Ideology, Careerism and Civic Consciousness

The abstract for your paper is included below. This will appear online only. In December 1482 Pope Sixtus IV gave his legate Angelo Geraldini the faculty to preach a crusade against the people of Basel for refusing to hand over the person of the Croatian Dominican Andrija Jamometić, whose appeal for a council had plunged Sixtus’s reign into crisis. This essay compares the various threads of thought and action which prompted the Pope to resort to the crusade and led Geraldini to make use of the faculty. It is argued that Jamometić’s rebellion was probably triggered by his acute discontent with the way Sixtus had managed the crusade against the Turks, most recently his duplicitous response to their landing at Otranto. A combination of triumphalist emphasis on papal authority and anxiety about a revival of conciliarism caused Sixtus to include crusade as one of the options given to Geraldini. The legate faced resistance at Basel but he was also frustrated by Sixtus’s practice of dispersing his delegated authority among a number of agents in the field; using the crusade faculty became the only way that Geraldini could assert his primacy and advance his own prospects. Basel’s opposition stemmed in part from the awareness of its ruling elite that Frederick III would have to shield it from the Pope and his agents in order to defend dynastic and imperial interests in south-western Germany. But it also sprang from growing coolness towards Rome, and this was evidenced by the undemanding terms imposed on Basel as the price for its readmission to the Catholic community in 1485

Consciousness · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Neuroscience · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

• The Papacy, Conciliarism and Crusade, 1449–1517

  Open Access•Norman Housley•The Journal of Ecclesiastical…•2020

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