One of the questions that appeared in the theologians’ list of questions to be asked of suspected Lollards was ‘An reges et domini temporales existentes in peccato mortali eo ipso cadunt ab omni iure et titulo ad illa regna vel dominia.’ This question appears between one that enquires whether anyone may preach without authority from the pope or a bishop, and another that seeks to know whether the suspect considers that the laity may freely ad suum arbitrium correct and judge delinquent lords. At the same position in the longer list put together by a jurist appears a somewhat different question: ‘an domini temporales possunt ad arbitrium suum auferre bona temporalia ab ecclesia et a viris ecclesiasticis.’ Wyclif’s followers would have returned a positive answer to both questions, though the enthusiasm of their reply would have been the more audible for the second. Throughout the history of the movement Lollards were notable for the stridency of their objections to clerical prerogatives, and, especially in the view of their opponents, for their sympathy towards the secular rulers. Individual heretics and isolated texts applied Wyclif’s views of dominion to kings and secular lords, but the theory was undoubtedly primarily used against ecclesiastics. Academic debate of Wyclif’s theory of dominion was early, and the issue formed the heart of Gregory XI’s condemnation in 1377. But the question does not seem to have figured largely in the disputations that followed Wyclif’s departure from Oxford in 1381.

In the early years of the fifteenth century, the European universities achieved what was probably the height of their influence within the Western Church, an influence accorded final sanction by their independent representation at the two general councils of Pisa (1409) and Constance (1414-18). Both of these assemblies had been summoned in the hope of terminating the Great Schism, the division of the Latin Church which had erupted with the rival elections of Urban VI and Clement VII as popes in 1378. During the course of the subsequent debates seeking a resolution to the dispute, the universities and their members had taken a prime role in formulating theories intended to find a way out of the dilemma of having two popes, each supposedly legitimate. Their scope for concrete, independent action was, however, limited: whatever their aspirations for a role on the wider stage of the medieval Church, the universities had to exist within the narrower confines of individual political entities, for the most part monarchies, whose rulers had their own conceptions of the appropriate place of scholars in the scheme of things.

One of the outstanding characteristics of the Church in the late Middle Ages consisted of its highly developed juridical structure. For the first time the Church was a strictly ordered legal body with, at the top, an absolute monarch. With its commandments and prohibitions it dominated all living creatures, from the highest to the lowest, both the whole community and the individual. It represented a closed, strictly disciplined, and organized corporation, with a highly developed system of law, a ‘state above the states’, in which the laymen were the ruled and the clerics were the rulers.

Certain aspects of both major and minor political writings in later medieval Europe remain intrinsically puzzling. Michael Wilks, in his seminal work on the ‘Problem of Sovereignty’ in this period called the later medieval and early modern epochs an ‘age of confusion’. One problem may be summed up as (1) What difference did Aristotle make? Ullmann argued that Aristotle made it possible to construct a plausible case for ‘the ascending’ (that is, quasi-democratic) view of authority. In that case, as Wilks persistently enquires: Why did defenders of papal monarchy make such free, prolific use of Aristotle?

In 1961, as a contribution to a Festschrift for Aubrey Gwynn, Walter Ullmann drew learned attention to an argument about precedence which arose, probably in 1440, between Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, and John Kemp, Archbishop of York, and Cardinal Priest of S. Balbina. The question was whether Kemp as a cardinal took precedence in the councils of the kingdom over Chichele, who, though primate and legatus natus, was not a cardinal. According to Ullmann, Chichele took his case against Kemp to Rome and briefed Antonio Caffarelli, a famous lawyer, only to encounter formidable opposition in a bull Non mediocri dolore, issued by Eugenius IV, which remained until modern times the foundation of the papal view of the role of cardinals and their status.

Over thirty years ago the dedicatee of this volume argued that the ardent defender of the hierocratic doctrine of papal monarchy, the Augustinian friar-hermit Augustinus (Triumphus) de Ancona (d. 2 April 1328), anticipated a number of conciliarist positions adopted by William of Ockham, notably concerning the deposition of a heretical pope. Paradoxical as this claim might seem, Wilks could show how both thinkers tried to mould the very idea of popular sovereignty into the traditional concept of papal supremacy itself. Furthermore, as several commentators have pointed out, rigorous consistency was not a prime virtue of this Augustinian friar, who exhibited a tendency to adopt two quite distinct concepts of papal power and to apply them in different contexts.

Sovereignty—suprema potestas—in the later Middle Ages was not blessed with Austinian simplicity: it was a complex and contradictory thing. Held by the ecclesiastical and lay powers, held by pope, emperor, king, and city-state, few populi were subjected to one authority alone. Not only did there exist a hierarchy of sovereign powers in the Western community, de iure and de facto, but the suprema potestas was in itself limited. It was the extent of this limitation and the degree of sovereignty possessed by the various governments which exercised, to a very large extent, the minds of later medieval and Renaissance jurists. A major reordering of the relationship between the spiritual and secular authorities was occasioned with the propounding of the via media by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Thomistic doctrine did much to promote and enhance the importance of civil government at the expense of hierocratic theories, but, as Michael Wilks observes in his fundamental study of medieval sovereignty, it proved to be almost as dangerous to the concept of the societas humana as to that of the societas christiana. Quite simply, as long as moral standards were applied to earthly government, political evaluation was forced into the theological sphere, and so, to some degree, into the realm of papal determination. And to Thomistic influences, as Michael Wilks again remarks, the civilians nearly all succumbed. Laying their claims very largely upon the bases of Roman law and Aristotle, legists expounded a profoundly secular philosophy; but the seemingly logical conclusion—logical, that is, to the modern mind—that secular man was freed from the theological order was not reached. The pope retained both a unique degree of dignitas and a superior degree of authority; he was head of the populus christiana, and this awesome position bestowed upon him certain ultimate rights and responsibilities in the affairs of secular corpora, even though these corpora were sovereign entities. In other words, papal sovereignty, although increasingly restricted and relegated to the realm of theory as the early modern State evolved, none the less remained a potent force; indeed, as it will be seen, in a particular aspect it fulfilled for the jurist a critical need of the young State.

Undergraduate ideas about medieval papal history tend to take the following form. In the late eleventh and early twelfth century the papacy led a reform movement and increased its power. In the mid- to late twelfth century its spiritual authority waned as its legal activities expanded. Innocent III gave a new lease of life to the institution by extending its protection to those elements in the effervescent spiritual life of the time which were prepared to keep their enthusiasm for evangelical preaching and apostolic poverty within the limits of doctrinal orthodoxy. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, the papacy was more preoccupied with Italian politics than with the harnessing of spiritual enthusiasm. Its power and prestige remained great until the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Pope Boniface VIII was humiliated by the forces of the French King, acting with the Colonna family. The ‘Babylonian Captivity’ at Avignon, which followed shortly afterwards, was a period of grandiose claims and real weakness in relation to secular powers (especially France), of financial exploitation of the clergy, and of costly involvement in Italian wars. The Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement marked a still lower point in the religious prestige of the papacy. In the later fifteenth century the superiority of pope over council came to be generally recognized. Moreover, the papal state, in central Italy, was consolidated to provide a relatively secure base, and popes became patrons of painting and humanism. The patronage was a largely secular matter, however, and the papal court that of a secular prince. As for the popes’ control over the Western Church, it was limited, at least in practice, by the power of kings and princes over the clergy of their territories. Above all, the idea of sovereign papal authority in the religious sphere no longer had any connection with the real forces of religious sentiment and spirituality.

If ‘the later conciliar controversy’ may be regarded as having come to an end by the middle of the fifteenth century, the years considered here may perhaps be seen as the period of the last controversy of quite that kind. It is true that words like ‘first’ and ‘last’ are always hazardous in historical discourse, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the history of ideas. Clearly the argument about the place of general councils in the polity of the Church had not completely died away in the second half of the fifteenth century; nor did it come to a sudden end in 1518 (specified here as the year which saw the Concordat of 1516 reluctantly accepted by the University of Paris and also the publication of John Mair’s Commentary on St Matthew’s Gospel, with its strenuous assertion of conciliarist principles). Twenty years more were to pass before the posthumous publication of the longest single work generated by the entire conciliar controversy, Domenico Giacobazzi’s De concilio. And seven years later it was, of course, a council of the Church that faced the challenge of what had, from small beginnings within the period examined here, become a schism more fundamental and far-reaching than that which had precipitated the original conciliar movement. Even at Trent, moreover, there were those who were prepared to speak up for ‘conciliarist’ principles and policies. Yet it still seems true to say that the years of the Council (or what purported to be the Council) of Pisa and Milan, and of the Fifth Council of the Lateran, saw the last significant and direct confrontation between conciliarism and papalism as those positions had developed in the ecclesiology and ecclesiastical politics of the period inaugurated by the Great Schism. No doubt this last act was an anticlimax, a controversy over the dubious claims of a conciliabulum which was at least politically used if not originally inspired by purely political motives. In the history of ideas, however, and perhaps especially in the history of political ideas, the debate is not so easily dismissed.

In his important and incisive essay ‘What was conciliarism? Conciliar theory in historical perspective’ Antony Black draws attention to the use made of biblical passages by conciliarist writers. He writes, ‘from Gerson onwards, and most markedly in Segovia, we hear the rebuke that the canonists have misunderstood the structure of ecclesiastical authority by introducing notions derived from secular, Roman law; we hear the call to return to scripture and patristic tradition.’ Among the passages used by them he cites ‘the dominical precept to “tell the community (die ecclesie)” if a brother errs persistently (Matthew 18.15-20)’. This appeal to the dominical precept in matters of community discipline was not new. Indeed, its use in this connection has a long and interesting history. One of its earliest appearances is in the Rule of St Benedict.

The revolutionary changes initiated by the Government in the 1530s obliterated at a stroke the centuries-old division in England between Church and State. The preamble of the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome of 1533 marks particularly clearly the country’s transition from a dual to a single allegiance, setting out in a quite unequivocal expression of the new royal supremacy how

Francisco Suarez devoted the opening chapter of his major work, De legibus ac Deo legislatore, to definitions of the words lex (law) and ius (right). In one sense, he wrote, ius could mean the same as lex, as in phrases like ius civile (civil law) or ius divinum (divine law). But there were other meanings too. In discussing them, Suarez quoted Isidore of Seville, ‘Ius is so called because it is just’, and Augustine, ‘What is done by right (iure) is done justly’—two texts that earlier had been incorporated into the medieval Corpus iuris canonici. According to this etymology, Suarez wrote, ius could mean ‘the just and fair’ or ‘what is prescribed by law’. Then Suarez presented a third, ‘strict’ definition.

In the period from the conclusion of the Tridentine Council in 1563 to the Turkish conquest of Crete in 1669 the Venetian Republic feared for its sovereignty over its Mediterranean possessions. These stretched from Istria, along the Dalmatian littoral, to the islands of Corfu and Zante. Cyprus was lost to the Turks from 1570, despite the Christian maritime victory at Lepanto subsequently. Venetian relations with the papacy were also strained after the Council of Trent, not only in the exceptional and dramatic circumstances of the Interdict of 1606-7. Defence of both Crete and the other remaining Mediterranean possessions was thus complicated by Venetian anxiety over Ottoman power on the one hand and concern at papal policy on the other. From the end of the Tridentine Council to the Interdict, and indeed beyond, Venice insisted on its role as a devoutly Catholic state, claiming from the papacy the concession of decime, paid by the clergy of the Republic, to sustain its defence of Christendom against militant Islam. But the Republic also resisted Roman suggestions that Catholic belief and practice were insecure or in need of reform within its territories. In the Mediterranean possessions, however, the presence of a Greek Christian population represented a particular problem.

Sovereignty ought to be a natural concept for Christians whose rhetoric is full of words or collections of words like ‘Lord’ or ‘King’ or ‘Kingdom’ or ‘Crown Rights of the Redeemer’. It ought to be doubly natural for the Christian inhabitants of an earthly kingdom whose monarch protects a national church. In fact, ‘sovereignty’ is not a word which comes trippingly to ordinary Christian lips, and it is a religious concept as fraught with theological ambiguity for Christians as it is a political concept fraught with secular ambiguity for citizens. Indeed, for British Christians and citizens the ambiguities merge. For a Roman Catholic who recently edited The Times, ‘Liberty puts the individual in command of his own decisions; his vote is the ultimate political sovereign in a democracy; his purchase is the ultimate economic sovereign in a free market.’ For a critic of the Methodist-turned-Anglican who was Prime Minister when that was written, ‘Where the Church of England lists thirty-nine essential articles of faith, Mrs Thatcher names three: the belief in the doctrine of Free-Will; in the divinely created sovereignty of individual conscience; and in the Crucifixion and Redemption as the exemplary, supreme act of choice.’ Yet to a political journalist, interpreting the same Prime Minister’s view of British sovereignty as opposed to any Western European understanding, it seems that Parliament alone is sovereign: ‘no citizen or subordinate authority can have any unalienable rights against the state, which can lend out power to groups or individuals but never give it away.’ Whose vote then is ultimate political sovereign? Whose conscience then is divinely-created sovereign?