§ 50. ^NEAS SYLVIUS DE' PICCOLOMINI, PIUS II. 419
The assembly was stirred to a great heat, but, so a contemporary says, the ardor soon cooled. Cardinal Bessarion followed Pius withan address which also lasted three hours. Of eloquence there was enough, but the crusading age was oyer. The conquerors of Jerusalem had been asleep for nearly 400 years. Splendid orations could not revive that famous outburst of enthusiasm which followed Urban's address at Clermont. In this case the element of romance was wanting which the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre had furnished. The prowess of the conquering Turks was a hard fact.
During the Congress of Mantua the controversy broke out between the German lawyer, Gregor of Heimbuj'g, and Pius. They had met before at Basel. Heimburg, representing^ the duke of the Tyrol, who had imprisoned Nicolas of Cusa, spoke against the proposed crusade. He openly insulted the pope by keeping on his hat in his presence, an indignity he jokingly explained as a precaution against the catarrh. From the sentence of excommunication, pronounced against his ducal master, he appealed to a general council, August 13, 1460. He himself was punished with excommunication, and Pius called upon the city of Niirnberg to expel him as the child of the devil and born of the artifice of lies. Heimburg became a wanderer until the removal of the ban, 1472. He was the strongest literary advocate in Germany of the Basel decrees and the superiority of councils, and has been called a predecessor of Luther and precursor of the Reformation.^ Diether, archbishop of Mainz, another advocate of the conciliar system, who entered into compacts with the German princes to uphold the Basel decrees and to work for a general council on German soil, was deposed, 1461, as Hermann, archbishop of Cologne, was deposed a hundred years later for undertaking measures of reform in his diocese.
Pius left Mantua the last of January, 1461, stopping on the return journey a second time at his beloved Siena, and canon-
1 Gregorovius, VII. 184. His tract Admonitio de injustis usurpationihus paparum rom. ad imperatorem . . . sive confutatio primatus papoe, and other tracts by Heimburg, are given in Goldast, Monarchia. See art. Gregor v. iZeim6wrgf,by Tschackert in Herzog, VII. 133-135, and for quotations, Gieseler.
420 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
izing its distinguished daughter, Catherine. ^ Here Rodrigo Borgia's gayeties were so notorious as tocall forth papal rebuke. The cardinal gave banquets towhich women were invited without their husbands. In a severe letter to the future supreme pontiff, Pius spoke of the dancing at the entertainments as being performed, so he understood, with "all licentiousness."
The ease with which Pius, when it was to his interest, renounced theories which he once advocated is sliown in two bulls. The first, the famous bull, Execrahilis^ declared it^n accursed and unheard-of abuse to make appeal to a councjl from the decisions of the Roman pontiff, Christ's vicar, to whom it was^given to feed his sheep and to bind and loose on earth and in heaven. To rid the Church of this pestiferous venom, — pestiferum virus, — it announced the papal purpose to damn such appeals and to lay upon the appellants a curse from which there could be no absolution except by the Roman pontiff himself and in the article of death. ^ Thus the solemn principle which had bloomed so promisingly in the fair days of the councils of Constance and Basel, and for which Gerson and D' Ailly had so zealously contended, was set aside by one stroke of the pen. Thenceforward, the decree announced, papal decisions were to be treated as final.
Three years later, April 26, 1463, the theory of the supremacy of general councils was set aside in still more precise language.^ In an elaborate letter addressed to the rector and scholars of the University of Cologne, Pius pronounced for the monarchical form of government in the church — monarchicum regimen — as being of divine origin, and the one given to Peter. As storks follow one leader, and as the bees have one king, so the militant church has in the vicar of Christ one who is moderator and arbiter of all. He receives his authority directly from Christ without mediation. He is the prince — prcesul — of all the bishops, the heir of the Apostles, of the line of Abel
1 A full translation of the letter is given by Gregorovius in Lxicrez. Borgia, p. 7 sq." ^ Mansi, XXXII. 2u9 sq. ; Mirbt, p. 169 sq.
8 Mansi, XXXII. 195-203. Gieseler quotes at length. -<Eneas had written a letter to the rector of the Univ. of Cologne with the same import, Oct. 13, 1447.