Читать книгу The Power and the Glorification - Jan L. de Jong - Страница 11

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THE POPE, THE PAPACY, AND THE CHURCH

The fifteenth century opened with the Roman Catholic Church in serious crisis. For more than a thousand years, it had been teaching that Christ had delegated the full authority to govern his church to Saint Peter and his successors, the popes. As Christ had assigned this power to one man alone, not to all of his apostles, it was fundamental that there could only be one pope at a time. While the church could be represented by a general council (though not in the same way that a modern nation is represented by a parliament), its decisions always needed papal approval to become valid. The pope is not elected or appointed by the general council, and is in no way subordinate to it. In fact, church councils are not even involved in the procedures to elect a pope. Over the ages, these procedures varied considerably, but around 1400 they crystallized into the practice that is still in use today, in which the electoral college of cardinals meets in conclave to vote for the new pope. This tension between the pope, endowed with plenitude of power (plenitudo potestatis), which was held to have been divinely instituted, and the general council representing the church but having no real grip or influence on the pope, was an important factor in the fifteenth-century crisis.¹

The direct roots of the crisis lay in the events of 1303, when Pope Boniface VIII died in the wake of a violent clash with the King of France, Philip IV. In an attempt to appease the conflict, the new pope, Clement V, gave in to the request of Philip IV and settled in Avignon in France.² This marked the beginning of an era of heavy French dominance. Soon the majority of the College of Cardinals consisted of Frenchmen, and, as a consequence, Clement’s immediate successors were all French. The papal court remained firmly settled in Avignon until 1376, when Pope Gregory XI, under mounting international pressure and criticism, moved the Papal See back to Rome, where it historically belonged. His untimely death in 1378 moved the assembled cardinals to act swiftly and elect a new pope before the French king could interfere. They elected not a Frenchman, but the Italian archbishop of Bari, who adopted the name Urban VI. Stirred up by the French king, however, a group of dissenting cardinals refused to recognize this new pope and proceeded to elect Clement VII, of Swiss origin, who took up residence again in Avignon.

This embarrassing situation became even worse in 1409, when a large group of cardinals, bishops, and other church dignitaries, unhappy with the present circumstances and sensitive to the generally increasing feelings of displeasure with the state of the church, came together in Pisa. Rather than siding with either Gregory XII in Rome or Benedict XIII in Avignon, they elected a new pope, Alexander V. Both incumbent popes, however, disputed the legitimacy of this election and refused to withdraw in favor of a single new successor to Saint Peter. The Catholic world thus now had three popes.

The solution to this painful crisis did not come from within the church, but was forced by the German King Sigismund. In 1414, acting on the model of ancient Christian rulers like Constantine the Great, he summoned a council to Constance.³ His personal attendance and active involvement gave the council, after a hesitant start, increasing momentum and convinced many cautious and skeptical clerics to join. One of the decrees adopted during the deliberations directly affected the position of the pope and the extent of his authority. It stated that a general council was a lawful assembly that represented the universal church and held its power directly from Christ; everyone in the church, therefore, had to obey the general council, including the pope. Moreover, general councils should meet at regular intervals of several years. This decree considerably curbed the authority of the pope, making him a representative of the general council and restricting his powers to the limits set by it. The church, in other words, was no longer a papal monarchy; its head was the general council, of which the pope was the chief officer.

It was along these lines that the Council of Constance dealt with the three incumbent popes. The Pisan Pope John XXIII, who had actually convened the council at the instigation of King Sigismund and presided over its first sessions, fled when he perceived that his manipulations did not help his chances to become the “new” legitimate pope. He was soon caught, however, tried, and officially declared deposed on May 29, 1415. A few months later, his Roman rival, Gregory XII, also ceded. However, Gregory would not recognize a council summoned by John XXIII, and was therefore allowed the right to convene the council afresh, which he duly did on July 4. Now that the council was also legitimate in his eyes, he immediately offered his resignation. The council accepted it by declaring him ineligible for reelection. Pope Benedict XIII, representing the Avignon line, was less cooperative. He refused to resign and even had a successor after his death in 1423. This next pope, however, had so little support that he stepped down in 1429 and joined the supporters of the pope who had come out of the council as the one legitimate successor of Saint Peter: Martin V.

The election of Martin V took place in a very particular way and at a moment that ran counter to King Sigismund’s will. Next to ending the schism, reform of the church was the major topic on the council’s agenda. However, Sigismund’s advice to carry through reforms before electing a new pope was disregarded. The representatives of the various states feared that reformers from all over might join and use the chance to make the church more independent and harder to control, against their national interests. They preferred to elect a pope first and then try to deal individually with him, as this would increase their chances of securing their national good. After long discussions about the procedures to follow, a special conclave consisting of twenty-two cardinals and thirty representatives of France, England, Italy, Spain, and the German Empire elected Pope Martin V on November 11, 1417.

What King Sigismund had wanted to prevent immediately happened. The various nations tried to deal individually with the pope and were largely successful in doing so. The pope wrongly assumed that concluding separate pacts would reestablish his authority over the individual countries, and the outcome accordingly showed that he had not been able to reaffirm his grip on affairs such as church taxation and investiture. Moreover, he lost many prerogatives and privileges. Yet he did resist pressure to settle in Germany or France, and in 1420 he definitely established the pontifical seat in the city where it historically belonged: Rome.

The pope not only had to restore his authority in European politics. He also had to reaffirm his control over Rome and the church.⁴ Through concessions, political manipulations, and the force of arms he managed to reestablish his dominion over the Papal States, which provided him with regular revenues. Within the church, however, he was confronted with problems that were more complicated. The period in Avignon had exposed the fact that, in spite of the biblical texts and the ensuing torrent of theological arguments, the papal plenitude of power could be curbed seriously by political force. Moreover, the aftermath had painfully shown that the papacy was not capable of solving its own problems; it needed the intervention of a general council and the support of secular rulers such as King Sigismund. Thus the one legitimate new pope, Martin V, had been elected by a special conclave set up by the general council. The participants of this conclave consisted not only of the customary cardinals, but also of representatives of the five national states that were involved. The implication was that, in order to solve the papal crisis, the general council had disrupted the traditional election procedure. Consequently, the new pope did not owe his position exclusively to the College of Cardinals, which had been the autonomous electing body since 1059. He now owed his position to the general council. Thus, he was no longer the supreme monarch of the church, but the main representative of the general council. It was now argued that Christ had delegated his power to bind and loose not just to Saint Peter, following Matthew 16, but to the community of believers who were represented by the general council. This advanced view on the highest authority in the church was based on Matthew 18:15–18, where Christ entrusts the leadership over his believers to all of his apostles.

The general relief and happiness about the solution of the papal crisis were so strong that it was hardly noticed that none of the subsequent popes ever formally confirmed the decrees of the Council of Constance. Conciliar enthusiasm had forced a solution, but in the following years it lost most of its momentum. The various European monarchs were suspicious about its basically democratic, bottom-up character, which they considered a potential threat to their own positions. From now on, they deemed it better to deal again with the pope and not the general council. Successive popes duly summoned new councils on the dates that had been appointed at Constance, but the scant interest from both the papacy itself and the various monarchs turned these councils into irrelevant meetings that adopted increasingly extreme, unrealistic positions. In 1439, the general council was divided over negotiations between the pope and the Byzantine emperor about a reunion of the Western and Eastern Church. One part of the council followed Pope Eugenius IV in concluding this pact, the results of which were to be short-lived (Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire would fall to the Turks in 1453). The other part continued its attempts to reform the church and proceeded to replace the legitimate Pope Eugenius IV with the antipope Felix V (1439–49; d. 1451).

Even though many long-standing problems and issues remained unsettled, the papacy had apparently regained some of its respect and reemerged as an important player on the European stage. It was again dealing with monarchs and other political leaders, but its recognition and support came at a heavy price: the concession of much of its control over national and local church affairs. In reality, the papacy was increasingly becoming an Italian affair, immersed in the obscure plotting and scheming of local politics, and its importance hardly extended beyond the Alps. The College of Cardinals was almost exclusively Italian, all but guaranteeing that the popes it elected would be Italian as well. Most of its members were deeply involved in domestic politics and had the interests of their own families as high on their agenda as the good of the church, if not higher.

Yet with its international respect apparently regained and the general council split, the papacy dared to adopt a tougher stance and challenge the council’s legitimacy. The union with the Eastern Church in 1439 gave the pope an opportunity to boost his claims of primacy and plenary power. (The Eastern Church, in need of help against the Turkish threat, let these assertions pass.) When the act of union was promulgated at the council of Florence, Pope Eugenius IV declared that “we define the Holy Apostolic See and the Roman Pontiff to hold the primacy over the whole world, and that the Roman Pontiff is the successor of blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and that he is the true Vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christians; and to him in blessed Peter has been delivered by our Lord, Jesus Christ, the full power of feeding, ruling, and governing the universal Church.”⁵ The pope’s position seemed even stronger in 1449, when the antipope Felix V abdicated and his supporters joined the “legitimate” pope in Rome, Nicholas V. The latter wisely adopted the ex-schismatics into his camp and bestowed a cardinal’s hat on the ex-antipope and some of his followers. He also came to good terms with the German King Frederick III, whom he crowned emperor in 1452, in the last ceremony of this kind to take place in Rome. The circumstances now seemed right to bolster again the primacy of the papacy and curb the influence of the council. The strategy followed two routes: explaining and justifying the pope’s primacy, and questioning the legitimacy of the Council of Constance and the series of councils that followed. A stream of writings began to flow, often springing from sources in or near the Roman curia, that passionately confirmed the papal primacy and its plenitude of power.⁶ Their reasoning usually started with Christ’s words to Saint Peter and repeated all the arguments that had been developed over the centuries. There was one issue that resisted smooth integration into this blueprint: the content and validity of two decrees adopted by the Council of Constance. Called Haec Sancta and Frequens, they respectively assert that the pope is obliged to obey the general council and lay down a method to ensure its gathering at regular intervals, even if this goes against the pope’s wishes. These decrees, however, had been adopted under circumstances that left room for some serious questions. To begin with, they had been embraced by a council that was first convened by the Pisan Pope John XXIII and then by the Roman Pope Gregory XII. Were these popes to be considered legitimate? Secondly, at which stage of the council, and under which pope, were these decrees actually adopted, and what did that mean for their validity? (The answers, of course, depend on which pope one wishes to consider as legitimate.) Thirdly, how much authority does a council have if its decrees are not confirmed by the pope? (It should be remembered that the papacy never formally confirmed the decrees of the Council of Constance.) The popes cleverly used this murky area of confusion, uncertainty, and personal opinions to reaffirm their authority and move the council into a subordinate position, claiming that they alone had the authority to convoke, transfer, and conclude a council, preside and direct its deliberations, and confirm its acts. In the 1460 bull Execrabilis, Pope Pius II forbade appeals to the general council against papal decisions and declared that any appellant would be excommunicated. Accordingly, in 1476 Pope Sixtus IV told the French King Louis XII, who threatened to appeal to a general council, that “the authority to will or not to will a general council is fixed solely in the Roman pontiff.”⁷ In 1478 he took the next step and annulled the decrees of the Council of Constance.

An important weapon in the papacy’s struggle to regain its full authority was propaganda, including not only the stream of writings that zealously advocated the pope’s primacy and plenitude of power, but also sculpture and paintings. The pair of bronze doors of the central porch of Saint Peter’s in Rome are an early but telling example (fig. 1).⁸ They were commissioned by Martin V’s successor, Pope Eugenius IV, who added to the papacy’s already enormous problems with his impulsive character and lack of political competence. Within a year after his election in 1431, he dissolved the Council of Basel, which had been summoned by Martin V. In 1433, however, he had to back down and acknowledge its legitimacy. The reunion with the Eastern Church in 1439 and its recognition of papal primacy gave a new boost to his authority, but could not prevent a group of unhappy council members from electing an antipope, Felix V. Eugenius was also confronted with huge problems in the city of Rome. In 1434, he was even forced to escape secretly, disguised as a monk, and was not able to return until 1443. When Antonio Averlino (called Filarete) finally finished the bronze doors in 1445, twelve years after he had been commissioned to make them, they included several direct references to those turbulent years. The doors were removed during the demolition of Saint Peter’s in the sixteenth century, but Pope Paul V had them adapted to the larger size of the central portal of the new church and reinstalled in 1619. There, in more or less the original site, they can still be seen.

The two doors each consist of three large, rectangular panels situated one above the other, separated by horizontal strips with little historical scenes and surrounded by borders of acanthus scrolls. The upper panels show Christ enthroned making a blessing gesture, and the Holy Virgin Mary in glory; the middle panels show the standing figures of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, and the bottom, square panels show the martyrdom of both saints. Together they illustrate Christ as the head of the church, Saint Mary as its symbol, and Paul and Peter as its founders. The panel with the standing Saint Peter makes this rather general symbolism more specific (fig. 2). It shows the saint entrusting the keys he received from Christ to a kneeling pope, thus illustrating that papal authority derives directly from Peter. Two inscriptions make this meaning more explicit. One says, “Saint Peter the apostle” and the other “Pope Eugenius IV from Venice,” denoting that the kneeling pope is not any pope, but Eugenius himself. The horizontal strips between the panels elaborate on this theme of Pope Eugenius and papal authority with concrete historical examples. The left strip between the upper and middle panels (fig. 3) shows the Greek delegation leaving Constantinople to attend the Council of Ferrara in 1438 and Emperor John VIII Palaeologus kneeling before Pope Eugenius. The strip on the right depicts the pope and the emperor attending the Council of Florence in 1439. The left strip between the middle and the lower panels depicts Pope Eugenius crowning Emperor Sigismund in Rome in 1433, followed by their ride through the city. The right strip shows the Jacobites (Syrians) accepting the agreement of unification with the Western Church and departing from Rome in 1443. Inscriptions in Latin explain the quintessence of these scenes, pompously concluding, “These are the illustrious proceedings of Eugenius IV, they are the testimonials of his lofty spirit.”⁹

The arrangement of the various scenes over the left and right doors reveals a carefully thought-out scheme. The scenes on the left door, under the figure of Christ, visualize the temporal aspect of the pope’s authority. They show the emperors John VIII Palaeologus and Sigismund both kneeling for Pope Eugenius, and between them Saint Paul, whose traditional attribute of a sword is prominently put on view, evoking associations with “the sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17). On the right door, scenes showing the unification of the church under Pope Eugenius IV as its supreme leader illustrate the spiritual power of the papacy. The central panel, with Saint Peter handing the keys to Eugenius, underscores the pope’s unlimited authority. Together, the doors bear out the papal claims of plenitude of power in both temporal and spiritual matters. These are the claims made by any pope, but within the difficult circumstances of the 1430s and 1440s they were especially relevant for Eugenius IV. The universal claims and entitlements of the papacy, which are the concerns of any pope in any time, are demonstrated via one specific pope, Eugenius IV, giving the events of his life a timeless dimension. This careful balancing of generality and specificity set the example for papal propaganda in the two centuries to come.

The fresco paintings on the walls of the Sistine Chapel offer another example of papal propaganda (fig. 4).¹⁰ They were commissioned by Sixtus IV, who was, more than thirty years after Eugenius, still battling with the general council. The conflict had flared up because of Sixtus’s ruthless aggrandizement of the papacy and of his own family. At the same time, the French King Louis XI, with whom he had strained relations, tried to outmaneuver him by appealing to a general council. The general council thus not only constituted a threat to the papal authority from within the church, but was prone to be (mis)used by secular rulers as a political instrument to put pressure on the pope. Sixtus’s response, as we have seen, was to annul the decrees of the Council of Constance and renew the Execrabilis bull, which forbade appeals to the general council. From 1481 to 1483 he had his claims to full papal authority visualized and legitimized on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. This was part of a project that Sixtus had started in 1477, which involved the construction and decoration of the chapel for official celebrations by the pope and his court. The decoration consisted of paintings by a team of prominent artists, headed by Pietro Perugino and including Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, and Luca Signorelli. The paintings depicted a parallel series of scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ. The two series started on the altar wall with The Finding of Moses and The Birth of Christ (both destroyed in the 1530s to make room for Michelangelo’s Last Judgment), continued over the two long walls, and concluded on the entrance wall with The Fight over the Dead Body of Moses and The Resurrection and Ascension of Christ (also lost in the sixteenth century, but soon replaced by new ones on the same subject; fig. 5). The frescoes that still remain on the south and north walls show closely corresponding episodes from the lives of Moses and Christ. The Trials of Moses (fig. 6), for instance, is matched by The Temptations of Christ (fig. 7), which is situated directly opposite it. The Latin captions help make the correspondence more explicit, as both use the word temptatio.¹¹ Thus, the scenes on the south wall show Moses as a representative of the Old Testament, whose deeds find their fulfillment in Christ and the New Testament. Another example is Moses Receiving the Tablets with the Ten Commandments (fig. 8), which is matched by Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (fig. 9). The captions explain that both episodes deal with promulgatio legis: promulgation of the law, respectively, of the Old and the New Testament.¹² Moses is thus represented as a sort of precursor, who instituted the rules of God that would be fulfilled by those of Christ.

One pair of corresponding paintings illustrates this point in particular. A fresco on the south wall, painted by Botticelli, shows several episodes of a revolt against the leadership of Moses and the supreme priesthood of his brother Aaron during Israel’s forty-year passage through the desert (fig. 10). God’s intervention, however, made the earth swallow the leaders of the revolt and restored Moses’s and Aaron’s authority.¹³ The caption explains the theme as “the threat [Conturbatio] to Moses, the bearer of the tablets of the Law.”¹⁴ An inscription within the painting further explains this. On a building in the background that closely resembles the Roman Arch of Constantine (at first sight a curious addition to a desert scene) is written a quote from the New Testament: “Neither doth any man take the honor to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was.”¹⁵ This makes it clear that the leadership of God’s people and the supreme priesthood are divinely instituted and not to be challenged by anybody. The reference to the general council disputing the pope’s full authority is obvious.

The corresponding fresco on the opposite wall, by Pietro Perugino, makes this message even more apparent (fig. 11). According to the caption, it illustrates “the threat [Conturbatio] to Jesus Christ, the lawgiver,”¹⁶ but this is actually only to be seen in the right background. According to the Gospel of John,¹⁷ Christ was twice on the point of being stoned when he professed to be God’s son, but both times he managed to walk away unharmed. The foreground of the painting prominently displays an episode that is literally the key passage of the papal institution: Christ handing the keys of heaven and earth to Saint Peter, according to the text in Matthew.¹⁸ Again it is hard to miss the reference to the pope’s plenitude of power and, by implication, to the unsubstantiated claims of the general council.

Just as in the bronze doors of Saint Peter’s, a balance is struck in the chapel frescoes between generality and specificity. They all represent episodes from the Bible, whose importance for any believer in any time is beyond doubt, and imply that if God helped (the leaders of) the faithful in the past, he will also sustain them in the future. The urgency of this message is underlined by the inclusion of contemporary details, such as portraits of members of the papal court and present-day buildings in Rome. Thus, they link the disastrous attempts to challenge the authority of Moses and Christ to the endeavor to curb the power of the pope in the 1470s and ’80s, making it clear that any attempt to dispute papal authority is bound to fail. Just like Christ’s biblical parables, the paintings appeal to those who have ears to hear.¹⁹ The direct and continuing link between Moses and Christ and the present-day pope (whoever may hold that position) is further illustrated by the series of popes painted between the windows, above the biblical scenes (fig. 12). They show (fantasized) portraits of the supreme pontiffs from Saint Peter until the year 313, when Constantine the Great officially recognized Christianity. The implication is that this series is continued by the living pope. Thus, a direct connection is visualized from the current pope, via his predecessors, to Christ and Moses, the lawgivers of the New and Old Testaments, whose authority was divinely instituted. Within this scheme, Sixtus IV himself is notably present, just as Eugenius was personally included in the representations on the bronze doors of Saint Peter’s. The original altarpiece in the chapel (now lost) showed Pope Sixtus together with Saint Peter and the other apostles as a witness of the assumption of Saint Mary (fig. 13). Furthermore, the inscription on the triumphal arches in the painting of The Threat [Conturbatio] to Jesus (fig. 11) praises his piety.²⁰ Thus, Sixtus IV represents the papacy in general, embodying the claims and entitlements of himself and every other pope.

In spite of all this propaganda, the prospect that history might repeat itself and a general council would convene to curb the pope’s authority, or even depose him and create a new pontiff, was not a chimera. Even in the sixteenth century, the various monarchs of Europe did not hesitate to intimidate the pope with such a possibility. Thus, in 1511, the French king, supported by the German emperor, ignored the Execrabilis bull and instigated a council in Pisa. One of the main issues was the deposition of Pope Julius II, on the charge that his conduct was ruining the church (and getting too much in the way of French interests and ambitions). Pope Julius countered by convoking the Fifth Lateran Council, which to no one’s surprise immediately annulled the acts of the Pisan assembly.

The Stanza d’Eliodoro frescoes, painted shortly afterwards by Raphael in the Vatican Palace, are certainly related to these events, but again the allusions to current issues are put in general terms. In 1508, the still relatively unknown Raphael had taken on the commission to decorate one of the rooms of the papal apartment, what is known as the Stanza della Segnatura. This room probably served as the pope’s library, and the paintings accordingly show famous authors and scholars from all ages (fig. 14). They astounded the pope so much that he immediately ordered Raphael to continue and decorate the adjoining Stanza d’Eliodoro. In all likelihood, this room was an audience chamber, and thus subjects with a more political content were chosen. Begun in 1511, the frescoes on the four walls show instances of divine intervention (fig. 15);²¹ in all four scenes a pope is shown as present, even if the story itself does not require him or his presence is downright anachronistic. In the first fresco, three heavenly creatures, in answer to the Jewish high priest Onias’s prayer for help, drive out Heliodorus trying to rob the temple treasury (fig. 16).²² A pope is miraculously included as an eyewitness to this episode from the Old Testament. In the second fresco, an angel liberates Saint Peter from prison (fig. 17).²³ In the third fresco, Saints Peter and Paul appear in the sky to assist Pope Leo I in deterring Attila and his Huns from advancing to Rome in 452 (fig. 18). In the final fresco, representing a miracle that took place at Bolsena in 1263, the communion wafer exudes real blood, releasing the celebrating priest from his doubts about the question whether the eucharistic transformation really changes the host into the body of Christ (fig. 19). A pope appears here too, though none was present when the miracle occurred. The relevance of these four events for the current pope has been highlighted by giving the painted pontiffs (except Saint Peter himself) the facial traits of Julius II and his successor Leo X, who continued the decoration project after Julius’s death.

Although it is tempting to relate the depicted events to the current political situation, particularly the threat of the French, it is actually hard to connect them directly to specific circumstances. Julius II was already likened to the high priest Onias before the problems with the French began,²⁴ and Leo I dispelling the Huns—at first sight an apt reference to Pope Julius’s military campaign against the French in 1511—a general example to demonstrate the papacy’s divinely supported independence.²⁵ Moreover, specific details of the preparatory sketches indicate that the paintings had already been planned in 1510, well before the Council of Pisa and the Fifth Lateran Council convened. In a more general sense, the paintings demonstrate that in every age, from biblical times to the present, God will support the leader of his faithful, whether the pope or his precursor, the Jewish high priest. The popes included in the paintings visibly convey that they feel secure in God’s helping presence. They seem quiet and undisturbed in spite of the dangers threatening them. Thus, the paintings create an image of the papacy as a divinely supported authority that through the ages has overcome doubts about its teachings and attacks against its power and institutions. Details from the present relate the events from the past to contemporary problems, without becoming too specific, making it clear that the papacy will prevail over the current troubles, as it will over those of the future. Just as in the doors for Eugenius IV and the paintings for Sixtus IV, a balance is struck between generality and specificity, which makes the paintings serve as fitting propaganda for the pope who commissioned them as well as for his successors.

The three cases discussed are just a few instances of the wave of propaganda issued by the papacy, in painting and sculpture as well as many other forms of art: writing, music, and temporary manifestations such as parades and theater festivals. In this respect, the papal court did not really differ from that of secular rulers, who also employed art as an important tool to promote their status and authority. But neither the amount nor the quality of the papal propaganda could change the fact that, a century after the Council of Constance, the position of the papacy was still unstable. The conciliar battle in 1511 showed that the days when the pope’s authority was taken for granted were definitely over.

Meanwhile there were other factors starting to contribute to the dwindling respect for the papacy. In spite of an urgent need to deal with all kinds of abuses and thoroughly reform the church in accordance with the call of the Council of Constance, the successive popes had never wholeheartedly embarked upon this major challenge. With myopic persistence, they had refused to tackle the core issues and continued to perform cosmetic surgery. Yet the need for reforms was real and could neither be ignored nor suppressed. All over Europe initiatives had emerged that found support on a local level, and reformers increasingly turned to secular rulers for endorsement. The papacy in Rome came to be viewed with suspicion, as an obstacle to rather than a promoter of reform. The result was disunity and regionalism, and a general climate of distrust and unhappiness with Rome. The atmosphere grew even more alarming for the papacy with the appearance of Martin Luther. This monk from a reformed Augustinian congregation not only joined the European choir chanting songs of lamentation about the abuses of the church, but started to sing a lead part in directly challenging the position of the papacy. However, like so many other attempts to put an end to the abuses in the church, Luther’s calls fell on deaf papal ears.

Besides complaints, Luther also confronted the church with a view on faith that basically made the priesthood and consequently the entire church hierarchy unnecessary. In his view, the relationship between God and man is a direct one, which is not and cannot be administered by the church. Man’s knowledge about God results from his own individual understanding of the Bible, not from the interpretation that the church imposes upon him through the priesthood. Every individual believer is therefore, according to Luther, his or her own priest. Even more importantly, man is not freed from his burden of sin by the church’s absolution, but by inner grace and faith.

Luther’s view presented a double threat for the papacy. Considering human salvation an individual affair between man and God implied that the church and its complete hierarchy, including the papacy, were marginal institutions. Not only was the door then open for the faithful to disagree with or ignore the teachings of the church—as many indeed did do—but secular rulers had an excuse to curtail the role of the church in their dominions and push back against papal interference in their national or local affairs—and this is what actually happened.

By 1520, the gap between Luther and the church had become too wide to be bridged, and in 1521 he was duly excommunicated. Support from German princes, however, enabled him to continue his reformation, which was soon mingled with political interests and immersed in waves of social unrest and other movements of a not strictly religious nature. It marked the beginning of a long and disturbing period that was to break Europe up into an assembly of religiously and politically separate territories.

Luther’s view of a more individual faith and the nonessential role of the priesthood offered the biggest challenge to the church. In the heat of the debate around 1520, however, some positions that derived from these basic tenets seemed more threatening. One of them was Luther’s position on the papacy. The logical deduction from his view that the priesthood is not essential was, of course, that the papacy is not essential either, and that its supposed plenitude of power is therefore simply not relevant. Yet the papacy was fully responsible, according to Luther, for misleading the congregation of the faithful and allowing the many abuses in the church to endure. In 1520, at the height of his dispute with the church and shortly before his excommunication, he published a pamphlet on The Papacy at Rome, in which he carefully discussed the question “whether the papacy at Rome, possessing the actual power over all Christendom (as they say), is of divine or of human origin, and this being decided, whether it is possible for Christians to say that all other Christians in the world are heretics and apostates, even if they all agree with us in holding to the same baptism, Sacrament, Gospel, and all the articles of faith, but merely do not have their priests and bishops confirmed by Rome, or, as it is now, buy such confirmation with money.” One part of this pamphlet contains a critical discussion of the key passage in the Gospel of Matthew (16:17–19), which the Catholic Church had traditionally interpreted as stating that Saint Peter’s authority is divinely instituted, that it is plenary and not subordinated to any earthly superior. To this interpretation, Luther responded,

the same Matthew has barred such erroneous interpretation in the xviii. chapter, where Christ says to all in common, “Verily, I say unto you, whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven.” It is clear that Christ here interprets His own words, and in this xviii. chapter explains the former xvi.; namely, that the keys are given to Saint Peter in the stead of the whole Church, and not for his own person. Thus also John, in the last chapter [i.e., 20:22–23], “He breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” To maintain the sole authority of St. Peter, where there are two texts against one, many men have labored in vain. But the Gospel is too clear, and they have had to admit until now that in the first passage nothing special was given to St. Peter for his own person.

After this refutation, Luther continued with pointing out the disastrous consequences of the Catholic interpretation of the key passage in Matthew:

Now the greater part of the Roman communion, and even some of the popes themselves, have forsaken the faith wantonly and without struggle, and live under the power of Satan, as is plainly to be seen, and thus the papacy often has been under the dominion of the gates of hell. And should I speak quite openly, this same Roman authority, ever since the time it has presumed to soar over all Christendom, not only has never attained its purpose, but has become the cause of nearly all the apostasy, heresy, discord, sects, unbelief and misery in Christendom, and has never freed itself from the gates of hell.²⁶

With these and similar arguments, Luther attacked the theological foundations of the papacy. At the same time, others were challenging its historical basis as well. In 1519, the German Ulrich von Hutten published a collection of writings by various authors who all attacked the position of the pope.²⁷ One, the Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), presented strong philological and historical arguments that the so-called Donation of Constantine was a forgery.²⁸ For centuries this document had been considered the authentic declaration that Emperor Constantine the Great had issued around the year 325, when he transferred the capital of his empire to Constantinople and ceded “the city of Rome and all the places, cities and provinces of Italy and the west” to the papacy in the person of Sylvester I. Thus, it had been a major historical support to justify the pope’s claim of supremacy over the emperor in western Europe. Valla’s treatise had caused some stir in the fifteenth century, but this had quieted down when the author found employment in the papal court in 1448. Yet this time bomb kept ticking, and the destructive explosion came with its rerelease in the charged atmosphere around 1520. Lorenzo Valla’s words sliced through the dense mass of papal claims and pretensions:

I know that for a long time people have been waiting to hear the accusation I would bring against the Roman pontiffs: a massive accusation assuredly, of either supine ignorance or monstrous avarice, which is enslavement to idols, or pride of rule, which is always accompanied by cruelty. Already for several centuries they either did not realize that Constantine’s Donation was a lie and a fabrication, or else they invented it themselves. Their descendants, following the deceitful path of earlier generations, defended as true what they knew to be false—dishonoring the majesty of the pontificate, dishonoring the memory of the pontiffs of old, dishonoring the Christian religion, and confounding everything with slaughter, collapse, and crime. They say that the city of Rome is his, that the kingdom of Sicily and Naples is his, that the whole of Italy is his, the peoples of Gaul, Spain, Germany, and Britain,—in short that the West is his: they say that all these are encompassed in that document of donation. Is all this yours because of that, supreme pontiff? Do you intend to recover all of it? Is it your idea to despoil of their cities all the kings and princes of the West and to force them to pay you annual tribute? I, on the contrary, think that the princes have a better right to despoil you of the entire empire you hold. For, as I shall show, that Donation, from which the supreme pontiffs want to derive their legal right, was unknown to [Pope] Sylvester and Constantine alike.²⁹

The impact of critical writings such as those of Luther and Valla—and many others in their wake—is apparent in The History of Italy, which Francesco Guicciardini wrote in Florence in the 1530s but which was only posthumously published in 1561. A digression on the history of the papacy, based on facts and critical observations and not on religious tenets, was omitted from all Italian editions up to 1621. A section of it may explain why and, at the same time, give an impression of the critical mood concerning the papacy in the sixteenth century:

Raised to secular power, little by little forgetting about the salvation of souls and divine precepts, and turning all their thoughts to worldly greatness, and no longer using their spiritual authority except as an instrument and minister of temporal power, [the popes] began to appear rather more like secular princes than popes. Their concern and endeavors began to be no longer the sanctity of life or the propagation of religion, no longer zeal and charity toward their neighbors, but armies and wars against Christians, managing their sacrifices with bloody hands and thoughts; they began to accumulate treasures, to make new laws, to invent new tricks, new cunning devices in order to gather money from every side; for this purpose, to use their spiritual arms without respect; for this end, to shamelessly sell sacred and profane things. The great wealth spreading amongst them and throughout their court was followed by pomp, luxury, dishonest customs, lust and abominable pleasures: no concern about their successors, no thought of the perpetual majesty of the pontificate, but instead, an ambitious and pestiferous desire to exalt their children, nephews and kindred, not only to immoderate riches but to principalities, to kingdoms; no longer distributing dignities and emoluments among deserving and virtuous men, but almost always either selling them for the highest price or wasting them on persons opportunistically moved by ambition, avarice, or shameful love of pleasure.

And for all these misdeeds, reverence for the papacy has been utterly lost in the hearts of men.³⁰

Guicciardini’s critical judgment reveals the difficult position of the papacy. A century’s stay in Avignon had seriously eroded the solid papal bulwark. The councils of Pisa and Constance had seemed to signal the beginning of a badly needed renovation, but it was ultimately only a patchwork. Then Luther began to undermine the papacy’s theological foundations, while the belated impact of Valla’s writings began to destabilize its historical basis. If the popes wanted their bulwark to endure, they had to react. But it took them years to recognize the seriousness of Luther’s impact and how much it reflected the general feelings of unhappiness with continuing abuses in the church. At the same time, they failed to notice the underlying desire for independence and individuality. They expected these stirrings to fade, as so many earlier attempts at reform had died away, and assumed that the commotion caused by Valla’s writings could be curbed by simply denying his conclusions and restating the church’s authoritative and exclusively correct version of history. Without recognizing that the landscape around their bulwark had been developed, that new strongholds had been erected and the winds were blowing from different directions, the popes kept pointing to the original floor plans and construction drawings, as if these would be a safeguard against any form of deterioration and justify their stubborn refusal to adapt. All the arguments that had been developed through the centuries to assert the primacy of the papacy and its plenitude of power, its superiority over the emperor and every secular ruler, were simply reiterated over and over again. No new arguments were developed, and reality was considered an irritating detail that was disturbing the established and undeniable truth.

In the following chapters, we will look at how these centuries-old claims underlie the historical cycles that were painted in the Vatican and other buildings within the orbit of papal influence. History, as we will see, was used to demonstrate the undeniable self-evidence of the plenitude of papal power. At the same time, it was the undisputable presupposition of the pope’s plenary authority that determined how history was perceived and interpreted.