BOOK VIII. 

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE BONIFACE VIII TO THE END  OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE,  A.D. 1303-1418.

 

CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE ELECTION OF POPE ALEXANDER V TO THE END OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE. A.D. 1409-1418.

 

THE hopes of union and of reformation which had been connected With the council of Pisa were not to be realized. Both Gregory XII and Benedict XIII continued to maintain their claims to the papacy, so that instead ef two popes there were now three, or, in the language of a writer of the time, the church had received a third husband in addition to those who already claimed her affections. Soon after the election of Alexander V, Gerson addressed to him a discourse on the duties of his office; but Alexander was not inclined to benefit by this advice. Although a learned theologian, he was altogether without the strength of character which is requisite for government. His easiness of disposition led him to grant all that was asked of him. Himself careless as to matters of business, he advanced many Franciscans to places for which they were unfitted by their want of pratical habits; in order to provide for the multitude of applicants, he increased the offices of his court to such a degree that they fell into contempt; and although, having no kindred, he was free from the temptations of nepotism, he was lavish in gifts, especially to the order of which he had been a member, and in whose society he continued to live. Such was his profusion in his new dignity, that he spoke of himself as having been rich as a bishop, poor as a cardinal, but a beggar as pope. Instead of attempting at once the work of reform, he professed to reserve it for a council which was to meet in 1412; and on the 7th of August 1409 he dissolved the council of Pisa. Soon after this Alexander displayed his partiality for his associates, and added to the subjects of discord which already existed in the church, by a bull, in which he authorized the members of the mendicant orders to receive tithes, and not only to hear confessions and to give absolution everywhere, but to administer the other sacraments, without regard to the rights of bishops or of parish priests; and the parochial clergy were charged to read in all churches this annihilation of their own rights, under pain of being punished as contumacious and obstinate heretics. Immediately a great ferment was excited. While the Augustine friars and the Franciscans took advantage of it, and the latter especially displayed much elation on account of their new privileges, the Dominicans and the Carmelites disowned it, as something which they had not asked for and of which they had no need. The university of Paris, headed by Gerson, sent envoys to the papal court for the purpose of inspecting the original document, as if nothing less than such evidence could be enough to warrant its genuineness; and, as it professed to be issued with the consent and advice of the cardinals, the envoys waited on the members of the college individually, whom they found unanimous in disavowing all concern in it. By this bull were rescinded no less than seven bulls of former popes. The papal privilege was met in France by the expulsion of the Franciscans and Augustinians from the university of Paris, and by a royal order, issued at the request of the university, forbidding the parochial clergy to let the mendicants hear confessions or preach in their churches.

Gregory XII, after his attempt to hold a council at Cividale, had withdrawn to Gaeta, where he lived under the protection of Ladislaus, to whom it is said that he sold his rights to the sovereignty of Rome and the papal states. Ladislaus got possession of the city; but after a time it was regained for Alexander by the legate of  Bologna, Balthazar Cossa, who was aided by Lewis of Anjou, by the Florentines, and by an insurrection within Rome itself. Alexander was driven from Pisa by a pestilence; but instead of complying with the invitation of the Romans, who sent him the keys of their city, he was constrained by Cossa, whose ascendency over him was absolute, to make his way across the Apennines through snow and ice to Bologna, where he arrived on the Epiphany, and died on the 3rd of May 1410. His end was generally explained by the ready supposition of poison, and this was supposed by many to have been administered through the contrivance of the legate.

On the 16th of May—the third day after the conclave had been formed—Cossa was chosen as pope by seven­teen cardinals, and took the name of John the Twenty-third. The accounts of his earlier life are such that we can hardly conceive how, if they may be believed, he should have been able to gain influence as an ecclesiastic, and eventually to attain the papal chair by the votes of his brother cardinals; yet all contemporary writers agree in the substance of the story, and the very blackest parts of it were brought against him without contradiction at the council of Constance. Born of a noble Neapolitan family, Cossa had early entered into the ranks of the clergy; but his clerical profession had not prevented him from engaging in the piratical warfare between Naples and Hungary; and in this stage of his life he acquired a habit, which afterwards adhered to him, of waking by night and sleeping by day. After having resided for some time at Bologna, where he affected the character of a student, he was made archdeacon of that city by Boniface IX, who afterwards transferred him to Rome and appointed him papal chamberlain. In this office Cossa exercised his genius in devising new forms of corruption for the benefit of the ecclesiastical revenues. To him is ascribed the system of sending out preachers to vend indulgences with the most impudent pretensions, while he himself was notorious for enriching himself by simony and bribes. In 1403 he was sent back to Bo­logna as cardinal-legate—partly, it is said, with a view of removing him from the neighbourhood of his brother’s wife, with whom he carried on a scandalous intercourse.

At Bologna he established a despotic and tyrannical power. The people were ground by taxation, monopolies, and plunder: licenses were sold for the exercise of infamous occupations—of usury, keeping of gaming­-houses, prostitution. His cruelty towards those who offended him was so widely exercised, that it is said to have visibly thinned the population of the city; his lust was so inordinate, that within the first year of his legation two hundred maidens, wives, or widows, and a multitude of consecrated nuns, are said to have fallen victims to it. He is charged with having bribed the cardinals to desert Gregory, whose arms he defaced on the public buildings of Bologna before setting out for the council of Pisa; and in that council he took a prominent part, although, on being proposed for the papacy, he found it expedient to put forward Alexander, as one whom he might make his tool, and who was not likely to stand long in his way. At Bologna, the conclave was subject to the legate’s control, and various stories are told as to the manner in which he carried his own election, by the use of bribery and of terror;  but as, in the course of the later proceed­ings against him, no charge was brought on this point, these stories may perhaps be safely rejected.

John began his pontificate by promulgating rules for his chancery which sanctioned the worst of the existing corruptions, and by uttering curses, according to usage, against his rivals Gregory and Benedict. The growing power of Ladislaus gave just ground for alarm; and John had a personal cause of dislike against him for having condemned two of the pope’s own brothers to death as pirates—from the execution of which sentence they had with difficulty been rescued by the intercession of Boniface IX. John declared the king to be excom­municate and deposed, and proclaimed a crusade against him with those offers of indulgences which, as we have seen, excited a commotion in Bohemia; and, in conjunction with Lewis of Anjou, he carried the war against Ladislaus into southern Italy. At Rocca Secca, near Ceperano, the pope and his allies gained a victory; but Lewis was unable to follow up this advantage, and found himself obliged to return to Provence, from which he made no further attempt on Italy.

After a time John found it expedient to enter into negotiations with Ladislaus, who agreed to abandon Gregory XII, but exacted heavy conditions—that the pope should disallow the claim of Lewis of Anjou to Naples, and that of Peter of Aragon to Sicily; that he should acknowledge Ladislaus as king of both territories, should declare him standard-bearer of the Roman church and empire, and should pay him a large sum of money. Gregory, finding himself obliged to leave the king’s territories, made his way from Gaeta by sea—not without danger from hostile ships—to Rimini, where he found a refuge with Charles Malatesta, the only potentate who still adhered to him;  and through this friend he carried on for a time negotiations with pope John—each of the rivals endeavouring to persuade the other to resign by liberal offers of compensation.

As if in fulfilment of the engagements into which his predecessor Alexander had entered, John affected to summon a council to meet at Rome in 1412, with a view to the reform of the church. But the number of bishops who attended was very scanty, and the only result seems to have been a condemnation of Wyclif’s writings, which were burnt on the steps ot St. Peter’s. The council broke up without any formal dissolution, in consequence of the troubles in which the pope was involved.

At Rome John had been received with acclamations and festive displays; but he soon made himself detested by the heaviness of the taxation which he imposed. The richer citizens were drained of their money; officials of all kinds were compelled to pay largely for their places; a rate was levied on trades and mechanical occupations; the coin was debased; the duties on wine were increased to such a degree that the growers found themselves driven from the Roman market. On this account, and because Ladislaus did not support the pope in an attempt to extort a second payment of fees from prelates and others who had held office under Gregory, a fresh rupture took place. The king got possession of Rome by surprise, while John fled to Viterbo and thence to Florence and Bologna. The palaces of the pope and cardinals were plundered; many of the churches were turned into stables. The castle of St. Angelo, after having held out for some time, was treacherously surrendered; and Ladislaus overran the whole country as far as Siena.

In the distress to which he was now reduced, John found himself obliged to turn, as his only resource, to Sigismund, the emperor-elect. At the death of Rupert, in May 1410, it had seemed as if the empire, like the church, were to be distracted between three claimants; for, while some of the electors wished to bring forward the deposed Wenceslaus again, one party chose his brother, king Sigismund of Hungary, while another party chose Jobst or Jodocus, marquis of Moravia. But Jodocus, who is said to have been ninety years old, was speedily removed by death, and Sigismund received the votes of those who had before stood aloof from him—among others that of Wenceslaus himself, with whom he was formally reconciled. For a time Sigismund’s energies were chiefly occupied by a war with the Venetians for the possession of Dalmatia; but a truce of five years, concluded in 1413, set him free to attend to the affairs of the empire and of the church. Sigismund was the most powerful emperor since the days of Frederick II, and at this time his influence was the stronger because France and England were about to renew their great struggle, and France, in addition to its dangers from the foreign enemy, was a prey to the bloody feuds of the Burgundian and Orleanist factions. The emperor’s noble presence, his accomplishments and knightly deportment, his love of splendour and magnificence (although this was continually restrained by pecuniary difficulties arising out of the imprudence of his youth), procured him general popularity. The faults of his earlier days—among which faithlessness, harshness, and excessive love of pleasure are noted—appeared to have been abandoned as the great dignity which he had attained brought with it a deep feeling of duty and responsibility. Most especially he was desirous to heal the schism of the church. As king of Hungary, he had acknowledged John, and at his election to the empire the archbishop of Mainz had exacted from him an oath that he would not accept the crown from any other pope than John or a successor of the same line. With re­gard to Ladislaus, Sigismund’s interest was one with that of John; for Ladislaus, in addition to the ambitious projects which he had formed as to Italy, directly claimed Sigismund’s kingdom of Hungary, and even had views on the imperial dignity.

With a view to the reunion of the church, Sigismund urged on John the necessity of a general council. If such an assembly were to meet, the question as to the place of its meeting was important for John’s interest. He himself told his secretary, Leonard of Arezzo, that it must not be in any place where the emperor was too powerful; that, while professing to give full powers to the commissioners whom he was about to send to Sigismund, he intended secretly to limit their choice to certain Italian cities: but at taking leave of the commissioners, acting on a sudden impulse, he professed entire confidence in them, and destroyed the list of places. On finding that they had agreed to fix on Constance, a town beyond the Alps and within the imperial dominions, he burst out into bitter reproaches against them, and cursed his own folly in having departed from his first resolution. At Lodi he had a meeting with the emperor, and urged on him that the council should be held in some city of Lombardy; but Sigismund, who had already issued his summons, was not to be diverted from his purpose. The plea that the patriarchs and cardinals would be unwilling to cross the Alps was met by the answer that the ecclesiastical electors of the empire would be equally unwilling to do so in the opposite direction.

Sigismund, in respectful terms, exhorted the pope to amend the courses by which he had scandalized Chris­tendom, especially as to simony; and John promised compliance. The emperor accompanied him as far as Cremona on his return towards Bologna. The French reformers, finding that the influence of their own nation had been insufficient to heal the schism, had now turned their hopes towards the emperor, and Gerson had urged the assembling of a council on him as a duty of his office which could not be neglected without mortal sin. In accordance with this view, Sigismund, as temporal head of Christendom, had sent forth his citation for a general council, while John, as pope, was persuaded to do the like. The time fixed in both documents, as if by independent authority, was the first of November in the following year. The emperor invited both Gregory XII and Benedict to attend, with their adherents, but refrained from giving to either of them the title of pope.

John was already committed to the council, when he was informed that Ladislaus, against whom he was endeavouring to enlist troops, had suddenly died at Naples. By this event his position was rendered easier, and less dependent on the alliance of Sigismund, so that he entertained the idea of taking up his abode at Rome instead of fulfilling his promise to appear at Constance. Some of his friends endeavoured to alarm him by telling him that, if he should go to Constance as pope, he would return as a private man. But the cardinals, fearing lest he should plunge into hazardous schemes for recovering the whole of the church’s territory, insisted on the fulfilment of his promise, and he unwillingly set forth from Bologna. In passing through the Tyrol, he had an interview with duke Frederick of Austria, whom he knew to be hostile to Sigismund; and it was agreed that in case of necessity the pope might reckon on the duke’s protection. As John was descending the Arlberg he was upset in the snow, and vented loud curses on his own folly in having set out on such an expedition; and when he arrived in sight of Constance, its appearance drew from him the exclamation, “So are foxes caught”.

Almost from the beginning of the schism the cries for a reform of the church had been loud and frequent. Nicolas of Clemanges, then rector of the university of Paris, had led the way in 1394 by a forcible appeal to the king of France; and about 1401 appeared a tract ‘Of the Corrupt State of the Church,’ which has been usually, although perhaps wrongly, ascribed to him. In this the condition of things is painted in very dark, and perhaps somewhat exaggerated, colours. The writer enlarges on the decay of the church from the simplicity of its primitive days. The three great vices of the clergy he declares to be luxury, pride, and greed; vices which prevail among every class from the pope downwards. He censures the popes for their usurpation of patronage, for the unworthy bestowal of it on ignorant and useless men, whereby the whole order of clergy had fallen into contempt, and for the exactions by which they oppressed the clergy. He is severe on the corruptions of the Roman court; on the pride of cardinals, their monstrous pluralities, their simony and venality, their unedifying manner of life. Bishops neglect their dioceses and hang about the courts of princes, under the false pretence of being needed as their counsellors; they are intent on getting money by discreditable means, and spend their time in frivolous and indecent amusements. Canons imitate in their degree the faults of the bishops. Monks are so much worse than others as by their pro­fession they ought to be better; and mendicants vitiate the good deeds which they claim by their unseemly boasting of them, so that they are the Pharisees of the church, and our Lord’s condemnations of the Jewish Pharisees are applicable to them. In conclusion the writer warns of dangers which are at hand, and declares that the only safety for the church is in humiliation and amendment. Peter d'Ailly, now cardinal and arch­bishop of Cambray, agreed with other writers in desiring reform, but saw greater practical hindrances in the way; and in 1410 he put forth a tract, ‘Of the Difficulty of Reformation in a General Council’, urging the vacancy of the empire, the disorganized condition of the church, and the danger that the cardinals might not agree in an election, or might increase the existing perplexities. To this a reply was made in a treatise ‘On the Ways of Uniting and Reforming the Church in a General Council,’ which has been commonly (but perhaps incorrectly) attributed to Gerson. The writer is strongly opposed to the assumptions and to the corruptions of the papacy. He considers that the necessity of the case is so strong as to overpower all ordinary difficulties. The pope, he says, is not above the gospel; he received his office for the general good, and for the general good he ought to resign it, if necessary. The popes should be urged to cession; and if this cannot be obtained, it would be legitimate to pursue the great object even by the use of fraud, violence, bribery, imprisonment, and death. In such a question all Christians, even to the lowest in station, are interested; all, and more especially those in high authority, are entitled to interfere. The emperor, as general advocate of the church, ought to call a general council, and a new pope ought to be chosen, who must neither be one of the existing claimants, nor a member of the college of cardinals; for cardinals ought, in the writer’s opinion, to be always regarded as ineligible on account of the danger of collusion, which might lead to the choice of unsuitable men. And the work concludes with suggesting some reforms which the future council ought to take in hand.

The influence of the school to which these writers belonged had been apprehended by John, and he had endeavoured to gain them by bestowing large privileges and other benefits on the university of Paris, and by raising Peter d’Ailly, as one of its most eminent members, to the dignity of cardinal.

The eyes of all Christendom were now turned with intense interest to the expected council. It was not merely to decide between the claims of rival popes, but was to settle the question whether a pope or a general council were the highest authority in the church. As the time of meeting drew near, multitudes of every class poured into Constance, and the arrivals continued for some months after the opening of the council. Of the ecclesiastical members, some appeared in plain and simple style, and others in pomp which displayed the union of secular wealth with ecclesiastical dignity. Among the latter class John of Nassau, the primate of Germany, distinguished himself by entering the city in complete armour, attended by a splendid train of 352 men, with 700 horses. The whole number of ecclesiastics present, with their attendants, is reckoned at 18,000. During the sittings of the council there were usually 50,000 strangers within the walls of Constance; sometimes twice that number, with 30,000 horses. Among those who were attracted to the great ecclesiastical assembly by the hope of gain were persons of all sorts—merchants and traders, lawyers in great numbers and in all their varieties, artists and craftsmen, players, jugglers, and musicians to the number of 1700, and no less than 700 avowed prostitutes.

John had obtained from the magistrates of Constance certain privileges as to jurisdiction. He ordered the arms of his rival Gregory to be torn down from the lodgings of Gregory’s representative, the cardinal of Ragusa; and when this act was afterwards called in question, the majority of the council justified it on the ground that such a display ought not to have been made within the territories where John was acknowledged, nor unless Gregory himself were present.

On the 5th of November the council was opened with a solemn service; and on the 16th the first general session was held. Among the members of the council (of whom, however, many did not arrive until later) were the titular patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem, twenty-two cardinals, twenty archbishops, nearly a hundred bishops and thirty-three titular bishops, a hundred and twenty-four abbots, and two hundred and fifty doctors, with many secular princes or representatives of princes.

Of the Italian prelates, the most active in the council was Zabarella, cardinal-archbishop of Florence; of those from the northern kingdoms, the leaders were Peter d’Ailly and the bishop of Salisbury, Robert Hallam, who had already borne a conspicuous part in the council of Pisa.

The treasures which John had at his disposal enabled him to exercise much influence. He contrived, by underhand movements, to divide the interests of the various nations, and to distract them from an agreement in action; and it is said that he made himself master of secrets through informants who resorted to him by night, and whom he was accustomed to absolve formally from the guilt of perjury which they incurred by their revelations.

Very early in the proceedings of the council there were indications of a spirit which it was impossible for John to misinterpret. Thus, when it was proposed by some Italians, on the 7th of December, that the council of Pisa should be confirmed—a step by which the new assembly would have bound itself to the pope of the line there established—it was resolved, in opposition to this proposal, that the council should be regarded as a continuation of that of Pisa, and therefore could not confirm its acts; and it was evident that the intention was not to decide between the rival claimants of the papacy, but to persuade all three to a cession of their claims, and to elect a new pope to the vacant office.

On the morning of Christmas-day, before dawn, Sigismund, who had lately received the German crown at Aix-la-Chapelle, arrived at Constance, having crossed the lake in a boat: and forthwith he proceeded to assist at a solemn mass which was celebrated by the pope. Habited in a dalmatic, and with the crown on his head, he read (according to the privilege of his office) the gospel of the decree which went out from Caesar Augustus; and the words were heard as betokening an asser­tion of the imperial superiority over the papacy. John put into his hand a sword for the defence of the church: and the emperor swore that he would always labour for that end to the utmost of his power. But, although this engagement was sincerely made, Sigismund was firmly resolved to pursue his own policy, instead of lending himself to the pope’s schemes; and it was in vain that John, knowing the necessities by which he was encumbered in the attempt to maintain the state of im­perial dignity, endeavoured to propitiate him by presents or loans of money.

Three days later, cardinal d’Ailly preached before the emperor, from the text, “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars”. The sun he interprets as representing the papacy, the moon as the imperial power, the stars as the various estates of the church. There can, he holds, neither be real reform without union, nor real union without reform. The pope, if he deviate from the likeness of the sun by entering ill, by living ill, by ruling ill, is but a false image of the sun. There cannot be three suns, but only one true sun. The emperor attends the council, not that he may be over it, but that he may benefit it; not to define spiritual and ecclesiastical matters by royal authority, but to maintain by his power those things which the synod shall determine. The members of the council—the stars—are assembled by the call of the supreme pontiff, who alone has the right to convoke general councils. The stars are to have their share of influence, as well as the sun and the moon. The power of decreeing and defining belongs, not to the pope alone, but to the whole general council; and to assert the contrary is a flattery of the pope which deserves to be severely reprobated.

In order to avoid disputes as to precedence, it was arranged that the members of the council should sit promiscuously, and that this should not be regarded as infringing on the privileges of any one. But questions arose as to the right and as to the manner of voting. In earlier councils the power of voting had been restricted to bishops and abbots; but d’Ailly argued that it ought now to be extended to other classes; that the precedents of ancient councils showed much variety; that as the present questions did not relate to the church’s faith or to the sacraments, the examples of former times were not binding; that the titular bishops, of whom many were present at the council, were not entitled to be held of the same account with the bishops of the earlier church; that the learning possessed by doctors of theology and of civil and canon law—a class which had arisen out of the uni­versities, and had, therefore, been unknown in the days of the older councils—was of such value as to render them fitter to be members of a council than an ignorant bishop or abbot; and that the representatives of princes, of absent prelates, and of capitular churches, ought also to be admitted. Fillastre, cardinal of St. Mark, in arguing on the same side, maintained that many parish priests were, both by the weight of their character and by the importance of their charges, more to be regarded than some bishops; and he declared “that an ignorant king or prelate is but a crowned or mitred ass”. The arguments for extending the right of voting prevailed, to the disadvantage of John, who had relied on the numbers of his titular bishops. But his interest was yet more seriously affected by a novelty which was introduced as to the manner of voting. Hitherto the decisions of councils had been determined by a majority of the whole body. But as John had at his command a host of insignificant prelates—titulars, officials of his court, and needy occu­pants of petty Italian sees—it was proposed, in order to counteract this undue influence, that each nation should debate by itself, and that the final decision should be given by the representatives of the several nations, which were thus to be on an equality. This proposal, derived from the arrangements of the university of Paris, was carried by the emperor’s influence; and the four nations—Italian, French, German, and English—proceeded to their separate deliberations. Their meetings were held in the refectories and chapter-houses of the various convents in the town, while the general sessions of the council took place in the cathedral.

Cardinal Fillastre, who, as dean of Reims, had formerly been a zealous champion of the papacy, sent forth a paper, in which, after a consideration of other expedients, it was proposed that each of the rival popes should cede his claims, and should receive valuable preferment in the church by way of consolation. On becoming acquainted with this scheme, John is said to have been violently angry; but stronger measures were at hand.

A paper of charges against John was produced before the council—it is supposed, by an Italian. These charges were in part so dark and monstrous that it was said that they ought to be kept secret, out of reverence for the papal office, and in order to avoid the general scandal of Christendom. John, who through his secret informants became aware of the movement, was inclined to admit some of the accusations, to deny others, and to take his stand on a supposed principle that a pope could not be deposed except for heresy; but he was persuaded by his confidential advisers to await the progress of events. In the meantime the German, French, and English nations, without knowing that he had any sus­picion of the charges, resolved that he should be advised to resign his dignity; and John, alarmed by intelligence which he had secretly gained, agreed to the proposal, with the condition that his rivals should also resign. Immediately after having entered into this engagement, he began to attempt an escape from it; he rejected two forms of cession which were proposed by the council, and the council rejected a form of his proposing; but at length he was induced, at the second general session, to swear before the high altar of the cathedral, after having himself celebrated mass, that he would freely resign the papacy if the other claimants would also resign, or if in any other way his resignation might extinguish the schism and re­store peace to the church. This promise was received with unbounded joy; the emperor kissed John’s feet, and thanked him in the name of the council, and the patriarch of Antioch added the thanks of the whole church. Te Deum was sung, and the bells of the cathedral announced the happy event to the world. When, however, John was asked to put his engagement into the form of a bull, he refused with vehement anger; but on being requested by Sigismund in person, he saw that further resistance would be useless, and on the 7th of March he issued a bull of the desired tenor.

It was Sigismund’s wish that the council should settle the religious difficulties which had arisen in Bohemia, as well as the great schism. He therefore requested his brother Wenceslaus to send Hus to Constance, and promised him a safe-conduct. Hus, who had always professed to desire the opportunity of appealing to a general council, willingly accepted the summons. He presented himself before a synod held by the archbishop of Prague in August 1414, and publicly challenged any one to im­pugn his faith, on condition of suffering, in case of defeat, the same penalties which would have fallen on Hus if convicted. The challenge was not accepted, and Palecz describes the Hussite party as so exasperated that it was unsafe to call them by their leader’s name. The arch­bishop, on being questioned by the nobles who befriended Hus, declared that he had no charge of heresy to bring against him, but that as he had been accused by the pope, he must make his excuses to the pope; and they wrote to Sigismund, requesting that Hus might be allowed to defend himself freely, lest Bohemia should be unjustly discredited. Hus obtained certificates of his orthodoxy from the king, from the archbishop, and from the papal inquisitor for Bohemia—Nicolas, bishop of Nazareth, to whom he had submitted himself for examination. Yet in truth his position was one which it is now hardly possible to understand; for while he believed himself to be a faith­ful adherent of the system established in the church, his opinions were, in some respects, such as later experience has shown to be altogether subversive of it.

On the eve of setting out for the council he showed some signs of misgiving. He was warned by friends not to trust the promised safe-conduct; and some letters which he wrote by way of farewell indicate a foreboding that he might never be allowed to return. On the nth of October, without waiting for the arrival of the safe-conduct, Hus began his journey under the escort of three noblemen appointed by the Bohemian king, John and Henry of Chlum, and Wenceslaus of Dubna. As he passed through the towns of Germany, he offered to give an account of his faith, and engaged in frequent discussions. Notwithstanding the old national quarrel as to the university of Prague (which was afterwards revived as a charge against him), he was well received everywhere, especially at Nuremberg; nor was there any attempt to enforce the interdict which had been pronounced against any place in which he might be.

On the 3rd of November Hus arrived at Constance, and two days later (on the very day of the opening of the council) he received the promised safe-conduct, which Sigismund had granted at Spires on the 14th of October. In answer to an application by John of Chlum, John XXIII declared that Hus should be safe at Constance if he had slain the pope’s own brother; and he suspended the interdict and ban, although he desired that Hus should refrain from attendance at mass, lest some excite­ment should arise. But Hus never ceded his right to perform the priestly functions, and he continued to celebrate mass as before. In the meantime two of his bitterest enemies arrived at Constance,—Stephen of Palecz, whose breach with him has been already mentioned, and one Michael of Deutschbrod, who, after having been a parish priest at Prague, had become a projector of mining speculations, but had since been appointed by the pope to the office of proctor in causes of faith, and thence was commonly styled De Causis. These and other adversaries posted upon the doors of churches bills denouncing Hus as an excommunicated and obstinate heretic; they supplied the pope, the cardinals, and other members of the council with extracts maliciously selected from his writings; they circulated tales and rumours against him, representing his errors as of the darkest kind, and yet as so popular in Bohemia that, if he were allowed to return, the lives of the clergy would not be safe there.

Proposals were made by which Hus might probably have been allowed to escape easily; but he had always insisted on a public hearing, and he looked for the expected arrival of the emperor. By the industrious exertions of his enemies, and by a false report that he had attempted a flight from Constance, the authorities were persuaded to place him under restraint. On the 28th of November he was decoyed into the pope’s residence, and was thence removed for custody to the house of the precentor of the cathedral; and on the 6th of December he was transferred to a dungeon in the Dominican convent, where the stench and other inconveniences soon produced a serious illness, so that his medical advisers prescribed a removal. Meanwhile his friend John of Chlum protested loudly against his imprisonment as an insult to the emperor, who had granted a safe-conduct. He reproached the pope to his face, and, by an appeal to Sigismund, procured an order that Hus should be set at liberty;  and as this was disregarded, he affixed to the church doors on Christmas-eve, when the emperor was approaching the city, a protest in Latin and in German against the treachery which had been practised towards Hus, and the neglect of the emperor’s warrant for his liberation.

While confined in his noisome prison, without access to books, and almost at a loss for the means of writing, Hus composed some tracts on religious subjects, at the request of his keepers and for their instruction, and was required to draw up answers to a set of charges brought against him by Palecz and Michael de Causis, the pope having on the first of December appointed certain commissioners for the investigation of his case. These charges were partly grounded on extracts unfairly made from his treatise ‘Of the Church’ and other books, partly on the evidence of unguarded letters which had been intercepted. On being questioned as to the articles, he explained the sense in which he believed them; but on being asked whether he would defend them, he answered “No,” and added that he stood at the determination of the council. He declared his wish to adhere to the church, to the tradition of the fathers, and to the canons, except where these were opposite to Scripture; and he professed himself willing to retract any errors, and to be instructed by any ma—of course, with the secret condition that the instruction should agree with his previous convictions. As being accused of heresy, he was not allowed the assistance of an advocate; where­upon he told the commissioners that he committed his cause to Him who would shortly judge them all, as his advocate and proctor.

With regard to the treasury of the merits of the saints, their intercession, and the power and dignity of the blessed Virgin, he expressed himself in accordance with the current theology of the time. As to the eucharistic presence, he held that it was enough for a simple Christian to believe the verity of the Saviour’s body and blood; but for himself he acknowledged the change denoted by the name of transubstantiation, and made use of the term itself. This change he held to be wrought by Christ himself through the medium of the priest; and therefore that a wicked priest might consecrate effectually, although to his own condemnation. One of the charges against him related to the administration of the cup to the laity. The necessity of this had been maintained by one James (or Jacobellus) of Misa, a parish priest of Prague, after Hus had set out for Constance; and Hus, on having his attention drawn to the question, declared the practice to be scriptural, primitive, and desirable, but would not affirm the necessity of it.

Unfortunately for Hus, the liberal or reforming party in the council was not disposed to favour him. The Parisian school, while bent on limiting the power of the papacy, insisted on strictness of orthodoxy, and regarded Hus as likely, by opinions which to them seemed extravagant and revolutionary, to bring danger and discredit on their own projects of reforms; moreover, as nominalists, they were opposed to the realism of his philosophical tenets. Gerson had written to the arch­bishop of Prague, urging him to use severe measures against the errors which had arisen in Bohemia, and, if ecclesiastical censures should be insufficient, to have recourse to the secular arm. He had obtained from the Theological faculty of Paris a condemnation of twenty propositions extracted from Hus’s writings; and in for­warding this condemnation to the Bohemian primate, he had spoken of the doctrine that one who is in mortal sin has no dominion over Christian people as one against which “all dominion, both temporal and spiritual, ought to rise, in order to exterminate it rather by fire and sword than by curious reasoning”.  From Gerson and his party, therefore, no sympathy was to be expected by the Bohemian reformer.

Sigismund, on receiving from John of Chlum the first notice of Hus’s imprisonment, was indignant at the violation of his safe-conduct, and threatened to break open the prison. After reaching Constance he was still so much dissatisfied on this account, that he even withdrew for a time from the city; but it was represented to him that, if he persisted in such a course, the council must break up, and he shrank from the thought of not only endangering his own reputation for orthodoxy, but rendering all his labours void and perpetuating the division of Christendom. He was plied with arguments and with learning from the canon law, urging that his power did not extend to the protection of a heretic from the punishment due to his errors; that the letter which he had granted ought not to be used to the injury of the catholic faith; that he was not responsible, inasmuch as the council had granted no safe-conduct, and the council was greater than the emperor. It would seem, too, that his feelings with regard to Hus were altered by the reports which reached him, so that he came to regard the Bohemian reformer as a teacher of mischievous errors, both in politics and in religion. The king of Aragon wrote to him that “faith is not broken in the case of one who breaks his faith to God”; and unhappily the emperor consented to violate truth, honour, and humanity by declaring that the council was at liberty to take its own course as to inquiries into charges of heresy. At a later time he attempted to palliate this concession by alleging the importunities with which he had been assailed, and the difficulties of his position.

The consent which pope John had given to the violation of the imperial safe-conduct in the case of Hus was to recoil on himself; and it was in vain that, when the council proceeded against him, he appealed to the promises which had been made to him. In the hope of propitiating the emperor (of whom it is said that he habitually spoke in very contemptuous terms), he be­stowed on him the golden rose, which was the special mark of papal favour; but Sigismund was not to be diverted from his purpose by this gift, which, instead of keeping it, he dedicated to the blessed Virgin in the cathedral of Constance. Strict orders were issued that no one should be permitted to leave the town; and John, after some urgency, was brought to promise that he would not depart until after the council should have ended its sessions. Some differences of opinion now began to show themselves between the nations. The Germans and the English were bent on sacrificing John for the unity of the church; Hallam, bishop of Salisbury, told him to his face, in the emperor’s presence, that a general council was superior to the pope, and the speech met with no rebuke from Sigismund, to whom John complained of it. But the Italians had always been with John, and the French now began to show a milder disposition towards him—chiefly, it would seem, from a spirit of opposition to the English members, whose king was at this very time preparing to carry his arms into the heart of France

In the hope of effecting some diversion, John proposed that the council should remove to Nice, or some place in its neighbourhood, or that he himself should repair to the same region for a conference with his rival Benedict; but these schemes met with no favour, and he found himself driven to another course. On the evening of the 20th of March, while the general attention was engrossed by a tournament given by duke Frederick of Austria (whom, as we have seen, John had before engaged in his interest), the pope escaped from Constance in the disguise of a groom, and fled to Schaffhausen, which was within the duke’s territory. Thence he wrote to the council that he had no intention of evading his engagements, but had left Constance in order that he might execute them with greater liberty and in a more healthful air; and he declared that duke Frederick had not been privy to his flight.

On the 23rd of March, when the council was about to send envoys to the fugitive pope, Gerson delivered a discourse in which the principles of the reforming party were strongly pronounced. The Head of the church, he said, is Christ; the pope is its secondary head. The union between Christ and the church is inseparable, but the union of the church and the pope may be dissolved. As the church, or a general council which represents it, is directed by the Holy Ghost, even a pope is bound to hear and to obey such a council under pain of being accounted as a heathen and a publican. A pope cannot annul its decrees, and, although it may not take away the pope’s power, it may limit that power. A general council may be assembled without the consent or mandate of a lawfully elected and living pope—among other cases, if he should himself be accused, and should refuse to call a council; and also if there be a doubt between rival claimants of the papacy. And the pope is bound to accept the decisions of a council with a view to the termination of a schism.

About the same time the university of Paris sent two papers of conclusions, which, although not fully adopted by the council, were of great use to it. In these papers it was laid down that the pope could not dissolve the council, and that any attempt to do so would bring him under suspicion of schism, if not of heresy; that the church is more necessary, better, of greater dignity, more honourable, more powerful, more steady in the faith, and wiser than the pope, and is superior to him; that the pope holds his power through the church and as its representative; and that the council may judge and depose him, even as it may be necessary to take a sword out of the hand of a madman.

The language of Gerson’s sermon became known to John on the same day by means of the envoys to whom it had been addressed. In the hope of breaking up the council, he immediately summoned his cardinals, with the members of his household and the officials of his court, to join him; and seven cardinals, with many of the inferior persons, obeyed the summons. Yet it would seem that the pope was made a coward by his conscience; for, instead of hurling anathemas at his opponents in the lofty style of Hildebrand, he could only have recourse to complaints and evasions. He wrote to the king of France, to the duke of Orleans, to the university of Paris, and others, querulously setting forth his grievances against the emperor and the council.

There was indeed reason to fear that the council would be unable to continue its sessions; some were even afraid that it might end in a general tumult and plunder; but Sigismund, by firmly exerting his authority and influence, succeeded in keeping the great body of the assembly together, and in holding them to the pursuit of the object for which they had met. At the third general session, on the 26th of March, it was affirmed that, notwithstanding the withdrawal of the pope, or of any others, the sacred council was not dissolved, but remained in its integrity and authority; that it ought not to be dissolved until it should have effected the extirpation of the schism and a reform of the church in faith and morals, in head and members; that it was not to be transferred to any other place; and that none of the members should leave Constance without its permission until its proceedings should be duly concluded.

In a general congregation, on the 29th of March, Gerson proposed a strong censure against John on account of his flight; but the cardinals succeeded in averting it. At the fourth session, on the following day, it was resolved that the council’s power, derived immediately from Christ, was superior to all dignities,—even to that of the pope, who was bound to obey it in matters relating to the faith and to the extirpation of the schism. When this document came to be read aloud by cardinal Zabarella, he was persuaded by his brother-cardinals to leave out such parts as were most strongly antipapal; but, as the nations complained loudly of this, the omitted passages were at the next session read out by the archbishop of Posen. At the same session it was resolved that Sigismund should be requested to bring back John, who, in alarm at the intelligence which he daily received as to the proceedings of the council, had removed on Good Friday from Schaffhausen to the castle of Lauffenburg. There, in the presence of witnesses, he executed a written protest, declaring that his concessions had been made through fear of violence, and therefore were not binding; and he wrote to the council, alleging the same motive for his flight. From Lauffenburg he withdrew further to Frei­burg, in the Breisgau, where a deputation from the council, headed by two cardinals, waited on him, with a request that he would appoint proctors to carry out the promised act of resignation. The pope received them in bed, and answered roughly, but promised to send proctors after them. From Freiburg he sent to the council a statement of the terms on which he was willing to resign—that he should be legate throughout all Italy for life, and should have a like authority in the region of Avignon, with an income of 30,000 florins, and a share with the other cardinals in the emoluments of the capella. But the council regarded the proposal as a proof that John intended to trifle with them by requiring extravagant and impossible conditions. Frederick of Austria was cited to answer for his complicity in the pope’s flight, and, as he did not appear, was put under the ban of the empire as a traitor to it, the council, and the church. His neighbours, both ecclesiastical and secular, were summoned to chastise him, and, in conjunction with the imperial forces, they overran his territories, so that he was compelled to sue at the emperor’s feet for forgiveness, to promise that he would give up the pope, and to receive submissively by a new investiture a portion of his former dominions, to be held at the imperial pleasure.

From Freiburg John, still wishing to be at a greater distance from the council, proceeded to Breisach and to Neuenburg, but Frederick, in fulfilment of his engagement to bring him back, desired that he would return to Constance; while the papal officials, finding no prospect of advantage in adhering to John, deserted him and rejoined the council.

In the meantime argument ran high in that assembly. The patriarch of Antioch, although hostile to John personally, asserted the papal pretensions in their extremest form—quoting from Gratian a dictum that if the pope, by his misconduct and negligence, should lead crowds of men into hell, no one but God would be entitled to find fault with him. But to this d’Ailly replied in a tract, which was afterwards embodied in his larger treatise ‘Of Ecclesiastical Power’, maintaining the authority of the general council over the pope, and taxing the patriarch with having been one of the flatterers who, “by feeding John with the milk of error, had led him to his ruin”. Wearied and irritated by John’s evasions and artifices, the council, at its seventh session, cited him to appear in person within nine days, in order to answer charges of heresy, schism, simony, maladminis­tration, notorious waste of the property of the Roman and other churches, and diminution of their rights; of incorrigibly scandalous life; and of having attempted, by his clandestine flight, to hinder the union and reformation of the church. John proposed that, instead of appearing, he should appoint three cardinals as his proxies; but those whom he named declined the task, and the council resolved that in a criminal case proxies could not be admitted. Witnesses were examined in support of the charges. On the 13th of May, there seemed to be a chance of a diversion in John’s favour, as Sigismund received letters informing him that the Turks were ravaging Hungary, in alliance with the Venetians; but his answer was that, even if he should lose the whole kingdom, he would not forsake the church and the council. On the 14th the pope was cited, and, as he did not answer, was pronounced contumacious; on the following day sentence of suspension was publicly pronounced against him; and the council resolved to proceed to deposition, if it should be necessary. A fresh examination of witnesses—thirty-seven in number—was then undertaken, and some of John’s wrongful bulls and grants were put in evidenced. The heads of accusation were seventy-two, but there was much of iteration among them. Some of them were not read aloud, out of regard for decency and for the reverence due to the papacy. Carrying back the inquiry to his earliest years, the indictment charged him with having been rebellious to his parents, and given to all vices from his youth. He was said to have got his preferments by simony; to have been guilty of gross maladministration as legate; to have contrived the death of Alexander V. As pope, he was charged with having neglected the duties of religion; with rape, adultery, sodomy, incest; with corruption of every sort in the bestowal of his patronage. He was styled a poisoner, a murderer; he had denied the resurrection of the dead and eternal life; he had intended to sell the head of St. John the Baptist, from the church of St. Sylvester, to some Florentines for 50,000 ducats. It was alleged that his misconduct was notorious and scandalous to all Christendom; that he had obstinately neglected the admonitions which had been addressed to him from many quarters; that he had dealt deceitfully with the council, and had absconded from it by night in the disguise of a layman. The evidence was considered to be so strong that his deposition was resolved on, as being guilty of simony, mal­administration of his office, dilapidation of the church’s property, and scandalous life. His seal was broken; all Christians were released from allegiance to him; and he was condemned to be kept in custody until the election of a new pope, to whom the further disposal of him was to be left. It was decreed that no election should take place without the consent of the council, and that no one of the existing claimants should be eligible.

John had been brought back by duke Frederick to Radolfszell, near Constance, whence, on the 26th of May, he addressed a letter to the emperor, reminding him of favours which the pope professed to have done to him in helping him to the crown, in seconding his wishes as to the council, and in other ways, and imploring him to observe his promise of a safe-conduct. But Sigismund, instead of being softened by this letter, appears to have been rather irritated by the contrast between its tone and that which he knew to be employed by John in speaking and writing of him to others. On the second day after the sentence of the council had been passed, it was announced to John by a deputation of five cardinals. He listened to it with submission and calmness, begging only that regard might be had to his dignity in so far as might be consistent with the welfare of the church. He voluntarily swore that he would never attempt to recover the papacy, and, strip­ping off the insignia of his office, he declared that he had never known a comfortable day since he had put them on.

The ex-pope was made over to the care of the elector palatine; for it was considered that the iniquities which had been proved against him, and his attempt to escape, had annulled the imperial safe-conduct. For some years he was detained as a prisoner, chiefly at Heidelberg; and this continued even after the council, at its first session under Martin V, had decreed that he should be transferred transferred by the emperor and the elector to the pope. At length, however, by the payment of a large sum to the elector, he obtained leave to go into Italy, where at Florence he made his submission to the new pope, and from him received the dignity of cardinal-bishop of Frascati. But within a few months he died at Florence, without having taken possession of his see.

The council had, after John’s flight from Constance, again directed its attention to the case of Hus, who, having been discharged from the custody of the pope’s servants, was made over to the bishop of Constance, and by him was kept in chains at the neighbouring castle of Gottheben. The Parisian reforming party, as has been already said, was resolved to assert its own orthodoxy by disavowing all sympathy with one whose ideas it regarded as crude, unsound, and revolutionary; and when a new commission was ap­pointed for the examination of his case—the flight of pope John having vitiated the authority of the earlier commissioners—d’Ailly, as a member of it, took a strong part against him. Reports of James of Misa’s practice as to administration of the Eucharist in both kinds were received from Prague, and were circulated in exaggerated forms. It was said that Hus’s principles as to endowments had been carried out by the spoliation of many Bohemian churches. The bishop of Leitomysl, one of Hus’s bitterest and most persevering enemies, represented that in Bohemia the sacramental wine was carried about in unconsecrated bottles, and that the laity handed it to each other; that laymen of good character were considered to be better authorized to administer the sacraments than vicious priests; that cobblers presumed to hear confessions and to give absolution.

The Bohemian and Moravian nobles protested strongly and repeatedly both against the treatment of Hus and against the imputations which were thrown on the faith of their nation. They urged that Hus might be allowed a free hearing, while he himself made requests to the same purpose, and declared that he was willing to be burnt rather than to be secluded; and as the proposal of a hearing was supported by Sigismund, the reformer was transferred from Gottlieben to the Franciscan convent at Constance, and on the 5th of June was brought before the council. Worn by long imprisonment, by the severities by which it had been aggravated, and by serious illness of various kinds, he was called on to answer the questioning of all who might oppose him, while, as being suspected of heresy, he was denied the assistance of an advocate. An attempt had been made, before his admission, to get him condemned on account of certain passages which his enemies had extracted from his writings; but this had been defeated by the exertions of John of Chlum and Wenceslaus of Dubna, who requested the emperor to intervene.

On the first day of Hus’s appearance, the uproar was so great that he could not find a hearing; on the second day, Sigismund himself attended, to preserve order—a task which was by no means easy. Of the charges brought against him, Hus altogether denied some, while he explained others, and showed that his words had been wrongly construed. In the doctrine of the eucharistic presence, he agreed with the current teaching of the church, and differed from that of Wyclif, with whom it was sought to connect him. D’Ailly, a zealous nominalist, endeavoured to entrap him by a scholastic subtlety as to the ceasing of the universal substance of bread after the consecration; to which Hus replied that, although the substance ceases to be in the individual piece of bread, it remains as subject in other individual pieces. An English doctor suggested that the accused was equivocating like Berengar and Wyclif; but Hus declared that he spoke plainly and sincerely. Another Englishman protested against the introduction of irrelevant philosophical matters, inasmuch as Hus had cleared his orthodoxy with regard to the sacrament of the altar.

Much was said as to the connexion of Hus’s doctrines with those of Wyclif, which the council had lately con­demned under forty-five heads; indeed an English Carmelite, named Stokes, with whom Hus had formerly been engaged in controversy, sarcastically told him that he need not pride himself on his opinions as if they were his own, since he was merely a follower of Wyclif. Hus explained that he had found himself unable to join in the late condemnation on all points; thus, he would not say that Wyclif erred in censuring the donation of Con­stantine, or in regarding tithes as alms and not as an obligatory payment. On being pressed as to having expressed a wish that his own soul might be with that of Wyclif, he explained that he had said so in consequence of the reports which had reached him as to Wyclif’s good life, and before his writings were known in Bohemia; nor had he intended to imply a certainty of Wyclif’s salvation. As to the opinion that a priest in mortal sin could not consecrate, he stated that he had limited it by saying that one in such a state would consecrate and baptize unworthily. But when he was charged with holding that a king, a pope, or a bishop, if in mortal sin, was no king, pope, or bishop, his answers were such as to provoke from Sigismund an exclamation that there had never been a more mischievous heretic, as no man is without sin. Much was said on predestination and the subjects connected with it; as to which Hus seems to have drawn his opinions from Wyclif.

The question of the papal supremacy brought out the uncritical nature of Hus’s views. He traced the pope’s pre-eminence to the supposed donation of Constantine; and, although D’Ailly told him that he would do better to refer it to the sixth canon of Nicaea (as that canon was then commonly understood), he still adhered to his belief in the donation. In answer to a charge of having urged his followers to resist their opponents by force of arms, Hus denied that he had recommended the material sword; and it would seem that some words of his as to the spiritual armour of the Christian had been misinterpreted.

The affair as to the expulsion of the Germans from Prague was brought forward, and was urged by Palecz and by another Bohemian doctor; but as to this it appears that Hus was able to satisfy his judges. He was also questioned, among other things, as to having said that, unless he had voluntarily come to Constance, he could not have been compelled to do so by all the authority of the council and of the emperor. In explanation of these words he said that he might have been safely concealed among the many castles of the nobles who were friendly to him; and this was eagerly confirmed by John of Chlum, while cardinal d’Ailly angrily cried out against Hus’s audacity.D’Ailly told him that he had done wrong in preaching to the people against cardinals and other dignitaries, when there were no such persons to hear him; to which Hus could only reply that his words had been meant for the priests and learned men who were present.

At the end of a trial which lasted three days, Palecz and Michael de Causis solemnly protested that they had acted solely from a sense of duty, and without any malice towards the accused; and d’Ailly then again repeated an opinion which he had often expressed in the course of the proceedings—that Hus had been treated with much consideration, and that his opinions were less offensively represented in the charges than they appeared in his own writings. Exhausted by illness and fatigue, Hus was led back to prison, receiving as he passed a pressure of the hand and some words of comfort from John of Chlum. The emperor, who had in vain urged the prisoner to retract, then declared that any one of the errors which had been brought home to him would have been enough for his condemnation; that, if he should persist in them, he ought to be burnt; that his followers ought to be coerced, and especially that his disciple who was then in custody—Jerome of Prague— should be speedily dealt with.

After his third appearance before the council, Hus was in prison for nearly a month. During this time attempts were made by many per­sons—among them by cardinal Zabarella—to persuade him to abjure the errors which were imputed to him. It was urged on him that by so doing he would not admit that he had ever held the errors in question; that in England excellent men who were wrongly suspected of Wyclifism had made no scruple as to abjuring it. But Hus regarded the matter in a more solemn light, and thought that to abjure errors which were falsely laid to his charge would be nothing less than perjury. He regarded his fate as sealed, although he still professed himself willing to renounce his opinions if any others could be proved to be truer; and he wrote pathetic letters of farewell to some of his Bohemian friends. On the 30th of June he was visited by Palecz, to whom, as having been his chief opponent, he expressed a wish to confess; but another confessor, a monk and doctor, was sent, who behaved with great tenderness to him, and gave him absolution without requiring any recantation of his opinions. At a later interview, Palecz wept profusely, and Hus entreated his forgiveness for any words of reproach which he might have used against him.

On the 6th of July, at the fifteenth session of the council, Hus was again brought forward—having been detained outside the church until the mass was over, lest his presence should profane the holy action. The bishop of Lodi, James Arigoni, a Dominican, preached on the text, “Our old man is crucified with Him that the body of sin might be destroyed” (Rom. VI. 6), applying the words to the duty of extirpating heresy and simony. The acts of the process against Hus were then read, ending with an exhortation to Sigismund to perform the sacred work of destroying the obstinate heretic by whose malignant influence the plague of error has been so widely spread. To the charges was now added a new article—that he had supposed himself to be a fourth person in the Godhead; but this he disavowed with horror as an idea that had never entered his mind. He declared that he had come to Constance freely, in order to give an account of his faith, and under the protection of the imperial safe-conduct; and as he said these words, he turned his eyes on Sigismund, who blushed deeply. He frequently interrupted the reading of the charges against him, in order to protest his innocence; but the cardinals d’Ailly and Zabarella reduced him to silence. He appealed to the Saviour, and it was stigmatized as an attempt to overleap all the order of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. But Hus continued to protest and to appeal, and he added a prayer for the forgiveness of his enemies, which called forth derision from some members of the council.

The ceremony of degradation from the priesthood followed. Hus was arrayed in the vestments of the altar, and the various articles symbolical of the priestly authority and of the inferior orders of the ministry were severally taken from him by bishops, while at every stage he made some remark by way of protest. As to the tonsure, a question arose whether it should be obliterated by shaving, or by clipping the surrounding hair. “Lo”, said Hus, addressing the emperor, “these bishops cannot agree even as to the way of mocking me!” When the degradation was completed, a tall paper cap, painted with hideous figures of devils, was placed on his head, and a bishop said to him, “We commit thy body to the secular arm, and thy soul to the devil.” “And I”, said Hus, “commit it to my most merciful Lord, Jesus Christ”. As he was led away to death, he passed a spot where a heap of his books, which had been condemned by the council, was burning amidst the merriment of the crowd. At this sight he smiled, and repeated a remark which he had before made as to the condemnation of his Bohemian writings by persons who could not read them. In answer to a question, he professed a wish to confess; but, as the confessor insisted that he should begin by acknowledging and renouncing his errors, Hus said that confession was not necessary, as he was not in mortal sin.

On reaching the place of execution, he entreated that the bystanders would not believe him guilty of the errors which were imputed to him. After he had been bound to the stake, he was once more asked by duke Lewis of Bavaria whether he would recant; but he remained firm and suffered with unshaken constancy, uttering to the last cries for mercy, professions of faith in the Saviour, and prayers for the forgiveness of his enemies. His ashes and the scorched remnants of his clothes were thrown into the Rhine, lest they should be venerated as relics by his adherents.

The death of Hus has usually been regarded as a deep stain on the reputation of the council which decreed it, and of the emperor who, notwithstanding the assurance of protection which he had given to the reformer, consented to his doom. But attempts at exculpation have often been made in the interest of the Roman church; and even very lately it has been argued, by a writer whose moderation and candour are usually no less to be admired than his ability and learning, that there was no breach of faith in prosecuting Hus to the death, notwithstanding the safe-conduct which he had received. The name of safe-conduct, indeed, appears to have been used in two senses—sometimes signifying the escort which accompanied Hus from Bohemia, and sometimes the passport which, although promised, did not reach him until after his arrival at Constance; and this double meaning will explain some difficulties which have been raised as to the emperor’s proceedings. It is pointed out that the passport did not profess more than to secure for Hus an unmolested journey to and from Constance; that Sigismund did not undertake, and could not have undertaken, to assure him against the consequences of an accusation of heresy; that the violation of the safe-conduct amounted to nothing more than the arrest of Hus before trial or conviction; that the Bohemians do not charge the emperor with breach of a written engagement, but only with having taken part against Hus, whereas they had reckoned on him as a friend. Yet even according to this view, the arrest of Hus, which is admitted to have been a breach of the safe-conduct, instead of being followed by his liberation, in compliance with the protests of his friends and with Sigismund’s own declarations, led to his being immured in one loathsome dungeon after another, to his being loaded with chains, ill fed, and barbarously treated; and, when reduced to sickness and debility by such usage, and deprived of all literary means of defence, he was required to answer to the capital charge of heresy. Even on this supposition, therefore, the wrong by which the safe-conduct was violated was one which, in its con­sequences, subjected the accused to cruel sufferings, and destroyed the fairness of his trial.

But in truth it seems clear that the safe-conduct was supposed to imply much more than is here allowed. The excitement which arose on Hus’s arrest is not to be accounted for by the mere informality of that act, nor is it easy to reduce the complaints of his Bohemian partisans within the limits which the apologists of the council mark out. Hus himself plainly declares his understanding of the matter to have been, that, if he should decline to abide by the sentence of the council, the emperor would remit him in safety to Bohemia, there to be judged by the king and the ecclesiastical authorities; he complains that the safe-conduct had been violated, and mentions warnings which he had received against trusting to it—warnings which were suggested, not by any idea that the instrument itself might be defective, but by the apprehension that it might be treacherously set aside.

That this must be explained away by speaking of Hus as inconsistent, is, like the denial of Sigismund’s having blushed on being reminded of the safe-conduct, a neces­sity of the cause which is to be defended. And how, unless there was some deception in the case, should the king of Aragon and the council have asserted principles which would justify the blackest perfidy towards one who was accused of heterodoxy? Why should it have been necessary to urge that a safe-conduct could not protect a heretic, unless Sigismund, as well as Hus, had supposed that the document in question would avail? Why should the council have attempted to get over it by the false and unsuccessful assertion that Hus had not received it until a fortnight after his arrest? Why, if the safe-conduct was not supposed to assure the safety of Hus at Constance, as well as on the way, were such efforts made to extort the recall of it from the emperor?

But, although the means by which his condemnation was brought about were iniquitous, and although there was much to blame in the circumstances of his trial, we can hardly wonder at the condemnation itself, according to the principles of his age. Hus set out from Bohemia with a confident expectation of being able to maintain his soundness in the faith; yet it is not easy to suppose such a result possible, if the nature of the tribunal be considered. The attestations of orthodoxy which he carried with him were probably in part influenced by the desire of the authors to clear their country from the imputations which had been cast on it, and were therefore not likely to tell strongly in his favour. In every point, except that of the eucharistic doctrine, Hus was but an echo of Wyclif, whose opinions had long been proscribed—whose English followers had been condemned to the stake by the church and the state alike. He did not, seemingly, understand how greatly his principles were opposed, not only to the system of the Roman court, but to the very being of the hierarchy. Much of his language sounded very dangerous : and if the sense, when explained by him, was more harmless than it seemed, it might reasonably be asked what likelihood there was that this sense would be understood by the simple hearers to whom the words had been addressed. It would seem that his demeanour had in it something which suggested the suspicion of obstinacy or evasion; and his continual professions of willingness to renounce his opinions, if he could be convinced that they were wrong, must have appeared to his judges as merely nugatory; for no one surely would avow that he deliberately prefers error to truth.

 

JEROME OF PRAGUE

 

At the time when Hus set out from Prague, his old associate Jerome was absent on one of those expeditions in which his religious zeal and his love of adventure alike found a frequent exercise. On learning, at his return, the fact of his friend’s imprisonment, Jerome resolved to join him at Constance, where he arrived on the 4th of April 1415. Finding that Hus had as yet been unable to obtain a hearing, he withdrew to a little town in the neighbourhood, and publicly announced by a placard his readiness to defend his faith, if the council would grant him a safe-conduct for going and returning; and he added that, if he should be convicted of heresy, he was willing to bear the punishment. But as his petition was refused, he complied with the solicitations of his friends, and set out towards Bohemia, carrying with him letters testimonial from his countrymen who were at Constance. The council, however, at its sixth session, cited him to answer for himself; he was arrested, and was carried back in chains to Constance, where at length the council granted him a safe-conduct, but with the significant reservation, “as much as is in us, and as the orthodox faith shall require, yet saving justice”. On the 23rd of May, Jerome, immediately after his arrival, and laden as he was with heavy chains, was examined before a general congregation of the council. Men who had been acquainted with his old adventures at Vienna and Heidelberg, at Paris and Cologne, gave evidence against him; among them was Gerson, who told him that at Paris his conceit of his eloquence had led him to disturb the university by many scandalous propositions as to universals and ideas. At the end of the day he was committed to the care of the archbishop of Riga, and was imprisoned in a tower, where he was chained more cruelly than before, and for two days was kept on a diet of bread and water. At the end of that time, however, Peter Mladenovicz discovered the place of his confinement, and was allowed to supply him with better nourishment.

After having been subjected to several examinations, Jerome, worn out by the hardships of his imprisonment, was brought on the 11th of September to condemn the errors imputed to Wyclif and Hus—with the reservation that, although mistaken and offensive, they were not heretical—that he did not commit himself to the truth of the imputations, and that he intended no disrespect to the characters of the teachers, or to the truths which they had delivered. This qualified submission, however, was not enough for the council; and at the nine­teenth general session, on the 23rd of September, a fresh declaration was extorted from him, in which he more explicitly abjured the tenets of Wyclif and Hus, and even included in the abjuration an opinion as to the reality of universals. At this same session it was decreed, with an exact reference to the circumstances of Hus’s case, that no safe-conduct granted by any secular prince, by whatsoever sanction it might have been confirmed, should prejudice the catholic faith or the church’s jurisdiction, so as so hinder the competent spiritual tribunal from inquiring into and duly punishing the errors of heretics or persons charged with heresy, even although such persons might have been induced to present themselves at the place of judgment by reliance on the safe-conduct, and otherwise would not have appeared; and that the granter of such a document, if he had done his part in other respects, was in no way further bound. By another document (which, however, may perhaps have been nothing more than a draft) it is declared that in the matter of Hus the king of the Romans had done his duty, and that no one should speak against him under pain of being held guilty of favouring heresy and of treason. Jerome, by abjuring the opinions which had been imputed to him, had entitled himself to liberty; but, although cardinal d’Ailly and others insisted on this, suspicions as to the sincerity of the prisoner’s recantation arose, and were strengthened by a tract which Gerson put forth on the subject of “Protestation and Revocation in Matters of Faith”. Fresh charges, derived from Bohemia, were urged against him by Palecz and Michael de Causis; and when d’Ailly, Zabarella, and others, indignantly resigned their office as judges, a new commission was appointed, before which Jerome was again April—May, examined. He was accused of various outrages against monks and friars; of having denied transubstantiation; of having caused the canon of the mass to be translated or paraphrased into Bohemian verse, so that mechanics supposed themselves able to consecrate by chanting it; of having in the course of his travels allied himself with the Russian schismatics in opposition to the Latins; of having lived luxuriously and riotously while in prison. Some of these charges Jerome denied; and in his answers he showed much dexterity and readiness, not unmixed with asperity and contempt towards his opponents. At his final examination, being allowed to defend himself, he delivered an eloquent speech. The display of authorities which he produced for his opinions excited admiration in those who considered that for 340 days he had been immured in a gloomy dungeon. He related the course of his life and studies. He explained the case of the university of Prague, and the unfair influence which the Germans had exercised in it. He declared that no act of his life had caused him such remorse as his abjuration of Hus and Wyclif, with whom he now desired to make common cause in all things, except Wyclif’s doctrine of the Eucharist. He professed himself ready to share the fate of Hus, whose offence he represented as having consisted, not in any deviation from the faith of the church, but in his having attacked the abuses and cor­ruptions of the hierarchy. He replied with courage and readiness to the many interruptions with which he was assailed; and the speech concluded with a commemoration of worthies, both heathen and scriptural, who had laid down their lives for the truth.

Urgent attempts were still made to persuade Jerome to fall back on the recantation which he had formerly made; Zabarella especially showed a friendly interest in him, and visited him in prison for the purpose of en­treating him to save himself. But all such efforts were fruitless, and Jerome suffered at the stake on the 30th of May 1416, enduring his agony with a firmness which extorted the admiration of men so remote from any sympathy with his character as the scholar Poggio Bracciolini (who was himself a witness of the scene) and the ecclesiastical politician Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini.

On the 4th of July 1415, two days before the death of Hus, Gregory XII, the most sincere of the rival popes in desiring the reunion of the church, resigned his dignity. For this purpose he had given a commission to Charles Malatesta, lord of Rimini, whose labours at Pisa and elsewhere for the healing of the schism have already been mentioned; and, in order to avoid an acknowledgment of the council as having been called by John XXIII, he affected to regard it as assembled by the emperor alone, and to add his own citation as pope, that it might entertain the proposed business. Malatesta accordingly appeared at the fourteenth session, and formally executed the act of resignation whereupon the council decreed that no one should proceed to choose a pope without its sanction, and that it should not be dissolved until after an election should have been made. The ex-pope became cardinal-bishop of Porto, and legate for life in the Mark of Ancona, with precedence over all the other members of the college. His cardinals were allowed to retain their dignities; and two years later, while the council was yet sitting, Angelo Corario died at the age of ninety.

Benedict XIII was still to be dealt with. Aragon and Scotland continued to adhere to him, and his pretensions were unabated. He had proposed a meeting with Sigismund at Nice, and John XXIII had endeavoured to avert this by offering to confer in person with his rival; but the council, remembering the failure of the conference of Savona, had refused its consent. It was now resolved that the emperor, as representative of the council, should treat with Benedict. On the 15th of July, Sigismund, kneeling before the high altar of the cathedral, received the solemn benediction of the assem­bly; and three days later he set out with four cardinals for Perpignan, where he had invited Benedict to meet him. At Narbonne he was joined by Ferdinand of Aragon, whose ambassadors had been in treaty with the council. But at Perpignan he found himself disappointed. Benedict had taken offence at being addressed as cardinal, whereas he held himself to be the sole legitimate pope; nay, even as a cardinal, he asserted that, being the only one who had been promoted to the sacred college before the schism, he was entitled to nominate a pope by his own voice alone. In accordance with the letter of an agreement, he remained at Perpignan throughout the month of June; but when the last day of that month came to an end at midnight, he immediately left the place, and pronounced Sigismund contumacious for having failed to appear. On the 19th of August he was at Narbonne, where he condescended to state his terms to the emperor’s representatives. But these and other proposals on the part of Benedict were so extravagant that it was impossible to accept them; and Benedict, after some movements, shut himself up within the rocky fortress of Peñiscola, in Valencia, where the archbishop of Tours and others sought an interview with him, but were unable to persuade him to resign. Sigismund succeeded in detaching from him the king of Aragon, with other princes who had thus far supported him; and these, in person or by their representatives, formally renounced him at Narbonne on the 13th of December 1415. The act was publicly declared at Perpignan on the Epiphany following by the great Dominican preacher St. Vincent Ferrer, in whose reputa­tion for sanctity the cause of the Spanish pope had found one of its strongest supports, but who now, in disgust at Benedict’s obstinacy, turned against him, and zealously exerted himself to promote the reunion of the church.

Sigismund then proceeded to visit the courts of France and of England, endeavouring to reconcile the enmity which had lately arrayed the nations against each other on the field of Agincourt (Oct. 25, 1415), and to unite western Christendom in a league against the Turks; and on the 27th of January in the following year he reappeared at Constance, where he was received by the council with great demonstrations of honour. In the meantime the representatives of the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms had been admitted, into the council as a fifth nation the agreement of Narbonne was confirmed, and measures were urged forward against Benedict Articles were drawn up, in which the charge against him was grounded chiefly on his breach of his engagements as to resignation, and he was cited to appear within a certain time. The envoys who were intrusted with the delivery of the citation at Peñiscola found him angry and obstinate, and brought back nothing but evasions and pretexts for delay. After having been repeatedly cited in due form at the door of the cathedral, he was pronounced contumacious on the first of April. Further articles were drawn up, and, after long formal proceedings, sentence of deposition was pronounced against him, as having been guilty of perjury, of scandal to the whole church, of favouring and nourishing schism, and of heresy, inasmuch as he had violated that article of the faith which speaks of “one holy catholic church.” The delivery of this judgment was followed by a jubilant chant of Te Deum; the bells of the churches were rung, and the emperor ordered that the sentence should be proclaimed with the sound of trumpets throughout the streets of Constance.

Thus the papacy was considered to be entirely vacant, as the three who had pretended to it had all been set aside. But the question now arose, whether the council should next proceed to the election of a new pope, or to discuss the reformation of the church, which had been much agitated during the time of the emperor’s absence. On the one hand it was urged that, as the church had long been suffering from the want of an acknowledged head, the papacy should be filled without delay. On the other hand it was represented that the reforming designs of the council of Pisa had been ineffectual because reform had been postponed to the election of a pope; that, since a reformation of the church ought to include the head as well as the members, a pope, by exerting his influence on those who naturally desired to stand well with him, might be able to put a stop to any movement for reform; that the chair of St. Peter, after the pollutions which it had lately undergone, ought to be cleansed, before any man, even the holiest, could sit in it without fear of contamination. The emperor, supported by the German and English nations, urged that the council should enter on the question of reform. The cardinals, with the Italians in general, pressed for the election of a pope, and drew to their side the Spaniards, who were new to the affairs of the council, and the French, whose eager­ness for reform was now overpowered by their enmity against the English. The contest was keenly carried on, both with tongue and with pen. Prayers were put up for the good success of the council in its designs, sermons were preached in exposition of the various views, and from each side a formal protest was made against the course which was proposed by the other; while invidious imputations were freely cast on the emperor and his adherents, as if, by maintaining that the church could be reformed without a head, they made themselves partakers in the heresy of Hus.

Still Sigismund stood firm, notwithstanding the taunts and insults which were directed against him, until at length he found his supporters failing him. Such of the French and Italians as had been with him fell away. By the death of Hallam, bishop of Salisbury, on the 4th of September, he lost his most esteemed auxiliary, while the English were deprived of a leader whose wisdom and moderation had guided them in the difficulties of their circumstances; and—partly, it would seem, in obedience to an order from their sovereign—they joined the growing majority. Two of the most important German prelates were bribed into a like course;—the archbishop of Riga, who, having been hopelessly embroiled with the Teutonic knights, was to be translated by the council to Liege; and the bishop of Chur, to whom the see of Riga offered at once an increase of dignity and an escape from his quarrels with Frederick of Austria. Finding that any further resistance would be useless, Sigismund yielded that the choice of a pope should precede the discussion of reform; but it was stipulated by him and the German nation that the future pope should, in conjunction with the council, make it his first duty to enter on a reform of the church, and that until this should have been effected the council should not be dissolved.

At the thirty-ninth session, October 9, 1417, it was decreed that a general council should be held within the next five years, and another within the following seven years ; that within every period of ten years for the time to come there should be a general council; that the pope might shorten the interval, but might not prolong it; and that for a sufficient cause (such as the occurrence of a schism) a council might be convoked at any time. But when the Germans desired that the future pope should be pledged to the observance of these rules, they were told by the cardinals that a pope could not be so bound.

Dissensions still continued to vex the council. The Aragonese, on joining it, had objected to the acknowledgment of the English as a nation—maintaining that they ought to be included with the Germans; and in this they were aided by cardinal d’Ailly, whose patriotism showed itself on all occasions in a vehement opposition to the English; while these stoutly asserted the importance of their nation and church by somewhat daring arguments, and put forward the venerable name of Joseph of Arimathea in opposition to that of Dionysius the Areopagite. The Castilians had contests of their own with the Aragonese; and they had even left Constance, in the belief that the council was hopelessly entangled, when they were brought back by the emperor’s command. The cardinals asked for leave to withdraw, and met with a refusal; Sigismund is said to have intended to arrest some of the most troublesome among them; and the members of the college displayed themselves in their scarlet hats, as a token of their readiness to become martyrs in the church’s cause. In the midst of these difficulties it was announced that Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and uncle to the king of England, was at Ulm, on his way to the Holy Land; and the English representatives suggested that by his reputation and authority, by his known influence with the emperor, and by his zeal for the peace of the church, he might be able to appease the differences which had arisen. The emperor with his own hand wrote to invite the bishop to Constance, where he was received with great honour; and by his mediation and advice he succeeded in effecting a reconciliation between the parties.

Beaufort had recommended that the election of a pope should at once be taken in hand; and new questions arose as to the right of sharing in it. Some wished to exclude the cardinals altogether, as having abused their privilege in time past; while the cardinals asserted that the right of voting belonged to them exclusively, but were willing to concede that, on this occasion only, representatives of the nations should be associated with them, and that the choice should be subject to the final approbation of the council. In the meantime there were discussions as to the points in which a reform was desired. Among them were the duties of the pope, and the limits of his authority; the prevention of double elections to the papacy; the composition of the college of cardinals, in which it seemed desirable that the Italians should not be too strong reservations, annates, expectancies, commendams, simony, dispensations, non-residence; the qualifications and duties of bishops; the abuses of the monastic and capitular systems; the nature of the causes that should be treated in the Roman court; the question of appeals; the offices of the papal chancery and penitentiary; indulgences; the alienation of church property; the cause, for which a pope might be corrected or deposed, and the manner of procedure in such cases.

Of these subjects, that of annates caused the greatest difference of opinion. The cardinals were in favour of the exaction, while the French nation denounced it as a novelty which dated only from the pontificate of John XXII. On this question, cardinal d’Ailly, who had formerly been opposed to the tax, now took part with his brethren of the college. With regard to the question of papal collation to benefices, it was remarked that, while many bishops, who were usually supporters of the papal interest, opposed it in this case from a wish to recover patronage for their own order, the representatives of universities sided with the pope, as being more likely than the bishops to favour the claims of learning in the bestowal of preferment. In the course of these discus­sions much heat was occasionally displayed. At one meeting, the wish to delay the election of a pope was denounced as a Hussite heresy, and the emperor, in disgust at the pertinacity of the opposition, arose and left the hall. As the patriarch of Antioch and others of his adherents followed, a cry arose, “Let the heretics go!”, and Sigismund, on being informed of the insult, knew that it was intended against himself.

At length, on the 30th of October, the preliminaries of the election were settled: that six representatives of each nation should be associated with the cardinals as electors; and that a majority of two-thirds among the cardinals, and in each nation should be necessary to the choice of a pope. The day was fixed for the 8th of November, when high mass was celebrated, and the bishop of Lodi (whose eloquence had been less creditably displayed in the cases of Hus and Jerome) preached from the text, “Eligite meliorem”—descanting on the qualities requisite for the papacy, and exhorting the electors to make choice of a pope different from those of the last forty years—one worthy of the office and bent on the reform of the church. The electors—twenty-three cardinals and thirty deputies of the nations—swore to the emperor that they would perform their duty faithfully, and were then shut up in conclave within the Exchange of Constance, under the guardianship of the master of the knights of Rhodes. Their deliberations lasted three days, during which companies of people—Sigismund himself, and the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries, among them—frequently gathered round the building, imploring with prayers, and with hymns chanted in low tones, the blessing of God on the election. At first, each nation was disposed to set up a candidate of its own; but gradually this was abandoned, and on St. Martin’s day an overwhelming majority, if not the whole body of electors, agreed in a choice, which was forthwith announced through an aperture made in the wall of the Exchange—“We have a pope—Lord Otho of Colonna!”. The news spread at once throughout the city, and produced an enthusiasm of joy; at last the schism which had so long distracted Christendom was ended. All the bells of Constance sent forth peals of rejoicing. A multitude, which is reckoned at 80,000, flocked from all quarters to the scene of the election. The emperor himself, disregarding the restraints of state, hurried into the room where the electors were assembled, and fell down before the pope, who raised him up, embraced him, and acknowledged that to him the peaceful result was chiefly due. For hours together crowds of all classes thronged to the cathedral, where the new pope was placed on the altar and gave his benediction. In honour of the day on which he was elected, he took the name of Martin V; and, after having been ordained deacon, priest, and bishop on three successive days, he was anointed and crowned as pope on the 21st of November.

Martin was now about fifty years of age. He belonged to the highest nobility of Rome, had been trained in the study of canon law, and had been created cardinal of St. George by Innocent VII. He had held to Gregory XII until the council of Pisa declared against that pope, and he had been one of the last to forsake John XXIII. His morals were irreproachable, and the prudence and moderation of his character were much respected. It is, however, said of him by Leonard of Arezzo, that whereas before his elevation he had been noted rather for his amiability than for his talents, he showed, when pope, extreme sagacity, but no excess of benignity.

Very soon Martin began to give indications that those who had chosen him in the hope of reform were to be disappointed. Almost immediately after his coronation he set forth, as was usual, the rules for the administration of his chancery; and it was seen with dismay that they differed hardly at all in substance from those of John XXIII; that they sanctioned all the corruptions which the council had denounced—such as annates, expectancies, and reservations ; nay, that this last evil was even aggravated in the new code. And now that western Christendom had one undoubted head, a man in whom high personal character was added to the dignity of his great office, the authority of the council waned before that of the pope. The emperor himself was superseded in the presidency of the assembly, and Martin’s power over it increased, while his address was exerted to prevent all dangerous reforms. He set forth a list of matters as to which a reform might be desirable; he constituted a reformatory college, made up of six cardinals, with representatives of the various nations, and at the forty-third session of the council some decrees were passed as to exemptions, simony, tithes, the life of the clergy, and other such subjects. But it was found that the several nations were not agreed as to the changes which were to be desired; and Martin skilfully contrived to take advantage of their jealousies so as to break up their alliance by treating separately with each for a special concordat. When the French urged Sigismund to press for reformation, he reminded them that they had insisted on giving the election of a pope precedence over the question of reform, and told them that they must now apply to the pope, since his own authority in such matters had ended when the election was made.

The Germans had presented two petitions for reform; among other points they urged that the cardinals should be fairly chosen from the various nations, and that their number should be limited to eighteen, or at the utmost should not exceed twenty-four. They also desired that means should be provided for the correction of a pope, so that popes might be punished and deposed by a general council, not only for heresy, but for simony, or any other grave and notorious offence. On this it would seem that no new enactment was considered to be necessary. Martin, however, put forth some proposals for a reform of the curia, in which, while he eluded some of the chief points in the German scheme, he agreed that the number of cardinals should be reduced, so as not to exceed twenty-four, that a regard should be paid to their qualifications, and that the dignity should be distributed in fair proportions among the various nations. He promised also an improved disposal of his patronage, and a redress of various crying grievances. To the Germans the promise as to the cardinalate appeared to hold out an important boon; for the instances in which Germans had been admitted to that dignity were exceedingly rare; but the hopes excited by Martin’s concession were very imperfectly realized, as the number of German cardinals has never been great.

The Spaniards, in ridicule of the faintness with which reform was taken in hand, put forth a satirical ‘Mass for Simony’. The piece was composed in the usual form of such services, and included prayers for the removal of the evil, with a lesson from the Apocalypse, descriptive of the woman sitting on the scarlet-coloured beast.

The concordats into which Martin had entered did not find much acceptance with the nations for which they were intended. That with England appears to have passed without notice. In France, although the kingdom was then in the depth of the weakness caused by internal discords and by the English invasion, the spirit of ecclesiastical independence, hallowed by the saintly renown of Lewis IX, and strengthened by the policy of Philip the Fair, and by the ascendency of later French sovereigns over the court of Avignon, was strongly manifested. The king was made to declare himself desirous to obey the council, but with the limitation “so far as God and reason would allow”. The concordat was rejected by the parliament of Paris; the principles of the pragmatic sanction were maintained; and the dauphin, who governed in his father’s name, refused to acknowledge Martin, whose election he supposed to have been carried by the hostile influences of Germany and Eng­land, until after the pope’s title had been examined and approved by the university of Paris.

Among the subjects which engaged the attention of the council, was a book in which John Petit, a Franciscan, had some years before asserted the right of tyrannicide in justification of the treacherous murder of the duke of Orleans by John “the Fearless”, duke of Burgundy.Petit himself had died in 1410, and is said to have professed on his death-bed regret for the doctrines which he had published; but his book had been examined, and eight propositions extracted from it had been condemned by an assembly of theologians, canonists, and jurists, under the presidency of the bishop of Paris, in 1414.

The matter was brought before the council of Con­stance in June 1415 by Gerson, who had taken an active part in the earlier stages;  and it occupied much time, during which he and cardinal d’Ailly exerted all their powers to obtain a condemnation of the atrocious opinions which Petit had enounced. The contest was obstinately and hotly waged, with the pen as well as with the tongue; Petit’s defenders were stigmatized as Cainites and heretics, while they retaliated by comparing Gerson to Judas, Herod, and Cerberus, and by taunting him with favours which he had formerly received from the Burgundian family. The influence in favour of Petit was so powerful, that his book escaped with the condemnation of only one especially outrageous proposition, while his name was unmentioned in the censure; and even this sentence was afterwards set aside on the ground of informality. It is noted that among the defenders of Petit’s book was Peter Caucher, vidame of Reims, who afterwards, as bishop of Beauvais, gained an infamous celebrity by his part in the condemnation of the Maid of Orleans.

Another book, the work of a Dominican, John of Falkenberg, was brought before the council, on the ground that the author, who wrote in the interest of the Teutonic knights, had grossly attacked the king of Poland, and had declared it to be not only lawful, but highly meritorious, to kill him and all his people. Before the election of Martin, this book had been condemned to the flames by the committee on matters of faith; but the sentence had not been confirmed in a general session, and the Poles found that Martin, although he had himself subscribed the earlier condemnation, was resolved as pope to do away with its effect. Being thus denied redress, they appealed to a general council, but Martin declared that no such appeal from a pope could be allowed. On this Gerson put forth a tract in which the new pope’s declaration was shown to be opposed to the principles on which the council had acted. But Martin, whether acquainted with Gerson’s tract or not, proceeded in direct opposition to his views. In answer to the allegations of the Poles, that the book contained “most cruel heresies” and therefore ought to fall under the censure of an assembly which had for one of its chief objects the extirpation of heresy, he declared that he approved of all that the council had done as to matters of faith. He enjoined silence on the complainants, under a threat of excommunication, and, although they still persisted, even to the last session of the council—styling Falkenberg’s opinions a “doctrine of devils”—their struggles to obtain a condemnation were fruitless.

At the forty-fourth session, Pavia was named as the place where the next general council should be held. The French representatives, who disliked this proposal, absented themselves from the meeting at which it was to be brought forward.

The forty-fifth and last session was held on the 22nd of April 1418, when the pope bestowed his absolution on all the fathers of the council, with their followers, and on all other persons who had been present on account of business connected with it. The emperor had been rewarded for his labours by a grant of a year’s eccle­siastical tithe from his dominions; and, although some German churches engaged a Florentine lawyer, Dominic de Germiniano, to oppose this grant as informal, illegal, and oppressive, such was the ascendency of the pope over the council that the advocate, instead of carrying out his commission, was fain to conclude his pleading with a proposal that the impost should be collected in a way less burdensome than that which had been originally intended.

Although Sigismund had endeavoured to prolong the pope’s stay in Germany, and the French had urged him to settle at Avignon, his answer to such solicitations had been that Rome and the patrimony of St. Peter required his presence. On the 16th of May, he left Constance with a magnificent display of pomp. Arrayed in his most splendid robes of office, he rode under a canopy which was supported by four counts, while the emperor and the elector of Brandenburg walked beside him, and held his bridle on either side. Frederick of Austria, with other secular princes and nobles, twelve cardinals, and a vast train of ecclesiastics of all grades, followed; and it is said that the whole cavalcade amounted to 4o,ooo. The scene might be regarded as symbolical of the victory which the papacy had gained. The council which had deposed popes had been mastered by the pope of its own choosing; the old system of Rome, so long the sub­ject of vehement complaint, had escaped untouched; and no mention had been made of any reform in doctrine.

While the pope was thus triumphant, Gerson, the great theologian of the council, withdrew from it to obscurity and exile. Paris was in the hands of the English, and of the ferocious duke of Burgundy, to whom he had made himself obnoxious. The university of which he had been the glory, and which had sent him forth at the head of its representatives, could no longer receive him; and he was glad to accept an asylum from the duke of Bavaria. The offer of a professorship at Vienna drew from him a poem of thanks to Frederick of Austria; but he remained in his seclusion until, after the assassination of the duke of Burgundy on the bridge of Montereau, in September 1419, he removed to Lyons, where he spent the last ten years of his life in devotion, study, and literary labour. The latest of his works was a commentary on the Canticles; and three days after having completed it he died, at the age of sixty-six, on the 12th of July, 1429.

 

CHAPTER IX.

THE GREEK CHURCH—CHRISTIANITY IN ASIA— CONVERSIONS.