The Council of Constance – part 3
We have talked about church reform for almost four years, the council of Constance talked about church reform for about the same amount of time and Luther will talk and write about church reform until he did no longer believe that the church could be reformed.
But what is church reform. Or more specifically, what did the delegates in Constance mean when they debated church reform, why did they fail to implement much even though they held off electing a pope and the voting system was set up to favour of the national churches and against central papal authority.
All this we will discuss in this episode plus we will hear some angelic voices that made even the most hardnosed church politician kneel in prayer.
To listen on Spotify – click here
To listen on Apple Podcast – click here
To listen on YouTube – click here
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 173 – The Council of Constance Part 3 – the end of the schism, also episode 10 of season 9 The Reformation before the Reformation
We have talked about church reform for almost four years, the council of Constance talked about church reform for about the same amount of time and Luther will talk and write about church reform until he did no longer believe that the church could be reformed.
But what is church reform. Or more specifically, what did the delegates in Constance mean when they debated church reform, why did they fail to implement much even though they held off electing a pope and the voting system was set up to favour of the national churches and against central papal authority.
All this we will discuss in this episode plus we will hear some angelic voices that made even the most hardnosed church politician kneel in prayer.
Before we start the usual thank yous. I will be brief because Christmas is coming up and all you need to do is tell your oved ones what you really, really want is two things, first an advertising free podcast and second, another year without Dirk singing Oh Tannenbaum. And we should all be eternally grateful to William M. , Jen, Philipp H., Tom C., Linus di P. and Beau W. who are so valiantly protecting us against these evils.
And with that, back to the show
The Stalemate at Constance: Why the Council Delayed Electing a Pope
Last week we talked about what the 20 to 30,000 delegates at the General council of the church at Constance did once they realised they would be marooned in cramped bedsits in a small German town for the foreseeable future. The week before we discussed why they had come there in the first place, and this week we will discuss why they stayed there for so long.
Because that seems at first glance unnecessary. The council’s work could have wrapped up quickly, with delegates returning home after having resolved the most pressing disputes. Just look at the timeline.
The council started in November 1414 and 10 months later by the end September 1415 one of the competing popes was deposed, another one had retired and the third one had made clear he would never resign. The natural next step would the have been to depose the last holdout and then elect a new pope, one that would be universally recognised and bring the Great Western Schism to its much desired end. But they did not do that before late autumn 1417, more than 2 years after the failed meeting of Perpignan.
For all these two years, there was no widely recognised pope. So why leave the church without a lead? This was still the Middle Ages and leaving a major centre of power, a kingdom, a principality or major bishopric without its head was a deeply worrying state of affairs. These hierarchical institutions needed someone at the top who made all the decisions, otherwise they simply did not work.
If the General Council left the Holy Mother church rudderless for such a long time, they needed a good reason to do that, and that reason was that they wanted to kick off a long overdue reform of the church.
Not that I am counting, but the word reform has appeared 322 times in the show so far and even that barely does justice to its importance. It is not unreasonable to say that for the five hundred years before 1400, whoever controlled the process of church reform controlled western Europe.
From Charlemagne to Henry III it was the emperors who led efforts to bring the church closer to the apostolic ideal. The people expected their anointed ruler not just to provide peace and justice but also to ensure they would receive instruction and sacraments from competent and viable intermediaries.
And the early emperors did exactly that. Charlemagne required the clergy to be literate and started a whole industry of book production. Otto III displayed piety on a level normally reserved to actual saints and Henry II cleaned up misbehaviour in monasteries. And these efforts converted into tangible political power in two ways.
For one was the church infrastructure became the main pillar of imperial administration, known as the Imperial church system. And the other was simply the prestige and authority that came with the role as the vicar of Christ, a title they – by the way- used for themselves before the popes nicked it.
And we have seen what happened once the lead in church reform shifted to the medieval reform popes, the Leo IXs and Gregory VIIs. Imperial power was eroded and eventually wiped out as the papacy established itself as the supreme moral authority in Christendom and then leveraged the internal tensions in the empire and the conflict with the Italian communes into temporal power, becoming the Imperial Papacy of Innocent III in the process..
And then we saw the swing back when the papacy moved to Avignon and focused less on dispensing divine grace and more on collecting cold hard cash. Abandoning even the pretense of following in the footsteps of the apostles and replacing it with aggressive money-grabbing and interference in the local church, eroded the pope’s moral authority.
Once nobody expected the papal administration to sort things out any more, emperor Ludwig the Bavarian could safely ignore excommunications and papal interdicts raining down from Avignon. He passed the declaration of Rhense which paved the way for full emancipation from papal oversight that was finally achieved through the Golden Bull of 1356. Episodes 150, 151 and 160 if you want to double check.
Before you think caring so much about the afterlife and the state of the church was just one of those weird medieval things, remember that christianity was not just core to the culture of the times, it was the culture. Living in a world dominated by culture wars as we do now, we should not be surprised that whoever leads the debate on the most important spiritual and cultural norms of a society was also in charge politically.
This long winded story will hopefully explain why there was no papal election for two years. Because as long as there was no pope, the sole authority in charge of church reform was the general council. And if control of church reform meant political control over western Europe, well, who would want to give that up.
The delegates at the council feared that, should they elect a pope, that pope would dissolve the council. And once the pope was back in control, he may or may not continue with the church reform, but would take credit for it either way.
So what areas of much needed reform did the delegates at Constance discuss?
In the HIgh Middle Ages when people talked about church reform they talked about how to make the clergy better intermediaries with the divine.That meant in particular how can we ensure that the vicar knew his bible and wasn’t just telling any old tale. And then it was important that whatever advice was issued from the pulpit was going to help in smoothing the way in the afterlife. And finally the performance of the sacraments had to be effective, the correct liturgy observed and the priest that performed it must not be tainted with sin to an extent that invalidated the act.
If these are the objectives, the important areas to address was first the recruitment of the clergy. It should be on merit and not on nepotism, or worse than that through bribery, the sin of simony. Then it was important that the priest who was selected was actually going to show up for the job rather than send an understudy whilst staying home and collecting the benefice. And third, there had to be standards of behaviour set and adhered to.
By the early 15th century, the church needed reform across all these dimensions.It is hard to say whether things were much worse than they had been in earlier periods but judging by tales in Chaucer and Boccaccio of monks living the high life and nuns seducing gardeners,at least by now things had deviated sharply for the asceticism of our old not quite friend of the podcast bernard of Clairvaux. And then we hear regularly about archbishops being elected as teenagers and Jan Hus himself admitted that hwt=at he hoped for was a benefice that would pay but not require him to go and do the actual job.
Did the council of constance address these issues? No, not really. They discussed simony in general terms and a ban on concubinage in a bit more detail. This proposed law stated that clergy including nuns and monks could be deprived of their benefices, aka their income, for a total of three months if they continue to openly live with a partner after having received a cessation notice. So that is not a ban on having sexual relations as such, just one on having a lasting attachment. And it required an official notice before the sanction was going to bite, i.e., no notice no salary cut.
What this is really about is to stop the clergy from procreating. Nothing to do with standards of morality but with land, money and power. If priests, bishops and popes had children, even if those were formally illegitimate, their father would still try to pave their way in the world, either into church benefices or temporal positions. And that could create a church aristocracy that would block the path for the second sons of the existing aristocrats. To say it plainly, if the archbishop of Mainz placed his son into pole position to succeed him, the second son of the margrave of Brandenburg could no longer become archbishop. And if he did not become archbishop, what would he do, he would fight his brother over the margraviate. And that would destroy the precarious equilibrium of the empire.
But what the second son of the margrave of Brandenburg gets up to in his bedchamber once he is archbishop – who cares. He never got the job for his piety in the first place.
If they did not discuss real church reform, what did they discuss?
The first complex of issues was about who controlled key appointments in the dioceses and abbeys. The Avignon popes had pulled more and more decision power into the curia. A process that had enraged local cathedral chapters who were used to select their bishops and abbots amongst themselves. They now found themselves saddled with external interlopers with good connections at the papal court.
The second huge topic was the question how much of the income of the local church was to be sent to Rome. In the preceding decades popes had come up with ever more elaborate provisions. For instance, if a seat was vacant, the income was going to Rome, once a new bishop was elected his first year income was going to Rome, additional general taxes were going to Rome. And the papal administration played this system for money. For example they would refused to appoint a successor, thereby extending the period when the seat was vacant, then once someone was appointed and had given up his first year salary, the pope would move him to another seat, creating one vacancy and another first salary obligation in one fell swoop. No wonder the local church grew exasperated and refused to obey, as it did in the german lands pretty much ever since Ludwig the Bavarian
And finally, there was the excessive use of excommunications and interdicts for political and sometimes simply for debt collecting purposes.
What do we conclude from that? Church reform at Constance was not about piety and helping the flock to ascend to heaven, but about controlling the church’s vast resources and political influence.
The delegates at the council were split on all these subjects. On the one hand you have the bishops and abbots representing the interests of the local church against the overbearing central papal administration. On the other side of the debate are the cardinals and the members of the curia, the lawyers and scribes that make up that self-same central administration and whose jobs are on the line.
The princes, the representatives of the European monarchs and the emperor Sigismund himself were backing up the local demands. They had used the weakness of the popes during the schism to establish national churches they could control and were somewhat independent from Rome. The French had already come quite far in the process as had some of the principalities, like for example Bohemia.
So, did any of these so-called church reforms get implemented? The answer to that is – very little. The council could not even pass the watered-down ban on concubinage, let alone any of the far-reaching constraints on papal power.
3. Establishing a constitutional papacy
This failure to pass any of the laws constraining papal authority was surprising given the unique voting system that had been established for the council of Constance.
Council decisions weren’t taken either on the basis of seniority, which would have given the cardinals the lead nor by headcount, which would have given the Italians a majority, but by nations. These nations were designed along the lines of the nations of the medieval universities, i.e., as a mixture of political significance, compass orientation and language.
There were in the end five nations. There was Italica, Gallicana, Germania which included Scandinavia, Poland, Lithauania, Croatia, Hungary and Bohemia, Anglica which was England, Scotland and Ireland and Iberica, which comprised the various Spanish kingdoms and Portugal.
Each of these nations had one vote and the cardinals in aggregate also had only one vote. Add to that that there wasn’t a pope yet, and the supporters of a powerful, centralised papal administration were very much on the back foot.
But still the great decentralisation of the church did not happen. It seems the nations could not agree on a joint position on any of the proposals above. The only thing they could agree on was that they, aka the General church council, should continue to be the supreme authority of the church.
They had made the first point in the decree Haec Sancta in the early days of the council when they moved on John XXIII. In this document the council declared that it derived its authority directly from Christ and was hence the supreme authority of the church able to overrule and even depose popes. And not just heretic popes, but any pope.
The next major decree came out closer to the end, in October 1417. There it stated that “frequent celebration of general councils is the best method of cultivating the vineyard of the Lord Almighty”. Specifically it stipulated that the next council should take place five years after the end of the Council of Constance and should be held in Pavia, the next one after that was to be scheduled five years later, with subsequent councils convened every 10 years. And to avoid the pope wriggling out of it, each subsequent council had to be called a month before the end of the previous one. If the pope refused to set a date or location by that time, the council itself would set such a date. And once a council is called it cannot be cancelled, only moved to a different location should there be war of pestilence.
These decrees turned the papacy from an absolutist monarchy into a constitutional one. The pope and his decisions were now subject to review by the general council and the council could constitute itself even if the pope were to refuse calling it.
Making monarchic rule dependent on the consent of the ruled was very much in line with the spirit of the times.I come back to Marsilius of Padua who had stated this as a god-given fact. And this is also the time when the parliament in england flexed its muscles, the princes from the teutonic knights to the counts of Wurttemberg had to recognise local assembly’s power over taxation and war.
But still, the pope was after all the supreme leader of Christendom and finding him tied down by a gathering of prelates and doctors of theology was a huge change. If that change was to become permanent the council needed to keep the lead in church reform, which as we know is the key to political power.
4. Finally electing a new pope in a demanding voting system
For now what mattered more was that the decree Frequens made this shift in the power balance between pope and council look settled. And since it was settled, the election of a pope would no longer threaten its position or its ability to initiate reform.
As a consequence the mood changed. WIth the risk of a return of the imperial papacy seemingly banished, the delegates could no longer close their ears to the rising chorus of voices demanding the return of the Pontifex Maximus. And maybe the delegates were dreaming of going home too.
By the autumn of 1417, three years after Baldassare Cossa and his umbrella had entered the city, the council agreed to proceed with the election of a new pope.
But what was the procedure for this election going to be? Traditionally a pope was elected by a qualifying two-thirds majority of the cardinals. But that is not the way the council nations would let things play out this time. If they had the right to depose a pope, then they should as well have the right to elect one.
This election was going to be by nations, not by number of cardinals. Which was a logistical challenge. Some of the nations had thousands of delegate members and there was no way they could all discuss and decide on a papal candidate. Electing a pope is difficult at the best of times,but venting the advantages or disadvantages of candidates in an open forum susceptible to interference by the mob was outright impossible. .
So it was decided that each nation was to select six members who would go and join the conclave, representing the main facets of their nation.
Let me give you the names of the 6 representatives of the Germanica Nation because it nicely illustrates how it worked:
There was the archbishop of Riga Johannes Wallenrode. He was a member of the Teutonic Order, had been bishop of Liege before and was originally from Franconia.
The next member was the archbishop of Gniesno, Nicolaus Traba, who led the Polish delegation. This was the delegation that had accused the Teutonic Knights of atrocities and heresy.
The third member was Bishop Simon de Dominici from Trogir in Dalmatia. I could not find out much about him, but given where his bishopric was, he was likely representing the interests of the kingdom of Hungary.
#4, Lambert del Sache was the prior of a Cluniac monastery in what is today Belgium and was a highly regarded theologian.
The fifth member, Konrad Koler von Soest was a professor at the University of Heidelberg and had been involved in the negotiations with Benedict XIII. He had aslo acted as a representative for the Elector Palatinate.
The sixth and last member was Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, a professor from the other recently founded university in the empire, the university of Vienna. He had been an envoy of the Habsburg duke Albrecht of Austria.
So a fairly mixed bag, linguistically, there were probably three who spoke Middle High German, two French, one Polish and one either Italian or Croatian. Politically they weren’t necessarily aligned, some like the archbishops of Riga and Gniesno were even direct political opponents, only one may be acting on behalf of emperor Sigismund, the rest had primary allegiances to other kings and princes.
Assuming these medieval nations represented the views of a specific monarch or country is inaccurate and anachronistic.They were a stepping stone to the concept of modern nationhood, but still a long way from the real thing.
So you have the six members of the nation who amongst themselves need to find a two thirds majority. Then all five nations and the cardinals have to agree not by majority, but unanimously on one candidate. That meant in practice that three voters inside one nation could veto any selection indefinitely. This voting system was extremely demanding, as had been shown by the inability of the council to pass meaningful church reform for two years.
With the complex voting process agreed, focus shifted to choosing an appropriate location for the conclave.
The cathedral where all previous council sessions had been held would not be suitable. A conclave needed privacy. Nobody outside was to know what was going on until the white smoke comes out. Nor should anyone be able to influence the voters with bribes or threats whilst the election was under way. A cathedral with huge windows and multiple entrances would never be completely sealed off. And finally there was a justifiable concern that we would get a rerun of the conclave of Viterbo that lasted from 1268 to 1271 and only ended when the roof of the papal palace was removed and the cardinals were reduced to bread and water. So they needed a place where the supply of food could be controlled.
That is why the conclave was moved from the cathedral to the newly constructed Kaufhaus, a large counting house. The Kaufhaus was both a storage facility and a space for foreign traders to present their wares. Its doors could be locked and windows shuttered so nobody could get in or out to smuggle food or information in or out.
The conclave began on November 8, 1417 when the 53 voters 23 cardinals and 30 representatives of the nations entered the Kaufhaus. After the first round of voting it was clear the pessimists had a point. Six names had been pulled out of the hat. Cardinal Oddone Colonna, the cardinal-bishops of Ostia, Saluzzo and of Venice, the bishops of Geneva and of Winchester.
The next day the list was down to four, still Oddone Colonna, the bishops of Ostia, Saluzzo and Geneva. Oddone Colonna was technically a good position with support across multiple nations, but consensus still seemed a long way away.
Meanwhile outside the Kaufhaus the people waited and prayed that the electors would choose someone who could be recognised by every nation and every monarch and that the schism would finally and permanently be over. Part of the prayer rituals was a boys’ choir that led a procession around the Kaufhaus singing hymns, in particular one, veni creator spiritus, Come oh Creator spirit. This ancient hymn was also sung at King Charles’ Coronation.
The sound of the boys singing passed through the walls and shuttered windows and had a huge impact on the electors. Many fell to their knees and prayed quietly. They thought they had heard angels sing, calling on them to come to a decision, quickly and unanimously. And so they did. Just minutes after the singing started the electors chose Oddone Colonna to become pope. The French nation who was most opposed to the election of an Italian gave in under the impact of the celestial voices and so did the remaining holdouts.
This story of the angels’ voices is confirmed by multiple sources, so is almost certainly true. And it makes sense. Just take into account the stress these electors were under. Apart from the cardinals, none of them had ever expected to have to make such a decision. They knew how much hinged on their choice. If they went for someone who would lose the support of one or other of the nations later on, the schism could return. Or if they chose a frail contender he could die soon after and be replaced by another piratical pope like Baldassare Cossa. Plus the isolation, dim lighting and unfamiliar surroundings, you can see why people heard angels.
5. Martin V: The unfulfilled promise of reform
The newly elected pope took the name Martin having been elected by divine intervention on the day of St. Martin. Choosing the name of a man famous for cutting his coat in half seems ironic for a pope tasked with uniting the Church—but what do I know about papal naming traditions?
And Pope Martin V did what the reform oriented council members had always feared. He passed some half-hearted reforms and signed concordats with some of the kingdoms present in Constance and then called the whole thing off.
He left the city on May 29, 1418 and began a 3 year long journey to Rome. This was a possession, a taking charge of the papal lands and authority that had not happened for a long time. He travelled down the Rhone valley and through northern Italy re-establishing the successor to St. Peter as the sole head of the church after a long absence.
Once arrived in the eternal city the focus of his pontificate lay more in regaining control of the papal states and the rebuilding of the city of Rome, the Lateran basilica and the Vatican palace, rather than in pushing church reform.
He did call a council as promised to Pavia, but moved it to Siena when plague broke out. That council again did not pass much in terms of reforms. In line with the decrees passed in Constance, Martin V called the next Council to take place in Basle. This time he was already quite reluctant to adhere to the rules laid down before his election.The council of Basel lasted for – depending on how you count it for 18 years from 1431 to 1449.
This was supposed to be the council that would finally bring about this long delayed reform of the church. It was to conclude the work that had begun in Constance.
But it wasn’t off to a good start. On the opening day there was only one delegate in the city. It took a few months and heavy marketing by the presiding cardinals to get the ball rolling. Once there was a quorum, the council did pass a few measures to reign in on misbehaving clergy, including the ban on concubinage.
But very quickly the political differences between council and pope took precedence over questions of spiritual and pastoral care. As you can imagine, the new pope, Eugene IV who had succeeded Martin V did not like the idea of the church as a constitutional monarchy. And in particular not if the council was actually going to pass the rules they actually wanted to pass, aka, cutting the papacy off from the money back in the bishoprics and abbeys.
We may or may not go into the back and forth of these debates at a later stage as it will impact Sigismund and the Hussites. But for this episode it is enough to point out that the relationship soured rapidly. Eugene IV asked the council to come to Florence, which some did and others refused. The refuseniks passed a number of ambitious reform decrees and then elected their own pope, a layman, the count of Savoy. This antipope who called himself Felix V lasted a few years and then stepped down. The Council of Basle finally in 1449.
With it the project to turn the church into a constitutional monarchy petered out. Councils are still the congregation of the faithful and formally above the pope. But it is now in the pope’s discretion whether or not to call one. And no pope calls a Council unless he is 100% certain of the outcome.
The other even more important outcome was that reform the church, and I mean a proper reform all about spirituality and pastoral care did not materialise, neither sponsored by the council nor pushed through by the papacy. Had constance or Basle succeeded in its ambition, Luther may not have had as much as 95 individual items to complain about and even if he did, he would not have had as successful a time of it as he ultimately did.
So, despite being the greatest gathering of minds in the Late Middle Ages, in its stated objectives the Council of Constance had been a failure. And in one very specific way it made things a lot worse for the catholic church.
And these most fateful decisions are the ones we will talk about next week, the convictions of Jan Hus and of Hieronymus of Prague that lead straight to the first Prague defenestration. I hope you will join us again.
In the meantime, if you want to rush up on the rise of the papacy from pornocracy to universal moral authority, go to episodes 28 to 32. And on the decline of the papacy, have a listen to episodes 150 and 151.
Now before I go, just a quick one. If you want to help the show to keep going, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time donation or sign up for a monthly contribution. Thank you all for listening and supporting the show.