Council of Constance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Council of Constance opened on the 16th of November 1414. No previous church gathering had faced a stranger situation. Three men simultaneously claimed to be pope of Rome, and each had his own court, his own cardinals, and his own loyal following across Christendom. The council that gathered in the German city of Constance would sit until the 22nd of April 1418. How did those competing papacies become one? How did a Bohemian reformer who came before the council end up executed by fire? What did the assembly decide about the rights of pagan peoples facing Christian military assault? And what became of the decrees that asserted councils had authority over any pope?

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• 2. Thirty Years of Division

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  Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377 after years of the papal court residing in Avignon, France. He died the following year, and the election of his successor Urban VI immediately provoked a rupture. Cardinals who felt Urban had been imposed by a Roman crowd defected and elected a rival pope at Avignon in 1378. For the next thirty years, neither court would yield to the other.

  The Council of Pisa, convened in 1409 to resolve the split, only deepened it. By electing a new pope without successfully removing the existing two, Pisa left the situation unresolved. Gregory XII held Rome, Benedict XIII held Avignon, and the newly elected Antipope John XXIII commanded the widest support of the three. Sigismund, King of the Romans and of Hungary, pressed for yet another council to break the impasse. It was John XXIII himself who called that council, though he would come to deeply regret the decision. Sigismund arrived at Constance on Christmas Eve 1414 and exercised a profound and continuous influence on the course of the council from that day forward.

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• 3. A Different Kind of Vote

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  Roughly 29 cardinals attended the Council of Constance, alongside 183 bishops and archbishops, 134 abbots, and 100 learned doctors of law and divinity. It was the first ecumenical council ever convened within the Holy Roman Empire. The scale of the gathering created immediate questions about how decisions would actually be made.

  An answer emerged during February 1415: instead of voting as individuals, the bishops would vote in national blocs. England, France, Italy, and Germany each formed a nation, with Poles, Hungarians, Danes, and Scandinavians grouped under the German banner. The Italian representatives made up roughly half of all attendees, yet they were equal in influence to the English, who sent only twenty deputies and three bishops. The Spanish delegation, drawn from Portugal, Castile, Navarre, and Aragon, was initially absent. They joined at the twenty-first session and formed a fifth nation. The legality of this entire arrangement was more than questionable; it was never authorized by any formal decree, yet it carried in practice and reshaped how power flowed through the assembly. John XXIII, who had called the council, soon grew deeply suspicious of where these national votes were heading.

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• 4. The Fugitive and the Decree

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  On the 2nd of March 1415, John XXIII promised the assembled council he would resign the papacy. Partly what drove the pledge was a fierce anonymous attack on his character from an Italian source. Eighteen days later, on the night of the 20th of March, he secretly fled the city. He took refuge at Schaffhausen, in territory controlled by his friend Frederick, Duke of Austria-Tyrol.

  The council pressed on without him. At the fifth session, on the 6th of April 1415, it promulgated the decree Haec sancta. The decree stated that the council had been legitimately assembled and held power directly from Christ. Everyone of whatever dignity, even papal, was bound to obey it in matters of faith. The eradication of the schism and the general reform of the church were named as its scope. Haec sancta marked the high-water mark of the conciliar movement, the effort to establish councils rather than popes as the supreme authority in the church.

  The council also ordered the writing of a guide on dying well. Written in 1415, it bore the Latin title Ars moriendi. The acts of the council were not made public until 1442, when the Council of Basel arranged their publication; they were not printed until 1500. Even as Haec sancta was being debated, Gregory XII's representatives were preparing to arrive in Constance to negotiate his departure from the papal throne.

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• 5. Three Claimants to None

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  On the 4th of July 1415, the Bull of Gregory XII was formally read before the assembled bishops. It named Cardinal Giovanni Dominici of Ragusa and Prince Carlo Malatesta as his proxies at the council. King Sigismund yielded the presidency of the proceedings to these papal legates. Malatesta announced he was empowered to resign the papacy on Gregory's behalf. The bishops voted to receive the abdication immediately rather than at a later date. Malatesta pronounced the resignation aloud and handed a written copy to the assembly.

  Gregory XII was then created titular Cardinal Bishop of Porto and Santa Ruffina, with rank immediately below the pope. Since the papal throne was now vacant, he became technically the highest-ranking person in the entire church. The council accepted Gregory's cardinals as legitimate but delayed electing a new pope. Members feared a new pontiff would curtail further debate on pressing reforms. Gregory was already dead by the time the election finally took place.

  Martin V was elected in November 1417, and it was the last papal election to occur outside of Italy until Vatican City became an independent state. Martin V soon asserted the absolute authority of the papal office, setting the stage for a long contest with the council's ambitious decrees.

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• 6. Safe Conduct and Fire

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  Jan Hus arrived at Constance carrying a letter of safe conduct issued by King Sigismund. He was a Bohemian reformer whose writings had drawn accusations of heresy long before the council convened. John Wycliffe, an earlier reformer whose ideas had shaped Hus's thinking, had been named in the council's opening session. The eighth session formally condemned him on the 4th of May 1415.

  Hus himself was found guilty of heresy and turned over to the secular court. At Session 15 on the 6th of July 1415, the council declared it had done all it could. It formally relinquished Hus to the secular court, which sentenced him to be burned at the stake.

  Jerome of Prague came to Constance to offer his assistance to Hus. He was arrested, judged, and found guilty of heresy, receiving the same sentence as his companion. Poggio Bracciolini, who attended the council, later recorded his account of the proceedings against Jerome, describing the process as deeply unfair. Pawel Wlodkowic and the other Polish representatives publicly defended Hus. Their stance reflected a broader engagement with questions of justice and sovereignty being argued out in a parallel debate at the same council.

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• 7. Rights of Pagans

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  In 1411, the First Peace of Thorn had ended the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War. The settlement proved fragile. Disputes over the Samogitian borders escalated into the brief Hunger War in summer 1414. Both sides agreed the disputes would be mediated by the council.

  Paulus Vladimiri, rector of the Jagiellonian University, argued the Polish-Lithuanian case with force and precision. He challenged the legal basis of the Teutonic crusade against Lithuania. Forced conversion, he contended, was incompatible with free will, which was an essential component of genuine conversion. The Knights could therefore only wage a defensive war, and only if pagans first violated the natural rights of Christians. Vladimiri went further: infidels held rights that neither the pope nor the Holy Roman Emperor could lawfully override. The Lithuanian side brought a group of Samogitian representatives to the council to testify in person about atrocities committed by the Knights.

  The Dominican theologian John of Falkenberg proved the fiercest opponent of the Polish position. In his Liber de doctrina, he argued that the emperor had the right to kill even peaceful infidels simply because they were pagans. In a separate work called Satira, he attacked the Polish-Lithuanian king Jogaila by name, calling him a mad dog unworthy to rule. Falkenberg was condemned and imprisoned for that libel. Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly published an independent opinion attempting to balance both sides.

  The council established the Diocese of Samogitia with its seat in Medininkai and appointed Matthias of Trakai as its first bishop. Pope Martin V recognized Jogaila and Vytautas as vicars general in Pskov and Veliky Novgorod. Vladimiri's arguments found no clean resolution at Constance; the Gollub War broke out in 1422 and ended only with the Treaty of Melno.

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• 8. The Decree That Wouldn't Die

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  Pope Martin V did not directly challenge the decrees the council had passed. His successor Eugene IV took a harder line. When a faction at the Council of Basel sought to declare Haec sancta and Frequens matters of binding faith, Eugene IV pushed back. His 1439 bull Moyses vir Dei repudiated the attempt, underwritten by the Council of Florence.

  Frequens had called for ecumenical councils to meet automatically every ten years. Pope Julius II, convening the Fifth Lateran Council between 1512 and 1517, pronounced that Frequens had lost its force. None of the regular councils it envisioned ever took place.

  Haec sancta proved harder to erase. The Gallican Articles of 1682 reaffirmed it in France, keeping conciliarist claims alive within the church long after Rome had rejected them. At the First Vatican Council of 1869-70, the French-American bishop of St. Augustine, Florida, was Augustin Verot. Verot attempted to read Haec sancta into the council's record of deliberations.

  In the 1960s, the reformist theologian Hans Kung argued in defense of Haec sancta's dogmatic character during the Second Vatican Council. Cardinal Franz Konig lent that argument his support. Hubert Jedin countered that the decree was an emergency measure with no binding validity beyond its immediate context. Joseph Gill rejected the validity of the session that passed it altogether. The debate subsided in the 1970s without resolution. The argument that Haec sancta was invalid because of when it was passed had not been articulated at the time of the council itself. Seventeenth-century Sorbonne theologian Andre Duval apparently first formulated it, and it remained a fringe position for generations before gaining wider influence within Catholicism.

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