From Crisis to Reformation in Christendom

A Milestone Documents E-text

Table of Contents

https://doi.org/10.3735/9781961844605.book.part.009

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Abstract

The church faced significant issues in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The united Christendom of the Middle Ages was seeing challenges in Bohemia, where the heretical Hussite movement had survived everything the church could throw at it, and on its southeastern flank, where the Muslim Ottomans were steadily advancing. Pope Pius II (r. 1458–1464) demonstrated the weakness of one traditional tool in the papal arsenal when a crusade he called against the Ottomans was a miserable failure. Europe’s monarchs had seized advantage of the Great Schism (1378–1418) between popes in Rome and popes in Avignon and the division between popes and councils in the early fifteenth century to increase control over the Catholic Church in their kingdoms.