi and Ladislas of Poland drove the Turks out of Servia and Bulgaria, and forced a ten years' truce on them. The sultan — Murad II — was so discouraged that he went into retirement. But when reinforcements came in to the Christian armies, in 1444, Cesarini persuaded Hunyadi — against his better judgment — to break the truce and to invade Bulgaria. This brought Murad into the field once more. There was a bloody battle outside Varna (November 10, 1444) and the Christian army was destroyed. Ladislas and Cesarini were among the slain.

The sultan now turned south and made himself master of the Morea (1446) and two years later, on the already fatal field of Kossovo, he destroyed yet another Hungarian army which Hunyadi had managed to raise. In 1451 Murad II died. His successor was the still greater Mohammed II, who almost immediately began the long- distance preparations for the capture of Constantinople. Against him there was nothing but the personal valour of the emperor — Constantine XII — and his handful of an army. The emperor, like his brother and predecessor, John VIII, stood by the union with the pope, and his fidlity cost him the support of the mass of his people. So bitter, indeed, was the anti-Latin spirit in the capital that even after thirteen years the emperors had not dared to publish officially the reunion decrees of the council. In all that time, the prelates who had accepted the papal authority for political reasons, and against their own real convictions, and the very much smaller band who had never, even at Florence, accepted it at all, had made good use of their unhindered freedom to campaign against the Latins. Never did the mass of the Greeks hold the Latins in greater detestation than in these last years and months before the Turk administered the final blow. It was, indeed, in these very months that the famous saying (or its equivalent) was first uttered, " Better the turban of the Prophet than the Pope's tiara. "

By this time the pope of the reunion council was dead, and in his place there reigned the great humanist and patron of Greek letters Thomas of Sarzana, Nicholas V. Like his predecessor he did the little that was possible to help the city, endlessly pleading with the princes of the West, and gathering what money and ships and men he could. It was a great misfortune that this pope was by nature what we have lately come to call an " appeaser. " The Christian cause had suffered so badly that Nicholas V had almost come to dread the thought of an offensive. Especially did the disaster of Kossovo in 1448 fill him with dismay, and he strongly urged the Hungarians to keep to a war of defence. But to the emperor at Constantinople, who was again appealing piteously in 1451, the pope sent a strong warning that so long as the Greeks trifled with their pledged word and refused in their pride to submit to the divinely founded authority of the pope, they could hardly expect anything but chastisement from the justice of God; 942 the emperor must make a beginning and, without further delay, proclaim the divine faith to which he has pledged himself. But the pope did not merely lecture the emperor. He sent all the aid he could, money to repair the fortifications, a little fleet, and, as his legate, one of the Greek bishops who had been resolute for reunion at Florence and consistently loyal to it since, Isidore, once the Metropolitan of Kiev, and now a cardinal.

On December 12, 1452, the union of the churches was at last proclaimed, in a great ceremony at Santa Sophia 943 — and from that day until the very evening before the city fell, the mass of the people avoided the church as though it were plague stricken.

It was nearly five months later than this that the pope's ships arrived, after fighting their way through the blockading fleet (April 20, 1453). Outside the city, and all around it, was the vast Mohammedan host, 160,000 regular troops. Within the walls perhaps 7,000 men stood by the emperor, nearly two-thirds of them Westerners, Italians chiefly. The population, cursing their emperor and dreading Mohammed, awaited in passive superstition the arrival of a miracle. But after two months of siege the city fell (May 29, 1453). Its capture was the crown of a hundred years of Moslem victories, and immediately it gave to the Ottoman achievement a solidarity, a consistency and an air of permanence it had never hitherto possessed. Their hold on this city which for one thousand five hundred years had been a key point of world strategy, gave to the Turks a kind of prestige as invincible which the race never lost.

Its more immediate effect was to make it certain that the yoke laid upon the Christians of south-east Europe would not be lifted for centuries, and that the tyranny would, in the near future, extend to yet further provinces of what had once been Christendom. The West, Christian Europe, has now before it — and will continue to have before it down to our own time — the permanent anxiety of the "Eastern Question"; and the popes, since they at least realise the menace and resist it, are henceforward burdened with a second, 944 and permanent, major distraction from their duty to attend to the badly-needed reform of Christian life and thought. It is perhaps this last effect of the Turkish conquests which was the most disastrous of all, from the point of view of religion. Even had the popes been able to bring about the impossible, to put new life into the France of Charles VII, to unite in immediate harmony the England of the Wars of the Roses, to banish the Hussite feuds still eating away the vitality of Germany, and then, uniting these mutually antagonistic national interests and combining these princes with those maritime states of Italy whose policy was in its inspiration the least Christian of all, to launch a well- planned, well-organised joint attack at a distance of months of marching from its bases and even had the attack been successful and the Turks, five hundred years ago, been crippled for ever, what could the papacy thereby have gained for religion? Territories where the victorious Latin princes would assuredly have been the rulers, and where populations violently attached to their anti-Latin prejudices would continue to prefer the temporal rule of Islam to the spiritual rule of the pope. Nothing but a succession of miracles — suspensions of the laws of the nature of things — in the fields of diplomacy and war could have now brought the Christian cause to triumph over the Turks, and nothing but a new series of miracles could have saved the lands so liberated from the bloody anarchy which had been their fate already for generations wherever Latins ruled Greeks and hellenized Slavs. 945 It is, however, rarely given to any man to see the problem of his own hour in all its dimensions. What is demanded of him, by posterity, is that he shall have faced the crisis generously, with a total abandonment of self-interest. By this test the popes of this generation must be judged to have succeeded, and in the continuous nine years' effort of the two popes Calixtus III and Pius II, the papacy now reaches to heights unscaled since Gregory X.

When Nicholas V died (March 24-25, 1455), fifteen cardinals met to elect his successor. 946 Seven were Italians, there were two Frenchmen, two Greeks, and four Spaniards. An Orsini party in the Sacred College favoured a French pope, while a Colonna party aimed at another Italian. The only way out of the deadlock was to elect a cardinal who was neither, and for a brief moment it seemed that the new pope would be the Greek Bessarion, the hero of the reunion party at Florence, a fine scholar, a theologian, and a good administrator; in many ways the most noteworthy churchman of his age. But prejudice was too strong, and jealousy of the neophyte. There was next a movement to elect, from outside the cardinals, the Friar Minor Antonio of Montefalcone; and then, "as it were to postpone the contest, " 947 on April 8 the cardinals elected an aged Spaniard, Alonso de Borja. 948

Calixtus III — this was the new pope's title — came of a race for which militant opposition to Islam, still, after seven centuries, in occupation of the south of Spain, was of the essence of Catholicism. He was, moreover, a Catalan, and the kingdom of Aragon, in whose service he had spent the greater part of his life, was the greatest of the Christian maritime powers. The pope began his reign by a solemn public vow to work for one thing only, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe and the liberation of their Christian victims. Then he set himself, with wonderful energy and skill, to reorganise the crusade. Indulgences were announced, tithes decreed, the date of departure fixed and legates sent to all the Christian princes, cardinals to the chief of them, bishops and the new Franciscan Observants 949 to the smaller states. Calixtus made his own generous personal contribution, sending jewels to the saleroom and his plate to the mint, and even selling off castles. The restoration plans of Nicholas V were abruptly halted. Sculptors were set to cut stone cannon balls, and architects bidden design ships and engines of war. There was to be an expedition by land under the command of the Duke of Burgundy, 950 while the sea warfare would be the task of the pope's old master the King of Aragon and Naples. 951 There was already a small papal fleet in existence, and it was now ordered into the Aegean to succour the population of the islands still in Christian hands. During the winter of 1455-1456 the pope set up shipyards along the Tiber, and at an immense cost built a second fleet of twenty-seven ships.

The difficulties which had hampered earlier popes did not disappear. From no one of the Western princes was there any real response to the pope's enthusiasm. Hardly any of the money laboriously collected from the clergy and people ever reached the pope. The Kings of France and Denmark and Aragon, and the Duke of Burgundy himself, simply transferred it to their own use. In France it was even denied that the pope had any right to levy taxes on French Church property, and Calixtus was threatened with a General Council should he not withdraw the tax — a threat which this tough old man met by excommunicating those who had signed this protest. In the first summer of the reign war broke out in central Italy — a war in which the King of Naples secretly helped the freebooter Picinnino against the pope, while the papal fleet (commanded by an Aragonese archbishop), instead of sailing to the Aegean, joined itself to the Aragonese fleet in an attack on Genoa. Nor was the new fleet, at first, a more useful instrument. It was not until August 6, 1456, that the cardinal who commanded it — Scarampo — could be persuaded to leave the security of Naples. And by that date the one great event of the war was over, the relief of the besieged city of Belgrade.

The conqueror of Constantinople, Mohammed II, who had in 1455 made himself master of Serbia, next planned the conquest of Hungary, the last power between himself and the West. Throughout the winter and spring (1455-1456) he made his careful preparations, and in June 1456 he moved, with a well-equipped force of 150,000 men. In July he laid siege to Belgrade. Against all likelihood the siege was raised, and Mohammed was forced to retire, with heavy losses in men and in material. The heroes of this amazing feat were the nameless thousands whom the sanctity and burning eloquence of the General of the Observant Franciscans, St. John Capistran, had recruited for the new crusade, whom the genius of the Spanish cardinal legate, Juan Carvajal, had organised, and whom John Hunyadi led. 952 The first stage of the victory was the five- hour fight on the Danube (July 14) when the crusaders forced their way through the Turks into the city and the citadel. Just a week later the sultan ordered a general assault. The Turks persisted for two days, and then they retired, in great confusion. Mohammed brought off his army indeed, but his losses were extremely heavy.

Hopes ran high at Rome, when the splendid news came in, and the pope, to commemorate for ever a victory which he regarded as a patent answer to his crusade of prayer, founded the new feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord (August 6). Elsewhere the great victory was readily interpreted as a proof that no further effort was needed. In Servia itself the very worst happened. Hunyadi died — of the plague — only three weeks after the rout, and St. John also died, a few weeks later (October 23). And next, when the weakling Habsburg King of Hungary — who had fled to Vienna as Mohammed's armies neared Belgrade — arrived with reinforcements (November), there was so violent a quarrel between Germans and Hungarians that the crusade broke up.

So much had the energy and faith of Calixtus III accomplished in one short year, and to so little had it all been brought. But the failure did not break the pope's spirit, nor halt his effort. A new Christian champion — Skanderbeg — now appeared in Albania, 953 and in August 1457 the little papal fleet won a battle off Mitylene, when twenty-five enemy ships were captured.

But the catastrophe which followed the relief of Belgrade was really the end of anything that Calixtus, at his great age, could expect to accomplish. Two years later he died, on the very feast he had founded, August 6, 1458.

As in 1455, and 1447, the vacant see was soon filled. On August 19 the Cardinal of Siena was elected, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He chose to be called Pius II, from devotion it may be thought to Virgil, rather than to the distant memory of that Pius I who was almost Virgil's contemporary. For Aeneas Sylvius, fifty-three years of age at his election, had been for a good thirty years and more one of the brightest figures in the revival of classical letters. He was not so learned as Nicholas V, nor had he that pope's natural affection for the sacred sciences. But much more than that enthusiastic collector of manuscripts, he had been throughout his life a most distinguished practitioner of the new literary arts. He had written poems in the classical metres, histories, romances even, and as a practical professional diplomatist he had shown himself a finished master of the new, highly-stylised oratory. His whole career had been rather that of a cultivated man of the world than of a priest, and in fact it was not until he was past forty that Aeneas Sylvius took the great step of receiving Holy Orders. What had delayed him for years he himself set down, with stark directness, in a letter to a friend: "Timeo continentiam. " His life as a layman had, indeed, been habitually marked by the gravest moral irregularities, and it was partly due to his way of life that at fifty-three he was prematurely old and broken, white-haired and crippled with gout. But the mind was as keen as ever, the enthusiasm for letters burned no less brightly, and the whole man, like another St. Augustine, was now devoted to the interests of religion.

The contrast between Pius II and his predecessor could not have been greater, save for one thing, his resolute will to free Christendom from the menace of Islam. With Pius II, too, this was the primary task before the Holy See. In a speech made on the very day of his election, the pope had made this clear. Given the many successes of his long diplomatic career, it was not strange that the pope should begin his reign by yet another effort to achieve the needed European unity, nor that the means he proposed was a congress of the sovereign princes. On October 12, 1458, he announced to the cardinals that he proposed to call this congress to meet at Mantua in the June of 1459, and that he would himself preside at it. On January 22 — in the face of much criticism — he set out from Rome. Travelling by slow stages, halting at Perugia, Siena, Florence, Bologna and Ferrara, he at length came to Mantua, on May 27.

The seven months of the pope's stay at Mantua 954 were an all but unrelieved disappointment. Of all the princes invited not one had even troubled to send an envoy. The very cardinals had secretly worked to dissuade the princes, and now they did their best to persuade the pope to abandon the scheme. Scarampo especially, the late admiral of the papal fleet, showed himself hostile and contemptuous, and presently returned to Rome. The emperor, whose interests Pius II had served magnificently when he was his secretary, chose this moment to proclaim himself King of Hungary, and thereby to begin a civil war in "this kingdom which is the shield of all Christendom, under cover of which we have hitherto been safe. " 955 The King of France, with whom the emperor was plotting to force a transfer of the congress to some imperial city, made it clear that he would not co-operate in the war unless the pope acknowledged the claims of the House of Anjou to the kingdom of Naples, and he underlined his hostility by scarcely veiled threats to renew the anti-papal agitation and feuds of Basel and Constance. The Venetians were so indifferent that the pope told them plainly they were thought to hold more with the Turks than with the Christians, and to be more interested in their trade than in their religion. 956

It was not until September 26, four months after the pope's arrival at Mantua, that enough envoys had appeared for the congress to hold a meeting. And though the pope, and various envoys, remained on for another four months it never met again. The pope thought it more practical to deal with the various ambassadors individually.

The delegates from France did at last arrive, in November 1459, but their real business was to bully the pope and to coerce him into a change of policy in Naples. 957 But Pius II was resolute, and so far from cowed by the king's hostility that he took the offensive, and demanded a revocation of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438. The Bishop of Rome, he said, was only allowed in France such jurisdiction as it pleased the Parlement to grant him. Were this to continue, the Church would become a monster, a creature with many heads. And to clinch the matter he published, from Mantua, the famous bull Exsecrabilis, 958 condemning as a novel and hitherto unheard-of abuse, the practice of appealing from the pope to some future General Council.

The congress formally ended with a bull proclaiming a three-years' crusade and announcing new grants of Church revenues for its support. On January 19, 1460, the pope left Mantua. It was not until October 6 that he was back in Rome, after an absence of nearly two years.

The response of Europe to the new appeal was as poor as ever. Eleven months after the return of the pope to Rome the news came, in September 1461, that Mohammed had overrun the last Christian state in Asia Minor, the empire of Trebizond, and that he was master of the Black Sea port of Sinope. Then it was once more the turn of the Balkan states and Greece. Lesbos was captured in 1462, and Bosnia was conquered in 1463. The Venetian admiral had looked on unmoved while the Turks too k Lesbos, but their attack, later that same year, on the republic's colonies at Lepanto and in Argolis brought the war party in Venice into power. Pius II, though under no illusions about the nature of the new Venetian zeal for a crusade, 959 thought the moment had arrived to publish the resolution to which he had come in March 1462 — the resolution of a brave man indeed, but of one who has all but despaired of his generation, and who will all but demand that Providence shall save it by a miracle. Venice, at last, had been persuaded by events that the only way of salvation for a Christian state was to defeat and destroy for ever the Turkish forces. Hungary, whence alone could come the military complement to the maritime power of Venice, was at last delivered from the war with Frederick III. 960 The French still resolutely held themselves aloof; Florence thought that Venice and the Turks should be left to fight each other until neither was strong enough to be dangerous to anyone else. But on September 12, 1463, the Venetians signed an offensive alliance with Hungary, and on September 23 the pope announced his resolve. To kill for ever the often-heard gibe that pope and cardinals would do anything except expose themselves to suffer in the Holy War, Pius II would personally lead the crusade, and all the cardinals would go with him, save only the sick and those needed for the vital administration of the Church.

"Whatever we do, " said the pope, "people take it ill. They say we live for pleasure only, pile up riches, bear ourselves arrogantly, ride on fat mules and handsome palfreys, trail the fringes of our cloaks and show plump faces from beneath the red hat and the white hood, keep hounds for the chase, spend much on actors and parasites, and nothing in defence of the Faith. And there is some truth in their words: many among the cardinals and other officials of our court do lead this kind of life. If the truth be told, the luxury and pomp of our court is too great. And this is why we are so detested by the people that they will not listen to us, even when what we say is just and reasonable. . . . Our cry 961 'Go forth' has resounded in vain. If instead, the word is ' Come, with me, ' there will be some response. . . . Should this effort also fail, we know of no other means. . . . We are too weak to fight sword in hand; and this is not indeed the priest's duty. But we shall imitate Moses, and pray upon the height while the people of Israel do battle below. "

So did the pope speak to his cardinals, and although there were political realists among them who only sneered, the majority caught something of his devoted spirit. To the princes who looked on unmoved at the last preparations, at the strenuous efforts to raise funds, the sale of vestments, chalices, and other plate, the renewed appeals to Florence, to Milan, and to Siena, and to the rest, at the slow labour of turning into an ordered force the thousands of poor men who came in from France, Germany, the Low Countries, from Spain and Scotland too, to seek victory and salvation with the pope, Pius II spoke his last word on October 22, 1463. "Think of your hopeless brethren groaning in captivity amongst the Turks or living in daily dread of it. As you are men, let humanity prompt you. . . . As you are Christians, obey the Gospel and love your neighbour as yourself. . . . The like fate is hanging over yourselves; if you will not help those who live between you and the enemy, those still further away will forsake you when your own hour arrives. . . . The ruin of the emperors of Constantinople and Trebizond, of the Kings of Bosnia and Rascia and the others, all overpowered the one after the other, prove how disastrous it is to stand still and do nothing. " The time was indeed to come when some of those who heard this would see the Turks masters of Hungary as far as Buda, masters, too, of the whole Mediterranean marine.

All through that winter, 1463-1464, the work of preparation continued, and the pope remained fixed in his resolve, though even his own subjects had to be constrained to subscribe to the war fund, though there were cardinals who used every chance to hinder and to destroy the great work, and though the French king, Louis XI, threatened an alliance with the Hussites and a new council once the pope was out of Rome.

On the day fixed, June 18, 1464, after a great ceremony in St. Peter's, Pius II left the city for Ancona, the port of assembly. He was already an old man, broken with years of gout and stone. The intense heat tried him further. It took him a month to reach Ancona, and by this time he was seriously ill. In the port all was confusion, crowded with Spanish and French crusaders — all of the poorest class — unorganised, leaderless and at daggers drawn. As August came in, and the temperature mounted, the plague broke out. The papal fleet had been delayed in its voyage from Pisa, and of course there was not a sign of any vessel from Venice. A new siege of the pope now began, to persuade him to abandon the expedition and to return to Rome. But the onetime elegant aesthete was long beyond the power of arguments addressed to his material happiness. He held firm to his resolve to sacrifice himself utterly, and tortured now by new anxieties as to the loyalty of Venice as well as by his fiendish bodily pain, Pius II slowly came to his end, with the disgusted among his cardinals occupied only with chances and prospects in the conclave that could not now be far off. At Ancona, in the night before the feast of Our Lady's Assumption, the pope died. He had had his last view of the world he had so loved, the antique world and the new, two days earlier, when carried to the window of his sickroom he saw the first of the Venetian galleys round the mole that runs outs beyond the triumphal arch of Trajan.

The body of the dead pope was taken back to Rome, and the cardinals hastened to follow it, for the funeral service and the conclave. The crusade had died with the pope. The doge used the opportunity of his presence at Ancona to make clear to the cardinals how ill-advised he thought the whole affair; and the cardinals, anxious above all else to get the expedition off their hands, made over the crusade fleet to him — to be restored should the pope whom they were about to elect require it for a crusade. They also paid to the doge — for transmission to the King of Hungary — what remained of the treasure collected, 40,000 ducats. The doge returned to Venice on August 18, and gave orders immediately that the great fleet should be dismantled.

The cardinals were all back in Rome by August 25, and on the 28th they went into conclave. 962 The election was soon over, for on the very first ballot they chose as pope a rich Venetian noble, forty-eight years of age, Cardinal Pietro Barbo, a nephew of Eugene IV. He took the name of Paul II. Personal leadership of the crusade was never any part of his policy. But Paul II was far from sympathising with the selfish policy of the great city whence he came. He gave what aid he could to Hungary in the crisis of 1465, and to Skanderbeg when hard pressed at Croja two years later. But Albania fell to the Turks in 1468, and the important Venetian possession, Negrepont, in 1470. Here, for the moment, the tale of Moslem success ended. After twenty years of conquest the effort of Mohammed II was coming to a halt, and his death in 1481 gave relief to the West for a generation.

The last events in the drama of Mohammed's reign were first the naval expedition, organised by Sixtus IV in 1473, which took and sacked the Turkish ports of Attalia (whereupon dissensions, and the return home of the Neapolitan contingent) and of Smyrna (after which the Venetians deserted); and finally, in 1480, a Turkish invasion of Italy and the temporary occupation of Otranto (August 11). 963 Had Mohammed's successor been such another as himself, nothing could now have saved Rome and Italy. The pope prepared to flee; Avignon was got ready for his court; 964 a an immense effort was made to raise an army and equip a fleet, and then, on June 2, 1481, the welcome news came that Mohammed II was dead. Special services of thanksgiving were held, and it was in a wholly new spirit of confidence that the fleet sailed to besiege Otranto. After ten weeks of vigorous resistance the Turks surrendered. And then, as always, the coalition broke up. The pope's scheme of an attack on Valona, in preparation for an attempt to free Albania, came to nought. Plague broke out in the papal ships, the men refused to serve any longer, winter was at hand, and so, despite the pope's energy, all the advantage was lost. The Turks were no longer attacking — when next a soldier of genius appeared among them it was Syria and Egypt that would attract him — and the Christian states were only too willing to leave them undisturbed in their new empire.

THE RETURN OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

The fifty years that followed the Council of Constance saw a remarkable revival in the fortunes of the papacy; in that time the popes managed to reassert everywhere the idea and the practice of their traditional primacy of jurisdiction over the universal Church. In that same half century, despite the continuous endeavours of the same popes, Christendom, as a political association, refused to league itself against the new militant Mohammedanism of the Ottomans; and at the very moment when Islam was about to be expelled from the last remnant of its ancient hold on Spain, it was yet able to gain in the south-east a greater hold on Christian Europeans than had ever been its fortune in the whole eight hundred years of its existence. But what is more generally associated with the history of these first two generations of the fifteenth century is that first rapid new flowering in Italy of literature and the arts, which, universally, is called the Renaissance. The effect of this on the fortunes of Catholicism was speedy, it was profound, and it has lasted.

There is scarcely any need nowadays to labour the point that there were painters and sculptors of lasting significance before, let us say, Botticelli and Donatello, or that the Gothic is not sterile and barbarous; nor, on the other hand, is it necessary to insist how barren in creative literature was this new revival in its most enthusiastically classical stage. Nor, again, will it be any longer contended that the most splendid achievement of the thought of Greece was a closed book for the West until, in the fifteenth century, Chrysoloras and Gemistes Plethon began to teach the Greek grammar to the enthusiastic patricians of Florence. But although the nature of the change which then began was for long misunderstood, the scale of its effect has never been exaggerated. It brought about, ultimately, a change in the educated man's whole outlook upon life, a revolutionary change, which disturbed all his standards of judgment — a change after which the Christian world was never to be, anywhere, quite the same kind of thing as before.

It all began with a new interest in the Latin literature of the golden age, in Cicero above all and in Virgil; and this interest became a permanent enthusiasm, and indeed a main purpose of life, in the world of the cultured as, during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, long forgotten works of these Latin poets, rhetoricians, philosophers and historians began to be "discovered" in the various monastic libraries of Italy, France and southern Germany. The second stage was the introduction to the West, now all aglow with the novelty of an artistic appreciation of literary form, of the still finer literature of the Greeks. It was in translations, first of all, that these masterpieces were read, translations made by the occasional Latin humanist of the new type who knew Greek. But presently the desire to read the actual texts bred a very passion to learn the language; and ability to read the Greeks themselves, once this became at all general, wrought such a revolution in the mind of the West that, for the next five hundred years, Greek studies would be everywhere considered not only the first foundation of all scholarship, but a vital necessity in the intellectual formation of the generally educated European.

It has been urged that the Renaissance had no importance, in the fifteenth century, for the ordinary man, that it passed by the people of its own time. This is no doubt true; but it by no means passed by the ruling classes of the time, whether rulers in the Church or in the State, and it actually created a new class, destined to be as powerful as either of these, the independent thinkers, with no official attachments, who wrote for the general public of men who could read. Also, this new ruling class came into existence almost simultaneously with that new art of printing, one of whose main results was precisely this, that now, for the first time, the ordinary man could really make a contact with all the great literature of the world. And the invention permanently established the public influence of this new ruling class, making it forever impossible to set barriers to the spread and development of new ideas, whether these were good or bad, whether to popes and kings they were found convenient or inconvenient.

Is it too much to say that the discovery of printing was the most important event of this century? Books had already been made, at the end of the fourteenth century, where each page was printed from a single block — an adaptation of a Chinese invention already some hundreds of years old. But the all important idea was that of making separate types for each letter and to print by combining them in a frame. To whom was this due? The question is still much controverted. But, at a time when the idea was "in the air", it was the German, John Gutenberg (1398-1468) who first, successfully, began to print, at Mainz. The first piece we possess of his craftsmanship is an indulgence, dated 1454, and among his books are two magnificent bibles. Two of Gutenberg's associates, Fust and Schoeffer developed the new art. Bamberg, Strasburg, Augsburg and Nuremberg all had presses by 1470, and it was a printer at Cologne who taught the craft to the Englishman William Caxton, who set up his press at Westminster in 1476. The first Italian press was set up in 1464, very appropriately in the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco. Soon there was an abundance of printers in Italy, thirty-eight in Rome alone by the end of the century, and as many as a hundred in Venice. Printing came to France in 1470, where its first patrons were the king, Louis XI, and the theologians of the Sorbonne.

Everywhere, indeed, the ecclesiastics welcomed the new invention, patronised the craftsmen and protected them against the strong opposition of the calligraphers, and of the booksellers too. The bishops in Germany, for example, considering the craft as a work of piety, granted indulgences to the printers and to those who sold the new books. Naturally enough, among the first to set up presses were the Brothers of the Common Life. Canons Regular, Benedictines, Premonstratensians, did the same. The first printer at Leipzig was a professor of theology in the university, and it was a Franciscan lector in theology who set up the first press in the university town of Tubingen.

Such is the tale everywhere, cardinals, bishops, religious and clergy united in an immense practical enthusiasm to employ and develop the art. At Rome the pope who saw its beginnings — Paul II (1464-1471) — put at the disposal of the first printers the manuscripts collected by his predecessors. The generous zeal of Nicholas V now began to reap a harvest far beyond anything he could have hoped. Bessarion did as much for the presses of Venice, lending the printers his Greek manuscripts. The printers were held in high honour. Popes employed them as ambassadors, ennobled them. It was an art that the clergy were proud to exercise, and among these earliest printers there were, at Venice, even nuns. And when the navigators revealed to Europe the existence of the new lands beyond the Atlantic, it was the missionaries who took the printing press across the seas.

The question must indeed rise immediately to the mind, how such a humanist movement as this — the humanist movement par excellence, in popular impression — affected the religion to which, for many centuries now, Western humanity had brought its mind in captivity; how did it affect, that is to say, not so much Catholicism as a body of truths, but as an association of human beings who accepted those truths? The Renaissance came upon this Catholic world at a moment when the Church was labouring under serious disintegrating strains, effects of the schism, of the long disputes about the papal primacy, and of the long decay of thought; in an age characterised by a general scepticism about the usefulness, or the possibility, of philosophy, an age when prelates who were the leaders of Catholic thought managed, in simple unawareness, to hold simultaneously the Catholic faith and philosophical positions incompatible with it, and this without interference, amid the time's general unawareness; and while, since Ockham, this practical scepticism had been slowly rotting the Christian mind, considerations of quite another order had been shaping the religious outlook of the new capitalist bourgeoisie, chafing at a morality which would limit its opportunities of profit. It was upon a Christendom "ready for anything" that there now came this movement which, inevitably, would not stop at any mere artistic appreciation of literary form. Almost from the beginning the movement effected important — if as yet concealed — apostasies from the Christian standard of morals.

It was the greatest movement of the century, the greatest movement of the human spirit indeed, since that which began in the days of Abelard and John of Salisbury, and — one of its most singular features — among the chief patrons of the movement, and even among its leaders, were the popes. Not all of them, indeed, were enthusiasts, but hardly one was indifferent to it, and none of them set himself in direct opposition to it.

What, it may be asked, had the popes to do with a movement that was not religious in its nature, nor yet in its immediate objective? where was their place in this new world of poets and painters and sculptors, of men of letters and artists generally? Here, surely, is the very antithesis to that conception of Christian perfection which inspired the contemporary Devotio Moderna? Rarely, indeed, in history has the papacy placed itself at the head of any contemporary new development, whether in thought or life; rarely has its role been that of the pioneer. In the earlier, medieval, renaissance — a renaissance not of a particular way of writing, of thinking, or of life, but a rebirth of life itself, of the activity of the human mind after the quasi- death of the terrible Dark Ages — the popes had scarcely initiated at all. They had been sometimes helpful, always watchful, and more often than not extremely suspicious. There are no philosopher popes in the formative stage of the century of St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure and Siger. But now, in the fifteenth century, popes are themselves among the most famous exponents of the new culture. The contrast could not be greater than between the attitude of Gregory IX to the Aristotelian revival in the first half of the century of St. Thomas, and that of Nicholas V in the morning of the Renaissance. The earlier pope, theologian and canonist, saw only the dangers — really latent — in the new rising cult of the Greek, but not the immense value of what was true in his thought, nor how the dangers it presented could be met. His successor, two hundred years later, saw only the glorious promise of a new age of Christian culture and wisdom; in an age already more superficial than any for five hundred years, it is not surprising that he mistook the signs, already evident, of an essential antagonism of ideals for the personal indecencies of a handful of looseliving men of letters.

The earliest of the medieval popes whom we know as an interested and discerning patron of the fine arts on the grand scale, was Boniface VIII, and this was made a count against him in Philip the Fair's endeavour to bring about his posthumous condemnation as a heretic and a false pope. Boniface had, indeed, done much to assist the Roman art of his time, employing such masters as Pietro Cavallini and the Cosimati; and he had also brought to Rome, from Florence, Arnolfo di Cambio and Giotto. The record survives of the mass of precious church and altar furnishings, of vestments, episcopal jewellery, reliquaries, statues, work in metal and in ivory, tapestries and embroideries, made to the order of this pope by artists and craftsmen from every country in Europe. Boniface, in the last months before the fatal crisis of Anagni, also completed the organisation of the Roman university, by adding a faculty of arts to the existing faculties of the sacred sciences and law. He founded a second university at Fermo; he founded anew the archives of the Apostolic See, which had disappeared during the troubled years of the wars between his predecessors and Frederick II. Finally Boniface VIII collected what remained of the ancient library of the popes, works for the most part of theology, liturgy and canon law; and by his care to extend this collection he has a real claim to be a principal founder of the Vatican Library. Boniface VIII could find but a handful of manuscripts that had survived the storms and the years of chaos. He left behind no fewer than 1,300. Most of these were religious works, many of them newly transcribed for the pope, and illuminated by the staff of copyists he had formed. There were bibles and theology and philosophy, liturgy and law and church history; there were the Latin fathers and some of the Greeks too — Origen at any rate, St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom. But there were also — and it is this which interests this chapter — manuscripts of Cicero and Seneca, Virgil and Ovid, Lucan, Suetonius and Pliny, the grammatical treatises of Donatus and thirty-three works in Greek, the earliest collection of Greek texts we know of in any medieval library, and works, all of them, of a scientific kind, Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes.

Boniface VIII died in 1303, his immediate successor reigned only a short nine months, and Clement V who next succeeded, the first of the Avignon popes, had not ever, until the close of his reign, any settled place of residence. Not until the coming of John XXII (1316-1334) were the popes again in a position to interest themselves in literature and the arts. It was this pope, and his successor, Benedict XII (1334-1342), the main organisers of the Avignon papacy as a system of government, who provided so magnificently for its housing in the great Palais des Papes that still dominates the ancient city by the Rhone. From this time Avignon became a centre to which architects, painters and sculptors and the whole world of craftsmen and artificers, flowed steadily in search of patronage; and with them came the men of letters, the most notable of all being Francesco Petrarch. While Rome, intellectually and materially, fell back into a very barbarism, Avignon, in these central years, of the fourteenth century, bade fair to become what Florence was a hundred years later.

The papal library was developed anew, and yet again there figured among its treasures what Latin classics the medieval world possessed — no Horace as yet, nor anything of Tacitus — and new translations from the Greek, of Aristotle, for example, and Aesop and Porphyry. But there is no Homer, no Demosthenes, no Thucydides, and no Greek tragedy. Yet although the Greek influence is still exercised in so limited a way, and through translations only, the fourteenth century is a time when contact with the Greek-speaking world is being steadily extended. The rapidly developing crisis of the Christian East, as the Ottomans advance, brings more and more Greeks to the West, in search of assistance or simply as refugees, and with both kinds of necessitous Greeks the papal court, in all these years, is very familiar. Gradually a practical knowledge of fourteenth-century Greek becomes more common at the curia and, through the curia, elsewhere too. The new religious discussions between Latins and Greeks also, inevitably, turn the mind of the West not only to the less familiar of the Greek fathers but to the original texts of all of them. In this new interest the pioneers are the Dominicans and the Franciscans — the Franciscans especially — whom, for more than a hundred years now, the popes have been employing as missionaries and agents in the islands of the Greek sea, in Asia Minor, in the very lands of central Asia as far as China itself. 965 As the diplomacy rises and falls between the popes and these Eastern princes, presents are exchanged, and among the presents from the East there are manuscripts of the Greek classics.

It is this world into which Petrarch was introduced, a young man in his twenties, about the year 1330. Here, at the papal court, he found patrons, protection, books, and the stimulus of new opportunities, rewards, a career, the means to form his own famous library, and his first Greek. And after this, a first practical fruit of the ancient literature's hold on him, came his interest in the other remains of the ancient culture, the beginnings of all that practical historical and artistic interest in the sculpture and architecture of Greece and Rome. Petrarch, it was said long ago, is "the first modern man." Others have also been put forward for the distinction, but there is much in Petrarch which is new, and which since Petrarch has become characteristic and typical. We can see in him all the main elements of the promise which the Renaissance seemed to offer to the Christian future, and something also of what it was that blighted that promise. Recalling his career, and the development of his spirit, we can better understand the unmisgiving way in which such an admirable Christian as Nicholas V welcomed the movement with open arms and without any reservations. Petrarch is the "modern man" in his violent reaction against the cultural achievement of the medieval world. Here he is a pioneer and, given his genius, his effect is weighty indeed. He has, for example, nothing but scorn for the unclassical latinity of the Middle Ages. He mocks the time for its dependence on translations; Aristotle would not recognise himself in his thirteenth-century Latin disguise. And he mocks at the cult of Aristotle himself. He is impatient with the superstition that entangles the learning of the Middle Ages, the bogus sciences of astrology and alchemy, the charlatanry that often passes for medicine; and he is impatient with the new lawyers' religion of the civil law, which they so eagerly develop, with a jargon of its own and distinctions for the sake of distinguishing, into a new and profitable pedantic superstition.

In Petrarch we also note, for the first time in a personage of international importance, the study of ancient history passing into such a love of the ancient world therein portrayed that the restoration of that world is urged as a practical solution for present discontents. Here is a first crusader driven by that nostalgie du passe which has afflicted so many others ever since. Rome, the Rome of Cicero, is the golden age; all since is usurpation and decay. So fourteen hundred years of history must, somehow, be undone. Whence the crazy-seeming alliance of Petrarch with Rienzi; whence the new Ghibellinism in which Petrarch tries, with all the power of flattery at his command, to enlist the realist princes to restore the Roman State; whence also the new anti-papal spirit, for the fact and presence of the papacy in Rome is the great obstacle to any real restoration of the republic. Here are ideas and ideals which, once given to the world, will not die. They inspire very many of the humanists — and conspirators — of the next generation, and Machiavelli will give them a still greater vitality, and thence they come down to our own age. Who will be so bold as to say we have yet heard the last of them?

Petrarch was a poet and a man of letters, and only incidentally was he a thinker or politician — these activities were but the overbrimming of his literary contemplation. But in one respect he makes an interesting contact of accord with the world of some contemporaries whom he never met, and with whom doubtless he would not have recognised that he had anything in common. For Petrarch was not anti-Aristotelian simply because, on crucial questions, he preferred the teaching of other philosophers, but because, fundamentally, he thought all such speculative philosophy a vain waste of time. Happiness is the object of life, thought cannot guide man to it, for in thought there is no certainty, and if a man wants to know how to be happy, let him read the Gospels — or Cicero. Not, indeed, because Cicero is a thinker-another Aristotle — but because Cicero is himself an apostle. Aristotle is cold, but Cicero is on fire with love of virtue and will enflame all those who read him. Not thought then but eloquence, not the philosopher but the artist, is the safe guide. Petrarch is yet another man who, sceptical about the power of reason, seeks elsewhere than in his reason the assurance he needs. And, as often happens when good men shrink from the labour of thought about their religious life, he assembles a strangely assorted company to aid him, and finds a curiously unchristian ratio for their union, and offers us Cicero and the divine Gospel as joint warranty for a Christian life, twin guardian angels for man cast into a world of temptation.

Petrarch, of course, knew that world as well as any other man. His sensitive spirit had been tried there as only such can be tried, and he had suffered defeats and perhaps routs. But the religious foundation remained secure. One day Petrarch was converted, and thenceforward he did battle manfully and continuously and, one may say, systematically with the tempter. Two traits, however, very notably, survived that conversion, to be a main source of anxiety with him to the end. They need to be mentioned explicitly, for they are to be the outstanding characteristics of almost all the great men of the Renaissance, though with these they are not defects, but rather the main end of life and the natural, hardly to be regarded, effect of their pursuit of it. Those traits are the desire for fame, and vanity. In Petrarch we find the earliest signs of that mania to be famous which is the leading note in the life of public men of all sorts during the last fifty years of which this book treats. No cult could be less compatible with the Christian ideal.

Petrarch, although he is hardly more than a precursor of the Renaissance as the term is generally used, is yet, as poet and man of letters, and as a man, a far greater personage than any of those who follow him in the more brilliant Italy of the next 966. century. Before we speak of these lesser men — who by the accident of their special scholarship were necessarily the artificers of the greatest change of all — and as a kind of preface to the statement of the effect of their lives on the last generations of medieval Catholicism, we need to note that Petrarch was not by any means the only Italian whose genius these French popes fostered at their court of Avignon. It is at Avignon that the popes first begin to employ the new humanists as their secretaries. The new age is not yet arrived when to write Ciceronian prose is the best of titles to a prince's favour, and a rapid highroad to wealth; but it is fast approaching. The last three of the Avignon popes — Innocent VI, B. Urban V, Gregory XI — were all men of culture, all university types, the first two indeed one-time professors. Innocent VI and Urban V brought to the service of the chancery the famous Coluccio Salutati, who later was to pass into the service of Florence as its chancellor and there to sponsor the entry into life and letters of "the heavenly twins" of the new age, Leonardo Bruni (called Aretino) and Poggio Bracciolini, and to bring to Florence the most active cultural force of all this time, the Byzantine Manuel Chrysolorus from whom Poggio, and Cenci, Filelfo himself, Ambrogio Traversari, and Thomas of Sarzana who was to become Pope Nicholas V, all learned their Greek. And it was Gregory XI's employment of Francesco Bruni that led to the appearance of his nephew Aretino in the papal chancery, and so to the beginning of all that development which made the corps of papal secretaries one of the first and most important centres of the classical revival in fifteenth-century Italy, a centre from which almost everything else was to come.

This is not a history of that revival, but the story cannot be told of the effect of the revival upon the papacy, and upon the papacy's government of the universal Church, without some mention of the famous humanists whom, from about this time, the popes began to call into their service, nor without some reminder of what that scholarship was which made these "civil servants" so famous. The chief of them, Poggio Bracciolini, entered the service of the popes, as a young man in his early twenties, about 1403. He served them for fifty years, rising to be the chief official of the chancery and amassing a huge fortune. In 1414 Poggio made one of the suite of John XXIII at the Council of Constance. For the debates there was presently great want of theological and patristic texts, and it was Poggio's task to organise the collection of needed manuscripts from the libraries of the monasteries of Switzerland and southern Germany. Along with the fathers he found in these libraries much else; a host of minor writers of the silver age of Latin letters, the histories of Ammianus Marcellinus, for example, Quintilian's Institutes and several long-forgotten speeches of Cicero. From this moment Poggio was a celebrity. Martin V was glad to retain him in the chancery as he reorganised it in 1418. Some few years later it was Poggio's good fortune to discover Petronius and Pliny and Tacitus. This man of letters was no less interested in what we have come to call antiques, and he was one of the first collectors of medals, coins, marbles, statues and other relics of the art of the ancient world. His museum was indeed celebrated, and the missionaries in the East were encouraged to contribute to it, for presents of this kind were the surest passport to Poggio's influence in the curia.

Among Poggio's colleagues in the offices of the chancery there were three other scholars of note, who shared in the hunt after the lost classics and who were also poets, Bartholomew Aragazzi, Agapito Cenci and Antonio Loschi. All three were already in the service of the curia by the time of Martin V's election (1417), and they remained in it for the rest of their lives. They are the first editors and commentators of the Latin classics, practitioners of the new art of writing Ciceronian prose, and they were brought into the papal service so that the state-papers — bulls and the like — might be drafted in a style worthy of the Roman See. Never did this somewhat pedantic occupation seem so marvellous an accomplishment; and never, before or since, was it so munificently rewarded. 967

The leading cardinals of the time followed the example set by the popes. It was Louis Aleman — whom we have seen in set opposition to the papacy at Basel — who was even able, when legate at Bologna, to win to the papal service, for a few brief months, the most famous of all Italian teachers of Greek, Filelfo. The Bishop of Bologna at that same time, the Carthusian cardinal Nicholas Albergati, was also a generous and interested patron of the new fashions. In his palace Filelfo was welcomed and he found there, among those eager to learn from him, the two future popes, Thomas of Sarzana, now beginning as the master of the cardinal's household a twenty years' apprenticeship to the business of effectively patronising art and letters, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. A third patron in the Sacred College who, like Albergati, was known universally for the piety and austerity of his life, was the youthful Domenico Capranica. A fourth, very notable, figure was the wealthy Girolamo Orsini, who gave all his energies and his money to gather a great library which, like the papal collection, should be at the disposal of all who loved studies. It was due to the combination of Poggio and Girolamo Orsini that the long-lost comedies of Plautus were given back to the world, and another effect of the revival is to be seen in the cardinal's no less momentous recovery of the works of St. Cyprian.

What first brought the popes of the fifteenth century into contact with the Renaissance was the most practical reason of all. The immediate task before these popes was to reorganise the machinery of government, and to rebuild the ruined churches and palaces and offices of their capital. They needed Latinists, and they needed architects, and painters and sculptors; and in each department they strove to gain the services of the best With Martin V bringing to Rome Gentili and Masaccio and Ghiberti, that historic association of popes and artists begins that is, in the minds of all, one of the most permanent memories of the next hundred and fifty years; the association that reaches its peak in the collaboration of the two gigantic figures of Julius II and Michelangelo. Eugene IV's long reign was too broken for him to bring to a finish Martin V's great work of restoration. Of the work done by Eugene's orders in St. Peter's, only Filarete's great doors remain. The chapel in the Vatican, to decorate which this pope brought Fra Angelico from Florence, has disappeared, and there disappeared too, in the time of Paul III, (1534-1549), the frescoes painted for Eugene IV by Benozzo Gozzoli.

Eugene IV was, to the end of his days, a most observant religious, 968 but neither by temperament nor training was he a man of letters or an artist. Nevertheless he too had learned Greek, and he was a great reader and student, especially of histories. His real interest in the new scholarship is shown unmistakably in his active patronage of one of the most winning figures of the time, the Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari. This truly saintly man had learnt his Greek, when prior of his monastery in Florence, from Filelfo; and from his cell in that austere cloister, through conversations, and through a most extensive correspondence, he exercised a very real influence on the movement, proposing and executing translations from the Greek and joining in the quest for still more manuscripts. Eugene IV made Traversari, in 1431, General of his order. In 1435 he sent him to Basel as legate, in a critical moment of the council's proceedings, and the combination of learning, letters and perfect charity that was Ambrogio Traversari worked wonders with the touchy assembly. It was Traversari, again, whom the same pope sent as his legate to Venice in 1438 to receive the Greek emperor and the delegation that had come for the reunion council. In the council he played the chief part on the Latin side, and living long enough to see the reunion a fact, he died just a few weeks later felix opportunitate mortis (October 20, 1439). But none of these public employments really interrupted the main interest of Traversari's life. He translated, at Eugene's request, the lives of the Greek Fathers, the Greek acts of the Council of Chalcedon, and he undertook also a new translation of the Bible.

Another evidence of this same pope's interest in the new scholarship, for the services this might be expected to render to the study of Sacred Scripture, is Eugene IV's lifelong patronage of Cyriac of Ancona, 969 a great traveller in the Greek East, a scholar and a practical archaeologist also. Eugene had first met Cyriac when, Cardinal Legate of the Marches, he had employed him to remodel the harbour of Ancona. From the East Cyriac brought back to the pope new manuscripts of the Greek Testament, and he was commissioned to compare these texts with the Vulgate translation; one of the first instances of the application of the new methods to scriptural studies. Cyriac was also a pioneer when he compiled the first collection of classical inscriptions.

Cyriac of Ancona is thus one of the earliest of archaeological writers. But still more celebrated, the very "Father of Archaeology," was Flavio Biondo of Forli (1388-1463), yet another of the college of papal secretaries, recruited for the service of the Holy See by Eugene himself in 1434. For the remaining twenty- nine years of his life Biondo remained in that service, studying actualities and composing the works which, after five hundred years, have by no means lost their value, and continue in daily use; namely the history of his own time, and the two great works Roma Instaurata and Italia Illustrata which are a skilled and detailed inventory of what still remained of the architecture and sculpture of the ancient world. No writings had a more speedy, or more lasting, effect in extending the general interest of that century in all the aims of the Renaissance.

The name of Tommaso Parentucelli — more generally styled Thomas of Sarzana — has already come into this story as a papal diplomatist and as one of the innermost circle of the leaders of the new movement. So late as 1444 he was still no more than the majordomo of the Cardinal Albergati. But when that saintly Carthusian — for such he assuredly was — died in that year, Eugene IV named Parentucelli to succeed him as Bishop of Bologna. In December 1446 the same pope gave him the red hat, and then, only ten weeks later, Tommaso was elected pope. There seemed something all but miraculous about such a speedy exaltation of a man, still on the young side of fifty, from the utmost obscurity in the ecclesiastical world to the very summit In memory of his old master, the new pope took the name Nicholas, and in Nicholas V, so all historians have agreed to say, the Renaissance in all its unspoiled freshness was truly enthroned as pope. Here were combined, in fact, high technical competence, impeccable taste, limitless enthusiasm, magnanimity and magnificence in their only true sense, religious scholarship, deep sincere piety and humility of soul, and a disinterestedness from all thought of self not to be seen again in that chair for seventy years, 970 and never again to be seen there allied with such a splendour of natural gifts.

But how far did Nicholas V, as pope, understand the realities of his time? the real condition of religion, the real nature of its weaknesses where it was weak, the causes of the weaknesses, and which weaknesses were heaviest with menace and even with mortality? To his immediate successor, the Aragonese crusader-pope Calixtus III, much of Nicholas V's programme was, apparently, little better than aesthetic trifling; and the next humanist pope, Aeneas Sylvius himself, made little secret of his belief, barely three years after Nicholas' death, that there were more urgent tasks before the papacy than the advancement of scholarship and belles lettres and the arts, even for what service these might bring to religion. We can, of course, hardly dismiss from our minds, as we regard the splendid schemes of Nicholas V, our knowledge of what the years that followed his reign were to bring, but if it is with a kind of reservation that we con the tale of his magnificent ideals, and of those vast achievements of his all too short and prematurely ended reign, we must remember also that to nothing were the later disasters due more, than to papal and episcopal neglect to foster ecclesiastical learning, and to make this truly effective by marrying it to all that was best in the intellectual life of the time. What the next fifty years needed was a succession of popes in whom the spirit of Nicholas V was active.

It has been a commonplace with the historians since the very reign of Nicholas V that, in him, the Renaissance itself was enthroned as pope. But true though this is, in one respect he was not a Renaissance type at all, as the term has come to be understood. For to Tommaso Parentucelli the central ultimate purpose of the passionately desired perfection in letters and the arts had never been the perfection of man, but the clearer manifestation of the glory of man's Creator. And this continued to be, no less certainly, the guiding principle of his immense humanistic activities as Pope Nicholas V.

To his brilliant constructive genius the chronic civil disorder of the Papal State was a challenge not to be ignored. A whole scheme, or rather series of schemes, sprang from his mind for the restoration of decayed towns, of bridges, of roads, of schools and universities, and for the establishment of permanent harmony between the fierce local patriotisms and the central Roman authority, between the patricians and the bourgeoisie, between the nobles and their papal ruler. And a most unlikely number of the schemes were carried through. No pope had ever built so much before. Nicholas did not indeed live to realise his dream of making the capital of the Christian religion the active chief centre and source of culture, too, for the whole Christian world; but it was he who finally swept away all the accumulated debris and patchwork restoration that remained from the disastrous Avignon century, and who crowned the tentative endeavours of the previous twenty-five years with an effective restoration on the grand scale. The walls of Rome in their whole circuit were rebuilt and strengthened, the great aqueduct of the Acqua Vergine was repaired and a beginning made thereby of a new era in the health of the city. Four of the bridges on the main roads out of Rome — the Ponte Milvio, Ponte Nomentano, Ponte Salario, and Ponte Lucano — were restored and fortified. The Capitol, too, rose up again from its ruins, and a good dozen of the ruined churches were rebuilt, while great works of restoration were carried through at the basilicas of St. Mary Major, St. Paul-without-the-walls, the Twelve Apostles and St. Lorenzo. It is again to Nicholas V that the oldest part of the Vatican as modern times know it goes back; it is, indeed, from this pope's time that the palace begins to have that importance in the story of the popes which has ended in its name being almost synonymous with the papacy itself. In the plans of Nicholas V for the rebuilding of the Leonine city we see his creative genius at its greatest. 971 These plans involved the most sacred shrine in Rome, the great basilica built by Constantine over the tomb of St. Peter. After a thousand years of wear and tear the fabric was, indeed, in a parlous state, the main south wall leaning outwards from the perpendicular as much as five feet, and the north wall pulled inward to the same degree. At first the pope thought only of rebuilding the choir, and the walls of the new choir had gone up as high as fifty feet when the views of the Leonardo of the day, Leon Battista Alberti, 972 induced Nicholas to consent to the extremely drastic remedy of pulling the great church down and building something entirely new in its place. But the pope died before anything more had been achieved than a little preliminary destruction, and it was not until the time of Julius II, fifty years later, that the transformation was really put in hand.

Rome was, indeed, during the eight years reign of Nicholas V, one huge building yard, a workshop, a studio. But outside the capital city the pope was no less active. At Orvieto, Spoleto, Viterbo, Fabriano, Assisi, Civita Castellana, Civita Vecchia, Narni, Gualdo and Castelnuovo, public buildings of all kinds, and public works, were planned on a generous scale and undertaken and carried through. The pope's great aim was to end the misery of the long baronial wars which made central Italy one of the least safe places in Christendom. His diplomacy, and his frequent visits to the provincial cities, did much to end these feuds, and his "Bloodless restoration of peace and order to the State of the Church", is indeed one of his chief glories. Particularly important was his reduction of the chronic insubordination of Bologna, in many ways the most important city in the pope's domains. Nicholas V is perhaps the most celebrated of the many great men who have passed from the spiritual rule of Bologna to the Roman See. 973 He had spent twenty-five years of his life there as priest and bishop, and he now won the city over by a kindliness, and a willingness to concede, that were new in the history of Bologna's papal rulers.

The details of the history of the popes as rulers of their Italian principality are perhaps no great concern of the history of the Church, except in so far as their political activity and its attendant cares influenced the general fortunes of religion. But Nicholas V's policies were of such rare generosity, his achievements were on such a scale and so characteristic, both of his own constructive genius and of the new vitality of the great movement with which he is associated, that they could not go unmentioned. Nevertheless, all this activity of what we would call town-planning, of restoration and new building, this extensive employment of architects and builders, of sculptors and painters, of goldsmiths and jewellers and weavers of precious stuffs, was the less important part of the pope's great and lasting influence on the development of the European mind.

Nicholas was primarily a scholar — an erudit, to be still more precise; the great passion of his life was books and the multiplication of other book lovers. The essential verse in the epitaph which Aeneas Sylvius wrote for him 974 is surely Excoluit doctos doctior ipse viros. His mission was that of Albert the Great two hundred years earlier: "To make all these things understandable to the Latins"; "these things" being, now, not the ideas of Aristotle but the beauty and strength of Greek literature. "The Renaissance until now had been Latin, henceforward it was Greek," a modern scholar has said, with pardonably warm exaggeration. But to no scholars, indeed, was Nicholas V so liberal — and his liberality to all of them knew scarcely any bounds — as to those who knew Greek. As he planned a new cite vaticane where popes and cardinals and ambassadors and scholars and monks should live, and the central activity of the Church turn for ever in a setting worthy of its sublime ends, so the pope also planned a new Latin literature, the translation of the literature of Greece wrought by the masters of the new Latin prose and verse.

For Nicholas V, then, Valla translated Thucydides and Herodotus; Poggio and Lapo di Castiglione undertook Xenophon; the corpus of Aristotle was divided among a half-dozen "best wits", Bessarion doing the Metaphysics, and George of Trebizond (alas ! for he was more interested in pay than in accuracy, or indeed in good work at all), the Rhetoric and the Ethics; Plato's Republic too, was in the list and the Laws, and Philo Judaeus also. Polybius, one of the pope's favourite authors, went to Perotti, who also produced a wonderful version of Strabo that for a hundred years or more obscured the original. But the greatest desire of Nicholas was never to be realised, the translation of Homer into Latin hexameters. For this he was prepared to pay no less than 10,000 gold pieces. First of all he prevailed on Carlo Marsuppini — then acting as secretary to the Florentine Republic — to undertake it; and when he died, in 1453, Filelfo took up the task. But Nicholas was dead before Filelfo had really begun his work. These were but literature and philosophy. Nicholas also arranged for translations of the Greek Fathers, of St. Basil, of the two Gregories, of Nazianzen and Nyssa, of St. Cyril and St. John Chrysostom and also of Eusebius of Cesarea. Finally, he commissioned Gianozzo Manetti, the pupil of Ambrogio Traversari, and a leading personage in the great world of Florence for years until he fell foul of the rising Medici, to re-translate the Bible. Manetti 975 knew Hebrew as well as Greek, and his Old Testament was to appear in three parallel columns, his own translation, the Septuagint and the Latin of St. Jerome's Vulgate.

But Nicholas V's time was short — far shorter than the rejoicing humanists could have guessed when their fellow, at forty-nine years of age, was elected pope in 1447. In 1450 he was already so ill that his life was despaired of; in the first months of 1451 he was ill again, and from this time indeed, never really well, and alas, utterly changed in disposition, nervous and apprehensive and reserved, where he had been all his life the friend of all the world. He was ill again in 1453, and for the last eighteen months of his life (he died on March 25, 1455), he scarcely ever left his bed. "Thomas of Sarzana saw more friends in a day," he said to his Carthusian friends who were preparing him for death, "than Nicholas V sees in a year." It was a sad ending to such bright promise, and yet it was said of his saintly passing, "No pope in the memory of man has died like this." Not all the detail was realised of what the great pope had planned, but the fundamental things remained, and above all the great fact that the papacy — an infinitely greater force than all the cultural courts and coteries of the day — had taken up and blessed the new movement and, as it were, made it for a moment its own work. This certainly lasted, and it was the personal work of Nicholas V.

With the passing of this pope there comes a time of flatness in the Renaissance story. Not even Aeneas Sylvius — Pope Pius II — is his heir, nor the cultured Venetian, Paul II, who next succeeds, but, of all men the least likely, the Franciscan theologian Sixtus IV, elected pope in 1471. And by that date — sixteen years after the death of Nicholas — many tendencies had developed which in his time were but in germ. For there is another side to the story of all this splendour of scholarship and poetry and art. It is time to consider how the return of the ancient world affected other things in the artist besides his mastery of technique, to say something of those Renaissance ideas, which. from now on, acted most powerfully against what still remained of the medieval synthesis of natural and revealed knowledge, against what remained of medieval theology's prestige, against the educated man's appreciation of the prestige of Christianity itself, and against the traditional Christian scheme of virtuous living.

We should perhaps not be far wrong if, attempting the impossibility of summary description, we said that the Renaissance was the effect upon the men of the fifteenth century of their rediscovery of classical culture in all its fullness; and that what men found most novel and most characteristic in that culture, and most congenial, was its perfection of form. New respect and enthusiasm for the newly discovered perfection of form, and a new ambition to realise the like perfection, are perhaps what chiefly differentiates the men of the Renaissance from their medieval forerunners. Classical antiquity is, for them, the age of perfection; the golden age, of life no less than of art. Life, as that perfect thing the literature of the Greeks has revealed it, is for them the proper study of mankind; and it is now that there is born that prejudice of the superiority of the classical culture over the Christian which even yet, amongst educated men, is far from extinct. This new cult was all the more easily triumphant because it came upon the educated world in a moment when this lacked an object adequate to its needs. Not only, at the opening of the fifteenth century, was there no such figure as Dante, a spirit nourished by the philosophy and theology of the schools, but the philosophy of the schools had by now all but vanished from the ken of the liberally educated; it was now scarcely more than a preoccupation of the new scientists in their disputes with the professionals of the old university world. The influence of the characteristically medieval thought upon its own world had been steadily declining for years; the reappearance of Greece had, for the liberally educated world, the effect upon that thought of a coup de grace. All who know no Greek are now as nothing, and by Greek is meant the literature of the Greeks as literature and, above all, Plato.

Here again, in recent years, the specialists in the matter warn us that we must be ready to revise old judgments, as we endeavour to understand what kind of thing that re-appearance of the Greek texts of Plato is, in western Europe of the fifteenth century. Not only, they tell us, was Plato not unknown in the Middle Ages, but medieval Platonism was not mere neo-Platonism. There did exist in the Middle Ages an active direct tradition of Platonic doctrine. But what a wealth of difference there lies between devotion to such a tradition, and devotion fed with the newly-revealed texts of the master himself ! Once these were available the cultured world "went Platonic" in a generation or so — and very consciously it went anti-Aristotelian — and Platonic it has remained, consciously and unconsciously, almost ever since. How should this be important to Catholicism? Very evidently, in this way at least, that the official theology of the Church, for now nearly two centuries, had been bound up with many of Aristotle's logical and philosophical doctrines and with his methods. And now, for Aristotle, already defeated in the field of physics, and his supremacy threatened by the Nominalist denial of the possibility of metaphysics, there was to be substituted, as the ideal, his own vastly more attractive master. If Plato reigned instead of Aristotle, what would become of the old theology's hold — none too secure already — upon the mind of the educated? True enough, St. Thomas Aquinas, who had somewhat tamed Aristotle to the Christian yoke, was not the first in time of Catholic theologians. Stretching back for a thousand years before St. Thomas there was the long line of the Fathers, and these were Platonists all. And the greatest of the Latin Fathers, St. Augustine, was not only Platonist, but was indeed the main channel through which — down to the discoveries of the fifteenth century — knowledge of Plato had come to western Europe. Whence the natural result of a reaction towards the Fathers, producing theologians who would like to ignore the Scholastic Theology, about which, also, (to the new sensitiveness of this literary generation) there clung something of Aristotle's own grimness of speech.

But damaging as this new indifference, and even hostility, of the new theologian was to the hold of Scholastic Theology, the new cult of Plato wrought also a harm that was positive. For thinkers who were Christians, Plato had always had this first attractiveness that here was philosophic recognition of the existence of a nonmaterial order of reality, and of its superiority to the material order; there was recognition that there existed an order of reality accessible only to the intelligence, and superior to that other order of reality with which the senses are occupied, the model indeed and the archetype of this lower order. In practice, here was a philosophy teaching that the things of earth are inferior, and that man's only happiness lies elsewhere, in his contact with that superior world and with the divine; here were theories to explain the divine nature, the kind of thing man's soul is and his mind, the way man's mind works, and the way man can attain to wisdom which is the condition sine qua non of his true happiness. Plato's temperament, it has been said, is essentially religious and ethical, and the religious (and specifically the theistic) interpretation of the universe is the chief historical legacy of his philosophy to subsequent ages. And it was as "a fusion of the rational-mathematical, the aesthetic and the religious elements in the contemplation of the universe. . . [a] glorification of the cosmos" that Plato appeared to the men who so eagerly gave themselves to him in the fifteenth century. 976

How would these new disciples of the philosopher whom all styled " the divine ", accommodate their discovery with the Catholic faith in which they had been bred? Would that faith remain as the guide of life, or could not a man find all that he needed in Plato? It was, all over again, the trouble that had tormented the Christian mind when, two hundred years before, the corpus of Aristotle's thought had first been laid before it. In Plato, so Marsiglio Ficino, one of the finest flowers of the new age, was to say "there are set forth all the directives for life, all the principles of nature, all the holy mysteries of things divine." 977 And again, "Plato. . . shows himself everywhere as much a religious man as a philosopher, a subtle disputant, and a holy priest, a fecund orator. For which reasons, if you will continue as you have begun, to follow further in the footsteps of the divine Plato, you will — God guiding you — find happiness, and this especially because Plato, along with the philosophy of the Pythagoreans and Socrates, follows the law of Moses and is a precursor of the law of Christ." 978

Marsiglio Ficino was the protege of Cosimo de' Medici, and the very foundation of that Academy of Florence which was the chief shrine of the new Platonic studies. When his old patron lay dying, in 1464, Marsiglio (not yet a priest) came to his assistance. Cosimo had earlier written bidding him bring his promised translation of Plato, " For I desire nothing more ardently than to learn that way which most easily leads man to happiness." As Cosimo lay in his last illness he made his confession and received the last sacraments. With Marsiglio he spoke much of Plato, and Plato was read to the dying man. He spoke too of the miseries of earthly life and of the contempt for it which a man should have who aspired to higher happiness, and Marsiglio reminded him how "Xenocrates that holy man, the beloved disciple of Plato," had set forth these things in his treatise on death. The story is a curious melange of Catholicism and Platonism, with Catholicism, surely, already suffering from the alliance. 979

Nor did Plato come to the age unaccompanied. Only a pace behind, in his very shadow, and not always distinguished from him, came Plotinus and the religious cult of Neo-Platonism which had developed through Plotinus. 980 Here was Platonism presented as a religion, where communion with the divine through ecstasy, for which lifelong asceticism prepared the soul, was presented as the supreme achievement of life. It was a "religion" where there was no place for real freedom, nor for personal responsibility, nor prayer, and where sin had no meaning. The world, for the Neo- Platonist was not created by the free act of a loving creator, but was the necessary expression of the nature of the first principle of all. Providence was but the kind of universal sympathy that links all things together in a fixed necessitated movement, all being moved by the single soul of the world. Here, in ultimate logic, is Pantheism and all its horrors; religion without a personal God, without any possibility of the Incarnation, mystical life without any need of grace and — since there is no such distinction as between creator and created — communion without subordination, and the idea that mystical experience is the basis and the test of truth.

Many things in Platonism and in Neo-Platonism can no doubt be given a Christian interpretation, but of themselves they are not Christian; for Christians with intelligences less than very well trained in Christian teaching, they are obviously dangerous.

But it was not only Platonism — in its purer and in its baser forms — that came to life again in the West as a force in men's lives. Stoicism also revived; and Epicureanism. Once more man is invited to the belief in the perfectibility of his nature, and to accept the doctrine of his own goodness. To the Christian doctrine of the fall and its effects on human nature, of all men's need of healing grace, there is opposed the new, more elegantly stated, cult of man as he is, meditations on a way of life unfettered by sobering thoughts of man as he ought to be. The new man is to be made perfect by the full freedom to indulge his every impulse, to satisfy his every desire; for this alone is life. Man is simply an animal endowed with the power to think, master of his fate indeed, sole captain of his soul, to whom all that is possible is lawful. Never before was the " natural " so attractively portrayed to the Christian world as good and perfectible. 981

And the artists re-echoed the philosophic teaching. "Such a feeling for nature in spring time," says a French critic of Lippo Lippi's "Adoration of the Shepherds," (painted about 1430) "as veracious in representation as it is intense in perception, had never before charmed the eye." Here, too, the primacy of nature begins to triumph, as the mysteries of the beauty of the human form are more and more lovingly explored. "Men had discovered that, outside Christianity altogether, there existed a culture, an art that was not only infinite in its riches, but which was also essentially natural, the spontaneous fruit of man's own faculties wherein was no element of dogma or revelation. And it SO happened that these products had, as things of beauty, an overwhelming superiority over all others. . . . The Christian centuries, from this point of view, seemed, — indeed, a time of repression and of barbarism." 982 Beauty — it had, indeed, never been lacking to medieval man; but for the first time there was now revealed to his meditative gaze, and in what formidable competition with Christianity, the long lost beauty of that pagan world over which Christianity had once — and it seemed finally — been triumphant. Here, again, there was a system and a formula that were complete, a whole philosophy of nature and of life: here was most potent matter for the revolt of revolts against the authority of Christianity, and that in an age already in revolt against the personnel of the Christian Church. The revival of interest in classical letters was showing itself, by the middle of the fifteenth century, as but a step in the quest for other ideals of thought and life.

And with the new cult of the natural, following upon the new proclamation of the primacy of Nature, there began the new attack on what chiefly stood between it and success, the spiritual and moral teaching of the Church. It was now that there began, not attacks upon the clergy for their vices, but attacks upon the monks for the "folly" of their ascetic ideals, and — another new feature — the literary glorification of vice. Morals begin, in every city and court of Italy, their gadarene descent, and among the most notorious of these ill-living antagonists of Christian ideals are the humanists of the Curia Romana. Nowhere did the new worship of antiquity produce greater contempt and hatred for the culture and the religion inspired by other sources, than in this circle. Poggio made the sins of priests and religious the butt of his filthy Facetiae and in his work on Avarice he mocked the very spiritual ideals that should have prevented sin. Valla, author of the De Voluptate, made an open attack on the ideal of chastity declaring that prostitutes were more useful to mankind than nuns. Aretino wrote the Oratio Heliogaboli ad meretrices. Alberti, correct it would seem in his personal conduct, did not scruple to accept the dedication of Beccadelli's infamous Hermaphrodite 983 There is scarcely one of the band whose work is free from sexual dirt, and their lives were as their writings. It has been said — no doubt truly — that public opinion by this time, looked upon the artist and the man of letters as a special kind of creatures, 984 in whom laxity of life was no longer shocking. Familiarity with the spectacle of such wickedness, and a general toleration of whatever was well expressed, slowly corrupted the judgment of those ill authority also, and after the spectacle of popes who were good men giving employment to such active agents of moral dissolution we come, in the next generation, to popes who, themselves good-living men, begin to promote badliving men even into the Sacred College. Finally, there come popes whose own lives are an open scandal.

It is a curious thing that the two popes who, above all others, were by temperament in sympathy with the Renaissance, and who lavished honours and wealth upon the new humanist scholars — Nicholas V and Paul II — were taught by practical experience how real was the determination of some of these to restore the Rome of antiquity, even at the expense of the papacy. In the time of Nicholas V Stefano Porcaro and his associates had planned to capture the pope and his cardinals, if necessary to kill them, and to set up the republic. This was in January 1453. The plot was, however, discovered on the eve of the day appointed and the conspirators taken and executed.

Ten years went by — the years when Calixtus III and Pius II were too engrossed with the urgencies of the crusade to be able to spare time or money for the patronage of poets and the arts. Then, in 1464, the newly-elected Paul II, re-arranging the curia, dismissed a number of the humanists appointed by Pius II. First they petitioned and then they threatened, prepared, they told the pope, to bring about a General Council before which he would have to justify his action. Their leader, Bartholomew Sacchi, called Platina, was arrested, put to the torture, and imprisoned in Sant' Angelo. After a time he was released, and presently, in revenge, he organised a new conspiracy.

The centre of this was Julius Pomponius Laetus, the most extreme — not to say eccentric — of all the humanists of Rome, a scholar who to the best of his ability and knowledge lived the life of Latin antiquity, refusing to learn Greek lest it injure the perfection of his Latin pronunciation, worshipping the Spirit of Rome, the leader of a band of like-minded semi-heathen freethinkers. Their aim was to re-establish the Republic of classical time and to drive out the pope and the whole body of clergy. In February 1468 the papal police suddenly rounded up the chiefs of the party. Again Platina was taken, again he was arrested and tortured. The plot, so the pope declared, 985 was twofold — to set up paganism once again in Rome and to murder himself. Presently Pomponius Laetus was arrested in Venice, and handed over to the pope. He too, like Platina, now confessed himself a most repentant Christian and, terror-stricken, begged for mercy. Their lives were spared, and presently they were released. Pomponius lived to become the principal tutor of three future popes, Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III; Platina to rise to great favour in the reign of Sixtus IV, the successor of the pope against whom he had plotted. He now became Vatican librarian, and was able to revenge himself on Paul II for all time by writing his life.

Notes

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