Council of Constance Part 1

The Council of Constance marked a pivotal moment in the history of the Catholic Church and the history of Europe in general.

One issue on the agenda was the ongoing schism that the council of Pisa had failed to resolve. Another the reform of the increasingly corrupt clergy all the way up to the pope himself. And then there were a number of individual questions this gathering of thousands had to address.

Whilst all these were crucial questions, the way the council constituted itself foreshadowed a fundamental change in the way European saw themselves.

This part 1 deals with the establishment of the council and the removal of the popes, most importantly the pope who had convened the council on the first place, John XXIII and his counterpart, the emperor Sigismund.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 171 – The Council of Constance Part 1 – Cleaning House, which is also episode 8 of season 9 “The Reformation before the Reformation”.

On a cold night in October 1414 a most unusual procession appeared near the village of Klösterle on the Arlberg pass. Not an army but almost as large. 600 men, some soldiers and bodyguards, a few high ranking aristocrats but mostly men of the cloth. Clerics, doctors of theology but also abbots, bishops and archbishops as well as the true princes of the church, cardinals, dozens of them. And at the center of the procession an enormous cart and in it the true lord of all of Christendom, the bearer of both swords, pope John XXIII.

The roads they had travelled on for days were terrible. Whatever was left of the old roman infrastructure had long been buried underground or had deteriorated so badly, it had gone out of use. So through the autumn mud the processions ploughs on. Just as they were passing the hamlet of Klösterle, in the holloway that masked as one of Europe’s busiest north-south connection the attendants watched in panic as the right hand side wheels of the papal wagon climbed the bank of the road. Before anyone could reign in the horses and prevent disaster, the carriage rose, went past the point of vanishing stability and with a terrifying thump landed on its side. The holy father was thrown out of his vehicle and lay buried deep in the snow. His lords and bishops run to him and ask: “Oh Holy father, has your holiness been harmed?” and he responded “here for devil’s sake I lie”.

Shaken but unharmed the vicar of Christ kept going. As the panorama widened and he could see the city of Bludenz down in the valley that leads to the lake and the city of Constance he uttered, full of premonition “So this is where they catch the foxes”.

And the old fox was right to be worried. For a year later he will find himself in prison in Mannheim, then just a solitary tower by the shore of the Rhine. How that happened and why he is now resting in a magnificent monument in the Baptistery of Florence paid for by the Medici family and bearing the inscription: John the XXIII former pope, Died in Florence A.D. 1419, on 11^th day before the Calends of January is what we will look at in this episode!

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Here we are, the pope John XXIII is travelling across the Alps to go to a general church council in Constance. Which begs just one question – why? Why would Baldassarre Cossa, elected pope and recognized as head of the church in dozens of lands, born on the sundrenched island of Procida near Naples call a church assembly to discuss the schism and in a foggy mid-sized town in the German lands to boot?

Well, the answer is, he didn’t. Or at least he did not call a church council to debate the schism. As far as John XXIII was concerned, the schism was done and dusted. The Community of the Faithful had come together in Pisa in 1409 and had deposed the two competing contenders, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and had replaced them with his predecessor Alexander V. And he, Baldassarre Cossa had been canonically elected as the successor of Alexander V. The fact that Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were still around claiming supremacy was a logistical and maybe military problem, but not one we need a church council for.

So the reason he did still call a church council had to do with one of the provisions of the previous council the one in Pisa. The Pisan gathering had made pope Alexander V swear he would call another council within the next three years to deal with the open issue of church reform. Because in all that debate about how to put an end to the schism, the important issue of how can we make a church a little less corrupt had fallen off the agenda.

That was why John XXIII found himself in a bind to call a church council. And he wasn’t opposed to the idea. Presiding over a major reform council would elevate him on to the level of the great popes Innocent II &III, Alexander III and  Gregory X. That would make everybody forget his – how can  say that politely – somewhat checkered past.

But as so often, Pope John XXIII struggled to find a suitable venue for his grand ecumenical council. Initially he wanted to do it in Rome, after all his capital and a categorical statement that the time when the Pope had to live away from the eternal city was now well and truly over.

The problem was that John XXIII had to live away from the eternal city except for very brief periods. His neighbor, King Ladislaus of Naples kept conquering papal lands and sacking Rome on regular intervals. That is the same Ladislaus who had inherited and pursued a claim on the crown of Hungary from his father Charles the Short who was made even shorter by Elisabeth of Bosnia. If that last sentence was complete gobbledygook for you, listen back to episode 169.

A lasting peace with Naples was unlikely. Pope John XXIII did not like Ladislaus of Naples very much ever since Ladislaus had his two brothers hanged as pirates. Ladislaus did not like the pope very much, because he could.

With Rome off the list of suitable venues, John needed to find a neutral place in Italy. But by then, the peninsula was in the grip of near perennial war. Many of the former communes have become principalities ruled by local strongmen. And strongmen do what strongmen are wont to do, they go after other people’s lands, cities and treasure until there are armies crisscrossing the land from early spring to late autumn.

Enter stage left our old friend Sigismund of Luxemburg. By now this extremely intrepid man had not only secured his reign over Hungary but had finally achieved his great ambition and had become king of the Romans. And best of all, his hated half-brother Wenceslaus was still around to see it happening.

How did he become King of the Romans, that was simple. Nobody really wanted the job any more. The reign of Rudolf of the empty pocket had shown beyond any doubt that there was no money left to establish any kind of imperial authority. Only the very, very richest could afford to don the imperial coronation mantle. And even after 4 decades of infighting and mismanagement, the house of Luxemburg was still the richest of the great eligible families of the empire. And being a squabbling lot, two Luxemburgs put their hat in the ring, Sigismund, king of Hungary and Jobst, margrave of Moravia. Weirdly, Jobst had the inferior title but a lot more money. But what he lacked was longevity. Both were elected by a mixture of correct and incorrect prince-electors but Jobst died in 1411. Sigismund had the election repeated and was confirmed by all.

Being king of the Romans and future emperor came with the role supreme protector of the church. And whilst John XXIII may think the schism is over, Sigismund did not see it like that. He had to deal with the fact that some imperial principalities, the Palatinate and Baden for instance kept their allegiance to the deposed pope Gregory XII. So this needed to be cleaned up. And he knew that one way to gain true control over the empire and with it the leverage to initiate much needed imperial reform, was to rescue  Holy Mother church.

That is why Sigismund pops up in Lodi in Northern Italy in December 1413 to discuss the long overdue church council with the pope. By now John XXIII had considered Bologna and even Avignon of all places, but both had been turned down by his advisors as either too dangerous or totally inappropriate.

At which point Sigismund suggested they all come over to his yard. Yard being the word my teenage son uses to describe a home and I thought I use it since I am a bit tired of using the same words again and again.

To tell what happened next, I have to introduce the chronicler Ulrich Richental. He was a citizen of Constance and he wrote a very detailed account of the council that – despite some biases – is still the #1 source for the events during that period. Richental is a big fan of Sigismund not so much of the popes. So he does make things up occasionally, like the road accident at the start of the episode. But he does it so nicely, I couldn’t stop myself pretending it did actually happen.

And here is Ulrich’s account of the two heads of Christendom discussing the venue for the most momentous event of the 15^th century:

When Sigismund proposed to come to Germany John XXIII responded: “I cannot convince my cardinals to travel north across the Alps”

Sigismund: “In that case I cannot get the princes and electors to travel south across the Alps”

Gridlock

Sigismund then turns to one of his entourage, the duke of Teck: “Isn’t there an imperial city close to the Alps?  Teck: “Sure Sire, the city of Kempten”. At which point a count of Nellenburg intervenes: “nah, there is not enough food in Kempten. But there is another city, just an hour’s ride away, Constance on the lake. They have a bishopric and everything”

Sigismund: “Holy father – do you like Constance?”

John XXIII: “Oh my beloved son, I do like Constance”

That’s it – That is how that went down – Richental told us so, so definitely true!

That is why on the 27^th of October Pope John XXIII and his entourage of 600 entered the city of Costance under a golden baldachin carried by four eminent burghers of the free imperial city. The Imperial bailee performed the service of the groom and a group of schoolchildren sang appropriate hymns. The pope grateful for the friendly welcome blessed the congregation.

Everything was going swimmingly. The pope and his immediate entourage was given accommodation in the bishop’s palace opposite the cathedral. The others were distributed amongst the homes of the locals who were all too happy to AirBnB their spare rooms for outrageous rents.

Because it wasn’t just the 600 papal delegates, which included humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini as well as the various prelates. There were also a total of 3 patriarchs, 23 cardinals, 27 archbishops 106 bishops, 103 abbots, 344 doctors of theology, all of whom came with their scribes, procurators and administrators of various kinds. Then there were the princes, a full complement of the prince electors, the dukes of Bavaria, Austria, Schleswig, Mecklenburg Lothringia and Teck as well as  a further 676 noblemen Those who did not come themselves like the kings of France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Polen, Naples, Castile and Aragon, sent representatives, as did the patriarch of  Constantinople and the emperor of Ethiopia. And then there were all these people who came hoping to make some money of this incredible gathering, goldsmiths, cobblers, furriers, blacksmiths, bakers, shopkeepers, apothecaries, moneylenders, buglers, pipers, entertainers, barbers, heralds, merchants of any kind and the often mentioned whores and public girls. All of them needed to stay somewhere and somehow all of them did.

The city museum at the Rosgarten hosts a wonderful model of Constance from around the time of the council which gives a great idea of its size or lack of it. Constance had maybe 6-8,000 inhabitants at the time which isn’t huge now and wasn’t even at that time. Places like Augsburg or Nurnberg were more than twice the size. How many people came in total to the council is hard to determine, in particular since our friend Richental tends to exaggerate a bit. Plus not everyone stayed all throughout the 3 years and some the council lasted. In one of my secondary sources they talk about 5000 monks and 16,000 priests which would suggest a total number of 25,000-30,000 new arrivals. I struggle to believe that but it is likely that the population at least doubled during that period and maybe more than tripled in the initial phase.

Given there is so much information available about Constance during that period, I may dedicate a future episode to the conditions not just during the council, but more generally. We have not done a Germany in the year 1400 episode yet, so this may be a good one.

But for now we leave the cramped conditions behind and go back to the high politics.

The pope was here, but the emperor had not yet arrived. The reason for the delay was that Sigismund had been elected three years earlier but had not yet been crowned, not even as king of the Romans. That had to happen before he went toe to toe with the pope. So on November 8, 1414 he was crowned in Aachen and then progressed south towards Constance. In Strasburg he told everyone that he and John were like totally aligned on everything. From there he took the road along the Neckar valley to Stuttgart and then down to the lake where he arrived in Űberlingen at midnight on the 24^th of December.

He had called ahead and asked for transport to cross the lake. So in the middle of Christmas eve the boatmen of Konstance set off across the lake to bring their emperor into their city. It was  3 in the morning when he finally arrived with his wife, several princes and their attendants all loaded up on torchlit boats. The city council came to the harbor to greet him and led him to the town hall where he was given a drink. And then they dashed across the square to the cathedral where – and that is still hard to believe – the pope was waiting for him. John XXIII had halted Midnight Mass for the emperor. And not only that, he had allowed Sigismund to do what the Luxemburg rulers have been doing since Karl IV, he let him read the gospel according to Luke where it says “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” He read this whilst wearing his crown and holding the imperial sword. No previous pope, not even the king of France had allowed such a display to go ahead. Nobody wanted to be reminded that even the bible acknowledged that the empire was an institution older than the papacy and one that was meant to rule the whole of the Roman world.

John XXIII left no record of his thoughts that night.

The council had started debating before Sigismund had arrived, but as the cardinal Fillastre noted, nothing of substance had yet been discussed, because nobody aka the pope himself, wanted to touch on the actual subject, the unity of the church and the continued schism.

That being said, the council wasn’t stalling. If you think about the sheer scale of what was going on. These thousands of delegates are pushed together into this mid-sized medieval town. The grand debates take place in the Münster, the cathedral, but few delegates get the chance to address the whole council. So they start to meet in smaller groups to debate specific issues, initially spontaneously and after a while in a formal structure of committees and working groups. But what also happened was that factions were forming. And these did not form around political programs or theological perspectives, but along geographic and cultural lines.

The council was establishing nations. The idea of nations came from the way medieval universities were organised as we have heard about Paris and Prague in previous episodes. And since most delegates had studied at university or were practicing academics, these divisions appeared natural. They were also a way to break up the hierarchy structure of the church that monopolised decision making in the hands of the pope and his college of cardinals.

But is not just that, it is also a sign of a changing world. Whilst on the outset it looked as if the council was resurrecting the idea of a unified Christendom under one pope and one emperor, the reality was that this concept was fading away not just as a political structure but also as a cultural entity. Instead the peoples of europe were developing separate identities. We are still centuries away from people seeing nationality as one of their primary defining characteristic and source of belonging, but there is clearly something shifting.

The vernacular has taken over from Latin on much of the cultural and administrative output of the times. For instance our chronicler Richental writes his work in German, more precisely in his native dialect. It’s not that he does not know Latin, more that he does not feel he needs to use it to be taken seriously. In Italy we have Dante and in England Chaucer who elevate the vernacular to a literary language, whilst French has become the language at the court of the Valois. I am not that familiar with developments in Poland and Hungary, but as we have seen last week, the Czech language has become a crucial marker of belonging in Bohemia.

Still the nations that form in Constance were not yet as rigidly defined by etymology and culture as modern nations are. The conciliar nations are created through a mixture of political significance, compass orientation and language. There were in the end five. There was Italica, Gallicana, Germania which included Scandinavia, Poland, Lithauania, Croatia, Hungary and Bohemia, Anglca which was England, Scotland and Ireland and Iberica, which comprised the various Spanish kingdoms and Portugal.

There were discussions about the structure of these nations, but interestingly from the Iberian side. Aragon wanted to be its own nation. That was turned down because in that case Castile and Portugal would also have their separate nations. And if that happened the Germanica nation would splinter as well, making the whole concept of nations unworkable.

Do you remember the cardinal Fillastre, the one who had been moaning that nothing was moving forward in this great church council? Well, in January 1415, two months into the debates he had had enough. He issued an treatise stating that all three popes should resign. And that the council had the power to force all three popes to step down if that was in the interest of the unity of the church.

The response from John XXIII and his supporters was the obvious. Sorry, last time we did that and deposed two popes, we got three. Why do you think by deposing three you will not end up with four? And what was wrong with me as pope?

Well on the last question, quite a lot, an awful lot. Most it were rumours at the time, but still. He might have been a pirate in his youth, after all his brothers had definitely been. Pope Alexander V, the one the council of Pisa had chosen had died only days after having lunch at the house of the man who became his successor. Then the bribes that were paid to the cardinals at his election were legendary, almost as legendary as his income from the sale of church benefices once he was made pope.

John XXIII’s opponents put together a list of 18 accusations, each one of them pretty damning.

But that would not have meant that he was done for. He had made sure that the majority of the participants at the council were Italians and the Italians would be very wary to opening up the ballot again, potentially ending up with a Frenchman who could take the church back to Avignon.

But that line of defence crumbled when Sigismund used his immense charm and power of persuasion to introduce a change in the voting process. No longer should it be by heads or by rank, but by nation. Each of the five nation was to have one vote, as would the college of cardinals.

Voting by nations totally undermined the church hierarchy, because suddenly the archbishops and bishops find themselves acting alongside the priests, monks and doctors of their nation, rather than with their brother bishops. And where it was even harder to take was for the cardinals. They had become accustomed to being a sort of cabinet of the church that would make all the major decisions along with the pope. But here in the council, they were relegated to having just one vote that ranked equal to any one of the nation’s votes.

John was a smart politician and he realised the non-Italian nations had a majority. His line of defence had crumbled and the game was up. So to avoid the publication of the 18 accusations he agreed to resign. Conditions were negotiated over for another 2 weeks but then, at the end of February 1415, three months after he had seen the fox trap from his vantage point above Bludenz, that trap had snapped shut. Pope John XXIII declared his resignation.

Immediately after that Sigismund put Constance into lockdown. The deposed pope must not be able to escape. Because if he escaped and gathered new supporters he could dissolve the council that he had called in the first place. And if he did that, the horror scenario of four popes would almost certainly materialise.

And what happened, well, what do you think? The pope escaped. Disguised as a groom and sitting on – for added humiliation – on a tiny horse.

As we heard at the beginning, John had had had his premonitions when he crossed the alps. So he took out life insurance. With Frederick of Habsburg, the duke of Austria. Frederick promised to help and protect him should the worst happen.  And the worst had happened. So it was to neighbouring Schaffhausen, one of the duke’s possessions that ex-pope John XXIII or to give him his correct name, Baldassare Cossa went. The helpful duke immediately came to his side to face down Sigismund and the council members.

Sigismund did not waste a second. He gathered the imperial princes who were in Constance anyway and formed an imperial court. The court gave Frederick 3 days to show and defend himself and when he failed to come they condemned him. They put duke Frederick of Austria in the imperial ban. He was made an outlaw, his vassals released from their oaths and an imperial army was gathered. 10 days after the spectacular flight of the pope, Sigismund’s forces oved on the gates of Schaffhausen.

Baldassare Cosssa fled on to Laufenburg another 30 miles down the Rhine but that was no solution, so on he ran towards Basel. But before he left Laufenburg, he issued a papal bull revoking his resignation and dissolving the council.

At that point the future of the church and the future of Sigismund hung in the balance. If the majority of the council attendants recognised his dissolution order it was over.

At that point the church and the universities had been discussing the role of the council and its relationship with the pope for decades. The schism created by the selfishness of cardinals and popes had undermined Holy mother church to a point a Gregory VII or an Innocent III would barely have recognised her any more. It was time for the congregation of the faithful to put their foot down. The council agreed the decree Haec Sancta which became a sort of Magna Carta of the church. Its opened with (quote)

“First [the council] declares that, legitimately assembled in the holy Spirit, constituting a general council and representing the catholic church militant, it has power immediately from Christ; and that everyone of whatever state or dignity, even papal, is bound to obey it in those matters which pertain to the faith, the eradication of the said schism and the general reform of the said church of God in head and in members.” (end quote)

It banned the pope from dissolving the council, from moving the curia from Constance or to do anything that would undermine its power.

The ecumenical council continued and Baldassare Cossa kept running. Until he could run no more. He was caught near Radolfzell and brought back to Constance to stand trial. The ruling was no surprise. He was convicted and declared unworthy, useless and dangerous and stripped of all his church offices. The next four years he spent as a prisoner of the count Palatinate in a customs tower at Mannheim. In 1419 he paid an enormous ransom and was allowed to return to Rome where he submitted to the new pope Martin V  who made him a bishop and cardinal again. He died shortly afterwards in Florence. His memorial in the great Baptistery is a spectacular piece created by the renaissance masters Donatello and Michelozzo. Who paid for it? Not Baldassare Cossa, but Florentine bankers including the Medici family who one can only assume owed the pope their rise to the top of the financial industry in Italy. And yes, the name John XXIII was taken off the official list of popes, which is why we have two popes called John XXIII, the last one reigning from 1958 to 1963 as one of the most popular and sympathetic figures of recent church history and – ironically – a pope who presided over a church council.

That left the council with still two false popes, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, who needed to be removed before a new, universally recognised pope could be elected and unity of the church could be restored.

Gregory XII was relatively easy. He was already a thousand years old, had lost all support in Italy and had been elected with the explicit provision to resign when asked. All he demanded was that he would not be deposed by a council that had been called by his enemy, the no longer pope John XXIII. So a weird charade took place. Two of Gregory’s ambassadors arrived in Constance and formally called a council in the name of Gregory XII. The council then reconstituted itself, now as one called by Gregory XII. It endorsed all previous decisions. And then they read a letter from Gregory resigning as pope. That was it. Gregory XII stepped back into the college of cardinals and died two years later. His much more modest memorial is in the small town of Recanati in the Marche. But he remained on the list of canonical popes.

One effect of this strange castling was that Sigismund was no longer the president of the council. He had taken that role during the proceedings against Baldassare Cossa, but now that a viable pope had resumed the reigns, if only for a technical second, he was no longer needed.

The task he took up instead was to rail in the last of the popes, the Avignon pope Benedict XIII. This was the most stubborn of the whole lot, who never yielded, not even when he had lost the support of the French. By 1415 he was living in Aragon, enjoying the support of his last remaining ally, king Alfonso V.

Benedict XIII agreed to meet with Sigismund who had come to Perpignan to speak to him directly. But this time the legendary charmer failed. Yes, Benedict XIII promised to resign but only under one condition. Since he was the only surviving cardinal who had participated in the election of Urban VI, back in 1378, he was the only truly legitimate cardinal in the whole world. All other cardinals have been appointed by contested popes. Therefore he was the only person in Christendom entitled to elect the new pope. He promised would do so within 24 hours and promised not to elect himself. Let’s say, argument was compelling, but there wasn’t the resounding support that Benedict might have expected.

Sigismund gave up on the stubborn Spaniard. Instead he worked on the Iberian monarchs and by December 1416 King Alfonso V of Aragon abandoned his pope and submitted to the council of Constance.

And that was all that really mattered. Benedict went to Peniscola a town and castle overlooking the sea between Valencia and Barcelona where he would spend the next 8 years ranting and raving against the council, the king and everybody else. When he died his ragtag band of cardinals elected a new pope they called Clement VIII. It took until 1429 before this pope finally resigned. The last negotiator who brought this sorry tale to an end was an Aragonese bishop by the name of Alfonso de Borgia. He would later rise to become pope Calixtus III who paved the way for his nephew Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI the most notorious of the Renaissance popes.

Hurrah – we have done it. The Schism is over. Three popes are gone. But we still need a new one, and ideally one that everybody will agree on. Spoiler alert, they will find one. But the council is not done. There are still many other matters to discuss, including the matter of a certain Jan Hus, a complaint from the Teutonic Knights and some Frenchmen wanting clarification on the term Tyrannicide. So, there will be a part 2 of the Council of Constance which I hope you will join us again next week.

And before I go just a quick reminder, the website to make a one-time donation or sign on for Patreon is historyofthegermans.com