The Papacy After Constance
Martin V reorganized the administration of the papal court so that it would work more efficiently. To pay for it, however, he found no better method than imitating secular rulers and selling church offices. His reasoning was practical: the Church had survived a century without reform, but it would not survive a week without money, so the need for revenue came before the need for reform.
The consequences were already visible to contemporaries. In 1430 a German envoy in Rome wrote to his master that greed ruled the papal court and that new ways of draining German money were devised every day. He warned that the resentment this produced would eventually lead either to serious trouble for the papacy or to a general refusal to obey Rome, and he expected many countries to accept the second outcome.
The Council of Basel and a New Schism
Martin's successor, Eugenius IV, was a man with the background of a modest friar and no training in statecraft, and he inherited a heap of unresolved problems. A pope in this period had to govern both a church and a set of territories, so he had to be a practical man with one foot firmly in the world. Holiness was rarely compatible with the job.
In the first year of Eugenius's reign the Council of Basel reasserted the supremacy of a general council over the pope. The council began to take over traditional papal functions:
- It issued indulgences.
- It appointed its own officials to church posts.
- It demanded that the first-year revenues of bishoprics, normally paid to the pope, be sent to the council instead.
Eugenius ordered the council dissolved. The council answered by declaring him deposed and electing Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy, as Pope Felix V in 1439, which reopened the schism.
The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges
King Charles VII of France completed the apparent defeat of the papacy by calling an assembly of French bishops, nobles, and jurists. It again affirmed the authority of councils over popes and issued the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438. Under this decree:
- Church officials were to be chosen by local clergy, with the king holding the right to recommend candidates.
- Lawsuits could not be taken to the papal courts unless the French courts had failed to resolve them or lacked jurisdiction.
- The first-year revenues of bishoprics could no longer be sent to the pope.
The result was a Gallican Church with the king at its head. A year later an assembly at Mainz adopted measures aimed at creating a similar national church in Germany, and Bohemia had already broken away from Rome.
The Union with the Greeks
The Ottoman advance unexpectedly helped Eugenius. As the Turks approached Constantinople, the Byzantine government concluded that reuniting the Greek Orthodox Church with Latin Christianity was unavoidable, since union was the price of Western military and financial aid. Greek bishops and nobles traveled to Ferrara and then Florence in 1438 to meet the church leaders summoned by the pope.
After a year of negotiations, an agreement recognized the authority of the bishop of Rome. On 6 July 1439 the whole Greek delegation, led by the emperor, knelt before Eugenius, the same pope whom few had taken seriously only a short time earlier. The union did not last, because the Greek clergy and people rejected it. Even so, it restored some of the papacy's lost prestige, left the rival council at Basel isolated, and brought that council to an end.
The Renaissance Popes
A succession of strong popes, raised up by the Italian Renaissance, brought the papacy to a level of power that matched even the age of Innocent III. Nicholas V devoted church revenues to learning and art and won the admiration of the humanists. Callixtus III entrenched nepotism, the practice of giving important positions to relatives, which became one of the foundations of church corruption.
Pius II and the Failure of Reform
Pius II was a gifted writer but a weak pope. He assembled a group of respected bishops to study the Church's faults and told them plainly that he wanted to fight the Turks and reform the Roman court, which set the example for all other church centers. His plan was to begin with the conduct of church officials and to stop the buying and selling of offices.
The committee produced sensible proposals, and Pius published them in a papal bull. In Rome, however, almost no one wanted reform, and roughly half of the officials were corrupt in one way or another. Their indifference and quiet resistance defeated the plan, while the fruitless crusade drained his energy and funds. Near the end of his reign he made a last appeal to the cardinals. People said, he admitted, that the court lived in luxury, kept hunting dogs, and spent freely on entertainers while doing little for religion, and he conceded there was some truth in it. He urged them to recover the moderation, simplicity, and devotion that had made the early Church great.
Decline Under the Later Popes
Sincere churchmen such as Cardinal Cesarini and Nicholas of Cusa worked for reform, yet the court grew more corrupt as the fifteenth century closed.
- Paul II wore a tiara said to be worth more than a palace.
- Sixtus IV made his nephews wealthy, played an eager part in Italian politics, blessed cannon used in his wars, and financed his conflicts by auctioning church offices.
- Innocent VIII held wedding celebrations for his children in the Vatican.
- Alexander VI fathered several children and treated clerical celibacy as unimportant. His lack of political principle and the brutality of his son Cesare Borgia, who recovered the Papal States, disturbed Europe more than his private life did.
- Julius II fought Venice and the French, often left the Vatican to command his armies in person, and astonished Europe by making the papacy a military power.
The Borgias used the methods of war and assassination that Machiavelli soon described in The Prince (1513) as necessary for building a strong state. Julius II was also a great patron who supported Raphael and Michelangelo, began the new St. Peter's, and was the first to give indulgences instead of wages to those who worked on its construction. Luther visited Rome during his reign and was shocked by the moral condition of the city that stood at the center of Christendom.
A Fairer Judgment
By this time no ruler regarded the papacy as a moral authority binding all nations into one Christian commonwealth. It had become a national Italian state. As the old faith weakened, Europe split into national states bound by no shared moral law, and it suffered civil wars for the next five centuries.
A fair assessment must place the Renaissance popes in their own time. Northern Europe, which paid the bills, felt their faults most sharply, while those who knew luxurious Renaissance Italy judged them more gently. Many shared the common Renaissance view that the world, though full of sorrow, could also be a beautiful place for an intense and happy life. The popes also left real achievements. They drained marshes, paved streets, repaired bridges and aqueducts, founded the Vatican Library and the Capitoline Museum, expanded hospitals and charities, rebuilt the University of Rome, and supported the humanists, painters, sculptors, and architects whose work is now a heritage of all humanity. In short, they drained millions from Europe and spent millions on Rome. Many lived simply in private, and their spending on St. Peter's was no greater than what French kings spent on their palaces.
The Changing World Around the Church
Just as the Church seemed to be regaining its grandeur, economic, intellectual, and political changes were slowly weakening the foundations of Latin Christianity.
Economic Change
Religion usually flourishes in an agricultural society and science in an industrial one. Each harvest seems a gift of the earth and the heavens, and the farmer, at the mercy of the weather, sees supernatural powers everywhere. The feudal order, with its chain of loyalty from lord to king to God, suited this outlook. The city worker, merchant, and banker live in a world of calculation, where material causes have regular and predictable effects and natural law seems to govern everything.
The fifteenth-century growth of trade and finance, the shift of activity from village to city, and the rise of a merchant class and of national and international markets were a bad sign for the old religious order. Merchants resented both the restrictions of the Church and the exactions of the feudal lords. The Church adapted to the practical need for credit, and by 1500 the traditional ban on usury was widely ignored. Lawyers and merchants gradually replaced nobles and clergy in government, Roman law recovered its old prestige, and civil courts expanded at the expense of church courts.
Political Change
The young monarchies, enriched by trade and industry, pulled away from the Church's control. They disliked papal legates in their territory, since those legates recognized no authority but the pope, and each national church became a state within the state.
- In England, laws of 1351 and 1353 sharply limited the Church's judicial and financial power.
- In France, the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges was formally canceled in 1516, but the king kept the right to choose archbishops, bishops, and abbots.
- The Venetian senate insisted on controlling senior church appointments in its territory.
- In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella ignored the popes by filling vacant church posts themselves.
- In the Holy Roman Empire, Sixtus IV allowed the emperors to nominate to three hundred benefices and seven bishoprics.
Kings often abused this power by placing favorites in such offices. These appointees collected the revenue of a monastery or diocese without carrying out its duties, and many clerical abuses can be traced back to these lay appointments.
Intellectual Change
The Church still trained devoted scholars, but its own schools and universities also produced a minority whose thinking troubled pious churchmen. Around 1420 Saint Bernardino complained that the worldliness of monks, nuns, and priests shook many people's faith, that some came to regard Christian teaching as human invention rather than revelation, despised the sacraments, and saw heaven as nothing more than this life.
Wealth, it is generally observed, tends to weaken religion, and the merchant class was no exception. The poet Gower claimed that English merchants paid little attention to the afterlife. Several other developments added to the doubt:
- The failure of the Crusades raised a lasting question about why God had allowed Islam to prevail over Christianity, and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks revived that question.
- Nicholas of Cusa in 1432 and Lorenzo Valla in 1439 showed that the
Donation of Constantinewas a forgery, which dealt a heavy blow to the Church's claim to secular authority. - The rediscovery of classical texts revealed a rich world of art and knowledge that predated Christianity, although the Fifth Lateran Council had declared that there was no knowledge or salvation outside the Church.
- The discovery of America and the expansion of trade to the East introduced Europeans to many peoples with their own useful and moral religions, and meetings of different faiths in ports and markets weakened the certainty of each.
Philosophy, which in the thirteenth century had served as the handmaid of theology, gained its independence in the fourteenth century through Ockham and Marsilius of Padua. In the sixteenth century it took on a bolder, materialist, and skeptical tone with Pomponazzi, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini. About four years before Luther voiced his objections, Machiavelli made a remarkable prediction. He argued that Christendom would have been happier and more united had the faith been kept true to its founder's teachings, that the corruption of Rome was shown by the fact that those closest to it were the most corrupt, and that the gap between the original principles and current practice pointed to the Church's coming ruin or punishment.