The last quarter of the 13th century was a time of growing bitterness and harshness. The golden age of Scholastic theology had come to an abrupt end, its theoretical foundation challenged by a number of theologians. The troubles of the Franciscans—who were divided between those who stood for the absolute poverty prescribed by the rule and testament of St. Francis (the Spirituals) and those who accepted papal relaxation and exemptions (the Conventuals)—were an open sore for 60 years, vexing the papacy and infecting the whole church. New expressions of lay piety and heresy challenged the authority of the church and its teachings, leaving the papacy itself vulnerable to disintegration. The “Babylonian Captivity”
The severest difficulties faced by the medieval church involved the papacy. The most extreme and inflexible advocate of papal authority, Boniface VIII, initiated a struggle with the French king, Philip IV, over Philip’s attempts to tax and judge the clergy. After Boniface issued the bull Unam sanctam (“One Holy”), which asserted the unity of the church and the authority of the pope over kings, Philip rallied the people of France and accused Boniface of blasphemy, murder, sodomy, and other crimes. In 1303, mercenaries in French pay and under French leadership harassed and humiliated the pope with impunity, arresting Boniface at his family palace in Anagni. Although freed by the people of the town, Boniface never recovered from the shock and died shortly afterward. The aftermath of this “outrage of Anagni” was the desertion of Rome by the popes and their long residence (1309–77) at Avignon (now in France), a chapter in church history called the “Babylonian Captivity” after the 70 years of Jewish exile in Babylon in the 6th century bc.
Palais des Papes (papal palace), Avignon, France.Courtesy of the French Government Tourist office; photograph, Lucien Viguier
The disputes among the Franciscans, which had crystallized finally upon the teaching of the Spirituals that their absolute poverty was that of Christ, were harshly settled (1322) by the irascible octogenarian Pope John XXII (reigned 1316–34), who persecuted the Spirituals and declared belief in the absolute poverty of Jesus and the Apostles heretical. Afterward a group of Franciscans led by Michael of Cesena, minister-general of the order, and William of Ockham became bitter and formidable critics of the papacy. With them for a time was the Italian political philosopher Marsilius of Padua, a Paris master who in his Defensor pacis (1324; “Defender of the Peace”) outlined a secular state in which the church was a government department, the papacy and episcopate were human institutions, and the spiritual sanctions of religion were relegated to a position of honourable nonentity. Between them, Ockham and Marsilius used almost all the arguments against the papacy that have ever been devised. Condemned more than once, Marsilius had little immediate effect or influence, but during the Great Schism (1378–1417) and later, in the 16th century, he and Ockham had their turn.
With the papacy “in captivity,” Europe and the church entered an epoch of disasters. As the 14th century proceeded, the so-called medieval synthesis of the Scholastic theologians was undone by the works of Ockham and John Duns Scotus, and nominalism captured the universities. In England, John Wycliffe challenged the papacy and the teachings of the church, prefiguring the attacks of the Protestant Reformers of the 16th century. Although condemned by the church, Wycliffe influenced the thought of Jan Hus and, especially, the Lollards of England. The church also suffered from the destruction of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between England and France and the devastation of the Black Death (1348–49), which decimated the population of Europe and inspired both orthodox and heterodox religious movements.
Despite this upheaval, the basic structures of Christian belief and practice changed little during the first half of the 1th century. Many of the largest parish churches of Europe date from this time, as do many popular devotions, prayers, hymns, pilgrimages, and carols; also, many hospitals and almshouses were founded. Although relations between the friars and the secular clergy had been canonically settled, friction between the two groups continued. The friars came under wider criticism for worldliness and immorality, but they remained popular. Although heresy and antisacerdotal (anticlerical) sentiment became almost endemic in the cities of Belgium and the Netherlands in the 14th century, the same period produced some of the greatest mystical writers of the church’s history: in the north, Johann Tauler and Jan van Ruysbroeck; in Italy, Catherine of Siena; and in England, Walter Hilton and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. The Beguine Marguerite Porete, another influential mystic, was burned as a heretic in 1310. Late medieval reform: the Great Schism and conciliarism
Reformation of the church and the papacy was what the advocates of a return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome had in mind. In the pope’s absence both the ecclesiastical power and the territorial integrity of the papacy had deteriorated within Italy, and the moral and spiritual authority of the office was in jeopardy throughout Christian Europe. This condition, so many believed, would continue and even worsen so long as the papacy remained in Avignon. Pope Urban V (reigned 1362–70) attempted to reestablish the papacy in Rome in 1367, but after a stay of only three years he returned to Avignon and soon died. It was finally Gregory XI (reigned 1370–78) who, in 1377, permanently moved the papal headquarters back to Rome, but he died only a few months later. The immediate result of the return to Rome was not the restoration of confidence and credibility that some had predicted but the very opposite. During the papacy’s residence in Avignon, not only had the church come under the political and religious domination of France but the College of Cardinals in Rome had filled the administrative vacuum by developing a form of government that can only be described as oligarchic. The powers that the cardinals had succeeded in appropriating were difficult for the centralized authority of the papacy, whether in Avignon or in Rome, to reclaim for itself.
Meeting in Rome for the first time in nearly a century, the College of Cardinals elected Pope Urban VI (reigned 1378–89). But Urban’s desire to reassert the monarchical powers of the papacy, as well as his evident mental illness, prompted the cardinals to renege on their choice later in the same year. In his place they elected Clement VII (reigned 1378–94), who soon took up residence back in Avignon. (This Clement VII is officially listed as an antipope, and the name was later taken by another pope, Clement VII, who reigned 1523–34.) The years from 1378 to 1417 were the time of the Great Schism, which divided the loyalties of Western Christendom between two popes, each of whom excommunicated the other and all the other’s followers. In the conflict between them, kingdoms, dioceses, religious orders, parishes, and even families were split, and the pretensions of the church to being, as the Nicene Creed said, “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” became a mockery. No one could be absolutely certain about the validity of the sacraments if the integrity and the very unity of the church, and therefore of the episcopate and priesthood as well, were in doubt. Speaking for a broad consensus, the University of Paris proposed three alternatives for resolving the crisis, which had now become, for laity and clergy alike, a crisis of faith: resignation by both popes, with the election of a single unchallenged successor; adjudication of the dispute between the two popes by some independent tribunal; or appeal to an ecumenical council, which would function as a supreme court with jurisdiction over both claimants.