The Late Medieval Crisis

The Babylonian Captivity

After Boniface VIII's humiliation by the French king in 1303 (see Popes Against Kings), the papacy fell under French influence. In 1305 a Frenchman was elected as Clement V. He never went to Rome, which was dangerous and violent at the time. In 1309 he settled in Avignon, a town on the Rhône then just outside the French kingdom. The popes stayed there for nearly seventy years and built a huge fortress-palace. All seven Avignon popes were French, as were most of the cardinals they appointed.

The Avignon popes were not all bad. Some were capable administrators who built an efficient, centralized bureaucracy. But that efficiency was largely about collecting money: fees for appointments, taxes on clergy, and payments for dispensations and favors. To many Christians, especially outside France, the papacy looked like a tool of the French king and a money machine. The Italian poet Petrarch called Avignon the "Babylon of the West." Critics borrowed the phrase "Babylonian Captivity," recalling Israel's exile.

Pressure to return grew, voiced by holy women like Bridget of Sweden of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, who wrote the pope bold letters urging him to come back to Rome. In 1377 Gregory XI finally did.

The Black Death

In 1347 ships from the Black Sea brought a terrible disease to Sicily: bubonic plague. In four years the Black Death swept across Europe, killing perhaps a third to a half of the population, roughly 25 million people. Whole villages vanished. Plague returned again and again for the next three centuries.

The religious effects were profound and mixed:

• Many clergy died caring for the sick. Hastily ordained replacements were often poorly trained.
• Death became an obsession in art and devotion: the "Dance of Death," skeletons and decaying corpses on tombs, and books on "the art of dying well" (ars moriendi).
• Bands of flagellants marched from town to town whipping themselves in public penance, until the pope condemned them.
• Jews were falsely accused of poisoning wells. Thousands were massacred in hundreds of communities, especially in Germany, despite the pope's declaration that Jews were dying of the plague too.
• Fear of purgatory and hell intensified. Demand for Masses for the dead, indulgences and relics grew.

The Great Western Schism

Things got worse. When Gregory XI died in Rome in 1378, a Roman mob demanded an Italian pope. The cardinals elected the archbishop of Bari as Urban VI. Urban quickly proved arrogant and violent, perhaps unbalanced. He reportedly had several cardinals who plotted against him tortured and killed. Within months, most of the cardinals declared his election invalid because it had been made under fear of the mob. They elected a Frenchman, Clement VII, who returned to Avignon.

Now there were two popes, each with his own cardinals and bureaucracy, each excommunicating the other and his followers. Europe divided along political lines. France, Scotland, Naples and parts of Spain followed Avignon. England, the Holy Roman Empire, northern Italy, Hungary and Poland followed Rome. Even saints disagreed: Catherine of Siena backed Rome, and the Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer backed Avignon. Ordinary Christians could not know which pope's sacraments were valid.

In 1409 cardinals from both sides met at the Council of Pisa, deposed both popes, and elected a new one. Neither of the others resigned, so now there were three popes.

Avignon and the Great Western Schism

The Council of Constance and conciliarism

The solution came from a general council. Pressed by the emperor Sigismund, the Pisan pope called the Council of Constance (1414–1418), on the shores of Lake Constance. It was a vast gathering of thousands of bishops, theologians, princes and their followers. In its decree Haec Sancta (1415), the council declared that it held its authority directly from Christ, and that everyone, including the pope, must obey it in matters of faith, ending the schism and reform. It deposed or accepted the resignation of all three popes and elected Martin V (1417), restoring a single papacy in Rome.

This theory, that a general council is the highest authority in the church, is called Conciliarism. Its supporters hoped regular councils would reform the church "in head and members." But once restored, the popes worked hard to undermine it. The Council of Basel (1431–1449) quarreled with the pope and elected its own antipope, discrediting the movement. In 1460 Pope Pius II forbade appeals from a pope to a council. Yet conciliarist ideas survived and would be raised again by Luther.

Wyclif: the Morning Star

Meanwhile, more radical critics were questioning the church's foundations. John Wyclif (c. 1330–1384) was a leading Oxford theologian. Disgusted by clerical wealth and the schism, he argued that:

• Scripture is the supreme authority, above popes and councils, and should be available to everyone in their own language.
• The true church is the community of the predestined, known only to God, not the visible institution.
• Clergy in serious sin lose their authority, and the state may confiscate the property of a corrupt church.
• The doctrine of Transubstantiation is philosophically incoherent. Christ is present in the Eucharist, but the bread remains bread.
• The papacy, as it then existed, was the Antichrist.

Protected by powerful nobles, Wyclif died in his bed. His followers translated the whole Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English (c. 1382–1395), the first complete English Bible. Poor preachers called Lollards spread his ideas. The English church and crown cracked down. A 1401 law allowed heretics to be burned, and in 1409 unauthorized English Bible translation was banned. Lollardy survived underground into the 1500s. Protestants later called Wyclif "the Morning Star of the Reformation." In 1428, by order of the Council of Constance, his body was dug up, burned, and his ashes thrown into the river Swift.

Jan Hus

Wyclif's writings reached Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) through Czech students at Oxford. There they inspired Jan Hus (c. 1372–1415), a popular preacher at Prague's Bethlehem Chapel and rector of the university. Hus preached in Czech against clerical corruption and the sale of indulgences. He insisted that Christ, not the pope, is the head of the church, and that Scripture is the final authority.

Excommunicated, Hus appealed to a general council. The emperor Sigismund gave him a written promise of safe conduct to attend the Council of Constance. Once there, he was arrested. The council decided that a promise made to a heretic need not be kept. Refusing to recant anything he did not believe he had taught, Hus was burned at the stake on 6 July 1415. The same council that had boldly asserted its authority over the pope sent a reformer to the flames.

Hus's death ignited Bohemia. His followers, the Hussites, revolted. They demanded, among other things, that lay people receive the cup as well as the bread at Communion, and the chalice became their symbol. They defeated five crusades sent against them. A moderate Hussite church was eventually recognized, and a radical branch survived as the Unity of the Brethren, ancestors of the Moravians. When Luther read Hus a century later, he exclaimed, "We are all Hussites without knowing it!"

Constantinople falls

In the East, the long decline of Byzantium ended. On 29 May 1453, after a seven-week siege, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died fighting on the walls. Hagia Sophia became a mosque. The Christian Roman Empire, which began with Constantine, was over. Leadership of Orthodoxy shifted increasingly to Moscow, which began to call itself the "Third Rome" (see Orthodoxy in Russia). Greek scholars fleeing west brought manuscripts that fueled the Italian Renaissance.

A church in need of reform

By the late 1400s, nearly everyone agreed the church needed "reform in head and members." The Renaissance popes did little to help. Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) (Rodrigo Borgia, 1492–1503) openly fathered children and used the papacy to enrich them. Julius II (1503–1513) led armies in person. In Florence, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola preached fiery sermons against luxury and papal corruption and organized "bonfires of the vanities." He was excommunicated and in 1498 hanged and burned.

Yet this was not a dead church. Lay piety was flourishing (see Christianity on the Eve of Reform). People were hungry for God, for preaching and for the Bible. The question was whether the church's leaders could meet that hunger. Their failure set the stage for the explosion of 1517.