No point of doctrine separated the two pontificates; they were kept asunder by party spirit alone; and everybody began to be tired of the scandal. An effort was made on both sides to put an end to it. The disciples of Avignon extorted from Benedict a promise to abdicate which he did not keep. Those of the Roman obedience also revolted and appealed to the Council of Pisa which put forth an edict deposing both popes and electing a new one. The other two refused to lay down their respective tiaras; and then christians, and I fear sinners too, beheld the spectacle of three popes at once, each fulminating bulls of excommunication and anathema against his two rivals. The Council of Constance then tried its hand. It seized John XXIII. the Roman pontiff who had also promised to resign and had not kept his word, and put him in prison. This so dishonored the name John that no pope has assumed it since, though it was the favorite before. Faction however still prevailed, and the two conclaves persisted in making separate elections. Avignon still disputed preëminence with Rome; but after Benedict XIII. the popes of the Schism do not seem to have resided there, and the Schism itself became apparently more or less vagrant and interrupted. Benedict’s successor a Spaniard named Munoz who called himself Clement VIII. sold out his interest in the triple crown for a bishopric; and the Schism slept. It was awakened again by the Council of Bàle which undertook to depose the Roman pontiff Eugenius IV., on a charge of heresy, and to set up in his place the strangest member of a strange family--that of Savoy. The feudal chiefs of that house had been known as Counts. Owing to their love of fighting and their success at it, the Emperor had created them Dukes; and a scion of that pugnacious race now reigns over Italy. Amadeus VIII. of Savoy, tired of fighting, turned monk. With a few of his nobles he withdrew to a monastery where the whole party made such progress in holiness, that the Council of Bale raised Amadeus to the papacy with the title of Felix V., and scattered bishoprics and other preferments among the rest. Eugenius mocked at the Council and refused to quit, and for nine years more the Church was convulsed by rival popes. Eugenius died clinging to the keys to the last; and the Savoyard, weary of supra-mundane elevation, went back to his monastery, leaving Nicholas V. who had succeeded Eugenius, sole head of the Church. The Schism of the West was at an end: it had lasted off and on within a year as long as the Captivity.