WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Perhaps, the main change in the Papacy’s position towards slavery came from its inability
to project itself as a source of homogeneous, absolute authority through the end of the fourteenth
and the beginning of the fifteenth century. By 1430, the Pope simply could not claim to be the
unifying voice of Christianity given that Christendom had been far from unified in the past sixty
years. The Great Schism had openly divided the Church by splitting national allegiances to two
(and later three) Popes; Europe had been divided in two camps through the French and English
war of succession known as the One Hundred Years War; and the teachings of John Wyclif and
John Hus had laid the first steps for a Protestant reformation by questioning the Church’s very
ability to function as a corporal entity. Eugene IV himself had felt the limits to Papal authority
that came from this fragmentation, having been compelled to admit the Ecumenical Council of
Basel (like his predecessor Martin V had done for the Council of Constance) as his superior in
spiritual and temporal matters.
In this environment, the metaphoric reading of the Christian “cultus,” through which
Clement VI channeled thirteenth-century arguments about sovereignty, would be ineffective as
there were real reminders of the limits to Papal power. 61 For it was not one sovereign but two
elective bodies, the Council of Constance (1414-1418) and the Council of Basel (1431-1441),
which in ending the Schism that had torn Christendom, had succeeded in making the idea of
incorporative sovereignty not merely metaphorical but an actual condition of politics. Through
what is known as Conciliar Movement, the temporal and spiritual authority of the Church was
not metaphorically represented in some individual but embodied in the collective will of the
council men. In the words of Antony Black, the canonist communal view on sovereignty “ended
61 Muldoon Popes 120.
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