FOUR great councils were held in the fifteenth century, all previous to the year 1460. The council of Pisa in 1409: it is not reverenced as an oecumenical one; it nevertheless, in deposing. Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII. elected Alexander III. to their place. This act did not extinguish the schism; on the contrary it occasioned at once three popes.

The council of Constance in 1414: this had greater authority; it caused John Huss and Jerome of Prague to be burned; further, it declared the superiority of general councils over the popes; a doctrine always disapproved of at Rome, and to which Martin V: did not adhere, though elected by this very council of Constance. But the church had no longer more than two heads, Martin V. and the obstinate Benedict XIII. Gregory XII. sent in his resignation; and John XXIII. the successor of Alexander V. was thrown into prison, from whence he did not come out until he had acknowledged Martin V. There is no vice, no crime, which contemporary historians and the council of Constance do not reproach John XXIII. with An act of accusation prepared against him, presented, they say, a complete catalogue of every mortal crime²⁷⁷ They assert that he had seduced three hundred nuns²⁷⁸ according to Theodoric de Nieve²⁷⁹ he kept at Bologna two hundred mistresses. These exaggerations discover calumny; and the friendship and hospitality with which the Florentines, especially the Medicis, a family at this period distinguished, honoured a pontiff so weakly established, would suffice to refute or weaken the accusations with which, his enemies and his misfortunes have loaded his memory. The weakness of his character stimulated the insults of his rivals, and his disgraces those of the historian. Stripped of his states by Ladislaus, king of Naples, betrayed by Frederick, duke of Austria, hunted by the emperor Sigismund, John used too liberally the sole resources which remained to him, simony and usury; he brought to perfection, even after Boniface IX. the traffic in benefices²⁸⁰ and we read²⁸¹ that a note for one thousand florins would be passed him where he lent eight hundred for four months.

The council of Basle in 1431: theologians declare it oecumenical to its twenty-fifth session only; it held forty-five. This council also humbled a good deal the papal authority; and its decrees on this head, as well as those of Constance, served to prepare in France the celebrated pragmatic sanction, to which we shall revert by and by. The fathers of Basle deposed Eugene IV., the successor of Martin V., describing the said Eugene as a disturber, a heretic, and a schismatic. Eugene excommunicated this third council, and held a fourth at Florence in 1459. In it the reconciliation of the Greeks was treated of: John Paleologus, emperor of the East, was at it, endeavouring to confirm by this re-union the throne upon which he tottered; but the priests of Constantinople persisted in the schism.

Louis III. of Anjou, had disputed the throne of Naples with Joan II., daughter of Charles Durazzo. Delivered from Louis by Alphonso V. king of Arragon, Joan adopted the Arragonese monarch, and her liberator was to become her heir. Subsequently some misunderstanding between Alphonso and Joan determined her to revert to Louis of Anjou, and to revoke in his favour the act of adoption obtained by Alphonso. Joan and Louis died: and, two competitors present themselves to reign over Naples, Alphonso and Reni, the brothers of Louis. Pope Eugene declares for Alphonso, precisely because Reni, more acceptable to the Neapolitans, and to Italy generally, would have been too formidable a neighbour for the Holy See. This is the principal affair purely political in which the pontiff concerned himself. He however obliged Uladislaus, king of Poland and Hungary, to break a peace with the Turks, sworn to on the Evangelists and on the Koran. A rupture fatal as it was perfidious, and which drew after it, in 1444 near Varne, the defeat and death of Uladislaus.

Eugene retained to his death the title of pope, although the counsel of Basle had conferred it on the duke of Savoy, Amadeus VIII. whose papal name was Felix V. This duke afterwards abdicated the tiara, and the church had at last but one head Nicholas V., the successor of Eugene; Nicholas, a pacific prelate; the friend of literature, and founder of the Vatican library, and one of the most generous protectors of the learned Greeks, who took refuge in Italy after Mahomet II. had taken Constantinople in 1446.

We have seen that during the first half of the fifteenth century, the priesthood, divided, had no means of very seriously threatening great empires. This opportunity ought to have been seized on for effecting those reformations, provoked by the corruptions which the false decretals had produced in the ecclesiastical discipline.

The ancient rules left to the clergy, to the people, and to the sovereign, an active part in the election of bishops, and the new law reserved to the pope the institution of the incumbents. Excommunications, formerly rare and confined to matters altogether spiritual, were multiplied after the tenth century against emperors and kings, whose power they shook. The popes of the eight first centuries never thought of enacting tributes from the newly elected bishops; now, the pope demands first fruits of them. Before the decretals, the ecclesiastics were in civil and criminal cases amenable to the secular tribunals: after the decretals, the pope wished to become, in all sorts of causes, the supreme judge of every member of the priesthood. In fine, dispensations, pardons, reservations and reversions, and appeals to the Holy See, were perpetual; the abuses, become excessive, wearied France in an especial manner.

After having withdrawn, as we have said, from obedience to both the candidates for the papacy, the Gallican church began to regulate itself agreeable to the primitive laws, and received with transport the decrees of the councils of Constance and Basle, which limited the power of the pope and subjected it to that of the united church. The council of Basle, when Eugene IV. had quitted it, sent its decrees to the king of France, Charles VII. who communicated them to the great nobles of his kingdom, secular as well as ecclesiastical, met together for this purpose in the holy chapel of Bourges. The decrees of Basle and of Constance, approved and modified by this assembly, formed the pragmatic sanction, which was read and proclaimed as the king’s edict, in the parliament of Paris, the 3d of July, 1439. It is determined by this edict, that general councils ought to be held every ten years, that their authority is superior to that of the pope, that the number of cardinals should be reduced to twenty-four, that the presentation to ecclesiastical benefices should be perfectly free, that the first fruits should no longer be demanded, and that neither reservations or reversions should be recognised.²⁸² All orders of the state received this “pragmatic” with enthusiasm; and the whole course of history attests how dear it was to the French.

In Italy the schism had gradually produced a revolution in their political views. Under doubtful and rival demi-popes; under the feeble influence of the emperors Robert, Sigismund, Robert II. Frederick III. the Guelph and Ghibeline factions become almost extinct either from want of heads or of standards, or lassitude consequent on four or five centuries of madness and misfortune. The Visconti, become the chiefs of the Ghibelines, sunk and disappointed, replaced by the Sforza, a family just hatched and destined to combat for interests new as itself. The Medicis, less recent, laboured to calm the commotions which agitated Florence, and indulged the hope of seeing liberty, laws, and literature flourish, in the loveliest country they could make their abode.— Impelled also by the idea of their advances in the fine arts, other cities of Italy aspired to free themselves altogether from the German yoke, and to exercise an habitual influence over the people they had outstripped in civilisation. This national pride it was which reconciled them secretly to the papacy, disposed them to consider it as the centre of Italian power, and to mourn over the ancient splendour of this once dreaded focus. The middle of the fifteenth century, is the true era in which was confirmed, and propagated in Italy, the doctrine elsewhere denominated ultramontane, a doctrine which has since been but the mask of the political interests of this nation, well or ill understood by her. Since then, the Italians have generally abstained from seconding the resistance that the English, the Germans, the French, have not ceased to oppose to the pretensions of the Roman pontiff, to his worldly ambition, and abuse of his spiritual ministry. Already, in the councils of Constance and Basle, the Italian prelates were in general remarked for the lukewarmness of their zeal in the reformation of ecclesiastical irregularities. Terrified no doubt, by the rash boldness of Wickliffe and many other innovators, they did not perceive that propriety of manners and wise laws would be the most certain security against alterations in doctrine; or rather, the preservation of the faith was not what they most sincerely desired to secure. Behold then, in what disposition the successors of Nicholas V., found the clergy, the learned, the rulers, and consequently the people of Italy; and such were the points of support on which the pontifical levers went to work, in order to put it under way once more.

Six popes, after Nicholas V, governed the church during the second half of the fifteenth century: Calixtus III., from 1445 to 1458; Pius II. to 1464; Paul II. to 1471; Sixtus IV. to 1484; Innocent VIII. to 1492; and Alexander IV. for the following years.

Calixtus III. who vainly preached a crusade against the Turks established at Constantinople, shewed much more zeal still for the particular interests of his family. This pope had three nephews: he raised two of them to the cardinalat, which they disgraced by the open irregularity of their conduct. He heaped secular dignities on the head of the third: he made him duke of Spoleto, and general of the troops of the Holy See; he was desirous of making king of Naples, and thus terminate the rivalry existing between Ferdinand, the son of Alphonso, John, the son of Rene, and other candidates, whose object this kingdom was. Calixtus endeavoured to arm the Milanese against Ferdinand, and forbad this prince on pain of excommunication from taking the title of king: but Calixtus reigned only three years, and his ambitious intentions had no durable consequence.

After him came Pius II., who before, under the name of Eneas Sylvius, was an author sufficiently distinguished: he had also been secretary to the council of Basle, and as such a zealous partisan of the supremacy of councils; but finally, when pope, an ardent defender of the omnipotence of the Holy See. He even formally retracted all that he had written at the dictation of the council; and, by an express bull, Pius II. condemns Eneas Sylvius.²⁸³ His bull ‘Execrabilis,’ anathematizes appeals to general councils, to one of which France appealed on this very bull. Charles VII. still reigned; he maintained the pragmatic sanction; and observe in what terms the attorney general Douvet protests against this bull:²⁸⁴

But Louis XI. succeeded Charles in 1461, and repealed the ‘pragmatic’ yielding to the solicitations of Pius, who wept for joy at it, ordained public festivals, and caused the act of the assembly at Bourges to be dragged through the puddle of Rome. Louis had affixed two stipulations to his compliance; one, that the pope should favour John of Anjou and proclaim him king of Naples; the other, that a legate, a Frenchman by birth, should be appointed to invest the incumbents in France. Pius, who had made both these promises, fulfilled neither; but he composed verses in honour of the king, and sent him a sword, ornamented with diamonds, to fight Mahomet II.—Louis highly irritated, directed the parliament secretly to oppose the edict which rescinded the pragmatic. This opposition it was not difficult to secure, it was sufficient not to thwart it: the parliament embraced so rare an opportunity of testifying their obedience, by refusing to obey. Louis XI. armed not against the Turks; but while Pius II. thus stimulated the kings of Europe to combat the new masters of Constantinople, let us see what the holy father writes to Mahomet II. himself.²⁸⁵

These are plain terms, we see, and disguise nothing of the pontifical policy.

To Pius II. succeeded Barbo, a Venetian, so handsome and so vain, that he was templed to assume the name of Formosa:²⁸⁶ he contented himself with that of Paul II. His efforts to league the Christian sovereigns against the Turks, and to have the abrogation of the pragmatic registered by the parliament of Paris, were equally unsuccessful; other interests occupied the former, and the parliament of Paris was obstinate. In vain Cardinal Balne obtained from Louis the deprivation of the solicitor general John de Saint Romain: the university united with the magistrates in an appeal to a future council. In the mean time letters are discovered which prove to Louis that he is betrayed by Balne. The cardinal is already cast into prison; but Paul pretends to be the sole legitimate judge of a prince of the church, and Balne, after a long detention in an iron cage, is finally liberated.

Paul also vainly endeavoured to make himself master of Rimini: in vain he armed the Venetians against Robert Malatesti who occupied this place: Robert, aided by the Medicis, opposed a formidable army to the Venetians, and which, under the command of the Duke d’Urbino, put that of the pope to flight²⁸⁷ His holiness received such conditions as his conquerors dictated; he loaded the Medicis with invectives, and no longer made war but with men of letters;²⁸⁸ he condemned many of these to horrible tortures to extort from them the avowal of heresies which they never professed; and when their constancy in refusing to make false confessions, when all the evidence, all the witnesses proclaimed their innocence, the holy father declared they could not leave their dungeons until they had completed in them an entire year, having at the time of their arrest made a vow not to release them before the expiration of this term.

Platina, one of Paul's victims, has compiled a history of the popes in which, this pontiff is not spared: Platina is doubtlessly here a suspicious testimony; but as the reverend Benedictine fathers judiciously observe,:

Two nephews, invested the one with the duchy of Sora, the other with the county of Imola; an expedition fruitless against the Mahometans; alternate alliances and enmities with the Venetians; disturbances encouraged in Ferrara, Florence and Naples; arms, stratagems, and anathemas, in turn assayed against the enemies of the Holy See: these several details of the history of Sixtus IV. would possess greater interest if the conspiracy of the Pazzi did not absorb all the attention this pontificate can claim.

The Medici had offended Sixtus IV. by some shew of resistance to the elevation of his nephews, and to the nomination of the archbishop of Pisa, Salviati. Their power, so much the more imposing as it was then connected with the most honourable renown, restrained and wearied the pontiff, who aspired to become master of Florence and the North of Italy. One of the first cares of Sixtus was, to deprive the family of the Medicis of the situation of treasurer of the Holy See, in order to give it to that of the Pazzi. Till this period, no jealousy was manifested between these two illustrious houses, united on the contrary by alliances and by mutual services. The Florentine authors exhaust in vain their investigations to discover motives or pretexts for the enmity of the Pazzi to the Medici. To represent the latter as tyrants, the conspirators as liberators, is at once to oppose sound morality and contemporary history. No, it is impossible to imagine any other causes here than the instigations of the court of Rome, and the hope presented to the Pazzi, of invading under the protection of the Holy See, the government of Florence, if they were willing to become, not the rivals of the Medicis, but their assassins. To the Pazzi were joined the Count Riacio, nephew of the pope, the cardinal Riacio, nephew of the Count, the archbishop of Pisa, a a brother of this prelate; one Bandini, known by the excess of his debaucheries; Montesecco, one of Sixtus’s ‘condottieri,’ with other robbers and priests. It was arranged to poignard Lorenzo and Giulio de Medici, on Sunday, the 26th of April, in the church, in the middle of Mass, at the moment of the elevation of the host. These circumstances, which added to the crime the character of sacrilege, terrified the conscience of Montesecco,²⁸⁹ who had received, as the best skilled of them all at assassination, the commission to strike Lorenzo; two ecclesiastics took the office on them. But they acquitted themselves with less skill than zeal; and Lorenzo, only wounded, escaped from their hands, while Giulio expired under the blows of Bandini and Francisco Pazzi.

The death of Giulio was instantly revenged: the traitors were seized, and exterminated by the populace. The archbishop of Pisa was seen when hanged by the side of Francisco Pazzi, biting in his agony the carcase of his companion. Montesecco revealed at the foot of the scaffold the dark clues and sacred origin of the conspiracy. Bandini, after having fled to Constantinople, was sent back by Mahomet 11. to Florence, where he was executed: a sultan would not afford an asylum to an assassin that a pope did not blush to arm; and while Lorenzo, scarcely recovered from his wounds, endeavoured to repress the popular indignation, even while he saves the Cardinal Riario, what does Sixtus do? As if his being an accomplice was not sufficiently exposed by Montesecco, was not abundantly demonstrated by the circumstances themselves, he proclaims it himself by the excommunication of Lorenzo de Medicis and the Florentines. He terms Lorenzo and the magistrates, children of perdition, suckers of iniquity: he declares them and their successors born or to be born, incapable of receiving or transmitting any property by will or inheritance; he summons the Florentines to deliver Lorenzo up to him; and, when he can no longer hope for so unprincipled a treason, he raises troops against Florence; he arms some Neapolitans; at any price he is desirous to consummate the crime, of which the Pazzi succeeded in effecting but the half. In the mean time Italy, Germany, and France, interested themselves for the Medicis; Louis XI. himself declares that he will restore the ‘pragmatic,’ if the pope does not revoke his anathemas: but the descent of the Turks at Otranto was requisite, and that the fears and the forces of the courts of Naples and of Rome should have to turn their attention to this point, before the pontiff would pardon the victim who had escaped his thunders and his poignards.²⁹⁰

Sixtus, to associate the court of Naples in his vengeance, had abolished a quit rent which it paid to the Court of Rome. Innocent VIII. designed its re-establishment, as necessary to the undertakings he meditated against the Mussulmans. Upon the refusal of king Ferdinand, the pope encouraged the Neapolitan barons to revolt, partisans of the Duke of Calabria, and little attached to the house of Arragon. He promised, and sent them troops; he excommunicated the king, deposed him, and called the king of France, Charles VIII. into Italy: but, indolent and unskilful, Innocent merited no success; and the eight years of his pontificate have left behind but trifling mementos.

Of Alexander VI. the private life is well known; the nature of our subject will excuse us from pursuing the details which compose it, of, robbery, perjury, revelings, sacrilege, obscenity, incest, poisoning, and assassination. Our business is with his politics not his manners. He persuaded Charles VIII. to pass into Italy, for the purpose of conquering Naples; and, while Charles was preparing for it, Alexander entered into negociations with every court, even that of the Sultan, to raise up enemies to France. His writing to Bajazet II. that Charles menaced Naples but in order to fall on the Ottoman empire; his delivering Prince Zizim, the brother of Bajazet, to Charles, by order of the Sultan, but delivering him up poisoned, and receiving from the latter the price of his crime: such were, in his political career, the feats of Alexander VI. Yet this did not prevent his holiness from concluding a treaty of alliance with Charles, and almost immediately after leaguing with the Venetians and the Emperor Maximilian against the same Charles, whose greatest error was, opposing the designs of eighteen cardinals who, already wearied with the excesses of Alexander, resolved to depose him.

The pope had a daughter named Lucretia, and four sons, of whom one named Geoffrey remains almost unknown; another obtained from the King of Naples the title of Squillace; another became celebrated under the name of Cesar Borgia; and the eldest was Duke of Gandia and Benevenlum. To advance Cesar, who was only a cardinal, Charles VIII. was promised support in a second expedition of the French into Italy: Charles died before it could be undertaken, and Frederick, king of Naples, was then resorted to. This prince was required to give his daughter in marriage to Cesar, who should be created prince of Tarentum: Frederick having rejected this proposal, it was necessary to recur a third time to the French, then governed by Louis XII.

Cesar arrived in France: he took with him a bull which authorised Louis to part with his first wife; and he instigated him to conquer Naples and Milan: Naples, which from the time of Charles of Anjou, had not ceased to belong to a French prince; Milan, where Louis was to recover the rights he derived from Valentine Visconti, his grandmother: and, to prevent his being over-ruled by wiser counsels, his minister, cardinal Amboise, was seduced with the hope of being one day the successor of Alexander VI. Behold here, how the best of kings, having become the ally of the most perfidious of pontiffs, engages in a dangerous war, in which the treacheries of Rome snatch from the French the fruits of their victories. But the Cardinal Cesar becomes Duke of Valentinois; the family of Borgia triumphs over its enemies, and enriches itself with their spoils; in fine, Alexander VI. became the first potentate in Europe, when a drug which he had prepared for others terminated, by a happy mistake, his abominable pontificate.

This pope and his predecessors, since Calixtus, have been much reproached with their nepotism, or zeal for the elevation of their nephews, their children, and their relations. Certainly we do not mean to justify this abuse of the apostolate, this triumph of the interests of individuals over those of the religion of Jesus Christ; but, in order to clear up as far we are able, by general observations, a history, the details of which we could not embrace here, we may say that Nepotism was a weakening, a degradation of the political ambition; that the papacy, regarded as a means of enriching and aggrandizing families, became, by these means alone, less formidable to sovereigns: and, that after the extinction of the schism from 1450 to 1500, the civil authority had suffered much more frequent attacks, if these domestic cares, these family interests, had not so often diverted the popes from the vast undertakings necessary to restore the importance of the Holy See. Sedulous to humble kings, Innocent III. and Gregory VII. did not busy themselves in elevating particular families: they sought to exercise themselves, and transmit to their successors, a universal supremacy. Many circumstances, which we have pointed out, would have favoured, at the middle of the fifteenth century, the re-establishment of this enormous power, if the popes had united the austere and disinterested enthusiasm of Hildebrand, to the knowledge which must have been possessed by the contemporaries of Politiano, and almost of Machiavel. It was not that Pius II. wanted sense, nor Paul II. wickedness, nor Sixtus IV. perfidy, nor Borgia any vice; but it is not sufficient to be unprincipled, a pope must know also how to turn to account the errors of others and his own crimes.