Pope Innocent VII (1404-1406)

The legitimate pope of the Roman line

To understand Innocent VII, one must first locate him within the Western Schism. Since 1378 two men had claimed to be pope: one in Rome, elected by the cardinals after the death of Gregory XI, and one in Avignon. Innocent VII belongs to the Roman line: he succeeds Boniface IX, himself the successor of Urban VI, and precedes Gregory XII.^[16][17]

That line is not an archival detail. It is the line the Catholic Church retained as legitimate. The simplest proof is found in names and numbers: when later legitimate popes took the same names, they counted from the Roman popes, not from the Avignon claimants. The legitimate Benedict XIII of the eighteenth century disregards the Avignon "Benedict XIII"; the later legitimate Clement VII disregards the antipope Clement VII.

"If the deliberate omission of the Avignon popes from the official list is not proof positive, it is at least a very strong presumption in favour of the legitimacy of the Roman popes Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII." — The Catholic Encyclopedia, article "Western Schism", vol. 13, 1912^[18]

Innocent VII is therefore not "one more antipope": he is one of the true successors of Peter in a tragic age when many Christians, in good faith, no longer knew whom to follow. Saint Vincent Ferrer himself long adhered to the Avignon obedience — he broke with Benedict XIII only in 1416 — while Saint Catherine of Siena had, from the very beginning, adhered to the Roman pope Urban VI: saints could thus be mistaken about obedience without losing the faith — proof that the crisis concerned a fact (the identity of the true pope), not dogma.^[19][20][21]

The pope who swore to abdicate for unity

Innocent VII's second claim to remembrance is an oath. Meeting in the conclave of October 1404, the cardinals decided that whichever one of them was elected would have to do everything possible to end the schism, including abdication. This was an electoral capitulation: a commitment accepted before election.^[22][23]

The idea was bold. It prepared the way of cession (via cessionis) that would dominate the following decade: if the two claimants resigned simultaneously, the Church could elect one uncontested pope. Innocent VII did not succeed in carrying this out, but the principle he swore to uphold was precisely the one that, ten years later, ended the schism at the Council of Constance, when Gregory XII, his successor, abdicated for the good of unity.^[24][25]

The humanist pope of a Rome being reborn

Finally, Innocent VII matters for what he sowed rather than for what he harvested. In a Rome depopulated, impoverished, and wounded by a century of papal absence and by the schism, he relaunched the Studium Urbis, the Roman university, and called to his service the flower of early humanism: Leonardo Bruni, Antonio Loschi, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Francesco da Fiano.^[26][27] Death interrupted the project, but the direction was set: Rome would again become a capital of culture. In this, this transitional pope already points toward the papal Renaissance of the following century.^[28]

A son of Sulmona, between military nobility and commerce

Cosimo — or Cosmato — Migliorati was born in Sulmona, in Abruzzo, around 1336.^[29][30] The date is not absolutely fixed: biographers hesitate between 1336 and 1339 because no birth record survives.^[31][32] His family, though not princely, belonged to a solid bourgeois world of military tradition and commerce — practical people, neither great lords nor common peasants.^[33]

Cosimo's career began locally: he was rector of the church of Santa Maria Annunziata in Sulmona, then archpriest of the city in the 1370s.^[34] Nothing at this stage destined him for Rome. Law would draw him there.

The jurist: Perugia, Padua, the Decretum

Migliorati studied civil and canon law in two of the great Italian universities of his time, Perugia and Padua.^[35][36] There he gained the degree of decretorum doctor — doctor of canon law — attested around 1383.^[37] The Milanese canonist Giovanni da Legnano, one of the leading jurists of the age, noticed him and pushed him toward the Roman curia.^[38][39]

This legal formation was not incidental. Like so many late-medieval popes — one thinks of his namesake Innocent VI, also a jurist — Cosimo Migliorati owed his rise not to birth but to administrative competence. The papacy of the period was a governmental machine hungry for capable legal minds.

Papal collector in England

Having entered the curia under Urban VI, Migliorati became a clerk of the Apostolic Camera and then collector of papal revenues in the kingdom of England, an office he held for about ten years.^[40][41] The task was delicate: he had to collect ecclesiastical revenues for Rome from a distant kingdom often resistant to Roman taxation.

This long English mission made him a man of international experience, used to finance, diplomacy, and the resistance of secular powers. That rare background helps explain his rapid rise after his return to Italy.

Archbishop, cardinal, legate

On 4 November 1387, Migliorati was appointed archbishop of Ravenna; on 19 June 1389, he was transferred to the archdiocese of Bologna.^[42] A few months later, on 18 December 1389, the new pope Boniface IX created him cardinal-priest of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, one of Rome's Constantinian basilicas.^[43][44]

As cardinal, he was sent in 1390 as apostolic legate in Lombardy and Tuscany, charged with pacifying the conflict between Gian Galeazzo Visconti, lord of Milan, and the communes of Bologna and Florence.^[45] For fourteen years he was one of the pillars of Boniface IX's government. When Boniface died on 1 October 1404, the cardinal of Santa Croce was one of the most respected prelates in the Roman curia.^[46][47]

The death of Boniface IX and the envoys from Avignon

Boniface IX died on 1 October 1404.^[48] His death came at a singular moment: ambassadors of Benedict XIII, the Avignon pope, were already in Rome to discuss a possible end to the schism.^[49][50]

The Roman cardinals attempted a bold move. They asked the Avignon envoys: if we refrain from electing a new pope, will your master abdicate so that the Church may elect one shepherd? The answer was blunt: Benedict XIII would never abdicate.^[51][52] Faced with that refusal, the cardinals judged that they could not leave the Roman see vacant. To abandon the election would have meant handing the Roman obedience over to the antipope. They therefore proceeded to elect.^[53]

The electoral capitulation: abdication if necessary

Before entering conclave, however, on 12 October 1404, the nine cardinals present swore an oath: whoever was elected would have to pursue the extinction of the schism by every means — including, if the good of the Church required it, his own abdication.^[54][55]

"Each bound himself by solemn oath to leave nothing undone, and even, if need be, to lay down the tiara, in order to end the schism." — after The Catholic Encyclopedia, article "Pope Innocent VII", vol. 8, 1910^[56]

This clause is one of the strongest of the late Middle Ages. It implicitly recognizes that, in so extraordinary a crisis, the visible unity of the Church could be worth the sacrifice of the supreme dignity — not because the papacy was at the mercy of the cardinals, but because a true pope can freely renounce his office, as Celestine V had done a century earlier. The oath of 1404 thus opened the path that would save the Church at Constance.^[57]

Election and coronation

On 17 October 1404, Cardinal Cosimo Migliorati was elected unanimously and took the name Innocent VII.^[58][59] He was crowned on 11 November 1404.^[60][61]

The announcement immediately provoked a Ghibelline riot in Rome, hostile to the temporal power of the popes; order was restored only by the armed intervention of King Ladislaus of Naples.^[62][63] From the first hours, the pontificate bore its mark: a legitimate pope, elected in concord by the Sacred College, yet immediately trapped by a city and a kingdom stronger than himself.

A city under arms

The Rome of 1404 was no longer the capital of Christendom it had once been. A century of Avignon papacy, followed by the schism, had left it poor, factional, and torn between rival great houses — the Colonna and Savelli on one side, the Orsini on the other.^[64] The Roman commune, jealous of its liberties, tolerated papal temporal authority poorly and dreamed of a republic.^[65][66]

Innocent VII inherited this powder keg. Only two days after his election — as early as 19 October 1404 — Ladislaus of Anjou-Durazzo, king of Naples, appeared before Rome with his army, officially to "protect" the pope, in reality to extend his influence over the city and the Papal States.^[67]

Ladislaus of Naples, an ambiguous "pacifier"

On 27 October 1404, new agreements were ratified in the Vatican between the pope, the Roman commune, and Ladislaus.^[68] The king of Naples was solemnly established as "supreme pacifier" between the factions and received from the pope the rectorship of Campagna and Marittima for five years.^[69] On 5 November he returned to Naples, satisfied.^[70]

The arrangement was full of traps. In exchange for his protection, Ladislaus obtained a right of oversight over papal policy: Innocent VII reportedly undertook to negotiate nothing with Benedict XIII unless the antipope first recognized Ladislaus's rights over Naples.^[71] In other words, the resolution of the universal schism was suspended on an Italian dynastic quarrel. The "pacifier" was in fact one of the chief obstacles to the peace of the Church.^[72][73]

The weight of nepotism: Ludovico Migliorati

To this political weakness Innocent VII added a more personal one: nepotism. Like many pontiffs of his age, he advanced his own family — but his two nephews must be distinguished. The cardinal-nephew is Giovanni Migliorati, archbishop of Ravenna, created cardinal-priest of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme at the consistory of 12 June 1405.^[74] Ludovico Migliorati, for his part, was never a cardinal: he is a condottiere, a former soldier of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, whom his uncle made captain of the papal militia and then rector of Todi (April 1405).^[75] The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia confuses the two nephews by attributing the elevation to the cardinalate to Ludovico; later documentation establishes that it was Giovanni.^[76][77]

"Nepotism was the only blot on this otherwise virtuous pontiff, esteemed for his piety and learning." — after The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8, 1910^[78]

This judgment sums up the pontificate: Innocent VII was neither cynical nor corrupt; he was too weak with his family, and that weakness would cost Rome and himself dearly.^[79]

The massacre at Santo Spirito Hospital

On 16 August 1405, the Roman commune sent fourteen citizens to ask the pope for custody of Ponte Molle (the Milvian Bridge), a strategic point in the city.^[80] Seeing the delegation as a threat, Ludovico Migliorati had eleven of them arrested. They were taken to the Santo Spirito in Sassia Hospital, a stone's throw from the Vatican, and there murdered; their bodies were thrown from the windows into the street.^[81][82]

"Ludovico dei Meliorati had eleven of them captured; they were taken to the hospital of S. Spirito in Sassia, where they were slaughtered." — Enciclopedia dei Papi, "Innocenzo VII", Treccani, 2000^[83]

The horror of the crime — committed in a hospital, a place of charity, and very near Peter's tomb — set Rome ablaze.

Uprising and exile

The popular response was immediate and violent: Romans burned the houses of the cardinals, attacked papal positions, and threatened Castel Sant'Angelo.^[84] The city slipped completely out of the pope's control. In August 1405, Innocent VII and the whole curia fled Rome to take refuge in Viterbo.^[85][86]

The episode was among the most humiliating in medieval papal history: a legitimate pope, driven from his own city by the crime of his own household, forced into exile only a short distance from Rome. He remained there for more than six months.^[87]

The return to Rome (March 1406)

Pacification was slow and patient. In November 1405, the pope had Francesco Panciatichi appointed senator of Rome to restore order; in January 1406, a city parliament voted the submission of Rome to the pope.^[88] On 13 March 1406, Innocent VII solemnly returned to the Vatican.^[89]

There remained the case of Ladislaus of Naples, who had supported the rebels and whose troops still occupied Castel Sant'Angelo.^[90] On 18 June 1406, the pope proclaimed in consistory the deposition of Ladislaus for "perjury, treason, and conspiracy"; on 24 June, the excommunication was published at Saint Peter's.^[91] Faced with papal firmness, the king yielded, withdrew his troops, and in August 1406 was reconciled: he was reinstituted as "defender, conservator, and gonfalonier of the Church".^[92][93] Innocent VII had recovered his authority — but time was already running out.

Via cessionis: the path of double abdication

The whole drama of the pontificate lies in the contrast between the oath of 1404 and the paralysis of action. Innocent VII had sworn to work for unity; he even convoked a general council at the end of 1404 to address the schism.^[94][95] But that council never met.^[96]

The solution many then envisioned was the via cessionis: that the two claimants — Innocent VII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Avignon — should resign together, so that a single conclave could elect an uncontested pope. In theory it was the simplest path; in practice the most difficult, because it required both men to exercise simultaneous humility.

Why Innocent VII did not succeed

Catholic historiography is clear about the causes of the failure. They were three, and none was doctrinal.^[97][98]

First, mistrust. Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna), an obstinate jurist, had let it be known that he would never abdicate; why should Innocent VII strip himself first, at the risk of handing the Church to a man determined not to keep faith?^[99][100] Second, the interference of Ladislaus of Naples, who had tied every negotiation to his own dynastic interests.^[101] Finally, the shortness of the reign: two years, including six months of exile and further months spent reconquering Rome, left little room for high diplomacy.^[102]

"The obstinacy of Benedict, the rebellion of the Romans against his nephew Ludovico, and above all, the shortness of Innocent's reign frustrated all his efforts." — New Catholic Encyclopedia, article "Innocent VII", W. R. Bonniwell^[103]

The point should be stated plainly: Innocent VII sincerely wanted unity, but he was a hindered pope, more overtaken by his age than master of it.^[104][105]

From Pisa to Constance

Innocent VII's failure was not sterile. The principle he had sworn to uphold — the possibility of abdication for unity — continued to work its way through the Church. When the two obediences proved unable to agree, some cardinals from both sides convoked the Council of Pisa (1409), which believed it could resolve the schism by deposing both claimants and electing a third pope. In reality, it created a third obedience and deepened the confusion.

Only the Council of Constance (1414-1418), the great council of the late Middle Ages, untied the knot: the Pisan antipope was deposed, Benedict XIII abandoned by nearly everyone, and above all Gregory XII — Innocent VII's direct successor — freely abdicated in 1415, after first legitimately reconvoking the council.^[106] The election of Martin V in 1417 finally gave the Church one uncontested pope. The act Gregory XII performed in 1415 was exactly the one Innocent VII had sworn to perform in 1404.^[107][108]

The bull Ad exaltationem Romanae Urbis (1406)

Amid so many trials, Innocent VII found energy for a significant cultural project. On 1 September 1406, shortly before his death, he promulgated the bull Ad exaltationem Romanae Urbis ("For the exaltation of the City of Rome"), which reorganized and endowed the Studium Urbis, the University of Rome.^[109][110]

The project was ambitious: Rome was to be equipped with faculties worthy of a capital, teaching not only law and theology but also classical letters and even Greek, a language then almost forgotten in the West.^[111] Innocent VII wanted to bind together the Studium, the City, and the renewal of ancient culture.^[112]

Humanists in the pope's service

To carry out this design, Innocent VII surrounded himself with the intellectual elite of his day. The bull itself was drafted by Leonardo Bruni, one of the fathers of Florentine humanism and apostolic secretary.^[113][114] Around the pope also moved Antonio Loschi, Pier Paolo Vergerio — author of the first great humanist treatise on education — and Francesco da Fiano.^[115]

"His death interrupted the formation of a possible Roman hegemony in the development of humanist culture." — Enciclopedia dei Papi, "Innocenzo VII", Treccani, 2000^[116]

This is one of the touching paradoxes of the pontificate: a pope overwhelmed by riots and schism laid, without seeing the work completed, one of the first stones of the Roman Renaissance. Where his contemporaries saw only a troubled and brief reign, the historian sees a seed.^[117]

Death on 6 November 1406, tomb at Saint Peter's

Innocent VII died in Rome on 6 November 1406, after two years and twenty days of pontificate.^[118][119] He was buried in Saint Peter's Basilica — then the old Constantinian basilica, which would be demolished in the following century to make way for the present one.^[120][121]

Catholic posterity has judged him, overall, kindly. It remembers a virtuous, pious, and learned man whose pontificate was wrecked by circumstances beyond him and by the one weakness of blood.^[122][123] He was not a great reformer like Innocent VI, nor a canonized saint like some of his predecessors, but he dishonored neither the tiara nor the faith.

Gregory XII and the end of the schism

After his death, the Roman cardinals met and elected, on 30 November 1406, the venerable Angelo Correr, who took the name Gregory XII.^[124] He too had sworn before his election to abdicate if Benedict XIII did the same, repeating the commitment of 1404.^[125]

This Gregory XII, gentle and timid, would have the historical honor of ending the Roman line of the schism: in 1415, before the Council of Constance, he first legitimately convoked the assembly and then freely renounced the pontificate, thus saving the unity of the Church.^[126] The oath Innocent VII could not fulfil, his successor accomplished. The Roman line — Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, Gregory XII — ended in that act of renunciation, and with it ended the longest schism in the history of the papacy.^[127]

The brief pontificate of Innocent VII is a lesson in the theology of the Church disguised as political chronicle. Three teachings stand out.

First, the indefectibility of the See of Peter depends neither on the strength of popes nor on the clarity of circumstances. At the heart of the schism, when even saints hesitated about which obedience to follow, apostolic succession was not interrupted: the legitimate chain ran, hidden but real, from Urban VI to Martin V. The Church confesses that Christ built his Church on Peter and that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Mt 16:18) — not because men are perfect, but because the promise is divine.^[128]

Second, the Western Schism was never a heresy. The two obediences shared the same faith, the same sacraments, the same Creed; they differed about a fact — the identity of the true pope — not about dogma. That is why, once the crisis was resolved, the Church could reintegrate the faithful of both camps without abjuration: they had not left the faith, but had followed a false track in good faith.^[129]

"The Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 882^[130]

Finally, Innocent VII's history reminds us that the holiness of a pontificate is not measured by visible success. This man did not end the schism; he fled his city; he loved his nephew too much. But he swore the humility of abdication when it had to be sworn, and he sowed a university while everything burned around him. Providence writes straight with crooked lines: the seed Innocent VII placed in the ground — the principle of renunciation for unity, and the renewal of Roman culture — rose after him, in Gregory XII and in Renaissance Rome.^[131][132]

• The Western Schism (1378-1417) — the major dossier on the double papacy in which Innocent VII was one of the legitimate Roman pontiffs.
• Pope Boniface IX (1389-1404) — his predecessor, who made Migliorati a cardinal and left him an agitated Rome.
• Pope Gregory XII (1406-1415) — his successor, whose abdication at Constance fulfilled the oath of unity sworn in 1404.
• Pope Innocent VI (1352-1362) — another jurist-pope of the late Middle Ages, reformer of the Avignon court.
• The Avignon Papacy (1309-1377) — the Rhone exile from which the schism directly followed.

Ignispedia article — Church History category, "The Popes" series. Sources: Catholic Encyclopedia (1910, 1912), Encyclopædia Britannica, Enciclopedia dei Papi (Treccani, 2000), New Catholic Encyclopedia (W. R. Bonniwell), Wikipedia (FR/EN), bull Ad exaltationem Romanae Urbis (1406), Catechism of the Catholic Church.