Council of Florence

Council Of Florence

The Seventeenth Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church was convoked as the Council of Basel (Basle in the once-preferred English spelling) by Pope Martin V shortly before his death in February 1431 and took place in the context of the Hussite wars in Bohemia and the rise of the Ottoman Empire. At stake was the greater conflict between the Conciliar movement and the principle of papal supremacy.

The Council was seated on December 14, 1431. On December 18 Martin's successor, Pope Eugene IV, tried to dissolve it and open a new council on Italian soil at Bologna, but was overruled. Sigismund, King of Hungary and titular King of Bohemia, had been defeated at the Battle of Domažlice in the fifth crusade against the Hussites in August 1431, and under his sponsorship the Council negotiated a peace with Calixtine faction of the Hussites in January, 1433. Pope Eugene acknowledged the council in May and crowned Sigismund Holy Roman Emperor on May 31, 1433. The divided Hussites were defeated in May 1434. In June 1434 the pope had to flee a revolt in Rome and began a ten year exile in Florence.

The Council entered a second phase after Sigismund's death in 1437. Eugene convoked a rival Council of Ferrara on 8 January 1438 and succeeded in drawing the Byzantine ambassadors to Italy. The Council of Basel first suspended him, declared him a heretic,and then in November 1439 elected an antipope, Felix V. The rival Council of Florence (moved to avoid plague in Ferrara) concluded in 1445 after negotiating unions with the various eastern churches. This bridging of the Great Schism proved fleeting, but was a political coup for the papacy. In 1447, Sigismund's successor Frederick III commanded the city of Basel to expel the Council of Basle; the rump council reconvened in Lausanne before dissolving itself in 1449.