Even in this attempt of Nicholas, however, is to be seen one of the causes which perpetuated the corruption of the church. He orders that all who thereafter persist in keeping concubines in defiance of the regulations shall be incapable of receiving benefices without special letters of indulgence from the Holy See.[991] Shrouded under a thin veil of formality, this in substance indicates the degrading source of revenue which was so energetically condemned in inferior officials. The pressing and insatiable pecuniary needs of the papal court, indeed, rendered it impotent as a reformer, however honest the wearer of the tiara might himself be in desiring to rescue the church from its infamy. Reckless expenditure and universal venality were insuperable obstacles to any comprehensive and effective measures of reformation. Every one was preoccupied either in devising or in resisting extortion. The local synods were engaged in quarrelling over the subsidies demanded by Rome, while the chronicles of the period are filled with complaints of the indulgences sold year after year to raise money for various purposes. Sometimes the objects alleged are indignantly declared to be purely supposititious; at other times intimations are thrown out that the collections were diverted to the private gain of the popes and of their creatures.[992] The opinion which the church in general entertained of the papal court is manifested with sufficient distinctness in a letter from Ernest, Archbishop of Magdeburg, to his ambassador at Rome. The prelate states that he has deposited five hundred florins in Fugger’s bank at Augsburg, for which he desires to procure certain bulls, one to enable him to sell indulgences, the other to compel the chapter of Magdeburg to allow him to dispose of the salt-works of Halle, in defiance of the vested rights of his church—thus taking for granted a cynicism of venality which it would be difficult to parallel in the secular affairs of the most corrupt of courts.[993] Even the power to dispense from the vow of continence was occasionally turned to account in this manner. One of the accusations against John XXIII. was that for 600 ducats he had released Jacques de Vitry, a Hospitaller, from his vows, had restored him to the world, and enabled him to marry.[994] In fact, when a pope like Sixtus IV. was found who openly sold all preferment, who kept a regular scale for every grade from the cardinalate downwards, and who only varied from his fixed prices by putting up at auction some choice benefice,[995] it can hardly be expected that discipline could be enforced or the ideal of chastity realized.
The aspirations of Christendom had culminated in the council of Bâle in the most potent form known to the church universal. If the results were scarce perceptible while the influences of the council were yet recent, and while the antagonistic papacy was under the control of men sincerely desirous to promote the best interests of the church, such as Nicholas V. and Pius II., we can feel no wonder, if the darkness continued to grow thicker and deeper under the rule of such pontiffs as Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., and Alexander VI. Savonarola found an inexhaustible subject of declamation in the fearful vices of the ecclesiastics of his times, whom he describes as ruffiani e mezzani.[996] In the kingdom of Naples the state sought to share with the church in the profits of impurity, and a regular tax was laid upon the concubines of ecclesiastics. In a document still preserved in the Neapolitan archives, Alfonso I. complains that this tax had not been paid for three years, and directs his bishops to compel its collection in their several dioceses.[997] In the assembly of the Trois États of France, held at Tours in 1484, the orator of the Estates, Jean de Rély, afterwards Bishop of Angers, in his official address to Charles VIII., declared it to be notorious that the religious orders had lost all devotion, discipline, and obedience to their rule, while the canons (and he was himself a canon of Paris) had sunk far below the laity in their morals, to the great scandal of the church.[998]
In England, the facts developed by the examination which Innocent VIII. in 1489 authorized Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, to make into the condition of the religious houses, present a state of affairs quite as bad. Henry VII.’s first Parliament, in 1485, had endeavored to accomplish some reform by passing an Act empowering the episcopal authorities to imprison all priests and monks convicted of carnal lapses,[999] but this, like all similar legislation, whether secular or ecclesiastical, appears to have been useless. Innocent describes the monasteries, in his bull to the archbishop, as wholly fallen from their original discipline, and this is folly confirmed by the results of the visitation. The old and wealthy abbey of St. Albans, for instance, was little more than a den of prostitutes, with whom the monks lived openly and avowedly. In two priories under its jurisdiction the nuns had been turned out and their places filled with courtezans, to whom the monks of St. Albans publicly resorted, indulging in all manner of shameless and riotous living, the details of which can well be spared.[1000] These irregularities were emulated by the secular ecclesiastics. Among the records of the reign of Henry VII. is a memorial from the gentlemen and farmers of Carnarvonshire, complaining that the seduction of their wives and daughters was pursued systematically by the clergy.[1001] That the prevalence of these practices was thoroughly understood is shown in a book of instructions for parish priests drawn up by a canon of Lilleshall about this period. In enumerating the causes for which a parson may shrive a man not of his own parish, he includes the case in which the penitent has committed sin with the concubine or daughter of his own parish priest.[1002]
Spain was equally infected. The council of Aranda, in 1473, denounced bitterly the evil courses by which the clergy earned for themselves the wrath of God and the contempt of man, and it endeavored to suppress the sempiternal vice by the means which had been so often ineffectually tried—visitations, fines, excommunication, suspension, forfeiture of benefice, and imprisonment—but all to as little purpose as before.[1003] The trouble continued without abatement and the council of Seville, in 1512, felt itself obliged to repeat as usual all the old denunciations and penalties, including those against ecclesiastics who officiated at the marriages of their children, which it prohibited for the future under a fine of 2000 maravedis—a mulct which it likewise provided for those who committed the indecency of having their children as assistants in the solemnity of the Mass.[1004]
What was the condition of morals in Germany may be inferred from some proceedings of the chapter of Brunswick in 1476. The canons intimate that the commission of scandals and crimes has reached a point at which there is danger of their losing the inestimable privilege of exemption from episcopal jurisdiction. They therefore declare that for the future the canons, vicars, and officiating clergy ought not to keep their mistresses and concubines publicly in their houses, or live with them within the bounds of the church, and those who persist in doing so after three warnings shall be suspended from their prebends until they render due satisfaction.[1005] In this curious glimpse into the domestic life of the cathedral close, it is evident that the worthy canons were moved by no shame for the publicity of their guilt, but only by a wholesome dread of giving to their bishop an excuse for procuring the forfeiture of their dearly prized right of self-judgment.
The Hungarian church, by a canon dating as far back as 1382, had finally adopted a pecuniary mulct as the most efficacious mode of correcting offenders. The fine was five marks of current coin, and by granting one-half to the informer or archdeacon, and the other to the archiepiscopal chamber, it was reasonably hoped that the rule might be enforced. The guardians were not faithful, however, for two synods of Gran, one in 1450 and the other in 1480, reiterate the complaint, not only that the archdeacons and other officials kept the whole fine to themselves, but also, what was even worse, that they permitted the criminals to persevere in sin, in order to make money by allowing them to go unpunished.[1006] This state of affairs was not to be wondered at if the description of his prelates by Matthias Corvinus be correct. They were worldly princes, whose energies were devoted to wringing from their flocks fabulous revenues to be squandered in riotous living on the hordes of cooks and concubines who pandered to their appetites.[1007] The morals of the regular clergy were no better, for a Diet held by Vladislas II. in 1498 complained of the manner in which abbots and other monastic dignitaries enriched themselves from the revenues of their offices, and then, returning to the world, publicly took wives, to the disgrace of their order.[1008]
In Pomerania the evil had at length partially cured itself, for the female companions of the clergy seem to have been regarded as wives in all but the blessing of the church. Benedict, Bishop of Camin, in 1492, held a synod in which he quaintly but vehemently objurgates his ecclesiastics for this wickedness; declares that no man can part such couples joined by the devil; alludes to their offspring as beasts creeping over the earth, and has his spleen peculiarly stirred by the cloths of Leyden and costly ornaments with which the fair sinners were bedecked, to the scandal of honest women.[1009] His indignation was wasted on a hardened generation, for his successor, Bishop Martin, on his accession to the see in 1499, found the custom still unchecked. The new bishop promptly summoned a synod at Sitten in 1500, where he reiterated the complaints of Benedict, adding that the priests convert the patrimony of Christ into marriage portions for their children, and procure the transmission of benefices from father to son, as though glorying in the perpetuation of their shame. What peculiarly exasperated the good prelate was that the place of honor was accorded as a matter of course to the priests and their consorts at all the merry-makings and festivities of their parishioners, which shows how fully these unions were recognized as legitimate, and, apparently, for prudential reasons, encouraged by the people.[1010]
Similar customs, or worse, doubtless prevailed in Sleswick, for when Eggard was consecrated bishop in 1494, he signalized the commencement of his episcopate by forbidding his clergy to keep such female companions. The result was that before the year expired he was forced to abandon his see, and five years later he died, a miserable exile in Rome.[1011]
The monastic orders were no better than the secular clergy. When Ximenes was made Provincial of the Franciscan order in Spain, he set himself earnestly at work to force the brethren to live according to the Rule. A large portion of them, known as Claustrals, led disorderly lives, almost purely secular, and refused absolutely to submit to the observance of their vows. King Ferdinand being appealed to pronounced sentence of banishment upon them, and they absolutely preferred existence in exile to the insupportable yoke of their Order. Yet they considered themselves so aggrieved that when they left Toledo they marched in procession through the Puerta Visagra with a crucifix at their head, singing the 113th Psalm “In exitu Israel de Egypto.” When Ximenes was promoted to the primatial see of Toledo, the malcontents appealed to the Vicar General of the Order in Rome, who came to Spain and warmly espoused their cause, being only forced to desist by the decided stand taken by Queen Isabella in favor of Ximenes.[1012] It was the same with the other monastic orders. A bull of Alexander VI., issued in 1496 for the purpose of reforming the Benedictines, describes the inhabitants of many establishments of both sexes in that ancient and honored institution as indulging in the most shameless profligacy; and marriage itself was apparently not infrequently practised.[1013] Savonarola did not hesitate to declare that nuns in their convents became worse than harlots.[1014] Even the strictest of all the orders—the Cistercian—yielded to the prevailing laxity. A general chapter, held in 1516, denounces the intolerable abuse indulged in by some abbots who threw off all obedience to the rule, and dared to keep women under pretence of requiring their domestic services.[1015] To fully appreciate the force of this indication, it is requisite to bear in mind the stringency of the regulations which forbade the foot of woman to pollute the sacred retirement of the Cistercian monasteries.[1016]