THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 771
prophets prepared the way for a new time, but were unable to marshal forces enough in their own age to inaugurate the new order. This it was the task of Luther to do.
In a retrospect of the marked features of the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, we are struck first of all with the process by which the nations of Western Europe became consolidated until they substantially won the limits which they now occupy. The conquest of the weary Byzantine empire seemed to open the way for the Turks in to all Europe. The acropolis of Athens was occupied in 1458. Otranto on the Italian coast was seized and Vienna itself threatened. All Europe felt as Luther did when he offered the prayer, " from the murderous cruelty of the Turk, Good Lord deliver us." Much as the loss of the city on the Bosphorus was lamented at this time, it cannot but be felt that there was no force in Eastern Christendom which gave any promise of progress, theological or civil.
The papacy, claiming to be invested with plenitude of authority, abatedjione of its claims, but by its history proved that those very claims are fictitious and have no necessary place in the divine appointment.
Seldom has a more impressive spectacle been furnished than was f urnishednSy "the Reformatory councils. Following the Avignon period and the age of the papal schism, they struggled to correct the abuses of the papal system and to define its limitations. The first oecumenical council held on German soil, the Council of Constance, made such an authoritative decision. Its weight was derived from its advocates, the most distinguished theologians and canonists of the time, and the combined voice of the universities and the nations of Latin Christendom. But the decision proved to be no stronger than a spider's web. The contention, which had been made by that long series of pungent tracts which was opened with the tract of Gelnhausen, was easily set aside by the dexterous hand of the papacy itself. Gelnhausen had declared that the way to heal the troubles in the papal household was to convoke a general council. ^ To this mode of state-
1 Gelnhausen in Martene, Thesaur. nov. anec, Paris ed., 1717, II. 1203. Conclusio principalis ista est quod pro remediando etde medio auferendo schismate moderno ezpedit, potest et debet concilium generale convocari.
772 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1204-1517.
ment Pius II. opposed his bull, Execrahilis, and his successors went on untroubled by the outcry of Latin Christendom for some share in the government of the Church.
But the appeal for a council was an ominous portent. It had been made by Philip the Fair and the French Parliament, 1303. It was made by the Universities of Paris and Oxford and the great churchmen of France. It was made by Wyclif, by Huss and Savonarola. In vain, to be sure, but the body of the Chu rch was thinking and the arena of free discussion was extending.
The most extravasfant claims of the papacy still had defenders. Augustus Triumphus and Al varus Pelayo declared there could be no appeal from the pope to God, because the pope and God were in agreement. He who looks upon the pope with intent and trusting eye, looks upon Christ, and wherever the pope is, there is the Church. Yea, the pope is above canon law. But these men were simply repeating what was current tradition. Dante struck another note, when he put popes in the lowest regions of hell, and Marsiglius of Padua, when he cast doubt upon Peter's ever having been in Rome and insisted that the laity are also a part of the Church.
The scandalous lives of the popes whose names fill the last paragraph of the history of the Middle Ages would have excluded them from decent modern circles and exposed them to sentence as criminals. They were perjurers, adulterers. Avarice, self-indulgence ruled their life. They had no mercy. The charges of murder and vicious disease were laid to their door. They were willing to set the states of Italy one over against the other and to allow them to lacerate each other to extend their own territory or to secure power and titles for their own children and nephews. Luther was not far out of the way when, in his ApiJeal to the German Nobility , lie declared '' Roman avarice is the greatest of robbers that ever walked the earth. All goes into the Roman sack, which has no bottom, and all in the name of God." In all history,it would be difficult to discover a more glaring inconsistency between profession and practice than is furnished by the careers of the last popes of the Middle Ages. .'"Upon freedom of thought, the papacy continued to lay the