Two events, separated by just four years, gave rise to the research question that will be addressed in this paper. The first was the end of the Council of Basle after eighteen years of activity. This took place in April 1449, when the rump of the council, in session at Lausanne following its expulsion from Basle, acknowledged the legitimacy of Pope Nicholas v and dissolved the council.Footnote 1 There would not be another general council until Fifth Lateran in 1512–17. The second event was Mehmed ii's conquest of Constantinople in May 1453. This made the promotion of a crusade against the Turks a central goal of papal policy for decades to come. Martin v, and more importantly Eugenius iv, had already taken pains to reinstate their curia as the premier platform for Christendom's crusading efforts, but it was Calixtus iii (1455–8) and Pius ii (1458–64) who invested the conviction, energy and resources required to make this reinstatement credible; and in different ways both Calixtus and Pius were inspired to do so by Mehmed's conquest and ambitions.Footnote 2 The struggle between Eugenius iv and the fathers at Basle over authority within the Church, which had generated renewed schism in the shape of the anti-pope Felix v (1439–49), had culminated in Eugenius’ triumph; and the crisis of 1453 helped to validate that triumph. Right up to the Reformation, the restored papacy and the Ottoman sultanate were locked in hostile embrace.Footnote 3
The urgency of organising a crusade often took precedence over the need for reform but it could never replace it. Radical reform of the Church ‘in head and members’ (‘in capite et membris’) had always been the prime concern of conciliarists, though not their only one. In the period between 1449 and 1517 numerous individuals and groups continued to lobby for a general council as the only way to bring about the thoroughgoing reform which every reflective Christian could see was imperative. They were consistently resisted by the papal curia, although it paid lip service to the need for reform and acknowledged the benefits that would accrue from summoning a general council. The popes could not escape the fact that the reunification of the Church by the fathers at Constance – and implicitly, their own legitimacy – was bound up with their decree that general councils should henceforth be convened at regular and specified intervals of time. Aldo Landi characterised the relationship between conciliarism and the Renaissance curia as ‘an unresolved problem’: only the Reformation could bring closure, by robbing the relationship of relevance.Footnote 4 At the same time the inability of the papacy to bring into being a crusade on the scale required to drive back the Turks became steadily more apparent. By 1500 the curia's actual commitment was being questioned, for it was clear that even an altruistic and resourceful legate like Raymond Perault was impotent in the face of Alexander vi's cynical dynasticism. As Landi put it, ‘the word crusade came to be paired in papal documentation with the word reform, but both were fated to remain words’.Footnote 5
Granted that powerful lobbies existed both for reform by council, and for a more effective crusade against the Turks, how did they relate to and influence each other? Until recently such a question might have been considered otiose. The prevailing view was that the great councils, Constance and Basle, had concerned themselves with ending schism and delivering reform; if considered at all, planning for a crusade was a marginal item on their agenda.Footnote 6 It is possible that some scholars regarded crusade and reform as unlikely bed-fellows because of the way that the popes of the Great Schism had made lavish use of the crusade against each other. It is undeniable that the excessive use (or abuse) of indulgences was a major concern at both councils.Footnote 7 But it has become apparent that relations between conciliarism and crusade were much more positive than such assumptions and generalisations would suggest. Crusade did feature at both Constance and Basle. Relevant information and news about the various crusade fronts were eagerly sought and discussed at both councils.Footnote 8 After much heart-searching, Basle engaged with the practices of crusade, in the form of cross-taking, preaching and the levying of taxes.Footnote 9 Far from being irreconcilable, reform and crusade could be symbiotic, following the lofty example set by the Fourth Lateran Council. As Pope Martin v put it in 1422, both were ways of serving God.Footnote 10 If this was true of recent councils, we would expect it to inform the thinking of those who yearned for another one. But how did it do so? And to what effect?
The answers to those questions will be set out in three sections. In section one, I shall outline and compare the most striking instances of conciliarism being invoked in association with crusade plans, from the reign of Pius ii to that of Leo x. In the middle section I shall analyse in more detail the various groups and individuals who demonstrated a conviction that council and crusade were complementary. Finally, I shall focus on the most consistent framework for the association being made, that of diplomatic exchange, and the problems that this throws up in terms of assessing underlying motivations.
Conciliarism and crusade from the Congress of Mantua to the Fifth Lateran Council
In the years between 1453 and Pius ii's Congress of Mantua (1459), the two major contexts within which crusade and council were linked had already crystallised. In the first place, there were individual rulers who were at odds with the curia, of whom the outstanding example in the mid-1450s was Alfonso v ‘the Magnanimous’ of Aragon and Naples. Alfonso nurtured grandiose but rather shapeless crusading ambitions which were at odds with both the papal and imperial templates for managing crusade; it made sense for the king to circumvent those templates by appealing to the Church assembled in council and to a notional community of Christian rulers.Footnote 11 Secondly, there were elite groups in the Church and universities that voiced opposition to the onerous fiscal demands that had become inseparable from papal crusade planning. Thus in 1456 the University of Paris and the clergy of Rouen appealed to a future general council against Calixtus iii's crusade tax.Footnote 12 But linking council and crusade occurred more frequently and posed a greater threat after the accession of Pius ii, especially after the pope summoned a congress at Mantua to promote his crusade. This was hardly unexpected; indeed Pius himself predicted it before his election.Footnote 13 The fragmented response to Nicholas v's half-measures and Calixtus' well-meant but unfocused activity pointed to the need for a broad Christian response, what Pius termed ‘the agreement of the peoples’ (‘nationum consensus’), and this could only be secured through some sort of assembly.Footnote 14 Whatever programme was agreed at such an assembly would carry a heavy price tag, and much of this would have to be paid by the Church. Most significant, however, was Pius’ strategic decision, following Alfonso v's death in 1458, to support the Aragonese claim to the throne of Naples rather than the French one. The reaction of the French crown was to reject Pius' entire crusade project, and to mobilise all available forces, including conciliarist ideas and sentiments, to destroy it. The danger of a perfect storm of opposition to Pius’ plans was apparent.
The pope's fear of such a storm is the obvious explanation for Execrabilis, his bull condemning appeals to a general council, which was composed on 18 January 1460, four days after the closure of the Congress of Mantua.Footnote 15 Landi pointed out that the ‘immediate occasion’ for the drafting of Execrabilis was the threat made by the French Church to appeal to a general council against Pius’ stringent crusade tax.Footnote 16 But the history of Execrabilis is a curious one. Students of the bull have long recognised that the most striking features of this draconian text are the slowness with which it was first published, and the reluctance of the curia to deploy its sanctions thereafter; it is much easier to point to occasions when Execrabilis could have been used and was not, than to times when it was.Footnote 17 Even the most extreme papalists found it distasteful to denigrate general councils, densely woven as they were into the fabric of the Church's history. As for opposition to Pius rooted in conciliarism, while it was severe it proved to be manageable. The pope had to face down a number of powerful men who all clustered under the conciliarist banner when criticising his crusade project: they included Archduke Sigismund of Tyrol, archbishop-elect Dieter von Isemburg of Mainz, and King George Podebrad of Bohemia. Above all there was the French court, whose antagonism was galvanised by the accession of Louis xi in 1461. These individuals formed ad hoc alliances and deployed the services of very able polemicists, especially Gregor von Heimburg, whose skill even Pius admired. But no overarching coalition came about, because interests diverged and the French court baulked at allying openly with Podebrad, who had been condemned as heretical. Pius confronted a number of very difficult challenges, both at Mantua in 1459–60 and in the years that followed through to his death at Ancona in 1464. Louis xi was able to inflict substantial damage on the pope's crusade coalition – Burgundy, Hungary, Venice and the papacy – by compelling his vassal Philip of Burgundy to withdraw from it (though Philip may well have been glad of the excuse). It is also likely that the stress induced by charges of duplicity and corruption, and threats of deposition and trial, contributed to Pius’ final illness; the shadow of Boniface viii's detention and death must have hung over him. But the pope still managed to assemble an army (of sorts) and a fleet (albeit delayed) with which he would have crossed the Adriatic had death not intervened.Footnote 18
Throughout the reigns of Paul ii (1464–71) and Sixtus iv (1471–84) criticism of papal activity – or inactivity – on the crusade meshed with demands for a general council. The position of these popes remained fundamentally awkward, for as a condition of election they had both agreed to terms (‘capitulations’) that committed them to promote crusade and reform. In addition to dedicating to the crusade all the receipts from mined alum, Sixtus iv undertook to initiate reform within three months of his coronation, and to convene a general council within three years. The twin goals of this council would be crusade and reform.Footnote 19 Of course this hostage to fortune proved extremely useful to rulers who were inimical to papal policy, and had learned from the experience of Pius ii's pontificate. In conversation with a Milanese envoy Louis xi boasted that he would deal with Paul ii by ‘throwing a council around his neck, to make him sorry for causing me so much trouble’.Footnote 20 And yet, just as during Pius ii's reign, the situation never quite became critical for the curia. To understand why, it is instructive to consider the extraordinary episode that began in the spring of 1482 when the Croatian Dominican Andrija Jamometić, titular archbishop of Granea and former envoy of the Emperor Frederick iii, proclaimed a general council in Basle and summoned Sixtus to the city to answer for his crimes. Jamometić accused the pope of ‘permitting’ the Turkish occupation of Otranto two years previously, and of forming a secret alliance with the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt. In reality Sixtus’ track record on the crusade was relatively sound: in particular, he had supported the Neapolitans in recovering Otranto after the Turks captured the port in 1480. But the pope had good reason to be alarmed by news of Jamometić's proclamation, because his corruption, bellicosity and overt dynasticism had generated much criticism, including opposition within the college of cardinals.Footnote 21
Sixtus certainly reacted with vigour to have Jamometić placed under arrest, and the legate whom he despatched to deal with the Croatian, Angelo Geraldini, took the extreme step of declaring a crusade against Basle. But much as in the case of Pius ii's Execrabilis, Geraldini's attempted crusade can easily be misconstrued. It was an ambitious ploy on the part of Geraldini, which alarmed his papal master and got nowhere.Footnote 22 Jamometić's position at Basle collapsed because his erstwhile employer Frederick iii disowned him, while the aged Louis xi had lost interest in pursuing his struggle with Rome. In Italy, Sixtus was at odds with both Florence and Venice, and support from either power could have caused difficulties for the pope. The Medici court sent an envoy to Basle who expressed enthusiasm for Jamometić's cause, but without a French initiative Lorenzo did not dare to act. The Venetians preferred to handle their own war of ideas; this included an appeal to a general council, but not the one that Jamometić had proclaimed at Basle. Shunned by everybody, the disgraced Croatian committed suicide in his prison cell in November 1484; the city, which initially had welcomed the prospect of again playing host to a general council, was forgiven by the pope not long afterwards. The Jamometić saga thus largely reaffirmed the lesson of Pius ii's reign. The popes were repeatedly subjected to demands for a general council, demands that reflected the stream of Turkish conquests on the one hand, and the curia's growing and scandalous corruption on the other. But as long as these demands remained separate and uncoordinated, they were manageable, mainly through a mixture of concessions and promises to convene a papal council, keeping the threat of Execrabilis as a last resort. There are signs that contemporaries recognised this pattern and factored it into their thinking. When Louis xi threatened to call a general council at Lyons in 1476 with an agenda of crusade and reform, the Milanese ambassador interpreted the move as tactical; the king was well aware that he would not secure the backing of Frederick iii, and his goal was to exert pressure on Sixtus to agree to his demands.Footnote 23
The 1480s witnessed a slackening of pressure for a general council to pursue crusade, due to Bayezid ii's decision to switch his attention to the east.Footnote 24 But from the early 1490s onwards a number of circumstances combined to create problems for the curia, and these proved as taxing as the ones that had followed the fall of Constantinople. The goals and methods of government of Alexander vi (1492–1503) and Julius ii (1503–13) were so outrageous that they gave rise to incessant calls for a general council to carry through root and branch reform.Footnote 25 Beginning with the destruction of a Croatian army at Krabava field in 1493, Ottoman conquests in the west resumed. And from the time of Charles viii's invasion of Italy in 1494, the Italian wars assumed a European dimension.Footnote 26 Any of the great powers fighting to secure a foothold in the peninsula was now powerful enough to create a crisis by sponsoring a general council, but it was the French crown that proved most consistently dangerous. After years of threatening to call a council, including abortive negotiations with the emperor Maximilian in 1500 and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1507, Louis xii was propelled to act by the flight of five cardinals from Julius ii's court in 1510. The result was the schismatic Council of Pisa, to which Julius was forced to respond by summoning the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17).
The Pisan council was a low-key and almost exclusively French gathering, but although the Lateran Council began life as a tactical move on Julius’ part, it developed a more ambitious agenda after the pope's death in 1513. This agenda included a crusade against the Turks, who under Selim i were displaying more sustained aggression than they had under his father and predecessor Bayezid ii. This compelled the new pope, Leo x, to devote more attention to crusading matters than either Alexander vi or Julius ii had done. Crusade decrees were passed and taxes levied, and there was much discussion about strategy both at the council and in the years that followed.Footnote 27 It all came to nothing, but the fact remains that the last detailed crusade programme before the Reformation took shape within a conciliar setting. It is tempting to view this as a success for those who for more than six decades had argued that a crusade must be promoted by a general council, but a degree of caution is called for. In the two decades since the arrival of Charles viii's army in 1494, crusade had certainly featured in numerous diplomatic exchanges as well as in the increasingly strenuous attempts made to win over public opinion.Footnote 28 It would be surprising if this had not been the case. But crusade did not play the dominant role that we might expect. For example, it is curiously marginal in the manifesto that Charles viii issued in November 1494,Footnote 29 as well as in cornerstone texts setting out the aims of the Pisan and Fifth Lateran Councils.Footnote 30 In their different ways the menace posed by the Turks and the aspirations of the French brought crusade into the discussion and the polemics that it generated, but by this point crusade had been overtaken by the desperate need for reform. This raises issues of cultural expectation to which I will return in the third section. Before doing so, however, it is important to pursue this subject beyond the courts and chanceries of Europe, to try to get a sense of which individuals and groups outside these vocal centres of power were lobbying for a general council to promote crusade.
‘This yearning for a council excites all the men of your nation who possess a smattering of learning’Footnote 31
In his ground-breaking 1987 study of the Council of Basle, Johannes Helmrath referred to the survival of conciliarist thought after 1449 as a field of research where much remained to be done.Footnote 32 Ten years later Aldo Landi argued that the incessant lobbying for councils by Europe's rulers reflected broad aspirations for reform within a conciliar setting. As he put it,
for the most part historiography has stigmatised the appeals of sovereigns to a council as simple exploitation (‘strumentalizzazione’) for ends that had little to do with the wish to reform the Church. But we should avoid generalising; and above all we should bear in mind that, either way, sovereigns could indulge in this exploitation because they knew that they could count on many people who sincerely aspired towards a reforming council.Footnote 33
Landi was restating a position that the great historian of conciliarism, Hubert Jedin, had advanced decades earlier, when Jedin – or more accurately his translator – wrote that ‘the real inner force of the idea of the Council lies neither in the conciliar theory nor in its misuse by the diplomatists, but in the widespread longing for a great Council invested with the requisite authority for carrying out a reform’.Footnote 34 This belief in a reservoir of support for the conciliar cause lay behind Francis Oakley's characterisation of the period as ‘silver age conciliarism’, but both the hierarchical nature of medieval society, and the regional diversity of Europe in the fifteenth century, make it problematic. For example, the many treatises calling for councils, which Landi took care to list and summarise, do not in themselves take us much further forward.Footnote 35 Assessing the persistence of loyalty to conciliarism, above all the central tenet of a general council's superiority to the pope, presents big challenges.
The two regions where conciliarism can most clearly be seen attracting allegiance were France and Germany. The University of Paris remained Europe's leading intellectual centre of support for councils,Footnote 36 at times issuing statements in which the sanctions contained in Execrabilis were simply ignored. In September 1491 the university responded to a papal attempt to levy a tenth with reference to a Constance decree on the need to consult a council first, and in 1502 it declared that sanctions for the non-payment of such tenths must be deferred pending an appeal to a council.Footnote 37 This boldness made the university masters natural allies and publicists of the crown during its regular conflicts with the curia. In January 1497 Charles viii asked Paris's theologians to debate whether the Constance decree Frequens still held weight. Not only was their answer affirmative, but they advised Charles that if the pope refused to obey the decree by calling a council, the king had the right do so in his place.Footnote 38 Nor did the university require the stimulus of a papal tax or royal leverage to flaunt its conciliarist colours: at times extreme papalist preaching was enough, as in 1483–4 when the Franciscan Giovanni Angeli was deemed to have overstepped the mark.Footnote 39
The situation in the Empire was less clear-cut. The universities of Erfurt, Vienna and Cologne were noted nurseries of conciliarist sentiment, while Heidelberg was anti-conciliarist.Footnote 40 The most striking commentary on German conciliarism derived from Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He made it in Germania, which he wrote in 1457–8, not long before his election to the papacy. Germania was an elaborate response to the complaints made by Piccolomini's friend Martin Mayer about the inexorable increase of Rome's fiscal demands. Mayer had argued that councils placed important constraints on such demands, to which Piccolomini replied that ‘this yearning for a council excites all the men of your nation who possess a smattering of learning’.Footnote 41 In other words, the Italian humanist believed that several years after Basle's ignominious end, conciliarist convictions were still entrenched among literate Germans. The reason he gave for this was unflattering: councils gave such men the chance to live well at the expense of others (‘sumptibus alienis’), while throwing their weight around.Footnote 42 Derogatory though this comment is, it should not lead us to dismiss Piccolomini's testimony. His own experience of the Empire and in particular of Basle was well-founded, and for all his faults he was an acute observer and commentator.Footnote 43 Stripped of its snobbery, Piccolomini's reflection points to the dual appeal of councils to Germany's educated elite: participation and reform went hand in hand.
It is probable that crusade also featured in the thinking of such individuals, more so for example than in the case of their French counterparts. From the fall of Constantinople onwards the imperial diets regularly considered the Turkish threat and the best means of responding to it.Footnote 44 A notable example was the Regensburg diet (Große Christentag) of 1471.Footnote 45 The diet paid much attention to the dangers opened up by the Turkish capture of Venetian Negroponte, and one written response to the diet took the form of a demand for a church council which would initiate both reform and crusade. The anonymous author of the text argued that a general council was the only way to get a crusade launched, but ‘it is widely reported that the pope and lord cardinals fear, hate, indeed loathe general councils’, ‘on the grounds that they would not be able to do what they want if a council were summoned … and dread being reformed by it’. The pope must be prevailed upon to summon a council and, if he refused, it was the duty of the emperor to take action.Footnote 46 The author of this treatise was advocating the very approach that Piccolomini had tried to rebut in his answer to Mayer's critique of papal fiscalism. Piccolomini's twofold response was reasonably robust at the time he made it. On the one hand, he argued, the lesson of Basle was that councils talked rather than acting: ‘the danger was that while the fathers bandied words in synod, the drawn sword of the Turks would have plunged into our entrails’.Footnote 47 On the other hand, Calixtus iii's fine crusading record showed what concentrated authority could achieve.Footnote 48 The argument that councils simply wasted precious time was plausible enough, and in Basle's case it was skilfully finessed by Piccolomini himself;Footnote 49 later apologists for the papacy, such as Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, continued to draw on it.Footnote 50 But after Pius ii's death in 1464 the curia's crusading measures became steadily less impressive, and there is no reason to consider the scepticism displayed by the author of the Regensburg treatise as unusual. For imperial intervention in these circumstances there was, of course, abundant historical precedent.
A danger of which the curia was well aware was that public support for conciliarism, typically expressed in tracts, sermons and orations, might constitute the tip of an iceberg of submerged sentiment which would surface if circumstances became favourable. It is undeniable that supporters of councils and reform knew when it was a good idea to keep their opinions to themselves. A good example occurs in a conversation in 1480 about the recent Turkish capture of Otranto between the pro-reform Pietro Barozzi and his fellow-Venetian, Cardinal Giovanni Michiel. Barozzi jestingly remarked that maybe the Turks had been sent to reform the Church. Anxious that he might have overstepped the mark, he hastened to add that of course the popes had done their best in the cause of reform; it was others who had foiled their plans.Footnote 51 In the immediate aftermath of the Jamometić crisis of 1482–3 the curia attempted to apply inquisitorial techniques of investigation to conciliarists in south-western Germany. In October 1483 the region's inquisitor, Heinrich Kramer (Institoris), was given orders to flush out conciliarists in towns, focusing on the universities and the circulation of pamphlets (opuscula).Footnote 52 The application of forensic inquisitorial methods to conciliarist networks was more practicable than Geraldini's earlier tactic of proclaiming a crusade against an entire city, but lumping together conciliarists (conciliistae), heretics and witches as ‘domestic foes’ (domestici hostes) of the Church, as Kramer did in a letter to Sixtus iv in February 1484, was a category error without a future. It reduced a Christian's belief (fides) to obedience to Rome, a simplistic definition that was unlikely to exercise broad appeal.Footnote 53
The fact is that none of the the popes from Eugenius iv through to Julius ii had much more idea than we do of whether Jedin's ‘widespread longing for a great Council’ was a feature of their times or not. Certainly they could not rely on their legates for reliable assessments. In his reports to Sixtus iv, Angelo Geraldini emphasised that failure to respond belligerently to Basle's recalcitrance over the future custody of Jamometić would fan the flames of German conciliarism. In June 1483 he wrote that while Jamometić's methods were condemned, his summoning of a council was praised, ‘common opinion has it that a council is crucial for the reform of the universal Church and future provision against the Turk’.Footnote 54 In the following month, when news reached Geraldini of Venice's appeal against papal sanctions to a general council, the legate seized on the idea that this might further stimulate German conciliarism, even bringing about a revival of Basle's claims.Footnote 55 This was blatantly aimed at validating Geraldini's flagging struggle with the city, and the curia was sensible enough not to take it at face value. But exaggeration could distort the reports of more altruistic legates than Geraldini, when they strove to make a case for action to which they were personally committed. In January 1432, at the start of the Council of Basle, Giuliano Cesarini had written to Pope Eugenius iv in alarmist tones of a Germany so rife with anti-clerical feeling that the country might embrace the Hussite heresy.Footnote 56 Two recent events shaped Cesarini's letter: the first was the disastrous outcome of the fifth Hussite crusade in August 1431, the second Eugenius iv's attempt in December 1431 to cancel the council at Basle before it even began, on the grounds that it was unacceptable to conduct negotiations with heretics. So while there is no reason to question the legate's deep concern about the situation in Germany, it is also true that he described it as grimly as he could to keep plans for talks with the Hussites going. A third legate, the crusading enthusiast Raymond Perault, provides a striking parallel. In 1502, desperate to stop the Emperor Maximilian laying his hands on the proceeds of his energetic preaching against the Turks, he claimed that his tour of German towns had convinced him that he could raise an army of up to 50,000 volunteers for an expedition.Footnote 57 All such reports and claims had to be filtered and assessed against a complex background: what the curia already knew of the situation or was discovering from other sources,Footnote 58 its own priorities and programmes, and the pressure to which it was being subjected, or expected to be subjected, from secular rulers.
‘Un problema irrisolto’
The aptness of Aldo Landi's subtitle for his study of the relationship between the Renaissance papacy and conciliarism will now be apparent. The popes could neither embrace conciliarism nor reject it. This applied above all in terms of reform and crusade, two of the projects which the curia most persistently claimed to pursue, and arguably its most signal failures. At this point it is logical to return to Europe's secular powers and the diplomatic leverage which they time and again applied to the curia. The clashes which resulted inevitably raise the question of whether those powers were simply exploiting Landi's ‘unresolved problem’, or whether they were influenced in a more altruistic sense by the ‘common opinion’ to which Geraldini referred in the summer of 1483. Much of our knowledge of the periodic crises provoked by demands for a council derives from the despatches of Italian envoys, and their dispassionate and clinical tone can give the impression of a Machiavellian cynicism. Indeed, in 1513 Machiavelli himself wrote in The prince of Ferdinand of Aragon using religious goals as ‘a cloak’ in all his wars, whether against non-believers or Christians.Footnote 59 While guarding against naïvete, we need to go beyond this tone; in particular we need to take into account several considerations that tell against what Landi termed ‘simple exploitation’ on the part of rulers and their agents.
The first of these considerations is the volume of evidence showing that Europe's courts were as susceptible as society at large to the kudos still attaching to the idea and practice of crusade. Until comparatively recently enthusiasm for crusade in the decades following the fall of Constantinople was viewed as attenuated and marginal. A similar attitude prevailed in relation to chivalry, with the result that occasions when commitment to crusade was expressed in chivalric settings, such as the Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 and the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, they were regarded as anachronistic, detached from political and military reality.Footnote 60 It is safe to say that this viewpoint is itself looking increasingly out of date, given the abundance of published work on the prevalence and popularity of late medieval crusade and chivalry.Footnote 61 No less significantly, recent scholarship on early printing and humanism has shown that new developments in European society in the late fifteenth century were no more at odds with crusade than older values like chivalry.Footnote 62
A second consideration working against the ‘exploitation’ of conciliarist loyalties by ambitious rulers and their envoys was the pressing need for Church reform and armed resistance to the Turks. The keen disappointment felt at the failure of the Basle council, tentative hopes that reform might be initiated by regional councils or even through the collective enterprise of the college of cardinals, repeated attempts to use electoral capitulations to commit new popes to summon a general council, constituted clear expressions of the need for root and branch reform.Footnote 63 As for the Turks, there was no alternative to a defensive response, and no realistic alternative to that mechanism being organised as a crusade. Legatine missions, diets, printed news-sheets and above all the regular release of indulgences to be administered on behalf of the war effort against the Ottoman Turks wove crusade into the pattern of the period's religious and political life.Footnote 64
Part of that pattern was a predilection for prophetic messages, and this too should make us pause before dismissing demands for councils as diplomatic leverage. The attraction of eschatology was shared by many of the educated, and its more apocalyptic expressions commonly brought the purgative reform of the Church, and the repulse of external threats like the Turks into wide-ranging programmes culminating in the triumph of Christianity and the last judgement. One of the most popular and recurrent prophecies, that of the Second Charlemagne, was based on the myth that the great emperor had led a crusade to Jerusalem. The prophecy had a strong appeal for Charles viii: we have seen that the king's agenda for his Italian campaign in 1494 included the idea of a crusade, and he saw himself as following in Charlemagne's illustrious foosteps. But Charles's invasion stalled, and the prophecy would be more fully embraced during the reign of Charles v, who possessed the credentials of office as well as name. After the emperor's great victory at Pavia in 1525, his secretary Alfonso de Valdés proclaimed in ecstatic language his hope that Charles was indeed the predicted successor to Charlemagne.Footnote 65 This messianism formed part of a complex image that played on themes taken from Scripture, classical antiquity, chivalric gesta and the crusading past.Footnote 66
A ruler whose career gathers all of these themes together was Charles v's grandfather, Maximilian i. Maximilian was obsessed with chivalry and constantly claimed that his ultimate goal was a great crusade; Theuerdank, a lavishly illustrated verse-history of his deeds of knightly prowess, concluded with blank pages to symbolise the crusade that was still to come. Given his inherited lands and duties, Maximilian could neglect neither reform nor the need to stem the onrush of Turkish conquest, on occasion adding his voice to the call for a church council to initiate activity.Footnote 67 He also displayed a consistent curiosity in prophecy and in natural phenomena that could be construed as divine pointers towards the right military path to follow.Footnote 68 It is only fair to point out that like his contemporary Julius ii, Maximilian became adept at projecting a self-image that would be flattering and positive, and that these themes fitted clear patterns of self-promotion.Footnote 69 But it is a big, and unwarranted, leap from this to the claim that every secular ruler was manipulating concerns about reform and crusade, and associated convictions about the need for a general council, in society at large. For they were part of that society.
To contemporaries who pinned their hopes on a general council as the best means of mobilising ideas and resources for the twin causes of reform and crusade, the sixty-eight years that separated the close of the Basle council from that of its successor in Rome brought little but disappointment. The papal curia was too wary of the conciliarist threat to its painfully reconstituted authority to act on its own initiative. It might be coerced into calling a council if subjected to external pressure, but the incessant rivalry between the period's emerging dynastic states meant that no ruler could construct a coalition broad and robust enough to apply such pressure; the Pisan council, airily dismissed by its opponents as a ‘mini-council’ (‘conciliabulum’) only became viable because Julius ii made the mistake of driving a group of his cardinals into schism. While it is tempting to view all players in these diplomatic exchanges as acting purely out of self-interest, there is also evidence for more altruistic engagement. Deciding whether self-interest or altruism was uppermost is a thankless task, but there exists a more fruitful way to interpret the recurrent cycle of lobbying, manœuvring, concession and retraction. This is to accept that the Catholic community had become trapped in what Richard Schoeck, in an essay on the Fifth Lateran Council, termed ‘a closed society’.Footnote 70 It was a world of clashing viewpoints and diplomatic gamesmanship, in which the Renaissance curia repeatedly faced crisis, but always succeeded in defusing the situation. With few exceptions, the popes of this period held limited ambitions, so to them survival in itself seemed enough. But as Schoeck commented, ‘the Church, the whole Church, paid the price’ for the victory of Julius ii and Leo x in the last and greatest of these crises.Footnote 71 That price was a religious upheaval that swept away the closed society of the post-Basle decades, assigning to history the hope that a general council might both cleanse the Church and defend it from the Turks.
