been able to reaffirm his grip on affairs such as church taxation and investiture. Moreover, he lost many prerogatives and privileges. Yet he did resist pressure to settle in Germany or France, and in 1420 he definitely established the pontifical seat in the city where it historically belonged: Rome.
The pope not only had to restore his authority in European politics. He also had to reaffirm his control over Rome and the church.4 Through concessions, political manipulations, and the force of arms he managed to reestablish his dominion over the Papal States, which provided him with regular revenues. Within the church, however, he was confronted with problems that were more complicated. The period in Avignon had exposed the fact that, in spite of the biblical texts and the ensuing torrent of theological arguments, the papal plenitude of power could be curbed seriously by political force. Moreover, the aftermath had painfully shown that the papacy was not capable of solving its own problems; it needed the intervention of a general council and the support of secular rulers such as King Sigismund. Thus the one legitimate new pope, Martin V, had been elected by a special conclave set up by the general council. The participants of this conclave consisted not only of the customary cardinals, but also of representatives of the five national states that were involved. The implication was that, in order to solve the papal crisis, the general council had disrupted the traditional election procedure. Consequently, the new pope did not owe his position exclusively to the College of Cardinals, which had been the autonomous electing body since 1059. He now owed his position to the general council. Thus, he was no longer the supreme monarch of the church, but the main representative of the general council. It was now argued that Christ had delegated his power to bind and loose not just to Saint Peter, following Matthew 16, but to the community of believers who were represented by the general council. This advanced view on the highest authority in the church was based on Matthew 18:15–18, where Christ entrusts the leadership over his believers to all of his apostles.
The general relief and happiness about the solution of the papal crisis were so strong that it was hardly noticed that none of the subsequent popes ever formally confirmed the decrees of the Council of Constance. Conciliar enthusiasm had forced a solution, but in the following years it lost most of its momentum. The various European monarchs were suspicious about its basically democratic, bottom-up character, which they considered a potential threat to their own positions. From now on, they deemed it better to deal again with the pope and not the general council. Successive popes duly summoned new councils on the dates that had been appointed at Constance, but the scant interest from both the papacy itself and the various monarchs turned these councils into irrelevant meetings that adopted increasingly extreme, unrealistic positions. In 1439, the general council was divided over negotiations between the pope and the Byzantine emperor about a reunion of the Western and Eastern Church. One part of the council followed Pope Eugenius IV in concluding this pact, the results of which were to be short-lived (Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire would fall to the Turks in 1453). The other part continued its attempts to reform the church and proceeded to replace the legitimate Pope Eugenius IV with the antipope Felix V (1439–49; d. 1451).
Even though many long-standing problems and issues remained unsettled, the papacy had apparently regained some of its respect and reemerged as an important player on the European stage. It was again dealing with monarchs and other political leaders, but its recognition and support came at a heavy price: the concession of much of its control over national and local church affairs. In reality, the papacy was increasingly becoming an Italian affair, immersed in the obscure plotting and scheming of local politics, and its importance hardly extended beyond the Alps. The College of Cardinals was almost exclusively Italian, all but guaranteeing that the popes it elected would be Italian as well. Most of its members were deeply involved in domestic politics and had the interests of their own families as high on their agenda as the good of the church, if not higher.
Yet with its international respect apparently regained and the general council split, the papacy dared to adopt a tougher stance and challenge the council’s legitimacy. The union with the Eastern Church in 1439 gave the pope an opportunity to boost his claims of primacy and plenary power. (The Eastern Church, in need of help against the Turkish threat, let these assertions pass.) When the act of union was promulgated at the council of Florence, Pope Eugenius IV declared that “we define the Holy Apostolic See and the Roman Pontiff to hold the primacy over the whole world, and that the Roman Pontiff is the successor of blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and that he is the true Vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christians; and to him in blessed Peter has been delivered by our Lord, Jesus Christ, the full power of feeding, ruling, and governing the universal Church.”5 The pope’s position seemed even stronger in 1449, when the antipope Felix V abdicated and his supporters joined the “legitimate” pope in Rome, Nicholas V. The latter wisely adopted the ex-schismatics into his camp and bestowed a cardinal’s hat on the ex-antipope and some of his followers. He also came to good terms with the German King Frederick III, whom he crowned emperor in 1452, in the last ceremony of this kind to take place in Rome. The circumstances now seemed right to bolster again the primacy of the papacy and curb the influence of the council. The strategy followed two routes: explaining and justifying the pope’s primacy, and questioning the legitimacy of the Council of Constance and the series of councils that followed. A stream of writings began to flow, often springing from sources in or near the Roman curia, that passionately confirmed the papal primacy and its plenitude of power.6 Their reasoning usually started with Christ’s words to Saint Peter and repeated all the arguments that had been developed over the centuries. There was one issue that resisted smooth integration into this blueprint: the content and validity of two decrees adopted by the Council of Constance. Called Haec Sancta and Frequens, they respectively assert that the pope is obliged to obey the general council and lay down a method to ensure its gathering at regular intervals, even if this goes against the pope’s wishes. These decrees, however, had been adopted under circumstances that left room for some serious questions. To begin with, they had been embraced by a council that was first convened by the Pisan Pope John XXIII and then by the Roman Pope Gregory XII. Were these popes to be considered legitimate? Secondly, at which stage of the council, and under which pope, were these decrees actually adopted, and what did that mean for their validity? (The answers, of course, depend on which pope one wishes to consider as legitimate.) Thirdly, how much authority does a council have if its decrees are not confirmed by the pope? (It should be remembered that the papacy never formally confirmed the decrees of the Council of Constance.) The popes cleverly used this murky area of confusion, uncertainty, and personal opinions to reaffirm their authority and move the council into a subordinate position, claiming that they alone had the authority to convoke, transfer, and conclude a council, preside and direct its deliberations, and confirm its acts. In the 1460 bull Execrabilis, Pope Pius II forbade appeals to the general council against papal decisions and declared that any appellant would be excommunicated. Accordingly, in 1476 Pope Sixtus IV told the French King Louis XII, who threatened to appeal to a general council, that “the authority to will or not to will a general council is fixed solely in the Roman pontiff.”7 In 1478 he took the next step and annulled the decrees of the Council of Constance.
An important weapon in the papacy’s struggle to regain its full authority was propaganda, including not only the stream of writings that zealously advocated the pope’s primacy and plenitude of power, but also sculpture and paintings. The pair of bronze doors of the central porch of Saint Peter’s in Rome are an early but telling example (fig. 1).8 They were commissioned by Martin V’s successor, Pope Eugenius IV, who added to the papacy’s already enormous problems with his impulsive character and lack of political competence. Within a year after his election in 1431, he dissolved the Council of Basel, which had been summoned by Martin V. In 1433, however, he had to back down and acknowledge its legitimacy. The reunion with the Eastern Church in 1439 and its recognition of papal primacy gave a new boost to his authority, but could not prevent a group of unhappy council members from electing an antipope, Felix V. Eugenius was also confronted with huge problems in the city of Rome. In 1434, he was even forced to escape secretly, disguised as a monk, and was not able to return until 1443. When Antonio Averlino (called Filarete) finally finished the bronze doors in 1445, twelve years after he had been commissioned to make
