Council of Constance ends the Papal Schism
With three rival popes simultaneously claiming legitimacy, the Council of Constance met for three and a half years and did something novel: it asserted that a general council of bishops was superior to any single pope, and it used that authority to depose all three claimants and elect a new one (Martin V). The resulting decree, Haec sancta (1415), is the high-water mark of conciliarism — the idea that Church authority flowed upward from collective deliberation rather than downward from the pope alone. The subsequent popes spent centuries rolling it back.
Conciliarism was explicitly attacked by Pope Pius II in 1460 (Execrabilis) and never recovered as a formal doctrine, but the precedent — that a crisis could force a deliberative assembly to override a supposedly absolute authority — was available for Enlightenment thinkers to reach for.
04 · Feudal Hierarchy
With Rome's collapse, the consensus mechanism in Europe fractured into two overlapping systems. Kings inherited power through bloodline. The Church ratified kings through coronation, and resolved doctrinal disputes through ecumenical councils of bishops. Between kings and kings, the feudal oath of fealty was the binding contract: personal, hierarchical, revocable only by death or excommunication. The first cracks in this system — Magna Carta, the Icelandic Althing, early parliaments — showed up as early as the 10th century but wouldn't compound into anything systemic for another 500 years.
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