Fifth Council of the Lateran

• 1. Introduction

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  Seven months after the Fifth Council of the Lateran held its final session on the 16th of March 1517, Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses. The Catholic Church had just finished a council meant to repair itself, and almost nothing had changed. This was the eighteenth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, and it ran from 1512 to 1517. It was the last one before the Protestant Reformation and before the Council of Trent.

  The council was also a rare event in Rome. It was the first ecumenical council hosted by the Papal States since 1213. No ecumenical council has met in the Lateran Palace since, although four earlier ones gathered there.

  Pope Julius II called it with two aims. He wanted peace between warring Catholic rulers, and he wanted the authority of the pope reasserted.

  Why did a pope who had sworn to hold a council wait years to call one? What rival assembly pushed him to act? And how could a council that debated so many real abuses leave so little behind?

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• 2. The Warrior Pope

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  In 1503, when he was elected pope, Julius II swore an oath to convoke a general council. The promise went unfulfilled at first. Trouble with Venice came before anything else.

  The Republic of Venice had been filling vacant bishoprics in its own territories without consulting Rome. It also put clergy before secular courts and brushed aside papal jurisdiction in other ways. In 1509 Julius joined the League of Cambrai, a coalition formed to return recently conquered lands to their former owners. He placed Venice under an interdict and sent papal troops, together with the league's forces, into Venetian-held Romagna. On the 14th of May 1509 Venice suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Agnadello.

  By 1510 Venice was ready to bargain. Julius withdrew from the League of Cambrai and lifted the censure. In return, Venice agreed to hand back disputed towns in Romagna and to give up any claim to fill vacant benefices. It accepted that church courts had jurisdiction over clergy, who were immune from secular tribunals and exempt from their taxes. Venice would also revoke unauthorised treaties with towns in the Papal States and allow papal subjects free navigation of the Adriatic Sea. One more clause stands out. Venice abandoned its appeal to a future general council against the papal bans.

  In July 1510, the Republic of Florence sent Niccolò Machiavelli on a diplomatic mission to France. King Louis XII had demanded that Florence declare its allegiance. Siding with France would invite an immediate attack and alienate Florentines, who dreaded a clash with the head of the Church. The city was also full of antagonistic parties and irreconcilable interests. Machiavelli found Louis eager for war and warm to the idea of a general council that could depose Julius.

  Julius was a soldier, and he wanted to free the entire Italian Peninsula from foreign control. Yet only Venice and the Old Swiss Confederacy were ready to field armies against the French. He opened hostilities by deposing and excommunicating Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, a vassal who backed France. In September 1510 Louis answered by convoking a synod of French bishops at Tours. The synod ruled that a pope had no right to make war on a foreign prince. If he did, the prince could invade the Papal States and withdraw his subjects' obedience. It also threatened Julius with a general council.

  Julius ignored the threat and again took personal command of the army in northern Italy. In August 1510 he fell dangerously ill at Bologna but recovered. By October he had assembled an anti-French alliance of the Papal States, Venice and Spain. England joined in November, and the emperor and Switzerland soon followed. Papal forces captured Mirandola on the 20th of January 1511. Then on the 23rd of May 1511, French contingents took Bologna from the papal troops and reinstated Annibale II Bentivoglio.

  Under Gaston of Foix, Duke of Nemours, the French at first held the upper hand. After his death they gave way to the stronger forces of the League. Beaten at the Battle of Ravenna in 1512, they retreated beyond the Alps. Bologna submitted to Julius again, and the cities of Parma, Reggio and Piacenza joined the Papal States.

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• 3. The Rebel Council at Pisa

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  Only a handful of prelates came to the gathering at Pisa in 1511. Among them were Cardinals Bernardino López de Carvajal, Guillaume Briçonnet, Francesco Borgia, Federico Sanseverino and René de Prie. Louis XII and Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, encouraged them.

  Earlier reforming councils supplied the argument. The councils of Constance, in 1414-1418, and of Basel-Ferrara-Florence, in 1431-1449, had both failed to reform the Church. Constance had issued the decree Frequens on holding regular councils, and Julius still had not called the one he swore to hold. The French synods of 1510 had already settled on convoking a general council.

  The motives were mixed. According to the scholar Kraus, French politicians meant to restrain Julius. They also wanted a general council to recognize the principles of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438. That document drew on the articles of Constance and of Basel-Ferrara-Florence. According to Shahan, Carvajal's rebellious attitude grew from his dissatisfaction with how Julius treated him, and from his subservience to the excommunicated Louis XII. Marco Pellegrini saw in the episode something broader. In his words, it "shows how some members of the Sacred College were ever open to schismatic solutions".

  The sessions met first in the choir of San Michele in Borgo and later in the choir of the Cathedral of Pisa. Florence had permitted the use of Pisa. That estranged Julius, and both Florence and Pisa were placed under an interdict.

  Maximilian had an agenda of his own. Since 1507 he had planned to procure his own election to the papacy after Julius died. He first protected the Pisa gathering, then withdrew that protection. The German bishops refused to have anything to do with the French schemes.

  Julius struck back. He stripped the four leading schismatic cardinals of their dignities, deposed them from their offices and excommunicated everyone who took part. Popular opposition drove the assembly from Pisa to Milan, where it possibly elected Carvajal as Antipope Martin VI. In 1512 its members feared a Swiss mercenary invasion of the French-occupied Duchy of Milan. They withdrew to Asti and then to Lyon, where they abandoned the effort that same year.

  Julius, meanwhile, had already answered the challenge with a council of his own.

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• 4. Bull and Pamphlet War

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  On the 18th of July 1511, Julius II issued a bull summoning a general council to meet in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran on the 19th of April 1512. The document did double duty. It was a formal summons, and it was also an argument aimed at the cardinals at Pisa.

  Julius insisted that his promise before his election had been sincere. Since becoming pope, he said, he had always sought a council. To prepare for one, he had worked to end quarrels among rulers, and the wars that followed had made calling it inopportune. He then reproached the Pisa participants for convening a council without the pope, who should lead any such gathering. Three months of preparation, he added, was not enough. No one, he declared, should attach any significance to what was said at Pisa.

  The dispute became a war of polemics. Thomas Cajetan, the Dominican Master General, defended the papal side. Jacques Almain, spokesman of the University of Paris, replied with conciliarist arguments.

  Events in the field also interfered. The fighting around Ravenna in 1512 hindered the opening of the council Julius had called.

  Once the council was under way, the support behind Pisa dissolved. The ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor announced that Maximilian rejected the decisions of the Pisa conciliabulum, and Louis XII's ambassador made a similar announcement. At the seventh session, in 1513, Carvajal and Sanseverino split from their French colleagues and formally renounced the schism. Pope Leo X restored both men to their offices.

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• 5. Inside the Chamber

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  Paride de Grassi, the papal master of ceremonies, handled the arrangements. He prepared by consulting several people who knew how earlier councils, such as Constance and Florence, had been run. In the nave of the Lateran Basilica he built a main council chamber, enclosed by a wall to protect the privacy of the proceedings. Because participants could not leave the premises, the enclosure held dining rooms and latrines.

  A second, smaller room was built in the aula concilii of the Lateran Palace. It was meant for the pope, cardinals, emperors and other high-ranking guests who wanted more privacy. It housed only one meeting, and no formal session took place there. The scholar Nelson Minnich reconstructed the layout, measurements and facilities, relying heavily on de Grassi's own diaries.

  The council finally met on the 3rd of May 1512. Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, also known as Giles of Viterbo, gave the opening address. A scholar and preacher, he spoke with inspiring urgency about the need for reform. His address was widely printed, and it voiced many concerns of Catholic reformists and humanists such as Ximenez, von Staupitz, John Colet and Erasmus.

  The attendance list was modest. It included fifteen cardinals, the Latin patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, ten archbishops and fifty-six bishops. Some abbots and generals of religious orders came too, along with ambassadors of Maximilian I, Venice and Florence. Julius II did not live to see the work finished. His successor, Leo X, carried it on.

  One name on the roll stands out. Alessandro Geraldini, the first Archbishop of Santo Domingo, attended the eleventh session. That likely made him the first prelate from the Western Hemisphere to attend an ecumenical council.

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• 6. Reforming the Clergy

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  Bishops had to be over 30 under an age limit the council set. The rule aimed at nepotism and at bishops who stayed away from their dioceses. The council also set better criteria for choosing abbots and told cardinals to review one another's visitation reports. Stricter regulation of the Roman curia followed, along with sumptuary rules curbing the luxury of cardinals and bishops.

  Simony drew a pointed penalty. Any papal election in which simony was exposed was declared null. The council also confirmed the excommunications of cardinals that Julius II had issued in 1512. It condemned the Pisa conciliabulum too, quashing everything that body had done.

  Ordinary priests came in for attention as well. A decree required documented competence in preaching, and the council aimed to improve the training and regulation of priests. Another decree dealt with power. Lay people held no power over clerics, and bishops held authority over friars in their own churches.

  The council even reached toward the Hussites. It invited them to attend and negotiate their re-integration, with better guarantees of security.

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• 7. Loans, Souls and Print

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  On the 4th of May 1515, Leo X promulgated the bull Inter multiplices. It approved the monti di pietà, financial institutions that lent to the needy in the manner of pawn shops. They operated under strict ecclesiastical supervision and offered no-interest lending. Since their founding in the previous century they had drawn both support and opposition inside the Church.

  Ideas received sharper scrutiny. The decree Apostolici Regiminis, on the immortality of the soul, is usually believed to have been aimed at Pietro Pomponazzi. The council condemned all propositions contradicting "the truth of the enlightened Christian faith". It also restricted what clergy could teach about the "nature of the rational soul". University courses in philosophy and poetry for clerics were regulated as well. Any philosophy teacher whose lesson contradicted the Christian faith had to add "convincing arguments" from the Christian point of view.

  Print came under control too. A new book could not be printed without the permission of the local bishop.

  Prophecy was curtailed as well. Preachers were told not to "presume to preach or declare a fixed time for future evils, the coming of antichrist or the precise day of judgment". The stated reason was that it is not for us to know the times or seasons.

  The council also dealt with kings. It confirmed the Concordat of Bologna of 1516 between the Holy See and the Kingdom of France. At the same time it abrogated the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438. A lengthy section called for peace between princes and said that everyone with influence must work for it.

  Finally, the council urged war against the Turks to reclaim the Holy Land. Three years of tax levies were to pay for it.

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• 8. After the Council

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  A Franciscan teacher judged the results harshly. In that view, "Few if any of the Council's decrees ever left paper." A serious effort to put them into practice might have made an impression, but none was made. Where decrees were applied, the pattern was uneven. Italy, Spain and parts of France saw some recommendations carried out. England blocked them, and Germany did not implement them at all.

  The Vatican website, in its introduction to the council's session reports, offers a split verdict. Reform of the curia failed, but the suppression of the Pisa pseudo-council succeeded. The small number of attending bishops, it notes, had raised questions about whether the gathering was truly "ecumenical".

  The council's priorities mattered beyond its own walls. The pope needed more money to finance military operations against the Turks and to restore the prestige and centrality of Rome. That need underpinned several of the council's discussions. It also lay behind the so-called sale of indulgences scandal, which set off Luther's Ninety-five Theses.

  The historian Nelson Minnich argues that Luther was shocked by what he saw as the council's abrogation of earlier councils' decisions. In consequence, Minnich says, Luther adopted sola scriptura. The council had addressed some issues that contemporary reformers raised. It had not addressed the particular issues the Reformation seized on.

  Whether the Reformation could have been avoided if the reforms had been carried out remains a matter of debate. Johann Eck thought it could have been.

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