History.—The earliest Gallic occupants of the territory at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saône were the Segusians. In 59 B.C. some Greek refugees from the banks of the Hérault, having obtained permission of the natives to establish themselves beside the Croix-Rousse, called their new town by the Gallic name Lugudunum (q.v.) or Lugdunum; and in 43 B.C. Lucius Munatius Plancus brought a Roman colony to Fourvières from Vienne. This settlement soon acquired importance, and was made by Agrippa the starting-point of four great roads. Augustus, besides building aqueducts, temples and a theatre, gave it a senate and made it the seat of an annual assembly of deputies from the sixty cities of Gallia Comata. At the same time the place became the Gallic centre for the worship of Rome and the emperor. Under the emperors the colony of Forum Vetus and the municipium of Lugdunum were united, receiving the jus senatus. The town was burnt in A.D. 59 and afterwards rebuilt in a much finer style with money given by Nero; it was also adorned by Trajan, Adrian and Antoninus. The martyrdom of Pothinus and Blandina occurred under Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 177), and some years later a still more savage persecution of the Christians took place under Septimius Severus, in which Irenaeus, according to some authors, perished.
After having been ravaged by the barbarians and abandoned by the empire, Lyons in 478 became capital of the kingdom of the Burgundians. It afterwards fell into the hands of the Franks, and suffered severely from the Saracens, but revived under Charlemagne, and after the death of Charles the Bald became part of the kingdom of Provence. From 1032 it was a fief of the emperor of Germany. Subsequently the authority over the town was a subject of dispute between the archbishops of Lyons and the counts of Forez; but the supremacy of the French kings was established under Philip the Fair in 1312. The citizens were constituted into a commune ruled by freely elected consuls (1320). In the 13th century two ecclesiastical councils were held at Lyons—one in 1245, presided over by Innocent IV., at which the emperor Frederick II. was deposed; the second, the œcumenical, under the presidency of Gregory X., in 1274, at which five hundred bishops met. Pope Clement V. was crowned here in 1305, and his successor, John XXII., elected in 1316. The Protestants obtained possession of the place in 1562; their acts of violence were fiercely avenged in 1572 after the St Bartholomew massacre. Under Henry III. Lyons sided with the League; but it pronounced in favour of Henry IV. The executions of Henri d’Effiat, marquis of Cinq-Mars, and of François de Thou, who had plotted to overthrow Richelieu, took place on the Place des Terreaux in 1642. In 1793 the Royalists and Girondists, powerful in the city, rose against the Convention, but were compelled to yield to the army of the republic under General Kellermann after enduring a siege of seven weeks (October 10). Terrible chastisement ensued: the name of Lyons was changed to that of Ville-affranchie; the demolition of its buildings was set about on a wholesale scale; and vast numbers of the proscribed, whom the scaffold had spared, were butchered with grape shot. The town resumed its old name after the fall of Robespierre, and the terrorists in their turn were drowned in large numbers in the Rhone. Napoleon rebuilt the Place Bellecour, reopened the churches, and made the bridge of Tilsit over the Saône between Bellecour and the cathedral. In 1814 and 1815 Lyons was occupied by the Austrians. In 1831, 1834, 1849, 1870 and 1871 it was the scene of violent industrial or political disturbances. In 1840 and 1856 disastrous floods laid waste portions of the city. International exhibitions were held here in 1872 and 1894, the latter occasion being marked by the assassination of President Carnot.
See S. Charléty, Histoire de Lyon (Lyon, 1903); J. Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie. Monographie du tisseur lyonnais (Lyon, 1899); A. Vachet, A travers les rues de Lyon (Lyon, 1902); A. Steyert, Nouvelle Histoire de Lyon et des provinces de Lyonnais Forez, Beaujolais (3 vols., Lyon, 1895-1899).
LYONS, COUNCILS OF. The first Council of Lyons (the thirteenth general council) met at the summons of Pope Innocent IV. in June and July of 1245, to deliberate on the conflict between Church and emperor, on the assistance to be granted to the Holy Land and the Eastern empire, on measures of protection against the Tatars, and on the suppression of heresy. Among the tasks of the council mentioned in the writs of convocation, the most important, in the eyes of the pope, was that it should lend him effectual aid in his labours to overthrow the emperor Frederick II.; and, with this object in view, he had described the synod as a general council. Since its numbers were not far in excess of 150 bishops and archbishops, and the great majority of these came from France, Italy and Spain; while the schismatic Greeks and the other countries—especially Germany, whose interests were so deeply involved—were but weakly represented; the ambassador of Frederick, Thaddaeus of Suessa, contested its oecumenicity in the assembly itself. The condemnation of the emperor was a foregone conclusion. The articles of indictment described him as the “prince of tyranny, the destroyer of ecclesiastical dogma, the annihilator of the faith, the master of cruelty,” and so forth; while the grossest calumnies were treated as approved facts. The objections of the ambassador, that the accused had not been regularly cited, that the pope was plaintiff and judge in one, and that therefore the whole process was anomalous, achieved as little success as his appeal to the future pontiff and to a truly oecumenical council. The representatives of the kings of England and France were equally unfortunate in their claim for a prorogation of the decision. On the 17th of July the verdict was pronounced by Innocent IV., excommunicating Frederick and dethroning him on the grounds of perjury, sacrilege, heresy and felony. All oaths of fealty sworn to him were pronounced null and void, and the German princes were commanded to proceed with the election of a new sovereign. In addition the council enacted decrees against the growing irregularities in the Church, and passed resolutions designed to support the Crusaders and revive the struggle for the Holy Land.
See Mansi, Collectio conciliorum, tom, xxiii.; Huillard-Bréholles, Historia diplomatica Frederici II., 6 tom. (Paris, 1852-1861); Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, ed. 2, vol. v. (1886), pp. 1105-1126; Fr. W. Schirrmacher, Kaiser Friederich der Zweite (4 vols., Göttingen, 1859-1865); H. Schulz, in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie, ed. 3, vol. ix. (1901), p. 122 sqq., s.v. “Innocenz IV.”; A. Folz, Kaiser Friedrich II. u. Papst Innocenz IV. (Strassburg, 1905).
The second Council of Lyons (the fourteenth general council) met from the 7th of May to the 17th of July 1274, under the presidency of Pope Gregory X., and was designed to resolve three problems: to terminate the Greek schism, to decree a new Crusade, and to counteract the moral corruption among clerics and laity. The council entered on its third task at a very late period, with the result that the requisite time for an adequate deliberation was not available. Nevertheless, on the 1st of November, Gregory was enabled to publish thirty-one constitutions, which may be taken to represent the fruits of the synod and its labours. The most important of the enactments passed is that regulating the papal election. It prescribed that the new election conducted by the college of cardinals should be held in conclave (q.v.), and its duration abridged by progressive simplification of the cardinal’s diet. The motive for this decision, which has maintained its ground in ecclesiastical law, was given by the circumstances which followed the death of Clement IV. (1268). The pope felt a peculiar interest in the Holy Land, from which he was recalled by his elevation to the pontifical throne. He succeeded in bringing influential interests to work in the cause; but his scheme of a great enterprise backed by the whole force of the West came to nothing, for the day of the Crusades was past. His projected Crusade was interwoven with his endeavours to end the schism; and the political straits of the emperor Michael Palaeologus in Constantinople came to the aid of these aspirations. To ensure his safety against the attacks of King Charles of Sicily, who had pledged himself to assist the ex-emperor Baldwin in his reconquest of the Latin empire, Michael was required to own the supremacy of the pope in the spiritual domain; while Gregory, in return, would restrain the Sicilian monarch from his bellicose policy with regard to the Eastern empire. The ambassadors of the emperor appeared at the council with letters acknowledging the Roman pontiff and the confession of faith previously dispatched from the eternal city, and submitted similarly-worded declarations from the heads of the Byzantine Church. One member of the embassy, the Logothete Georgius Acropolites, was authorized by the emperor to take an oath in his name, renouncing the schism. In short, the subjection of the East to the Roman see was completed in the most binding forms, and the long-desired union seemed at last assured. Gregory himself did not live to discover its illusory character. The Council of Lyons was, moreover, of importance for the German dynastic struggle: for Gregory took the first public step in favour of Count Rudolph of Habsburg, the king-elect, by receiving his deputy and denying an audience to the delegate of the rival claimant, King Alphonso of Castile.
See Mansi, Collectio conciliorum, tom. xxiv.; Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, vol. vi. ed. 2 (1890), p. 119 sqq. Also C. Mirbt, in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklop. f. protestantische Theologie, vol. vii. (1899), p. 122, s.v. “Gregor X.”
(C. M.)