Reviving the Eternal City by Elizabeth McCahill

Author:Elizabeth McCahill [McCahill, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, Renaissance, Religion, Christian Church
ISBN: 9780674726154
Google: EQfeAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-10-14T22:27:33+00:00

Ceremony and Eugenius’s Relations with the College of Cardinals

Eugenius’s love of splendid ecclesiastical garments suggests that he appreciated the show and drama of papal ceremonies, but there is also other evidence that this was a pope who took the ritual of his court seriously. In a bull of 1432, Eugenius begins a long list of rules for Rome’s clerics with directions about processions.96 As discussed in chapter 4, Eugenius was deeply concerned with the morals and behavior of the clergy, especially the clergy of Rome. The fact that he commences his stipulations for their reform with ceremonial protocol indicates that ceremony represented, in his opinion, an essential measure of the Church’s order.

This section explores the ways in which papal ceremony not only affirmed Eugenius’s position as a papal monarch but also helped to establish and confirm the hierarchical organization of the rest of the Church. In particular, it examines the role ceremony played in Eugenius’s fraught relations with his cardinals. At the beginning of the pope’s reign, the Council of Basel and the College of Cardinals were challenging the traditional model of Church power, a model with the pope at the top, a model in which both councils and cardinals derived their authority from the successor of Peter. The representatives at Basel and the College agreed that the Church should instead be an oligarchy, with the cardinals sharing in papal power and participating in all papal decisions. Eugenius’s success in convincing his cardinals that they had more to lose than to gain from their support of conciliarism played a vital role in his eventual triumph over the Council of Basel. Charting the vicissitudes of his relations with the College elucidates the ways in which the pope used the demarcation and enactment of the Church’s hierarchy as a diplomatic tool.

From the beginning of his pontificate, Eugenius did not have cordial relations with the College. Because the cardinals had objected to the nepotism and high-handedness of Martin V, in the consistory after his death, they signed an election capitulation. During the previous eighty years, election capitulations had become routine, but this particular capitulation demanded that the pope observe the decrees of the Council of Constance and articulated the rights of cardinals more fully than earlier capitulations.97 Eugenius IV not only signed this capitulation but issued a bull to ratify it. Although he did not adhere to the capitulation for long, in theory, it obligated him to move ahead with the Council of Basel and to include the Sacred College in his decisions. Making promises he did not intend to fulfill did not endear Eugenius to his cardinals, and one more particular tension quickly arose. In 1426, Martin V had secretly made Domenico Capranica a cardinal, although he did not announce the appointment until November 1430. Because of his absence from Rome, Capranica was not given a red hat before Martin’s death, and his fellow cardinals, led by Giordano Orsini, used this as an excuse to ban the Colonna client from consistory.98 Capranica

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