Eugene IV

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Eugene IV 1383-1447, pope (1431-47), a Venetian named Gabriele Condulmer; successor of Martin V. He was of exemplary character and ascetic habits. Gregory XII, his uncle, made him cardinal (1408). The first part of Eugene's reign was beset with the difficulties created by the Council of Basel (see Basel, Council of ), which began just after his election. Eugene at first opposed the council in its antipapal acts, but after he had been driven by rebellion from Rome into exile at Florence (1434) he was disposed to conciliate. Finally in 1437 he removed the council to Ferrara. Antipapal leaders refused to move, and the council, now in heresy, continued at Basel. It declared Eugene deposed and elected Amadeus VIII of Savoy antipope (as Felix V). It attracted little support, however. Meanwhile the Council of Ferrara-Florence met and proclaimed (1439) the reunion of Eastern and Western churches. Abortive as this union proved to be, it greatly enhanced the papal prestige, and in 1443 Eugene returned to Rome from Florence. Eugene was succeeded by Nicholas V.

Bibliography: See biography by J. Gill (1961).

Eugene IV (3 Mar. 1431–23 Feb. 1447). On Martin V's death the cardinals, resentful of his harsh yoke, all undertook that whoever should be elected would not only devote himself to reform at the impending council at Basle, but would accept the full collaboration of the sacred college in the government of the church and the papal state. Their choice fell on Gabriele Condulmaro, who was born of wealthy bourgeois parents at Venice c. 1383, who as a young man settled as a monk with some friends at an Augustinian house in the lagoon, and whom his relative Gregory XII promoted bishop of Siena in 1407 and then cardinal at his controversial creation of 12 May 1408. After Gregory's abdication (4 July 1415) he took part in the council of Constance (1414–18), and Martin V appointed him governor of the March of Ancona and of Bologna. Once elected, he published a bull confirming the electoral pact, although he was to pay little heed to it during his stormy pontificate.

Eugene first moved against the Colonna family, forcing them to disgorge vast teritories which Martin V had granted to his nephews; his violent measures produced lasting troubles in all parts of the papal state, and made the Colonna his lifelong enemies. But the continuous shadow over his reign was the reform council of Basle, which Martin V had summoned, for which he himself confirmed Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini (d. 1444) as president, and which was opened in Cesarini's absence by papal representatives on 23 July 1431. The initial attendance was sparse and this, combined with profound mistrust of its intentions, caused Eugene to dissolve it on 18 Dec. 1431, promising a new council to be presided over by himself in eighteen months' time. His precipitate action created consternation at Basle, shocked Cesarini, and alienated opinion generally. The council refused to disperse, on 15 Feb. 1432 appealed to the teaching of the council of Constance that a general council is superior to a pope, and on 18 Dec. 1432 issued an ultimatum to him. As only six of the twenty-one cardinals were on his side, schism seemed inevitable, but it was averted largely through the mediation of the German king Sigismund (1410–37), whom Eugene crowned emperor at Rome in May 1433. But he had to withdraw his bull of dissolution (15 Dec. 1433) and acknowledge the council's legitimacy and unbroken continuance in humiliating terms.

At home Eugene faced a chaotic situation, with the condottiere F. Sforza occupying the papal state, and a revolution fomented by the vengeful Colonna breaking out in Rome in May 1434. Disguised but still pelted by the crowd, he fled to Florence, where he mainly resided until 1443; it was a stay which brought him and the curia into touch with the artistic and intellectual aspirations of the Renaissance. Meanwhile his concessions to the council had only whetted its appetite for radical solutions. While carrying through some much needed reforms, it decreed (9 June 1435) the suppression of annates and other papal dues, and set about cutting both papacy and curia down to size. Eugene denounced its pretensions in a memorandum circulated in June 1436 to Christian princes, but it was over union with the eastern church, an item on the council's agenda to which both he and it attached importance, that the final rupture came. While the great majority of the council proposed Basle itself or Avignon or Savoy for the negotiations, Eugene preferred a city in Italy. Having won over the Greeks, he transferred the council on 18 Sept. 1437 to Ferrara. He opened it there through his legate Cardinal Albergati on 8 Jan. 1438, but moved it because of an alleged danger of plague (really for financial reasons) to Florence in Jan. 1439. Here an act of union between the two churches, destined to be ephemeral but forced on the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus (1425–48) by the imminence of a Turkish invasion, was promulgated in the decree Laetentur coeli on 6 July 1439. Later Eugene signed agreements, on the basis of orthodoxy, with the nominally monophysite physite Armenians in 1439 with the Copts or Jacobites of Egypt in 1443, and with certain hitherto dissident Nestorian groups in Mesopotamia in 1444 and in Cyprus in 1445; but a crusade he financed in 1443 ended disastrously at Varna, in Bulgaria (10 Nov. 1444).

The union, with its recognition by the Greeks of the pope's primacy and their acceptance of agreed statements on Purgatory, the eucharist, and the Filioque, as well as the fact that most of the fathers abandoned Basle for Ferrara-Florence, greatly strengthened Eugene's authority. The rump left at Basle suspended him on 24 Jan. 1438, deposed him on 25 June 1439, and on 5 Nov. 1439 elected Felix V as antipope. Eugene riposted (4 Sept. 1439) by challenging the earlier phases of the council of Constance and condemning that of Basle. The council was encouraged by the declared neutrality of France and Germany, and by the incorporation by France of twenty-three of its reform decrees restricting the pope's authority in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, which the French clergy issued on 7 July 1438 and which upheld the right of the French church to administer its temporal property independently of the holy see and disallowed papal nominations to vacant benefices. But its puppet pope had little following, and Eugene's recognition in spring 1443 of the claims of Alfonso V of Aragón (1416–58) to the crown of Naples deprived it of its most substantial support, since the king withdrew his bishops from it. It also enabled Eugene to return to Rome in Sept. 1443 after a nine years' absence. Here he strove to counter the effects of the schism. Antipope Felix V's ablest adviser, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later (Pius II), had made peace with Eugene in 1442, and in Sept. 1445 helped to arrange an agreement between him and Frederick III, the new German king (1440–93). Eugene's protests against the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges were ineffectual, but through the Concordat of the Princes, negotiated by Piccolomini with the German electors in Feb. 1447, the whole of Germany declared for him. Concessions were made by both sides, but Eugene safeguarded his position by publishing on his deathbed a bull declaring that he did not intend by these to derogate from the authority or privileges of the holy see.

Although Eugene's reign was a troubled one, it resulted in victory for the papacy over the council, and dealt a death-blow to the attempt to introduce democracy into the government of the church. But he himself, impulsive and lacking in political capacity, deeply pious but prone to blunders, was more at the mercy of events than their controller. As he lay dying, he is said to have bitterly regretted ever having left his monastery.

Bibliography

E. von Ottenthal , ‘Die Bullenregister Martins V und Eugens IV’, MIÖG: Ergänzungsband 1, 1885;
J. Gill , Eugenius IV: Pope of Christian Union (Westminster, Maryland, 1961);
F. P. Abert , Papst Eugen der Vierte (1884);
P 1;
MC 2;
DHGE 15, 1355–9 ( P. de Vooght );
EC 5, 802–4 ( P. Paschini );
NCE 5, 626 f. ( J. Gill );
Seppelt 4, 274–306.