It was Duke Amadeus VIII. who began this new campaign. Not satisfied with having enlarged his states with the addition of Genevois, Bugey, Verceil, and Piedmont, which had been separated from it for more than a century, he petitioned Pope Martin V. to confer on him, for the great advantage of the Church, the secular authority in Geneva. But the syndics, councillors, and deputies of the city, became alarmed at the news of this fresh manœuvre, and knowing that ‘Rome ought not to _lay its paw_ upon kingdoms,’ determined to resist the pope himself, if necessary, in the defence of their liberties, and placing their hands upon the Gospels they exclaimed: ‘No alienation of the city or of its territory--this we swear.’ Amadeus withdrew his petition; but Pope Martin V., while staying three months at Geneva, on his return in 1418 from the Council of Constance, began to sympathise with the ideas of the dukes. There was something in the pontiff which told him that liberty did not accord with the papal rule. He was alarmed at witnessing the liberties of the city. ‘He feared those general councils that spoil everything,’ says a manuscript chronicle in the Turin library; ‘he felt uneasy about those turbulent folk, imbued with the ideas of the Swiss, who were always whispering into the ears of the Genevese the _license of popular government_.’[35] The liberties of the Swiss were dear to the citizens a century before the Reformation. The pope resolved to remedy this, but not in the way the dukes of Savoy intended. These princes desired to secure the independence of Geneva in order to increase their power; while the popes preferred confiscating it to their own benefit. At the Council of Constance, from which Martin was then returning, it had been decreed that episcopal elections should take place according to the canonical forms, by the _chapter_, unless for some _reasonable and manifest_ cause the pope should think fit to name a person more useful to the Church.[36] The pontiff thought that the necessity of resisting popular liberty was a _reasonable_ motive; and accordingly as soon as he reached Turin, he translated the Bishop of Geneva to the archiepiscopal see of the Tarentaise, and heedless of the rights of the canons and citizens, nominated Jean de Rochetaillée, Patriarch _in partibus_ of Constantinople, Bishop and Prince of Geneva. Four years later Martin repeated this usurpation. Henry V. of England, at that time master of Paris, taking a dislike to Jean de Courte-Cuisse, bishop of that capital, the pope, of his sovereign authority, placed Courte-Cuisse on the episcopal throne of Geneva, and Rochetaillée on that of Paris. Thus were elections wrested by popes from a christian people and their representatives. This usurpation was to Geneva, as well as to many other parts of christendom, an inexhaustible source of evils.