Six hundred years ago, in the year of our Lord 1409, Christians woke up to a piece of terrible, incredible news: the Cardinals of the Church, after having messed things up for the last two decades by breaking up into two factions and electing two trains of antagonistic, uncompromising popes, had now conjured up the perfect nightmare. They had met again in conclave in Pisa and elected a third pope in the absence of the other two. For the next five years, Christendom was going to have to bear the scandal of three warring popes at its helm. It was an unheard of – a devilish – piece of news if ever there was one

How did the Church arrive at such an impasse? Well, it is a long, long story and here I can only attempt to describe the general situation with very broad brush strokes, and it cannot fail to remain an impressionistic image at that. Even people who were living in those troubled times failed to size up anything except their own tiny piece of the puzzle – and, as I have just said, it was a gigantic puzzle.

The first thing to remember is that in the early 15th century, Europe did not exist as an entity. Nations that we recognise today were absent then: you had Burgundy and Anjou but no France, and the King of England still lorded it over half the French. You had no Spain, but Aragonese bent on empire building in the Mediterranean and Castilians fighting the last remaining Moorish strongholds. The German emperors, those anachronistic leftovers of Charlemagne’s once holy Europe, had claims everywhere – even down in the Lombardy plain – on cities that had now tasted freedom and republican government and did not give a fig about the emperors’ legitimate rights, or anyone else’s, for that matter. The popes, supposedly independent spiritual figures, were nothing of the sort: for too long now they had reverted to being just the passing fancy of anyone who had enough power in central Italy to impose his puppet on the Petrine throne.

All over Italy itself, everyone was at war with everyone else, for the land, as in the time of the Roman Empire had, once again, become the goose that laid the golden egg. There was a continual scramble for its riches and the political affluence that these brought with them. Italy was once again the garden of Europe, its most scintillating jewel, the land where culture reigned supreme and glory in any field could be achieved. Alas, it was also a lawless land, where only might was right.

For most of the preceding period, political ascendancy had lain with the Angevins, an up-and-coming junior branch of the French monarchy, bent on carving out their little empire on Italian soil. They had been invited by the popes to come in as their supporters against anyone who dared infringe papal territorial hegemony in central Italy. In many cases, this meant the territories of their family clan – because popes, before becoming international figureheads, were first and foremost representatives of a small batch of aristocratic Roman families, and did their bidding in every possible way.

After their bad experience with the later German emperors, especially Barbarossa and Frederick II, the popes’ new dalliance with the French, although warranted as short-term security, on the crazy chessboard of Italian politics was bound to become rotten. In fact, after a few decades of Angevin rule, the Italians rose up in revolt: Sicily was lost to the Aragonese after the Night of the Vespers, and in the north their hegemony was gradually eaten up by the rising star of the warlords of Milan, the Viscontis.

In Rome, the situation had been precipitated with the accession of one of the ablest and most unscrupulous of pontiffs, a scion of the Gaetani clan, elected as Boniface VIII (1294-1303) who waged a bitter and protracted wrestling match with the French for no less than the complete temporal overlordship of the whole of Christendom. On the threshold of the 14th century such harebrained ideals from the days of Innocent III had simply become anachronistic and, quite frankly, outdated. But Benedict Gaetani, the man whom Dante eventually consigned for his atrocities and warmongering to the eighth circle of Hell in his Divine Comedy, had overreached himself. In 1303, the French King sent a military commando to capture the nefarious pontiff and bring him to trial in front of a French church council for nepotism, simony, murder and even atheism. The plot failed, but the die had been cast.

For the next seven decades, the popes were mostly Frenchmen, were chosen by the French and preferred to go and live on French soil at Avignon. Italy was left behind in complete anarchy, but its evergreen lure eventually brought them to their senses. In 1376, after 70 years in gratuitous exile, they made a reappearance on the Tiber. But it was to be short-lived.

To forestall any last minute attempt at another French imposition, on the death of the last of these Gallic usurpers, the Roman mob chose a Neapolitan, Bartolomeo Prignano, and forced him on the cardinals as Pope Urban VI. The French cardinals were taken by surprise, but the situation, for the moment, had escaped their control. Until, that is, Prignano started playing into their hands with his increasingly filthy temper and overbearing behaviour. When it became all too obvious that the new pope had become unbearable, they picked up their soutaines and retired to Fondi, where they chose one of their own, cardinal Robert from Geneva, and had him installed as the new pope instead of Prignano.

The choice of Robert of Geneva illustrates, like nothing else, the level of debasement to which the morals of those supposedly involved in church governance had sunk. This man, once Archbishop of Cambrai, had lately been papal legate to Italy for his Avignon masters and, in this capacity, he had directed the siege of Cesena and ordered the massacre of 4,000 of its civilians for the city’s persistent refusals to be incorporated into the papal dominions – an atrocity even by the rules of war of the time. This man, still remembered today as the butcher of Cesena, was now Pope Clement VII. What was worse still, he soon got cold feet on Italian soil and took his court back to Avignon.

These parting shots of the Great Western Schism resuscitated an age-old dilemma that had tormented men of the Church since early Christianity: who in the end ruled the Church – the bishops, convened in a general council, or the pope? Now that the same batch of cardinals had elected two popes within a few months of each other, who was the rightful one, Urban or Clement? If Canon Law required that popes convene general councils of the church, then it was inconceivable that either of the two claimants would convene a church council to resolve the problem without the other excommunicating him. And this is what actually happened: Clement excommunicated Urban, who in turn excommunicated Clement.

For the next 30 years the situation remained stuck in a morass of religious and political confusion. While the two parties bequeathed more popes and antipopes to a bewildered Europe, and while nations were forced to take sides more out of political expediency than moral or canonical certitude, the popes’ opposing emissaries and legates continued to fight over the Italian patrimonies in what was now open civil war.

The aggressive, expansionistic Duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzio Visconti, and the Angevin king of Naples, Ladislas of Hungary, also plunged their greedy hands into the power vacuum until the situation got so out of hand that, eventually, France decided to abandon the Avignonese popes and push for a durable and ecumenical solution. But what happened between the Council of Pisa in 1409 and the Council of Constance in 1414 became so devilishly intractable and perfidious that men of goodwill were many times on the point of despairing for the fate of the Church.

It was only thanks to the iron will and dogged patience of Jean Gerson, one of the foremost theologians of the time, that the mess was finally faced. But it was an uphill struggle all the way: his first idea was to arrange a meeting between the two popes of the moment (Benedict XIII and Gregory XII) on condition that they would simultaneously abdicate, but they both faltered at the last minute. Gerson then pushed for a more radical solution: a self-convened Council of the Church, an idea for which he campaigned copiously with pamphlets and much soliciting but which contravened canonical law. Although containing cardinals from both opposing camps, his Council at Pisa immediately backfired because the two popes at large again refused to recognise the new Pisan pope and declined to step down, even though the Council deposed them both.

Gerson’s last resort was the Emperor Sigismund: if he would not come forward to cut the Gordian knot, then no one would. The problem, however, was John XXIII, the last of the Pisan popes. As former legate of Bologna, architect of the Franco-Guelph alliance, and true leader of the Pisan party, Baldassere Cossa was foremost an able and energetic politician and soldier, but also a worldly, unscrupulous man who, as legate, had sold ecclesiastical offices and employed immoral means to extract taxes. On his election as pope he had not even been a priest!

His political motives were notorious. He had renewed the war against Ladislas with the backing of Florentine money but was in the end defeated on all fronts. His understanding with Emperor Sigismund to convene a council in 1414 to end the schism was more of a ploy to get Sigismund to intervene militarily on his behalf. When this did not happen, John was forced to convene the Council but then tried to escape. He was caught and brought back to face charges of schism, immorality, simony, piracy and even murder.

He was eventually deposed, with the other two Popes still at large, and a new pope, Martin V, was elected. John died as Bishop of Tuscolo in 1419. A funerary tomb was erected inside the Baptistery of Florence Cathedral by his friend, Cosimo de Medici. Today he is unremembered, overshadowed by one who took away his name, John XXIII, alias Angelo Roncalli.

Thus the Great Western Schism of the Church was ended.