Eugenius

Eugenius, the name of four popes.

Eugenius I., pope from 654 to 657. Elected on the banishment of Martin I. by the emperor Constans II., and at the height of the Monothelite crisis, he showed greater deference than his predecessor to the emperor’s wishes, and made no public stand against the patriarchs of Constantinople. He, however, held no communication with them, being closely watched in this respect by Roman opinion.

Eugenius II., pope, was a native of Rome, and was chosen to succeed Pascal I. in 824. His election did not take place without difficulty. Eugenius was the candidate of the nobles, and the clerical faction brought forward a competitor. But the monk Wala, the representative of the emperor Lothair, succeeded in arranging matters, and Eugenius was elected. Lothair, however, came to Rome in person, and took advantage of this opportunity to redress many abuses in the papal administration, to vest the election of the pope in the nobles, and to confirm the statute that no pope should be consecrated until his election had the approval of the emperor. A council which assembled at Rome during the reign of Eugenius passed several enactments for the restoration of church discipline, took measures for the foundation of schools and chapters, and decided against priests wearing a secular dress or engaging in secular occupations. Eugenius also adopted various provisions for the care of the poor and of widows and orphans. He died in 827.

Eugenius III. (Bernardo Paganelli), pope from the 15th of February 1145 to the 8th of July 1153, a native of Pisa, was abbot of the Cistercian monastery of St Anastasius at Rome when suddenly elected to succeed Lucius II. His friend and instructor, Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential ecclesiastic of the time, remonstrated against his election on account of his “innocence and simplicity,” but Bernard soon acquiesced and continued to be the mainstay of the papacy throughout Eugenius’s pontificate. It was to Eugenius that Bernard addressed his famous work De consideratione. Immediately after his election, the Roman senators demanded the pope’s renunciation of temporal power. He refused and fled to Farfa, where he was consecrated on the 17th of February. By treaty of December 1145 he recognized the republic under his suzerainty, substituted a papal prefect for the “patrician” and returned to Rome. The celebrated schismatic, Arnold of Brescia, however, put himself again at the head of the party opposed to the temporal power of the papacy, re-established the patricianate, and forced the pope to leave Rome. Eugenius had already, on hearing of the fall of Edessa, addressed a letter to Louis VII. of France (December 1145), announcing the Second Crusade and granting plenary indulgence under the usual conditions to those who would take the cross; and in January 1147 he journeyed to France to further preparations for the holy war and to seek aid in the constant feuds at Rome. After holding synods at Paris, Reims and Trier, he returned to Italy in June 1148 and took up his residence at Viterbo. The following month he excommunicated Arnold of Brescia in a synod at Cremona, and thenceforth devoted most of his energies to the recovery of his see. As the result of negotiations between Frederick Barbarossa and the Romans, Eugenius was finally enabled to return to Rome in December 1152, but died in the following July. He was succeeded by Anastasius IV. Eugenius retained the stoic virtues of monasticism throughout his stormy career, and was deeply reverenced for his personal character. His tomb in St Peter’s acquired fame for miraculous cures, and he was pronounced blessed by Pius IX. in 1872.

Eugenius IV. (Gabriel Condulmieri), pope from the 3rd of March 1431 to the 23rd of February 1447, was born at Venice of a merchant family in 1383. He entered the Celestine order and came into prominence during the pontificate of his uncle, Gregory XII., by whom he was appointed bishop of Siena, papal treasurer, protonotary, cardinal-priest of St Marco e St Clemente, and later cardinal-priest of Sta Maria in Trastevere. His violent measures, as pope, against the relations of his predecessor, Martin V., at once involved him in a serious contest with the powerful house of Colonna. But by far the most important feature of Eugenius’s pontificate was the great struggle between pope and council. On the 23rd of July 1431 his legate opened the council of Basel which had been convoked by Martin, but, distrustful of its purposes and moved by the small attendance, the pope issued a bull on the 18th of December 1431, dissolving the council and calling a new one to meet in eighteen months at Bologna. The council refused to dissolve, renewed the revolutionary resolutions by which the council of Constance had been declared superior to the pope, and cited Eugenius to appear at Basel. A compromise was arranged by Sigismund, who had been crowned emperor at Rome on the 31st of May 1433, by which the pope recalled the bull of dissolution, and, reserving the rights of the Holy See, acknowledged the council as ecumenical (15th of December 1433). The establishment of an insurrectionary republic at Rome drove him into exile in May 1434, and, although the city was restored to obedience in the following October, he remained at Florence and Bologna. Meanwhile the struggle with the council broke out anew. Eugenius at length convened a rival council at Ferrara on the 8th of January 1438 and excommunicated the prelates assembled at Basel. The result was that the latter formally deposed him as a heretic on the 25th of June 1439, and in the following November elected the ambitious Amadeus VIII., duke of Savoy, antipope under the title of Felix V. The conduct of France and Germany seemed to warrant this action, for Charles VII. had introduced the decrees of the council of Basel, with slight changes, into the former country through the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (7th of July 1438), and the diet of Mainz had deprived the pope of most of his rights in the latter country (26th of March 1439). At Florence, whither the council of Ferrara had been transferred on account of an outbreak of the plague, was effected in July 1439 a union with the Greeks, which, as the result of political necessities, proved but temporary. This union was followed by others of even less stability. Eugenius signed an agreement with the Armenians on the 22nd of November 1439, and with a part of the Jacobites in 1443; and in 1445 he received the Nestorians and Maronites. He did his best to stem the Turkish advance, pledging one-fifth of the papal income to the crusade which set out in 1443, but which met with overwhelming defeat. His rival, Felix V., meanwhile obtained small recognition, and the latter’s ablest adviser, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, made peace with Eugenius in 1442. The pope’s recognition of the claims to Naples of King Alphonso of Aragon withdrew the last important support from the council of Basel, and enabled him to make a victorious entry into Rome on the 28th of September 1443, after an exile of nearly ten years. His protests against the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges were ineffectual, but by means of the Concordat of the Princes, negotiated by Piccolomini with the electors in February 1447, the whole of Germany declared against the antipope. Although his pontificate had been so stormy and unhappy that he is said to have regretted on his death-bed that he ever left his monastery, nevertheless Eugenius’s victory over the council of Basel and his efforts in behalf of church unity contributed greatly to break down the conciliar movement and restore the papacy to the position it had held before the Great Schism. Eugenius was dignified in demeanour, but inexperienced and vacillating in action and excitable in temper. Bitter in his hatred of heresy, he yet displayed great kindness to the poor. He laboured to reform the monastic orders, especially the Franciscan, and was never guilty of nepotism. Although a type of the austere monk in his private life, he was a sincere friend of art and learning, and in 1431 re-established finally the university at Rome. He died on the 23rd of February 1447, and was succeeded by Nicholas V.