BOOK IX. 

FROM THE END OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE TO THE END OF THE FIFTH COUNCIL OF THE LATERAN, A.D. 1418-1517.

 

CHAPTER III.

FROM THE ELECTION OF POPE NICOLAS V TO THE DEATH OF PAUL II. A.D. 1447-1471.

 

EUGENIUS, a few days before his death, had decreed that the regulations of the council of Basel as to the choice of a pope should be of no effect, but that the election should be conducted according to the laws enacted by Gregory X at the council of Lyons and by Clement V at the council of Vienne. In accordance with this decree, the cardinals met in conclave at the church of St. Mary sopra Minerva, on the 4th of March. But before that meeting an attempt to effect a revolution in the government of Rome had been made by Stephen Porcaro, a man of much literary culture, eloquent, popular, and connected by familiar friendship and correspondence with some of the most eminent among his contemporaries. Porcaro’s mind had been inflamed by his classical studies with an enthusiastic desire for the restoration of the ancient republican government. He disdained the career of pub­lic office, in which he had held honourable employments under the last two popes; and, not content with the respectable dignity of a knightly pedigree, he affected to trace his descent up to the ancient Roman Porcii. Believing that the opportunity for action had come, he addressed the common council of the people when it was assembled in the church of Ara Coeli, after the death of Eugenius, denouncing in vehement language the indig­nity and disgrace that the children of the Scipios should submit to the yoke of priestly dominion. But, although there were some who would gladly have acted on such words, others recalled to memory the anarchy which had followed on the expulsion of Eugenius, and the citizens were held in check by the fear of Alfonso of Naples, who had occupied Tivoli and other places in the neighbour­hood, and had assured the cardinals of his protection and assistance in case of need. The business of the conclave was therefore allowed to proceed, under the guardian­ship of the ambassadors of certain princes—amongst whom Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini appeared as repre­senting the emperor.

The names of Capranica, Carvajal, and Prosper Colonna were brought forward, and on the afternoon of the third day it seemed as if Colonna were likely to be elected by the method which is termed access. The bishop of Bologna was about to vote for him, when his own name (for which some votes had been given in the morning) was suggested by the archbishop of Taranto; and it was accepted by all as that of the only one among the cardinals who was not obnoxious to any party.

The new pope, Thomas Parentuccelli, was the son of a physician, and was born in 1398 at Pisa, although he was commonly styled after his mother’s birthplace, Sarzana. He had studied at Bologna, and had acquired such a reputation that Aeneas Sylvius speaks of his knowledge as universal, and declares that whatever was hidden from him must be beyond the knowledge of man. Having early lost his father, and having been unkindly treated by his stepfather, he had in his youth been compelled to struggle with difficulties. But he was drawn forth from obscurity by the patronage of cardinal Albergati, in whose household he spent twenty years; he had distinguished himself in disputation with the Greeks at Ferrara and at Florence; he had been employed in important missions, such as that which was sent into Germany for the purpose of breaking up the league of the electors; and within eighteen months he had become bishop, cardinal, and pope. In grateful remembrance of his patron, Nicolas Albergati, he took the name of Nicolas V.

Nicolas is described as a man of small and spare person, as affable and unassuming, quick in temper but easily pacified; as sparing of expense on himself, but liberal to others, and munificent in his encouragement of literature and art. Aeneas Sylvius blames him for too great confidence in his own judgment, and for disregard of the opinion of others. Although moderate in his general policy, he was zealous for the interests of the Roman see, and was bent on recovering for it, if possible, the privileges which had been assailed by the councils of Constance and Basel. When asked by Piccolomini to confirm the agreement which his predecessor had made with the Germans, he expressed himself with moderation and good sense—that the bishops of Rome appeared to him to have extended the borders of their garments too far, by leaving no jurisdiction to other bishops; while, on the other side, the council of Basel had too much shortened the pope’s hands; that, for himself, he did not intend to deprive the bishops of their rights, but trusted that respect for the rights of others would be found the best means for the preservation of his own.

Piccolomini, on whom Eugenius had intended to bestow the bishopric of Trieste, received this reward of his labours from Nicolas, and returned to Germany, carrying with him a written confirmation of the late agreement, and resolved to work out the pope’s design.

In June 1447 a meeting was held at Bourges, where Charles of France presided, and the archbishop of Treves represented his brother electors of Cologne, the Palatinate, and Saxony. It was agreed between the French and the Germans that no regard should be paid to the authority of either the council of Basel or that of the Lateran, although it was explained that by this nothing was intended against the observance of such decrees as had been accepted either in France or in the empire; that the king should urge the disso­lution of both assemblies, and should request pope Nicolas to summon a new council for the following year, in compliance with the decree of Constance.

In July a diet was assembled at Aschaffenburg, where cardinal Carvajal appeared as legate, while Piccolomini acted at once as a servant of the emperor and of the pope. The question of a provision for the pope, which had been proposed at the council of Basel, was ad­journed for discussion until the next diet, unless in the meantime it should have been settled by an agreement with the legate; and Carvajal took advantage of the interval to procure the emperor’s assent to a scheme which was greatly in favour of Rome. Instead of receiving a compensation, the pope was to resume the practices of annates and reservation, on terms almost the same which had been allowed by the council of Constance, except that, instead of the alternate patronage of certain dignities, he was to have the presentation to such as should fall vacant in the alternate months of the year. By this concordat, the acceptata of Mainz were set aside, and Ger­many became again subject to those burdens against which she had for thirty years been struggling, and from which she had for a time appeared to have gained a deliverance. This triumph of the papacy was chiefly due to the art of Piccolomini, who not only swayed the mind of Frederick, but, by an unscrupulous use of bribery in the form of privileges, patronage, exemptions, and the like, induced the reluctant electors to sacrifice the interests of the national church to their own private advantage.

Nicolas in the end of 1447 proclaimed a crusade against the antipope, and authorized the French king to seize his territories. But such measures were happily not needed in order to the extinction of the schism. The submission of the Germans to Eugenius and his successor involved an abandonment of the council of Basel. The emperor, therefore, signified to that assem­bly that he withdrew his protection from it, and charged the citizens of Basel, under penalty of the ban of the empire, to harbour it no longer. By this the remaining members found themselves obliged to join the antipope at Lausanne; and at a meeting held at Lyons, between cardinal Allemand, as president of the council, and envoys from the kings of France, England, and other princes, it was agreed that Felix should submit to his rival. The antipope, whose supporters had fallen away from him until he found himself acknowledged only in his own duchy of Savoy, declared to the remnant of the council that, for the sake of the church’s peace, he resigned his dignity; the eight cardinals of Felix’s party then affected to choose Thomas of Sarzana to the papacy; and the assembly, after having lasted nearly eighteen years, formally dissolved itself. By a wise moderation on the part of Nicolas, all the sentences of Eugenius against the coun­cil were revoked. Amadeus was made cardinal-bishop of Sabina, with the first place in the sacred college, and a commission as legate for Savoy and Piedmont; and his adherents were allowed to retain their dignities. The most prominent of these adherents, cardinal Allemand, not only continued to enjoy the archbishopric of Arles, but was able so entirely to atone for his offences against the papacy that he eventually received the honour of beatification from pope Clement VII. Amadeus him­self returned to the cheerful seclusion of Ripaille, where he died in 1450 or the following year.

In his political conduct, and especially with regard to the other Italian powers, Nicolas showed himself sincerely desirous of peace; nor did he allow himself to be entangled in a contest for the duchy of Milan, which became vacant by the death of the last Visconti, Philip Mary, in 1447. Philip Mary had bequeathed his power to Alfonso of Naples; but the emperor claimed the duchy as a fief, which had lapsed to the empire through the extinction of the Visconti; while Charles of Orleans advanced pretensions which were supported by the king of France, and the Milanese themselves favoured Francis Sforza, a condottiere, who had married an illegitimate daughter of the late duke, but had alienated the jealous nature of Philip Mary by the growth of his power and renown. A war of two years and a half was concluded in February 1450 by a peace which established Sforza in possession of the duchy.

Throughout his earlier life, Nicolas had been distin­guished by his love of literature; and his elevation enabled him to foster by the authority and by the wealth of the papacy the studies to which he was devoted. The time was one of extraordinary intellectual movement. Already men of letters were held in high consideration by the princes of Italy, who were proud to entertain them at their courts, and in some cases endeavoured to acquire for themselves the reputation of learning and mental accomplishments; and, under the republican govern­ment of Florence, they found such encouragement from the chief families (among which the Medici were now rising into pre-eminence) as to make that city the head­quarters of the literary revival. Nicolas himself had lived there in the train of pope Eugenius, and had been intimate with the most eminent scholars. His own patronage of literature, as has been remarked, was not the condescension of a prince, but showed the interest of a genuine lover of books. He invited men of learning to settle at Rome; he collected manuscripts wherever they could be found; even the great calamity which in his pontificate befell Christendom through the Turkish conquest of Constantinople was turned to advantage in this respect, as fugitive scholars brought with them to Italy such books as each could rescue, and Nicolas employed agents to search in Greece for remains of ancient literature. The study of Greek, which had been revived in the preceding century, became now so popular in Italy, that even ladies of high rank are said to have been able to discourse in that tongue. Plato was introduced into the west by Gemisthius Pletho, and disputed the supremacy which Aristotle had long held in the schools. In the western countries, too, manuscripts which had lurked in monastic or other libraries were now brought to light, and revealed writings of classical authors which had been unknown for centuries. Through the works of Cicero and Quintilian the power of oratory rose into such estimation that Nicolas himself is even said to have partly owed his election to the admiration excited by his funeral discourse over his predecessor.

Under Nicolas the scanty library of the popes, which had accompanied them to Avignon and had thence been brought back to Rome (although not without con­siderable losses), was lodged in the Vatican, and was increased by 5000 manuscripts. The pope employed a large number of copyists in the multiplication of books— a work in which such labour was soon to be superseded by the art of printing, which at this very time produced its first-fruits. He engaged scholars of reputation to translate into Latin the writings of Greek classics and fathers; and a new version of the whole Bible, from the original tongues, was projected and partly executed.

Among the most eminent scholars of the age was Laurence Valla, born at Rome in 1406. About the year 1440, Valla produced his treatise on the ‘Donation of Constantine,’ a masterly exposure of the forgery which, although not without occasional question, had been gene­rally received for centuries. But Rome was no safe place for the author of such a work; and Valla secretly withdrew to Naples, where his critical spirit was exercised on the pretended correspondence of the Saviour with Abgarus, and on the common belief that the creed which takes its name from the apostles was formed by the contribu­tion of an article by each of the twelve. For these writings he was arrested by the Inquisition, was condemned as a heretic, and would have been burnt, but for the interces­sion of king Alfonso. His entreaties that he might be allowed to return to Rome were disregarded by Eugenius; but Nicolas invited him, made him his own secretary, and furnished him with literary employment. To this employment Valla probably owed his preservation from sharing in fatal revolutionary schemes which might have been likely to enlist his sympathy; for, after having shown the worthlessness of the foundation on which the tem­poral power of the papacy had been made to rest, he had gone on to argue that no pretence of prescription could be admitted in behalf of that power, to exhort the Romans to rise against it, and to advise the popes themselves to abandon it. Valla was promoted by Calixtus III to a canonry of the Lateran church, and died in 1465.

Of the Greeks, Bessarion was distinguished above the rest, not only by his fame as a scholar, but by the dig­nities of cardinal and titular patriarch of Constantinople. He had acquired a perfect command of the Latin lan­guage, and had been able to adapt himself to the manners of his new society. For a time he administered the government of Bologna as legate with great success; he was employed on important missions, and at more than one election appeared likely to be chosen pope. He lived in splendour and bounty, and was regarded as the patron of the Greeks who had settled at Rome. His house was full of scholars, partly his own countrymen, and partly Latins who cultivated Greek literature; and, like Nicolas, he was a zealous collector of manuscripts, of which he bestowed a precious collection on the doge and senate of Venice.

The character of the new literary class in general was not without serious defects. They were too often without dignity or self-respect, indifferent to public interests, wil­ling to bask in the patronage alike of popes, of republics, or of the princes who held in Italy a position like that of the ancient Greek tyrants; and they were always ready for the sake of advantage to transfer themselves from one patron to another. They were vain, greedy, quarrelsome, bitter in their mutual jealousies and envies, unsteady, unthrifty; and with their study of the classics they not uncommonly combined the morality of ancient paganism. Nor even in respect of literary value can their works claim the praise of originality; the minds of these scholars were exercised in the illustration and imitation of the ancients, without being able to produce anything of independent merit. And little did Nicolas and the other ecclesiastical patrons of the classical revival suspect that its results would be, on the one hand, to paganize the church, and, on the other hand, to produce a rebellion against its authority.

Nicolas was bent on renewing the splendour of his city. The whole of the Vatican quarter was to be rebuilt according to one grand plan, and in a style of unexam­pled magnificence. The venerable basilica of St. Peter, founded by the first Christian emperor, was to make room for a new structure, to be designed in the form of a Greek cross, and surmounted by a soaring cupola; and the work was begun by removing the ancient sepulchral chapel of Probus, at the further end of the church, in order to the erection of a new tribune, which had risen only a few feet above the ground at the time of the pope’s death and was destined to be superseded by a yet more magnificent structure in the following century. Around the great church were to be grouped a palace, churches, convents, and a library, with porticoes, gardens, and a cemetery; and the rebuilding of the palace was commenced. The Pantheon was restored from a ruinous condition, and the destruction of ancient Roman monu­ments was checked. Many other churches of the city were restored; much was spent on repairs of the walls and on new fortifications of the Vatican quarter, with a view to protecting the popes against such tumults as that by which Eugenius had been driven from Rome; and in many provincial towns—such as Orvieto, Viterbo, Fabri­ano, Spoleto, and Assisi—the short pontificate of Nicolas was marked by the erection of new and splendid public buildings. To him is also ascribed the introduction of a magnificence before unknown into the services of the church. Gold and silver plate in profusion, jewelled mitres, vestments, altar-coverings, and curtains inwoven with gold, attested the munificence of the pope and the sumptuousness of his taste.

The arts of painting and sculpture, as well as that of architecture, enjoyed the patronage of Nicolas. Under him the saintly Dominican John of Fiesole, styled Angelico, who had been invited to Rome in 1445 by Eugenius, adorned the new chapel of St. Laurence in the Vatican. But both literature and art were exotics at Rome, where the love of antiquity rarely took any other form than that of political republicanism. With the exception of Valla, no native Roman became prominent among the scholars of the time; the painters, the sculptors, the architects were brought from Florence; and while they found patrons in the popes and the cardinals, they met with no encourage­ment from the Roman nobles.

An attempt had been made in 1423 to celebrate a jubilee according to the calculation of thirty-three years, as that interval had elapsed since the first jubilee of Boniface IX. in 1390. This attempt, according to the expression of a chronicler, was “neither forbidden nor authorized” by Martin V, and it proved a failure. But in the pontificate of Nicolas, the term of half a century since the jubilee of 1400 was completed, and the pope took measures for celebrating the festival with the fullest effect. By some powerful persons, indeed, the pilgrim­age was discouraged. Duke Henry of Bavaria told his people that forgiveness might be had of God in all places alike. The Teutonic knights of North Germany, wishing to prevent their subjects from taking a long journey which might have been hurtful to the interests of the brotherhood, refused to publish the bull for the jubilee; but they were afterwards glad to appease the pope’s anger by a present of a thousand ducats, in order that the indulgences of the jubilee might be dispensed by their own clergy to those who should give certain alms and perform certain devotional exercises in their own country. The unwonted security of the ways in­duced multitudes to flock to Rome, so that no jubilee since the first (that of the year 1300) had been so crowded or so brilliant. The pilgrims are compared to flights of starlings, to heaps of bees or ants, to the sand of the sea-shore; and such was the pressure one day on the bridge of St. Angelo, when the stoppage of a mule caused a confusion between those who were rushing to the display of the Veronica in St. Peter’s and those who were returning from it, that about two hundred were crushed to death, or forced into the Tiber and drowned.

The privileges of the jubilee were continued for some time after the end of the year, and the cardinal of Cusa was sent to dispense such graces in Germany. But, although he discharged this function with much success, it would seem that his own belief in their efficacy was not enthusiastic; for, on being asked whether a monk might go on pilgrimage without the leave of his abbot, he quoted pope Nicolas himself for the opinion that obedience is better than indulgences.

The wealth which the pope received through the jubilee contributed largely to support the cost of his buildings and of his encouragement of learning and of the arts. But at the very time when so vast a concourse was drawn towards Rome, a plague, which had raged with great violence in the north of Italy, reached the capital; and with the growing heat of the weather its virulence increased. Soon after midsummer, the pope withdrew, and with a party of scholars, in whose society he delighted, he shut himself up in one castle after another until the danger was over.

In 1452 Rome witnessed for the last time the corona­tion of an emperor. Frederick, whose territory and wealth were ill equal to the support of his great dignity, imagined that his authority might be enhanced by receiv­ing the imperial crown according to the traditional usage, and, leaving disaffection and conspiracy behind him, he crossed the Alps with a small force. The cost of the expedition was in part supplied by the pope, in con­sideration of the advantage which he had gained by the Vienna concordats The days were past when the visit of an emperor was formidable to the Italians : “all before him”, says a contemporary writer, “had made some attempt to recover power; he was the first who gave up the hope.” Everywhere Frederick was received with honour, and was entertained at the expense of the cities through which he passed. He did not disdain to ask for safe-conducts from the local authorities;  nor to gain some money by bestowing privileges of various kinds,—such as the dignities of count and knight, and even the degree of doctor or the office of notary. From an unwillingness to acknowledge Sforza, by whom he had been baffled as to the duchy of Milan, he declined his invitation to that city, alleging as his excuse the plague which had lately raged. The pope, who had been alarmed by prophecies and rumours, and by the remem­brance of former troubles, had endeavoured to delay the emperor’s visit, but his objections had been overcome by the skill of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who had just been promoted to the bishopric of Siena; and Nicolas contented himself with providing against any danger from the Germans by strengthening the fortifications and the garrison of Rome. At Florence two cardinals appeared with the announcement that all was ready for the coro­nation, and required that Frederick, before entering the territory of St. Peter, should take an oath to the pope, which they represented to be prescribed by the Clemen­tines, and by ancient custom. To this he truly replied that the oath had not been taken by Henry VII, that it was no older than the time of Charles IV, and that therefore the Clementine decree was of no force; yet he submitted to it at Siena, and bound himself by a second oath before entering the gates of Rome. At Siena the emperor was met by his intended bride, the princess Leonora of Portugal, who had been conducted from her landing in Italy by Piccolomini. On their arrival at Rome, Frederick was lodged in the Lateran palace, and thus had the opportunity for frequent confidential conversations with the pope by night. On the 16th of March the nuptials took place, and Frederick was crowned as king of Italy, although not with the ancient Lombard crown, but with that of Germany, which had been brought from Aix-la-Chapelle. And on the 18th, the anniversary of the pope’s own coronation, the imperial coronation was solemnized with a ceremonial which is minutely described by the chroniclers of the time. The emperor swore once more to support the Roman church, and, according to the traditional usage, he per­formed the “office of a groom” by leading the pope’s horse a few steps.

After a short visit to king Alfonso at Naples, where he was received with great magnificence, Frederick again spent three days at Rome; but whereas he and the Ger­mans had pressed for a general council, to be held in Germany, he now allowed himself to be drawn into ask­ing, by means of a long and eloquent speech delivered by Piccolomini before the cardinals, that a crusade might be undertaken. To this Nicolas, who well knew the emperor’s unfitness for the command of such an expe­dition, replied that he strongly desired a crusade, but that the other powers of Christendom must be consulted before anything could be determined.

Frederick, on his return to Germany, found that his coronation had not procured him any additional power. The Hungarians and Bohemians urged him to give up to them the young Ladislaus, whom he had carried with him to Italy, where attempts had been made to rescue the prince from his guardianship; and although the pope threatened them with excommunication, they extorted the surrender of their sovereign by force of arms.

The attempt of Stephen Porcaro to effect a revolution at Rome after the death of Eugenius IV has already been related. Nicolas, in accordance with his usual policy of conciliation, and in the hope of gaining this man, appointed him podestà of Anagni; but Porcaro’s restless spirit led him back to Rome, where, at the cele­bration of a popular festival, he again endeavoured to excite the multitude to throw off the papal yoke. In consequence of this he was banished to Bologna, where a liberal allowance was provided for him, but with the condition that he should every day present himself before the cardinal-legate Bessarion. By such restraint his republican zeal and his hatred of the hierarchical govern­ment were exasperated; he was in the habit of declaim­ing, with an application to himself, the famous verses in which Petrarch had been supposed to have stimulated the energies of Rienzi. By correspondence with his relations and friends at Rome, he organized a conspiracy, which was to be carried out on the Epiphany, 1453, by forcing a way into the Vatican and setting the palace on fire, surprising the pope and cardinals while engaged in a solemn mass, and carrying off Nicolas, to be used as a hostage in order to obtain possession of the fortress of St. Angelo; after which a republic was to be established, with Porcaro at its head as tribune.

A few days before the time appointed, Porcaro, having excused himself under the plea of sickness from waiting on the legate as usual, made his escape from Bologna and joined his accomplices in Rome. But his absence was speedily discovered and reported to the papal government, while some of the conspirators also betrayed the design. Porcaro was arrested, and, after having in vain begged that he might be allowed to address the people, whom he expected to rise for his deliverance, he was hanged by night from a tower of the castle of St. Angelo. Many of his kinsmen and confederates—some of them brought from distant cities, where they had sought a refuge—were also put to death; and in order to suppress utterly the spirit which had projected the late plot, cruelty, and even treachery, were employed. Nicolas, deeply mortified by the ingratitude of the Romans, among whom much sympathy was displayed towards Porcaro and his associates, and perhaps affected by remorse for the late excesses of severity, became from this time reserved, melancholy, and distrustful. From having been accus­tomed to show himself familiarly in public, he rarely appeared, and was difficult of access; the gout, from which he had suffered since the time of his election, became more acute and was complicated by other disorders; and he sank into a rapid decay. To those who were admitted into his confidence he deplored the insincerity of men, declared himself to be miserable in his great dignity, and expressed a vain wish that he could again become Master Thomas of Sarzana.

Within a few months after the conspiracy of the Porcari, tidings of an overwhelming calamity were received from the east. The emperor John Palaeologus, alarmed by the discontent of his subjects, and finding little benefit from the alliance with the Latins which had been purchased by the concessions of Florence, had in his last years renounced the union of the churches. But his son and successor, Constantine, under the pressure of increased danger from the Turks, under Mahomet, the son of Amurath II, had again turned in supplication to the west, professing repentance, and offering to return to communion with the Roman church. The pope, after reproving the Greeks for their breach of engagements, expressed his willingness to receive them once more, and prepared to send some galleys to their assistance, while cardinal Isidore, himself a Greek, and formerly metro­politan of Russia, was commissioned to carry out the reconciliation. But although Isidore found some eccle­siastics and the higher laity ready to comply, the reunion was viewed with abhorrence by the great body of the clergy, and yet more strongly by the monks and female recluses; while the common people in the taverns uttered curses against it, and drank to the image of the blessed Virgin, imploring her aid against the Turks, and rejecting that of the Latins. And when, after the decrees of Florence had again been signed, a solemn thanksgiving was celebrated in St. Sophia’s, the more rigid of the Greeks, disgusted by the introduction of Latin peculiarities into the service, avoided the great church as if it were contaminated, “like a Jewish synagogue”. It was in vain that the more courtly party pleaded that their compliances were insincere, and were intended to last only until their country should have been delivered by the help of the Latins. The Greeks in general abjured the pope and his communion; and during the following Lent the clergy in the confessionals excited their penitents to oppose the union, and to refuse the sacraments and other rites at the hands of any who favoured it. So violent was the feel­ing against the Latins, that a great official declared that he would rather see a Turkish turban than a cardinal’s hat in Constantinople.

Meanwhile Mahomet pressed more and more closely on the city, and on the 6th of April 1453 laid formal siege to it. The emperor, in his extremity, was obliged to despoil the churches of their treasures for the payment of his foreign auxiliaries, with the promise of fourfold restoration: but the end was at hand. On the 29th of May—a day which had been determined by astrological calculations—the final assault was made, and the capital of eastern Christendom became the prey of the victorious Turks. The body of the emperor, who in his last days had displayed heroic qualities, was, after a long search, found beneath a heap of dead. Isidore, who for a time was supposed to have perished, escaped in disguise, and, after many adventures, was able to reach Italy in safety. Spoliation, destruction, profanity, far exceeding the outrages which had disgraced the Latin conquest of Constantinople, were committed, but might in the comparison have pleaded the excuse that the actors were not professedly Christians. The treasures of Greek learning were destroyed or dispersed; St. Sophia’s, after having been the scene of gross profanations, was turned into a mosque; monasteries were given over to dervishes or to workmen of low occupations; the patriarch, George Scholaris (or Gennadius), who had retired to a monastery, but had continued to be the oracle of the party opposed to Rome, was chosen anew by some representatives of the Christian community, under an order of the sultan; and the churches of the city were shared between the Christians and the Mussulman conquerors, until this countenance of the subject religion was ended sixty years later by sultan Selim.

Among the sovereigns of the west, divided as they were by their own differences, and little interested in the Greeks, the loss of Constantinople failed to produce such a feeling as had been aroused by similar calamities in former days. The emperor Frederick wept, and again expressed his wish for a crusade; but he took no active measures. Philip, duke of Burgundy, who in power, wealth, and splendour was among the foremost princes of Europe, alone manifested a stronger zeal. At a great festival, held at Lille, a lady representing the church appeared before his court, seated on an elephant led by a giant, and in a versified speech en­treated assistance. The herald of the Golden Fleece then brought in a live pheasant, richly adorned with jewels. The duke delivered to him a paper containing a vow “to God, the blessed Virgin, the ladies, and the pheasant”, that he would succour the church in her distress; and he was followed by his son Charles, count of Charolais, by the duke of Cleves, and a multitude of nobles and knights, who all in like form pledged themselves to the holy enterprise. But instead of carrying out this vow as he had intended, the duke found himself obliged, in consequence of the enormous cost of the Lille festivities, to break up his household for a time, and to travel in Germany and Switzerland, where he still endeavoured to promote the cause of the crusade.

To Nicolas the loss of Constantinople appeared in all its importance. Not only had the Byzantine empire fallen, but its ruin drew after it that of many lesser Christian principalities in the east; and the insatiable ambition of Mahomet seemed to design nothing less than a con­quest of all Christendom. In the end of September 1453, the pope sent forth a bull, in which he declared the founder of Islam to be the great red dragon of the Apocalypse, and, after dwelling on the conquest of Constantinople by Mahomet II and his designs against western Christendom, he exhorts all princes,, by the remembrance of their baptismal and coronation vows, to take arms in behalf of the faith. Indulgences are promised, both for personal service and to those who should furnish soldiers. The pope binds himself to devote to the cause all the payments which he should receive for institution to sees and other benefices; he requires a tenth from the clergy, and he charges the Christian world to maintain peace within itself. But the popes could not now rouse all Europe for a war against the infidels, as at an earlier time.

Piccolomini was employed to stir up the princes of Germany, while John of Capistrano, an Observant friar, whose eloquence was unequalled among his contemporaries in its sway over the popular heart, was sent into the same country as a preacher of the new crusade. But although Aeneas Sylvius employed his powers of persuasion in diets at Ratisbon (where Philip of Burgundy appeared) at Frankfort, and at Neustadt, he found that the Germans were animated by a feeling of distrust, which arose out of the late sacrifice of their ecclesiastical liberties. It was supposed that the pope intended, under pretext of the crusade, to get money for himself; and reproaches were cast on Nicolas for having spent large sums on needless fortifications, while he allowed the capital of the east to fall into the hands of the infidels. But Piccolomini represents himself as so far successful, that the diet of Frankfort, in October 1454, promised to raise 10,000 horse and 32,000 foot for a crusade in Hungary.

The death of Nicolas, which took place on the 24th of March 1455, for a time checked these attempts. In his last hours he called around him the cardinals, and took leave of them in a long address, recounting the chief events of his papacy, his acts, and his designs. He dwelt on the authority of the Roman see, he exhorted them to love and maintain the church, and, after bestowing his blessing on them, he expired.

Fifteen out of the twenty cardinals met for the election of a successor. It seemed as if Bessarion were about to be pope; but some members of the college, who felt his strictness of character as a reproach of their own laxity, objected that it would be a reflection on the Latin church if they should elect a Greek neophyte, who had not yet shaved off his beard; and the choice April 8, fell, by way of access, on Alfonso Borja or Borgia, a native of Valencia, who took the name of Calixtus III.

Borgia had been a student and a professor in the Spanish university of Lerida, and was esteemed the greatest jurist of his time. Even when pope, he retained in his mind all the details of ecclesiastical and civil law, and took pleasure in answering legal questions. He had received preferment from his countryman Benedict XIII, and was afterwards employed by Alfonso of Aragon in negotiating for the extinction of the schism which Benedict had attempted to perpetuate. For this service Martin V rewarded him with the bishopric of his native city. He became Alfonso’s most trusted counsellor; and, having been sent by him to Eugenius IV, while resident at Florence, he was induced by Eugenius to attach himself to the papal court, and was raised by him to the dignity of cardinal. Perhaps his advanced age—seventy-seven—may have contributed to promote his elevation to the papacy.

Calixtus despised the elegant and costly tastes of his predecessor, whom he openly blamed for having spent on manuscripts and ornamental things the money which might have been employed in a war against the Turks. Buildings which Nicolas had begun were suspended, and the materials which had been collected for them were dispersed. To the holy war Calixtus devoted himself with a zeal which was second only to his regard for the interest of his family. Immediately on his election he recorded a solemn vow to employ all possible weapons, spiritual and temporal, against the Turks. He sent forth a bull, summoning the nations of the west to serve for half a year from the 1st of March i456. Every day at noon the bells of all churches were to be rung, and all Christians were at the sound to pray for the success of the crusade. He freely spent the treasures which Nicolas, notwithstanding his munificent expenditure, had left in the papal coffers. He even alienated jewels and other church property for the purpose of aiding the crusade. He entered into correspondence with the oriental enemies of the Turks, in order to secure their co-operation. He equipped a fleet against the enemy, and sent aid to Scanderbeg, the chief who for a quarter of a century kept up an incessant warfare against the Turks among the mountains of Albania. Legates were sent into all countries, to appease the quarrels of Christian princes and to animate them for the holy war, while hosts of friars were commissioned to carry out a like work among the people.

In this John of Capistrano especially distinguished himself. The Turks, under Mahomet, laid siege to Bel­grade; but there they encountered the valour and conduct of John Huniades, and John of Capistrano, by his eloquence, collected a force of 40,000 for the defence. These were, indeed, an undisciplined and rudely-armed multitude, as the nobles, with very few exceptions, held aloof from the enterprise; but the generalship of Huniades and the exhortations and prayers of the friar, controlled and animated them; and after a siege of forty-six days the Turks were driven off with great loss. But the nations of the west, instead of taking from this success a warning to unite for the common cause of Christendom, were encouraged by it to think themselves secure from danger, and were confirmed in their apathy.

Charles of France forbade the publication of the pope’s bulls within his dominions, lest the crusade should deprive him of strength which he needed against the English; but he allowed a collection of a tenth for the expedition. By some universities, and by a portion of the clergy, an appeal was made to a general council against the new impost; but the university of Paris, which had taken the lead in this movement, afterwards submitted to pay, with the understanding that the money should be regarded as a pious aid, and that it was given for once only. Alfonso of Aragon and Sicily promised to assist, but, after having got the crusading tithe into his hands, he turned it against the Genoese, whom he described as the Turks of Europe; and other princes limited their assistance to words. But in Germany, where Carvajal was legate, a vehement spirit of opposition was manifested. The Germans not only thought that they had been defrauded by the concordat of Vienna, but complained that the terms of that agreement had been violated. They talked of insisting on a pragmatic sanction; they cried out that they had been sufficiently drained of money under the pretext of crusading tenths, in order to feed the pope’s rapacity. Some of them ventured to question whether the papacy had been founded by the Saviour; and there were threats of setting up a king of the Romans in opposition to the emperor, whose neglect of the duties of his station was loudly censured. Piccolomini, whose services to the papacy had been rewarded successively by the bishoprics of Trieste and Siena, and whose views became more and more papal as he rose higher in eccle­siastical dignity, exerted himself indefatigably for the crusade. He wrote letters, attended diets, and made speeches in a tone which contrasts remarkably with that of his earlier acts at Basel. In 1456 he was sent to convey the assurance of the emperor’s obedience to the new pope, when he took the opportunity to deliver an eloquent oration in favour of the holy war, and his late exertions were acknowledged by his promotion to the cardinalate. In answer to the mutterings of Germany, Calixtus himself wrote to the emperor that all the money which had been collected was spent on the war, and that more was needed; he did not hesitate to say that the observance of concordats depended wholly on the pope’s grace, although he condescended to add that for his own part he would observe them. And Piccolomini, who was probably the author of the pontifical letter, told the archbishop of Mainz, in his own name, that there could properly be no pact between a lord (such as the pope) and his subjects. In order to set forth his views of the relations between the papacy and the Germans, the cardinal wrote his book on Germany. In this he defends the conduct of the pope in the various questions which had arisen. He meets the charge of drawing money from the poverty of Germany by dilating on its wealth, as displayed in the principal cities. He contrasts the free cities of Germany, which owned subjection to the emperor alone, and enjoyed the greatest liberty anywhere known, with the Italian repub­lics, such as Venice, Florence, and Siena, where all but the dominant few were alike slaves.

With the sovereign whose confidant he had formerly been, Calixtus was involved in serious difficulties. Alfonso, being without lawful issue, had procured from pope Eugenius a document, by which his son Ferdinand was legitimatized, and was declared capable of holding the highest offices. And this privilege had been confirmed by Nicolas, so as distinctly to make Ferdinand capable of succeeding to the Neapolitan crown, which Alfonso, regarding as his own acquisition, intended to bestow on his son, while the hereditary kingdom of Aragon was to fall to his own brother John. Calixtus, however, although he had been himself Alfonso’s agent in the negotiations with Eugenius, refused to confirm this —declaring that Ferdinand was not only illegitimate but supposititious, and that the consent of Eugenius had been got by surprise and under false pretences. On Alfonso’s death, in 1458, the pope claimed the kingdom as a fief which had lapsed to the Roman see, forbidding the people to swear to any claimant, and absolving them from any oath already taken. It was believed that he intended to bestow the kingdom on his nephew Peter; while Charles, count of Viana, and John, a son of the old claimant Rene of Provence, on various grounds asserted pretensions to it. The Neapolitans themselves, who desired to preserve the independence of their king­dom, were in favour of Ferdinand, who protested against the papal bull, and claimed to be king by the gift of God and by the consent of the Neapolitan estates.

The pope, old and gouty, spent much of his time in his sick-room, surrounded by friars, and by his three nephews, the children of his sisters. During the pontifi­cates of Eugenius and of Nicolas, there had been no ground for complaint of undue family influence; but it was now found that the pope’s kindred, with their parti­sans, who were invidiously styled the Catalans, engrossed all power, and an enormous share of office. The first cardinal made by Calixtus was his nephew Lewis John Milano, whom he appointed legate of Bologna. But his favours were yet more remarkably shown to his other nephews, Peter and Roderick Langol or Lenzuol, whose father, in honour of his marriage into a family more distinguished than his own, took the name of Borgia, and thus unwittingly gave occasion for the proverbial black­ness of infamy which has become attached to that name. Among the offices heaped on Peter Borgia (who remained a layman) were those of vicar of Benevento and Terracina, captain of St. Angelo, prefect of Rome, and standard-bearer of the church; together with the dukedom of Spoleto, to which (as we have seen) it was supposed that the kingdom of Naples was to be added. The younger brother, Roderick, at the age of twenty-two, was raised to the college of cardinals, in disregard of the remonstrances of its most eminent members; he was appointed chancellor of the Roman church, legate of the Marches, and was loaded with ecclesiastical benefices. Under the administration of these nephews Rome fell into a frightful state of disorder; justice was corrupted, robbery and murder were unpunished.

Before the quarrel as to Naples had time to come to a height, Calixtus died, on the 6th of August 1458. Im­mediately the Roman populace, instigated by the Orsini, broke out into insurrection against the Colonnas and the Catalan party, of whom some were killed and some were committed to prison. The prefect, Peter Borgia, was driven to take flight, and, after having with difficulty escaped down the Tiber, made his way to Civita Vecchia. But in the course of his escape he was seized with a fever, of which he died in the harbour of that place, leaving his wealth to swell the treasures of his brother Roderick.

On the 16th of August, eighteen cardinals met in conclave, Capranica, whom his experience and his merits had appeared to mark out as worthiest of the papacy, had died during the solemnities of the late pope’s funeral. Barbo, Estouteville, and Calandrino were brought forward, but after several scrutinies it appeared that no one had the necessary proportion of votes; and recourse was had to the method of access. Roderick Borgia, chancellor of the church, then stood forward, declaring himself for the cardinal of Siena; and on him—Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini—the choice of the electors fell. Bessarion, in the name of those who had voted for the French cardinal, expressed their high sense of the new pope’s worthiness, and said that the weakness of his health was the only reason why they had refrained from voting for him at a time when bodily energy seemed to be necessary for the office. With an allusion, as it would seem, to the favourite Virgilian epithet of Aeneas, Piccolomini took the name of Pius, which had before been borne by only a single pope, and at a date so remote as the second century.

Of all the cardinals, Piccolomini was the most widely famous. He had served many masters, had been engaged in opposite interests, and had been trained by a vast experience of affairs. His character was not saintly, or in any way elevated; he represented the literary culture of his time, but, above all things, he was a politician. Political dexterity, variety of accomplishments, eloquence, tact, personal fascination, were the gifts by which he had risen, and on which he relied. Six years before, as he was descending the Ciminean range, near Viterbo, in attendance on Frederick, who was then on his way to the Roman coronation, the emperor had foretold to him the dignity which he had now attained. The election was popular among the Romans, who were weary of the Catalan domination; and the report of it was received with satisfaction by princes and others in foreign coun­tries, to whom the new pope was personally known.

At the election, the cardinals had entered into a capi­tulation in which there were some novel features. The future pope was bound to carry on the war against the Turks, to reform the curia, to secure a provision for the cardinals, to act by their advice, to choose them according to the decrees of Constance, without regard to the im­portunities of princes. Once a year the cardinals were to meet, in order to inquire as to his performance of his engagements; and they were authorized to admonish him in case of failure.

Pius was much attached to his native place, Corsignano, and to Siena, the home of his ancestors; and he showed to the Sienese a favour which excited jealousy and animadversion. To this favour some cardinals owed their places in the college; even St. Catharine was indebted to it for her canonization. He raised the see of Siena to metropolitical dignity, and enriched the church with relics and other gifts he made Corsignano a bishopric, under the new name of Pienza, and adorned it with a cathedral, a palace, and other buildings, which to our own day stand in remarkable contrast with the small size and scanty population of the town. But although he admired and sympathized with the tastes of Nicolas V., he did not venture to build at Rome, with the exception of some small restorations and improvements; and the hopes with which the literary class may naturally have looked to a pope who might be regarded as one of themselves, were disappointed in so far as concerned the direct encouragement of literature, although he bestowed many court-offices and benefices on men of learning. The war against the Turks engrossed his care, and left him no funds to spare for the patronage of arts or of letters. His personal tastes and habits were simple; he delighted in the pure air of the country, and intensely enjoyed the beauties of nature; and the rapidity of his movements disgusted the formal officers of the court, although these movements did not really interfere with his attention to the details of business.

Pius wisely abandoned his predecessor’s policy as to Naples. He acknowledged Ferdinand on certain conditions, and sent a cardinal to officiate at his coronation; and the reconciliation was cemented by a marriage between a nephew of the pope and an illegitimate daughter of the king.

If the character of Pius was incapable of religious enthusiasm, he had yet many motives for continuing, in his new position, his endeavours to promote a crusade. The advance of the Mussulmans threatened Christendom and its civilization, and an energetic effort was required to oppose and to repel them; perhaps, too, Pius may have thought to restore the greatness of the papacy by the same means which had enabled former popes to place themselves at the head of the European nations. Within two months after his election, he sent forth an invitation to an assembly which was to be held at Mantua—a place selected as being convenient on the one hand for the pope, and on the other for the princes beyond the Alps. The meeting was not to be an ecclesiastical council, but a diet or congress of princes and so greatly was the imperial authority sunk, that no one questioned the pope’s right to convoke such an assembly, or to assume to himself the presidency of it. He instituted an order of knighthood, named after “the blessed Virgin Mary of Bethlehem” for the intended enterprise; and on the 22nd of January he set out from Rome amidst the general lamentation (as he tells us) of his people. In order to assure the Romans, whose misgivings were aroused by the remembrance of the long sojourn of the popes at Avignon, he had decreed that, if he should not return, the election of his successor should take place nowhere but at Rome. When apprehensions were expressed that his enemies might take advantage of his absence to invade his territory, he answered that the temporal possessions of the papacy had often been lost and regained, but that if the spirituality should be lost, it could hardly be recovered. Although only fifty-three years of age, Pius was, prematurely broken in health; and he suffered severely from illness as he made his way over the frozen Apennines.

On arriving at Mantua, he found himself almost alone with his cardinals. A war was raging between the emperor and the son of Huniades, Matthias Corvinus, who had lately been chosen king of Hungary; and it is probable that Frederick may have gladly availed himself of this as an excuse from paying homage to a pope whom he had long known as his own servant. He therefore did not appear in person, and the ambassadors whom he sent were so wanting in dignity and in ability that the pope sharply reproved him by letter for the deficiencies of his representatives, as well as for his absence. The French king, offended by the pope’s policy as to Naples, declined the summons, and would not commit himself to the crusade. England was too deeply engaged in the wars of York and Lancaster to spare any force for the general cause of Christendom.

On the 1st of June, the pope opened the assembly. He expressed his disappointment at the scantiness of the attendance, which he contrasted on the one hand with the zeal which he himself had shown in despising the sufferings and the perils of the journey to Mantua, not­withstanding age, sickness, and the troubles which beset the Roman see, and on the other hand with the enthusiasm of the Turks in favour of their “most damned sect.” And he dwelt on the ambition of the infidels, who had already made their way through Greece and Illyria into Hungary, and, unless checked, might be expected to overwhelm all Europe, to the ruin of the Christian religion. Disregarding the remonstrances which were pressed on him, and the reports which were studiously circulated that the assembly was a hopeless failure, he endeavoured to increase its numbers by addressing letters to the princes of Europe, in which he again earnestly urged them to appear at Mantua, or to send representatives. In consequence of these letters the congress gradually increased, but not to any great degree.

The duke of Burgundy, although he had been per­suaded by his councillors to remain at home, sent a splendid embassy, with the duke of Cleves at its head, to express his willingness to fulfil his vow to the pheasant, if other princes could be induced to settle their mutual quarrels, and to unite in the cause of Christendom. The duke of Milan and some of the smaller Italian princes appeared in person; and at length, on the 16th of November, arrived a French legation, headed by the archbishop of Tours and the bishop of Paris.

On the 26th of September, the pope delivered a speech which lasted three hours; but, although it was much admired for its eloquence, it failed to raise any such enthusiasm as that which had vented itself in the Diexlo volt of Clermont. Of the cardinals who had accom­panied him, Bessarion alone showed any zeal for the crusade.

Much time was wasted by the ambassadors of princes in discussing their mutual differences. The French, when asked what help bright be expected from them, said that it was useless to speak of the subject while France was at war with England. To this the pope replied that the Hungarians would be destroyed by the common enemy before the French and the English were reconciled; and he suggested that both nations should contribute to the crusade in proportion to their numbers, so that the forces which remained at home might bear the same relations to each other as before. But this ingenious proposal failed to draw forth any promise of help. Of the Italian powers, some were persuaded to promise aid in money for three years; but the Venetians would promise nothing, and the Florentines afterwards disavowed the engagements which their envoys had made for them. The duke of Burgundy undertook to supply 6000 men. The Germans, after many difficulties had been raised by Gregory Heimburg, who represented the emperor’s brother, Albert of Austria, and is described by the pope as having laboured to sow dissensions, were brought to renew the promise which they had made to pope Nicolas—that they would furnish 10,000 cavalry and 32,000 foot. But in order to carry out this, the sanction of two diets was necessary; and those diets the pope took it on himself to summon, while, in order to compen­sate for this invasion of the imperial rights, he declared the emperor leader and captain-general of the crusade, —a position for which Frederick was notoriously, and even ridiculously, unfit.

On the 19th of January 1460, the pope dissolved the congress by a speech in which he reckoned the promises which he had received as amounting to 88,000 men, besides the assurance of co-operation from Scanderbeg and others in Greece, and the confident expectation of assistance from the enemies of the Turks on the east.

Before leaving Mantua, Pius sent forth a bull which from its first word is known by the title of Execrabilis, declaring an appeal from a pope to a general council to be punishable with excommunication, and, in the case of a university or of a college, with interdict. Although he tells us that he had consulted the fathers who were at Mantua, and bad obtained their unanimous consent, this was nothing less than an assumption that he was entitled to overrule by his own authority the contrary decrees of Constance and Basel.

In the end of January the pope set out homewards, and, after some stay at Bologna and at Florence, and having suffered more severely than before on the frozen mount­ains, he reached Siena, where he was received with great rejoicings. The congress of Mantua had undeceived him in a great degree as to the prospects of a crusade; for instead of uniting the princes of Europe for the holy cause, it had served chiefly to bring to light their luke­warmness and their discords.

Pius was recalled to Rome by tidings of some disorders which had grown out of the remains of the Porcaro conspiracy and were suppressed with the capital punishment of the leaders. He arrived on the 7th of October, when he was received with a joyful welcome; and he soon after vindicated himself, in a speech of two hours before the popular council, against the charge of preferring the interests of Siena to those of the papal city.

With a view of stirring up the Germans for the crusade, and of effecting a reconciliation between the emperor and the king of Hungary, Bessarion was sent into Germany. But he was met by complaints that the imposition of a tenth by the pope’s sole authority was contrary to a decree of the council of Constance; and the cardinal was so much irritated and disgusted by the turbulence of the Germans and by the backwardness of the clergy, that at leaving Vienna he gave his blessing with the left hand instead of the right.

At this time the German church was distracted by a contest for the primacy. Diether, count of Isenburg, had in 1459 been elected to the see of Mainz—not with­out bribery, according to his enemies, although this is strongly denied. Before confirming the election, Pius wished to bind him by engagements that he would not urge the assembling of a general council, and that he would not convoke the princes of the empire without the consent of the emperor, to whom such meetings were almost as unwelcome as general councils were to popes. Diether, with some difficulty, obtained a dispensation from appearing in person at Mantua; but his representatives at the congress submitted to a demand of 20,500 florins by way of first fruits on his appointment, and, as they were not provided with the money, they borrowed it of some Roman bankers. On these terms, and on their pledging him to appear at the papal court within a year, the pope’s confirmation was granted. But the archbishop, on hearing of the affair, protested against the exaction, as being more than double the amount required of his predecessors, and as a vio­lation of the late concordat, which Pius himself had negotiated; and, as he did not repay the loan, he was excommunicated at the instance of the creditors. This was, indeed, nothing more than a part of the regular process of some inferior court at Rome, to whose jurisdiction the matter of the debt belonged; and the pope disavowed all knowledge of the excommunication, while he justified the increase of the payment on the ground that it was destined for the crusade. But Diether maintained that the curia was in collusion with the money-lenders; and, in defiance of the late bull Execrabilis, he appealed to a general council. In Aug. 21, consequence of this appeal, a sentence of deposition was issued against him; and count Adolphus of Nassau, a canon of Mainz, was nominated by the pope to the see. The rivals fought, according to the usual German fashion, by their families, their dependants, and their allies, desolating the country which was the scene of their warfare, and utterly disregarding the common interest of the crusade. But at length Diether was brought to give up his pretensions to the archbishopric, on condition that he should enjoy for life certain towns, castles, and tolls, and that Adolphus should, at his own expense, procure his restoration to the church.

About the same time with the question of the German primacy, a violent quarrel as to jurisdiction, the collection of annates, and other subjects, arose between Sigismund of Austria, duke of the Tyrol, and cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, who ten years before had been appointed by pope Nicolas to the bishopric of Brixen, in preference to a candidate elected by the chapter. The duke ventured so far as to imprison the cardinal; whereupon the pope denounced him and his abettors by sentences of anathema and of other penalties, against which Sigismund appealed to a general council. A fierce controversy followed, in which the most conspicuous of Sigismund’s partisans was the indefatigable enemy of the Roman court, Gregory Heimburg. Gregory was excommunicated in October 1460, but continued to employ against the papacy all the resources of his learning, acuteness, and unsparing sarcasm. Sigismund was absolved in 1564, through the mediation of the emperor, who is said, in his anxiety for the honour of his family, to have even thrown himself at a legate’s feet. But Gregory Heimburg remained under excommunication, and during the following years he was found wherever there was an opposition to the papacy—with Diether at Mainz, with Albert of Austria when he besieged his brother Frederick in Vienna, with king George Podiebrad in Bohemia. At length, in 1471, feeling the approach of death, he submitted to the church, and entreated absolution; and thus the sturdy adversary of Rome died in outward peace with the papacy.

The frequent appeals to general councils forced on the pope’s notice the inconsistency which was observed between his earlier and his later policy; and, in order to vindicate himself, he put forth, in April 1463, his “Bull of Retractation”, addressed to the university of Cologne. In this he admits that he had said, written, and done many things which might be condemned; but he professes a wish, like St. Augustine, to retract the errors of his earlier years, rather than obstinately to adhere to them. He lays down strong principles as to the authority of the papacy, and desires that anything inconsistent with these in his writings may be rejected. “Believe an old man,” he says, “rather than a young one, and do not make a private person of more account than a pontiff. Reject Aeneas; receive Pius : the former gentile name our parents imposed on us at our birth; the latter Christian name we took with our apostolic office.”  In order to show that this change of opinions had not been caused by his elevation, he enters into an account of his earlier career. At Basel his inexperience had been misled by the misrepresentations of cardinals and other persons hostile to Eugenius, and by the authority of the Parisian and other academics, to fall in with the general disparage­ment of the papacy. Thus, when he came to take an independent part in the council, it was in accordance with the spirit which prevailed there; and supposing the defections of Julian Cesarini and others to the council of Ferrara to have been prompted by a fear of losing their preferments, he remained at Basel and took part with the antipope. The emperor’s refusal to acknowledge Felix staggered him; he passed into the service of Frederick, who, like the Germans generally, was neutral in the question of the papacy; and among the neutral party he learnt the falsehood of many of the charges against Euge­nius. Still more, he learnt, by frequent conversations with Cesarini, who was then on his Hungarian legation, to see many things in a new light. He goes on to relate the course of his submission to Eugenius, and points out that until then he had been merely a clerk, without having proceeded even to the minor orders. Having thus explained his own career, he proceeds to dwell on the unity of the church, under the pope as its head; and he professes reverence for councils approved by the pope, whose sanction he considers necessary to their validity. Skilful as this apology is, perhaps its effect is rather to bring out than to justify the contrast between the writer’s earlier and his later opinions.

With France the relations of Pius were not very cordial. He strongly desired the repeal of the pragmatic sanction of Bourges, which he spoke of to the French ambassadors at Mantua as a spot and a wrinkle deforming the national church, and a token of Antichrist’s approach. And his bull Execrabilis, in censuring appeals to a general coun­cil, implied a condemnation of the pragmatic sanction. But so little were the French convinced by this vehemence, that in the following year the king’s procurator-general, John Dauvet, put forth an answer to the pope’s speech, and appealed to the judgment of the universal church. The death of Charles VII., however, produced a change in this respect. Lewis XI., who had been on bad terms with his father, was inclined, out of hatred to the memory of Charles, to reverse his policy in this and in other matters. It is said that he looked on calmly when, at the late king’s funeral, the bishop of Terni, as papal legate, insulted the memory of Charles and the reputation of the Gallican church by pronouncing an absolution over him for his concern in the pragmatic sanction; and he was persuaded by John Godefroy, bishop of Arras, a crafty politician, who conveyed to him the pope’s blessing on his accession, that, by abolishing the sanction, he would do away with the influence which the great feudatories exercised in ecclesiastical promotion, and might reckon on getting the real patronage into his own hands. In the following year, the king sent Godefroy (for whom he and the duke of Burgundy had procured the dignity of cardinal) to announce at Rome the repeal of the pragmatic sanc­tion. The tidings were received with great rejoicing. All work was suspended for three days; the city was illuminated, bells were rung, the streets were animated by singing and dancing, the sound of trumpets, and the blazing of bonfires; and copies of the obnoxious document were ignominiously dragged through the mud. The pope rewarded Lewis with a gift of a consecrated sword, which bore an inscription in verse, exhorting him to destroy the power of the Turks. But the hopes which the bishop of Arras had deceitfully held out, that the pope would declare for the Angevine interest as to Naples, were utterly disappointed. Pius offered nothing more than to arbitrate between the claimants; and he at once began to exercise his new privileges in the patronage of French dignities. Lewis in his anger was disposed to recall his late concession; and he found it had produced an indignation which he had not expected in the parliaments and in the universities of France, among the nobles and among the citizens, who regarded it as a sacrifice of the national honour. In 1467, under the pontificate of Paul II, when the king’s confidant, cardinal Balue, produced before the parliament the royal letter by which the sanction was repealed, John de St. Romain, the king’s procurator-general, opposed the registration of it, which was necessary to give it the force of law; and, on being threatened by the cardinal with the royal displeasure, he replied that he would rather lose his office than do anything which might endanger his soul, his sovereign, and his country. The parliament cried out that within three years 3,000,000 of gold crowns had been drawn from France by the papal court. Lewis expelled the pope’s collectors, and seized the temporalities of those cardinals who held sees or abbacies in France. Without formally retracting his late act, he proceeded as if the pragmatic sanction were still in force; and this state of things continued throughout the reign.

Notwithstanding the discouragement which Pius had received as to the crusade, he was still bent on that enterprise. After the gradual extinction of the smaller Greek principalities, the work of resisting the Turks was chiefly left to the king of Hungary on the lower Danube, and to the indomitable Scanderbeg in Albania. But frequent communications were brought to Rome, as if from eastern princes, who offered to co-operate in vast force, if the Christians of Europe would attack the Turks on the west. And in 1461 a great sensation was produced at Rome by the arrival of Thomas Palaeologus, brother of the last Byzantine emperor, and formerly lord of the Morea, who had been driven from Greece, and brought with him from Patras, the traditional place of St. Andrew’s martyrdom, a head which was said to be that of the apostle. The pope had eagerly entered into treaty for this venerable relic, and succeeded in obtaining it against the competition of many princes. It was brought with much ceremony from Ancona, where Palaeologus had left it, was met at Narni by Bessarion and two other cardinals, and on its arrival at Rome was received with extraordinary reverence. Invitations had been sent to the cities of Italy, with a promise of the same indulgence as at a jubilee for those who should be present; and the crowd was as great as at the jubilee under Nicolas V. The head was carried to St. Peter’s in procession, attended by 30,000 torches, while the palaces and other houses along the way were hung with tapestry, and nu­merous altars adorned the streets. The hours occupied by the procession from the Flaminian gate were the only interval of fair weather in a whole month, and the solemnity of the holy week, which had just begun, combined with the other influences of the scene. The Vatican basilica was splendidly illuminated; the pope addressed the holy relic in an eloquent and affecting speech, while the vast multitude showed their sympathy by weeping, sobbing, and beating their breasts; and, after other ceremonies, to which the strains of music from instruments and voices added effect, the head of St. Andrew was deposited beside that of St. Peter.

Soon after the loss of Sinope and of Trebizond had been reported in the west, Pius ventured on the extraordinary measure of addressing a letter to Mahomet, for the purpose of urging him to embrace the Christian faith. He begins by warning the sultan not to trust in his fortune, but to seek for power and fame rather through being baptized; and in this part of the letter he partly appeals to motives of temporal interest. He then goes on to statements of Christian doctrine, with many reflections on the errors of Mahometanism and on the laxity of its morality. He argues against the assertion that the Scriptures had been cor­rupted, ridicules the legends of the Koran, and celebrates the great writers of the Christian church; and he concludes by again exhorting Mahomet to enter into the church by baptism. Although this letter displays much learning and ingenuity, it is difficult to conceive how a man so shrewd and so experienced as the writer could have expected it to produce conviction in the mind of the Turkish prince, even if (as was most unlikely) he were ever to listen to the reading of it.

A discovery of alum mines near La Tolfa, in 1462, added considerably to the papal revenue, and at the same time deprived the Turks of the money which the western nations had been accustomed to pay for the alum of Asia Minor; and Pius did not hesitate to give the name of miracle to an event which thus doubly tended to advance his hopes of a crusade.

Pius invited all princes to send representatives to a congress at Rome, and he addressed the cardinals in an eloquent and pathetic speech, proposing a crusade, with a truce for five years among Christians. He declared his intention of joining the expedition, not for the purpose of fighting, but that, while God’s people fought, he might, like Moses, from a hill or from the elevated deck of a ship, pray for them and pour curses on the enemy. Of the cardinals, to whom he spoke in a second address, all but those of Spoleto and Arras were in favour of a crusade. But when he issued a bull for the purpose, no Christian states, except Venice and Hungary, were found to respond. In Germany the cry was rather for a reform of the church than for a war against the infidels. In England, when the pope asked the clergy to give a tenth for the crusade, a sixtieth was proposed by some, and only a fortieth was voted. Lewis of France, irritated by his disappointment as to Naples and by the consequences of his concession as to the pragmatic sanction, not only held aloof, but urged duke Philip of Burgundy to leave unfulfilled his vow to the pheasant. A few of the Italian powers, however, agreed to pay the same amounts which had formerly been promised at Mantua.

On the 19th of June 1464, the pope, although suffering from gout and fever, set out for Ancona, where he expected to find the Venetian fleet. Turning round to look on his city from the Quintian meadows, he burst out into the words “Farewell, Rome! thou wilt never again see me alive!”.  On account of his weak condi­tion, he took advantage of the Tiber as far as possible, proceeding up the stream from the Ponte Molle, and after a slow land-journey by way of Loreto, he reached Ancona on the 18th of July. In the course of this journey he repeatedly fell in with parties of volunteers who had flocked into Italy for the crusade; but they were in general utterly unfit for the work—unarmed, undisciplined, without any leaders, many of them worn out and impotent, beggarly, ragged, and hungry. The pope, distressed and disgusted by the sight of such allies, gave them his blessing, and desired them to return to their homes; whereupon the better of them sold such things as they had, and obeyed his charge, while others, after having vainly waited for the beginning of the expedition, betook themselves to robbery for support.

At Ancona Pius found that the expected naval allies had not yet arrived; and in the meanwhile his illness was growing on him. On the 12th of August he had the gratification of seeing, from the bishop’s palace, where he was lodged, the entry of twenty-four Venetian galleys into the harbour, under the command of the doge, Christopher Moro; but he was too weak to receive the doge, as he had intended, on the following day. On the 14th he called to his bedside the cardinals who had accompanied him, and recommended to their care the prosecution of the war, the ecclesiastical state, and his own nephews. He asked for the last sacraments, and had a discussion with the bishop of Ferrara on the question whether he should receive extreme unction, as he had already re­ceived it when dangerously sick at Basel. He repeated the Athanasian creed, which he declared to be “most true and holy.” Bessarion endeavoured to comfort him by the assurance that he had governed well; and on the following day the pope expired. However we may judge of the versatile character and of the strangely varied career of this remarkable man, the circumstances of his last days entitle him to respect, as having sacrificed his life for Christendom, even if it may be supposed that other motives mingled with those of religion.

The crusade ended with the death of the pope who had projected it. Of the money which he had collected for the expedition, a part was given to the Venetians and a part to the king of Hungary; and these powers continued to carry on war against the Turks by sea and by land.

The cardinals returned to Rome for the purpose of electing a pope; and on the 31st of August, at the first scrutiny, it was found that their choice had fallen on Peter Barbo, a Venetian, whose family pretended to descent from the old Roman Ahenobarbi. The new pope, who was forty-six years of age, took the name of Paul II; he was a nephew of Eugenius IV, on whose elevation he had exchanged a mercantile life for the profession of an ecclesiastic. He had been created cardinal of St. Mark at the age of twenty-two by his uncle, and while holding that dignity had rebuilt the church from which he took his title, and had begun the vast Venetian palace, for which the materials were chiefly derived from the plunder of the Colosseum. After the death of Eugenius, he was able to secure the favour of Nicolas and Calixtus; and he obtained from Pius a pension charged on the Cluniac priory of Paisley, although this pope was in the habit of speaking of him as Maria pientissima on account of his affectedly soft and tender manner, which he carried so far as to make use of tears for any purpose which could not otherwise be gained. So vain was Barbo of his handsome person, that, if we may believe Platina, he wished as pope to take the name of Formosus, and was with difficulty dissuaded by the cardinals. His love of display and show led him to spend large sums on jewels, precious stones, and other ornaments; and in order to provide the means of this expenditure, he was accustomed to keep in his own hands the income of vacant bishopric’s and other offices, instead of filling them up. He was fond of exhibiting himself in splendid attire at great religious functions, and on some occasions endeavoured to heighten the effect of his appearance by painting his face. Among his other peculiarities, it is mentioned that he was accustomed to transact all business by night. It is from Paul’s institution, rather than from any unbroken traditions of paganism, that the festivities of the Roman carnival derive their character; and he used to look on from the Venetian palace at the races run by old men and young men, by Jews, horses, asses, and buffaloes, along the Via Lata, which from these sports acquired the new name of Corso.

In other respects there is a conflict of testimony as to his character; for while Platina (who had special reasons for disliking him) represents him as heartless, cruel, and difficult of approach, other writers dilate on his tender­ness, his universal benevolence, and his bountiful charity. Among the objects of this bounty were even the poorer cardinals and bishops, as Platina himself tells us; and he agrees with the eulogists of Paul in describing him as merciful to those who offended against the law.

Before proceeding to an election, the cardinals had been exhorted in a discourse by the bishop of Torcello, who represented the danger that all authority might pass from the college to the pope, so as to be exercised at his mere will, and advised them to choose such a pope as might remedy this evil. They had bound themselves by capitulations, slightly altered from those which had been framed at the last papal election. The future pope was to carry on the crusade which had been begun against the Turks; to call a general council within three years; to observe certain rules as to the nomination of cardinals; to appoint no more than one cardinal from among his own kindred, and to refrain from bestowing certain important offices on these; and there were special pro­visions for securing to the cardinals a real influence as counsellors of the pope in the administration of his office. His promises were to be read over to him in the con­sistory every month, and twice a year the cardinals were to inquire as to his performance of them, and, in case of his failure, were to admonish him with filial deference. Yet Paul, although he had not only agreed to these stipulations, but had again sworn to them after his election, threw off their obligation. He declared that such engagements were unlawful; and, chiefly by wheedling, partly by other means, he induced the cardinals to subscribe, instead of the capitulations, an altered form, which he then locked up, so that it was never seen again. Bessarion was forcibly compelled to sign; the aged Carvajal alone persisted in refusing.

Paul showed little of his predecessor’s zeal for the holy war, although the Turks were pressing onwards in their career of conquest, so that Italy itself seemed to be in danger. He gave, however, the produce of the alum mines for the crusade, as he had engaged to do by the capitulations. He spent large sums, with but little effect, in subsidising the king of Hungary, Scanderbeg, and other opponents of the Turks; and he endeavoured to seek for alliances and money in Germany, where his representatives found both princes and people generally indifferent to the cause.

In the end of 1468, the emperor suddenly revisited Rome, with a small train of attendants. The professed object of his journey was to fulfil a vow of pilgrimage which he had made on his deliverance, by George Podiebrad, from being besieged in his palace at Vienna, and to concert an expedition against the Turks; but it has been suspected that its real motive was different,— that he perhaps even intended to contrive the ruin of the neighbour to whom he had been so greatly indebted. He arrived on Christmas eve, was conducted by torch­light from the Flaminian gate to the Vatican, and, on the morning of the great festival, edified the congregation assembled in St. Peter’s by the skill with which he chanted the gospel of the decree which went out from Caesar Augustus. The emperor communicated with the pope; but, whereas it was usual for persons admitted to that honour to receive in both kinds, the chalice was on this occasion received by the pope alone, lest encouragement should be given to the Hussite belief of its necessity. The visit lasted seventeen days, during which Frederick visited the remains of antiquity, and Paul had the gratification of entertaining the emperor by a display of his precious jewels. But even as to etiquette there were some differences; and when Frederick proposed a con­gress like that of Mantua, the pope replied that such meetings produced discord rather than union. Whether for avowed or for secret reasons, the two were mutually dissatisfied, and Frederick returned to Germany in dis­pleasure.

Paul professed himself desirous of reforming the curia; but, notwithstanding these professions, offices as well as benefices continued to be offered for sale. In one instance, however, he made an attempt at reform, which, by provoking the enmity of the biographer Platina, has seriously affected his reputation with posterity. The college of abbreviators, which took its origin from the days of the Avignon papacy, had been reconstituted by Pius II, who fixed its number at seventy. These for the most part had bought their offices, with the assurance that they were permanent, and among them were many men of the literary class, including the biographer of the popes. When, therefore, Paul charged the abbreviators with simony and other corruption, and proceeded to dissolve the college, he raised against himself a host of peculiarly dangerous enemies; and the narrative of Platina, who had suffered especial hardship and persecu­tion, has left imputations on the pope’s character and conduct which, although we may not fully trust the writer, are not met by any evidence on the more favour­able side. In the course of this affair, the pope attempted to connect Platina with a party which he accused of paganism. The members of this party had formed themselves into an academy, of which Pomponius Leti, an illegitimate offspring of the counts of San Severino, was president. They are said to have disdained their baptismal names, and to have taken up instead of them fantastical substitutes, such as Callimachus and Asclepiades; but while at Florence the revival of classical learning was animated by a passion for the literature of Greece, the spirit of this party was so exclusively Roman that Leti refused even to become acquainted with the Greek language. To Paul such an association was naturally obnoxious, although we need not trace this dislike, with Platina, to his own want of literary culture alone, but may refer it with more probability to a dread of heathen and republican tendencies. He therefore proceeded against them with much rigour; some of them were severely tortured in his own presence, and were banished; one even died in consequence of the torture.

Among the events of this pontificate may be mentioned the introduction of the new art of printing into Rome by Ulric Hahn, a German, and by his more famous countrymen Schweynheim and Pannartz, who had before practised it in the monastery of Subiaco.

Paul was found dead in his bed on the 26th of July 1471. His death is attributed by Platina to indigestion; but, as he had not received the last sacraments, it was popularly believed that he had been killed by a devil, whom he was supposed to carry in his signet-ring. Although he had advanced three of his relations to the cardinalate, it is recorded to his credit that he did not give himself over to the influence of any favourite, but kept his family and servants in due subordination; and his pontificate, however little we may find in it to respect, came afterwards to be regarded as an era of purity and virtue in comparison with the deep degradation which followed.

We may now revert to the religious history of Bohemia.

In 1444, on the death of Ptaczek, George Boczek, of Podiebrad, was chosen by the Calixtines to act as regent during the minority of Ladislaus, in conjunction with Meinhard of Neuhaus. But the co-regents disagreed, as Meinhard became more decidedly favourable to the Roman usage in the administration of the Eucharist; and he died not long after the capital had been wrested from him by Podiebrad in September i448. In April 1451, Podiebrad was chosen sole regent, and he honestly attempted to deal fairly with all parties. On gaining possession of Prague he had brought back Rokyczana, who exercised almost all the rights of an archbishop, and bore hardly on the Roman party. Negotiations were carried on with Rome—the utraquists asking that Rokyczana might be consecrated, and that the compactata might be extended in their favour, while the Roman party required full restoration of ecclesiastical and monastic property, and wished the liberty of receiving the chalice to be withdrawn. The compactata laboured under the difficulty that the Bohemians had concluded them with the coun­cil of Basel alone, at a time when it was in hostility to pope Eugenius; and that, when terms were afterwards made between the council and Nicolas V, the compactata had not been included. Hence the curia now astonished the Bohemians by treating the agreement as if it did not exist; and cardinal Carvajal, on a mission in 1448, pro­voked them so much in this and in other respects, that his departure from Prague became the signal for a popu­lar outbreak, in which he was assailed with curses and with stones.

In 1451 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, then bishop of Siena and secretary to the emperor, was sent by Frederic to explain to the Bohemians his reasons for retaining the guardianship of their young king. He had interviews with Podiebrad, who set forth the national grievances; to which the envoy replied by complaining that the utraquists did not observe their part of the Basel agreement. And when the regent dwelt on the pope’s refusal to consecrate an archbishop, Piccolomini answered that the Bohemians did wrong in insisting that Rokyczana should be the man.

But the most remarkable part of this narrative is the account of his visits to Tabor. He found the people rude, although they wished to appear civilized. They were roughly hospitable; their clothing was scanty; their houses, built of wood or clay, were arranged like the tents out of which the town had grown, and within them was displayed a profusion of spoil brought home from marauding expeditions. As such resources were no longer available, the Taborites had betaken themselves to commerce; the principle of a community of goods, which had formerly been established, was now abandoned. On attempting to convert his host, Piccolomini found him a very questionable Taborite, who kept images for his secret worship.

In his return, the envoy again visited the place, but would neither eat nor drink there, and held a discussion with Nicolas Biscupek and others on the eucharistic usage and other points of difference. Their opinions he found to be far worse than he had expected; and he concludes his account by saying that among barbarians, anthropophagi, and the monstrous natives of India and Libya, there were none more monstrous than the Taborites. In the following year Rokyczana was able, by the aid of the regent Podiebrad, to reduce the Taborites to conformity. Nicolas and another leader were imprisoned in fortresses until they should acknowledge Rokyczana, and ended their days in confinement; and in the month of December 1452 mass was for the first time celebrated at Tabor with the vestments and rites of the Calixtines.

In 1451 John of Capistrano, the eloquent Franciscan who afterwards animated the defenders of Belgrade, was sent by Nicolas V into Bohemia and the neighbouring countries for the purpose of opposing Hussitism, with authority to absolve all who should submit to the church. His preaching is said to have been enforced by miracles, and its effects are described as prodigious. At Breslau, the people were at once subdued into repentance for their sins, and excited to enthusiastic fury against the Bohemian heretics; and they brought together playing-cards, dice, chess-boards, and other instruments of gaming or of vanity, for a great bonfire in the market-place. At Olmütz, he tells us that he had 100,000 hearers at once; and he made upwards of 3000 converts, partly by the confident assurance that all who had received the Eucharist in both kinds were lost. But his excess of zeal led him into extravagances, which were blamed even by his associate Nicolas of Cusa; and as the regent threw obstacles in the way of his entering Bohemia, the challenges which passed between the friar and Rokyczana did not result in the disputation which both professed to desire. Although the Greeks, at the time of the council of Basel, had greatly resented an incautious phrase which classed them with the Hussites, the increasing distress of the empire had reduced them to seek for aid in any quarter from which it might possibly be hoped for; and thus, in 1452, the highest personages of the Byzantine church made overtures to the Bohe­mians, in which they expressed themselves as willing to tolerate any rites which might be found edifying and at the same time not contrary to the laws of the church. But this negotiation was ended by the fall of Constanti­nople in the spring of the following year.

The emperor had at length been compelled to give up Ladislaus to his Bohemian subjects; and, as the king was only thirteen years old, Podiebrad became his tutor, and continued to act as regent. Ladislaus, under the instructions of Piccolomini, had been strongly prepossessed against the utraquists : “If the Bohemians wish to have me for their king”, he said, “they must be Christians, and confess the same faith with me”. But by the regent’s prudent management, he was brought to confirm all that had been promised by his predecessors Sigismund and Albert, including the maintenance of the compactata, and an engagement to take measures for the confirmation and consecration of Rokyczana as archbishop. Thus Podiebrad succeeded in preserving peace between Ladislaus and his subjects; but a renewed application to Rome in favour of Rokyczana was ineffectual.

Ladislaus died after a short illness in December 1457. There were several candidates for the vacant throne; but the election fell on the regent Podiebrad, as being the fittest to enjoy in his own name the power, which he had successfully administered in the name of the late sovereign. For this he was partly indebted to the support of Rokyczana, who eloquently advocated the expediency of choosing a native Bohe­mian; “rather than elect a foreigner for king,” he said, “Bohemia ought to become a republic, like Israel in the time of the judges.” The coronation was performed by two Hungarian bishops, as no Bohemian prelate could be found to officiate; and the new king bound himself by an oath, as to the interpretation of which there was afterwards much question, that he would be obedient to the Roman church, to pope Calixtus and his successors; that he would hold to the unity of the orthodox faith, and would protect it with all his might; that he would labour to recall his people from “all errors, sects, and heresies, and from other articles contrary to the holy Roman church and the catholic faith, and to bring them to obedience, conformity, and union, and to the rite and worship of the holy Roman church.”

To this time is referred the origin of a community which has lasted to our own day, and has been greatly distinguished in missionary and other religious labours—the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian brethren. The peculiar ideas out of which it grew are traced to Peter of Chelcick, a layman, who was born about 1390, and lived on his own estate near Wodnian. Peter produced many writings, which are said to show an earnestness rather for the moral part of religion than for doctrines; in some points—such as the condemnation of secular dignity in the clergy and of the alliance between temporal and ecclesiastical power, of oaths, war, and capital punishment—his principles resemble those of the Waldenses, with whom he and his followers formed a connexion. One Gregory, who, although of noble family, was a tailor by occupation, on applying to Rokyczana for the satisfaction of some perplexities, was referred by him to the writings of Peter, in which he found his own thoughts anticipated; and in consequence of this he sought the author’s acquaintance. After a time, Gregory, considering himself to have acquired a higher degree of spiritual insight, attempted to make a convert of Rokyczana, and to place him at the head of a new communion; but Rokyczana was not to be so gained, although he treated the party with kindness, and procured for them from king George permission to settle at a lonely place called Kunwald. The new society attracted members from all ranks; all called each other brethren; and, having convinced themselves that the church was hopelessly corrupt, they separated from it in 1457. Ten years later, they set up a ministry of their own, independent of any theory of succession, and resting its claims on the personal piety of the ministers, who at first were chosen by lot. Rokyczana, notwithstanding his kindly feeling towards the brethren, found himself obliged to carry on an inquisition into their doctrines and practices. The settlement at Kunwald was broken up, and, in fulfilment of the oath taken by the king at his coronation, they were persecuted with great severity, so that they were driven to perform their services in the woods; while, unlike the Taborites, they professed and acted on a principle of patient endurance and submissions But notwithstanding persecution, the party continued to increase.

The fairness with which the new king endeavoured to deal between the two great parties among his subjects has been acknowledged even by hostile writers, who also admit his great merit as a sovereign in other respects, and in the position to which he had been raised, his prudence, courage, and skill were severely tried. From the Silesians and the Moravians he met with much opposition, of which Breslau was the centre. The excitement lately produced in that city by John of Capistrano , has been already mentioned; and the people were con­tinually stirred to disaffection by the lower clergy and friars, who persuaded them that George was a Nero, a Decius, a murderer—that he was the great dragon of the Apocalypse, and that he prayed not to God, but to Rokyczana. The Roman party in Bohemia divided its allegiance between the king and the papacy; and the emperor Frederick, who had himself been a candidate for the crown of Bohemia, regarded his successful rival with jealousy and ill-will.

At Rome, George was acknowledged as king by Calixtus; and Pius, in his eagerness to enlist so important an ally for the crusade, invited him to the con­gress of Mantua, although, from hesitation as to address­ing him by the royal title, he sent the letter through the emperor. George took occasion from this letter to claim the allegiance of those who had held aloof from him as a Hussite; but he was unable to appear in person at Mantua, and fresh questions soon arose between him and the papacy. Pius, in disregard at once of the compactata and of Rokyczana’s claims, nominated the dean of Prague as archbishop; and when the king, in 1462, sent an embassy to Rome, for the purpose of asking that Rokyczana’s title might be acknowledged, and that the authority of the compactata might be clearly established, as John of Capistrano had disowned them, the pope himself declared that they had never been admitted by the papacy—which, he said, knew nothing of such compromises. Moreover, he added, the generation to which this indulgence had been granted by the council of Basel was now almost extinct; the Bohemians, by failing to observe their own side of the compactata, had forfeited all right to claim the benefit of them; and, in any case, the pope might do away with the arrangement, and might substitute something better.

Fantino della Valle, a doctor of laws, was sent with the ambassadors on their return, and was commissioned to persuade the Bohemians to give up the chalice and the compactata. But he behaved with such insolence to the king, by publicly taxing him with breach of his coronation-oath, and threatening him with deposition and anathema as a heretic, that George was with difficulty restrained from personal violence, and committed him for a time to prison; although he declared that Fantino was thus punished, not as papal legate, but for having acted unfaithfully as the king’s procurator at Rome. George indignantly disavowed the sense which the Roman party attempted to put on his oath. Was it possible, he asked, that he could have supposed his own religious opinions—founded, as they were, on the gospel and on the primitive faith—to be included among the heresies which he had bound himself to extirpate? If he had supposed the compactata to be heretical, was it possible that he should have asked the pope to confirm them? Rather would he sacrifice his crown than be false to his oath. And in proof of his sincerity as to the fulfilment of it, he was able to point to the severities which he had exercised against the more extreme sections of the utraquists,—the remnant of the Taborites and the new party of united brethren. The pope, instead of answering a letter from George, denounced him to the emperor as a heathen man and a publican, who had separated himself from the church; and it was in vain that the emperor attempted to intercede for him.

When about finally to leave Rome, Pius cited the Bohemian king to answer within a hundred and eighty days; and in the meantime George was labouring to form a league of princes against the Turks, which should be independent of the papacy.

The policy of Pius as to Bohemia had been dictated by his personal experience of that country and its parties; and it was continued by his successor Paul, chiefly under the influence of cardinal Carvajal, whose mission to Bohemia had produced in him an inflexible hostility to the Hussites, and who for many years had been labouring to July 22, undo the work of Constance and of Basel. The process against George was resumed and was committed by the pope to Carvajal, Bessarion, and another cardinal; and “George of Podiebrad, who styles himself king of Bohemia,” was again cited to answer at Rome within a hundred and eighty days, for heresy, relapse, perjury, sacrilege, and blasphemy. In the following year an alliance of Bohemian and other nobles was formed against George. They presented a list of twelve grievances; they demanded that the king should perform his coronation oath, and should expel Rokyczana with the utraquist clergy; and they asked the pope to give them another king, declaring a preference in favour of Casimir of Poland.

At a diet which was held at Nuremberg, at Martinmas 1466, for the purpose of raising Germany against the Turks, Fantino della Valle appeared as papal legate, and insisted that the Bohemian ambassadors should be excluded, on the ground that their king was a heretic. By this insult George was deeply provoked, and at Christmas, while the tidings of a sentence of deposition passed on him at Rome two days before were on their way to him, he sent a defiance to the emperor, from whom he had met with much underhand enmity, instead of the gratitude which he had justly earned by delivering Frederick when besieged by. his brother Albert.11 The letter of defiance was composed by Gregory Heimburg, with all the vigour of his style, and with a hearty expres­sion of the dislike and contempt with which he regarded the emperor.

The king had endeavoured, by ceasing to insist on the other points of the compactata, to gain the papal sanction for the administration of the chalice to the laity, and for the consecration of an archbishop, who might ordain clergy both for the utraquists and for the adherents of the Roman system; but such proposals met with no attention. The pope, without observing the usual forms of process, condemned George by repeated bulls, as guilty of heresy, perjury, sacrilege, and other offences; pronounced him to be deposed, and released his subjects from their engagements to him. On Maundy Thursday following, George was denounced as foremost of those who had incurred the anathema of the church; and when the sentence was afterwards repeated, it was extended to his wife and children, to Rokyczana, and to Gregory Heimburg, who gladly brought the power of his learning and of his sarcastic pen to combat the papal assumptions in this new quarrel.

A crusade was proclaimed against George, with the usual privileges for those who should take part in it. Casimir of Poland was disinclined to accept the over­tures of the discontented Bohemians; but Matthias of Hungary, a prince bold, able, ambitious, and unscrupulous, on being invited by the pope and by a party election to wrest the kingdom from his father-in-law, responded with an eagerness which hardly needed the papal exhortation to disre­gard the ties of gratitude and of blood. Paul had allowed Matthias to enter into a truce with the Turks, that he might be at liberty to turn his arms against the Bohemians; and a war of devastation began. George, on the other hand, had appealed to a general council and to a future pope; and he endeavoured to give his cause a national rather than a sectarian character, so that he still retained in office many persons whom he knew to be zealous for the Roman side in matters of religion. The Germans in general were little inclined to move. Some of the princes and prelates had consulted universities on the question whether it were right for Christians to make war on heretics, and especially to attack the utraquists of Bohemia; and the answer had been in the negative. But when the formal condemnation came from Rome, many students of Leipzig and Erfurt, excited at once by the ill-repute of Bohemia as a nest of heresy, and by a youthful love of adventure, sold their books, and even their clothes, to fit themselves out for the new crusade.

Although opposed to Matthias, to the catholic league of nobles, and to hosts of crusaders from foreign countries, George was for the most part successful in the war; and he was able to drive Matthias out of Bohemia. But at length the weight of years and weariness of conflict induced him to seek a compromise with Rome. Before the effect of this application could be known, the king died on the 22nd of March, 1471, having survived exactly a month after the death of Rokyczana.

 

 

CHAPTER IV.

SIXTUS IV. AND INNOCENT VIII. A.D. 1471-1492.