Crises in the History of the Papacy: A study of twenty famous popes whose careers and whose influence were important in the development of the church and in the history of the worldMcCabe, Joseph
History
Crises in the History of the Papacy: A study of twenty famous popes whose careers and whose influence were important in the development of the church and in the history of the world
McCabe, Joseph
Catholic Church -- History; Papacy -- History
The last words of his friends at Bologna must have recurred to him
again and again as he passed up the autumnal valley of the Adige and
entered the snows of the Tirol. He would not return a Pope, they said.
In the Arlberg Pass his carriage was overturned, and he exclaimed, as
he lay in the snow: "Here I lie, in the name of the devil, and I would
have done much better to stop at Bologna." He remained for some days at
Meran with Duke Friedrich, whom he made captain-general of the Papal
troops, with a salary of six thousand ducats a year. It was well to
make a friend of this powerful and discontented vassal of Sigismund.
At last, on October 27th, his troops turned the crest of the last low
hills before Constance, and he gazed down on the hollow between the
guardian mountains. "A trap for foxes," he is said to have muttered. On
the following day he rode into Constance, on his richly harnessed white
horse, under a canopy of cloth of gold, and occupied the episcopal
palace.
For three weeks the snowy roads down the mountain-sides from all
directions discharged gay streams of princes and prelates, bishops
and abbots, theologians and lawyers, thieves and prostitutes, bankers
and acrobats, upon the sleepy old town, until it seemed to burst with
a ravening multitude. Something between fifty and a hundred thousand
visitors had to be housed and entertained, and it is reported by grave
observers that more than a thousand prostitutes flocked to Constance
in the days of the Council.[269] There were, in the course of time,
twenty-nine cardinals, thirty-three archbishops, a hundred and fifty
bishops, a hundred and thirty-four abbots, and a hundred doctors
of law and divinity: among the latter a certain pale and thin man,
Master John Hus, who did not suspect that he had come to be tried on
a capital charge. But the Emperor was late--he was crowned at Aachen
on November 8th--so the first sitting of the Council, on November 5th,
was adjourned to the 16th, and then until the new year. Meantime the
thousands of entertainers did their duty, and the city rang day and
night with revelry, and a crowd speaking thirty different languages
filled the streets and overflowed on to the roofs and into the sheds
and even the empty tubs of Constance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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