COUNCIL AT LYONS

[1Sidenote: [1274-1294 A.D.]]

2Accordingly, as soon as he was consecrated, he appointed a council to be held at Lyons in France, and attended it in person in the month of May, 1274. The principal subjects discussed were the re-establishment of the Christian dominion in the East, and the reunion of the Greek and Latin churches. This has commonly been reckoned the fourteenth general council, and is particularly noticeable for the new regulations it established for the election of Roman pontiffs, and the celebrated provision which is still in force requiring the cardinal electors to be shut up in conclave. Neither did the pontiff, though of a milder disposition than many others, hesitate to repeat and inculcate that odious maxim of Gregory VII, that the pontiff is supreme lord of the world, and especially of the Roman Empire. For in the year 1271 he sent a menacing letter to the princes of Germany, admonishing them to elect an emperor, and without regarding the wishes or the claims of Alfonso, king of Castile; otherwise he would appoint a head of the empire himself. Accordingly, the princes assembled, and elected Rudolf I, of the house of Habsburg.

3Gregory X died in the year 1276, and his three immediate successors were all chosen and died in the same year. Innocent V, previously Pietro di Tarantaisia, was a Dominican monk, and bishop of Ostia. Adrian V was a Genoese, named Ottoboni, and cardinal of St. Adrian. John XXI, previously Pedro, bishop of Tusculum, was a native of Portugal. The next pontiff, who came to the chair in 1277, reigned longer. He was Giovanni Gaetano, of the family of Ursini, a Roman, and cardinal of St. Nicholas, who assumed the title of Nicholas III. He greatly enlarged what is called the patrimony of St. Peter; and, as his actions show, had formed other great projects, which he would undoubtedly have accomplished, as he was a man of energy and enterprise, had he not prematurely died in the year 1280.

4His successor, Martin IV, elected by the cardinals in 1281, was a French nobleman, Simon de Brion, a man of equal boldness and energy of character with Nicholas. For he excommunicated Michael Palæologus, the Greek emperor, because he had violated the compact of union with the Latins, which was settled at the Council of Lyons. Pedro of Aragon he deprived of his kingdoms and of all his property, because he had seized upon Sicily; and he bestowed them gratuitously on Charles, son to the king of France. He was projecting many other things, consonant with the views of the pontiffs, when he was suddenly overtaken by death in 1285. His plans were prosecuted by his successor, Giacomo Savelli, who was elected in 1285 and took the name of Honorius IV.

5But a distressing disease in his joints, of which he died in 1287, prevented him from attempting anything further. Nicholas IV, previously Girolamo d’Ascoli, bishop of Palestrina, who attained to the pontifical chair in 1288, and died in 1292, was able to attend to the affairs both of the church and of the nations with more diligence and care. Hence he is represented in history sometimes as the arbiter in the disputes of sovereign princes, sometimes as the strenuous asserter of the rights and prerogatives of the church, and again as the assiduous promoter of missionary labours among the Tatars and other nations of the East. But nothing lay nearer his heart than the restoration of the dominion of the Christians in Palestine, where their cause was nearly ruined.

6In this he laboured strenuously indeed, but in vain; for death intercepted all his projects.

7After his death the church was without a head till the third year, the cardinals disagreeing exceedingly among themselves. At length, on the 5th of July, 1294, they unanimously chose an aged man, greatly venerated for his sanctity--Pietro, surnamed di Murrhone, from a mountain in which he led a solitary and very austere life; he assumed the pontifical name of Celestine V. But as the austerity of his life tacitly censured the corrupt morals of the Romish court, and especially of the cardinals, and as he showed very plainly that he was more solicitous to advance the holiness of the church than its worldly grandeur, he was soon considered as unworthy of the office which he had reluctantly assumed.

8Hence some of the cardinals, and especially Benedict Cajetan, persuaded him very easily to abdicate the chair, in the fourth month of his pontificate. He died, 1296, in the castle of Fumone, where his successor detained him a captive, lest he should make some disturbance. But afterwards Clement V enrolled him in the calendar of the saints. To him the sect of Benedictine monks who were called, after him, Celestines, owed its origin; a sect still existing in Italy and France, though now nearly extinct, and differing from the other Benedictines by their more rigid rules of life.