The Renaissance Papacy 1400-1600 9004449566, 9789004449565

Table of contents :
Front Cover
‎Half-Title Page
‎Series Title Page
‎Title Page
‎Copyright Page
‎Contents
‎Preface
‎Acknowledgments
‎Figures and Maps
‎Notes on Contributors
‎List of Renaissance Popes, 1400–1600
‎Chapter 1. Renaissance Papacy (Minnich)
‎Chapter 2. Ecclesiologies: Popes, Cardinals, and Councils (Oakley)
‎Chapter 3. Renaissance Papal Court and Curia (Minnich)
‎Chapter 4. The Papal States (Shaw)
‎Chapter 5. Rome: Urban Government, Society, Economy, Religion (Esposito)
‎Chapter 6. Art and the Papacy (Rowland)
‎Chapter 7. Relations with National States: 1400–1600 (Giordano)
‎Chapter 8. The Papacy and the Crusade, 1400–1600 (Meserve)
‎Chapter 9. The Renaissance Papacy and Missions outside Europe (Colombo)
‎Chapter 10. The Renaissance Papacy and Eastern Christianity: Greek and Slavic (Avvakumov and Yost)
‎Chapter 11a. Relations between the Renaissance Papacy and the Oriental Churches: Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, and Ethiopian (Yost)
‎Chapter 11b. Relations between the Renaissance Papacy and the Oriental Churches: The Syriac Churches (Minnich)
‎Chapter 12. The Papacy and Heresy (Borromeo)
‎Chapter 13. Papacy and the Protestant Reformation (Borromeo)
‎Chapter 14. Reform and the Renaissance Popes (O’Malley)
‎Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

The Renaissance Papacy 1400–1600

The Renaissance Society of America texts and studies series

Editor-in-Chief Eric M. MacPhail (Indiana University)

Editorial Board Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Ingrid De Smet (University of Warwick) Paul Grendler, Emeritus (University of Toronto) James Hankins (Harvard University) Gerhild Scholz-Williams (Washington University in St. Louis)

volume 22

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rsa

The Renaissance Papacy 1400–1600 Edited by

Nelson H. Minnich

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Titian, Pope Paul iii with his Grandsons Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Castro, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 1545–1546. Oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024061873

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 2212-3091 isbn 978-90-04-44956-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-71322-2 (e-book) doi 10.1163/9789004713222 Copyright 2025 by Nelson Minnich. Published by Koninklijke Brill bv, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 jc Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill bv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill bv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill bv via brill.com or copyright.com. For more information: [email protected]. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To the Society of Jesus Founded by the Papacy during the Renaissance and To Pope Francis, the First Jesuit Pope and To the Memory of Father John W. O’Malley, s.j. Eminent Historian of the Renaissance Church

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Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments x List of Figures and Maps xi Notes on Contributors xiii List of Renaissance Popes, 1400–1600 xv 1

Renaissance Papacy 1 Nelson H. Minnich

2

Ecclesiologies: Popes, Cardinals, and Councils Francis A. Oakley

3

Renaissance Papal Court and Curia Nelson H. Minnich

4

The Papal States 78 Christine Shaw

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Rome: Urban Government, Society, Economy, Religion Anna Esposito

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Art and the Papacy 128 Ingrid D. Rowland

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Relations with National States: 1400–1600 Silvano Giordano

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The Papacy and the Crusade, 1400–1600 Margaret Meserve

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The Renaissance Papacy and Missions outside Europe Emanuele Colombo

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The Renaissance Papacy and Eastern Christianity: Greek and Slavic 259 Yury P. Avvakumov and Charles C. Yost

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101

184

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11a Relations between the Renaissance Papacy and the Oriental Churches: Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, and Ethiopian 287 Charles C. Yost 11b Relations between the Renaissance Papacy and the Oriental Churches: The Syriac Churches 303 Nelson H. Minnich 12

The Papacy and Heresy 314 Agostino G. Borromeo†

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The Papacy and the Protestant Reformation Agostino G. Borromeo†

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Reform and the Renaissance Popes John W. O’Malley, s.j.† Index

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Preface What a saga! Back in 2015, Dr. Craig Kallendorf approached me about editing a volume for the Renaissance Texts and Studies Series, to be titled Companion to the Renaissance Papacy. I drew up a proposal that was approved by the Renaissance Society of America’s editorial board and I proceeded to commission leading scholars to write the various chapters. The goal was to publish the volume in 2018. While many contributors submitted their essays on time, some faced extenuating circumstances that caused delays or made it impossible for them to submit their chapters. Consequently, I authored a couple of the chapters myself to ensure the project remained on schedule. I am most grateful to all—the editors at rsa and Brill, and the contributors to the volume—for their extraordinary patience. It has finally been rewarded. May this volume be a worthy contribution to the study of the Renaissance papacy.

Acknowledgments The editor is most grateful to the editors at Brill, Arjan van Dijk and Ivo Romein, for their remarkable patience, willingness to make accommodations as problems emerged, and funding the translations. Professor L.R. Poos graciously and expertly drew the maps of the Papal States and City of Rome. Dr. Tyler Sampson expertly translated the essays of Professors Anna Esposito and Agostino Borromeo, while Mr. Jonathan R. Gaworski similarly translated the essay of Professor Silvano Giordano. Mr. Benjamin Weiskircher provided skillful assistance in compiling the Index. Professor Yury Avvakumov graciously provided some bibliographical references for the essay on the Syriac churches. Professor Paul F. Grendler generously offered helpful suggestions for revising the first chapter. Anonymous reviewers also kindly provided useful assistance.

Figures and Maps Figures 1 2

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6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Pietro Vassalletto, Sphinx. Lateran cloister. Marble. Photo: Lars Berggren. 129 Roman School: Pope Boniface viii Proclaiming the First Jubilee from the Lateran Loggia. Formerly attributed to Giotto di Bondone (1266–1336). Fresco. Rome, San Giovanni in Laterano. Scala/Art Resource, NY. 131 Donatello and Michelozzo, Tomb of Antipope John xxiii, 1420’s. Marble. Baptistery, Florence. agefotostock/Alamy Stock Photo. 132 Masolino da Panicale, The Founding of Santa Maria Maggiore (Colonna Altarpiece), 1423–1428, originally Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. Tempera on gold on wood panel. Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. prisma archivo/Alamy Stock Photo. 136 Francesco Borromini, The walls of the Lateran nave. Drawing c. 1648. Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Dietmar Katz/Art Resource, NY. 138 Antonio di Pietro Averlino, called “Filarete”, Bronze doors to St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Scala/Art Resource, NY. 141 Fra Angelico, The Consecration of St. Lawrence as Deacon, Vatican, Cappella Niccolina. Fresco. 145 Melozzo da Forlì, Pope Sixtus iv Charges Bartolommeo Platina with the Administration of the Vatican Library, 1477. Fresco. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 149 Sandro Botticelli, The Temptation of Christ. 1481–1482. Fresco. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. hip/Art Resource, NY. 152 Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Tomb of Sixtus iv. 1484–1493. Bronze. Museum of the Treasury, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Scala/Art Resource, NY. 153 Pinturicchio, St. Catherine disputing the elders of Alexandria, 1492–1494. Fresco. Borgia Apartments, Vatican Palace. Scala/Art Resource, NY. 157 Pinturicchio, Resurrection, detail of indigenous people, 1492–1494. Fresco. Borgia Apartments Vatican Palace. Musei Vaticani. 160 Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–1512. Fresco. Michele Falzone/Alamy Stock Photo. 162 Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509–1511. Fresco. Vatican Palace. painting/Alamy Stock Photo. 164 Donato Bramante, crossing of St. Peter’s Basilica (wide angle view), designed in 1506. Paul Rushton/Alamy Stock Photo. 165

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Peter van Aelst, on a design by Raphael, St. Paul Preaching to the Athenians. 1515–1521. Tapestry. Pinacoteca, Vatican Museums. Scala/Art Resource, NY. 166 Raphael and workshop, Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 1524. Fresco. Sala di Costantino, Vatican Palace. Author’s photo. 168 Michelangelo, Last Judgment, 1536–1541. Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace. World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo. 171 Michelangelo, Moses, 1513–1515. Marble. San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. prisma archivo/Alamy Stock Photo. 173 Titian, Pope Paul iii with his Grandsons Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Castro, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. 1545–1546. Oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 174 Pirro Ligorio, Casino of Pius iv, Vatican Gardens. Zoonar GmBH/Alamy Stock Photo. 177 Giorgio Vasari, The Battle of Lepanto, 1572–1573. Fresco. Sala Regia, Vatican Palace. Scala/Art Resource, NY. 179 Ignazio Danti, Panorama of Venice, from the Hall of Maps, Vatican Palace. 1580–1582. Fresco. Scala/Art Resource, NY. 181 Cesare Nebbia and Giovanni Guerra, Salone Sistino. 1589. Fresco. Vatican Library. Vatican 2008/Alamy Stock Photo. 182

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21 22 23 24

Maps 1 2 3 4

Giovanni Maggi, New Description of the City of Rome (1600 Jubilee). Courtesy of the University of Minnesota. 5 Map of the Papal States in the Renaissance. By L.R. Poos. 80 Map of the City of Rome in the Renaissance. By L.R. Poos. 106 Map of the Center of the City of Rome in the Renaissance. By L.R. Poos. 107

Notes on Contributors Avvrakumov, Yury P. a Russian priest expert on the history of Latin-Byzantine and Latin-Slavic relations in the medieval and early modern periods, an associate professor in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. †Borromeo, Agostino G. worked on early modern Italian and Spanish Catholicism, the papacy, and inquisitions; retired as a professor from the Sapienza University in Rome, died in 2024. Colombo, Emanuele studies global Catholicism in the early modern period, professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, and Research Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies (Boston College). Esposito, Anna a specialist on the religious culture of Rome, working notably on confraternities, women, and Jews, a retired associate professor of medieval history in the Department of History, Culture, Religions of the University of Rome La Sapienza, Giordano, Silvano a Discalced Carmelite priest and lecturer in Early Modern History in the Faculty of History and Cultural Heritage of the Church at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Meserve, Margaret an expert on crusades, she is an associate professor of History at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Minnich, Nelson H. works on early modern councils, the papacy, and Christan humanism, a professor of Church History and History at The Catholic University of America in Washington, Oakley, Francis A. scholar of late medieval and early modern political and religious thought, the former President of Williams College in Massachusets

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†O’Malley, John W. prolific writer on Renaissance religious culture, church councils, and the Society of Jesus, a Jesuit priest and former professor at Georgetown University in Washington, died in 2022. Rowland, Ingrid an expert on Renaissance culture, art, and architecture, a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture teaching at its Rome school. Shaw, Christine a scholar of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy, she has been a researcher and editor at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford; she is now retired. Yost, Charles an assistant professor of Medieval and Eastern Christian History in the History Department at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

List of Renaissance Popes, 1400–1600 During the Great Western Schism: Roman Obedience: – Boniface ix (1389–1404) Pietro Tomacelli – Innocent vii (1404–1406) Cosimo Gentile de’ Migliorati – Gregory xii (1406–1415) Angelo Correr—resigned Avigonese Obedience: – Benedict xiii (1394–1417) Pedro de Luna—deposed Pisan Obedience: – Alexander v (1409–1410) Pietro Philarghi, ofm – John xxiii (1410–1415) Baldassare Cossa—deposed Restored Unified Papacy: – Martin v (1417–1431) Oddone Colonna – Eugenius iv (1431–1447) Gabriele Condulmaro, Aug. Can. Baslean Schism (1439–1449): – Felix v (1439–1449) Amadeus viii of Savoy—resigned Roman Line Continued: – Nicholas v (1447–1455) Tommaso Parentucelli – Calixtus iii (1455–1458) Alfonso de Borja – Pius ii (1458–1464) Enea Silvio Piccolomini – Paul ii (1464–1471) Pietro Barbo – Sixtus iv (1471–1484) Francesco della Rovere, ofm – Innocent viii (1484–1492) Giovanni Battista Cibò – Alexander vi (1492–1503) Rodrigo de Borja y Borja – Pius iii (1503) Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini – Julius ii (1503–1513) Giuliano della Rovere – Leo x (1513–1521) Giovanni Damaso Romolo de’Medici – Adrian vi (1522–1523) Adrian Florenzoon Dedal – Clement vii (1523–1534) Giulio de’ Medici, OStJohnHier. – Paul iii (1534–1549) Alessandro Farnese – Julius iii (1550–1555) Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte – Marcello ii (1555) Marcello Cervini – Paul iv (1555–1559) Giampietro Carafa – Pius iv (1559–1565) Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici – Pius v (1566–1572) Antonio Ghislieri, op – Gregory xiii (1572–1585) Ugo Boncompagni

xvi – – – – –

list of renaissance popes, 1400–1600

Sixtus v (1585–1590) Felici Peretti, ofm Urban vii (1590) Giambattista Castagna Gregory xiv (1590–1591) Niccolò Sfondrati Innocent ix (1591) Giovanni Antonio Fachinetti Clement viii (1592–1605) Ippolito Aldobrandini

chapter 1

Renaissance Papacy Nelson H. Minnich

Because the papacy is such an ancient institution, numerous historians have written about it using many different approaches. The Liber pontificalis, a chronological history of individual papacies, dates from at least the eighth century. It has been revised over the centuries to include new pontiffs. In the Renaissance, it was further revised by Bartolomeo Sacchi (Platina, 1421– 1481) to include accounts of recent pontiffs (Vitae pontificum) and then again by Onofrio Panvinio, oesa (1530–1568), Antonio Ciccarelli (d. 1599), Giovanni Stringa (fl. 1601), Abraamo Bzowski, op (1567–1637), and still others, who brought it up to the pontificate of Innocent xi (1676–1689).1 Another collection was titled Vitae, et res gestae pontificum romanorum et s.r.e. Cardinalium ab initio nascentis ecclesiae usque ad Clementem ix. p.o.m. It was based

1 On the origins of the work, see Françoise Monfrin, “Liber Pontificalis,” The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, 3 vols. ed. Philippe Levillain (French ed. Paris: Fayard, 1994) and John W. O’Malley (English ed., New York: Routledge, 2002), ii, 941–943 and Rosamond McKetterick, Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis (Cambridge, 2020); on Platina, see Stefan Bauer, The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s ‘Lives of the Popes’ in the Sixteenth Century (Turnhout, 2017); other collections: and Francesco Petrarca and Niccolò Garanta, Chronica de le vite de pontefici et imperadori romani (Venice: Per Marchio Sessa, 1534), on Panvinio, see Stefan Bauer, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform [Oxford-Warburg Studies] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) and the expansion of his collection Vitae romanorum pontificum a D. Petro usque ad Clementem viii (Liège: Ex officina Henrici Houij, 1597), by Platina (took the series up to Paul ii), Onofrio Panvinio, oesa (continued it from Sixtus iv to Pius v), Antonio Cicarelli (Gregory xiii to Gregory xiv), Giovanni Stringa (Clement viii), Bartolomeo Dionigi (Leo xi), and Abraamo Bzouio, op (Paul v). Jean Baptiste de Glen, oesa (c. 1552–1613) republished the Vitae with images of popes inserted in his Liège: ex officina Henrici Hovii, 1597 edition. Others who updated, revised, and expanded this collection of papal lives include: Antonio Bagatta, Domenico Belli, Giovanni Pietro Brigonci, Girolamo Brusoni, Giovanni Battista Cavalieri, Jean Baptiste de Glen, Lauro Testa, Francesco Tomasuccio, and still others. For other collections of lives of popes, see: Marin Barleti (1450–1512), Compendium vitarum summorum pontificum usque ad Marcellum ii (Romae: Apud Vincentium Lucrinum, 1555)—Barleti end with the pontificate of Julius ii (p. 105), someone else added popes up to Marcellus ii (pp. 106–108); Jean Papire Masson (1544–1611), Libri sex de episcopis urbis, qui Romanam Ecclesiam rexerunt, rebusque gestis eorum … (Paris: Apud Sebastianum Nivellium, 1586) that ends with the pontificate of Gregory xiii.

© Nelson H. Minnich, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_002

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on a manuscript left by Alfonso Chacón, op (1530–1599) and published by his nephew in Rome by the press of S. Paolino in 1601. The manuscript, based chiefly on the Liber pontificalis, was continually revised and updated: Francisco Morales Cabrera (1564–1616) added the pontificates from Alexander vi (1492–1503) to Clement viii (1592–1605). In 1630, the collection, now published by the Vatican, was brought up to Urban viii (1623–1644) with the assistance of Andrea Vittorelli (1580–1653), Gerolamo Aleandro (1574–1629), Ferdinando Ughelli (1594–1670), and Luke Wadding (1588–1657). Agostino Oldoini (1612– 1683) in 1677 brought the collection up to Clement ix (1667–1669); and Mario Guarnacci (1701–1785) drew it up to the pontificate of Clement xii (1730–1740), publishing his collection in Rome in 1751 by the press of Venanzio Monaldini.2 In modern times, the Renaissance papacy has been the subject of numerous studies beginning with the father of modern history, the Protestant Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and his Die römischen Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert [The Popes of Rome, Their Church and State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries] (3 vols., 1836). This was followed by the five volumes of the Anglican divine Mandell Creighton (1843– 1901), A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation (1882–1894), which studied the papacy from the time of the Great Western Schism to the Sack of Rome (1378–1527). The Roman Catholic Ludwig von Pastor (1854–1928) tackled the topic of the early modern papacy in a hefty sixteen-volume series, Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters [History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages] (1886–1933; English trans. 40 vols., 1891– 1953). The first eleven German volumes took the story up to Clement viii (1592– 1605). Later historians were not so ambitious and concentrated their efforts on individual popes or the issues they confronted. More recent papal historians have focused on such themes as papal pietas (taking care of relatives and clients), cultural patronage, ceremonies, printing propaganda, and less so on current debates about race and slavery that are, nonetheless, treated in the chapter on missions.3 The steady stream of scholarly studies on the Renais2 For Chaçon’s collection, Vitae, et res gestae pontificum romanorum et s.r.e. Cardinalium ab initio nascentis ecclesiae usque ad Clementem ix. p.o.m., Alphonsi Ciaconii Ordinis Praedicatorum & aliorum opera descriptae (Rome, 1601), see Silvia Grassi Fiorentino, “Chacón (Ciaconius), Alonso (Alfonso),”Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 24 (1980), 352–356, here 354–355. 3 See, for example, A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, eds. Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, [Brill’s Companions to European History, 17], (Leiden: Brill, 2019); See, for example, on papal nepotism, see Wolfgang Reinhard, Papstfinanz und Nepotismus unter Paul v. (1605–1621) [Studien und Quellen zur Struktur und zu quantitativen Aspekten des päpstlichen Herrschaftssystems, 1] (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1974); on papal ceremonies, L’oeuvre de Patrizi Piccolomini ou le cérémonial papal de la première

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sance papacy is chronicled in the annual bibliography of the Archivum Historiae Pontificiae. Surveys of the recent scholarship on significant themes related to the Renaissance papacy are found in the following pages. There are many ways of viewing the papacy during the Renaissance period, depending on the lens used. One of the classic ways, proposed by Hubert Jedin (1900–1980), focused on the theme of reform and saw the popes initially preoccupied with other pressing concerns and not embracing the need for reform until pressured by the Protestant revolt spreading from Germany. The papacy’s chief response was the Council of Trent that issued important reform decrees whose implementation the popes oversaw. From this German perspective, the overarching issue confronting the papacy was the need for reform.4 While it became a central concern of the popes, they had many other challenges also to meet—and they did so with significant success. Various factors determined the timeframe assigned to this volume. The series editors wanted a volume that would bridge the gap between the Medieval and Baroque / Early Modern periods. John O’Malley has surveyed the various nomenclatures that can be assigned to this period: Catholic or CounterReformation, Early Modern, and so forth, depending on which aspect is emphasized. The terms containing the word “Reformation” ignore the other concerns of the papacy, such as resisting Muslim advances, spreading Christianity to the pagan world, and reuniting with Eastern Christians.5 “Early Modern” is the Renaissance, 2 vols., ed. Marc Dykmans [Studi e testi, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 293– 294] (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1980–1982); Niels Krogh Rasmussen, “Maiestas Pontificia: A liturgical reading of Etienne Dupérac’s engraving of the Capella Sixtina from 1578,” Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, Bd. 12 (1983), 109–148; Nelson H. Minnich, “Rite Convocare ac Congregare Procedereque: The Struggle Between the Councils of Pisa-MilanAsti-Lyon and Lateran v,” in his Councils of the Catholic Reformation: Pisa i (1409) to Trent (1546–1563) [Collected Studies Series cs890] (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2008), ix, 1– 54; and Jennifer Mara deSilva’s two chapters in the her edited volume The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World Studies and Sources (Farnham /Burlington: Ashgate, 2015) and her The Office of Ceremonies and Advancement in Curial Rome, 1466–1528 (Leiden: Brill, 2022); on papal printing, see: Paolo Sachet, Publishing for the Popes: The Roman Curia and the Use of Printing (1527–1555). (Leiden / Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2020) and Margaret Meserve, Papal Bull: Print, Politics and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). 4 Hubert Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation. Ein Versuch zur Klärung der Begriffe nebst einer Jubiläumsbetrachtung über das Trienter Konzil (Lucerne: Josef Stocker, 1946); Paolo Prodi further elaborated on this scheme in his “Riforma cattolica e controriforma,” in: Nuove Questioni di Storia Moderna, 2 vols., ed. Luigi Buferetti (Milano: Marzorati Editore, 1964), i, 357–418, he treats the distinction between Renaissance and Baroque on 418, n. 8. 5 John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cam-

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most neutral term. However, it overlaps with the period 1600 to 1800, which was very different because the papacy had to deal with absolutist monarchies and the French Revolution. Such noted historians as Jules Michelet (1798– 1874), Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), Georg Voigt (1827–1891), and their illustrious twentieth-century successors such as Hans Baron (1900–1988) and Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999) assign the name “Renaissance” to the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and the term is still used today. Humanism came to dominate the cultural world of letters and education, while a similar rebirth of ancient forms was experienced in the area of the arts. Although not central to negotiations with Eastern Christians or missionary efforts, these emissaries of the popes and Iberian kings, especially Jesuits, often brought a Renaissance mentality with them. Renaissance culture predominated during this period, in Rome and elsewhere.6 In addition, “Renaissance” avoids the problems related to other nomenclatures. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how the popes restored and transformed the papacy in the Renaissance era by meeting the challenges confronting them with various degrees of success. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the papacy was in shambles. Three men with differing allegiances laid claim to the papal tiara. Rebellious cardinals had created the Great Western Schism. Papal authority reached its nadir when the Council of Constance (1414– 1418) decreed in Haec sancta (1415) that popes must obey the council in matters of faith, unity, and reform. The city of Rome was reduced to a medieval market town of 17,000 inhabitants squeezed in the bend of the Tiber River, while cattle grazed in the Roman Forum and elsewhere in the once capital city of Western Europe. Rival barons fought over control of the city. Buildings, roads, and aqueducts were in desperate need of repair. The walls of the ancient Constantinian Basilica of St. Peter were in danger of collapsing. Rival feudal aristocracies ruled the countryside, its roads were the arenas of bandits. Rebellious nobles controlled the cities and lands of the Papal States. Taxes and tribute went unpaid and the papal treasury bordered on empty. Italian states such as Florence, Milan, Naples, and the expansionistic Venetian Republic each tried to take advantage of papal weaknesses to annex cities and lands to add to their territories. On the other side of the Adriatic Sea, the Ottoman Turks were conquering Christian kingdoms in the Balkans. Western leaders ignored papal calls for a crusade and concentrated their military might on disputed imperial elections, a Hundred Years War, and the Reconquista in Iberia. The nation of Bohemia bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 130–134 (Catholic and Counter Reformations), 140–143 (Early Modern as “bland”). 6 E.g., Joanne M. Ferraro. The Renaissance and the Wider World (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

map 1

Giovanni Maggi, New Description of the City of Rome (1600 Jubilee) courtesy of the university of minnesota

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went into heresy and papal efforts to use military means to suppress the Hussites repeatedly ended in stunning defeats.7 By the end of the sixteenth century, the papacy was transformed. Within Catholicism, the authority of the pope on spiritual matters was widely acknowledged. The decrees of the councils of Florence (1439), Lateran v (1516), and Trent (1563) had effectively given the pope control of councils. Cardinals were no longer “barons” but dutiful bureaucrats in consultative congregations. The Roman Curia was reorganized and reformed. The city of Rome numbered 100,000 inhabitants and was transformed into a modern city with major thoroughfares, splendid palaces in classical style, and impressive churches and basilicas, the most important being the new St. Peter’s with its cupola closed. Aqueducts with their terminal fountains brought fresh water that helped to settle previously deserted sections of the city. Popes were firmly in control of the municipal bureaucracy. Outside the city, law and order reigned. Papal governors managed the Papal States, and the former duchy of Ferrara came under direct papal rule in 1597. Revenues from these lands now constituted almost 80% of the papal budget. The papal treasury held huge reserves. The popes were on good terms with the major Catholic powers and had brought peace between Spain and France with the Treaty of Vervins (1598). The advance of Protestantism came to a halt in France, the Empire, and Poland, with Catholicism restored in various places. Millions of Greek-rite Ruthenians joined the Church of Rome (1595). Papal assistance had helped to check the Turks at Malta and Lepanto and slow their advances into Eastern Europe. The jubilee year of 1600 brought hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and tourists to Rome, the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, where the majesty and authority of the successor of St. Peter was on display, a papacy restored.8 Although not all problems and con7 Marco Pellegrini, Il papato nel Rinascimento [Universale Paperbacks Il Mulino, 594] (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010); Sandro Carocci, Vassalli del papa: potere pontificio, aristocrazie e città nello Stato della Chiesa, xii–xv sec. (Roma: Viella, 2010); Peter Partner, The Lands of St Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) and his Renaissance Rome, 1500–1559: A Portrait of a Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); and Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 8 Torgil Magnuson, Rome in the Age of Bernini, Vol. i: From the Election of Sixtus v to the Death of Urban viii (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1982); Clare Robertson, Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement viii (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Pamela O. Long, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Giorgio Simoncini, Roma: Le trasformazioni urbane nel Quattrocento. Vol. i: Topografia e urbanistica da Bonifacio ix ad Alessandro vi, Vol. ii: Funzioni urbane e tipologie edilizie (Florence: Olschki Editrice, 2004) and his Roma: La trasformazioni urbane nel cinquecento, Vol. i:

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cerns were resolved, the papacy was in a much stronger position to deal with them in 1600 than it was in 1400. During these two centuries, emphases would shift given external situations and the personal inclinations of each pope. However, all of them were confronted with a similar set of problems: asserting their authority vis-à-vis councils, cardinals, and secular rulers (within the city of Rome, the Papal States, or Christendom at large), patronizing the renovation of Rome and its intellectual and artistic culture, maintaining a bureaucracy that would give effect to their decisions, financing their operations, forging cooperative relations with civil rulers, resisting the advances of Islam, ending the schisms separating the Christian churches, preserving the integrity of the Faith, promoting its spread to the newly discovered lands, suppressing old heresies and confronting the new Protestant movements, and reforming abuses. It is only by studying these issues that one can gain a proper understanding of the Renaissance papacy. But before examining how the popes dealt with the challenges confronting them, it may be useful to have an overview of the popes themselves. The conventional image of Renaissance popes emphasizes characteristics divorced from, if not at odds with, their spiritual office. In the popular imagination, they appear as petty Italian princes who involved themselves in conspiracies and warfare to advance the political fortunes of their families. Examples include the backing of the assassination attempt in 1478 on Lorenzo de’Medici (1449–1492), the Magnificent of Florence, to install the nephew of Sixtus iv (1471–1484), Girolamo Riario (d. 1488), as lord of Imola (1473–1488); or waging war in 1516 to remove Sixtus iv’s grandson Francesco Maria della Rovere (1490– 1538) as duke of Urbino (1508–1516, 23–38) and replace him with Leo x’s nephew Lorenzo de’ Medici (1492–1519), the grandson of the Magnificent. The desire to provide for members of their families extended to their illegitimate children. At least seven Renaissance popes acknowledged such offspring and there may be more unacknowledged. The two popes who most used their office to promote the fortunes of their children and grandchildren were Alexander vi (1492–1503) and Paul iii (1534–1549). The Spanish pope tried to make his son Cesare Borgia (c. 1475–1507) Duke of Romagna and married off his daughter Lucrezia (1480– 1519) to a series of aristocrats. They have been immortalized in the pages of Il principe (1513) of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and in the Diarium sive

Topografia e urbanistica da Giulio ii a Clemente viii, Vol. ii: Dalla città al territorio [l’Ambiente storico. Studi di storia urbana e del territorio, 13] (Florence: Olschki Editrice, 2008–2011); Architetture per i principi della Chiesa, committenze in Roma, 1400–1700, ed. Flavia Cantatore [Biblioteca dell’Archivum Romanicum. Serie 1, Storia, letteratura, paleografia] (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2023).

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rerum urbanarum commentarii (1483–1506) of Johann Burchard (c. 1450–1506). Paul iii promoted two of his grandsons to the cardinalate: Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589) at age 14 and Guido Ascanio Sforza (1518–1564) at age 16. He had his son Pierluigi (1503–1547) made Duke of Castro (1537–1547) and then of Parma and Piacenza (1545–1547). His grandson Ottavio (1524–1586) he named Duke of Camerino (1540–1545) and betrothed (1539) to Margaret of Austria, the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Charles v and widow of the Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici (d. 1537). A number of the popes of the High Renaissance were men of discriminating aesthetic tastes and generous patrons of art and letters. Julius ii (1503–1513) is famous for commissioning Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) to fresco the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520) the walls of the Stanze of the papal apartments. Leo x (1513–1521) had Raffaello continue work on the Stanze, adorn the Loggia with scenes from the Bible, and design the cartoons for the tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel. This Medici pope also hired Michelangelo to work on the family tombs in Florence. Leo x was also lavish in his support of humanists who penned Latin literary works in the classical style. To reinforce the view that Renaissance popes in general neglected their spiritual duties for more worldly concerns, it is noted that only one of the thirty-three (beginning with Boniface ix) was canonized as a saint, the Dominican Pius v. Who were the Renaissance popes?9 If the term refers to pontiffs who personally engaged with the culture of the humanists and artists, the list might begin with Nicholas v (1447–1455) or Pius ii (1458–1464), while excluding several successors who lacked such interests. If the term, however, refers to the popes who reigned from the onset of Renaissance culture in Rome, an earlier starting point is warranted. In the early years of the fifteenth century, noted humanists came to Rome to work for the popes who appreciated their elegant Latin style. These include Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) who served the Roman popes Innocent vii and Gregory xii, for the Pisan popes Alexander v and John xxiii, and for Martin v; Antonio Loschi (1368–1441) served until his death the popes of the Roman obedience (from Gregory xii to Eugenius iv); Pier Paolo Vergerio (1370–1444) labored in the court of Innocent vii; and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) who wrote for Boniface ix and John xxiii.10 The father of Renaissance humanism

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The information on the Renaissance popes in the following paragraphs is found in John Norman Davidson Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 230–276 and in The Papacy: An Encyclopedia. Walther von Hofmann, Forschungen zur Geschichte der kurialen Behörden vom Schisma bis zur Reformation, 2 vols. [Bibliothek des königlisch-preussischen historischen Instituts

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himself, Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), had served three-quarters of a century earlier the popes in Avignon. The election of Martin v (1417–1431) at the Council of Constance ended the Great Western Schism, and his settling in Rome in 1420 inaugurated a new era in papal history. The twenty-six men who reigned as popes from the time of Martin v (1417– 1431) until Clement viii (1592–1605) came mostly from Italy. Only three of these popes were “foreigners”: the Valencian Borjas, Borgias Calixtus iii and his nephew Alexander vi and the Dutchman Adrian vi (Adriaan Florenszoon Dedal). From the Papal States (Rome, Lazio, Bologna, the Marches) came seven popes; from Liguria (Savona, Genoa, Sarzana) five; from Tuscany (Florence, Siena) also five; Lombardy three, Venice two, and Naples one. The known occupational backgrounds of their fathers included high nobility (three: Martin v, Paul iii, Paul iv), lower nobility or patrician (three: Eugenius iv, Pius ii, Pius iii); high governmental officials (two: Innocent viii, Gregory xiv); jurists or notary (four: Julius iii, Marcellus ii, Pius iv, Clement viii); medical doctor (one: Nicholas v); commerce and banking (six: Paul ii, Sixtus iv, Julius ii, Leo x, Clement vii, Gregory xiii), managing small land-holdings, farming, and shepherding (four: Calixtus iii, Alexander vi, Pius v, Sixtus v); carpenter or ship-builder (one: Adrian v). While six popes were the nephew or first cousin of a previous pope (Gregory xii—Eugenius iv—Paul ii; Calixtus iii— Alexander vi; Pius ii—Pius iii; Sixtus iv—Julius ii; Leo x—Clement vii), and many had uncles and or cousins in the Sacred College, only one had a father who was a cardinal (Gregory xiv).11 If one were from the humblest background (shepherd, farmer), the route to the throne of St. Peter was by pursuing a career in a mendicant order (Pius v, Sixtus v). Of the six popes from the fifteenthcentury period of the Great Western Schism, and the one anti-pope from the Council of Basel, five came from nobility, including a duke, Felix v, one from a bourgeois family (Innocent vii), and one from a humble background, the Franciscan Alexander v. The educational background of the Renaissance popes was diverse. All were educated men. Those from aristocratic families and papal nephews were often tutored and might attend classes at a university without taking a degree (Paul ii, Innocent viii, Clement vii, Paul iii, Paul iv). Some were trained in a monastic setting (Eugenius iv, Julius ii, Paul iv), but then went on to acquire academic

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in Rom, Bande xii, xix] (Rome: Verlag von Loescher & Ce., 1914), i, 144, ii, 107, 110, 115; Clémence Revest, Romam veni: Humanisme et papauté à la fin du Grand Schisme (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2021). On the relationships among the cardinals, see Barbara McClung Hallman, Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

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degrees (Alexander v, Sixtus iv, Pius v, Sixtus v). Only six earned degrees in theology, conferred either by a university or by their religious order (Gregory xii, Alexander v, Sixtus iv, Adrian v, Pius v, Sixtus v). Only two stopped their formal education with an arts degree from a university (Nicholas v, Pius ii). The overwhelming majority of popes received formal training in law, often both civil and canon law, and at least eleven received a doctorate. Many studied law at Perugia, but for the doctorate they often went to Bologna.12 Given their academic degrees, some began their careers as professors at universities or the studia of the mendicants (Innocent vii, Alexander v, Calixtus iii, Sixtus iv, Adrian v, Pius v, Gregory xiii). And they later put their legal and theological skills to practice in the Roman Curia or Roman Inquisition. Before becoming popes, most men belonged to the ranks of the secular clergy. Of the thirty-three popes, only seven were members of a religious order: Franciscan (Alexander v, Sixtus iv, Sixtus v), Dominican (Pius v), Canon regular of St. Augustine (Eugenius iv), Theatine (Paul iv), Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem and Rhodes (Clement vii). Only one pope Felix v, was a lay hermit. Almost all had served in the Roman Curia or as papal governors and diplomats (nuncios or legates). Few had extensive pastoral experience in their dioceses. Because he took his episcopal duties seriously, Gregory xiv came to the throne unprepared to manage the Roman bureaucracy. Except for Felix v, they were all cardinals at the time of their respective election. If one considers all thirty-three popes of the three obediences, their average age on election was 59.2 years; if only the Roman popes from Martin v onward, it was 58.7. The average age of the disputed popes at election was 60.9 years. The youngest popes were the Medici cousins Leo x at 37 and Clement vii at 44; the eldest popes were Gregory xii at 81 and Paul iv at 78. The average length of their reigns varied: all 7.7 years; the Roman line from Martin v onward 8.2; the disputed popes 5.8. If one excludes the six popes who reigned for two years or less (e.g., Pius iii reigned for 26 days, Marcellus ii for 22 days, and Innocent ix for 62 days) the average reign was 10.6 years. The longest reigns were those of Benedict xiii up to his deposition in 1417 (22.8 years), Eugenius iv (16 years), and Paul iii (15.1 years).

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Perugia had a strong, but not eminent, faculty of law, both civil and canon, both in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Bologna had a much larger faculty of legists and was the place to get one’s doctorate in canon law—see Paul Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 12–19 (Bologna), 65–68 (Perugia), 444–447 and 455–456 (decline of canon law).

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The men who elected the pope, advised him, and served in important capacities in the Roman Curia and Court were the cardinals. These men were appointed by the pope with the consent of the College of Cardinals. Attempts were made to limit their number to twenty-four and to have them represent the various regions of Christendom.13 Popes inherited the College from their predecessors and sought to include in it members who would be most loyal to them, often a member of their family, a “nephew” (son, grandson, nephew, grandnephew, first cousin) who would serve as an intimate advisor and manager of the bureaucracy. If one considers all thirty-three popes, they appointed 665 cardinals or on average 20.2 per pontificate. The popes of the Roman line from Martin v onward appointed 577 cardinals or 22.2 per pontificate. The thirtythree popes appointed fifty-nine “nephews” or 1.8 per pontificate. The Roman line from Martin v onward appointed fifty-five “nephews” or 2.1 per pontificate or 9.5% of their cardinals were “nephews.” The two popes who appointed the most “nephews” were Sixtus iv (6 out of 34) and Leo x (6 out of 43); followed by Alexander vi (5 out of 43) and Julius iii (5 out of 20).14 The authority of the pope was much discussed in the late medieval and Renaissance periods. It gave rise to the field of ecclesiology with its theological and canonical reflections that are here studied by Francis A. Oakley.15 He notes that popes welcomed theories that attributed to them the plenitude of power in both the spiritual and temporal realms. All jurisdictional authority was seen as a delegation from the pope. However, other strains of thought viewed the Roman Church (the pope together with the cardinals) as the source of authority, with the cardinals able to constrain the pope. The chaos of the Great Western Schism led to the rise of conciliarism which held that a general council, to be held on a regular basis, was the supreme authority in the Church which even popes must obey. This teaching was defined in the decrees Haec sancta (1415) and Frequens (1417) of Constance and reiterated at Basel. The popes successfully opposed this view and won to their side the rulers of Christendom by a series of concordats. The pope and cardinals beat back any 13 14

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E.g., The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols., eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Norman Tanner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), i, 501. The data were taken from the lists of cardinals in Conrad Eubel, Hierarcia catholica medii [et recentioris] aevi … ab anno 1198 usque ad annum 1431 perducta, editio altera (Monasterii: Librariae Regensbergianae, 1913), 25–34; Ibid, ii: ab anno 1431 usque ad annum 1503 perducta, editio altera (1914), 3–25; Ibid. iii: Saeculaum xvi ab anno 1503 completens, eds. Guilelmus van Gulik incohavit, Conrad Eubel absolvit, Ludovicus Schmitz-Kallenberg editionem alteram curavit (1923), 3–55; Ibid. iv: a Pontificatu Clementis pp. viii (1592) usque ad Pontificatum Alexandri pp. vii (1667), ed. Patritus Gauchat (1935), 3–8. See Chapter 2, “Ecclesiologies: Popes, Cardinals, and Councils.”

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attempt by the bishops to have a permanent voice in the management of the Church at Lateran v or to restrain their authority at Trent.16 Sixtus v in 1588 took away the power of individual cardinals as heads of bureaucratic units by replacing them with a series of congregations of rotating cardinals whose function was to advise the pope who could make major decisions without consulting all the cardinals in consistory. Power was now centralized in the hands of the pope. Roberto Bellarmino (1542–1621) asserted that the pope held plentitude of spiritual power and indirect temporal power. Gregory xiii (1572–1585) by reforming the calendar (1582) exercised implicitly both powers directly, while claiming he was only carrying out Trent’s reform of the liturgy.17 To help the pope carry out his responsibilities, a vast bureaucracy was eventually created.18 The Avignonese papacy had already established numerous offices and sophisticated procedures, which the Renaissance popes inherited. At the top of the bureaucracy was the College of Cardinals which elected the pope, advised him on major decisions, and whose members often served as heads of various curial departments, as legates governing portions of the Papal States, and as special messengers and diplomats to the courts of Europe. The chief officials of the Roman Curia included the following. The office of chancellor had become defunct by the time of the Renaissance. His responsibilities were assumed by the vice-chancellor, who supervised the correspondence and bulls that testified to papal decisions. The official responsible for placing the date on papal documents, essential for their validity, was known as the Datarius. The fees he charged for his service were reserved for the pope. The head of papal finances, who also controlled the affairs of the Papal States, was known as the Camerarius or Camerlengo or Chamberlain. The Grand Penitentiary han-

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Nelson H. Minnich, “The Ecclesiology of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517),” in: Incorrupta Monumenta Ecclesiam Defendunt: Studi offerti a mons. Sergio Pagano, prefetto dell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vol. i: La Chiesa nella storia. Religione, cultura, costume, Tomo 2, eds. Andreas Gottsmann, Pierantonio Piatti, and Andreas E. Rehberg (Città del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2018), 1115–1128; Giuseppe Alberigo, “L’Ecclesiologia del Concilio di Trento,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, 18 (1964), 227–242; Klaus Ganzer, “Gallikanische und Römische Primatsauffasung im Widersteit. Zu den ekklesiologischen Auseinandersetzungen auf dem Konzil von Trient,” Historisches Jahrbuch, 109 (1989), 109–163; and Klaus Ganzer, “Die Ekklesiologie des Konzils von Trient,” in his Kirche auf dem Weg durch die Zeit. Institutionelles Werden und theologisches Ringen (Münster: Aschendorff, 1997), 266–281. Franco Motta, Bellarmino: Una teologia politica dell Controriforma (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005), 197–384; August Ziggelaar, “The Papal Bull of 1582 Promulgating a Reform of the Calendar,” in Gregorian Reform of the Calendar, ed. George V. Coyne et al. (Città del Vaticano: Specola Vaticana, 1983), 201–239, here 201–202. See Chapter 3, “Renaissance Papal Court and Curia.”

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dled cases of absolution for violations of canon law. Legal cases referred to the pope were usually handled by the office of the Signature of Justice, but could also be given to the auditors of the Sacred Rota for a ruling. The pope’s private secretaries usually handled diplomatic correspondence. The office of Secretary of State eventually evolved from that of the “intimate secretary” and assumed the functions of the “papal nephew.” In addition to the Roman Curia there was the papal court, composed of personal advisers and relatives. Taking care of one’s family and friends was viewed by contemporaries as an obligation, a manifestation of the virtue of pietas. Serving the pope and his household was a huge staff of servants: from papal sacristan and musicians to butlers and valets, from shield-bearers and stablemen to cooks and caretakers of the fishpond and elephant. The number and cost of these functionaries kept escalating until greatly reduced by Pius v. To finance this bureaucracy and various papal projects, from rebuilding Rome to funding crusades, was a constant problem for the popes. Tributes and taxes levied on the Papal States and Rome gradually increased as the popes gained greater control. Fees for documents of appointment, favors, dispensations, and absolutions were shared with the College of Cardinals. The practice of selling venal offices and creating new ones was favored and expanded under Sixtus iv, Julius ii, and Leo x as a way to finance their wars and building projects. The office of tax collector was farmed out for a fee, and honorary offices bestowing knighthood were sold for substantial sums. The granting of indulgences for a donation helped pay for the crusades and the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica, a tactic that sparked the Ninety-Five Theses protest of Martin Luther. Monopolies on the sale of minerals also helped: salt from the flats at Cervia and alum from the mines at Tolfa. With the revenues from the latter being dedicated to the crusade effort. When all these devices still proved inadequate to close the budgetary gaps, the papacy resorted to selling bonds or montes that functioned like annuities. Unlike their contemporary rulers, the popes never declared bankruptcy. By taxes, loans, and the sale of offices, Sixtus v, toward the end of this period, amassed a huge treasury of over four million scudi that secured papal financial independence for generations thereafter. A commonality of concerns typified the pontificates of Martin v and his successors until the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation and the Sack of Rome (1527) reset their priorities. In the early fifteenth century, as detailed in the essay by Christine Shaw,19 the popes were eager to regain control of the city of Rome and the Papal States. To be the common father of all Christians,

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See Chapter 4, “The Papal States.”

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the popes needed a secure base of operations that would shelter them from undue pressures from civil rulers. Rome, the site of the tomb of St. Peter and the seat of the Western Patriarchate, was the traditional residence of the popes. The more recent prolonged residence in Avignon was provoked in part by the unruly conditions in Rome and the surrounding areas. During the Avignonese papacy, the popes had approved the Aegidian Constitution (1357), named after Cardinal Gil [Aegidius] de Albornoz, that acknowledged local authorities in the Papal States provided they agreed that they ruled as vicars of the pope and under various constraints. Shaw surveys the developments in the political organization and economy of the Papal States, from the time of Boniface ix during the Great Western Schism to Clement viii at the end of the sixteenth century. In the early years, the popes had difficulty establishing their authority over rebellious condottieri and local feudal nobility. When local authorities failed to function as loyal vassals, the popes needed to punish and remove them. In Rome, baronial families struggled for predominance, be they the Ghibelline (pro-imperial) Colonna and the frequently French-allied Guelph (pro-papal) Orsini, with their feudal lands scattered throughout the Patrimony of St. Peter and their alliances with other noble families, The powerful dukes of Ferrara and Urbino were notably problematic in their failures at times to support the policies of their papal overlord. Neighboring states such as the Republic of Venice, or Kingdom of Naples under Ladislas, the Duchy of Milan of Giangaleazzo Visconti tried to take advantage of the instability to establish protectorates or annex papal territories. Without a standing army, the popes were forced to hire mercenaries. To ward off these threats, the popes entered into alliances and eventually joined the Italian League of 1455 and later the League of Cambrai of 1509. Their great fear was that the same power would hold both the Duchy of Milan to the north and the Kingdom of Naples to the south, thus putting the Papal States in a potential vise and reducing the pope to the status of the personal chaplain of this powerful neighbor. In the sixteenth century, the Habsburgs and Valois strove for control of Milan and Naples. The popes initially tried to balance them off, entering into the anti-French Holy Leagues of 1493 and 1510 and the anti-Imperial League of Cognac of 1526, but they were forced to accept Habsburg domination of the peninsula that was finally settled by the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559). The popes organized their territory into five provinces governed by rectors who sought to get the various lords and barons to submit to papal authority by being given the status of papal vicars or to negotiate capitoli which regulated the relationship between cities and the central government. The Camera Apostolica administered the Papal States. New bureaucracies replaced it: the Sacro Consiglio, the Consulta, and the Congregazione del buon governo. Popes used their position to enrich their relatives

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with papal offices and revenues. The del Rovere, Borgia, Medici, and Farnese tried to make princes of their relatives by investing them with papal lands until Pius v put an end to the practice in 1567. Shaw challenges the argument that popes practiced nepotism to get reliable servants, noting that many nepoti were without administrative or military skills when appointed. She also rejects the thesis that the popes sought to create a strong, centralized state, but instead came up with ad hoc practical solutions to a series of problems. Nonetheless, by the end of the sixteenth century, the papal authority over its lands was much strengthened. Anna Esposito explores the popes’ solicitude that the city of Rome, the goal of pilgrims, of persons seeking favors and justice for their cause from the spiritual head of Christendom, of aristocratic visitors and diplomats, and of clerics seeking a career in the Church’s bureaucracy, be a place that demonstrated in its churches, palaces, and monuments the majesty, grandeur, and authority of the papal office.20 She traces the developments in the city of Rome: its evolving administrative structures (districts, officials, deliberative bodies) and its relationship to the papacy; urban growth (river ports, new streets, construction projects, fountains); its demographics (native-born citizens, resident foreigners, visitors) and social structures (baronial families, nobles, merchants, skilled workers, day-laborers, beggars and prostitutes); and its religious life with festivals and confraternities providing social services. From an unstable medieval town during the Great Western Schism, it evolved into a carefully managed magnificent capital city with palaces and ornate churches. Ingrid Rowland traces the transformation of the city. The ruins of the once capital of a great empire lay strewn throughout the city.21 A new capital of Christendom needed to be built. Ancient churches were repaired. In the case of the dilapidated Constantinian Basilica of St. Peter, the decision was eventually made to replace it with a grand edifice in the classical style. Bridges were built or restored to connect the Borgo and Trastevere with the rest of the city. Aqueducts brought fresh water to the center of the city, previously confined to the bend in the Tiber River, or opened up peripheral areas for settlement. New streets were laid out connecting city gates, ports, major churches, and palaces, along which new houses were constructed. Prelates were encouraged to use their church wealth gained from benefices, pensions, and salaries to build elegant residences. Leading artists were hired to adorn these churches and palaces with fitting frescos and sculptures, the popes being the prime patrons of this transformation. Rowland surveys the popes’ patronage of art during the Renais20 21

See Chapter 5, “Rome: Urban Government, Society. Economy, Religion.” See Chapter 6, “Art and the Papacy.”

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sance period from the time of John xxiii to Clement viii. She selects major paintings and sculptures, pointing out their stylistic innovations and iconographic messages, and often providing stunning reproductions of them. She enlivens her account with telling details that reveal larger themes. Ironically, popes showed themselves as modern by reviving ancient classical models. They brought leading artists and architects to Rome, commissioning them to construct and decorate churches and palaces that transformed Rome into the cultural capital of Western Europe, the New Jerusalem, an appropriately grand home for the vicar of God on earth and his court. Silvano Giordano studies how the Renaissance popes related to Christian rulers.22 The restored papacy in the person of Martin v Colonna elected by the Council of Constance stabilized in 1418 its relations with various states through a series of concordats meant to last for five years and regulating how rulers would deal with the Roman Curia. Martin v’s primary concern was restoring papal authority over Rome and the Papal States. They were seen as a secure base for the autonomy and independence of the pope so that he could function as the common father of all Christians. The Council of Basel attempted to reform the Roman Curia, passing a series of decrees that were implemented by the French and German churches. The popes got the Germans to replace these with concordats in 1447 and 1448, while it was not until 1516 that the Concordat of Bologna replaced the French Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438). Nicholas v negotiated other concordats with Denmark and Poland that regularized relations. The popes granted to the Portuguese Order of Christ patronage rights over the lands it was exploring, rights that were eventually incorporated into the crown. Starting with Alexander vi the popes granted patronage rights to the kings of Spain over its colonies. To secure the Papal States, the popes entered into leagues: that of Lodi (1454) with Italian states, and that of Cambrai (1508/09) with non-Italians. They got caught up in the rivalry between the Habsburg and Valois kings, often favoring the Valois for fear of Habsburg hegemony, but after the Sack of Rome (1527) and defeat at Paliano (1557), the popes made peace with the Habsburgs that became stabilized by the Peace of Cave (1557) and of Cateau-Cambresis (1559). Under Clement vii the papacy lost Sweden and Denmark to Lutheranism and England to schism. Efforts to win back England by excommunicating Elizabeth i (1570) and by the force of the Spanish Armada (1588) both failed as did the refusal to compromise on mostly disciplinary matters (1580) prevent the return of Sweden under King John iii (1568–1592). The popes supported the Catholic League in France, but in the end accepted as king the former Huguenot Henry of Bourbon who re-converted 22

See Chapter 7, “Relations with National States: 1400–1600.”

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to Catholicism. Pope then secured peace between the two Catholic powers of France and Spain. By the end of the sixteenth century the popes were secure in their Papal States and on good terms with Catholic rulers. As the “common father” of all Christians, the popes tried to rally, with only occasional success, a disunified and conflict-ridden Europe to ward off the threats coming from an aggressive and expansive Ottoman empire.23 While popes at times took sides in military conflicts among Christian princes in order to secure the Papal States, they preferred to act as arbiters, sending out legates to negotiate truces and treaties of peace. They watched with horror as Christians slaughtered each other while the armies of Islam rolled up victory after victory in the Balkans, threatening the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The Greeks sought military aid from the Latins, but that was conditioned on ending the schism in the Church. Eugenius iv promised such aid after the reunion negotiated at the Council of Florence in 1439 and worked to organize the great expedition to defeat the Ottoman Turks in 1444, only to have his legate Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini and King Vladislav vi of Poland (1434–1444) and of Hungary (1440–1444) killed at the Battle of Varna on 10 November 1444. The efforts of Nicholas v to raise an army to rescue the city of Constantinople from attacking Turks were unsuccessful and it fell on 29 May 1453. Subsequent efforts to retake it failed and Calixtus iii succeeded only in minor naval victories and in fending off the siege of Belgrad in 1456. Pius ii organized the Congress of Mantova in 1459–1460 to raise a crusading army, dedicated the revenues from the newly discovered alum deposits at Tolfa to funding the expedition, and died in Ancona waiting for the army and navy to assemble. The victories of Selim i (1512–1520) over the Persian Shiite shah (1515) and the Mameluke sultans of Egypt (1516– 1517) led Leo x to expend great effort in negotiating a peace treaty among Latin princes and planning for a crusade, but Francis i sabotaged the effort and later made an alliance with Suleyman ii (1520–1566) against Charles v. Taking advantage of the wars between the Valois and Habsburgs, the Ottoman sultan took Belgrad (1521) and Rhodes (1522), killed King Louis of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács (1526), captured Buda in 1529, and attacked Vienna unsuccessfully that same year. While Adrian vi tried to rescue Rhodes, his successor Clement vii was not unhappy to see Habsburg power curtailed by the Turks. His successor Paul iii joined Venice in a Holy League that suffered a naval defeat off Preveza in Greece (1538), thus allowing the naval forces of Khayr ad-Din (d. 1546, Barbarossa) and other Turkish captains to dominate the Mediterranean until their defeats at Malta (1565) and Lepanto (1571). Margaret Meserve places the call for a crusade within the broader context of papal leadership of Western Christen23

See Chapter 8, “The Papacy and the Crusade, 1400–1600.”

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dom. Crusades were a tool used by the popes to fend off challenges to their authority coming from infidels, schismatics, and heretics, whether Hussites, Waldensians, or Protestants. Popes used the printing press to promote their offering of indulgences to finance the crusades and celebrated military victories in public festivals and in frescoes decorating the churches and palaces of Rome. Emanuele Colombo investigates the role of the popes in the spread of Christianity to the lands explored by the Portuguese and Spanish.24 The papacy granted the Iberian kings patronage rights and responsibilities for the churches in the new lands. But they also intervened to protect indigenous peoples from exploitation and to affirm the equality of all Christians. By resolving questions related to the administration of the sacraments and practice of the Faith, the popes were able to intervene and limit the royal authority over the mission churches. Thus, they replaced mass baptism with individual ones, allowed interpreters and charts for confession while urging training in native languages, maintained monogamous marriage with dispensation for consanguinity, and promoted native clergy. By the formation of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (1622), the papacy tried to gain greater control of the missionary enterprise. Yury P. Avvakumov and Charles C. Yost trace the origins of the tensions between the Byzantine Church and the Latin West due to theological and disciplinary issues and political factors.25 The 1204 Sack of Constantinople, Latin hegemony over sections of the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin reluctance to come to the aid of the Byzantines against their Muslim enemies unless the Greeks reunited with the Roman church on terms dictated by Rome impeded efforts at cordial relations. Only when true dialogue occurred at the Council of Ferrara-Florence-Rome (1438–1445) was unification possible. Some Greek scholars were sympathetic to Scholasticism, especially to Thomism. The subjection of the Byzantine church to Muslim rule after the 1453 fall of Constantinople made relations with the West more difficult. Within the Ruthenian church, free of Muslim control, the Moscovites resisted Western overtures, while the Ukrainians successfully united with Rome for a variety of reasons. The relations between Rome and the non-Chalcedonian Monophysite churches and the Georgians are surveyed by Charles C. Yost.26 The Council of Florence’s proclaimed unions with the Armenian and Coptic churches failed to take effect on the local levels. Renewed efforts in the sixteenth century 24 25 26

See Chapter 9, “The Renaissance Papacy and Missions Outside Europe.” See Chapter 10, “The Renaissance Papacy and Eastern Christianity: Greek and Slavic.” See Chapter 11, “The Renaissance Papacy and Eastern Christianity: Non-Chalcedonian.”

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also failed due to these churches’ fear of the condemnation of their popular saints and Roman rigidity. The Portuguese efforts to unite the Ethiopian church with Rome led to civil war and the expulsion of the Jesuits from the African kingdom. Nelson H. Minnich traces Rome’s efforts to unite with the Syriac churches: Maronites, Chaldeans, Antiochians, and St. Thomas Christians. While the Maronites united permanently with Rome, the others did so for a period but then schisms reopened, especially over issues of Latinization. In his chapters, Agostino Borromeo has surveyed the papacy’s efforts to identify and repress heresy.27 He treats such groups as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Waldensians, Fraticelli “de opinione,” Wycliffites and Lollards, Hus and the Hussites, the Iberian fictive conversi and illuminati, and witches. The popes delegated various persons to investigate and prosecute heretics: cardinals, papal inquisitors (often Dominicans and Franciscans), and entrusted the “Catholic Kings” with setting up the Spanish Inquisition. The popes’ efforts to organize crusades against the Hussites and Waldensians failed to suppress them. Their efforts to control printed books focused on preventive censorship and only later did they adopt a policy of suppressing prohibited books already published. In his adjoining chapter, Agostino Borromeo traced the response of the papacy to the evolving Protestant movement.28 Leo x is depicted as someone who was preoccupied with political matters and insensitive to the growing antipapal sentiments in Germany. He was slow to take serious measures against Luther and thought the support of Emperor Charles v was sufficient to suppress the friar’s movement. His cousin Clement vii likewise misread the situation. It was only with Paul iii that the papacy backed a council as the proper venue for dealing with Protestantism, once the colloquies had failed. In the early years, the northern kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark and large sections of Germany broke with Rome. England went into schism under Henry viii and into the Protestant camp under Edward vi. After the brief restoration of Catholicism under Mary i, her half-sister Elizabeth i returned the country to Protestantism. The hope that Scotland would return to the Catholic fold under King James v, whose mother and wife were Catholic, never materialized. Nor did Sweden return, despite its King John abjuring Lutheranism, because Pope Gregory xiii would not make temporizing concessions. With the help of nuncios, Jesuits, and local prelates the popes prevented France and Poland-Lithuania from going over to the Protestant camp. The inquisitions established by the

27 28

See Chapter 12, “The Papacy and Heresy.” See Chapter 13, “The Papacy and Protestantism.”

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papacy in Spain, Portugal, and the Italian peninsula stopped the spread of Protestantism there. This was supported by its sponsoring of indexes of prohibited books. But it was especially the Council of Trent that clarified Catholic doctrine, reformed abuses, and mandated pastoral care that secured the Faith with the papacy seeing to the implementation of its decrees. John W. O’Malley provided a sweeping overview of the attitudes the Renaissance popes toward church reform.29 The ability of the Council of Constance to bring an end to the Great Western Schism by deposing two popes and pressuring the other to resign and its issuing reform decrees that limited papal liberty of action made popes wary of councils. The conciliar decrees of Constance addressed some of the traditional grievances against papal granting exemptions from episcopal jurisdiction and against the pope’s imposition of fees for documents testifying to appointments and dispensations. The restored unified papacy gave priority not to reform but to regaining control over the Papal States and to promoting crusades against the advancing Turks. Eugenius iv sabotaged the reform efforts of the Council of Basel. Serious abuses occurred under Sixtus iv who practiced extreme nepotism and spent lavishly on construction and artistic projects. Innocent viii and Alexander vi promoted the careers of their illegitimate children. Under Julius ii and Leo x, the papal council meeting at the Lateran issued very general reform decrees that were not enforced, while the council fathers’ proposal for a permanent college (sodalitas) of bishops in the Roman Curia was sternly blocked by the cardinals and pope. Clement vii resisted the efforts of the German Diet and of Emperor Charles v to convoke a council to deal with the issues raised by Martin Luther for fear it might review and reverse the papal excommunication of Luther and put a council in the driver’s seat. While Paul iii and Julius iii did convoke the council that met in Trent, they were more concerned with doctrinal clarifications than with reform measures they feared might limit papal authority and alter curial practices. Under Pius iv the Council of Trent issued many reform decrees restoring episcopal authority and removing abuses. He confirmed them and began the process of implementing them which was continued by his successors. Having surveyed papal actions in these areas of concern, one may ask: How seriously did the Renaissance popes take their responsibilities? Did they see their election primarily as an opportunity to enrich their family and friends, or as the famous quip recorded by the Venetian ambassador and attributed to Leo x stated; “Now that God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it”?30 Their spiritual jurisdictional authority had been challenged by conciliarists and by 29 30

See Chapter 14, “Reform and the Renaissance Popes.” According to the relatione made on 17 March 1517 by Marin Zorzi, the Venetian ambas-

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the rising national monarchies that wanted to control church appointments and revenues. The popes needed to put their finances on a stable basis. As the common father of all Christendom, they were called upon to make peace among Christian princes and to unite them in an effort to stem the seemingly inexorable advance of the Ottoman Turks. Healing the schisms with the churches of the East could help this cause. Bringing the Hussites back to the Church and keeping church teachings free from error was also a concern. Calls for a reform in head and members, often implying a reduction in papal prerogatives and fees, had to be managed without impeding the restoration of the papal monarchy. Although not considered a responsibility of the papal office, taking care of one’s family and friends was viewed by contemporaries as an obligation, a manifestation of the virtue of pietas. While each pope had to address these common concerns, each prioritized them according to his particular situation and interests. The men who ascended to the throne of St. Peter were elected because their colleagues in the College of Cardinals considered them competent to the task. They were men who had proven their administrative and diplomatic abilities and were capable of defending the Faith. With the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, a premium was placed on their orthodoxy. Their personalities varied. The popes of the early fifteenth century were often resolute in pursuing a goal: Martin v in regaining control of Rome, Eugenius iv in resisting the Council of Basel and in bringing the churches of the East back to union with Rome, Calixtus iii in fighting the Turks, Nicholas v in healing the Basel schism, restoring physically the city of Rome, and promoting learning, and Pius ii in annulling the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges and in organizing a crusade. A lack of clear focus afflicted the popes of the latter half of that century: Paul ii was more interested in displays but also tried to promote a crusade, Sixtus iv in furthering the interests of his relatives and adorning Rome, Innocent viii having trouble pursuing a coherent policy toward Naples, and Alexander vi conflicted between advancing the careers of his children or the interests of the Church. Reform that would have entailed a reduction in revenues was never high on their list of priorities, for it would have hindered their achievement of other goals deemed more pressing. Austere was a word applied to Eugenius iv and Calixtus iii, affable to Nicholas v and Pius ii, vain to Paul ii, irresolute to Innocent viii, and devious to Sixtus iv and Alexander vi. The most pious of them was probably Eugenius iv. sador to the papal court, Leo x on becoming pope said to his confidant, “Juliano, godianci il papato, poichè Dio ce l’ha dato.” I diarii di Marino Sanuto, tomo xxiv (Venice: a spese degli editori, 1889), col. 90.

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The popes of the sixteenth century shared similar concerns, but also had to address new threats coming from the Protestant Reformation. The brief reign of Pius iii was given to prevent Cesare Borgia from seizing control of the Papal States. Julius ii was dedicated to restoring the rights of the Church over the Papal States and preserving its independence by driving foreign powers out of Italy. Leo x healed the Pisan Schism, replaced the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges with the Concordat of Bologna, and closed the Lateran Council that passed measures furthering the goals for which it had been called. He failed to address successfully the challenges coming from Martin Luther. Adrian vi’s reign was too brief to bring about a serious reform. Clement vii made cosmetic reforms in Rome, was obsessed with checking the power of Charles v, sought to restore Medici rule in Florence, resisted calling a reform council, and lost to the Church large areas of Germany, Scandinavia, and England. Paul iii made his family members dukes over papal territories, began a process of curial reforms, approved new religious orders, and assembled the Council of Trent that clarified Catholic teachings. Julius iii continued the council, promoted his nephews, and spent much time at his luxurious villa. Following the very brief reign of Marcellus ii, Paul iv tried to reform the Church by himself and free his native Naples from Spanish domination, failing at both tasks. Pius iv brought the Council of Trent to a close and set up a bureaucracy to see to its implementation. Pius v carried out the tasks assigned to the papacy by the council, issuing a new missal, breviary, and catechism, and organized a league that successfully opposed the Ottoman Turks at Lepanto. Gregory xiii pushed for the implementation of Trent, established various seminaries in Rome, and tried to roll back Protestantism, with limited success in Germany and failure in Sweden. His reform of the calendar gave great prestige to the papacy. Sixtus v was the great urban planner of Rome and reorganizer of the Roman Curia. Little could be accomplished during the twelve-day reign of Urban vii. Gregory xiv supported the unsuccessful Catholic League in France. Innocent ix continued the failed policy. Clement viii recognized Henry Bourbon as king of France, reconciled France and Spain, and revised ecclesiastical texts: Bible, missal, breviary, pontifical, and index of prohibited books. While the priorities of each pope often varied depending on their personalities and circumstances, they carried out their responsibilities as they saw them. The obligation to take care of their relatives and clients was among them but did not cause them to neglect their other responsibilities. The vast majority led scandal-free lives as pope, some were even noted for their piety and austerity. The few exceptions have captured the attention of historians and have been made unfairly to characterize the others.

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The papacy that had been seriously weakened by the Great Western Schism became during the Renaissance a strong papal monarchy. It was located now permanently in the ancient city of Rome, with its tomb of Saint Peter housed in a new basilica adjacent to the papal palace. The Renaissance popes had confronted a series of challenges. They regained control of the city of Rome and of the Papal States. They stabilized papal finances, having avoided bankruptcy and amassed a huge treasury. They transformed Rome into a cultural center with the help of leading humanists, artists, and architects and restored its churches and shrines into fitting goals of pilgrims. They beat back challenges to their authority coming from cardinals and councils. They negotiated concordats with Christian rulers that secured their loyalty and regulated relations with the Roman Curia. They worked to rally these rulers to join in a common defense of Christendom against the advancing Ottoman Turks, checking any Muslim dominance of the Western Mediterranean basin and slowing further advances into central and eastern Europe. The popes promoted the spread of the Catholic Faith in the lands colonized by the Iberian powers. They reached out to the separated brethren in northeast Africa, the Middle East, and India in an effort to restore church unity. They kept the Maronites loyal to Rome, succeeded off and on with the Ethiopian, Antiochian, and Chaldean churches, and were able to keep the majority of the St. Thomas Christians united with Rome. The greatest success was in bringing the Ukrainian church into union with Rome. The popes’ greatest failure was in preventing the spread of Protestantism in parts of Germany, most of the Swiss cantons, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the Netherlands. By diplomacy, financial subsidies, military means, and with the help of religious orders, the papacy managed to keep loyal to Rome France, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, sections of Germany and Hungary, the southern Netherlands, and most of Ireland. The moral, administrative, and financial abuses and the doctrinal confusion that had helped to fuel the Protestant revolt were slowly addressed, especially by the Council of Trent, convoked, directed, and implemented by the papacy. But these reforms came too late to bring back the northern lands where Protestant doctrine had taken hold and civil rulers enjoyed control of church appointments, wealth, teaching, and discipline. But in southern Europe, in the lands explored by the Portuguese and Spanish, and in various ancient communities in eastern Europe, the Middle East, and India that had previously been estranged, church unity was maintained or restored. By the end of the Renaissance period, the Roman pontiffs presided over a truly global church as the successors of St. Peter and the vicar of Christ on earth.

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Bibliography The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols., eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Norman Tanner. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. Eubel, Conrad. Hierarcia catholica medii [et recentioris] aevi … ab anno 1198 usque ad annum 1431 perducta, editio altera. Münster: Librariae Regensbergianae, 1913; ii: ab anno 1431 usque ad annum 1503 perducta, editio altera (1914); iii: Saeculaum xvi ab anno 1503 completens, eds. Guilelmus van Gulik incohavit, Conrad Eubel absolvit, Ludovicus Schmitz-Kallenberg editionem alteram curavit (1923); iv: a Pontificatu Clementis pp. viii (1592) usque ad Pontificatum Alexandri pp. vii (1667), ed. Patritus Gauchat (1935), Hallman, Barbara McClung. Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Hofmann, Walther von. Forschungen zur Geschichte der kurialen Behörden vom Schisma bis zur Reformation, 2 vols. [Bibliothek des königlisch-preussischen historischen Instituts in Rom, Bände xii, xix] Rome: Verlag von Loescher & Ce., 1914. Kelly, John Norman Davidson. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, 3 vols. ed. Philippe Levillain (French ed. Paris: Fayard, 1994) and John W. O’Malley (English ed., New York: Routledge, 2002).

chapter 2

Ecclesiologies: Popes, Cardinals, and Councils Francis A. Oakley

In approaching the ecclesiological thinking characteristic of the Renaissance era, it might be wise to begin by taking a moment to glance back at the great ecclesiological turning point that had occurred in the latter half of the eleventh century. At that time, the Gregorian reformers, having already proclaimed that “the age of priest-kings and emperor-pontiffs” was over, and having moved to sponsor the desacralization and declericalization of the temporal monarchs of Europe, became locked in combat with the German emperor, himself still a stubborn claimant to the honorific title of “Vicar of Christ.” During the course of the ensuing Investiture Conflict, the great pope Gregory vii (1078–1085), it has been said, had risen in stature to become “the towering forerunner and prophet” of the papal monarchy of the high Middle Ages.1 It is a commonplace to acknowledge, then, that it was during the Investiture Conflict that the foundations were laid for subsequent papal attempts to vindicate both the papal primacy of jurisdiction in the spiritual and ecclesiastical order and the superiority of his jurisdictional power over the emperors and kings who ruled in the temporal order. Less often acknowledged, however, is the fact that that same era of conflict also witnessed the germination of two rival and long-enduring ecclesiological traditions. The first of these was quasi-oligarchic in nature and clearly in tension with the essentially monarchial papal tradition. It pivoted on the claim of the cardinals to enjoy as a body a role in the governance of the Roman church on the grounds that “the power of St. Peter resided not in the papal monarch alone but in the entire Roman See,” so that, accordingly, “their [the cardinals’] privileges were proof against the [arbitrary] will of any pope.”2 The second of the two traditions in question pertained, rather, to the internal constitution of the universal Church in its entirety, and it was episcopalist in nature. It reflected the fierce resistance of at least some of the German bishops, taking their stand on a hallowed episcopalist heritage, to Gregory’s unflinching exploitation of papal discretionary power 1 Herbert Edward John Cowdray, Pope Gregory vii, 1073–1085 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 677. 2 Karl F. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 300–1140 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 312–313; cf. 318–323.

© Francis A. Oakley, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_003

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and his willingness to reach for a species of papal omnicompetence, administrative no less than legal. All three of these traditions were destined to reach their maturity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With that in view, we will take them up in turn.

1

The High-Papalist Monarchical Tradition

It was the first quarter of the fourteenth century that witnessed the peak moment in the theological articulation of the high papalist monarchical ecclesiology that was to be handed down in turn to such prominent ideological successors as Juan de Torquemada (1388–1468), the great propagandist for the papal cause during the turmoil occasioned by the Council of Basel (1431–1449), to Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534), who sought to vindicate a slightly modified form of high papalism against the latter-day conciliarists defending the conciliabulum of Pisa (1511), and, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to that “great administrator of doctrine” Robert, Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621).3 But it should be recognized that the form of papalist ecclesiology given such forceful expression at the start of the fourteenth century was itself in many ways simply a more coherently-developed and theologically-grounded version of a point of view that had gradually been hammered out by popes and canonistic commentators alike over the course of the two centuries preceding. It was two great clashes between temporal rulers and popes that precipitated in the first quarter of the fourteenth century and among the theologians of the day a great efflorescence of high papalist theorizing. The first, occurring at the turn of the century, was that between Boniface viii (1294–1303) and Philip iv (1267/8–1314) of France, and leading the former to promulgate three celebrated bulls—Clericis laicos, Ausculta fili, and Unam sanctam. The last of the three (promulgated in 1302) was the most sweeping, and despite the somewhat guarded nature of its language, it really does seem to reach beyond the claim to an indirect power of papal intervention in matters temporal ratione peccati (which Bellarmine was to attribute to it three centuries later) and to convey at least an implicit commitment to the stronger claim that the pope could properly exercise a more direct species of power in that

3 William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of Counter-Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 297, is responsible for this felicitous designation.

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sphere.4 Most prominent among the high papalist treatises occasioned by this marked upheaval of the theopolitical spirit were the De regimine Christiano by James of Viterbo (d. 1307/8) and De ecclesiastica potestate by Aegidius Romanus (d. 1316).5 The second of these historic clashes between pope and temporal ruler was the tangled and protracted struggle between Pope John xxii (1316–1334) and the emperor-elect Lewis iv of Bavaria (1314–1347). That, in turn, spawned the thoroughgoing hierocratic effusions of Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona (c. 1270–1328), a theologian of the Augustinian Hermits, and of the Franciscan Alvarus Pelagius (c. 1275–1349). The most pertinent of the former’s works are the Tractatus brevis de duplici potestate praelati et laicorum (c. 1308) and the Summa de potestate ecclesiastica (c. 1320–1328). And, of the latter, his De planctu ecclesiae (1330–1332, but revised later). These latter works warrant especial attention, not only because of the popularity and wide circulation they enjoyed in their own day and across the two centuries succeeding,6 but also because they tended to nudge into the shadows the high-papalist tracts even of James of Viterbo and Aegidius Romanus written just a few years earlier. No less than those earlier tracts, however, they, too, bore the imprint of the highpapalist theory and practice that had gradually moved into center stage across the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Three characteristics of that theory and practice warrant at least a moment of attention here.7 The first is the conviction (not something to be taken simply for granted) that the papacy is in its very essence a monarchical office, with the popes, at

4 Robert, Cardinal Bellarmine, De summo pontifice, 5:5 and 7; in: Bellarmine, Opera omnia, 6 vols. (Naples: Joseph Giuliano, 1856–1862), 2:152 and 157. But Heinrich Finke, Aus dem Tagen, Bonifaz viii (Münster i.W.: Verlag der Aschendorffschen, 1902), 159, sees the bull as aligned rather with traditional papal claims to a potestas directa. Similarly, Jean Rivière, Le problème de l’église et de l’état au temps de Philippe le Bel (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1926), 89. 5 De regimine christiano, ed. and trans. by Robert W. Dyson as James of Vitertbo: On Christian Commonwealth (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2009). The De ecclesiastica potestate, ed. and trans. by Robert W. Dyson as Giles of Rome: On Ecclesiastical Power: A Medieval Theory of World Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 6 On which, see Blasius Ministerii, De vita et operibus Augustini de Ancona (Rome: Analecta Augustiniana, 1953), 111–115; Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 11. 7 For a fuller if still comparatively succinct explication of these intricate developments, along with references to the pertinent primary and secondary literature, see Francis Oakley, The Mortgage of the Past: Reshaping the Ancient Political Inheritance (1050–1300) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 169–184.

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least from the time of Nicholas ii (1058–1061) onwards, being crowned in a ceremony that was meant to signify by visible, easily comprehensible, and familiar means their kingly status. Despite the onslaught launched against it by the Gregorian reformers, a stubborn aura of sacrality had continued to cling to the temporal monarchs of Europe. By the end of the thirteenth century, however, that aura had come to be dimmed by the astonishing transformation in status of the papacy itself. Once the great enemy of sacral kingship, it had come to conform itself, in its claims, laws, and ceremonial trappings to the lineaments of that archaic phenomena and to appropriate for itself so many of the appurtenances attaching to it. By that time, indeed, “all the symbols of empire had become attached to the papacy,” and popes like “Gregory ix and Boniface viii [had come to be] seen in every possible respect as successors of Constantine.”8 If the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was later to characterize the papacy as nothing other than “the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned on the grave thereof,” that characterization was no less accurate in its fundamental perception for being derisive in its conscious intent.9 When, in the early fourteenth century, James of Viterbo came to write his De regimine christiano, then, he identified the Christian society at large with the visible Church, but also depicted that Church as a kingdom with the pope himself as its earthly king. The ground had long since been prepared in visual representation, symbolism, and ceremony for the theopolitical vision he elaborated in so thoroughgoing a fashion. But it had also been prepared in more abstract theoretical terms and that was the second development that left its mark on the high papalist writers of the early-fourteenth century. For it was the pope who was “the first European monarch for whom a sophisticated theory of kingship was developed, and the canonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ‘were the ones’ primarily responsible for shaping … [that] theoretical structure.”10 The third hierocratic theme passed on to the early-fourteenth century high papalist theorists was of more tightly-focused ecclesiological import and left within the church a legacy that was to endure well beyond the age of monarchical absolutism. It had come into focus during the bitter controversy that in the 1250s had broken out at the University of Paris between the theologians who belonged to the secular clergy and those who (like Aquinas or Bonaven-

8 9 10

Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Sylvia Ann Ogilvie (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 79; cf. 201–203. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 4, ch. 47; ed. Michael Oakeschott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 457. Kenneth Pennington, The Pope and the Bishops: The Papal Monarchy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 190.

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ture) belonged to the mendicant orders of Dominican and Franciscan friars. It reflected in general a reaction on the part of the bishops and their supporters among the secular clergy against the growing centralization of ecclesiastical power in the hands of the papal monarch that the papal grant of pastoral privileges and affected emoluments to the friars both reflected and encouraged. But, after 1256, as tensions continued to mount, the dispute came to focus most intently on a more fundamental matter that was essentially constitutional in nature. It did so after a Franciscan friar, Thomas of York by name, bluntly insisted that the grant of papal privileges to the friars was no more than one particular manifestation of the fact that the pope was himself the source of all jurisdictional power in the Church, including the power wielded by such lesser prelates as bishops. This was a startling and in many ways revolutionary claim. For it had the effect of undercutting the older hallowed view that “the church’s constitution consisted of a collection of rights and duties, some established by Christ, others by custom,”11 and that each bishop wielded by divine right and concession a measure of autonomous authority grounded in the Church’s fundamental law. For that view of things was now being substituted a “derivational” theory of ecclesiastical jurisdiction pivoting on the pope. While that theory was to prove (as we shall see) to be extremely influential and to help focus the attention of later medieval theologians on matters pertaining to the internal governance of the Church, it did not immediately carry the day or, in the long run, sweep the ecclesiological field. One of those, interestingly, who may not have been fully persuaded by it was none other, high papalist though he was, than James of Viterbo, for on this very matter his formulations are lacking somewhat in precision.12 But if imprecise on the derivational theme, his De regimine christiano (“the oldest treatise in the Church”)13 is in general nothing less than clear, firm, and precise. And especially so in the other sweeping claims it makes for papal power in relation both to the internal governance of the institutional Church and to the subordinate power of the temporal monarchs ruling the various kingdoms making up the Christian commonwealth at large. And the Church he characteristically identifies with that all-embracing Christian commonwealth in its entirety.14 11 12 13

14

Ibid., 188. On this, see Oakley, Mortgage, 134–135. Thus Henri-Xavier Arquillière, Las plus ancient triaté de l’église: Jaques de Viterbo, De regimine christiano, 1301–1302 (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1926), which prints an edition of the Latin text. My references are given to Dyson’s new critical edition of that text and to the English translation printed on facing pages. See above, n. 5. James of Viterbo, De regimine christiano (drc), pt. 1, cap. 3–6; ed. Dyson, 2009, 12–13.

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Central to his whole argument in the De regimine christiano is his insistence that “the church is most rightly, truly, and aptly called a kingdom …. Just as the church is called the kingdom of Christ, so truly can she be called the kingdom of his vicar, of the Supreme Pontiff, who is truly called, and is, a king.”15 Though commentators have not always done so, we would do well, when he speaks in this way, to take his words at face value. He means, in effect, precisely what he says, and he devotes his treatise to the spelling out of the consequences of conceiving the Church’s essential nature in this particular way. Christ, he says, is “called the king not only of the heavenly and eternal kingdom but of the temporal and earthly also, because he dispenses and judges heavenly and earthly things together.” That royal power pertains to Christ both as God and man, but we should remember that, as man, he is possessed also of a priestly power, that of mediating “between God and man” and “uniting man with God through his ministry.”16 It is important to recognize, however, that as king Christ is greater in dignity and superiority than he is as priest. For he is “a priest [only] as man, but he is … a king, both as God and man.” And that difference in status carries over into the regnum ecclesiae when God confers upon men the two powers, royal and priestly, entrusting them thereby with the continuation of his own earthly ministry. Hence, among the prelates of the Church the “royal power, which is called jurisdiction [potestas jurisdictionis] is superior to [the] priestly power, which is called the power of order [potestas ordinis].”17 That superiority is particularly evident when it comes to the pope, the possessor after all of the plenitude of jurisdictional power as Successor to Peter, Vicar of Christ, Roman pontiff, “primate and patriarch,” universal shepherd and ruler, “supreme hierarch and monarch of the whole Church Militant,” the pope is not simply king but a veritable “king of kings.” That is so whether the kings in question are spiritual or secular, for “Christ himself, whose vicar he is, is called the prince of the kings of the earth,” whether they are secular kings or those other kingly figures who go by the name of prelates “because they are set before others, which belongs to kings.”18 So far as those kingly prelates are concerned, 15 16

17

18

drc, Pt. 1, cap. 1; ed. Dyson, 2009, 6–7, 16–17. drc, Pt. 2, cap. 1; ed. Dyson, 2009, 94–95: “It belongs to Christ to be a priest, as also a minister according to his human nature only, whereas it belongs to Him to be a king, as also a head, according to both his divine and human nature.” Cf. ibid, cap. 4, 164–165. drc, Pt. 2, cap. 4; ed. Dyson, 2009, 164–165. In this, James is at one with the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Anonymous and for much the same theological reasons. See Francis Oakley, Empty Bottles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 165–176. drc, Pt. 2, cap. 5 and 3; ed. Dyson, 2009, 174–175, 170–171, 135–141 (the pages listed in order of citation).

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they are hierarchically subordinated to the papal king of kings and derive their royal jurisdictional power via his mediation. And, so far as secular monarchs are concerned, their power being ordered to “earthly things as an end,” to “outward acts,” “inferior actions,” “baser tasks,” it is accordingly inferior in degree of power, dignity, and perfection to the spiritual power.19 To the latter the temporal power is in fact ordered, “as a secondary end is ordered to the principal one,” or, put differently, it is contained within the spiritual.20 Every act that belongs to the temporal power belongs to the spiritual and in a more excellent way. If kingly prelates choose not to involve themselves on a regular basis in the lowly tasks discharged by temporal lords that should not be taken to preclude their ability to do so, even to the point of punishing temporal rulers and deposing them.21 In contrast to James of Viterbo’s treatise, Aegidius Romanus’s De ecclesiastica potestate gives the impression of hasty composition and inadequate revision; in organization it is also somewhat flaccid.22 But that duly acknowledged, the work must still be said to resonate in general to the same ideological frequencies as the De regimine christiano. Aegidius’s thinking also presupposes the continued existence of a unitary Christian commonwealth to which any notion of royal, sovereignty bounded by territorial or national borders is really quite alien. His thinking presupposes, too, a commitment to the view that that commonwealth is a monarchy at once both sacred and absolute, and to the view that “everything that can be said about ecclesiastical … power is also a statement about papal power.”23 Two powers, he says, rule this commonwealth. First, the spiritual power wielded by the Church and quintessentially by the pope. Second, the temporal power wielded by (secular) kings and other temporal rulers. Of the two, the former, or spiritual, power precedes the latter in honor, dignity, and direct jurisdictional power. It is the agency whereby the secular rulers who wield that temporal power can be judged and, if necessary, dismissed from office. Whereas the pope, he insists, can be “judged only by God. For … it is he who judges all things and is judged by no one, that is, by no mere man, but by God alone.”24 “No one is a prince over temporal things who either does not have it from the church that he is a prince, or does not have it from her

19 20 21 22 23 24

drc, Pt. 2, cap. 4 and 8; ed. Dyson, 2009, 154–161, 231, 234–235, 238–239. drc, Pt, 2, cap. 7; ed. Dyson, 2009, 216–217. drc, Pt. 2, cap. 7 and 8; ed. Dyson, 2009, 215, 238–239. On which, see Oakley, Mortgage, 195–196. Giles of Rome, De ecclesiastica potestate (dep); ed. Dyson, 2004, Editor’s Introduction, xxi. dep, Pt. 1, cap. 5; ed. Dyson, 2004, 26–27.

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that he is a true and worthy prince.”25 The Church, therefore, and accordingly, the Supreme Pontiff “can never lack a superior and primary jurisdiction over temporal matters,” and “the spiritual sword is the lord of all things [and of all men].”26 In support of such sweeping claims Aegidius elaborates a complex theory of “lordship” (over both people and things—dominium) as contingent upon the possession of grace which leads to the conclusion that there can be no true lordship whatsoever except that subject to the Church. For the Church has a superior, universal, and primary dominium over all persons and things. But while we cannot enter here into the intricacies of that theory,27 there are two other aspects of Aegidius’s teaching of which we should at least take note. The first is the firmness and clarity with which he indicates his commitment to the “derivational” theory of ecclesiastical jurisdictional power. Lesser prelates, that is to say, he sees as wielding their jurisdictional power via delegation from the pope who, within the Church, is the “fount” of all power, the sea “which offers itself to fill all vessels,” the “universal agent which allows all things and all secondary causes to act by their own motions.”28 The second, following in this the path trodden in the late-thirteenth century by the canonist Hostiensis (Henry of Segusia), is his appropriation of the theological distinction between God’s power conceived as absolute and as ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata) and its application by analogy to the power of the pope. For the pope, both in governing the faithful and in exercising jurisdiction in matters temporal, does so (just as does God in governing the world) “according to a two-fold law,” one “absolute” the other “governed by rules.” Although of his absolute power the Supreme Pontiff, he says, “is a creature without bridle and without halter,” nevertheless, he chooses himself to regulate his own actions. Taking his example “from God Himself, whose Vicar he is,” and who “governs things in such a way that He allows them to pursue their own courses,” the pope, though he is above all positive law, governs the Church by his “regulated power,” that is, in accordance with “the common law” and “permits the earthly powers to exercise their office in temporal [matters].”29 With God and the pope that is the case, at least, “normally and ordinarily” or “regularly and according to the common law” and “ordinary course of nature.” But in God and the pope alike there resides an absolute power (potentia absoluta) or plenitude of power (plenitudo

25 26 27 28 29

dep, Pt. 3, cap. 4; ed. Dyson, 2004, 310–311. dep, Pt. 2, cap. 18; Pt. 3, cap 7; ed. Dyson, 2004, 253, 343, 349. See the brief discussion of his theory of dominium in Oakley, Mortgage, 199–203. dep, Pt. 2, cap. 2; ed. Dyson, 2004, 290–291. dep, Pt. 3, cap. 2 and 7; ed. Dyson, 2004, 296–299, 344–347.

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potestatis) by which they can do directly and without the intermediary of any secondary agency (whether secondary natural causes of subordinate human agents) whatsoever they can do indirectly by means of them.30 Thus God can act beyond the common laws of nature and perform a miracle. Similarly, the pope can act beyond the common laws he has established for governing the Church and perform, in effect, a “papal miracle.” For “whatever he can do with other ecclesiastics he can do without them.”31 And, while recognizing that temporal things are de facto “subject to the immediate and executory judgment” of the temporal power, he nevertheless retains “a superior and primary jurisdiction directly over” them.32 These sweeping high papalist claims were, a few years later, to be reiterated and broadcast more widely and effectively by Augustinus Triumphus and Alvarus Pelagius. Of these two authors Charles Howard McIlwain once remarked (after analyzing the former’s Summa and the latter’s De planctu ecclesiae) that there is scarcely a claim made for the Pope by Augustinus Triumphus or Alvarus which Egidius Romanus, James of Viterbo, or some preceding Canonist had not made already, yet these books are of the highest importance because these older ideas are presented here in more systematic and elaborate form than ever before and supported by a vast array of precedents and authorities.33 They are of the highest importance, too, we may add, because they seem to have enjoyed so wide and enduring a readership across the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, constituting at that time the peak expression of high papalism. The Summa de ecclesia alone survives in no less than forty-seven manuscripts, and was printed and reprinted in 1473, 1475, 1479, 1484, 1487, 1582, 1584, 1585, and 1587.34 30 31 32 33

34

dep, Pt. 3, cap. 9; ed. Dyson, 2004, 360–363. dep, Pt. 3, cap. 9; ed. Dyson, 2004, 370–371. dep, Pt. 3, cap. 7; ed. Dyson, 2004, 342–345. Charles H. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 287. The Tractatus brevis de duplici potestate is printed in Richard Scholz, Die Publizistik zur Zeit Philipps des Schönen und Bonifaz viii (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1903), 486–501, to which my references will be given. The Summa de potestate ecclesiastica was printed several times in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I give my references to the 1582 edition. For the De planctu ecclesiae, my references are given to the edition of Juan Tomás de Rocaberti, Bibliotheca maxima pontificia, 21 vols. (Rome: F. Buagni, 1698–1699), 3: 23–264. See Ministerii, De vita, 111–115.

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Having spent time, however, with both Aegidius and James of Viterbo and given constraints of space, we may pass over in merciful silence the “vast array of precedents and authorities” to which McIlwain alludes and limit ourselves to focusing attention on three central issues. The first is that both authors firmly align themselves with the traditional notion in accordance with which the Church itself is identified with the allembracing Christian commonwealth. Thus the Ecclesia is the “society of all Christians,” the principatus mundi, incorporating not simply subordinate churches but also the kingdoms of this world. All of them are parts of that all-embracing whole over which presides the pope, himself possessed of an ultimate jurisdiction over the entire world.35 Second, Michael Wilks claimed that “it was this idea of Ecclesia, the assumption that all Christians and potentially all men formed a single corporate entity, on which the entire hierocratic theory rested.”36 From it, certainly, flowed what Augustinus Triumphus and Alvarus had to say on the matter of the right relationship of spiritual to temporal power. Within the Ecclesia kings and emperors are reduced, in fact, to the status of parts contained in the whole.37 From the pope, “a quasi-God on earth” and deserving of the designation of king and priest after the order of Melchisedeck,38 the emperor acquires his jurisdiction. If the pope is indeed the minister of God, the emperor is to be viewed as the minister of the pope; he is, in effect, “the vicar of the pope in matters temporal.”39 As was the case with Aegidius Romanus and James of Viterbo, what is envisaged here is not simply a sort of indirect, casual, or incidental power of papal intrusion ratione peccati, but, rather, an altogether direct papal power in matters temporal and over temporal rulers. Third, the matter of the right relationship of papal head to faithful members, that is, to the Church at large. It should be noted that, when Augustinus Triumphus and Alvarus explored this particular issue, the concept of the Church they tended to have in mind was less that of an all-embracing universal Christian society than that captured by the narrower notion of an international Church conceived in institutional terms as a corporate, hierarchically-ordered, 35 36 37 38

39

Alvarus Pelagius, De planctu ecclesiae, cap. 37, 40, 59; ed. Rocaberti, 1698, 3: 46, 60, 175; Augustinus Triumphus, Summa, xx, 2, xxii, 3, xxxviii, 4; ed. 1582, 122, 131–132, 227. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, 18. Augustinus Triumphus, Summa, 1, 3, and 4; ed. 1582, 5–7. Alvarus Pelagius, De planctu ecclesiae, cap. 37 and 38; ed. Rocaberti, 1698, 3: 47 and 267. Augustinus Triumphus, De duplici potestate; ed. Scholz, 1903, 499; idem, Summa, i, 2 and 7; 1582, 4, 10–11. ed. Alvarus Pelagius, De planctu ecclesiae, cap. 68; ed. Rocaberti, 1698, 3: 247–248; Augustinus Triumphus, Summa, xxxv, 1, and xl, 3; ed. 1582, 206, 232.

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and clerically-dominated body, presided over by its monarchical papal head. Partly as a result, the position these two high papalists adopted on this matter was able to enjoy a much longer shelf life than did their passionate attribution to the pope of a direct power in matters temporal. The more so in that they framed their position with an unparalleled degree of clarity and force. The heart of the matter, both men insist, invoking the canonistic distinction concerning ecclesiastical power which by their day had become standard, is not the “power of order” (potestas ordinis) which is conferred on all priests and bishops by the sacrament of holy orders. Instead, it is the “power of jurisdiction” (potestas jurisdictionis), a power of coercive government in the external and public forum, the exercise of which does not always and necessarily call for the possession also of the potestas ordinis.40 Whereas Christ confers the latter (sacramental) power directly on all ordained priests and, in its fullness, on all consecrated bishops, the former (governmental) powers he confers directly upon the pope alone. As Christ conferred that potestas jurisdictionis upon the other apostles only via the mediation of Peter, so too, is it conferred upon bishops and other prelates only via the mediation of the pope, who represents the person of Peter (repraesentat personam Petri).41 No more than equal to the other bishops though the pope may well be so far as the power of order is concerned, he is, nonetheless, the very “fount and origin” of all the jurisdictional or governmental power wielded by the other members of the clerical hierarchy and derived only though him.42 As such, he is aligned with Christ’s regal and divine nature, whereas the priesthood at large by virtue of its possession of the potestas ordinis is aligned, rather, with Christ’s priestly and human nature.43 And, as King and God, Christ is, of course, greater in dignity and superiority than he is as priest and man.

40

41

42

43

Thus Augustinus Triumphus, De duplici potestate; ed. Scholz, 1903, 489–490. For a discussion of this and related subdistinctions, see Oakley, Empty Bottles of Gentilism. 104, 169–170. “Whence in Matthew 16,” he adds, “when Christ therefore granted the power of jurisdiction, he did not speak in the plural but in the singular, saying to Peter alone, I shall give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, as if he would say plainly: although I have given the power of order [equally] to all the apostles, I give thus to you alone your power of jurisdiction, to be dispensed and distributed though you to all the others”—Augustinus Triumphus, Tractatus de duplici potestate; ed. Scholz, 1903, 490. Augustinus Triumphus, Summa, i, 1, iv, 1 and 2; ed. 1582, 2–3, 40–42. Alvarus Pelagius, De planctu ecclesiae, cap. 68; ed. Rocaberti, 1698, 3: 248: “a papa tanquam a primo fonte descendat omnis jurisdictio, et episcoporum, et presbyterorum.” Cf. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, 31, 382. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, 376–377.

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The “unwritten constitution” of the Church notwithstanding, Augustinus Triumphus is, then, moved as far as possible to minimize the existence of constraints on the papal exercise of power, even at times when papal malfeasance may have entered the picture. Thus, he dismisses as simply “ridiculous and frivolous” not only the idea of appealing from pope to general council, but even that of appealing from pope to God. For “the sentence of the pope and the sentence of God are one sentence,” and “one can hardly appeal to the pope against his own sentence.”44 These extreme high-papalist claims represent the high-water mark in the protracted rise to prominence of papalist monarchical thinking. They were being advanced, moreover, very much at the end of the line and at a time when challenged already by secular rulers, they were also beginning to run into increasingly negative clerical headwinds. And, not least of all, headwinds generated by “the divines of Paris” who were to play so central a role in the subsequent attempt to subordinate popes to the authority of general councils. That did not preclude, however, the reiteration of those high-papalist claims by such celebrated papalist theologians of the Renaissance era as Juan de Torquemada in the fifteenth century, Cajetan in the sixteenth, and Bellarmine in the seventeenth. All three subscribed firmly, for example, to Aegidius Romanus’s and Augustinus Triumphus’s insistence that all the jurisdictional power wielded by lesser prelates derived by delegation for the papal monarch.45 But that view, though it was to remain the dominant ecclesiological position among members of the Roman (if not the Gallican) theological school right down into the nineteenth century, never quite succeeded in carrying the day. It was to be endorsed neither by the Council of Trent (1545–1563) nor (perhaps more surprisingly) by Vatican i, and it was finally to be precluded by Vatican ii’s historic teaching on episcopal collegiality.46 It should be noted, moreover, that on two other matters, such later papalist theorists as Torquemada, Cajetan, and Bellarmine all moved to qualify the more extreme claims made by their early-fourteenth century predecessors. In 44 45

46

Augustinus Triumphus, Summa, vi, 1 and 6; ed. 1582, 56–57, 61–62. See Thomas M. Izbicki, Protector of the Faith: Cardinal Johannes de Turrecremata and the Defense of the Institutional Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1981), 76–77, and 62; William Henn, “Historical Theological Synthesis of the Relation between Primacy and Episcopacy during the Second Millennium,” in Il Primato del Successore di Pietro. Atti del Simposio-Teologico, Roma, dicembre 1996 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998), 222–223; Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy from its Origins to the Present, trans. John A. Otto and Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 128–174. For this whole question, see Henn, “Historical-Theological Synthesis,” 222–273. For the difficulty the Council of Trent experienced with this highly-fraught issue, see Hubert Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 4 vols., in 5 (Freiburg: Herder, 1948–1978), 4/2: 57.

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this, they were clearly responding to the two major challenges handed down to papal authority by temporal rulers and conciliarist thinkers alike during the crisis precipitated by the Great Schism of the West (1378–1417).47 The first of those challenges concerned the precise nature of the power to be attributed to the pope in matters temporal; the second concerned the relationship of general council to pope. In his Tractatus de regia potestate et papali, while reacting sharply against the radicially hierocratic position arrived at by Aegidius Romanus, John of Paris (ca. 1250/54–1306), rather than digging in at some opposite ideological extreme, had sought instead to identify and occupy a complex species of mediating ground. Thus, while forthrightly dismissing the notion that the pope possessed any direct authority in matters temporal, one of the moves he made in so doing was to concede that, under extraordinary circumstances and via his authority to preach or impose excommunication, the pope might nevertheless intervene in matters temporal in an “indirect,” “incidental,” or “conditional” way. In so doing, he added, the pope could even go to the point of persuading a king’s subjects to deprive him of his high office. That position was to be echoed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by conciliarist theologians of stature like Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420) and Jean Gerson (1363–1429) as well as by such leading fifteenth- and sixteenth-century papalists as Juan de Torquemada and Cajetan. In connection with it, John of Paris’s name was to be evoked in laudatory fashion by none other than that staunch papalist Robert, Cardinal Bellarmine who affixed to it the label of an indirect papal power in matters temporal.48 In the wake of the Great Schism, moreover and of the great challenge of conciliarists handed down to the papacy at the Councils of Constance (1414– 1418) and Basel (1431–1449), the type of papalism endorsed by Torquemada and Cajetan revealed, when it came to the relationship of pope to council, a very significant shift. That is to say, it was modified in such a way as to reflect a degree of deference to conciliar authority that would have been quite alien to the views espoused by their early-fourteenth century predecessors. In effect, while the 47 48

For the latter, see below, Section ii. John of Paris, unfolds this argument for a power working indirectly to deprive a king of his office in Tractatus de regia potestate et papali, cap. 13; ed. Fritz Bleienstein, Johannes Quidort von Paris. Über königliche und papstliche Gewalt (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1969), 135–141. For d’Ailly, see Oakley, Mortgage, 280. For Torquemada’s similar rejection of any direct papal power over temporal affairs, see Izbicki, Protector of the Faith, 112–116, and for the influence of his position on such Renaissance papalists as Cajetan and Suarez, see Michele Maccarrone, Vicarius Christi. Storia del titulo papale (Rome: Facultas Theologica Pontificii, Athenaei Lateranensis, 1952), 269–275, 279.

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high papalist monarchical ecclesiology did endure into the post-Basel era of papal restoration, we should not miss the fact that it did not do so without qualifications, hesitancies, and complexities generated by the presence even in the thinking of those prominent in its defense of a changed attitude towards conciliar authority. Thus, while Torquemada himself had come firmly to deny the validity of the Constance superiority decree Haec sancta and of Frequens, too, he had aligned himself with Laetentur coeli, the conciliar definition of the Roman primacy promulgated in 1439 by the Council of Florence, and had also rejected the Decretalist corporative element in the strict conciliar theory, he had nonetheless affirmed a version of the older Decretist teaching in that theory. That teaching, encapsulated in Gratian’s Decretum, Distinction 40, chapter 1, concerned the case of the heretical pope or the pope guilty of crimes against the status ecclesiae or general wellbeing of the Church. And Torquemada ascribed to the general council in that connection, as also in the case of a disputed papal election, quite extensive powers at least of an investigative and declaratory nature.49 Something similar is true of his contemporary, the curialist Antonio de Roselli, staunch advocate of the papal monarchy though he was, as also, later on of the reformer Vicenzo Quirini at the time of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517). In his Tractatus super concilium generalium Quirini could insist, of course, that “the pontifical authority is above the council,” for that had long been the mantra of those who adhered to the papalist position. But that did not preclude his insisting also on a clear role for general councils in the removal of heretical popes.50 Against that background, the complexities and moments of fragility evident in the conciliar position that Cajetan hammered out in October, 1511, in his De comparatione authoritatis papae et concilii became more readily comprehensible.51 For he was at one with Torquemada and other latter-day papalists in echoing a version of the old Decretist teaching that the universal Church itself, via the agency of a general council, had a role to play in the deposition of an heretical pope.52 More readily comprehensible, too, given these hesitations 49 50

51 52

Izbicki, Protector of the Faith, 93–94. For Constance’s superiority decree and the various elements that came together in the conciliar theory, see below Section ii. Pietro Quirini, Tractatus super concilium generalium, in Johannes-Benedictus Mittarelli and Anselmus Costadini, eds., Annales Camaldulensis, 9 vols. (Venice: apud Jo Baptistam Pasquale, 1755–1773), 9: 606 § 25. For an analysis of that position see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 120–129. See Cajetan, De comparatione, cap. 17: 22 and 26; ed. Jacques V.M. Pollet (Rome: Angelicum, 1936), 112–119, 167–175. Cf. Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, 120–123; Jacques V.M. Pollet, “Le Doctrine de Cajetan sur l’Église,” Angelicum, 11 (1934), 514–532, and 12 (1935), 223–244.

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in the thinking even of post-restoration theologians of high-papalist bent, was the subsequent inability of the Council of Trent in its final and best-attended phase (1562–1563—when the strongly conciliarist French delegation was now in attendance), to come to terms with the most pressing ecclesiological question of the day—the hotly-disputed matter of the nature and reach of papal power.53

2

Councils, Cardinalate, and Conciliarism

For purposes of expository simplicity I have chosen to focus exclusively, thus far, on the more absolutist, high-papalist strand of thinking that more or less dominated ecclesiological discourse from the late-twelfth to the earlyfourteenth centuries. But it is time now to acknowledge that the canonistic legacy handed on to the future from those centuries harbored faults and contradictions that had the effect of making it less than fully coherent. Certainly, the legacy of the revived Roman law and of the canonistic counterpart that drew on it as a model and inspiration was ambivalent, even “bipolar” in nature. While on the one hand, and as we have seen, there was much in the canon law and in the vast body of commentary surrounding it that was supportive of papal aspirations to an authority that was sovereign and unrestrained, on the other there was equally a “strong emphasis on the indefeasibility of the community,” itself directly reflective of the Holy Spirit’s guiding presence at work among the Christian people.54 That, too, had to be recognized and, with it, the limits it imposed on the untrammeled exercise of papal power as well as the degree to which it entailed a right on the part of the community to reject any abuse of that power.55 Under the crisis conditions precipitated by the outbreak of the Great Schism in 1378 and the persistence for almost four decades of a situation in which first two and then three papal claimants competed scandalously for possession of the papal office, that other, more constitutionalist strand of ecclesiological thinking rose understandably to prominence in what we know as the conciliar movement of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and

53

54 55

At the end, and in somewhat prophetic mode, the pope’s legates were at pains to convey to the pope their own worried sense that peace in the church would continue to prove elusive and recurrent divisions to be inevitable so long as that neuralgic question was left undecided. See Jedin, Geschichte der Konzils von Trient, 4/2: 57. Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought: 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 14–16. For the ambivalent nature of the canonistic heritage, see Oakley, Mortgage, 42–56, 81–91.

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was given historic expression in the form of what we are accustomed to call “conciliarism” or “the conciliar theory.”56 Of the four marks or works of the Church designated by the Nicene Creed— one, holy, catholic, and apostolic—the mark of holiness had appeared earlier and more frequently in the various creeds than had the other three. And it was also the characteristic that had given rise to some of the earliest ecclesiological controversies.57 But in the great tide of debate concerning the nature of the Church that was to crest during the conciliar epoch it was less the work of holiness than that of unity that lay at the very heart of disagreement. If, for adherents to the more prominent high-papalist position, the key to that unity lay in the firm subordination of the entire Christian community to a single papal head, for the others the key lay, rather, in the corporate association of those members. It was from the latter group that the conciliarists of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries took their cue. Committed to the belief that the papal leadership of the Church was indeed of divine foundation, but moved also, it seems, by memories of what today would be called the ecclesiology of communio and by the scriptural and patristic vision of the community of Christians as forming a single body with Christ (its “primary or ultimate head”), the proponents of conciliarist views sought to combine those two convictions. That is to say (and as James H. Burns has rightly insisted),58 their argument with the high papalists was not an argument “for or against [papal] monarchy as such,” but an argument about the nature of that papal monarchy. For they sought to harmonize their twin convictions by insisting that, side by side with the institution of papal monarchy, it was necessary to give the Church’s communitarian or corporate dimension more prominent and routine institutional expression, most notably by the regular assembly of general councils representing the entire community of the faithful. As they went about that task, they were led to advance a complex of ideas susceptible of many more variations than it once was common to assume— too many, certainly, to capture by invoking the simple slogan of the superiority of council to pope. But if, in the thinking of the various conciliarist authors, shaped by individual temperament, shifting circumstances, and other contextual factors of one sort or another, one finds theories of differing textures

56 57 58

In what follows, I draw on the much more complete and fully-documented account in Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, 60–129. See Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), 159–162. James H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 127.

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and dimensions, one also finds that those theories are still woven around a shared pattern of belief. That being so, I believe that it is possible to discern within the complex fabric of conciliarist thinking as it emerged during the Great Schism and the conciliar epoch (1378–1449)—its “classical” era of greatest prominence—three broad strands. Distinct in their origins and (in some measure) in their subsequent careers, those strands were woven in this period into a coherent, meaningful, and historic pattern. I believe, too, that one’s understanding of the overall theoretical pattern can be advanced if one teases these three strands apart and focuses on each of them in turn. Of the three, the first, oldest, and most prominent is the demand for reform of the Church “in head and members” and the conviction that this reform could best be achieved and consolidated through the periodic assembly of general councils. Rooted in the defensive reaction of the provincial churches of Europe in the latter part of the thirteenth century to what they had come ruefully to see as the remorseless progress of Roman centralization, it had taken on a tone of greater hostility to papal jurisdictional authority in the demand for church-wide reform elicited by the assembly of the Council of Vienne in 1311 and in Durand the Younger’s call at that time for the future assembly of general councils at regular, ten-yearly intervals. But, as Hubert Jedin has said, it was to require “the pitiful situation created by the Schism to bring about an alliance of Conciliar theory with the demand for reform.”59 Once that alliance was concluded, however, the destinies of both were to be interwoven for the duration of the conciliar epoch itself and, though only intermittently, during the centuries ensuing. Although lacking in one of the very first of conciliarist tenets, the Epistola concordiae (1380) of Conrad of Gelnhausen, this reformist strand was to appear as early as 1381 in the Epistola concilii pacis of his Parisian colleague Henry of Langenstein who, in advocating the assembly of a general council to settle the Schism, saw reform as one of the major tasks of such a council of reunion.60 In so doing, he set the pattern for much that was to follow. The reformist strand was to be present in the thinking of the other leading conciliarists. Thus, at the time of the Council of Pisa (1409) and Constance (1414–1418): Pierre d’Ailly, Jean Gerson, Dietrich of Niem, Francesco Zabarella; at the time of the Council of Pavia-Siena (1423–1424): John of Ragusa, Andrew of Escobar, John of Segovia, Nicholas of Cusa, and Panormitanus (Nicholas de Tudeschis). Constance itself 59 60

Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1952–1961), 1: 9. Epistola concilii pacis, in Jean Gerson, Opera omnia, ed. Louis Ellies Dupin, 5 vols. (Antwerp, 1706), 2: 835–840.

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gave official expression to the heartfelt conviction that the frequent assembly of general councils was a necessary condition for any truly effective reform of the Church. For, prior to proceeding in 1417 to the election of Martin v (1417– 1431), it promulgated the decree Frequens, mandating (and seeking to render automatic) the future papal assembly of general councils at regular, stipulated intervals. In the minds of its framers, Frequens may well have been closely associated with the earlier superiority decree Haec sancta (1415), but it did not itself necessarily presume any assertion of the superiority to the pope alone of the council membership acting apart from or in opposition to its papal head.61 Whatever the case, the commitment to conciliar reform of the Church “in head and members” remained the most prominent strand in the conciliarist thinking of the classical era at least. Given the fact that the sort of reform it envisaged was targeted most insistently on the “head” and conceived most persistently as reform of the Roman curia and the curbing of its authority over the universal Church, it should not be a matter for surprise that the second major strand in conciliar thinking, though certainly of great importance, was a less prominent one. That strand sought to give heightened institutional expression to the Church’s corporate nature by envisaging its constitution in quasioligarchic terms, its government ordinarily in the hands of the curia, and the pope being in some measure limited in the exercise of his authority by that of the cardinalate, with whose “advice, consent, direction and remembrance” he was to rule.62 Such a view of things, adumbrated already during the Investiture Conflict, had come to be rooted in traditional curial claims stimulated by the de facto share increasingly taken by the cardinals over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the day-to-day government of the universal Church. It was in the anonymous early-thirteenth century operations on Gratian’s Decretum which bears the name Ecce vicit Leo that these customary claims received what appears to have been their first theoretical formulation. But the decretalists Hostiensis (d. 1271) and Johannes Monachus (d. 1311) moved, later on, to give that formulation more explicit expression. Taking as their premise the idea that “pope and cardinals together formed a single corporate body subject to the normal rules of corporation law,” so that “the Pope stood exactly in the same relation to the cardinals as any other bishop to his

61

62

The two decrees are printed (Latin, with English translation on facing pages) in Giuseppe Alberigo and Norman P. Tanner eds., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London and Washington, D.C.: Sheed and Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1: 409 and 439–442. These words are taken from the alleged professio fidei of Boniface viii. For which, see Stephanus Baluzius and Johannes Dominicus Mansi, Miscellanea (Lucca: 1781–1784), 3: 418.

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cathedral chapter,” they maintained that the cardinals shared with the pope the exercise of the plenitudo potestatis. For them, “authority in a corporation was not concentrated in the head alone but resided in all the members,” so that “the prelate could not act without the consent of the members in the most important matters affecting the well-being of the whole corporation.”63 From that angle of vision, then, the claim of the cardinals to an intimate and vital role in the decision-making process could hardly be contested. This was the point of view that was to inspire the dissident cardinals during the electoral crisis of 1378 when they rejected the demand for a general council and took it upon themselves to pass negative judgment on the validity of Urban vi’s election, thereby precipitating the Great Schism. Those outside the ranks of the cardinalate who believed that the general council alone was the proper forum for deciding so grave a question remained unimpressed by the claims being made for the Sacred College, and one would certainly look in vain for any trace of sympathy with such quasi-oligarchic sentiments in the writings of early conciliarists like Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein. With the passage of time, however, and as the events that had led to the onset of schism receded now into history, some of the conciliarists at Constance itself—notably the theologians Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson as well as the great canonist Francesco Zabarella—came to embrace sentiments of that sort. So, too, among the conciliarists at Basel did Nicholas of Cusa and Denys van Rijkel (the Carthusian), both men drawing their views on the matter from the case d’Ailly had made at Constance in his Tractatus de potestate ecclesiastica.64 But, of all of these conciliarists, it was Zabarella who, in his Tractatus de schismate (1403–1408)—a work of pure canonistic scholarship—gave what I have called the quasi-oligarchic strand its most coherent, indeed classic, exposition.65 The expression “apostolic see” does not refer, he says, to the pope alone, but to the pope and cardinals who together form a single body of which the pope is the head and the cardinals the members. Thus if, under the deplorable circumstances of schism, the pope were to refuse to summon a general council, that 63

64

65

Following here the interpretation proposed by Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 58–84, 117, 149–153, 180–190. The words cited appear at 184, 117. Printed in Gerson, Opera omnia, 5 vols., ed. Dupin, 2: 925–960. See the discussion in Francis Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly: The Voluntarist Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), 114–129. The Tractatus de Schismate is printed in Simon Schardius, De jurisdictione (Basel: Oporinus, 1566), 688–711.

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right would devolve upon the cardinals. Again, and under any circumstances whatsoever, it is the case that “without the cardinals the pope cannot establish a general law concerning the state of the universal church”;66 nor, without consulting them, can he act in matters of importance. For their own part, however, if circumstances warrant it, the cardinals can exercise their authority even to the extent of withdrawing allegiance from the pope. Moreover, during a vacancy or even a “quasi-vacancy” (which would occur if the pope could not effectively rule the church) they succeed to the full power of the Apostolic See. And they do so because the Sacred College in electing the pope represents the universal Church and acts in its place.67 By the end of the fourteenth century this last sentiment had become common enough to help explain how men like d’Ailly and Zabarella, though they were at pains to stress the supreme authority in the Church of the general council, could still contrive also to embrace the quasi-oligarchic curialist position that others viewed as being in tension with strictly conciliarist views. That reflects the fact that if Zabarella and (less clearly) d’Ailly saw the local Roman church or Apostolic See as itself a corporate body composed of pope and cardinals—with all that that might imply, constitutionally-speaking— they also saw it as the head in turn of a greater corporate body, the universal Church itself, from which it derived its authority and the well-being of which it existed to promote. By so doing, of course, they were affirming the third, most fundamental and most enduring strand in the conciliarist pattern of thought, a strand that I will refer to henceforth as “the strict conciliar theory.” Whatever the controversialist descriptions of later years might suggest, the strict conciliar theory possessed no monolithic unity, and even the version prevalent in the classical age of Constance and Basel encompassed a variety of formulations. In this regard, one should note especially that during the protracted confrontation between Eugenius iv (1431–1447) and the Council of Basel, when the council began to intrude upon the day-to-day government of the Church, some of the conciliar theorists of the day (notably John of Segovia) moved beyond their predecessors and edged into somewhat more radical territory. Evoking the analogy of the civil republic and fusing corporation theory with the ideals of the commune, they turned from the notions of mixed monarchy prevalent among those predecessors to that of community sovereignty. And in so doing they attributed what amounted to an “unlimited jurisdiction to the church-in-council, with the pope as merely its executive servant (primus

66 67

Ibid., 692–693, 702. Ibid., 698, 711.

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minister).”68 But if the conciliar theory of the classical era of Constance and Basel did indeed encompass a variety of formulations, common to them all were the beliefs that the pope, however divinely instituted his office, was not an absolute monarch or incapable of doctrinal error but in some sense a constitutional ruler and susceptible therefore of correction; that he possessed a merely ministerial authority delegated to him by the community of the faithful (congregatio fidelium) for the good of the entire Church which itself possessed the gift of indefectibility; that that community had not exhausted its inherent authority by the mere act of electing its ruler but had retained whatever residual power was necessary to preserve the truths of the Christian faith and to prevent its own subversion or ruin; that it could exercise that power through its representatives assembled in a general council, could do so in certain cases acting alone and against the wishes of the pope and, in such cases, could proceed if need be to judge, punish, and even depose him. Such views, once thought to reflect ideological novelties of questionable orthodoxy, we now know, instead, to have deeply engaged in Decretalist corporation theory and in earlier Decretist debates concerning the role the general council should play in the case of an heretical pope.69 Such were the views, given notable expression at Constance by such leading (and comparatively moderate) figures as d’Ailly, Gerson, and Zabarella, and that informed the thinking of the council fathers during the crisis precipitated in April 1415 by the flight from the council of John xxiii, the pope who had convoked it. In response to that anomic event, the fathers moved swiftly to promulgate the classic “superiority” decree Haec sancta and then went on to try, judge, and depose him. In so doing, they were acting on the terms laid down in the decree. They recognized (as Gerson was to point out to Martin v after the council was over) that they were moving judicially to deprive a “true pope” (verus papa) of his office and not merely issuing some sort of declaratory judgment to the effect that this or that claimant to the papacy was not in fact the pope.70 Over the centuries, a great deal of effort (some of it smacking of sheer hermeneutical desperation) has been devoted by those of high-papalist leanings to the task of reading Haec sancta in such a way as to make it say what it 68

69 70

Following here the interpretation proffered by Antony J. Black in Monarchy and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), as well as in his Council and Commune (London: Burns and Oates, 1979), and in his “The Conciliar Movement,” in: James H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 573–587. The words cited appear in this last at 580. For which, see Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory. Jean Gerson, De auferabilitate papae, consid. 14, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Polemon Glorieux, 10 vols. (Paris: Desclée, 1960–1973), 3: 304–305.

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does not say or not say what it clearly does. But largely in vain. Not only those who have affirmed its provisions but also those who have rejected them have tended, properly, to take those provisions at face value. And what were they? Affirming that Constance was itself a general council “legitimately assembled in the Holy Spirit” with the objective of ending the schism and bringing “reform and unity to God’s church,” it affirmed that, “representing the catholic church militant” it had its power “immediately from Christ and that everyone of whatever state or dignity, even papal” was “bound to obey it in matters pertaining to the faith, the eradication of the said schism, and the general reform of the said church in head and members.” Further (and here it’s made clear that it was addressing the longer future and not simply the current crisis), it also decreed that “anyone of whatever condition, state or dignity, even papal,” who contumaciously refused to obey its own decrees or the decrees “of any other legitimately assembled general council” in the areas aforesaid or in “matters pertaining to them” would be subjected to penance and, if need be, to punishment in accordance with the law.71 In 1418 Gerson pointedly reminded Martin v and in 1431 the papal legate, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, likewise reminded Eugenius iv that the validity of their own papal titles depended on the legitimacy of the actions Constance had taken in accordance with the provisions of Haec sancta. And Martin v and (at the start) Eugenius iv did not in fact challenge the validity of the decree. But as the Council of Basel ground on, Eugenius came to change his stance on the matter, and subsequent popes were to deny its continuing validity. In the decree Execrabilis (1460) Pius ii sought to prohibit appeals from the authority of the pope to that of a future general council. And, a fleeting, oblique, and ambivalent formulation in the decree Pastor aeternus promulgated in 1516 by the Fifth Lateran Council has often (if improbably) been taken to constitute a condemnation of the conciliar theory itself.72 By that time, of course, and under the

71

72

Italics mine. For the full text, see Alberigo and Tanner, eds, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1: 409. During the 1960s, vigorous debate surfaced concerning the meaning and reach of Haec sancta. Most of the contributions to that protracted debate are described and analyzed in Francis Oakley, Council over Pope? Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 118–131, and in Paul de Vooght, “Les Controverses sur les pouvoirs du concile l’autorité du Pape au Concile de Constance,”Revue théologique de Louvain, 1 (1970), 45–75. For more recent debate on the topic, see Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, 81–99. Thus Jedin, History, 1:133, comments that “to the papal prohibition of appeal to a Council, the assembly now added a condemnation of the theory itself.” For a rejection of that claim, see Francis Oakley, “Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council?,” Church History, 41 (1972), 452–463, where I echo Bishop Bossuet’s similar rejection in the late-seventeenth century.

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changed circumstances of the day, the bonds that, during the classic age of conciliarism, had linked together the three disparate strands described above had long since begun to fray. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indeed, those three strands, distinct as they had been in their origins, were turning out now to be distinct also in their subsequent careers. We have seen that the first and most prominent of those strands was the demand for reform of the Church in head and members and the belief that that sort of reform could best be achieved and consolidated through the periodic assembly of general councils. As the fifteenth century wore on, however, those who continued to espouse the strict conciliar theory proved not to be as fervently wedded to the reforming cause as had been their predecessors at Constance and Basel. In its formal pronouncements the conciliaristinspired conciliabulum of Pisa (1511–1512) strove to give a different impression, but the real ecclesiastical problem it had met to remedy (with the help of the French king, Louis xii) was nothing more spiritual than Pope Julius ii’s adoption of a diplomatic posture hostile to the French presence in Italy. Certainly, in the tracts of its most prominent apologists—Jacques Almain and John Mair of the Parisian theology faculty not excluded—the matter of reform does not occupy a prominent place. No more, indeed, than it was to occupy in the thinking of later conciliarists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.73 At the same time, those who still believed that the necessary reform of the Church in head and members could be achieved only by means of a general council had come increasingly to recoil from advocacy of the strict conciliar theory itself. And it was with the papally-convoked Fifth Lateran Council (1512– 1517) rather than with Pisa that most of them chose to align themselves. But it is important to realize that their rejection of the strict conciliar theory as advocated by men like Almain and Mair did not necessarily entail a complete abandonment of the first strand of conciliarist thinking. Of course, given the use made of Frequens by the conciliarist initiators of the conciliabulum of Pisa, it is not surprising that the Dominican Cajetan, their great opponent, should denounce any insistence on the periodic assembly of general councils as an infringement on the legal rights of the papacy.74 At the same time, however, the two Camoldolese monks, Tommaso Giustiniani and Vicenzo Quirini, in the great program for reform they had laid out in the Libellus they presented to Pope Leo x, did not hesitate to state quite explicitly their conviction that it was

73 74

Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, 111–181. Cajetan, De comparatione, cap. 16, n. 237; ed. Pollet, 110.

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vital to the recovery and maintenance of the Church’s health that general councils be held every five years.75 These are striking and important manifestations of the persistence of one strand of conciliarism in the thinking of supporters of the Lateran Council whom we tend to classify as “papalists.” But what, in conclusion, of the second or quasi-oligarchic strand which had envisaged the pope as being limited in the exercise of his power by that of the cardinals? In the classical age of conciliar theory such views had been synthesized with the more “democratic” strict conciliar theory. That synthesis, however, had not turned out to be a very stable one. The years after the demise of the Council of Basel were to witness its disintegration and, by the time of the Pisan crisis such advocates of the strict conciliar theory of Almain and Mair, though they drew heavily on Pierre d’Ailly’s conciliar thinking, were quick to distance themselves from the specifically oligarchic strand in his ecclesiology.76 Their reason for so doing is not too hard to detect. In their day, the old oligarchic tradition was far from being defunct. But by their day it had come once more to find its home where it had found it originally. Not, that is to say, among those of recognizably conciliarist commitment but in the Roman curia itself. In his great Summa de ecclesia of 1453 Juan de Torquemada had reproduced verbatim (though naturally without acknowledgement) much of d’Ailly’s discussion of the role of the cardinalate in the government of the universal church. And the advocacy of those views by the dean of papalists himself (as well as by the curialist Domenico Domenichi and others) had been a factor of some importance in the struggle for power that came to rage between the college of cardinals and the popes during the latter part of the fifteenth century. In that struggle, the efforts of the cardinals had not met with much success. Concerned above all to advance their own private interests they turned to the mechanism of electoral capitulations publicly demanding the assembly of a general council, the reform of the church, and the launching of a war against the Turks. The faithful observance of those capitulations they sought to impose on pope after pope. But without success. They were, as Jedin has said, “rearguard actions, not offensive strokes.”77 Even if the old curialist tradition was still alive at the time of Pisa and the rival Lateran Council, it is significant that it was with the latter, papally-convoked assembly that the majority of cardinals aligned themselves.

75 76 77

Libellus ad Leonem x, in Mittarelli and Costadoni eds., Annales Camaldulensis, xi: 708. See esp. Jacques Almain, Tractatus de auctoritate ecclesiae, in Gerson, Opera omnia, ed. Dupin, 2: 1011; cf. ibid., 996. Jedin, History, 1: 90. For the extent of such tensions within the restored papacy, see the informative account in ibid., 1: 76–101.

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And their subsequent alignment with the pope in opposition to a little-noted move made by the bishops assembled at the council witnesses to the degree to which they had now come to distance themselves, not only from the strict conciliar theory, but from anything that smacked at all of “episcopalism.” In making the move in question, the bishops were attempting to put a stop to the damage being done to the coherence of their own jurisdictional authority by the papal privileges and exemptions long since extended to the members of the great international orders of friars. With that end in view, they had proposed the establishment of an episcopal “sodality” or “confraternity” (episcopalis societas, confraternitas, sodalicium) and, beyond that, had petitioned the pope to be allowed a common chancellor and a common treasury, as well as to be allowed to meet in common when it was necessary to do so in order to procure the interests of the episcopate as a whole. Not only did the pope react very coolly to this intriguing, proto-collegial, initiative; so, too, did the cardinals. Upon it, then, and it was an important moment in the history of early-modern ecclesiology, a “perpetual silence” was imposed.78

Bibliography Arquillière, Henri-Xavier. Las plus ancient triaté de l’église: Jaques de Viterbo, De regimine christiano, 1301–1302. Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1926. Bouwsma, William J. Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of Counter-Reformation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. Burns, James H. Lordship, Kingship, and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. de Vooght, Paul. “Les Controverses sur les pouvoirs du concile l’autorité du Pape au Concile de Constance,” Revue théologique de Louvain, 1 (1970), 45–75. Folz, Robert. The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century. Trans. Sylvia Ann Ogilvie. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Henn, William. “Historical Theological Synthesis of the Relation between Primacy and Episcopacy during the Second Millennium,” in: Il Primato del Successore di Pietro. Atti del Simposio-Teologico, Roma, dicembre 1996. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998. Izbicki, Thomas M. Protector of the Faith: Cardinal Johannes de Turrecremata and the Defense of the Institutional Church. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1981. Jedin, Hubert. Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 4 vols., in 5. Freiburg: Herder, 1948– 1978. 78

Oakley, “Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council?,” 456–458.

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Maccarrone, Michele. Vicarius Christi. Storia del titulo papale. Rome: Facultas Theologica Pontificii, Athenaei Lateranensis, 1952. McIlwain, Charles Howard. The Growth of Political Thought in the West. New York: Macmillan, 1932 Morrison, Karl F. Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 300–1140. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Oakley, Francis. Council over Pope? Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969. Oakley, Francis. “Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council?” Church History, 41 (1972), 452–463. Oakley, Francis. The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Oakley, Francis. Empty Bottles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050). New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Oakley, Francis. The Mortgage of the Past: Reshaping the Ancient Political Inheritance (1050–1300). New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012. Pennington, Kenneth. The Pope and the Bishops: The Papal Monarchy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. Rivière, Jean. Le problème de l’église et de l’état au temps de Philippe le Bel. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1926. Schatz, Klaus. Papal Primacy from its Origins to the Present, trans. John A. Otto and Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996. Tierney, Brian. Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Tierney, Brian. Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought: 1150–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Wilks, Michael. The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.

chapter 3

Renaissance Papal Court and Curia Nelson H. Minnich

To support the pope in his dual roles as the spiritual head of the Church and temporal ruler of the Papal States, he was served by two bureaucracies, the papal court and the Roman Curia. The distinction between them was not always maintained, but in general the court consisted of the pope’s personal (and some essential bureaucratic) entourage, while the curia was composed of the bureaucratic administrative offices.1

1

Papal Court

The papal court was divided into two groups. The first was known as the strict/small/ “secret” [private] court, the pope’s personal “family.” It was devoted to his personal, domestic service. It was composed of such officials as writers of papal documents, notaries, sergeants-at-arms, guards, cooks, bakers, waiters in the refectory, stablemen, long-term guests, honorary officials—some were allowed to have one or more familiars or servants of their own. The secret court followed the pope when on the road. Appointments to this court ended on the death of the pope. The second group was known as the common court or “family.” It consisted of the permanent civil service working to maintain the papal palace and curial administration, such as clerics of the Camera (who handled finance). Service to the pope was recompensed initially by housing and food. In the mid-fourteenth century, the “family” cost ca. 25,000 florins per annum to maintain, by the early sixteenth century the sum had risen to almost a million florins per year. The Venetian ambassador in 1517 estimated that Leo x spent 8,000 to 9,000 ducats per month on just the papal refectories (tenelli, major et minor).2

1 “Curia,” The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Philippe Levillain, English language edition consultant John W. O’Malley, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1: 444–475: “14th and 15th Centuries,” by Bernard Guillemain, 455–461; “15th Century,” by Marco Pellegrini, 462–464; “16th to 18th Centuries,” by Mario Rosa, 464–470. 2 Please see Appendix for an explanation of the coinage used in Renaissance Rome and their approximate valuations.

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Members of the strict / private family were given lodgings in the papal palace on the Vatican hill or subsidized housing nearby, and were fed at the “secret” table. Members of the common family enjoyed common table rights. In the later medieval period, they were given an allotment (twice a year) of cloth for their clothes and of forage for a horse or mule, but this was commuted to the payment every two months of a salary. Additional income came from fees the officials charged for services they rendered in the Curia. They were also rewarded with preference in obtaining benefices.3 Members of the papal family were often divided into those who were “secret” and those “common.” Among the secret members were the domestic prelates. Twenty-eight of them appear on the list of Leo x’s court: archbishops, bishops, abbots, protonotaries, personal secretaries, papal sacristan, intimate advisers of the pope— only two lacked a familiar of their own, while another two had as many as eight. Of the eight serving Vincenzo de Andreis, bishop of Ottochaz in Croatia, half were his relatives.4 Next in rank were the chamberlains and chamber clerks (camerarii and cubicularii). Leo x had sixty-four camerarii and sixty-nine cubicularii. The camerarii were the pope’s constant companions, some of whom were blood relatives, his domestic secretaries (Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto) who handled his correspondence, the master of the household who kept things functioning smoothly, the master of the hall who supervised the dining room, the quartermaster in charge of the papal household and possessions (jewels, clothing, furniture, bedding, linens, food, etc.), the custodians of the papal library, etc. Leo x’s cousin Luigi Rossi was among their number and had a staff of eleven familiars or servants, so too did Guido de’ Medici. Among the cubicularii were to be found the noted humanist Rafaello Brandolini and singers Gabrielle de Laude and Nicholas de Albis, but most were minimally identified except for their names and at times their dioceses. They came from all over Western Christendom. The category with the largest number of members was that of the shieldbearers (scutiferi). Among these ninety-four men were to be found physicians, musicians, an astrologer, humanists, private butlers, three private stewards, accountants and dispensers of money of various types, a master of the stables, and the supervisor of the pope’s pet elephant. In 1515 Leo x raised the number of shield-bearers to 140. 3 Guillemain, “14th and 15th Centuries,” 455; Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 20–46. 4 Alessandro Ferrajoli, Il ruolo della corte di Leone x, ed. Vincenzo de Caprio [«Europa delle corti», Centro studi sulle società di antico regime, Biblioteca del Cinquecento, 23] (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1984), 5–33.

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Clerics associated with the papal liturgy were members of the court. They included the chaplains and clerics of the chapel who accompanied the pope at Mass and office. Musicians and cantors sang the office. Some clerics of the chapel were merely honorary and did not reside in Rome (in 1378 there were over 900 listed). Among the papal officials belonging to the court was the papal almoner who distributed alms (coins, food, etc.) to the poor daily, but especially on feast days when the gifts were more generous. In the mid-fourteenth century, about 25,000 florins were dispersed annually. The pope’s official theologian was known as the master of the Sacred Palace. He was often a Dominican who taught theology in the studium generale Curiae Romanae that granted licenses to teach throughout Christendom. Sergeants-at-arms protected the pope. These knights, squires (often nobles), and soldiers guarded the entrances to the palace and its chambers, especially the pope’s private living quarters. They also protected him when outside the papal palace. Couriers carried letters and citations, made arrests, and cleared the way for the pope. In processions, they carried on poles the baldachino over his head. Among the numerous household servants were the butlers, butchers, cooks, bakers of bread, bottlers of wine, caretakers of dishes, dining room waiters, suppliers of water and candles, janitors and sweepers, laundry men, barbers, apothecaries, blacksmiths, stablemen (grooms for saddles and harnesses, valets for the care of animals—in 1376 they cared for 315 animals: palfreys, other horses, and mules), gardeners, keepers of the fish pond, etc. Also included in the papal family were the Greek scholars, the fifteen Ethiopian monks of San Stefano, the six walled anchoresses of St. Peter’s, and their chaplain. Those members of the court who misbehaved were placed in the care of the marshal of justice. He was assisted by judges and sergeants and supervised the prison for courtiers and curial officials found guilty of infractions. In 1520 Leo x introduced a new category of officials, the Knights of St. Peter. They were 401 in number. If one were wealthy enough, one could thus purchase from the pope noble status. Each had to pay 1000 ducats for the honor and received an annual return on the investment of about ten percent. The knights were given places of honor at papal ceremonies. Similarly, Paul iii established a college of 200 Knights of St. Paul and three minor ones (Loreto, St. George, and Lily) each with 50 members, while Pius iv the Knights of Pius. By increasing the number of their members, the popes raised new revenues.5 5 Felice Litva, “L’attività finanziaria della Dataria durante il period tridentino,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 5 (1967), 79–174, here 138, 140–143.

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As can be seen by the listing of the members of the pope’s family, both private and common, he supported a large number of familiars. Some curial officials such as the scribes of the Chancery and Penitentiary officials were also given “family” status. In 1378, the papal family contained about 550 persons. In the mid-fifteenth century, Peter Partner estimates it numbered 150. By the time of Leo x in 1514, it consisted of about 683 prelates, aristocrats, and officials with their familiars.6 The full list brings the number to over 900. Many of these members of the papal family had income also from benefices, offices, and family sources. The court of Paul iii, studied by Léon Dorez, was also princely.7 By the reign of Pius iv, their number was greatly reduced. However, by the end of the century, the pious but spendthrift Clement viii increased the cost of his household four times that of Sixtus v due to his moving around and penchant for lavish display. The cost of the papal household over the long sixteenth century was usually around 8% of the total budget.8

2

Roman Curia

In addition to the papal family, both private and common, was the Roman Curia. It was divided into various organizations. The most important of these was the Sacred Consistory, that is, the College of Cardinals together with the pope. Its power declined over the fifteenth century, but popes still sought the consent of the cardinals on making warfare or appointing new cardinals, on establishing new dioceses or managing the Papal States, on matters of faith or canonizations, and on deciding major appeals. Prior to the mass promotions, there were usually twenty-five to thirty cardinals resident in Rome with an average in 1509 of 145 familiars in their households; only ten percent of the cardinals were permanently absent.9 The material was prepared before the consistory met by a cardinal proposer of a candidate, by a commission

6 Ferrajoli, Il ruolo della corte di Leone, 32; Partner, Pope’s Men, 39. 7 Léon Dorez, La Cour du pape Paul iii d’après les registres de la trésorerie secrète (Collection F. de Navenne), 2 tomes (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1932), tome i gives the names and lives of the officials for the periods 1535–1538 and 1543–1545, tome ii deals with his private income and expenditures. 8 Peter Partner, “Papal Financial Policy in the Renaissance and Counter Reformation,” Past & Present, No. 88 (1980), 17–62, here 50–51. 9 David Chambers, “The Economic Predicament of Renaissance Cardinals,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3 (1961), 289–313, reprinted in his Renaissance Cardinals and Their Worldly Problems (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1997), here 290, 293.

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of cardinals (usually three) charged to investigate a particular matter, or by consistorial advocates who presented legal cases. The consistory usually met three times per week (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), unless a feast day fell on one of these days. Cardinals meeting in consistory with the pope were consulted on the appointment of bishops and abbots whose annual revenues were more than 100 florins for bishops and 200 florins for abbots. The appointment was promoted by a cardinal, for which he received a gratuity (propina), by 1530 equaling fifteen percent of the annual taxable value of the benefice. A cardinal’s average annual income from common service fees was about 900 ducats. A major source of the cardinals’ other income came from the bishoprics and monasteries they held, whether as their ordinary or administrator or in commendam—one cardinal held thirteen bishoprics. The Council of Trent prohibited this practice. Various reformers recommended a total annual income of about 6,000 ducats. To maintain their princely lifestyle, cardinals supplemented their curial income by numerous benefices, pensions, gifts from those seeking their support, and other strategies.10 It was a difficult task. Popes claimed the right to confirm bishops in their office once they had been elected by the cathedral canons and to extract a fee for this confirmation. Increasingly popes also claimed the right to bypass local elections and make the appointment themselves. They attempted to justify this in part on the grounds that a diocese or abbey needed a new bishop or abbot promptly when the former one died while in Rome (vacante in curia Romana) or while on the way to or from Rome. The new appointee was frequently a member of the Roman curia or one of the pope’s clients who resided in Rome, enjoying the revenues attached to the benefice and naming someone else to carry out the pastoral duties. This absentee prelate would most likely die in Rome and the pope would continue to appoint his successor. By the early sixteenth century, cardinals became officially the “protectors” of nations and religious orders and argued their causes in the Consistory. The cardinal protector of a nation, who usually functioned as the relator for candidates from his nation for a consistorial appointment, could make up to 5,000 ducats per year for his services. Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggi in 1533 claimed a fee (propina) of 350 ducats for being the relator of the appointment of Thomas

10

Chambers, “Economic Predicament,” 294, 297; Barbara McClung Hallman, Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property, 1492–1563 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 22, 26, 29, 40–41, 54; according to Partner, “Papal Financial Policy,” 60, cardinals in the early sixteenth century (when they numbered around twenty-four) had revenues from benefices of 350,000 gold ducats per annum, while in 1571 when their numbers increased to seventy their revenues from benefices were a million gold scudi.

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Cranmer to the see of Canterbury.11 Some cardinals exercised their influence also outside the Consistory as palatine cardinals who resided in the papal palace and were the pope’s special advisors. Select cardinals sat on commissions set up to examine a problem and make recommendations. Within the Consistory were factions, some based on supporting the interest of specific Christian rulers or the personal causes of fellow cardinals and their families or on promoting various policies in the Church.12 The chief department for finance was known as the Apostolic Camera. It was headed by a chamberlain (camerarius or camerlengo) who in earlier centuries was not necessarily a cardinal, but by the fifteenth century he was. Next to the pope, he was considered the most important person in the Roman Curia. The Camera was staffed principally by a treasurer of the Apostolic Camera (who kept track of receipts and expenses), secretaries, notaries, couriers, auditors (judges) of a tribunal that handled financial cases and had its own prison, and the clerics of the Camera. They numbered four in the fourteenth century, but by 1438 there were seven of them who actually functioned in the position (de numero) and they were established as a college in 1444. The seven clerics of the Camera actively supervised on an annually rotating basis the various administrative sectors of the Camera. The Camera became increasingly responsible for the management of the Papal States, public order, coinage, the maintenance of roads and bridges, grain and water supplies. Often through its agents in foreign lands known as collectors, it collected the tribute, annate fees, and Peter’s pence owed to the popes. Among the Camera’s other officials were the Thesaurarius generalis Ecclesiae Romanae, the Depositarius generalis or papal banker, and the governor of the City of Rome whose office merged with that of the vice-chamberlain.13

11 12

13

Chambers, “Economic Predicament,” 294, 301–302, 312. Pierre Jugie, “Consistory,” The Papacy, 1: 413–415; Partner, Pope’s Men, 21; Leonard E. Boyle, o.p., A Survey of the Vatican Archives and of Its Medieval Holdings [Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Subsidia Mediaevalia, i] (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972), 80–83; Hallman, Italian Cardinals; Miles Pattenden, Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Jean Favier, “Apostolic Camera,” The Papacy, 1: 80–84; Partner, Pope’s Men, 24–26, 97–98; Stefan Weiss, “The Curia: Camera,” in: A Companion to the Medieval Papacy: Growth of an Ideology and Institution, eds. Keith Sisson and Atria A. Larson (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 220– 228; Boyle, Survey of the Vatican Archives, 41–42; Peter Partner, “La Camera Apostolica come organo centrale delle finanze pontificie,” in: Cesare Borgia di Francia, Gonfaloniere di Santa Romana Chiesa, 1498–1503, conquiste effimere e progettualità statale: Atti del convegno di Studi Urbino, 4–5–6 dicembre 2003, eds. Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti and Monica Miretti (np: Tecnostampa Edizioni Ostia Vetere A.V., 2005), 73–84.

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The Apostolic Chancery (Cancellaria Apostolica) handled correspondence. It gradually lost its monopoly on issuing papal letters, but retained control over bulls emanating from consistorial decisions. Once a certificate testifying to the consistorial grant had been drawn up, registered by the master of the Chancery (custos cancellariae), and presented to the vice-chancellor, a bull could be issued ordinarily through the Chancery with its service fees. But papal grants could also be made extraordinarily, by-passing the Chancery and its taxes, as was done as a favor for a cardinal or high official and executed by papal secretaries or in the Datary. While the Chancery was increasingly by-passed with a concurrent diminution in the income of the cardinals who shared in its revenues, it nonetheless produced at the end of the fifteenth century several thousand letters per year and the fees attached to them. Under Leo x the Chancery produced 600 papal letters per month that were registered. The vice-chancellor (who headed the Chancery, the office of Chancellor having disappeared) gradually lost his power to make decisions which were increasingly referred directly to the pope. The Chancery was governed by a set of rules (Regulae Cancellariae Apostolicae) periodically issued by popes.14 Assisting the Vice-chancellor were the apostolic protonotaries (protonotarii apostolici). They were organized into a college of seven [in 1585 increased to twelve] participantes de numero or officio fungentes, men who actually carried out important tasks in the Chancery, plus the honorary ones (supernumerarii) whose number was limitless and were unpaid. Apostolic protonotaries handled matters related to consistorial benefices and letters of justice. They had the power to create apostolic notaries, to legitimize bastards, and to grant doctoral degrees in theology and canon law. They were exempt from episcopal jurisdiction and until the time of Pius ii tried to take ceremonial precedence over bishops. The office brought status and was considered an important step toward becoming a bishop or cardinal.15

14

15

Andreas Meyer, “The Curia: The Apostolic Chancery,” in: A Companion to the Medieval Papacy, 239–258, here 240, 249; Regulae cancellariae apostolicae: Die päpstlichen Kanzleiregeln von Johannes xxii. bis Nikolaus v., ed. Emil von Ottenthal (Innsbruck, 1888, reprinted Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1968); Hieronymus Paulus, Practica cancellariae apostolicae (Rome: Johannes Besicken and Sigismund Mayr, 1493); reprinted by Ludwig SchmitzKallenberg, ed., Practica Cancellariae Apostolicae saeculi xv. exeuntis (Münster i. Westfalen: Coppenrathsche Buchhandlung, 1904); Stilus—modus—usus: Regeln der Konfliktund Verhandlungsführung am Papsthof des Mittelalters = rules of negotiation and conflict resolution at the papal court in the Middle Ages, eds. Jessika Nowak and Georg Strack (Turnhout: Brepols: [2019]). Paulus Rabikauskas, “Protonotary,” Papacy: An Encyclopedia, 2: 1263–1264.

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From the time of Martin v to the end of the reign of Paul ii, the number of curial officials was for the most part steady. Things changed under Sixtus iv who saw the multiplication and sale of curial offices as a way to finance his wars with Ferrara, Venice, and Florence and to pay for his building projects. He raised the number from 300 to 625. His successors followed his example. By the time of his nephew Julius ii, the number had reached 936, under Leo x it increased to 2232 venal offices, and under Pius iv to 3617. But many officials held multiple offices so that the stable number of officials in Rome during the period 1503–1514 was closer to 560. Under the Medici popes the number of members of the papal household increased to between 600 and 700.16 Paying these officials what was owed on their investment put a huge strain on the budget. Revenues created by the offices were inadequate, and revenues from the Papal States, from increased income from the Datary, and later from the sale of bonds on the public debt were used to meet the obligations. Adrian vi wanted to abolish many of these venal offices, but was warned by the College of Cardinals that justice demanded that he would have to reimburse the officeholders what they paid for the offices. To balance his budget, Adrian imposed a new and unpopular tax of a half-ducat on every hearth (household).17 To help understand how the Chancery functioned, and which officials performed what tasks, they will be reviewed in the order in which they processed a request arriving at the curia and produced the bull that granted it. Requests arrived at the Chancery located in the palace of the vice-chancellor on the other side of the Tiber River. From the time of Calixtus iii to 1521 it was housed in the palace of Rodrigo Borgia (later Alexander vi) located on the Via Papale (today this building is known as the Palazzo Cesarini-Sforza, sandwiched between the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the street that leads directly to the Ponte S. Angelo). When the massive palace of Cardinal Raffaello Riario constructed on the edge of the Campo dei Fiori between 1483 and 1511 was confiscated because of his involvement in the plot to poison Leo x, the Chancery was relocated into this palace that henceforth was called the Cancelleria.

16 17

Partner, The Pope’s Men, 38–39; Litva, “L’attività finanziaria,” 134, 147. Peter Partner, “The ‘Budget’ of the Roman Church in the Renaissance Period,” in: Italian Renaissance Studies: A Tribute to the Late Cecilia M. Ady, ed. Ernest F. Jacob (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), 256–278, here 269–270, 273; Michele Monaco, “Le finanze pontificie al tempo di Clemente vii (1523–1534),” Studi Romani, Anno vi (1958), 278–296, here 281, and his “Il primo debito pubblico pontificio: il Monte della Fede (1526),” Studi Romani, Anno viii (1960), 553–569, here 564.

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Petitioners usually hired someone to act as their procurator. Thus, requests arriving at the Chancery were entrusted to the solicitors of apostolic letters (sollicitatores litterarum apostolicarum), who had their benches in the public room of the palace, separated off from other officials by an altar. The solicitors were men of influence and curial expertise who knew and oversaw the whole legal process for obtaining a request and securing the composition (the fee paid for a document) and dispatch of the bull granting it. They often served foreign clients. The bishops of some countries employed a special procurator to handle their requests. Among these functionaries were the Luxemburger Jakob Quastenberg, the Frenchman Thomas Regis (Le Roy), and the Spaniard Gonzalez de Lerma. Sixtus iv in 1482 gave these solicitors and procurators official status by organizing them into a college of 100 “janissaries” or lawyers and procuratores. They took the requests and referred them to officials known as referendarii (referrers).18 The referendarii were made into a permanent office under Eugenius iv and also grouped into a college, varying in size from eight to seventeen by 1503. These skilled lawyers reviewed petitions and saw that they were put then into proper form, summarizing each on a sheet called a supplication (supplicatio) and assigning it to one of the two signature, called such because these offices provided signatures on supplications testifying to a papal decision having been made. Julius ii divided the Signatura into two offices: the signatura gratiae—in which one could ask for a favor such as a dispensation, indulgence, or honor— or the signatura justitiae—in which one argued for justice, with the possibility that the case could be sent from this tribunal to the Rota for resolution. The two signature were located in the papal apartments of the Vatican Palace. There the referendarii read the requests to the pope. Once the pope made a decision, he would sign the supplication with the word “Fiat ut petitur” (Let it be as requested) plus his baptismal name or initials, or in certain cases the vicechancellor and a referendarius might sign the petition, using the word “Concessum in praesentia domini nostri Papae” (Granted in the presence of our lord the pope) and noting the decision and any restrictions on it. An official known as a datarius put a date on the signed supplication.19 A bull documenting the pope’s decision was produced by a series of curial officials. The clerics of the register (clerici registri) copied the signed supplications into a register of supplications (the sheets were bound into a codex). 18

19

Partner, Pope’s Men, 22; Thomas Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste der Hochrenaissance (1471– 1527) [Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, Band 63] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 343 (894), 358 (1079), 449 (2163). Frenz, Kanzlei, 93–97; Partner, Pope’s Men, 21–23; and Boyle, Survey of Vatican Archives, 93.

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From the time of Martin v to 1799, there survive in the Vatican archives 7266 volumes of supplications, each codex consisting of about 300 folios. A document (a concept, draft, or minuta) that summarized the facts of the case and the pope’s decision was drafted by a member of a select group of twelve abbreviators (abbreviatores), most of whom were doctors of canon law. They were called de parco majore because they sat around an oval table in the private chamber of the palace of the Vice-Chancellor who presided from his chair on a raised platform under a baldachino. The senior member of this group, called the corrector, was responsible for the correct contents of the document. Another member called the distributor chose which of his fellow abbreviators would draw up the draft. A tax of five grossi was charged for this minuta. Assisting the abbreviators de parco majore were sixty other abbreviators, twenty-two of whom were called de parco minore and thirty-eight of the first inspection (de prima visione), whose benches were in the public chamber. Pius ii had set up a college of seventy abbreviators (valued at 30,000 florins); Paul ii tried to suppress this college; and Sixtus iv enlarged it from a nominal twenty-five to seventytwo. These seventy-two positions were not always occupied. Once drafted, the minuta and the supplication were taken by the petitioner to an official called the re-writer (rescribendarius). He chose from among the writers or scribes of apostolic letters (scriptores litterarum apostolicarum) the person who would produce a good copy of the proposed bull or letter in final form. The scriptor did not work in the Chancery but did his engrossing of the bull at home. Sixtus iv established in 1483 a college of seventy-two scribes, but this was abolished by Innocent viii in the following year, only to be resurrected in 1507 by Julius ii as a college of 101 scriptores archivii Romanae curiae. Once the scribe has produced the bull, a calculator or accountant (computator) figured out the service fee to be charged. The document was then checked for accuracy by three officials: the guard of the Chancery (custos cancellariae), an abbreviator of first inspection, and a listener (auscultator). The abbreviator of the first inspection scrutinized the document to make sure it contained no erasures. The listener kept attention while the bull was read aloud to determine if there were any mistakes in its style, content, or form. If there was a possible problem, he alerted the correctors (correctores) who checked and corrected bulls for accuracy. No erasures or errors were allowed. The rewritten, if necessary, document was then read aloud before a tribunal presided over by a judge of contradictory letters (auditor litterarum contradictarum). During this reading someone could protest against the letter or bull and the judge would render a decision as to the validity or meaning of the document. The assignor of the date (datarius or dator) put the date of the concession on the document. It was then sealed with a lead bolla by one of the sealers (bullatores or Fratres barbati). Innocent viii in 1486 set up a col-

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lege of fifty-two bullatores, each paying 500 florins for the post, but the actual work of affixing the lead seal was usually done by one of the two illiterate Cistercian monks from the monastery of Fossanova who were unable to read the bulls and thus could not tamper with them. The master of the register (magister registri) supervised the registrars (registarii) who copied the documents into papal registers. The collectors of the tax on the seal (collectores taxae plumbi— Alexander vi in 1497 established a college of 104) guarded the sealed bulls until the appropriate persons claimed them and paid the service fees.20 Within the Chancery was a tribunal (audientia litterarum apostolicarum) composed of the solicitors of apostolic letters (sollicitatores litterarum apostolicarum) and the judges (auditores) who gave official interpretations of contested chancery bulls. A tax or service fee was exacted by the college of each office that dealt with the document. Curial offices were sold and the revenues they collected were divided between those who had purchased the office but did not function in it (usually receiving 10% per year on the cost of the office) and officials who actually did the work who received an additional fee. The assigner of dates (datarius) determined what percentage of the composition fees should go to the pope. It was particularly difficult to reform the Datary because so much of the papal revenues came from it.21 One could also secure a document from the Roman Curia without going through this complicated process. A supplication signed by the pope or by the Vice-Chancellor and referendarius could suffice. The pope could grant a favor on the request of one of his secretaries and the document testifying to it could be issued as a brief or bull that did not go through the Chancery with its costly fees, but through the private chamber of the pope (per camera secreta).22 The Apostolic Secretariat, located in the papal palace, was detached from the slow Chancery, and headed by one or two domestic secretaries (secretarii domestici), papal secretaries who handled diplomatic correspondence, special favors for cardinals and high officials, and issues of orthodoxy of the Faith. This latter function was transferred to the Roman Inquisition in 1542. In 1456 the staff of the Secretariat was fixed at six, but Innocent viii in 1487 increased it by twenty-four members for a total of thirty in order to finance his War of the Barons in Naples. While the two domestic secretaries did not pay for their office, the others did: 2500 ducats under Alexander vi, and 4500 ducats under Leo x. The college was valued at 62,000 florins at the time of Innocent viii. It sent out nuncios (nuntii) and commissioners (commissarii) on diplomatic 20 21 22

Meyer, “Apostolic Chancery,” 245–251. Frenz, Kanzlei, 105–131, 247–257. Partner, Pope’s Men, 26–27.

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missions and issued bulls, briefs, and letters. Leo x established the office of intimate secretary (secretarius major or intimus) who handled state business, writing to the nuncios in the vernacular. On special occasions, letters or briefs to princes and other dignitaries were written in an elegant Latin style by one of the leading humanists. The Secretariat of Briefs (secretaria brevium) was set up as a college of eighty-one writers by Alexander vi in 1502/03, but only six persons, often humanists, actually produced the papal brief (littera brevis). This document dealt with spiritual and non-diplomatic matters, but under a later reorganization in 1560 added political matters. It gave succinct instructions in a less solemn and involved format and was sealed with wax and the fisherman’s ring. It was less expensive to produce than a bull. Bulls were elegantly written and decorated documents sealed with a leaden bolla. The post of apostolic secretary was considered very prestigious and a launching pad for higher office (bishop or cardinal).23 The Datary was a separate bureaucracy located in the papal palace that rivaled the Chancery. It received its autonomy in the early fifteenth century and handled petitions, getting its name from the official who put the “date” on the documents related to petitions. The datarius, who had the rank of bishop, expanded his functions to oversee petitions (deciding which referendarius would handle the request), check documents for accuracy, register them, and collect a tax (composition fee) that was reserved for the pope. This fee was deposited in the pope’s private treasury (camera secreta) and not shared with the Chancery. The datarius also handled the sale of curial offices and requests for favors, dispensations, and absolutions that did not go through the Chancery. The revenues produced by the Datary were crucial to papal finance and allowed popes to provide gifts and pensions to their relatives and clients. Under Sixtus iv the Datary brought in about 64,000 gold florins per year, under Leo x 144,000, and under Pius iv 141,500 gold scudi. Between 1535 and 1565 the Datary’s sale of offices alone brought in an average of 78,300 gold scudi annually. The reforms of the Council of Trent reduced the amount to about 68,000 gold scudi annually from 1572 to 1576. But they grew again under Sixtus v to 166,000, becoming 200,000 in the early seventeenth century. The revenues from the sale of offices equaled or outstripped that from composition fees from the time of Paul iii onward.24

23 24

Ibid., 220–223; Partner, Pope’s Men, 26–28, 42–44, 86–87, 98–101. Joël-Benoït D’Onorio, “Datary, Apostolic,” The Papacy, 1: 482–484; Frenz, Kanzlei, 97–100; Partner, Pope’s Men, 21–23, 29–30; Boyle, Survey of Vatican Archives, 50–54; and Litva, “L’attività finanzaria,” 84–118. On the increasing revenues from the Datary, see Partner, “Papal Financial Policy,” 47 and Litva, “L’attività finanziaria,” 155, 157 n. 1. For a list of the

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The Penitentiary handled cases of absolution from papal censures and the lifting of excommunications and interdicts; it could also grant certain privileges and dispensations from canon law and could declare a person innocent. The most common requests had to do with marriage (dispensations from consanguinity, affinity, public honesty, and spiritual relationships; annulments due to deception or fear, etc). Next came the lifting of penalties incurred from violations of monastic vows or clerical celibacy, oaths, perjury, heresy, simony, sacrilege, violence by or against clerics; permissions not to fast or reside in one’s monastery or to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The third most common category dealt with questions of illegitimacy, especially as a result of clerical concubinage. Other requests were for holding more than one benefice, for being promoted to holy orders despite being of illegitimate birth or under age or physically deformed or lacking the permission of one’s ordinary or the title to a benefice, for being absent from one’s benefice for the purpose of study, for using a portable altar, or for choosing one’s own confessor. Between 2,800 and 3,600 such petitions were submitted annually in the later fifteenth century, that is, about 200 to 300 cases per month with about ten cases decided per day. Many were the criticisms that the Penitentiary too readily granted dispensations to increase its revenues.25 Some cases were sent to the Datary for resolution: simony involving church offices, commutation of vows to go on pilgrimage or crusade, selling weapons to infidels, closer bonds of consanguinity or affinity within the third degree.

25

fees the Datarius charged for a composition in 1519, see Léonce Celier, Les Dataires du xve et les origines de la Daterie Apostolique (Paris: Fontemoing et Cie Éditeurs, 1910), 155–164, nr. 15, e.g., a bull of regress granted through the Chancery cost 13 ducats, a bull granting a perpetual union valued under twenty-five ducats costs twenty five ducats, for a benefice with pastoral care given to a child ten years old or younger costs one-hundred ducats, for an indult for a defect of birth (bastardy) costs one-hundred ducats, for an indult from second degree consanguinity it costs for someone poor 300 to 400 ducats and for someone rich or noble 800 to 1000 ducats or for someone of baronial or royal blood 2,000 to 10,000 ducats, a bull allowing a subdeacon or deacon to leave holy orders and marry costs 900 ducats, for a priest it costs 3500 to 4000 ducats (the Hungarian priest on learning the cost dropped his request), commutation of a vow to go on pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem or Compostella costs the expense of such a trip, absolution from a murder committed on lands of the Church costs twenty-five to thirty ducats, etc. Kirsi Salonen, “The Curia: The Apostolic Penitentiary,” A Companion to the Medieval Papacy: Growth of an Ideology and Institution, eds. Keith Sisson and Atria A. Larson [Brill’s Companion to the Christian Tradition, 70] (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 259–275, here 263. For a study that helps to explain the procedures of the Penitentiary, see “The Complicated Case of Paolo Vigerio, Son of Cardinal Marco Vigerio, o.f.m.,” by Nelson H. Minnich and Ugo Taraborrelli, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 39 (2022), 191–217.

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The Penitenziere major (Grand Penitentiary) was a cardinal; he was assisted by one or more regents and by legal experts (auditores) who saw that decisions conformed to canon law. The penitenzieri minores were from eight to eighteen, but generally eleven, often members of religious orders who were experts in theology and canon law. They could hear confession (in foro interno) in foreign languages in the major basilicas of St. Peter, St. John Lateran, and St. Mary Major, grant absolution, provide “letters of the Church” (litterae ecclesiae) testifying to the absolution, and order the local ordinary (most often a bishop) to grant a dispensation. Petitioners who sought a decision from the Grand Penitentiary usually sought the assistance of a proctor who put their request into a proper legal form that was checked by a legal expert (auditor) and then submitted to the Grand Penitentiary or his regent. If approved and signed, the petition was given to the distributor who charged a corrector to compose the draft of a letter of grace. The distributor checked the draft and gave it to a scribe to produce a good copy that was assigned a date by the datarius (an auditor) and a tax fee by the computator. It was then sent back to the person who had approved the petition to be assured it was correct and then annotated (visa per me …). The document was then sent to be sealed with red wax and registered. The proctor paid the tax and gave it to the petitioner who reimbursed him. But it was also possible to skip the later steps of production and use only the signed petition (sola signatura) as the final document. It testified to the absolution in foro externo. In all, there were probably some 200 officials employed by the Penitentiary. The constitution (1433) of Eugenius iv regulated the officials and functioning of the Penitentiary until the reforms of Pius iv who in 1562 restricted its competency to conform to the decrees of the Council of Trent and set the number of minor penitentiaries at twelve and of Pius v who drastically reduced its competency to the internal forum, eliminated nine-tenths of the procurators and scribes, staffed the operations at Santa Maria Maggiore with six Dominicans, and put in charge of the Penitentiary Carlo Borromeo who appointed outstanding upright experts as officials.26 The fees charged for the document were technically not for the favor but for the cost of producing the letter. Someone too poor to pay the fee was exempted from it. In general, the fees of the Penitentiary were lower than those charged by other curial bureaucracies.27

26

27

Agostino Borromeo, “Il Concilio di Trento e la riforma postridentina della Penitenziaria Apostolica (1562–1572),” in: La Penitenziaria Apostolica e il Sacramento della Penitenza: Percorsi storici, giuridici, teologici e prospettive pastorale, eds. Manilio Sodi and Johan Ickx (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009), 111–134. Kirsi Salonen and Ludwig Schmugge, A Sip from the “Well of Grace”: Medieval Tests

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The Sacred Rota (Audientia causarum apostolici palatii) was a tribunal of twelve judges or auditores (established by Sixtus iv in 1472 as a college of twelve judges ranked by seniority, the dean the most senior, the treasurer the youngest) who heard cases related to benefices, patronage rights, exemptions, marriage cases, religious profession, and other matters that did not require a papal decision. There are two theories as to why the tribunal was called the Rota: because it met in a circular hall or because its judges were seated at a round table (rota meaning a round wheel). These auditores were often eminent lawyers and professors of law whose competency was checked by a public lecture and who had already an annual income of 200 florins. They would be promoted to bishop or cardinal as a reward for their services. Each was assisted by four notaries who drew up the necessary legal documents. In 1477 Sixtus iv made the forty-eight notaries of the Rota permanent officials of the Curia, and Julius made them papal familiars. When a vacancy occurred, the auditor could choose only one of his notaries, the others being chosen by the pope, vicechancellor, and master of the Camera. Notaries worked in shifts, making official copies of documents. An auditor could adjudicate a case on his own, but for difficult ones he often consulted the other auditors and followed the majority opinion. Very complicated cases were referred to senior auditors. The auditors were considered the supreme court of the Holy See and only the pope in Sacred Consistory could overturn their decisions.28 Toward the end of the period here studied, a new bureaucracy arose in the Roman Curia, that of congregations. Over the centuries, popes have appointed commissions to deal with particular matters, but these ceased to exist once the issue was settled. The continuing threat to the Catholic Church coming from Protestants led Paul iii to set up the permanent Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition in 1542. To advise him on matters related to the Council of Trent, he set up another congregation of cardinals in Rome. Once the council ended, Pius iv instituted the Sacred Congregation of the Council of Trent in 1564 whose functions evolved from enforcing the council’s decrees to providing official interpretations of them. These two congregations staffed

28

from the Apostolic Penitentiary [Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law] (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 2009), 13–83. Kirsi Salonen, Papal Justice in the Late Middle Ages: The Sacra Romana Rota [Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West] (London: Routledge, 2016), 18–41, of the twelve auditors, the pope appointed three and the following rulers each appointed one: Castile, Aragon, France, Germany, Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, and Perugia; prior to 1491, the vice-chancellor designated which auditor would hear a case, after that date the Signature of Justice assigned the case, Ibid., 14; Bernard de Lanversin, “Rota, Tribunal of the,” The Papacy, 3: 1349–1351; Boyle, Survey of Vatican Archives, 90–92.

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by cardinals became the most important of all the fifteen congregations that Sixtus v in 1588 entrusted with managing the affairs of the papacy: Inquisition, Segnatura, Erection of Churches and Consistorial Provisions, Sacred Rites and Ceremonies, Index of Forbidden Books, Council, Regulars, Bishops, Vatican Press, Annona for the provisioning of Rome and the provinces, Navy, Public Welfare, Sapienza, Roads-Bridges-Waters, and State Consultations.

3

Revenues from the Bureaucracy

The Roman Curia produced revenues for the popes and its officials. Among the fees charged for its services were annates. These were taxes collected by the papacy on reserved minor ecclesiastical benefices valued at twenty-four florins or more and collected at the time of collation. Early in the fourteenth century, the pope adopted a practice found in secular society of charging new officials a fee for their appointment amounting to the revenues of one year attached to the office. When practiced by the Church, the fee consisted of half the revenues, once the administrative costs of management and maintenance had been deducted. In addition to the annates (annatae or annualia), there were small service fees (servitia minuta) involved in securing the document of appointment that were shared with the cardinals and curial officials. Dioceses with annual revenues of 100 or more golden florins and monasteries with 200 or more value whose bishop or abbot was appointed or confirmed by the pope were subject to substantial fees (servitia communia) amounting to a third of the first year’s gross income. Of this sum, the pope was entitled to half and the cardinals divided the rest among themselves equally according to the number present at the consistory in which the appointment was approved. The cardinal who proposed the candidate for the office received a gratuity (propina) equal to fifteen percent of the service fees. These often amounted to five times what an individual cardinal received and were shared with the curial officials who produced the document of appointment.29 For a sense of how much revenues could come in from annates on episcopal appointments, the following are some

29

Boyle, Survey of the Vatican Archives, 46; Johann Peter Kirsch, “Annates,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: The Encyclopedia Press, 1907/13), 1: 537–538; when Francis i became king in 1515, the officials he appointed and those confirmed in their offices were expected to pay him an annate which he reduced to one-half of their annual salary—see the report of Francesco Pandolfini, to Giuliano de’ Medici, from Paris, 19 January 1515, in Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Signori, Dieci di Balia, Otto di Practica, Legazioni e Commissarie, Missive e Responsive, nr. 55* [nr. 45 in the Serie Archivistica], fol. 204r.

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of the annate taxes in florins for some of the wealthiest sees: Winchester 12000; Canterbury 10000; Cologne 10000; Mainz 10000; Trier 10000; Salzburg 10000; Toledo 8000; Liége 7500; Braga 6000; Metz 6000; Toulouse 5000; Gniezno 5000; Compostella 4000; Paris 3500; Lyon 3000; London 3000; Cuenca 3000; Cracow 3000; Condom 2500; Magdeburg 2500; Malaga 2500; Naples 2000; Lisbon 2000; etc. Under Leo x in the years 1513–1518, annate fees came mostly from (in decreasing order) Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, England, Eastern Europe, Scotland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.30 A list of the taxes charged by the Penitentiary at the end of the fifteenth century on various graces helps one to have a sense of the fees charged and which officials received them. A few examples will suffice. The fee for the letter documenting the absolution from the penalties attached to fornication cost five grossi of silver, of which three went to the writer and two to the procurator. For legitimization of someone whose father was a cleric in orders so that he could go on to receive two compatible benefices, the fee was sixteen and a half grossi, seven and a half to the writer, five and a half to the sealer, three and a half to the procurator. To be promoted to sacred orders while underage cost nineteen or twenty grossi, seven and a half to the writer, eight and a half to the sealer, three and a half to the procurator. A dispensation for someone who contracted marriage knowingly with someone within the third or fourth grades of consanguinity or affinity costed twenty and a half grossi, ten and a half to the writer, seven and a half to the sealer, two and a half to the procurator.31 Curial offices produced revenues for their incumbents from the fees they charged for their services, but for the popes the very sale of the office itself brought in large sums of money. The sale of curial offices, administered by the Datary and following similar practices in Europe, dated from the time of the Great Western Schism. Curial officials such as scribes were selling their offices privately, a practice the popes tried unsuccessfully to prohibit. By the time of Sixtus iv, it became legal to sell almost all minor offices, with the Datary administering the practice and charging a fee to resign the office in favor of another. Eventually, a price was assigned to each office that was the base price, the office often being sold for more. Some examples of the base cost of an office from a

30

31

Götz-Rüdiger Tewes, Die römische Kurie und die europäischen Länder am Vorabend der Reformation [Bibliothek des Deutschen Histiorischen Institut in Rom, 95] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 245 Tab. 36, 393 Tab. 39 (gives a different ranking). Emil Göller, Die Päpstliche Pönitentiarie von ihrem Ursprung bis zu ihrer Umgestaltung unter Pius v., Band ii: Die päpstliche Pönitentiarie von Eugen iv. bis Pius v., ii. Teil: Quellen [Bibliothek des koniglich Preussischen Historischen Instituts in Rom, viii], (Rome: Verlag von Loescher & Co. 1911), 141–144.

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list of 1509–1512 may prove illustrative.32 It gives the name of the office, the number of persons who hold that office, the cost of the office, and the annual income one could expect from holding the office. The sums are in ducats. – Apostolic Protonotaries [Protonotarii participantes] (7 officials): 3500 ducats cost, 500 ducats annual income – Notary of the participating protonotaries [Notarius protonotariorum participantium] (1): 600 cost, 70 income – Clerics of the Camera [Clerici camerae] (7): 12000 cost, 600 income – Notaries of the clerics of the Camera [Notarii clericorum camerae] (9): 2000 cost, 250 income – Notaries of the auditor of the Camera [Notarii auditoris Camerae] (10): 900 cost, 250 income – Apostolic secretaries [Secretarii] (29): 3500 cost, 450 income – Writers of briefs [Scriptores brevium] (81): 1200 cost, 120 income (if he does no work; if he actually writes, he gets 4 ducats extra per month) – Apostolic writers [Scriptores apostolic] (101): 2500 cost, 200 income (doing no work) – Solicitors of apostolic letters or Janissaries [Sollicitatores sive Janiceri] (101): 1100 cost, 120 income – Abbreviators of the major bench [Abbreviatores de parco maiore] (12) 3500 cost, income 400 (doing no work) – Abbreviators of the minor bench [Abbreviatores de parco minore] (60) 2100 cost, 220 income – Corrector of bulls [Corrector bullarum] (1 prelatus): 3500 cost, 700 income – Notary of the corrector of the bulls [Notarius correctoris bullarum] (1): 5500 cost, 1200 income – Auditor of the tribunal of contradictory letters [Auditor in audientia litterarum contradictarum] (1 prelate): 3000 cost, 300 income – Procurators of the tribunal of contradictory letters [Procuratores in audientia litterarum contradictarum] (13): 1000 cost, 125 income – Notaries of the tribunal of contradictory letters [Notarii in audientia litterarum contradictarum] (2): 500 cost, 70 income 32

Walther von Hofmann, Forschungen zur Geschichte der kurialen Behörden vom Schisma bis zur Reformation, 2 vols. [Bibliothek des königlich-preussischen Historischen Instituts in Rom, xii–xiii] (Rome: Verlag von Loescher & Co., 1914), ii: Quellen, Listen und Exkurse, 166–167; Litva, “L’attività finanziaria,” 132–136. For a list of sixty-seven offices, their number, price, and earnings for the pontificates of Leo x, Clement vii, Julius iii, and Pius iv, see Litva’s Table iii on pp. 166–168. Franz, Kanzlei, 204–233 (1471–1527), 246 (1509–1523) provides lists with mostly similar, but at times different, costs. In general, the cost of the offices increased with time.

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– Notaries of the auditor of the Rota [Notarii auditoris Rotae] (?): 1000 cost, 200 income – Writers of the Penitentiary [Scriptores penitentiarie] (27) 1200 cost, 220 income (doing no work) The costliest office was that of the cardinalate. In the early sixteenth century it is known that Bandinello dei Sauli paid 25000 ducats for the red hat in 1511; Francesco Argentino paid 4000, plus resigning offices worth 8000 in 1511; and Ferdinand Ponzetti paid 30000 ducats in 1517. Appointment to a papal honorific knighthood to which a pension was attached also involved the payment of a fee. The cost of curial offices changed over the years. For example, between 1483 and 1551 the price of the office of protonotary varied between 2450 and 3800 ducats, but most often cost 3500. To be a notary of the Chancery cost 5500 ducats in 1509 but 16000 in 1551. The guard of the Chancery cost 6000 ducats in 1509 and 8000 in 1551. A writership of apostolic letters cost 700 florins in 1446, 2500 ducats in 1509, and 1600 in 1551.33 Offices within the papal household were also sold. For example, in 1509 to be a cursor cost 800 ducats, in 1526 a master of ceremonies cost 1200 ducats, in 1506 the master of the door of the sacred palace cost 480 ducats, in 1515 a shield-bearer cost 800 ducats, and in 1509 a servant of arms cost 900 ducats. As these prices indicate, papal offices in Rome were not accessible to someone from the lower classes but were the preserve of the upper classes. The offices brought prestige and income. In general, one earned between eight and eleven per cent on one’s investment per year. It is estimated that by the year 1520, the value of the offices in the Curia came to two and a half million ducats, while the annual payout to the office holders was 275,000 to 300,000 ducats. In 1525 there were about 2,300 offices valued at 2.5 million gold scudi; in 1599 about 2,900 offices worth 3.8 million gold scudi.34 Tenure in one’s office varied. The average length in an office was 7.5 years. For the office of abbreviator de parco majore held by legal experts the average tenure was 12.56 years, the median 9.5; for abbreviators de parco minore the average was 8.64 years, the median 6. One would need to occupy the office for at least ten years to recoup one’s investment. This short tenure was caused not only by death, but also by promotion to a higher office requiring one to vacate the lower one without compensation, or by selling or resigning one’s office to another, at times a relative, on the payment of a fee and the suitability

33 34

Frenz, Kanzlei, 204–233. Partner, “Papal Financial Policy,” 22–23 Litva, “L’attività finanziaria,” 135.

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of the successor as deemed by the Datary. Curialists could move on to other posts. Curial officials could also hold multiple compatible offices. A study of 2200 officials found that sixty-four percent held only one office, and thirty-six percent two or more: e.g., 400 held two, 180 held three, 110 held four, and so on, with one held thirteen. Those entering their post between the ages of 5 and 19 years were 10.3%, while 34% entered their posts between the ages of 20 and 29, 24.7% between 30 and 39, and 30.9% were over the age of 40 when they entered. The average length of a career at court was between 24 and 28 years. The average lifespan of a curialist was 61.2 years.35 The geographical origins of members of the court and curia changed over time. From the healing of the Western Schism to the end of the sixteenth century, only three non-Italians were elected pope (Calixtus iii, Alexander vi, and Adrian vi). Attempts were made to limit the number of cardinals and the number from any one region. In the concordats (1418) negotiated at the Council of Constance and in the 1436 decree of the Council of Basel, it was stipulated that the cardinals be limited to twenty-four and be drawn from all the regions of Christendom, no more than a third coming from one region. The popes claimed Italy was divided into various regions: Genoa, Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, and other areas, and thus the vast majority of the cardinals could come from northern and central Italy. Of the twenty-seven cardinals appointed by Eugenius iv, thirteen were Italian. Of the 154 created between 1447 and 1513, eighty or 52% were Italians. Of the 232 raised between 1513 and 1565, 165 or 71 % were Italian, 13% French, and 9% Spanish, and 7 % others. Of the 147 promoted between 1566 and 1605, 106 or 72% were Italian, 18 % French, 9 % Spanish, and 7 % others.36 For the period 1471 to 1527, Partner gives the geographical origins of the 181 cardinals studied as 59.7% Italian, 17.1% Spanish, 14.4 % French, 2.2 % English, and 2.2% others.37 While the increasing Italianization of the College of Cardinals was contested by Catholic rulers, leading Protestants attacked the non-biblical basis of the College and the lifestyles of many of its members.38 In her study of the social origins of the 102 Italian cardinals for the period 1512 to 1549, Hallman finds that sixty-one percent came from the nobility and patriciate, twenty-four percent were “new men” (often skilled in canon and civil law

35 36 37 38

Partner, “Papal Financial Policy,” 22, and his Pope’s Men, 38, 52, 92–93. Frenz, Kanzlei, 241, 252 n. 7, 257 n. 15. John F. Broderick, “The Sacred College of Cardinals: Size and Geographical Composition (1099–1968),” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 25 (1987), 7–71, here 30–46. Partner, The Pope’s Men, 209. For example, Jean Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (reprinted Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1975), ii, 386–388.

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or in the humanities), and fifteen of humble origins (e.g., coming from religious orders or backed by powerful patrons).39 During the Avignonese papacy, 70% of the curialists were French, while 23% Italian.40 Once the papacy returned to Rome, Italians came to dominate. Franz provides a list of 2223 curial officials for the period 1471–1527 with data on their origins and careers but does not provide cumulative statistics on their origins. He does, however, identify the location of the benefices they held. Thus, of the 342 curial bishops, 228 held Italian sees, 41 French, 27 Spanish, 13 Dalmatian, 4 Imperial, and 2 English. Of 293 curial prelacies held, 111 were Italian, 73 Spanish, 56 French, 36 Imperial, 3 Polish-Hungarian, and 1 Dalmatian. Of 459 simple clerical positions held, 295 were Italians, 102 Spanish, 32 French, 21 Imperial, and 2 Polish-Hungarian. In cumulative figures, 60.5 % of the benefices were Italian; 19.3% Spanish; 12.3% French; 5.8 % Imperial; 1.3 % Dalmatian; 0.4% Polish-Hungarian; and 0.2% English.41 Of the 363 clerics of the chamber and apostolic secretaries for the period 1417 to 1527, 77.1% were Italian, 11.6% Spanish, 5% French, 5% Imperial, 0.6% English, and 0.8 % other. Lesellier has calculated that of the 1,268 curial notaries for the period 1507–1519, the Italians numbered 519, the French 319, the Spanish 160, the Germans 135, the Flemish and Brabant dwellers 39, the Greeks 26, and the others 70. But over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Italians became the overwhelming majority of notaries.42 The cost of the office of cleric of the Camera and secretary was such that one needed family resources to buy them and thus their holders came from notable families. They were a good investment, paying between 8 to 11% annually and provided opportunities for obtaining benefices: 34% became bishops, and between 12 to 15 % went onto become cardinals.43 When one looks at the geographical origins of familiars and servants at the papal court, one is surprised at how cosmopolitan they were, coming as they did from many regions of Latin Christendom in significant numbers. For example: the domestic prelate and papal sacristan, Gabriele Mascoli, oesa,

39 40 41 42

43

Hallman, Italian Cardinals, 8–13. Partner, Pope’s Men, 7. Franz, Kanzlei, 241; Partner, Pope’s Men, 9, 12. Joseph Lesellier, “Notaries et archives de la curie romaine (1507–1625): Les notaires français a Rome,” Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire—École Française de Rome 50 (1933), 250–275, here 259–262. Partner, Pope’s Men, 37, 47, 49. Of the 285 cardinals between 1417 and 1527, 39% had previously served as clerks in the Roman court and curia; for the period 1593 to 1667, 59% had previously served in the curia.

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had seven servants, of whom five were from outside Italy (Besançon, Cambrai, Geneva, Rennes, and Tournai); Giovanni da Prato, bishop of Aquila, had three servants, all Germans. The vast majority of the domestic prelates had at least one and often many more non-Italian servants. While the “common cooks” of the tinellus, who numbered ten, all non-Italians (from the dioceses of Bamberg, Besançon, Cambrai, Lausanne, Lyon, Mainz, Meissen, Mende, Rennes, and Tarazona), may be remarkable, non-Italians held numerous minor positions in the papal household. It is estimated that there were about seventy Germans at the papal court.44 Various popes attempted to reform the Roman Curia. Sistus iv’s reform bull Quoniam regnatium cura was never promulgated, and neither was Alexander vi’s In apostolicae sedis specula.45 On 30 March 1512, Julius ii issued a bull making minor reforms of the Curia in anticipation of more serious ones to be made by the upcoming Lateran Council.46 The comprehensive reform of the Curia was promulgated in Leo x’s bull Pastoralis officii of 13 December 1513. It regulated and reduced fees and abolished abuses. The demands of the bishops at the council for a more sweeping reform led to another bull Supernae dispositionis arbitrio of 5 May 1514 that attempted a reform of the lifestyle of the cardinals.47 Unfortunately, Leo x soon gave dispensations from the new reforms and did not pursue their enforcement. His successor Adrian vi tried to reform the Curia but was met with stiff resistance from the College of Cardinals that pointed out that justice required him to reimburse the office-holders for any offices he might abolish. Clement vii returned to the ways of his cousin Leo x.48 Paul iii enacted some minor reforms based on Pastoralis officii in an effort to stave off demands for more serious ones by the Council of Trent. He

44 45

46

47

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Ferrajoli, Il ruolo, 6, 9–33. Léonce Celier, “L’Idée de Réforme à la cour pontificiale: du concile de Bâle au concile de Lateran,” Revue des questions historiques 86 (1909), 418–435, and his “Alexandré vi e la Réforme de l’Église,” Mélanges d’archéologie et histoire de l’Ecole Française de Rome 27 (1907), 65–124. Hoffman, Forschungen, 1: 313, 2: 54–55, 240–248; Bullarum, diplomatum et privilegiorum sanctorum romanorum pontificum taurinensis editio locupletior facta collectione novissima plurium brevium, epistolarum, decretorum actorumque S. Sedis a s. Leonis Magno usque ad praesens. Edited by Luigi Bilio, Charles Cocquelines, Francesco Gaude, and Luigi Tomassetti. 25 volumes. (Turin: Seb. Franco et Henrico Dalmazzo, 1857–1872), v: Eugenius iv— Leo x., 571–601. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, 2 vols. Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press, 1990, i, 614–625; Nelson H. Minnich, “Lateran v and the Reform of the Roman Curia,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 37 (2020), 135–196. Hofmann, Forschungen, 2: 56–68.

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was adamant that he and not the council would reform the Curia.49 Paul iv, out of his concern to avoid simony, so reformed the Datary that he lost almost half of the revenues it usually produced for the fees it charged for dispensations. But despite such reforms and some modifications by Pius iv of the fees charged by the Penitentiary, Chancery, and Camera, the Datary continued along the same path, with increased composition fees, new colleges of officials, and additional members paying to join one of the papal knighthoods.50 Popes made minor reforms: Pius v reorganized the Penitentiary and Gregory xiii set up various congregations to advise him. Sixtus v made major reorganizations of the Roman Curia. By the bull Postquam verus of 3 December 1586, he increased the number of cardinals to a maximum of seventy, thus reducing the power and revenues of any single cardinal. By his bull Immensa aeterni Dei of 22 January 1588, he set up fifteen bureaucracies or congregations to manage different aspects of the pope’s spiritual and temporal administration. Composed of rotating cardinals and their consulters, they made recommendations to the pontiff who made decisions now without needing to consult with the whole College of Cardinals. Instead of their former role as would-be senators and barons, cardinals were reduced to papal diplomats and bureaucrats.51 Scholars have estimated that the portion of revenues from the tribute and taxes paid by the Papal States as compared to those revenues coming from the Curia became increasingly important as the principal source of papal revenue.52 Getting accurate estimates is very difficult given the loss of many records. But a few surviving ones give a complex picture. From the time of Sixtus iv come two documents. A Vatican budget for the tenth year of his reign (1480–1481) lists the total income at 160,000 ducats of which the spiritual revenues (common services and annates) constituted an estimated 42,000 ducats or 26%, while a Florentine document from ca. 1484 gives the spiritual revenues

49

50 51

52

Stephen Ehses, “Kirchliche Reformarbeiten unter Papst Paul iv. vor dem Trienter Konzil,” Römische Quartalschrift 15 (1901), 153–174, 395–409, esp. 154 and 168, also Concilium Tridentinum: Diariorum, actorum, epistularum, tractatuum nova collection, ed. Görresgesellschaft, 13 tomes (Freiburg im Briesgau: Herder, 1901–2001), 4: 451–457, esp. 451 n. 3. Litva, “L’attività finanziaria,”130, 145, 148–149. Giampiero Carocci, Lo Stato della Chiesa nella seconda metà del sec. xvi: Note e contributi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), 37; Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince. One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Haskins (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 80–88; Mario Rosa, “Sixtus v,” Papacy: An Encyclopedia, 3: 1436–1438. Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 127–130; Partner, “Papal Financial Policy,” 45 (taxation of the Papal States quadrupled during the sixteenth century).

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at 60,000.53 A report from 1523 estimates total income at 500,000 with 200,000 coming from annates, common services, dispensations, composition fees, and sale of offices, for a figure of 40% of the income. A budget for 1525 estimated the total revenues at 432,000 ducats with 212,000 coming from spiritual revenues or 49% of the budget.54 As the pope gained greater control over the Papal States, their subjects were required to pay their tribute and taxes and the percentage of income from this source increased—the temporal revenues constituting 67% in 1481 and 78% in 1605. The large and complicated bureaucracies of the papal court and curia grew over time to serve not only the needs of the popes, but also of the officials who worked in them. The court protected and enhanced the majesty and authority of the Holy See while the curia documented and publicized the pope’s decisions. These bureaucracies provided employment to the family members and clients of the pope and his cardinals and to the lawyers and men of letters who sought careers in Rome. Although various popes tinkered with reforming the papal court and curia, their offices, practices, and fees remained only modestly altered due to vested interests and the pope’s need for the revenues and services they produced. They contributed to making Rome during the Renaissance the administrative center of Roman Catholicism and the cultural capital of Christendom.

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Clemente Bauer, “Studi per la storia delle finanze papali durante il pontificato di Sisto iv,” Archivio della R. Società romana di storia patria, L (1927), 319–400, here 340, 343, 349; Mario Caravale, “Le entrate pontificie,” in: Roma capitale (1447–1527): Atti del iv convegno di studi del Centro Studi sulla Civilità del Tardo Medioevo, 27–31 ottobre 1992, San Miniato (Pisa), ed. Segio Gensini (Pisa: Pascini, 1994), 74–106, here 105 gives the figures for 1480–1481: temporal revenues 170,000, spiritual 120,000, while Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du xvie siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1959), ii, table between pp. 756 and 757 gives the following figures: 165,000 ducats of gold as temporal revenues [67%] and 70–80,000 as spiritual [33%] in 1480/81 [Sixtus iv]; 300,000 temporal [60 %] and 200,000 spiritual [40 %] in 1521 [Leo x]; 369,000 temporal [74%] and 130,000 spiritual [26 %] in 1526 [Clement vii]; 623,472 écu of silver temporal [81%] and 147,000 spiritual [19%] in 1551 [Julius iii]; 600, 000 écus of silver temporal and ? spiritual in 1558 and 1563 [Paul iv and Pius iv]; ca. 1,000,000 écus of gold temporal [83%] and 200,000 spiritual [17%] in 1565 [Pius iv]; 981,450 écus of silver temporal [78%] and 279,528 spiritual [22%] in 1576 [Gregory xiii]; 1,168,488 écus of silver temporal [82%] and 250,427 spiritual [18 %] in ca. 1590 [Sixtus v]; and 1,392,508 écus of silver temporal [78%] and 384,000 spiritual [22 %] in 1604/05 [Clement viii]. Partner, “Budget of Roman Church,” 266–273; Monaco, “Finanze pontificie,” 289 (where he does not factor in the annates and commn services). In Table 5 of his “Papal Financial Policy,” on page 49, Partner provides figures that show that spiritual revenues constituted 33 % of total revenues in 1480, 44.5 % in 1525, 25.3 % in 1576, 26.2% in 1592, and 27.4% in 1599.

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Appendix: Coinage Valuation

When citing financial figures given in the coinage of the time, it may be helpful to list some of the annual salaries of the period: a fully employed unskilled laborer in the Venetian Arsenal was paid 15 to 20 ducats (women and boys half that amount), an oarsman on a galley 20; a skilled craftsman 50; a ships’ master 100; the Arsenal’s chief accountant 180; the man in charge of construction around the Piazza San Marco 80 to 200—see Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 197), 333– 334. A grammar teacher in Volterra in 1462 was paid 70 florins, his assistant 22; a Florentine Latin teacher in 1477 was paid by the commune 50 florins, an abbaco (mathematics) teacher in 1519 received a salary of between 50 to 100 florins, his assistant 12—see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 37–40. Ducats and florins of gold were of almost equivalent worth, while the giulio and grosso of silver, also near-equivalents, were worth probably about sixty percent of the gold coins (but this fluctuated widely over the century—in 1504 Julius ii set the rate of ten giulios to one papal ducat)— see Carlo M. Cipolla, Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–35 and his Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, second edition (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1980), 200–201. The issue of papal coinage is complicated, given the various coins in circulation and their fluctuating exchange rates. The Apostolic Camera denominated its fees in terms of the ducat of gold of the Camera. The worth of other coins was pegged to this ducat. The papal grosso was a silver coin, called a grosso to distinguish it from smaller coins (minuti, piccioli) such as the denario. Ideally, ten grossi were equivalent to one ducat. The grosso was also called a carlino (named after King Charles Anjou of Naples, 1285–1309). In the later fifteenth century, the value of the carlino declined so that by 1503 thirteen (no longer ten) carlini equaled a ducat. In 1504 Julius ii created a new coin called a giulio to replace the devalued carlino and restored the rate of ten giulios to a ducat. This evaluation lasted until 1545 when twelve giulios now equaled one ducat. The old carlini coins continued in circulation. The grosso/giulio was divided into twelve denari. A ducat could also be divided into bolognini or its equivalent the bajocchi romani. The rate varied over time. In the fourteenth century, one ducat equaled 48 bolognini, but by 1512 the rate was 97, and in 1527 the rate rose to 100 bolognini per ducat. The grosso/giulio was divided into ten bajocchi. Under Clement vii the fiorino became a common currency, equal to the ducat of the Camera. It was divided into twenty soldi. Another coin the scudo, originally from France, also became common

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under Clement vii and Paul iii. In 1533 one scudo equaled 100 bolognini. In 1544 the scudo was worth between eleven or twelve giulios. See Giuseppe Garampi, Saggi di osservazioni sull valore delle antiche monete pontificie (Rome: Niccolò and Marco Pagliarini, 1766), 35–39, 45–49, 95–96, 123–124. To get some idea of what these coins are worth in today’s currency, it is reasonable to consider the ducat worth about $1000. Thus, at the time of the Fifth Lateran Council and its Pastoralis officii that set the fees of the Roman Curia, a grosso or carlino or giulio was worth close to $100, a bolognino or bajocchio romano approximately $ 10.

Bibliography Bauer, Clemens. “Die Epochen der Papstfinanz: ein Versuch,” Historische Zeitschrift 138 (1927), 457–503. Reprinted in his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1965), 112–147. Boyle, o.p., Leonard E., A Survey of the Vatican Archives and of Its Medieval Holdings. [Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Subsidia Mediaevalia, i]. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972. Ferrajoli, Alessandro. Il ruolo della corte di Leone. Edited by Vincenzo de Caprio [«Europa delle corti», Centro studi sulle società di antico regime, Biblioteca del Cinquecento, 23]. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1984. Frenz, Thomas. Die Kanzlei der Päpste der Hochrenaissance (1471–1527) [Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, Band 63]. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986. Hallman, Barbara McClung. Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property, 1492– 1563. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Hofmann, Walther von. Forschungen zur Geschichte der kurialen Behörden vom Schisma bis zur Reformation, 2 vols. [Bibliothek des königlich-preussischen Historischen Instituts in Rom, xii–xiii]. Rome: Verlag von Loescher & Co., 1914. Ippolito, Antonio Menniti, Il governo dei papi nell’età moderna: Carriere, gerarchie, organizzazione curiale [La storia. Temi, 2]. Rome: Viella Libreria Editrice, 2007. Levillain, Philippe, ed. The Papacy: An Encyclopedia. English language edition consultant John W. O’Malley, 3 vols. New York: Routledge, 2002. Litva, Felice. “L’attività finanziaria della Dataria durante il period tridentino,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 5 (1967), 79–174. Partner, Peter. “Papal Financial Policy in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation,” Past and Present 88 (1980), 17–62. Partner, Peter. The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

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Pattenden, Miles. Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pellegrini, Marco. Il papato nel Rinascimento [Universale Paperbacks Il Mulino, 594]. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010. Salonen, Kirsi. Papal Justice in the Late Middle Ages: The Sacra Romana Rota [Church, Faith, and Culture in the Medieval West]. London: Routledge, 2016, Salonen, Kirsi and Ludwig Schmugge. A Sip from the “Well of Grace”: Medieval Tests from the Apostolic Penitentiary [Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law]. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 2009. Sisson, Keith and Atria A. Larson, eds. A Companion to the Medieval Papacy: Growth of an Ideology and Institution [Brill’s Companion to the Christian Tradition, 70]. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Sodi, Manlio and Johan Ickx, eds. La Penitenzieria Apostolica e il sacramento della penitenza: Percorsi storici, giurdici, teologici e prospettive pastorali [Monumenta studia instrumenta liturgica]. Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009. Tewes, Götz-Rüdiger. Die römische Kurie und die europäischen Länder am Vorabend der Reformation [Bibliothek des Deutschen Histiorischen Institut in Rom, 95]. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001.

chapter 4

The Papal States Christine Shaw

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the popes’ rule over the Papal States was central both to their own policies and preoccupations, and to how they were regarded by others, especially in Italy. Some popes appeared to give priority to their interests as a temporal prince over their spiritual and ecclesiastical duties and obligations, to the detriment of the prestige and authority of the papacy. In defense of their attention to their own temporal interests, it could be argued that the Avignonese papacy and the Schism had demonstrated the importance to the papacy of having its own secure base, its own state, to protect its independence. On the other hand, as the popes, in their efforts to secure and extend the Papal States, became fully engaged in the complex inter-state politics in Italy, they were unavoidably drawn into alliances and wars among the Italian powers, becoming, in important respects, just one of them. Simply trying to establish control over all the territories they claimed brought the popes into conflict with other Italian powers. The Papal States were a major arena for competition among neighboring powers, who were aiming either to take the territory for themselves, even if offering some acknowledgement of papal sovereignty over it, or to exercise political and economic influence there that would eclipse that of the pope. The challenge for the popes was not just to establish their own authority over their subjects but to stop their subjects looking to other powers for protection and favour, as they had long been accustomed to do. As few pontificates lasted more than a decade, some considerably less, individual popes could not build up bonds of loyalty, obligation, and interest with their subjects which could be passed on to their successors, as dynastic princes could. The realities of papal control over the Papal States, the gradual establishment of papal authority on a stable basis throughout them, were shaped and determined by changes and developments in the Italian state system, and by popes taking advantage of opportunities these changes offered, rather than by a consistent policy, passed on from one pope to another. It is misleading to think of a consistent papal policy towards the Papal States, that could be traced through a series of pontificates. Each pope had their own interests and ideals, and there could be striking contrasts among successive popes. Rather than seeing the history of the Papal States in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as exemplifying the deliberate

© Christine Shaw, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_005

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construction of a centralized, absolutist state, which was the prevailing interpretation backed by the authority of Jean Delumeau and Paolo Prodi, historians have more recently tended to stress the constraints on papal rule, the variety of arrangements and compromises with local forces that characterized the administration of the provinces.1 Most of central Italy was claimed by the papacy, from the regions south and east of Rome, the provinces of the Campagna and Marittima and the Sabina, bordering on the kingdom of Naples, the region north of Rome, the province of the Patrimony of St Peter, stretching up to the border of Tuscany, and all of Umbria, to the eastern regions of the Marche and the Romagna. Much of this was not under direct papal control in the early fifteenth century, even without the added challenge to papal authority caused by the Schism (declared allegiance to the Avignonese pope could provide a cause or pretext for challenging the Roman pope in the Papal States). The provinces around Rome were dominated by the Roman baronial families, such as the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Caetani, and Conti, whose power was based not only on their extensive lands and many fortresses, but on long-established networks of factional alliances, extending into Umbria. Some barons also held lands in the kingdom of Naples, and would not necessarily believe that their primary allegiance should be to the pope. The links of the southern Papal States to Naples were reinforced by the aspirations of King Ladislas of Naples to hold sway there. In the northern Papal States, most towns and cities were ruled by signori, lords for whom the grant of a papal vicariate was generally additional legitimation of powers that they already exercised and that were often formally based on delegation of powers from the communal governments. Towns and cities that were not ruled by signori might still pay scant attention to papal officials, governing themselves and looking to their own security when the pope could not offer effective protection. Both the towns and the signori were involved in the contest between the republic of Florence and Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan (Visconti influence had reached deep into the Papal States for much of the fourteenth century). The condottieri captains employed to fight these wars were another obstacle to papal control of the Papal States. They were ready to take over towns

1 Jean Delumeau, “Le progrès de la centralisation dans l’État Pontifical au xvie siècle,” Revue historique, 226 (1961), 399–410, published in English as “Rome: political and administrative centralization in the Papal State in the sixteenth century,” in Eric Cochrane (ed.), The Late Italian Renaissance 1525–1630 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 287–304; Paolo Prodi, Il Sovrano Pontefice: Un corpo e due anime: la monarchia papale nella prima età moderna (Bologna: il Mulino, 1982), published in English as The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

map 2

Map of the Papal States in the Renaissance map by l.r. poos

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and lands for themselves, to set themselves up as lords, and their employers might approve, even encourage them to do that, if it relieved the pressure to pay them. Sometimes, the popes had to pay their own condottieri by granting them vicariates, or were obliged to sanction by vicariates occupation or conquest of lands in the Papal States by soldiers who were not in their employ. Boniface ix granted many vicariates, not just to signori and condottieri, but to the communal governments of towns and cities, such as Fermo and Bologna. These grants could not ensure stability or loyalty. In spite of the vicariate, Bologna looked to Florence, rather than the pope. Even the presence of the pope could not ensure obedience. In 1392, Perugia agreed to submit to Boniface if he moved the curia there, but he could not master the factions and his residence only lasted a matter of months; Perugia was taken over by the Perugian condottiere, Biordo dei Michelotti. Moving to Rome, Boniface managed to hold his own against the communal government there, but he struggled against barons who challenged him until he was aided by Ladislas in 1399. He was unable to prevent the submission of Perugia to Giangaleazzo Visconti in early 1400, or that of Bologna two years later. Only the death of Giangaleazzo in 1402 and the subsequent disintegration of the Visconti state enabled Boniface to recover Bologna and Perugia. The greatest threat to successive Roman popes in the following decade came from Ladislas. In 1408, during the pontificate of Gregory xii, he occupied Rome and a large swathe of territory, extending northwards. Ladislas’s forces were pushed back by the troops of Florence and the French Angevins, supporting the pope elected by the Council of Pisa, Alexander v, but he held on to Perugia and much else besides, and in 1413 occupied Rome again. Fear of Ladislas helped to persuade John xxiii to agree to the Council of Constance, and when the king died the pope tried in vain to use a wish to recover the Papal States as a reason to postpone it. During the Council, the Papal States were dominated by condottieri, those in papal service being held in uncertain allegiance by grants of vicariates. Most powerful of these condottieri was Braccio da Montone, who ruled Orvieto and much of Umbria, and in 1417 held Rome for a while. These bare outlines of the situation in the Papal States during the Schism can convey some idea of the weakness of the temporal power of the papacy; the true extent of the confusion defies summary.2 Few, if any, of its subjects would have had cause to think of the papacy as an effective ruler or protector of peace and public order. The loyalties, networks and rivalries that shaped their

2 Peter Partner, The Lands of St Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), 366–395.

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political lives had formed and evolved largely without reference to the papacy. After the Schism, reviving papal administration in the provinces was the easy part. Establishing the dominance of the political influence of the papacy over the Papal States would be far more difficult, and take over a century to accomplish. The Council of Constance wanted the papacy to control the Papal States, for the pope to “live of his own”. The choice fell on Oddone Colonna, Martin v, in 1417, not least because of the strength of his family there, with political partisans and allies that could be used not only to provide trusted officials and soldiers, but to gain consent for papal rule.3 Nevertheless, Martin did not feel able to go to Rome until nearly three years after his election, after getting on good terms with Queen Joanna of Naples. In the north, Filippo Maria Visconti had revived Milanese power sufficiently to vie with Florence for influence in the Romagna and Marche; Martin stayed neutral between them when they fought there.4 After failing to oust Braccio da Montone from Umbria, Martin had to come to terms with him, granting him vicariates for most of the places he held, although Orvieto was brought back under the direct rule of the papacy. The rest of the lands were recovered following Braccio’s death in battle in 1424. The vicariates granted to Braccio were for a limited term, three years, and the same limitation was placed on most of the vicariates Martin agreed to confirm or extend, such as those to the Ordelaffi of Forlì, and the Alidosi of Imola.5 He tried to challenge the powerful Malatesta family, the lords of several cities in the Romagna, including Rimini and Cesena. In 1430 their lands were declared forfeit, for non-payment of the census due for their vicariates, but their lordship was firmly rooted and the pope had to back down. Some lands were taken from them, however, and most retained under the direct government of the Church.6 Marriage alliances between the Colonna and several signorial dynasties, including the Montefeltro of Urbino, helped Martin. The pope granted and bought extensive estates around Rome for his own branch of the Colonna family. But he did not oppress the rivals of the Colonna, making significant grants

3 Amedeo De Vincentiis, “La sopravvivenza come potere: papi e baroni di Roma nel xv secolo,” in Sandro Carocci (ed.), La nobilità romana nel medioevo (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2006), 559–563. 4 Partner, The Lands of St Peter, 399–400. 5 Philip Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 153. 6 Ibid., 170–171.

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to the Orsini, too. Martin’s nepotism differed from that of most other popes in that he was enhancing the existing position of his family, rather than aiming to elevate them to be signori in places with which they had no connection. Unlike most other papal nipoti, the Colonna were able to hold on to much of what he had given them. Martin reconstituted the structures of papal government in the provinces, on the template set out in the Constitutiones Egidiane promulgated in 1357 by the legate Cardinal Gil Albornoz, incorporating earlier legislation. These would be updated several times in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and remained a point of reference, although the actual administrative structures varied from that model and changed over time. The Papal States were divided into provinces—the Campagna and Marittima, the Patrimony, Perugia and the duchy of Spoleto (Umbria), the Marche, and Bologna and the Romagna. Judicial and financial offices were separated into different hierarchies. At the head of each province was a rector (who during the fifteenth century came often to be called a governor), with a staff of judges; a provincial treasurer collected papal revenues, paid out the expenses of local administration from them, and sent any surplus to the Camera Apostolica in Rome.7 Perugia was incorporated into this structure, but Bologna proved more troublesome. Initially, Martin recognized Bologna (which had rebelled against the papal governor in 1416) as autonomous, but in 1420 he sent troops under Braccio da Montone and Romagnol signori to force submission to the papacy, and refused to renew the vicariate of the communal government. Bologna rebelled again in 1428, and Martin was unable to re-establish control there before his death. In fact, compromise and adaptation to local political circumstances were necessary in dealings with all towns and cities immediate subiecte (under the direct government of the papacy). Governors independent of the provincial rector were sent to towns recovered from Braccio, for example. It was to Martin’s advantage that the experience of rule by Braccio or Ladislas caused towns to stipulate that they should not be granted out in vicariate again.8 Separate terms, capitoli, were agreed with each town as it submitted: as with the relations of other Italian princes to the communities under their rule, the pope’s subjects regarded him as lord of their particular community, rather than as prince of a state of which their community was a part. Capitoli had

7 Andrea Gardi, “Gli “officiali” nello Stato pontificio del Quattrocento,” in Gli officiali negli stati italiani del Quattrocento (Annali della Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, Ser. 4, Quaderni, 1, Classe di Lettere e filosofia, 1997), 242–244. 8 Sandro Carocci, “Governo papale e città nello Stato della Chiesa. Ricerche sul Quattrocento,” in Sergio Gensini (ed.), Principi e città alla fine del Medioevo (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996), 166.

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to be renewed in each pontificate, a process which furnished the opportunity for negotiation of adjustments. They were framed as grants at the discretion of the pope, but were thought of by the communities as reciprocal agreements. Where there was a city governor, much of the communal finances tended to be under the direct control of papal officials. In others, the commune agreed on the sum to be paid to the papal treasury and was responsible for raising the money. The sum agreed upon could be a substantial proportion of communal revenues, as at Ancona, where it was about half.9 Some important revenues from the Papal States were handled separately from the provincial governments. The Dogana dei Pascoli, for example, the dues for pasturage of transhumant flocks in the Patrimony, were directly controlled by the Camera Apostolica. The Camera retained the role of managing the revenues from the Papal States, when much of the spiritual revenues went to the Tesoreria segreta, the pope’s private treasury. It has been estimated that about half of the papal income in 1426–1427 came from the Papal States.10 But the diversion of revenues to the private treasury, under the care of the datary, and the scarcity of surviving accounts for it, complicate the estimation of the importance of the temporal revenues to the popes. Caution is needed in placing great weight on the argument that Renaissance popes had to exert greater control over the Papal States in order to compensate for the reduction of spiritual revenues by the concordats agreed with the temporal powers. Much of the authority gained by Martin v over the Papal States was lost during the pontificate of Eugenius iv. His position in Rome was weaker, not least because of the hostility between him and the Colonna, which flared up early in his pontificate. Rebellion in Rome forced Eugenius to flee in May 1434; he took refuge in Florence. He sent Cardinal Giovanni Vitelleschi with an army, financed by loans from the Medici, on a successful but brutally executed campaign to recover Rome and the surrounding provinces. Vitelleschi razed several Colonna and Savelli fortresses, and with the help of the Orsini, ended the power of the once-dominant di Vico family in the Patrimony. He also moved against the da Varano lords of Camerino and the Trinci lord of Foligno, both of whom were killed. But he was unable to enter Bologna, which had rebelled again, and Eugenius need the help of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti to install another papal governor there.

9 10

Peter Partner, The Papal State under Martin v. The Administration and Government of the Temporal Power in the Early Fifteenth Century (London: British School at Rome, 1958), 180. Partner, The Lands of St Peter, 404.

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Throughout his pontificate, Eugenius was dependent on the support of other powers to impose his rule over the Papal States. Venice and Florence took advantage of his need for their help, Venice taking over Ravenna in 1440 and Florence occupying Città di Castello, besides being given Borgo San Sepolcro by Eugenius. Filippo Maria Visconti switched from being ally to enemy and back several times, sometimes using adherence to the Council of Basel to justify sending condottieri into the Papal States. One of them, Francesco Sforza, occupied most of the March of Ancona and some of Umbria; Eugenius bowed to the fait accompli, granting him vicariates and making him Marquis of the March for life, among other concessions, in March 1434. Four years later, Visconti sent another condottiere, Niccolò Piccinino, who occupied Bologna. Eugenius was only able successfully to attack Sforza when he had the help of Visconti, and of King Alfonso of Naples. In 1445 Sforza was left with only Jesi, and his brother Alessandro as lord of Pesaro. Fortunately for the pope, Sforza’s attention shifted to Lombardy, in anticipation of his ultimately successful bid to become duke of Milan on the death of Filippo Maria Visconti without legitimate heirs. By the time Eugenius died in 1447, the temporal power of the papacy had been much restored. He had returned to Rome in 1443, and his successor was able to stay there. Nicholas v consolidated the recovery of the temporal authority by agreeing to new capitoli with Bologna, giving the Bolognese a level of control over their own affairs with which they felt comfortable, while accepting the presence of a legate or his deputy.11 A new, more stable system of inter-state relations developed in the 1450s, with the papacy as one of five major powers, with Florence, Venice, Milan, and Naples, whose alliances and rivalries shaped Italian politics. Despite the improved temporal position of the papacy, alliances and connections of patronage of the communities and lords of the Papal States with other powers persisted. The connection between the Sforza dukes of Milan and the Bentivoglio and other leading families of Bologna, for example, was, if anything, closer than that the Visconti had had, although the Sforza did not try to take Bologna under their direct rule.12 They and other powers were still ready to grab papal territory if the opportunity arose, not by force, but by striking a bargain with the lords. Venice bought Cervia in 1463 from the city’s Malatesta lord, when supporting the Malatesta against Pius ii. Galeazzo Maria Sforza persuaded Tad-

11 12

Angela De Benedictis, Repubblica per contratto. Bologna: una città europea nello Stato della Chiesa (Bologna: il Mulino, 1995), 107–136. Maria Nadia Covini, “Milano e Bologna dopo il 1455. Scambi militari, condotte e diplomazia,” in Mario Del Treppo (ed.), Condottieri e uomini d’arme nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2001), 165–214.

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deo Manfredi to exchange Imola for lands in the duchy of Milan in 1473, before selling it to Sixtus iv’s nephew, Girolamo Riario, who was betrothed to Galeazzo Maria’s natural daughter, Caterina. Unless it was to their own personal advantage (as the transaction over Imola was in the end), the popes did not regard such arrangements as legal. In the second half of the fifteenth century, they were more ready to challenge the assumption that they could have no valid objection to their subjects having independent relations with other powers, or to them accepting military condotte from other powers, without reference to the pope. Other Italian powers, however, considered such connections too useful to relinquish. Florence, Milan, Venice, and Naples were still vying for influence in the Romagna, more concerned with competing with each other than with whether they were encroaching on the authority of the papacy. Condottieri from the Papal States were valued partly because they might use their own resources of lands, fortresses, and factional allies in the service of their employer against the pope.13 It was not considered to be in the interests of other Italian powers for the pope to be in full control of the Papal States. With the greater stability of the Italian state system, the pope was in a better position to seek to punish troublesome barons or lords, to revoke vicariates, and take possession of lands—if he chose the right target, at the right time. External support for papal subjects, and the strength of local political connections and networks, limited what a pope could achieve. When Pius ii proceeded against Sigismondo Malatesta (who had annoyed him by not observing terms of an arbitration by Pius), some places subject to Sigismondo that surrendered to papal troops for fear of being pillaged, soon rebelled and re-elected him their lord. Other powers did not help Pius. The Venetians intervened on behalf of the Malatesta, securing Cervia and its valuable saltpans for themselves from Malatesta Novello, much to the annoyance of the pope, and saved Rimini for Sigismondo by promising to join Pius in a crusade against the Turks if he left Rimini alone. Pius got an agreement with Malatesta Novello that his vicariates would revert to the papacy if he died without legitimate male issue. Paul ii enforced this on Malatesta Novello’s death in 1465, but could not secure Rimini on Sigismondo’s death in 1468, because he could not dislodge his son Roberto once King Ferrante of Naples pledged to defend him. Roberto retook some of the territory that had been lost to Pius, and was invested with the vicariate by Sixtus iv in 1473.14 13 14

Christine Shaw, “The Roman barons and the security of the Papal States,” in Del Treppo (ed.), Condottieri e uomini d’arme, 311–325. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini, 225–246.

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Several popes in the second half of the fifteenth century sought to assert their authority over the Roman barons, with mixed success. Calixtus iii intervened in an inheritance dispute between Napoleone Orsini and Everso d’Anguillara, sending his nephew Pedro Luis Borgia (whom he had appointed Captain-General of the Church) in 1458 to attack the estates Napoleone had taken. Napoleone kept the estates, and Pedro Luis had to flee the vengeance of the Orsini after Calixtus died. Pius ii attacked Jacopo Savelli, who had harbored Roman rebels and the troops of the condottiere Jacopo Piccinino as they raided lands near Rome. Pius said that he wanted to punish him so severely that other barons would be cowed, but Savelli submitted and kept his estates.15 Paul ii succeeded in depriving the sons of Everso d’Anguillara of their lands, after they had refused terms he offered over an estate they claimed, but his attempts to undermine local support for the Roman barons only annoyed them, and had no lasting effect.16 The Colonna incurred the wrath of Sixtus iv, principally by putting allegiance to Ferrante of Naples above that to the papacy. Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, with Cardinal Gianbattista Savelli, was arrested in 1482 and held for over a year. In 1484, Lorenzo Oddone Colonna, an apostolic protonotary, who claimed Sixtus was plotting against him, was taken by force from the cardinal’s palace in Rome, tortured, and executed. The Colonna estates were attacked and their fortresses beseiged by papal troops under Girolamo Riario, who wanted their lands. Sixtus’s death put an end to the campaign, and the Colonna recovered all they had lost.17 When popes sent their troops against Romagnol signori or Roman barons, they were usually seen not so much as enforcing their rightful authority over their subjects as causing trouble, disturbing the peace for their own personal interests. It was commonly assumed that they wanted to take territory to give to their own family. In fact, Paul ii was the only pope in the second half of the fifteenth century with a clear policy of extending the lands immediate subiecte; under other popes, any towns or lands acquired for the papacy were generally granted out again, more often than not to their own relatives.18 Much of the territory Pius ii took from the Malatesta, for example, was given to his nephew, Antonio Piccolomini.

15 16 17

18

Christine Shaw, Barons and Castellans. The Military Nobility of Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 181. De Vincentiis, “La sopravvivenza come potere,” 579–580. Christine Shaw, The Political Role of the Orsini Family from Sixtus iv to Clement vii. Barons and Factions in the Papal States (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio evo, 2007), 173–174. Carocci, “Governo papale,” 172.

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Nepotism had been a feature of the temporal government of the papacy throughout the Middle Ages, but the Renaissance papacy became noted for what has been called ‘grande nepotismo’, when the popes used the resources of the papacy not just to enrich their families, but to set them up as lords, even princes. The assumption that they would do so became a factor in the calculations of other powers in their relations with the papacy. It was not believed that popes used their nipoti, nephews, brothers, or sons, as governors or commanders, or made them lords, because they would be the most trustworthy instruments to increase papal control over the Papal States, as some historians have argued.19 Nipoti generally lacked previous military or political experience, and few showed much natural aptitude for military command or government. Papal objections to the influence or interventions of other powers in the Papal States were set aside when popes were looking for protectors for their relatives, who might help them hold on to power after their papal sponsor died. For other powers, providing protection for papal relatives was only worthwhile if it would enhance their own influence within the Papal States. Agreeing to cede Imola to Girolamo Riario made sense to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, for example, because he envisaged holding a kind of military protectorate over it. Even before Sixtus died, the Milanese regent Ludovico Sforza thought of taking for himself both Imola and Forlì, which had been granted to Riario in 1480 when a family feud among the Ordelaffi provided justification for the revocation of the vicariate, and the diplomatic situation was favourable. Innocent viii had plans eventually to give Forlì and Imola to his son Franceschetto Cibò. Ludovico Sforza was more interested in maintaining influence over Imola and Forlì than in the survival of Riario, but he did not want to drive him to look to Venice for protection. Riario was not popular with his subjects; when the seventh plot against him in Forlì finally succeeded in 1488, the conspirators summoned the papal governor of Cesena, but Milanese support enabled Caterina Sforza to hold on.20 The period when condottieri could occupy on their own account large swathes of territory in the Papal States, setting themselves up as signori, was over. Jacopo Piccinino found this out when, during the sede vacante in 1458, he seized places in Umbria, including Assisi, which his father Niccolò had

19

20

For example, Mario Caravale, “Lo Stato pontificio da Martino v a Gregorio xiii,” in Mario Caravale and Alberto Caracciolo, Lo Stato pontificio da Martino v a Pio x (Turin: utet, 1978) (Storia d’Italia, ed. G. Galasso, xiv), 104–107. Marco Pellegrini, Congiure di Romagna. Lorenzo de’ Medici e il duplice tirannicidio a Forlì e a Faenza nel 1488 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1999), 19–64.

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held, only to have to relinquish them to the new pope after a few months.21 Popes could now expect to hold on to places that were under their direct rule. The structures of the papal administration were bedded in, and there were an increasing number of fortresses and garrisons of papal troops.22 If papal government was more firmly rooted, it could still not secure public order. Fortresses were no deterrent to the main cause of disruption, fighting between factions or families competing for political dominance. In Tivoli, for instance, factional conflict increased in ferocity and intensity after the construction of the Rocca Pia, begun in 1461, replacing a fortress which the people of Tivoli had destroyed a few years before.23 The Spoletans were not restrained by the papal fortress in their city from taking a leading role in the Guelf and Ghibelline conflicts and alliances linking the urban factions of Umbria to the Roman barons.24 Provided they did not directly challenge the papal government, however, popes could leave factions and politically dominant families alone. Paul ii was exceptional in his determination not to permit “tyrannies” to prosper “under the mantle of St Peter,” in Bologna or elsewhere.25 He intervened more frequently than other popes did in the elections of communal officials, or the institutions of communal governments. Sometimes popes did feel that the use of force was necessary to assert their authority or restore order. Thus, Sixtus iv sent his nephew, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, at the head of a military expedition to settle faction-fighting in Spoleto and Todi and curb the growing dominance in Città di Castello of Niccolò Vitelli, who was too closely linked with Florence for his liking.26 With more established papal government came an increase in revenues from the Papal States. Local administration still absorbed most of the money raised from communities, but other taxes were collected more effectively and new ones introduced. A “budget” for 1480–1481, probably prepared by the Camera Apostolica as an estimate of what was expected rather than what had been received, indicated a total of 170,000 ducats coming from the Papal States, as

21 22 23 24

25 26

Serena Ferente, La sfortuna di Jacopo Piccinino. Storia dei bracceschi in Italia, 1423–1465 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2005), 76–79. Carocci, “Governo papale,” 176, 183–185. Sandro Carocci, Tivoli nel Basso Medioevo: Società cittadina ed economia agraria (Rome, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1988), 109–110. For these associations, see Christine Shaw, “The Roman barons and the Guelf and Ghibelline factions in the Papal States,” in Marco Gentile (ed.), Guelfi e ghibellini nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome: Viella, 2005), 475–494. Ian Robertson, Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter: Paul ii and Bologna (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 18. Christine Shaw, Julius ii: The Warrior Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 19–24.

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against 120,000 from spiritual revenues. The 170,000 ducats included 50,000 from the revenues of the papal alum mines at Tolfa, which did not go to the Camera.27 Initially, the income from the mining of the deposits of alum discovered in the Patrimony during Pius ii’s pontificate had been earmarked for crusades, but it is not known where they went or how they were spent between 1471 and 1553.28 Revenues from the Papal States came to be assigned to the payment of interest on the new venal colleges of curial officials, and to be collected by tax farmers, not provincial treasurers, few of whom remained. If anything, they were declining as a proportion of total papal revenues. In documents concerning the reform of the Camera Apostolica in the early 1480s, and setting out information for a new papal treasurer in 1500, emphasis was placed on spiritual revenues as the most important for the Camera.29 The Italian Wars which began in 1494 and only finally concluded in 1559 with the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, brought momentous changes to the Italian state system, changes that ultimately assisted the popes in strengthening their hold over the Papal States. The duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples ceased to be independent powers, coming under the rule of the king of France or Spain, then of Emperor Charles v. The Florentines were preoccupied with their own problems, and during the pontificates of the Medici popes, Leo x and Clement vii, were treated as an adjunct to the papacy. These changes meant that the popes no longer had to contend with Florentine or Milanese influence over their subjects, although the connection of some Roman barons to Naples could still be problematic. The Venetians remained ready to expand into the Romagna and the Marche, as they did after the death of Alexander vi in 1503, and following Clement vii’s humiliation in the Sack of Rome in 1527. But they were no longer able to hold on to these lands against the pope’s refusal to sanction it. French or Spanish kings or the emperor were not interested in offering the same kind or degree of political protection to minor lords. They might, however, extend their protection over bigger fish, such as the city of Bologna, or the duke of Ferrara, or major Roman barons. They could perceive the advantages of exploiting the military resources of the Roman barons and

27 28

29

Peter Partner, “The ‘Budget’ of the Roman Church in the Renaissance period,” in Ernest F. Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies (London: Faber, 1960), 263. By the second half of the sixteenth century, revenues had fallen and seem to have been used for payments to officials and interest on a public debt, the Monte Allumiere, set up by Paul iv. See Jean Delumeau, L’alun de Rome. xve–xvesiècle (Paris, sevpen, 1962), 150–154, 158–161. Peter Partner, “La Camera Apostolica,” in Carla Frova and Maria Grazia Nico Ottaviani (eds), Alessandro vi e lo Stato della Chiesa (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2003), 28.

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other military nobility to threaten the pope. They gave them military commands, but not condotte, so the barons and signori could no longer maintain large companies of their own soldiers. Nevertheless, for the popes it could still be galling, and in some cases dangerous, that their subjects continued to feel at liberty to accept commands from other powers and give their primary loyalty to them.30 Through their participation in the Italian Wars, the ultramontane monarchs became more aware of the weight of the pope’s concerns as a temporal ruler, and of the prominence given to the personal, family interests of the popes in the policies of the papacy. If they ruled Milan or Naples, their lands bordered on the Papal States. In their dealings with the papacy, they came to adopt much the same attitudes as the Italian powers of the fifteenth century: they were prepared to go to war with the popes, invade the Papal States, or to offer lands, marriages, protection to papal relatives. This was detrimental to the reputation of the papacy—particularly as much of the warfare engaged in by the popes during the Italian Wars was intended, directly or indirectly, to be for the benefit of papal nipoti.31 Alexander vi, notoriously, had no compunction about using the resources of the papacy for the endowment of his family, the Borgia. In 1498, he threatened all holders of papal fiefs and vicariates whose census payments were in arrears with deprivation. That provided a pretext for the campaigns against the surviving signorial dynasties in the Romagna and the Marche, to take the lands with which Alexander endowed his son, Cesare Borgia, as Duke of Romagna, but these included Cesena and Fano, which were immediate subiecte. He dispossessed many Roman barons of their estates, exploiting opportunities when they lacked political protection; most of the lands taken went to endow some of his other children. Cesare was placed under the protection of the king of France, but believed that he would also need the support of some Roman barons to maintain his position after his father’s death. When Alexander died in 1503, the barons swiftly recovered their estates, and the French and Spanish competed for their services, rather than those of Cesare. Julius ii worked hard throughout his pontificate to strengthen the hold of the papacy on the Papal States. The Venetians used the excuse of taking lands from Cesare Borgia to expand into the Romagna in 1503, taking Rimini and Faenza and other territory. Julius refused to acquiesce in this, and managed to get some territory back from them, as well as taking Cesena, Imola, and Forlì under direct 30 31

Shaw, Barons and Castellans, 227–241. Christine Shaw, “The Papacy and the European powers,” in Christine Shaw (ed.), Italy and the European Powers: The Impact of War, 1500–1530 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 107–126.

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papal rule. The recovery of the remaining lands in the Romagna held by Venice was his reason for participating in the War of the League of Cambrai in 1509. All the lands he recovered from Venice, which included Ravenna and Cervia, were retained under the direct rule of the papacy. From the first years of his pontificate, he made an effort to curb faction-fighting and disorder in the Papal States. The military expedition he led in 1506, with most of the papal court in tow, to make clear that Perugia and Bologna were subject to the rule of the papacy, not of the Baglioni or the Bentivoglio families, was the most striking example of this.32 Giovanni Bentivoglio angered the pope not only by his arrogance, but also by having a personal connection to Louis xii, who held Milan, and who was prepared to use his protection of the Bentivoglio and Bologna against the pope, when it suited him. Maintaining a connection with Louis, when Julius regarded him as an enemy, was the major reason for Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, incurring the pope’s wrath. Julius began what became a prolonged effort by successive popes to take Ferrara from Alfonso. He did not look to the protection of other powers to secure the future of his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, who had inherited lands in the Marche given to his father by Sixtus iv. Julius arranged his adoption as the heir of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the childless duke of Urbino, his maternal uncle. Only on his deathbed did he agree that Francesco Maria could also have Pesaro, which had reverted to the direct rule of the papacy in 1512.33 Julius also extended the bounds of what was claimed as papal territory. Parma and Piacenza were his share of the spoils when the armies of the league of which he as a member drove the French out of the duchy of Milan in 1512, and Modena and Reggio, Imperial fiefs, were taken from Alfonso d’Este. Leo x thought of all these recent accessions as being a possible endowment for his brother, Giuliano de’ Medici. Parma and Piacenza had to be given up to Francis i, following his reconquest of Milan in 1515; in return Francis promised protection for the Medici and Florence, and for the Papal States, but refused to renounce his protection of Alfonso d’Este. Leo recovered Parma and Piacenza in 1521, when he joined Charles v in attacking the French in Milan. His ambitions for his family extended beyond the Papal States, for his sights were set on making the Medici lords of Florence, if not of Tuscany. When he took the duchy of Urbino from Francesco Maria della Rovere in 1516, accusing him of treachery on factitious grounds, his real motive was that he thought Urbino would be a useful appendage, with a ducal title, for his nephew Lorenzo de’

32 33

Shaw, Julius ii, 127–161. Shaw, Julius ii, 183–184.

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Medici, to reinforce his position in Florence. Lorenzo’s death in 1519 scuppered these plans, and Leo declared Urbino devolved to the papacy. Francesco Maria recovered his duchy after Leo’s death, and held on to it.34 During the pontificate of Clement vii, papal authority was weakened and undermined. Imperial agents used the Colonna to threaten and humiliate the pope, making an incursion into Rome with men from Naples and the Colonna estates in 1526. Clement took his revenge by sending troops to ravage Colonna lands, but this complicated his relations with Charles v. Clement’s vacillating policy prepared the way for the invasion of the Papal States and the dreadful Sack of Rome by Imperial troops in 1527. In the aftermath, Venice seized Ravenna and Cervia again, Alfonso d’Este took Modena (he had already recovered Reggio in the sede vacante after Leo’s death), and there was a revival of faction-fighting in the Papal States. In the general peace negotiations in Bologna in the winter of 1529–1530, when Charles v came to be crowned emperor by Clement, Venice had to surrender Ravenna and Cervia, but Charles refused to agree that the pope should have Modena and Reggio. The family of Paul iii, the Farnese, already had a base in the Papal States, their estates in the Patrimony. Paul extended these, creating the duchy of Castro for his son, Pier Luigi, in 1537. Intervening in a dispute over the inheritance of the duchy of Camerino, he made his grandson Ottavio duke there in 1540. There was a proposal from the Farnese to buy the duchy of Milan from Charles v for Ottavio (who was married to Charles’s natural daughter, Margaret), with money from the papal coffers. In the end Paul endowed his family with Parma and Piacenza, erecting them into duchies for Pier Luigi in 1545. To appease opposition among the cardinals, Paul agreed to restore Camerino to the direct government of the papacy, and Ottavio had to make do with the duchy of Castro. After Pierluigi was assassinated in 1547, and Imperial troops from Milan occupied Piacenza, Paul decided to bring Parma and Piacenza back under papal government as well. But Ottavio defied him, and Julius iii, and succeeded in holding on to Parma with the help of the French, and coming to terms with Philip ii of Spain, ruler of Milan, in 1556 to recover Piacenza. Popes continued to regard Parma and Piacenza as papal fiefs, but they were never again part of the Papal States. The Farnese were the last papal nipoti to be elevated to a princely dynasty by their pope. Paul iv’s nephew, Giovanni Carafa, was given lands confiscated from the Colonna (guilty in the pope’s eyes, because of their association with 34

Cecil H. Clough, “Clement vii and Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino,” in Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss (eds), The Pontificate of Clement vii. History, Politics, Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 81–108.

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Charles v and Philip ii), and made duke of Paliano. But Paul did not give his nephews enough to have enabled them to defend their position after his death, even if they had not lost their uncle’s confidence before he died. He accused them of having deceived and betrayed him, and exiled them from Rome. Paul’s successor, Pius iv, prosecuted them, and two, Giovanni and Cardinal Carlo Carafa, were executed. Arguably, Pius was not so concerned with punishing their misdeeds as with asserting his own authority.35 He did think of providing for his own nephew, Federico Borromeo, by giving him Camerino, but Federico died before this was put into effect. In the Rome of the Catholic Reformation, however, tolerance for the popes’ use of papal territory to elevate their families into princely dynasties was wearing thin. Popes would continue to use the resources of the papacy to enrich their families, and to endow them with estates and fine titles, but not to try to make them into princes. On the other hand, it became established practice for a cardinal-nephew to be in charge of the administration of the Papal States. Following the disgrace of his nephews, Paul iv instituted a new tribunal, the Sacro Consiglio, to direct the temporal government. This council became the Consulta, the base from which the cardinal-nephews exercised their supervision of the affairs of the Papal States. This was one aspect of a new phase of consolidation of the administration of the Papal States in the second half of the sixteenth century, facilitated by the greater political stability in Italy with the end of the Italian Wars. Another aspect was increased fiscal pressure on the pope’s subjects. There had already been changes to the ways in which revenues were raised from the Papal States. A summary “budget” of papal revenues, dated 1525, showed a great increase in the estimated revenues from Rome, with the revenues from the provinces of the Papal States being about the same as in the “budget” of 1480–1481. The value of the contract for the alum mines was down to less than 20,000 ducats; Modena and Piacenza were noted as yielding 26,000 ducats, about the same as the Patrimony and Umbria together. The anticipated income from the Papal States, apart from the alum, added up to about 103,500 ducats, and from Rome 98,000 ducats. Spiritual revenues were expected to be around 212,000 ducats, on the assumption that the datary would receive around 12,000 a month.36 Clement tried new ways to raise additional money, including instituting the Monte della Fede, the first papal funded debt, in 1526,

35 36

Miles Pattenden, Pius iv and the Fall of the Carafa. Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Partner, “The ‘Budget’ of the Roman Church,” 265–270, 275–278.

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imposing a new hearth tax in 1531, and an attempt in 1529 to impose a tax directly on all property, lay and ecclesiastical, which seems to have failed.37 Paul iii renewed the hearth tax, and in 1537 increased the tax on salt, which provoked revolts. The Perugians paid for their rebellion in 1540 by the abolition of their communal government and the construction of a fortress in the city. These harsh measures were soon mitigated in practice, however, and Julius iii, who had family ties to Perugia, restored the municipal institutions.38 Ascanio Colonna, defending the tax privileges of his estates against what he denounced as papal tyranny, lost his lands in 1541, having rejected a settlement negotiated for him by the Imperial ambassador in Rome; as usual when the lands of Roman barons were taken from them by a pope, he would recover them after the pope’s death.39 Once the unrest was quelled, the contested taxes were replaced in 1543 by a new one, the sussidio triennale, originally intended to be an extraordinary levy, for three years; it became an established, regular tax, imposed on clergy, even cardinals, as well as laymen. The method of assessment and imposition became the model for other new taxes. Generally, the amount required would be set in Rome, and the decision how to raise it was taken at a local level.40 In this, the papal government was demonstrating a desire to proceed in agreement with the provincial elites. Such a method of assessment allowed the local elites who controlled the communal governments to shift the tax burden onto others. They were able to invest in the various new monti that were instituted in Rome and in the provinces, receiving interest that was paid from the taxes they apportioned. These financial advantages consolidated the relationship between the local elites and the papal government.41 Association with the papal government by, for example, a member of a provincial family making a career in the papal bureaucracy in Rome, became a prime way to achieve local eminence. Civic elites were able to present themselves at home as defenders of local autonomy, and to Rome as devoted subjects of the pope, “ecclesiastical citizens”. Larger communities kept a permanent representative in Rome, to deal with all matters concerning their relations with the central government, while others sent ad hoc deputations when the need arose. In Rome, besides the Camera Apostolica, the main office dealing with the affairs of the Papal States

37 38 39 40 41

Caravale, “Lo stato pontificio,” pp. 228–230; Andrea Gardi, “La fiscalità pontificia tra Medioevo ed Età moderna,” Società e storia, 9 (1986), 533–535. Christopher F. Black, “Perugia and Papal absolutism in the sixteenth century,” English Historical Review, 96 (1981), 511–512. Shaw, Barons and Castellans, 233–234. Gardi, “La fiscalità pontificia,” 538–542. Ibid., 542–544.

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in the second half of the sixteenth century was the Consulta. In the provinces, papal officials were rarely laymen; the typical papal governor would be a bishop of a minor diocese, with legal training.42 Provincial legations were fragmented, allowing closer control by papal officials at a local level. This was acceptable to local elites, who did not wish to have their town subordinate to neighbouring towns, and found it easier to strike bargains with a resident governor.43 While the provincial urban elites were being drawn into a closer, mutually advantageous relation to the papal government, papal officials were seeking to exercise greater supervision over noble fiefs and jurisdictions. In 1567, Pius v issued a bull forbidding any fief that devolved to the papacy from being granted out again, and in 1580 Gregory xiii ordered a review of all titles to any property, including fiefs and vicariates, for which a census was owed to the Camera Apostolica. It is not clear whether the diligent efforts of papal officials to prove that estates that had for centuries been regarded as allods were in fact fiefs, were carried out on the orders of the popes.44 All this has been interpreted as a stage in ‘a long process of anti-feudal legislation’ stretching back to the late fifteenth century,45 or, rather than a long-term policy, as a series of disparate measures aimed at curbing the economic power of the barons and increasing papal revenues.46 But it was not a policy specifically targeting barons and powerful nobles, for many of the fiefs and jurisdictions concerned were minor. The popes were not hostile to the Roman barons as a group. Prestigious titles, of duke or prince, were conferred on major barons, titles which their families may have had in the kingdom of Naples, but not in the Papal States before. Paolo Giordano Orsini was made Duke of Bracciano by Pius iv, for example, Marcantonio Colonna, Prince of Paliano by Pius v. The duke of Bracciano and the prince of Paliano were declared to have the same powers within their lands as the dukes of Urbino, Ferrara, and Parma.47 Powerful as the major families still were, their political weight in the Papal States was waning, with the decline in the Guelf and Ghibelline networks that had linked the, still flourishing, factions in individual towns, and the reduction of their independent military power. As 42 43 44 45 46 47

Andrea Gardi, Lo Stato in provincia. L’amministrazione della Legazione di Bologna durante il regno di Sisto v (1585–1590) (Bologna: Istituto per la storia di Bologna, 1994), 49–50. Bandino Giacomo Zenobi, Le “Ben regolate città”. Modelli politici nel governo della periferie pontificie in età moderna (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1994), 46–47. Sandro Carocci, Vassalli del papa. Potere pontificio, aristocrazie e città nello Stato della Chiesa (xii–xv sec). (Rome: Viella, 2010), 74–80. Prodi, Il Sovrano Pontefice, 151. Caravale, “Lo stato pontificio,” 328–331, 339–343. Francesca Laura Sigismondi, Lo Stato degli Orsini. Statuti e diritto proprio nel Ducato di Bracciano (Rome: Viella, 2003), 30–32; Caravale, “Lo stato pontificio,” 312–313, 330–331.

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in earlier periods, the highest military commands in the papal army tended to be given to papal nipoti, however personally ill-suited they might be (like the eight-year-old Michele Peretti made captain-general of the papal guard by Sixtus v); as before, Roman barons and other papal subjects with military experience would be placed at their side to take effective charge. Papal subjects did hold commands over the new militias that were formed in the Papal States, but these posts were not prestigious or lucrative enough to attract the major barons. Those who wanted to follow a military career found better prospects in the service of other powers.48 The popes were still unable to exercise a monopoly on the services, or the loyalties, of the major barons. The links of the Colonna to the king of Spain remained strong; those of the Orsini to the king of France were less so, but they maintained historic connections to Florence and Venice. Opportunities for nobles to make a lucrative career as a professional soldier in Italy were much reduced, however; those who went elsewhere in Europe to fight often did so as volunteers, in search of honor and adventure. These restricted opportunities to earn money in military service contributed to the financial difficulties several baronial families experienced, as did trying to keep up with the standards of conspicuous consumption set in Rome by papal nipoti and wealthy cardinals. The strengths and weaknesses, the reach and the limitations of the temporal government as it had developed by the late sixteenth century were revealed by the strong assertion of papal authority by Sixtus v, and the mixed results of his efforts. Six of the fifteen new Congregations that he set up in 1588 were concerned with the government of the Papal States, and the Consulta became a Congregation, but the new ones did not last long.49 In revising and reissuing the Constitutiones Egidiane for what would be the last time, Sixtus was primarily interested in claiming new revenues, including all those from fines and confiscations in criminal cases. Provisions of local statutes concerning criminal penalties were annulled, unless they had been confirmed by Paul iv or his successors. This measure would have had far-reaching implications, if it had been put into full effect.50 It is not known whether a provision Sixtus issued concerning the need for papal approval for sales, gifts, or exchanges of estates with jurisdiction took effect, either.51 Measures to deal with the scourge of bands of outlaws (which was not peculiar to the Papal States in late-sixteenth cen-

48 49 50 51

Giampiero Brunelli, Soldati del Papa. Politica militare e nobiltà nello Stato della Chiesa (1560–1644) (Rome: Carocci Editore, 2003), 35–98. Gardi, Lo Stato in provincia, 62–63. Ibid., 63–65. Carocci, Vassalli del papa, 78.

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tury Italy, but was particularly troublesome there) imposed an obligation on barons and communities to guard against and punish them; those who gave them refuge or aid, however unwillingly, were to be guilty of lèse-majesté, their families and communities of origin were to be held liable for the damage they caused. The outcome of these measures was an increase in the numbers of outlaws.52 Intent on accumulating reserves, Sixtus introduced new taxes, increased control over the finances of the towns and cities to bring more into the Camera Apostolica, and greatly increased the public debt, with the bulk of the interest payments on the debt assigned to the revenues from the Papal States. On his death, interest payments had reached nearly a million scudi a year, when the annual revenues of the papacy have been estimated at around 1,300,000– 1,400,000 scudi a year. By the late sixteenth century, four-fifths of papal revenues came from Rome and the Papal States, with Rome contributing over a third of that.53 Sixtus left a treasury of nearly five million scudi; one of the few uses to which he intended this could be put was the defence of papal territory.54 But he had put the accumulation of money before maintaining the political and social balance of interests that had come to sustain the government of the Papal States. To appease discontent, Clement viii had to abolish several of the new taxes. In 1592, Clement instituted the Congregazione del buon governo, headed by the cardinal-nephew, to regulate the communal administrations and supervise their budgets.55 The most dramatic development in the government of the Papal States during Clement’s pontificate was the accomplishment of an ambition of several popes earlier in the century, when he was able to enforce the devolution of the duchy of Ferrara to the papacy following the death of the childless Alfonso ii d’Este in 1597. Cesare d’Este, from a putatively illegitimate branch of the family, who claimed the inheritance, could not successfully defy the pope, as Alfonso i had done. The support and loyalty of their subjects had been lost by the Este, and neither the king of France nor other powers were prepared to oppose the pope in order to help Cesare in claiming Ferrara. The Emperor Rudolf ii told him to “restore to the Church what belonged to the Church,” or he would not

52 53 54 55

Irene Polverini Fosi, La società violenta. Il banditismo dello Stato pontificio nella seconda metà del Cinquecento (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985), 142–148. Gardi, Lo Stato in provincia, 65–69; Alberto Caracciolo, “Da Sisto v a Pio ix,” in Caravale and Caracciolo, Lo Stato pontificio, 387–388. Gardi, Lo Stato in provincia, 69. Gardi, “La fiscalità pontificia,” 549–550; Stefano Tabacchi, Il Buon Governo. Le finanze locali nello Stato della Chiesa (secoli xvi–xviii) (Rome: Viella, 2007/2011).

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be able to confirm Cesare’s rights to Modena and Reggio.56 In the face of an army led by the cardinal-nephew Aldobrandini, Cesare had to cede Ferrara, and content himself with Modena and Reggio. Clement’s triumph in securing the devolution of Ferrara was perhaps an even better indication than the policies of Sixtus v of the effective power and authority exercised by the papacy over the Papal States by the end of the sixteenth century. Essentially, the popes were as powerful as they could convince their subjects that it was in their own interests that they might be. Their subjects were ready to accept and co-operate with papal government when other options were closed or no longer seemed attractive or sustainable alternatives. Aided by changes to the Italian state system, which meant that neighboring powers no longer continually intervened in the Papal States, undermining papal rule, the popes could wield more political control over their temporal dominions, providing the conditions for the administration in the provinces to become more effective. There were still clear limits to the efficacy and reach of papal government in the provinces, and the Papal States were far from being an absolute, centralized state, but there was no longer any question that the pope was sovereign there.

Bibliography Caravale, Mario. “Lo Stato pontificio da Martino v a Gregorio xiii,” in: Mario Caravale and Alberto Caracciolo, Lo Stato pontificio da Martino v a Pio x [Storia d’Italia, ed. G. Galasso, xiv], (Turin, utet, 1978), 1–371. Carocci, Sandro. “Governo papale e città nello Stato della Chiesa. Ricerche sul Quattrocento,” in: Sergio Gensini, ed., Principi e città alla fine del Medioevo (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996), 151–224. Carocci, Sandro, Vassalli del papa. Potere pontificio, aristocrazie e città nello Stato della Chiesa (xii–xv sec.). Rome: Viella, 2010. De Benedictis, Angela. Repubblica per contratto. Bologna: una città europea nello Stato della Chiesa. Bologna: il Mulino, 1995. Fosi, Irene Polverini. La società violenta. Il banditismo dello Stato pontificio nella seconda metà del Cinquecento. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985. Frova, Carla and Ottaviani, Maria Grazia Nico, eds. Alessandro vi e lo Stato della Chiesa. Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2003. 56

Angelantonio Spagnoletti, Le dinastie italiane nella prima età moderna (Bologna: il Mulino, 2003), 50–51 (for the quotation); Gian Lodovico Masetti Zannini, La capitale perduta. La devoluzione di Ferrara 1598 nelle carte vaticane (Ferrara: Corbo Editore, 2000).

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Gardi, Andrea. “Gli ‘officiali’ nello Stato pontificio del Quattrocento,” in: Gli officiali negli stati italiani del Quattrocento [Annali della Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, Ser. 4, Quaderni, 1, Classe di Lettere e filosofia, 1997], 225–291. Gardi, Andrea. Lo Stato in provincia. L’amministrazione della Legazione di Bologna durante il regno di Sisto v (1585–1590). Bologna: Istituto per la storia di Bologna, 1994. Jones, Philip. The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Partner, Peter. The Lands of St Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. London: Eyre Methuen, 1972. Prodi, Paolo. Il Sovrano Pontefice: Un corpo e due anime: la monarchia papale nella prima età moderna. Bologna: il Mulino, 1982; published in English as The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Shaw, Christine. Julius ii: The Warrior Pope. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Shaw, Christine. The Political Role of the Orsini Family from Sixtus iv to Clement vii. Barons and Factions in the Papal States. Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio evo, 2007. Tabacchi, Stefano. Il Buon Governo. Le finanze locali nello Stato della Chiesa (secoli xvi– xviii). Rome: Viella, 2007, 2011. Tabacchi, Stefano. Lo stato della Chiesa. [Universale paperbacks il Mulino, 817] Bologna: il Mulino, 2023. Zenobi, Bandino Giacomo. Le “Ben regolate città”. Modelli politici nel governo della periferie pontificie in età moderna. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1994.

chapter 5

Rome: Urban Government, Society, Economy, Religion Anna Esposito

1

Introduction

After the end of the Great Schism and the stable return of the papacy to the city in 1420, Rome gradually proceeded to assume a new function, that of a “capital,” seat of the governing bureaucracy of the Church and of the “sovereign papal” court, one of the great Italian courts of the period. It reaffirmed with great force its international vocation to be the center of Christianity, and thus a center of pilgrimage, culture, diplomacy for the whole known world, and simultaneously a center of craftsmanship and professional activities by workers from very diverse backgrounds. At the end of the 1300s the popes had become the true lords of Rome when Pope Boniface ix (r. 1389–1404) finally brought under his control the previously citizen-based commune. During the prolonged absence of the papacy from the city and the vicissitudes of the period of the schism, the commune with its headquarters on the Capitoline Hill, under the “popular” rule of the Felice Società dei Balestrieri e Pavesati [the Felicitious Society (or: “Jolly Band”) of Crossbowsmen and Shieldbearers], had won a remarkable autonomy and successfully defended it until their effective surrender in 1398.1 After that the city will be bound in an indissoluble way to the Curia, the true center of power that effectively dominated the economic and institutional life of Rome. Indeed, the pope began divesting the prerogatives of the commune and controlling the whole municipal administration, as well as nominating the principal civic magistrates, in particular the Senator, (which already, since the return of the popes from Avignon, had been an instrument of papal politics)2 as

1 Arnold Esch, Bonifaz ix. und der Kirchenstaat (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969); Arnold Esch, “Nobiltà, comune e papato nella prima metà del Quattrocento. Le conseguenze della fine del libero comune nel 1398,” in La nobiltà romana nel Medioevo, ed. Sandro Carocci (Rome: École française de rome, 2006), 495–513. 2 Massimo Miglio, “Il Senato in Roma medievale,” in Il Senato nella storia (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1997), 117–172, at 171.

© Anna Esposito, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_006

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well as the magistri stratarum, [supervisors of the streets]. This last magistracy increasingly assumed a particularly important role in revitalizing the city, which appeared to the Florentine merchants of the time—according to Vespasiano da Bisticci—as “a mere cow-pasture, for the people kept cattle and cows as far as the places which are now filled with shops of traders,”3 in the most important streets. In fact, beginning with Pope Martin v (r. 1417–1431), the Renaissance popes tried to reorganize the use of the urban space with their extensive city planning and architectural campaigns; they tried—not always coherently—to make Rome, then decadent and in disrepair, into a magnificent city worthy of its new function.4 In the following pages I will seek to provide an overview of the institutional arrangement of the Roman commune, of the urban space and its modifications, of the composition of the diverse civic society, of the economic resurgence, and finally of the religious institutions with their devotions and charitable activities that characterized Renaissance Rome.

2

The Institutional Arrangement of the Commune, 1400–1550

At the return of Pope Martin v to Rome, the city offered an amorphous institutional framework that would be made more precise in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.5 The magistracy of the Senator, equivalent to the chief magistrate in other Italian cities, instituted in 1143 at the birth of the commune,6 suffered the reduc3 Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, 2 vols, ed. Aulo Greco (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinasciamento, 1974), 1:24; trans. in The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the xv Century, Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts, trans. William George and Emily Waters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 30. 4 On Rome in the fifteenth century, see Arnold Esch, Rom vom mittelalter zur Renaissance 1378– 1484 (Munich: Beck, 2016). 5 Peter Partner, The Papal State under Martin v. The Administration and Government of the Temporal Power in the Early Fifteenth Century (London: British School at Rome, 1958). For a comprehensive description of the Roman communal institutions, see Emmanuel Rodocanachi, Les institutions communales de Rome sous la papauté (Paris: Picard, 1901). A synthetic over view is Anna Esposito, “Die Päpste und Rom: Bürger, Auswärtige, Institutionen,” in Die Päpste der Renaissance. Politik, Kunst und Musik, ed. Michael Matheus, Bernd Schneidmüller, Stefan Weinfurter, and Alfried Wieczorek (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2017), 233–242. 6 In the early years of the Roman commune, a senatorial assembly is documented, later becoming a single Senator in 1205, and in 1238 a magistracy consisting of two Senators. See Franco Bartoloni, “Per la storia del Senato Romano nei secoli xii–xiii,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano, 60 (1946), 50–65; Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, “Il comune romano,” in Roma medievale, ed. André Vauchez (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 2001), 125– 126.

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tion of its political management and administration over time and was no longer the expression of civic power. In fact, to the holders of this office— initially Roman, then a non-Roman from 1360, and by papal nomination from 1393—in the course of the 1400s were restricted to only strictly judicial and ceremonial competencies. However, even its tribunal, which theoretically had jurisdiction over all citizens of Rome, saw a restriction in its areas of oversight by other Roman tribunals. Notwithstanding these limitations, the senator continued to represent symbolically the highest municipal power throughout these centuries.7 As the civic statutes show (from those reformed in 1425 to the new edition of 1580), the magistracy of the three Conservators of Rome continued to be an expression of the Roman cives [citizens]. From 1363 the Conservators governed the bureaucratic municipal structure, acquiring throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a whole series of prerogatives, which effectively defined the role of leadership in the civic res publica [republic]. Moreover, they were put in charge of the Capitoline Chamber [Camera Urbis], the financialadministrative body that managed the revenues and expenditures of the city and its territory, with disciplinary oversight of its functionaries and personnel.8 They had in their employ a whole series of hand-picked officials with functions ranging from the registration and sealing of acts (the notary of the conservators, the senate scribe,9 the secretaries, etc.), to the management of particular administrative sectors (the revisors, the depositors, the computisti [book-keepers], the gabellieri [the collectors of customs duties]), to the inspection of commercial and fiscal fraud (the attorney and procurator of the Camera, the straordinari [extraordinaries]).10 They controlled the judges of their own tribunal and in particular the jurisdiction of the consules [counsels] of the craft guilds. They formed with the Caporioni [heads of the principal districts], Prior of the Caporioni, and the two chancellors of the Camera Urbis, the commune’s council (called the Magistrato Romano [Roman Magistrate]), which had the most important decision-making and executive powers. The Caporioni, one for 7

8 9 10

Michele Franceschini, “Il municipio romano e Sisto v: apparato di rappresentanza o struttura di governo?” in Il Campidoglio e Sisto v, ed. Luigi Spezzaferro and Maria Elisa Tittoni (Rome: Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1991), 33–36. On the institutional structure, see Stefano Andretta, “Le istituzioni e l’esercizio del potere,” in Roma del Rinascimento, ed. Antonio Pinelli (Rome: Laterza, 2001), 119–121. Capitoline functionaries who had as their principal duty the drafting of acts of greater significance to the Roman commune. Franceschini, “Il municipio romano,” 33; Michele Franceschini, “I conservatori della Camera Urbis. Storia di un’instituzione,” in Il Palazzo dei Conservatori e il Palazzo nuovo in Campidoglio. Momenti di storia urbana di Roma, ed. Maria Elisa Tittoni (Pisa: Pacini, 1996), 19–27.

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each of the thirteen rioni [districts] of the city (the Borgo will be considered the fourteenth rione only in the late 1500s), led by a Prior, assisted the Conservators in the detailed management of the city’s territory and in keeping the public order. They were assisted by several trusted citizens, called constables or capotori, who thus constituted a type of urban police force.11 The magistracy of maestri di strada [supervisors of the street], already restored by the municipal government in the late 1300s, was first defined in the statute of magistri aedificiorum Urbis [supervisors of the buildings of the City] dating to 1410, followed in 1425 by Martin v’s bull Etsi in cunctarum, and above all in the new statute maestri de li edifitii [supervisors of edifices] promulgated in 1452 at the behest of Pope Nicholas v.12 By the late fifteenth century, however, these magistrates, whose functions ranged from urban planning and construction (streets, roads, piazzas, bridges, and other public works), to permitting demolition and construction, to land use, to sewage drains and water supply problems, to public sanitation, were no longer officials of the Roman commune, but were placed under the supervision of the Camerlengo della Camera Apostolica [Chamberlain of the Apostolic Chamber] and the clerical Presidente delle Strade [President of the Streets]. As in other Italian cities, there were two Consigli [Councils] in the structure of the Roman commune: the private (or secret) and the general (or public). The documents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the statutes of 1363 (although these last do not treat it specifically) made a distinction in these two bodies, which were fully defined in the course of the fifteenth century. The Consiglio privato [Private Council], presided over by the conservators, for all of the fifteenth century consisted of the Twelve and Twenty-six Good Men [boni viri],13 from the thirteen Caporioni and the two chancellors of the city, to which could be added a variable number of Roman citizens. It exercised a primary deliberative power to which every other decision adopted by any other body had to be submitted. In turn, the Consiglio generale [the General Council], presided over by the Senator and the Conservators, consisted of—along with 11 12

13

Rodocanachi, Les institutions, 146–147, 175–178. Emilio Re, “Maestri di strada,” Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria 43 (1920), 5– 102; Orietta Verdi, “Da ufficiali capitolini a commissari apostolici: i maestri delle strade e degli edifici di Roma tra xiii e xvi secolo,” in Il Campidoglio e Sisto v, 54–63; Orietta Verdi, Maestri di edifici e di strade a Roma nel secolo xv. Fonti e problem (Rome: Roma nel Rinasciamento, 1997). For a treatment of the phrase “xiii et xxvi boni viri electi, deputati et ordinati pro rebus necessariis ad honorem et statum domini nostri Pape sancte romane Ecclesie et Romani populi,” see Michele Franceschini, “Dal consiglio pubblico e segreto alla congregazione economica: la crisi delle istituzioni comunali tra xvi e xvii secolo,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 4, no. 2 (1996), 350.

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the members of the Consiglio privato [Private Council]—a certain number of councilors chosen each time as needed. The Consiglio generale was convoked, however, only in particular circumstances. It is the Consiglio privato, meeting regularly, that decided the larger part of the measures related to civic government, and thus represented the more significant expression of the will of the ruling class of Rome and its social components.14 The early 1500s witnessed an enlargement of the base of the communal deliberative body that “from the restricted nucleus that originally—perhaps already from the second half of the 1400s—had the right to vote, was to lead to the admission into the assembly a fuller representation.” This process was in part due to the increasingly frequent settling of wealthy foreigners in Rome who were connected in various ways to the papal court, and to their acquiring Roman citizenship by privilege, which granted them the same active political rights that were enjoyed by the original cives.15 The process of defining the Consiglio privato and the Consiglio generale came to a close in 1580 with the civic statutory reform approved by Gregory xiii.16

3

The Urban Landscape

The division of the City into rioni, in use in Rome during the Renaissance, can be traced back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Trastevere was added as the thirteenth rione to the previous topographical-administrative division into twelve rioni. Up to that point, Trastevere, along with the Tiber Island, had been an administrative unit unto itself, as was the Leonine City, Borgo, which was directly dependent on the pope. We must come to 1586 before the Borgo would be considered a rione in its own right, the fourteenth, whereas in the 1400s it appeared to be an annex to rione Ponte, just as the Tiber Island was to the rione Ripa. This repartitioning remained constant until 1743 when Benedict xiv sensibly modified the borders of the individual rioni.17 14 15 16

17

Franceschini, “Dal consiglio pubblico,” 349–350. Franceschini, “Dal consiglio pubblico,” 355–356; Paola Pavan, “Cives origine vel privilegio,” in Il Campidoglio e Sisto v, 37–41. Statuta almae Urbis Romae auctoritate s.d.n.d. Gregorii papae xiii Pont. Max. a Senatu Populoque romano reformata et edita (Romae: in Aedibus Populi Romani, mdlxxx), lib. iii, cap. ii, 125–127, cited in Franceschini, “Dal consiglio pubblico”, 357–358. Camillo Re, “Le regioni di Roma nel Medioevo,” Studi e documenti di storia e diritto 10 (1889), 349–381; Umberto Gnoli, Topografia e toponomastica di Roma medievale e moderna (Rome: Staderni, 1939), 260–261. These are the 12 rioni: i: Monti; ii: Trevi; iii: Colonna; iv: Campomarzio; v: Ponte; vi: Parione; vii: Arenula; viii: S. Eustachio; ix: Pigna; x: Campitelli; xi: S. Angelo; xii: Ripa.

map 3

Map of the City of Rome in the Renaissance map by l.r. poos

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map 4

Map of the Center of the City of Rome in the Renaissance map by l.r. poos

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Already during the early Middle Ages the population of Rome had come to be concentrated in those rioni nestled into the bend of the Tiber: especially Ponte, Parione, S. Eustachio, Arenula, S. Angelo, Pigna, and Campomarzio— a trend that was accentuated in the fifteenth century.18 Still in the second half of the fifteenth century, approximately two-thirds of the area within the Aurelian walls remained uninhabited. The basilicas of S. Giovanni in Laterano [St. John Lateran] and S. Maria Maggiore [St. Mary Major] were practically in the countryside, and so, too, the Roman Forum, not surprisingly called a “cow pasture,” like the rest of the Tarpeian Rock under the Capitoline Hill, colloquially called Monte Caprino [Goat Mountain] for the frequency of grazing animals. The popes of the 1400s, beginning with Eugenius iv, concerned themselves assiduously with the repopulation of the more abandoned areas of the city. Eugenius worked to revitalize the district of Borgo, whose structures were particularly damaged in the early years of the fifteenth century by the troops of King Ladislaus of Naples. The pope granted to all who would go and live there an exemption from municipal duties and taxes for twenty-five years, in addition to freedom from harassment by creditors for a decade and immunity from lawsuits excluding homicide and rebellion against the Church.19 Similar measures were employed by his successors to increase the population in other areas of the city, such as in Monti near the basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, already the object of interventions at the end of fourteenth century. In both cases, papal interest in repopulation can be connected with an interest to facilitate the renovation—and thus the esteem—of particularly deteriorated patrimonial real estate assets: namely, both the basilica of St. Peter and the hospital of S. Spirito largely concentrated in Borgo, and the Liberian basilica of S. Maria Maggiore.20 It does not escape notice, how this politics of incentivizing construction was based on the active participation of workers who recently immigrated not only in search of work but also of a place of residence. Not surprisingly contemporary lease agreements give witness to low rental fees and to long-term, sustained improvement and restoration work.21 Even Leo x and Clement vii granted exemptions and particular privileges to 18

19 20 21

Mario Romani, Pellegrini e viaggiatori nell’economia di Roma dal xiv al xvii secolo (Milano: Società editrice, 1968), 68–69. The figures given by Romani are also used by Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du xvi siècle (Paris: De Boccard, 1957), 1: 225–226. Pio Paschini, Roma nel Rinascimento (Bologna: Cappelli, 1940), 159. Giorgio Simoncini, Roma. Le trasformazioni urbane nel Quattrocento. i: Topografia e urbanistica da Bonifacio ix ad Alessandro vi (Florence: Olschki, 2004). Giovanna Curcio, “ ‘Nisi celeriter reparetur totaliter est ruitura.’ Notazioni su struttura

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those who came to live in Campo Marzio between the Porta del Populo [the gate by the church of Santa Maria del Popolo] and the Porto di Ripetta [harbor on the bank of the Tiber], an area in which the buildable land, in large part property of the Church, the Augustinian convent of S. Maria del Popolo, and the nearby hospital of S. Giacomo in Augusta, was given in a perpetual lease to the carpenters, wall builders, and boatmen with the obligation to construct for themselves homes and to reside there permanently subject to the payment of a modest annual fee.22 Therefore in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a progressive urbanization both of the intramural landscape in the more peripheral rioni (only partly successful), and of the “green” [or open] areas still existing in the more densely populated rioni and where the population, including new immigrants, continued to concentrate. The studies of historians, however, have brought to light other elements, in addition to the urbanization of de-populated areas. From the return of Martin v, the restoration of ruined buildings is the first sign in the process of a transformation of the physical structure of the built-up area, and, from the late 1400s, there was a need to give “decorum” to the residential dwellings in order to confer on them their significance as a sign of the status and social role of their inhabitants. In fact, almost every new pope also expressed his interest in the city through the politics of construction, especially with the palaces in which he resided, making them truly palaces of power.23 Martin v, a member of the Colonna family—the pope who brought the papacy back to Rome—rebuilt the family palace at ss. Apostoli, restored the adjacent church, and made it the papal seat (whether because he felt more secure with his family or to better control the nearby Capitoline Hill, the seat of municipal power). In turn, Nicholas v returned the papal seat to the Vatican, which he began to restore as part of an urban planning project to make Rome a splendid representation of the glory of the Church, whose center was

22

23

urbana e rinnovamento edilizio in Roma al tempo di Martino v,” in Alle origini della nuova Roma. Martino v (1417–1431), ed. Maria Chiabò et al. (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo, 1992), 537–554. Delumeau, Vie, 1: 234–240. For the urbanization of the area north of Campomarzio by the Lomabrd builders, see Paschini, Roma, 436; Roberto Fregna and Salvatore Polito, “Fonti d’archivio per una storia edilizia di Roma. Primi dati sull’urbanizzazione nell’area del Tridente,” Controspazio 4 (1972), 2–18; Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “Costruttori lombardi nell’edilizia privata romana del xvi secolo,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 119/2 (2007), 341–362. https://doi.org/10.3406/mefr.2007.10367. On Rome in the fifteenth century, see now Arnold Esch, Rom vom mittelalter zur Renaissance.

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the Vatican. Yet, next to these important interventions were other more modest undertakings that were no less significant. I refer to the arrangements both for the improvement of the sanitary conditions of the city,24 which were quite poor because of the boorish behaviors of residents and craftsmen who dumped all of their refuse and the production scraps from their work into the public streets,25 and for guaranteeing the negotiability of the streets and of the Tiber riverbed, areas pertaining to the old magistracy of the maestri di strada. The actual results of these measures are unknown, though likely not entirely resolved if one needs to periodically legislate on them, but what counts, in my opinion, is the very fact of having confronted the problem. Above all, as regards the renovation of the city’s buildings, the magistracy in charge of construction, directly controlled by the pope, sought to signify the direct control of its authorities over any future urban expansion. This is not the place to rehearse the history of the urban and architectural evolution of fifteenth-century Rome, it has been well-covered in recent historiography.26 However, it needs to be noted how the expansion of building construction in the city became one of the stimuli to growth since it required strong investments of private and public capital in raw materials, labor, creative intelligence, etc. This process had its financial preconditions already during the pontificate of Boniface ix and especially that of Martin v, when Tuscan merchant bankers returned to frequenting Rome and the papal court, at first in reduced numbers but growing ever more numerous. The bankers invested also in the construction sector, providing capital to the popes, cardinals, and members of the curia for the construction of evermore-splendid palaces and churches, and they encouraged the citizens to follow their example.27

24 25 26

27

Anna Modigliani, “Die Päpste und Rom: Urbane Strategien und Nutzung des öffentlichen Raums,” in Die Päpste der Renaissance, 243–261. Anna Esposito, “Sanità e igiene pubblica nelle città e borghi del Lazio medieval,” Rivista storica del Lazio, 19 (2003), 3–12; Verdi, Maestri, 25. See Carroll William Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447–1455 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974); Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, trans. Daniel Sherer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Anna Modigliani, Disegni sulla città nel primo rinascimento romano: Paolo ii (Rome: Roma nel Rinasciamento, 2009); Maurizio Gargano, Origini e storia. Roma, Architettura, Città. Frammenti di Rinascimento (Rome: Roma nel Rinasciamento, 2016) with full bibliography. Christoph L. Frommel, Der römische Palastbau der Hochrenaissance, 3 vols. (Tübingen: E. Wasmuth, 1973); Luciano Palermo, Sviluppo economico e società preindustriali. Cicli, strutture e congiunture in Europa dal medioevo alla prima età moderna (Rome: Viella, 1997),

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Finally, it seems useful to point out the more significant interventions in the city’s landscape, remembering that in a polycentric city like Rome, a primary need was to connect the principal urban poles of attraction to the city’s gates, to the river ports, to the bridges “through the use of the ancient network of streets or the creation of new thoroughfares.”28 As was touched upon earlier, the popes of the fifteenth century concerned themselves first with redeveloping areas of primary importance, such as the Vatican and the Capitoline Hill, the subject of special attention by Nicholas v, while contingent needs led to action on the network of roads, whether paving the three principal streets that connected the Vatican to the rest of the city (via dei Pellegrini, via Papale, via Retta), or constructing a new bridge over the Tiber, as Sixtus iv had done for the Jubilee of 1475. The most incisive actions, however, occurred in the sixteenth century: the opening of new streets, with precise decorative and functional features that commemorated the popes who established them by their names. Alexander vi began with the opening of via Alessandrina in the Borgo in 1500, and likewise Julius ii mapped out the via Giulia, that connected three of Rome’s most populous rioni (Ponte, Arenula, S. Angelo) with the Vatican, which until then had been connected only by via dei Pellegrini and its continuation, the via Mercatoria. Leo x was concerned to connect the Porta del Popolo—the northern entrance to the city—to the via Papale through the area of the Porto di Ripetta with the eponymous via Leonina later known as the via di Ripetta, completed by Clement vii, to whom is credited the creation of the “Trident,” the three streets that originate in Piazza del Popolo. The improvements of the roads intensified under Paul iii, who among other things, systematized the Piazza Farnese, Piazza S. Marco, and Piazza ss. Apostoli, and opened the via di Panico, via Paola, and the one that connected Piazza Navona and Piazza S. Apollinare. Pius iv did no less: he is credited with making level the large Piazza di S. Giovanni in Laterano, the enlargement of the Borgo with a new area called Borgo Pio, and the new magnificent street between the Quirinale and Porta Nomentana.29

28 29

esp. ch. 4: “Un modello di sviluppo per la Roma rinascimentale”. An ulterior motive for the development of construction in the city could be seen in the bull of Sixtus iv, Etsi universis (1 January 1474), which permitted the curia (lay and clergy) to dispose freely of their assets; see Augustin Theiner, Codex diplomaticus dominii temporalis S. Sedis, iii: 1389–1793, (Rome, 1862), 480–481. On this privilege, see Simoncini, Roma. Le trasformazioni, 185– 186. Anna Modigliani, Mercati, botteghe e spazi di commercio a Roma tra Medioevo ed Età moderna (Rome: Roma nel Rinasciamento, 1998), 6. Anna Esposito, “La città e i suoi abitanti”, in Roma del Rinascimento, 18–20.

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The Population of Rome: Romans, Foreigners, Jews

As was noted previously, Rome developed from the depopulated city of Martin v to what Montaigne wrote of in 1581: Rome “of all towns in the world, the one most filled with the corporate idea, in which difference of nationality counts least; for, by its very nature, it is a patchwork of strangers, each one being as much at home as in his own country.”30 It is therefore “pluralistic Rome”31 that needs to be considered now, where on the one hand we find Romans nostalgic for the glorious communal past but also with their profound contradictions, and on the other hand we find the foreigners striving for integration at all levels with their churches, national hospices, craft guilds, worlds seemingly separated but on the foundation of a slow yet unstoppable process of integration. Before giving an account of these dynamics, we need a quick look at the characteristics of Roman society as a whole without attempting to present an in-depth analysis, but simply wishing to illustrate a social reality that underwent profound transformation from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth century, in part because of the imposition of papal rule over the city.32 At the return of Martin v, Roman society was essentially divided into four groups: first, a group comprised of what could be called a “lower middle-class,” artisans and small shopkeepers, which the documents describe as discreti viri [good enough men]; second, an upper middle-class of recently successful families, which were joined to the class of agricultural entrepreneurs (bobacterii) in the late fourteenth century; and third, the families of established patronyms from before the mid-fourteenth century, who built their wealth on the property and management of the great farms of the Roman countryside. “It had to be several dozen families”—whose members were called nobiles viri [noblemen]— “that controlled among them the property of two-thirds of the approximately 400–500 farmsteads then covering the Ager romanus [the Roman cultivated land].”33 During the course of the fifteenth century, the second and third groups slowly formed a single group that was “essentially homogenous yet dynamic 30 31 32 33

The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy, trans. W.G. Waters (London: John Murray, 1903), 2:163; Michel De Montaigne, Viaggio in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 211. Luigi Fiorani and Adriano Prosperi, “Introduzione a Roma, la città del papa,” in Storia d’Italia, Annali 16 (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), xxiii. Esposito, “La città e i suoi abitanti.” Henri Broise and Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, “Strutture famigliari, spazio domestico e architettura civile a Roma alla fine del Medioevo,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, xii (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 125–130.

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in its composition” whose members, all called nobiles viri, were representative of what came to be the Roman municipal aristocracy.34 This class is characterized by some elements that permit us to recognize its social identity: the practice of endogamy, the jobs undertaken (management of farmsteads, commerce, financial contracts), how they inserted themselves into the urban setting, the custom of gathering in confraternities for religious devotions, and, a factor of major importance, holding municipal offices.35 Above all of these was the fourth social group composed of a small number but powerful “baronial families, preeminently respected by the rest of the aristocracy, whose resources predominantly came from their manorial domains, ecclesiastical revenues, the appropriation of shared incomes,” and were adorned with the title of magnifici viri [magnificent men],36 in addition to being characterized by a lifestyle quite different from that of all of the other social classes. Among these families, those of Colonna and Orsini clearly stand out, followed by the Savelli, Caetani, Conti, and others. Already in the early sixteenth century, we witness the fortune and decline of a certain number of Roman families, not only baronial, and the success— in the areas of economics and politics—of members of provincial and foreign noble families. Their fortune “was now at stake in the court, in the relationship with the pope and the networks woven into the inner workings of curial factions that extended to the city and its aristocracy.”37 It is not by chance that the attribution of citizenship tends to be used in the sixteenth century, on the one hand, as an instrument in defense of the old nobility in the city. On the other hand, it is used “as a means to integrate within it both the merchant families Romanam curiam sequentes [following the Roman Curia],38 which have been active in Rome for some time, and prominent persons in the curia, members 34

35

36 37 38

Anna Modigliani, “Continuità e trasformazione dell’aristocrazia municipale romana nel xv secolo,” in Roma medievale. Aggiornamenti, ed. Paolo Delogu (Florence: All’Insegno del Giglio, 1998), 267–279. See Anna Esposito, “ ‘Li nobili huomini di Roma’. Strategie familiari tra città, curia e municipio,” in Roma capitale (1447–1527), ed. Sergio Gensini (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali, 1994), 373–388; Anna Modigliani, “ ‘Li nobili huomini di Roma.’ Comportamenti economici e scelte professionali”, in Roma capitale, 345–372. More recently Anna Esposito, “Famiglie romane”, in Roma 1347–1527. Linee di un’evoluzione. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Roma, 13–15 novembre 2017), eds. Massimo Miglio and Isa Lori Sanfilippo, (Roma, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2020), 79–93. Irene Fosi, “La nobiltà a Roma nella prima metà del Cinquecento,” Roma nel Rinascimento 16 (1999), 61–77. Fosi, “La nobiltà a Roma,” 67, 71. Melissa M. Bullard, “ ‘Mercatores Romanam Curiam Sequentes’ in the Early Sixteenth Century,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976), 51–61.

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of the nobility and patricians from other Italian states who found a new home in Rome.”39 Therefore, in the sixteenth century, even the Roman aristocracy of the city seem to follow a process we could define as “internationalization,” expanding their own ranks, an obvious sign of a society in a slow, but progressive, transformation. Passing now to the forenses [outsiders], we have noted the consistent demographic growth caused by the immigration of foreigners to the city.40 The causes of this immigration were varied and can be attributed to the peculiarity of a city like Rome.41 First of all, there were the disparate needs of the papal curia and of the courts of the cardinals,42 formed for the most part by compatriots of the pope and the cardinals and mostly of non-Romans, which could number hundreds of people (in the census of 1526–1527, the members of the courts of the cardinals added to those of the papal court represented seven percent of the population of Rome);43 second, Rome was the point of reference of all those who were in a relationship with the curia for ecclesial, economic, and political reasons; and finally, the indisputable call that Rome represented for all Christians.44 Moreover, it is evident that the new needs of a growing city, the center of a princely court and the capital of a state, attracted masses of specialized artisans in a wide array of sectors and enlivened commerce, which can be seen in the demand for consumer goods.45 Therefore, quite early, the presence of for39 40

41 42 43

44

45

Fosi, “La nobiltà a Roma”, 76–77. Egmont Lee, “Foreigners in Quattrocento Rome,” Renaissance and Reformation 19 (1983), 135–146; Anna Esposito, Un’altra Roma. Minoranze nazionali e comunità ebraiche tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Rome: Il Calamo, 1995); Matteo Sanfilippo, “Roma nel Rinascimento: una città di immigrati,” in Le forme del testo e l’immaginario della metropoli, ed. Benedetta Bini and Valerio Viviani (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2009), 73–85. Esposito, Un’altra Roma, 20–23. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Viscegli, ed., Court and Politics in Papal Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Gigliola Fragnito, “Le corti cardinalizie nella Roma del Cinquecento,” Rivista Storica Italiana 106 (1994), 5–41; Anna Esposito, “Di fronte al lusso: la corte pontificia e il popolo romano,” in Pompa sacra: lusso e cultura materiale alla corte papale nel basso Medioevo, 1420–1527. Atti della giornata di studi, Rome, 15 February 2007, ed. Thomas Ertl (Rome: Istituto storico germanico, 2010), 131–144. On the structured cardinal familia and the magnificentia of the cardinals, see Giacomo Ferraù, “Politica e cardinalato in un’età di transizione. Il De cardinalatu di Paolo Cortesi”, in Roma capitale, 519–540. Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome, 1500–1559: A Portrait of a Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). See now Arnold Esch, Roma dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (1378– 1484), (Roma: Viella, 2021), 147–176. Ivana Ait, “Mercanti ‘stranieri’ a Roma nel sec. xv nei registri della dogana di Terra,” Studi romani 35 (1987), 12–30.

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eigners does not seem connected only to the development of curial jobs, but also to their incorporation into the economic and social fabric of the city, as much in varying areas of artisanal, non-agricultural production as in commerce and the financial market.46 The financial markets in particular were dominated by Tuscan merchant-bankers, especially Florentines, whereas the Romans only figured marginally in this sector. A not-insignificant component of the Roman population was represented by Jews, whose presence in Rome is attested to at least by the end of the second century B.C.47 In the fifteenth century they largely resided in the rione S. Angelo and in the areas bounded by the rioni Arenula and Ripa, while only a small contingent continued to reside in Trastevere, the first area of Jewish settlement. The principal community institutions rose up in the contrada iudeorum [area of the Jews]: the principal (and older) synagogue, called the Scola Tempio, and in succession the other synagogues of differing rites founded by immigrant Jews in the immediate vicinity of the former (eventually numbering eleven in the early sixteenth century); the women’s ritual bath, firmly documented at the beginning of the sixteenth century as an annex to the synagogue of the Jewish Catalans; the slaughterhouses placed in the crypt of the theatre of Marcello near to those of the Christians.48 Their weekly market took place on Friday morning in the piazza called “del Mercatello,” near Piazza Giudea, which represented, together with via Rua, the heart of the quarter, where the Jews by preference carried out artisanal and commercial activities in the sectors tied to food, to the processing of fat and leather, to the production and trade of textiles and clothing, and so forth. This entire area, characterized economically by the fish market, the mills on the Tiber, and the proximity of the Port of Ripa Romea, was largely inhabited by Christian members of the working class and craftsmen, but also by families of more or less ancient nobility (Savelli, Fabi, Cenci, Boccapaduli, Santacroce) who maintained varying relationships with the Jews.49 After 1492, the conspicuous presence of Jewish groups expelled from the territories of the King of Spain, 46

47 48

49

Luciano Palermo, “Espansione demografica e sviluppo economico a Roma nel Rinascimento,” in Popolazione e società a Roma dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, ed. Eugenio Sonnino (Roma: Il Calamo, 1998), 319. Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), 8–24. On the Jewish settlement of the earlier centuries, see Anna Esposito, “Pellegrini, stranieri, curiali ed ebrei”, in Roma medievale, 213–239. The exemption from the conspicuous sign had been ordered in a municipal decree of 1310 and reiterated by the papal vicar in 1402. Anna Esposito, “Gli ebrei a Roma tra Quattro e Cinquecento”, Quaderni storici 54 (1983), 817.

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along with Jewish refugees from Portugal, Navarra, Provence, and eventually Tripoli, will shape life in the contrada iudeorum in various ways, especially from a demographic perspective.50 By the mid-sixteenth century, Roman Jews find themselves in economic and social positions inferior to Christians. Jews were frequently in debt to Christians and were active in low status professions (save some rare exceptions like physicians), prevented—by ancient statute—from practicing usury. However, it is actually in the credit industry where they had the most significant innovations: in 1521 Leo x officially authorized the Jews of Rome to open twenty loan banks, with the added possibility of forming a society among the bankers. Among these, the prevalence of Sephardic Jews, while Jewish Romans and Italians make up a minority, signals that the recovery in this industry in the period before the ghetto, must be attributed to the provision of capital by Iberian refugees, especially.51 But what were the relations between Jews and Christians? As the copious notary documents demonstrate, Jews lived in their quarter in close contact with the Christian population, with whom they shared work activities, leisure time, and collective rituals.52 In the civic statutory legislation, the only truly discriminatory clause was that which obliged Jews to wear a distinctive mark on their clothing. The regulation which forbad Jews to work on Sunday and other Christian festivals was in some ways counterbalanced by the recognition—by the papal authority—of the Sabbath, a day on which Jews could not be cited in court nor be compelled to work.53 The attitude of the Romans toward the Jews was effectively defined by “a coexistence of frequent contact and separateness,”54 where the consciousness

50

51

52 53

54

Anna Esposito, “Le ‘comunità’ ebraiche di Roma prima del Sacco (1527): problemi di identificazione,” Henoch 12 (1990), 165–190; Ariel Toaff, “Gli ebrei a Roma,” in Storia d’Italia, Annali 11: Gli Ebrei in Italia, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 1: 121–152. The banks, growing to 70 in the seventeenth century, were closed in 1689. See Anna Foa, “The Jews in Rome,” in Rome-Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter van Kessel and Elisja Schulte (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 260–269. Esposito, Un’altra Roma, 188–191. Statuti della città di Roma, ed. Camillo Re (Rome: Tipografia della Pace, 1880), lib. ii, cap. 197, 190. For the papal instructions relative to the Sabbath, see Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 1394–1464 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1989), 771–774 (nr. 658). Ottavia Niccoli, “ ‘Le donne biastemavano orazzione’. Forme del consumo del sacro nella lunga Controriforma romana,” in Roma, la città del papa, 628, 639; see also Anna Foa and Kenneth Stow, “Gli ebrei a Roma. Potere, rituale e società in età moderna,” in Roma, la città del papa, 555–581.

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of one another’s particularities never diminished, even in daily life. There were moments, however, when the “diversity” emerged with particular force: after the fiery anti-Jewish homilies of Franciscan preachers, that occurred with frequency in the piazzas of Rome from the early fifteenth century, after the religious play in the Colosseum on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, or, in conjunction with the Carnival games which could have demonstrations of intolerance toward Jews, at times violent but always defined more by the stimulus of the moment and—to the early decades of the sixteenth century—without a truly persecutorial character.55 Even the relationship between the papacy and Jewish Romans up to that point was characterized by a mixture of protection and persecution.56 The policy of the papacy toward the Jews, especially those who were Roman, was marked by moments of hardship and opposition, and moments of protection and defense: particularly the agreeable Martin v, who encouraged the establishment of relationships of “familiarity” between Jews and Christians, and so too Paul ii, Alexander vi, and Leo x, while Eugenius iv and Nicholas v had a contradictory attitude.

5

Roman Economy

In the course of the fifteenth century and the early decades of the sixteenth, the city of Rome entered a phase, which, in its entirety, could be considered one of economic growth, defined in large part “by the expansion of commercial and banking capital, by the subsequent opening of capital and commercial markets, and by the strengthening of the urban structures of production and exchange.”57 As the historiography has emphasized and was frequently noted, one of the causes of economic development was the massive immigration of individuals from Italy and other regions of Europe.58 These immigrants not only occupied the principal curial offices and were the managers of the large

55

56

57 58

Esposito, Un’altra Roma, 193. The season of forced preaching had not yet begun, for which see Emily Michelson, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews. Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022). Adriano Prosperi, “Incontri rituali: il papa e gli ebrei,” in Gli ebrei in Italia, 510–516. For a summary of the Jewish presence in Rome in the period considered, see now Marina Caffiero, “Le minoranze. Gli ebrei prima del ghetto”, in: Roma 1347–1527, 57–77. Luciano Palermo, “L’economia,” in Roma del Rinascimento, 48–92. Egmont Lee, ed., Habitatores in Urbe: The Population of Renaissance Rome / La popolazione di Roma nel Rinascimento (Rome: Università la Sapienza, 2006); Esposito, Un’altra Roma.

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banking and mercantile capital,59 but they were active, as a more or less specialized workforce, in specific areas of artisanal production (one thinks of the German bakers and cobblers or of the masters employed in carrying out specialized tasks in the boatyards on the Tiber,60 in construction, in artistic and intellectual production, and so forth).61 Even the service and hospitality industries, in relation to the religious and political role of Rome, became a firm civic fixture with the multiplication of hotels, inns, homes for rent, hospices, and hospitals (of which a good number were reserved to different Italian and European “nationalities”), and more. Thus, there developed some expansion of demand in all industries. As Luciano Palermo writes, “once again, demographic development, the increase of employment opportunities, and the rise of distributed incomes in the form of a salary increased the general inclination to consumption.”62 Indeed, early Renaissance Rome became a great center of consumption. As can be observed from an examination of the customs records, whether those from the customs house in rione S. Eustachio (for goods by land) or the customs near the port of Ripa Romea at the base of the Aventine Hill (for goods by sea), raw materials (for construction, iron, timber) and some semi-finished materials (wool, fabric, animal hides, paper, spices, etc.) were the bulk of imports, 59

60

61

62

Thomas Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste der Hochrenaissance (1471–1527) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986); Christiane Schuchard, Die Deutschen an der päpstlichen Kurie im späten Mittelalter (1378–1447) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987); Christiane Schuchard, “I tedeschi alla curia pontificia nella seconda metà del Quattrocento,” in Roma Capitale, 51–71; Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men. The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “La presencia de los espagnoles en la economìa romana (1500–1527). Primeros datos de archivo,” En la España Medieval 16 (1993), 287–306. Knut Schulz, “Artigiani tedeschi in Italia,” in Comunicazione e mobilità nel Medioevo. Incontri tra il Sud e il centro dell’Europa (secc. xi–xiv), ed. Siegfried de Rachewiltz and Josef Riedmann (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), 197–228; Ivana Ait, “Mercato del lavoro e forenses a Roma nel xv secolo,” in Popolazione e società, 335–358; Ivana Ait, “Un aspetto del salariato a Roma nel xv secolo: la “fabrica galearum” sulle rive del Tevere (1457–1458),” in Cultura e società nell’Italia medievale. Studi per Paolo Brezzi (Rome: Istituto Storico per il Medioevo, 1988), 1: 7–25; Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “Ricerche sui salari nell’edilizia romana (1500– 1650),” Rivista Storica del Lazio 4 (1996), 131–158. See Anna Maria Corbo, “I contratti di lavoro e di apprendistato nel secolo xv a Roma,” Studi Romani 21 (1973), 469–489; Anna Maria Corbo, Fonti per la storia sociale romana al tempo di Nicolò v e Callisto iii (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1990); Egmont Lee, “Workmen and Work in Quattrocento Rome,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. Paul A. Ramsey (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 141–152; Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “Artigiani e botteghe spagnole a Roma nel primo ’500,” Rivista Storica del Lazio 3 (1995), 99–116; and Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “I lavoratori dell’edilizia a Roma tra xv e xvi secolo”, in Vivere la città—Roma nel Rinascimento, eds. Ivana Ait and Anna Esposito (Roma: Viella, 2020), 117–139. Palermo, “L’economia,” 57.

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in addition to finished, consumer-ready products (luxury items like precious fabrics and weapons, and art objects of varying standards), which were highly requested by courtiers.63 From these sources, short-range trade also becomes visible: the provision of the city by its surroundings with food products destined for the city’s inhabitants from the Campagna Romana.64 Moreover, it should be kept in mind, as Anna Modigliani has emphasized, that “the economic development of the city was not directed toward the wholesale exportation of manufactured goods and craft goods, but more toward an internal market” largely constituted, however, by foreigners and pilgrims who carried what they acquired in Rome back to their homelands: “thus, they created an extremely fragmented form of exportation that was hidden to the customs ledgers.”65 Instead, the agricultural income of the lands in the Roman and regional district, which depended on Rome since Romans were their proprietors for the most part, revealed a crisis situation in this period, evident in the stagnant price of wheat and other grains. In fact, the stagnation in this fundamental sector was “often politically forced,” because the curial and civic leadership wanted to guarantee inexpensive food to Rome’s residents—for reasons of public order— and so they controlled the prices.66 This contraction did not greatly affect the profits of the merchants, but rather the agricultural producers and the small and midsize landowners, who experienced a profound crisis, because there was nothing able to incentivize the development of agricultural production, over the preferred, more lucrative cattle raising.67 63

64

65 66

67

Arnold Esch, “Roman Customs Registers 1470–1480: Items of Interest to Historians of Art and Material Culture,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995), 72–87; Arnold Esch, Economia, cultura materiale e arte nella Roma del Rinascimento. Studi sui registri doganali romani 1445–1485 (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2007); and the essays in Pompa sacra. In addition to the earlier citations, see Arnold Esch, La Roma del primo Rinascimento vista attraverso i registri doganali (Milano: Jaca Book, 2012); Ivana Ait, “La dogana di S. Eustachio nel xv secolo,” in Aspetti e problemi della vita economica e culturale di Roma nel Quattrocento (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1981), 81–147; Maria Luisa, Aspetti e problemi della vita economica e culturale di Roma nel primo Quattrocento. Aspetti istituzionali, sociali, economici, (Roma: Centro di Ricerca, 1983). Modigliani, Mercati, botteghe, 26. Luciano Palermo, “Fattori della produzione e sviluppo economico a Roma nel Rinascimento,” in Roma medievale. Aggiornamenti, 257–262; Luciano Palermo, L’economia, 57–60; Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “Terra e rendita fondiaria a Roma all’inizio del xvi secolo,” in Economica e società a Roma tra Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi dedicati ad Arnold Esch, ed. Anna Esposito and Luciano Palermo (Rome: Viella, 2005), 283–316. Alfio Cortonesi, Ruralia. Economia e paesaggi del medioevo italiano (Rome: Il Calamo, 1995); Alfio Cortonesi, “L’allevamento nella Campagna romana alla fine del medioevo,” in Città e vita cittadina nei paesi dell’area mediterranea: secoli xi–xv, ed. Biagio Saitta (Rome:

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Concurrent with falling agricultural incomes, however, one can observe the rise of urban real estate income from the early fifteenth century, that was promoted in every way by the demand for housing, especially by immigrants, and by the reorganization of the lands due to the “greater mobility and movement within the city itself to concentrate in selected rioni according to trade or nationality.”68 The papacy and curial and civic authorities, by deciding to “build in some specific areas and not in others, to open new bridges or streets …, to relocate the center of curial power … in the area of the Vatican Basilica, to create new urban markets or to relocate those already in existence, … they not only implied cultural and prestige choices, but they produced stages of prestige promotion of urban areas and the houses that were built in them, … with immediate consequences once again on the volume and level of revenues and on the formation of a consistent and profitable investment sector.”69 Finally, mention should be made of another industry that developed between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the financial market. Without being able to address the organization of papal finances and the public debt,70 we must remember that it was precisely for managing the financial administration of many public sectors (duty contracts, management of customs, treasurer of the public administration, etc.) that a number of foreign bank houses established themselves in Rome: from the Florentine bankers (the Medici, the Span-

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Viella, 2006), 207–247; Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “La campagna romana nel xvi secolo: attività economiche e trasformazioni ambientali,” in Roma. Le trasformazioni urbane nel Cinquecento. Vol. 2: Dalla città al territorio, ed. Giorgio Simoncini, (Florence: Olschki, 2011), 259–289. Luciano Palermo, “Sviluppo economico e organizzazione degli spazi urbani a Roma nel primo Rinascimento,” in Spazio urbano e organizzazione economica nell’Europa medievale, ed. Alberto Grohmann (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994), 413–435. On the spread of real estate investments between the fiftheenth and sixteenth centuries, see now Mercato immobiliare e spazi urbani nella Roma del Rinascimento, ed. Luciano Palermo (Roma: Istituto nazionale di Studi Romani, 2022). The quote is from Palermo, L’economia, 70. On the real estate market, see Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “Il mercato immobiliare,” in Alle origini della nuova Roma, 555–569; Henri Broise, “Les maisons d’habitation à Rome aux xve et xvie siècles: les leçons de la documentation graphique,” in D’une ville à l’autre: structures matérielles et organisation de l’espace dans les villes européennes (xiiie–xvie siècle), ed. Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur (Rome: École française de rome, 1989), 609–629; Roberto Fregna, La pietrificazione del denaro. Studi sulla proprietà urbana tra xvi e xvii secolo (Bologna: clueb, 1990); Frommel, Der römische Palastbau. For this, see the previously noted studies of Luciano Palermo and now his “Le finanze pontificie all’epoca di Leone x,” in Leone x. Finanza, mecenatismo, cultura, ed. Flavia Cantatore et al., (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2016), 1: 45–58.

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nocchi, the Doni, the Altoviti, the Capponi, etc.) and Sienese bankers (principally the Chigi), to the Genoese (the Grimaldi, the Sauli, the Pallavicino, the Pinelli, the Giustiniani) and the Comasco (the Oligiati), and so on. However, the popes’ continued need for money created a phenomenon that, even if it was already present in the 1300s with Pope Boniface ix, became more widespread from the time of Sixtus iv: the venality of the curial offices.71 Studies of the topic demonstrate the great attraction that these offices had at the end of the 1400s not only for foreigners, largely Italians, who desired a career in the Roman court,72 but also—for mid-level offices without tasks to perform, and usually without great value—for segments of the Roman population of modest means. Moreover, with the organization of venal offices into a “society,” “as with a commercial deal, one could now legally participate in the property and the revenue of a venal office,” even if obviously not in the title and associated privileges, which were the titular prerogative.73 If the buyer of an office only had a portion of the money necessary for the purchase, he turned to a group of financiers who would give him the remainder of the needed funds. In exchange, the holder of the office had to share the income with his creditors and pay each according to how much he was lent. Such a system comprised, as is evident, numerous speculations, but had the advantage of permitting even modest account holders (including women and minors) to invest money and procure moderate income.74 Next to this form of investing will be placed the taxes on real estate (farms, vineyards, houses, etc.), a practice that spread with particular success in the course of the early sixteenth century: the “income race”—one of the phenomena that deeply marked society in the sixteenth century—had already begun.75

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Anna Esposito, “La pratica delle compagnie d’uffici alla corte di Roma tra fine ‘400 e primo ‘500,” in Offices, ècrit et papauté (xiiie–xviie siècle), ed. Armand Jamme and Olivier Poncet (Rome: École française de rome, 2007), 497–515. Marco Pellegrini, “Corte di Roma e aristocrazie italiane in età moderna. Per una lettura storico sociale della Curia romana,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 30 (1994), 551– 562. Wolfang Reinhard, “Finanza pontificia e Stato della Chiesa nel xvi e xvii secolo,” in Finanze e ragion di Stato in Italia e in Germania nella prima età moderna, ed. Aldo De Maddalena and Hermann Kellenbenz (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984), 375. Stefano Levati, “La venalità delle cariche nello Stato pontificio tra xvi e xvii secolo,” Ricerche storiche 26 (1996), 537. On the diffusion of census contracts and their problems, with particular attention to Rome, see Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “I censi consegnativi. La vendita delle rendite in Italia nella prima età moderna,” Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura 47 (2007), 57–94.

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The Religious Institutions: Devotion and Charity

In addition to the many parish churches, great basilicas (San Pietro, S. Maria Maggiore, San Paolo fuori le Mura, and San Giovanni in Laterano), and the churches and monasteries tied to traditional monasticism, from the thirteenth century on the mendicant orders (first the Franciscans and Dominicans, and then also the Augustinians), albeit slowly, succeeded in imposing themselves, and then in the fifteenth century, in prevailing over the older institutions: “they were interpreters of a spirituality much more engaged in the age and therefore more akin to, or better more ‘competitive’ in comparison with the secular clergy than with the monks.”76 Indeed, from the permanent return of the papacy to Rome in the early 1400s, the mendicant churches (especially S. Maria in Aracoeli of the Franciscans, S. Maria sopra Minerva of the Dominicans, S. Agostino of the Hermits, and from 1472 S. Maria del Popolo of the Observant Augustinians) were preferred by Romans over the parish churches and ancient basilicas. They also constituted a first landing place for all of those forenses [outsiders]— Italians and foreigners—who, though wishing to integrate into religious civic life, preferred at first to turn to the mendicant orders who were well known to them also in their homeland. The religious and devotional life of those who lived in Rome is nevertheless largely identifiable through the study of the lay confraternities. The first lay association attested to in the 1200s—the Raccomandati della Vergine [the Recommended of the Virgin]—venerated the ancient icon of the Madonna in S. Maria Maggiore77 and constituted the early core of the famous Arciconfraternita del Gonfalone [Archconfraternity of the Standardbearer]. In more or less the same period, a sodality was founded in the vicinity of the Lateran Basilica that would later assume a place of great importance in civic life, not only from the devotional perspective: the society of the Raccomandati del Salvatore [the Recommended of the Savior], better known later as the society of the ss. Salvatore [Most Holy Savior]. This association was dedicated to the veneration of the miraculous image of Christ kept in the Sancta Sanctorum [Holy of Holies] chapel of the Lateran.78 Here, members of the most prominent Roman families 76 77

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Giulia Barone, “Chierici, monaci e frati,” in Roma medievale, 188. On the Marian icon venerated in S. Maria Maggiore (the Liberian Basilica), considered to be the work of St. Luke, see the beautiful study of Gherard Wolf, Salus populi Romani. Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter (Weinheim: vch Acta Humaniora, 1990). On the “sainte Icône par excellence” of the Savior lateranens, see Kirstin Noreen, “Revealing the sacred: The icon of Christ in the Sancta Sanctorum, Rome,” in The language of the object: Essays in honour of Herbert L. Kessler, ed. Martina Bagnoli and Peter W. Parshall, (London: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 228–237.

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would gather, those with connections to agricultural business and commerce, who had a sincere desire for a more intense and participatory religious life that was, however, specifically lay. Very soon this confraternity turned particular attention towards the comfort and concrete aid for the poorest and suffering with the preparation and operation of its own hospitals. Seeming like the work of mercy par excellence, this type of dedication to the suffering neighbor was a characteristic common to the majority of the lay civic associations.79 Other forms of charity were not excluded, such as distributing food, supplying dowries for poor young women (for which the society of the ss. Annunziata alla Minerva [the Most Holy Annunciation at the Minerva] was founded around 1468 and, in about 1492, the society of ss. Concezione [the Most Holy Conception] in S. Lorenzo in Damaso), ministering to those condemned to death (to which the sodality of the Florentine nation of St. John the Beheaded was dedicated).80 It is not until the early 1500s that institutions dedicated to the rehabilitation of prostitutes, who were truly numerous in Rome, will appear: from the data obtained in the census of 1526, it could be estimated that there were approximately 1,500 prostitutes making up about 3 % of the counted population.81 The confraternity of Divine Love, which was already operating in the hospital of the Incurables, first took responsibility for saving these women from their sinful lives with the foundation (entirely new to Rome) of a monastery designated for penitent prostitutes: the monastery of the Converts of St. Mary Magdalene al Corso, erected by Leo x on 19 May 1520 under the Augustinian Rule and spiritually guided by the Minims of St. Francis di Paola, but managed by the members of the confraternity of S. Girolamo della Carità.82

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The hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia, a preeminent pontifical institution, was no exception, and likewise the eponymous confraternity, supported and managed by the brothers of the order of Santo Spirito and not by laity. See Anna Esposito, “La casa madre di Santo Spirito in Saxia di Roma,” in Anna Esposito, Andreas Rehberg, and Miriam Davide, Ospedaletto di Gemona. Storia di un priorato dell’Ordine di Santo Spirito (Udine: Forum, 2013), 15–40. On the Roman hospitals, see Carla Keyvanian, Hospitals and Urbanism in Rome 1200–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). See Anna Esposito, “Delegated Charity: Confraternities between City, Nations and Curia in Late Medieval Rome,” in Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, Stefania Pastore (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 23–39. Pio Pecchiai, Roma nel Cinquecento (Bologna: Cappelli, 1948), 303–305. Daniela Matteucci, “Gli ospizi di S. Maria Maddalena e S. Marta,” in L’ospedale dei pazzi di Roma dai papi al ‘900. Lineamenti di assistenza e cura a poveri e dementi, ed. Franca Fedeli Bernardini, Iaria Antonio, and Alessandra Bonfigli (Bari: Dedalo, 1994), 2: 331–339; Alessandra Camerano, “Donne oneste o meretrici? Incertezza dell’identità fra testamenti

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It is not possible to record all of the existing civic lay confraternities in Rome in the period under consideration. I will limit myself to noting those that had as a devotional characteristic the practice of flagellation (“by the whip”): the Trastevere Sodality of ss. xl Martiri [of the Forty Holy Martyrs] and the Sodality of S. Lucia vecchia in the rione Parione. In the course of the 1400s, confraternities unrelated to penitential religiosity adopted the practice, namely the members of the Annunziata de via Oratoria and the previously noted Raccomandati della Vergine housed in the basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, which will constitute the original nucleus of the congregation of the Gonfalone, to which will be added other confraternities at various times.83 It is also worth mentioning the congregation of S. Maria del Popolo that took care of the hospital of S. Giacomo in Augusta, in the rione Campomarzio, that specialized in treating syphilis at the end of the fifteenth century through the charitable work of the members of the Divine Love confraternity that became that of S. Giacomo degli Incurabili.84 The confraternity S. Maria della Consolazione, with its hospital beneath the Campidoglio, that was the result of the merger of three precious sodalities, will undergo great developments in the 1400s.85 The national foundations, which became numerous in the course of the 1400s, deserve mention. Instituted with the stated purpose of establishing reference points for their compatriots, especially for travelers and pilgrims, the confraternities of forenses [foreigners] (and their churches and hospices) were mostly located in the central rioni on the major thoroughfares of the city (and not only in the vicinity of the most famous places of worship as the early medieval scole were). Among the most well-known are S. Maria dell’Anima of the Germans, S. Giacomo of the Spanish, San Tommaso of the English, S. Giovanni of the Florentines, and S. Ambrogio of the Lombards. If it is certain that in the foundation of institutions of this type attention is placed principally on providing welcome in their hospices (especially in holy years), it is interesting to note that especially in the late 1400s for those communities with consis-

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e diritto di proprietà a Roma,” Quaderni storici 99 (1998), 637–675; and especially Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci, I devoti della carità. Le confraternite del divino amore nell’Italia del primo Cinquecento (Naples: La città del sole, 2002), 193–200. For an in-depth study of these small fraternities, see Anna Esposito, “Le ‘confraternite’ del Gonfalone,” in Le confraternite romane: esperienza religiosa, società, committenza artistica, ed. Luigi Fiorani, Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma 5 (1984), 91–136. Solfaroli Camillocci, I devoti della carità. Anna Esposito, “Le confraternite e gli ospedali di S. Maria in Portico, S. Maria delle Grazie e S. Maria della Consolazione a Roma (secc. xv–xvi),” Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa n.s. 17–18 (1980), 145–172.

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tent population numbers and an historic presence in Rome (e.g., the Spanish, Germans, Tuscans, Lombards, etc.), the target audience is no longer only the pilgrims but the pauperes et infirmi of the nationals resident in Rome.86 In the course of the 1400s, following the impulses and exigencies of Roman society, the increasingly felt need to turn outward was manifest in civic societies by the multiplication of public events (processions, patronal feasts, liturgical feast days, etc.) and in the intensity of patronage for what was ephemeral.87 Likewise, the municipal religious celebrations experienced a significant change in the same period (here we are not speaking of the grand papal ceremonies).88 In the fifteenth century “the great religious festival of the Roman people” continued to be the feast of the Assumption in mid-August,89 financed in part by the commune itself and in part by private funding, in which all the municipal magistrates, knights, corporations, and devotional confraternities participated according to an order of well-defined precedents. Two of these, the confraternity of the Gonfalone and the sodality of the Raccomandati del Salvatore, as “guardians” of the two sacred images, were the primary organizers of the festivities and of the procession that accompanied the sacred image of the Savior to the meeting with that of the Madonna in S. Maria Maggiore. Even this staging of the sacred images in the great basilicas was gradually suppressed. In 1539 the re-enactment of the Passion at the Coliseum was definitively abolished for concerns of public order. From the fifteenth century, it had been one of the highest devotions of the Confraternita del Gonfalone, all of whose members participated as actors, musicians, and managers of the scenery and costumes.90 86

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Anna Esposito, “National Confraternities in Rome and Italy in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Identity, Representation, Charity,” in A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 235–256. On the national confraternities and churches of Rome, the following are now available: Identità e rappresentazione. Le chiese nazionali a Roma, 1450–1650, ed. Alexander Koller and Susanne Kubersky-Piredda (Rome: Campisano, 2015); and Chiese e nationes a Roma: dalla Scandinavia ai Balcani (secc. xv–xviii), ed. Antal Molnár, Giovanni Pizzorusso, and Matteo Sanfilippo (Rome: Viella, 2017), 161–174. Anna Esposito, “Men and Women in Roman Confraternities in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Roles, Functions, Expectations,” in The Politics of Ritual Kinship, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82–97; Silvia Carandini, “L’effimero spirituale. Feste e manifestazioni religiose nella Roma dei papi in età moderna,” in Roma, la città del papa, 529. On this subject, see now Anna Esposito, “Fare festa con devozione (Roma, fine xv secolo)”, in Vivere la città, 263–275. Ibidem; see also the essays in Cérémonial et rituel à Rome (xvie–xixe siècle), ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia and Catherine Brice (Rome: École française de Rome, 1997). Emmanuel Rodocanachi, La première Renaissance. Rome au temps de Jules ii et de Léon x (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1912), 304–307. Anna Esposito, “Apparati e suggestioni nelle ‘feste e devotioni’ delle confraternite romane,”

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In conclusion … In this chapter we have quickly retraced the evolution of the city of Rome during the first centuries of the Renaissance. After the demographic decline in the years of the Schism, Rome became a populous city, chiefly as a consequence of the impressive and continual influx of migrants characterized by their socio-professional variety, whether as passing or stable residents, with a new urban and architectural structure, with an economy that, subject to the traditional interests in the use of the land, found further fields of expansion in urban real estate income and in the financial market. It became a city where the number of consumers grew at an exponential rate and so, too, the importation of goods, not only those of primary necessity but also nonessential and luxury goods, with a clear dependence on the presence of the pope in the city and a strong emphasis on the holy years.91 Rome in these centuries advanced its role as the capital of a state with its institutions and its evergrowing offices, but also as the capital, according to Giorgio Chittolini, “as the center of a network of relations that were intensified and consolidated between the Roman court from one side (the Roman court in the fullest sense: the curia, the papal court itself, cardinal families, etc.) and from the other side the Italian and European states, the local aristocracies, and their representatives.”92

Bibliography Delumeau, Jean, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du xvi. siècle. Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 184. 2 vols. Paris: de Boccard, 1957–1959. Esch, Arnold, Economia, cultura materiale e arte nella Roma del Rinascimento. Studi sui registri doganali romani 1445–1485. Roma nel Rinascimento. Inedita, 36: Saggi. Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2007. Esposito, Anna, “National Confraternities in Rome and Italy in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Identity, Representation, Charity”, in A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler, Companions to the Christian Tradition, 83. Leiden, Brill, 2019. Cap. 12.

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Archivio della Società romana di Storia Patria 106 (1983), 320–322; in particular, on the sacred presentation of the Passion at the Colosseum, see Barbara Wisch and Nerida Newbigin, Acting on Faith: The Confraternity of the Gonfalone in Renaissance Rome (Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s University Press, 2013). On the opulence of Roman society at the time, see also Bruno Laurioux, Gastronomie, humanisme et société à Rome au milieu du xve siècle. Autour du De honesta voluptate de Platina (Florence: sismel edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006). Giorgio Chittolini, “Alcune ragioni per un convegno,” in Roma capitale, 2.

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Identità e rappresentazione. Le chiese nazionali a Roma, 1450–1650, edd. Alexander Koller/ Susanne Kubersky-Piredda, con la collaborazione di Tobias Daniels, Roma: Campisano Editore, 2015. Keyvanian, Carla, Hospitals and Urbanism in Rome 1200–1500, Leiden: Brill, 2015. Lee, Egmont, Habitatores in Urbe. The population of Renaissance Rome / La popolazione di Roma nel Rinascimento. Roma: Università La Sapienza, 2006. Modigliani, Anna, Mercati, botteghe e spazi di commercio a Roma tra Medioevo ed Età moderna. Roma nel Rinascimento. Inedita, 16: Saggi. Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1998. Palermo, Luciano, Sviluppo economico e società preindustriali. Cicli, strutture e congiunture in Europa dal medioevo alla prima età moderna. I libri di Viella, 12. Roma: Viella, 1997 Partner, Peter, The Pope’s Men. The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Roma capitale (1447–1527): Atti del iv Convegno di studio del Centro di Studi sulla civiltà del tardo Medioevo, 27–31 ottobre 1992, San Miniato (Pisa)]. Ed. Sergio Gensini. Pubblicazioni degli archivi di stato. Saggi, 29; Collana di studi e ricerche, Centro di studi sulla civiltà del tardo Medioevo, 5. San Miniato: Pacini, 1994. Roma, la città del papa: vita civile e religiosa dal giubileo di Bonifacio viii al giubileo di papa Wojtyła. Eds. Luigi Fiorani, Adriano Prosperi. Storia d’Italia, Annali, 16. Torino: G. Einaudi, 2000. Roma del Rinascimento, ed. Antonio Pinelli. Storia di Roma dall’ antichità a oggi, 3. Eds. Antonio Pinelli and Stefano Andretta. Storia e società. Roma-Bari: glf Editori Laterza, 2001., Roma medievale, ed André Vauchez. Roma medievale: Storia di Roma dall’antichità a oggi, 2. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001. Roma. Le trasformazioni urbane nel Quattrocento, 2 vols. Ed. Giorgio Simoncini, L’ambiente storico, 10. Firenze: Leo S. Olschi, 2004. Tafuri, Manfredo, Ricerca del Rinascimento. Principi, città, architetti. Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1992.

chapter 6

Art and the Papacy Ingrid D. Rowland

1

Beginnings

The visual arts, like music, ritual, and public oratory, provided Renaissance popes with a potent means of mass communication. A vast range of objects and materials could convey the aspirations of a pontificate: embroidered vestments and altar cloths, candlesticks and chalices, illustrated books, and largescale coordinated programs of architecture, painting, sculpture, and mosaic. Through inspired ingenuity, these human inventions brought a glimpse of heavenly beauty down to earth. Artists, in turn, garnered an increasingly important social status over the two centuries from 1400 to 1600, so that their creations came to be regarded with new respect as works of the spirit—that is, as art, a new concept—rather than simply as beautiful practical objects. Many of the qualities that distinguish most Renaissance papal commissions had already begun to emerge in the later Middle Ages in Rome, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Such distinctive features included a close connection with the ancient city, its history, and its monuments, a vivid sense of Rome’s timeless destiny, a special devotion to Peter and Paul, the city’s two patron saints, and a general inclination toward Franciscan theology. Medieval popes came for the most part from a few Roman baronial families, each of which maintained its own strong traditions of artistic patronage and habits of sophisticated taste, and under papal sponsorship, individual artists and artistic families had already begun to emerge, such as the sculptor-architects Pietro Vassalletto (12–13th century) and Jacopo and Deodato Cosmati (14th century), literate in Latin as well as vernacular, the stellar talents of long-lived dynasties.1 Stoneworkers, sculptors, mosaicists, and architects, the Vassalletti and the 1 This Franciscan slant began with the pontificate of Nicholas iv, the first Franciscan pope: Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans, and the Painting of the Basilica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Peter Cornelius Claussen, “The Remodeling of San Giovanni in Laterano by Pope Nicholas iv: Transept, Apse, and Façade,” in Lex Bosman, Ian Haynes and Paolo Liverani, eds., The Lateran Basilica to 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 318–344. See also Claudia Bolgia, Reclaiming the Roman Capitol: Santa Maria in Aracoeli from the Altar of Augustus to the Franciscans, c. 500–1450 (London: Routledge, 2017).

© Ingrid D. Rowland, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_007

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figure 1 Pietro Vassalletto. Sphinx, Lateran cloister photo lars berggren

Cosmati sometimes reused ancient materials for their pavements, parapets, and cloisters, and just as often adapted ancient motifs from the city’s surviving monuments to a new Christian purpose, including smiling Egyptian sphinxes, Roman lions, and intricate pavements of porphyry, serpentine, and colored marble.2 Clearly, these artists felt that they were working fully within a long classical tradition. Virtually the only crucial distinction between an ancient Roman portico and works like the Vassalletto cloisters in the patriarchal basilicas of St. John Lateran (Fig. 1) and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls (late 12th-early 13th centuries) lies in the slender proportions of the columns sustaining the medieval arcades.3 2 Enrico Bassan, “Vassalletto,” Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, Part 11 (Rome: Treccani, 2000— https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/vassalletto_%28Enciclopedia‑dell%27‑Arte‑Medievale %29/); Peter Cornelius Claussen, Magistri doctissimi Romani. Die römischen Marmorkünstler des Mittelalters [Corpus Cosmatorum, i] (Stuttgart/Wiesbaden: Steiner Wiesbaden, 1987); idem, “Marmo e splendore. Architettura, arredi liturgici, spoliae,” Arte e iconografia a Roma. Da Costantino a Cola di Rienzo, eds. Maria Andaloro, Serena Romano (Rome: Jaca Book, 2000), 193–226; Manuela Gianandrea, “Creazioni à l’antique. I Vassalletto e il facino della sfinge egizia nel Medioevo romano,” in Les renaissances médiévales, Hortus Artium Medievalium, Journal of the International Research Center for Late Antiquity and Middle Ages [Zagreb], 16 (2010), 151–160; eadem, “Egypt of the Pharaohs in the Rome of the Popes. Reflections on Egypt in Medieval Culture Between History, Religion, and Myth,” in Eugenio Lo Sardo, ed., The SheWolf and the Sphinx: Rome and Egypt from History to Myth (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2008), 132–142; Enrico Bassan, “Cosmati,” Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, Part 5 (Rome: Treccani, 1994), 366–375; Dorothy F. Glass, Studies on Cosmatesque Pavements, (Oxford: bar [British Archaeological Reports], 1980); Paloma Pajarez-Ayuela, Cosmatesque Ornament: Flat Polychrome Geometric Patterns in Architecture (London and New York: Norton, 2001). 3 Raphael had already made this observation in his letter of Pope Leo x in 1519; see Francesco

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For a pope or an ambitious cardinal, hiring a famous artist could signal a conscious bid for attention in a larger sphere. In 1298, Pope Boniface viii engaged the Tuscan luminary Giotto di Bondone to paint a fresco in St. John Lateran, commemorating the moment when the pontiff decreed the first Jubilee in 1300 (Fig. 2).4 At the same time, Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi, canon of St. Peter’s Basilica (the Lateran’s inveterate rival), asked Giotto to produce a vast mosaic (far more costly than fresco) for “his” church, effectively announcing his own hopes for higher office.5 Giotto’s Stefaneschi altarpiece is now the best preserved of these three commissions: the Lateran fresco survives only in a fragment, and the mosaic in St. Peter’s was heavily reworked when it was transferred from the old basilica to its sixteenth-century successor. By 1309, the spirit of that ambitious Jubilee had been dashed, when the Curia (including Stefaneschi) relocated from Rome to Avignon under pressure from the king of France. There the popes, cardinals, and curial apparatus remained until 1376; then, for another forty years, a schism among the cardinals and a series of church councils created a series of competing popes and antipopes.6 The election of Oddone Colonna as Martin v at the Council of Constance effectively resolved this Western Schism in 1417, although the Pisan antipope John xxiii (Baldassare Cossa), deposed in 1415, continued to provoke his onetime rival from beyond the grave by means of his spectacular tomb in the Baptistery of Florence (Fig. 3).7

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Paolo Di Teodoro, Lettera a Leone x di Raffaello e Baldassare Castiglione (Florence: Leo F. Olschki, 2020). Kenneth J. Conant describes the Vitruvian aspects of the cathedral at Cluny, “The after-life of Vitruvius in the Middle Ages,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 27:1 (1968), 33–38. See also Wim Verbaal, “The Vitruvian Middle Ages and Beyond,” Arethusa 49:2 (2016), 215–225. The fresco has been so thoroughly repainted that scholars agree now that there is no way to attribute it securely to Giotto or his workshop on the basis of the physical evidence. For the commissioning of the fresco, see Charles Mitchell, “The Lateran Fresco of Boniface viii,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14:1–2 (1951), 1–6; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, “Bonifacio viii, l’affresco di Giotto e i processi contro i nemici della chiesa. Postilla al giubileo del 1300,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome, 112:1 (2000), 459–483. Serena Romano and Pietro Petrarola, eds., Giotto, l’Italia. Catalogo della mostra Milano, 2 giugnoi 2015–10 gennaio 2016 (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2015). Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Avignon and its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); Yves Renouard, The Avignon Papacy: The Popes in Exile, 1305–1403, trans. Denis Bethell (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970); Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 151–176. Philip Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance (1414–1418) (Leiden: Brill, 1994).

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Roman School: Pope Boniface viii Proclaiming the First Jubilee from the Lateran Loggia. Attributed to Giotto di Bondone (1266–1336), heavily repainted. Rome, San Giovanni in Laterano scala/art resource, ny

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Donatello and Michelozzo, Tomb of Antipope John xxiii, 1425–1427. Marble. Baptistery, Florence agefotostock/alamy stock photo

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The tomb of John xxiii was commissioned before 1421 by his executors, most importantly the banker Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, but the intense negotiations behind the project delayed its execution to 1425–1427.8 A daring political statement, backed by exquisite artistry in the new consciously classical style that would define the Italian Renaissance, the monument announced the civic ambitions of the Medici family as clearly as it celebrated the legacy of John xxiii as a model of humility, charity, and piety. The tomb occupies the entire space between one of the seven pairs of ancient granite columns decorating the Baptistery’s interior, and its sculpted canopy, marble imitating fringed fabric, seems to hang from the building’s lower cornice when in fact it stands on its own. The commission was entrusted to two Florentine artists, the sculptor Donatello de’ Bardi, already a renowned master in his thirties, and the architect Michelozzo Michelozzi, ten years younger than Donatello and at the beginning of his career, the first in a series of fruitful collaborations. Beneath the monument’s fictive canopy, a marble Madonna and Child, carved in high relief against a semicircular scallop shell, overlook a bronze image of the deceased, lying in state above a marble sarcophagus carved with two sad-faced crouching cupids (the Florentines called them “spiritelli”, “little spirits,”) who unfurl a curling fictive parchment with an inscription that commemorates the deceased as “quondam papa,” “former pope”—a clear slap at his living competitor, Pope Martin.9 Adding to the monument’s aggressive tone, the sarcophagus rests on four sturdy consoles that form a protective canopy over three shields, carved in bas relief with coats of arms: a shield bearing the crossed keys of the papacy flanked by two shields with the stemma of the Cossa family—as far as his tomb is concerned, John xxiii was as valid a pope as St. Peter himself. The consoles, in turn, rest on a slender architrave supported by four engaged Corinthian pilasters framing three niches capped by a classical scallop-shell motif. The niches contain images in high relief of the cardinal virtues: Hope carrying a chalice, Charity with a cornucopia, and Faith with her hands raised in prayer. Their flowing robes and Charity’s bared breast consciously evoke ancient statues. Sustaining the whole ambitious structure is a pedestal shaped like an ancient Roman sarcophagus, with antique-style garlands draped between disembodied cherub heads, its base moldings directly extended from the bases of the surrounding columns. Taken as a whole, the

8 Sarah Blake McHam, “Donatello’s Tomb of Pope John xxiii,” in Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen, eds., Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 146–173, 232–242. 9 For the term “spiritelli,” see Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: unc Press, 2001), esp. 61–66.

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monument to John xxiii makes an eloquent argument for the compatibility of classical form with Christian spirituality. Its only real connections with Gothic style are its elongated proportions and the Gothic arch created by the sweep of its marble canopy. Pope Martin was no less eager to trumpet his own claims to the papacy through art from the unrivaled pulpit of Rome.10 Local artistic traditions had withered during the Curia’s “Babylonian Captivity” in Avignon, when the city’s political sphere of influence shrank to a few territories in central Italy and opportunities for artists in the city itself dwindled for lack of patrons. Furthermore, a succession of natural disasters seemed to suggest that God had abandoned Rome altogether. Between 1348 and 1351, the Black Death carried off between one third and one half of the population, its toll compounded by the earthquake in 1349 that may have toppled the western side of the Colosseum and collapsed the immense vault of the Basilica of Maxentius in the Forum. Yet despite these calamities, the lure of Rome drew visitors like Petrarch and Bridget of Sweden, both of whom urged Pope Clement vi to hold a jubilee in 1350 and, unlike the pontiff, actually made the pilgrimage to the vulnerable, sadly reduced city that huddled beneath the monuments of its imperial past.11 Fifty years later, Pope Boniface ix celebrated the Jubilee of 1400 in residence, despite a raging plague and a stubborn rival in Avignon, Benedict xiii, but the perilous state of the city compelled him to spend long periods of his pontificate in Assisi and Perugia. Martin, like his medieval predecessors, belonged to one of Rome’s great baronial clans, the Colonna, and believed implicitly that the destiny of the Church was rooted in Roman soil. But moving the Holy See and a fractured Curia back to their dilapidated former home would require years of effort. Martin himself only reached the city in 1420, after a protracted stay in Florence, where recovery from the ravages of plague had been much more rapid. To signal Roman renewal, and to put Florence in its place, Martin declared a special Jubilee for the year 1423. The celebration also sent a signal to Avignon, for this followed the year when Pope Benedict xiii finally died.12 10 11 12

Concetta Bianca, “Martino v, papa,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 71 (2008): https://​ www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/papa‑martino‑v_(Dizionario‑Biografico). Elizabeth McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City, Rome and the Papal Court, 1420–1447 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1–39. Clement viii, successor to Benedict xiii, abdicated in 1429, the last of the Avignonese popes. For Martin v’s patronage, see McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City, 19–44; Hellmut Wohl, “Martin v and the Revival of the Arts in Rome,” in Paul A. Ramsay, ed., Rome in the Renaissance: The History and the Myth (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 171–178.

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To judge from his surviving artistic commissions, Martin v was a patron of exquisite and daring taste. He engaged two Florentines, Masaccio and Masolino da Panicale, to paint a polyptych, the Colonna Altarpiece, for the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, perhaps for the Jubilee of 1423, the first evidence of the two artists’ collaboration and an early example of the linear perspective for which Masaccio would earn such renown.13 Filippo Brunelleschi had developed the technique in Florence with a series of experiments between 1415 and 1420, but the Colonna Altarpiece (Fig. 4) suggests some of the ways in which linear perspective would take on a special theological significance in papal Rome.14 The central panel of the polyptych shows the miraculous August snowfall in the year 352 that outlined the future site of Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill. The scene is framed by buildings that recede sharply into space, so starkly that they almost feel like a De Chirico painting, while in the sky little clouds follow the same perspective scheme in orderly ranks. In the remote background, we see the Aurelian Wall and two monuments that identify the scene specifically as Rome: the pyramidal tomb of the ancient Roman official Gaius Cestius next to the ancient Porta Ostiense, and the adjacent Monte Testaccio, an artificial mountain made of the discarded amphoras from ancient Rome’s emporium alongside the Tiber. Above, perched on a larger cloud, Christ appears with the Virgin Mary within the concentric circles that symbolize the planetary spheres and the golden expanse of the region beyond the stars and planets; thus, the heavenly figures occupy a completely different space from the human beings whose lives they direct. Although Christ is visibly standing in front of the Virgin, the rules of perspective do not apply with the same rigor in the realm beyond all worlds as they do in the world itself. The ancient Romans 13

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McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City, 39–43; Kenneth Clark, “An Early Quattrocento Triptych from Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 93, No. 584 (November 1951), 339–347; Perri Lee Roberts, Masolino da Panicale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 87–90; Allan Braham, “The Emperor Sigismund and the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece,” The Burlington Magazine, 122 (1980) 106–112; Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister, Dillian Gordon, and Nicholas Penny, Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 252–254; Paul Joannides, “The Colonna Triptych by Masolino and Masaccio: Collaboration and Chronology,” Arte Cristiana, 76 (1988) 339–346; Brandon Strehlke and Mark Tucker, “The Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece: New Observations,” Arte Cristiana, 719 (1987), 105–124. Samuel Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), idem, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Rocco Sinisgalli, Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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Masolino da Panicale, The Founding of Santa Maria Maggiore (Colonna Altarpiece), 1423–1428, originally Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. Tempera on gold on wood panel. Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte prisma archivo/alamy stock photo

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knew about perspective, but they used it playfully, routinely putting multiple vanishing points and perspective systems into a single wall painting. Renaissance artists, on the other hand, beginning with Brunelleschi, focused relentlessly on one-point perspective, and in the works commissioned by Renaissance popes, that unique point often seems to offer a reflection on the singleness of God. In 1427, Martin managed to lure the celebrated painter Gentile da Fabriano to Rome, with a commission to fresco the battered nave of the Lateran Basilica.15 Since Giotto’s visit in 1298, the mother church of Christendom had been blasted by lightning and badly burned in 1306, shaken by earthquake in 1349, and struck again by lightning in the plague year of 1361, when a bell tower came crashing down through the roof. Inspired by the examples of surviving decorations at St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, and Santa Maria in Trastevere, as well as by ancient Roman triumphal arches, Gentile divided the walls of the Lateran’s vast nave into horizontal registers of differing dimensions. In the top register, monumental figures of Hebrew prophets, Christian evangelists, Church fathers, and apostles, some in color, some in shades of ochre, stood within Gothic frames (in those days, the Lateran was still filled with stunning Gothic fixtures of marble and mosaic inlay fashioned by the Vassalletto and Cosmati families); beneath them, vivid narrative panels recounted the life of Christ, an old medieval theme retold in the latest artistic style, with bodies twisting and turning through space in daringly modern perspective. When Gentile died after only a few months in Rome, Martin summoned the artist’s brilliant student Pisanello to complete the scheme, which the sixteenthcentury artist Giorgio Vasari would praise both for the beauty of its execution and for the stunning ultramarine blue, provided by the pope himself: powdered lapis lazuli, imported “beyond the seas” from Afghanistan. The Lateran frescoes became a model for the public art of papal Rome and beyond, exerting a tremendous influence on every artist who beheld them; they echo, for example, in the tiered composition of Jan Van Eyck’s resplendent Ghent Altarpiece, painted after the Fleming’s own trip to Rome. Unfortunately, they were almost entirely lost when Francesco Borromini restored the Lateran nave in 1648–1649 (in his defense and that of Pope Innocent x, who commissioned the restoration, the walls of the nave listed dangerously off kilter). Borromini, who understood what would be lost, made careful drawings of

15

Andrea de Marchi, “Reconsidering the Traces of Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano in the Lateran Basilica,” in Lex Bosman, Ian Haynes and Paolo Liverani, eds., The Lateran Basilica to 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 379–399.

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Francesco Borromini, The walls of the Lateran nave. Drawing c. 1648. Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany photo: dietmar katz/art resource, ny

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the frescoes (Fig. 5), our best clue now to their composition, and his own stucco decoration carefully provided elliptical “windows” onto the older works, covered in the eighteenth century with fictive frescoed panes of glass. Recently, however, Andrea de Marchi has discovered surviving fragments of the frescoes, including the haunting face of a prophet, looking out at the viewer with a penetrating eye.16 As the member of the old Roman aristocracy, Pope Martin had come to the papacy in the time-honored medieval way, through family connections. The upheavals of the fourteenth century and the contemporary conciliar movement, which advocated granting greater authority to church councils rather than to the pope himself, favored a new trend that, albeit with exceptions, has continued to prevail within the College of Cardinals ever since: selecting popes who were self-made men from relatively undistinguished families to ensure, at least in theory, a greater degree of personal competence and greater political neutrality.17 Martin’s successor, Eugenius iv, stood somewhere in between past and future: Gabriele Condulmer was a Venetian from a wealthy merchant family who had served his uncle, Pope Gregory xii, as treasurer and protonotary, and did so effectively enough to come to the attention of his fellow cardinals at a young age.18 Crowned pope in St. Peter’s, Eugenius commissioned a new set of bronze doors for the ancient basilica in 1433, engaging the Florentine artist Antonio Averlino, whose teacher, Lorenzo Ghiberti, himself an expert maker of ornamental bronze doors, had given him the Greek nickname Filarete, “Lover of Virtue.” High-minded but far from diplomatic, Eugenius fled Rome in 1434, spending much of his reign in Ferrara, Bologna, and Florence, the base from which he struggled for the ambitious principles that occupied nearly all his attention: to reinforce papal authority against the inroads of the conciliar movement, to secure the territories of the Papal State (not least by wresting feudal properties from the Colonna relatives of Martin v), to mend the schism with the Orthodox Church, to abolish the European slave trade, and to brace the Christian world for inevitable conflict with the Ottoman Empire.19 In 1436, he consecrated Florence Cathedral, crowned 16 17

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De Marchi, “Reconsidering the Traces,” 392. Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome, 1500–1559: Portrait of a Society (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), 3–13. For the complex political position of the papacy in Renaissance Rome, see Gigliola Fragnito, “Cardinals’ Courts in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” The Journal of Modern History, 65:1 (1993), 26–56; Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Haskins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City, 71–96. McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City, 72–78.

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by Filippo Brunelleschi’s magnificent dome. In 1445, after twelve years of labor, Filarete’s bronze doors (Fig. 6) were finally installed at St. Peter’s.20 Lavish and highly visible, the doors emphasized several of the themes that would continue to dominate papal artistic commissions for the next two centuries and beyond: the unique destiny of Rome, ratified by the presence of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the primacy of the pope as the successor to Saint Peter and the vicar of Christ, and the continuity between classical antiquity and the Christian era, which had begun, like the Empire itself, under the reign of Augustus. Filarete drew inspiration from several ancient Roman bronze doors, including those of the Pantheon, the Senate House (Curia Julia), the so-called Temple of Romulus in the Roman Forum, and the famous singing doors of the fifth-century chapel of John the Baptist in the Lateran Baptistery, sadly silenced forever after the Mafia bombing of the Lateran slightly shifted the ground beneath them in 1993. Filarete’s doors are divided into registers: two rows of large, stately standing figures with smaller narrative panels ranged above and below. A lush, curling garland of acanthus binds the design together, an ancient motif that continued to flourish in medieval Roman art as an image of the Tree of Life. Filarete’s Tree of Life entwines antiquity with the present, circling its tendrils around tiny reliefs of ancient mythological figures and contemporary portraits. The largest images are those of Christ, the Virgin Mary, Saint Paul, and Saint Peter, who hands the keys of office to a kneeling Pope Eugenius, discreetly shown at a smaller scale. A square panel beneath the Apostle Paul depicts his martyrdom just outside Rome, while the corresponding panel for Saint Peter shows his upside-down crucifixion between two ancient Roman tombs: the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius near the Ostian Gate, known in Filarete’s day as the “Pyramid of Remus,” and the “Pyramid of Romulus”, an ancient tomb near the Vatican that was dismantled in the 1490s by Pope Alexander vi.21 For good measure, Filarete adds the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the defensive fortress built from the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian, and a watchful Emperor Nero, his profile clearly inspired by a Roman coin. The historical panels show Filarete’s fascination with contempo20 21

McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City, 168–198; Robert Glass, “Filarete’s Hilaritas: Claiming Authorship and Status on the Doors of St. Peter’s,” The Art Bulletin, 94:4 (2012), 548–571. Peter Lacovara, “Pyramids and Obelisks Beyond Egypt,” Aegyptiaca. Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt, 2 (2018), 124–137; Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 29–30. The foundations of the Meta Romuli have now been discovered near the Vatican; see Laura Petacco, “La Meta Romuli e il Terebinthus Neronis,” in Claudio Parisi Presicce and Laura Petacco, eds., La Spina: Dall’agro vaticano a via della Conciliazione (Rome: Gangemi, 2016), 33–40.

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Antonio di Pietro Averlino, called “Filarete”, Bronze doors to St. Peter’s Basilica, 1445. Vatican City scala/art resource, ny

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rary foreigners and their costumes: the Byzantine Greeks and Ethiopians who attended the ecumenical Council of Florence at the pope’s invitation (but failed to resolve their differences), and the Hungarian king Sigismund, who came to Rome to receive (from Eugenius) the crown of Holy Roman Emperor. The message of the doors is clear: the Church is both timeless and universal, working in this world and in eternity. The beautiful doors are permanently closed today so that people can admire them in their full glory, but symbolically they stand wide open, to all the nations of the world.

2

Stability: Nicholas v-Pius ii-Paul ii

The struggles of Eugenius iv left a far more settled papacy to his successor, the distinguished scholar and diplomat Nicholas v (Tommaso Parentucelli), who settled into the Apostolic Palace adjoining St. Peter’s rather than the dilapidated Lateran.22 Here he installed the earliest version of the Vatican Library to serve his own scholarly interests and those of the talented intellectuals he gathered to his court.23 Shortly after his election in 1447, Nicholas also drew up a comprehensive urban plan for Rome that included five major projects: 1) restoring the city walls, 2) improving the water supply (he commissioned the first Trevi Fountain), 3) improving the Borgo Vaticano, the neighborhood around St. Peter’s, 4) improving the Apostolic Palace, 5) restoring Rome’s forty churches. Nicholas also declared a Jubilee for the year 1450. To restore Rome’s prestige as an artistic center, he awarded two major commissions to the Florentine painter Fra Angelico in 1447: a chapel in Saint Peter’s Basilica, and a private chapel in the Apostolic palace, where the pope said his daily Mass. Both were complete by 1449, in time for the Jubilee.24 22

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Christine Smith, Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice, [Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies], (New York, Binghamton, 2007); Massimo Miglio, “Niccolò v,” in Enciclopedia dei Papi, 3 vols. (Rome: Treccani/Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000), 2: 644–658; Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 177–184; Flavia Cantatore, “The Palace of Nicholas v: Continuity and Innovation in the Vatican Palaces,” in Silvia Beltramo, Flavia Cantatore, and Marco Folin, eds., A Renaissance Architecture of Power: Princely Palaces in the Italian Quattrocento [The Medieval Mediterranean, 104], (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 230–319; Antonio Menniti Ippolito, I papi al Quirinale. Il sovrano pontefice e la ricerca di una residenza (Rome: Viella, 2004). Leonard Boyle, “The Vatican Library,” in Anthony Grafton, ed., Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1993), xi–xx: Antonio Manfredi, “The Vatican Library of Pope Nicholas v: The Project of a Universal Library in the Age of Humanism,” Library History, 14:2 (1998), 103–110. Innocenzo Venchi, Renate Colella, Arnold Nesselrath, Carlo Giantomassi and Donatella

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A Dominican friar, Fra Angelico held important offices within his order along with responsibility for a huge Medici-sponsored commission to decorate the walls of his own convent, San Marco in Florence.25 The chapels of Nicholas v were therefore executed largely by the friar’s assistants, the talented Benozzo Gozzoli chief among them. Benozzo deftly captured Angelico’s soft, gentle style; his own style favored a more hard-edged, almost photographic, clarity. Sadly, the chapel in St. Peter’s perished with the destruction of the old basilica in the sixteenth century (the direct culprit was Pope Paul iii), but the private chapel, the Cappella Niccolina, still survives, luminous since its expert restoration in 1995, an intimate but lofty space, only four by seven meters wide and nine meters high, crowned by a graceful groin vault. Nicholas himself had close ties with the Dominicans of Florence—hence his interest in importing Fra Angelico to Rome—and his chapel expresses some of the characteristic themes that the Order of Preachers emphasized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: preaching, almsgiving, courageous martyrdom for the faith, and a pointed hostility to Judaism (an attitude shared with most of the other mendicant orders of the era).26 The frescoes, divided into two registers, trace the lives of two exemplary deacons of the early church: St. Stephen, whose life fills the upper lunettes, and St. Lawrence, whose life plays out just above eye level in the lower register. The Book of Acts relates how Stephen, a Greek-speaking Jew from Jerusalem, was convicted of heresy for his preaching by the Jewish authorities, the Sanhedrin, and stoned to death during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius (circa 33–36 ce). Stephen’s prominent position in this papal sanctum sends a strong message of inclusion to the Greek Orthodox Church on the eve of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, and sets up a parallel between the holy city of Jerusalem and Rome, the New Jerusalem. The Jewish martyr Stephen and the Roman martyr Lawrence also reinforce a vision of the Church that had been powerfully captured in an Early Christian mosaic from the basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome, the mother church of the Dominican Order. Created in the fifth cen-

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Zari, Fra Angelico and the Chapel of Nicholas v (Vatican City: Musei Vaticani, 1999); Francesco Buranelli, ed., Il Beato Angelico e la Cappella Niccolina. Storia e restauro (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 2001); Diane Cole Ahl, Fra Angelico (London: Phaidon, 2008), 159–194; Kevin Salatino, The Frescoes of Fra Angelico for the Chapel of Nicholas v: Art and Ideology in Renaissance Rome, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992); Carl Brandon Strehlke, “Fra Angelico, A Florentine Painter in Roma Felix,” in Laurence Kanter and Pia Palladino, Fra Angelico (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 203–214. William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Salatino, The Frescoes of Fra Angelico, 93–158.

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tury to proclaim that Christianity was not a branch of Judaism, but rather a new religion open to all, the mosaic portrays two elegant matrons robed in purple and carrying open books who personify “the Church of the Jews” and “the Church of the Gentiles,” slightly different, equally dignified.27 The Jewish Sanhedrin who dispute with St. Stephen are no less dignified in their bearing: the High Priest wears a robe of ultramarine blue, the most expensive pigment of all, perfectly setting off Stephen’s robe of golden yellow. The painter specially ordered gold and ultramarine from Florence for this assignment.28 As a visual model for Jerusalem, Fra Angelico uses Florence, showing it as a walled city in pointed homage to the pope’s restoration of Rome’s walls, but set in a landscape that is unmistakably Tuscan. The Rome of Saint Lawrence, in pointed contrast, is a city of stately classical columns, just like the city where the real Lawrence had lived and died. Angelico’s attempt to recapture the purity of antiquity in fact declares a new, absolutely modern, style for papal art. The chapel assigns special prominence to the fresco showing the consecration of Lawrence as deacon by Pope Sixtus ii (Fig. 7). Within an imposing colonnade slanting in sharp perspective toward an apse flanked by Corinthian columns and adorned by an early medieval gold mosaic, Lawrence, kneeling in a vermilion robe with gold embroidery, takes the chalice of Communion from the blue-robed pope, who bears the features of Nicholas beneath his elaborate tiara. The pigments in this scene are the most expensive in the repertory: real gold leaf decorates the chalice, the background mosaic, the pope’s tiara and the robes of the prelates attending the scene. The stunning ultramarine blue was ground from lapis lazuli. The yellow robe of the priest on the left is a stable mineral pigment, ochre. Lawrence was once clad in brilliant scarlet, but cinnabar, the rare, poisonous mineral used for his vermilion garment, is a mercury ore that darkens on exposure to light.29

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Frederick W. Schlatter, s.j., “The Two Women in the Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, 3:1 (1995), 1–24 (though the article is about another mosaic, the Santa Sabina mosaic is integral to its argument). For the Dominicans at Santa Sabina, see Joan Lloyd, “Medieval Dominican Architecture at Santa Sabina in Rome, c. 1219–c. 1320,” Papers of the British School at Rome, 72 (2004), 231–292. Creighton Gilbert, “Fra Angelico’s Fresco Cycles in Rome: their Number and Dates,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 38:3/4 (1975), 245–265, esp. 251, 255, 256, 263. Marika Spring and Rachel Grout, The Blackening of Vermilion: An Analytical Study of the Process in Paintings, [National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 23], (London: National Gallery of Art, 2002), includes Fra Angelico in its analyses. Vitruvius had already complained about its degradation a millennium and a half earlier; see his Ten Books on Architecture, 7.

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Fra Angelico, The Consecration of St. Lawrence as Deacon, 1449. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Cappella Niccolina musei vaticani

Through the inspired work of a Florentine artist, the pope’s inner sanctum perfectly announced his ambitions for the art of papal Rome: a majestic wedding of ancient grandeur with Christian spirituality, for a church that aimed to knit together East and West, Jewish and Gentile traditions. The Cappella Niccolina would exert its own profound effect on subsequent commissions for the Vatican palace.

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Nicholas was succeeded in 1455 by another distinguished scholar and diplomat, seventy-seven-year-old Callixtus iii, the former Alfonso de Borja (Italianized as Borgia), who devoted his short papacy to stopping the advance of the Ottoman Empire. To this end, Callixtus diverted the papal treasury from building projects to mounting a new crusade, promoted by the preachers he sent on mission throughout Europe. When Hungarian troops met an Ottoman force at Belgrade in 1456, Callixtus ordered that every church in Christendom ring its bells at noon as a signal to pray for the crusaders—who eventually won the battle. The noon bell has continued as a Roman tradition ever since. Callixtus’ most lasting contribution to art in Rome was indirect; he set his brilliant, unscrupulous nephew Rodrigo Borgia on course to become pope in his own right by appointing him cardinal at the age of 25, and then, in the following year, 1457, Vice-Chancellor of the Apostolic Chamber, the chief financial officer of the Curia, a role the young cardinal would discharge with great efficiency for the next 35 years. Callixtus himself died in 1458, at the ripe age of eighty. His successor, Pope Pius ii, the former Enea Silvio Piccolomini, was already a famous author and a diplomat of wide travels and vast experience when he (at least by his own account) maneuvered his election in 1458. Somewhat to his contemporaries’ surprise, the urbane novelist took office with a burning sense of mission: he continued his predecessor’s call for a Crusade, using all his exceptional powers of persuasion to insist on the supremacy of the pope’s authority over that of church councils.30 The pontiff’s tastes in art, architecture, and literature, however, were as thoroughly avant-garde as his writing—that is, profoundly inspired by antiquity. He threw himself first into two ambitious projects in his native Tuscany, the region that provided many of Rome’s most important bankers and bureaucrats. He outfitted his family’s Gothic palazzo in the center of Siena with a new, heavily rusticated Florentine-inspired façade, flanked by a spacious market loggia modeled on the medieval Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. At the southern border of the Republic of Siena, he undertook a thoroughgoing renovation of his native village, Corsignano, renamed Pienza in his honor. In this tiny settlement, a few kilometers east of the great pilgrim route to Rome, the Via Francigena, Pius encouraged the Florentine architect Bernardo Rossellino to create a new style of architecture especially for the cathedral: inspired by Rome, but also by the Gothic churches the pope had seen in his travels through Europe.31 Setting a 30 31

Emily O’Brien, The Commentaries of Pope Pius ii and the Crisis of the Renaissance Papacy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). Charles R. Mack, Pienza: The Creation of a Renaissance City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

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clever precedent, he invited the College of Cardinals to participate in his efforts. Young Cardinal Borgia, eager to reinforce his new position as Vice-Chancellor, obliged Pius by commissioning an impressive little palazzo on Pienza’s main square. Future popes would rely increasingly on cardinals to reinforce their efforts to beautify Rome and promote the mission of the Church through a distinctively Roman style of art and architecture, weighty, monumental, classical in style, Christian in purpose. In Rome itself, Pius expedited his building projects by helping himself liberally to pieces of the ancient ruins—his autobiographical Commentaries record his dread at leaving behind a legacy of half-completed structures like Nicholas v.32 In nearby Tivoli, the pope demolished an ancient Roman amphitheater, scavenging its blocks of volcanic tuff to build a defensive fortress, the Rocca Pia, in a single year (1460–1461). Marble from the Colosseum supplied new steps for St. Peter’s Basilica, ancient spectators’ seats long since fallen to the ground in an earthquake, flanked in their new position by marble statues of St. Peter and St. Paul (1460–1462; the identity of the sculptor is debated). Between 1461 and 1464, Pius assembled columns from the Portico of Octavia and more marble from the Colosseum to erect an immense benediction loggia at the entrance to the atrium of St. Peter’s. Only four bays had been completed when he died in Ancona in August 1464. This last trip in a life of travel had been a tour to inspect the forces he had gathered for a Crusade, but the expedition dissipated with the sudden loss of its chief advocate. The next pontiff, Paul ii (Pietro Barbo), a onetime Venetian merchant, owed his quick rise within the Church to his uncle, Pope Eugenius iv. His strong advocacy of church councils as a cardinal won him election on the first ballot in 1464, but he was not the only pope to see things differently once he held the office himself. Rather than championing the conciliar camp from his uniquely authoritative pulpit, he devoted most of his business sense and his energies to expanding Palazzo Venezia, the immense residence he had first commissioned in 1455, and adding to his personal collection of antiquities (his cameos were especially famous) and works of art.33 Descriptions of Palazzo Venezia’s

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Christoph Frommel, “Francesco del Borgo, Architekt Pius ii und Pauls ii,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 21 (1984), 71–164; Ruth Rubinstein, “Pius ii and Roman ruins,” Renaissance Studies, 2:2 (1988), 197–203; David Karmon, The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 69–72. Frommel, “Francesco del Borgo”; Giulia Barberini, Stefano Petrocchi, Gianni Pittiglio, Carolina Vigliarolo, eds., Palazzo Venezia. I percorsi originali dell’esperienza. Appartamento

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interior, with its famous frescoed Mappamondo (World Map) are too vague to enable a plausible reconstruction (it was still a world map with only three continents!), and the building itself was significantly altered by Benito Mussolini between 1929 and 1943, when he adopted the Sala del Mappamondo as his office. Vain and reclusive, Paul was not widely mourned when he died in 1471.

3

Rome Restored: Sixtus iv-Alexander vi

Pope Paul’s successor, Sixtus iv, by contrast, was a renowned Franciscan theologian, Francesco Della Rovere, who clearly understood the power of art as a medium for communication, and the significance of city planning as a means of reinforcing the place of Rome in both the continuous history and presentday functioning of the Church. Elected in 1471, he quickly instituted a program of urban renewal inspired by the example of Nicholas v, calling a Jubilee for 1475 to serve as a stimulus. He ordered that the city’s haphazard medieval colonnades be hidden behind orderly modern façades, and flung a new bridge across the Tiber, the Ponte Sisto, to handle the crowds that flocked to the Vatican in the Jubilee Year. It was the first bridge to be built in the Eternal City since antiquity.34 As a loyal Franciscan, Sixtus repaired two of the most important Franciscan churches in Rome, San Pietro in Vincoli and Santissimi Apostoli, adding distinctive porticoes supported by octagonal columns, and engaging the painter Melozzo da Forlì to fresco the apse of Santissimi Apostoli with a heavenly panorama of the resurrected Christ surrounded by angel musicians; sadly, only fragments of these captivating paintings have survived an eighteenthcentury remodeling of the church. Within the Vatican itself, Sixtus ordered a new wing for the Apostolic Palace. Three rooms on the ground floor hosted the newly chartered Apostolic Vatican Library, for which Melozzo da Forlì painted a fresco in 1476 (Fig. 8) to commemorate the library’s reorganization

34

Barbo, guida di approfondimento alla mostra Il Quattrocento a Roma. La Rinascita delle Arte da Donatello a Perugino (Rome: Fondazione Roma, 2008—now online at http://​ www.museopalazzovenezia.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/161/file‑di‑testo); Diana Scarisbrick, “A Signet Ring of Pope Paul ii,” The Burlington Magazine, 127:986, (1985), 222– 294. Christoph Luitpold Frommel, “Papal Policy: The Planning of Rome During the Renaissance,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1986), 39–65, esp. 47–50; Jill E. Blondin, “Power Made Visible: Sixtus iv as ‘Urbis Restaurator’ in Quattrocento Rome,” The Catholic Historical Review, 91 (2005), 1–25.

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Melozzo da Forlì, Pope Sixtus iv Charges Bartolommeo Platina with the Administration of the Vatican Library, 1477. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Pinacoteca Vaticana erich lessing/art resource, ny

the year before (the painting has since been detached from the wall and transferred to the Vatican’s picture gallery).35 Pope Sixtus sits enthroned in profile on 35

Nicholas Clarke, Melozzo da Forlì, Pictor Papalis (London: Phaidon, 1990), 27–41; Mauro Minardi, “Melozzo da Forlì, Bartolommeo Platina rende omaggio a papa Sisto iv,” in Daniele Benati, Mauro Natale, and Antonio Paolucci, eds., Melozzo da Forlì: L’umana bellezza tra Pierto della Francesca e Raffaello [Mostra, Forlì, Musei San Domenico, 29

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the right side of the fresco, in a hall sustained by elaborate classical piers. The piers are paneled with veined marble veneer (or at least plaster painted to look like marble), and are topped by gilded Tuscan capitals; typically for the fifteenth century, the designs of the capitals and moldings are invented rather than copied directly from ancient ruins. In the background of the painting, two tall windows, typical for fifteenth-century libraries, admit light into a green-walled chamber; in front of them a white marble Corinthian capital crowns a splendid green marble column (“borrowed,” perhaps, from a side aisle of the ancient Lateran Basilica). Four of the Pope’s nephews stand at attention as the Vatican librarian, Bartolommeo Platina, kneels before an enthroned Sixtus, pointing downward to a fictive stone inscription praising the Pope’s improvements to Rome in Latin verse. The two lay nephews on the far left are dark, stocky Leonardo della Rovere, Prefect of Rome, and tall, blonde Girolamo Riario, lord of Imola, clad in opulent fur-trimed robes with gold chains prominent on their chests. Platina kneels to the right of them in a flowing blue giornea (sleeveless robe). At the painting’s center, with the column just behind him to suggest that he is the real pillar of the Vatican Library, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, in brilliant scarlet, directs his gimlet gaze toward his young cousin, Raffaelle Riario, clad in the black robes of the Augustinian Friars. There is no question about who rules this conclave, and it is not the elderly reigning pope—it is the vigorous thirty-two-year-old cardinal who will become pope in his own right in 1503, the future Julius ii. The stately, opulent architecture, the Latin inscription with its perfect lettering and classical frame, the coffered ceiling in perfect perspective, the solid pope and his domineering nephew all announce that Rome has embarked on a new era, expressed artistically and architecturally in an inspired adaptation of antique traditions: the Church, ancient wisdom, classical style, to the needs of the contemporary city in a contemporary world. Because the fourteenth-century Great Chapel in the Apostolic Palace had fallen into disrepair, Sixtus commissioned a new structure to replace it shortly after the Jubilee. Architect Baccio Pontelli had completed the huge new Sistine chapel by 1481, the year in which Sixtus invited a team of artists to transform its bare plaster walls: the Umbrian Pietro Perugino, who probably headed the project, followed by the Florentines Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli,

gennaio–12 giugno 2011] (Cinisello Balsamo [Milano]: Silvana, 2011), 218–221; Lorenzo Finocchi Ghersi, Melozzo e l’architettura, in Sergio Rossi and Stefano Valeri, Le due Rome del Quattrocento. Melozzo, Antoniazzo e la cultura artistica del Quattrocento. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Roma, 21–24 febbraio 1996) (Rome: Lithos Editrice, 1997), 65–76. Sergio Bettini, “In biblioteca: Sisto iv, il Platina e l’architettura dipinta nell’affresco di Melozzo da Forlì,” Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell’Arte, 34 (2010), 55–66.

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Cosimo Rosselli, and their assistants.36 The ceiling, a shallow barrel vault, was painted blue and studded with gilt stars. Sixtus himself provided the choice of subjects and the explanatory inscriptions for the frescoes on the Sistine Chapel walls, evidently inspired by the Lateran frescoes that Martin v had commissioned of Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello. Beneath each of the lunettes cutting into the chapel’s main barrel vault, six on each side, a round-headed window is flanked by two full-length portraits of popes standing within shell-capped niches, an updated version of the Lateran’s saints in Gothic frames. Beneath the popes, sixteen rectangular panels, two on the entrance wall, six on each side, and two behind the altar, traced the parallel lives of Moses (south wall) and Christ (north wall) in a single, monumental register. Four of these panels have perished: two when the door of the entrance wall collapsed in 1522, and two when Michelangelo replaced them with his Last Judgment in 1536. The lowermost register of the chapel walls, the most vulnerable to casual damage, portrays fictive draperies (eventually these areas would be hung with real tapestries on festive occasions). The surviving paintings of the Sistine Chapel walls, completed in 1483, reveal careful collaboration among the artists, who must have agreed in advance on palette, scale, and general composition. The deep azure skies on every panel, including the Last Supper, fade consistently toward the horizon, suggesting that these painters were well aware of those famous blues on the walls of the Lateran nave. Ultimately, however, the colors of the Sistine Chapel also depended on Pope Sixtus himself; copious amounts of ultramarine, gold leaf and gilded stucco attest to the generous budget he allotted to this public presentation of the papacy as a royal priesthood. Stately classical buildings and meticulous one-point perspective characterize a distinctive style, in which Egypt, Galilee, and Jerusalem look suspiciously like Rome, and now it is not the Rome of the ancients, but the contemporary Rome of Pope Sixtus iv. The Temple of Jerusalem in Botticelli’s Temptations of Christ (Fig. 9) looks remarkably like the pilgrim hospital of Santo Spirito, remodeled by Sixtus for the Jubilee, with its high triangular pediment and its arcaded porch. The cardinal just to the right of this fresco’s center is, once again, Giuliano della Rovere, in a thoughtful mood that Raphael would also capture in a portrait painted around 1510, thirty years after Botticelli noticed the same expression and the same tilt of the cardinal’s head. 36

Carol Lewine, The Sistine Chapel Walls and the Roman Liturgy (University Park PA: Penn State, 1993); Peter Howard, “Painters and the Visual Art of Preaching: The Exemplum of the Fifteenth Century Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel,” in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 13 (2010), 33–77.

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figure 9

Sandro Botticelli, The Temptation of Christ. 1481–1482. Fresco. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City hip/art resource, ny

Sixtus died in 1484, a year after the completion of his chapel and its decoration. According to the contemporary historian Raffaele Maffei of Volterra, it took the Florentine artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo ten years to design and cast the pontiff’s bronze tomb monument (Fig. 10), a freestanding structure, installed in St. Peter’s Basilica in 1493, marking a radical departure from the wall tombs that had become customary for popes since the late Middle Ages (as we have seen above with the monument to John xxiii).37 As the tomb’s inscription reports, the guiding spirit behind the project was Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere, who had already begun to amass one of the era’s most impressive collections of antique sculpture in his Roman palazzo. Pollaiuolo’s design, in turn, conspicuously draws its inspiration from classical antiquity. A full-length, life size portrait of Pope Sixtus, its features drawn from his death mask, lies in state, propped by two plump bronze pillows, on a platform surrounded by reliefs of fourteen beautiful women. On a horizontal plane, bas-relief enthroned figures of the four cardinal and three theological virtues (Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice; Faith, Hope, and Charity) frame the fictive stone slab on

37

Leopold D. Ettlinger, “Pollaiuolo’s Tomb of Sixtus iv,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16 (1953), 239–274; Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 358–387.

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figure 10 Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Tomb of Sixtus iv. 1484–1493. Bronze. Museum of the Treasury, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City scala/art resource, ny

which the pontiff lies in state. Beneath them, curved, sloping panels framed by acanthus scrolls bear languidly reclining figures of the seven liberal arts (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music), dramatically posed in high relief, their fluttering drapery emphasizing rather than hiding their voluptuous forms twisting in space and their slender, muscular limbs.

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The most impressive artistic commission of Sixtus’ immediate successor, the Genoese Innocent viii (Giovanni Battista Cybò, 1484–1492), was an idyllic refuge on the Vatican Hill, the Villa Belvedere, that was almost entirely transformed in the eighteenth century. According to Giorgio Vasari, Nicholas v was the first pope to build on this steep outcrop of volcanic stone, only a few hundred meters from the Apostolic Palace, the site of a botanical garden since the thirteenth century. In 1484, Antonio del Pollaiuolo took time away from the tomb of Sixtus iv to design a little summer house on the site, just distant enough, and lofty enough, to catch summer breezes and enjoy a spectacular view of the city from its panoramic loggias.38 Innocent invited the painters Bernardino Pinturicchio and Andrea Mantegna to provide the “Palazzetto Belvedere” with its frescoed interior decorations. The most impressive of these, in Vasari’s opinion, was “a loggia all made up of cityscapes” (“tutta di paesi”), where Pinturicchio “portrayed Rome, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Venice and Naples in the Flemish style, which, as something novel for the time, earned high praise.”39 By “Flemish style,” Vasari presumably meant the meticulous, nearly photographic attention to detail for which painters from the Low Countries were particularly prized in the fifteenth century. A few traces of these frescoes were recovered on the walls of the Belvedere in the 1940s, along with scant remnants of Mantegna’s frescoes for the Belvedere chapel, tantalizing hints of what must have been a delightful retreat for this otherwise unprepossessing pope.40 Pollaiuolo and his brother Pietro also designed Innocent’s tomb, set into a wall of the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica, showing an enthroned Innocent holding up the prize relic he had acquired in 1492 from the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid ii: part of the Holy Lance with which St. Longinus was said to have pierced the side of Jesus on the Cross.41 Since 1490, Innocent had held Bayezid’s half-brother and rival Cem Sultan hostage in the Vatican, and the grateful monarch was only too

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Mauro Papa, “Note su restauri, distruzioni, e interventi di ‘ricomposizione decorative’ sui dipinti murali del Casino Innocenziano nella seconda metà del Settecento,”bta, Bollettino Telematico dell’Arte, 2 December 2000, n. 239: http://www.bta.it/txt/a0/02/bta00239.html. Giorgio Vasari, Life of Pinturicchio: “E non molto dopo, cioè l’anno 1484, Innocenzo viii genovese gli fece dipingere (al Pinturicchio) alcune sale e loggie nel palazzo di Belvedere, dove tra l’altre cose, si come volle esso Papa, dipinse una loggia tutta di paesi, e vi ritrasse Roma, Milano, Genova, Firenze, Venezia e Napoli alla maniera dè fiamminghi, che come cosa insino allora non più usata, piacquero assai,”. Sven Sandström, “The Programme for the Decoration of the Belvedere of Innocent viii,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 29 (1960), 35–75; idem, “Mantegna and the Belvedere of Innocent viii,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 32 (1963), 121–122. Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 388–408.

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happy to repay that favor with the Lance and a gift of 120,000 crowns. This tomb and the monument to Sixtus iv are the only surviving pontifical tombs from the original St. Peter’s. Innocent barely had time to enjoy venerating the Holy Lance, for he died in the malarial month of July in the year 1492. By this time, the twenty-seven— member College of Cardinals included no fewer than ten papal nephews among its numbers, and not surprisingly, one of them emerged as pope from the conclave: Rodrigo Borgia, nephew of Callixus iii, was fortified by thirtyfive years of efficient service as Vice-Chancellor of the Apostolic Chamber, and took the name Alexander vi. A skilled diplomat and administrator, Alexander would be so systematically and colorfully vilified by his successor, Julius ii, that neither the Borgia pope nor his family have ever recovered their reputations. Yet Alexander maneuvered skillfully in a troubled European political climate to reinforce the authority of the papacy and stabilize its economy.42 The pope’s artistic patronage included installing a new ceiling in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, its wooden coffers covered with some of the first gold to arrive from the New World. He also raised the roof of the ancient church by about a meter; the Late Antique proportions of its nave had come to seem squat to eyes accustomed to tall Romanesque and Gothic interiors.43 Gold also appears in dazzling profusion on the walls and ceilings of the pope’s residential suite in the Apostolic Palace, six rooms of varying sizes frescoed by Bernardino Pinturicchio between 1492 and 1494.44 The complex themes of the paintings were suggested by the Dominican friar who served the pope as Master of the Sacred Palace, the remarkable scholar Annius of Viterbo, who supported his distinctive ideas about ancient history with an extensive body of forged texts, inscriptions, and artifacts. Unusually for a Dominican, Annius also believed fervently in the Immaculate Conception of Mary, a doctrine favored by the Franciscans, and shared Pope Alexander’s special devotion to the Virgin.45

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Michael Mallett, The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty (London: The Bodley Head, 1969); Christopher Hibbert, The Borgias and their Enemies, 1431–1519 (Orlando: Harcourt, 2008). An inscription in the basilica itself claims that the gold came from the “Indies,” but the tradition has no explicit surviving documentary proof; see Guglielmo Berchet, Fonti per la storia della scoperta del nuovo mondo, Rome: Reale Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1892, xxii. Francesco Buranelli, “L’appartamento Borgia in Vaticano,” in Maria Grazia Bernardini and Marco Bussagli, eds., Il ’400 a Roma. La rinascita delle arti da Donatello a Perugino (Milan: Skira, 2008), 1: 233–245. Paola Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo ispiratore di cicli pittorici,” in Gigliola Bonucci Capo-

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The Borgia Apartments set a new standard for papal art, both in the opulence of their materials and in their strong thematic message. The walls of the apartments were also decorated with intricate frescoed designs, still visible today. The gaily painted maiolica floor tiles also survive, as do the painted and gilded ceilings, their soffits, and their lunettes. Through their style and content, the frescoes stress the essential continuity between antiquity (both classical and Hebrew) and Christianity: each lunette in the Hall of the Sibyls shows an ancient prophetess waving a ribbon inscribed with an oracle that seems to predict the coming of Christ, matched with Hebrew prophets bearing similarly prescient tidings. In the Hall of the Creed, Christian Apostles bearing banners with the words of the Nicene Creed share the lunettes with Hebrew prophets bearing prophecies that seem to foretell its content; the Hall of the Liberal Arts commemorates the seven branches of medieval education, the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry), in open rivalry with Pollaiuolo’s bronze reliefs on the same theme for the tomb of Sixtus iv. The two largest surviving rooms in the Borgia suite (the largest, the Hall of Popes, collapsed in a storm in 1500) present a more public version of Alexander’s vision of the papacy in frescoed scenes set beneath lavishly painted groin vaults. The vaults contain smaller painted scenes framed by fictive compartments, the whole scheme shaped by Pinturicchio’s sketching trips into the subterranean ruins of Nero’s Golden House, with its tantalizing traces of ancient Roman painting. A spacious hall is devoted to the Seven Mysteries of the Christian faith, and another hall to a series of carefully chosen saints. When they were first unveiled, Pinturicchio’s frescoes would have struck viewers as brilliantly modern, with their clean perspective lines, their graceful figures clad in ornate robes, their careful evocation of ancient buildings, and their three-dimensional detailing in gilded stucco, an imitation of the ancient stuccoes preserved on the walls of the Colosseum and in the “grottoes” of the Emperor Nero’s Golden House, whose subterranean ruins had begun to attract curious artists already in the 1470s. (We know that Pinturicchio was there because he scrawled his name on one of the buried vaults.)46 Yet the

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rali, ed. Annio da Viterbo: Documenti e ricerche (Rome: Centro Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1981), 257–339; Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 107–131. Roger Gill makes an interesting case for Ermolao Barbaro as the author of the Egyptian scheme, Pinturicchio’s Frescoes in the Sala dei Santi in the Vatican Palace: Authorship and a new interpretation of the ‘Egyptian’ theme, (Ph.D. diss., Birmingham City University, 2015). Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renais-

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Pinturicchio, St. Catherine disputing the elders of Alexandria, 1492–1494. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Borgia Apartments scala/art resource, ny

themes of the Borgia Apartments were also daringly modern, based on Annius of Viterbo’s inspirational forgeries, which created a vivid picture of Italy’s primordial Golden Age as a means of suggesting that contemporary Rome could bring a new Christian Golden Age within reach (no wonder his tales were so successful!). The emphatic presence of gold (New World gold?) in the Borgia Apartments underscores the idea that Alexander’s papacy will indeed usher in a new Christian Golden Age of peace and harmony. The fresco of St. Catherine Disputing the Elders of Alexandria in the Hall of the Saints (Fig. 11) shows the saint (dressed in a gown of ultramarine blue dotted with gold) standing before a Roman-style triumphal arch inscribed (in gold letters on a blue background) pacis cultori, “to the fosterer of peace”— Christ. Jarringly to a modern eye, this triumphal arch is topped by the golden image of a bull, a gilded stucco appliqué that gleams as it catches the light from the chamber’s windows. In the pope’s apartments, we might mistake this figure for the idolatrous Golden Calf that the Israelites began to worship while

sance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969); Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Art of Transformation. Grotesques in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2018).

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Moses was sequestered on Mount Sinai, but Annius of Viterbo had other ideas about golden bulls. The ancestral Borgia coat of arms, the one still used by Calixtus iii, had featured an ox, a castrated bull, but already as a cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had restored the masculinity to his family’s heraldic beast. Annius of Viterbo, among his many other tales, had convinced the pope that the Borgia bull was in fact a direct descendant of the Egyptian Apis bull, an incarnation of the god Osiris, who was slain by his brother Typhon and resurrected in bovine form—an Egyptian-style prefiguration of the Passion of Christ.47 To reinforce this interpretation of the bull as a prototype of Christ rather than an empty idol, Pinturicchio has painted the tale of the death of Osiris and his incarnation as the Apis bull on the vault above the fresco of Catherine’s disputation. The figure of Catherine, the Alexandrian princess who became a Christian martyr, is said, quite plausibly, to be a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia. The turbaned figure to her left is the Ottoman hostage Cem Sultan. The fresco’s Egyptian landscape looks more like Pinturicchio’s native Umbria than the Nile Delta, which he had never seen, and the Egyptians are dressed in turbans, for Egypt in the late fifteenth century was ruled by Mamluk Turks. But in fact, all these associations could happily slide into one another in Renaissance Rome, sometimes to the great confusion of visitors like Erasmus, who thought it was all too pagan. But the specifically Roman form of this triumphal arch, which commemorates the triumph of Christianity over all other religions, reminds us that the Rome of Alexander vi nurtured similar aspirations to conquer the globe, spiritually if not politically, and usher in a new Christian version of the Golden Age. The episode of Catherine debating the wise men of Alexandria, with the great Library at their disposal, calls to mind a Christian version of the Library of Alexandria taking shape in Rome in this same Apostolic Palace: the Apostolic Vatican Library. Ancient wisdom is necessary to full understanding of Christian truth, as the Hall of the Sibyls, the Hall of the Credo, and the Hall of the Liberal Arts bear pictorial witness. Lurid tales of the Borgias, some of them dismally true, can blind our eyes to the full weight, spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic, of this ambitious decorative program, intended to reach the most influential figures in the Church, who certainly gathered in these reception halls. And at least one spectator, as we shall see, looked long and carefully at what the pope, his Dominican crony, and the “little painter” from Umbria achieved on the walls of these not-so-private apartments. 47

Brian Curran, “ ‘De Sacrarum Litterarum Aegyptiorum Interpretatione.’ Reticence and Hubris in Hieroglyphic Studies of The Renaissance: Pierio Valeriano and Annius of Viterbo,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 43/44 (1998/1999), 139–182, esp. 165– 167.

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Pinturicchio’s style was a beguiling mix of the familiar and the new, characteristic of Roman art just before and after 1500. His graceful figures still preserved a Gothic lilt in their posture and a Gothic opulence in their robes, just as his contemporary Antoniazzo Romano persisted in using old-fashioned gold backgrounds long after urban perspectives and landscapes had come into fashion.48 But the familiarly medieval aspects of this turn-of-the-century style mixed bracingly with new inventions: in Antoniazzo’s case, a startling, almost photographic precision in his figures. With Pinturicchio, the innovation lay in his dramatic backgrounds: rigorous perspective schemes dominated by classical buildings: a perfect expression of the heady mix of papal imagery at the turn of the half-millennium, as time and cultures collapsed into one another in the hopes of finding their ultimate fulfillment in papal Rome. A recent cleaning of the Borgia Apartments has revealed yet another strand in this complex web of ideas and images: beneath the figure of Christ in Pinturicchio’s Resurrection, a tiny group of nude men in feathered headdresses does a dance in celebration of the miracle (Fig. 12). They may provide the first known representation of indigenous people from the New World.49 The high hopes expressed on the walls of the Borgia Apartments were much harder to realize in the earthly realm than on the walls of the Apostolic Palace. Pinturicchio may well have put his final touches on this fresco at about the time when King Charles viii of France invaded Italy in 1494, bringing a new “French disease”—syphilis. Alexander convinced the king to return to Paris without setting foot in Rome, but the next century would bring Italy many more invasions and an endless series of wars, most of them small, most of them atrocious. One of the most flamboyant participants in these Italian Wars was the Pope’s own son, Cesare Borgia, immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince.

4

The Fullness of Time: Pius ii, Julius ii, Leo x, Adrian vi

Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere had nurtured dreams of becoming pope at least since 1492, but in October 1503 the College of Cardinals decided instead to elect the elderly, infirm Sienese cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini to succeed the Borgia pope. Unfortunately, Pius iii was so sick that he died before his coronation, 26 days into his reign. When the College of Cardinals met for its 48 49

Stefano Petrocchi, Antoniazzo Romano: Pictor Urbis 1435–1440/1508 (Rome: Silvana Editoriale, 2013). Antonio Paolucci, “Ecco la prima immagine dei nativi americani raccontati da Colombo,” L’Osservatore romano, 27 April 2013, 5.

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figure 12 Pinturicchio, Resurrection, detail of indigenous people, 1492–1494. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Borgia Apartments musei vaticani

second conclave of 1503, Giuliano Della Rovere took no chances. He procured the most auspicious temporary cell inside the Sistine Chapel, the one stationed directly beneath Perugino’s fresco of Christ’s Donation of the Keys to St. Peter, and offered generous bribes in exchange for votes. Elected by an overwhelming majority on the first scrutiny in December 1503, he took the name Julius ii, fully aware that most people would associate it not with the obscure fourth-century pope Julius i (best known for setting the date of Christmas) but with a Julius who needed no introduction: Caesar.50 Julius did not come to his pontificate unprepared. As a cardinal, he had already undertaken a vast program of patronage, including a famous collection of antiquities, a wide variety of artistic and architectural commissions from fortresses to altarpieces, and a close involvement with the Vatican Library. As pope, he embarked almost immediately on an ambitious plan to transform Rome into a modern city, enlisting the help of Donato Bramante, painter, architect, musician, and close friend of Leonardo da Vinci. The most evident

50

Documents showing Julius’ recourse to simony are presented in Ludwig Von Pastor, History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, trans. Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, third edition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1911), 6: 209.

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results of the collaboration between Julius and Bramante were the drastic decision to replace St. Peter’s Basilica with an entirely new structure (begun in 1506), the expansion of the Vatican Palace, and the creation of the Via Giulia, a broad straight street cut through the medieval maze of the city center in 1505, to be lined with impressively ambitious palazzi in the most up-to-date style. In all these efforts, somewhat paradoxically, ancient Rome provided the guidelines for the most inventive modern design, for only ancient Rome had been able to create on a scale, and with an opulence, equal to the new pope’s vision of a triumphant Christian Church. At the same time, however, Julius devoted close attention to infrastructure. He endowed libraries. He entrusted crucial aspects of Vatican finance to a new generation of bankers, including the Sienese Agostino Chigi and the Bavarian Jakob Fugger, merchants on an unprecedented international scale (as they vied for the title of richest man in Europe).51 And yet, however worldly his concerns, Julius was also a pope of profound spirituality, a Franciscan friar who had become captivated by the new religious currents of Christian Neoplatonism, a movement presented with particular eloquence in the early sixteenth century by the Augustinian prelate Giles of Viterbo. In 1506, Julius appointed Giles Vicar General of the Hermits of Saint Augustine, and Prior General in 1507. Giles also delivered many sermons at the pontiff’s request, and had an evident effect on the two great fresco cycles that Julius commissioned for the Apostolic Palace in 1508: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, assigned to Michelangelo, and the pope’s own private apartments, for which Julius summoned a team of artists, but soon entrusted the entire project to Raphael Sanzio, a promising young relative of Donato Bramante. These two large-scale decorative schemes not only presented a monumental, inspired vision of contemporary theology to the public; they also changed the course of Renaissance art. Originally, Julius had asked Michelangelo to cover the Sistine Chapel’s gently arching vault with images of the Twelve Apostles, but the eventual scheme of the frescoes would trace the Church and its apostolic mission back to the very creation of the universe (Fig. 13).52 At the center of Giles of Viterbo’s Christian

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Nicholas Temple, Renovatio Urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius ii (New York: Routledge, 2011); Felix Gilbert, The Pope, his Banker, and Venice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (New York: Walker & Company, 2003);

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figure 13 Michelangelo, detail, Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–1512. Fresco michele falzone/alamy stock photo

Neoplatonism stood the conviction that ancient wisdom traditions, especially those of the Hebrew Bible and the classical authors of Greece and Rome, had always been part of God’s plan for humanity, serving as the indispensable forerunners by which the world had been prepared to receive the Christian message. The Sistine Chapel’s wall decorations, commissioned by Sixtus iv in 1481, had set a perfect stage for Michelangelo’s ceiling by tracing the parallel lives of Moses and Christ. As if to complete this story, and root it in the very structure of the cosmos, the powerful fictive architecture that gives the chapel’s vast vault its sense of order (and symbolizes the Church as a spiritual rather than physical structure) contains scenes that stretch in time from the Creation of Light to the Sacrifice of Noah, to demonstrate how the Christian story was already rooted in the primordial origins of cosmic history. Hebrew prophets and ancient Sibyls enthroned beneath the narrative panels continue a theme of continuity already developed in the Borgia Apartments, but Michelangelo’s

John W. O’Malley, “The Theology Behind the Sistine Ceiling,” in The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered, ed. André Chastel (London: Muller Blond & White, 1986), 92–148, 268.

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muscular figures have an epic presence that is entirely new, explicitly inspired by the ancient statues in the papal collection—this, too, established by Julius in the Villa Belvedere of Pope Innocent viii, connected to his apartments by the long corridors of a newly expanded Apostolic Palace (expanded, of course, on Bramante’s design). Once again, antiquity provided the spark of inspiration for the Italian Renaissance to create dramatically new forms of artistic expression. Michelangelo’s mighty vision presented the spiritual aspirations of Pope Julius in their most impressive public form, but the pope, with a personality as driven and tempestuous as that of the Florentine sculptor, chose to live day to day among frescoes by Raphael, whose commanding visions of a triumphant Christian faith were tempered by the quality that contemporaries called grazia, grace.53 Physically, the Raphael Rooms are located directly above the Borgia apartments in the Vatican Palace, with their frescoes by Raphael’s former master, Pinturicchio. In passing from one suite of rooms to the other, we can see the ways in which the elder artist must have influenced the younger, but we can also see how quickly and thoroughly Raphael established his independence from his contemporaries and set out to challenge the ancients head on. The School of Athens (Fig. 14), his second fresco for Julius, painted between 1509 and 1511, also reveals Raphael’s acute awareness of other contemporaries: he employs Leonardo’s sfumato modeling for the faces of the secondary figures under the central arch, creates a building that evokes Bramante’s visionary architecture for the new St. Peter’s, and paints a portrait of a brooding Michelangelo as the philosopher Heraclitus that uses the distinctive combination of muscular figures and exotic, vibrant colors he had seen on a sneak trip into the unfinished, top secret Sistine Chapel in 1510. Like the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the School of Athens traces the history of the Church back to antiquity, showing how ancient wisdom, centered on the twin figures of Plato and Aristotle, prepared the world to receive the Christian message; at the same time, classical forms provided Raphael with the basis for a new style of contemporary art. As with the Sistine Chapel, the influence of Giles of Viterbo’s generous, inclusive

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John Shearman, The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decorations [Italian Lecture, British Academy, 1971], (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Ingrid D. Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of the School of Athens: Tracking Divine Wisdom in the Rome of Julius ii,” in Marcia Hall, ed., Raphael’s School of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131–170; eadem, “The Vatican Stanze,” in Marcia Hall, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 95–119; Christiane Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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figure 14 Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509–1511. Fresco. Vatican Museum, Stanze di Raffaello painting/alamy stock photo

vision of sacred history is all-pervasive; despite the passionate debates occurring beneath the great vault of the Temple of Philosophy, what strikes us most of all about The School of Athens is its sense of serene harmony, among Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, extending over thousands of years. The statues of Apollo and Minerva remind us that according to Giles of Viterbo, the ancient divinities were guardian angels, guiding souls toward the ultimate truth of the Holy Trinity. The impact of these two projects for Pope Julius was overwhelming and immediate; together, Michelangelo and Raphael transformed the ideal of painting, not only in Italy, but also in the rest of Europe, just as Bramante was transforming architecture. When Julius died in 1513, the Sistine Chapel ceiling was complete, but Raphael had finished only one room of the papal suite. The impact of New St. Peter’s is the most difficult project to assess today, when the dome of the basilica is (by law) the tallest feature on Rome’s horizon. The destruction of the ancient basilica of St. Peter was vandalism on a breathtaking scale, and its construction site was the largest building project in Rome since classical antiquity. The building that Julius and Bramante had

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figure 15 Donato Bramante, crossing of St. Peter’s Basilica (wide angle view), designed 1506. Vatican City paul rushton/alamy stock photo

in mind was radically different from the building that painfully evolved over the next century. The only real constants were its unprecedented size, its massive two-layered dome, and the shape of the central crossing, with its angled supporting piers: the single element of Bramante’s plan to survive intact (Fig. 15). Leo x, the successor to Julius, retained Raphael without hesitation for the remaining rooms of the papal apartments and also commissioned a set of tapestries to adorn the lowermost section of the Sistine Chapel walls (Fig. 16). Raphael’s full-sized cartoons (preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) were woven into tapestry by the Flemish master Peter van Aelst and his workshop.54 The portly Leo himself appears as a spectator in St. Paul Preaching to the Athenians (directly to Paul’s right), which takes place among structures that look more Roman than Greek.

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For the Vatican tapestries, see the Victoria and Albert Museum, https://www.vam.ac.uk/​ articles/story‑of‑the‑raphael‑cartoons#slideshow=5239394909&slide=0 (consulted 10 July 2023); Sharon Fermor, (1996). The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons: Narrative, Decoration, Design (London: Scala Books / Victoria & Albert Museum, 1996); John Shearman, Raphael’s Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

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figure 16 Peter van Aelst, on a design by Raphael, St. Paul Preaching to the Athenians. 1515– 1521. Tapestry. Vatican Museums, Pinacoteca Vaticana scala/art resource, ny

Leo x was a proud Florentine, the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici “the Magnificent,” and his pontifical name paid homage to the Tuscan city’s symbolic lion, the Marzocco. With these credentials, and riding on the momentum of the indomitable Julius, he established Rome as a great cultural center, especially for the visual arts and architecture, with Raphael and Michelangelo as the two dominant figures, both of them shrewd entrepreneurs as well as incomparable artists. By 1517, however, Leo’s reign had turned problematic: the papal coffers began to run low, and Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar in the Saxon town of Wittenberg, had begun to question the existing system of papal power with increasing cogency. As a result, the great urban plan of Julius ii did not quite stop in its tracks, but it was split up and handed over to private investors. Raphael’s death in 1520, followed four days later by that of his most important private patron, the banker Agostino Chigi, signaled the end of an era. In 1521, as one of the last

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acts of his pontificate, Leo excommunicated Martin Luther, ensuring that the Protestant Reformation would dominate Church policy, including art, for the rest of the century and far beyond.55 As Leo’s successor, the conclave of 1521–1522 chose a compromise candidate, the Grand Inquisitor of Aragon and Castile, Adriaan Florensz, who kept his given name as Pope Adrian vi. The new pontiff took six months to reach Rome from Aragon, and his attempts to reform the Curia on his arrival won him few allies. He had no time for frivolities like art and literature. For the remaining year of his one-and-a-half-year reign, Rome’s litterati mocked him in scurrilous poems, artists sought out cardinals and bankers for commissions, and Pope Adrian struggled with the military advances of Süleiman the Magnificent to the east and the religious advances of the Lutherans to the north. His impressive tomb in the German church of Santa Maria dell’Anima had nothing to do with him. It was commissioned posthumously by his friend, Cardinal Willem van Enckevoirt, and completed in 1533, ten years after Adrian’s death.56 In the conclave of 1523, the cardinals did their best to bring back the glory days of Julius ii and Leo x by electing Leo’s cousin, Giulio de’ Medici, who became Pope Clement vii. As a cardinal, the new pontiff had been an enthusiastic patron of literature, music, and art, and he continued that extensive sponsorship as pope.57 Raphael’s workshop completed their deceased master’s designs for the papal suite in the Apostolic Palace as well as for the marvelous villa on the northern outskirts of Rome that Cardinal Giulio had begun in 1518, now known as Villa Madama.58 Raphael contributed two figures to the last and largest room in the papal suite, the Hall of Constantine, with a daring experiment in oil paint on plaster, but the great fresco showing Constantine’s vision of the Cross guiding the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was executed by his workshop, headed by Giulio Romano, in 1524. A recent restoration has once again revealed

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Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance, 243–254. Renata Samperi, “L’architettura della tomba di Adriano vi in Santa Maria dell’Anima: osservazioni e ipotesi di ricerca,” in Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Howard Burns, Arnaldo Bruschi, Francesco Paolo Fiore, and Pier Nicola Pagliara, eds. Baldassare Peruzzi, 1481–1536 (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 2005), 231–239. Sheryl Reiss and Kenneth Gouwens, eds., The Pontificate of Clement vii: History, Politics, Culture (Farnham: Ashgate 2005). Caterina Napoleone and Claudio Strinati, Villa Madama: Il Sogno di Raffaello (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2007); Yvonne Elet, “Raphael and the Roads to Rome: Designing for Diplomatic Encounters at Villa Madama,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 19:1 (2016), 143–175; Christoph Luitpold Frommel, “Die architektonische Planung der Villa Madama,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 15 (1975), 59–87.

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figure 17 Raphael and workshop, Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 1524. Fresco. Vatican Museums, Sala di Costantino author’s photo

the painting’s vibrant colors (Fig. 17). Raphael’s intense study of classical monuments in Rome extends to every detail of the battle, from the soldier’s armor to the form of the bridge, which still exists today, to the figures of fighting men and horses, drawn from ancient sarcophagi. Constantine’s profile derives from an ancient coin. Seriously devout and an experienced statesman, Clement would be overwhelmed by the turbulence of the world around him. Leo had depleted his treasury, and his diplomatic gifts could not compensate for his indecisiveness when crises erupted all around him. In England, King Henry viii split from the Church by divorcing Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn. François i of France and aspiring Holy Roman Emperor Charles v (he would be crowned in 1530) invaded northern Italy and battled each other on Italian soil. Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent invaded Eastern Europe. And in 1527, Charles v fired a motley troop of Swiss, Italian, and Spanish mercenaries in northern Italy. Rather than slinking homeward, they decided to attack Rome.59 Alaric and the 59

Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome, 1527 (London: Macmillan, 1972); André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Archer Beth [The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1977] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

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Visigoths had sacked Rome in 410, but their raid lasted only three days. The 1527 Sack of Rome subjected the city to six months of atrocities: the Swiss mostly drank and scrawled Lutheran graffiti on frescoed walls, but the Spaniards and Italians raped, tortured, and held prisoners for ransom. Clement managed to escape from the Vatican to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the former mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian, long since turned into a fortress, and eventually withdrew to exile in Orvieto. He returned to Rome in 1530, after having forged a humiliating alliance with Charles v, whom he had crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in the vast Bolognese church of San Petronio, done up for the occasion to look like St. Peter’s. In 1533, a chastened Clement asked his fellow Florentine, Michelangelo, to prepare a new fresco for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, a project that would inevitably obliterate the first popes of the series that decorates the chapel’s walls, including Saint Peter, as well as Pietro Perugino’s hope-filled Nativity and Finding of Moses, all painted for Pope Sixtus iv half a century earlier. Hope may have been one of the theological virtues, but it was not a virtue that inspired Clement after the Sack. He chose a new theme: the Last Judgment.60 Michelangelo accepted the assignment, but showed little enthusiasm for so somber a project. By 1534, Clement was dead, his reputation forever blighted by the Sack of Rome. It had taken the cardinals fifty days to elect the Medici pope in 1523. It took them two days to elect his successor.

5

Reform: Paul iii-Paul iv

As a young cardinal, Alessandro Farnese exemplified all the complexities of the Renaissance Church. He began as the ultimate insider: the eldest son of an old baronial family, he studied humanities at the University of Pisa and at the Medici court in Florence before joining the Curia in 1491. Appointed cardinal at twenty-four in 1493 (for having introduced his sister Giulia to Pope Alexander vi), he continued to live a worldly life, fathering five children with his mistress, Silvia Ruffini, two of them legitimized by Pope Julius ii, and at least one other “natural” son with another lover. All his children, and their children, would eventually benefit from their father’s relentless string-pulling on their behalf. By 1513, however, the worldly cardinal had already begun to turn into a serious reformer, first in his diocese, and then within the Curia itself. 60

Michelangelo refers to the assignment early as a Resurrection, but he may well mean the resurrection of the dead; Marcia Hall, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Resurrection of the Body, the Hidden Clue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Clement vii appointed him Dean of the College of Cardinals, a sign of approval that certainly favored his swift election as Pope Paul iii.61 Reform and nepotism remained the guiding forces of Paul’s pontificate. Among his first appointments to the College of Cardinals were two of his teenaged grandsons, followed by some of the sixteenth century’s greatest reformers: Jacopo Sadoleto, Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, and a future pope, Giovanni Pietro Carafa, Paul iv. In a similar vein, he recognized a new missionary religious order, the Society of Jesus, in 1540. In 1536, Paul announced his intent to call a general church council to address the Protestant challenge, and formed a committee of nine to investigate ways to reform and renew the Catholic Church in hopes of effecting a reconciliation with Luther and his followers, a result much sought after by Holy Roman Emperor Charles v. The committee issued a trenchant report in 1537, the Consilium de emendenda ecclesia, but the Lutheran split was already too deep to heal. As for England, Paul excommunicated Henry viii in 1538. After endless discussions and several false starts, a Catholic Church council finally convened in December 1545 in the Tyrolean city of Trent.62 The elderly pope did not attend in person. As the Council dragged on for the next eighteen years, its initial spirit of reconciliation would turn into intransigence, but by that time Paul iii was long dead. The frustrations of his position and his troubled, war-torn times finally sapped his health, and he died in 1549. Pope Paul’s artistic tastes had been forged in the glory days of Julius ii and Leo x, Raphael and Michelangelo. By the time of his election, Raphael’s workshop had broken up, but Michelangelo, seven years younger than Paul, was as vigorous at an advanced age as the pope himself. The two were friends as well, good enough friends to induce Michelangelo to move to Rome from his beloved Florence and finally begin work on the Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel. The Pope sweetened the offer by commissioning two other frescoes for his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, honoring Rome’s two patron saints, both, according to legend, martyred in the Eternal City in the year 64.63 61

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Bryan Cussen, Pope Paul iii and the Cultural Politics of Reform, 1534–1549 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020); Guido Rebecchini, The Rome of Paul iii: Art, Ritual, and Urban Renewal (London: Harvey Miller, 2020). John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). Antonio Paolucci, Silvia Danesi Squarzina, and Alessandro Zuccari, eds., Michelangelo e la Cappella Paolina. Riflessioni e contributi sull’ultimo restauro (Atti della giornata di studi del 26 maggio 2010, Sapienza—Università di Roma, curata da Alessandro Zuccari) (Vatican City; Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 2016).

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figure 18 Michelangelo, Last Judgment, 1536–1541. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City world history archive/alamy stock photo

Preparations for the Last Judgment included filling in two tall, thin windows and coating the whole wall with new plastering; this work was carried out in 1535. The work of painting took Michelangelo six years, from 1536 to 1541, starting from the top and working downward (Fig. 18). Earlier paintings of the Apocalypse had always contrasted the orderly ranks of the blessed souls headed toward Heaven with the chaos of the damned souls bound for Hell, but Michelangelo’s composition shows a mass of turbulent nudes rotating around the central figure of a muscular, beardless Christ, whose upraised arm has sealed the fate of all souls for all eternity. The Virgin Mary cowers behind him, her work as intercessor done; nothing now can keep the damned from the Inferno. The landscape at the bottom of the fresco

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veers from the verdant meadows of Paradise on the left to the flaming mouth of Hell on the right; a close look into the seething fires (if the chapel’s guards will permit it) reveals a horde of tiny devils painted with the lightest of touches. The chaotic composition and the crush of naked bodies shocked many of the fresco’s early viewers, but Paul defended both the extravagant painting and the artist: souls are naked, after all. The pope’s Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained about the nudes long before the fresco was finished, in time for Michelangelo to immortalize him as a figure from Dante’s Inferno: King Minos of Crete, who assigns each newcomer to Hell a position within its nine rings by wrapping his snaky tail around his body the appropriate number of times. Michelangelo adds a few unfriendly details: Biagio/Minos has the enormous ears of an ass, and the snake-tail, wrapped twice around the king’s ample paunch (signifying the sin of lust), takes a painful bite out of his private parts. Everything about the Last Judgment is extreme: the exaggerated muscles on males and females, the twisted postures, the acid, iridescent colors that flash amid a sea of blues and pale, silvery figures who represent the ethereal glorified bodies of the resurrected dead, not earthly flesh and blood. The Last Judgment provides a perfect portrait of the turmoil that racked this moment in the history of the papacy. In 1545, Michelangelo finally parted with an old friend, who had been standing in his Roman studio for decades: Moses, the centerpiece for the tomb of Pope Julius ii. The monument’s ambitious size had long been reduced and its location shifted from the crossing of St. Peter’s to the ancient basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains), where Giuliano della Rovere had been titular cardinal, but Michelangelo had grown to love his marble image of the majestic Hebrew prophet, sculpted a generation earlier in 1513–1515; affectionately, he would slap its knee and say “Speak, damn you!” (Fig. 19).64 Michelangelo also took the unending project of New St. Peter’s in hand, altering the design of the exterior by binding the façade together with a giant order of columns rather than dividing it into two stories, and tackling the problem of a partially-built dome that had to be demolished before it could be rebuilt safely. He would spend the rest of his life on the project, but the church would not be completed until the following century.65 Paul had met the great Venetian painter Titian in 1543, when he traveled north to meet Emperor Charles v, and sat for a portrait at the age of 75. In

64 65

William Wallace, Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of his Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 9–19. This is the subject of Wallace, God’s Architect.

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figure 19 Michelangelo, Moses, 1513–1515. Marble. San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome prisma archivo/alamy stock photo

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figure 20 Titian, Pope Paul iii with his Grandsons Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Castro, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. 1545–1546. Oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples erich lessing/art resource, ny

1546, Titian came to Rome and painted several more portraits of a visibly aged pontiff, including one of Paul with his two grandsons, Cardinal Alessandro and Duke Ottavio Farnese (Fig. 20).66 66

Clare Robertson, “Portraits of Early Modern Cardinals,” in Mary Hollingsworth, Miles Pattenden, and Arnold Witte, eds., A Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal (Leiden, Brill, 2020), 566–567; Roberto Zapperi, Tiziano, Paolo iii e i suoi nipoti (Turin: Bollati Boringheri,

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Titian’s ability to render textures with his bold, abstract brush strokes must have delighted the pope, but the artist’s psychological insight cut too close; Titian shows the frail old man in his ermine-lined robes, bathed in a dazzling beam of light that singles him out as divinely chosen. With a devastating sidelong glance, the pope shrinks back instinctively as Duke Ottavio bends over him to make an obsequious bow. The elaborate drape in the background has raised the curtain on an unsavory family drama; Paul is said to have died after a violent argument with Cardinal Alessandro, whose position in the portrait makes it look as if he and his grandfather are on the same side—at least for the moment. The conclave of 1549, split over the Council of Trent, elected a Tuscan cardinal known as a moderate reformer, Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, who took the ambitious name Julius iii. As pope, he proved a disappointment; as his gout grew ever more excruciating, he spent most of his energy supervising the construction of a villa just north of Rome’s city wall, the glorious Villa Giulia, designed by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola with contributions from Bartolommeo Ammanati and Giorgio Vasari, and enjoying the luxurious life his office permitted him.67 When Julius died in 1555, the College of Cardinals hoped to restore some stability to the papacy by choosing a distinguished scholar and reformer, Marcello Cervini, Pope Marcellus ii. Unfortunately, Marcellus took ill and died of a stroke twenty-two days after his election, on May 1, 1555. He was succeeded by a pontiff as harsh and intransigent as Marcellus had been moderate and diplomatic: Giovanni Pietro Carafa, Pope Paul iv.68 As a cardinal, Carafa had persuaded Pope Paul iii to establish a Roman version of the Spanish Inquisition, the Holy Office, in 1542. As pope, he turned it into a powerful instrument of intimidation as he sought to impose church reform by authoritarian rule. Within two months of his election, Paul had

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1990); idem, “Tiziano e i Farnese,” in Nicola Spinosa, ed., Tiziano e il ritratto di corte da Raffaello ai Carracci (Naples: Museo e Gallerie di Capodimonte, 2006), 51–56. Tancredi Carunchio, “La Villa di Papa Giulio,” in Anna Maria Sgubini Moretti, Villa Giulia dale origini al 2000: guida breve (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2000), 3–34; Natsumi Nonaka, Renaissance Porticoes and Painted Pergolas: Nature and Culture in Early Modern Italy (New York: Routledge, 2017), 104–114; Denis Ribouillaut, “Julius iii’s Tower of the Winds: A Forgotten Aspect of Villa Giulia,” in Machtelt Israëls and Louis Waldman, eds., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Villa I Tatti, 2013), 1: 474–484. Giampiero Brunelli, “Marcello ii, papa,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 69 (2007), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/papa‑marcello‑ii_(Dizionario‑Biografico); Antonio Santosuosso, “An Account of the Election of Paul iv to the Pontificate,” Renaissance Quarterly, 31:4 (1978), 486–498.

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confined the Jews of Rome to a walled ghetto, where they would remain in miserable conditions for the next 300 years. Though Paul’s older cousin, Cardinal Olivero Carafa, had been a discerning patron of art, such frivolities had no place in his own agenda; one of his first acts as pope was to cut off the pension of 80-year-old Michelangelo. He complained loudly about the indecent nudes of the Last Judgment, and threatened to cover them, but this threat, at least, was one on which he never acted. He did begin a rustic retreat on the grounds of the Vatican, called his “house in the woods” in 1558, a one-storey building with a fountain. He spent much of his time in that sylvan retreat rather than in the Apostolic Palace.

6

Reform and Renewal: Pius iv-Gregory xiii

The pope’s death in 1559 put the end to a reign of terror. The conclave that followed was predictably long and tormented, settling at last on a Milanese cardinal, Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici, who used the same coat of arms as the Florentine Medici. He was not really a relative, but he hoped to evoke their idea of Rome as an ideal Christian capital of faith and culture.69 The pope’s name, Pius iv, evoked memories of the Sienese popes Pius ii and Pius iii, another comforting sign. Once in office, Pius pushed for a reforming the Church by more gentle means than his hated predecessor, reconvening the languishing Council of Trent in 1562, and pressing it to an end. The Council issued its final decrees in 1563; its 25th session specifically addressed the role of art and architecture in church life.70 Protestant iconoclasts had destroyed “graven images” in violent campaigns throughout England, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, but the Council strove to preserve religious art. The vague language of its prescriptions left artists a good deal of freedom to experiment, although a few limits were certain: the visual riddles that delighted Italian artists from Botticelli in the fifteenth century to Bronzino in the sixteenth were to be sacrificed for clarity: the faithful should be able to recognize the figures they saw in order to draw meaning from the sacred stories. And Michelangelo’s Last Judgment definitely had too many nudes, presented at undignified angles. Pius waited until the great man’s death at eighty-eight before engaging a for-

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Miles Pattenden, Pius iv and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). John W. O’Malley, “Art, Trent, and Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment,’”Religions, 3 (2012), 344– 356; Jesse Locker, ed., Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance: After Trent (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

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figure 21 Pirro Ligorio, Casino of Pius iv, 1562. Vatican Gardens zoonar gmbh/alamy stock photo

mer student, Daniele da Volterra, to introduce a series of discreet drapes and loincloths in 1565.71 For his efforts, Daniele earned the name “Braghettone”— “Mr. Britches.” The most provocative image of them all, King Minos/Biagio da Cesena, he left untouched. Pius remodeled Paul iv’s “house in the woods” as a more elaborate “casino”, entrusting the overall design to the imaginative Neapolitan architect Pirro Ligorio and execution of the frescoes to a team of young painters, including the great Federico Barocci of Urbino, who would set a colorful, inventive precedent for future religious art, with vibrant hues, classically-inspired figures, and extravagant stucco work in the antique style.72 Completed in 1562, just before 71

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Fabrizio Mancinelli, “The Painting of the Last Judgment: History, Technique, and Restoration,” in Loren Partridge, Gianluigi Colalucci and Fabrizio Mancinelli, eds. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: A Glorious Restoration (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997), 155–186; Vittoria Romana, “Ricciarelli, Daniele, detto Daniele da Volterra,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 87 (2016): https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ricciarelli‑daniele‑detto‑daniele​ ‑da‑volterra_%28Dizionario‑Biografico%29/. Daria Borghese, ed., La Casina di Pio iv in Vaticano (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2010); Arnold Nesselrath, “Pirro Ligorio’s Casino of Pius iv Reconsidered, or, Why People Love Ligorio’s Buildings,” in Fernando Loffredo and Ginette Vagenheim, eds., Pirro Ligorio’s

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the Council of Trent issued its final decrees, the richly ornamented Casino of Pius iv provided artists with the leeway they needed to continue exulting in their craft. Pius iv died in December 1565, succeeded by one of his most stubborn adversaries, the Dominican Michele Ghislieri, a protégé of Charles Borromeo.73 The new pope’s chosen name Pius v declared his stern personal mission rather than any homage to previous pontiffs. His austere reign included good works like aggressive action against famine, improving Rome’s water supply, abolishing the office of court jester, and banning bull-fights, along with a stern interpretation of church reform. He leveled stringent laws against blasphemy, horseracing, and homosexuality, and debated whether to sell off the Vatican’s collection of ancient statues, which he regarded as pagan idols. An implacable enemy of Protestants and infidels, he excommunicated Elizabeth i and spearheaded the Holy League that defeated the Ottoman fleet at the battle of Lepanto in 1571. He died the following year. He was canonized in 1712. The conclave of 1572 lasted less than twenty-four hours. Amazingly, Cardinal Ugo Buoncompagni of Bologna satisfied nearly everyone; he had been a distinguished professor of law, an effective administrator for the Church, and an energetic reformer in a milder mode than Pius v.74 His name, Gregory xiii, paid homage to Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory xiii is best known today for his reform of the calendar (1573), an effort he entrusted to the Jesuit Christopher Clavius, but he was also a fervent promoter of education, founding several universities and approving the Oratorian congregation of the future saint Philip Neri, which used education, scholarship, art, and music to bring church teachings to the greater public. Gregory also streamlined the curial bureaucracy. His foreign policy was ruthlessly anti-Protestant: it included celebrating the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Huguenots in 1572 with a Te Deum in Rome.

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Worlds: Antiquarianism, Erudition, and the Visual Arts in the Late Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 181–199; Carmelo Occhipinti, “Pirro Ligorio and St. Peter’s Basilica: More on the Historical-Christian Investigations and on a Medieval ‘Reuse’ in the Casino of Pius iv,” ibid., 200–217; Robert W. Gaston, “Pirro Ligorio, the Casino of Pius iv, and Antiques for the Medici: Some New Documents,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 47 (1984), 205–209. Pius v was canonized in 1712. For his biography, see Simona Feci, “Pio v, santo,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 83 (2015): https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pio‑v‑papa‑santo​ _%28Dizionario‑Biografico%29/. Claudio Cieri Via, Ingrid D. Rowland, and Marco Ruffini, eds., Unità e frammenti di modernità: Arte e scienza nella Roma di Gregorio xiii Boncompagni (1572–1585) (Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2012).

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figure 22 Giorgio Vasari, The Battle of Lepanto, 1572–1573. Fresco. Sala Regia, Vatican City scala/art resource, ny

Unlike his predecessor, Gregory was an enthusiastic sponsor of art and architecture. His long reign and generous patronage encouraged artists to experiment further with elaborate stucco work, brilliant colors, and classically-inspired figures in exotic clothing and extravagant poses. In 1572, he engaged the elderly Giorgio Vasari, by then the famous author of two editions of The Lives of the Artists (1550 and 1568) as well as a successful painter and architect, to decorate the Vatican’s Sala Regia with frescoes of the Battle of Lepanto and other triumphs of the Church. In 1578, Gregory also commissioned the first interior space of the new St. Peter’s to be usable for liturgy, the Cappella Gregoriana, designed by the redoubtable architect Giacomo della Porta. Beneath a domed portion of the basilica’s massive crossing, it set a magnificent precedent with walls and pavement covered, like the monuments of ancient Rome, in polychrome marbles and glittering, expensive mosaic. Its decorative themes incorporated parts of the old basilica (like the altar of the Madonna of Succour), and reflected the Pope’s Marian devotion (the Annunciation, the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel), and what Lex Bosman has termed “a geographical and spatial ideal of Chris-

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tian ecumenism,” with four Doctors of the Church, two from the Latin West (Jerome and Gregory the Great) and two from the Greek East (Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus). It was significantly remodeled in the eighteenth century.75 In a similar ecumenical spirit, Gregory commissioned the extraordinary Gallery of Maps in 1580 for a long corridor the Vatican Palace, detailed views of the Italian peninsula based on drawings by Ignazio Danti, mathematician, geographer, cosmographer, and Dominican friar, elegantly framed by elaborate stucco and grotesques. Like the Cappella Gregoriana, the Gallery confronts the turmoil of the sixteenth centory by presenting a serene vision of an orderly world under secure Catholic governance (Fig. 23).76 Gregory’s successor, Sixtus v, the former Felice Peretti Montalto, reigned for only five years, 1585–1590, but he used those years with astounding efficiency to promote Rome as a capital city to rival the other great cities of Europe.77 In an ambitious scheme of urban planning, he put in new roads to accommodate the latest in transportation, the horse-drawn carriage, and simplified the pilgrim routes through the Eternal City’s labyrinthine streets. With the help of a brilliant young architect and engineer, Domenico Fontana, he transported four ancient Egyptian obelisks to strategic points in the city as lofty signposts for visitors on the main roads into Rome: one in front of St. Peter’s, one at the northerly Porta del Popolo, one on the Quirinal Hill, and one behind the ancient basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, the church where he also began to erect his lavish mortuary chapel (Rome’s second Sistine Chapel, dedicated to Sixtus v rather than Sixtus iv). The most stunning pictorial record of the pope’s reign was commissioned as part of another of his massive projects, the expansion of the Vatican Library.78 The vast vault of the library’s new reading room, 75

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Kaspar Zollikofer, Die Cappella Gregoriana: Der erste Innenraum von Neu-Sankt-Peter in Rom und seine Genese. Bibliotheca Helvetica Romana 36 (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2016); Lex Bosman, review of Zollikofer, Die Cappella Gregoriana, Renaissance Quarterly, 71:2 (2018), 677. Lucio Gambi and Antonio Pinelli, eds., La Galleria delle Carte geografiche in Vaticano / The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, 3 vols. (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1994); Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Politics, and Cartography in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 169–230. Judith Testa, Rome is Love Spelled Backward: Enjoying Art and Architecture in the Eternal City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 196–204; Peter Stefan, “Rom unter Sixtus v. Stadtplanung als Verräumlichung von Heilsgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 72:2 (2009), 165–214; Alessandro Zuccari, I pittori di Sisto v (Rome: Palombi, 1992). Massimo Ceresa, La Biblioteca Vaticana tra Riforma cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590) (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012), 379–417; Alessandro Zuccari, “Una Babele pittorica ben composta. Gli affreschi sistini della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,” in La Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ed. Ambrogio M. Piazzoni (Milan: Jaca Book, 2012), 266–307.

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figure 23 Ignazio Danti, Panorama of Venice, from the Hall of Maps, 1580–1582. Fresco. Vatican Museums scala/art resource, ny

the Salone Sistino (Fig. 24), frescoed by Cesare Nebbia and Giovanni Guerra, presents the history of human writing, from Adam’s primordial script through Greeks, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Hebrews, Chaldaeans, to China and Japan; Gregory xiii and Sixtus hosted the first Japanese ambassadors to Rome in 1585. The Salone also records all of the pope’s efforts in urban planning and architecture.

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figure 24 Cesare Nebbia and Giovanni Guerra, Salone Sistino, 1589. Fresco. Vatican Library vatican 2008/alamy stock photo

Like the Gallery of Maps, it proclaims a vision of the Church rooted in respect for the importance of literature and the arts to the apostolic ends of enhancing personal faith and in communicating the Christian message to the rest of the world, incorporating a broadened version of ancient wisdom, persuasive rather than coercive. A recent restoration of this magnificent space is meant to demonstrate that a similar spirit motivates the Vatican Library today. Despite the short reigns of this energetic pope’s successors (Urban vii reigned for twelve days in 1590, Gregory xiv for eleven months between 1590 and 1591, and Innocent ix for two months of 1591), papal Rome continued to attract and nurture the era’s leading artists. The tastes of Pope Clement viii, elected in February of 1592, focused on figures like Giuseppe Cesari, the “Cavalier of Arpino,” who is best known now because he briefly employed a painter who had already begun to attract attention in the last decade of the sixteenth century: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. In 1597, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, grandson of that Ottavio Farnese who bows so obsequiously in Titian’s portrait of Paul iii, invited the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci to come to Rome and execute a series of frescoes for the Roman palazzo commissioned by the future Paul iii in 1518. The next chapter in the history of art and the papacy, the era we call Baroque, was already underway.

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Bibliography Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Fiorani, Francesca. The Marvel of Maps: Art, Politics, and Cartography in Renaissance Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Frommel, Christoph Luitpold, “Papal Policy: The Planning of Rome During the Renaissance,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1986), 39–65. Grafton, Anthony, ed. Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale, 1993. Karmon, David. The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Lewine, Carol. The Sistine Chapel Walls and the Roman Liturgy. University Park, PA: Penn State, 1993. Locker, Jesse, ed. Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance: After Trent. Leiden: Brill, 2018. McCahill, Elizabeth. Reviving the Eternal City, Rome and the Papal Court, 1420–1447. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. O’Malley, John W. Trent: What Happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Rebecchini, Guido, The Rome of Paul iii: Art, Ritual, and Urban Renewal. London: Harvey Miller, 2020. Reiss, Sheryl, and Kenneth Gouwens, eds. The Pontificate of Clement vii: History, Politics, Culture. Farnham: Ashgate 2005. Rowland, Ingrid D. The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Smith, Christine, Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice. [Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 317]. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006. Stinger, Charles. The Renaissance in Rome. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Temple, Nicholas, Renovatio Urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius ii. New York: Routledge, 2011. Venchi, Innocenzo, Renate Colella, Arnold Nesselrath, Carlo Giantomassi, and Donatella Zari, Fra Angelico and the Chapel of Nicholas v. Vatican City: Musei Vaticani, 1999. Wallace, William. Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of his Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

chapter 7

Relations with National States: 1400–1600 Silvano Giordano

The Council of Constance (1414–1418) marked a turning point in relations between the papacy and political power. During the Avignon period (1305– 1378), the papacy took advantage of the claims elaborated in the course of the thirteenth century that situated it on the summit of Christianitas as Vicar of Christ and dominus beneficiorum, with a wide control of ecclesiastical administration. Some new elements manifested themselves during the fourteenth century: the complex relationship with the kings of France, apart from the clash between Boniface viii and Philip the Fair, and the long fight with the emperor, that concluded with the secularization of the empire ratified by the Golden Bull issued by Charles iv in 1356. Relationships internal to Christianitas had changed in a definitive way. The Great Western Schism begun in 1378, brought into light the weakness of the papacy, incapable of determining the legitimacy of the claimants to the throne of Peter. The thirty-six years-long schism allowed the emergence of a new system of relations, founded on the autonomy of the European princes and on the aggregation of national realities that were aspiring to control their own territories, including religious institutions, that followed a new path with respect to the developments of the Latin Church from the eleventh century.1

1 Always useful for an overview of this period is the work of Ludwig, Freiherr von Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters. Vol. 1–11 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1886–1927), translated into various languages. In addition, see Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, Das Papsttum. Grundzüge seiner Geschichte von der Antike bis zur Renaissance ([Darmstadt]: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984); Maria Antonietta Visceglia, ed., Papato e politica internazionale nella prima Età moderna (Rome: Viella, 2013); and Nelson H. Minnich, Councils of the Catholic Reformation. Pisa i (1409) to Trent (1545–1563) (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2008). For biographies of the popes, see: John Norman Davidson Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Enciclopedia dei Papi. Vols. 2–3, (Rome, 2000), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/elenco‑opere/​ Enciclopedia_dei_Papi; Philippe Levillain and John W. O’Malley, eds., The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2002); John W. O’Malley, A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Juan María Laboa, Historia de los Papas: entre el reino de Dios y las pasiones terrenales (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2013). The decrees of the councils are edited in Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta, vol. ii–iii (Turnhout: Brepols Publisher, 2010–2013).

© Silvano Giordano, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_008

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The papacy had to re-adjust itself to confront the European political situation that saw the rise of national states, religious controversies that resulted in the Protestant Reformation and in confessional pluralism, and the broadening of geographic horizons following the explorations and conquests of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Apart from papal effort to organize a territorial state, the Papal States that were a partial guarantee of its autonomy and independence and were placed at the base of a new universalism, the papacy promoted itself after many uncertainties as the “common father” of all Christians, a concept that led to the foundation of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in 1622. The two centuries under analysis can be divided into different stages. The first, which continued until the end of the mid fifteenth century, is characterized by the stabilization of the papal relationships with the European nations in the course of the Council of Basel (which ended in 1449), and from an initial clarification of the Italian situation, signaled by the peace of Lodi (1454); the second period saw the development of the Renaissance papacy that adopted patronage as an instrument of government and gave rise to the formation of the Ecclesiastical State, which ended with the pontificate of Clement vii (1523– 1534); the third period, characterized by a new way of understanding the pontiff’s role as the “common father,” culminating with the mediation of Vervins (1598) and of Lyon (1601), structured itself around the paradigm elaborated by the Council of Trent.2 The politics of the pontiffs acted on a double register: the international fora that characterized the great choices of political-religious influence and the local sphere in which the pope confronted the Italian lordships and the baronial Roman families, also involved in both the international and local political dialectic. On November 11, 1417, Cardinal Oddone Colonna, elected pope with the name of Martin v, confronted a rather fragmented reality. The council assembled at Constance had reconstituted the unity of the Church, but at the same time it had been organized into nationes, that is, into groups with sectoral interests, widely supported by princes, and oriented towards particularism, rather than to a unitary vision.3 One important issue brought up by the conciliar discussions concentrated on the reform of the Church, particularly on the relationship between the local churches and the papacy, which intended to overcome the centralism practiced 2 Paolo Prodi, Il paradigma tridentino: un’epoca della storia della Chiesa (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2010). 3 Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Konstanz, 1414–1418 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1991–1998) and Das Konstanzer Konzil 1414–1418, Weltereignis des Mittelalters. Katalog, ed. Badischen Landesmuseum (Darmstadt: Theiss, wbg-Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2014).

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by the Avignon papacy.4 A sensitive issue was the provision of benefices, with its important consequences over the balance of power and over the economic and financial relationships. The council wanted to respect the rights of the ordinary collators: bishops and abbots were to have been elected by their respective chapters and confirmed by the pope. An alternative system was valid for other benefices: the pope disposed of two thirds of the nominations, while a third being reserved to the ordinary. The reform decrees were approved on March 21, 1418; nevertheless, the council disbanded without having completed the work, making that task the responsibility of the pope. Martin v preferred to deal with the nationes, rather than with princes, and signed five concordats which layed down the method of appointing bishops and abbots, and established the principles of ecclesiastical finances, dealing with the taxes to be sent by the local church to the Roman curia. The French concordat, signed on June 10, 1418, to last for five years, and a model for other agreements, provided for the restoration of the election of bishops and abbots that had to be confirmed by the pope if they had an income of over 200 livres [libbre]. For collated benefices the alternative system was maintained. The annate payment, the equivalent of a year’s income from a benefice, remained in force, but the amounts were halved. Furthermore, concordats were signed with the Italian nations, whose text was lost, Spanish (May 13), and German (April 15), with similar contents and duration. On July 21 the agreement with the English nation was concluded, with unlimited duration, trying to regulate the intervention of the papacy in the affairs of the local church, while the norms regarding the collation of benefices, the annates, and the appeals to Rome were already determined by the laws of the kingdom. There remained the problem of where to settle the pontifical seat. Discarding the different proposals, the pope wanted a place where the power was supported by his own family, thus reconstituting the Ecclesiastical State with the goal of safeguarding its own independence through territorial support and financial help. Thanks to the alliances woven with the sovereigns of the kingdom of Naples, with Florence, whose bankers controlled the papal collectors, and with the Visconti, the lords of Milan, the pope was able to defeat the leader Braccio da Montone, who tried to occupy Rome, and retake control of Umbria, the main region of his domains.5

4 Conciliarismo, Stati nazionali, inizi dell’Umanesimo. Atti del xxiv convegno storico internazionale, Todi 9–12 ottobre 1988. (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1990). 5 Maria Chiabò, Concetta Ranieri, et al., eds. Alle origini della nuova Roma: Martino v (1417– 1431). Atti del convegno, Roma, 2–5 marzo 1992 (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992).

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The pontificate of Eugenius iv, successor to Martin v in 1431, was marked by the conflict with the council that opened at Basel in December of 1431, convoked by his predecessor according to the agreements signed at Constance.6 The clash sharpened progressively, despite the mediation attempts negotiated by the cardinal legate Giuliano Cesarini and by Sigismund, the king of the Romans, who in May of 1433 went to Rome to receive imperial coronation. The pope, allied with the Medici family that came to power in Florence in 1434 under Cosimo the Elder, was able to pursue the fight with the council that was transferred to Ferrara in 1437, thanks to Cosimo’s financial help. In reaction, at Basel on November 5, 1439 the duke of Savoy Amadeus viii was elected pope, who took the name of Felix v. The council of Basel originally was supported by numerous sovereigns, among them the king of the Romans. The assembly of the clergy of France, convoked at Bourges in 1432 by King Charles vii, declared itself favorable to the council and urged the king to send his representatives. A new assembly of clergy reunited again at Bourges in June of 1438 to discuss the reform decrees issued at Basel and to adapt them to the local situation. The king promulgated the resulting text, known as the Pragmatic sanction, which reestablished elections to ecclesiastical offices by the ordinary collators and allowed the king and the princes of the kingdom the possibility “to beseech benignly and benevolently” in favor of the determined subjects, provided that they not accompany it through the use of violence. All pontifical taxes were abolished and lawsuits were transferred to ordinary tribunals. The determinations of the assembly were situated within a process begun a century before, according to which the Church of the kingdom of France elaborated its own way, aimed to restore the ancient discipline. It placed itself under the protection of the king, yet without disregarding the spiritual magisterium of the pope. In this project, one can recognize the roots of Gallicanism. Nevertheless, the arrangement established by the Pragmatic sanction did not fail to create problems: the king, recognizing the power of bishops and abbots, tried to impose his own candidates, and the pope had to intervene several times, after being brought into the case by the chapters and by the king. The Pragmatic sanction was contested by the episcopate of southern France that was closer to the pope than to the council.7

6 Michiel Decaluwe, A Successful Defeat. Eugene iv’s Struggle with the Council of Basel for Ultimate Authority in the Church, 1431/1449 (Bruxelles: Institut historique belge de Rome, 2009). 7 Noël Valois, Histoire de la Pragmatique Sanction de Bourges sous Charles vii. (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1906).

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The king of Castile, allied to the French, maintained his oscillating view, but later opposed the deposition of Eugenius iv (June 1439).8 The position of the king of Aragon was conditioned by the affairs of the kingdom of Naples: initially he supported the council, he then adopted a neutral attitude, and finally in 1439 reconciled with the pope, who recognized Alfonso v as king of the Two Sicilies and gave him investiture in 1443. The same year Scotland rendered obedience to the pope. England, which had supported the attempt of the German electoral princes to mediate between the pope and the council, in order to preserve the union with the Greeks reached at Florence, placed itself formally on the side of the pope on April 23, 1440.9 In the empire after the death of Sigismund (December 9, 1437), the electoral princes set themselves to reconcile the pope and the council. The Instrumentum acceptationis, published at Mainz in 1439, did not obtain the hoped for effects, inasmuch as it was not able to impede the rupture between Eugenius iv and Basel. The Diets of Mainz (1441) and Frankfurt (1442) maintained neutrality with respect to the two contenders, determining also the position of the king of the Romans Albert ii (1438–1439). Frederick iii instead in 1445 rendered obedience to Eugenius iv, asking in exchange for the creation of the diocese of Vienna and the reorganization of diocesan boundaries in the southeastern area, which did not have effect due to the opposition of the bishops. At the Diet of Aschaffenburg (1447) the electoral princes, despite some internal opposition, recognized Eugenius iv through the so-called Concordat of Princes, thus preparing the way for the accord between Frederick iii and Nicholas v, sealed at Vienna in 1448, known as The German Concordat. It incorporated in part the pacts signed in 1418 and regulated the relationships between the Church of the empire and the Holy See until the beginning of the nineteenth century.10 The accord determined the end of the council, which under the control of the king of France had transferred from Basel to Lausanne. Two years later, the concordat was adopted by the king Christian i in Denmark. At the time of the schism, the kings of Denmark had remained faithful to the Roman obedience, according to a political bent retaken after the parentheses of the council of Basel. The king, and successively his wife Dorothy, went to Rome

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Óscar Villarroel González, El rey y el papa. Política y diplomacia en los albores del Renacimiento (el siglo xv en Castilla) (Madrid: Sílex ediciones, 2009). Margaret Harvey, England, Rome and the Papacy 1417–1464. The Study of a Relationship, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993). Andreas Meyer, “Das Wiener Konkordat von 1448. Eine erfolgreiche Reform des Spätmittelalters,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 66 (1986), 108–152.

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where they obtained from the pope the faculty of intervening in the naming of ecclesiastical offices and of erecting a university, which was established at Copenhagen on June 1, 1459.11 Also, Poland drew benefit from the concordat, in as much as Nicholas v in 1447 conceded to the king Casimir iv Jagiellon control of numerous benefices. The Polish bishops had participated at the council as part of the German nation and had rendered obedience to Felix v. The University of Krakow, which intervened in the polemic to favor the pope elected by the council, was the last European university to recognize Nicholas v on July 3, 1449.12 In Hungary, considered the bastion of Christianity against the Turkish expansion, the sovereigns enjoined a broad authority over the Church regarding the provision of ecclesiastical benefices according to the tradition rising in the fourteenth century, codified in 1404, and confirmed at the council of Constance in 1417.13 In the summer of 1448, Charles vii of France returned to Roman obedience. Devoid of the support of France and of the Empire, the council received the resignation of Felix v, recognized Nicholas v as legitimate pontiff, and disbanded on April 25, 1449. The jubilee of 1450 celebrated the retrieved centrality of Rome. Having once again regularized relationships with the great European monarchies, Nicholas v (1447–1455) was able to concentrate on the Italian situation. The accords with sovereigns ratified in an expressed or tacit manner had assured the spiritual authority of the pontiff. Nevertheless, they were reached through concessions to princes and to local clergy that involved the cession of competence and the reduction of the fiscal revenue received by the Curia. To compensate for the missing income, the pontiffs effected a reorganization of the Patrimonium Sancti Petri, exploiting the resources at their disposal. Nicholas v focused on the maintenance of peace on the Italian peninsula. In 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, he convoked a congress at Rome that saw representatives of Naples, Florence, Venice, and Milan come together in the month of November; nevertheless, the conferences proved fruitless. An accord was reached at Lodi on April 9, 1454, through the initiative of Venice, but with the absence of representatives of the pope and of the king in Naples

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Martin Schwarz Lausten, A Church History of Denmark, transl. by Frederick H. Cryer (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 59–67. Jerzy Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71. Péter Tusor, The Papal Consistories and Hungary in the 15th–16th Centuries. To the History of the Hungarian Royal Patronage and Supremacy. (Budapest and Roma: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia—ppke Lendület Church History Research Institute, 2012), 35–60.

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who ratified the treaty only one year later. The Italian league thus had its origin and it established an equilibrium among the various Italian States, delineating respective interests in the frame of a global accord.14 A long conflict with the king of Bohemia, George of Poděbrady, began during the pontificate of Pius ii (1458–1464). The relationships between Rome and Bohemia were debated for decades, beginning with the mission of the legate Giuliano Cesarini in 1431 at the time of the Hussite wars. At the time of his coronation in 1458, the king swore to abolish the Four Articles of Prague (1420) approved by the council of Basel (1433), but the circumstances of the kingdom did not allow him to do it. In 1462, the curia abolished the Articles and excommunicated and deposed the king as a heretic (1466). However, thanks to the support of the emperor, he was able to be restored to the throne until his death (1471).15 Sixtus iv (1471–1484) began a politics of systematic nepotism, already partly actualized in the preceding pontificates of Calixtus iii and Pius ii, through the insertion of his relatives into the government of the Church. There were two famous cardinals, Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere, whom he created in December of 1471. Particularly conflicted were his relations with Florence, due to political and economic factors; other disagreements were of an ecclesiastical nature regarding the choice of the archbishops of Florence and of Pisa and the reluctance of the pope to create a cardinal of the Medici family. In this climate, an attempt to overthrow Lorenzo de’ Medici developed, known as the Pazzi conspiracy, perpetrated in the cathedral of Florence on April 26, 1438, where Giuliano was killed, while Lorenzo succeeded in saving himself. Thanks to the mediation of the emperor Frederick iii, of the king of France Louis ix, and of Edward iv of England, reconciliation was established between the Holy See and Florence on December 3, 1480. The fall of Otranto into the hands of the Turks (August 11, 1480) produced a moment of truce; nevertheless in 1482 warfare resumed between Italian princes for the possession of Ferrara, concluding in 1484. Particularly problematic were relationships of the pope with Louis xi, king of France. In 1472 a concordat was concluded, strongly opposed by the Parlement of Paris. But in 1475 relations deteriorated; the king promulgated different ordinances of a Gallican nature and threatened to convoke a council. 14

15

Giuseppe L Coluccia, Niccolò v umanista, papa e riformatore: renovatio politica e morale. (Venice: Marsilio, 1998); Antonio Manfredi and Franco Bonatti, eds. Niccolò v nel sesto centenario della nascita. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi: Sarzana, 8–10 ottobre 1998. (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 2000). Václav Filip and Karl Borchardt, Schlesien, Georg von Podiebrad und die römische Kurie, (Würzburg, Karlstadt [Main]: Verein für Geschichte Schlesiens, 2005).

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Sixtus iv favored the marriage between Zoe, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, having taken refuge at Rome, and the Grand Duke Ivan iii, celebrated in 1472, in hope of obtaining help against the Turks; nevertheless, having left Italy the princess renounced Roman obedience. Contemporaries had already recognized that Sixtus iv privileged the interests of his family and the temporal considerations of the Ecclesiastical State over spiritual and religious questions, comporting himself more like an Italian prince involved in the political struggles of the peninsula than as the head of the Church. In particular, he was reprimanded for the abuse of using spiritual weapons, namely excommunication and interdict, in his conflicts with Florence and Venice for purely temporal goals.16 The conclave of 1484 had as protagonist the cardinal Giuliano della Rovere who, too young to aspire to the tiara, favored the election of his trusted man, the cardinal Giovanni Battista Cybo, who rose to the pontificate with the name of Innocent viii. In the first months of 1485, the pope, allying himself with Venice, entered into conflict with the king Ferrante of Naples. Innocent viii supported the revolt of the Angevin party that erupted in the last months of 1485. Milan and Matthias Corvino, the king of Hungry and son-in-law of Ferrante, intervened in the contest to aid the king of Naples. Innocent viii made an appeal to Emperor Frederick iii, who needed the support of the pontiff to secure the recognition of his son Maximillian as king of the Romans. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile also demonstrated their interests in the Italian situation, supporting their Neapolitan cousins while still engaged in the war of Granada. The pope and the Neapolitan rebel barons looked to Charles viii of France and René ii of Anjou, duke of Lorraine; nonetheless, France for financial reasons was unable to organize a military expedition. Innocent viii sought an alliance with Lorenzo de’ Medici that was ratified by the marriage between his son Franceschetto and Maddalena, daughter of Lorenzo, celebrated on June 20, 1488. In 1491 the pope conferred on Franceschetto the county of Anguillara: he was the first son of a pontiff to be invested with territory of the Church, a practice adopted later by Paul iii and Gregory xiii in the next century. The granting of the red hat (March 9, 1489) to the thirteen-year-old Giovanni, son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the future Leo x, opened the doors of the College of Cardinals to the great Italian princely families. 16

Massimo Miglio et al. Un Pontificato ed una città: Sisto iv (1471–1484). Atti del convegno, Roma, 3–7 dicembre 1984 (Rome: Associazione Roma nel Rinascimento, 1986); Claudio Crescentini and Fabio Benzi, eds., Sisto iv: le arti a Roma nel primo Rinascimento: atti del Convegno internazionale di studi. Roma, 23–25 ottobre 1997 (Rome: Associazione culturale Shakespeare and Company 2, 2000).

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The pontificate of Innocent viii was problematically weak and concentrated on affairs of the Italian peninsula. His control on the Ecclesiastical State continued to be precarious: there were revolts in Romagna and Perugia and for a while the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvino, occupied Ancona in his disputes with Venice. A new phase opened itself with Alexander vi (1492–1503).17 His election represented the victory of the party led by Ascanio Sforza, who made Ludovico Il Moro head of the duchy of Milan, over the party of Giuliano della Rovere supported by the king of Naples. With the promotion of September 20, 1493, Alexander vi appointed his trusted men to be part of the College of Cardinals. His opposition, led by Giuliano della Rovere, turned to the king of France, at whose court and in Avignon the cardinal took refuge. In September of 1494, Charles viii made agreements with Spain and the Empire and travelled to Italy to conquer the kingdom of Naples, on which he vaunted his rights that originated from his maternal grandmother, Marie of Anjou. He entered Rome on December 31. The pope granted him permission to cross his states to Naples, but did not concede to him investiture of the kingdom. Instead, he joined the Holy League (March 31, 1495), the first alliance signed to provide equilibrium in Europe, concluded among Milan, Venice, Spain, and the Empire, which defeated the French king at Fornovo, while on his retreat to his homeland. The expedition of Charles viii marked the end of the period of equilibrium among the Italian powers begun with the peace of Lodi (1454) and initiated the war of Italy, combated by the continental powers, in particular France and Spain, for the control of the Peninsula. Connected to the expedition of Charles viii and to the difficult relationships between the pope and Florence was the affair of the Dominican Girolamo Savonarola, prior of the convent of Saint Mark in Florence, a popular preacher who propounded a reform of the Church and of the morals of citizens. Alexander vi, who saw in the friar the principal obstacle to removing Florence from France, prohibited him to preach. Savonarola initially obeyed, but afterwards by order of the Signoria resumed preaching with a strong accent on hostility against the Court of Rome. The pope tried to win him over, offering him the cardinal’s hat; but confronted with his disobedience, he excommunicated him (May 13, 1497). Initially the friar was protected by Florentine authorities; nevertheless, entering into conflict with the citizen factions, 17

Ivan Cloulas, Les Borgia (Paris: Fayard, 1987); Maria Chiabò, Silvia Maddalo, et al., eds. Roma di fronte all’Europa al tempo di Alessandro vi: Atti del convegno: Città del VaticanoRoma, 1–4 dicembre 1999, 3 vols. [Pubblicazioni degli archivi di Stato, Saggi 68] (Rome: Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, 2001).

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he was abandoned by his supporters and, after a manipulated process, was put to death on May 23, 1498.18 In the second half of the fifteenth century, Rome became the focal point for the diplomacy of all Europe. In the last decade of the century, numerous diplomatic residences were accredited there and also the Holy See, from the beginning of 1492, adopted the common practice with the appointment of Francisco des Prats as resident nuncio to the Catholic kings. At the end of the pontificate of Clement vii (1523–1534), the pope had diplomatic representation established in the Empire, in France, in Spain, and in Venice, while the other states of Europe received papal postings in more or less prolonged missions according to the circumstances.19 In 1500, Cesare Borgia, son of Alexander vi, having resigned the cardinal’s hat, began a military campaign in the Ecclesiastical State with the support of France. The objective seemed to be the creation of a personal state within the territory of the Church, which responded to the nepotistic prospect of constituting a principality belonging to the relatives of popes. At the end of 1501 his sister Lucretia became the spouse of Alfonso d’Este, son of the duke of Ferrara, thus guaranteeing control of a territory that Venice never permitted Cesare to conquer. Half way through 1503, the Borgias controlled all the papal regions.20 In the course of this process, the pope had consolidated relationships with the principal mercantile houses and European banks, linking them to the Curia: the Medici, the Sienese Agostino Chigi, financier of the military campaign in Romagna, and the Fugger family that in 1495 began to lend substantial sums to the papacy. The Borgia’a Spanish origins favored relationships of Alexander vi with Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.21 Married in 1469, they reunited under their dominion most territories of the Iberian Peninsula through the conquest of Granada (1492) and of the kingdom of Navarre (1512). At the end of 1492, after the first fortunate expedition of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish also began the exploration of the discovered territories, joining the movement that the Portuguese had commenced in 1415 with the conquest of Ceuta. In the 18 19 20

21

Lauro Martines, Savonarola. Moralità e politica a Firenze nel Quattrocento (Milan: Mondadori, 2008). Paolo Prodi, Il sovrano pontefice: un corpo e due anime: la monarchia papale nella prima età moderna. new ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006), 308–322. Carla Frova and Maria Grazia Nico Ottaviani, eds. Alessandro vi e lo Stato della Chiesa: atti del convegno (Perugia, 13–15 marzo 2000). (Roma: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione Generale per gli Archivi, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 2003). Álvaro Fernández de Córdova Miralles, Alejandro vi y los Reyes Católicos. Relaciones político-eclesiásticas, 1492–1503 (Rome: Università della Santa Croce, 2005).

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years 1442–1443 the papacy accorded a series of privileges to the prince Henry the Navigator, son of John i of Portugal, administrator of the military order of Christ. In 1455, with the constitution Romanus Pontifex, Alfonso v obtained the recognition of Portuguese sovereignty in Africa, while the bull Inter Coetera of March 13, 1514 laid the basis of the padroado, assigned to the order of Christ and transferred to the Crown in 1514. The same year Leo x accorded to the king Manuel i and his successors the right of patronage over the dioceses and their benefices of the overseas territories. Finally in 1551 Julius iii incorporated into the Crown the title of Grand Master of the Order of Christ. In 1536, at the request of the king John iii, Paul iii instituted the tribunal of the inquisition, which busied itself with new Christians in Portugal and successively extended its competence also to Brazil and to Goa.22 From the beginning of 1493, the pope conceded to the Catholic kings, so enumerated in the bull Inter Coetera of May 4, 1494, numerous prerogatives over the lands discovered and to be discovered, culminating with the bull Universalis Ecclesiae of Julius ii issued in 1508, through which he conferred on Ferdinand the right to establish ecclesiastical institutions in the New World and the burden of supporting them economically. In the preceding years, the kings of Spain had obtained universal patronage over the Canary Islands and over the kingdom of Granada (1486), as well as the proceeds of the subsidio (1482) and of the cruzada (1485), ecclesiastical taxes destined to finance the fight against the Moors. On June 7, 1494, the treaty of Tordesillas was signed, confirmed by Julius ii in 1506, which delimited the areas of the influence of Spain and Portugal. It reprised the treaty of Alcáçovas (1479) that recognized the sovereignty of Castile on the Canary Islands, while the Islands of Azores, Madeira, Guinea, the kingdom of Fez, and the island of Capo Verde were assigned to Portugal. It was confirmed two years after by Sixtus iv. The long process desired by the kings of Spain for the control of the ecclesiastical institutions of their kingdoms, begun in 1456 by Henry iv of Castile, which obtained the recognition of the right of supplication for vacant sees, grew through the concession of the tribunal of the Inquisition on the part of Sixtus iv (1478), and concluded during the reign of Charles i, who in 1523 and 1529 obtained the right of patronage over the church of the Iberian peninsula. From 1538, after the issue of the bull Sublimis Deus of Paul iii (1537) which recognized the capacity of the indigenous of America to adhere to Christianity, the Crown of Castile began to exercise control on the promulgation in its territories of papal bulls, a control known as pase regio.23 22 23

José Pedro Paiva and Giuseppe Marcocci, História da Inquisição Portuguesa 1536–1821 (Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros, 2016). Benedetta Albani, “Nuova luce sulle relazioni tra la Sede Apostolica e le Americhe. La

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At the death of Alexander vi (August 18, 1503), the system created by him collapsed. After the brief pontificate of Pius iii, the pope became the adversary of the Borgia family, Giuliano della Rovere being elected November 1, 1503 with the name Julius ii.24 He had Cesare Borgia arrested and took control of his conquests, while he restored to the Colonna and to the Orsini their stolen territories. The problems of the territories south of the Po occupied by Venice remained to be resolved. The pope entered into discussions with France and the Empire, culminating in the treaty of Blois (September 22, 1504), which also had an anti-Venetian component, and personally conquered with arms the cities of Perugia and Bologna. At the end of 1508 the League of Cambrai was constituted, with the participation of the emperor and the kings of France, Spain, and England. The pope rejoined them on March 23, 1509, hoping to be able to use it for the conquest of Constantinople. The provisions of the treaty also provided for an excommunication and interdict against Venice and for the recovery by the pope of the lands of Romagna occupied by the Republic. The goal was reached with the battle of Agnadello (March 14, 1509), where the Venetians were heavily defeated and the French troops occupied the Venetian territory defined by the peace of Cambrai. Julius ii, fearing an excessive strengthening of the French in northern Italy, reached an accord with Venice, liberating it from excommunication on February 4, 1510. In exchange, the Republic restored the occupied lands, recognized the right of the pope over ecclesiastical benefices, and the liberty of navigation in the Adriatic Sea to subjects of the Church. The last years of Julius ii were characterized by anti-French politics, the condition for the stability of his control over his pontifical territories. The pope tried to distance the republic of Genova from France and excommunicated Alfonso i d’Este, the duke of Ferrara, allied to Louis xii, with whom each contestant was supporting a different rival in the competition between the salt flats of Ferrarese Comacchio and papal Cervia. First to move against the pope, Louis xii sought the support of public opinion in his kingdom and convoked an assembly of clerics, parliamentarians, and university persons who assembled in Tours on September 13, 1510 under the presidency of François de Rohan, archbishop of Lyons. French troops travelled to Italy, possessing Bologna on May 23, 1511 and reestablishing the lordship of Bentivoglio, while the cardinals

24

pratica della concessione del “pase regio” ai documenti pontifici destinati alle Indie,” in: Claudio Ferlan, ed., Eusebio Francesco Chini e il suo tempo. Una riflessione storica (Trent: fbk Press, 2012), 83–102. Massimo Rospocher, Il Papa guerriero: Giulio ii nello spazio pubblico europeo [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, Monografie 65] (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008).

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proclaimed a council that would open in Pisa in November 1511. As a response, on July 18, 1511, the pope convoked a council to meet in the Lateran in the following year. In the meantime, he turned to Spain to contest French influence. On October 4 he joined the Holy League to which adhered, other than the pope, Venice and Ferdinand of Spain. Henry viii of England joined in the month of November, while the Swiss promised their support. Emperor Maximilian instead deployed at the flank of the king of France. The conclusion of the treaty influenced the composition of the council of Pisa, at which few Italian bishops participated nor did those of the Spanish, thus putting in evidence its exclusive political character. On April 21, 1512 the Francophile council transferred from Pisa to Milan and suspended the pope from temporal and spiritual governance. On May 3 Julius ii opened his council in the Lateran, which declared illegitimate the assembly of Milan, which then transferred to Asti and finally to Lyons.25 At the beginning of the pontificate of Leo x, elected on March 11, 1513, the military reversals suffered in northern Italy induced the king of France to recognize the Lateran as the only legitimate council. Initially the pope proposed to maintain an equilibrium among the princes operating in northern Italy; however, when at the beginning of 1515 Francis i succeeded Louis xii on the throne of France and resumed the project to conquer Milan and the kingdom of Naples, Leo had to abandon his neutrality. In July of 1515 he adhered to the anti-French coalition and sent troops against the French invasion in Italy. The French victory of Marignano (September 14, 1515) permitted Francis i to recover the duchy of Milan and to threaten the Medici of Florence. Leo x reached an accord with the French king, ratified on October 13 and confirmed in the encounter between the two sovereigns who came to Bologna in December of 1515.26 On this occasion, the situation of the Church in France was discussed and the outlines of a concordat were elaborated and promulgated by Leo x on August 18, 1516. It was approved the following December 19 by the Lateran Council, which defined the procedures regarding appointments to the greatest benefices. The nomination was left to the king, while the provision was incumbent on the pope, with the possibility of rejecting a candidate deemed unworthy. Appeals were limited to the pontifical tribunal, the payment of

25 26

Nelson H. Minnich, The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517): Studies on its Membership, Diplomacy and Proposals for Reform (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1993). Flavia Cantatore, ed., Leone x: finanza, mecenatismo, cultura. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Roma, 2–4 novembre 2015 (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2016); Jean-Louis Fournel, ed. François Ier et l’espace politique italien: états, domaines et territoires (Rome: École française de Rome, 2018).

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annates was maintained, and restrictions put on the use of ecclesiastical censure. Despite the opposition of the parlements and of the University of Paris, the king imposed the observance of the concordat, which remained in vigor until the French Revolution.27 In 1518 succession to the office of emperor opened, marked by rivalry between Charles of Habsburg, grandson of the emperor Maximilian, and Francis i of France. Leo x was opposed to the election of Charles, who had become king of Naples the preceding year. In the thirteenth century, the popes had forbidden that the same person hold the imperial crown and that of Naples to avoid the situation created by the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Equally, the pope was against the candidacy of the king of France, lord of Milan. Thus he supported other German princes, among whom was Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, to whom he sent the Golden Rose in the hope that he would cease to protect Martin Luther. The pope reached an accord with Charles i, for whom he drew up a secret bull that dispensed him from renouncing the kingdom of Naples in the case of election, and another with Francis i. Charles was elected emperor on June 28, 1519 and recognized by the pope, who gave him the dispensation for the kingdom of Naples, but maintained a firm prohibition against extending the direct domain of the empire over Lombardy and Tuscany. During his brief pontificate, Adrian vi (1522–1523), still close to the emperor, maintained neutrality in the fight between France and the Empire. Only in 1523, when he discovered that cardinal Francesco Soderini, a man esteemed by the pope and head of the Francophile party of the Curia, wanted to push the pontiff to support Francis i in his proposals to reconquer the Italian domains, did he imprison and try him. On August 3, 1523, a defensive anti-French alliance was signed among the pope, the emperor, the king of England, the archduke of Austria, and the republics of Florence and Genoa. Clement vii (1523–1534), previously cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and strict collaborator of his papal cousin, adopted the politics of an alliance between the Holy See and the republic of Florence practiced by Leo x. He also supported the agrarian politics of baronial families that had possessions near to Rome, in an attempt to stimulate the agriculture and scale back sheep pasturing. The Roman feudal nobility, whose interests were affected, prepared to combat the pope. This occurred in concomitance with the expedition into Italy of Francis i, who on February 24, 1525, was defeated near Pavia and taken prisoner by the emperor. The pope came to an accord with Charles v, but in 1526, when

27

Jules Thomas, Le concordat de 1516: ses origines, son histoire au xvie siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1910).

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the king of France was liberated, he adhered to the League of Cognac (May 22, 1526), promoted by Francis i, together with Venice, Florence, and Milan. In the course of the successive conflict, the pope accused the emperor of bullying, while Charles v reproved Clement for not comporting himself as universal father of Christianity and appealed to a future council. He thus passed to arms. The first episode had as protagonist the Colonna, who on September 20, 1526, sacked Rome, the Vatican palaces, and Saint Peter’s. In the following years the imperial troops, commanded by Charles of Bourbon, conquered Rome (May 6, 1527) and sacked it. The pope took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he remained prisoner until the beginning of December, when he fled to Orvieto. The sack of Rome is considered by historiography as the turning point of the Renaissance papacy and the end of politics aimed at securing the liberty of Italy maintained internally at the second half of the preceding century.28 Relationships between the pope and the emperor were reconstituted at Barcelona through a pact that provided for a league against the Turks and the German Protestants, the restitution to the Church of all the lands occupied by Venice and by Ferrara, and the return of the Medici to Florence. The accord reached was confirmed by the coronation of Charles v, having come to Bologna on February 24, 1530. Once the king of France was defeated, the emperor imposed his predominance on the Italian peninsula and Clement vii resumed his control of the State of the Church, except for the duchy of Ferrara and the cities of Modena and Reggio.29 From 1527 Clement vii had to occupy himself with the marriage of Henry viii of England. Their relationship became distant. A little after he was created cardinal, on September 1513, the future pope offered his services to the king and proposed himself as protector of the kingdom. In such guise he obtained for the king’s favorite Thomas Wolsey the red hat and the powers of legate for the kingdom (May 17, 1518). In 1521 the king published the treatise Assertio Septem Sacramentorum against the doctrines of Luther, dedicated to Leo x, who conferred on him the title Fidei Defensor. In 1527, deprived of a male heir, Henry viii began proceedings to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon, aunt of Charles v. In the month of May, he sought to resolve the case by the ecclesiastical tribunals of the kingdom, when the pope, after the sack of Rome found himself under the control of the emperor. The pontiff des-

28

29

André Chastel, Le Sac de Rome, 1527. Du premier maniérisme à la Contre-réforme ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1984); Volker Reinhardt, Blutiger Karneval. Der Sacco di Roma 1527: eine politische Katastrophe ([Darmstadt]: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009). Francesca Cantù and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, L’Italia di Carlo V. Guerra, religione e politica nel primo Cinquecento. (Rome: Viella, 2003).

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ignated as judges the cardinals Thomas Wolsey and Lorenzo Campeggi, from 1523 protector of England, with the faculty to issue an unappealable sentence. The process, opened in London on May 31, 1529, was suspended on July 30; in the meantime the pope, responding to a request of the queen, took the case to himself. With the death of Thomas Wolsey (November 29, 1530), who was succeeded by Thomas Cranmer, the king had a change of strategy, conditioned by political alliances, which saw Henry viii and Francis i of France allied against Clement vii and Charles v. With the favorable opinion of numerous European universities, without interrupting negotiations with Rome, the king obtained from Parliament a series of juridical acts attempting to separate the clergy from obedience to the pope and to declare the king as supreme head of the Church in England. In 1531 the assembly of the ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and of York recognized him as Protector and supreme Lord of the Church and of the clergy “quantum per Christi legem licet.” In 1533, he secretly married Anne Boleyn, who had become pregnant; therefore Cranmer, who became archbishop of Canterbury (February 21, 1533), took it upon himself to render a decision. After having gotten Parliament to prohibit appeals to Rome (April 1533), the king had an ecclesiastical assembly declare that the pope did not have the power of dispensation. On May 10, a legal proceeding opened at Dunstable, the residence of queen Catherine, presided by Cranmer; it concluded on May 23 with the sentence unfavorable to her. A few days later, the marriage with Anne Boleyn was proclaimed legitimate, who was crowned queen on June 1 and in September gave birth to the future queen Elizabeth. In July of 1533 Clement vii declared null the new marriage of the king and he was excommunicated. However Henry continued on his enterprising path; the following year by the Law of Supremacy, Parliament proclaimed the king supreme head of the Church in England. Henry viii was newly excommunicated by Paul iii in December 1538, when by then the separation of the English Church from Rome became irreversible.30 In Sweden, the Lutheran doctrine was introduced in 1518 by Olaf Pietri, who had begun his studies at Wittenberg in 1516. In 1520, following the Massacre of Stockholm, where a hundred nobles and Swedish ecclesiastics lost their life, Gustav Vasa, nephew of one of the assassinated nobles, led a revolt against Christian ii of Denmark that marked the end of a century of the union of Kalmar, formed by Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The Holy See intervened to help the deposed archbishop of Uppsala, the Dane Gustav Trolle, who had

30

George W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation. Henry viii and the Remaking of the English Church, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

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collaborated in the massacre. In 1527 the Diet of Västerås constituted, with the help of the middle classes of the kingdom, a strong centralized monarchy and a national church separated from Rome. The clergy were placed under civil jurisdiction and the goods of the Church utilized by the monarch to pay the debt contract with the city of Lübeck, his ally against Denmark.31 The kingdom of Denmark, which comprised Norway and other territories, became officially Lutheran in 1537, under the governance of Christian iii, crowned together with his wife by Johannes Bugenhange, provided by Wittenberg, to whom the task of organizing the church was confided. From 1528 Christian had introduced the Lutheran reform into his territories situated in the duchy of Schleswig, thanks to the help of the theologians Eberhard Weidensee and Johann Wendt. The rupture with the Holy See came on the occasion of the diet of nobles at Odense (1526–1527), during the reign of Frederick i, when the reformers obtained the power to preach and to have their own parishes.32 The pontificate of Paul iii (1534–1549), despite its pursuit of nepotistic practices, presented a vision more articulate and less concentrated on affairs of the Ecclesiastical State, by now in the way of consolidation.33 Different from his predecessor, who participated in the fights among European princes, putting in light the weakness of the papal political situation, Paul iii wanted to present himself in the guise of the mediator, as “common father” with the goals of reabsorbing the confessional divisions and confronting the Turkish danger. Towards such an end, he strove to reestablish peace among Christian princes, putting an end to the Anglican Schism and undertaking a profound reform of the Church through the convocation of a council. Nevertheless, the divergences of the political directions among the different actors and the fear of an excessive strengthening of the emperor in Europe and in Italy led to a series of contests that postponed the opening of the assembly. After a failed first convocation to meet in Mantua in 1537, Paul iii in May–June of 1538 brought together at Nice the emperor and the king of France who agreed to a truce of ten years. After the failure of the religious colloquies among Catholic and Protestant theologians of the Empire, and the agreement ratified by the Diet of Regensburg of 1541 and by the peace of Crépy, signed between the emperor and Francis i in 1544,

31

32 33

Conrad Bergendoff, Olavus Petri and the Ecclesiastical Transformation in Sweden (1521– 1552). A Study in the Swedish Reformation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965; originally: New York: Macmillan, 1928). Lausten, A Church History of Denmark, 85–120. Thomas Worcester and James Corkery. The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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the Council of Trent opened on December 13, 1545, with small participation of bishops.34 Paralleling the conciliar work, which proceeded until 1547 at Trent and then for another two years at Bologna, the emperor, with the support of the pope, defeated the Protestants at Mühlberg (April 24, 1547). Nevertheless, the assassination of the pope’s son Pier Luigi Farnese (1547), on whom Paul iii had two years previously conferred the cities of Parma and Piacenza, and the concession to Protestants of the Augsburg Interim (1548), led to a rupture with Charles v, a rapprochement with the king of France, Henry ii, and the suspension of the council in 1549. Julius iii (1550–1555), former legate at the council of Trent, tried in the first years of his pontificate to resume the politics of mediation practiced by his predecessor. Nevertheless, he came into conflict with Charles v due to a divergence of opinion regarding how to manage the conflicts with the Protestants and with Henry ii, an adamant supporter of anti-Imperial action. Notwithstanding, the pope decided to move ahead with the council that resumed its labors at Trent in May of 1551. The emperor had to accept the confirmation of the decrees approved in the first period, while Henry ii threatened the convocation of a Gallican council. The relationships were otherwise complicated by the affairs of the city of Parma, which Julius iii had restored to Ottavio Farnese. Nevertheless, when the Protestants allied with France in June of 1551, war broke out and Henry ii recalled from Rome the ambassador and the French prelates, impeding the bishops of the kingdom from participating in the council. Despite the threat to create a Gallican patriarch, blocked by the resistance encountered in the kingdom, the French king reconciled in April of 1552. In July 1553, following the death of Edward vi, Mary Tudor ascended to the throne of England. Because she was a Catholic, there was hope of ending the Anglican schism. Julius iii nominated Cardinal Reginald Pole as apostolic legate, sending him on his journey on September 29, 1553. His mission was obstructed by Charles v, inasmuch as it interfered with the emperor’s projected marriage between the queen and his son Philip to serve an anti-French function. Pole moved about Germany, Flanders, and France, and this delay caused him to arrive in England only after the celebration of the nuptials. On November 30, 1554, he proclaimed a reconciliation of the kingdom of England with the Catholic Church. At the end of the year, he convoked a synod and in March of 1556 succeeded Thomas Cranmer as archbishop of Canterbury and primate of the English Church, striving for the reintroduction of the institutions of 34

Hubert Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient. 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1951–1975); John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).

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the ancient Church. His work was interrupted by death, which befell him on November 17, 1558, a few hours after the death of the Queen Mary (1553–1558).35 Paul iv abandoned the politics of neutrality, aiming instead for an antiHabsburg alliance with France. During these years emperor Charles v gave a new ordering to his domains, according to which in 1552, with the peace of Passau, he confirmed in 1555 the Religious Peace of Augsburg by which the Lutheran princes were granted religious liberty, thus recognizing the failure of his project to reconstitute the Empire with a unified confession. Charles transmitted successfully to his son Philip the duchy of Milan, the kingdom of Naples, the Low Countries, and Burgundy, and finally the kingdoms of Spain, Sicily, and the Indies, while his brother Ferdinand was given the Empire. At the beginning of his pontificate, Paul iv created as a cardinal his nephew Carlo Carafa, a man of arms at the service of the French crown, and entrusted to him the relationships of the Holy See with the princes. In actuating his anti-Habsburg politics, the pope clashed with the Roman barons faithful to the imperial house, in particular with the Colonna. The war, begun in 1556 by troops led by the duke of Alba, viceroy of Naples, followed by the intervention of French troops, who were defeated at Paliano on July 27, 1557. More determinate was the victory of the Spanish arms over the French army at Saint-Quentin (August 10, 1557), which obliged the duke of Guise, commander of the French army in Italy, to reenter his homeland. The uncertain condition of war, in which contemporaries saw a possible repetition of the events of 1527, this time with Spanish troops at the walls of Rome, resulted in the defeat of the pontiff. It fell to Carlo Carafa to negotiate the peace, signed at Cave, near Palestrina, on September 14, 1557, which obligated the pope to disband the anti-Spanish league, to reintegrate the Colonna in their possessions, and to maintain at Paliano a Spanish garrison. The failure of the project of Paul iv was confirmed by the Peace of CateauCambresis (April 3, 1559), consequent to the victory of Saint-Quentin, which put an end to the war of Italy and started forty years of Spanish hegemony on the Italian peninsula. The weakness of France, struck by a dynastic crisis following the death of Henry ii (1559), favored the control of the papacy exercised by Philip ii, who presented himself as the defender of Catholicism. Nevertheless, moments of dialectic tensions were not absent. Pius iv (1559– 1565), soon after his election, in order to resume the council had to negotiate with the Catholic king, who wanted in the bull of convocation an explicit mention of its continuity with the preceding sessions, while other sovereigns had preferred a new convocation. A source of tensions was the trial of Bartolomé

35

John Edwards, Archbishop Pole (London, Ashgate Pub. Co., 2014).

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de Carranza, archbishop of Toledo, accused of heresy and tried in Spain by a tribunal of the Inquisition. In 1567 the pope called to himself the case and Carranza was brought to Rome where he died in 1576, shortly after having received absolution.36 Along the same line of conflicts, there is to be placed the debate, raised between 1565 and 1590, regarding the institution of a nunciature in the Indies, requested by persons in the Americas, which was not implemented due to the opposition of the Crown.37 The Holy See intervened in the debate over the succession to the throne of Portugal that fell vacant following the death of king Sebastian, which occurred on August 4, 1578 during an expedition against the Moors of northern Africa. Succeeding him was the elderly cardinal Henrique, the last descendent of the house of Avis who died on January 31, 1580. Among the various claimants and first in line was Philip of Spain, the candidate preferred by Gregory xiii. In the controversy, the pope maintained strict neutrality and sent Alessandro Riario to Philip as legate, with the task of avoiding war. Nevertheless, Philip anticipated the events and occupied Portugal militarily. Gregory recognized him as sovereign and gave the order to the legate to consecrate him.38 Pius v (1566–1572) followed carefully the affairs of England. The anti-Catholic politics of queen Elizabeth, who ascended to the throne in 1558, favored exploring the possibility of placing on the English throne the Catholic Mary Stuart, former queen of France as wife of Francis ii (1559–1560) and then queen of Scotland (1561–1567), who took refuge in England after being defeated by the Scottish Protestant nobility. On February 5, the pope began the process against the queen Elizabeth, concluding with the sentence of February 25, 1570, by which Elizabeth was declared queen of heresy, excommunicated, and forfeited of any rights to the English crown. Nevertheless, the kings of France and Spain prevented the publication of the bull in their respective kingdoms. Gregory xiii in 1572 tried to convince Philip ii to launch an expedition against England with the goal of restoring Catholicism, after having deposed Elizabeth. The project was abandoned in favor of an attack on Ireland carried out in 1580, which Gre36 37

38

José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, El proceso romano del arzobispo Carranza (1567–1576) (Rome: Iglesia Nacional Española, 1988). Pedro Borges, “La nunciatura indiana. Un intento pontificio de intervención directa en Indias bajo Felipe ii, 1566–1588,” Missionalia Hispanica 19 (1962), 169–227; León Lopetegui, “Proyectos de nunciaturas para la América española (1565–1590).” Miscellanea Comillas 33 (1975), 117–140. Agostino Borromeo, “La Santa Sede y la candidatura de Felipe ii al trono de Portugal,” in: Congreso internacional Las sociedades ibéricas y el mar a finales del siglo xvi. Tomo v: El área atlántica. Portugal y Flandes ([Madrid]: Sociedad Estatal Lisboa ’98, Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe ii y Carlos v, 1998), 41–57.

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gory xiii financed with 350,000 scudi. A new attempt at an invasion of England, approved by Sixtus v, was put into action by Spain in 1588 through the Invincible Armada that was destroyed by inclement weather. Despite all these attempts, Elizabeth remained on the throne and consolidated the religious constitution of the kingdom. It remained to the popes only the possibility of dedicating themselves to the formation of the English Catholic nobility on the continent and to favor concord between different parties. Regarding the Empire, after the friction that had characterized the pontificate of Paul iv, it befell Pius iv to restore relationships of trust in view of the convocation of the council. The pope recognized the validity of the election as emperor of Ferdinand, contested by his predecessor, and that of his son Maximilian as king of Romans. Gregory xiii promoted the activity of the German Congregation, instituted by his predecessor in 1568, with the task of reinforcing Catholicism in the territories of central Europe.39 A particular case of papal intervention in Germany, in collaboration with the emperor, was the war of Cologne, which broke out over control of one of the more important ecclesiastical principalities. The archbishop-elector Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, elected in 1577, wanted to marry the canoness Agnes von Mansfeld and to secularize the principality, and in December of 1582 he passed officially to Protestantism. Gregory xiii excommunicated him on April 1, 1583 and in his place was elected Ernest of Bavaria, sustained militarily by his family and by Spanish troops.40 To assist the new archbishop in 1584, the pope instituted the nunciature of Cologne with jurisdiction over the territories in the Rhine basin, entrusting it to Giovanni Francesco Bonomi. It was the principal of the so-called “nunciatures of reform” (Reformnuntiaturen), established both in southern Germany (1573), at Graz (1580), in Switzerland (1586), and in Flanders (1596). Their task was to encourage and assist Catholicism in territories with different confessions. The political-religious activity of the popes in the Empire was constantly present, from the protest of Luther, through the sending of nuncios and legates, aiming to reconstitute confessional unity and to reunite the council. Having ascended to the throne of Sweden in 1568, John iii in 1576 published a new order for the church in the kingdom, arousing opposition of the Lutheran clergy and laity. Thanks to the influence of the Polish court and of the Jesuit Laurentius Norvegus, the king converted to Catholicism and permitted the Jesuits to found a college at Stockholm, which remained active for four 39 40

Josef Krasenbrink, Die Congregatio Germanica und die katholische Reform in Deutschland nach dem Tridentinum (Münster: Aschendorff, 1972). Max Lossen, Der Kölnische Krieg. 2 vols. (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1882–1897).

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years. Nevertheless, because of his political weakness, in order to make public his conversion, he asked the pope to permit the Swedish clergy to marry, the Mass to be in local languages, and communion under the two species. Gregory xiii refused and the king expelled the Jesuits. After John’s death (1592), an assembly at Uppsala was convoked (1593) which abolished the ecclesiastical legislation and reestablished the order instituted by the reform of Laurentius Petri.41 Thanks to collaboration with the emperor, in 1561 the pope nominated Anton Brus z Mohelnice to the archiepiscopal see of Prague, that finally had a Catholic bishop after 150 years. In Poland Paul iv confided the fight against Protestantism to Stanislaus Hosius, who a little later served as legate to the Council of Trent. The popes were following closely the election of Polish sovereigns in order to contest the diffusion of Calvinism among the nobility. After the death of Sigismund iii Augustus (July 7, 1572), during the three interregna, with the goal of reinforcing threatened Catholicism, Gregory xiii supported through his nuncios candidates of the house of Austria.42 In 1588 Sixtus v sent cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini, the future Clement viii, to settle the controversy between Sigismund Wasa, king of Sweden, and Archduke Maximilian Habsburg, claimants to the throne after the death of king Stephen Báthory.43 In Hungary in the second half of the sixteenth century, the topic of the naming of bishops was particularly sensitive with the king boasting important privileges. The Holy See sought to provide its own [bishops] to the dioceses located in the territory occupied by Turks and it tried to oppose the practice of the kings whereby they left sees vacant in order to utilize their revenues to finance warfare. In 1578, thanks to the work of the nuncio Zaccaria Delfino, bishops were nominated to the sees of Győr and Vác; and in 1595, after another two decades of vacancy, Rudolf ii nominated the archbishop of Esztergom.44 The popes followed closely the evolution of the situation in France, where the great families of the Montmorency, Guise, and Bourbon contended with

41 42

43 44

Michael Roberts, The Early Vasas. A History of Sweden, 1523–1611 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Almut Bues, “Die päpstliche Politik gegenüber Polen-Litauen zur Zeit der ersten Interregna,” in: Alexander Koller, ed., Kurie und Politik. Stand und Perspektiven der Nuntiaturberichtsforschung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1998), 116–135. Jan Władysław Woś, “La legazione diplomatica in Polonia del cardinale I. Aldobrandini in una lettera di Emilio Pucci.” Rinascimento 10 (1970), 219–234. Alexander Koller, “Circondato da turchi et heretici. Il regno d’Ungheria nel Cinquecento visto dai nunzi pontifici”, in: Gaetano Platania, Matteo Sanfilippo, and Péter Tusor, eds. Gli archivi della Santa Sede e il Regno d’Ungheria (secc. 15–20). In memoriam di Lajos Pásztor, (Budapest: ppke, Gondolat, 2008), 28–32.

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each other for control of the monarchy. The civil wars began in 1562 also had a religious character, with the Protestant party supported by Elizabeth i of England and the Catholic party by Spain and the pope. Pius v helped Catherine de’ Medici and Charles ix by sending substantial financing assistance and troops. The same policies were followed by Gregory xiii who celebrated as a victory of Catholics the massacre of the Huguenots that occurred in the night of Saint Bartholomew’s feast day (August 23–24, 1575). After the ascension to the throne of Henry iii (May 30, 1574), the pope tried to stabilize the situation by promoting an alliance between France and Spain. Nevertheless, following the failure of this initiative, he supported the Catholic League formed under the leadership of the dukes of Guise following the edict of Beaulieu (1576) that allowed for retaining troops favorable to the Protestants. Nonetheless, on June 10, 1584, with the death of François d’Alençon, duke of Anjou and heir to the throne, the struggle over succession began since Henry iii had no male heir. On the extinction of the house of Valois, the rights to succession passed to the king of Navarra, head of the Protestant party. In 1588, when the king assassinated duke Henry de Guise and his brother cardinal Louis, a conflict between the king and the League opened, the latter being aided by Spain and the pope. On August 1, 1589, when Henry iii was assassinated by the Dominican Jacques Clément, Henry of Bourbon asserted his claim to be king of France. Sixtus v ascended to the papal throne in 1585 and presented himself as mediator between Henry iii and the Catholic League, which controlled half of the country. On June 27, 1585, he declared Henry of Bourbon stripped of the sovereignty of Navarre and of Béarn inasmuch as he was a heretic and a relapsed person, and thus unable to succeed to the throne of France. Nevertheless, after the assasination of Henry iii and the death of the Catholic cardinal Charles Bourbon (May 9, 1590), a number of Catholics became opposed to the politics of the Hispanophiles of the League and supported by the candidature of Henry of Bourbon. Sixtus v sent as mediator cardinal Henry Caetani, who, contrary to the instructions received, supported the party of the League;45 the pope instead resisted the pressures of Philip ii who wanted him to involve himself in an anti-French alliance. In 1593, the estates general of the League assembled in Paris and asked for a Catholic sovereign, but refused the candidacy of

45

Michel de Boüard, “Sixte-Quint, Henri iv et la Ligue. La légation du cardinal Caetani en France (1589–1590).” Revue des questions historiques, 60 (1932), 59–140; Klaus Jaitner, “Instruktionen und Relationen für die Nuntien und Legaten an den europäischen Fürstenhöfen von Sixtus v. bis Innozenz ix. (1585–1591),” [Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte, 68. Supplementband] (Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder, 2021), 29–44, 263–265, 308–334, 341–347.

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Isabel Clara Eugenia, daughter of Philip ii and Elisabeth of Valois. Henry of Navarre understood that the country could not accept a Protestant sovereign and announced his conversion to Catholicism, declared through an abjuration in the church of Saint-Denis on July 25, 1593, and agreed to be crowned on February 27, 1594, after having received from the bishops of the kingdom an absolution from excommunication. Negotiations with the pope concluded on September 17, 1595, when Arnoud d’Ossat and Jacques David du Perron, bishop of Évreux, pronounced the public abjuration in the name of the king and received absolution from Clement viii.46 In this way, the pope confirmed Catholicism as the principal confession of the kingdom of France and assumed a posture that allowed the Holy See to claim an equidistant position between the two Catholic powers, liberating it from Spanish protection. The new situation demonstrated its advantages in 1598, when the duchy of Ferrara was placed under the direct governance of the Holy See, an episode that signaled virtually the territorial integration of the Ecclesiastical State. On October 27, 1597, duke Alfonso ii d’Este died without sons and his territories were occupied by Cesare d’Este, who claimed the succession. Clement viii, comforted by the support of the French, excommunicated the claimant and took possession of the duchy, remaining there from May to November of 1598.47 On an international level, the papacy assumed authoritatively the mediation in the conflict between France and Spain, which concluded with the peace of Vervins, ending the period initiated with the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Philip ii was not able to impose his designs on France, while the French monarchy had re-established its stability through the ascension to the throne of Henry iv of Bourbon. From the beginnings of 1596, Clement viii had sounded out the intentions of Philip ii and sent the cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici, the future Leo xi, as legate de latere to Henry iv with the task of reconstituting the ecclesiastical structures of the kingdom. The treaty negotiations begun early in 1598 under the presidency of cardinal de’ Medici concluded positively on May 2.48 On September 13, Philip ii died. The treaty of Vervins had left open the question 46

47

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José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, “La absolución de herejía de Enrique iv de Francia por Clemente viii. Un caso moral, canónico y político conflictivo,” Revista Española de Derecho Canónico, 58 (2001), 51–93. Bernard Barbiche, “La politique de Clément viii à l’égard de Ferrare,” Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire, 74 (1962), 289–328; Alberto Gasparini, Cesare d’Este e Clemente viii (Modena: Società Tipografica Editrice Modenese, 1960). Bernard Barbiche, “Le grand artisan du traité de Vervins: Alexandre de Médicis, cardinal de Florence, légat a latere,” in: La paix de Vervins, 1598, textes réunis par Claudine Vidal et Frédérique Pilleboue. (Laon: Fédération des sociétés d’histoire et d’archéologie de l’Aisne, 1998), 65–74.

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of the marquisate of Saluzzo, occupied by Carlo Emanuele i of Savoy during the Franco-Spanish war. The disputes were settled through the treaty of Lyon, concluded on January 17, 1601, between France and the Savoy with the mediation of cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, nephew of the pope.49 Clement viii at the dawn of a new century was thus able to consolidate the territory of the Ecclesiastical State, to repair the peace in Europe, and to credit himself as mediator between the Catholic powers. With the presence of Catholic France on the European scene, the seventeenth century opened new horizons for the papacy.

Bibliography Bernard, George W. The King’s Reformation. Henry viii and the Remaking of the English Church. Yale: Yale University Press, 2005. Chiabò, Maria, Silvia Maddalo, et al., eds. Roma di fronte all’Europa al tempo di Alessandro vi: Atti del convegno. Città del Vaticano-Roma, 1–4 dicembre 1999. Roma: Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, 2001. Decaluwe, Michiel, A Successful Defeat. Eugene iv’s Struggle with the Council of Basel for Ultimate Authority in the Church, 1431/1449. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. D’Amico, Juan Carlos and Jean-Louis Fournel, eds. François Ier et l’espace politique italien: états, domaines et territoires. Rome: École française de Rome, 2018. Kłoczowski, Jerzy. A History of Polish Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Koller, Alexander. Imperator und Pontifex. Forschungen zum Verhältnis von Kaiserhof und römischer Kurie im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung (1555–1648), Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2012. Minnich, Nelson H. Councils of the Catholic Reformation. Pisa i (1409) to Trent (1545– 1563). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. O’Malley, John W. Trent, what happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA-London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Prodi, Paolo. Il sovrano pontefice: un corpo e due anime: la monarchia papale nella prima età moderna. Nuova ed. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006. Reiss, Sheryl E., Kenneth Gouwens, eds. The Pontificate of Clement vii. History, Politics, Culture, London: Routledge 2005. Rospocher, Massimo. Il papa guerriero. Giulio ii nello spazio pubblico europeo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2015.

49

Denise Turrel, ed., Le Traité de Lyon (1601) in Cahiers d’histoire, 46.2 (2001).

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Schimmelpfennig, Bernhard. Das Papsttum. Grundzüge seiner Geschichte von der Antike bis zur Renaissance. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984. Tusor, Péter. The Papal Consistories and Hungary in the 15th–16th Centuries. To the History of the Hungarian Royal Patronage and Supremacy. [Collectanea Vaticana Hungariae, Classis ii, Tom. 4]. Budapest-Rome: mta-ppke Lendület Church History Research Institute, 2012. Visceglia, Maria Antonietta, ed. Papato e politica internazionale nella prima Età moderna. Roma: Viella, 2013. Worcester, Thomas, and James Corkery, The papacy since 1500: from Italian prince to universal pastor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

chapter 8

The Papacy and the Crusade, 1400–1600 Margaret Meserve

In October, 1394, Pope Boniface ix issued a bull proclaiming a new crusade against the Ottoman Turks, whose emir, Bayezid i, had led raids into Bulgaria and Hungary the previous year.1 Two years later, an allied force of French, German, Hungarian, and Burgundian troops met the Ottoman army in battle below the Bulgarian fortress of Nicopolis. Although a fleet of Venetian and Genoese ships had sailed up the Danube to lend support, land and naval forces were unable to join up and the crusader army was left dangerously exposed. Thousands of Christian soldiers were killed in the fighting, while the Turks captured hundreds more and held them for ransom. The Crusade of Nicopolis has been called the last crusade of the Middle Ages, both because of the magnitude of the defeat and because—as many historians see it—it was the last time a pan-European land force ventured east to confront an Islamic adversary.2 And yet, as the fifteenth century dawned, Catholic Europe’s long history of conflict with the Islamic world was hardly over. Over the next two centuries, Latin Christian and Ottoman Turkish forces would clash repeatedly on both land and sea. Large crusader armies like the one that perished at Nicopolis were rarely mustered, and few Christian soldiers confronted Turkish troops in pitched battle. The Renaissance crusade was a more piecemeal phenomenon: a sporadic progression of spectacular but often inconclusive naval encounters, sudden raids on Ottoman territory, and expeditions to relieve cities or islands under Turkish siege. Christian soldiers signed with the cross clashed with Ottoman forces at Varna in 1444 and at Belgrade in 1456. In the 1470s, Sixtus iv sent a papal fleet to harass the Anatolian coast. In 1480, when Ottoman forces besieged Rhodes and occupied Otranto in the heel of Italy, European attempts at rescue were framed—and marketed—as a cru-

1 Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 4 vols (Philadelphia, 1976–1984), 1.341–357. For general background, see Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, transl. Frederick I. Antrobus, 40 vols (London: Routledge & Paul, 1891–1953), passim, and further studies listed in n. 3, below. 2 For example, David Nicolle, Nicopolis, 1396: The Last Crusade (Oxford: Osprey, 1999); Oscar Halecki, “The Last Century of the Crusades: From Smyrna to Varna (1344–1444),” Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 3 (1945), 300–307.

© Margaret Meserve, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_009

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sade. The pattern continued at the Turkish sieges of Rhodes in 1521 and Vienna in 1529; in the defense of Cyprus in 1538; at Malta in 1565; at the Catholic naval victory at Lepanto in 1571; and at the Portuguese disaster at Alcácar in 1578. None of these campaigns was aimed at the Holy Land, at the recovery of Jerusalem or restoration of the Holy Places, goals the original crusades had claimed, if not always realized. By the fifteenth century, “crusade” had come to mean something rather broader: a campaign to defend Christians or to attack “infidels” or “enemies of the faith,” Muslim or otherwise, that could be waged by almost anyone, almost anywhere in the world. Not only Ottomans and Mamluks in the eastern Mediterranean, but also Berbers in North Africa, Moors in Spain, or unbelievers even further afield (in the New World, for example) could be named as targets of a Renaissance crusade. Voyages of discovery and campaigns of colonization were often celebrated with crusading rhetoric. And opponents of the Latin Church closer to home—heretics in Bohemia, conciliar advocates, and, later, Protestants—could also become objects of crusading campaigns. The prospect of Jerusalem faded from view, and over time even the recovery of Constantinople, the urgent need proclaimed by crusade propagandists of the mid-fifteenth century, became less of a priority. As its definition expanded, the crusade grew even more ubiquitous as an idea, a constant theme in European political and cultural discourse. Crusading themes were commonplace in Renaissance courtly ceremonial and princely propaganda, in the verses of poets, in the prophetic visions of preachers, and in the private devotions of individual subjects. Christian monarchs invariably listed defeat of the infidel among their most solemn commitments, and princes and prelates alike rallied political support from the faithful by calling on them to take up the cross, or to contribute funds to those who did. Some princes even took the cross themselves, presenting themselves as crusading defenders of the faith and assailing their rivals who failed to join them in marching to Christendom’s aid. For the Renaissance papacy, the crusade against the Turk was a perennial project, integral to the refoundation of the institution after the Schism and its retrenchment in Rome—an enterprise proclaimed, argued for, and argued about throughout the period, even after the shock of Lutheran reform introduced new challenges to Catholic authority much closer to home. The Renaissance popes played a central role in keeping the crusading ideal alive, planning, raising funds for, and publicizing new expeditions, transferring the crusade to new contexts, and exploiting it for their own ends. They also gradually expanded the idea of the crusade to include the defense of their own institution, their territorial state, and their metropolitan city. Catholic triumph over unbelievers abroad became conflated with protecting the papacy from external

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attack and preserving the prerogative of the pope to wield spiritual and temporal power in Europe. Over two centuries during which their authority was constantly called into question, the popes sought to capitalize on the urgency and romance of crusading projects as a way of articulating their authority, raising cash, and thwarting political antagonists. The precarious position of the bishop of Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, his fiscal needs, and the challenges to his authority that came at him from secular princes, conciliar theorists, and Protestant reformers alike were all factors that contributed to the papacy’s constant advocacy for the crusade.3

1

The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century

The Ottoman Turks dominate the story of the Renaissance crusade from Nicopolis to Lepanto, but at the start of the fifteenth century, it was not at all clear that the Turks would become the major rival to Latin Christendom that they eventually did. Bayezid i’s victory at Nicopolis was devastating; it followed on another spectacular Ottoman triumph in the Balkans at Kosovo, “the Field of the Blackbirds,” in 1389. But the new century saw a formidable enemy emerge in the east, the world-conquering Timur. When Timur defeated Bayezid at the Battle of Ankara in 1402 and then kept him in humiliating captivity for several years, Western observers feared a new age of Mongol invasions was at hand.4 At the Council of Constance (1414–1418), for example, the Italian traveler Beltramo Mignanelli composed a tract for John xxiii and the council fathers warning of Timur’s savagery and the devastation his followers had wrought in Syria and Asia Minor. Mignanelli even expressed pity for the poor Turks of Anatolia whom Timur had scattered in the course of his campaigns.5 3 The classic treatment of the topic is Setton, as in n. 1 above, now supplemented by studies written or edited by Norman Housley: The Later Crusades: 1274–1580: Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); ed., Religious Warfare in Europe 1400–1536 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); ed., Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact (London: Palgrave, 2004); Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453-1505 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); ed., Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade (London: Palgrave, 2017); ed., The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures (London: Routledge, 2017). See also Benjamin Weber, Lutter contre les Turcs: Les formes nouvelles de la croisade pontificale au xve siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013). 4 Adam Knobler, “The Rise of Timur and Western Diplomatic Response, 1390–1405,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 5 (1995), 341–349; Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 203–215. 5 Nelly Mahmoud Helmy, Tra Siena, l’Oriente e la Curia: Belatramo di Leonardo Mignanelli e le sue opera [Nuovi studi storici, 91] (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 2013).

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Timur’s empire disintegrated almost as quickly as it had formed, however, and Mamluks and Ottomans alike were able to regroup. By the 1420s, both were on the offensive again. In Anatolia, Bayezid’s son Mehmed i edged out his brothers and took sole control of the Ottoman state in 1413; he would lay siege to Constantinople in 1422. In 1425, a Mamluk fleet attacked and sacked Nicosia, captured the Lusignan king, and killed his brother. The European response to these events was muted. General instability in Europe made it all but impossible for the Christian powers to act in concert to organize a new crusade. The Great Schism was not the only political crisis Europe faced in the early fifteenth century. By the 1420s, England and France had been at war with each other for nearly a hundred years. Imperial politics were hopelessly complicated by local rivalries in the Rhineland and Bavaria and dynastic upheavals in Austria, Hungary, and Poland. Northern and central Italy had been destabilized by the opportunistic moves of warlords, condottieri, upstart princes, and expansionist republics, who all redrew the map with violent regularity. The maritime republics, Venice and Genoa, maintained trading relations with the Islamic East and were often hesitant to provoke Ottoman ire; in Naples, the only proper kingdom in Italy, the Angevin dynasty was under constant pressure from distant French candidates who maintained designs on their throne. Furthermore, it was not at all clear where a new crusade might go. After the fall of Acre, the last crusader state, in 1294, the Latin Christian presence in the eastern Mediterranean had devolved into a confusing patchwork: Venetian colonies in the Aegean, Genoese in the Black Sea, a Lusignan regime on Cyprus that maintained ties to princely houses in France and Savoy; Catalan companies in the Peloponnese; and a Florentine duchy in Athens. In Constantinople, the Paleologan dynasty presided over the slow collapse of Byzantine power. And the Turks were not the only power taking advantage of their decline. The Venetian Republic was annexing cities along the Adriatic coast even as Hungary expanded its reach south through the Balkans with an eye on the same coastal ports. The Ottoman threat was alarming, but to European observers, it was not obvious who should do something about it, nor who ought to benefit from whatever action might occur. Problems within the Church kept the pope from providing leadership on the issue. After the controversial election of Urban vi in 1378, rival popes of the Roman and Avignon obediences vied for authority in the Church; after the election of Alexander v in 1409, the number of claimants rose to three. As popes and antipopes argued over claims to legitimacy and precedence (at times even declaring crusades against each other), heretical sects broke away from Catholic obedience entirely. The Hussite movement in Bohemia posed a

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real threat to the authority of Rome, especially when it was not clear where “Rome” really stood nor who was its bishop. The Council of Constance, convened to address both schism and heresy and to attempt a general reform of the Church, produced a compromise pope, Martin v, who acknowledged the need to lend aid to Byzantine territories under threat of Turkish attack and issued crusading indulgences for those who would travel east to defend the Greeks. But the ancient schism between Orthodox and Latin Churches remained a stumbling block to more concentrated action, as did the diminished state of papal finances. A papal legation to Constantinople in 1422 failed to advance the cause of union between the Eastern and Latin Churches. In Europe, Martin’s crusaders mustered to attack Hussites, not Turks.6 Before long, the pope’s attention turned to reasserting control over the papal states and restoring the urban fabric of Rome. As the bishop of Rome set about rebuilding his dilapidated city, the Turks resumed their advance on Constantinople. Under Murad ii, they besieged the Byzantine capital in 1422, expanded north into the Balkans, and sent ships to capture Sinope on the Black Sea (1424), Smyrna (1426), and Thessalonica (1430). The steady encirclement of Constantinople prompted John viii Paleologus to lead an embassy to the West on another quest for military support; the emperor appeared before Eugenius iv at the Council of Ferrara and followed the assembly when it transferred to Florence. As at Constance, the Latin fathers insisted on resolution of the schism as a prerequisite for military aid. This time, the Greeks were more willing to negotiate. The union of the Greek and Latin churches was proclaimed at Florence in the bull Laetentur caeli (July 6, 1439), a moment of triumph for Eugenius iv that prompted general optimism in the West. On January 1, 1443, Eugenius made good on his end of the bargain, declaring a new crusade against the Turks and naming as its captains Wladyslaw iii, king of Hungary and Poland; Philip, duke of Burgundy; and John Hunyadi, voivode of Transylvania. A Christian army marched south through the Balkans to the Ottoman frontier that spring; after a year of campaigning, and some initial successes, they met the Ottomans in battle before the Black Sea fortress of Varna on November 10, 1444—yet another event that has been called the “last crusade.” The crusaders were overwhelmed, and both Wladyslaw and the papal legate, Giuliano Cesarini, were killed in the fighting. By then, the Orthodox faithful in Constantinople had dismissed the union as unacceptable, and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was all but inevitable. On May 29, 1453, the city fell to Murad’s son, the young Sultan Mehmed ii. 6 Antonin Kalous, “Papal Legates and Crusading Activity in Central Europe: The Hussites and the Ottoman Turks,” in The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century, 75–89.

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The fall of Constantinople concentrated European minds. Nicholas v sent messengers across Europe inviting the Christian princes to discuss plans for a new crusade and issued a crusading bull on September 30, 1453 decrying the sack of the city, calling on Christians everywhere to take up the cross to avenge its loss, and promising a plenary indulgence to all who would fight, or pay someone else to fight, against the infidel for at least six months.7 The Italian states ceased fighting one another long enough to form the League of Lodi, a mutual defense pact in which all agreed to protect each other against the aggression of the Turk; in Burgundy, Philip the Bold took a crusader’s vow at the famous Feast of the Pheasant; and Emperor Frederick iii convened a series of imperial diets where German commitments to the crusade were to be ironed out. But the initial waves of panic and resolve soon gave way to the familiar status quo. No one wanted to be the first to commit men, arms, or money to a cause that others might yet avoid supporting. Papal exhortations to the faithful counted for little when the Christian princes were so hesitant to take the lead. After the inconclusive Diet of Regensberg in 1454, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius ii) lamented the lack of Christian concord: “Christendom has no head whom all will obey—neither the pope nor the emperor receives his due. There is neither reverence nor obedience … every city has its own king, and there are as many princes as there are households. How can one persuade the many rulers of the Christian world to take up arms under a single standard?”8 Nicholas v, Calixtus iii, and Pius ii all tried to launch new crusades to recover Constantinople, and Calixtus even succeeded in dispatching a papal fleet to Turkish waters. But as the above examples suggest, the popes faced an almost impossible task in attempting to focus the attention of the Christian princes, secure commitments, and plan strategy with a wide array of potential allies, many of them openly hostile to one other. The examples of Nicopolis and Varna left the European princes wary of large-scale campaigns. Recapturing Constantinople would require expeditions on land in the Balkans as well as on several seas. All wondered—and feared—who might benefit from a victory. Venetian enthusiasm for the project did little to secure the commitments of Florentines or Milanese, for example; if the Aragonese in Naples expressed support, the French pulled back; any campaign to benefit the Hungarians incurred

7 Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turks (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1967), 31. 8 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini to Leonardo Bentivoglio, 1454, in Opera quae extant omnia (Basel: per Henrichvm Petri, 1551), 656; translation by Mary Martin McLaughlin, in Portable Renaissance Reader (New York: Viking Penguin, 1953), 75.

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obstruction from Frederick iii; Burgundian support could only come if the French were neutralized at home; and so negotiations went nowhere. In 1459, Pius ii invited the European powers to the Congress of Mantua in an effort to resolve these differences and orchestrate a new expedition to the east. The pope’s first-hand account, preserved in his autobiographical Commentaries, vividly describes the rivalries and canny self-interest that motivated the participants.9 For Pius, the crusade was an urgent necessity on several grounds. The fall of Constantinople had affected him profoundly. As a humanist, he mourned the loss of the Greek city, its libraries and scholarly communities. He famously likened the sack of the city to the sack of Rome a thousand years earlier, calling the Turkish onslaught a new barbarian invasion and “a second death for Homer, a second destruction of Plato.”10 But Pius had political reasons for wanting to promote a new crusade, as well. If the Turks threatened the safety of Christian Europe from without, the conciliar movement threatened equally to break the Christendom from within. The Council of Constance, even as it resolved the Great Schism, had left crucial questions of authority in the Church unresolved. Martin v had had to make certain concessions to conciliar authority as a condition of his election. The question remained open: did the pope preside over the council, or could the council make (and unmake) the pope? The Council of Basel brought a new wave of conciliar challenges to papal authority, including the brief election of an antipope, Felix v. The Christian princes—above all Louis xi of France and Emperor Frederick iii—sought to capitalize on the uncertainty to show minimal obedience and extract maximal concessions from the bishop of Rome. In their crusade sermons and orations, Pius and the humanists in his circle extolled the crusade as a necessary project and one that only the pope could lead. Harking back to the age of the First Crusade when (as they saw it), Urban ii had commanded the princes of Europe to march east at the head of a vast crusading force, the publicists of the Roman curia argued that a successful crusade might actually restore the authority of the papacy in turn, securing the position of the pope as the head of Christendom, arbiter of war and peace both east and west, to whom the Christian princes must defer.11 These were 9 10 11

Pius ii, Commentaries, ed. and transl. Margaret Meserve (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004–), vol. 2, Book ii. Nancy Bisaha, “Pius ii and the Crusade,” in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, 39–52. On these themes, see Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, revised ed., 1998), esp. 106–123; Emily O’Brien, The Commentaries of Pope Pius ii (1458–1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Margaret Meserve, “Italian Humanists and the Problem of the Crusade,” in The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century, 13–38.

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themes that ambassadors and legates representing other states echoed when they presented formal orations before the pope; every humanist in Europe, or so it seemed, had an oration against the Turk in his repertoire and was prepared to deliver it coram papa.12 Despite these idealistic appeals, no crusading coalition emerged from Mantua. The following year, the Turks captured mainland Greece, ejecting the last Paleologans from the Despotate of Mistra. Pius pressed ahead with his own crusading plans, issuing the crusade bull Ezechielis propheta in the autumn of 1463, a document which secured Burgundian and Venetian support, but little acknowledgement from the other European powers. In frustration, Pius declared that ten years had passed since the fall of Constantinople; the time was ripe to avenge the loss; and in the absence of any secular champion, he would lead the crusade himself. In June, 1464, he took up the cross in St. Peter’s Basilica. Though in ill health, he set out with his cardinals and curia for the Italian port of Ancona, on the Adriatic coast, where a rendezvous with Venetian galleys full of mercenaries was planned. Neither troops nor fleet materialized, however, and the pope died in a borrowed palace overlooking an empty harbor. Pius’ enterprise, too, has been called the “last crusade.”13 Six years later, Venice lost the island colony of Negroponte, their largest and most important outpost in the Eastern Mediterranean. In Rome, Paul ii led relics in procession around the Lateran and despatched letters and legates across Europe to sound the alarm once again, but again, to little effect.14 After the debacle of Pius ii’s crusade, no pope or Christian power seriously considered a major military expedition to the east for over a century. In the 1470s, Sixtus iv shifted tactics. He focused on fundraising, sending preachers and commissioners across Europe to sell crusade indulgences to the faithful. Sixtus’ agents used the new medium of the printing press to mass-produce confessional certificates and letters of indulgence and raked in contributions in record amounts.15 With his coffers full, Sixtus was able to outfit and send a

12

13 14 15

James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed ii,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995), 111–207; Margaret Meserve, Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), chapter 7. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–1954), 3: 468. Margaret Meserve, “News from Negroponte: Politics, Propaganda, and Information Exchange in the First Decade of the Italian Press,”Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 440–480. Norman Housley, “Indulgences for Crusading, 1417–1517,” in Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Robert N. Swanson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 277–307.

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fleet east in 1472. Under the command of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, papal ships joined Neapolitan and Venetian galleys to attack the Anatolian ports of Satalia and Smyrna,16 which they occupied briefly. But the Venetian and papal legates could not agree on how to capitalize on the exploit, and the league soon dispersed. Yet more losses followed: the Ottomans besieged the Albanian city of Scutari in 1474 and captured the Genoese port of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1475; Turkish raiders pushed overland into Venetian Friuli, at the head of the Adriatic, in 1472 and 1478–1479. In 1480, Ottoman troops occupied Otranto in Puglia, in the heel of the peninsula, and at the same time began a year-long siege of Rhodes, headquarters of the Hospitaller Knights of St. John. These twin emergencies created yet another moment of brief resolve among the Italian powers. Sixtus broke off the war he had been conducting against Lorenzo de’ Medici and joined forces with Naples to send relief to Puglia. The Ottomans soon pulled back from Italy. Whether Italian efforts, or the death of Mehmed ii in May, 1481, contributed more to the Ottoman withdrawal from operations in the West is an open question.

∵ It is worth considering what effects the crusade—or talk of the crusade, at least—had on the fifteenth-century papacy and, by extension, on the rest of Europe. The Christian princes rarely came forward with financial commitments or military action, as we have seen. But by consistently calling for a crusade, and by dispatching special legates de latere to the Christian princes at times of crisis, the Renaissance popes succeeded in putting themselves at the center of diplomatic conversations throughout the century.17 The Council of Basel, for example, began life as a conciliar enterprise intended to curb the power of the pope. Eugenius iv ingeniously transformed the assembly into a conference dedicated, at least in part, to the question of the crusade. After transferring the council to Ferrara/Florence, Eugenius hosted an imperial delegation from Byzantium, secured the union with the Orthodox Church (however short-lived), and maneuvered Venice, Hungary, and Burgundy into supporting an expedition to the east. After the fall of Constantinople, Nicholas v was unable to organize the Italian powers into a crusade, but he did bring them together in the peace of Lodi, styling the signatories as a “Most Holy League” 16 17

Pastor, History of the Popes, 4: 225–228. See the table of legations in Antonin Kalous, “Papal Legates and Crusading Activity in Central Europe,” 81.

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arrayed against the threat of the Turk. Garrett Mattingly has noted how the pact helped establish the system of resident ambassadors that secured peace in Italy for the next forty years.18 The popes also publicized crusading initiatives directly to the people, sponsoring campaigns of preaching and indulgence sales throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.19 These campaigns would have profound effects on both papal finances and lay devotions. Nicholas v’s crusade indulgences of 1454 and 1455 were among the first texts Johannes Gutenberg experimented on as he developed the new technology of movable type. In the years he was preparing his great Bible for publication, Gutenberg also printed Calixtus iii’s 1456 bull encouraging contributions for the relief of the siege of Belgrade and a German poem lamenting the fall of Constantinople.20 For the next five decades, German printers would earn much of their business from the printing of indulgence blanks, confessional certificates, advertisements of new indulgences, credentials for new indulgence preachers, and other administrative documents connected with the vastly lucrative indulgence trade. The terms set out in these spiritual contracts echoed those stipulated in the crusading bulls of earlier centuries, but as Norman Housley has pointed out, the documents grew in complexity along with the economy of indulgenceselling itself. Commissioners selling crusade indulgences had to compete with a host of other indulgences on offer—to benefit the upkeep of local churches or shrines or to underwrite renovation costs—as well as the recurring event of a Jubilee Year. Documents announcing new crusading indulgences included a growing litany of terms suspending other indulgences, setting means-tested prices, and specifying who could benefit from their purchase.21 The 1476 Saintes indulgence was the first to be published by Raymond Peraudi, who would become one of the most indefatigable and prolific indulgence-sellers in north18

19

20

21

Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 81–84, esp. 83: “Perhaps partly because there was some vague notion of a general war against the Turks … the exchange of residents was extended. Extremely rare in 1440, resident ambassadors were commonplace throughout Italy by 1460.” For two examples of crusade preaching campaigns, from the 1460s and 1510s, see Ludwig Mohler, “Bessarions Instruktion für die Kreuzzugspredigt in Venedig (1463),” Römische Quartalschrift, 35 (1927), 337–349; Norman Housely, Documents on the Later Crusades (London: MacMillan, 1996), 147–153; idem, “Indulgences for Crusading,” 290–292. George Painter, “Gutenberg and the B36 Group: A Reconsideration,” in Essays in Honor of Victor Scholderer, ed. Dennis E. Rhodes (Mainz: Pressler, 1970), 292–322; Janet Ing, “The Mainz Indulgences of 1454/5: A Review of Recent Scholarship,” British Library Journal, 9 (1983), 14–31; Eckehard Simon, The Türkenkalender (1454) Attributed to Gutenberg and the Strasbourg Lunation Tracts (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1988). Housley, “Indulgences for Crusading,” 282–284.

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ern Europe in the decades before Luther. Sold to benefit both the cathedral of Saintes as well as the crusade against the Turk, this indulgence was among the first to offer remission from punishment not only for the living buyer and his or her dependents, but for the souls of the deceased in purgatory as well.22 This innovation led to a marked increase in sales, but would also be one of the most provocative issues for theologians objecting to the abuse of indulgences, among them Martin Luther.23

2

The Crusade in the Long Sixteenth Century

After the death of Mehmed ii in 1481, the next two Ottoman sultans, Bayezid ii and Selim i, focused their attention eastward, especially on the rising power of the Safavids in Iran, allowing a temporary respite for Europe.24 Innocent viii and Alexander vi came to diplomatic arrangements with the Turks; among other concessions, they kept Bayezid’s rival and brother, Cem Sultan, as a hostage in the Vatican in exchange for Ottoman inattention. Innocent viii tried briefly to organize the Christian princes into another crusading coalition 1490, but negotiations were inconclusive. If the papacy at the end of the fifteenth century was perhaps less convinced of the need for a new crusade, this did not stop various European powers from invoking the enterprise anyway. Charles viii invaded Italy in 1494 on the grounds that, as the titular king of Jerusalem, he was called by God to launch an expedition to defeat the infidel; the conquest of Naples was to be the first stop on a journey across the Adriatic to engage the Turks in naval battle. Charles never made it past Naples and in fact withdrew from Italy the following year. A decade later, Maximilian i made the crusade a central feature of his political persona, orchestrating pageants and commissioning commemorative propaganda that celebrated his achievements as a chivalrous knight-crusader, riding forth to defend the faith and gain glory for the house of Habsburg. In practice, Maximilian was as reluctant to commit to a crusade as his father Frederick iii had been. Other northern princes—Louis xii, the young Henry viii, and Fran-

22 23 24

Housley, “Indulgences for Crusading,” 286–287; certain indulgences sold in Spain in earlier decades may also have benefitted the dead as well as the living. See, for example, Thesis 27 of the 95 Theses: “Hominem predicant, qui statim ut iactus nummus in cistam tinnierit evolare dicunt animam.” A recent, and not uncontroversial treatment of this period is Alan Mikhail, God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020).

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cis i—were equally ready to invoke crusading rhetoric and political imagery, and equally unlikely to turn plans into reality. By the early decades of the sixteenth century, the crusade against the Turk was more an object of princely fantasy than practical planning. At the same time, other European states were launching expansionist initiatives beyond the Mediterranean that brought them into conflict with “infidels” much further afield. In the mid-1480s, Portuguese envoys to the papal court reported on recent expeditions conducted in the name of Christ in Africa and the Indian Ocean.25 Ferdinand and Isabella’s reconquest of the Spanish peninsula culminated in the capture of Granada in 1492, the last Muslim principality in Western Europe, a decade-long enterprise for which Sixtus iv, Innocent viii, and Alexander vi all issued crusading bulls and indulgences.26 On hearing the news of Granada’s fall, Alexander sponsored public processions and celebrations in Rome. Granada was recaptured just as Christopher Columbus was staking Spanish claims to the “Indies” on the other side of the Atlantic, imagining his voyages of discovery and conquest as a work of evangelism for Christ. In the wake of Columbus’ discoveries, Alexander vi issued the bull Inter caetera dividing the world beyond Gibraltar between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. The bull made specific reference to the previous recovery of Granada from “Saracen tyranny,” and celebrated the fact “that in our times the Catholic faith and the Christian religion has been exalted and everywhere increased and spread … as barbarous nations are being overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” It is not hard to imagine Alexander’s relief at being presented with a “crusade” that had actually succeeded. In this view; Turks, Moors, and Indians alike could all be objects of the same papal solicitude, targets for conquest and conversion.27 Evangelization proceeded pari passu with militant triumph, and crusading grew conflated with colonial enterprises in the Old World as well as the New.28

∵ 25 26 27

28

The Obedience of a King of Portugal, transl. Francis M. Rogers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958). Norman Housley, “Indulgences for Crusading, 1417–1517,” 289. Alexander vi, Inter caetera, May 4, 1493: “recuperatio regni Granate a tyrannide Saracenorum.” See James Muldoon, “Papal Responsibility for the Infidel: Another Look at Alexander vi’s Inter Caetera,” The Catholic Historical Review, 64 (1978), 168–184. Benjamin Weber, “Toward a Global Crusade? The Papacy and the Non-Latin World in the Fifteenth Century,” in Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, 11–44.

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European expansion abroad served as a tempting proxy for the traditional crusade against the Turk, a project still much discussed, if rarely pursued. At the Fifth Lateran Council, Giles of Viterbo interpreted Iberian discoveries overseas as portending the dawn of a new “Golden Age” under Julius ii. As infidels around the globe yielded to the might of Christian arms, the way lay open for the Gospel to spread to the ends of the earth. All that was needed was reform of Church in head and members, and the strengthened Christian polity would easily triumph over its enemies, including the Turks. The details of just how this might happen were left unspecified.29 In practice, Julius confined his wars to Italian soil, forming leagues with other Christian powers to reduce first the power of the Venetians, then that of the French. In both cases, the League of Cambrai and then the Holy League against France justified militant action with the argument that war would bring peace, and peace in Europe would be the prelude to a new crusade. But peace in Europe remained elusive. Julius’ successor, Leo x, seems to have believed quite sincerely in the necessity of the crusade. In May, 1514, presiding over the ninth session of Lateran v, Leo called for a universal peace among the Christian powers of Europe, the better to organize a campaign “against the evil and implacable enemies of the Cross of Christ.” At the final session of the council, in November 1517, Leo established a cardinalatial commission to discuss tactics and strategy and despatched legates de latere to the European monarchs to secure a truce of five years and financial commitments for the outfitting of a fleet. The Christian princes proved as immune to Leo’s urging as they had been to Pius ii’s some six decades before, and little became of Leo’s crusade.30 It is worth considering the rhetoric of this line of thinking, nevertheless. From Constance to Basel to Lateran v, the project of reforming the Church inevitably included calls for a new crusade against the Turk. Clerics and lay observers alike saw the situation in the East as intimately bound up with the internal problems of the Church. All agreed that a united Christendom—at peace with itself and obedient to a Church led by prelates worthy of respect— would never have allowed Constantinople to fall. A functioning Christendom would have protected the islands of the Aegean and kept the Turk from marauding through the Balkans. Reform the Church, correct its excesses, amend its finances, and renew devotion, the thinking went, and crusading armies would

29

30

Giles of Viterbo, “Fulfillment of the Golden Age under Pope Julius ii,” in Francis x. Martin, Friar, Reformer, and Renaissance Scholar: Life and Works of Giles of Viterbo, 1469–1532 (Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1992), 222–282, esp. 254. Kenneth M. Setton, “Pope Leo x and the Turkish Peril,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 113 (1969), 367–424.

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practically assemble themselves. There were strains in Christian thinking— for example, Erasmus’ pacifism or Luther’s fatalism—that preferred to accept Turkish ascendancy as God’s punishment for Christian failure.31 But in papal diplomacy, preaching, and propaganda, support for the crusade—or at least, the articulation of a policy of aggressive containment against Muslim empires—remained a powerful and effective political stance. These gestures were echoed by the Catholic monarchs with whom the popes made common cause, even if most were reluctant to take positive action. The crusade could also be bound up in the artistic, devotional, and ceremonial life of the papal city, where, as with the rhetoric of the humanists, crusading imagery and themes served purposes somewhat distinct from the actual prosecution of war in the Ottoman east. In 1462, Pius ii staged the translation of a relic—the head of St. Andrew, brought from mainland Greece, recently conquered by the Turks, to Rome—as a crusading pageant in which he himself played a leading role. To make way for the relic, streets were cleared, cardinals ordered to decorate their palaces, and a monumental marble loggia was constructed across the façade of Old St. Peter’s. The translatio of the relic was meant to focus minds on Pius’ proposed crusade, but it was equally important for how it elevated the figure of the pope, his church, and his palace at the Vatican over the rest of the city and—by extension—the rest of Christendom. In 1483, Giuliano della Rovere (newly promoted to the position of cardinal bishop of Ostia, and the future Julius ii) began construction of a new fortress at Ostia, ostensibly for the protection of the papal city from Ottoman attack.32 It was only two years since the Turks had violently occupied Otranto in Puglia, so there was some merit to the claim that Rome might need defending from a Turkish fleet, but Cardinal della Rovere was also seeking to consolidate and protect his own position in Rome before the death of his uncle, the reigning Sixtus iv. (During the reign of his nemesis, Alexander vi, the cardinal bishop would barricade himself in his fortress at Ostia on several occasions.) In the second decade of the sixteenth century, the building was coopted into a visual commemoration of crusading in the Raphael Stanze inside the Vatican Palace. A scene in the Stanza dell’Incendio depicts a somewhat obscure episode from the ninth century, when an Arab fleet intent on raiding Rome was dispersed by

31 32

For an exhaustive survey of these themes, see Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Alessandro Pastore, “Giulio ii,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani (2001): “con lo scopo di garantire la sicurezza di Roma dagli attacchi turchi e di tenere sotto controllo il rifornimento alimentare della città.”

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a sudden storm at the mouth of the Tiber. The Battle of Ostia portrays Leo iv with the features of the contemporary pope Leo x, seated beneath the fortress on a picturesque assembly of Roman ruins and watching the Saracen fleet founder on the waves as naked Arab captives are led to his feet.33 Elsewhere in the room, painted reliefs portray secular rulers of various eras who showed particular deference to Rome—Charlemagne and Matilda of Tuscany, as well as Godfrey of Bouillon, the crusading conqueror of Jerusalem, and Ferdinand of Aragon, hailed in a cartouche as “propagator of the Christian Empire” in the New World. The program of the Raphael Stanze consistently conflates the defense of Rome with crusading abroad, the defense of the faith with its advance around the globe. In the Sala di Costantino, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge commemorates how Constantine’s vision of the Cross allowed him to triumph over the pagan Maxentius and refound Rome as a Christian metropolis. In the Stanza d’Eliodoro, another scene of Leonine triumph depicts the moment Leo i (again with the features of Leo x) defended Rome against Attila the Hun.34 Overhead, Saints Peter and Paul appear with swords drawn, their appearance invoking the miraculous intervention of Castor and Pollux at the Battle of Lake Regillus in 469bc when the Romans triumphed over enemy tribes of the Latin League. The rooms thus elide time, protagonists, and enemies alike: Rome, ever threatened by external attack—whether by Italic tribes, Huns, Saracens, or Turks—is guarded by tutelary divinities who provide the city’s rulers—consuls, emperors, and popes alike—with special protection. Art historians have connected the Battle of Ostia to the plans Leo articulated for a crusade at the Fifth Lateran Council. But if the scene is to be understood as a crusade painting, it also demonstrates the extent to which the enterprise had come to be seen as a project to defend Rome and exalt its bishop, as much as to recover the Holy Places. In similar fashion, both Julius ii and Leo x directed resources to the Marian shrine at Loreto in the Marche, a few miles inland from the Adriatic, where the Virgin Mary’s house was said to have landed after an angelic flight from Nazareth around the time of the fall of Acre. The Loreto cult had many meanings in early sixteenth-century Italy: it was a site of pilgrimage, a place where the Virgin effected miraculous cures, and the spot to which sailors brought offerings after shipwrecks and storms at sea. But the Loreto legend also cast the 33 34

For a reading of the scene see George L. Hersey, High Renaissance Art in St. Peter’s and the Vatican (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 156–157. Ibid., 148.

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Virgin as a refugee from Islamic aggression, brought by angels from the fallen crusader kingdom to a site inside the papal states where the bishop of Rome could protect her. Pius ii had prayed at her holy house on his way to launch his doomed crusade from Ancona; Paul ii and Sixtus iv began construction of a massive basilica that enveloped the little house and protected it from potential attack. Leo x fortified the entire town of Loreto against the threat of a Turkish fleet sailing up the Adriatic to pillage it.35 Humanists and other writers would long invoke the Madonna di Loreto as a special defender of the Christian faithful against the Turks.36

∵ The realities of the Ottoman advance intruded frequently on these devotional and propagandistic speculations. In 1516, Selim i won a decisive battle over the Mamluks in Syria; the following year, he overthrew the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, occupied Cairo, and seized the subject cities of Damascus and Jerusalem, causing general Christian alarm. In 1521, his successor Suleyman i captured Belgrade and in 1522, the Ottomans drove the Hospitallers from their island fortress of Rhodes. In 1526, Suleyman overran the armies of Hungary at Mohacs, which led directly to the death of the young King Louis ii, a disaster that left the country partitioned for centuries. At the siege of Vienna, in 1529, Charles v was barely able to repel an Ottoman force twice the size of his own. Each event triggered panic and alarm in Europe and new assertions of crusading fervor, but still little action. Throughout this period, the Christian princes were at war with one another, and the spread of Lutheran ideas north of the Alps did little to advance the cause of Christian unity. When Clement vii became pope in 1523, he noted three great problems facing Christendom, each equally urgent: the Turks abroad, war at home, and Lutheran schism.37 Those Christian princes who did choose to play the part of a latter-day crusader tended to choose fairly easy targets for their campaigns, and Rome’s weakness meant they were often able to negotiate significant papal support for their efforts. Charles viii of France may never have meant for his “crusade” to progress past Naples, but he was able to force Alexander vi to hand over Cem

35

36 37

Eva Renzulli, “Loreto, Leo x and the Fortifications on the Adriatic Coast against the Infidel,” in Italy and the European Powers: The Impact of War, 1500–1530, ed. Christine Shaw (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 57–73. Bernard Hamilton, “The Ottomans, the Humanists, and the Holy House of Loreto,” Culture, Theory and Critique, 31 (1987), 1–19. Housley, The Later Crusades, 127–128.

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Sultan as a bargaining chip. Leo x catered to Maximilian’s crusading fantasies. Maximilian’s son Charles v’s attacks on Tunis in the 1530s were lightning raids, not sustained campaigns, that nevertheless won him a Roman triumph courtesy of Paul iii (an event for which Michelangelo redesigned the Campidoglio). Charles’ troops had sacked Rome some eight years earlier; celebrating his victorious “crusade” in the same streets that his landsknechts had so recently looted must have been a bittersweet event for the Romans. With champions like these, it is not surprising, perhaps, that the popes of the later sixteenth century had rather less to say about the crusade than their predecessors of the High Renaissance. Under Paul iii, who was concerned above all with suppressing Lutheran schism, papal policy shifted irreversibly from diplomatic efforts to form crusading coalitions to financial support of the crusading efforts of others. Clement sent lavish subsidies to Charles v for the defense of Vienna in 1529 and Paul for the capture of Tunis in 1535—an enterprise supported additionally by crusade preaching and financial instruments.38 Charles’ successes in North Africa had the effect of driving Francis i into an alliance with Suleyman (1536), a scandalous realignment that would persist for the rest of the century. Another Holy League funded from papal coffers (this one formed by Venice, the Empire, and the pope) sent a fleet east in 1538 in an effort to curb the activities of the Ottoman admiral Barbarossa. Their efforts were so unsuccessful that Venice, too, soon made a separate peace with the Ottomans (1540). When the Council of Trent opened in 1545, defeat of the infidel was still high on the ecclesiastical agenda, along with reform of the Church and resolution of schism. But the diplomatic map of the continent was by now hopelessly confused. Some Christian states entered freely into truces or even alliances with the Ottomans, while others were willing to go to war with the Turks but only with papal subsidy. Paul iii, Julius iii, and Paul iv would grant crusade indulgences and taxes to Catholic states preparing expeditions against the Ottomans. Naval leagues underwritten with papal financing became the predominant form of “crusade” in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Successive popes thus played an important part in the successful defense of Malta in 1565 and the unsuccessful attempt to defend Cyprus in 1570. The Ottoman attack on Venetian Cyprus inspired the formation of yet another Holy League, struck between Venice, the Habsburgs, and the papacy, which launched a fleet in 1571 that attacked and defeated the Ottoman navy at Lepanto. Lepanto was hailed as a Catholic triumph, but in fact its impact on the military situation in the Mediter-

38

Ibid., 130–132.

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ranean was minimal. Within a year, the Ottomans rebuilt their navy, and they would retain their mastery over the sea from Constantinople to the Adriatic for many decades to come. A glance at the map of the Mediterranean in 1600 might suggest that the Renaissance crusade had amounted to rather little. At one end of the sea, the Byzantine Empire was gone, and with it, Christian control of the Balkans. Venice had lost its maritime empire. The Ottomans had overthrown the Mamluks, conquered Egypt and the Holy Land, and fought off the Safavids on their eastern flank, winning near-hegemony over the Islamic East. To the west, however, Europe’s overseas expansion into the Americas, Africa, and the Indian Ocean meant that Ottoman domination of Mediterranean trade routes mattered far less than they might have done a few centuries before. The loss of Venetian and Genoese colonies in the Aegean mirrored the general eclipse of the Italian city states, much diminished in the political economy of the sixteenth century and the rise of national monarchies. But if Europe in 1600 found itself in a far stronger position, vis à vis the Muslim East, than it did in 1400, it was not because the Christian princes had finally found the unity or concord their publicists had sought for so many decades. The idea of a united Christendom had been long since broken from within. The Venetians continued to pursue separate peace with the Ottomans when it suited them. The Franco-Ottoman alliance was a settled feature of European diplomacy. Protestant princes showed the pope no more deference than the sultan did. Elizabeth i was a frequent correspondent with Muslim princes from Tunis to Persia, including the Ottoman Sultan Murad iii. Christian Europe found equilibrium with the Ottomans just as its constituent parts had fractured beyond any hope of repair.

3

Crusades against Christians

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Renaissance popes declared crusades against fellow Christians within the borders of Europe almost as frequently as they called for crusades against the Turk. This was not entirely an innovation of the fifteenth century: in the 1220s, Innocent iii had targeted heretical Cathar sects in the south of France in the so-called Albigensian Crusades, and Innocent iii and Gregory ix also declared crusades (or used crusading rhetoric, at least) against Frederick ii Hohenstaufen and his ministers in their disputes over Sicily. These moves were repeated in the so-called “Aragonese Crusade” that Martin iv declared against Pedro iii of Aragon in 1284–1285. The Renaissance popes continued to declare crusades against Christians, both heretics and polit-

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ical opponents.39 After the execution of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415, the Bohemian Hussites rose up in a general rebellion. In 1420, Martin v issued a crusade bull encouraging preachers to rouse the faithful to join the battle for Christian souls in Bohemia.40 Martin v and Eugenius iv between them launched six separate crusades against Bohemian Utraquists between 1419 and 1434. The crusade against heretics had a brief revival when in 1487, Innocent viii issued a crusading bull against Waldensians or Vaudois in Piedmont, Savoy, and the Dauphiné. And there were still populations that could be characterized as pagan in the far corners of Europe. As late as 1503, Alexander vi issued a crusade indulgence for the Teutonic Knights as they prepared for war against Rutheni and Tartari in Russia. And Julius ii issued crusading indulgences to support Polish and Livonian campaigns againsts “Turks, Tartars, schismatics, and other sects.”41 The Turks were Muslim, of course, as were many Crimean Tatars; the Orthodox Russians were assimilated to them as schismatics and heretics, and all were meant to recall the pagan tribes the medieval Knights had once subdued. The popes were equally likely to declare “crusades” against their own political rivals much closer to home. There were medieval precedents for this kind of action, too. As early as the twelfth century, popes and councils had declared crusades or issued crusading indulgences against internal enemies on the grounds that the purpose of a crusade was to defend the faith, and the faith could be threatened by schismatics or rebels against papal authority inside Europe just as much as it could be threatened by infidel or pagan aggressors abroad.42 The fourteenth century saw the Avignon popes launch a series of crusades in Italy whose goal was to pacify the papal states and restore Roman authority, whether over freelance mercenary companies, recalcitrant vassals, or breakaway city-states. During the Great Schism, popes and antipopes declared crusades against each other and their followers, and John xxiii declared a crusade against Ladislas of Naples when he invaded central and northern Italy. (This did not stop Ladislas from attacking and briefly occupying Rome in 1413.) A brief resurgence of schism in the 1440s, when the Council of Basel elected the antipope Felix v, saw Nicholas v offer crusading indulgences to Charles vii

39 40 41

42

Pavel Soukup, “Crusading against Christians in the Fifteenth Century: Doubts and Debates,” in Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, 90–122, at 99. Housley, “Indulgences for Crusading,” 279, 284–285. Anti Selart, “Switching the Tracks: Baltic Crusades against Russia in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century, 90–106. Housley, “Indulgences for Crusading,” 287– 289. Housley, The Later Crusades, 234–235 and more generally, 234–266.

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of France in exchange for a French invasion of Savoy.43 In 1482, a renegade Croatian archbishop attempted to reconvene the Council of Basel, prompting Sixtus iv and his legate Angelo Geraldini to issue crusade bulls against the city of Basel, promising plenary indulgences to any soldier who fought against the city and helped oust the rebellious archbishop, Andrija Jamometić.44 Even more common was the rhetorical justification of war against a rival to clear the way for a future crusade. In the Pazzi War of 1478–1479, Lorenzo de’ Medici accused Sixtus iv of squandering his crusade funds on wars closer to home in Italy (including a war against Lorenzo himself). In a printed brief that circulated widely in Italy, Sixtus argued the opposite: only by waging war against Lorenzo could the pope pacify the Italian peninsula, unify it against a potential Ottoman attack, and ultimately prepare the Italians for a new crusade against the Turk. “Do you want to inflict maximum damage on the Turks, the enemy of our faith, and deflect the threats they pose against us? Then join us in driving out this seed of discord [Lorenzo]. With Italy pacified … the foul plague of the Turks will be eradicated and the Christian polity … will be restored to its original state.”45 The militant popes of the sixteenth century distributed crusading indulgences, or discussed launching full crusades, on occasions when they saw their authority in doubt. Julius ii issued indulgences to his own troops fighting his wars in northern Italy, and to English soldiers planning to invade France; later popes threatened Henry viii with a crusade against England.46 Julius iii threatened a crusade against France when Henri ii made a treaty with the Turks; and Paul iv considered declaring crusades against Charles v and Philip ii.47 Norman Housley argues that these were isolated incidents, not indicative of general papal practice in the sixteenth century; the popes of the Counter-Reformation worried about antagonizing some European monarchs by declaring crusades against them, and feared giving others too much authority or military license by making them captains of such a crusade. The glaring exception is the launching of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when Sixtus v issued crusade indulgences 43 44 45

46

47

Ibid., 249. Meserve, Papal Bull, chapter 4. Reported in Sigismondo dei Conti, Storie de’ suoi tempi 2 vols. (Rome: [G. Barbera], 1883, repr. as Supplementi al Bollettino storico della città di Foligno, 12—Foligno: Accademia Fulginia di Lettere Scienze e Arti, 2015), 1: 41. Susan Brigden, “Henry viii and the Crusade against England,” in Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb, eds, Henry viii and the Court: Art, Politics, and Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 215–234; Catherine Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 168. Housley, The Later Crusades, 260.

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to the soldiers and sailors of the departing fleet and lauded the expedition as a campaign to punish English heresy and reclaim apostate lands for the Catholic faith.

4

After Lepanto

In the summer of 1571, nearly two hundred years after the Crusade of Nicopolis, Pius v blessed a banner for the fleet of the Holy League before it sailed east to confront the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean. On October 7, the galleys of the league under Don Juan of Austria and the Roman admiral Marcantonio Colonna overwhelmed and dispersed over two hundred Ottoman ships in the largest naval engagement of the early modern era. The Christian forces credited their victory to the intercession of the Virgin, who had changed the winds at a critical moment. To celebrate the triumph, Pius declared October 7 a feast in honor of Our Lady of Victory (later renamed the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary), commissioned commemorative prints, medals, and music,48 and staged a triumph for Colonna in Rome that December. Modern historians tend to see Lepanto as a less consequential encounter.49 The Holy League deprived the sultan of his fleet and put a stop to Turkish maritime expansion beyond the Aegean, but no land campaign ensued; no Turkish territories were reclaimed by or for any Christian power. After Pius v’s death in May, 1572, the members of the League drifted apart and its fleet dispersed. The Ottoman vizier Mehmed Sokullu is said to have remarked that in capturing Cyprus from the Venetians the year before, the Ottomans had cut off a Christian arm, but the League that scattered the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto had merely shaved the Turkish beard. And beards could grow back.50 Still, the celebrations in Europe at the time, and the place that Lepanto held in Catholic memory long

48

49

50

For example, the Spanish composer Fernando de las Infantas, resident in Rome in the 1570s, produced the motet Canticum Moysis pro victoria navali contra Turcas (Sacrarum Cantionum Liber, 2.5); the Flemish composer Jacobus de Kerle produced a Cantio octo vocum de sacro foedere contra Turcas in the same decade. Andrew C. Hess, “The Battle of Lepanto and its place in Mediterranean History,” Past and Present, 57 (1972), 53–73; Stefan Hanß, Lepanto als Ereignis: dezentrierende Geschichte(n) der Seeschlacht von Lepanto (1571), (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017) and his Die materielle Kultur der Seeschlacht von Lepanto (1571): Materialität, Medialität und die historische Produktion eines Ereignisses, [Istanbuler Texte und Studien 38/1–2], (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag in Kommission, 2017). Possibly an apocryphal statement. Historians who repeat it include Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto (London: Cassell, 2003), 284; Jason Goodwin, Lords of

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after, were both prodigious. The victory of the Holy League was declared a triumph over unbelief, much needed in a time of confessional strife. By the time of Lepanto, the Roman Church had faced decades of challenges to its authority from sources much closer to home. The reform movement that Luther launched and that spread across Northern Europe in the sixteenth century called aspects of Catholic doctrine into question that were central to the idea of crusade. The theology of works that Luther so doubted was intrinsic to the notion of pilgrimage, and the crusade was still imagined as a peregrinatio, a perilous journey toward the Holy Land made for the good of the pilgrim’s soul. The indulgence sales that underwrote so many crusading campaigns were also now suspect; the Council of Trent had decreed their use should be much curtailed. And the idea that the pope should concern himself with military affairs, temporal alliances, and the hiring of mercenaries was one that Erasmus had skewered and Luther deplored. In response, the popes of the Counter-Reformation doubled down, invoking the crusading ideal as they sought to defeat the “heresy” of Luther and other Reformers. Spanish occupiers suppressing the Dutch Revolt, French partisans in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the admirals of the Spanish Armada all saw themselves venturing forth in the name of the Cross to defend Catholic truth against Protestant dissent. For their services, the pope was quick to offer spiritual graces as a reward. When, in August 1572, a French Catholic mob rose up against the Huguenots of Paris, massacring thousands including leading figures of the royal court and university on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Gregory xiii decreed a holiday commemorating the happy coincidence of two Catholic triumphs over heresy and unbelief: Lepanto in 1571 and Paris the following year. Giorgio Vasari painted frescoes in the Sala Regia of the Vatican Palace celebrating, on one side, the destruction of the Huguenots, and opposite them, the defeat of the Ottoman fleet.51 The two events were paired elsewhere in Rome, as well. Pius’ tomb in the Capella Sistina of Santa Maria Maggiore includes twin marble reliefs depicting the Catholic victory at Lepanto and the Catholic triumph in France.52 The Bat-

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the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (London: Vintage, 1998), 128; Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (New York: Morrow/Quill, 1979), 272. Alexandra Herz, “Vasari’s ‘Massacre’ Series in the Sala Regia: The Political, Juristic, and Religious Background,” Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte, 49 (1986), 41–54; Rick Scorza, “Vasari’s Lepanto Frescoes: ‘Apparati,’ Medals, Prints and the Celebration of Victory,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 75 (2012), 141–200. Two other reliefs show the pope entrusting his military commanders with commissions to fight against the Huguenots and against the Turks.

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tle of Lepanto left its imprint on Rome in other sites as well—most famously in a massive fresco depicting the battle on the ceiling of the salone of Palazzo Colonna.53 Victories over heretics and infidels continued to be commemorated together in Roman churches for many years more. In 1620, Paul v hailed the Battle of the White Mountain as another triumph of Catholicism over unbelief. The Catholic victory over the Protestants of Bohemia prompted the dedication of the early Baroque church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, near the Baths of Diocletian, that same year. The monumental fresco Giovanni Domenico Cerrini painted on the ceiling in 1675 portrayed the Virgin in triumph beneath a stucco banderole with the antiphonal text Cunctas haereses sola interemisti (“thou alone hast foiled all heresies”). When, in 1683, Jan Sobieski routed an Ottoman army at the siege of Vienna, this church was naturally the place where Turkish standards captured in battle—whether at Vienna or elsewhere—were sent.54 Rome remained the spiritual home of the crusade, even though the pope had long since lost the ability to command or guide its direction.

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Depending on their sponsors, different Roman sites awarded credit either to Pius v or to the patrician admiral Marcantonio Colonna. In the Vatican Palace, in addition to Vasari’s frescoes in the Sala Regia, the battle of Lepanto is depicted on the map of mainland Greece and its waters in the Gallery of Maps. The civic government of Rome installed a marble monument celebrating Colonna as the architect of the victory in the Palazzo dei Conservatori at Campidoglio; the triumphal inscription is supported by rostrated columns with four Turks chained to their bases. In Santa Maria in Aracoeli, long the chapel of the communal government, a gilded wood ceiling was installed in 1575 as a thank-offering for the victory at Lepanto, with another long inscription in praise of Colonna, and on the vault of the major sala of Palazzo Colonna, Sebastiano Ricci painted his vast Allegory of Lepanto in the late 1600s. On the papal side, meanwhile, Gianluigi Valesio (d. 1640) painted Pius v presiding over the victory at Lepanto in a lunette of the cloister of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Three Roman churches built in the twentieth century include commemorations of Lepanto: San Pio v, constructed in 1952, with a mosaic depicting Lepanto on the façade; Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, with frescoes by Giuseppe Mele ca. 1957–1965; and S. Giovanni Bosco, with a relief installed during construction in the early 1960s. Via Lepanto, in Prati, was laid out in the early twentieth century. The Metro stop that shares its name opened in 1980. Authorities differ as to the identity of the Turkish banners in Santa Maria della Vittoria (now hung in the sacristy). They are variously identified as loot from the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Battle of Timisoara in 1662, the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Siege of Vienna in 1529, and even the Battle of Ceuta, at which King John i of Portugal prevailed over a Moroccan force in 1415. Seeking to improve ecumenical and interfaith relations, Paul vi sent one Turkish banner captured at Lepanto back to the Republic of Turkey in 1965, around the same time he sent Pius ii’s relic of St Andrew’s head back to Greece. The banner now hangs in the Naval Museum of Istanbul.

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Bibliography Housley, Norman, ed. The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures. London: Routledge, 2017. Housley, Norman. The Later Crusades: 1274–1580: Lyons to Alcazar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kalous, Antonin. “Papal Legates and Crusading Activity in Central Europe: The Hussites and the Ottoman Turks,” in: The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century. Pp. 75–89. Malcolm, Noel. Useful Enemies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Meserve, Margaret. Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pastor, Ludwig. History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages. Trans. Frederick I. Antrobus et alii. 40 vols. London: Routledge & Paul, 1891–1953. Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade. Ed. Norman Housley. London: Palgrave, 2017. Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–1954, Setton, Kenneth M. The Papacy and the Levant, 4 vols. Philadelphia: Amerian Philosophical Society, 1976–1984. Weber, Benjamin. Lutter contre les Turcs: Les formes nouvelles de la croisade pontificale au xve siècle. Rome: École française de Rome, 2013.

chapter 9

The Renaissance Papacy and Missions outside Europe Emanuele Colombo

1

Introduction

The Renaissance popes faced multiple challenges emanating from outside Europe.* The spread of Islam and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453) spurred the popes to fight against Islam and work for reunification with eastern Christians, who had lived in the vicinity of Muslims for centuries.1 At the same time, the discovery and conquest of extra-European lands in Africa, America, and Asia by the competing Iberian powers of Portugal and Spain, together with the diffuse presence of apocalyptic prophecies and millenarian ideas, introduced new theological questions concerning the Church’s relationship with non-Christian peoples and begged for the creation of innovative juridical instruments and pastoral guidelines to regulate and support the evangelization of the New Worlds.2 Theologians and canon lawyers worked * I am grateful to Maria Teresa Fattori for her valuable comments and suggestions. 1 Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Benjamin Weber, Lutter contre les Turcs: Les nouvelles formes de la croisade pontificale au xve siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013); Norman Housley, ed., Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-century Crusade (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Benjamin Weber, ed., Croisades en Afrique. Les expéditions occidentales à destination du continent africain, xiiie–xvie siècle (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2019). 2 The Portuguese explorations in Western Africa during the fifteenth century culminated with the expedition of Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope (1487–1488), followed by the expeditions by Vasco da Gama, who landed in Calicut in 1498, and Tomé Pires, who headed the first official embassy from a European nation in China (1516). While the Portuguese discoveries in the East fueled the kings with enthusiasm, the discovery of Brazil by Pedro Álvares Cabral (1500) initially went unnoticed. Supported by the Spanish Crown, after the first journey by Cristoforo Colombo (1492), Hernán Cortés travelled to Mexico (1519– 1521), Fernão de Magalhães completed the circumnavigation of the globe (1519–1522), and Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru (1524–1532). See Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420–1620 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); Charles Ralph Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansionism, 1415–1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961); Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969); Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediter-

© Emanuele Colombo, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_010

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to revise medieval juridical doctrines and reinterpreted ancient juridical tools, in particular the “bulls of crusade”.3 The complex relationship that emerged between the popes and the Iberian monarchs brought into existence the Portuguese Patroado and the Spanish Padronato. These juridical systems, which evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gave rise to an expectation by the Iberian monarchs that they would exercise complete control over the church in Africa, America, and Asia. However, communications between the extra-European churches and Rome were never completely interrupted.4 The Renaissance papacy ended with the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which opened a new era in which the popes slowly gained more control of the extraEuropean churches, and missionaries negotiated their privileges in a delicate balance between obedience to Rome and dependence on patronage. This process culminated, sixty years later, with the creation of the Congregation De Propaganda Fide (1622), which played a key role in the development of early modern global Catholicism. This chapter describes the role of the Renaissance papacy in the process of creation of the Patroado and the Patronato; the popes’ initiatives in directing the ecclesiastical situation in the extra-European territories before the Council of Trent; and the consequences of the Council for the popes’ control of the missions outside Europe.

2

The Making of Portuguese (1420–1514) and Spanish (1486–1508) Patronage

Ecclesiastical patronage was the juridical instrument that regulated relations between the Church and the monarchy in the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain ranean to the Atlantic 1229–1492 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Timothy J. Coates, “The Early Modem Portuguese Empire: A Commentary on Recent Studies,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 37, no. 1 (2006), 83–90; Francisco Bethencourt and Diego Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800 (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3 James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250– 1550 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); Muldoon, Canon Law, the Expansion of Europe and World Order (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). 4 For an overview on the historiography, see Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Oltre lo schermo del Patronato regio: I rapporti tra Santa Sede e Chiesa ispano-americana in età moderna,” in Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio Alvariño et al., eds., Beyond the Borders. Percorsi e nuove prospettive di ricerca, tra Mediterraneo e Atlantico (secc. xvi–xx) (Palermo: New Digital Frontiers, 2024), 121–132.

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and their respective overseas possessions: Africa, Asia, and Brazil for the Portuguese kings (beginning in 1514) and Spanish America and the Philippines for the Spanish kings (beginning in 1508). The kings of Portugal and Spain attempted to administer higher ecclesiastical positions in the overseas territories and to control members of the religious orders. Additionally, their representatives—viceroys and governors—acted as vice-patrons, enforcing the royal will in ecclesiastical affairs. Papal briefs, bulls, and other documents emanating from Rome were received by the two colonial empires only after they had been endorsed and registered in the royal chancery in Lisbon or Madrid. In this way, political authority guided the ecclesiastical and religious life of the colonies. 2.1 The Portuguese Padroado Although on a strictly juridical level, the right of patronage was more broadly applied in Spain and its possessions, its origins go back to the first papal concessions made in favor of the Portuguese sovereigns, who, since the beginning of the fifteenth century, had embarked upon a policy of expansion in Africa and the Mediterranean. This expansion required new forms of legitimation from the popes, who issued documents whose language and style resembled the earlier bulls of crusade and supported geographical expansion as part of an anti-Muslim defensive war. Gradually, the language and the style of these documents evolved to provide the juridical foundation for the Portuguese Padroado.5 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta (1415), followed by the discovery of the archipelago of Madeira (1419–1420) 5 On the Portuguese Padroado, see Charles-Martial De Witte, Les bulles pontificales et l’expansion portugaise au xve siècle. Extrait de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique (Louvain: Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 1958); De Witte, Le lettres papales concernant l’expansion portugaise au xvie siècle (Immensee, Nouvelle Revue de science missionnaire, 1986); Ángel Santos Hernández, Las misiones bajo el patronato portugués, 2 vols. (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 1977); Roland Jacques, De Castro Marim a Faifo: Naissance et developpement du padroado portugais d’Orient des origines a 1659 (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1999); Maria do Rosário Sampaio Themudo Barata Azevedo Cruz, “O Padroado português do Oriente de 1498 a 1622,” in Vasco da Gama e a Índia. Actas da conferência internacional, 3 vols. (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1999), 3: 21–42; Giuseppe Marcocci, L’invenzione di un impero. Politica e cultura nel mondo portoghese (1450–1600) (Rome: Carocci, 2011), with a rich bibliography. On the documents of the Portuguese padroado, see Levy-Maria Jordão and João Augusto Garca Barrieto, eds., Bullarium patronatus Portugalliae regum in Ecclesiis Africae, Asiae, atque Oceaniae, 5 vols. (Lisbon: Typographie Nationale, 1868–1879), (hereafter bppr); Antonio J. Dias Dinis, ed., Monumenta Henricina, 15 vols. (Coimbra: Comissão executiva das comemorações do v centenário da morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1960–1974), 2: 367–368 and 388 (hereafter mh).

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and the Azores (1427–1432) was considered the beginning of a new Christian response to the expansion of Islam. Pope Martin v (Oddone Colonna, 1417–1431) signed the first documents supporting Portuguese conquest of Africa and the Portuguese administration of the Church in the conquered lands.6 In subsequent years, the rising threat posed by the Ottoman empire made the popes even more interested in supporting anti-Muslim campaigns. Starting in the 1430s, the idea of a “right of conquest” was introduced into papal bulls. In 1436, Pope Eugenius iv (Gabriele Condulmer, 1431–1447) granted King Duarte (Edward) of Portugal (r. 1433–1438) the right to conquer and hold the Canary Islands.7 His successor, Pope Nicholas v (Tommaso Parentucelli, 1447–1455) issued the bull Dum diversas (1452) asking the Portuguese king Alfonso v (1438– 1481) to contribute to the spread of the faith. The bull introduced an extension of the idea of crusade; describing the Portuguese conquest as being in continuity with the anti-Muslim campaigns, it endorsed King Alfonso’s attempts to penetrate into sub-Saharan Africa. Its justification of war against “pagans or other enemies of Christ” was open to a broad range of interpretations and was later used as a justification for the slave trade. The ambiguity, in fact, meant that “pagans” were often enslaved and characterized as prisoners of a “just war.”8 After the fall of Constantinople (1453), Nicholas v expressed further support for anti-Muslim campaigns. When King Alfonso asked the pope to support his African crusade, he addressed the bull Romanus pontifex (1454) to both the king and the Infante D. Enrique, known as Henry the Navigator (1394–1460).9 The latter was a promoter of expeditions to Africa and the Grand Master of the Order of Christ, a prominent Portuguese military order.10 Romanus pontifex, like the previous bull, used the language of crusade, but expanded its application to a broader category of the “enemies of the name of Christ” and “gentiles

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7 8 9 10

The bull Rex regum (April 4, 1418), supported the rights of Portugal versus other Catholic crowns, namely Castile and Aragon. The bull In apostolicae dignitatis specula (March 25, 1420), gave the Order of Christ—a prominent Portuguese military order—the task to defend the Christians in the newly discovered lands, and named the Infant Enrique (Henry the Navigator) great master of the Order of Christ. The concessions were reinforced and became definitive with the bull Eximiae devotionis affectus (November 14, 1420), mh, 2: 367–368 and 388. Romanus Pontifex (1436), in mh, 5: 281. Dum diversas (June 18, 1452), in bppr, 1: 22–23. Romanus pontifex (1454), in bppr, 1: 31–34; mh, 12: 72–77. The Ordem Militar de Cristo was founded in 1319 after the suppression of the Templars. In fifteenth-century Portugal there were three military orders: The Order of Christ, the Order of Avis, and the Order of Santiago.

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and pagans not yet defiled by the sect of the impious Mahomet.”11 The bull also expressed the desire that the Portuguese expeditions could reach the legendary Prester John—who was thought to be a Christian priest living in Ethiopia surrounded by hostile infidels—and the Christians of Saint Thomas (“the people of India who honor the name of Christ”).12 Finally, Romanus pontifex introduced the idea that capturing “inhabitants of the Guinea and other Negroes” could be helpful for the conversion of their souls.13 The absence of any geographical limitation on the area in which the Portuguese could operate was unprecedented and was in effect an endorsement of unlimited expansion.14 A clearer definition of the geographical boundaries of papal support was included in the bull Inter cetera quae (1456) by Nicholas’s immediate successor, Callixtus iii (Alfons de Borja, 1455–1458).15 A great supporter of Portugal, Callixtus ordained that “the islands, towns, ports, regions, and localities” from Cape Bojador and Nao, extending down to all of Guinea, were under the political and ecclesiastical control of the Portuguese Order of Christ. He also extended the rights granted by the bull to future Portuguese conquests. Unlike in Spain, the bull did not entrust these privileges directly to the king (a lay authority), but to the Order of Christ (an institution of ecclesiastical right). This was, however, mostly a fiction of law considering the strong connection between the Order of Christ and the king of Portugal.16 Over the

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Romanus pontifex (1454), trans. in William Eugene Shiels, King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961), 50. Ibid. On Prester John and expeditions to Ethiopia, see L’Occident, la croisade et l’Éthiopie, Benjamin Weber and Robin Seignobos, ed., thematic issue of Annales d’Ethiopie, 27 (2012). Two delegations from the Church of Ethiopia were sent to the Council of Florence in 1441, reawakening the interest for Prester John. See Enrico Cerulli, “Eugenio iv e gli Etiopi al concilio di Firenze nel 1441,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, s. 6, 9 (1933), 347–368. On the Christians of Saint Thomas, see Leslie Brown, The Indian Christians of St Thomas: An Account of the Ancient Syrian Church of Malabar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). Romanus pontifex (1454)—trans. in Shields, King and Church, 52. Romanus pontifex explicitly granted the Portuguese the control of the sea, breaking the tradition that excluded the sea from the control of a king. In this way, the Portuguese Crown was granted the monopoly on the commerce and whoever violated it could be treated as a pirate. Inter cetera quae (March 13, 1456), in bppr, 1:36–37; mh, 12:286, English trans. in Shiels, King and Church, 55–57. The bull gave unprecedented powers to the Order of Christ: the ecclesiastical control of a vast region, in which, according to the bull, “no diocese exists”. The political powers were attributed by the bull to the Grand Master of the Order of Christ (at that time Henry the Navigator), while the ecclesiastical responsibilities were attributed to the Grand Prior of the Order of Christ, who was a cleric. See Jacques, De Castro Marim a Faifo, 49.

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subsequent years, the power of the Order of Christ diminished and was replaced by the power of the crown, a process that was completed in 1551.17 Portuguese victories were celebrated in Rome with spectacular reenactments of the ancient imperial festivals during the pontificate of Julius ii (Giuliano della Rovere, 1503–1513), who in 1506 confirmed the right of patronage over the dioceses of Portugal to King Manuel i (1495–1521).18 The same right over the overseas territories was explicitly recognized in 1514 when Pope Leo x (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1513–1521) granted the Portuguese king and his successors the right to submit to the Holy See the names of candidates for appointment as archbishops and bishops as well as for other offices in the already-conquered territories, plus those that would be conquered in the future.19 Pope Paul iii (Alessandro Farnese, 1534–1549) began to spell out the rights and obligations of the padroado in 1534.20 The crown would now also have the right to confiscate a portion of ecclesiastical revenues and prevent missionaries from going to Portuguese territories without royal authorization. In return, the sovereigns assumed the obligation of building churches and other sacred buildings, of providing for the needs of worship, and of guaranteeing the support of the clergy in the overseas territories. The first extra-European dioceses were created in the early sixteenth century. In 1514, Leo x created the diocese of Funchal on the island of Madeira, a suffragan of the archdiocese of Lisbon, granting the crown the right to nominate the bishop, who was given spiritual jurisdiction over all Portuguese territories in Africa, the East Indies, and Brazil.21 Later, Paul iii elevated Funchal to an archdiocese and created the diocese of Goa (1534), which Paul iv (Gian Pietro Carafa, 1555–1559) elevated to a metropolitan and primatial see (1557), adding

17 18

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The bull Praeclara charissimi (December 30, 1551) by Julius iii granted the king of Portugal with the jurisdictional power previously attributed to the Order (ap, 1: 647–657). Julius ii declared three days of thanksgiving in Rome, which culminated in a solemn celebration in Saint Peter’s with a speech by Giles of Viterbo. See John W. O’Malley, “Fulfillment of the Christian Golden Age under Pope Julius ii: Text of a Discourse of Giles of Viterbo, 1507,” Traditio, 25 (1969), 265–233. Dum fidei constantiam (June 7, 1514); Pro excellenti praeminentia, and Gratiae Divinae praemium, (June 12, 1514); Praecelsae devotionis (November 3, 1514), in bppr, 1: 98–99, 100– 101, 102, 106–107. Aequum reputamus (November 3, 1534) in bppr, 1: 153–157. Pro excellenti praeminentia (June 12, 1514), in Josef Metzler, America Pontificia primi saeculi evangelizationis: 1493–1592: documenta pontificia ex registris et minutis praesertim in Archivo secreto vaticano existentibus, 2 vols. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1991), 1: 123–127 (hereafter ap, 1; ap, 2).

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the dioceses of Cochin and Malacca.22 The ecclesiastical province of Goa continued to expand with the inclusion of the suffragan dioceses of Macao in 1575, which was given spiritual jurisdiction over all of China, and Funai (today’s Ōita) in 1588, with jurisdiction over the islands of Japan. Paul v (Camillo Borghese, 1605–1621) created the diocese of Mylapore (1606), and Alexander viii (Pietro Vito Ottoboni, 1689–1691) the dioceses of Beijing and Nanjing (1690).23 The creation of dioceses in Brazil was much slower: Salvador de Bahia detached from Funchal in 1551, followed by the creation of the dioceses of Rio de Janeiro (1575) and Pernambuco (1614). 2.2 The Spanish Patronato The Portuguese Padroado was the model for the Spanish Patronato, even if there were juridical differences between them. Since the Middle Ages, the kings of Castile and Leon had unsuccessfully attempted to obtain from Rome the right to nominate the bishops of the two kingdoms.24 It was only in 1486, with the bull Ortodoxae fidei propagationem by Pope Innocent viii (Giovanni Battista Cybo, 1484–1492), that Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile obtained the right of Patronato real for Granada, the Canary Islands, and Puerto Real (Cádiz), in view of their imminent conquest of the Kingdom of Granada, which was still under Muslim control.25 The monarchs received patronage rights over all the benefices to be established in Granada after its conquest and 22 23 24

25

See three bulls by Paul iv: Etsi sancta, Pro excellenti, and Pro excellenti (all dated February 4, 1557) in bppr, 1: 191–198. bppr, 2: 4–6, 192–197. On the Spanish Patronato, see Antonio de Egaña, La teoria del Regio Vicariato Español en Indias (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1958); Pedro de Leturia, Relaciones entre la Santa Sede e Hispanoamérica, 1493–1835, 3 vols. (Rome-Caracas: Pontificia Università Gregoriana-Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1959–1960), 1: 101–152; Shiels, King and Church; Alberto de la Hera, “El Patronato y el Vicariato Regio en Indias,” in Historia de la Iglesia en Hispanoamérica y Filipinas (siglos xv–xix), ed. Pedro Borges (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1992), 1: 63–79. For the documents on the Spanish Patronato, see ap, 1; ap, 2; Metzler, America Pontificia: Documenti pontifici riguardanti l’evangelizzazione dell’America: 1592–1644, vol. 3 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1995) (hereafter ap, 3); Francisco Havier Hernaez, ed. Colección de bulas, breves, y otros documentos relativos a la iglesia de America y Filipinas, 2 vols. (Brussels: Vromant, 1879) (hereafter Colección). Ortodoxae fidei propagationem (December 13, 1486), English trans. and Latin text in Shiels, King and Church, 66–70 and 277–282. The Iberian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were unified in three steps: the marriage (1469) between the Infant Ferdinand of Aragon (1452– 1516) and the infant Isabella of Castile (1451–1504); the access to the throne of Isabel after the death of Henri iv of Castile (1474); and that of Ferdinand after the death of John ii of Aragon (1479). In 1496, pope Alexander vi gave them the title of Catholic Monarchs, that was later held also by their successors.

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agreed to provide support for the building and endowment of places of worship and the sustenance of the clergy. The bull also allowed monarchs to select bishops and other high-level clergy. Ortodoxae fidei propagationem was different compared to the earlier Portuguese bulls because it entrusted the privileges directly to the secular authority.26 In 1492, three important events contributed to the creation of the patronage: the surrender of Granada and the end of the Reconquista; the election of the Valencian pope Alexander vi (Rodrigo de Borja, 1492–1503), who strongly supported the Spanish crown; and the success of the expedition by Cristoforo Colombo. On May 3 and 4, 1493, Alexander vi issued two bulls, both entitled Inter cetera, in which he entrusted to Ferdinand and Isabella, as papal delegates in spiritual matters, the task of evangelizing the New World. Unlike the bull of Granada and its predecessors, these bulls did not derive from a crusading movement but from a new experience, the discovery of what would now be called “open land.”27 Another bull issued in 1493, answered the Catholic monarchs’ request for a grant qualitatively equal to those made to Henry the Navigator, in order to strengthen their position in the competition with the Portuguese.28 The Spanish Patronato was not limited to the West Indies, but also included the East Indies if reached by westward sailing.29 Later, Alexander vi granted the Spanish monarchs the tithes and first fruits of benefices, but with a corresponding obligation to pay for the propagation and support of the faith in America and the Indies.30 In 1504, Pope Julius ii attempted to create a diocesan structure in Hispaniola (archbishopric of Yaguate, with suffragan dioceses of Magua and Baynua), but Ferdinand insisted that his patronage rights over such matters was implicit in the earlier bulls.31 The pope surrendered and granted the Spanish monarchs patronage rights over all ecclesiastical benefices (including bishoprics) in the New World, effectively renouncing his jurisdictional authority over the

26 27 28 29

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The difference was visible in the historical developments: the theory of the vicariato regio developed in Spain but not in Portugal (Shiels, King and Church, 63). Inter cetera (May 3, 1493) in ap, 1: 71–75. Eximiae devotionis (May 3, 1493) in ap, 1: 76–78. Dudum siquidem (September 26, 1493), in ap, 1: 87–89, trans. in Shiels, King and Church, 85–87. One year later was issued the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), an independent agreement between the two Crowns, that was completed a few decades later by the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), which specified the antemeridian to the line of demarcation of Tordesillas. Eximiae devotionis, (March 21, 1499), in Colección, 1: 15–16 and Eximiae devotionis (November 16, 1501) in ap, 1: 89–91, English trans. in Shiels, King and Church, 88–91. Illius fulciti presidio (November 15, 1504) in ap, 1: 91–94.

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Church in New Spain.32 The juridical process of evolution of the Patronato was now complete: the patronage was extended to the New World and became the Patronato real de las Indias. In the following years, the pope established three new dioceses: Santo Domingo and Concepcion de la Vega on Hispaniola and San Juan on Puerto Rico, all suffragans of Seville.33 The king had the right of Patronato over the dioceses and was allowed to receive the tithes on metals and a third of the tithes on agricultural products.34 In the meantime, starting in 1524, the Council of the Indies—the executive, legislative, and judicial commission that ruled the Spanish empire in America and the Philippines—was charged with authority over religious life in the Indies. Later, in 1538, the crown began controlling the approval and rejection of official papal documents addressed to the Indies, the so-called pase regio. These and other similar developments led to extreme interpretations of the Patronato in the following decades, in particular under Philip ii (1556–1598). A committee created by the king issued a document that assigned broader powers to the Spanish kings over the Indies, including oversight of ecclesiastical life and punishment of clergy who did not fulfill their obligations. The king, by virtue of his claim to be the vicar of the pope, was granted the authority to intervene in the internal affairs of the Church in the Indies pursuant to the theory of Regio vicariato de Indias. This radical increase in the exercise of royal power led to growing tension between the popes and the Spanish crown that persisted during the seventeenth century.

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Universalis ecclesiae regimini (July 28, 1508) in ap, 1: 104–107. Romanus pontifex (August 8, 1511) in ap, 1: 112–117. In 1516 Concepción became a metropolitan see; in 1528 Santo Domingo and Concepción were merged, but separated again on February 12, 1546 when, with the three bulls entitled Super universas orbis ecclesias by Paul iii (ap, 1: 520–528), the three dioceses were made independent from Seville and depended directly to the Holy See; Santo Domingo was raised to metropolitan status (e.g. was considered the primatial see of New Spain), but Seville named the patriarchate of the Indies. By the 1570s, Latin America consisted of thirty dioceses organized into six ecclesiastical provinces: Santo Domingo, Mexico, Guatemala, Santa Fe de Bogota, Santiago de Chile, and Lima. For a chronological list of the dioceses, see Shiels, King and Church, 181. Territorial rearrangements would be the subject of precise negotiations between the papacy and the crowns through the eighteenth century, into the Napoleonic era and beyond. See Maria Teresa Fattori, “Districts, Metropolitans and Ecclesiastical Territories: Geo-Local Aspects of Ecclesiastical Territorial Evolution,”Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 132 no. 2 (2021), 218–262. Julius ii, Eximiae devotionis (April 8, 1510) in ap, 1: 109–112. A few years later, in a negotiation with pope Adrian vi, Charles v obtained the right of presentation of the bishops for all the dioceses of Spain, a right that created further tensions with the Holy See but that lasted until the twentieth century.

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The Popes and the Missions before the Council of Trent (1545–1563)

By virtue of the patronage, the Iberian kings oversaw the ecclesiastical life in their ultramarine territories in Africa, America, and Asia, whose boundaries were defined by the treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529). The patronage has often been depicted as establishing an impenetrable barrier between the popes and the Church in the mission lands. However, documents in the Roman archives reveal both that the barrier was porous and also that Renaissance popes continually attempted to control overseas ecclesiastical and religious life. Certainly, these attempts became more systematic during the second half of the sixteenth century, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563); but even in the pre-Tridentine period they intervene in various aspects of religious life in the mission lands, including the life of the religious orders, relationships with native peoples, the creation of a native clergy, and the administration of the sacraments. 3.1 Religious Orders After the Church in Spanish America began to expand, the religious orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Mercedarians, Trinitarians, and Carmelites) spread exceptionally fast.35 The popes contributed to this growth through the concession of privileges. One of the most important documents implementing these privileges was the brief Exponi nobis fecisti (also known as Omnimoda, 1522) by Pope Adrian vi (1522–1523), which granted the Franciscans and other mendicant orders the right to act with the authority of bishops over missionaries, Christians, and native converts in places where no diocese had been formed.36 Later, Paul iii, by a series of bulls in 1532, 1534, and 1540, extended these faculties to diocesan territories on the condition that the local bishop agreed.37 35

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Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain: 1523–1572, trans. by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966; original edition, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1933). Exponi nobis fecisti (May 9, 1522) in ap, 1: 166–169. See Pedro Torres, La bula Omnimoda de Adriano vi (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1948); Antonio García y García, “Los privilegios de los religiosos en lndias. El breve ‘Exponi nobis’ de Adriano vi,” in Proceedings of the Eight International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1988), 657–677. For instance, Gregory xiii, Cum aliquando eveniat (June 8, 1575) in ap, 2: 990–991, and Cum aliquando (February 3, 1576) in ap, 2: 1040–1041, allowed Dominican superiors to proceed against delinquent friars.

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After the official approval of the Society of Jesus in 1540, its members received extraordinary canonical faculties ( facultates), such as the authority to preach anywhere without the need to secure permission, to hear confessions of any of the faithful of either sex, and to grant absolution from reserved cases.38 The Jesuits exercised these privileges after they landed in Peru (1568) and Mexico (1572); later, bishops questioned and challenged the exercise of their privileges, but many popes reaffirmed them. The popes often sided with a particular religious order in disputes over jurisdiction. The Dominican Pope Pius v (Antonio Ghislieri, 1566–1572), for instance, often sided with Dominican friars who did not acknowledge episcopal jurisdiction, while Gregory xiii (Ugo Boncompagni, 1572–1585) required that they conform to the decrees of Trent. Later, Gregory xiv (Niccolò Sfondrati 1590–1591) and Clement viii (Ippolito Aldobrandini, 1592–1605) tended to favor the mendicant orders, undermining the monopoly of the Jesuits.39 Because of the paucity of secular priests, religious could be installed as pastors of diocesan parishes. Popes encouraged the establishment of religious houses and monasteries for nuns, approving their foundation and granting them indulgences, but the nuns were subject to episcopal supervision. Despite the attempts of some popes to use their authority over the religious orders to gain more control over the churches in mission lands, the patronage allowed the king to appoint the heads of canonically erected religious houses, a royal privilege that Pius v tried to end, but that Gregory xiii restored. 3.2 Defense of the Native Peoples The fifteenth-century bulls that created the Portuguese padroado were often used to justify the legal slavery that was often practiced in the mission lands, even by religious orders, especially in Brazil. During the sixteenth century, however, the popes were vocal in defending the freedom and rights of the natives. As early as 1453, Eugenius iv sent the bishop of Lanzarote (Canarias) a bull condemning the slavery of natives who were already baptized or who were going to be baptized and ordered the liberation of the slaves in fifteen days under penalty of excommunication latae sententiae.40 38 39

40

See, for instance, the privileges granted to the Jesuits by Paul iii on June 6, 1546, in Epistolae et Instructiones Sancti Ignatii, 12 vols. (Madrid: ihsi, 1903–1911), 1: 397. Onerosa Pastoralis officii cura, (December 12, 1600), in Magnum bullarium Romanum: bullarum, privilegiorum ac diplomatum Romanorum Pontificum amplissima collectio (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlangsanstalt, 1964), 5/2: 23–24 (hereafter mbr); Pius v, Ecclesiae universalis regimini in ap, 3: 371–374. Sicut dudum (January 13, 1435) in Annales ecclesiastici ab anno mcxcviii, ubi desinit Cardinalis Baronius (Lucca: Leonardo Venturini, 1752), 9: 226–227.

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In the early sixteenth century, Dominican missionaries wrote to King Ferdinand denouncing the harsh treatment of natives by Spanish conquistadores and colonists. The king set up a commission to make recommendations that resulted in the thirty-five Ordinances or Laws of Burgos (June 27, 1512) that forbade harsh treatment of the natives but assigned them, as vassals of the king, reasonable labor as their tribute and in recompense for the instruction they had received in the faith, a system known as encomienda. The natives, however, often did not receive proper instruction, and abuses continued. Once again, missionaries and bishops denounced these practices, this time to the pope.41 The Dominican Julián Garcés (1452–1542), the bishop of Tlaxcala (Mexico), wrote to Pope Paul iii a letter that was brought to Rome by his confrere Bernardino de Minaya (c. 1489–1562).42 As a result, two important documents were issued by Paul iii in 1537. The brief Pastorale officium (1537) was addressed to the archbishop of Toledo, Juan Pardo de Tavera (1472– 1545), and insisted that the natives, even though pagan, retained their natural rights to liberty and private property.43 They should be considered capable of conversion to Christianity, which could be accomplished only through the preaching and the good example of the Spaniards. Those violating the natives’ rights were subject to excommunication latae sententiae with absolution reserved to the pope. The second document, the famous bull Veritas ipsa (also known as Sublimis Deus or Excelsus Deus, 1537), condemned the enslavement of natives effected on the pretext that they were brute animals. The pope insisted that they were “truly men and that they [were] not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but […] they desire[d] exceedingly to receive it”.44

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Denunciations also came from the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas, in particular his book entitled Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión. The bishops of Spanish America received the title of “protectors of the Indians,” first held by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1516) and attributed to all the other bishops (1527). See Rene Acufia, Fray Julián Garcés: Su alegato en pro de los naturales de Nueva España (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1995). Pastorale officium (May 29, 1537) in ap, 1: 359–361. Veritas ipsa (June 2, 1537) in ap, 1: 364–366. See Lewis Hanke, “Pope Paul iii and the American Indians,” Harvard Theological Review, 30 (1937), 65–79. Papal and ecclesial protection was often ambivalent: it granted privileges but was also a source of exclusion and discrimination. See Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mondo. La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1977), 49–110; José A. Llaguno, La personalidad jurídica del indio y el iii Concilio provincial mexicano (1585). Ensayo histórico-jurídico de los documentos originales (Mexico: Editorial Porrua, 1963).

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The conquistadores reacted negatively to the bull, and pressured Charles v (1500–1558) to prohibit its publication, claiming that it was extorted from the pope based on false information. In September 1538, Charles v wrote the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco (r. 1535–1550), granting him permission to confiscate all copies of Sublimis Deus and also published a decree establishing that all papal documents be examined by the Council of the Indies before circulation in Spanish America. As we have seen, this gesture marked the beginning of the pase regio. Under the pressure of Charles v, Paul iii retracted Pastorale officium (but not Sublimis Deus), thus removing the threat of excommunication latae sententiae, but still condemning the enslavement of the natives.45 Charles v accepted some of the pope’s recommendations and, in 1542, issued the New Laws (Leyes nuevas), which supported the view of the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1448–1556), protecting the native people and preventing their enslavement. Paul iii also supported the education of native people. In 1537 he sent an instruction to the papal nuncio in Lisbon, Girolamo Recanati Capodiferro (1502–1559), in which he protested the Portuguese law prohibiting Brazilian natives from traveling to Europe for study. The ostensible reason for the ban was that the natives risked being converted to Judaism in Europe; in reality, however, the colonists feared that the natives would complain about their maltreatment. The pope objected to the ban, claiming it was better for natives to become Jews than to suffer evil at the hands of Christians.46 Later, by his brief Exponi nobis fecisti (1547), Paul iii also complained of the enslavement, inhuman treatment, and often violent deaths of native Mayans and Incas. The popes continued to reiterate their defense of native peoples in documents which they often issued at the erection of a cathedral or ratification of a bishop’s election;47 however, until the late seventeenth century,

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Brief Non indecens videtur (1538). Sublimis Deus was never revoked and was later quoted and confirmed by Urban viii’s Commissum Nobis (1639), in Colección, 2: 109–110; by Benedict xiv’s Immensa Pastorum (1741), in Sanctissimi domini nostri Benedicti Papae xiv bullarium (Rome: Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1746–1757), 1: 92–102; and by Gregory xvi’s In Supremo Apostalatus (1839) in Acta Gregorii Papae xvi scilicet constitutiones, bullae, litterae apostolicae, epistolae (Rome: Ex Typographia polyglotta, 1901), 2: 387–389. Istruttione di Sua Santità, (February 17, 1537) in ap, 2: 358–359. Other documents in favor of the Natives were issued in the following years: in Da parte di Nostro Signore (1566) in ap, 1: 739–744, an instruction by Pius iv to the nuncio in Spain, Archbishop Giovanni Battista Castagna (1521–1590), insisted that the Natives should not be forced to render services to colonists, that infidels and Christians be treated with equal justice, and that warfare not be waged against the infidels. Pius v, in his letters, Credimus allatas esse (October 7, 1567) in ap, 2: 774–775, to the archbishop of Mexico, the Dominican

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Rome was less vocal in condemning the enslavement of men and women of African descent, especially in Brazil.48 3.3 Native Clergy and Religious One of the main issues the Renaissance popes had to confront, both in the Americas and in Asia, was the possibility of ordaining natives. Advocates of the formation of a native clergy argued that it would allow the Church to take root in the mission lands. However, most ecclesiastical authorities and members of the religious orders strongly resisted the ordination of indigenous peoples, who were usually kept in a strictly subordinate condition to the European clergy.49 The popes often protested against this attitude. In 1518, by the papal brief Exponi nobis, Pope Leo x encouraged the training and ordination of native clergy and authorized the royal chaplain in Lisbon to ordain the “Ethiopians, Indians, and Africans” who might reach the moral and educational standards for the priesthood.50 The first systematic attempts to undertake the formation of a native clergy in Portuguese Asia dated from 1541, when the vicar-general of Goa, Miguel Vaz,

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Alfonso de Montufar (1489–1572) and Te una cum dilecta (October 7, 1567) in ap, 2: 774– 775 to the viceroy of New Spain, Gastón de Peralta (1510–1587), complained of the harsh treatment of Natives by the soldiers and colonists that impedes conversions. Carlos A. de Moura Ribeiro Zeron, Ligne de foi. La Compagnie de Jésus et l’esclavage dans le processus de formation de la société coloniale en Amérique portugaise (xvie—xviie siècles) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009); Pius Onyemechi Adiele, The Popes, the Catholic Church and the Transatlantic Enslavement of Black Africans 1418–1839 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2017). By 1686, the Holy Office opposed the enslavement of black people and communicated the opposition to local churches. See Maria Teresa Fattori, “‘Licere-Non licere’. La legittimità della schiavitù nelle decisioni della Sede Apostolica Romana tra xvii e xix secolo,”Rivista Storica Italiana, 132 no. 2 (2020), 393–436; Fattori, “La questione della schiavitù tra dubbi missionari e risposte dell’Inquisizione romana: prospettive tra Europa e America spagnola e portoghese,” in Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio Alvariño et al., eds., Beyond the Borders, 133–149. See Charles Ralph Boxer, “The Problem of Native Clergy in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith, ed. Geoffrey J. Cuming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 85–105; Brendan Röder, “Skin Colour and Priesthood. Debating Bodily Differences in Early Modern Catholicism,” The Journal of Religious History 48 (2024), early view, 135–152. Exponi nobis (May 4 and June 12, 1518) in Monumenta Missionaria Africana, Africa Ocidental, vol. 1, 1471–1531, ed. António Brásio (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952), 421–422. In the same year, the pope agreed to the appointment of the son of King Afonso of Congo, Prince Ndoadidiki Ne-Kinu a Mumemba (ca. 1494–1531), baptized as Henrique, as titular bishop of Utica and auxiliary to the bishop of Funchal.

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persuaded the local authorities to open the seminary of Santa Fe to the religious training of Asian and West African people. The project, however, did not succeed.51 At first, most of the religious orders had no laws in their rules and constitutions on the subject of native religious, but by the end of the sixteenth century they had established very rigid ones. In 1579, for instance, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Everard Mercurian (generalate 1573–1580), prohibited the admission of Asians and Eurasians to the Society of Jesus (1579).52 An exception was made in favor of the Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Koreans, but the ban on the admission of Indians was retained up to the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from the Portuguese empire in 1760. Other religious orders working in the East followed the example of the Jesuits, making it more and more difficult for native people or mestizos (mixed-race European and indigenous) to be ordained.53 Developments in Spanish America and the Philippines paralleled those of Portuguese Asia. There were few attempts to allow native ordination in Spanish lands, and they were not very successful. In 1536, the Spanish crown funded the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico, to provide education to the native people. The students were selected from among the sons of the indigenous Mexican aristocracy and the Franciscans were in charge of their instruction. The college was expected to form a cultural elite among the laity and, according to some historians, to prepare Native Americans for eventual ordination to the Catholic priesthood.54 The experiment was a failure, and in the following decades the provincial councils held in Mexico and Peru approved drastic measures to prevent the formation of an indigenous clergy on the grounds that

51

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See Boxer, “The Problem of Native Clergy,” 98. However, native clergy were trained at the monastery of St. Eloi in Lisbon and in the seminary on São Tomé Island in the Gulf of Guinea (1571) for the African church. See Charles Ralph Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440–1770 (Baltimore; The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 5–10; 122–123. See Thomas M. McCoog, ed., The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture, 1573–1580 (Rome and Saint Louis, MO: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu-Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004). “For instance, the Franciscans, who in 1589 were still admitting mestiços as novices at Goa (though they had been ordered not to do so by their Superiors in Portugal) fifty years later were priding themselves on the fact that they had a rigidly exclusive colour-bar” (Boxer, “The Problem of Native Clergy,” 179–180). Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 217–235; Boxer, “The Problem of the Native Clergy”, 180. A different view in, Juan Estarellas, “The College of Tlatelolco and the Problem of Higher Education for Indians in 16th Century Mexico,” History of Education Quarterly, 2 (1962), 234–243.

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they were too young in their faith, might challenge Spanish authority, and were considered unable to live chastely.55 The First Council of Mexico (1555) blocked Amerindians, mestizos, and mulattos from access to holy orders; the decree was softened with the Second Council of Lima (1567–1568) and the Third Council of Mexico (1585) but was again hardened at the Fourth Council of Lima (1591).56 With respect to mestizos, the ecclesiastical policy finally adopted was somewhat more liberal, but the problem was that many candidates were born illegitimately. Gregory xiii, by Nuper ad nos, gave bishops faculties to dispense with the requirement of legitimacy and thus supported the ordination of mestizos, and in 1588 the Spanish crown stated that they could access holy orders, but the policy was usually to limit the number of mestizos ordained and instead to ordain creoles (born of white parents in the colonies) or Spaniards.57 A similar ecclesiastical policy of racial discrimination was extended to the Philippines after Spanish occupation and Christianization in the second half of the sixteenth century. 3.4 Sacraments During the first half of the sixteenth century, missionaries were faced with a growing number of questions and dilemmas concerning the administration and validity of the sacraments.58 Before, and, to a greater extent, after the Council of Trent, they asked Rome for exemptions and adaptations of the rituals 55

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See Juan B. Olaechea, “Los Concilios Provinciales de América y la ordenación del indio,” Revista Española de Derecho Canónico, 24 no. 69 (1968), 489–514; Luís Martínez Ferrer, “La ordenación de indios, mestizos y ‘mezclas’ en los Terceros concilios provinciales de Lima (1582/83) y México (1585),” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 44 no. 1 (2021), 47–64; Massimo Carlo Giannini, “The Problem of Exclusion of Non-White People from the Priesthood and Religious Orders in the Early Modern Catholicism(s),” Cristianesimo nella storia, 42 no. 3 (2021), 751–792. On the connections between the discriminations of New Christians in the Iberian Peninsula and Native Americans in the New World, see a case study on the Society of Jesus in Emanuele Colombo, “ ‘The Society of the World’. Antonio Possevino (1533–1611) and the Jesuit Debate over Purity of Blood,” in Jesuits and Race. A Global History of Continuity and Change, 1530–2020, ed. Charles H. Parker and Nathaniel Millett (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022), 23–52. The provincial councils of Goa (1567, 1575, 1585, 1592, and 1606) also established forms of exclusion and granted the priesthood only to the aristocracy and upper castes; see Josef Wicki, “Die Konzilien der Kircherprovinz Goa (1567–1895),” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 13 no. 1–2 (1981), 155–296. Nuper ad nos (January 25, 1576) in ap, 2: 1030–1031. Maria Teresa Fattori, “Sacraments for the Faithful of the New World, Jews, and EasternRite Christians: Roman Legislation from Paul iii to Benedict xiv (1537–1758),” The Catholic Historical Review, 102 (2016), 687–711; Fattori, ed., Politiche sacramentali tra Vecchio e Nuovi Mondi, thematic issue of Cristianesimo nella storia, 31, no. 2 (2010).

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to accommodate the new circumstances. Slowly, regulation of the sacraments became the main battleground between the Roman Curia and the missionary churches, and papal decisions about sacramental issues became a way of reinforcing the spiritual power of the pontiff over the churches subject to royal patronage. For its part, the Spanish and Portuguese patronage tried to limit the influx of requests to Rome. Baptism was a key point of contention. Starting in the 1530s, missionaries began to raise doubts about the utility and lawfulness of mass baptisms. Pope Paul iii, by Altitudo divini consilii (1537), ordered that baptism should be administered not by sprinkling crowds with holy water, but individually, with water and the anointing on the forehead with chrism and the oil of catechumens.59 Mass baptisms, widespread in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, continued in the following decades, triggering debates and controversies among the members of various religious orders, while the popes continued to intervene.60 During this period there was an important shift in the definition of a “neophyte.”61 According to canon law, the status of neophyte was regarded as a temporary condition defined by a set period after baptism. In the missionary territories, it became commonplace to accept that the condition of neophyte could last an unlimited amount of time and depended upon the convert’s place of birth and race. All people born in extra-European lands (even if they were born of Catholic parents) were considered neophytes.62

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Altitudo Divini consilii (June 1, 1537) in ap, 1: 361–364. See, for instance, the Brief by Pius iv to the Archbishop of Goa, Intelligimus in istis, in Josef Wicki and John Gomes, eds., Documenta indica (Rome: mhsi, 1948–1988), 5: n. 85, cit. in Giuseppe Marcocci, Pentirsi ai tropici: Casi di coscienza e sacramenti nelle missioni portoghesi del ‘500 (Bologna: edb, 2013), 61. Exceptions to the rite of baptism were constantly being discussed: in 1562 Pius iv allowed the confection of chrism in the New World using local aromatic substances rather than balsam from the distant Orient (Licet ecclesia Romana [August 12, 1562] in ap, 1: 709–710) and at the end of the century Clement viii granted the Jesuits permission to omit certain parts of rite that were not considered essential (Decet Romanum Pontificem [September 23, 1594] in ap, 3: 84). “Néophyte,” in Dictionnaire de droit canonique: contenant tous les termes du droit canonique, avec un sommaire de l’histoire et des institutions et de l’état actuel de la discipline , ed. Raoul Naz (Paris, Letouzey et Ané, 1935–1965), 6: 997. Gregory xiii, Animarum saluti (September 21, 1581) in Colección, 1:151. “In 1618 the Holy Office ruled on who were deemed newly converted, encompassing recently baptized adults, children of new converts, and those with European blood mixed with ‘Indio’ blood (a generic expression referring to Native Americans, Asians, and Africans)” (Fattori, “Sacraments for the Faithful,” 695). At the end of the seventeenth century, given the ethnic mix in

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By his bull Cupientes Judaeos (1542), Paul iii insisted that the baptized be treated as full citizens of their locales, with all the relevant privileges, immunities, and liberties, and that their non-Christian relatives be prohibited from excluding them from their natural inheritance rights.63 The widespread idea that the neophytes were weak in their faith often resulted in the popes granting them dispensations (privilegios) from certain obligations. These privileges were mainly related to marriage and were a way to regulate complex circumstances that could not be solved by traditional legal instruments. The Church considered valid natural marriages contracted in different traditions. Yet, it had no means of approaching those traditions in which marriages between close relatives was permitted.64 The bull Altitudo Divini consilii (1537), granted dispensations for marriages within the third degree of consanguinity or affinity.65 Another problem was how to deal with polygamous natives who converted and were baptized. Which of the wives should they choose? What if the second and the third wives converted, but the first one did not? The answer to an animated debate on this topic came from Pius v, who with the bull Romani Pontificis (1571), allowed a baptized polygamous Indio to keep the wife who had been baptized with him (or who planned to be baptized) even if she was not the first he had married.66 In colonial Brazil, mixed marriages fostered

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the Indies, Innocent xii (1691–1700) issued regulations on the mestizos (people half European and half indigenous) cuarterones (people whose racial origins were three-quarter European and one-quarter indigenous), and puchueles (people whose racial origins were seven eights European and one eight indigenous). Cupientes Judaeos, et alios infideles (November 21, 1542) in mbr, 4/1: 204–206. See Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Éstoile, “Le mariage des infidèles au xvie siècle: Doutes missionnaires et autorité pontificale,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 121 (2009), 95–121. See here, footnote 59. Later, Pius iv (Exuberans et indefessus [June 15, 1563] in ap, 2: 730– 732) gave the Jesuit provincials the privilege of validating, both in the Eastern and Western Indies, the marriages of neophytes linked up to the second grade of consanguinity, with some limitations. Romani Pontificis, (August 2, 1571) in ap, 2:894–895. Some theologians wondered whether the bull could be applied to African slaves who had been married in a pagan rite in Africa and then deported without their spouses to Brazil or New Spain. Could they remarry after baptism? The issue was resolved in 1585, when Gregory xiii, by Populis ac nationibus (ap, 2: 1228–1230), granted bishops and Jesuits the authority to dissolve the natural marriages of African slaves brought to America and celebrate new ones. While the pagan marriage was valid, the slaves could nonetheless, upon conversion, enter into a new marriage if they did not know whether their spouses in Africa were still alive. If after the new marriage they learned that their spouses in Africa were in fact still alive, the new marriage remained valid, even in cases of the first spouse’s conversion before the slave’s second marriage.

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the social promotion of native people and enslaved men and women, who were often able to influence the interpretations of the ecclesiastical regulations on marriage.67 Another sacrament that was vigorously discussed during the sixteenth century was penance. One of the main problems related to this sacrament was that the missionaries were not always able to understand the native people. The popes urged clerics to learn the native languages and reiterated the need for native clergy; at the same time, they allowed the use of interpreters—despite the fact that this violated the secrecy of the sacrament—and the use of pictures and charts with representations of sins.68 Additionally, given the difficulty of traveling to Rome to be absolved of a sin reserved to the pope, bishops of mission churches were given faculties to absolve such sins and to delegate local priests to do so.69

4

After Trent: Toward Early Modern Global Catholicism (1564–)

The decades that followed the Council of Trent marked the end of the Renaissance papacy and were key to the development of Catholic extra-European missions. This period is particularly complex, and it is hard to summarize the various intersecting movements and agents.70 The picture is radically different depending on one’s focus—either from a Roman perspective, concentrating on the operation of centralized organizations, or from local points of view anywhere in the world, as these were extremely diverse, introducing many nuances

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See Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, Un catholicisme colonial. Le mariage des Indiens et des esclaves au Brésil, xvie–xviiie siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019) and the review by Maria Teresa Fattori in Annali Recensioni Online, 5 (2022) https://aro‑isig.fbk​ .eu/issues/2022/1/un‑catholicisme‑colonial‑maria‑teresa‑fattori/ Pius v, Cum sicut accepimus (1572) in ap, 2: 931–932. Written confession was discussed but never officially approved: on Mexico, see Osvaldo F. Pardo, The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nathua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004). For instance, Gregory xiii by Cum sicut exponi (January 1, 1583) in ap, 2: 1184–1186, granted bishops the right to absolve the Indo from reserved cases: the sins of heresy, idolatry, and other selected charges. Simon Ditchfield, “Decentering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 101 (2010), 186–208; Ditchfield, “Tridentine Catholicism,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 15–31; Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Early Modern Global Catholicism (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

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and exceptions.71 After Trent, as the papacy claimed supreme power over the extra-European churches, the Iberian crowns asserted their rights under the patronage and their control over religious life in the mission lands. The involvement of other European powers, such as France, in the missionary enterprise further complicated the picture. The actions of Rome were more limited in the territories under Spanish patronage, where the Tridentine reforms were introduced relatively early, and several dioceses were created. In the territories of the Portuguese patronage, instead, the dioceses were less numerous and exercised little control, and the effect of the Tridentine reforms was uncertain. Additionally, the Holy See often viewed the right of Portuguese patronage as being ineffective. For these reasons, it was easier for Rome to take control over Portuguese areas, to send missions and name bishops, causing sharp disputes between Rome and Lisbon.72 The unification of the two Iberian crowns under the Habsburgs had an important impact on missionary activity. Philip ii, the king of Spain from 1556 to 1598 and of Portugal from 1581 to 1598, in order to gain ever-greater control of the Church in his territories, progressively substituted secular clergy for members of religious orders to strengthen the presence of an episcopal hierarchy faithful to the crown. His establishment of a network of dioceses also supported a process of “creolization” of the extra-European church: under Philip, the creoles, who were more numerous in the secular clergy than in the religious orders, enjoyed remarkable social advancement in the colonial world.

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For a global perspective, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640,” The American Historical Review, 112, no. 5 (2007), 1359–1385; Giuseppe Marcocci, “Is There Room for the Papacy in Global History? On the Vatican Archives and Universalism,” Rechtsgeschichte. Legal History, 20 (2012), 366–367; Roberto Regoli, “Papato: Soggetto mondiale in prospettiva globale?,” Rechtsgeschichte. Legal History, 20, no. 4 (2012), 386–387. On the importance of the Roman archives to understand the functioning of the patronage system, see Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Il Padroado régio portoghese nella dimensione ‘globale’ della Chiesa romana,” in Gli archivi della Santa Sede come fonte per la storia del Portogallo in età moderna. Studi in memoria di Carmen Radulet, ed. Giovanni Pizzorusso, Gaetano Platania, and Matteo Sanfilippo (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2012), 157–199; Benedetta Albani and Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Problematizing Royal Patronage: New Approaches to the Governance of the Ibero-American Church From the Perspective of the Holy See,” in Actas del xix Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Historia del Derecho Indiano, ed. Thomas Duve (Madrid: Dykinson, 2017), 519–544. Recent studies tend to reduce the differences in Rome’s approach toward the Portuguese Patroado and the Spanish Padronato. See Fattori, “Districts, Metropolitans and Ecclesiastical Territories.”

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The role of the Council of Trent in Catholic overseas missions has been the subject of historiographical debates for many years.73 Some scholars have highlighted that explicit references to missionary activity were largely absent from the discussions at Trent, where, notably, bishops from the extra-European dioceses were not represented.74 Missions outside Europe, according to this view, were supported by the religious orders on their own initiative and with no mandates from the ecclesiastical hierarchy.75 Other scholars, however, have emphasized that some of the Council’s decisions had a significant influence on the missionary world, including the 1563 decree that requested the use of vernacular in the teaching of Christian doctrine—an imposition that fostered extraordinary linguistic efforts outside Europe.76 Additionally, many scholars have underlined the relevance of the “Tridentine paradigm” to the world of the missions: despite the absence of canons specifically directed at the missions, the decrees of the Council were gradually disseminated in the mission lands, and the theological and juridical framework of missionary jurisdiction was determined, to a large extent, by the Tridentine canons.77 73

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See Michela Catto and Adriano Prosperi, eds., Trent and Beyond: The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), in particular the section “Trent out of Europe,” with a rich bibliography. “Few aspects of Catholicism, indeed, of Catholic ‘pastoral ministry,’ in the sixteenth century are more characteristic and significant than the intense missionary activity that began with the Portuguese and Spanish conquests and explorations in the late fifteenth century and continued with intense fervor and expenditure of men and money into the seventeenth. On this phenomenon Trent uttered not a word. It fell completely outside the council’s purview of ‘reform of the church’.” John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 20–21. “It was the religious orders, moreover, not the bishops and pastors, that provided the start-up personnel and energies for missions outside Europe. They did so on their own initiative, inspired by their own traditions, with no reference to Trent and, generally speaking, with no mandates from the ecclesiastical hierarchy”. John W. O’Malley, Trent and all That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 69. Ines G. Županov, “Translating the Doctrina christiana: Jesuit Linguistic Mission before and after the Council of Trent (Sixteenth-Seventeenth-Century India),” in Catto and Prosperi eds., Trent and Beyond, 559–581. Paolo Prodi, Il paradigma tridentino: Un’epoca della storia della Chiesa (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2010). On the implementation of the decrees of Trent in the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms, see Federico Palomo, A Contra-Reforma em Portugal 1540–1700 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2006); António Camões Gouveia, David Sampaio Barbosa, and José Pedro Paiva, eds., O Concílio de Trento em Portugal e nas suas conquistas: Olhares Novos (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de História Religiosa-Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 2014); Allyson M. Poska, Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain

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Provincial councils were held in Mexico, Lima, and Goa,78 where local bishops, mainly from the secular clergy, emerged, and where the Tridentine canons were discussed and slowly implemented.79 In the meantime, the Inquisition was established in the Indies, with tribunals dependent on the Iberian inquisitions at Goa (1560), Lima (1570), Mexico City (1571), and Cartagena de Indias (1610). Recent studies have also shown the relevance of the Congregation of the Council (1564), which supported the connection between overseas bishops and Rome with respect to the administration of the sacraments in mission lands.80 From the 1570s, inquiries about practices related to the sacraments (Dubia circa sacramenta) were sent from the mission lands directly to Rome.81 The Holy Office pronounced judgments and issued decrees that were subsequently confirmed by pontifical authority. Missionary practice was, therefore, subject to the scrutiny of the Roman congregations, allowing the apostolic see to use the sacraments as policy instruments whose legitimacy could not be questioned by local political powers. Rome used the sacramental dossiers as occasions to intervene and exert authority over the churches subject to royal patronage. The twofold nature of the missionary enterprise in the second half of the sixteenth century, with its connections to Rome and the decrees of the Council on the one side, and the efforts of the religious orders to be independent from ecclesiastical authorities on the other, can be seen in the history of the

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(Leiden: Brill, 1998); Ignasi Fernández Terricabras, Felipe ii y el clero secular. La aplicación del Concilio de Trento (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe ii y Carlos v, 2000). On the provincial councils in Goa (1567, 1575, 1585, 1592, and 1606), see Wicki, “Die Konzilien der Kircherprovinz Goa (1567–1895)”; on the provincial councils in Lima (1551– 1552, 1567–1568, 1582–1583, 1591, and 1601) and Mexico (1555, 1565, and 1585) see Antonio García y García, “Las asambleas jerárquicas,” in Historia de la Iglesia in Hispanoamérica y Filipinas, ed. Pedro Borges (Madrid: Bac Maior, 1992), 1: 175–191; Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest, 109–127. See, for example, the archbishops of Lima, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo (1538–1606), and Mexico City, Pedro Moya de Contreras (1528–1591). The Congregation of the Council was founded in 1564 by Pius iv with the Apostolic Constitution Alias nos. See La sacra Congregazione del Concilio: Quarto centenario della fondazione (1564–1964): Studi e ricerche (Vatican City: [Libr. Ed. Vat.], 1964); Benedetta Albani, “In universo christiano orbe: La Sacra Congregazione del Concilio e l’amministrazione dei sacramenti nel Nuovo Mondo (secoli xvi–xvii),” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée, 121 no. 1 (2009), 63–73. See Paolo Broggio et al., eds., Administrer les sacrements en Europe et au Nouveau Monde. La Curie romaine et les “Dubia circa sacramenta”, in the thematic issue of Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 71, no. 1 (2009).

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Capuchins, the Discalced Carmelites, and the Jesuits, which, founded midway into the sixteenth century, dominated the scene with respect to the extraEuropean missions. Recent historiography has focused on the Society of Jesus, which had been present in Asia since the order’s founding and had reached Brazil in the 1550s and Spanish America after the conclusion of the Council of Trent (Peru in 1568 and Mexico in 1571). In many places, Jesuits were not the first to establish Catholic missions, but instead continued the work begun by others, introducing new experiments and more extreme forms of accommodation, which often fueled conflicts with the secular clergy and local bishops.82 The relationship between Jesuits in the overseas missions and papal authority was ever-fluctuating. At first the popes supported Jesuit missionary methods, but during the seventeenth century they gradually began to criticize them. For their part, the Jesuits were often suspicious of Roman attempts to centralize control of the missions.83 There were also some instances of collaboration between the Jesuits and Rome, as can be seen in the many Jesuits who worked for the Inquisition and in the long process of creating the Congregation De Propaganda Fide, in which a number of Jesuits played a key role. The main purpose of the Congregation De Propaganda Fide was in fact to supervise and assist missionaries in already-known lands (and in those yet to be discovered). Founded by Gregory xv (Alessandro Ludovisi, 1621–1623) in 1622, more than fifty years after the end of the Council of Trent, the long period of its establishment began a few years after the conclusion of the council.84 Work toward a Roman congregation whose goal would be the conversion of

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For an overview, see Thomas Cohen and Emanuele Colombo, “Jesuit Missions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern History, ed. Hamish Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 254–279; Ines G. Županov, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); on Jesuits in the Portuguese empire, see Dauril Alden, The Making of the Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). The Jesuit general Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615), for instance, tried to preserve a delicate balance with the Iberian kingdoms while maintaining the Society’s privileges. See Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Flavio Rurale, eds., The Acquaviva Project: Claudio Acquaviva’s Generalate (1581–1615) and the Emergence of Modern Catholicism (Boston: Institute for Jesuit Sources, 2017). See Josef Metzler, ed., Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide memoria rerum, vol. 1 (Rome, Herder, 1971); the works by Giovanni Pizzorusso are now summarized in Pizzorusso, Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel xvii secolo: La Congregazione Pontificia de Propaganda Fide (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2018); Pizzorusso, Propaganda Fide, i: La congregazione pontificia e la giurisdizione sulle missioni (Rome: Edizioni Storia e Letteratura, 2022).

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unbelievers was begun in 1568 by Pope Pius v, in collaboration with the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Francisco de Borja (generalate 1565–1572) and his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–1576). The initial project failed, mainly because of the opposition of Philip ii. Efforts toward a centralized reorganization of the missions intensified during the pontificate of Gregory xiii, who gave new impetus to the evangelization by supporting the creation of new Jesuit colleges and intensive use of the printing press. After a setback under Sixtus v (Felice Piergentile, 1585–1590), efforts began again under Clement viii in collaboration with the Jesuit Antonio Possevino (1533–1611) and with the support of illustrious ecclesiastical personalities like Robert Bellarmine (1542– 1621), Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), and Federico Borromeo (1564–1631).85 The long gestation period of the Congregation during the second half of the sixteenth century witnesses to the determination of the papacy to recover its primacy over the ecclesiastical life and pastoral activities in the mission lands. De Propaganda Fide slowly became a key agent in the organization of Catholic overseas missions, especially in the Portuguese Indies. Harsh debates developed around jurisdiction over the Indies. Two different solutions were adopted, with the creation of districts organized in territorial dioceses-parishes ruled by secular clergy (recruited following the Tridentine standards) and districts under the supervision of the religious orders: the first were more independent, the second more dependent on the Crowns. European powers and their representatives in the colonial world, the ecclesiastical authorities in the mission lands, and the members of the religious orders all had an interest in controlling the missions, and often their priorities conflicted with the agenda of Rome. Archival documents from Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, and the Indies show that Propaganda Fide and the Roman Curia were not—and would never be—the only actors in this complex and fascinating story and the relations, tensions, and constant exchanges between Rome and that the missionary churches demonstrate the polycentricity of early modern Catholicism.

Bibliography Alden, Dauril. The Making of the Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. 85

Emanuele Colombo, “Il libro del mondo. Un documento di Antonio Possevino,” in Milano, l’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei nuovi mondi (secoli xvii–xviii), eds. Michela Catto and Gianvittorio Signorotto (Milan: Bulzoni, 2015), 335–362.

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Boxer, Charles Ralph. “The Problem of Native Clergy in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith, ed. Geoffrey J. Cuming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 85–105. Broggio, Paolo et al., eds. Administrer les sacrements en Europe et au Nouveau Monde. La Curie romaine et les “Dubia circa sacramenta,” in Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 71, no. 1 (2009), 5–217. Catto, Michela and Adriano Prosperi, eds. Trent and Beyond. The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. Fattori, Maria Teresa, ed. Politiche sacramentali tra Vecchio e Nuovi Mondi, thematic issue of Cristianesimo nella storia, 31, no. 2 (2010). Fattori, Maria Teresa. “Districts, Metropolitans and Ecclesiastical Territories: Geo-Local Aspects of Ecclesiastical Territorial Evolution,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 132 no. 2 (2021), 218–262. Jacques, Roland. De Castro Marim a Faifo: Naissance et developpement du padroado portugais d’Orient des origines a 1659. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1999. Marcocci, Giuseppe. L’invenzione di un impero. Politica e cultura nel mondo portoghese (1450–1600). Rome: Carocci, 2011. Muldoon, James. Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. Muldoon, James. Canon Law, the Expansion of Europe and World Order. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. O’Malley, John W. Trent: What Happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pizzorusso, Giovanni. Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel xvii secolo: La Congregazione Pontificia de Propaganda Fide. Viterbo: Sette Città, 2018. Pizzorusso, Giovanni. Propaganda fide. i. La congregazione pontificia e la giurisdizione sulle missioni. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2022. Prodi, Paolo. Il paradigma tridentino: Un’epoca della storia della Chiesa. Brescia: Morcelliana. 2010. Shiels, William Eugene. King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007), 1359–1385. Županov, Ines G., ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

chapter 10

The Renaissance Papacy and Eastern Christianity: Greek and Slavic Yury P. Avvakumov and Charles C. Yost

The concept of the Renaissance, when applied to the relations between the papacy and Eastern Christianity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, becomes an example of those “perils of periodization” that have been problematized in recent historical scholarship.1 Can the Renaissance be viewed as an individual era in the history of these relations? Is this concept applicable here at all? Can we trace continuities in East-West ecclesiastical interaction throughout the Renaissance, the continuities related to the period’s basic features as they have been outlined by modern scholarship at least since Jacob Burckhardt? Arguments both in favor and against could be brought forward. On the one hand, the life of the Christians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries passed through ruptures too significant to allow us to treat this era as a seamless continuity in regard to relations between the papacy and Eastern Christianity. Both protagonists of the story transformed into new realities in the course of the period: the papacy of the confessional age beginning with the Protestant Reformation was no longer the medieval papacy, particularly after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Eastern Christianity after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 entered a new, post-Byzantine, era under Ottoman domination. Historians of the “estrangement”2 between Rome and Constantinople in the medieval and early modern periods often organized their narratives along the dates of the clashes or the unions between the two. To the former category belong the conflict between Pope Nicholas i and Patriarch Photios in 860s, the mutual excommunications of the papal legates and Patriarch Michael Keroularios in 1054, and the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204; to the latter, the union at the second council of Lyons in 1274 and the union of Florence of 1439. Only the council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1439 falls, both chronologically and

1 Marina S. Brownlee, “The Perils of Periodization,” in Marina S. Brownlee and Dimitri H. Gondicas, eds., Renaissance Encounters: Greek East and Latin West (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 5–7. 2 The term “estrangement” (éloignement) was made popular by Yves Congar in his Neuf cents ans après: Notes sur le ‘Schisme oriental’ (Paris: Éditions de Chevetogne, 1954).

© Yury P. Avvakumov and Charles C. Yost, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_011

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geographically, into the Renaissance period proper; but can it be unambiguously called “a Renaissance council”? And yet certain cultural features usually associated with the Renaissance do indeed seem to have influenced the perception of Eastern Christianity in Western Europe, and particularly in Rome and Italy, throughout the period. Thus, the Renaissance fascination with classical learning contributed to the growing interest in Greek Christianity—this fascination itself being stimulated by increased interactions with Greek émigré intellectuals, scholars, clerics, and theologians. The Renaissance enthusiasm for geographic discoveries and opening new world horizons spurred curiosity for “exotic” Eastern Christian nations living in Egypt, Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, India, and other regions of the world. Furthermore, certain cultural, intellectual, and moral features common to “Renaissance popes” can likely be counted among the factors that shaped the style and manner of papal actions—or lack thereof—in respect to Eastern Christians in each individual case.

1

The Ottoman Advance, and the Greek Émigrés at the Service of Popes

The history of relations between the papacy and Eastern Christians in the Renaissance stands under the shadow of the military advance of the Ottomans. Military expedition against the Turks or some form of aid for endangered Constantinople remained on the agenda of practically every pope of the first half of the fifteenth century. These efforts ultimately proved to be unsuccessful, however. In 1444, the Ottoman army defeated Western crusaders at Varna;3 on May 29, 1453, Constantinople was captured by the army of Sultan Mehmed ii.4 The fall of the celebrated city of Constantine the Great delivered a deathblow to the Eastern Christian Empire; it put the entire Eastern Mediterranean under Islamic domination and changed the situation of Christian communities there dramatically. Even if Western powers, Venice in particular, retained control over a few territories in the Levant (including Cyprus until 1570 and Crete until 1669),5 the military advance of the Ottomans relentlessly continued 3 Oskar Halecki, The Crusade of Varna (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America [Herald Square Press], 1943). For a collection of related texts in English translation: Colin Imber, The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 4 David Nicolle, John F. Haldon, and Stephen R. Turnbull, The Fall of Constantinople: The Ottoman Conquest of Byzantium (Oxford: Osprey, 2007). 5 For an overview over Latin territories in Greek Mediterranean, see: Gerhard Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453—1821) (Munich: Beck, 1988), 4– 16. Cf. fn. 49.

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throughout the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, reaching its peak under Süleyman ii (1520–1566) with 1529, the year of the first Turkish siege of Vienna, being one of the milestones.6 The Ottoman expansion brought about at least two consequences relevant for our topic. In the first place, it spurred Greek emigration to the West. From the mid-fourteenth century onward, an ever-increasing number of Byzantines came to Western Europe, especially Italy, seeking refuge from the Turkish threat.7 The Ottoman factor was not the sole motive for emigration, but it was the most conspicuous one. In the course of the late fourteenth and of the fifteenth centuries, Greek émigrés made unique contributions to the rise of humanistic learning and the study of Greek language and literature in Western Europe. They became teachers of Greek, served as interpreters and translators, copied Greek manuscripts of classical and patristic texts, and built up collections of manuscripts from the East in Western libraries.8 The activities of the Greeks were by no means limited to the stimulation of secular learning;9 they also worked for the Church in the West as ecclesiastical figures, theologians, translators of Byzantine theological texts, curial secretaries and interpreters, papal experts on Eastern issues, and negotiators in matters of church union. Most of them had the ambition to be equally knowledgeable in pagan as well as in Christian literature in both Greek and Latin languages, but they viewed themselves primarily as promoters of Greek literacy and culture, as well as the Greek cause. At the origins of Greek learning in the Renaissance stands the pioneering figure of Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1350–1415),10 a 6

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A brief timeline of the Ottoman advance see: Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. ix. A detailed account in Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. ii: The Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1978). Fundamental for the topics: Jonathan Harris, Greek Emigres in the West 1400–1520 (Camberley, Surrey: Porphyrogenitus, 1995); John Monfasani, “Greek Renaissance Migrations,” in Italian History and Culture, 8 (2002), 1–14, reprinted as Essay i in: John Monfasani, Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy: Studies on Humanism and Philosophy in the 15th Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); John Monfasani, “The Greeks and Renaissance Humanism,” in David Rundle, ed., Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2012), 31–78. Helpful lists of Greek copyists and others have been compiled by Monfasani, “Greeks and Renaissance,” 58–68 (“Appendix i”). This has been recently very well shown by John Monfasani in his “Pro-Latin Apologetics of the Greek Émigrés to Quattrocento Italy,” in Byzantine Theology and its Philosophical Background, eds. Antonio Rigo, Pavel Ermilov, and Michele Trizio (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 160–186. On Chrysoloras, see: Lydia Thorn-Wickert, Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1350–1415): eine Biogra-

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friend and advisor to Manuel ii who accompanied the Byzantine Emperor in his travels to the West. He spent the main part of his later career in Italy as a renowned teacher of Greek letters. A number of prominent Italian humanists studied with him; some of them, like Ambrogio Traversari and Leonardo Bruni, served and advised the popes. Manuel Chrysoloras participated at the Council in Constance and died there. Cardinal Bessarion (ca. 1403–1472), a participant and protagonist of the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1439 who was made cardinal by Pope Eugenius iv, occupies a unique place in the history of Greek scholarship and of Greek ecclesiastical influence in Rome and Italy. At the conclave in 1455, Bessarion was considered as a possible successor to Pope Nicholas v, and only the opposition of the French cardinals hindered this choice and led to the election of Calixtus iii instead. The voluminous oeuvre of Cardinal Bessarion which included theological as well as philosophical works have attracted much attention in modern scholarship.11 Bessarion’s dire opponent and adversary, George of Trebizond (1395–1472/73) occupied the position of papal secretary under several popes and, along with his ardent engagement with philosophy and rhetoric, was the author of a few important theological and politico-ecclesiastical works.12 Isidore (ca. 1390–1462), Metropolitan of Kyiv in 1437–1442 and the unionist patriarch of Constantinople in 1459– 1462, a participant at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1439 and an eyewitness of the conquest and plundering of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, was both a manuscript copyist and collector, and a cardinal of the

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phie des byzantinischen Intellektuellen vor dem Hintergrund der hellenistischen Studien in der italienischen Renaissance (Frankfurt: Lang, 2006); Riccardo Maisano and Antonio Rollo, eds., Manuele Crisolora e il ritorno del Greco in Occidente: atti del convegno internazionale (Napoli, 25–27 giugno 1997) (Naples: c.i.s.c.s.f., 2002). On Bessarion, see: the classical work: Ludwig Mohler, Kardinal Bessarion als Theologe, Humanist und Staatsmann. Funde und Forschungen, 3 vols. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1923– 1942), and also: Joseph Gill, Personalities of the Council of Florence, and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 45–54; John Monfasani, Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy: Cardinal Bessarion and Other Emigrés (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995); Claudia Märtl, Christian Kaiser, Thomas Ricklin, eds., “Inter graecos latinissimus, inter latinos graecissimus.” Bessarion zwischen den Kulturen (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013). For a nuanced picture on the role of Bessarion at the Council of Florence, see Sebastian Koditz, “Bessarion und der griechische Episkopat im Kontext des Konzils von Ferrara-Florenz,” in Märtl, Inter graecos latinissimus, 37–78. See the classical comprehensive studies: John Monfasani, George of Trebizond. A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden: Brill, 1976); John Monfasani, Collectanea Trapezuntiana: Texts, Documents, and Bibliographies of George of Trebizond (Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1984).

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Roman Church.13 The four names here mentioned represent the most successful and celebrated cases. But there were dozens of other Greek émigré intellectuals who contributed, in various ways, to shaping the Renaissance papacy’s views and approaches to Eastern Christianity, among them Theodore Gazes (ca. 1400–ca. 1475/6),14 Ioannes Argyropoulos (ca. 1415–1487), Michael Apostoles (ca. 1420–1474 or 1484), Demetrios Chalkondyles (1423–1511), Marcus Musurus (1470–1517), and Janos Laskaris (ca. 1445–1535).15 The activities of the generations of Greek émigrés brought fruits in the post-1453 period: while Greek education was in the state of decline under Ottoman rule, Greek educational institutions were founded in the West and Greek books began to be printed there.16 A highpoint of this development was the foundation of the Greek college in Rome by Pope Gregory xiii in 1577, which trained a long series of prominent Greek Christians, both uniate and non-uniate (a total of 690 from the school’s founding until 1700).17 Another consequence of the Ottoman expansion was the direct political impact of the Muslim threat and—after 1453—of Muslim rule over the Golden Horn on the ecclesiastical relations between Rome and Constantinople.18 Prior to 1453, the fear of the Turks was for the Byzantines a powerful motive for seeking reconciliation and union with the Roman Church, in the expectation

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Marios Philippides and Walter K. Hanak, Cardinal Isidore, c. 1390–1462: A Late Byzantine Scholar, Warlord, and Prelate (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). Deno J. Geanakoplos, “Theodore Gaza, a Byzantine Scholar of the Palaeologan ‘Renaissance’ in the Early Italian Renaissance (c. 1400–1475),” in Geanakoplos, Constantinople and the West: Essays on the Late Byzantine (Palaeologan) and Italian Renaissances and the Byzantine and Roman Churches (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 68– 90. See, in particular: John Deno Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962). The first Greek book was printed in Venice in 1471; the first Greek printing house was founded there in 1499. Vittorio Peri, “Inizi e finalità ecumeniche del Collegio Greco in Roma,” Aevum, 44 (1970), 1–37; Zacharias N. Tsirpanlis, To Ellēniko Kollegio tēs Rōmēs kai oi mathētes toy (1576–1700) (Thessalonike, Patriarchikon Hidryma Paterikon Meleton, 1980). On the situation of the Church of Constantinople still valuable is Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); for a detailed account of the ecclesiastical situation see more recently Podskalsky, Die griechische Theologie; on Roman Catholic relations with the Ottomans see: Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983; reprinted 2006), esp. 5– 66.

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that the pope and Western rulers would be more prone to provide military aid against the Ottomans if Christians in the East were in full ecclesiastical unity with Rome. After 1453, the patriarch of Constantinople became a subordinate to the sultan by whom he was appointed the leader of the Greek ethnic and religious community (millet) in the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the relations between Roman popes and patriarchs of Constantinople, if there were any, were closely and zealously supervised by the Ottoman administration; no direct contact between the two hierarchs was possible without the consent of the sultan. The relationship between popes and patriarchs fluctuated with the ebb and flow in relations between popes and the sultans. Thus, the expansionist politics of Mehmet ii (1451–1481), reciprocated by the crusading zeal of the first five post-1453 popes (Nicholas v, Calixtus iii, Pius ii, Paul ii, Sixtus iv), boosted mutual animosity and undoubtedly contributed to the stern anti-papal stance of the Constantinopolitan patriarchs of that period which expressed itself, in particular, in the official decree of 1484 repudiating and condemning the union of Florence.19 A temporary turn came in the 1490s with the new appeasement politics of Innocent viii and Alexander vi towards the Ottomans which led to a thaw in relations between the two powers in the late fifteenth century.20 It is curious that exactly from that period we have a patriarchal document taking a much more moderate position on the issue of union with Rome: the letter of Patriarch Nephon ii to Metropolitan Iosyf of Kyiv from the year 1498.21 The subsequent history of relations between the papacy and the Ottoman Empire saw a period of hostility that lasted for at least fifty years. In the sixteenth century, however, the relations again improved, and Catholic missionaries from the West, particularly Jesuits, began their work in the territory of the Ottoman Empire, attracting many Eastern Christians. This, in turn, caused suspicion on part of the Turkish rulers and led to a cooling of relations between the papacy and the Ottomans.22

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Machē Paizē-Apostolopoulou and Dēmētrēs G. Apostolopoulos, Episēma keimena tou patriarcheiou Kōnstantinoupoleōs: Ta sōzomena apo tēn period 1454–1498 (Athens: Ethnikó Idryma Ereunōn, Kéntro Neoellēnikōn Ereunōn, 2011), 183–190. Further details in Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, 18–22. The text in Andreas Šeptyckyj, ed., Monumenta Ucrainae Historica (Rome: Centro di Studi Superiori Ucraini, 1964), 1: 5–7 (#7). For details of this history, see Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, 22–45, 67–83.

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The Byzantine Henotic Movement and the “Love-Hate” Relationship between Greeks and Latins

Modern research at least since Edward Gibbon has tended to separate the contribution of the Byzantine émigrés to the revival of classical learning in the West from their theological work, with only the former contribution seen as having a truly lasting significance.23 It was also common to present Byzantine ecclesiastical engagement in favor of union with the Roman Church as motivated almost exclusively by the fear of the Ottomans and, thus, by purely political and military considerations.24 Recently voices have been heard in favor of a more balanced and historically contextualized picture. It has been underscored that Greek émigrés themselves saw no contradiction between their humanistic and theological interests,25 and their ecclesiastical concerns were by no means exhausted by pragmatic and political goals. The unionist or “henotic” (to use the Greek word, which Byzantine advocates of church union employed to describe themselves) turn of some fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Greeks was a form of the late Byzantine fascination with Latin patristic and medieval theology and the Western church. The slighting attitude towards Frankish “barbarians” which was so typical for the Byzantines in the eleventh and twelfth centuries gave way among broad-minded Byzantine intellectuals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to an admiration of Latin theological and philosophical achievements.26 Greeks at the council of Florence recognized the superiority of Latins in theological discourse.27 At least since the 23 24

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One of the most salient examples is Nigel G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). The origins of this view can be again traced back to Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. John Bagnell Bury, 7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1897–1900). This view reverberates in Aristeides Papadakis’ entry on “Ferrara-Florence, Council of” in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (= odb), 3 vols. ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan (New York and Oxford: Oxford, 1991), 2:783. A classic example in German scholarship is August Franzen, Bruno Steimer, and Roland Frölich, Kleine Kirchengeschichte (Freiberg/Basel/Vienna: Herder, 1988). See also typical statements in Jan-Louis van Dieten, “Der Streit in Byzanz um die Rezeption der Unio Florentina,” Ostkirchliche Studien 39 (1990), 164. Monfasani, “Greeks and Renaissance Humanism,” 31–78. This aspect has been underscored by Gerhard Podskalsky, Von Photios zu Bessarion: Der Vorrang humanistisch geprägter Theologie in Byzanz und deren bleibende Bedeutung (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2003). E.g.: Gennadios Scholarios, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Louis Petit, Xenophon A. Siderides, and Martin Jugie (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1928), 299. (Cited by Aristeides Papadakis in The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 [Crestwood: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1994], 393).

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mid-fourteenth century, beginning with Demetrios Kydones’ (1324–1397) copious translations of Thomas Aquinas’ writings into Greek, a group of Byzantine intellectuals and ecclesiastical figures emerged who became enthusiastic admirers of the Roman Church and Latin scholastic theology. This group was not numerous, but it was notable and proved to be influential on the later Byzantine intellectual horizon.28 Most of the names mentioned in the preceding section belonged to the unionist group, including Cardinals Bessarion and Isidore. The unionist movement looked differently in Constantinople and the shrinking Byzantine domain of the Palaeologan dynasty, on the one hand, and in the Mediterranean Greek territories under Latin rule, on the other. In the territories like Lusignan Cyprus or Venetian Crete, Negroponte (Euboea), and Kerkyra (Korfu), the local Greek population was subjected to high ecclesiastical and cultural pressure that effected rapid Latinization. Sometimes a Greek was left with no other choice than to become fully Latin culturally; in such cases, it becomes hardly possible to speak of a conscious unionist position, of course. There were, however, many Greeks in the Latin territories who preserved and cherished their Greek culture while promoting union with Rome, like the Cretan “united priest” John Plousiadenos (1429/1430–1500), who collected and edited the acts of the Council of Florence and was the author of a series of passionate works in defense of the union.29 The movement towards the Roman Church was countered—and on the Byzantine territory mostly outweighed—by the opposite tendency among the Greek clergy and monks promoting aversion towards the Latins and blaming them for grave theological errors and ecclesiastical as well as political offenses. This loathing of the Latins was inherited from the conflicts of the ninth, eleventh and particularly the thirteenth century, when a series of charges against them arose, which by the fifteenth century had crystallized into five main theological points (πέντε διαφοραί): the procession of the Holy Spirit (the issue of the Filioque); Eucharistic bread (leavened in the Greek Church, unleavened in the Latin); purgatory; the question of the beatitude of the saints; and 28

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A manifesto of the goals and motives of the group is the Apology by Demetrios Kydones, see the edition in: Giovanni Mercati, Notizie di Procoro e Demetrio Cidone, Manuele Caleca e Teodoro Meliteniota ed altri appunti per la storia della teologia e della letteratura bizantina del secolo xiv (Vatican City: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1931), 359–403. A rough English translation in: James Likoudis, Ending the Byzantine Greek Schism: Containing the 14th c. Apologia of Demetrios Kydones for Unity with Rome and St. Thomas Aquinas’ Contra errores Graecorum (New Rochelle: Catholics United for the Faith, 1992), 22–70. plp 10: #23385; Charles C. Yost, “Neither Greek nor Latin, but catholic: Aspects of the Theology of Union of John Plousiadenos,” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, 1 no. 1 (2018), 43–59.

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papal primacy. Along with this, however, the political and military offense of the conquest and plundering of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 played a prominent, if not the decisive role in the estrangement and conflict.30 Taking into consideration both the anti-Latin and the pro-Latin, henotic tendencies in the Greek Church and society, the impression one gains is that the Byzantines of the Palaeologan period seem to have displayed a sort of a love-hate relationship towards the Latin Church and Latin theology. Resentment generally prevailed; but sympathy and admiration were never extinguished, and the unionist (henotic) movement, even if not numerically predominant, was influential enough and intellectually appealing to many. Love, however, could easily turn into hatred at times, as happened in the celebrated case of Gennadios Scholarios (1400–1473), the first post-1453 patriarch of Constantinople. An outspoken admirer of Thomas Aquinas, he initially supported the union of Florence but later became one of the leading Greek anti-unionists.31 In the eyes of anti-Latin polemicists, everyone who expressed agreement with or even sympathy for the Latins was suspected of heresy. The word λατινόφρονες (“Latinminded”) was employed as a weapon against the unionists who were accused of being heretics and traitors of the Greek cause.

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The “Union of Florence” 1439 and Its Ambiguous Legacy

At the council of Ferrara-Florence-Rome (1438–1445) several unions between Rome and Eastern Churches were concluded. The union with the Greek Church 30

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On the events of 1204 and their significance for the later period see: Angeliki E. Laiou, ed., Urbs capta: The Fourth Crusade and Its Consequences = La ive croisade et ses conséquences (Paris: Lethielleux, 2005); Pierantonio Piatti, The Fourth Crusade Revisited: Atti della Conferenza Internazionale nell’Ottavo Centenario della iv Crociata, 1204–2004; Andros (Grecia), 27–30 maggio (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2008); Thomas F. Madden, ed., The Fourth Crusade: Event, Aftermath, and Perceptions: Papers from the Sixth Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Istanbul, Turkey, 25–29 August 2004 (London and New York: Taylor and Francis, Ashgate, 2008). On Scholarios: Marie-Hélène Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios (vers 1400-vers 1472): Un intellectuel orthodoxe face à la disparition de l’empire Byzantin (Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 2008); Franz Tinnefeld, “Georgios Gennadios Scholarios,” in Carmelo Giuseppe Conticello and Vassa Conticello, eds., La théologie byzantine et sa tradition, vol. 2 (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2002), 477–541. Marcus Plested opines that “on closer inspection, it seems most plausible to see Scholarios as consistently committed to a true union of the Churches in the right circumstances” (Orthodox Readings of Aquinas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 129). It is true that Scholarios’ remained a diligent reader of Aquinas throughout his life; however, the anti-unionist views he expressed in his later writings contributed to the estrangement between Greeks and Latins greatly.

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of Constantinople, officially promulgated by the document Laetentur caeli signed in Florence on July 6, 1439, was the first and most consequential among them. The theological dialogue with the representatives of the Church of Constantinople occupied a central place at the council and was perceived as its crowning achievement: it lasted, with intermissions, for over a year, beginning in Ferrara and ending in Florence, and involved theological heavyweights from both the Latin and the Greek sides, the total number of the Byzantine delegation that arrived at Ferrara from Constantinople in the spring of 1438 being over 700 persons (including servants and technical personnel).32 The union with the Greeks was not the only one: in the same year, on November 22, the bull Exultate Deo was signed in Florence, declaring union with the Armenian Church. After the council was transferred to the Lateran in Rome, unions were signed with the Copts (“Egyptian Jacobites”; February 4, 1442), the Syrians of Mesopotamia (November 30, 1444), and, finally, with the Chaldean and Maronite communities of Cyprus (August 7, 1445). The union with the Greeks, however, remained the most celebrated result of the council. It was seen as such already by the organizers and participants: the long list of triumphant messages sent along by Pope Eugenius iv to various prelates and secular rulers informing them of the success of the union with Constantinople is a telling testimony of this.33 Although the “Union of Florence,” both in its success in 1439 and in its ensuing failure to heal the rift between Rome and Constantinople, has tended to dominate modern scholarly discourse on the Latin-Byzantine relations of the later medieval period, it is necessary to consider the Florentine unification against the backdrop of the councils that preceded it. Without the councils in Constance (1414–1418) and in Basel (1431–1449) no union would have been possible at Florence. It was the rivalry with the conciliarists of Basel that prompted Pope Eugenius iv (1431–1447) to undertake efforts towards union with the Greek Church. First steps in this direction were made by his predecessor, Martin v (1417–1431), the pope elected at the Council of Constance, whose pontificate had ended the Great Schism of the Latin Church (1378–1417). In Constance, the representative of the Ruthenian (i.e., Ukrainian) Church, the Metropolitan of Kyiv, Hryhory Tsamvlak, unambiguously expressed the demand of the East towards Rome: the union “should be concluded on this condition, that it

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For the Council of Florence, see the classic study of Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Epistolae pontificiae ad concilium Florentinum spectantes, 3 parts, ed. Georg Hofmann, [Concilium Florentinum: Documentum et Scriptores] (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1940–1946), 3:81–84 (#178–189) and 85 (#192–193).

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be done in the right, honorable, and accustomed way, namely by the summoning of a council, so that from both sides there be brought together those who are skilled and practiced in law, to decide on the matters of faith and regulate the differences between that nation and the holy Roman Church.”34 A union resulting from a dialogue of two churches whose representatives come together on equal terms to a joint council was not an easy decision for the popes. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the popes had been used to conceive a council of union as merely a ceremonial event whose purpose was to celebrate the reception of schismatic Greeks back into the obedience of the Roman Church. Precisely in this way, according to extant sources, the union was concluded at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274: the council’s Ordinatio makes no mention of any theological debates; the Byzantine representatives had merely to sign the confession of faith prepared for them in advance by the Latin side, and to participate in a solemn liturgy celebrated on that occasion.35 The same could have happened in the fifteenth century too, if it had not been for the rise of the conciliarist movement that sought to find a solution for the stalemate of the Great Schism in the West. Conciliarist theologians, in their attempt to bring the rivaling popes in Rome and Avignon to a common council despite mutual excommunications between them, suggested a strategy that could be applied also to the handling of Greek “schismatics.” This transfer of the Western conciliarist model onto the relations with the Greeks can be clearly seen, in particular, in some of the sermons of Jean Gerson delivered in the context of the council of Pisa of 1409. Although Gerson had no hesitations about qualifying Byzantines as schismatics and even heretics,36 he proposed to convoke a general council of both Latins and Greeks, “just as the last council [i.e., the council of Pisa] was necessary for the peace of the Latins.”37 The Greeks should 34

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Heinrich Finke, ed., Acta Concilii Constanciensis, vol. ii (Münster: Regensberg, 1923), 164– 167. Engl. translation: John Hine Mundy and Kennedy M. Woody, eds., The Council of Constance: The Unification of the Church, trans. Louise Ropes Loomis (New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 176–177; 436–437. On the events at the Council in Lyon in 1274, see: Ordinatio concilii Lugdunensis Sermo factus coram Alexandro Papa in die Ascensionis Domini 1409, in: Jean Gerson, Opera Omnia, ii, ed. Louis Ellies du Pin (Antwerp: Sumtibus Societatis, 1706): 135A: “[Graecos] mala tempestas a sede Petri disjectos, non modo schismatis, sed nonnullius etiam haeresis macula foedavit.” We quote the English translations from Gerson in: Gill, Personalities, 247–249. Sermo pro pace ecclesiae et unione Graecorum, in: Gerson, Opera Omnia, ii, col. 152C: “Et quia Graeci possint et velint convenire non est (ut apparet) dispositio altera convenientior ad pacem de qua loquimur, quam esse debeat dictum Concilium; nec alio meliori modo negotium hoc poterit expleri, sicut postremum Concilium fuit necessarium propter pacem Latinorum …”.

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be permitted to attend this council “not as anathematized”; on the contrary, “a careful consideration should be given to what they wish to say.”38 The concession made by Pope Martin v towards the Byzantine demands of a joint council was closely related to his commitment to follow Frequens, the constitution of the Council of Constance promulgated in 1417 that prescribed the regular convocation of general councils (the first one in five years, the second one in seven, and henceforth every ten years). The Latin conciliarist norm, adopted—albeit without much enthusiasm—by the papacy, thus met the Byzantine expectations. In this form, Martin v passed on the problematics of the union with the Greeks to his successor, Eugenius iv, who “with an ardent spirit and complete zeal”39 worked to outstrip in this task the conciliarists of Basel. In Basel, a Byzantine embassy arrived in July 1434 for negotiating the conditions of a union council (one of the delegates was the future metropolitan of Kyiv and then cardinal Isidore). These negotiations resulted on September 7 in the conciliar constitution Sicut pia mater, which outlined a road map towards union and stressed that the “universal synod” of Latins and Greeks had to be “free and inviolate,” “that is, each may freely declare his judgment without any obstacle or violence.”40 After the breach between the council of Basel and Eugenius iv, the pope did his best to outdo his rivals in Basel in bringing the Greeks into union with the Latin Church. This made him even more prone to allow discussion and seek compromise with the Easterners at Ferrara and Florence.41 In this sense, the council in Ferrara and Florence was unprecedented in the relations between Latins and Greeks: for the first time in the entire history of disagreements and disputes, representative delegations from both sides came together for a free discussion of controversial issues. A prominent American historian of Greek origin called the council in Ferrara-Florence “the most brilliant convocation of Greeks and Latins in the entire Middle Ages” that “marked the first occasion in centuries that East and West assembled in ecumenical council to debate the differences separating their two churches.”42 This charac-

38

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Ibid., 147A: “… non debent reputari pertinaces vel anathematizati. Hic diligenter considerandum esset, quid dicere vellent; vel inveniendum est medium expediens, ut omnia ponerentur ad concordiam”. “Ardenti animo et tota alacritate” (Doctoris gentium of September 18, 1437, in Epistolae pontificiae i: 91 (#88)). Joseph Alberigo et al. eds., Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. altera (Basel: Herder, 1962), 458. For the document of Basel on the union with the Greeks, see Alberigo, Decreta, 454–458. Deno J. Geanakoplos, “The Council of Florence (1438–1439) and the Problem of Union between the Byzantine and Latin Churches,” in Constantinople and the West, 224.

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terization remains true, even if we recognize that the council, sharply criticized theologically by its adversaries and accused of predominantly political motivation, was ultimately rejected by the post-Byzantine Greek Church.43 The irony of the history of the Union of Florence, however, is that the Byzantines, by choosing the papalist council in Ferrara against the conciliarist council in Basel, contributed to the final defeat of conciliarism in the West. This is a clear sign that the Byzantines did not perceive the Western conciliarists as likeminded allies. Byzantine models of collegiality were profoundly different and lay much closer to the papal model. In relations with the Latins, it was important for the Byzantine side to present itself at a joint council as a body represented by all the four patriarchs of the East (although the Byzantine-appointed, Melkite patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch certainly could not represent the authentic Coptic and Syriac traditions). This was a typical approach on the part of the Byzantines: they often sought to reinforce their unitary system with the rhetoric of specious collegiality. Thus, the Council of Florence, despite its great importance for the history of relations between the East and the West, precisely through its success (from the pope’s point of view) buried the idea of reforms and the regular convocation of councils. Starting with the main beneficiary of the Council of Florence, Eugenius iv, popes no longer considered it necessary to adhere to the instructions of Constance. This meant, in essence, the freezing of serious reforms and the multiplication of internal tensions in the church— all the factors that ultimately led to the stormy beginnings of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Thus, the Council of Florence turns out to be, in fact, one of the milestones that led to the catastrophe of the sixteenth century.44

4

The Fate of Florence in the Greek East

It has often been assumed that the Union of Florence died with the Byzantine State in the fatal year of 1453.45 Significant as the end of Byzantine political autonomy was for the prospects of ecclesiastical unity in general—for centuries it had been Byzantine emperors who negotiated union with popes—and

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Gill, Personalities of the Council, 1–14. Gill, Council of Florence, 411. Cf. Papadakis, Christian East, 397–408. See also the comments of Petro B.T. Bilaniuk, The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517) and the Eastern Churches (Toronto: Central Committee for the Defence of Rite, Tradition and Language of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in USA and Canada, 1975), 2. Typical is the sentiment of Papadakis, Christian East, 409 and idem, “Ferrara-Florence, Council of” in odb 2:783.

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for the legacy of Florence in particular, this assumption is overly simplistic. To be sure, when the conqueror, Sultan Mehmet, arrived on the scene, he effectively stepped into a politico-ecclesiastical vacuum. The emperor was dead and there was no patriarch in residence. The sultan needed a man on the ground whom he could hold accountable for his Greek subjects and whom he could trust—hence anyone committed to union with an outside and independent papacy was out of the question. In view of these considerations, the previous flight of the pro-union patriarch Gregory iii to Rome in 1451 provided a convenient occasion for the sultan to choose the vehemently anti-union monk Gennadios Scholarios as patriarch of the Church of Constantinople and ethnarch of the Greek millet.46 Thenceforth, leadership over the Church of Constantinople was contested by two independent patriarchal lineages until the Roman Catholic Church abolished the so-called “Latin patriarchate of Constantinople” in 1964. The patriarchate of Constantinople had entered a new era. Between 1454 and 1465, Patriarch Gennadios ii was in and out of office according to the pleasure of the sultan, thus establishing a trend that typified Ottoman oversight of the church during this new era of Turkokratia. It is also worth noting that no official condemnation of the Union of Florence by the Eastern Church occurred until 1484, during the patriarchate of Symeon i (1482–1486). This repudiation was justified on the grounds “that the Council of Florence had not been canonically summoned or composed.”47 Despite the short and troubled trajectory of the Florentine union in Constantinople and what remained of the Empire until 1453, it persisted—at least in theory—throughout the Eastern Mediterranean in the Greek-speaking coastal regions and islands still under Latin political control. Nor were these holdings inconsiderable. Some sense of their extent may be considered from a letter written by Isidore of Kyiv after his survey of the Greek East undertaken in behalf of the cause of union between 1444 and 1448. Along with “the island of Rhodes and also Cyprus,” Isidore informed Pope Nicholas v that there were “entire cities in communion with us, Methone, Corone with their provinces and in various other places many other people.”48 In addition, Isidore might

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On Scholarios, see authors cited above in n. 32. See Runciman, Great Church in Captivity, 228. For the documents, see Dēmētrēs G. Apostolopoulos, Ho “Hieros Kōdix” tou patriarcheiou Kōnstantinoupoleōs sto B’ miso tou ie’ aiōna: Ta mona gnōsta sparagmata (Athens: Ethniko Hidryma Ereunōn, 1992), 123–133; Paize-Apostolopoulou and Apostolopoulos, Episēma keimena tou patriarcheiou, 183–190. Cited in Gill, Council of Florence, 389–390.

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have specified the city of Monemvasia in the southern Peloponnese, as well as the islands of Crete, Euboea (Negroponte), Lemnos (Navigaioso), Samothrace, Imbros, Thasos, Scutari, Andros, Tinos, Naxos, and Antikythera (Cerigotto).49 In these places, the question of the implementation and demands of union remained a live concern as far as the papacy, Latin political authorities, and local populations were concerned. Certainly, the union sparked controversy, such as is documented for Venetian Crete in contemporary records of the Venetian Senate and seen in vivid detail in the writings of the unionist priest John Plousiadenos.50 In the face of controversy, resistance, and occasional rebellion against the Florentine Union, the papacy reacted in various ways: appointing inquisitors to rein in misunderstandings of Florence in partibus Orientis;51 financially supporting pro-union clergy;52 and even requiring (by specific mandate of Pope Callixtus iii in 1457) that Greek priests include the controversial Filioque clause during their celebrations of the liturgy—a stipulation that went beyond the letter of Laetentur caeli itself.53 While the course of union in each of these places differed in particulars, suffice it to say that, as these cities and islands were lost to the Ottoman advance in the 1460s, the Florentine Union was lost with them, though Crete hung on until 1669 while Kerkyra (Corfu) survived the Turkish juggernaut altogether.54

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51 52

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For a survey of the territories constituting the Eastern Mediterranean Venetian Empire, see Freddy Thiriet, La Romanie vénitienne au Moyen Age: Le développement et l’exploitation du domaine colonial vénitien, xiie–xve siècles (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1959), 389–391. See now Eleftherios Despotakis, John Plousiadenos (1423?–1500): A Time-Space Geography of his Life and Career (Leuven/Paris/Bristol: Peeters, 2020) and Yost, “Neither Greek nor Latin,” 43–59.,. See Epistolae pontificiae ad concilium Florentinum, 3:17–21 (#243). Henri D. Saffrey, “Pie ii et les prêtres uniates en Crète au xve siècle,” Θησαυρίσματα, 3 (1964), 40–41; Zacharias N. Tsirpanles, To Klērodotēma tou kardinaliou Bēssariōnos gia tous philenōtikous tēs Benetokratoumenēs Krētēs (1439–17os ai.) (Thessaloniki: Aristoteleion Panepistēmion Thessalonikēs, 1967), 81–83 and passim. See Georg Hofmann, “Papst Kalixt iii. und die Frage der Kircheneinheit,” Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, vol. 3, Letteratura e storia bizantina, Studi e Testi, 123 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1946), 209–213 (especially 213 where he provides the Latin text of the October decree). For the text of the September bull (i.e., “Reddituri”), see Bullarium Romanum: Bullarum diplomatum et privilegiorum sanctorum Romanorum pontificum, Taurinensis edition, Collectione novissima plurium brevium, epistolarum, decretorum actorumque S. Sedis a S. Leone magno usque ad praesens, vol. 5, Ab Eugenio iv (an. mccccxxxi) ad Leonem x (an. mdxxi), ed. Collegium adlectum Romae virorum S. Theologiae et ss. Canonum peritorum (Turin: Franco et Dalmarzo, 1860), 139–140, #viii. Again, see Thiriet, La Romanie vénitienne, cited above.

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A Renaissance-Era Programmatic Look at Eastern Christians

“If there are some people […] who think that there are no other Christians in the world than the ones we know, who live in Europe, […] such persons are suffering from a colossal ignorance of the facts.”55 These words from a lengthy memorandum (Libellus) addressed to Leo x in 1513 by two Camaldolese monks, Paolo Giustiniani and Pietro Querini, seem to breathe the air of the Renaissance, both by chiding, in humanistic fashion, contemporaries’ “ignorance” and by the fresh awareness of the world’s vastness transcending European boundaries.56 The Libellus was composed soon after the election of the promising, thirty-seven-year-old cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo x. His predecessor, Julius ii, had summoned the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517), the first general church council after the gathering in Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome in 1431–1445, but never lived to bring it to completion. Seizing the opportunity offered by the council and the newly elected pope whom they personally knew, the authors of the Libellus called Leo x to engage in a sweeping church reform, one of the main reform tasks being to work for uniting Eastern Christians with the Roman Church.57 According to the Libellus, there are seven Eastern Christian nations who “inhabit the furthest reaches of Asia and Africa”:58 Abyssinians, Jacobites, Armenians, Georgians, Syrians, Maronites, and Greeks. They “do not belong to the Roman Church”59 and dissent from it to a greater or a lesser degree; they “seem to accept some parts of the Christian faith and not to accept others.”60 Overall, the memorandum takes a benevolent stance towards Eastern Christians. Its principal author, Giustiniani, quotes his experience of visiting the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and meeting people from Eastern Christian nations there: they possess so much “natural

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Blessed Paolo Giustiniani and Petro Querini, Libellus Addressed to Leo x, Supreme Pontiff, ed. and trans. Stephen M. Beall (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2016), 112– 113. On Giustiniani, Querini, and their Libellus, s.: Eugenio Massa, Una cristianità nell’alba del Rinascimento: Paolo Giustiniani e il Libellus ad Leonem x, 1513 (Genoa and Milan: Marietti, 2005); Stephen D. Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002); Dom Jean Leclercq, “A Humanist Hermit” in Camaldolese Extraordinary: The Life, Doctrine, and Rule of Blessed Paul Giustiniani, ed. Camaldolese Hermits of Monte Corona (Bloomingdale, OH: Ercam Editions, 2003), 29–210; Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council, 54–86. Giustiniani and Querini, Libellus, 238–239. Ibid., 112–113. Ibid., 124–125. Ibid., 112–113.

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goodness” and “zeal for their faith” that the European Christians “might all blush for shame.”61 Most Eastern Christians “err through ignorance rather than any wicked malice;”62 some of them “have little or no knowledge of the Roman Pontiff,” particularly because between Europe and the lands inhabited by them “lie great oceans and great expanses of land, and a wall of infidel nations is placed in the middle.”63 In the authors’ view, to bring these nations “back to the lap of the Mother Church”64 would, basically, mean to enlighten them about the truth and the purity of the Roman Church and about the union of the Eastern Churches with Rome that took place in Florence and Rome in 1439–1445—a task that could be accomplished relatively easily because “they are ready and eager to hear and quick to understand.” One Christian nation, however, differs from the rest through its “stubborn pride” and “inflexible ignorance”65—the Greeks. They dissent from the Roman Church not only from ignorance, but also “with a certain tenacious disrespect;”66 therefore the task of uniting them with Rome will be “more difficult than all the others combined.” Even they, however, “will not be incorrigible” if the pope would be truly willing to correct them. The authors admonish the pope to invite representatives of the Eastern Christian nations to participate in the on-going Lateran Council.67 The reform project of the two Camaldolese monks, placed within the history of relations between the Roman Church and Eastern Christianity, illuminates the accomplishments and failures of the Renaissance-period popes in this area well. It delineates the horizon of the West in its knowledge and awareness of Eastern Christians. It shows what ideas the most enlightened representatives of the clergy in the West had about Eastern churches shortly before the beginning of the Reformation, and what proposals were put forward regarding papal politics towards the Christians of the East. It is useful to trace the extent to which these ideas and proposals worked—or did not work—in the papal policy of the Renaissance period.

61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Ibid., 128–129. Ibid., 112–113. Ibid., 114–117. Ibid., 128–129. Ibid., 130–131. Ibid., 134–135. Ibid., 130–131; 133.

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The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517), the Beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, and the Metropolitanate of Kyiv

Indeed, concerns for the perpetuation of the Florentine legacy of union, as expressed by humanist monks or even by leaders of Byzantine-rite communities, were not necessarily met and responded to with sensitivity or tact by the pontiffs of the period. Between 1453 and 1517, popes would call for crusades against the Ottomans. At times, papal calls for military action were urgent—such as during the pontificate of Pope Pius ii (1458–1464) or after the Ottoman conquest of Otranto in southern Italy in 1480—but often popes of this period were preoccupied with political and cultural ambitions closer to home. Pope Leo x’s call for a crusade against the Turks in 1517—along with his other projects, e.g. the building of St. Peter’s in Rome, but also the first, albeit abortive (1516–1521), foundation of a Greek College in Rome for the purpose of preserving for the West the Hellenic literary patrimony threatened by Islamic conquest—required him to devote his efforts to raising revenues, by whatever means necessary. This, of course, provided the occasion for the theological controversy in which all Latin Europe soon became embroiled.68 At the Fifth Lateran Council, Ruthenia—the territory corresponding to modern Ukraine and Belarus in which Byzantine Christians of the Church of Kyiv resided under Polish and Lithuanian political authority—became a vital region.69 Isidore, the Greek metropolitan of Kyiv, had attended Florence with the wary consent of the Grand Prince of Muscovy, but upon the metropolitan’s return to Moscow, where he announced the tidings of union, he was promptly jailed.70 Isidore managed to escape, but the rejection of Florence by the Muscovites led to the de facto separation of the anti-union metropolitanate of Moscow from that of Kyiv. Between 1458 and 1502, pro-union metropolitans occupied the see of Kyiv and enjoyed the recognition of both Roman pontiffs

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Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, 23–24. On Pope Leo x and the Greek College, see Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars, 149–161, 184–187. Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council; Nelson H. Minnich, “Leo x’s Response to the Report on the Errors of the Ruthenians,” in Reimund Haas, ed., Fiat voluntas tua. Theologe und Historiker—Priester und Professor: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Harm Klueting am 23. März 2014 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2014), 209–222. For basic orientation to the region and its centers of political and ecclesiastical authority, see Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitinate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), xvi and 1– 7. Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council, 15.

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and Orthodox patriarchs of Constantinople. In 1500, metropolitan Josyf i of Kyiv wrote to Pope Alexander vi (1492–1503) formally acknowledging the latter’s headship over the universal Church.71 Even though the situation was complicated in 1502, when Helena—dowager grand duchess of Lithuania and daughter of Ivan iii of Moscow—brought about the appointment of anti-unionist clerics to positions of high office in the Kyivan Church, the main obstacle to the legacy of Florence in Ruthenia came not from the Ruthenians themselves, but from the Latin hierarchy in Lithuania who regarded these Greek-rite Slavs with suspicion. As early as 1500, concerned Latin-rite clergy began drawing Rome’s attention to the alleged “errors” of the Ruthenians in an attempt to preempt a formalization of union between the Roman and Kyivan churches according to the terms of Florence, which is to say a union that would preserve the Ruthenians in their distinctive rite rather than absorb them into the Latin Church. A survey of these supposed Ruthenian practices—including denying papal supremacy, baptizing infants with vinegar, and failure to regard murdering Latins as a sin—was prepared by Johannes Sacranus (Jan z Oświęcimia) at the request of the Latin bishop of Vilnius.72 Pope Alexander vi responded by sending a letter to Alexander, then Grand Duke of Lithuania, wherein he insisted upon doctrinal orthodoxy while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of the Byzantine rite of baptism as practiced among the Ruthenians, thereby maintaining the terms of Florence.73 Little more than a decade later, Sacranus’ survey, lightly emended, found its way into the Fifth Lateran Council as an official “report” by the Latin Archbishop of Gniezno and “spokesman of the Most Serene Prince Lord Sigismund … King of Poland” on the state of Christianity in Ruthenia.74 The problem was delegated to a special subcommittee, whose advice was included in Pope 71

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For this source see: Vetera Monumenta Historica Hungariam Sacram Illustrantia, ed. Augustin Theiner, t. 2, Ab Innocentio pp. vi usque ad Clementem pp. vii, 1352–1526 (Rome: Typis Vaticanis, 1860), 620–623, n. 812. For commentary, see: Minnich, “Leo x’s Response,” 210–212; Halecki, From Florence to Brest, 33–140; Gudziak, Crisis and Reform, 43–58; Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council, 142—and see these authors for events related in the following paragraph. Elucidarius errorum ritus Ruthenici (s.l, [1501]). Gudziak, 324 n. 69 provides references to several of Sacranus’ prints that appeared in the course of the sixteenth century. Documenta pontificum Romanorum historiam Ucrainae illustrantia, ed. Athanasius Welykyj, vol. 1 (Rome: Basiliani, 1953), 186–188; Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council, 143. For an English translation of this text with helpful notes, see Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council, 87–134. See also the summary of Minnich, “Leo x’s Response,” 212–215. For the relationship between the report of Jan Łaski, archbishop of Gniezno, and the text by Johannes Sacranus, see Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council, 134–154; Minnich, “Leo x’s Response,” 211– 216.

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Leo x’s 1515 bull Sacrosanctae universalis ecclesiae regiminis.75 Significantly, this bull marked a stark change in papal policy toward Byzantine Christians—at any rate, the Greek-rite Christians of Ruthenia. Whereas the terms of Florence had guaranteed to Byzantine Christians the free use of their ancestral rite, and this guarantee had been, on the whole, consistently extended to Greekspeaking Christians, now Pope Leo directed that “baptism and the other sacraments should be repeated—according to the rite of the Roman Church—upon those same schismatics and Ruthenians who are returning to the faith of the Catholics,” so long as said Ruthenians had not been previously “baptized, confirmed, or ordained according to a rite usually maintained and tolerated by this same Roman Church.”76 In other words, contrary to the previous ruling of Pope Alexander vi, the Slavonic practice of the Byzantine rite among the Ruthenians was not beyond suspicion or automatically recognized as valid by the Roman Church.77 The relationship between the Roman Church and the Ruthenians remained tepid throughout much of the sixteenth century: the papacy was absorbed in other affairs, primarily in the controversy with Martin Luther. Nevertheless, it was the outbreak of Protestantism itself and the reformconsciousness that it ushered in which would lead to the renewal of the legacy of the union of Florence in Ruthenia in the latter part of the sixteenth century.

7

Confessional Divisions, Reform, and the Union of Brest (1596)

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the crisis in Latin Christendom triggered by the Protestant challenge had forced the popes to take in hand the business of reform that had been deferred for the better part of a century for a number of reasons, the triumph of papalist ecclesiology at the Council of Florence definitely being one of them. Between 1545 and 1563, the Catholic Church gathered in council at Trent and Bologna in order to address the abuses that had instigated the Reformation, all the while trenchantly defining its doctrine on the contested questions of authority, ecclesiology, sacraments, justification, and many others. The participants at Trent, even if they were focused almost exclusively on Western problems, did recognize the specificity of Eastern canonical and liturgical tradition and approached it with a certain respect, as one can see in the council’s discussions on the issues of matrimony and divorce, 75 76 77

Minnich, “Leo x’s Response,” 209–210, 216–219; Bilaniuk, Fifth Lateran Council, 87–154. Vetera Monumenta Historica, ed. Theiner, 621; Minnich, “Leo x’s Response,” 219 n. 61. See the nuanced assessment of Leo’s policy toward Ruthenians in Minnich, “Leo x’s Response,” 218–221.

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in which Latins and Greeks followed different canonical regulations.78 In the context of the council of Trent, particular attention should be given to the activities of Marcello Cervini, cardinal in 1539–1555 who became Pope Marcellus ii shortly before his death in 1555. Cervini cultivated connections with the Eastern Churches and promoted studies in Eastern Christianity by ordering translations from the Greek fathers and a few other important related texts, in particular the Ethiopic Mass.79 A consciousness of the urgency of Christian unity in the face of renewed Ottoman aggression was also manifest in Pope Pius iv’s invitation to Ivan iv, crowned tsar in 1547, to send delegates to the council. These gestures proved fruitless: there would be no Muscovite-Latin Christian alliance against the Ottomans under the auspices of papal Rome. Moscow had its own vision of Christian hegemony.80 This vision achieved its ecclesiastical establishment during the nominal reign of Ivan’s mentally-fragile heir Feodor, when power was in fact exercised by the boyar Boris Godunov. In 1588, Patriarch Jeremiah ii Tranos of Constantinople journeyed northward—up through Ruthenian lands and into the territory of Muscovy.81 The patriarch was seeking alms for his much-beleaguered flock in the Ottoman Empire. Amidst these circumstances, the patriarch and his entourage were essentially held hostage in Moscow until they agreed to elevate—in a fashion contrary to Byzantine canon law and liturgical practice—the metropolitan of Moscow to patriarchal status. Now Patriarch Job of Moscow was permitted by Patriarch Jeremiah to assume a place as the least member of the Orthodox pentarchy. This occurred without the consent of Alexandria, Antioch, or Jerusalem.82

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Theobald Freudenberger, “Das Konzil von Trient und das Ehescheidungsrecht der Ostkirche. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Canons 7 de matrimonio,” in Ernst-Christoph Suttner and Coelestin Patock, eds., Wegzeichen. Festgabe zum 60. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Hermenegild Biedermann osa (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1971), 149–187. Sam Kennerley, Rome and the Maronites in the Renaissance and Reformation: The Formation of Religious Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 57–85; idem, ‘Identity, Inquisition, and Censorship in the editio princeps of Theodoret of Cyrus’s Anti-Heretical Works (1545–1547),’ in Erudition and the Republic of Letters 7 (2022) 1–43; idem, The Reception of John Chrysostom in Early Modern Europe. Translating and Reading a Greek Church Father from 1417 to 1624 (Berlin/Bosrton: de Guyter, 2023), 202–213. For the letter of Pius iv to Ivan iv, see: Aleksandr Ivanovič Turgenev, ed., Historica Russiae Monumenta (Petersburg: Pratzi, 1841), i: 180–181 (#140). See also Gudziak, Crisis and Reform, 77–88; Halecki, Florence to Brest, 151–152. Christian Hannick and Klaus-Peter Todt, “Jérémie ii Tranos,” in Conticello and Conticello, eds., La théologie byzantine, 551–575, esp. 568–575. Gudziak, Crisis, 168–187. Cf. Runciman, Great Church, 330–333.

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In the past, scholars assumed that this decision of the patriarchate of Constantinople to lavish such favor on Moscow triggered anxiety in the Metropolitanate of Kyiv and its suffragan sees, and helped foster the renewal of prounion sentiments that would culminate in the Union of Brest in 1596.83 Borys Gudziak, on the contrary, has shown that concerns about possible subjugation to a Muscovite patriarchate were conspicuously absent from Ukrainian deliberations regarding union with Rome: different concerns predominated.84 In the first place, the Reformation and Counter-Reformations had made their impact on the populations of Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia. Protestantism—specifically Calvinism—was making inroads among the nobility. Meanwhile, counter-reformation efforts were spearheaded by Jesuits such as Benedict Herbest (Zielewicz) and Peter Skarga (1535–1612) who sharply critiqued the “abuses” of Ruthenian Christians, diagnosed their theological and cultural retardation as symptomatic of their subordination to the wayward “Greeks,” and urged conversion to Latin-rite Roman Catholic Christianity—an appeal to which a not inconsiderable number of Ruthenian nobles responded positively, especially in view of the civic and social advantages to such conversion within a Polish-Lithuanian political context. And these ideas were circulating among the Ruthenians by new means: the printing press fostered an environment which emphasized new confessional divisions and scattered expectations of renewal that helped cast an unflattering light upon the Ruthenian Church, which looked to many contemporaries as particularly in need of its own reform.85 Patriarch Jeremiah’s journey back to Constantinople took him through the lands of the Polish Commonwealth. Personally concerned with the expansion of Protestantism—Jeremiah had responded to the Augsburg Confession for-

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On the Union of Brest, along with Gudziak’s magisterial monograph, see: Ryszard Łużny, Franciszka Ziejka, and Andrzej Kępiński, eds., Unia brzeska: Geneza, dzieje i konsekwencje w kulturze narodów słowiańskich (Kraków: Universitas, 1994); Bert Groen and Wil van den Bercken (eds.), Four Hundred Years of Brest (1596–1996). Acta of the congress held at Hernen Castle, the Netherlands, in March 1996 (Leuven: Peeters, 1998); Johann Marte and Oleh Turij, eds., Die Union von Brest (1596) in Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung: Versuch einer Zwischenbilanz (Lviv: Institut für Kirchengeschichte der Ukrainischen Katholischen Universität, 2008); Alfons Brüning, Unio non est unitas. Polen-Litauens Weg im konfessionellen Zeitalter (1569–1648) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008); Sophia Senyk, A History of the Church in Ukraine. Vol. 2: 1300 to the Union of Brest (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2011), 234–309; Anthony Edward Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox. Sources and History of a Debate (Oxford: oup, 2017), 337–344. Gudziak, Crisis, 222–223. Gudziak, Crisis, 77–88 and 105–118.

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warded to him by Lutherans in 157686—the patriarch was likewise concerned to guide the Kyivan Church away from union with Rome. At a synod in Vilnius, Jeremiah opposed unionist sentiments, consecrated a new metropolitan of Kyiv (Michael Rahoza, 1588–1599), and appointed a patriarchal exarch tasked with reforming the Kyivan Church and bringing it in line with Constantinopolitan standards. In so doing, the patriarch empowered lay associations to police their bishops—a move that alienated members of the Ukrainian hierarchy. Among others, Michael Rahoza chafed under the overbearing surveillance of the patriarchal exarch. Taken together, these currents—the challenge of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and the heavy-handed interference of the patriarch of Constantinople—spurred the metropolitan of Kyiv and his suffragans to seek union with Rome in 1595. It was a bid to protect Kyivan autonomy, to reform their Church, and to elevate especially the lower clergy all while avoiding Jesuit imperatives to Latinize. The identity and freedom of the Ukrainian Church could not be maintained, these hierarchs reasoned, without a renewal of union according to the terms of the Council of Florence.87 This grassroots union movement was approved by Pope Clement viii in two bulls, Magnus Dominus et laudabilis nimis and Decet Romanum Pontificem, in 1595 and 1596, and union between the Kyivan and Roman Churches was formally declared at the Synod of Brest on October 9, 1596.88 The union did not go uncontested: it faced opposition from powerful local princes and was initially boycotted by the bishops of Przemysl and Lviv, which dioceses eventually accepted the union in 1692 and 1700 respectively.89 An anti-unionist confraternity in Kyiv, under the protection of the Cossacks, even facilitated the visitation of Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem and his establishment—with the approval of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate—of a parallel non-uniate hierarchy in 1620 that ultimately led to a full-scale religious war on the territories of Ukraine and Belarus in the mid-seventeenth century.90 86

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Acta et scripta theologorum Wirtembergensium et Patriarchae Constantinopolitani D. Hieremiae (Wittenberg: Haeredes Johannis Cratonis, 1584); Engl. tr. and comm.: George Mastrantonis, Augsburg and Constantinople (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1982). On the correspondence: Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986); Hannick and Todt, “Jérémie ii Tranos,” 558–560; Runciman, Great Church, 247–256. Gudziak, Crisis, 189–230; 244–255. The standard collection of related documents: Athanasius Welykyj, ed., Documenta unionis Berestensis eiusque auctorum (1590—1600) (Rome: pp. Basiliani, 1970). For relevant documents, see: P. Athanasius G. Welykyj osbm, ed., Epistolae metropolitarum Kioviensium catholicorum, series ii, Analecta osbm, sectio iii (Rome: pp. Basiliani, 1958), 67–70 (#40–42). Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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Concluding Reflections

Between 1439 and 1600, the Renaissance papacy assumed a position of leadership over an expanding and increasingly global Christendom. Through a remarkable series of unions initiated at the Council of Florence in 1439 and continuing into the mid-fifteenth century and beyond, to the unions with the Ruthenians and the St. Thomas Christians of India at the synods of Brest (1596) and Diamper (1599) respectively91—the Roman pontiff was recognized as the supreme hierarch of the universal Church by Christians in central Europe, the Greek East, Africa, Asia, and America—from Kyiv to Kerala to Mexico City. There is an irony in the fact that this new era of global Christianity under the aegis of Rome only commenced in earnest after the shriveling of the Petrine discourse of plenitude of power (characteristic of the high medieval papacy) amidst burgeoning national monarchies, after the fall of the Byzantine Empire—the only credible alternative to papal ecumenism—to the Ottoman Turks, and the disruption of Western Christendom into competing confessions by the forces of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. To be sure, the Christendom over which Rome presided in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries had very different dimensions than the ancient ecumene based on the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean world, or the Latin-Germanic communion of the Middle Ages centered on Western Europe. One wonders what Pope Innocent iii (1198–1216) or Pope Boniface viii (1294–1308) would have thought of this new papacy—contested in Western Europe and opposed by Ottoman might, but embraced by a considerable number of Greeks, Maronites, Arabs, Chaldeans, Indians, Ruthenians, and Ethiopians. There is compelling evidence that in this period (and later) diverse Christian peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa came to view the Roman Church as a universal “arbiter” and guardian of a pure Christianity in its global (“catholic”) dimensions.92 This was so for the Ruthenians of the later sixteenth century who looked on the order and stability of Latin Christendom as a preferred option to the disorder and chaos of Greek Christendom under Ottoman rule. Earlier in that same century, Chaldean Christians native to Mesopotamia and Persia

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George Nedungatt, s.j., ed., The Synod of Diamper Revisited, [Kanonika, 9] (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2001). Of special interest in that volume is the article by Nedungatt, “The Synod of Diamper and the Union of Brest. A Comparison,” 135–146. See especially Robert John Clines, “Pope as Arbiter: The Place of Early Modern Rome in the Pan-Mediterranean Ecumenical Visions of Eastern Rite Christians,” in A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome, ed. Matthew Coneys Wainwright and Emily Michelson (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021) 55–88.

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appealed to the Roman Church as an ally in the reform of their church governance, which had been undermined by a century of nepotism.93 Even earlier still, Christians from Africa—Copts and Ethiopians—had favorably received the invitation to join the Florentine union.94 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Rome would be flooded by Eastern Christians seeking financial assistance, employment, and spiritual comfort from the papacy as from the very font of Christian order and wellbeing.95 Here the legacy of the Council of Florence was crucial. The achievement of Florence was to crystallize a model of the Church that was both “one” and “catholic”—which is to say, truly universal but authentically united—by means of preserving different Christian peoples in their unique liturgical and ritual expressions and accommodating them, in their uniqueness, within one Church through fidelity to Roman pontiff as successor to St. Peter. This Florentine legacy was built upon the insights of thirteenth-century Scholastic thought and has its origins in the bold discourse of twelfth-century religious reform, whose slogan was: diversa, sed non adversa—“different, but not [therefore] in opposition.” It is possible here to view the deep medieval and renaissance roots of “modern” concepts of multiculturalism and diversity.96 On the other hand, this Florentine legacy was not always respected, and seems even to have been mutilated or completely abandoned in certain notorious interactions between the Latin West and the Christian East in this very period. In the sixteenth century, in the context of the Fifth Lateran Council, Pope Leo x had allowed for the validity of Byzantine-rite baptism, as practiced among the Ruthenians of Ukraine, to be called into question—in apparent contravention of the guarantees of Florence. Appeals for assistance in Church

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Clines, “Pope as Arbiter,” 57–59, 70–79. Gill, Council of Florence, 321–327. Gill, however, notes that it took almost a century after 1444 for Pope Clement vii to receive the Ethiopian emperor’s notice of “a letter and book sent by Pope Eugenius to the [previous] Emperor Jacob”; see also Alastair Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 1439–1822: The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49–57. Sam Kennerly, “Ethiopian Christians in Rome, c. 1400–c. 1700,” in Companion to Religious Minorities, 144–145, is even more skeptical of the solidity of union between the Ethiopian and Roman Churches in the sixteenth century. Cesare Santus, “Wandering Lives: Eastern Christian Pilgrims, Alms-Collectors and ‘Refugees’ in Early Modern Rome,” in Companion to Religious Minorities, 237–271. Yury P. Avvakumov, Die Entstehung des Unionsgedankens: die lateinische Theologie des Hochmittelalters in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Ritus der Ostkirche (Berlin: Oldenbourg Akademieverlag, 2002), esp. 335–371. A classic work on the discourse of diversa, sed non adversa in the twelfth century Latin West is: Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002).

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reform from native churches—such as the Chaldeans of the Middle East— were inevitably met by an influx of foreign, Latin missionaries who brought with them Western institutions and instruments of education, Western expectations, and prejudices. As might be expected, in many instances these missions became occasions of acculturation to Latin belief and practice—especially when those beliefs and practices were reflexively regarded as expressions of a supposedly “higher culture”—with loss to the integrity of indigenous Christian culture and the disruption of local Churches as a result. One need only think of the destruction of the literary patrimony of the St. Thomas Christians of India in the sixteenth century at the instigation of Portuguese authorities, or the violent controversy stirred up in seventeenth-century Ethiopia resulting from the attempt of Jesuit missionaries to suppress certain traditional Ethiopian practices—such as circumcision—that Westerners could not bring themselves to accommodate within their paradigm of the one universal Church.97 If Christian rite can be taken as the religious expression of cultural uniqueness, then it is easy to see Latin articulations of the praestantia ritus Romani and the suppression of native liturgical tradition in favor of Latin ritual as a form of cultural imperialism.98 Historical realities are infinitely more complex than the monochromatic alternative of “catholic universalism” vs. “westernizing colonialism” for describing the posture of the Renaissance papacy toward the Eastern Churches.99 Rather than alternatives, it may be more appropriate to speak of a spectrum, in which universalism shades by uncomfortable and ambiguous degrees of gray into “imperialism.” The fineness of the line separating the one from the other becomes all too evident with the help of this picture. But we make a mistake if we think that this problem only began with the colonialism of the early modern period, the confessional disputes of the Reformation, or the intellectual curiosity of the Renaissance. Rather, the tensions between conformity to one rule of faith in the midst of liturgical and cultural diversity was a problem upon which medieval churchmen—lawyers, theologians, and popes—had

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Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, Eastern Christianity in India: A History of the Syro-Malabar Church from the Earliest Time to the Present Day, trans. Edouard R. Hambye, s.j. (Bombay/Calcutta/Madras: Orient Longmans, 1957), xiii, 27–68;. See, for instance, Jacob Vellian, “The Synod of Diamper and the Liturgy of the SyroMalabar Church,” in Synod of Diamper, 173–198, esp. 187–188, 197–198. This has been well shown recently by Simon Ditchfield, ‘The “Making” of Roman Catholicism as a “World Religion,” ’ in Jan Stievermann and Randall C. Zachman, Multiple Reformations? The Many Faces and Legacies of the Reformation (Tübingen: Morh Siebeck, 2018), 189–203.

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already been pondering for centuries. As a conservative institution, the papacy could bring these medieval insights to bear on the problems of the Renaissance period—even if it did not always do so in a way appropriate for the cultural diversity of Christianity. This would suggest, then, that encounters between the papacy and the Eastern Churches during the Renaissance are best understood not in historiographical isolation, but as an intensification within the longue durée of medieval history.

Bibliography Bilaniuk, Petro B.T. The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517) and the Eastern Churches. Toronto: Central Committee for the Defence of Rite, Tradition and Language of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in USA and Canada, 1975. Blanchet, Marie-Hélène. Georges-Gennadios Scholarios (vers 1400-vers 1472): Un intellectuel orthodoxe face à la disparition de l’empire Byzantin. Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 2008. Frazee, Charles A. Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983; reprinted 2006. Geanakoplos, Deno J. “The Council of Florence (1438–1439) and the Problem of Union between the Byzantine and Latin Churches,” Church History, 24 (1955), 324–346. Gerhard Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453—1821). Munich: Beck, 1988. Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Giustiniani Paolo, and Petro Querini, Libellus Addressed to Leo x, Supreme Pontiff. Ed. and trans. Stephen M. Beall. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2016. Gudziak, Borys A. Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitinate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Minnich, Nelson H. “Leo x’s Response to the Report on the Errors of the Ruthenians,” in Fiat voluntas tua. Theologe und Historiker—Priester und Professor: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Harm Klueting am 23. März 2014. Reimund Haas, ed. Münster: Aschendorff, 2014. Pp. 209–222 Mohler, Ludwig. Kardinal Bessarion als Theologe, Humanist und Staatsmann. Funde und Forschungen, 3 vols. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1923–1942. Monfasani John. “Pro-Latin Apologetics of the Greek Émigrés to Quattrocento Italy,” in Byzantine Theology and its Philosophical Background. Antonio Rigo, Pavel Ermilov, and Michele Trizio, eds. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Pp. 160–186. Monfasani, John. George of Trebizond. A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic. Leiden: Brill, 1976.

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Nedungatt, s.j., George, ed. The Synod of Diamper Revisited. [Kanonika, 9] Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2001 Philippides, Marios, and Walter K. Hanak, Cardinal Isidore, c. 1390–1462: A Late Byzantine Scholar, Warlord, and Prelate. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968 Wainwright, Matthew Coneys, and Emily Michelson, eds. A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021 Yost, Charles C. “Neither Greek nor Latin, but catholic: Aspects of the Theology of Union of John Plousiadenos,” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, 1, no. 1 (2018), 43–59.

chapter 11a

Relations between the Renaissance Papacy and the Oriental Churches: Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, and Ethiopian Charles C. Yost

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The Armenians

By the Renaissance period, the papacy and the Armenian Church already had a long history of contact, exchange, and even fitful union going back to the time of the passage of the First Crusade through Asia Minor and the Levant (1097–1099).1 During the period of the Avignon papacy (1309–1376), these relations only intensified, particularly during the long reign of Pope John xxii (1316–1334), who corresponded with the king and catholicos of the Kingdom of Cilicia. Toward the end of his reign, there emerged a subset of the societas peregrinatium—the missionary front of the Dominican Order. Known as the fratres unitores (“uniting brethren”), their personnel comprised Armenians who had embraced the Latin rite and who dedicated themselves to work with and among the Armenians of Cilicia. These men provided a vital link between Avignon and Cilicia and mediated between the Armenian and Latin religious cultures—though by no means was this process uniform or unmarked by controversy. The union of the Cilician catholicos of Sis with Rome triggered the emergence of a rival, anti-union party back in the ancestral Armenian heartland (“Greater Armenia”), and during the pontificate of the Benedict xii (1334– 1342), a minute investigation into the orthodoxy of the Armenian faith and rite was launched. This process culminated in the Synod of Sis in 1341/2, where the Armenian Franciscan Daniel of Tabriz defended the usages of the Armenian

1 See Colin McEvedy, The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (London: Penguin, 1992), 50– 51, 70–71 and see n. 1 on p. 70. For the frustrations, on tensions, see particularly Vrej Nerses Nersessian, “Armenian Christianity,” in The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, ed. Ken Parry (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 43, regarding the frustrations vented by Mhkitar Skrewtasi at the Council of Acre in 1262—though Nersessian is wrong about the date. See: S. Peter Cowe, “The Armenians in the era of the crusades,” The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5, Eastern Christianity, ed. Michael Angold (New York: Cambridge Universty Press, 2014), 418.

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Church. The political context of these confrontations was the decline of Mongol power in central Asia and the end of the pax Mongolica preparing the rise of the Timurid dynasty. Under these circumstances, the trade continuum that had facilitated the movement and activity of the fratres unitores was disrupted and the initiative passed to staunchly traditionalist and generally anti-unionist theological currents. It was only in 1439 that union was renewed between the Roman See and the Cilician catholicate of Sis, with the publication of the Decretum pro Armenis on November 22.2 This decree, known by its incipit as Exultate Deo, begins by commemorating the previous union with the Greeks and “today this union of the Armenian people, which is diffused in great quantity throughout the north [i.e., in the vicinity of the Crimea] and the east [i.e., Cilicia and the Caucasus region].” But the terms of union imposed by the decree on the Armenians are rather more detailed and exacting than those that had been placed on the Greeks in July. In the first place, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed including the Filioque was conveyed to the Armenians with explanations defending the addition and mandates commanding that this creed “be sung or read during the solemnities of the Mass in all the churches of the Armenians, at least on Sundays or during major feast days.” Then the issue of the historic non-acceptance of the Council of Chalcedon (451) by the Armenians is addressed head-on. The decree recognizes that the Armenians’ former refusal to accept Chalcedon and the sanctity of the principal author of its definition of the two natures of Christ, Pope Leo i, was based on a misapprehension that these interventions were tainted by Nestorianism. The Council required the Armenians to recognize Leo as a saint and “all the other universal councils legitimately celebrated by the authority of the Roman pontiff”—including Chalcedon (451) and Constantinople iii (681)—as authoritative. What follows is a detailed enumeration of the seven sacraments and their principal parts, based largely on a tract that had been written by Thomas Aquinas, but expanded to address particularities of the Armenian rite. In some cases, these expansions accept, but in others reject, certain aspects of Armenian liturgical practice. As an example of acceptance, the decree recognizes as valid formulae of baptism both the traditional first-person-active mode traditional in the Western Church (“ego te baptizo in nomine …”) as well as the third-person-passive mode common in

2 Cowe, “Armenians in the era of the crusades,” 424–427; Irene Bueno, “Avignon, the Armenians, and the Primacy of the Pope,” Archa Verbi 12 (2015), 108–129; Claudine Delacroix-Besnier, Le Dominicains et la Chrétienté grecque aux xiv et xv siècles (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1997), 8–34, 54–60, 129–134, 135–172.

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Eastern Churches (“baptizetur talis servus Christi in nomine …”).3 As an example of rejection, the decree imposes the admixture of water into the wine of the Eucharistic chalice prepared for consecration—contrary to the traditional Armenian practice of offering unmixed wine at the altar.4 The Armenian liturgical calendar was also required to conform to those of the Roman and Greek Churches by including the feasts of the Annunciation, the nativity of John the Baptist, Christmas, the feast of the circumcision of Christ, and the feast of the purification of the Virgin on their conventional dates.5 The union of 1439 caused a schism in the Armenian Church and by 1441 the see of Ejmiatsin, back in Greater Armenia, had emerged as a rival, anti-union catholicate.6 In the context of the general decline of the Kingdom of Cilicia into obscurity and then its absorption by the Ottoman Empire, the catholicate of Ejmiatsin was able to establish its hegemony over the Armenian Church in general. Under Ejmiatsin’s leadership, the identity of the Armenian people was preserved under Islamic rule. Although the union of Florence had generally lapsed by the sixteenth century, the catholicos of Ejmiatsin sent several envoys to Rome offering submission in exchange for assistance against the Muslims. These contacts intensified during the reign of Pope Gregory xiii (1572–1585) and bore fruit in the emergence in the Roman Curia of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide and other institutions dedicated to proselytizing Eastern Christians living in the Ottoman Empire. By the end of our period and in the first decades of the seventeenth century, energetic missionary work among the Armenians renewing the lapsed ties of concord between Armenia and Rome was being carried out by French Jesuits and Capuchins under Fr. Joseph de Paris, prefect of missions under Cardinal Richelieu.7

3 Joseph Alberigo et al., eds., Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. altera (Basel: Herder, 1962), 534–550—hereafter cited as cod. Also see Georg Hofmann, ed., Documenta concilii Florentini de unione Orientalium, ii, De unione Armenorum (Rome: Apud Aedes Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1935), 21–47. On the controversy over the eastern formula of baptism during the thirteenth century, see Yury Avvakumov, “The Controversy over the Baptismal Formula under Pope Gregory ix,” in Martin Hinterberger and Christopher D. Schabel, eds., Greeks, Latins, and Intellectual History, 1204–1500 [Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales. Bibliotheca, 11] (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 69–84. 4 Alberigo, cod, 546. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, De articulis fidei et Ecclesiae sacramentis ad archiepiscopum Panormitanum in: S. Thomae Aquinatis Opuscula theologica (Turin: Marietti, 1954), pars 2: “Tertium sacramentum est Eucharistia, cuius materia est panis triticeus, et vinum de vite, modica aqua permixtum, ita quod aqua transeat in vinum ….” 5 Alberigo, cod, 553–554. 6 Cowe, “Armenians in the era of the Crusades,” 428–429. 7 S. Peter Cowe, “Church and diaspora: the case of the Armenians,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, 430–431. For the Catholic missions following the period of the Renaissance

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The Georgians

Because of their geographical proximity and close historical connection (often troubled) with the Armenians, it makes sense to insert here a brief comment about the Georgians and their relations with the Roman Church—brief, because, in comparison to the Armenians (geographic proximity notwithstanding), contacts between the Georgian Church and the papacy were much less intense during our period and did not achieve a specific ecclesiastical union beyond the generic union with “the Greeks” at the Council of Florence. Contact between the Bagratid dynasty of Georgia and the medieval papacy was forged in the thirteenth century, particularly in the troubled circumstances of 1240 when Queen Rusudan fruitlessly beseeched Pope Honorius iii to provide assistance against the Mongol threat. Predictably, Pope Honorius iii used the queen’s appeal to suggest ecclesiastical union. Though no union occurred, in the following century Franciscan and Dominican friars journeyed to Georgia within the same geo-political contexts that had brought them in increasing numbers to Armenia: the strengthening of the Genoese mercantile presence in the environs of the Black Sea and the relative stability afforded by the pax mongolica. By 1328, Pope John xxii had established a Latin bishop at T’bilisi. This Latin see weathered the political fragmentation attending the decline of Mongol power and the invasions of Tamerlane and endured until the sixteenth century.8 Given this long-lived Latin foothold in Georgian territory and the fact that the Georgians—unlike the Armenians to the south—accepted in common with Rome the controversial council of Chalcedon (451), it is interesting to note that Georgian Church did not enter any formal union with Rome prior to the Council of Florence. At that Council, Georgian representatives played a marginal role, though their recorded acts showed them opposed to union, and they in fact departed from the council prior to the formal declaration of union on 6 July of 1439.9 The absence of representatives from this autonomous Christian kingdom did nothing to dampen Pope Eugenius iv’s exultant mood papacy, see, e.g., Adina Ruiu, “Missionaries and French Subjects: The Jesuits in the Ottoman Empire” and Christian Windler, “Ambiguous Belongings: How Catholic Missionaries in Persia and the Roman Curia Dealt with Communicatio in Sacris,” in A Companion to the Early Modern Catholic Global Missions, ed. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 181–204, 205–234. 8 Stephen H. Rapp, Jr., “Georgian Christianity,” in Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity (cited above), 148. 9 Rapp, “Georgian Christianity,” 148. On Georgians at the Council, see Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1959), 89 n. 2, 110, 227, 263.

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on that occasion. Presumably, the Georgians’ Chalcedonian christology, Byzantine liturgy, and historic ties with Constantinople led Roman authorities to assume that union with “the Greeks” automatically entailed union with the Georgians—although since the eleventh century the Georgians had claimed to have their own patriarch: a statement of autocephaly that had only been enhanced by the decline of Byzantine political power since the thirteenth century.10 As it so happens, there is no extant letter to the king or patriarch of Georgia among the celebratory “follow-up” letters issued by Pope Eugenius iv in the aftermath of the union of Florence.11 In the post-1453 world, Georgia was largely lost from western view as it became a disputed corridor in the power struggles between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran. The high tide of Roman Catholic influence in Georgia would come in the seventeenth century—that is, beyond the chronological scope of this volume—through the labors of Theatine and especially Capuchin missionaries, the latter of which operated within the scope of the eastern policy of the Kingdom of France in the age of Louis xiv.12

3

The Copts

Flush with the success of union with the Greeks and the Armenians at the Council of Florence, Pope Eugenius iv turned his attention to the remaining Churches of the East. From the vantage point of Pope Eugenius iv, foremost among the non-Chalcedonian Churches of the East (after the Armenian Church, in dealing with which the Roman Church had long experience stretching back to the period of the Crusades) was the Coptic Church of Egypt. Soon after the publication of Laetentur caeli, the bull of union with the Greeks, on July 6th of 1439, the pope sent an invitation to union to Patriarch John xi of Alexandria. The Coptic pope responded favorably and delegations of Coptic and Ethiopian clergy were dispatched to Florence. These ambassadors were warmly received in Florence in 1441 and the friendly letter of the Coptic patriarch was translated from Arabic into Latin and read out before the pope. After 10 11

12

On the Georgians and Chalcedon, see Rapp, “Georgian Christianity,” 142–144; on the establishment of the patriarchate, see Rapp, “Georgian Christianity,” 146. See George Hofmann, ed., Epistolae pontificiae ad concilium Florentinum spectantes, ii, Epistolae pontificiae de rebus in concilio Florentino annis 1438–1439 gestis (Rome: Apud Aedes Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1944) and iii, Epistolae pontificiae de ultimis actis concilii Florentini annis 1440–1445 et de rebus post concilium gestis annis 1446–1453 (Rome: Apud Aedes Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1946). Rapp, “Georgian Christianity,” 148–149.

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visiting the holy sites in Rome in the fall of 1441, the Alexandrian clergy returned to Florence on October 13th where the business of union negotiations got underway. Talks continued until February 4 of 1442 when union with the Coptic Church was ostentatiously celebrated in a joint liturgy and proclamation of the bull Cantate Domino, which was publicly read in the church of Santa Maria Novella. Along with the previous bulls of union with the Greeks (Laetentur caeli) and Armenians (Exultate Dei), the union with the Coptic Church appeared to mark the final triumph in the union trifecta of the Council of Ferrara-Florence.13 And yet appearances can be deceiving. As would prove to be the case with the Greeks, in the coming years the gap between union as agreement on paper and union as lived reality became all too clear. In retrospect, this seems clear enough: how could the teeming faithful of an ancient church across the Mediterranean, secluded from Rome for centuries by schism and Islamic conquest, be held accountable for professions made by an extreme minority of clerical envoys? The difficulties are immediately evident from the bull of union itself, which contained anathemas of Eutyches and Dioscorus—men venerated by the Coptic Church precisely for their opposition to the two-nature Christology of Council of Chalcedon (451).14 How likely was it that mere words committed to parchment, no matter how ostentatious their proclamation, could stand up against a centuries-old tradition of opposition with which the very identity of the Coptic Church was inextricably bound? This marks a noteworthy contrast to the union with the Greeks. In that case, the Florentine documents insisted that the Latin and Greek saints and fathers actually fundamentally agreed about the Trinity, in spite of superficial differences of expression, since both Latin and Greek fathers were holy and inspired by one and the same Holy Spirit.15 This approach of consensus patrum created the possibility for the Greeks to join the union without losing face. No such opportunity was afforded

13

14 15

Alastair Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 1439–1822 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51–54. For the text of the bull of union with the Copts, see also George Hofmann, ed., Documenta concilii Florentini de unione orientalium, iii, De unione Coptorum, Syrorum, Chaldaeorum, Maroniatrumque Cypri (Rome: Apud Aedes Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1936), 29–39. For the relevant document, besides Hofmann, see also Alberigo, cod, 567–583, esp. 579. Regarding the hermeneutic of consensus patrum, see John Monfasani, “Pro-Latin Apologetics of the Greek Émigrés to Quattrocento Italy,” in Byzantine Theology and its Philosophical Background, ed. Antonio Rigo, Pavel Ermilov, and Michele Trizio (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 160–186, passim, esp. 181; Gill, Council of Florence, 255–256, 261. For critical comments, see Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 402, 407.

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the Copts, who were required to admit that Dioscorus and Eutyches were heretics—and hence that their Church, down to its very roots, had been wrong. Cantate Domino remained mere discourse until the sixteenth century. Despite the efforts of Franciscan friars and the attempt of Pope Leo x to reestablish contact with the Copts in 1521, it was only in 1554—amidst the Council of Trent—that the Dominicans Ambrosius Buttigeg and Antonino Zahara were able to have an interview in Cairo with Patriarch Gabriel vii. In the following year, there appeared in Rome a Coptic Christian named Abram al-Suryani who carried a letter from Patriarch Gabriel to the pope—by now Paul iv. The letter was friendly but vague, and Abram assured the pope’s court that he was a deacon of the Church of Alexandria and Gabriel’s official delegate. The pope was suspicious. Inquiries were made to the patriarchate as to the authenticity of Abram’s claims via the Venetian consulate in Egypt. Abram was apparently able to anticipate these inquiries and pre-empt them, sending his own agent to Gabriel and instructing him to confirm his authority. Thereafter, Abram was accepted in Rome as an authorized delegate of the Coptic patriarch, but to this day scholars remain uncertain about whether he had actually been sent by Gabriel in the first place. As subsequent events would show, al-Suryani played an ambiguous role in the subsequent mission and he would ultimately be repudiated by the Coptic patriarch.16 This subsequent mission was handled by the young Society of Jesus. On July 2, 1561, a four-man team set out for Egypt from Rome. The missionaries were led by the Jesuit scholar Cristóforo Rodríguez in association with a Jewish convert and newly-minted Jesuit priest Giovanni Batista Eliano. In his previous life, Eliano had accompanied his father on at least two business ventures to Cairo and allegedly knew Arabic. These two were joined by Alfonso Bravo and Abram al-Suryani himself.17 The mission arrived in Egypt on November 4, after which they proceeded to Cairo and were welcomed by the patriarch. From the very beginning, it was apparent that the proclamation of union at Florence had not even begun to paper over the divergent customs of the Copts and the Latins. The Copts insisted upon observing Mosaic purity laws with respect to the slaughtering of animals for meat; they practiced divorce and remarriage; they married within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity; ordained fiveyear-olds as deacons and practiced circumcision. Even the Coptic enumeration

16

17

Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 56–57; Francesco Pericoli-Ridolfini, “La missione pontificia presso il patriarca copto di Alessandria Gabriele vii nel 1561–1563,” Rivista degli studi orientali, 31, 1.3 (1956), 129–134. For brief biographies of the Jesuits involved, see Pericoli-Ridolfini, “La missione pontificia,” 134–137.

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of the sacraments failed to satisfy the Jesuits, who concluded that the Copts did not consider marriage or confirmation sacramental, and had never even heard of extreme unction.18 In principle, these talks should have apparently been conducted through al-Suryani and Eliano as translators. As things turned out al-Suryani proved personally unreliable, to say nothing of Eliano’s meager Arabic which was entirely unequal to the task. Moreover, the true meaning and implications of professing obedience to the papacy had not fully dawned yet on the Copts.19 When it became clear to the Copts that the Roman doctrine of ecclesial supremacy entailed hierarchical subordination, they objected that the Roman pontiff was merely one among the several hierarchs into whose obediences the Christian faithful had been divided. In their understanding, the pope was simply a sort of ethnarch for the Franks—just as the patriarch of Constantinople was for the Greeks and the Alexandrine patriarch for the Copts. Meanwhile, on the doctrinal level talks foundered on the contentious issue of Christ’s nature(s) and the Council of Chalcedon. The Jesuits returned to Italy having accomplished nothing concrete in their negotiations.20 Eliano returned to Egypt in September 1582. Previously, Eliano had been sent on a mission to Lebanon where he managed to alienate the Jacobite (monophysite) patriarch of Antioch, Dawud. Dawud shared his hard feelings against Eliano with the Coptic patriarch, which did nothing to help Eliano’s subsequent reception in Cairo. But Patriarch Dawud had also complained about Eliano to the pope of Rome. Pope Gregory xiii lost faith in Eliano and authorized an independent embassy to Egypt—the Florentine merchant Giovanni Battista Vecchietti and the united Ethiopian priest Kefla Maryam—which arrived in July of 1585 and openly opposed itself to the ongoing Jesuit mission.21 Under these circumstances of renewed contact, this opposition was unfortunate—for this time Eliano adopted an irenic posture toward the Copts. He came to appreciate that the force motivating Coptic opposition to Chalcedonian Christology was the fear of Nestorianism—that is, an understandable, even praiseworthy abhorrence of heresy. While suggesting to his superiors in Rome that indulgence might be extended to the Copts when it came to their traditional artic18 19

20 21

For all of this, see Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 58–62; Pericoli-Ridolfini, “La missione pontificia,” 140–155. Rodríguez had previously been under the mistaken impression that this question had been essentially resolved (see Pericoli-Ridolfini, “La missione pontificia,” 154, where he also refers to “Giorgio,” another figure involved in the mediation between the patriarch and the Jesuits). Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 62–67. Ibid., 68–70.

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ulations of Christology, Eliano began seriously mining the writings of Saints Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom for statements showing the consonance of these teachers—highly-esteemed in the Egyptian Church— with Roman orthodoxy. In this way, Eliano was on the way to establishing common patristic ground that would serve as the solid basis for a agreement—the approach that had been followed in the previous century with the Greeks.22 Unfortunately, Eliano’s new approach was not supported by the papacy. At the synod of Memphis in December of 1583, the patriarch flatly refused to accept the doctrine of two natures in Christ, and though some of his subordinates were willing to accept Chalcedonian christology in principle, none of them was willing to abandon the traditional verbal formula of a single nature. But Rome required an explicit, verbal confirmation of the two natures and so the council went nowhere. Eliano returned to Rome empty-handed in the summer of 1585. In Alastair Hamilton’s view, the first Jesuit mission to the Copts foundered upon the general tepidity of Coptic Christians toward union with Rome—the benefits of which were not often very apparent—as well as the rigidity that had characterized, for the most part, the Jesuit approach toward the Coptic Church. Eliano’s adoption of a more conciliatory posture came too late: by that time, he had already lost the trust of both Alexandria and Rome.23 And yet, for all these failures, union between the Churches was in fact achieved before the end of the sixteenth century—though not through the Society of Jesus. Union with Rome continued to appeal to the Coptic Church as a means of transcending its humiliating degradation beneath Ottoman authority by linking itself to the premier hierarch of the free Christian world. The Coptic Church was also seeking financial assistance. In 1594, Coptic delegates arrived in Rome bearing letters from Patriarch Gabriel vii expressing his desire for union. This time, he was willing to accept the theory of the two natures in Christ, to repudiate the anti-Chalcedonian Eutyches and Dioscorus of Alexandria, and to acknowledge Roman primacy. Professions of faith were dispatched to Alexandria, accepted there, and then borne back to Rome by the patriarch’s envoys. By 1602, a Coptic College had been established in Rome for the training of uniate Coptic clergy who would return to Egypt to further establish the union. By 1601, Pope Clement viii declared Roman Catholics and Coptic Christians as constituting “a single fold and a single faith.” But the enthusiasm for union in Egypt passed within the span of a few years. Without formally renouncing or condemning the union, Coptic patriarchs—beginning

22 23

Ibid., 70–71. Ibid., 71–73.

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with Mark v—slipped back into their traditional non-Chalcedonian Christology. There was no definitive termination of the union and friendly relations endured between the two great sees, but it was no longer clear what union meant. The great age of Coptic Catholicism still lay in the future, in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.24

4

The Ethiopians

The opposition of the Egyptian Church to the Council of Chalcedon (451) set the trajectory for the church in Ethiopia, which depended on the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria for its hierarchy until 1948. The Ethiopian king (negus) preserved his people’s Christian culture and political autonomy amidst the Islamic invasion and conquest of Roman Egypt in the seventh and eighth centuries. Insulated from the rest of Christendom by the Islamic advance, Ethiopian Chrisitanity developed its own genius in the splendid isolation of its own pre-Roman royal traditions traced back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Throughout the Middle Ages, the shadowy figure of the Christian king of Ethiopia (negus) tantalized the imagination of Western Christians who dreamed of “Prester John”—the exotic Priest-King of the Orient by whose assistance the forces of Islam would at last be overcome and the Holy Land regained.25 In 1441 at Florence, Pope Eugenius iv received—along with the delegation from the Coptic patriarch—a distinct delegation led by a certain Peter, an Ethiopian monk from a monastery in Jerusalem. Peter brought the friendly tidings of the Emperor of Ethiopia and expressed the latter’s alleged desire “to be united with the Roman Church and to cast himself at [the pope’s] most holy feet”—although there is some question as to the reliability of such sentiments, given that they were expressed by an Ethiopian ecclesiastic hailing not from

24 25

Ibid., 74–76, and for the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries see 76–82; 83–103. Indispensable studies on the interactions between the Ethiopian and Roman Churches in this period: Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632 (Leiden: Brill, 2015) and Alberto Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo d’Etiopia, 2 vols. (Milan: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2017). For a concise overview of the history of Ethiopian Christianity, see David Appleyard, “Ethiopian Christianity,” in Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, 118–125; on the legend of “Prester John” and Ethiopia specifically, see Matteo Salvadore, “The Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (1555–1634) and the Death of Prester John,” in World-Building and the Early Modern imagination, ed. Allison B. Kavey (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 142–144.

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the court of the negus, but from Jerusalem.26 Despite the high emotions and mutual warmth expressed for communion restored, the nature of this union remained on the theoretical level of mutual courtesy and benevolence rather than assuming any definite, institutional character.27 The institution of union with the Roman Church among the Ethiopians would only occur in the following century, within the context of Portuguese colonial ventures, and would yield violence and contention. When the Portuguese made contact with the Ethiopians in 1508, they found no negus on the throne but the seventy-year old empress, Eleni, who ruled as regent in behalf of her minor grandson Lebna Dengal, along with Abuna Marquos, chief hierarch of the Ethiopian Church. Eleni authorized an Armenian merchant, Matthew, to journey to Lisbon in an official capacity to negotiate a treaty of friendship with the Portuguese.28 During his audience in Lisbon, Matthew may have intimated that the Ethiopian Church wanted to submit to the papacy. Word of this was transmitted to Pope Leo x by 1514, and the pontiff confirmed Mārqos as head of the Ethiopian Church while weighing in the legitimacy of various rites and customs practiced by Ethiopian Christians.29 The papacy’s concern here was for instances of “Judaizing” and it drew a distinction between such practices that could be safely accommodated—such as the eating of a Paschal Lamb at Eastertide—and that must be discontinued—such as circumcision.30 As of yet, however, these distinctions represented the wishes of the Roman Church and did not translate into actual alterations of Ethiopian practice “on the ground”.

26

27

28

29 30

Gill, Council of Florence, 321–327. Quotation cited on p. 324. In contrast to the zeal of this statement, Gill notes, ibid, that “[t]he letter he presented from his Abbot Nicodemus was not quite so emphatic on the Emperor’s subservience.” See also Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 49–57; Sam Kennerly, “Ethiopian Christians in Rome, c. 1400–c. 1700,” in Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome, ed. Matthew Coneys Wainwright and Emily Michelson (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 144–145. For the more detailed account of Latin-Ethiopian relations in this section, see: Matteo Salvadore, “Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 24 May 2018; accessed 22 Dec. 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.187; see also Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 415–445. Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 535–563. See also introductory remarks by Richard Stephen Whiteway in his translation and edition of The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1902), xvii–xviii. Salvadore, “Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe”; Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 564–594. On the “Judaic features” of Ethiopian Christianity, see Appleyard, “Ethiopian Christianity,” 126–127.

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In 1520, the Portuguese sent a delegation led by Rodrigo de Lima to Lebna Dengal, who by now had come of age and ruled in his own name as Dawit ii.31 In turn, the negus sent his own envoy to Europe bearing, among other letters, a missive directed to the pope. The delivery of this missive to the pope was delayed until 1533, by which time it had been translated by the initiative of Francesco Alvarez, a Portuguese chaplain who had accompanied the Ethiopian embassy. According to Alvarez’s version of the letter, which he presented before Pope Clement vii in 1533, the negus had offered ecclesiastical submission to Rome. Whereas these sentiments were found in the translated letter, whether they had in fact been so expressed in the original is unclear.32 Even if the negus Dawit had expressed these sentiments in keeping with what he understood to be proper diplomatic courtesy, he clearly had no intention of severing his church’s ties with the Coptic Church in Egypt. Losses before Islamic armies and famine compelled the negus to send an embassy back to Portugal in 1535 with the mission to obtain European military assistance.33 Heading this embassy was the Portuguese João Bermudes, who had accompanied the previous Portuguese mission to Ethiopia as barber (“bleeder”). Once back in Europe, Bermudes decided to exceed the parameters of his mission. In 1537 he had an audience before Pope Paul iii in Rome wherein he claimed that the dying abuna of the Ethiopian Church had chosen him as his successor and he therefore asked the pope to appoint him patriarch of Ethiopia. Pope Paul iii refused this request, after which Bermudes made his way to Lisbon where he successfully passed himself off to the Portuguese court as not only ambassador of the negus but patriarch over his church. Bermudes obtained military aid from King John of Portugal, through which the Ethiopians were able to defeat their Muslim foes in 1543.34 Thereafter, some Portuguese settled in Ethiopia, where they were known as farang (“Franks”), while an uptake in Ethiopian pilgrimage to Rome resulted in the formation of a resident community centered around the still extant Santo Stefano degli Abissini, a church near St. Peter’s Basilica given over to the Ethiopians, which became the first important center of serious African studies in early modern Europe.35 31 32 33 34 35

Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 564–578. Salvadore, “Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe”; Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 595–610. Donald Crummey, “The Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahedo Church,” in The Cambridge History of Eastern Christianity, 462–463. Salvadore, “Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe”; Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 611–660. Salvadore, “Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe”; Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands: Geopolitics, Missions and Mé-

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After the Islamic threat had been successfully neutralized thanks to Portuguese assistance, in 1544 Bermudes demanded that the negus Galāwdēwos (1540–1559) recognize him as abuna and cooperate in the Latinization of the Ethiopian Church. The negus flatly refused, banished Bermudes, and turned to Alexandria to request a new abuna: this was Yosāb, who took up his position in 1548. At the same time that he wrote to Alexandria, Galāwdēwos also addressed a letter to King John iii of Portugal wherein he complained about Bermudes’ behavior. The king of Portugal had the impression that the negus needed assistance in finding a suitable hierarch for his church. Through the concerted efforts of the king, the papacy, and St. Ignatius Loyola, the fledgling Society of Jesus was mobilized to provide a “proper” patriarch for Ethiopia from among its own ranks. Deliberations over the personnel for this mission (in which Ignatius himself was intensely involved) carried on between 1546 and 1554, when Pope Julius iii appointed the Jesuit João Nunes Barreto as patriarch of the Ethiopians. Barreto died before setting foot in Ethiopia, after which the office devolved to Andrés de Oviedo, the Jesuit appointed by Julius iii as Barreto’s successor.36 After Andrés de Oviedo arrived in Ethiopia in 1557, the negus had a delicate situation on his hands. On the one hand, he was committed to his ancestral faith and rites. On the other hand, he did not want to strain relations with the Portuguese king upon whom the Ethiopians had previously relied for military assistance. In debates orchestrated between the Jesuits and the Ethiopians, the negus Galāwdēwos exasperated de Oviedo with his refusal to accept the doctrines of Rome; the Jesuit retaliated by directing the Portuguese to have nothing to do with the “schismatic” Ethiopians, but for all that the negus made no attempt to expel the “Frankish” foreigners. In 1559, Galāwdēwos fell in battle against the Muslims and was succeeded as negus by his brother Minas (1559–1563).37 Minas was no more inclined to Catholicism than his predecessor

36

37

tissage,” in Reinterpreting Indian Ocean Worlds: Essays in Honour of Kirti N. Chaudhuri, ed. Stefan C.A. Halikowski Smith and Stefan Halikowski (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publ., 2011), 2–32; Kennerly, “Ethiopian Christians in Rome,” 142–168; Olivia Adankpo-Labadie, “A Faith between Two Worlds: Expressing Ethiopian Devotion and Crossing Cultural Boundaries at Santo Stefano dei Mori in Early Modern Rome,” in Companion to Religious Minorities, 169–191; Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 666–671. Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 671–692. On the cooperation between the Portuguese crown, the papacy, and the Society of Jesus in this venture, see also Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “The Birth of a Mission: The Jesuit Patriarchate in Ethiopia,” Portuguese Studies Review, 10.2 (2002–2003), 1–14. Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1:693–703, 715 and see the introductory remarks of Wendy Laura Belcher in Galawedros, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother

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had been, but in addition, he was hostile to the Portuguese, whose privileges he severely restricted and whose hierarch (de Oviedo) he incarcerated and then expelled. Minas forbade Ethiopians from attending Latin services and the Jesuits from preaching in public. Relations between the negus and Portuguese deteriorated further after the latter gave their support to a rebellious lord. All the same, Pope Pius iv—under the impression that the Ethiopians had accepted Catholicism—invited the negus to send representatives to the Council of Trent in 1561.38 Generally, tension characterized the relationship between the Portuguese hierarch and the Ethiopian Church and the prospects of union meager indeed until the death of Oviedo in 1577.39 Fortunately, his successor, the Jesuit Pedro Páez, was cut of an entirely different cloth. By his humility, his urbanity, and his gentleness Páez converted members of the royal family, including the negus Za-Dengel (1603–1604) himself. After embracing union with Rome, Za-Dengel sought to modify Ethiopian Christianity in response to Western critiques of certain aspects of Ethiopian ritual practice as “Judaistic.” While this tampering provoked civil war in Ethiopia, Páez managed to convert, in 1622, negus Susenyos, who fought his way to the throne amidst civil strife and held onto it until 1632. It was during the reign of Susenyos, known as “the Catholic,” that attempts to Latinize the Ethiopian Church reached high tide. The new Portuguese patriarch, Afonso Mendes, lacked his predecessor’s tact.40 His attempts to alter and modify the Ethiopian rite in accordance with Latin expectations were so brazen that they sparked another civil war as well as charismatic, and notably female, opposition in the anti-unionist ministry of Ethiopian women such as the nun Walatta Petros (1592–1642).41 The outcome was the expulsion of the Portuguese and the Society of Jesus from Ethiopia in 1633.42

38

39 40 41

42

Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, trans. and ed. Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 4–5. Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 715–723. Again, see the summary remarks of Wendy Laura Belcher in Galawedros, The Life and Struggles, 4–5. In his chapter on “mission metrics,” Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner has tabulated fascinating quantitative information pertaining to the Jesuit missions between 1555 and 1623. For the period between 1555 and 1603, see Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys, 83–95. For further details, Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 723–758. For mission metrics for this period (1577–1623), see Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys, 95–117. Specifically see Wendy Laura Belcher, “Sisters Debating the Jesuits: The Role of African Women in Defeating Portuguese Proto-Colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Abyssinia,” Northeast African Studies, 13.1 (2013), 121–166; and on Walatta Petros, see specifically the Belcher and Kleiner’s edition and translation of Galawderos’ Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros. For this latter period in general, see Elli, Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo, 1: 759–

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General reflections on the relations between the papacy and these great Oriental, mainly Miaphysite, churches during the Renaissance are difficult to formulate in straightforward terms. On the one hand, papal-Miaphysite relations were relatively unburdened by the heavy experience of acrimonious polemic and even geo-political tensions that had marked Byzantine-Latin relations since the era of the Crusades. On the contrary, friendly relations between Rome and the Armenian Church can be traced back to this era precisely. On the other hand, the churches of Rome and Constantinople (including the Slavicspeaking churches of the Byzantine rite as well as the Georgian church) shared in common a theological tradition stretching back to the fifth century. Miaphysite rejection of the Council of Chalcedon, as well as Miaphysite commitment to alternative Christologies and patristic traditions, created considerable stumbling blocks to preserving union once the first hopeful enthusiasms had quieted down. While the Florentine Union could and did serve as the enduring foundation for the union of a considerable number of Byzantine and specifically Slavic Christians with Rome, among the Miaphysites the Council of Florence merely provided a sort of ecumenical bridgehead: an opportunity to become acquainted, only to realize subsequently how much alterity existed between the Roman and these Oriental traditions, which led to the lapse of union on specifically Florentine terms, though not the loss of the bridgeheads themselves between East and West. When partial unions were renewed with these Churches toward the end of our period (and after), it would have to be on terms and by means largely transcending those of Florence.

Bibliography Angold, Michael, ed. Eastern Christianity. Cambridge History of Christianity, 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bueno, Irene. “Avignon, the Armenians, and the Primacy of the Pope.” Archa Verbi 12 (2015), 108–129. Elli, Alberto. Storia della Chiesa Ortodossa Tawāhedo d’Etiopia. Studia Orientalia Christiana: Monographiae, 25. 2 vols. Milan: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2017. Gälawedros, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman. Translated and edited by Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

904. For metrics for the latter period of the Jesuit mission, between 1623 and 1632 (just before the expulsion of 1633), see Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys, 117–133.

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Hamilton, Alastair. The Copts and the West, 1439–1822: The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church. Oxford: Warburg Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Andreu. Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632. Jesuit Studies—Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit History, 2. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. Parry, Ken, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Pericoli-Ridolfini, Francesco. “La missione pontificia presso il patriarca copto di Alessandria Gabriele vii nel 1561–1563.” Rivista degli studi orientali 31, fasc. 1/3 (1956), 129–167. Salvadore, Matteo. “Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. May 24, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore /9780190277734.013.187. Wainwright, Matthew Coneys and Emily Michelson, eds. A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 95. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021.

chapter 11b

Relations between the Renaissance Papacy and the Oriental Churches: The Syriac Churches Nelson H. Minnich

1

Maronites

In the Middle Ages, the Maronites were on generally good terms with the Western crusaders.1 With the fall of the crusading kingdoms and the devastation of Syria by the Mameluke sultans, the Maronites retreated to the mountainous areas of Lebanon and lost open contact with the West. The Franciscans in the Holy Land often served as a bridge between the Maronites and Rome. Because Syrian monks often adhered to Miaphysite and Monothelite theological traditions and spread their ideas among the Maronites, Latins became concerned about their beliefs. When Eugenius iv invited Eastern Christians to attend his council, the Maronite Patriarch Yuhanna Al-Jaji (1404–1445) appointed a Franciscan Fra Juan, superior of the Franciscans of Beruit, to bring letters to Eugenius iv by which he professed his faith. Eugenius granted Yuhanna a mitre and pallium which Juan conferred on him in 1439. Yuhanna then sent Fra Pietro da Ferrara to the pope in 1440, stating that he agreed to whatever was decided by the Council of Ferrara-Florence. The patriarch also asked the pope to send some men learned in the Catholic faith as teachers to the Maronites.2 Franciscan friars such as the Flemish Gryphon (d. 1475) and Fra Francisco da Barcelona, and later with their Maronite colleague Gabriel Ibn Butrus Ibn Guriya, known as al-Qila’i di Lehfed (1447–1516), began working steadily with the Maronites from 1450 onward, opposing the Miaphysite and Monothelite monks.3 New Maronite patriarchs such as Butrus al Hadathi 1 Pierre Dib, History of the Maronite Church, trans. Seely Beggiani (Detroit: Maronite Aposolic Exarchate, c. 1971), 57–65; Rudolf Hiestand, “Die Integration der Maroniten in die römische Kirche. Zum ältesten Zeugnis der päpstlichen Kanzlei (12. Jahrh.)” in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 54 (1988) 119–152. 2 See Eugenius’ letters to the Maronite patriarch in: Georgius Hofmann (ed.), Epistolae pontificiae ad Concilium Florentinum spectantes. Pars iii (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1946), pp. 43–44 (No. 256); 99–100 (No. 279); Dib, History, 72–73. 3 Halim Noujaim, I Francescani e i Maroniti (1233–1516), trans. from Arabic by Bartolomeo Pirone [Studia Orientalia Christiana. Monographiae, 20] (Milano: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2012), 35–72

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(1458–1492), brother of Yuhanna, and Simeon Ibn Hassah of Hadeth (1492– 1524) nephew of Butrus, sought confirmation by the pope who on being assured of their proper beliefs conferred on them the pallium and encouraged them to adopt Latin practices. In 1516 a Maronite delegation came to the Fifth Lateran Council and at its eleventh session made a solemn profession of faith in the name of the patriarch.4 Cardinal protectors were appointed for the Maronites. While Patriarch Mousa Saade el-Akari Kafroun, (1524–1567) sent Gergis Sulayman al-Qubursi, archbishop of Damascus (1561–1577), as his representative to the Council of Trent, Pius iv prevented him from attending on the grounds of his lack of linguistic skills.5 Popes made efforts to see that the Maronite clergy were trained in Catholic doctrine and implemented the decrees of the Council of Trent, with the holding of synods and councils. The Franciscans sent young men to Italy for their education, while Paul iii urged them to open a seminary there. Eventually, the Jesuits replaced the Franciscans as papal liaison agents. Giovanni Battista Eliano and Girolamo Dandini worked to eliminate any heterodoxy from Maronite liturgical writings and rituals. On 27 June 1584, Gregory xiii reconstituted the Maronite hospice he had set up two years earlier into a Maronite college.6

2

Orthodox Church of Antioch

The Syriac-Jacobite Orthodox Church of Antioch was open to good relations with Rome due to the missionary activities of the Franciscans and Dominicans. At the Council of Ferrara-Florence-Rome, the Jacobite patriarch Ignatius v (1412–1453) was represented by Abraham ʿAbdallah, archbishop of Edessa. He was interviewed regarding his church’s doctrine and practice and instructed in the Catholic faith which he accepted in his own name and in that of the patriarch and his nation. He made a Catholic confession of faith at the council on (Grifone), 81–126 (Gabriele); Dib, History, 75–76; Matti Moosa, The Maronites in History (Syracuse NY, Syracuse University Press, 1986), 239. 4 Moosa, Maronites in History, 240–241; Noujaim, Francescani e Maroniti, 133–143. 5 Bullarium Maronitarum / Bullaire Maronite, trans. and annotated by Karam Rizk and Mireille Issa (Paris: Geuthner, 2019), 106. 6 Ibid., 7, 242–268; Robert John Clines, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean: Early Modern Conversion, Mission, and the Construction of Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 99–149; Ignace Antione ii Hayek, Le relazioni della Chiesa Siro-iacobita con la Santa Sede dal 1143 al 1656, eds. Pier Giorgio Borbone and Jimmy Daccache [Cahiers d’Études Syriaques, 3] (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 2015), 97.

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30 September 1444 in the Lateran Basilica. Eugenius iv issued the bull Multa et admirabilis uniting the Syro-Jacobite church with Rome.7 In the sixteenth century, a century later, patriarch Ignatius ʿAbdallah ibn Istifan from Qal’at Mara near Mardin (1520–1557), sent the monk Mosé to Rome in 1549. The purpose of his mission is unclear. In an audience with Pope Julius iii, he presented a letter from the patriarch. In a responding letter of 22 April 1550, the pope praised his Catholic faith and acknowledgment of the primacy of the pope. Mosé brought the letter to the patriarch who sent him on a return legation to Rome (1551–1556) with the commission to present the confession of faith made by the patriarch on 28 May 1551 and to secure the printing of the New Testament in Syriac font. Julius iii on 26 May 1553 sent a letter to the patriarch praising his confession and requesting clarifications on the procession of the Holy Spirit and the two natures of Christ. With the financial assistance of Emperor Ferdinand, the Syriac New Testament was printed in Venice in 1555. Mosé returned to Syria in 1557, shortly before patriarch Ignatius died.8 The Syriac hierarchy elected as his successor Ignatius Na’matallah (c. 1515– 1587, reigned 1557–1576), who had been his predecessor’s vicar and secretary. He sent to Rome as his representative Athanasius Johannes Ibrahim Qasha, bishop of Hadditha who arrived in 1562. Pope Pius iv in his letter of 23 July 1562 responded by formally inviting the Syriac church to unite with Rome based on the terms of the Council of Ferrara-Florence-Rome. On 13 August 1563, Ignatius responded with his profession of faith and acknowledgment of the pope as head of the Church. Pius iv responded on 28 February 1565 with a letter entrusted to Johannes Baptista of Ethiopia, bishop of the Ethiopians in Cyprus, to deliver. Unfortunately, he died in Cyprus before completing his mission, but two Syriacs, bishop Athanasius and the monk Adel, who had accompanied him, brought the papal letter to patriarch Ignatius Na’matallah in Diyarbakir. On four occasions between 1565 and 1571, he attempted to send his profession of faith to Rome but was prevented by the warfare between the Ottomans and Persians and by various misfortunes befalling his legates. For reasons unclear, on 10 March 1576, the patriarch converted to Islam. He resigned his office in favor of his nephew Ignatius Petrus Dawud ii Shah (1576–1591) who was duly elected and consecrated as patriarch in 1576. Repenting his apostasy and fear-

7 Hayek, Le relazioni della Chiesa Siro-iacobita con la Santa Sede, 42–45; Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), i, 586–589. 8 Hayek, Relazioni, 47–81.

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ing the death penalty for having reverted to Christianity, Ignatius then fled to Rome, arriving there in 1578 where he was received absolution from Gregory xiii. The pope allowed him to retain the title of Patriarch of Antioch, while bestowing on his nephew Ignatius Petrus Dawud ii by his bull of 11 September 1581 the pallium, removing him from the archbishopric of St. Thomas. Ignatius Na’matallah remained in Rome where he became the expert on Syriac matters, dying there in. 1587.9 Efforts at securing union with the Jacobites encountered difficulties under Ignatius Petrus Dawud ii (d. 1591). His profession of faith was considered flawed. A papal delegation headed by Leonardo Abela, titular bishop of Sidonia in Syria, left Rome on 12 March 1583, arriving near Aleppo in July, bringing the pallium and other gifts for the patriarch. He was received by the patriarchial vicar who refused to ratify the Council of Chalcedon or the condemnation of Dioscorus considered a saint by the Jacobites. The vicar promised to consult with the patriarch. Meanwhile, Abela refused to hand over the pallium until there was a clear profession of Catholic faith. The patriarch Ignatius Dawud repeatedly avoided a personal meeting with Abela, claiming fear of persecution from Moslems and opposition from the faithful. Only the deacon Safar ibn Mansur Qotai, a vicar of the patriarch, openly accepted the Catholic profession of faith in a ceremony on 29 March 1586. Abela returned to the Rome of Sixtus v in February 1587 to report on his mission, promoting the cause of church reunion, and dying there in 1605. The Jacobite church remained in schism for the rest of the sixteenth century.10 But in the seventeenth century, relations with Rome were restored and patriarch Ignatius Shim’un Shukr-allah Ibn Ni’matallah al-Dabbagh (1640–c. 64) created problems in the Indian Church of Malabar by sending to it in 1652 as its archbishop Mar Atallah with supposed authorization of the pope and on the request of the Archdeacon Thomas Parampil (1640–1673), the nephew of the deceased Archdeacon George of the Cross. When the Portuguese prevented Mar Atallah from taking his seat as archbishop, the St. Thomas Christians “ordained” Thomas as their bishop in 1653

9

10

Hayek, Relazioni, 84–112, 127; on Johannes Baptista the Ethiopian, see Matteo Salvadore, “African Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Diasporic Life of Yohannes, the Ethiopian Pilgrim who became a Counter-Reformation Bishop,” Journal of African History, 58 (2017), 61–83. Hayek, Relazioni, 95–128; Heleen Murre van den Berg, “Syriac Christianity,” in: The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, ed. Ken Parry (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Company, 2007), 249–268, here 256; Lucy Parker, “The Ambiguities of Belief and Belonging: Catholicism and the Church of the East in the Sixteenth Century,” The English Historical Review, 133 [nr. 565] (Dec. 2018), 1420–1445, here 1444.

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and went into schism from Rome.11 The efforts of Carmelite friars succeeded in restoring within ten years the majority of the Thomas Christians to union with Rome.

3

Church of the East

The Eastern Syrian church, based in Mesopotamia and known as Chaldean,12 had sought unity with Rome in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with its patriarchs sending statements of belief to the pope for his approval. As mentioned above, Patriarch Ignatius Behnam sent Abdala, the archbishop of Edessa to the Council of Ferrara-Florence that had moved to Rome. There in the thirteenth session, he accepted the teaching of the Catholic Church in his own name and that of the patriarch, an event recorded in the conciliar bull Multa et admirabilia (30 November 1444).13 The Chaldean archbishop of Tarsus, Timothy, on behalf of his flock in Cyprus who were formerly Nestorians similarly subscribed to the Catholic Faith at the fourteenth session as noted in the conciliar bull Benedictus sit Deus (7 August 1445).14 The traditional seat of the Chaldean patriarch was Seleukia-Ctesiphon (near Baghdad). In 1551 quarrels over the practice of simony, a dissolute lifestyle, approval of illicit marriages, the underage ordinations of bishops, and the hereditary succession to the office of patriarch led a group of Chaldean bishops to reject the candidacy of Simon viii Denhā, the eight-year-old nephew of the previous patriarch. They elected instead as patriarch the reluctant John Suid Sulāqā, the superior of the monastery of Rabban-Hormizd, near Mosul.

11

12

13

14

Hayek, Relazioni, 144–147; Anthony Mathias Mundadan, The Arrival of the Portuguese in India and the Thomas Christians Under Mar Jacob 1498–1552, foreword by Georg Schurhammer (Bangalore: Dharmaram College, 1967), 83–94. For helpful overviews of the Chaldean Church, see: Giuseppe Beltrami, La Chiesa Caldea nel secolo dell’Unione [Orientalia Christiana, vol. 29, nr. 83] (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1933); Herman G.B. Teule, Les Assyro-Chaldéens: chrétiens d’Irak, d’Iran et de Turquie (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Torch Publishing Group, 1992; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005); and Ian Gillman and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Christians in Asia before 1500 (Ann Arbor: The Univrsity of Michigan Press, 1999), 109–152. 55–204. Georg Hofmann, ed., De unione Coptorum, Syrorum, Chaldaeorum Maronitarumque Cypri 4 Febr. 1442–1447 Aug. 1445 (Rome: Apud Aedes Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1936), 46–50 (No. 11); Giuseppe Alberigo and Norman Tanner, eds., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, i, 586–589. Hofmann, De unione, 50–54 (No. 12); Alberigo and Tanner, Decrees, i, 589–591.

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He turned for help to the Franciscans who were working in the area among the Nestorians and they sent him to Rome in 1552 to be confirmed in his office. After an investigation, Julius iii on 20 February 1553 proclaimed him patriarch of Mosul and consecrated him on 9 April 1553, giving him the pallium on April 28.15 From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries the patriarch provided the Thomas Christians of the Malabar Coast of India with its hierarchy, usually a monk from a monastery in Mesopotamia who was consecrated and sent to India. The right of the patriarch to provide bishops for these Christians was eventually challenged by the Portuguese who claimed that the pope had given them the right to patronage over the Christians of the East. Sulāqā strengthened his position regarding the Thomas Christians by obtaining from the Portuguese ambassador in Rome letters testifying to his appointment and orthodoxy to be presented to the Viceroy in India. Sulāqā returned to Mesopotamia with two Maltese Dominicans (Ambrogio Buttigieg [d. 18 January 1558] and Antonino Zahara) to help him, and proceeded to consecrate five new bishops and introduce reforms. His rival Simeon viii Denhā got the Pasha of Amadya to imprison, torture, and kill Sulāqā (12 January 1555). Sulāqā’s successor, Mar ‘Abdīshōʿ iv of Jezireh (1555–1570), went to Rome where he was confirmed by Pius iv on 17 April 1561, receiving the pallium on May 4. Pius iv decided not to allow him to attend the Council of Trent due to his lack of skills with Latin and Italian, but to have instead his profession of faith read at the twenty-second session on 17 September 1562. The Portuguese ambassador at the Council protested his claim to jurisdiction over the Thomas Christians.16 ‘Abdīshōʿ iv Maron was succeeded by the elderly Yahballaha iv (1572–1579), and then by a convert to Catholicism Shimun ix Dinkha (1579–1600) who was the last patriarch of the Shimun line to be recognized formally by Rome.17 The Nestorian Simeon viii

15

16

17

Beltrami, Chiesa caldea, 2–8, 19–27, 59–66; Giuseppe Sorge, “Giovanni Simone Sulaqa primo patriarca dell’ ‘Unione formale’ della Chiesa caldea,” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 12 (1980), 427–440; and Parker, “The Ambiguities of Belief and Belonging,” 1427. Beltrami, Chiesa caldea, 6–27, 59–63; Concilium Tridentinum. Diariorum, Actorum, Epistularum, Tractatuum nova collection, edidit Societas Goerresiana. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1901–2001), viii, 956–959; Herman G.B. Teule, “Les professions de foi de Jean Sullāqā, premier patriarche chaldéen, et de son successeur ‘Abdishoʿ d-Gāzartā,” in: L’union à l’épreuve du formulaire. Professsions de foi entre églises d’orient et d’occident (xiiie–xviiie siècle), ed. Marie-Hélène Blanchet and Frédéric Gabriel, (Leuven-ParisBristol: Peeters, 2016), 259–269; Josef, Wicki, s.j., “Zur Orientreise des papstl. Nuntius Ambrosius Buttigeg, o.p. (1553 56),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica [Rome] 19 (1953), 350– 371. Beltrami, Chiesa caldea, 66–81.

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Denha died in 1558 to be succeeded by Elia vi (1558–1591). He tried to be confirmed by Rome, but Pope Sixtus v rejected his profession of faith as deficient.18

4

St. Thomas Christians

When the Portuguese arrived in India (1498) they encountered Christian communities along the Malabar Coast and entered into friendly relations with them.19 The Portuguese initially left them alone. Two East-Syrian bishops seem to have ruled them: Mar Jacob, residing in Cranganore (1504–ca. 1550), and his younger assistant Mar Denha in Quilon.20 However, Portuguese missionaries and King Manuel eventually tried to get the Thomas Christian bishops to adopt Latin ways and break relations with their patriarch. On the death of Mar Jacob, the Thomas Christians wrote to their patriarch requesting a new bishop. The Nestorian patriarch Simon viii Dehnā sent Mar Abraham (d. 1597) who arrived in Kerala, set up residence in Angamali, and began ordaining priests and deacons by 1556. Meanwhile, the Catholic patriarch, ‘Abdīshōʿ of Jezireh, appointed Sulaqa’s brother Yawsep (Mar Joseph) as metropolitan of India and

18 19

20

Beltrami, Chiesa caldea, 81–85. For further details of Portuguese politics in respect to Syro-Malabar Christians, see: George Schurhammer, The Malabar Church and Rome: During the Early Portuguese Period and Before (Bengaluru: Dharmaram Publications, 2019); and Josef Wicki, “Das portugiesische Padroado in Indien 1500–1580,” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 28 (1972), 275– 287. On the Syro-Malabar Christians, see Eugene Tisserant, Eastern Christianity in India. A History of the Syro-Malabar Church from the Earliest Time to the Present Day, authorized adaptation from the French by Edouard R. Hambye s.j. (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co, 1957); M.K. Kuriakose, ed., History of Christianity in India: Source Materials (Madras: The Christian Literature Society, 1982); Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to ad 1707 (Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge up, 1984); Cristelle Baskins, “Popes, Patriarchs, and Print: Representing Chaldeans in Renaissance Rome,” in Renaissance Studies, 28 (2013), 405–425; James Abraham Puliurumpil, History of the Syro-Malabar Church (Kottayam: Oriental Institute of Religious Studies, 2013); Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India from Beginnings to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 91–141; Placid J. Podipara, The Canonical Sources of the Syro-Malabar Church (Kerala: Oriental Institute of Religious Studies, 1986); and History of Christianity in India, 6 vols., i: Anthony Mathias Mundadan, From the Beginning up tthe Middle of the Sixteenth Century (Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 1984); ii: Joseph Thekkedath, From the Middle of the SixteenthCentury to the End of the Seventeenth Century (1982). Anthony Mathias Mundadan, The Arrival of the Portuguese in India and the Thomas Christians under Mar Jacob 1498 1552, foreward by Georg Schurhammer (Bangalore: Dharmaram College, 1967).

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sent him and metropolitan Elias together with Buttigeg and Zahara to India to install Mar Joseph there. On their arrival in 1555, the Portuguese authorities arrested them, confining Mar Joseph and Elias to a Franciscan monastery in Salsette, north of Mumbai, where their orthodoxy and probity were verified. The Portuguese, however, did not want them to take pastoral charge of their flocks because they wanted the Latin bishop of Goa to be considered their sole shepherd. However, given the Portuguese troubles with the Nestorian Mar Abraham, they released them in 1557 to counteract Mar Abraham’s influence. Mar Elias succeeded in getting Mar Abraham to become Catholic and submit to Rome in a public ceremony in the cathedral of Cochin in 1558. But Mar Abraham was arrested, sent to Goa, and returned to Mesopotamia where he continued as a Catholic. Mar Elias also returned to Mesopotamia. Mar Joseph continued to bring Thomas Christians into conformity with Latin customs and practices. But he was denounced as a Nestorian heretic and sent in 1562 to the Inquisition in Goa, and from there sent in 1563 to Lisbon. He had planned to go to Rome, but the Regent and Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Henrique, convinced him not to and he wrote to Pius iv instead. His orthodoxy was fully vindicated. In his absence, the Latin bishop of Cochin, George Temudo op, tried to bring the Thomas Christians under his direct jurisdiction. He was resisted by the archdeacon George of Christ (d. ca. 1585), whom Mar Joseph had appointed as his vicar general. In 1564 Mar Joseph returned from Lisbon but was denounced as a heretic and simoniac to Pius iv. In 1568 he set sail for Lisbon and Rome to justify himself. In 1569 he reached Rome and he was found not guilty, but he died in Rome in 1569.21 To replace Mar Joseph during his absence, the patriarch ‘Abdīshōʿ thought of re-sending Mar Abraham, once he had gone to Rome to obtain letters of recommendation from the pope. In 1564 he reached Rome where he was conditionally re-consecrated as bishop. He returned with letters from Pius iv dated 23 February 1564, telling the authorities in Goa not to impede the work of Mar Joseph and Abraham. Mar Abraham reached Goa in 1568 but was detained by the viceroy and archbishop who claimed he did not have the authorization of

21

Mundadan, Beginning to Mid-Sixteenth, 283–390, 476–521; Josef, Wicki, s.j., “D. Jorge Temudo, o.p., 1. Bischof von Cochin, 2. Erzbischof von Goa (1558–1567–1571),” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 21 (1965), 172–183, 243–251; Johannes Petrus Maria van der Ploeg, “Mar Joseph, Bishop—Metropolitan of India, 1556–1569,” in: iiio Symposium Syriacum 1980. Les contacts du monde syriaque avec les autres cultures (Goslar 7–11 septembre 1980), ed. René Lavenant [Orientalis Christiana Analecta, 221]. (Rome: Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1983), 161–170 and Parker, “The Ambiguities of Belief and Belonging,” 1422 (Mar Thomas’s retention of Nestorian beliefs and cult).

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the king of Portugal to enter India. He escaped and went to Kerala where he functioned until he died in 1597. He avoided the Portuguese but kept up a correspondence with the popes. He agreed to introduce certain Latin liturgical practices. He was opposed by a Nestorian rival “bishop,” Simon, who arrived in 1576 and was later sent to Rome where it was discovered that he was never ordained. Simon was sent to Lisbon and kept in a monastery where he died in 1599.22 The Synod of Goa ii (1575) tried to resolve these difficulties by requesting that the pope allow the king of Portugal instead of the Chaldean patriarch to appoint bishops for the Thomas Christians and by putting the Thomas Christian bishops into the Latin province of Goa. A synod held at Angamali (1583) by Mar Abraham brought the Thomas Church closer to Latin practices, while at the third provincial council of Goa (1585) he was pressured to accept the decrees of Trent and the Latin missal, breviary, and pontifical.23 The Council of Trent in 1562, however, allowed for diversity, urging each local church to retain its approved ancient rite, while Pius v in 1570 did not mandate the use of the Roman rite and allowed the continued use of those that were at least two-hundred years old.24 The Catalan Jesuit Francisco Roz (1557–1624) was entrusted with purging the Syriac liturgical books of any Nestorianism.25 On the death of Mar Abraham, he was made archbishop of Angamaly-Cranganore in 1599 and continued the process of Latinizing. His diocese was now formally under the patronage of the king of Portugal. The Augustinian friar Alexis de Jesu de Menezes, Archbishop of Goa (1595–1612), conducted a visitation of the Malabar Coast in 1599 during which he conducted numerous ordinations and

22

23 24

25

Thekkedath, Middle of the Sixteenth, 24–63; Cyriac Thevarmannil, “Mar Abraham, the Archbishop of St. Thomas Christians in Malabar (1508? 1597),” (Doctoral dissertation. Rome: Gregorian University, 1965). Josef Wicki, “Quellen zum 3. Provinzialkonzil von Goa (1585),” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 5 (1973), 382–407. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, ii, 735: 11–12; Joseph A. Jungmann, s.j., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missaurm Sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner, 2 vols. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1951–1955), i, 133–138. Francisco Ros S.I., De Syrorum orientalium erroribus: a Latin-Syriac treatise from early modern Malabar (1586). edited and summarized with a preface and introduction by Antony Mecherry, S.J [Gorgias Eastern Christian studies, 61] (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press llc, 2021); he has provided an English translation in his “On the Errors of the East Syrians (by Francisco Ros sj, 1586): An Introduction with English Translation of a Latin-Syriac Treatise from Early Modern Malabar,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 91, fasc. 181 (2022), 187– 221; Antony Mecherry sj, Testing ground for Jesuit accommodation in early modern India: Francisco Ros sj in Malabar (16th–17th centuries) [Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu, 79] (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2019).

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at the Synod of Diamper (1599) he codified the Latinization.26 Rome, however, never approved its decrees. Because the papacy had granted patronage rights to the kings of Portugal over the churches in their overseas empire, the popes had great difficulty protecting the rights of the Chaldean and Malabar churches. Portuguese authorities and their bishops tried to curtail the authority of the archdeacon, who administered the temporal affairs of the Church of the St. Thomas Christians, exercised spiritual authority during a sede vacante, and tried to safeguard traditional practices. The popes respected the authority of the archdeacon, issuing supportive letters. Gregory xiii in 1580 even authorized the consecration of Archdeacon George of Christ as bishop, but he died in 1585 without receiving consecration.27 When Latin bishops disregarded the wishes of the archdeacon, increasing tensions mounted. The Archdeacon George of the Cross (1593–1640), the nephew of George of Christ, rebelled against Archbishop Stephen Britto, sj, (1621–1636) in 1632 and his nephew-successor Archdeacon Thomas Parampil (1640–1670) led the Revolt of 1653 during which the archdeacon was “ordained” by twelve priests and a major schism followed, with Thomas claiming the title of patriarch.28 The subsequent efforts of the Carmelites to reconcile the St. Thomas Christians with Rome mostly succeeded, but a portion continued to resist the Portuguese efforts to Latinize and subject them to its padroado system. Despite the Jesuits’ reputation for cultural adaptation, especially the Italian Jesuit missionaries Matteo Ricci, Alessandro Valignano, and Roberto di Nobili, many of the Portuguese Jesuits were less accommodating. They supported the claims of the Portuguese king to exercise patronage rights over the Christians of the East and they insisted on conformity, with the implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent as the guarantors of orthodoxy. Liturgical rites and practices that had existed for a millenium were subjected to Latinization. If Rome had been more respectful of its sister churches, the Portuguese were eager to bring them under its jurisdictional control and impose uniform religious practices. Such attitudes created problems that sabotaged the Ethiopian mission and strained relations with the St. Thomas Christians. 26

27

28

Carlos Alonso Vañes, Alejo de Meneses, osa (1559–1617), arzobispo de Goa (1595–1612): estudio biográfico [Estudios de historia Agustiniana, 4] (Valladolid: Ed. Estudio Agustiniano, 1992); Jonas Thalliath, The Synod of Diamper (Rome: Pontificum Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1958); Jekkab Velliyan, The Beginnings of Latinization of the Malabar Liturgy, 1599–1606 (Notre Dame IN: University. of Notre Dame, Diss., 1973). Beltrami, Chiesa caldea, 126–128, 132 n. 102, 134 n. 106, 136, 253–256, 263–269 (letters of St. Thomas Christians to pope Clement viii), 270 (letter of Clement viii to George of Christ); Thekkedath, Middle of the Sixteenth, 59–64, 77. Thekkedath, From the Middle of the Sixteenth Century, 80–100.

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Bibliography Beltrami, Giuseppe. La Chiesa Caldea nel secolo dell’Unione [Orientalia Christiana, vol. 29, nr. 83] Roma: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1933. Hayek, Ignace Antione ii. Le relazioni della Chiesa Siro-iacobita con la Santa Sede dal 1143 al 1656. Eds. Pier Giorgio Borbone and Jimmy Daccache [Cahiers d’Études Syriaques, 3] Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 2015. Mecherry sj, Antony. Testing ground for Jesuit accommodation in early modern India: Francisco Ros Sj in Malabar (16th–17th centuries) [Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu, 79] Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2019. Moosa, Matti. The Maronites in History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986. Mundadan, Anthony Mathias. From the Beginning up the Middle of the Sixteenth Century [History of Christianity in India, 1] Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 1984. Noujaim, Halim. I Francescani e i Maroniti (1233–1516). Trans. from Arabic by Bartolomeo Pirone [Studia Orientalia Christiana. Monographiae, 20] Milano: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2012. Thalliath, Jonas. The Synod of Diamper. Rome: Pontificum Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1958. Thekkedath, Joseph. From the Middle of the Sixteenth Century to the End of the Seventeenth Century. [History of Christianity in India, 2] Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 1982. Vañes, Carlos Alonso, Alejo de Meneses, osa (1559–1617), arzobispo de Goa (1595–1612): estudio biográfico [Estudios de historia Agustiniana, 4] Valladolid: Ed. Estudio Agustiniano, 1992.

chapter 12

The Papacy and Heresy Agostino G. Borromeo†

The primary objective in the exercise of papal primacy is to confirm the community of believers in the faith and ensure unity of doctrine and ecclesial communion for the Church. It is therefore the duty of the pontifical magisterium to transmit the message of Christ in its entirety and to protect Catholic doctrine from all possible error. A corollary requirement of the latter is the duty to condemn and repress heresy. In the period under consideration, the actions taken by the papacy to counter the spread of heresy were expressed either by way of formal condemnation of teachings deemed heterodox, persuasion, or, more often, coercion, even physical coercion, in dealing with culprits. In the most serious cases, such repression could entail capital punishment or the promotion of veritable military campaigns against entire groups of dissidents. This article will take into consideration all of the diverse interventions, not only those promoted by individual popes but also by those bodies of which the Roman Pontiff availed itself in the exercise of the Petrine Ministry. These bodies are: at the central level, the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia; on the periphery, the legates a latere, the nuncios, or some such ecclesiastical persons or institutions that operated with an express papal mandate. The tribunals of the inquisition are included among this final category. In fact, the respective titular head of the tribunals, by virtue of the jurisdictional powers delegated by the papacy, were the competent authority to judge those accused of one crime: heresy. Established in the first half of the thirteenth century,1 these institutions were renewed at the end of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, progressively assuming different structures and organizational systems according to the geographical region of relevance (Spain, Portugal, and Italy). The common

1 Peter Segl, “Einrichtung und Wirkungsweise der “inquisitio haereticae pravitatis” im mittelalterischen Europa. Zur Einfürung” in Die Anfänge der Inquisition im Mittelalter. Mit einem Ausblick auf das 20. Jahrhundert und einem Beitrag über religiöse Intolleranz im nichtchristilichen Bereich, Peter Segl ed. (Köln; Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 1993), 1–38, esp. 4–7; Werner Maleczek, “Innocenz iii., Honorius iii. und die Anfänge der Inquisition,” in Praedicatores inquisitores, 1: The Dominicans and the Medieval Inquisition. Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition, Rome, 23–25 February 2002 (Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 2004), 33–43, esp. 40 ff.

© Agostino G. Borromeo†, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_014

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and constitutive element of these new inquisitorial institutions will remain, however, the source of jurisdictional power exercised by the judges: the papal mandate. It would be useful to recall that the responsibility in matters of anti-heretical repression also fell to individual bishops in the ambit of their dioceses. The jurisdiction the bishops exercised, however, did not derive from papal mandate but was innate in the episcopal powers derived from the appointment to a specific diocese. As such, their autonomous initiatives against heresy will not be considered here, except in those cases in which special papal faculties have been granted them. That said, by the end of the fourteenth century the large heretical movements, like that of the Cathars had already disappeared following the repressive actions undertaken by the papacy. Some, such as the Waldensians, survived and, as will be seen, continued to be pursued, while others were reduced to small groups of adherents. Such was the case, for example, with the Brethren of the Free Spirit. This heretical movement first appeared in the second half of the thirteenth century and initially spread widely, especially in the Mediterranean basin from Spain to Byzantium. Its teachings were based on the principles of antinomianism: its followers were convinced that, by the means of grace, they could achieve an intimate union with God, and thus they considered themselves exempt from the observance of current moral norms. Condemned by the Council of Vienne with the decree Ad nostrum (1311), prosecuted by bishops and inquisitors, their survival into the fifteenth century is attested by several isolated cases. It should also be added that today many ponder whether indeed the movement was truly based on a structured body of shared doctrine or whether it was the fruit of a rational systematization carried out by the ecclesiastical authorities of the time on the basis of the confessions of individual defendants.2

1

Waldensians

Waldensianism is the only medieval religious movement active to this day— the denomination known as the Waldensian Church. Their founder, Waldo,

2 Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, 3rd edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 164–181; Peter Biller, Christians and Heretics in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006–2009), 4: Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100–c. 1500, Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, eds., 70–186, esp. 174.

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was a rich man from Lyon, probably a merchant. Between the years 1173–1176, an inner conversion inspired him to sell his belongings and to dedicate himself to itinerant preaching in the vernacular. He quickly surrounded himself with a group of followers, men and women. They also embraced the practice of poverty and dedicated themselves to preaching, in spite of the elementary religious formation of many followers. Known as the “poor of Lyon,” they were condemned as heretics in the decree Ad abolendam of Lucius iii in 1184.3 In the first half of the fifteenth century, the existence of the Waldensians can be placed in a European geographic context. In spite of the repression endured from the thirteenth century, their survival is nevertheless attested in various countries of central and eastern Europe (particularly in Poland and in the kingdom of Bohemia) and even, around the Mediterranean, in the Papal State and Southern Italy. However, the more numerous groups were situated on the two sides of the Western Alps, in the valleys of Piedmont (under the sovereignty of the Duke of Savoy) and the Dauphiné in France, as well as in Provence.4 The papal inquisition, when it discovered suspect persons, did not neglect to proceed, as witnessed by the famous processes at Bern in 1399, at Strasbourg the following year, or at Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1430. In this last case, out of sixty-nine accused, one, a certain Peter Sager, was given a death sentence as a result of being a recidivist heretic (in the language of canon law: pertinacious).5 Yet it was above all in the Alpine regions where papal delegates were called to concentrate their operations. In 1448, the Dominican inquisitor Giacomo di Buronzo was sent to the Valle di Luserna (Val Pellice, Piedmont in Northern Italy). In Torre di Luserna he stumbled upon a large Waldensian community and decided to strike all of the churches of the region with an interdict. The determined actions of Fra Giacomo obtained the desired outcome. From a later brief of Nicholas v dating to16 July 1453, we learn that the pope subsequently revoked the censure, given that a significant number of Waldensians had recanted and sought absolution.6 3 Carlo Papini, Valdo di Lione e i “poveri nello spirito”. Il primo secolo del movimento valdese (1170– 1270), (Torino: Claudiana Editore, 2001), 85 ff.; Grado Giovanni Merlo, Valdo. L’eretico di Lione, 2nd edition (Torino: Claudiana Editore, 2019), 37 ff. 4 Gabriel Audisio, Les Vaudois de Provence, 1460–1560 (Marseille: Centre régional de documentation pédagogique / Merindol: Association d’Etudes Vaudoises et Historiques du Luberon, 1987), 6–8. 5 See Richard Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Liverpool: University Press, 1979), 71; Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser von Freiburg im Uechtland (1399–1439), Kathrin Utz Tremp ed. (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2000), 281–582, esp. 393–396. 6 Maurice Pezet, L’épopée des Vaudois: Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, Piémont, Suisse (Paris: Seghers, 1976), 99; Euan Cameron, Waldenses: Rejection of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 165–166.

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Rome, however, continued to urge civil and ecclesiastical authorities to intervene against the adherents to the Waldensian heresy. This is seen in briefs dating to 1463 addressed by Pius ii to Louis xi as well as to the ecclesiastical authorities in the kingdom of France. With his messages, the pope intended to encourage the royal interlocutor and the senior clerics to promote an effective anti-heretical suppression of “the Waldensian sect.”7 However, a more violent offensive was promoted by Innocent viii in 1487. With the bull Id nostri cordis of 27 April 1487, the pope confirmed the archdeacon of Cremona, Alberto Cattaneo, in his previous roles as papal nuncio and commissioner against the heresy in the states of the Duke of Savoy, Charles i, and in the Dauphiné. It was a veritable punitive mission. Innocent viii, in fact, had exhorted the king of France Charles viii, the duke, and “other lords” to send assistance to Cattaneo. Therefore, while the commissioner subjected roughly a thousand people to interrogators, gathering their recantations and pronouncing punishments on those who refused to mend their ways, the troops of Charles viii indulged in massacres and looting. The tragic events of 1488 sparked protests and complaints of the victims. As a consequence, Alexander vi, probably under pressure from Louis xii, created a commission. Things took quite a while: only in 1509 (more than 20 years later) was the sentence of appeal pronounced at Paris. With this, the sentences meted out by Cattaneo were declared null, because neither the regular procedures had been respected nor was the guilt of the accused proven.8 The suppression at the end of the fifteenth century did not result in the extinction of the movement. Waldensianism—as will be seen further on— gained a new vitality, through its adherence to the Reformation, on the occasion of the synod of Champforan in 1525.

2

Wycliffites and Lollards

The figure of John Wyclif is central to understanding the origins of the Wycliffites and Lollards in England, and (as will be seen further on) that of the Hussites in Bohemia. Born in Yorkshire between 1331 and 1335, John Wyclif became 7 Gabriel Audisio, Les vaudois du Luberon, Une minorité en Provence (1460–1560) (Gap: Impr. Louis-Jean, 1984), 71. 8 Jean Gonnet, Amedeo Molnar, Les Vaudois au Moyen Age (Torino: Claudiana, 1974), 267–269; Marina Benedetti, “Condanne e riabilitazioni nei processi inquisitoriali medievali: alcune riflessioni” in Tra storia e diritto. Giustizia laica e giustizia ecclesiastica dal Medio Evo all’Età Moderna, Marina Benedetti et al., eds. (Milano: Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre, 2019), 35–50, here 49–50.

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a priest and, after 1371/72, obtained a professorship at Oxford. He taught there until 1382, the year in which he had to relinquish teaching following the charge of heterodoxy brought against his doctrine by the ecclesiastical authorities. He retired to the rectory of Lutterworth where he died in 1384, without ever being personally subjected to a trial for heresy.9 There would have been good grounds to do so, where it not for the fact that Wyclif benefitted from the influential support of the English court. Inspired by a sincere yearning for the reform of ecclesial institutions, Wyclif, through the gradual elaboration of his own theological and ecclesiological theses, arrived at positions increasingly in contrast to official Church teaching. He considered the Bible the sole source of Revelation: it was, therefore, appropriate to translate it into the vernacular and make it accessible to the people. In the treatises De Ecclesia (1378/79) and De potestate papae (1379), he put forth some of his more radical ideas: the true Church is a community of the predestined, even if none of the parties is able to know if he is among the elect or not; obedience to superiors is not required—neither in the spiritual nor temporal realms—when the superiors in question are in a state of mortal sin; the exercise of the priestly office is not primarily for the administration of the sacraments, but rather for the transmission of the faith; the authority exercised by the papacy of the time had no foundation in the Scriptures. Moreover, in De Eucharistia (1380), the author repudiates the doctrine of transubstantiation: after the consecration the material substance of the bread and wine remain unaltered (remanence).10 After his retirement from teaching, Wyclif dedicated himself to the revision of his old writings and to the composition of new works. In his final years, he returned to the vernacular translation of the Bible, later known as the Wycliffite Bible. To this day it is still unclear to researchers whether he was the actual curator of the overall work of translation or if he limited himself to beginning a work later brought to completion by others.11 His teachings must have immediately alarmed the ecclesiastical authorities, and, consequently, Rome. By the spring of 1337, detailed accusations against 9 10

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Andrew E. Larsen, “John Wyclif, c. 1331–1384,” in A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, Ian Christopher Levy ed. (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2006), 1. Paul J.J.M. Bakker, “Réalisme et rémanence. La doctrine eucharistique de Jean Wyclif,” in John Wyclif: logica, politica, teologia. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Milano, 12–13 febbraio 1999, Maria Teresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri and Stefano Simonetta, eds. (Tavernuzze, Impruneta: sismel—Ed. del Galluzzo, 2003), 87–112; Stephen E. Lahey, “Wiclif’s Trinitarian and Christological Theology,” in A Companion to John Wyclif, 127–198; Takashi Shogimen, “Wyclif’s Ecclesiology and Political Thought,” ibidem, 199–240. Mary Dove, “Wyclif and the English Bible,” in A Companion to John Wyclif, 365–406, esp. 386–393.

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Wyclif had already been brought to the papal curia. Thus, on 22 May of that year, Gregory xi issued a series of bulls addressed to King Edward iii; the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury; to the bishop of London, Richard Courtenay; and also to the University of Oxford. The pope directed the two bishops, in particular, to command the accused to present himself personally in Rome.12 Obviously, Wyclif disregarded the summons. Only in 1382 during a provincial council assembled in London, did Courtenay—in the meantime promoted to Archbishop of Canterbury—obtain, the condemnation of twentyfour articles attributed to Wyclif: ten heretical propositions and fourteen erroneous.13 Even after his death, theses taken from his works were formally condemned. In 1411, by order of the then Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel, Oxford University drew up a list of at least 267 of Wyclif’s theses containing heresies or errors in matters of the faith. The archbishop prepared to send it to John xxiii.14 This latter solemnly sanctioned the sentence: on 10 February 1413, during the council of Rome, manuscript copies of his works were burned on the steps in front of St. Peter’s basilica.15 However, Wyclif’s writings continued to spread in England. During his lifetime, they were circulated on the initiative of his first followers, for the most part clergymen who were professors at Oxford. In fact, it is in that academic environment that the derogatory epithet “Lollard” first appears as a synonym for “heretic.”16 Until the first decades of the sixteenth century, this lexeme, of unknown origin and uncertain etymology, was used to indicate the religious movement that, some way, was inspired by Wyclif’s thesis.17 Today, a distinction is generally made between the positions of the first followers belonging to academic or, at least educated, circles (the “Wycliffites”) and the successive multiform movement of the “Lollards.”

12 13 14

15 16 17

Joseph H. Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif (New Haven; London: Yale University Press 1952), 46–49. Larsen, “John Wyclif,” 44–62. Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Trial Procedures against Wyclif and Wycliffites in England and at the Council of Constance,” in Idem, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2001), 5, 20. François Charles Uginet, “Giovanni xxiii, antipapa,” in Enciclopedia dei papi, 3 vols. (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000), 2: 615; Larsen, “John Wyclif,” 63–64. Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2–4. Agostino Borromeo, “Introduzione alla storia religiosa dell’Inghilterra” in Storia religiosa dell’Inghilterra, Adriano Caprioli and Luciano Vaccaro, eds. (Milano: la Casa di Matriona; Gazzada: Fondazione Ambrosiana Paolo vi, 1992), 23–24.

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Some of Wyclif’s academic followers sought to make amends. This was the case of Nicholas Hereford, ordained priest in 1370 and a fellow of Oxford University. He was condemned and excommunicated by the church authorities as a Wicliffite, but he appealed to the Holy See and went to Rome. His case was examined by Urban vi together with the cardinals gathered in consistory, which condemned him to life in prison. After his escape from prison and his return to England, he seems to have recanted around 1391. He ended his life as a Cistercian monk.18 The case of Philip Repington is comparable, but with a surprisingly different epilogue. As a disciple of Wyclif, he was excommunicated shortly after the meeting of the London synod of 1382. That same year he recanted. In 1404, he was named bishop of Lincoln by Rome, and four years later on 18 September 1408, he was elevated to cardinal by Gregory xii—a dignity he appears to have refused.19 However, Lollardy did not constitute a monolithic movement founded on a unitary and common corpus of doctrine. Not only did the religious beliefs of its adherents often diverge from those of Wyclif, they also differed considerably from one group to another (and even from one individual to another). Nevertheless, several elements connote a Lollard identity: the centrality of the Scriptures to the practice of the Christian life; the plurality of soteriological doctrines; an intense aversion to the institutional Church; the rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation; and lastly, the systematic use of the vernacular in both propagating doctrine and proclaiming the Word of God.20 The activity of the Lollards in England was noticed by Rome. However, it was also known how the local ecclesiastical authorities were occupied in combating them. According to what Martin v had to affirm in 1423, the papacy’s true concern seems to have been two-fold: on the one hand, the risk being run by the English church of replicating the division that had taken place in Bohemia a few years prior; and on the other hand, that the documented contacts between

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Jeremy Catto, Fellows and Helpers: the religious Identity of the Followers of Wyclif in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy and the Religious Life. Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff, Peter Biller, Barrie Dobson, eds. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999), 141–161, here 144–147; Simon Forde, “Nicholas Hereford,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 26: 763–765. Hierarchia Catholica Medii et Recentioris Aevi, i, Conrad Eubel ed. (Münster: Sumptibus et typis librariae Regensbergianae, 1913), 31; Catto, “Fellows and Helpers,” 148–149; Simon Forde, “Philip Repyngdon (Repington, Repingdon),” in Oxford Dictionary, 46: 503–505. J. Patrick Hornbeck ii, What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 197–204.

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the English Lollards and the Bohemian Utraquists could aggravate the religious situation in Eastern Europe. In other words, the pope intended to combat Wycliffites and Hussites to avoid them transmuting into a pandemic capable of infecting the entire Church.21 Such an inauspicious prospect never occurred, since Lollardy vanished as a consequence of a later event, one all the more dramatic for the papacy: the schism of England in 1534.

3

Jan Hus and His Followers

In discussing the Wycliffites and Lollards, repeated reference has been made to a realm geographically removed from England: Bohemia. Cultural ties between the two nations had long existed, and thus the writings of the Oxford professor circulated throughout Bohemia.22 The capital, Prague, was a lively intellectual center thanks to the prestigious Charles University, founded in 1348, where Jan Hus completed his own studies. Hus was born around 1370 and ordained in 1400 at the end of his studies whence he dedicated himself to university teaching. In 1402 he was appointed rector of the chapel of the Holy Innocents of Prague (known popularly as the chapel of Bethlehem). This appointment carried with it the obligation to preach in the vernacular. In fulfilling this duty, Hus grew in the conviction that the ministry of preaching represented the highest duty of a priest. At the same time, he was developing his own ideal of reform, seeking not only to remove known clerical abuses, but also to promote the spiritual growth of the whole of society.23 This ideal would have drawn inspiration from both the theses of Prague’s reformist circles as well as the thought of Wyclif, of whom Hus was an attentive reader. He did not, however, wholeheartedly embrace their teachings, starting with that concerning the remanence: Hus always openly professed his adherence to the doctrine of transubstantiation. By contrast, in his tract De Ecclesia (1413), he did embrace the concept of the Church as a community of the pre21

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Apostolic Letter of Martin v to the “officials of the Church of England”, 9 October 1428 in J. Patrick Hornbeck ii and Michael Van Dussen, “Introduction: The Europe of Wycliffism,” in Eidem, eds., Europe after Wyclif (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 1–10, esp. note 1, 7–8; Birgit Studt, Papst Martin v. (1417–1431) und die Kirchenreform in Deutschland (Köln: Böhlau, 2004), 67 ff. František Šmahel, “Wyclif’s Fortune in Hussite Bohemia,” in Die Präger Universität im Mittelalter, František Šmahel ed. (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007), 467–489. Ota Pavlíček, “The Chronology of the Life and Work of Jan Hus” in A Companion to Jan Hus edited by František Šmahel, in cooperation with Ota Pavlíček (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2015), 9–68, esp. 9–22.

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destined, and, as a consequence, called into question the existing hierarchical structure and the required obedience to it.24 Nevertheless, Wyclif’s teachings, divided the university community in Prague between followers and detractors. The first debate between these opposing factions took place in 1403, when, at the behest of the Dominican Johannes Hübner, forty-five articles drawn from the works of Wyclif were condemned by the university. The first twenty-four articles were those already censured by the 1382 Synod of London, while the latter twenty-one had been developed by Hübner himself. A group of professors, Hus among them, fruitlessly opposed the condemnation, accusing their colleague of including propositions not contained in any work by Wyclif among his twenty-one articles.25 At the time, this academic dispute did not appear to cast Hus in a bad light before the ecclesiastical authorities. Hus came into public conflict with the archbishop of Prague, Zbynĕk Zajíc of Házmburk, in 1410 when the prelate published a papal bull that he had solicited himself. In the document, dated 20 December 1409, Alexander v ordered the destruction of Wyclif’s works circulating in Bohemia and prohibited preaching in private places of worship. It was a double blow for Hus, as a follower of the Oxford Master and as a preacher in the chapel of Bethlehem and he was summoned to the Holy See. His case was entrusted to a commission presided over by Cardinal Oddone Colonna (the future Martin v), who ordered him to appear personally in Rome. Hus refrained and, rather prudently, was represented in the Roman Curia by a procurator. In response to his absence, Cardinal Colonna found him guilty of insubordination and declared him anathema in February 1411.26 In the following years, the situation remained substantially unchanged, even though John xxiii, successor of Alexander v, had transferred—for unknown reasons—the competency of Hus’s case first to Cardinal Francesco Zabarella, then to Cardinal Rainaldo Brancaccio, and finally, toward the middle of 1412, to Cardinal Pietro Stefaneschi, who increased the sanctions to excommunication.27 Despite the alternating situation, the case of the Bohemian magister did not progress on merit. After John xxiii had made public on 9 December 1413 his intention to convene an ecumenical council at Constance, Hus decided spon-

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František Šmahel, “The National Idea, Secular Power and Social Issues in the Political Theology of Jan Hus” in A Companion to Jan Hus, 214–253, esp. 245ff. Pavlíček, “The Chronology”, 23–24. Jiři Kejř, Die Causa Johannes Hus und das Prozessrecht der Kirche, (Regensburg: Pustet, 2005, 47–58. Thomas A. Fudge, The Trial of John Hus: Medieval Heresy and Criminal Procedure, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 136–165.

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taneously to appear before the assembly, which he identified as the appropriate gathering before which to defend his case. This decision would reveal itself a fatal one.28 He was convinced he would be allowed to present his theses before the council in the model of an academic debate (more scolastico). He did not realize that the Roman authorities saw him as nothing more than a contumacious defendant twice anathematized years earlier. As such, on 28 November 1414 shortly after arriving in Constance, he was arrested and imprisoned. From that moment a trial began, mostly taking place before a commission of council fathers, that lasted through the beginning of July 1415. In the course of the proceedings, Hus was accused of having spread the heresies of Wyclif through his preaching and writings. In his own voice, the accused Hus undertook to articulate his defense: in some cases, he denied ever having embraced those ideas which he himself defined as false; in others, he noted how certain points made by Wyclif, if interpreted honestly, contained no errors. It was a defense destined for failure: in trials of heresy, the accused was not permitted to demonstrate the orthodoxy of his positions already deemed heretical by the judges. With the passage of time, his situation only became more precarious. On 4 May 1415, while the trial was underway, the general assembly approved the formal condemnation of the controversial forty-five theses of Wyclif (those submitted by the Dominican Hübner) together with other of his works.29 The noose was tightening. The commission, however, wanted to avoid imposing the death penalty for fear of making Hus a martyr and rekindling the heresy. But Hus refused to recant, announcing he could not betray the trust of those who had followed his teachings with an admission of guilt for that which he had not done.30 He died, burned at the stake, on 6 July 1415.31 Prior to pronouncing the sentence, the council had deliberated the condemnation of a further 260 Wyclif propositions.32 A year later, the same tragic end that met Hus befell another Bohemian disciple of Wyclif, Jerome of Prague (Jeroným Pražský). A layman with a restless 28 29

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Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Kostanz, 1414–1418, 2 vols., (Paderborn: F. Schönigh, 1991–1997), 1: 323 ff. Concilium Constantiniense, sessio xiv, 4 May 4 1415, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta (= cod), Giuseppe Alberigo et al., eds., third edition (Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 2013), 411–416. Sebastián Provvidente, “Hus’s Trial in Constance: “Disputatio aut Inquisitio”,” in A Companion to Jan Hus, 265. Kejř, Die Causa Johannes Hus, 164–165; Fudge, The Trial of Jan Hus, 277–287; Provvidente, Hus’s Trial in Constance, 287–288. Concilium Constantiniense, sessio xv, 6 July 1415, in cod, 421–426.

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spirit, Jerome was born around 1378 and led an eventful life. After studying at the Charles University, he completed his education at Oxford, from whence he carried home copies of Wyclif’s works. His numerous travels were dogged by suspicions of heresy. His friendship with Hus prompted Jerome to join his friend in Constance, where he was arrested and in turn put on trial. He was condemned to death and burned at the stake on 30 May 1416.33 Thus, the Council of Constance imposed the death penalty on two heretics. The assembly, however, also condemned other more specific doctrines. The first related to the practice, introduced in Bohemia several years prior, of distributing the Eucharist to the faithful under both the species of bread and wine (sub utraque specie). Such a practice was seen by Rome as a violation of ancient Church custom, and, worse, as potentially leading the faithful to doubt the validity of the administration of the sacrament under one species. Therefore, on 15 June 1415, the council issued a decree pertaining to this matter with two points. First, whoever held that the body and blood of Christ were not contained in their entirety in each of the two species must be punished as a heretic. Second, the same sanction carried to whomever, having promoted communion in both species, continued obstinately to preach and practice it.34 The decree mentioned no names, but it is certain that it meant to implicate the teachings of Jacob of Mies (Jakoubka ze Stříbra), the principal promoter of the new practice.35 It will be seen later how this controversy was destined to profoundly impact religious life in Bohemia. Another doctrine condemned by the Council regarded the liceity of tyrannicide. The relevant decree referred (without naming the author) to the pamphlet Quilibet tyrannus by the French theologian Jean Petit, though deceased since 1411. With his writing, the author had attempted to justify the 1407 assassination of Louis of Orleans, the brother of the King of France Charles vi, at the command of the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless.36 The conciliar document condemned as heretical the enunciation of the principle on the basis of which any tyrant could be assassinated lawfully or meritoriously (lecite et meritorie). The omission of the author’s name was evidently driven by the need to

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Thomas A. Fudge, Hieronymus von Prag und die Anfänge der hussitischen Bewegung (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2020), 173ff. Concilium Costantiniense, sessio xiii, 15 June 1415, in cod, 418–419. Paul de Vooght, Jacobellus de Stříbo († 1429), premier théologien du hussitisme (Louvain: Publications universitaires de Louvain, 1972), 159–174; Brandmüller, Das Konzil, 1: 360ff.; 2: 139 ff. Richard Vaughan, John the Fearless, New Edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2002), 44 ff.

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avoid rekindling a potentially explosive controversy in France due to the obvious political consequences.37 After the election of Martin v, on 11 November 1417, and the approval of the final decrees, the council was dissolved. The final point of heretical suppression advanced by the assembly would be symbolically sealed forty-four years after the natural death of Wyclif. In 1428, on the express order of the pope, his remains were exhumed, burned to ash, and dispersed. But this macabre rite failed to stem, as we already know, the spread of his teachings.

4

The Hussite Revolution

As the council fathers left Constance, the religious situation in Bohemia was deteriorating. The execution of Hus gave rise to protests in Bohemia. Not only was his condemnation to death perceived by many as the execution of an unjust sentence, but the victim was immediately venerated as a martyr and saint.38 Hus’ followers, however, never formed a cohesive movement. In fact, they rather quickly took up heterogeneous positions and came into conflict with one another. The more moderate among them considered the right to receive communion sub utraque specie a priority (from which comes the designation utraquists). They called for the reform of the Church while defending the existing social order. At the other extreme were the advocates of a radical dissidence that resulted in iconoclasm, the denial of the cult of the saints, the plundering of the Church’s riches, and appeals intended to encourage the physical extermination of feudal lords. Some groups relocated to the mountains, to some of which were given biblical names: the first community was established in 1420 on Tabor in the south of Bohemia, whose members were called “Taborites.”39 37

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Concilium Costantiniense, sessio xiii, 15 June 1415, in cod, 432; Alfred Coville, Jean Petit. La question du tyrannicide au commencement du xve siècle (Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1932), 207 ff.; Sebastián Provvidente, “Stylus theologicus et iuridicus: la causa Jean Petit à Constance (1414–1418) et les débats sur le tyrannicide,” in Médiévales. Langues, Textes, Histoire, 77 (2019), 129–151, here 133ff.; Agostino Borromeo, “Repressione antiereticale e interferenze politiche nella Francia di primo Quattrocento: la condanna delle tesi di Jean Petit sulla legittimità del tirannicidio” in Libellus quasi speculum. Studi offerti a Bernard Ardura, 2 vols, Pierantonio Piatti ed., (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2022), 1: 403–426. Phillip N. Haberkern, Patron, Saint and Prophet. Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21–37. Howard Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967; rpt. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004), 310ff.

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Nevertheless, there was a minimal agenda on which all of the factions agreed, despite their differences. This was synthesized in a document produced in Prague in May 1420, the so-called Four Articles of Prague, which did in fact list four points. The first claimed it was the right of priests to freely preach the Word of God; the second demanded the distribution of the Eucharist in two kinds; the third denied the right of the Church to exercise power in temporal matters; and the fourth imposed on the civil authority the competence to punish mortal sins.40 The Four Articles had a wide circulation and constituted the principal element of contention in all of the successive discussions with the Church of Rome. Meanwhile, Martin v had announced a crusade, on the model of those organized to combat the Albigensians in the thirteenth century. In July of 1418, the task of promoting the crusade was given to Cardinal Giovanni Dominici, named legate a latere in the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia.41 The formal proclamation of the crusade came in a bull of March 1420, which exhorted the entire Catholic hierarchy to fight the “Wiclefistas Hussitasque et reliquos” and encouraged all interested temporal authorities to carry out their repression with arms.42 From then on, both Martin v and his successor Eugenius iv, actively strove to promote an ongoing series of crusades.43 Yet, surprisingly, the disparate Hussite forces inflicted a series of humiliating defeats on the Catholic coalition under the command of the Taborite commander Jan Žižka (Jan Žižka z Trocnova a Kalicha), and, after his death in 1424, by the Taborite priest, Prokop the Great (Prokop Veliký, also known as Prokop Holý, Procopius the Shaven).44 The papal recourse to arms proved to be a failure. As a consequence, some on the Catholic side attempted to enter into dialogue. The decisive step was taken by the Council of Basel, meeting from 23 July 1431. As is known, the meager attendance led Eugenius iv to dissolve the assembly. Unexpectedly, the few

40 41

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František Šmahel, Die hussitische Revolution, 3 vols. [Monumenta Germaniae historica. Schriften, 43] (Hannover: Hahn, 2002), 1: 636–674. Bull De summis coelorum to Giovanni Dominici, Geneva 10 July 1418 in Acta Martini v. 1417– 1422, Jaroslav Eršil ed., 3 vols. [Acta Monumenta Vaticana res gestas Bohemicas illustrantia, vii] (Pragae: Typis Gregerianis, 1996–2001), 1: 149–151. Bull Omnium plasmatoris Domini of Martin v to the whole Catholic hierarchy, Florence 1 March 1420, in Acta Martini v, 247–249. Antonín Kalous, Late Medieval Papal Legation Between the Councils and the Reformation, Roma: Viella, 2017, 151–158. Frederick G. Heymann, J. Žižka and the Hussite Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 16 ff.; Thomas A. Fudge, The Magnificent Ride. The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Adershot: Ashgate, 1998), 108 ff.

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council fathers present in the city refused to comply with the papal injunction. In addition to other topics of discussion, and after wearisome negotiations at both Basel and Prague, the council came to an agreement with the opposing party. A more tempered, less anti-Catholic, version of the Four Articles was approved by the assembly on 15 January 1437. This new text came to be known as the Compactata.45 The dissenters, however, were aware that without papal approval, the implementation of the Compactata excluded them from communion with the Church of Rome. In 1447, a Bohemian delegation departed for the Eternal City, where, by their arrival, Eugenius iv was already dying. His successor Nicholas v, elected 6 March 1447, tasked the capable Cardinal Juan de Carvajal with the study of the requests brought by the emissaries, the most important of which was papal ratification of the Compactata. Having been appointed legate to Bohemia shortly thereafter on 4 August, the cardinal preferred to defer talks until his coming sojourn in Prague. The negotiations, from 6 to 20 May 1448, ended in total failure. The intransigence of the Hussites and the dilatory behavior of the cardinal, who knew that Rome would have never granted their requests, led to a complete breakdown.46 In spite of this, the pope did not neglect to use the power of persuasion, by dispatching one of the most famous preachers of the time, the Observant Franciscan (and future saint) John of Capistrano, to Germany and Bohemia in 1451. The Franciscan, however, was permitted by the civil authority to preach in Moravia but not in Bohemia proper.47 A new opportunity for reconciliation between the Utraquists and the Roman Church presented itself a decade later. On 2 March 1458, with the extinction of the House of Luxembourg, the Estates General of Bohemia elected the noble George of Podebrady (Jiři z Poděbrad) king. On 19 August of that year, after the death of Callixtus iii, Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini acceded to the papal throne taking the name of Pius ii. The new pope had previously visited Bohemia and even personally had known George. This presupposed favor-

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Johannes Helmrath, Das Basler Konzil, 1431–1449: Forschungsstand und Probleme (Köln: Böhlau, 1987), 353–372; Olivier Marin, La patience ou le zèle: les Français devant le hussitisme (années 1400—années 1510) [Collection des études augustiniennes. Série Moyen âge et temps modernes, 56] (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiennes, 2020), 135–165. Lino Gómez Canedo, o.f.m., Un español al servicio de la Santa Sede Don Juan de Carvajal, cardenal de Sant’Angelo, legado en Alemania y Hungria (1399?–1469) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Inst. Jerónimo Zurita, 1947), 112–119. Johannes Hofer, Giovanni da Capestrano. Una vita spesa nella lotta per la riforma della Chiesa, Aniceto Chiappini ed., trans. Giacomo Di Fabio, (L’Aquila: [s.n.], 1955), 150ff.

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able conditions to address and heal the schism. Instead, the discussions which began in March 1462, first between a royal ambassador and Pius ii himself, and then, with a commission of cardinals, came to a devastating end. Faced with the immovable position of the Bohemian delegates, the pope not only formally proclaimed the Compactata null on 31 March, but, two years later, in the public consistory of 16 June 1464, sanctioned the coming rupture in summoning King George to present himself personally in Rome.48 Pius ii’s successor, Paul ii, followed the policies of his predecessor. On 2 August 1465, he reiterated the injunction for the king to appear before the Roman Curia. George ignored the summons, and, as a result, on 23 December 1466, the pope declared him to have forfeited his right to the crown.49 Upon the death of King George in 1471, the Estates General elected the son of the king of Poland as sovereign, Vladislas ii Jagiello. Although Catholic, he had to swear to observe the Compactata before his coronation. As a result, Rome considered him an illegitimate ruler. In this context, the Utraquist Church of Bohemia, while continuing to seek to establish connections with Rome, ended up developing into a national Church independent of the papacy and equipped with its own hierarchy.50

5

The Fraticelli “de opinione”

Fraticelli is a term that appears, from fourteenth century, to designate diverse groups of dissenters in the sphere of the Order of Friars Minor. In the midfifteenth century, the papacy seems to have focused its attention on a particular sect: the so-called Fraticelli “de opinione.”51 The origins of this group date back to the general chapter of the Order celebrated at Perugia in 1322. There, the assembly unanimously approved a “manifesto” (or opinio) in which was asserted that Christ and the Apostles had taught and practiced complete poverty, having no possessions either personally or communally. In 1323 this proposition was declared heretical by John xxii, as 48 49 50 51

Pastor, Storia dei papi, 2: 156–174; Frederick G. Heymann, George of Bohemia, King of Heretics (Princeton: Princeton Univerity Press, 1965), 262–278, 381–382. Pastor, Storia dei papi, 2: 377–390; Otokar Odlozilík, The Hussite King: Bohemia and European Affairs, 1440–147 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgeres University Press, 1965), 161ff. Frederick G. Heymann, “The Hussite-Utraquist Church in the 15th and 16th centuries,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 52 (1961), 8 ff. Grado Giovanni Merlo, “Fraticelli,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, ed. Adriano Prosperi, with the collaboration of Vincenzo Lavenia and John Tedeschi, 4 vols. (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010), 2: 627.

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it was contrary to Sacred Scripture. Not all of the brothers accepted the decision: their dissent gave rise to a schismatic group, whose members were called Fraticelli “de opinione” in reference to the opinio of 1322.52 The extent to which the sect had maintained a consistent number of adherents at the beginning of the fifteenth century is unknown. What is known is the reduced number of defendants in individual inquisitorial trials: this would seem to indicate that the movement was experiencing an irreversible decline, which was not only numerical but also religious and spiritual. The sect considered the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy heretical from John xxii onwards. The Fraticelli countered the institutional Church with their own schismatic church, complete with a pope and bishops.53 For their part, the ecclesiastical authorities attributed to the adepts a gruesome practice, that of the so-called “barilotto” or “keg”: during the nightly meetings of the sect, men and women purportedly entertained open sexual relations and practiced ritual infanticide. The actual reality of the “keg” should be investigated more thoroughly. As has recently been pointed out, the main source on the subject are the confessions of the accused during the last trial of 1466–1467, which will be mentioned later. There are reasons to believe that the admissions of the accused, released after being subjected to torture, were guided by the questions of the judges, who, in turn, referred to the stereotype of the heretic as a rebel against the foundations of faith and morals.54 Nevertheless, the recourse to repression became more tenacious at the beginning of the fifteenth century, after the accession of Martin v. This is attested in a bull of 1418 sent to the patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops of the Roman Province as well as the local inquisitors so that they might exercise the faculties granted them to extirpate the heresy of the Fraticelli “de opinione.”55 At the time in question, coupled to the evident religious reasons were political motivations, namely the open contestation of papal authority exhibited by the

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Attilio Bartoli Angeli, “Il manifesto francescano di Perugia del 1322 alle origini dei fraticelli “de opinione”,” in Picenum Seraficum, 11 (1974), 214 ff. Mariano d’Alatri, “Il processo di Foligno contro quattro abitanti di Visso seguaci dei fraticelli,” in Idem, Eretici e inquisitori in Italia. Studi e documenti, 2 vols. (Roma: Istituto storico dei Cappuccini 1986), 2: 235–236, 238–240. Michele Lodone, “Il Sabba dei fraticelli: la demonizzazione degli eretici nel Quattrocento,” in Prima di Lutero. Nonconformismi religiosi nel Quattrocento italiano, Lucio Biasiori, Daniele Conti, eds., in Rivista Storica Italiana, 129/3 (2017), 887–907. Bull Ad ineffabilis of Martin v to the patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops of the Roman Province, and to the local inquisitors, Mantova, 14 November 1418, in Bullarium Franciscanum, sive Romanorum Pontificum Constitutiones, Epistolae, …, 7 vols., (Romae: Typis Sacrae Congregationis De Propaganda Fide, 1759–1904), vol. 7, Konrad Eubel ed., 512–513.

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dissidents was seen as an obstacle to the papacy’s efforts to the re-establish papal sovereignty over the Papal States following the unrest caused by the Great Schism.56 Even though pontifical policy did not exclude coercive measures, it seems to have largely inspired by a criterion of clemency. In June 1424, Martin v took back the city of Jesi in Marche, occupied manu militari by the commander Braccio da Montone. During the operations it became obvious that there were active groups of Fraticelli in the region. On 24 September 1424, the pope decided that they could be allowed to recant, without the usual punishment, as long as they confessed their guilt. Some took advantage of the opportunity; the more hardline, however, would face a most harsh repression.57 In other cases, the pope preferred to expel the Fraticelli from their religious houses, substituting them with Franciscans of the Observant branch, as happened from 1420–1425 in five convents in Maremma (eastern Tuscany).58 Another method adopted by Martin v was to send out preachers. In 1426, the pontiff assigned the Franciscan Giacomo Antonio di Monteprandone (better known as Giacomo della Marca) through the exercise of his ministry to lead the Fraticelli and their followers throughout Italy back to the right path.59 Despite this, in Rome Fratellicism continued to be considered a threat to be met with instruments of repression. This was attested by the nomination of Cardinal Gerolamo Orsini and Cardinal Antonio Correr in 1427 as coordinators of the inquisition against the Fraticelli specifically, and more generally, against all other forms of heresy “per quaslibet mundi partes.”60 Eugenius iv confirmed their appointment in 1432.61 In this specific case, one cannot exclude the possibility that the pope’s decision was made in relation to events taking place on the Iberian peninsula. In the preceding October, the pope had called on the highest ecclesial and civil authorities of the kingdom

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Concetta Bianca, “Martino v e le origini dello Stato della Chiesa” in Martino V. Genazzano, il pontefice, le idealità. Studi in onore di Walter Brandmüller, Pierantonio Piatti and Rocco Ronzani, eds., (Roma: Centro culturale agostiniano, 2009), 17–18. Giovanni Annibaldi, “Nuovo documento sulla lotta contro i fraticelli della Marca Anconitana,” Picenum Seraficum, 13 (1976), 328–329. Mariano D’Alatri, “Fraticellismo e inquisizione nell’Italia centrale,” in Eretici, 2: 199. Idem, “Il ruolo di Giacomo della Marca nella repressione dei fraticelli,” Picenum Seraphicum, 13 (1976), 330–345. Bull Apostolicae sedis providentia of Martin v to cardinals Giordano Orsini and Antonio Correr, Rome, 7 June 1427, in Bullarium Franciscanum, 680–681. Bull Apostolica Sedes of Eugene iv to cardinals Orsini and Correr, Rome, 1 May 1432, in Livario Oliger, “Documenta inedita ad historiam Fraticellorum spectantia”, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 6 (1913), 528–529.

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of Aragon to prosecute a dissident Franciscan, Felipe de Berbegal. This Franciscan, miscendo articulos et sectam Bohemorum [Hussites] cum secta fraticellorum qui sunt in Italia, sowed heresy and recruited followers.62 The pope’s appeal was heeded by the Aragonese prelates. Even though the leader of the sect and some followers succeeded in disappearing without a trace, it would seem that some of his followers gave proof of their spontaneous reform, while others made acts of submission at the end of a trial held in Tarazona in July 1432.63 Nevertheless, the Fraticelli appeared to be still present in other geographic areas. In 1451, Nicholas v instructed the Dominican Simone da Candia, inquisitor in the province of Greece, to seek out, arrest, and extradite to Italy certain Fraticelli “de opinione” residing in Athens and its environs. He had to dedicate particular effort to obtain the arrest of one, who se eorum primum pontificem seu papam nominare presumit.64 It would appear that the search was not particularly fruitful. The episode, however, demonstrates that reports about the presence of the sect outside of Italy—well-founded or not—continued to reach the Roman Curia. With the passage of time, the judicial dossiers against the Fraticelli would become increasingly rare. The final trial of which we have knowledge took place at Rome in the pontificate of Paul ii between August and October 1466. There were seventeen accused: one of whom, Nicolò da Massaccio, was a selfdesignated bishop with the name of Bernard of Pergamo (Bergamo?).65 The individual sentences are not reported in the acts of the papal tribunal. We know only that eight men condemned for heresy appeared in a public ceremony in Rome on 8 July 1467.66 In the following years, all traces of the sect of the Fraticelli “de opinione” were lost; the only memory of their existence is consigned to the tracts dedicated to the confutation of their doctrine.67

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José Maria Pou y Martí, o.f.m., Visionarios, Beguinos y Fraticellos catalanes (siglos xiii–xv) (Vich: Ed. Serafica, 1930), 285–287. José Sanchis Sivera, “Fraticelos catalano-aragoneses (Dos documentos ineditos),” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia, 11 (1935), 25–28. Bull Cum de fide di Nicolò v to the inquisitor Simone da Candia, Rome, 13 February 1451, in Oliger, Documenta, 529–530. The acts of the trial are partially published in Ehrle, Die Spiritualen, 2: 113–134. Alatri, “Fraticellismo e inquisizione”, 216–217; Michele Lodone, Invisibile come Dio. La vita e l’opera di Gabriele Biondo [Studi, 42] (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2020), 21– 22. John Monfasani, “The Fraticelli and Clerical Wealth in Quattrocento Rome” in Idem, Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy: Selected Articles (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), nr. xiv, 182, n. 27177–195.

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The Spanish Inquisition

A series of papal decisions issued beginning with the pontificate of Sixtus iv proved to be fraught with consequences for the repression of heresy on the Iberian Peninsula (and later for the New World), with the creation of the Spanish Inquisition. In the Middle Ages, the institution was active only in the territories of the Crown of Aragon, while it was never introduced in the realms of the Crown of Castile and Leon. In 1478, the sovereigns Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon (later honored with the title Catholic Kings by Alexander vi) requested and obtained permission from Sixtus iv to appoint two or three inquisitors in each city or diocese of the Crown of Castile where their intervention was deemed necessary. The petition of the sovereigns had been motivated by the discovery of the worrying spread of the phenomenon of Crypto-Judaism especially in Andalusia. It regarded the apostasy carried out by Jewish converts (called nuevos cristianos or conversos, or, with the disparagement, marranos) many of whom, after being baptized, returned to practicing secretly their ancestral faith.68 The first inquisitors were appointed nearly two years later on 17 September 1480: the Dominicans Miguel de Morillo and Juan de Sanmartín, to the seat of Seville. However, the hastily applied methods of the two judges pushed groups of conversos to appeal to the pope sentences they considered arbitrary. Their pressure led Sixtus iv to address the sovereigns. So as to not give the impression of dissenting from the appointment of the Dominicans, the pope confirmed their appointments while enjoining them to follow the regular inquisitorial procedures.69 This initial intervention by the Holy See was followed by other papal documents which were not always marked by a linear progression. From the papal texts it appears evident that Sixtus iv and his successor Innocent viii (elected in 1484) found themselves having to face opposing forces: from the one side, there were the delegates of the conversos, sent to Rome to request justice, and from the other, the representatives of the sovereigns, the most influential of whom was the vice chancellor of Holy Roman Church, Cardinal Rodrigo de Borja, the future Alexander vi.70 68

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Bull Exigit sincere devotionis of Sixtus iv to Ferdinand and Isabella of 1 November 1478, in Bulario de la Inquisición española (hasta la muerte de Fernando el Católico), Gonzalo Martínez Díez, s.j., ed. (Madrid: Ed. Complutense, 1997), 74–79. Juan Meseguer Fernández, “Periodo fundacional (1478–1517): Los hechos” in Historia de la Inquisición en España y América, Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, eds., 3 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1984–2000), 1: 300–306. See, for example, the brief Venerabilis frater noster of Sixtus iv to Ferdinand of 10 October 1482 (Bulario, 110–112).

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Over time, and amid the concessions and reconsiderations of the papacy, the new institution progressively took shape. In 1483, Ferdinand’s request to extend the new inquisition to the realms of Aragon and Valencia, as well as Catalonia, was granted. The relative appointment was conferred by Sixtus iv on the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada,71 previously one of the inquisitors active in Castile and Leon from 1482.72 Thus, all of the domains of the Catholic Kings fell under the jurisdiction of the new body. It was integrated into the wake of the papal inquisition insofar as it concerned judicial objectives and procedures. The organizational structure, however, had no precedent. The instituting bull of 1478 granted to the sovereign—that is, a lay authority—the power to appoint inquisitors and to decide which seats they should be assigned to. Less than a decade later in 1487, Innocent viii gave Torquemada the title of “Inquisitor General,” at the request of the sovereigns, for the whole of their realms, with the additional faculty to delegate his own authority to suitable clerics.73 The concession of Innocent viii gave the Spanish Inquisition a centralized structure, whose leading figure was the Inquisitor General. At the same time, it laid the foundation for the claim by the Catholic Kings and their successors to the right to propose the name of the candidate for appointment to the reigning pontiff.74 Even if we do not know when such a right was formally recognized by the papacy, it is certain that from the outset the Spanish monarchy benefitted from a supervisory power over the inquisitorial structure. This power was then reinforced when the sovereigns unilaterally established a royal council of the inquisition (the Consejo de la Suprema Inquisición) during the last decade of fifteenth century. This body was invested with a consultative role, but, in fact, constituted the instrument through which the royal authority, without intervening in the merit of cases, could exercise a controlling power over the effective functioning of the inquisitorial bureaucracy.75 This should not imply, however, that the Spanish tribunal was a royal tribunal. Rather, it was only by

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Breve Supplicari nobis of Sixtus iv to fra’ Tomás de Torquemada of 17 October 1483 (Bulario, 158–159). Bull Apostolicae Sedis providentia of Sixtus iv, Rome, 11 February 1482 (Bulario, 92–95). Bulls Pro humani generi of Sixtus iv to Torquemada of 6 February 1487 and Quanto carissimus, also to Torquemada of 24 March 1487 (Bulario, 188–193, 194–199). Agostino Borromeo, “Felipe ii y la tradición regalista de la Corona española,” in Felipe ii (1527–1598). Europa y la Monarquía Católica, 5 vols., José Martínez Millán, ed. (Madrid: Editorial Parteluz, 1998), 3: 114. According to a more recent study, the Suprema was instituted between September 1498 and May 1499 (José Ramón Rodríguez Besné, El Consejo de la Suprema Inquisición. Perfil jurídico de una institución [Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2000], 47–48).

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papal appointment that the Inquisitor General acquired the canonical powers to exercise pontifical jurisdiction in matters of heresy, and to delegate that authority to the peripheral inquisitors he appointed. Thus, just as the pope had established the Spanish institution, he could also revoke it. Evidence of this is seen in Leo x’s bull of 20 March 1520, suppressing the Spanish Inquisition. Concerned by the incessant protests of the Spanish conversos, the pope had a plan drawn up that called for the dismantling of the Spanish Inquisition’s bureaucracy and transfer of responsibility and coordination of anti-heretical repression to the diocesan ordinaries. It took the intervention of Charles v to have the decision over-turned. Leo x acquiesced apparently because, at that moment, he wanted to prevent the emperor from raging against Luther.76 The pope, equipped with scarce theological training and animated by an illusory hope, believed that the German monk could still be brought back to the right path.77 All the while, the Spanish Inquisition was committed to pursuing the followers of a new heterodox movement, that of the alumbrados (literally, “enlightened”). The movement, comprising men and women, had neither a unitary character nor a unified body of doctrine. In actuality, the inquisition included under the category of alumbrados individuals and groups whose spirituality was characterized by an interior religious experience from divine “illumination,” and consequently, the refutation of traditional external forms of worship imposed by the Church.78 Several people were subjected to inquisitorial trials, many of them were women: the most famous is that of María de Cazalla, tried by the tribunal of the Inquisition of Toledo from 1532 to 1534 resulting in a light penalty.79 The papacy appears not to have been involved in the repression of the alumbrados, because in those years it was already engaged in the struggle against the spread of Lutheranism.

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Stefania Pastore, Il Vangelo e la spada. L’inquisizione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (1460–1598), (Roma: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 2003), 125–129. See the following chapter. See also Current Trends in the Historiography of Inquisitions: Themes and Comparisons, eds. Irene Bueno, Vincenzo Lavenia, and Riccardo Parmeggiani (Rome: Viella, 2023) and Dizionario storico dell’ Inquisizione, eds. Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia, and John Tedeschi, 4 vols. (Pisa: Edizioni della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2010). Antonio Márquez, Los alumbrados. Orígines y filosofía (!425–1559), 2nd edition (Madrid 1980), 31 sqq.; Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain. The Alumbrados (Cambridge: Clarke, 1992), 25 ff. Milagros Ortega Costa, Proceso de la inquisición contra Maria Cazalla [Documentos históricos, 8] (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1978), 29–504.

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335

Witchcraft as a Crime of Heresy

The conviction that certain persons are equipped with special powers by which they can bring blessings, or, more frequently, curses to the detriment of their neighbor, dates back to periods before the rise of Christianity. In as much as such individuals used their powers (“arts”) to the detriment of certain persons or their property, they had to be legally prosecuted. In medieval Europe, magic and witchcraft came to be included in this case in the crimes of “the mixed forum”: that is, they came under the jurisdiction of lay tribunals just as often as episcopal tribunals.80 A radical doctrinal, and juridical, turning point occurred when, through a progressive theological elaboration, the theory that magicians and witches were only able to obtain their wicked purposes with the cooperation of the devil was affirmed. Consequently, the repression of witchcraft was no longer treated as the punishment of an ordinary crime, but rather as the prosecution of one of the most serious heretical crimes: apostasy.81 The oldest extant document is a letter of 22 August 1320, written by the cardinal legate to Avignon, Guillaume de Peyre Godin, on the order of John xxii to the inquisitors of Toulouse and of Carcassonne. The recipients were to proceed, in accordance with the powers granted them to repress heresy, against those accused of sorcery and evil perpetrated by the invocation of the devil.82 The directives coming from Cardinal Godin were endorsed, ten years later, by the same John xxii.83 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, there is no lack of papal letters reaffirming the authority of the Inquisition in matters of magic and witchcraft. On 30 August 1409 Alexander v wrote to the Franciscan Ponce Fougeyron, inquisitor in Avignon. The pope began by saying he has received news (probably from the inquisitor himself) pertaining

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Vincenzo Lavenia, “ “Anticamente di misto foro”. Inquisizione, stati e delitti di stregoneria nella prima età moderna,” in Inquisizioni: percorsi di ricerca, Giovanna Paolin, ed., (Trieste: Università di Trieste, 2001), 38 ff. Agostino Borromeo, “L’inquisizione in Italia: aspetti e momenti dal xvi al xviii secolo,” in Storia religiosa dell’Italia, Luciano Vaccaro ed., 2 vols. (Milano: Centro Ambrosiano, 2016), 1: 344 ff. Godin to the inquisitors of Toulouse, Jean de Beaune, and of Carcassonne, Bernard Gui, Avignon, 22 August 1320, in Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: Georgi, 1901), 4–5. Bull Dudum venerabilis frater of John xxii, Avignon, 4 November 1330, to the archbishop of Narbonne, Bernard, to his suffragans and to the inquisitor of Carcassonne; identical bull, same date to the archbishop of Toulouse, to his suffragans and to the inquisitor (Hansen, Quellen, 6–7).

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to the appearance of new sects devoted to sorcery and other magical arts that invoke the devil. Therefore, he granted to the inquisitor the necessary powers to pronounce the final verdict, even in cases which carry a penalty of death. These same powers were confirmed for Fougeyron, on his explicit request, by Martin v in 1418, and by Eugenius iv in 1435.84 The basic principle by which witchcraft was under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition was reiterated in other apostolic letters sent to the individual inquisitors. It is enough to scan the list, certainly incomplete, of the cases tried in the first half of the fifteenth century to observe how the repression of witchcraft was conducted, by both lay and episcopal tribunals, and even by inquisitorial tribunals.85 Concurrent with these events was the cause celebre of Joan of Arc (circa 1412– 1431). Her ecclesiastical trial was swift, substantially motivated by political considerations in the context of the final years of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. The Holy See was notified of the trial only after its tragic conclusion. Joan, a sixteen-year-old girl, on the basis of supernatural revelations from which she claimed to benefit, obtained from Charles the Dauphin of France (the future Charles vii), the command of an army. She fell into the hands of the English, at which point she was subjected to a trial in Rouen, led by the anglophile bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, assisted by the Dominican Jean Le Maître, delegate of the Inquisitor General for France.86 Joan was accused of witchcraft and summoning evil spirits, and, consequently, of heresy and schism. She was convicted and burned at the stake on 20 May 1431. More than 20 years later, at the instigation of the French court, her family appealed her sentence to the Holy See. In 1454 the request was delivered to Nicholas v, who died in 1455 without having reached a decision. His successor, Callixtus iii, however, took up the appeal and appointed three papal commissioners: the archbishop of Reims, the bishop of Paris, and the bishop of Coutances. They pronounced their sentence at Rouen on 17 July 1456: it found her, the victim, entirely innocent and declared her trial null.87 84

85 86 87

Martine Ostorero, “Des papes face à la sorcellerie démoniaque (1409–1459): une dilatation du champ de l’hérésie?” in Aux marges de l’hérésie. Inventions, formes et usages polémiques de l’accusation d’hérésie au Moyen Âge, Frank Mercier and Isabelle Rosé, eds. (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017), 154. Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials, Their Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 123, 124, 125, 127, 128. Francois Neveux, L’évêque Pierre Cauchon (Paris: Denoël, 1987), 129–191. “Callixte iii,” in Dictionnaire encyclopédique de Jeanne d’Arc, Pascal-Raphaël Ambrogi and Dominique Le Tourneau, eds. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2017), 378–381; “Procès en nullité,” ibidem, 1562–1579.

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Innocent viii signaled a historic turning point in the papacy’s suppression of witchcraft in the apostolic constitution Summis desiderantibus affectibus, issued 5 December 1484. At the beginning of the document, the pope stated first of all that he has been informed that in several ecclesiastical provinces of Germany individuals, of both sexes, have invoked Satan and engaged in sexual relations with demons. These persons used their demonic powers for the purpose of inflicting harm on their neighbors. In spite of the seriousness of the facts, news was sent to Rome that two inquisitors deputized by the Holy See, the Dominican Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger, had been hindered in their operation, and so the pope granted them full power to conduct trials in matters of witchcraft.88 To highlight the coercive nature of his decision, the pope made it public in the solemn form of an apostolic constitution “ad perpetuam rei memoriam”: that is, a document with no specific recipient and thus binding on all the faithful.89 It should not be thought, however, that Innocent viii’s initiative was born of the desire to impose a stricter course on the inquisitorial suppression of witchcraft. We now know that the text of the constitution is nothing more than a revised version, in the curial style, of a petition by the same Henricus Institoris (the latinized name of the Alsatian Dominican Heinrich Kramer). He presented this petition on behalf of his confrere Jakob Sprenger, unbeknownst to the latter. The papal document gained an unexpected diffusion as a result of the fact that the entire text was reproduced in an untitled, anonymous tract of 1486. The author of the text, later republished with the title Malleus maleficarum,90 was none other than Institoris.91 This work would become a landmark document in the history of the suppression of witchcraft.92 88

89

90

91 92

Apostolic constitution Summis desiderantes affectus of Innocent viii, Rome, 5 December 1484, in Bullarium Romanum … Taurinensis editio, 24 vols., Luigi Tomassetti and Francesco Gaude, eds., 24 vols. (Turin: Franco et Dalmazzo, 1867–1872), 5: 296–298. This specific element is highlighted by Ernst Pitz, “Diplomatische Studien zu den päpstlichen Erlassen über das Zauber- und Hexenwesen” in Der Hexenhammer. Entstehung und Umfeld des “Malleus Maleficarum” von 1487 Peter Segl, ed. (Köln: Böhlau, 1988), 30, 53–56. For the vast bibliography on the Malleus maleficarum, see Heinrich Kramer (Institoris), Der Hexenhammer. Malleus Maleficarum, Günther Jarouschek, Wolfgang Behringer, eds. (München: dtv Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. kg, 201712), 804–835. Die lateinischen Original-Ausgaben des Malleus Maleficarum in Kramer (Institoris), Der Hexenhammer, 803. There is no title in the first three editions of the work. Only from the fourth edition, published in Nuremberg in 1494, does the treatise appear with the title which is known to history, Malleus maleficarum (Jarouschek Behringer, “‘Das unheilvollste Buch der Weltliteratur’? Zur Entstehungs- und Wirkungsgeschichte des Malleus Maleficarum und zu den Anfängen der Hexenverfolgung,” in: Kramer (Institoris), Der Hexenhammer, 22).

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Various findings attest how, shortly thereafter, the inquisitorial suppression of witchcraft was particularly fierce, especially where the tribunals of the inquisition undertook intense activity.93 The inquisitor of Como, the Dominican Modesto Scrofa da Vicenza, held a tragic record in this regard. From the year 1520, he, assisted by his eight vicars, oversaw thousands of trials against witches, about one hundred of whom were put to death.94 The subsequent commitment of the new Roman Inquisition to the prosecution of followers of the Protestant Reformation relegated the suppression of witchcraft to second place. A change in this trend occurred toward the end of the sixteenth century, once the danger of the diffusion of reformed doctrines in the remnant of Catholic Europe had been eliminated. Sixtus v expressed this change in the constitution Coeli et terrae of 9 January 1586, in which he fulminated the condemnation of the those who practiced astrology (as an attempt to predict the future), palm-reading, necromancy, and other forms of divination and superstition effected by the intervention of demonic powers.95 Since the Sistine constitution foreshadowed the hypotheses that even simple witches and palm-readers could invoke demonic forces, the inquisitorial tribunals were excessively enlarged. The resulting increase in the pace of suppression is borne out statistically: on the Italian peninsula, for example, the witchcraft trials conducted between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth exceeded 40% of the total number of trials in some cases.96

8

The Beginnings of Papal Censure of Printed Works

The invention of the mechanized printing press by Gutenberg was initially received in ecclesiastical circles as “a divine art,” in the expression of the archbishop of Mainz, Berthold of Henneberg.97 But the more discerning understood that the new technology was a double-edged sword. If, on the one hand,

93 94 95 96 97

Rainer Decker, Die Päpste und die Hexen aus den geheimen Akten der Inquisition (Darmstadt: Primus-Verlag, 20132), 50–53. Michael Tavuzzi, Renaissance Inquisitors. Domenican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527, (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007), 257. Apostolic Constitution Coeli et terrae of Sixtus v of 9 January 1586, in Bullarium Romanum, 8: 646–650. Borromeo, “L’inquisizione in Italia”, 344–345. Vittorio Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice. La censura ecclesiastica dal Rinascimento alla Controriforma (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006), 15–16.

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it permitted the spread of sacred texts and devotional works, on the other, it could become a vehicle for distributing heterodox teachings or texts contrary to public morality.98 The papacy appears to have understood quite early the necessity to exercise some form of control over printed works of a religious or moral nature. As early as 1479, Sixtus iv had granted the University of Cologne coercive powers over the printers, vendors, and possessors of heretical books. This was, however, an action of local scope in that it was limited to the one named institution.99 The first pontifical provision of a universal character was put into force with the constitution Inter multiplices promulgated by Innocent viii on 17 November 1487. The document introduced to the whole Catholic world the double criteria of prior censorship (examination of a work prior to its publication) and censorship a posteriori (examination of already published works). As a result, anyone wishing to send a written work to press was obligated, if resident in the Roman Curia, to submit the manuscript for examination by the Master of the Apostolic Palace (the papal theologian) to obtain approval, or, if resident outside the Curia, to request the imprimatur of his diocesan ordinary. Regarding the censure, a posteriori, a rule was ratified requiring publishers and booksellers to submit, within terms to be established, their inventory of books published or put up for sale, to the examination of the Master of the Apostolic Palace if they operated in Rome, or to their diocesan ordinary in all other cases. If such works were found to contain passages judged “fidei catholicae contraria, impia, adversa, scandalosa aut male sonantia,” they were to be sequestered and burned by the competent ecclesial authority.100 A new version of the Innocent viii’s constitution was promulgated by Alexander vi on 1 June 1501 with a bull addressed to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier, and Magdeburg. It contained a new restriction with respect to the constitution of Innocent viii: the obligation to compile the inventories and submit them to the competent authorities was now extended even to those who were possessors, institutions, or private persons.101 98 99

100 101

Jyri Hasecker, Quellen zur päpstliche Pressekontrolle in der Neuzeit (1487–1966) (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017), 27. Brief of Sixtus iv to the University of Cologne, Rome, 17 March 1479, in Joseph Hilgers, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher. In seiner neuen Fassung dargestellt und rechtlich-historisch gewürdigt (Freiburg im Brisgau: Herder, 1904), 479–480. A critical edition of the constitution Inter multiplices of Innocent viii of 17 November 1487 in Hasecker, Quellen, 158–160. Bull Inter multiplices of Alexander vi of 1 June 1501, in Annales Ecclesiastici ab anno mcxcviii ubi Card. Baronius desinit auctore Odorico Raynaldo Tarvisino …, xix, (Romae: Varesius, 1663), an. 1501, n. 36.

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The theme was confronted anew at the Fifth Lateran Council, meeting in Rome from 1512 to 1517. The relative decree was promulgated under the form of an Apostolic Constitution in Session x, held on 4 May 1515. The document demonstrated the dangers derived from the publication of works contrary to the faith or morality. Consequently, it prescribed that no one should be able to send a text to press without the imprimatur of the ecclesiastical authority. In the diocese of Rome, it would be granted by the papal vicar for Rome and the Master of the Apostolic Palace; in other dioceses, by the bishop (or a suitable person delegated by him) and by the local inquisitor.102 Diverging from Innocent viii’s constitution, the council’s deliberation did not contemplate any measure aimed at the exercise of the censure a posteriori on works already in circulation. And it will be precisely the absence of adequate legislation on the matter that permitted, some years later, the diffusion of the works by Luther, followed by those of the other reformers.

9

Conclusions

It is no easy task to draw conclusions from a series of events spread across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nonetheless, a few observations can be proposed. Firstly, it is apparent that, before the Council of Trent, the papal suppression of heresy did not seem to observe a systematic or linear development. This circumstance should be linked to individual situations and to the personalities of individual popes. Second, not all of the papal documents issued resulted from the initiative of the reigning pontiff or his closest collaborators: the most eloquent example is provided by the legislation regarding witchcraft that offers a sensational case of pontifical laws promulgated on behalf of an individual petition. Third and last, the Holy See’s fight against the spread of heterodox movements necessarily implicated the involvement of temporal powers, especially when, as in the Hussite case, the papacy found itself obliged to involve the Catholic powers of central-eastern Europe in a series of military campaigns. Translation Tyler D. Sampson

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Hasecker, Quellen, 162–163; Nelson H. Minnich, “The Fifth Lateran Council and Preventive Censorship of Printed Books,” in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2, 1 (2010), 92–95.

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Bibliography Borromeo. Agostino. “Repressione antiereticale e interferenze politiche nella Francia di primo Quattrocento: la condanna delle tesi di Jean Petit sulla legittimità del tirannicidio,” in: Libellus quasi speculum. Studi offerti a Bernard Ardura, 2 vols. Ed. Pierantonio Piatti. Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2022. Pp. 1: 403–426. Cameron, Euan. Waldenses: Rejection of Holy Church in Medieval Europe. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. A Companion to Jan Hus. Ed. František Šmahel, in cooperation with Ota Pavlíček. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2015. A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian. Ed. Ian Christopher Levy. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2006. Fudge, Thomas A. The Trial of John Hus: Medieval Heresy and Criminal Procedure. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Haberkern, Phillip N. Patron, Saint and Prophet. Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hasecker, Jyri. Quellen zur päpstliche Pressekontrolle in der Neuzeit (1487–1966). Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017. Historia de la Inquisición en España y América. Eds. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet. 3 vols. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1984–2000. Hornbeck ii, J. Patrick, What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Kieckhefer, Richard. European Witch Trials, Their Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Lerner, Robert E. The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notree Dame Press, 2007. Praedicatores inquisitores, 1: The Dominicans and the Medieval Inquisition. Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition, Rome, 23–25 February 2002. Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 2004. Tavuzzi, Michael. Renaissance Inquisitors. Domenican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007.

chapter 13

Papacy and the Protestant Reformation Agostino G. Borromeo†

1

Introduction

On 31 October 1517, a German friar of the order of the Hermits of St. Augustine, Martin Luther (originally Luder, Lutherus in the Latinized form) released a text, entitled The 95 Theses, into the public domain in Wittenberg. In it, the author—a university lecturer known in local academic circles—enunciated 95 propositions (or, indeed, theses). They were centered on a radical critique of the papal powers regarding the granting of indulgences: the author thus sowed the first seeds of a contestation, which, within a few years, would cause an irreparable rupture with the theological and ecclesiological magisterium of the Church of Rome.1 That brief writing was, in fact, to mark the beginning of a historical turning point in the religious affairs of Europe, causing an irreversible split in the sphere of Western Christianity. But how does one explain that a mere academic text could have had such a disruptive effect? The public dissemination of a number of theses, in the university tradition, merely implied an invitation to open an academic debate among scholars on the proposed topics. Luther’s protest engendered epochal changes because his protest against the papacy and the Roman Curia found a receptive environment in the Germanic world (but also elsewhere). In that wide geographical area, the Holy See was perceived as a corrupt and money-grubbing center of power, not least because it was impersonated by morally discredited pontiffs, who, apart from their reprehensible private lives, appeared mainly interested in strengthening their position as Renaissance princes. Anti-Romanism also flourished among the clergy due to the exorbitant taxes imposed by the papacy on ecclesiastical revenues. Moreover, it must be considered that the territorial princes of the Empire did not enjoy the same papal privileges in the matter of appointment to ecclesiastical offices that, for example, the French Monarchy enjoyed,2 so that the pos1 Paolo Ricca, “Le 95 Tesi e la cristianità del nostro tempo,” in Paolo Ricca and Giorgio Tourn, Le 95 Tesi di Lutero e la cristianità del nostro tempo. New revised edition, (Turin: Claudiana, 1998), 15–71. 2 Cf. Jean-Louis Gazzaniga, “Les relations entre la France et le Saint-Siège: le Concordat de

© Agostino G. Borromeo†, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_015

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sibility of gaining broader faculties in this matter would have induced some to shun papal authority.3 The papacy does not seem to have been aware of this widespread antiRomanism. At the top of the Church, there was a lack of perception of the religious situation in the Germanic world and of the potential danger inherent in Luther’s challenge. From the outset, in fact, the case was treated, not infrequently, in the same way as those of theologians who were authors of theses liable to censure. Contributing to this approach was, on the one hand, Leo x’s (1513–1521) lack of theological training and his prevailing interests in temporal matters; on the other hand, the direction of his European policy aimed, on the one hand, at obtaining from the German princes the financing of a campaign against the Ottoman Turks and, on the other hand, at preventing the possible election of the King of Spain, Charles of Habsburg, as emperor. The achievement of this twofold objective induced Leo x to maintain the closest relations with the elector princes, and in particular with Frederick the Wise of Saxony, whose subject the Augustinian friar had been granted his protection.4

2

Rome and Luther

The facts are well known. Leo x had promulgated, on 31 March 1515, an indulgence whose offerings were to be used to finish the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica. Luther’s writing is a complex and non-organic text, conceived as a starting point for an academic dispute. In the circumstances in which it was written, it centred on a discussion about the theological foundations of indulgences and, consequently, about the actual papal powers in granting them. In keeping with traditional practice, the author dutifully sent a copy of his paper to the higher ecclesiastical authorities: to his own diocesan ordinary, Hieronymus Schultze (Scultetus), in whose diocese of Brandenburg Wittenberg was

Bologne de 1516,” in: Lutero 500 anni dopo. Una rilettura della Riforma luterana nel suo contesto storico ed ecclesiale. Raccolta di Studi in occasione del v centenario (1517–2017), Gert Melville and Josep Ignasi Saranyana Closa, eds. [Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche—Atti e Documenti, 51], (Città del Vaticano: Editrice Vaticana, 2019) 147–158. 3 Richard Marius, Martin Luther. The Christian Between God and Death (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 20045), 6–18. 4 Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei papi dal fine del Medio Evo, 17 vols. in 20 tomes (Rome: Desclée & Ci., 1950–1963), iv, 1, p. 249; Marco Pellegrini, “Leone x,” in: Enciclopedia dei papi, 3 vols. (Roma: Istituto della Encilopedia Italiana, 2000), iii, 42–64, esp. 58.

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located, and to the archbishop of Magdeburg and Mainz, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, the prelate responsible for preaching indulgences in Germany.5 The archbishop took care to transmit the text to Rome, which arrived there in January 1518. The trial against Luther began towards the end of May 1518. Leo x entrusted it to the Auditor of the Apostolic Chamber, Bishop Girolamo Ghinucci. The analysis of the 95 Theses was entrusted to the Master of the Sacred Palace (the pope’s theologian), the Dominican Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio (or Prieras) who drafted his opinion in three days. As he himself was later to point out, he could not elaborate a more detailed refutation at the time, as Luther did not mention the foundations on which he based his conclusions. The Dominican, however, formulated the accusation of heresy: as a result, Luther was summoned to appear at the Roman Curia in early July within sixty days, a summons that he was careful not to comply with.6 In the meantime, Luther had been summoned to Augsburg by the Dominican cardinal Tommaso de Vio, known as Gaetano, sent by Leo x as papal legate to the Imperial Diet that was to meet there between 12 and 14 October 1518. The conversation between the cardinal and the Augustinian friar had no result other than to highlight Luther’s dissent from the papal doctrine on indulgences.7 Consequently, the judicial proceedings—the last phase of which was entrusted to a commission chaired by Leo x himself—came to an end with the publication of the bull Exsurge Domine of 15 June 1520. In it, forty-one of Luther’s propositions were condemned and he was ordered to retract them within sixty days. The break with Rome was consummated by a provocative initiative of the Augustinian: after the deadline had expired, he publicly set the papal bull on fire.8 The consequence of this gesture of defiance provoked the promulgation of a second bull, Decet Romanum Pontificem of 3 January 1521, in which Leo x fulminated the excommunication against Luther and declared him a heretic. Consequently, on the basis of canon law, Leo x asked Charles v to implement the canonical sanctions, to impose them on Luther, and banish him 5 Giancarlo Pani, “Le 95 Tesi di Lutero del 1517: storia di un mancato dialogo,” Analecta Augustiniana, 80 (2017), 9–29, esp. 13–19. 6 Michael Tavuzzi, Prierias. The Life and Work of Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio, 1456–1527 [Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 16] (Durham, NC: Duke University Pres, 1997) 104–106. 7 Jared Wicks, Cajetan und die Anfänge der Reformation (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1983), 72–83. 8 Heinz Schilling, Martin Lutero. Ribelle in un’epoca di cambiamenti radicali, trans. Roberto Tresoldi (Turin: Claudiana, 2016), 164–167; Pani, Le 95 Tesi, 25–26; Volker Reinhardt, Lutero l’eretico. La Riforma protestante vista da Roma (Venice: Marsilio, 2017), 112–120.

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from the Empire. The Diet, at which Charles v was to take the requested measures, opened in Worms on 27 January 1521. According to the usual practice, the accused had to be heard before the banishment could be imposed. During April, Luther appeared twice before the Diet (7 and 8 April 1521). But having refused to recant his doctrines, as he was requested to do, on 26 May 1521, the emperor, in agreement with the papal nuncio Girolamo Aleander, decreed his banishment from all the territories of the Empire.9 It is evident that the timing of the trial against Luther was surprisingly long. It must, however, be considered that, as already mentioned, Leo x did not intend, for political reasons and family interests, to convict the subject of an elector prince on whom he counted to oppose the election of Charles of Habsburg. Once this had taken place (27 June 1519), the trial resumed the ordinary procedures. The circumstance that Luther’s banishment was issued almost two months after his appearance before the Diet is today explained by Charles v’s desire to issue the measure only when he was certain that the accused was safe in the Wartburg, the impregnable fortress of electoral Saxony.10 But if, regardless of these circumstances, the pope considered himself satisfied, his successors could not say the same. As a matter of fact, pro-Lutheran territories and cities obtained that in successive diets (between 1524 and 1529) the application of the edict was declared non-compulsory until a council was convened. Consequently, the papal excommunication did not achieve the effects it should have.11

3

The Expansion of the Reformation.

After the imperial sentence, the Holy See took no further interest in Luther’s person.12 This circumstance confirms the inability of the papacy to perceive the seriousness of the events. Leo x had described the controversy as a “dispute between friars,” referring to the public dispute between the Augustinian Luther and the Dominican Johannes Tetzel, an uninhibited preacher in charge of gaining indulgences in central Germany. Adrian vi (1522–1523), showed more 9 10 11

12

Schilling, Martin Lutero, 172–200; Volker Reinhardt, Lutero l’eretico, 138–173. Schilling, Martin Lutero, 197. Stefano Cavallotto, “Lutero e la Riforma tedesca: dispute confessionali e nuovi assetti politico-ecclesiastici nell’Impero (1517–1555),” in: Storia religiosa della Germania, 2 vols., Luciano Vaccaro ed., [Europa ricerche, 19], (Milan: Centro Ambrosiano, 2016), i, 241–282, esp. 256–257. Scott H. Hendrix, Luther and the Papacy. Stages in a Reformation Conflict (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 146–147.

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attention to the expansion of the doctrines of the Reformation. But his short pontificate did not allow him to develop a systematic strategy. His successor, Clement vii (1523–1534), similarly to his cousin Leo x, was only marginally interested in anti-heretical repression: in particular, he did not know how to evaluate either the activity of Ulrich Zwingli and other reformers in the Helvetic Confederation or, later, the efforts of John Calvin.13 The papacy hoped to limit the expansion of the Reformation, but failed. The first territories to switch to Lutheranism were the Scandinavian countries. Sweden, under King Gustav Vasa, formally broke relations with Rome in 1527: this break resulted in Finland, whose only diocese, Turku, was suffragan to the Swedish metropolitan archdiocese of Uppsala, switching to Lutheranism. Denmark went over to the Reformation in 1536, when Christian iii annexed Norway to the kingdom, which consequently also embraced Lutheranism.14 The last territory to fall was distant Iceland, a possession of Denmark. The establishment of Lutheranism proved more complex there. The bishop of Skálholt, Gissur Einarsson, had switched to the evangelical faith, while the bishop of the diocese of Holar, Jón Arasson, remained firmly Catholic. His plight was evidently known to the Holy See, for it is recorded that Paul iii wrote to him at an unspecified date to encourage him to remain faithful to Rome. But his adversaries overcame the resistance of the bishop, who was beheaded in 1550. With his death, the last resistance to Lutheranism in the entire Scandinavian area came to an end.15

4

Poland-Lithuania

Given its geographical proximity to the Germanic world, Poland, to which Lithuania was then united, was exposed to the infiltration of Lutheranism. This circumstance explains why the papal nuncios exercised special attention to the religious policy of the rulers. Thus, in 1520, the nuncio Zaccaria Ferreri induced King Sigismund to prohibit the importation of Luther’s works. Similarly, on 7 March 1523, under pressure from the papal envoy, the Dalmatian

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Bernhard Schimmelpfenning, Il Papato: Antichità, Medioevo, Rinascimento, Roberto Paciocco ed., [La corte dei papi, 16], (Rome: Viella, 2006), 284–285. Poul Georg Lindhardt, Skandinavische Kirchengeschichte seit dem 16. Jahrhundert, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 236–239, 263–264, 276–279. Pastor, Storia dei papi, v, p. 659; Michael Fell, And Some Fell into Good Soil. A History of Christianity in Iceland, [American University Studies, Series vii: Theology and Religion, 201], (New York: Lang, 1999), 94–97.

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bishop Thomas Crnič, the sovereign issued an edict in which, on pain of death, he forbade the propagation of Luther’s doctrines, as well as the import, reading, and distribution of publications by Protestant authors.16 Despite their severity, it does not appear that, in fact, these measures were strictly enforced. But above all, it is striking that the anti-Lutheran orientation—at least in principle—of Sigismund’s domestic policy was matched by an opposite orientation in his foreign policy. The news that Sigismund had, in 1525, invested his own nephew Albert of Hohenzollern, until then Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, as Duke of Prussia, in spite of the fact that he had in the meantime converted to Lutheranism, caused a sensation in the Roman Curia, and in Clement vii personally. The scandal was twofold: firstly, because the possessions of the Order, constituting the new duchy, were ecclesiastical property that the king could not dispose of; secondly, because Albert’s abandonment of his religious vows was judged to be perjury.17 Apparently, the scandal had no consequences. However, the lack of rigor with which the royal edicts were enforced had the effect that, towards the end of Sigismund i’s reign, Poland had become a multi-faith kingdom: Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, anti-Trinitarians, and even members of the Bohemian Brethren sect, who had penetrated the neighboring kingdom, coexisted there. Moreover, the country had become a land of refuge for those foreign dissenters—particularly Italians—who did not recognize themselves in any established confession.18 But aggravating Rome’s worries was the pro-Protestant orientation of the new King Sigismund Augustus (1548–1572). The latter, in 1556, sent an embassy to Rome to request the concession of communion under the two species, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, the abolition of ecclesiastical celibacy, and the convocation of a national council.19 The request, of reformed into-

16

17 18

19

Janusz Tazbir, A State without Stakes: Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, [The Library of Polish Studies, 3], (New York: Kósciuszko Foundation, Twayne, 1973), 36. Natalia Nowakowska, King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: the Reformation before Confessionalisation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 135–146. Tazbir, A State without Stakes, 54; Domenico Caccamo, Eretici Italiani in Moravia, Polonia Transilvania (1558–1611): Studi e documenti, [Biblioteca del Corpus Reformatorum Italicorum] (DeKalb, Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 1970), 14ff., 75ff.; Agostino Borromeo, “Il dissenso religioso, tra il clero italiano e la prima attività del Sant’Ufficio romano,” in: Per il Cinquecento religioso italiano. Clero, cultura, società. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Siena, 27–30 June 2001, ed. Maurizio Sangalli, 2 vols., (Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2003), 461, n. 25. Maciej Ptaszyński, “The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth,” in: A Companion to the Ref-

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nation, could not have come at a less opportune time, since—as we shall see later—in October 1555, a new papal nuncio arrived in Poland to whom Paul iv (1555–1559) had entrusted the eradication of all forms of heresy as his main task.20

5

France

In France, the papal inquisition had been active during the entire fifteenth century. From the perspective of Rome, inquisitorial courts and episcopal tribunals were to combine their efforts to combat the spread of reformed doctrines. This is attested by Clement vii’s bull of 30 August 1533 addressed to the archbishops, bishops, and inquisitors of France. With it, the pope asked the addressees to take action in the prosecution of heretics and Lutherans, watching over the sincerity of abjurers.21 It is likely that the Roman Curia did not have a clear perception of the religious situation in France. Firstly, they were apparently unaware that only in the south of the country were inquisitorial courts still operating, whereas in the north they had practically disappeared. Secondly, they were apparently unaware that the fight against heresy had in fact been taken over for decades by the secular power through the parlements (the courts of appeal in the French judicial system).22 It should be noted that parlements were not limited to conducting trials against laymen and clergymen, but even claimed jurisdiction over the work of the papal inquisitors themselves. Thus, in 1532, the parlement of Provence suspended the inquisitor Jean de Roma from his post, accused of using irregular procedures in the trials he conducted. Similarly, the Parlement of Toulouse did not hesitate, in 1538, to condemn the inquisitor of Languedoc, Louis Rochette, to be burnt at the stake for heresy, while the following year the same punishment was inflicted on his socius (substitute), Antoine Riccardi for the crimes of heresy and sodomy.23

20 21 22

23

ormation in Central Europe, eds. Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock, [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition] (Leiden, Boston: Brill, [2015]), 52–54. See below note no. 86. Gabriel Audisio, Les vaudois du Luberon, Une minorité en Provence (1460–1560), (Gap, Merindol: Association d’etudes vaudoises et historiques du Luberon, 1984), 76–87, esp. 71. William Monter, “France: The Failure of Repression, 1520–1563,” in: La Réforme en France et en Italie. Contacts, Comparaisons et contrastes, eds. Philip Benedict, Silvana Seidel Menchi, et al., [Collection de l’École Française de Rome, 384] (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2007), 465–479. William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 60–61, 65–66, 76–79.

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On the other hand, it must also be noted that in the fight against heresy in France, an important part was played by a pontifical body, the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris. Between 1520 and 1521, it issued a Determinatio in which no fewer than 104 of Luther’s propositions were condemned. In 1544, it published a printed Index of Forbidden Books, which was, from the beginning, a reference text used also outside France. This first edition was followed by five others, the last of which was printed in 1556.24 An attempt to bring anti-heretical repression back within the pontifical sphere of competence was implemented by Paul iv (1555–1559). The pope regarded the fight against heresy as a priority. It is therefore not surprising that he asked Henry ii in April 1556 to appoint three inquisitors-general for the kingdom of France. The king appointed Cardinals Odet de Chatillon, Charles de Lorraine (from the family of the Dukes de Guise) and Charles de Bourbon. The Parlement of Paris registered the act of appointment, but in fact the decision remained a dead letter.25 In spite of the severity of secular and ecclesiastical authorities, everything seems to indicate that the danger of the spread of Calvinism was underestimated. It is very true that the Paris parlement had the works of John Calvin burnt in 1544. Nevertheless, the penetration of Calvinism in France at the beginning of the second half of the sixteenth century was apparently not noticed. It appears that from 1555 onwards, eighty-eight pastors trained in Geneva entered the kingdom;26 in 1562, more than 800 congregations had been established, and around 1570, about 1200 churches could be counted: the adherents were referred to as Huguenots, an appellation of uncertain origin.27 But the most conspicuous phenomenon consisted in the adherence to the new confession of members of the high nobility such as Gaspard, Count of Coligny and Admiral of France, Cardinal Odet de Chatillon, a prince of royal blood, the Prince of Condé, Louis de Bourbon, Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, and her son Henri of Navarre, the future Henry iv.28 24

25 26 27

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Index de l’Université de Paris, 1544, 1545, 1547, 1549, 1551, 1556, eds. Jésus Martínez de Bujanda, Francis M. Higman, James K. Farge, et al., [Index des livres interdits, i], (Sherbrooke; Genève: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance, 1985) 42, 49, 54–55, 68–74. Nancy Lyman Roelker, One king, one faith: the Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 231–232. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 26. Philippe Chareyre and Raymond A. Mentzer, “Organising the Churches and Reforming Society,” in: A Companion to the Huguenots, eds. Raymond A. Mentzer and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, [Brill’s Companion to the Christian Tradition, 68], (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016) 17–42, esp. 17. Hugues Daussy, “Huguenot Political Thought and Activities,” in: A Companion to the Huguenots, 66–89, esp. 66–70.

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The kingdom seemed destined to experience a deep rupture, but, as we shall see below, this did not in fact happen.

6

The English Reformation

British historiography has long adopted the term “English Reformation” to emphasise how the schism of the Church of England from the Church of Rome had indigenous origins and peculiar developments that had nothing to do with the other Reformation movements that had established themselves on the continent. The tensions of Henry viii, who ascended the throne in 1509, with the papacy were to arise when the sovereign requested the declaration of the nullity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (aunt of the Emperor Charles v) from whom he had no male heirs. To achieve his aim, Henry viii defended the thesis that the dispensation granted by Julius ii, thanks to which he had been able to marry his brother Arthur’s widow, was invalid. This was a specious argument. In reality, the sovereign intended to take his mistress Anne Boleyn as his legitimate consort, in the hope of having from the second marriage the male heir he did not have.29 Clement vii was informed of the sovereign’s claim in the spring of 1528. He had at first accepted the request of Henry viii’s ambassadors to have the case heard in England and had entrusted the responsibility to two cardinal legates, the Englishman Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England, and the Italian Lorenzo Campeggi. The latter, however, had been secretly instructed to drag out the proceedings. This recommendation by Clement vii was a consequence of the protest made to him by Charles v. The emperor, in fact, was opposed to a procedure that would harm his aunt’s honor. The appeal to Rome subsequently presented by the queen altered the pope’s plan, so that on 16 July 1529, he was able to take the case to himself.30 After this decision, the Pontiff showed excessive condescension towards the sovereign both because he did not want to provoke a further religious fracture in Europe and because, ill-informed on internal English affairs, he was convinced of Henry viii’s substantial loyalty to Rome. The latter, on the other hand, having realized that he would never obtain a declaration of nullity from Clement vii, decided to take another path that would allow him to achieve his

29

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Agostino Borromeo, “Introduzione alla storia religiosa dell’Inghilterra,” in: Storia religiosa dell’Inghilterra, Adriano Caprioli and Luciano Vaccaro, eds., (Milan: la Casa di Matriona; Gazzada: Fondazione Ambrosiana Paolo vi, 1992), 7–67. Guy Bedouelle and Patrick Le Gal, Le “divorce” du roi Henri viii. Études et documents, (Genève: Droz; [Paris]: [distributor Champion-Slatkine], 1987), 24–25.

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aim by evading papal jurisdiction. Thus, in early 1533, he obtained from the surrendering pontiff the appointment to the primatial see of Canterbury of an active supporter of his cause, the pro-Protestant theologian Thomas Cranmer. The following May, the compliant new archbishop declared the king’s marriage to Catherine null and void and validated his privately contracted marriage to Anne.31 Informed of the facts, Clement vii took the necessary measures, but left an opening for a possible change of heart on the part of the sovereign: on 11 July 1533, he declared the marriage with Anne Boleyn null and void and threatened excommunication against Henry if he did not restore Catherine to her position as legitimate consort by September. The sovereign retaliated by having Parliament pass a series of laws designed to diminish Rome’s authority over the Church of England and strengthen that of the Crown. Having thus prepared the ground, the sovereign took the final step. On 3 November 1534, he obtained Parliament’s approval of the Act of Supremacy by which he was given the title of “sole Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England.”32 The Act of Supremacy sanctioned a break with the papacy that would prove to be definitive. A schism had taken place without heresy, if one disregards the denial of the doctrine of papal primacy. For everything else, no changes were made in the liturgy, nor was any dogma of Catholic theology denied.33 Meanwhile, on 13 October 1534, Paul iii Farnese had succeeded the yielding Clement vii. Circumstances prompted him to take a firmer attitude than that of his predecessor. On 30 August, he had the text of a second excommunication against Henry viii prepared. As a consequence, the sovereign’s ecclesiastical policy became more radicalized between 1536 and 1539, with the progressive suppression of monasteries and convents and the sale of their property.34 Henry viii died on 28 January 1547. He was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, the son of his third wife Jane Seymour, under the name Edward vi. The regency had been entrusted to a council, but was in fact directed by his maternal uncle Edward Seymour and, after him, until 1551, by John Dudley. Under the subsequent leadership of the two noblemen and with the collaboration of Archbishop Cranmer, the doctrine of the Church of England underwent a change inspired by the theology of Calvin and Zwingli. In this context, the 31 32

33 34

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer. A Life, (New Haven, London: Yale Univerrsity Press, 2016), 86–98. Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, The King’s Great Matter. A Study of Anglo-Papal Relations, 1527– 1534, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1967), 294–300; John J. Scarisbrick, Enrico 8, trans. Valeria Lalli, [Biblioteca storica] (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984), 393–416. Borromeo, “Introduzione,” 25–26. Scarisbrick, Enrico 8, 400 ff.; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 175–236.

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papacy could not take any initiative. However, the danger of an England in the process of joining Protestant extremism prompted Julius iii (1550–1555) to settle the pending dispute between the Holy See and France by establishing closer relations with Henry ii.35 A turning point was to occur in 1553, at the death of sixteen-year-old Edward vi. He was to be succeeded by Mary Tudor, born in 1516 and the only surviving daughter of Henry viii and Catherine of Aragon. This unexpected circumstance could not but create great expectations in Rome.36 Indeed, the new queen set herself the task of restoring Catholicism in England and reestablishing full communion with Rome. Bishops who had adhered to the Reformation were imprisoned or sentenced to death. Mary was also able to gain the support of Parliament, so that within a few months all anti-Catholic legislation enacted under Henry viiii and Edward vi was revoked and the papal primacy fully recognised. On 25 July 1554, after long negotiations, Mary married Prince Philip of Spain (the future Philip ii), son of Emperor Charles v, in London.37 The expectations of the Holy See could not have been more fully met. Since Mary’s accession to the throne, Julius iii had destined Cardinal Reginald Pole as legate in England. However, the cardinal, as a profound connoisseur of the English religious situation, was aware that, once the initial resistance had been overcome, one of the greatest obstacles to the Catholic restoration was the reintroduction of the religious orders and the reconstitution of their estates. Consequently, he had obtained broad decision-making powers in this matter from Julius iii.38 Under Pole’s direction, a plan for recatholicization was drawn up: a synod, which met in London in 1555–1556, approved regulations concerning the restoration of papal authority, anti-heretical repression, the reform of clerical abuses, the re-establishment of ecclesiastical celibacy, and the spiritual training of the laity.39 On the other hand, the restoration of religious orders with 35

36 37

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Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 26–28; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant. Edward vi and the Protestant Reformation, (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 16–17, 28–29, 200 ff. David Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor. Politics, Government and Religion in England, 1553– 1558, (London; New York: Longman, 19912) 96 ff., 157 ff. John Edwards, Mary i England Catholic Queen, (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2011), 14–20, 136–191; Eamon Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition. Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 200ff. Pastor, Storia dei papi, vi, 196 ff.; Edwards, Mary i, 214–215. Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: prince & prophet, (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 235ff.; John Edwards, Archbishop Pole, (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 169 ff.

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their patrimony proved impossible to achieve due to lack of funds.40 But decisive for the success of the work of Catholic restoration undertaken by Pole were the suspicions that Paul iv harbored about his orthodoxy, which is why he revoked his appointment as papal legate. The cardinal was careful, under pressure from the Queen, not to leave England. Be that as it may, Mary’s reign was short and fate would have it that on the same day of her death (17 November 1558), Cardinal Pole also died.41 According to the order of succession, Mary was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth i, daughter of Henry viii and Ann Boleyn. The accession of the new sovereign to the throne gave Rome the illusion that, under the new reign, England would remain Catholic. This explains why Pius iv refrained from issuing an excommunication against her. For his part, Philip ii, as former prince consort, shared the same course of action.42 He even entertained the vague and illusory project of being able to restore Catholicism in England and had kept his own ambassador in London for this purpose. One can well understand the Spanish sovereign’s irritated reaction when he learnt that Pius v, on 25 February 1570, without having given him prior notice, had issued an excommunication against Elizabeth i: but despite Philip ii’s protests, the papal decision was irrevocable.43 Sixtus v (1585–1590), in spite of the excommunication fulminated by Pius v, did not despair of obtaining Elizabeth’s conversion. The capital execution of Mary Stuart in 1587 and the alliances for war signed by the English queen with Protestant states and princes were to dash the papal hopes. Sixtus v, consequently, promised substantial financial aid to Philip ii, who was arming a powerful fleet to invade England. The disastrous outcome of the Spanish naval expedition—operated by the emphatically named “Invincible Armada”—also marked the defeat of papal expectations: consequently, Sixtus v refused to pay the promised subsidy to Spain. For her part, Elisabeth reinforced her antiCatholic policy by securing support for the Republic of the United Provinces and Henry of Navarre.44 40

41 42 43

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Rex Hartley Pogson, “Revival and Reform in Mary’s Tudor Church: A Question of Money,” in: The English Reformation Revised, ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19903), 139–156. Edwards, Mary i, 332–335. Philip Hughes, Rome and the Counter-Refomation in England (2016 reprint of London: Burns Oates, 1944), 164–171, 198–200. Agostino Borromeo, “Filippo ii e il papato,” in: Filippo ii e il Mediterraneo, ed. Luigi Lotti and Rosario Villari, [Percorsi, 42], (Rome-Bari: glf editori Laterza, 2003), 477–535, esp. 492. Klaus Jaitner, Instrucktionen und Relationen für die Nuntien und Legaten an den Europäischen Fürstenhöfen von Sixtus v. bis Innozenz ix. (1585–1591) [Römische Quartalschrift für

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The Reformation in Scotland

For the purposes of the Holy See’s politico-religious policies, the small kingdom of Scotland, although located on the northern periphery of Europe, was a valuable pawn in the papacy’s international chessboard, not least because of the reigning family’s kinship links with the major European dynasties. This explains the honorary distinctions bestowed by Rome on the rulers of the Stuart family: James iv, husband of a sister of the future Henry viii, had received the Golden Rose in 1491, a precious sceptre in 1494, and, in 1507, a finely chiselled sword. In addition, the papacy was always complacent in meeting the Crown’s requests for episcopal appointments.45 A case in point is Julius ii’s appointment of eleven-year-old Alexander, the natural son of James iv and a former pupil of Erasmus, as archbishop of the primatial archdiocese of St Andrews in 1504..46 With the promulgation of the Act of Supremacy, Scotland found itself in the situation of a kingdom bordering a schismatic state and in the potential position of a military base for a possible Catholic invasion of England. Under the circumstances, James iv’s successor, James v, lost no opportunity to gain all possible advantages from Clement vii and Paul iii. The latter actively ensured that the king’s plan to marry a Catholic princess was brought to a conclusion, as indeed it was, in 1537, with the marriage of the king and Madeleine, daughter of Francis i. For the occasion, on 17 January 1537, the pontiff sent James v the blessed cap and sword. The marriage, however, was very short-lived: the bride died a few months later. A year later, James v contracted a second marriage to Marie de Guise, by whom he had a daughter, Mary Stuart.47 The Calvinist turn of religion in Scotland was brought about by John Knox. A Scot, he had the opportunity to spread Calvin’s doctrines at home since 1547. But the accession of Queen Mary to the English throne led him to leave the country and take refuge in Geneva.48 His actions would result in turning Scotland into a Calvinist kingdom.49

45 46 47 48

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Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte, 68. Supplemendband]. (Freiburg; Basel; Wien: Verlag Herder, 2021), 28–29. Jane E.A. Dawson, Scotland Re-formed, 1488–1587, [The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, 6], (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 67–69. Hierarchia Catholica Medii et Recentioris Aevi, Konrad Eubel, Guilelmus van Gulik, et al., iii, (Münster: Regensberger, 1923), 108. Pastor, Storia dei papi, v, 649; Dawson, Scotland Re-formed, 116–117. Alastair A. McDonald, “Propagating Religious Reformation in Scotland to ca. 1567,” in: A Companion to the Reformation in Scotland, ca. 1525–1638. Framework of Change and Development, ed. William Ian P. Hazlett, (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022), 23–50. Jane E.A. Dawson, “John Knox and the Scottish Protestant Reformation,” ibid, 105–127.

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The Papacy, Charles v, and the Empire

Ever since the Diet of Worms in 1521, there was the call for a council. As the papal nuncio Girolamo Aleandro reported at the time in an alarmist tone, for nine-tenths of the population the war cry was “Luther,” for the other tenth “death to the Roman Curia,” while all were clamoring for a council.50 A first, partial response to the invectives reported by the nuncio came from Adrian vi, through the nuncio Francesco Chieregati, sent as his papal representative to the Nuremberg Diet of 1522. In the statements made by Chieregati, besides reiterating his condemnation of Luther and his followers and inviting states and cities to come to their senses, the pope admitted that there was a need not only to reform the practices of the Roman Curia, but also to heal the entire Church corrupted by abuses and the failure to apply strict ecclesiastical discipline. This was a courageous admission, but the pontiff’s untimely death on 14 September 1523 prevented him from carrying out this ambitious program. It must be noted, however, that Chieregati’s speech was a failure, because it led the Diet to reiterate the demand for a free council on German soil.51 Adrian vi’s successor, Clement vii, like his cousin Leo x, was more interested in his own family’s interests than those of the Church, and did not want to hear about the Council, because it, with its reforms of the Curia and the entire Church, would have meant less temporal power and less income for the papacy. On the other hand, the traditional pro-French policy of the Medici that he followed must have earned him the hostility of Charles v. Once the conflict with Charles v had been resolved, culminating with the Sack of Rome and definitively settled with the solemn coronation as emperor, celebrated by the pope in Bologna in 1530,52 Clement vii had to face the question of the council. Prompted by the emperor—who saw the future assembly as the only instrument to settle the religious split in Germany—the pontiff promised to convene the council on condition that the Protestants committed themselves to a prior return under papal obedience. From that moment until his death, Clement vii used every pretext to prevent the ecumenical assembly from being held.53

50 51 52 53

Quoted in Cavallotto, “Lutero,” 255. Pastor, Storia dei papi, iv, 2, 83–92; Hubert Jedin, Storia del Concilio di Trento, 4 vols in 5, trans. Gino Cecchi et al. (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1973–1981), i, 237–242. Karl Brandi, Carlo v, trans. Leone Ginzburg and Ettore Bassan (Torino: Einaudi, 1961), 237– 242, 272–278. Jedin, Storia del Concilio di Trento, i, 290–291, 303–324; Franz Xaver Bischof, “Il Concilio di Trento. L’istituzione della “Chiesa confessionale” e i suoi effetti. Gesuiti, Cappuccini e ordini femminili,” in: Storia religiosa della Germania, 283–308, esp. 284–285.

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His successor Paul iii had become convinced of the need to convene the council. The new pope belonged, from a generational point of view—he was born in 1468—to the world of the Renaissance. He belonged to it from the aspect of his censorious former private life and from that of his nepotism. He was gifted with acute intelligence and innate wisdom. He understood that, however unwelcome, council and church reform were inevitable. In fact, after formally committing himself to Charles v, Paul iii convened the council for 23 May 1537 in Mantua. The Duchy of the Po Valley was an imperial fiefdom and therefore, as a territory not subject to the papacy, could be a suitable location for the demands of the Protestant counterpart. However, the princes adhering to the Reformation (united since 1531 in the League of Schmalkalden), as well as France refused to accept the invitation. And this refusal was also repeated when, on 8 October of that same year, Paul iii moved the assembly to Vicenza, in the territory of the Venetian Republic. Noting the failure of his initiative, Paul iii suspended the council sine die.54 A few years later, on the independent initiative of Charles v, meetings were organized between a Protestant and a Catholic delegation, first in Hagenau, in June 1540, then in Worms, between the end of 1540 and the beginning of 1541, finally in Regensburg, between April and July 1541. In view of this event, Paul iii appointed Cardinal Gaspare Contarini, whose moderate views could have facilitated an agreement with the Protestants. Despite initial successes, the talks failed because the parties could not agree on the doctrine of transubstantiation.55 While the failure of the Regenburg talks confirmed Paul iii’s conviction that only a council could put an end to theological differences, the development of events reinforced Charles v’s conviction that there was no other way to bend the Protestant princes than to resort to arms. He succeeded in convincing the pope to support him: in 1545, Paul iii had him sent huge subsidies in money and pledged to send papal auxiliary troops, but on the condition that they would only be used to fight the Protestants. In July 1546, Charles v unleashed war against the League of Schmalkalden, which he defeated at the Battle of Mühlberg (24 April 1547).56 In the wake of his victory, the emperor initiated his own religious policy at the Diet of Augsburg (1547–1548). At that 54

55

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Jedin, Il concilio di Trento, i, 330–397; Alain Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente (1518– 1563), [Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 295] (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, Palais Farnèse, 1997), 98–108. Alfredo Marranzini, Paolo Prodi, and Paolo Ricca, “L’azione e le idee di Gaspare Contarini. (Tavola rotonda),” in: Gaspare Contarini e il suo tempo. Atti Convegno di Studi, Venezia 11– 13 marzo 1985, ed. Francesca Cavazzani Romanelli, (Venice: Comune di Venezia; Studium Cattolico Veneziano, 1988), 167–242. Pastor, Storia dei papi, v, 496–497; Brandi, Carlo v, 542–550.

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assembly, on 15 May 1548, he promulgated a text—which has gone down in history as the Augsburg Interim—by which he obliged the Protestants to adopt an essentially Catholic doctrine until the council had reached its conclusions, while granting them communion under the two species and the marriage of clerics. Of course, Paul iii, to whom the document was communicated afterwards, disapproved of it, also because, in the meantime, the council had begun its work.57

9

Council of Trent

In fact, the council had started at the end of 1545. Since 1542, the Diet of Speyer had agreed to celebrate the ecumenical assembly in Trent, a principality of the Empire. Paul iii, perplexed by this choice, reluctantly accepted it. But the first convocation in Trent (22 May 1542) was a failure. Two weeks later, Francis i declared war on Charles v. Only the conclusion of the peace of Crepy between the two contenders (18 September 1544) allowed Paul iii to reconvene the council in Trent for 15 March 1545. In fact, the assembly was opened on 13 December 1545, in the presence of only thirty-one bishops, whose number, however, increased with time. The council was to be held in three different periods. In the first period (1545–1548), the majority of the assembly, in its eighth session on 11 March 1547, decided to move to Bologna because the symptoms of an epidemic plague had appeared in Trent. The decision was opposed by a minority of bishops, mainly Spanish, who refused to move the Council, but above all the decision met with the firm opposition of Charles v, so that in the second half of 1548 the Council was dissolved. When Paul iii died on 10 November 1549, his successor was Cardinal Giovanni Maria del Monte (1550–1555), who had been president of the first phase of the Council. He reconvened the assembly in Trent, which continued its work from 1 May 1551: it came to a standstill again due to the resumption of hostilities in the Empire. Charles v asked the pope to interrupt the work of the council, a request that Julius iii granted with the brief of 25 April 1552. This was a temporary suspension. In fact, the Council was only reconvened in 1562, by Pius iv, and finally concluded on 4 December 1563.58

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Pastor, Storia dei papi, 618–623; cf. Cavallotto, “Lutero e la Riforma,” 281, footnotes 60–62. In addition to the works already cited by Jedin, Storia del concilio di Trento, ii–iv, 2; Alain Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente; for the most recent bibliography see The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Trent, ed. Nelson H. Minnich, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

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One cannot help but notice that, despite the results achieved by the assembly, the original aim—the return of the Protestants under the authority of Rome, so longed for by Charles v—was not even remotely achieved. The German Reformers went to the council only for a limited period of the second phase, without their presence initiating the desired dialogue. The final outcome of the work of the assembly was—as is known—a double series of decrees and canons: those of a doctrinal nature and those of a disciplinary nature. With the former, the main points of Catholic doctrine were reaffirmed against the denials of the Protestants and various Protestant theological propositions were condemned as heretical. With the latter, the guidelines for an incisive reform of the Church were outlined and the premises were laid for the general resumption of a more intense religious life, both among the clergy and the laity.59

10

Reinforcement of Anti-heretical Repression in the Catholic World

Starting with the pontificate of Paul iii, an ecclesiastical policy was initiated in Rome aimed at reinforcing anti-heretical repression in those parts of Europe where the papacy could still exercise its full authority, namely Portugal, peninsular Italy,60 the southern Netherlands, and Spain. The papal inquisition had not been introduced in Portugal during the Middle Ages.61 However, since the end of the fifteenth century, the Lusitanian Crown had begun to be alarmed—as, decades earlier, had the Catholic Monarchs—by the spread of the heresy of crypto-Judaism, i.e. the return to the clandestine practice of their original religion by numerous Jewish converts (called ‘new Christians’, cristãos novos).62 Since 1516, King Manuel had been working

59

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The complete edition of the decrees and canons of the Council of Trent is published in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum decreta, bilingual edition, ed. Alberto Alberigo et al., 3rd ed. (Bologna: Istituto per le scienze religiose, 2013), 660–799. It should be borne in mind that Sicily and Sardinia were subject to the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition – see Agostino Borromeo, “L’inquisizione nell’Italia spagnola nell’età di Filippo ii: strutture e organizzazione in Sardegna,” in: Spagna e Stati italiani nell’età di Filippo ii. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Storici nel iv Centenario della morte di Filippo ii, Cagliari, 5–7 November 1998, eds. Bruno Anatra and Francesco Manconi (Cagliari: am&d, 1999), 391–413. Elvira Cunha de Azevedo Mea, A inquisição de Coimbra no século xvi: a istitução, os homens e a sociedade, (Porto: Fundacion Antonio de Almeida, 1997), 30. Giuseppe Marcocci, I custodi dell’ortodossia: inquisizione e Chiesa nel Portogallo del Cinquecento, (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2004), 40–42. 27–28.

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to obtain from the Holy See the creation of an inquisitorial structure similar to the one already operating in the kingdoms of neighboring Spain. However, the negotiations would only begin fifteen years later and would drag on for more than thirty years. The first step was taken on 17 December 1531 with the issuing by Clement vii of the Bull Cum ad nihil, by which he appointed Fray Diogo da Silva, confessor of King John iii, as inquisitor in Portugal.63 Note how the bull specified that the new inquisitor was competent to judge not only the crime of crypto-Judaism, but also all other heresies, starting with Lutheranism. In Rome, the fight against the spread of reformed doctrines in the remaining Catholic countries was now considered one of the priority objectives of anti-heretical repression. The bull, however, did not satisfy the court in Lisbon, probably because it did not grant the Crown the same privileges that had been obtained by the Spanish sovereigns. Thus began a long diplomatic negotiation between Lisbon and Rome, the time of which was prolonged by the pressure exerted, in opposition to the royal demands, by representatives of the “new Christians” in the Roman Curia. The negotiations were concluded on 16 July 1547, when Paul iii promulgated the apostolic constitution Meditatio cordis. With it, the inquisitor general was granted the power to appoint peripheral inquisitors and employees.64 The Portuguese Inquisition was thus given its final form: in terms of structure, organization, and procedures, and its relative autonomy from the papacy, it was now entirely similar to the Spanish Inquisition. In the meantime, the pontiff had reformed the inquisitorial apparatus operating in peninsular Italy by means of the constitution Licet ab initio of 21 July 1542. The initiative coincided with the time when rumors were becoming increasingly alarming in Rome about the spread of reformed doctrines in the Italian peninsula, particularly in Ferrara, Modena, Lucca, and Naples. The papal decision, however, marked the defeat, within the Sacred College, of those moderate elements open to dialogue. They were referred to as “spirituals” (such as the Englishman Reginald Pole or the Milanese Giovanni Morone). It also signified the prevalence of the intransigent positions represented by the rigid Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa (the future Paul iv), probably the inspirer of the document.65 63

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Bull Cum ad nihil of Clement vii to Diogo da Silva, Rome 17 December 1531 in: The Apostolic See and the Jews, ed. Shlomo Simonsohn, 8 vols., (Toronto; Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988–1991), [iv], 1828–1830. Constitution Meditatio cordis of Paul iii, Rome 16 July 1547 in The Apostolic See, [v], 2596– 2598; Giuseppe Marcocci and José Pedro Paiva, História da inquisição portuguesa, 1536– 1821, (Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros, 2013), 38. Agostino Borromeo, “La congregazione cardinalizia dell’Inquisizione (xvi–xviii secolo),” in: Linquisizione: Atti del Simposio internazionale: Città del Vaticano, 29–31 ottobre 1998, ed.

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In the beginning of the constitution, the pontiff stated how he had hoped that the authority of the general council destined to meet would induce those who had turned away from the Catholic faith to return to it. Since the meeting of the council had been postponed, the pope had decided to set up a special commission (soon to be known as the cardinals’ congregation of the Inquisition or congregation of the Holy Office) composed of five cardinals and presided over by the aforementioned Carafa. The cardinals were given the broadest powers to proceed against heretics and suspected heretics.66 Thanks also to the progressive renewal of the network of peripheral tribunals,67 the foundations were thus laid for the inquisitorial structure, controlled directly by the Holy See and later called the Roman Inquisition (to distinguish it from the pre-existing Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions). Cardinal Carafa exercised uncontested hegemony over the new body and directed its work with the intransigence that was in keeping with not only his personality but also his alarmist perception of the impending danger. The line of rigor he adopted and pursued with an autonomy of action not contemplated by the original mandate was to create moments of tension, both with Paul iii and with Julius iii. The latter was to discover, to his great disappointment, that, unbeknownst to him, Carafa had initiated inquisitorial proceedings against members of the high ecclesiastical hierarchies, such as, among others, the Bishop of Bergamo, Vittore Soranzo, the Archbishop of Otranto, Pietro Antonio di Capua, as well as Cardinals Giovanni Morone and Reginald Pole, at that time legate in England.68 Having become pope himself, in 1555, with the name of Paul iv, Carafa did not fail to accentuate the repressive action of the congregation. On the one hand, he imprinted a more pressing rhythm to its activity; on the other, he

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idem, [Studi e Testi, 417], (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003) 323– 344, esp. 326. Constitution Licet ab initio of Paul iii of 21 July 1542 in Bullarium romanum. Bullarum, diplomatarum et privilegiorum Sanctorum Romanorum Pontificum …, ed. Francisco Gaude, 24 vols., (Torino: Seb. Franco, H. Fori et H. Dalmazzo editoribus, 1867–1872), vi, 344–346. Agostino Borromeo, “Il dissenso religioso tra il clero italiano e la prima attività del Sant’Ufficio romano,” in: Per il Cinquecento religioso italiano. Clero, cultura, società. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Siena, 27–30 June 2001, Maurizio Sangalli, ed., 2 vols., (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2003), ii, 455–485, esp. 467. On Pole, see note no. 39 above. On the other figures mentioned, see Borromeo, “Il dissenso religioso,” 474–477; Massimo Firpo, Vittore Soranzo vescovo ed eretico. Riforma della Chiesa e inquisizione nell’Italia del Cinquecento, (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 2006), 388ff.; Idem, La presa di potere dell’Inquisizione romana, 1550–1553, (Rome; Bari: glf editori Laterza 2014), 68ff.; Massimo Firpo and Germano Maifreda, L’eretico che salvò la Chiesa. Il cardinale Giovanni Morone e le origini della Controriforma, [Einaudi storia, 84], (Turin: Einaudi, 2019), 461ff.

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extended its sphere of action to new types of heretical crimes, such as simony and sodomy. Moreover, he severely prosecuted illustrious suspects, starting with Cardinal Morone who, in 1557, was imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo pending a formal trial for heresy. With the death of Paul iv in 1559, the new pope, Pius iv, who did not share his predecessor’s intransigent guidelines, took steps to bring the powers of the Holy Office back within their original limits. With the constitution Pastoralis officii munus of 14 October 1562, he confirmed the primitive competences of the dicastery and reserved to himself the pronouncement of the final judgement of trials against bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. Consequently, he acquitted Cardinal Morone, and with him, another prestigious ecclesiastic, the Protonotary Apostolic Pietro Carnesecchi. The ascent to the papal throne in 1566, with the name of Pius v, of Cardinal Michele Ghislieri, already a close collaborator of Paul iv, was to impart greater severity to the institution’s action. A clear proof of the new turnaround was the reopening of the trial against Carnesecchi and his condemnation to death on 21 September 1567. The competences of the dicastery were definitively fixed in the constitution Immensa aeterni Dei with which, on 22 January 1588, Sixtus v (himself a former inquisitor) proceeded to a radical restructuring of the Roman Curia, increasing the number of cardinalatial congregations to fifteen.69 The document placed the Congregatio Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis at the top of the list. The dicastery was given wide-ranging powers to prosecute cases of manifest heresy, schism, apostasy, magic, sorcery, abuse of the sacraments, as well as in all other cases in which a possible crime of heresy could be suspected. This extensive list seems to indicate that, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the danger of an Italy torn apart by irreversible confessional divisions could be considered definitively vanquished. It is a fact that the local courts of the Inquisition now mainly oriented their judicial activity on “minor crimes.”70 Another geographical area in which anti-heretical repression was strengthened was the Netherlands, which became the domain of Charles v in 1519, after the death of his grandfather Maximilian i. The papal inquisition had operated in those territories in the Middle Ages. The penetration of Lutheranism, first, and Anabaptism and Calvinism, later, led the emperor to appoint an inquisitor, in the person of a layman, François Vander Hulst. The latter was confirmed

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Constitution Immensa aeterni Dei of Sixtus v of 22 January 1588 in Bullarium Romanum, viii, 585–589. Agostino Borromeo, “L’inquisizione in Italia: aspetti e momenti dal xvi al xviii secolo,” in: Storia religiosa dell’Italia, Luciano Vaccaro ed., 2 vols., [Europa ricerche, 21], (Milano: Centro Ambrosiamo, 2016), i, 331–358, esp. 337, 344.

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by Adrian vi on 1 July 1523.71 However, the offences committed by the inquisitor led to his dismissal that same year. Clement vii, consequently, appointed three papal inquisitors on 21 February 1524, at the proposal of Charles v. They were subsequently, on 12 February 1525, subjected to the supreme authority of the Prince-Bishop of Liège, Erard de la Marck, as Inquisitor General. In fact, therefore, the fight against the crime of heresy remained under papal control. This situation was not to the liking of Charles v, who still hoped to introduce the Inquisition according to the Spanish model. The emperor did not succeed and neither did his son and successor Philip ii. The latter, after the rebellion of the northern provinces and the pacification of Ghent (8 November 1576), decided to entrust the anti-heretical repression to the diocesan ordinaries.72 The Protestant threat appeared in Spain later than in the rest of Europe. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the institution’s activity seems to have focused on the alumbrados and the followers of Erasmus.73 Substantial Lutheran outbreaks were discovered at the beginning of the second half of the century. In 1558, in Valladolid, the offenders were condemned to be burnt at the stake in two public executions on 21 May and 8 October 1559. In the same year, a similar end befell a Lutheran conventicle discovered in Seville: its members too were burnt at the stake on 24 September 1559 and 22 December 1560.74 The alarm caused by the presence of the Reformed in Spain was to induce the incumbent Inquisitor General, Fernando de Valdés, to appeal to Paul iv to strengthen the powers of the Spanish Inquisition. Pope Carafa did not hesitate to accept the request. On 4 January 1559, he issued a brief in which he authorized the court to hand over to the secular arm (i.e., to condemn to death) any defendant who attempted to convert third parties to the new doctrines. The death penalty could also be imposed on defendants who had recanted during the trial, if it turned out that the recantation was made out of fear of punishment and not as a result of sincere repentance. By another brief, promulgated

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Paul Frédéricq, Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis neederlandicae: verzamling van stukken betreffende de pauselijke en bischhoppelijke Inquisitie in de Nederlanden, 5 vols., (Gent: Vuylsteke, 1889–1906), iv, 188. Aline Goosens, Les inquisitions modernes dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux, 1520–1633, 2 vols., (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles 1997–1998), i, 137–164. Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España. Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo xvi, trans. Antonio Alatorre (Mexico, Buenos Aires: Fondo de cultura economica, 1966), 699ff.; Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition. An Historical Revision, (London: Yale University Press, 1997), 86–89. Helen Rawlings, The Spanish Inquisition, (Bologna: Society, 2008), 119–126.

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the following day, all licences granted to read forbidden books were revoked. Finally, on 7 January, the pontiff issued a further brief. With it, he granted the inquisitor general, for a two-year period, the faculty to institute trials against persons of ecclesiastical dignity (even archbishops, patriarchs, and primates), it being understood that the final sentence remained the exclusive competence of the Holy See.75 The latter document could not refer to the defendants of Valladolid and Seville, since they did not include any clergymen of episcopal rank. The general request of the Inquisitor General had, in reality, a single objective: to obtain the papal faculties to put on trial none other than the Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, the Dominican Bartolomé Carranza. The latter was the author of a work entitled Comentarios del Cathecismo Christiano, published in Antwerp in 1558. The text, even examined from the point of view of the strictest theology, is unquestionably orthodox. However, the wording of some expressions lent itself to being misunderstood and raising doubts as to the author’s right feeling in matters of faith. Additional factors were that the inquisitor general Valdés was personally hostile to him and that, even in his own religious order, Carranza counted brethren prejudiced against him.76 Be that as it may, on 22 August 1559 the archbishop was arrested and then imprisoned and tried. Thus began what was one of the most sensational trials in the history of the Inquisition. According to the pontifical norms in force, the final judgement rested with the Holy See. However, Philip ii had ended up adopting the position of Inquisitor General Valdés, according to whom the extradition of the accused to Rome would damage the authority of the Spanish Inquisition. The sovereign’s position was only superseded by Pius v: the unfortunate archbishop arrived in Rome in May 1567 and the trial resumed following procedures that were more respectful of the authority of the accused. The final sentence was not pronounced by Gregory xiii until 14 April 1576, almost seventeen years after the defendant’s imprisonment. Carranza was declared strongly (vehementer) suspected of heresy for certain propositions contained in the Catechism, and consequently sentenced to abjure them ad cautelam. The interminable judicial affair was to end sadly: a little over two weeks later, the archbishop breathed his last in prison.77

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José Luis G. Novalín, El Inquisidor General Fernando de Valdés (1483–1568). Su vida y su obra, (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 20082), 309–310. José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, El arzobispo Carranza ‘Tiempos recios’, 2 vols., (Salamanca: Publicaciones Universidad Pontificia; [Madrid]: Fundación universitaria española, 2003– 2004), i, 243–383; ii:153–268. Borromeo, “Filippo ii e il papato,” 516–519.

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After the conclusion of the Carranza trial, the Spanish Inquisition ceased to consider the fight against the spread of Protestantism a priority and, like the Roman Inquisition, concentrated its activity on the investigation of “causas menores.”78

11

The Post-Tridentine Papacy: Hopes Dashed and Ground Regained

After the conclusion of the Council of Trent, the prestige of the papacy grew. In fact, successive conclaves elected as popes cardinals with a higher moral profile than their predecessors, who were committed, each according to their own personality, to the internal reform of the Church and the fight against heresy. In some cases, hopes were disappointed; in others, expectations were fully met. Some hope seemed to be kindled in relation to the religious situation in Scotland. Before the beginning of the third phase of the Council, a historic reversal occurred in the ecclesiastical history of the kingdom. On 11 June 1560 Marie de Guise, widow of James v and Regent of the realm on behalf of her daughter Mary Stuart, who in turn had married King Francis ii of France, died. In the summer, the Scottish Parliament resolved that the only form of worship now permitted was the reformed form of worship; consequently, papal jurisdiction over the Catholic Church was abolished and the celebration of Mass and all the sacraments prohibited.79 The institution, as such, was not being suppressed, but it is clear that, under such conditions, the whole edifice was bound to collapse. On 5 December of the same year, Francis ii died, and Mary was left with no choice but to move to Scotland in order to preserve her throne. Pius iv sent the Jesuit Nicolaes Florensz (Gaudanus) to her to support her in her new responsibilities, but also to report to Rome on the religious situation in the country.80 But in spite of the political and diplomatic support of the Holy See—from Paul iv to Pius v—Mary’s political inexperience and her lack of knowledge of the kingdom made her lose the support of a large part of the nobility, so that she 78

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See Maria Helena Sánchez Ortega, “La inquisición y los ‘delitos menores’,” in: Actas del iv Congreso internacional encuentro de “las tres culturas”, Toledo, 30 septiembre-2 octubre 1985, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, (Toledo: Ayuntamiento de Toledo, 1988), 147–191, esp. 148–149. Dawson, Scotland Reformed, 212–213. Roy Scott Spurlock, “Post-Reformation Scottish Catholic Survival,” in A Companion to the Reformation in Scotland, 578–604, esp. 578; P. Begheyn, Goudanus (Florensz), Nicolaes in Diccionario Histórico de la Compañia de Jesús. Biográfico-Temático, eds. Charles O’Neill, S.I. and Joaquín Ma Domínguez, S.I., 4 vols., (Rome; Madrid: Inst. Historicum, S.I., 2001), ii, 1790–1791.

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decided, in July 1567, to abdicate in favour of her son (the future James vi) and, therefore, in May 1568 to take refuge in England with her cousin Elizabeth i. The latter, however, saw her as a rival, since Mary, in her position as Henry vii’s great-granddaughter, could legitimately aspire to the throne of England. For this reason, the queen confined her to various residences in the central part of the country. More than eighteen years later, Mary was accused of taking part in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth i. Convicted, she was sent to the gallows on 8 February 1587.81 Despite the deliberations of the Scottish Parliament in 1560 and the intricate political events, Catholicism survived. In this context, James Beaton, the exiled Archbishop of Glasgow, asked Gregory xiii (1572–1585) in 1584 to arrange for Scottish Jesuits to be sent to the kingdom, although initially only four arrived and the Jesuit mission never exceeded ten members. King James vi, who had been baptized according to the Catholic rite but in fact leaned towards Protestantism, had to resign himself to the fact that, in 1593, his wife, Anne of Denmark, had converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism. The news, which soon reached Rome, led Clement viii (1592–1605) to hope that Scotland could return under the authority of the papacy. In fact, the king maintained an ambiguous attitude, because he aspired to the Crown of England and did not want to antagonize the Catholic powers or even English Catholics. Clement viii’s hopes were dashed: on the death of Elizabeth i in 1603, James vi (who became James i of England) had given no sign of wanting to return to Catholicism, nor of granting English Catholics, let alone Scottish Catholics, freedom of worship.82 Another country where, after the council, it was rumored in Rome that the ancient religion could be restored was Sweden. John iii Vasa, son of Gustavus had succeeded in deposing his brother Eric xiv for dementia in 1568. The new ruler had married the Polish royal princess Katherin Jagellon, a Catholic. The queen had come to Sweden accompanied by Polish chaplains. Judging the situation to be favourable, a Norwegian Jesuit, but son of a Swedish father, Laurentius Nielsen (“Norvegus”) succeeded, in the middle of the year 1575, in breaking into the court and founding a college in Stockholm. Gregory xiii, doubting Nielsen’s abilities, sent the Society of Jesus’s secretary, Antonio Possevino, as superior of the mission in 1578. Possevino succeeded in obtaining the sovereign’s abjuration on 6 May 1578. John iii, however, intended to main-

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Pastor, History of the Popes, vii, 455–477; Idem, History of the Popes, viii, 372,392; on the queen, see Antonia Fraser’s classic biography, Mary Queen of Scots, 2 vols., (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009), ii, 12 ff.; Dawson, Scotland Reformed, 265–270, 316–319. Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei papi, cit., xi, pp. 355–365; Agostino Borromeo, “Clemente viii,” in Storia dei papi, iii, 249–269, esp. 258.

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tain certain practices of Lutheranism for at least a decade. Gregory xiii proved inflexible in denying his consent. As a result, the Jesuits’ relations with the Crown deteriorated and the two clerics had to leave Sweden in 1580.83 The king’s eldest son, educated as a Catholic by his mother’s Polish chaplains, was elected King of Poland in 1587 as Sigismund iii. Upon his father’s death in 1592, he also became King of Sweden. Clement viii saw the possibility of reconverting Sweden to Catholicism. But, despite his political support and the subsidies he sent, Sigismund iii proved to be a weak man, indecisive, afraid to take initiatives, and therefore prone to procrastinate any decisions. Consequently, in 1599, he was deposed from the Swedish throne and succeeded by his uncle Charles. The illusory hope that Poland and Sweden could form a single Catholic kingdom finally vanished.84 The two nations, threatened by Protestantism, where, on the other hand, the papacy succeeded in definitively consolidating Catholicism, were Poland and France. In Poland, as mentioned above, Paul iv had sent as nuncio an experienced person, the bishop of Verona, Luigi Lippomano, who arrived in the kingdom in October 1555.85 Significant detail: the new nuncio asked the pope to be accompanied by two Jesuit theologians. Paul iv appointed only one, but a very prestigious one, Alfonso Salmerón, one of the first companions of Ignatius of Loyola. And it was under these circumstances that the first member of the Society of Jesus entered Poland.86 The nuncio immediately made contact with the bishops—in particular with the bishop of Warmia, and future cardinal, Stanislaus Hosius (Stanisław Hozjusz), as well as with Catholic magnates. He visited several dioceses and convened a provincial council meeting at Łowicz, from 6 November to 11 November 1556. The Bishop of Verona left Poland at the beginning of 1557. Despite the brevity of his stay, it must be acknowledged that, under his leadership, Catholicism had been strengthened and the reform of the Church initiated.87 83

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Vello Helk, Laurentius Nicolai Norvegus s.j. En biografi met bidrag til belysning af romerkirkens forsøg på at gevinde Danmark-Norge i tiden fra reformationen til 1622, (København: G.E.C. Gad, 1966), 80–164; Oskar Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia: Jesuit Educatonal Strategy, 1553–1622, (Leiden, New York, København, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1992), xix–xxviii; Vello Helk, “Norvegus (Nielssen, Nilsen, Nicolai, Klosterlasse), Laurentius,” in: Diccionario Histórico, iii, 2835. Pastor, History of the Popes, xi, 379–400; Borromeo, “Clemente viii,” 259. Maciej Ptaszyński, “The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth,” 40–67, esp. 52–54. Acta Nuntiaturae Polonae, iii,1: Aloysius Lippomano (1555–1557), Henricus Damianus Wojtyska, cp, ed., (Romae: Institutum Historicum Polonicum, 1993), 20–21: Cardinal Carlo Carafa to Lippomano, Rome 18 July 1555. He informs that the pope has decided to send only one theologian, Salmerón. Henricus Damianus Wojtyska, “Introductio,” in Acta Nuntiaturae Polonae, iii,1, xii–xvi

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It was realized in Rome that the constant presence of a papal representative in Poland could produce unexpected fruits. It is significant that in the instructions given to Nuncio Giulio Ruggieri in 1565, it was stated that the dual purpose of his mission was to preserve and expand the Catholic faith. According to the curial language of those years, this meant fighting heresy and applying the Council’s reform decrees, which had already been promulgated in the kingdom by King Sigismund Augustus in 1564.88 The Society of Jesus played a leading role in the restoration of Catholicism. After the isolated presence of Salmerón, the Superior General Diego Laínez— at the request of Cardinal Hosius and evidently with the approval of Pius iv— sent nine Jesuits in November 1564. In 1565, the first college was opened in Braniewo, followed by several others, notably the Vilnius college in Lithuania. The latter was elevated to university status by Gregory xiii in 1579. While colleges were multiplying in Poland (in Poznán, Jorosłav, Pułtusk and other towns), a new college was founded in 1585 in the voivodship of Dorpat (presentday Estonia). To the Society’s educational and pastoral work, we must add a dynamic and fruitful commitment to the conversion of Protestants, which was instrumental in strengthening the Catholic Church.89 But the thorniest problem for the development of the Holy See’s strategy was the circumstance that in Poland the appointment of the sovereign was elective. In fact, the dynasty of the Jagiellons having died out with the death of Sigismund Augustus in 1572, the skill of the French ambassador to Poland and bishop of Valence, Jean de Monluc, was able to work in such a way as to steer the votes towards Henry of Valois, younger brother of the reigning sovereign, Charles ix of France.90 Elected on 11 May 1573, Henry refused to accept the regulations in favor of Protestants that he was asked to approve (the so-called Articuli Henriciani). A few months after his arrival in the kingdom, the death of his brother (30 May 1574) forced him to leave Poland to assume the Crown of France. In truth, it appears that Gregory xiii was in favor of the hypothesis

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Instruttione per il nuntio di Polonia, s. d., in Acta Nuntiaturae Polonae, vi, Iulius Ruggieri (1565–1568), eds. †Thaddeus Glemma and Stanislaus Bogaczewicz, (Romae: Institutum Historicum Polonicum, 1991), 7–16. Nello Helk, Die Jesuiten in Dorpat, 1583–1625. Ein Vorposten der Gegenreformation in Nordosteuropa, [Odensee University Studies in History and Social Sciences, 44], (Odense: Fyens Stifftsbogtry, 1977), 78–127; Ludwik Piechnik and Ludwik Grzebién, “Polonia,” in: Diccionario Histórico, iv, 3173–3187, esp. 3173–3177. Guy Le Thiec, “La Pologne, la Scandinavie et l’Empire russe,” in: Arlette Jouanna, Jacqueline Boucher, et al., Histoire et dictionnaire des guerres de religion, (Paris: R. Laffont, 1998), 605.

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that Henry could accumulate the two crowns.91 The Diet opposed this, so the Palatine of Transylvania, Stefan Báthory, was elected as successor to the now King of France. The latter ratified the conditions that Henry iii had refused to approve.92 When Báthory died (12 December 1586), there were two major candidates: in the armed clash between the opposing factions, Sigismund Vasa not only prevailed, but managed to take his competitor, Archduke Maximilian iii of Austria, prisoner. Sixtus v felt that the Holy See should intervene to restore peace between the two Catholic princes. To this end, in May 1588, he appointed Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini as legate a latere in Poland. The latter, with tact and skill, was able to resolve the conflict and get the parties to sign a peace treaty.93 We already know that, later elected Pope, with the name of Clement viii, Aldobrandini would not obtain from Sigismund, from 1592 also King of Sweden, the restoration of Catholicism in that kingdom.94 In another geographical area, France, the religious situation in the kingdom was one of the most worrying problems that the papacy, starting with Pius iv (1559–1565), had to face. The substantial presence of Calvinists in the kingdom had induced the regent Catherine de’ Medici—widow of Henry ii (deceased in 1559) and guardian of her minor son Charles ix95—to convene a national council in order to put an end to the discord. The pontiff opposed this, also because the Council of Trent was about to meet to celebrate its third phase. He consented, however, to the holding of a meeting between Catholics and Huguenots—the so-called Poissy Colloquies (Poissy—Saint Germain, September 1561-February 1562)—at which he was represented by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, a cardinal favored by the regent for his pro-French sentiments, and the Jesuit Diego Laínez, superior general of the Society of Jesus. They were in charge of overseeing the progress of the work in order to prevent a possible schism. The authority of the two papal envoys underlined the concern that the religious affairs of France aroused in Pius iv. The talks turned out to be a failure, apart from the decision of Catherine and the French bishops to send a delegation to the Council, which had meanwhile been reconvened in Trent.96 91

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Miroslaus Korolko and Henricus Damianus Wojtyska, cp, “Introductio,” in: Acta Nuntiaturae Polonae, ix: Vincentius Lauro (1572–1578), i: 25.vii.1572–30.ix.1574, Miroslaus Korolko and Henricus Damianus Wojtyska, cp, eds., (Romae: Institutum Historicum Polonicum Romae, 1994); ii: 1.x.1574–30.vi.1575, Miroslaus Korolko and Lucianus Olech, eds., (Romae: Institutum Historicum Polonicum Romae, 1999), v–xxxiii, esp. xiv–xxi. Ptaszyński, “The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth,” 55–56. Jaitner, Instruktionen, 26–28. See supra note 84. Ivan Cloulas, Catherine de Médicis, (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1979), 153ff. Mario Scaduto, S.I., L’epoca di Giacomo Laínez, 1556–1565, 2 vols., [Storia della Compagnia

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In the following decades, armed clashes between Catholics and Huguenots resulted in the eight conflicts that have gone down in history as the “Wars of Religion.”97 The bloodiest episode occurred on the night of 23–24 August 1572 (the “night of St. Bartholomew”) during which around 6,000 Huguenots and perhaps even more were slaughtered throughout France. In Rome, however, the tragic event was celebrated as a success: Gregory xiii (1572–1585) had thanksgiving Masses celebrated and a special commemorative medal minted.98 But the most serious problem presented itself to the papacy when, on 10 June 1584, the heir to the throne, the Duke of Anjou, François de Valois, died.99 As Henry iii had no children, the heir to the throne became the Calvinist Henry of Navarre, a recidivist heretic. For this reason, Gregory xiii had a canonical trial started against him, but he died before it was completed. Sixtus v completed his predecessor’s initiative. With the bull Ab immensa aeterni. of 9 September 1585, Henry was condemned as a relapsed heretic (he had in fact abjured twice, in 1562 and 1572, before returning to Calvinism). As such, in the document, he was declared disqualified from exercising his powers of sovereignty over Navarre and Béarn and, more generally, incapable of reigning over any other kingdom, starting with France.100 The delicate question of succession on the French throne was addressed by Clement viii (1592–1605) from the very beginning of his pontificate. In 1589, Henry iii had been assassinated. The death of Sixtus v in 1590 and the short pontificates of Urban vii (15–27 September 1590), Gregory xiv (8 December 1590–16 October 1591), and Innocent ix (29 October-30 December 1591) had

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di Gesù, iii–iv], (Rome: Edizioni “la Civiltà Cattolica”, 1964–1974), ii: L’azione, 113–135; Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: the Colloquy of Poissy, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 94 ff. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Harry H. Leonard, “The Huguenots and the St. Bartolomew’s Massacre,” in: The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Context. Essays in Honour and Memory of Walter C. Utt, eds. David J.B. Trim and Walter C. Utt, [Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 156], (Leiden: Boston: Brill, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2011), 43–68. The author, while giving the figure of 6,000 victims in the whole of France, does not exclude that they may also have amounted to between 8,000 and 10,000 (ibid., p. 43). Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 211–212. Bernard Barbiche, “Clément viii et la France (1592–1605). Principes et réalités dans les instructions générales et les correspondances diplomatiques du Saint-Siège,” in: Das Papsttum, die Christenheit und die Staaten Europas, 1592–1605. Forschungen zu den Hauptinstruktionen Clemens’ viii, ed. Georg Lutz and Stefano Andretta, [Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 66], (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 99–118, esp. 99–100.

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left the problem unresolved. Initially, Clement viii acted with extreme caution, also not to upset Philip ii of Spain who supported the French Catholics. But the consolidation of Henry’s political and military position, his abjuration in 1593, his coronation as King of France on 27 February 1594, followed a month later by his triumphal entry into Paris, induced Clement viii to take realistic note of the situation. Consequently, on 17 September 1595 he granted absolution to the man who thus became Henry iv of France. Clement viii was convinced that he had definitively restored Catholicism in France. One can well understand how, when he learned that Henry iv had granted partial freedom of worship to the Huguenots (Edict of Nantes, 30 April 1598), the pope did not fail to express his indignation. According to the pontiff, concessions to heretics are always pernicious, but even more so when they are granted in times of peace. Henry iv, moreover, would have demonstrated his duplicity because he aimed to offer the Huguenots a satisfaction so that he could then escape their criticism when he had to rely on the support of Catholic forces to achieve his political goals.101 Clement viii, however, ended up accepting a fait accompli, also because questioning the sincerity of the king’s conversion would necessarily have led to a new excommunication, plunging the kingdom back into chaos and running the risk of provoking a schism.102

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Papal Censorship

As seen in the previous chapter, since the last decades of the fifteenth century, the papacy had begun to exercise stricter supervision over heretical or suspected heretical printed works. In 1515, the Lateran Council v had introduced the obligation for authors to obtain a prior licence (imprimatur) from the competent ecclesiastical authorities. Apparently, after Luther’s condemnation, there was no need to develop a more effective strategy. However, the seriousness of the danger was felt in other Catholic countries. This explains the appearance of catalogues (or indexes) of books whose reading was forbidden to the faithful. The two main ones were those of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris (from 1544 until 1556) and the University of Leuven in 1546.103

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Bernard Cottret, 1598. L’Édit de Nantes: pour en finir avec les guerres de religion, ([Paris]: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1997), 214. Berbard Haan, “Les réactions du Saint-Siège à l’édit de Nantes,” in: Coexister dans l’intolérance. L’édit de Nantes (1598), eds. Michel Grandjean, Bernard Roussel, François Bos, and Béatrice Perregaux Allisson, (Genève: Labor et Fides, 1998), 353–368, esp. 363ff. Borromeo, “L’inquisizione in Italia,” 337–338.

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The papacy, on the other hand, was slow to intervene with the promulgation of its own index, in spite of the circumstance that the congregation of the Holy Office had already begun to exercise some form of supervision over the circulation of works by heretical authors or, in any case, of suspicious content from 1543 onwards.104 However, it was not until January 1559, under the pontificate of Paul iv, and after an initial draft drawn up in 1557 and still unpublished, that the first Roman index of prohibited books was promulgated..105 The breadth and severity of Paul iv’s index prohibitions did not fail to arouse controversy. In fact, not only the entire works of individual non-Catholic authors were banned, regardless of the subject matter, but also as many as forty-five editions of the Bible and the New Testament, as well as the entire production of sixty-one printers, guilty of having published heretical books. Finally, the bans also extended to works by Catholic authors, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, and literary works by writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, or François Rabelais, because they contained criticism of the Church or passages of an immoral nature.106 The protests aroused in some sectors of the Catholic world by the extent of the prohibitions led Pope Carafa’s successor, Pius iv, to intervene. First, on 14 June 1561, he had an instruction published aimed at moderating the severity of certain condemnations, and then, with a brief dated 14 January 1562, he decided to entrust a complete revision of the index to the Council once again convened in Trent for the third phase of its work. In fact, the ecumenical assembly failed to complete the work of revision before its closure, so that the edition of the new index—later known as the Tridentine index—was completed in Rome and published there in April 1564.107 In essence, the list of prohibitions reproduced those contained in the 1559 index, but with some significant deletions that emphasized its more moderate character. A peculiar feature of the Tridentine index is the enunciation of ten general rules preceding the list of prohibitions. They enunciated the general criteria to which the ecclesiastical authorities responsible for censorship had to adhere from then on.

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Borromeo, “Il dissenso religioso,” 473–474. Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605), (Bologna: Società Editrice Il Mulino, 1997), 82–85. Jesús Martínez De Bujanda, “Introduction historique,” in: Index de Rome, 1557, 1559, 1564. Les premiers index romains et l’index du Concile de Trente, eds., Jesús Martínez De Bujanda et al., [Index des livres interdits, 8], (Sherbrooke; Genève: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance, 1990), 25–54. Bujanda, “Introduction historique,” 51–99.

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The growing production of works by reformed authors and their circulation also in Catholic countries soon made clear the need to resolve doubts concerning the application and interpretation of the rules of the Tridentine Index, as well as the need to update periodically the list of prohibited books. Consequently, Pius v, in March 1571, decided to entrust the handling of the relative procedures to a special commission of cardinals, later formally erected as a permanent congregation of the Index on 13 September 1572 by Gregory xiii.108 The first relevant result of the latter’s work came, after a very long and troubled gestation, a good twenty-five years later, with the publication of the index promulgated, in 1596, by Clement viii.109 In essence, it was an update of the Tridentine index, with a thousand more prohibitions and a significant additional restriction: in it reappears the rule, already contained in Paul iv’s index, that forbade the reading of the Bible in the vernacular without a special licence from the ecclesiastical authority. In the stricter climate within which the religious training of the laity took place in the post-Tridentine era, the papacy wanted to prohibit people who were not adequately educated from freely interpreting Holy Scripture (rule iv).110

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Conclusion

The year 1517 thus marks an epoch-making turning point in the history of Christianity and, consequently, in the history of the Church of Rome. Everything seems to indicate how, initially, the papacy, even after Luther’s condemnation in 1521, delayed in taking adequate measures to combat the expansion of the Reformation. It was only after the decision of Paul iii to accede to the request of Charles v and the various imperial diets to convene a council that the situation of the Roman Church was strengthened against the expansion of the Reformation. Even though the original aim, pursued by the emperor as part of an illusory irenic project, of reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics 108

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Agostino Borromeo, “Aspetti della riforma della Chiesa dopo il concilio di Trento nelle fonti della Biblioteca Vaticana,” in: La Biblioteca Vaticana tra Riforma Cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590), ed. Massimo Ceresa [Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ii], (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012), 237– 259, esp. 245. Paul F. Grendler, “Introduction historique,” in: Index de Rome 1590, 1593, 1596. Avec étude des index de Parme, 1580, et Munich, 1582 ed. Jesús Martínez De Bujanda et al., (Sherbrooke, Genève: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance, 1994), 286–307. Gigliola Fragnito, Proibito capire. La Chiesa, il volgare nella prima età moderna, (Bologna: Mulino, 2005), 48 ff.

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failed, the convocation of the ecumenical assembly marked the beginning of a turning point in the affairs of the papacy. The conclusion of the Council in 1563 and the start of its implementation strengthened the Catholic Church. The result of its work was—as noted—a twofold series of decrees: those of a doctrinal nature and those of a disciplinary nature. In this context, the papacy had the means to combat all forms of religious deviance, both in Catholic countries such as Portugal, Italy, and Spain, and in countries such as Poland, where a form of multi-confessional system had been established, or France, where it seemed that the Huguenots might prevail. And it is on this basis that, with the passage of time, Catholicism was able to regain some of the ground lost in the religious field.

Bibliography Caravale, Giorgio. Libri pericolosi. Censura e cultura italiana in età moderna. Bari-Roma: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 2022. Coexister dans l’intolérance. L’édit de Nantes (1598). Eds. Michel Grandjean, Bernard Roussel, François Bos, and Béatrice Perregaux Allisson. Genève: Labor et Fides, 1998, A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe. Ed. Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015, A Companion to the Reformation in Scotland, ca. 1525–1638. Framework of Change and Development. Ed. William Ian P. Hazlett. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022. Garstein, Oskar. Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia, Vol. 2: Jesuit Educatonal Strategy, 1553–1622. Leiden; New York; København; Köln: E.J. Brill, 1992, Holt, Mack P. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. L’Inquisizione. Atti del Simposio internazionale, Città del Vaticano, 29–31 ottobre 1998. Ed. Agostino Borromeo. [Studi e Testi, 417] Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2003. Jaitner, Klaus. Instrucktionen und Relationen für die Nuntien und Legaten an den Europäischen Fürstenhöfen von Sixtus v. bis Innozenz ix. (1585–1591) [Römische Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte, 68. Supplemendband]. Freiburg; Basel; Wien: Verlag Herder, 2021. Koller, Alexander. “Karl v. und die Päpste seiner Zeit,” in Kaiser Karl. und das Heilige Römische Reich. Normativität um Strukturwandel eines imperialen Herrschaftsystems am Begin der Neuzeit. Im auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig und der nationalen Andalusischen Akademie für historich-juristische Wissenschaften zu Córdoba. Eds. Ignacio Czeguhn and Heiner Lück. Stuttgart: Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 2022.

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Lutero 500 anni dopo. Una rilettura della Riforma luterana nel suo contesto storico ed ecclesiale. Raccolta di Studi in occasione del v centenario (1517–2017). Eds. Gert Melville and Josep Ignasi Saranyana Closa, [Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche, Atti e Documenti, 51] Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2019. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cranmer. A Life. Rev. ed. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2016 Monter, William. Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 Nowakowska, Natalia. King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: the Reformation before Confessionalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, Pastor, Ludwig von. Storia dei papi dalla fine del Medio Evo. Trans. from German. 17 vols. in 20 tomes. Newly reprinted. Roma: Desclée & C. Editori Pontifici, 1950–1963,

chapter 14

Reform and the Renaissance Popes John W. O’Malley s.j. †

As is well known, the Council of Constance deeply affected the papacy and papal efforts at reform. It first of all rescued the papacy from the path of selfdestruction that the obstinate behavior of the three contenders for the chair of Peter had set it upon during the final years of the Great Western Schism. The council save the papacy, however, by the radical solution of deposing two of the contenders, forcing the third to resign, and proceeding to elect a new pope, Martin v (1417–1431), Oddone Colonna.1 These measures had two important consequences. Until Constance, the relationship between popes and the councils they convoked had been for the most part collaborative. The popes looked upon councils as partners in effecting measures needing attention. There were of course difficult moments in the relationship, but by and large neither party saw the other as a threat. That style of relationship ended with Constance, and the tension between council and pope persisted into the nineteenth century. The specter that a council might, like Constance, depose them or even in less drastic ways cause them harm haunted popes from the fifteenth century forward. There was a second reason popes became wary of councils. Beginning with the very first centuries of Christianity, councils had acted as the official agent of reform on both the local and the church-wide basis. Since the twelfth century, that was the purpose for which the popes principally convoked them, as is most brilliantly clear for Lateran Council iv, 1215. But after Constance, the popes’ wariness about councils rendered them also wary about reform, which to them sometimes seemed a code word for curtailing their liberty of action. The decree Frequens of Constance requiring that the pope convoke a council at stated intervals was in essence a resounding vote of noconfidence in the popes’ ability to govern the Church and to undertake needed reforms. Although Constance came into being principally to end the Schism, it committed itself very much to the related task of church reform. In its very first

1 See, e.g., Heribert Müller and Johannes Helmrath, eds., Die Konzilien von Pisa (1409), Konstanz (1414–1418), und Basel (1431–1449): Institution und Personen (Ostfildern: J. Thornbecke, 2007).

© John W. O’Malley s.j. †, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004713222_016

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decree, November 16, 1414, Constance announced its purpose: “to attend to the peace, exaltation, and reform of the Church and to the quiet of the Christian people.” In its next decree, the famous Haec Sancta, March 26, 1415, it described its purpose as twofold, to bring unity to the Church, that is, to heal the schism, and to effect the “reform of the church in head and members.” A few days later, it repeated the same formula of reform in head and members and repeated it again in its next decree a week later.2 Although the council did not coin the formula, it launched it into Christian consciousness in a newly intrusive way. It became a mantra that concisely expressed the persistently urgent preoccupation of thoughtful Christians from that time forward. Reform of the head—the mantra thus specified the popes as an object of reform, which for the popes was an unwelcome prospect. The Council of Basel a few decades after Constance passed measures that gave form to the popes’ worse fears, but even Constance focused its reforms on the papacy. On October 30, 1417, it imposed on the pope whom it was about to elect an agenda of eighteen reforms of the church “in its head and in the Roman curia.”3 The decree insisted that the newly elected pope was to address these eighteen issues before the council dissolved. In explicitly singling out the curia, it hit the aspect of the papacy about which complaints were the most pointed and widely agreed upon. The decree was a grocery list of long-standing grievances that the Schism had exacerbated. The first, for instance, was “The number, quality, and nationality of the lord cardinals.” The sixth was “Appeals to the Roman curia.” Number twelve was “Not alienating goods of the Roman church and of other churches.” The list ended with: “14. The eradication of simony,” “15. Dispensations,” “16. Revenues of the pope and the cardinals,” “17. Indulgences,” and “18. Tithes.” If the list looked to the past by articulating long-standing grievances, it also unwittingly looked into the future because the list articulated abuses that were not effectively addressed and that would continue to trouble the church for a long time to come. Virtually every one of the eighteen issues dealt explicitly or implicitly with money transactions and were, moreover, a cry of protest against the ever expanding authority over local churches and practices that the curia assumed. It was a cry of protest, in other words, against a centralizing momentum that

2 Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1: 405, 407, 408, 409. 3 See Ibid., 1:444.

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qualified the prerogatives of local authorities. The curia was, therefore, the target of virtually all eighteen of the issues. Reform of the head in practice meant reform of the curia, the popes’ agency for governing the church. Reform Rome, reform the world! The slogan, common in the era, embodied a conviction held by most reformers at the time. The reform must begin with the head because the head must act as the prime mover in a general reform. But the head must first of all put its own house in order—to provide a good example for the rest of the Church but much more than that. The head had to be reformed because the head, especially in its fiscal practices, was the source from which flowed most of the evils that afflicted the Church at large. What did the council understand church reform (and, hence, curia reform) to mean? In this era church reform was almost a technical term. It meant establishing good order in the Church especially by enticing or forcing the holders of the three pastoral offices in the Church to perform their traditional duties as these were specified in canon law. The expression reform of the Church had, therefore, a specific focus—the offices of pope, bishop, and pastor. It had a specific method and goal—the reestablishment of traditional canonical discipline. This was the principle that underlay the eighteen issues. Reform of the Church did not mean a searching review of all aspects of Catholic practice and belief as was undertaken at Vatican Council ii. The prelates at the Council of Trent, for instance, had not a word to say about the missions to the New World, one of the most characteristic and important aspects of Early Modern Catholicism. Reform of the Church had a circumscribed scope, even though it in practice sometimes spilled beyond it. If this was the scope of “reform of the Church,” it does not mean that the popes and other leaders were not concerned about the wellbeing of the Church in other ways. Pope Julius ii (1503–1513), for instance, took measures to promote the reform of the Augustinian order, and Pope Paul iii (1534–1549) approved and implicitly gave his support to the sisterhood that became the Ursuline order and to the brotherhood that he established as the Jesuit order. Although such measures had an incalculably great and positive impact on Catholicism and constitute an essential element in what is sometimes called Reform Catholicism, they were not what contemporaries primarily meant when they spoke of church reform. Listing eighteen items needing reform was one thing, taking measure to address them was another. Shortly after Martin v was elected, the council established a commission made up of cardinals and of delegates chosen by Martin to work out the measures the pope was to take. When it became clear that the commission could not reach an agreement, Martin took matters into this own hands and in conjunction with the commission produced the council’s man-

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date in the decree Attendentes of March 21, 1418.4 This was the last substantive decree passed by the council before it concluded a month later. Attendentes was not quite the wide-ranging reform that the decree of Session 40 called for. Nonetheless, it hit neuralgic points. Its opening paragraph, for instance, rescinded all exemptions from episcopal authority that the papal contenders had conceded during the Schism. The decree thus mitigated the centralizing trend that gave the popes control over further benefices. It was a measure that, if implemented, reduced the revenue of the Holy See. A later section of the decree rendered null and void elections achieved through simony and mandated that all revenues acquired by such an election be surrendered. The decree enjoined the observance of the laws that forbade the imposition of tithes “by anyone lower than the pope [himself],” and Martin then promised that he would not impose them except for a grave and urgent reason. The decree enjoined that revenues accruing during the vacancy of a benefice be applied according to the provisions of the canons and not be applied “to us and to the apostolic camera.” One paragraph of the decree dealt with dispensations that exempted holders of benefices from performing the duties of their office. Such dispensations were generally dispensations that allowed bishops to be absent from their diocese and pastors from their parish. In other words, the dispensations allowed the persons in question to collect the money but not do the job. The decree was clear: “Since benefices are granted by reason of the duties attached to them, we consider it absurd that those who obtain benefices refuse or neglect to carry out their duties.” The decree went on to revoke such dispensations. Unfortunately, the decree failed to root out the abuse, which continued to be a major target of reformers. When the problem of such dispensations surfaced at the Council of Trent, it created a ten-month crisis that seemed almost impossible to resolve. The issue cut to the very heart of the financial practices of the papal court. Such dispensations are, moreover, the prime example of how abuses in the curia directly affected the proper functioning of holders of the two other pastoral offices—the bishops and the pastors. Reform Rome, reform the Church! Neither the list of abuses nor Attendentes explicitly mentioned the high lifestyle of the curia. That issue became ever more explicit and urgent as Rome recovered from the disarray resulting from forty years of Schism and as the curia increasingly took on the trappings of a princely court. Attendentes and Frequens go hand in hand. The underlying supposition of Attendentes was that the popes would undertake the reform of themselves and

4 See Ibid., 1:447–450.

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their curia. The purpose of Frequens was to make sure they did so. The popes were correct in seeing Frequens as a threat to their freedom of action. In the period between the end of the Council of Constance and the end of the Council of Trent, the popes achieved little regarding reform of the head. When in 1520 Luther called for church reform in his Appeal to the German Nobility, he repeated in exaggerated measure and overwrought rhetoric the agenda Constance set forth in its eighteen points. When the Council of Trent took place decades later, it found itself faced with situations that in some ways seemed worse rather than better. Despite how they are often depicted, the popes after the Council of Constance were serious about their duties as they understood them and were genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of the Church. For the most part, however, they were ecclesiastical careerists who wanted to serve the Church while at the same time using the Church to serve themselves and their families. Aside from self-serving purposes, the popes needed money simply to sustain the basic services the papacy was supposed to provide, and they could not count on the Papal States as a reliable source of income because of the serious and ongoing problems of governing them. There were other factors that account for the failure to clean up the situation, not least of which were entrenched practices difficult to root out and a culture deeply resistant to change. The popes suffered, moreover, from hearing and subscribing to an inflated rhetoric that, for instance, equated the Church with the Roman Empire and that equated the cardinals with the senators of the Empire. They came to believe that, for their own protection and for the prestige of their office, they had to mimic or surpass the sumptuous practices of other courts. Besides being the visible head of the Church, the pope was, after all, the ruler of a territory of considerable size in central Italy. Neither bad will nor moral turpitude was the cause of the failure to pursue a vigorous policy of reform. The cause was the need to reward friends and allies. The cause was pressures upon the popes of various kinds. There were other causes, but basic was the reduced revenue that would result from a strict implementation of canonical norms.

1

The Restored Papacy: Martin v to Paul ii

Constance ended in 1418. Martin v slowly made his way to Rome. Neapolitan troops held the city, which required Martin to negotiate his entry with Queen Joanna of Naples. Once he was able to enter on September 28, 1420, he found a city where the infrastructure had eroded, churches and public buildings fallen

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into disrepair, and the surrounding countryside the home of brigands. Moreover, the Papal States, which provided the first line of defense for the city, were controlled by local lords, some of whom were upstart men of fortune. One such was Braccio da Montone, who dominated large swaths of the territory. Martin and his successors had, therefore, many problems to deal with besides reform of the Church, and dealing with them in most cases cost money. With Martin began, moreover, the evolution of the conviction on the part of the popes that they could no longer rely on foreign princes to protect them. They had tried that many times, and many times it had failed, as their protectors turned into their masters. They would now try to take their fate into their own hands, as they began to consider themselves and be considered by others as monarchs in the full sense of the term. This was not exactly new, but it was now more obvious, deliberate, programmatic, and successful. It was a development that placed even more obstacles in the reform of a curia that now felt the need and the desire to ape the magnificence of other courts. Not surprisingly, Martin, though vigorous and able, made little progress regarding reform. He found it impossible to reduce the number of offices and suppress the customary financial transactions regarding benefices. He was determined to increase, not lessen, papal authority, and for that he needed funds. Moreover, a fair number of those who possessed benefices and offices in the curia had given the papal treasury money in return for the favor of the benefice or office. The papacy was unable to repay the debt and hence could not act against the lenders. In general, resistance was too strong and the rights acquired much too jealously held for Martin to effect a thorough reform. Moreover, despite his valiant promises, he found it difficult to resist the pressure from his family demanding favors. In obedience to Frequens, Martin convoked a council to meet in 1423 in Pavia, which had to be transferred to Siena because of an outbreak of the plague. The bull of dissolution of the Council of Siena established another commission of cardinals to recommend reforms. Martin published a constitution incorporating the reforms but took no really effective action on them. Before the Council of Pavia-Siena adjourned, it decreed that, in conformity with Frequens, a new council was to meet in 1431, and it designated Basel as the site. Martin duly convoked the council, but he died unexpectedly a week later, on February 21, five months before the council opened. Martin’s successor, Eugenius iv (1431–1447), inherited the Council of Basel and soon found himself in conflict with it. As a nephew of Pope Gregory xii, whom the Council of Constance had forced to resign, he was instinctively wary of Basel and, as well, lacked the finesse to deal with it effectively, a problem exacerbated by his not attending the council in person. A few months after the

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council opened, he seized upon the poor attendance as an excuse for dissolving it, an action that raised a howl of protest and had the effect of increasing attendance at the council and of support for it. This and a further sequence of events intensified anti-papal sentiment at the council and inflamed an increasingly radical determination to “reform the head.” On June 9, 1435, Basel abolished throughout Christendom almost all papal taxes and forbade the exacting of fees for official documents issued by the curia.5 The next year it issued a long decree limiting the number of cardinals to twenty-four, stipulating that they be chosen on an international basis, forbidding that nephews or any other relative of the pope be made cardinal, and imposing qualifications regarding age, life-style, and learning. Further: “The household, table, furniture and horses of both pope and cardinals should not be open to blame as regards quantity, scale, display or any other excess.”6 Eugenius denounced such pretensions in a circular to Christian princes the next year and later transferred the council to Ferrara and thence to Florence. The majority at Basel refused to recognize the translation, which resulted in two councils and the election at Basel of an anti-pope. Meanwhile, Eugenius had had to flee Rome and had other strictly political problems as well. In such a situation, it is no wonder that he took no significant measures regarding reform, an item that did not appear on the agenda of the Council of Florence. Among the twenty-seven cardinals Eugenius named was a nephew, Pietro Barbo, age twenty-three, who later became Pope Paul ii. Eugenius’s success in bringing the Council of Florence to conclusion dealt a mortal blow to Basel and generally weakened threats to the papacy that a council might pose. The popes let Frequens slip into oblivion. For that reason and for others, Eugenius’s immediate successor, Nicholas v (1447–1453) had a more tranquil reign. He deserves credit for welcoming the intellectual and artistic movements of the Renaissance into the service of the Church, but he undertook no reform measures in the curia. Yet in 1451 he sent the learned and devout Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa on a reform mission to German lands. The object of the mission was to reestablish in monasteries and cathedral chapters a faithful observance of their rules of life. In that regard, Cusa seems to have had considerable success. Underlying the reform mission, however, was the mission to eliminate sentiment still favoring the Council of Basel.7 5 See Ibid., 1:488–489. 6 See Ibid., 1:504. 7 See Ludwig von Pastor, History of the Popes, 40 vols., trans. Francis I. Antrobus et al. (St. Louis, MO: Herder, 1923–1949), 2:105–137.

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In the year of Pope Nicholas’ death, 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks, an event that brought with it an increased awareness of the threat of the Turkish army and navy. That threat preoccupied the popes of the Renaissance from this point forward and helped distract them from reform. It certainly dominated the short pontificate of Calixtus iii (1453–1458), who devoted his best energies to trying to organize a crusade to retake Constantinople. Although in his personal life Calixtus was austere and pious in a rigorous mode, he did reform a disservice by the favors he lavished on relatives, which included naming as cardinals two young nephews. One of them was Rodrigo Borgia, the future Alexander vi. The crusade against the Turk was the overriding aim of the next pope, Pius ii (1458–1464). An accomplished man of letters in the humanist tradition, he had early fathered several illegitimate children, but a serious illness had led him to mend his ways and be ordained a priest. As pope he bore himself with dignity and, though he in fact did virtually nothing to change curial practices, he was not insensitive to the problem. As part of the process of his election to the papacy in 1458, he had in fact sworn to undertake a reform of the court of Rome. When he appointed a commission of cardinals and others to draw up a memorandum on the subject, he told the members, “Two things are particularly dear to my heart, the war with the Turks and the reform of the Roman curia.” Aside from the summoning the commission, Pius requested advice from individuals, including the learned Venetian bishop Domenico dei Domenichi, which resulted in Domenichi’s treatise on the reform of the curia (Tractatus de reformationibus Romanae curiae). Domenichi focused on sumptuary concerns—modest lifestyle of curia members, the elimination of elaborate banquets, and similar issues. However, he also targeted dispensations allowing persons to possess more than one benefice at a time. Pius went so far as to construct a reform bull, Pastor Aeternus, but he never published it. In view of other urgent problems that confronted him and absorbed his energy and attention, he did not want to risk the opposition a serious reform would certainly evoke.8 Paul ii (1464–1471), the nephew of Eugenius iv, was a devout and genial man, who showed little practical concern for the reform of the curia. He was able to create a large number of cardinals, and he chose men of substance and integrity, including three nephews. Worthy though the nephews might have been, they were part of the pattern of nepotism that was gaining new impetus. When Paul died, he brought to an end the series of popes in the period immediately after Constance. During this period, the huge crisis ignited by the Coun-

8 See Ibid., 3:269–275.

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cil of Basel, coming right on the heels of Constance, threatened the papacy to its depths. Eugenius iv managed to resolve the crisis through his alternative Council of Florence. The success of Florence allowed the popes to forget Frequens, even if their enemies did not, and they thus for the time being rid themselves of the specter of a council intent on reforming them and their curia. When the popes of the period promised to undertake reform, they almost certainly were speaking honestly, but they in fact did little to make their promises good. They were caught in a system. They lacked the imagination and courage that might allow them extricate themselves from it. The weight of the status-quo was too heavy, pressures requiring an even greater expenditure of money too immediate, and the implications of a radical change too terrifying. Although these popes did not improve the situation, they at least did not notably worsen it. That was about to change.

2

The Renaissance Papacy: Sixtus iv to Leo x

Sixtus iv (1471–1484), Francesco della Rovere, is one of the great enigmas in the history of the papacy. The values he seemed to espouse before his election contrast so starkly with his actions as pope that he seems almost to be two different persons. Born of a moderately prosperous family in Savona, he as a teenager entered the Conventual branch of the Franciscan order, where he made a brilliant career for himself as theologian and preacher. In 1464, he was elected superior general of his order. Three years later he was cardinal, four years later pope. Even though he had a reputation for austerity, learning, and administrative skills, he was elected pope by the slimmest of margins. The first sign of things to come appeared during the conclave itself with the machinations of his unscrupulous and ambitious nephew, Pietro Riario, who acted as his attendant. Riario promised favors to cardinals to persuade them to vote for his uncle. During the early years of Sixtus’ papacy, Pietro became known as his uncle’s tutor and was held responsible for the misguided and unsavory aspects of the reign. Whether due to Pietro or to some other cause, the new pope, formed as a young man in the austere other-worldliness of the Rule of Saint Francis, displayed a this-worldliness that shocked even jaded contemporaries. The ballots were hardly counted in the consistory before he named as cardinals Pietro and another young nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius ii. He loaded both with benefices. He made Giuliano Archbishop of Avignon, Archbishop of Bologna, Bishop of Lausanne, Bishop of Constance, Bishop of Viviers, Bishop of Mende, Bishop of Ostia and Velletri, and recipi-

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ent of many other benefices. He was perhaps even more prodigal with Pietro, whom he similarly loaded with benefices, beginning with the rich and prestigious archbishopric of Florence, the see recently held by a saint, Antoninus. Sixtus later made four other nephews cardinal, one of whom was only seventeen at the time. Such measures could not have been a more flagrant affront to the reforms mandated by Constance. But they had a further significance. With them, papal nepotism took a new turn. Sixtus created a pattern that produced not simply individual cardinals who were extremely wealthy but a new class made up of rich cardinals who had close family ties. They constituted powerful forces in the Sacred College, and they were not keen on surrendering what they had gained.9 Through Sixtus’ appointments of thirty other men to the College of Cardinals, he launched a secularization of the College that would not significantly change for the better for half a century.10 To pay for his soaring expenditures, he sold offices and privileges, while he meanwhile enriched a swarm of relatives and arranged for them highly advantageous marriages. When Pietro, whose luxurious lifestyle was itself a scandal, died in 1474, his brother Count Girolamo took his place. Girolamo involved his uncle in some of the darkest political intrigues of the day, including the Pazzi Conspiracy, a plan to murder Lorenzo de’Medici and his brother in the cathedral of Florence during high Mass on Easter Sunday. Ten years after the conspiracy, in 1488, the conniving Girolamo was himself brutally assassinated. Expenses mounted. Sixtus spent lavishly on the papal navy better to equip it to oppose the Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean. He is best remembered as an intelligent and prodigious patron of the arts, more responsible than any of his predecessors for the cultural and artistic renaissance in Rome. He built the chapel soon named Sistine in his honor, and he brought to Rome Botticelli, Perugino, Signorelli, and other major artists to decorate it. He restored a number of churches in the city and repaired public works. Praiseworthy though such initiatives might be, they cost money. Sixtus could not avoid hearing calls for him to reform the court. At the funeral of Cardinal Bessarion at which the pope was present, Niccolò Capranica told his audience how greatly the cardinal esteemed learned and virtuous men and how he hated men who were lazy and pursued a life of piggish sen-

9 10

See Barbara McClung Hallerman, Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property, 1492–1563 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). See Pastor, History, 4:408–416.

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suality “of which the curia is full.” Capranica was not a lonely voice either in Rome or in the Church at large, as the curia acquired a newly acrid notoriety.11 Maybe it was partly in response to such voices that Sixtus ordered a reform bull drawn up, Quoniam regnatium cura. The bull set forth norms for the reform of the curia that were just the opposite of those Sixtus was pursuing. It comes as no surprise that he never published or made the slightest effort to implement it. When he died, he left behind a curia more problematic than ever before. After a conclave filled with intrigue and promise of favors, Innocent viii (1484–1492) succeeded Sixtus. Irresolute, in precarious health, and a creature of the system, he was anything but a reformer. Moreover, he inherited immense debts from his predecessor, which he tried to pay off by creating useless offices in the curia that he sold off to the highest bidder. He, for instance, raised the number of apostolic secretaries from six to thirty. The sale brought in 64,400 gold florins, in exchange for which the buyers received certain privileges and a share in taxes. Besides further debasing the court, such short-term measures failed to solve the financial crisis, in fact they served to protract it, and added to the court’s venality. To his credit, Innocent named some worthy clerics to the College of Cardinals, but two nominations stand out for how they offended reform ideals: Lorenzo Cibò, his brother’s illegitimate son, and Giovanni de’ Medici, age fourteen, son on Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence.12 Before Innocent was ordained, he had fathered two illegitimate children. Perhaps his only claim to fame—or infamy—is that he is the first pope since antiquity openly to acknowledge the fact. The great social event of his pontificate was the sumptuous celebration in the Vatican of the marriage of a daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent to his son, Franceschetto. The marriage, plus the dissolute life of Franceschetto, sent the message that in the papal court almost anything goes. Innocent’s eight-year reign was an insignificant interlude in the history of the papacy and a further step in the wrong direction in the history of reform. Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia succeeded him as Alexander vi (1492–1503), a pope whose very name became a byword for a corrupt papacy. Enemies fabricated stories about him that entered history books as fact and that ever since have provided superb material for lurid novels, movies, and television dramas. Alexander vi was intelligent, respected for his learning and for his good judgment. These qualities had ensured him important offices in the curia for almost 11

12

See, e.g., John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, 1450–1521 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), 195–237. See Pastor, History, 5:355–372.

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the first moment his uncle, Calixtus iii, created him cardinal. From that first moment, he was also thoroughly enmeshed in the system that prevailed in the curia. He amassed an enormous private fortune through the accumulation of benefices, such as the bishoprics of Gerona, Valencia, Carthagena, Majorca, and Erlau. Most of these he held simultaneously. As story-tellers never fail to relate, he fathered many children by different women. Rosa Vannozza de’ Catanei gave birth to his most famous offspring—Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Joffrey. Alexander’s zeal in promoting the fortune of his children led him into measures that so blatantly violated canonical norms as to stir up ever greater scandal and resentment. It provided grist for the mill of fiery preachers and reformers, such as Girolamo Savonarola of Florence. In such a situation, reform of the head stood little chance of success. But on the night of July 14–15, 1497, Alexanders’ son Juan was mysteriously assassinated and his body thrown into the Tiber. The loss deeply upset the pope, who then seemed to want to fulfill his obligations regarding reform. As by now had become almost a ritual, he established a commission of cardinals to prepare a reform bull, In apostolicae sedis specula. As with the similar bulls of Pius ii and Sixtus iv, no serious changes ensued. To understand the phenomenon of such bulls we need to reckon with the fact that in the College of Cardinals at least a nucleus of worthy members was never wanting. Moreover, most of the others, no matter how their position and livelihood might rest on violations of canon law, were genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of the Church, and dispensations from the requirement of the canons allowed them to function with consciences more or less clean in regard to the deviations from the letter of the law. They could, therefore, support many of the measures that such reform bulls proposed, such as those touching the sacred liturgies of the court, those regarding the repair and upkeep of churches, and those requiring bishops (or their vicars) to visit the institutions of the diocese on a regular basis. They balked, however, at provisions that threatened their lifestyle and the sources of their livelihood, the root problem. After the one-month pontificate of Pius iii, the formidable Julius ii (1503– 1513), Giiuliano della Rovere, nephew of Sixtus iv, came to the throne. He is remembered today as the imperious patron of Michelangelo, from whose genius he drew the frescoes of the Sistine Ceiling, and of Raphael, from whom he drew the “School of Athens” and other frescoes for his apartment. He is the “warrior pope” who mounted his horse and led his troops into battle to wrest the Papal States from the petty lords who controlled it and to bring it under papal control. That job done, he mounted his horse once again to drive the French out of Italy.

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The latter campaign incited the King Louis xii of France and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian i, in collusion with a group of disaffected cardinals, to convoke a council at Pisa to call the pope to account, just what the popes had feared since Constance and Basel. Julius, ever decisive, took the measure his predecessors had never dared to take and convoked his own council to meet in the papal residence at the Lateran basilica in Rome, where he could make sure it did not go astray. He soon won support for it and thus effectively scotched the threat of the Council of Pisa. Lateran v lasted five years, 1512 to 1517. Julius died after the first year, to be succeeded by the still young Giovanni de’ Medici, who took the title Leo x (1513– 1521). The council, long described as poorly attended, has been shown, on the contrary, to have had better attendance than some earlier councils and be more international in its membership. Besides condemning the Council of Pisa, its objectives were achieving a general peace among Christian princes especially in view of the Turkish threat, the defense of the faith and uprooting of heresy, and, as almost inevitable, the reform of the Church.13 While Julius was still alive, it published on February 16, 1513, a strong bull forbidding simony in papal elections. The bull incorporated verbatim the constitution Julius ii had himself published on January 15, 1505, relatively soon after he was elected. Julius’ constitution formed the substance of the council’s bull. The pope was incapable of pro forma gestures, and his constitution against simony was certainly not one. In it, Julius defined simony as any “gift, promise or receipt of money or goods of any sort, and castles, offices, benefices, promises or obligations.”14 The pope, complex, fearless, and clear of vision, was busy about many things, but he was genuinely concerned for the Church and ready to break with ingrained practices if he thought them detrimental. Unlike his uncle and his immediate predecessors, he for the most part kept his relatives at a distance and did his best to nominate to the Sacred College men worthy of it, even if they might also be politically useful to him. He actually published a reform bull in which he mandated that curia officials adhere to the legal restrictions on their transactions. Under Leo, the council published on December 19, 1513, a bull that affirmed an earlier bull (Pastoralis officii) that reformed the fees and practices of the Roman curia. On May 5, 1514 the council issued the Great Reform Bull.15 The 13 14 15

See Nelson H. Minnich, The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517): Studies in Membership, Diplomacy and Proposals for Reform (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993). See Tanner, Decrees, l: 600–613. On the curial reform bull, see Nelson H. Minnich, “Lateran v and the Reform of the Roman

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basic norm for the reform was “to restore things to their earlier observance of the sacred canons.” The bull dealt with generalities to which it would be difficult to object—the Roman pontiff was to appoint worthy men, the physical fabric of monasteries and churches should be repaired, appropriate clothing was to be worn for ceremonies, and similar measures. It was a reform that threatened no one because it did not mandate any significant change. As part of their reform efforts, the bishops at Lateran v labored in vain to establish their own episcopal college in the curia to promote and defend their own interests and give them a permanent voice there. They resented and worked to limit intrusions into their own jurisdictional authority by the curia, by religious orders, and by the popes themselves. Although they persisted in trying to pass such a measure, they finally had to admit defeat because of the resistance of the cardinals of the curia and of Leo himself. Had their college been established, it as an outside voice in the curia might have had a reforming impact on the curia’s practices.16 Leo uncovered a conspiracy against him in the Sacred College and punished the instigators severely. He then took the utterly unprecedented step of promoting thirty-one new cardinals, an exorbitant number never seen before. Although among them there were some deserving members, most notably the great Dominican theologian, Tommaso di Vio (Cajetan), the majority was of questionable merit, and the membership of these individuals in the Sacred College further debased it. These nominations raised the number of cardinals from the customary twenty-four to more than double that number, which bloated an institution with members who had few responsibilities and many leisurely hours. These members were, however, fitting ornaments for a princely court. Leo died in 1521. The previous year Luther published his Appeal to the German Nobility. With that, the issue of church reform took on an urgency not experienced since the councils of Constance and Basel, but now intensified by the rapid dissemination of polemical tracts and treatises made possible by the invention of moveable type. Faced with his German domains torn apart over reform, the young Emperor Charles v (r. 1519–1556) took it upon himself to persuade, cajole, or force the papacy to put its house in order by convoking a council. A new era had opened regarding reform. Reformers like Luther denounced the Church of their times as the worst ever. Although they certainly cannot be taken at their word, abuses in the sys-

16

Curia,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 37 (2020), 135–196 on the Great Refom Bull, see Tanner, Decrees, 1:600–625. See Nelson H. Minnich, “The Proposals for an Episcopal College at Lateran v,” in his Fifth Lateran Council, v, 213–232.

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tem were widespread, in large part due to the example and the practices of the curia. Churches were full and religious practice high, but reformers such as Erasmus denounced the latter as formulaic and sometimes superstitious. The gluttonous monk, the lecherous friar, and the gullible priest were commonplaces in the satire of the era. Viewed from such perspectives, the ecclesiastical and religious situation of Europe on the eve of the Reformation looks like a landscape of unrelieved desolation. In the past thirty years, however, historians have showed that the situation was complex to a degree that defies generalization and that at the same time challenges the negative stereotypes that still prevail in popular media. In many parts of Europe, serious reforms of clergy and religious orders had been under way ever since the end of the Schism, and by 1517 the results were considerable. The churches of the mendicant orders were bustling centers of pastoral activity, where preachers held forth at length on every Sunday and feast day. In self-generated institutions such as confraternities, the laity—both men and women—found a congenial place to deepen their religious devotion and practice their faith. The confraternities were in many places more important institutions than the parishes. The great saints of the next generation, such as Philip Neri, Angela Merici, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Teresa of Avila had been spiritually nurtured in these decades before the Reformation, and they grew to maturity without any significant impact from the turmoil raised by Luther. The same can be said of the new religious orders that were born at about the same time—the Barnabites, the Theatines, the Ursulines, the Jesuits, and others. Assessments of the quality of these phenomenon differ according to what evidence is examined and, perhaps more important, upon the criteria applied to evaluate it. We surely cannot accept the inflammatory rhetoric that denounced the age as utterly corrupt. Nonetheless, the image of a papacy seemingly more concerned with securing ample income for itself than with providing pastorally responsible bishops was widespread. The image was grounded in the reality of the situation and made credible by the flagrant violations of the most fundamental ideals and principles of canon law.

3

Reform and the Council of Trent: From Clement vii to Pius iv

Shortly before Leo x died, the bull he published excommunicating Luther went into effect. It did not settle the matter, but, instead, soon gave rise to the cry in Germany for a “free Christian council in German lands” to render judgment on Luther and to address the issues he raised. Other parts of Europe soon joined

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in a propaganda campaign for a council to address the present crisis, but also to deal with other long-standing grievances. The campaign was objectionable to the papacy for two reasons: it suggested that its judgment on Luther was not final but could be reversed by a council, and the very possibility of a council was a threat. Pope Clement vii (1523–1534), who after the brief pontificate of Adrian vi, succeeded his cousin, Leo x, felt that threat to an almost paranoid degree. Elected after a conclave of fifty days, he felt insecure in his position and determined not to risk a council. Charles v had emerged as the most important and persistent advocate for a council, which he saw as dealing first and foremost with reform. Clement therefore especially feared a council in which Charles’ influence would be dominant. Charles, however, was determined on a council and worked to overcome all obstacles placed in its way. The obstacles were many, including a series of wars waged with Francis i, king of France, but the unwillingness of Clement, even after Charles’ troops sacked Rome in 1527, was major among them. Regarding the council, the story of Clement’s pontificate is a cat and mouse game in which, by one ruse or another, Clement was able to end his days by sometimes promising a council and never taking even the first step in convoking one. It took fifty days to elect Clement vii. It took only two to elect his successor, Paul iii (1534–1549), Alessandro Farnese. Among the reasons that hastened the balloting was a new mood that the Sack of Rome had generated among the cardinals. Something had to change, and Alessandro Farnese seemed to be the man to undertake it. Shortly after his election, for instance, he announced his intention to convoke a council. In his early days as a cardinal, he had behaved like many of his peers and begot three sons and a daughter. In 1512, however, he broke with his mistress, was ordained priest and then bishop, and began to live a life appropriate for his calling. In his devotion to his family, however, he followed the bad example of other popes and even surpassed it. One of his first acts, for instance, was to name two teenaged grandchildren to the College of Cardinals—Guido Sforza (age 16) and his namesake, Alessandro Farnese (age 14). He loaded the latter with so many benefices that he became one of the wealthiest persons in Rome. During his pontificate of fifteen years, he created seventy-one cardinals, an unprecedented number even in comparison with Leo x. Although he named many simply for political expediency’s sake, he also named men of genuine probity, some of whom were much more than that—such as Reginald Pole, Giampietro Carafa, and the Venetian nobleman, Gasparo Contarini. With such

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nominations, Paul certainly did not drive out of the College all ambition or venality, but he did much to temper the secularization that had set in with Sixtus iv. In 1536, two years after his election, he established a small commission of cardinals to draw up a memorandum on the reform of the Church. Paul surely saw this commission as a preemptive strike, his claim on reform before the council met and was able to claim up. For that reason, the commission had a degree of papal commitment that previous commissions lacked. Paul appointed Contarini as chair of the commission and named other reformminded cardinals such as Pole and Carafa as members. A year later the commission issued its report, in which the second paragraph contained blunt lines that went right to the heart of the problem. The paragraph accused “some popes, your predecessors,” of finding teachers who “justified for them whatever they wanted to do rather than what they ought to do,” teachers who taught that “the pope was lord of all benefices” and that therefore “the pope could not be guilty of simony.” They taught that the will of the pope was supreme and that therefore he could do anything that pleased him. The paragraph ends, “From this source, as from a Trojan horse, so many abuses and such grave diseases have rushed upon the church of God that we now see her afflicted almost to the despair of salvation.”17 Paul took no action on the memorandum, which mandated such a drastic change in the culture of the curia and carried with it such drastic financial implications for the functioning of the Holy See that implementation seemed unthinkable. The Datary, for instance, was a major papal office through which most requests for dispensations, indults, privileges, and benefices had to pass. The fees the Datary charged for its services came to well over 100,000 ducats a year, about half of the curia’s total income. But the council was the burning question. Paul was determined to push ahead on it despite the obstacles thrown in its way principally by King Francis i of France, who saw the council helping his political rival, Charles V. Francis’ fears were not unfounded. The pope and the emperor had formed an uneasy partnership regarding the council. Although Paul convoked the council, he did so in large measure to solve problems most directly and most crucially facing Charles. To bring the enterprise about, the two men needed each other. In any case, after eight years of frustration and false starts, the Council of Trent finally opened on December 15, 1545.

17

See John C. Olin, Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenes to the Council of Trent, 1495–1563 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 65–79, at 66.

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No agenda had been prepared for it, although dealing with Luther and the Reformation was understood to be the reason for the council in the first place. Luther’s challenge was twofold. The first was doctrinal: the doctrine of justification by faith alone and then the consequences flowing from it, especially concerning the sacraments. The second was reform of the Church. The pope and the emperor disagreed radically on how the council was to address these two issues. Paul saw the council’s task as almost exclusively doctrinal. He interpreted Luther’s teachings as simply old heresies in new dress, which the council would be able to condemn in short order and thus virtually conclude its business. The council needed to be much more circumspect about reform, especially reform of the curia, which was best handled, he maintained, by the pope himself. Charles’ agenda for the council, which he felt was his prerogative to promote, was almost diametrically opposed to the pope’s. He hoped that some measure of reconciliation with the Lutherans was possible, and therefore wanted the council to delay dealing with doctrine until it had effectively addressed church reform. A practical man, he believed that the unreformed character of the Church had caused the Reformation, and that therefore, reforming it was the first and essential step in resolving the problems that resulted from it. Once that was done, accord on doctrine would be relatively easy. In the early days of the council, the bishops debated whether to give priority to doctrine or reform. They soon came to see that the two issues were related and decided to treat them in tandem—a reform decree would accompany every doctrinal decree. The decision so greatly displeased the pope that rumors spread in Rome that he was going to recall the legates presiding at the council, who had allowed this measure to pass. Cardinal Marcello Cervini, one of the legates, explained to him that the measure was the best they could manage and that to insist on dealing exclusively with doctrine, or even as just the first item of business, would be disastrous. He hinted that if the pope himself undertook the reform of the curia, he would forestall the council’s doing so. Paul, unhappy, finally accepted the situation.18 The council understood reform principally in the sense prevalent at least since Constance, as we have seen—reform of the three principal pastoral offices of pope, bishop, pastor. Although the council in a few instances deviated from this norm, as for instance in condemning dueling, it for the most part adhered to it Even its long decree on the reform of religious orders was

18

See John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 77–82.

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largely motivated by concerns about how the pastoral privileges of the orders impacted on bishops’ prerogatives. In this first period, 1545–1547, the legates were deft in steering the council away from the reform of the papacy. The council approved several reform measures, including one enforcing the canonical requirement of residence for bishops and pastors. Strong though it was, it was not strong enough.19 In 1547, the council moved to Bologna, where it languished until 1549, when Paul iii finally allowed it to dissolve. The pope died a few months later. His successor was Julius iii (1550–1555), who as Cardinal Giovanni Maria Del Monte had been a papal legate at Trent. Within a month of his election, he informed Charles that he intended to call a council to meet in Trent or even in a German city on condition that Charles assure him that the authority of the Holy See and the reform of the curia not be allowed on the agenda. Charles, though displeased with the condition, accepted it, and the Council of Trent resumed for its second period (1551–1552). This period was particularly contentious, due in large part to the highhanded tactics of the legate, Marcello Crescenzio. The council passed two reform decrees, both dealing with technical juridical problems related to the episcopal office. Reform-minded bishops at the council boiled with resentment at the legate’s sometimes crude but always successful efforts to keep the council distant from fundamental problems concerning reform. By January, 1552, the council began to unravel and the political situation badly deteriorate. On April 25, Julius iii suspended the council indefinitely. It would not resume for ten years. When Julius iii died in 1555, he was succeeded for less than a month by Marcello ii, who as Marcello Cervini had also been a legate at the first period. The cardinals then elected Giampietro Carafa, who took the name Paul iv (1555– 1559). The new pope was a vigorous seventy-nine years old, a consistent and determined advocate of reform and a co-founder of the austere religious order of priests, the Theatines. It would be difficult to imagine anyone more zealous for the good of the Church, but his unmitigated confidence in his own judgment and his intolerance for anyone whose views might differ from his own destroyed the possibility of a constructive reign. He saw heresy in anyone guilty of the slightest deviation from his own narrow orthodoxy, and he proceeded against them. He for instance put Cardinal Giovanni Morone, a leading and highly respected member of the Sacred College, on trial for heresy and imprisoned him in the Castel Sant’Angelo.

19

See Tanner, Decrees, 2:681–683.

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Although Paul iv was scrupulously careful about making worthy appointments to the College, he made mistakes, one of which was colossal. Reformer though he was, he within two weeks of his election named cardinal his nephew, Carlo Carafa. Carlo, an intelligent but devious young man, manipulated behind his uncle’s back and at the same time led his uncle into bad or questionable decisions. Once Paul finally became aware of what was going on, he banished Carlo and some other relatives from Rome, but many people felt the punishment was inadequate. To his great credit, he singlehandedly took in hand the reform of the Datary, which had become a symbol of all that was wrong with the curia. Paul’s reform was drastic, and it cost the Holy See well over fifty percent of its income. Paul had contempt for the Council of Trent, which in his view had accomplished nothing of merit, and he came up with an alternative, a meeting that would take place in Rome under his immediate supervision. But he died before he could take steps to implement the plan. On January 18, 1562, the final and most productive period of the Council of Trent opened. It had been convoked by the Paul iv’s successor, Pius iv (1559– 1565). The legates decided to begin with discussion of a reform decree, at the heart of which was, once again, the neuralgic problem of absentee bishops. By now it was clear that the decree of the subject in the first period had had no effect. Even with the many penalties threatened for failure to reside, nothing had changed. In Rome itself, either in the curia or elsewhere in the city, were housed 113 absentee bishops. The loophole that allowed bishops to flaunt the law had not changed, papal dispensations. Absentee bishops saw the requirement as merely a provision of canon law, an ecclesiastical regulation, which therefore was not binding if sufficient reason for non-observance could be found. Reformers at the council saw clearly that until that loophole was closed, neither exhortations nor penalties were of any avail. For them, residence was not simply an ecclesiastical law. It was intrinsic to the office of bishop, and for that reason they began to propose that residence was a divine law, jus divinum. If it was a divine law, even the pope could not dispense from it. The problem with this approach was that it touched on two subjects the popes, including Pius iv, had endeavored to keep off the agenda of the council at all costs, the authority of the pope and the actions of the curia. The jus divinum issue divided the council into two factions almost the moment it was introduced, with each faction holding passionately to its opinion, which resulted in the ten-month stalemate, from September 1562 until July 1563. During that period the council was unable to publish a single decree, and the tensions that resulted contributed to the death of the two most important

reform and the renaissance popes

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legates. It moreover brought about the threat of an intervention by Charles v’s successor, Emperor Ferdinand i. By the first week of March 1563, the crisis point had been reached, and the very viability of the council was in question. At the epicenter of the crisis was Pius iv, whom the emperor and others held ultimately responsible for the crisis and whom they saw as holding the key to its resolution. Pius iv faced a crisis of epic proportions for himself and the future of the Church. Pressed to the wall, he acted decisively by appointing Giovanni Morone, now released from the prison of Sant’ Angelo, as a new legate, a person in whom he had complete trust. It was a brilliant choice for a number of reasons, not least because of Morone’s good judgment and diplomatic skills. Morone was able to calm down the emperor, win his confidence, and persuade him to give the pope the benefit of the doubt about reform. By July Morone had worked out a compromise that both factions were able to agree to and that the pope was forced to accept. The decree avoided the lightning-rod term, jus divinum, and even the word residence. It said, instead, that intrinsic to the bishop’s office was the duty to fulfill the traditional pastoral tasks of their office. Understood was that they could not do that if they were not in residence. A basic principle lurked behind the reformers’ zeal: if you did not do the job, you did not get the money.20 Although the decree did not directly and explicitly declare dispensations from residence null and void, it did have a chastening effect on the impulse to grant them. Moreover, after the council bishops like Carlo Borromeo, provided impressive examples of bishops residing in their dioceses and reforming them. They set in motion a process by which in time the problem was much ameliorated. By the last few months of the council, Morone saw clearly that there was no way he could prevent the council from directly addressing the reform of the curia, even though he tried to hold it to a minimum. He was able to convince Pius iv that it was in his best interests to accept what the council determined. In its final reform decrees, the council, for instance forbade “even cardinals” from holding more than one benefice that entailed the care of souls, and it imposed austere sumptuary laws on “the cardinals of the holy Roman church, seeing that the administration of the universal Church rests on their advice to the pope.”21 Once the council ended, Pius set to work trying to implement its decrees and have the curia do the same, but he was in ill health and had only a short time

20 21

See Ibid., 2:744–753, and O’Malley, Trent, 217–223. See Tanner Decrees, 2:785.

396

o’malley

to live. He nonetheless published on March 24, 1564, a new Index of Prohibited Books, a revision and significant mitigation of the Index of Paul iv, 1559. The revision was a mandate of the council to him. His successor, Pius v (1566–1572), was made of sterner stuff and was more deeply committed to reform of the Church and the curia. But such reforms were to be a long-term and, indeed, a perennial task. Under Pius and succeeding popes, revised and improved versions of the missal, the breviary, the martyology, and other liturgical texts were published and made obligatory. Such publications were a fulfillment but also an expansion of a mandate of the council. Pius’ successor, Gregory xiii (1572–1585), made good use of nuncios in different places in Europe to promote the council’s reforms, but his efforts to upgrade the training of the clergy had a particularly long-range effect. He was in that regard a generous patron of the new Jesuit institutions in Rome, especially the Roman College (now the Gregorian University) and the German College, whose remit was to train priests to return to areas of central Europe affected by Protestantism. Sixtus v (1585–1590) made his most lasting achievement in his complete reorganization of the curia into permanent bureaus or departments known as congregations, each of which was headed by a cardinal. This creation of a modern bureaucracy was one of the first in Europe, and it remains the basic structure of the curia today. Although by the time of Clement viii (1592–1605) the reform movement had begun to flag, the ideal of the pope as a model of reformed clergy had taken hold and had effect The post-Trent popes had assumed new responsibilities and created new institutions to fulfill them, many of which would continue to define the papacy through subsequent centuries into the present.

Bibliography Catto, Michele, et al., eds. Trent and Beyond: the Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures. Tunrhout: Brepolis, 2017. Hallerman, Barbara McClung. Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property, 1492–1563. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1985 Jedin, Hubert. Papal Legate at the Council of Trent: Cardinal Seripando. Trans. Frederic Eckhoff. Saint Louis: Herder, 1947. Jedin, Hubert. A History of the Council of Trent. 2 vols. Trans. Ernest Graf. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957–1961. Levillain, Phillipe, ed. The Papacy: An Encyclopedia. 3 vols. New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Minnich, Nelson H. The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517): Studies on Its Membership, Diplomacy and Proposals for Reform. Aldershot: Variorum, 1993. Minnich, Nelson H. Councils of the Catholic Reformation: Pisa i (1409) to Trent (1545– 1563). Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Murphy, Paul. Ruling Peacefully: Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. O’Brien, Emily. The Commentaries of Pope Pius ii (1458–1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Olin, John C. Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenez to the Council of Trent, 1495–1563. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. O’Malley, John W. Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979. O’Malley, John W. A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. O’Malley, John W. Trent: What Happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pastor, Ludwig von. History of the Popes. 40 vols. Trans. Francis I. Antrobus, et al. Saint Louis, MO: Herder, 1923–1949. Robinson, Adam Patrick. The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580): Between Council and Inquisition. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2012. Tanner, Norman. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.

Index Abdala of Edessa 307 Abdallah ibn Istifan 304 ‘Abdīshō iv of Jezireh, Mar 308–309 Abela, Leonardo 306 Abraham Abdallah of Edessa 304 Abraham, Mar 309–310 Abram al-Suryani 293 Atallah, Mar, archbishop 306 absolution 63, 207, 370 Abuna 299 Act of Supremacy (1534) 351 Adel 306 Adrian vi and diplomatic concerns 197 and Martin Luther 345–346, 355 as patron of the arts 167 Aegidian Constitution (1357) 14, 83, 97 Aegidius Romanus (Egidio Colonna) 27, 31, 33 Ailly, Pierre d’ 37, 41, 42, 45, 48 Albornoz, Gil 83 Aldiosi family 82 Aldobrandini, Ippolito 368 Aleandro, Girolamo 345, 355 Alexander v 335 Alexander vi 7, 225 and diplomatic concerns 192–194 and printed works 339 and reform 385–386 and the Borgia family 91 and the Spanish Inquisition 332 as patron of the arts 155–159 Alexis de Jesu de Menezes 311 Alfonso of Naples 85 Almain, Jacques 47, 48 Altoviti family 121 Alumbrados 334, 362 Alvarez, Francesco 298 Andrés de Oviedo 299 Andrew of Escobar 41 Anguillara, Everso d’ 87 Anne of Denmark 365 Annius of Viterbo 155 Antioch, Orthodox Church of 304–307 Antonio del Pollaiuolo 152 Apostoles, Michael 263

Aquinas, Thomas 28, 266, 267 Arasson, Jón 346 Archivum Historiae Pontificae 3 Argyropoulos, Ioannes 263 Armenians 268, 257–289 art and architecture in church life, role of 176 art, works of Battle of Lepanto 179, 232 Battle of Ostia 224 Battle of the Milvian Bridge 167–168, 224 Conversion of Saint Paul 170 Crucifixion of Saint Peter 170 Last Judgement 170–172, 176–177 Lives of the Artists 178 Moses 172–173 Pope Boniface viii Proclaiming the First Jubilee from the Lateran Loggia 131 Pope Paul iii and His Grandsons 174–175 Pope Sixtus iv Charges Bartolommeo Platina with the Administration of the Vatican Library 149 Resurrection 160 Sistine Tapestries 165 St. Catherine disputing the elders of Alexandria 157 St. Paul Preaching to the Apostles 165– 166 The Battle of Lepanto 178–179 The Consecration of St. Lawrence as Deacon 145 The Founding of Santa Maria Maggiore 136 The School of Athens 163 The Temptation of Christ 152 Tomb of Antipope John xxiii 132 Tomb of Sixtus iv 153 artisans 114 Assumption, Feast of the 125 Athanasius Johannes Ibrahim Qasha 305 Attila the Hun 224 Augsburg Interim 257 Augustinus, Triumphus 27, 33 authority, papal challenges to 7

400 civil 15 plentitude of power 11 Averlino, Antonio see Filarete Avignon 130 Avvakumov, Yury P. 18, 259–287 Azores 237 Baglioni family 92 bandits 97 Johannes Baptista of Ethiopia 305 Barbarossa 226 Barocci of Urbino, Federico 177 Barreto, João Nunes 299 Bartolomé de Carranza 202–203 Bartolomé de Las Casas Basilicas / Churches Holy Apostles see Ss. Dodici Apostoli S. Agostino 122 Ss. Dodici Apostoli 109, 148 S. Giovanni in Laterano, see St. John Lateran 108, 129, 137, 138 S. Maria Maggiore see Mary Major S. Maria del Popolo 108, 122, 124 S. Maria della Vittoria 232 S. Maria in Aracoeli 122 St. Mary Major 108 S. Maria sopra Minerva 122 S. Pietro in Vaticano see St. Peter’s St. Peter’s 108 St. Paul Outside the Walls 129 S. Pietro in Vincoli 148, 172–173 S. Sabina 143 Báthory, Stephen 204, 368 Bayezid i 212 Bayezid ii 154, 210 Beaton, James 365 Bellarmino S.J. Roberto 12, 26, 36–37 Bembo, Pietro 52 benediction loggia 147 Bentivoglio family 85, 92, 195 Bermudes, João 298 Berthold of Henneberg 338 Bessarion, John Basil, Cardinal 262, 384 bishops, absence of, conciliar 378, 394 Boccaccio, Giovanni 371 Boccapaduli family 115 Bohemia 4–6, 316, 321 Boleyn, Anne 199, 350 Bonaventure 28–29

index bonds 13 Boniface viii (1294–1303) 26 as patron of the arts 130, 131 Boniface ix 81 and Jubilee 134 and the crusades 210 as Lord of Rome 101 Borgia Apartments 156–158 Borgia family Cesare 7, 91, 193, 195, 386 Joffrey 386 Juan 386 Lucrezia 7, 386 Rodrigo 382 Borja, Rodrigo de, see Alexander vi Borgo San Sepolcro 85 Borromeo family Agostino 19, 314–374 Carlo 64, 395 Federico 94 Borromini, Francesco 137, 138 Boseman, Lex 180 Botticelli, Sandro 150–152 Bracciano, Duchy of 96 Braccio da Montone 81, 82, 186 Bracciolini, Poggio 8 Bramante, Donato 160–161 Brandolini, Rafaello 52 Braniewo, city of 367 Bravo, Alfonso 293 Brethren of the Free Spirit 315 Bridget of Sweden 134 Bronze doors of Filarete 140, 141 Brunelleschi, Filippo 135 Bruni, Leonardo 8, 262 Brutus al Hadathi 303 Bull, Conciliar Ad nostrum (1311) 315 Attendentes (1418) 378 Cantate Domino (1442) 292 Exultate Deo (1438) 268, 288 Frequens (1417) 11, 38, 42, 47, 270, 375 Great Reform Bull (1514) 387 Haec sancta (1415) 4, 11, 38, 42, 376 Laetentur coeli (1439) 6, 38, 214, 268, 273 Sicut pia mater (1434) 270 Unam sanctam (1302) 6, 26 Bull, Papal Altitudo divini consilii (1537) 250, 251

401

index Benedictus sit Deus (1445) 307 Coeli et terrae (1586) 338 Cum ad nihil (1531) 359 Cupientes Judaeos (1542) 251 Decet Romanum Pontificem (1596) 281, 344 Dum diversas (1452) 237 Ad abolendam (1184) 316 Execrabilis (1460) 46 Exsurge Domine (1521) 344 Sacrosanctae universalis ecclesiae regiminis (1515) 278 Eximiae devotionis affectus (1420) 237 Exponi nobis fecisti (1522) 243, 246, 247 Ezechielis propheta (1463) 217 Id nostri cordis (1487) 317 Illius fulciti presidio (1504) 241 In apostolicae dignitatis specula (1420) 237 In apostolicae sedis specula (1497) 386 Inter caetera (1493) 221, 241 Inter cetera quae (1456) 238 Inter coetera (1514) 194 Magnus Dominus et laudabilis nimis (1595) 281 Multa et admirabilis (1444) 305, 307 Nuper ad nos (1576) 249 Ortodoxae fidei propagationem (1486) 240 Pastor Aeternus (unpublished) 382 Pastorale officium (1537) 245–246 Pastoralis officii (1513) 7, 387 Quoniam regnatium cura (unpublished) 385 Rex regum (1418) 237 Romani Pontificis (1571) 251 Romanus pontifex (1454) 238 Sublimis deus (1537) 194, 245–246 Universalis ecclesiae (1508) 194, 242 Buonarroti, Michelangelo 8, 161–163, 170– 173, 176, 226, 386 Burchard, Johann 8 Burns, James H. 40 Buttigeg, Ambrosius 293, 308, 310 Byzantine Empire 17 Caetani family 79, 113 Cajetan, Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal 37, 38, 47, 344, 388

26, 36,

Callixtus iii 382 and crusades 215 and Eastern Churches 273 and missions 238 and Roman barons 87 and witchcraft 336 as patron of the arts 146 Calvin, John 349, 351 Campeggi, Lorenzo 55, 190, 350 Canary Islands 237 Capitoli 83 Capponi family 121 Capranica, Niccolò 384 Carafa family Carlo 94, 394 Giampietro 390 Giovanni 93, 94 Olivero 176, 218 Pietro see Paul iv Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 182 Cardinals 11, 42, 48, 54 and reform 395 as papal nephews 11 as protectors 55 College of 12 geographical origins of 70 gratuity (propina) 55, 66 Italianization 70 national origin 71 palatine 55 secularization of 384 social origins of 70–71 Carnesecchi, Pietro 361 Carracci, Annibale 182 Carranza, Bartolomé 363 Carvajal, Juan de 327 casino 177–178 Castro, duchy of 93 Catanei, Rosa Vannozza de’ 386 Catherine of Aragon 198, 350 Cattaneo, Alberto 317 Cauchon, Pierre 336 Cem Sultan 154, 220, 225–226 Cenci family 115 Cervia, city of 13, 85, 86, 195 Cervini, Marcello, Pope Marcellus ii 278, 392 Cesarini, Giuliano 46, 187, 214 Cesena, city of 91

402 Chaldean Church 268 Chalkondyles, Demetrios 263 Charles de Bourbon 349 Charles de Lorraine 349 Charles ix 368 Charles of Poland 366 Charles v, Habsburg, Emperor 92, 197– 198, 226, 245, 344–345, 350, 355, 372 Charles viii of France 159, 220, 225 Chatillon, Odet de 349 Chieregati, Francesco 355 Chigi family 121 Agostino 161, 163 Chittolini, Giorgio 125 Christian ii of Denmark 199, 200 Christian iii of Denmark 346 Christians of Saint Thomas 238 Chrysoloras Manuel 261 Cibò, Franceschetto 88, 191 Cibò, Lorenzo 385 Città di Castello 85, 89 class structures 112–115 Clement vii and Charles v 355 and England 350 and reform 390 and the Ethiopian Church 298 and the Reformation 347–348 as patron of the arts 167–169 diplomatic concern 197–200 Clement viii 182 and diplomatic concerns 207 and French succession 369–370 Coeli et terrae (1586) 338 Coinage valuation 75–76 Colegio de Santa Cruz 248 Colombo, Emanuele 18, 234–258 Colonna Altarpiece 135, 136 Colonna family 14, 79, 82, 97, 113 Egidio (Romanus) 27, 31, 33 Giovanni 87 Marcantonio 96 Marcantonnio 230 Oddone, see Martin v Columbus, Christopher 193 Comacchio, salt flats of 19 Compactata 327–328 Conciliabulum of Pisa (1511–1512) 47

index conciliar theory 44 conciliarism 11, 39 Momentum, conciliar 376–377 concordats 186, 188 Constance (1418) 16 Danish (1451) 188 French, of Bologna (1516) 196 German Concordat (1448) 16, 188 German Princes (1447) 16, 188 Spanish (1523, 1529) 194 Condottieri captains 79, 86, 88 Confraternities, Roman Lay confraternities 122 Annunciation of via Oratoria 124 Divine Love 123 Forty Martyrs 124 Most Holy Annunciation at the Minerva 123 Recommended of the Savior 122 Recommended of the Virgin 122, 124 St. John the Beheaded 123 St. Lucy 124 St. Mary of the Consolation 124 Standardbearer 122 Congress of Mantova 17 Conrad of Gelnhausen 41–42 Consejo de la Suprema Inquisición 333 Constantinople 17 Constitutiones Egidiane see Aegidian Constitution Constitution, Apostolic Immensa aeterni Dei (1588) 73, 361 Licet ab initio (1542) 359 Meditatio cordis (1547) 359 Pastoralis officii munus (1562) 361 Contarini, Gasparo 356, 390–391 Conti family 79, 113 conventicle, Lutheran 362 conversion to Catholicism 207 Coptic College 295 Copts 268, 291–296 Correr 330 Corsignano see Pienza Cosmati, Deodati 128 Cosmati, Jacopo 128 Councils provincial councils 255 Council of Constance (1414–1418) 4, 16, 37, 41, 184, 185, 268, 375

index Council of Basel-Lausanne (1431– 1449) 16, 37, 216, 268, 326, 376, 380 Council of Ferrara-Florence-Rome (1437– 1445) 6, 18, 38, 259–260, 265, 267–271, 288, 290, 381 Council of Goa, Third (1585) 311 Council of Lateran v 6, 11, 38, 46, 47, 48, 275, 304, 340, 387 Council of Lima, Second (1567–1568) 249 Council of Lima, Fourth (1591) 249, 255n78 Council of London (1382) 319, 320 Council of Mantua (1537) 356 Council of Mexico, First (1555) 249 Council of Mexico, Third (1585) 249 Council of Pavia-Siena (1423–1424) 41, 380 Council of Pisa (1409) 41, 269 Council of Pisa, Milan, Asti, Lyon (1511– 1512) 196, 387 Council of Rome (1413) 319 Council of Trent (1545–1563) 6, 11, 36, 39, 201, 231, 254–255, 278, 300, 304, 308, 311–312, 357–358, 389, 391– 395 Council of Vatican i (1870) 36 Council of Vienne (1311) 41, 315 Synod of Angamali (1583) 311 Synod of Brest (1596) 281, 282 Council of Chalcedon (451) 292 Synod of Champforan (1525) 317 Synod of Constantinople 1484, decree of 264 Synod of Diamper (1599) 282, 312 Synod of Goa ii (1575) 311 Synod of Memphis (1583) 295 Synod of Sis (1341/2) 287 Court, Papal 13, 51–54 Almoner, Papal 53 Camerarii see Chamberlains Chamber clerks 52 Chamberlains 52 Clerics of the chapel 53 Cost of 51, 54 Couriers 53 Cubicularii see Chamber clerks Divisions of 51

403 Domestic prelates 52 Greek scholars 53 Household servants 53 Liturgy, papal 53 Master of the Sacred Palace 53, 339, 340 Membership of 52 San Stefano, Ethiopian monks of 53 Scutiferi see Shield-bearers Secret court 51 Sergeants-at-arms 53 Shield-bearers 52 St. Peter’s, anchoresses of 53 Cranmer, Thomas 199, 351 creolization 253 Crescenzio, Marcello 393 Crnič, Thomas 347 Crusades 210–233 against Ladislas of Naples 228 against Bohemian Utraquists 228 against Christians 227–230 crypto-Judaism 332 Curia 12–13, 54–66 abbreviators 60 accountant 60 Annates 66, 67 apostolic letters, scribes of 60 Banker, papal 56, 193 Camera, Apostolic 14, 56, 95 Camera, clerics of the 56, 68 Chamberlain 12, 56 chancery location 58 Chancery, Apostolic 57, 58 Collectors 56 Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith 18, 235, 256–257 Congregation of the Index 372 Congregation 65, 97 Congregazione del buon governo 98 Consistorial appointment 55 Consulta 96, 97 contradictory letters, judge of 60, 68 Corrector of bulls 68 correctors 60 Cost of 69 Curial offices, sale of 67 datarius 12, 59, 60, 61, 62 Datary 62, 394 distributor 60

404 Episcopal college 388 Governor of the city of Rome 56 Grand Penitentiary 12, 64 Inquisition, Roman 65, 338, 359–360 Janissaries, see solicitors of apostolic letters Judges 61, 65 Length of career 70 Lifespan 70 Master of the register 61 Minor penitentiaries 64 notaries 65 Notary 68 Number of officials 58 Nuncios 61, 193, 396 Procurators 68 Protonotaries 57, 68 Referrers 59 Reform 72 register, clerics of 59 Registrars 62 Resignation 69 Revenues 73, 89, 94 Sacred Congregation of the Council of Trent 65, 255 Sacred Consistory 54, 94 Sacred Rota 13, 65 Sacro Consiglio see Sacred Consistory sealers 60 Secretariat of Briefs 62 Secretariat, Apostolic 61, 68 Secretaries, domestic 61 Secretary of State 12 Secretary, intimate 62 Signature of Justice 13 Signature 59 solicitors of apostolic letters 59, 68 Taxes 67 Tenure 69 Treasurer 56 Treasury 98 Vice-chamberlain 56 Vice-chancellor 12, 57 Writers of the Penitentiary 69 Writers, apostolic 68 Dandini, Girolamo 304 Daniel of Tabriz 287 Dauphiné 316 Dawud of Antioch, patriarch 294

index Decretum pro Armenis 288 Deitrich of Niem 41 Delumeau, Jean 79 demographics 15 Dengal, Lebna 297 Denha, Mar 309 Denmark 16, 188, 200, 346 Diets Hagenau 356 Regensburg 356 Worms 345, 356 Dioscorus 292, 295 Dispensations 63 Dogana dei Pascoli 84 Domenico Domenichi 48, 382 Dominici, Giovanni 326 Donatello de’ Bardi 132, 133 Doni family 121 Dorpat 367 Duarte (Edward) of Portugal 237 Dudley, John 351 Earnest of Bavaria 204 Edward vi of England 351, 352 Einarsson, Gissur 346 Electoral capitulations 48 Elia vi 309 Eliano, Giovanni Batista 293, 304 Elias, metropolitan 310 Elizabeth i of England 203, 227, 353, 365 Encomienda 245 England 16, 198–199, 201–204 Episcopalism 49 Erard de la Marck 362 Erasmus 223, 231, 362, 371, 389 Esposito, Anna 15, 101–127 d’Este family Alfonso 92, 195 Alfonso ii 98 Cesare 98 Ippolito 368 Ethiopian practices, suppression of 284 Ethiopians 296–300 Eucharist sub utraque specie 324 Eugenius iv 46, 84, 85 and crusades 218 and diplomatic concern 187 and heresy 330–331

index and mission 237 and reform 380–381 and witchcraft 336 as patron of the arts 139–142 Eutyches 292, 295 Excommunication 203 Fabi family 115 Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris 349, 370 Faenza, city of 91 Farnese family 92 Alessandro 8, 390 Ottavio 8, 93 Pier Luigi 8, 93, 201 fees for documents 13 Felipe de Berbegal 331 Ferdinand, Emperor 305 Fermo, city of 81 Fernando de Valdés 362 Ferrara, duchy of 98 Ferreri Zaccaria 246 Filarete 139–142 Finland 346 Florensz, Nicolaes (Gaudanus) 364 Florentine legacy 283 Fontana, Domenico 180 Foreigners 114–115 Forlì, city of 91 Fornovo 192 Fougeyron, Ponce 335 Four Articles of Prague 190, 326 Fra Angelico 142–145 France 205, 345–350 Francis i 17, 196, 197, 220–221 Francisco da Barcelona 303 Fratricelli de opinione 328–331 Fray Diogo da Silva 359 Frederick i 200 Frederick iii 215 Frederick the Wise 198 Frederick the Wise of Saxony 343 French missionaries 289 Fugger family 193 Fugger, Jakob 161 Funchal 239 Gabriel Ibn Brutus Ibn Guriya 303 Gabriel vii, Patriarch 293, 295

405 Galāwdēwos, Negus 299 Gallery of Maps 180 Garcés, Julián 245 Gaspard, Count 349 Gazes, Theodore 263 Genitle da Fabriano 137 Gentile da Fabriano 151 George of Christ 310, 311 George of Podĕbrady, King of Bohemia 190, 327 George of the Cross 312 George of Trebizond 262 Georgians 290–291 Gergis Sulayman al-Qubursi 304 German College 396 Gerson, Jean (1363–1429) 37, 41, 42, 45, 46, 269 Ghibelline 14 Ghinucci, Girolamo 344 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 150 Ghislieri, Michele 361 Giacomo della Marca 330 Giacomo di Buronzo 316 Gibbon, Edward 265 Giles of Viterbo 161, 222 Giordano, Silvano 16, 184–219 Giotto di Bondone 130, 131 Giustiniani family 121 Paolo 274 Tommaso 47 Goa 239 Godunov, Boris 279 governors 83 Gozzoli, Benozzo 143 Gratian 38 Greece 331 Greek college in Rome 263, 276 Greek emigration to the West 261 Gregory iii of Constantinople, Patriarch 272 Gregory vii 25 Gregory xi 319 Gregory xii 81 Gregory xiii and diplomatic concern 203 and missions 244 and noble titles 96 and patronage of art 178–180 and reform 396

406 and Spain 363 and the Church of the East 312 calendar reform 12, 178 Gregory xv 256 grievances, conciliar 376 Grimaldi family 121 Gryphon 303 Gudziak, Borys 280 Guelph 14 Guidobaldo da Montefeltro 92 Guillaume de Peyre Godin 335 Gutenberg, Johannes 338 Hall of Constantine 167–168, 224 Hamilton, Alastair 295 head of St. Andrew 223 Helena of Lithuania 277 Henrique, Cardinal 310 Henry de Guise 206 Henry ii of France 349 Henry iv, Bourbon, of France and Navarre 206–207 Henry of Langenstein 41, 42 Henry of Valois 367 Henry the Navigator 194, 237 Henry viii of England 198, 220, 350, 352 Herbest, Benedict 280 Hereford, Nicholas 320 Historian Baron, Hans 4 Burckhardt, Jacob 4 Bzowski, Abraamo 1 Chacón, Alfonso 2 Alfonso v 237 Ciccarelli, Antonio 1 Creighton, Mandell 2 Jedin, Hubert 3, 41, 48 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 4 Michelet, Jules 4 Morales Cabrera, Francisco 2 O’Malley, John 3, 375–397 Panvino, Onofrio 1 Papal 1–4 Pastor, Ludwig von 2 Ranke, Leopold von 2 Sacchi, Bartolomeo (Platina) 1 Stringa, Giovanni 1 Voigt, Georg 4 Hobbes, Thomas 28

index Hohenzollern, Albrecht von 344, 347 Holy Lance 154 Holy of Holies chapel of the Lateran 122 Hosius, Stanislaus 205, 366 Hospices, Roman, based on nations 124– 125 S. Ambrogio 124 S. Giacomo 124 S. Giovanni 124 S. Maria dell’Anima 124 San Tommaso 124 Hospitals, Roman Incurables 123 S. Giacomo in Augusta 109, 124 Santo Spirito in Sassia 108, 123 Hostiensis (Henry of Seguisa) 32, 42 Housley, Norman 219 Hübner, Johannes 322 Huguenots 178, 349 Hulst, François vander 361 Humanism 4 Hungary 189, 205 Hunyadi, John 214 Hus, Jan 228, 321–323 Hussites 228 Iceland 346 Ignatius Na’matallah 306 Ignatius of Loyola 389 Ignatius Petrus Dawud ii Shah 305, 306 Ignatius Shim’un Shukr-allah Ibn Ni’matallah al-Daddagh 306 Ignatius v 304 Imola, city of 86, 88, 91 Indexes 370 Indulgences 13, 219 Innocent viii and diplomatic concerns 88, 191–192 and heresy 317 and mission 240 and reform 385 and witchcraft 337 as patron of the arts 154 tomb of 154 Inquisition, Portuguese 194, 255 Inquisition, Spanish 255, 332–334 Institoris (Kramer), Henricus 337 Inter multiplices (1487) 339 Investing 121

407

index Investiture Conflict 25–26 Iosyf of Kyiv, Metropolitan 264 Ireland 203 Isidore of Kyiv, Metropolitan 262, 272, 276 Ivan iii of Moscow 191, 277 Ivan iv of Russia 279 Jacob, Mar 309 Jacob of Mies 324 James iv of Scotland 354 James v of Scotland 354 James vi of England and Scotland 365 James of Viterbo (Giacomo Capocci) 27, 28, 29 Jamometrić, Andija 229 Jean de Monluc 367 Jean de Roma 348 Jean Le Maître 336 Jeremiah ii Tranos of Constantinople 279, 280 Jerome of Prague 323–324 Jesi of Naples 85 Jesuit missionary methods 256 Jews 115–117 Coexistence 116 Intolerance 117 Loan banks 116 Joanna of Naples 82 Job of Moscow, Patriarch 279 Johannes, Monachus 42 John iii of Sweden 204 John Mair 47, 48 John of Capistrano 327 John of Paris 37 John of Ragusa 41 John of Segovia 41, 44 John Suid Sulāqā 307, 308 John viii Paleologus 214 John xi of Alexandria, Patriarch 291 John xxii 328, 335 John xxiii 81 as antipope 130, 132 tomb of 130, 132, 133–134 Joseph, Mar 310 Josyf i of Kyiv 277 Juan de Sanmartín 332 Juan de Torquemada 26, 36, 37, 48 Juan of Beruit 303 Jubilee year

of 1300 130 of 1400 134 of 1423 134 of 1450 142, 189 of 1475 111, 148 of 1600 6 Judaizing 297 Julius ii 195 and crusades 222 and England 350 and mission 239, 241 and reform 386–387 and the Papal States 91 as patron of the arts 160–165 tomb of 172–173 Julius iii and land acquisition 93 and Mary Tudor 352 and the Church of Antioch 305 and the Church of the East 307 and the Council of Trent 357, 393 as patron of the arts 175 diplomatic concern 201 Katherin Jagellon of Poland 365 Keroularios, Patriarch Michael 259 Knightood, Papal Of Loreto 53 Of Pius 53 Of St. George 53 Of St. Paul 53 Of St. Peter 53 Of the Lilly 53 Knox, John 354 Kydones, Demetrios 266 Ladislas of Naples 14, 79, 81 Laínez, Diego 367, 368 Laskaris, Janos 263 Laski, archbishop of Gniezno, Jan 277 de Laude, Gabrielle 52 Leo x 8, 17, 47, 72 and crusades 222 and Eastern Churches 274 and land disputes 89 and Martin Luther 343–345 and missions 239 and reform 387 and religious institutions 123

408 and the Ethiopian Church 297 and the Spanish Inquisition 334 as patron of the arts 165–167 diplomatic concern 196–197 Lerma, Gonzalez de 59 Letters of the Church 64 Letters, Papal 57 Leuven, University of 370 Liber pontificalis 1 Ligorio, Pirro 177 Lippomano, Luigi 366 Lollard 319 Loreto, Shrine of 224 Loschi, Antonio (1368–1441) 8 Louis of Orleans 324 Louis xii of France 92, 195, 220 Luther, Martin 13, 220, 223, 230, 334, 342– 345, 379, 388 Machiavelli, Niccoló 7, 371 Madeira 236 Malatesta, Novello 86 Malatesta, Roberto 86 Malatesta, Sigismondo 86 Malleus maleficarum 337 Mamluks 213 Manfredi, Taddeo 85–86 Mantegna, Andrea 154 Manuel i of Portugal 239, 358 Marcellus ii 175, 278 Margaret of Austria 8 María de Cazalla 334 Marie de Guise 354, 364 Mark v of Alexandria 296 Maronite college 304 Maronites 268, 303–304 Mārquos of Ethiopia, patriarch 297 Marquos, Abuna 297 Martin v (1417–1431) 9, 46, 82 and crusades 214 and diplomatic concern 185–186 and heresy 320, 322, 326 and Jubilee 134 and mission 237 and reform 379–380 and the Eastern Church 268 and the Fratricelli 329–330 and witchcraft 336 as patron of the arts 134–139

index Mary Tudor 201 Maryam, Kefla 294 Masaccio da Panicale 135 Mascoli, Gabriele 71 Masolino da Panicale 135, 136 Mathew of Armenia 297 Mattingly, Garrett 219 Maximilian i, Emperor 220 Maximillian iii of Austria 368 Mazzolini, Silvestro 344 McIlwain, Charles Howard 33 d’Medici family 120, 187 Alessandro 8 Catherine 368 Cosimo the Elder 187 Francesco Maria 93 Giovanni 191, 385 Giovanni di Bicci 133 Giuliano 92 Guido 52 Lorenzo (The Magnificent) 7 Lorenzo 7, 92–93, 229 Mehmed i 213 Mehmed ii 214, 260 Melozzo da Forlì 148, 149 Mendes, Afonso 300 Mendoza y Pacheco, Antonio de 246 merchant bankers 110, 115 merchant families 113 Merici, Angela 389 Meserve, Margaret 17, 210–223 Mestizos 249 Michelotti, Biordo dei 81 Michelozzo Michelozzi 132, 133 Mignanelli, Beltramo 212 Miguel de Morillo 332 Military Conflict Agnadello, Battle of (1509) 195 Alcácar, Battle of (1578) 211 Belgrade, Battle of (1456) 210 Blackbirds, Field of the (1389) 212 Cambrai, War of the League of 92 Cologne, War of (1577) 204 Constantinople, Fall of (1453) 214, 259 Cueta, Conquest of (1415) 193, 232n54, 236 Cyprus, Battle of (1570) 226, 230, 260 Cyprus, Defense of (1538) 211, 226, 230 Granada, Battle of (1492) 221

409

index Italian Wars 90, 91, 94 Lepanto, Battle of (1571) 211, 226, 230 Malta, Defense of (1565) 226 Marignano, Battle of (1515) 196 Mohacs, Battle of (1521) 225 Mühlberg, Battle of (1547) 201, 356 Nicopolis, Battle of (1396) 210 Otranto, Fall of (1480) 190, 210, 218 Pazzi War (1478–1479) 229 Rhodes, Siege of (1480) 210, 218 Siege of (1521) 211 Rome, Sack of (1527) 93, 169, 355, 390 Ruthenians and Tatars, War againt (1503) 228 Spanish Armada (1588) 229, 353 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) 369 Varna, Battle of (1444) 17, 210, 214, 260 Vienna, Siege of (1529) 211, 225, 261 White Mountain, Battle of the (1620) 232 Minas, Negus 299 Minnich, Nelson H. 1–25, 51–77, 303–313 Modena, city of 92, 93, 98 Modigliani, Anna 119 Mohelnice, Anton Brus z 205 Monte della Fede 94 Montefeltro family 82 Morone, Giovanni 359, 361, 393, 395 Mosé 305 Mousa Saade el-Akari Kafroun 304 Murad ii 214 Musurus, Marcus 263 Native peoples artistic representation of 159 as clergy and religious 247–249 Baptism of 250 Condemnation of enslavement of 244 Defense of 244–247 Education of 246 Marriage of 251 Penance of 252 Sacraments of 249–252 Society of Jesus ban on admission of 248 training and ordination of 247 Nephon ii, Patriarch 264 nepotism 88

Neri, Philip 389 Netherlands 361 new laws 246 Nicholas de Albis 52 Nicholas of Cusa 41, 42, 381 Nicholas v 8, 85 and crusades 215, 218 and diplomatic concern 189–190 and heresy 316, 327 and mission 237 as patron of the arts 142–145 Nicolò da Massaccio 331 Nielsen, Laurentius (Norvegus) 204, 365 Nobili, Roberto di 312 nomination of bishops 205 Norvegus, see Nielsen Nunciatures of reform 204 O’Malley, John W. 20, 375–397 Oakley, Francis A. 11, 25–50 opinio 328 Ordelaffi family 82 Order of Christ 194 Ordinances (Laws) of Burgos (1512) 245 Orsini family 14, 79, 83, 97, 113 Gerolamo 330 Napoleone 87 Paolo Giordano 96 Our Lady of Victory (Rosary) 230 Páez, Pedro 300 Palazzo Venezia 147 Paliano, duchy of 94, 96 Pallavicino family 121 Parampil, Thomas 306, 312 Parlements of France 348 Parma, city of 92, 93 pase regio 194, 242 passion play 125 patronage of missions, royal 235–242 rights of patronage 194 patrons of art and letters 8 Paul ii as patron of the arts 147–148 Paul iii 8, 72, 372 and Charles v 356 and mission 239 and reform 382, 390–393

410 and support of native people 246 and the Council of Trent 357 and the Ethiopian Church 298 as patron of the arts 170–175 diplomatic concern 200–201 Paul iv 175–176 and diplomatic concerns 202 and England 353 and reform 393–394 and the Inquisition 359–360 and the Reformation 349 Pavia, city of 380 Pazzi conspiracy 190, 384 Pelagius, Alvarus 27, 33 Peraudi, Raymond 219 Peretti, Michele 97 Perron, Jacques David du 207 Perugino, Pietro 150 Pesaro, city of 85, 92 Peter of Ethiopia 296 Petit, Jean 324 Petrarch, Francesco 9, 134 Petros, Walatta 300 Philip ii, Habsburg of Spain 93, 352–353, 363 Philip iv of France 26 Philip Habsburg of Portugal 203 Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy 214–215 Philippines 249 Photios, Patriarch 259 Piacenza, city of 92, 93 Piccinino, Jacopo 87, 88 Piccinino, Niccolò 85 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius, Pope Pius ii 215 Piccolomini, Antonio 87 Piedmont 316 Pienza 146 Pietri, Olaf 199 Pietro da Ferrara 303 Pinelli family 121 Pinturicchio, Bernardino 154–159 Pisanello 137, 151 Pius ii 8, 17 and crusades 215–217 and diplomatic concern 190 and heresy 317, 327–328 and land acquisition 87 as patron of the arts 146–147

index Pius iv and artistic reform 176–177 and censorship 371 and judicial action 94 and the Church of the East 310 and the Council of Trent 357 diplomatic concern 202–203 Pius v 8, 230 and diplomatic concern 203 and England 353 and fiefdoms 96 and missions 244 and Spain 363 as patron of the arts 178–180 tomb of 231 Plousiadenos, John 266, 273 Poissy Coloquies 368 Poland 16, 189, 316, 346–348, 366 Pole, Reginald 201, 352–353, 359, 390–390 Ponte Sisto 148 Pontelli, Baccio 150 Pope(s) and censorship 370–372 and crusades 210–233 and wariness of councils 375 as administrators 10 as arbiters 17 as common father of all Christians 16, 185 as fathers of illegitimate children 7 as foreigners 9 as Italian princes 7–8, 342 as leading reprehensible private lives 342 as morally discredited 342 as prisoners 20 as religious 10 as secular clergy 10 average ages 10 education 9–10 elected by cardinals 10–11 father’s occupation 9 financial support of the crusades 226 personalities 21 Porta, Giacomo della 179–180 Portugal 203, 358 Possevino, Antonio 365 Pragmatic sanction 187 Prester John 238

index printed works, censure of 338–340 Prodi, Paolo 79 Prokop the Great 326 Provinces of Papal States 83 Bologna 81, 83–85, 196 Campagna and Marittima 83 Marche 83 Patrimony, the 83 Perugia 81, 83 Romagna 83 Spoleto (Umbria) 83, 89 Public abjuration 207 Public events 125 Quastenberg, Jakob 59 Querini, Pietro (Vicenzo) 38, 47, 274 Rabelais, François 371 Raphael Rooms (Stanze) 163–164 Rahoza, Michael 281 Ravenna, city of 85, 93 rector, papal official in provinces of Papal States 83 Reggio, city of 92, 93, 98 Regis, Thomas 59 Religious orders and missions 243–244 Mendicant churches 122 Mendicant orders 389 Augustinians, Observant 122 Barnabites 389 Dominicans 122 Franciscans 122 Society of Jesus (Jesuits) 244, 248, 256, 367, 389 Theatines 389 Ursulines 389 Repington, Philip 320 Residences, embassies, diplomatic 193 Riario, Girolamo 7, 87, 88, 150 Riario, Pietro 383 Riario, Raffaelle 150 Riccardi Antoine 348 Ricci, Matteo 312 Ricci, Sebastiano 232 Ricciarelli, Daniele (da Volterra) 177 Rijkel, Denys van 42 Rimini, city of 86, 91 Rochette, Louis 348

411 Rodríguez, Christóforo 293 Roman College 396 Roman index of prohibited books 371, 396 Romano, Antoniazzo 159 Romanus Pontifex 194 Romanus, Aegidius (Egidio Colonna) 27, 31, 33 Rome, commune institutions 102–105 Camera Urbis see Capitoline Chamber Capitoline Chamber 103 Caporioni see Heads of the principal districts Capotori see Constables Conservators 103 Consiglio generale see council, general Consiglio privato see council, private Constables 104 Council, General 104 Council, Private 104 Felice Società dei Balestrieri e Pavesati see Felicitious Society of Crossbowsmen and Shieldbearers Felicitious Society of Crossbowsmen and Shieldbearers 101 Heads of the principal districts 103 Internationalization of Rome 114 Maestri de li deifitii see supervisors of edifices Maestri di strada see supervisors of the streets Magistrato Romano see Roman Magistrate Magistri stratarum see Supervisors of the streets President delle Strade see President of the Streets President of the Streets 104 Roman Magistrate 103 Senator 101, 102 Supervisors of edifices 104 Supervisors of the streets 102 Supervisors of the streets 104 Rome, city administrative structures 15 religious life of 15, 122–125 sanitary conditions of 110 social structures 15 urban landscape of 105–111 Districts (Rioni) 105–108 urban plan for Rome 142

412 Rome, economy of 117–121 Agricultural production 119 Bank houses 120 Cattle raising 119 Center of consumption 118 Economic growth 117 Financial market 120 Immigration 117 Service and hospitality industries Trade 119 Urban real estate income 120 Rome, roads in 111 via Alessandrina 111 via Giulia 111, 161 via Leonina 111 via Pia 111 Roselli, Antonio de 38 Rosselli, Cosimo 151 Rossellino, Bernardo 146 Rossi, Luigi 52 Rovere, della, family Francesco Maria 7, 92 Guliano 150, 151, 383 Leonardo 150 Rowland, Ingrid 15–16, 128–183 Roz, Francisco 311 Ruggieri, Giulio 367 S. Stefano degli Abissini 298 Sacranus, Johannes 277 Sadoleto, Jacopo 52 Safar ibn Mansur Qotai 306 Sager, Peter 316 Sala Regia 178–179 sale of minerals 13 sale of offices 62 Salmerón, Alfonso 366 Salone Sistino 181 Santacroce family 115 Sanzio, Raffaello 8, 161, 166–170 Sauli family 121 Savanarola, Girolamo 192 Savelli family 79, 84, 113, 115 Savelli, Jacopo 87 Scholarios, Gennadios 267 Scotland 354 Scrofa, Modesto 338 Sebastian of Portugal 203 Selim i (1516) 225

index

118

Seminary of Santa Fe 248 Seymour, Edward 351 Seymour, Jane 351 Sforza family Caterina 88 Francesco 85 Galeazzo Maria 85 Guido Ascanio 8, 390 Shaw, Christine 13, 78–100 Shimun ix Dinkha 308 Siena, city of 380 Sigismund ii Augustus of Poland 346–347, 367 Sigismund iii, Vasa of Poland and Sweden 205, 366, 368 Simeon Ibn Hassah of Hadeth 304 Simon viii Denhā 307–309 Simone da Candia 331 simony 387 Sistine Chapel 150, 161–163 Sixtus iv (1471–1484) 7, 59, 229 and crusades 217–218 and indulgences 217 and printed works 339 and reform 383–385 and the Spanish Inquisition 332 as patron of the arts 148–153 diplomatic concern 190 tomb of 152–153 Sixtus v 11–12, 73, 229 and England 353 and papal authority 97 and reorganization of the curia 73, 361 as patron of the arts 180–181 Skarga, Peter 280 Sobieski, Jan 232 Societas peregrinatium 287 Spain 362 Spanocchi family 120–121 Spirituali / zealoti 359 Sprenger, Jacobus 337 St. Peters, New 164 Stanza d’Eliodoro 224 Stefaneschi, Jacopo 130 Stuart, Mary 354, 364 Suleyman ii (1520–1566) 17 Summis desiderantibus affectibus (1484) 337 Susenyos 300 Sweden 16, 199, 204, 346, 365

413

index Symeon i of Constantinople, Patriarch 272 Syrian Church 268 Taborites 325 Taxes, Roman hearth 95 real estate 121 salt 95 sussidio trennale 95 Temudo, George 310 Tetzel, Johannes 345 Theological differences, Latin and Greek 266, 270 Beatitude of the saints 266 Eucharistic bread 266 Filioque see Procession of the Holy Spirit Papal primacy 266 Procession of the Holy Spirit 266, 273 Purgatory 266 Theophanes of Jerusalem, Patriarch Theresa of Avila 389 Thomas Christians 308–312 destruction of their literary patrimony 284 Thomas of York 29 Timothy of Tarsus 307 Timur 212 Titian 172–175 Tivoli, city of 89 Todi, city of 89 Tolfa, alum mines at 13, 90, 94 Torquemada, Juan de 26, 36, 37, 48 Torquemada, Tomás de 333 Traversari, Ambrogio 262 Treaties /Leagues /Agreements Alcáçovas, Treaty of (1479) 194 Augsburg Interim (1548) 201 Augsburg, Religious Peace of 202 Cambrai, League of (1509) 195 Cateau-Cambrésis, Treaty of (1559) 90, 202 Catholic League (1576) 206 Cave, Treaty of (1557) 202 Cognac, League of (1526) 198 Crepy, Peace of (1544) 357 Holy League (1495) 192, 196 Italian League (1455) 190 Lodi, Peace of (1454) 192, 215, 218 Mantua, Congress of (1459) 216

Schmalkalden, League of 356 Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494) 194 Vervins, Treaty of (1598) 6, 17, 207 Tridentine index 371 Trinci family 84 Trolle, Gustav 199 Tsamvlak, Hryhory 268 Tudeschis, Nicholas de 41 Tudor, Mary 352 Tunis 226 tyrannicide 324 Union of Florence 267–272, 304 Uniting Brethren 287 Urbino, duchy of 92 Utraquists 325 Val Pellice 316 Valignano, Alessandro 312 Varano family, da 84 Vasa, Gustav 199, 346 Vasari, Giorgio 178–179 Vassalletto cloisters 129 Vassalletto, Pietro 128 Vatican 109 Library 142, 148 Palace 161 Vecchietti, Giovanni Battista 294 Venal offices 13, 121 Vergerio, Pier Paolo (1370–1444) 8 Vespaisano da Bisticci 102 Vicariate, papal 79 Vicenza, city of 356 di Vico family 84 Villa Giulia 175 Vilnius, city of 367 de Vio, Thomas see Cajetan, Cardinal Visconti, Filippo Maria 82, 84, 85 Visconti, Giangaleazzo 14, 79, 81 Vitelleschi 84 Vitelli, Niccolò 89 Vladislas ii Jagiello 328 Waldburg, Gebhard Truchsess von 204 Waldensians 315–317 Waldo 315–316 Wilks, Michael 34 Witchcraft 335–338 Wladyslaw iii 214

414 Wolsey, Thomas 198, 350 Wyclif, John 317–319, 323, 325 Xavier, Francis 389 Yahballah iv 308 Yawsep (Mar Joseph) 309 Yosāb 299 Yost, Charles C. 18, 259–302 Yuhanna Al-Jaji 303

index Zabarella, Francesco 41, 43, 45 Za-Dengel, Negus 300 Zahara, Antonino 293, 308, 310 Zbynĕk, Zajíc 322 Žižka, Jan 326 Zoe Palaiologina 191