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