en been much esteemed as a pious and modest man, seems to have lost
his head on being raised to his new office. He held himself vastly above
the cardinals, wishing to reform them violently, and to lord it over
them in a style which they had not been used to. By such conduct he
provoked them to oppose him. They objected that he had not been freely
chosen, and also that he was not in his right mind; and a party of them
met at Fondi, and chose another pope, Clement VII., a Frenchman, who
settled at Avignon.

Thus began what is called the Great Schism of the West. There were now
two rival popes--one of them having his court at Rome, and the other at
Avignon; and the kingdoms of Europe were divided between the two. The
cost of keeping up two courts weighed heavily on the Christians of the
West; and all sorts of tricks were used to squeeze out fees and money on
all possible occasions. As an instance of this, I may mention that
Boniface IX., one of the Roman line of popes, celebrated two jubilees,
with only ten years between them, although in Boniface VIII.'s time it
had been supposed that the jubilee was to come only once in a hundred
years.

The princes of Europe were scandalized by this division, and often tried
to heal it, but in vain; for the popes, although they professed to
desire such a thing, were generally far from hearty in saying so. At
length it seemed as if the breach were to be healed by a council held at
Pisa in 1409, which set aside both the rivals, and elected a new pope,
Alexander V. But it was found that the two old claimants would not give
way; and thus the council of Pisa, in trying to cure the evil of having
two popes, had saddled the Church with a third.

Alexander did not hold the papacy quite eleven months (June, 1409, to
May, 1410). He had fallen wholly under the power of a cardinal named
Balthasar Cossa; and this cardinal was chosen to succeed him, under the
name of John XXIII. John was one of the worst men who ever held the
papacy. It is said that he had been a pirate, and that from this he had
got the habit of waking all night and sleeping by day. He had been
governor of Bologna, where he had indulged himself to the full in
cruelty, greed, and other vices. He was even suspected of having
poisoned Alexander; and, although he must no doubt have been a very
clever man, it is not easy to understand how the other cardinals can
have chosen one who was so notoriously wicked to the papacy.

CHAP