Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Yahoo's excellent chronology continues:

1438 In France, a national assembly met in Bourges and issued a document called the Pragmatic Sanction. It recognized decrees made at Basel and Constance affirming the superiority of councils to popes; the rights of elections traditionally enjoyed by cathedral chapters, collegiate churches, and monasteries; abolished annates and other forms of papal taxation and meddling; and warned the pope against becoming involved in ecclesiastical trials before they ascended to him through the various levels of appeal courts. French independence of Rome came to be termed “Gallicanism.”

1439 The French Parlement made the Pragmatic Sanction a statute for France.

1453 The English were expelled from France entirely, except for Calais (end of the Hundred Years War).

1478-80 A severe outbreak of plague in Europe. Perhaps 15% of the population of England, France, and the Netherlands were killed.

1494 King Charles VIII of France marched into Florence. Their coming had been predicted two years before by Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican who preached about the last days and claimed to have visions of and to speak with God. With the Medici driven out of Florence, Savonarola set up a democratic Republic there. Critical of the church in Rome and the Pope Alexander, Savonarola attempted to reform the church in Florence.

The French army brought a hitherto unknown disease with them, which was soon known as the French pox. It appears to have been like syphilis.

King Charles VIII had come to Italy to lay claim to the Kingdom of Naples. Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), threatened by the French army, asked the Turkish Sultan Bayezid for 300,000 ducats to help him drive the French from Italy, and so prevent them from using the peninsula to launch a new crusade against the Turks.

1498 The government of Florence hanged and burned Girolamo Savonarola (see 1494). Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) had excommunicated him in 1497. In 1495, the pope had tempted Savonarola to travel to Rome, but Girolamo smelled a trap. The pope viewed him as the principal impediment to Florence joining the Holy League (the papal territories, the German empire, Aragon, Venice, and Milan) against the king of France.