The Power Of The Popes

t is not reverenced as an oecumenical one; it nevertheless, in deposing. Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII. elected Alex

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 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

n 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 H

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

ry seriously threatening great empires. This opportunity ought to have been seized on for effecting those ref

ry 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 tri

mmunicated 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, th

, 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 Ro

enth century: Calixtus III., from 1445 to 1458; Pius II. to 1464; Paul II. to 1471;

eir 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, an

hen 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,' anath

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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. Th

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liament 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 fu

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

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s with the Venetians; disturbances encouraged in Ferrara, Florence and Naples; arms, stratagems, and anathemas, in turn assayed against the enemies of the Holy See: thes

vestigations 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

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

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 excomm

r 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 wer

as 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

er: 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 Fr

iching 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 supre