Lecture 24: The Babylonian Captivity, the Papal Schism, and the Fall of Constantinople

The lecture, section by section

1. How the office corrupted its holders

   The review is brisk and damning: papal power rested on a misread verse, Matthew 16, and a forged document, the Donation of Constantine, which surfaced around the ninth century, was doubted by scholars within a few hundred years, and has long been proven fraudulent, but not before it let popes seize lands across Italy. Power drew the powerful: mandated clerical celibacy arrived in this era, and historians note the financial motive, priests without legitimate heirs leave their lands to the church, a mandate the east, sharing a millennium of the same tradition, never adopted. Popes taxed Europe, raised armies, dressed as royalty, and kept the Scriptures locked in a Latin nobody spoke, the Vulgate's common-tongue purpose inverted into a prison. When Luther visited Rome in 1510, Schaff records, the Romans themselves had a saying: if there is a hell, Rome is built on top of it.

2. The question underneath everything

   Busenitz names the Reformation's root issue a century early: who is the head of the church, Christ or the pope? The five solas all flow from that answer. The rest of this lecture shows why, by the early 1400s, Europe was finally in a position to ask the question out loud and survive asking it.

3. The Babylonian captivity of the papacy

   Nationalism was rising, and kings began to push back. When Boniface VIII forbade France and England to tax the church for their war, Edward of England simply ignored him, and Philip of France went further: he cut off the pope's own revenues, absorbed his excommunication, and had the pope seized and imprisoned, where he soon died. The French then effectively captured the office itself: Clement V, a Frenchman, moved the papacy to Avignon in the early 1300s, and for roughly seventy years, the length that gives the era its biblical nickname, seven successive French popes ruled from France as instruments of the French crown, to the fury of the rest of Europe.

4. The papal schism: two popes, then three

   Gregory XI finally returned the papacy to Rome in 1377, and the schism began at the next election: Urban VI, chosen on a promise to the powerful French cardinals to move back to Avignon, reneged once elected. The French cardinals declared him illegitimate and elected their own pope, and from 1378 to 1417 Christendom had rival popes with rival colleges of cardinals, each anathematizing the other, France obeying Avignon and most of Europe obeying Rome. The Council of Pisa in 1409 tried to fix it by deposing both and electing a third; the two refused to go, and for eight years three men reigned at once, each declaring the other two counterfeit. When John Hus preached in Prague that Christ alone is the head of the church, the argument rather made itself.

5. Constance, and the succession that wasn't

   The Council of Constance, 1414 to 1418, ended the schism the only way left: it deposed all three claimants, declaring none of them legitimate, and elected a fresh pope, Martin V. Busenitz presses the apologetic point: here is a break in the supposed unbroken chain of Petrine succession, certified by Rome's own council, which found not one of three reigning popes to be pope at all. The same council burned John Hus, whose verdict on it stands: a generation, the Swiss said, would not suffice to cleanse Constance of the sins the council committed there.

6. Councils over popes

   Constance also inverted the church's power structure. Once emperors had stood over councils; after the west lost its emperors, popes did; but a council that can depose three popes stands over the papacy, and the Council of Basel said so explicitly, declaring general councils the church's true authority. Popes resisted and resented it, but the damage was decisive: papal authority, though not papal corruption, was broken, and that breaking, Busenitz argues, is precisely what made the Reformation survivable. Earlier protest movements had been crushed by papal power; in God's providence, the princes of Europe would soon be strong enough, and willing, to protect a Luther.

7. Inquisitions, superstition, and the sacramental cage

   Meanwhile the machinery of a fused church and state ground on: inquisitions, most famous in Spain, treated heresy as capital treason, and would later burn Protestants, as Protestants in turn would execute Anabaptists, the story Foxe's Book of Martyrs tells. Relic superstition multiplied, splinters from Jerusalem becoming fragments of the true cross; Mary's elevation escalated on its pagan-inherited track. And in the thirteenth century the seven sacraments were codified, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, ordination, and marriage, no one, Busenitz notes wryly, being eligible for all seven. The deeper tragedy is the category shift: practices once framed as means of sanctification became means of justification, and at that point the true gospel was eclipsed.

8. 1453: the siege of Constantinople

   The Middle Ages end where they began, at a falling capital. Mehmed II brought some eighty thousand Ottoman troops against a city defended by roughly seven thousand, a scene, Busenitz says, straight out of an epic siege film, except no rescue comes. An engineer named Orban had offered the defenders a monstrous new cannon, his bombard; they could not pay, so he sold it to Mehmed, and gunpowder, whose battlefield debut here marks the threshold of the modern age, began the long obsolescence of city walls. From April 5 to May 29 the seven thousand held; then the walls failed, the city fell, and the Hagia Sophia, Christendom's most magnificent church, was converted to a mosque, as it remains. A Christian remnant endured under tolerated status, and a patriarch of Constantinople remains to this day.

9. The Renaissance out of the ruins

   Twice the west grew rich on the east's catastrophe: the loot of 1204 that fills Venice, and now the flight of Greek scholars, artisans, and manuscripts to Italy after 1453. The Italian Renaissance, Busenitz observes, owed more to the destruction of the eastern empire than to western innovation, and that recovered learning, Greek texts above all, would soon serve the Reformation. No crusade to retake the city ever materialized: the papacy that once commanded Europe's armies could no longer raise one.

10. Voices before Luther

    The lecture closes with its encouragement and its preview: Luther did not spark reform from nothing, and never claimed to. Behind him stands a long line of protest, the Waldensians from the twelfth century, the Lollards under John Wycliffe, the Hussites under John Hus and the Moravians after them, voices raised while the papacy was at its most schizophrenic. The final lecture takes up these forerunners of the Reformation, and with them this course's story reaches its threshold.

1. Papal power was broken before papal corruption was, and the Reformation slipped through that gap. Where else in this course have you seen providence work through institutional weakness?

2. Means of sanctification quietly became means of justification. What guards a church's good practices, disciplines, ordinances, traditions, from making that same category shift?

3. Hus preached that Christ alone is head of the church while three popes fought for the title. How does that one confession reorder everything a church does?