Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... pontifical ease.1 Juvenal and Brantome can suggest nothing more shameless or more foul. Nor was the tone of morality heightened when, fifty years later, Nicholas de Clamenges takes up the tale. His brief reference to the adulteries and vileness with which the cardinals befouled the papal court, and the obscenities in which their families imitated their example, shows that the matter was so generally understood that it needed no details.1 The Great Schism perhaps could scarcely be expected to improve the morals of the papal court. Yet when the Church universal, to close that weary quarrel, agreed to receive one of the competitors as its head, surely it might have selected, as the visible representative of God upon earth, some more worthy embodiment of humanity than Balthazar Cossa, who, as John XXIII., is alone, of the three competitors, recognised in the list of popes. When the great Council of Constance in 1415 adopted the awful expedient of trying, condemning, and deposing a pope, the catalogue of crimes--notorious incest, adultery, defilement, homicide, and atheism--of which the fathers formally accused him, and which he confessed without defending himself,1 is fearfully suggestive of the corruption which could not only spawn such a monster, but could elevate him to the highest place in the hierarchy, and present him for the veneration of Christendom. It affords a curious insight into the notions of morality prevalent in the papal court to observe that when he had as chamberlain of Boniface IX. scandalised Rome by openly keeping his brother's wife as a concubine, the remedy adopted for the disorder was to create him Cardinal and send him as legate to Bologna, while the lady was conveyed to her husband in Naples. The result of this...
