Peter Partner. The Papal State Under Martin V. London: The
When Oddo Colonna was elected Pope at the Council of Constance in 1417, taking as his name Martin V, he was elevated to a Papacy which was in many ways in critical condition. The Council had ended a schism, deposing the antipope John XXIII (whose name and number would much later finally be supplanted by a great twentieth century reformer Pope), but the work of restoring the power and prestige of the Holy See still had to be undertaken. The Avignon exile and the schism had weakened the standing of the Papacy. Broad social and economic changes had stripped it of much of the revenue from Christendom in general which it had enjoyed in the Middle Ages, while the other critical source of papal revenue the temporal Papal States in Italy had been reduced to chaos during the Schism.
Moreover, while the Council had set reform in motion, it had in many ways created for the Papacy potential problems as great as those which it solved.
The council of Constance had resembled in some respects
a Congress of the European powers, and in others a
Parliament of the whole ecclesiastical estate. It had
created Martin Pope by a new conciliar procedure, and,
as long as the Council continued, he was bound to find
himself to some extent subordinate to the body which
(p. 42)
The underlying possibility was, indeed, that the precedent of the Council and of Martin's election would produce an entirely new and different constitution of the Church, a conciliar Church in which the Pope would be at most a sort of constitutional monarch.
The task of Martin V was thus to re establish the power of the Papacy, and a critical instrument for that purpose was to be the Papal States. How Martin restored those states, and how they were administered in his time, is the principal topic of Pet...