The Forty-Year Period When Europe Had Two and Sometimes Three Popes at the Same Time

The Catholic-Christian world of Western Europe had two popes simultaneously between 1378 and 1409, and three popes simultaneously between 1409 and 1417. The forty-year crisis is known as the Great Western Schism. It followed directly from the Avignon papacy of 1309–1377 — the period in which the papacy had operated from southeastern France rather than from Rome — and produced the most substantive challenge to papal institutional authority that Latin Christendom had experienced since the 11th-century investiture controversy.

How it started

Pope Gregory XI, the seventh and last of the Avignon popes, returned the papal administration from Avignon to Rome in January 1377 under substantive political pressure (most visibly from the Italian Dominican mystic Catherine of Siena, who travelled to Avignon personally to argue the case). Gregory died at Rome in March 1378, fourteen months after the return.

The College of Cardinals — sixteen voting members, mostly French and resident in Italy under substantial duress — elected the Italian archbishop Urban VI in April 1378. Urban’s behaviour in the first months of his pontificate (substantial outbursts of public anger at individual cardinals, an apparent intention to substantively transfer the papacy back from French to Italian dominance, possibly clinical mental illness) alienated the French cardinal majority. The thirteen French cardinals retired to Anagni in summer 1378, declared Urban’s April election invalid on coercion grounds, returned to Avignon, and elected the French cardinal Robert of Geneva as Clement VII in September 1378.

Both lines claimed the chair of Saint Peter. Both excommunicated the other. Both maintained full curial administrations and substantive papal claims to the universal Catholic Church.

How the obedience split

The political division was substantively Anglo-French. The Roman line (Urban VI and his successors Boniface IX, Innocent VII, Gregory XII) was recognised by England, the Holy Roman Empire, the Italian states, Scandinavia, Hungary, and Poland. The Avignon line (Clement VII and his successor Benedict XIII) was recognised by France, the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, Scotland, Naples, and Cyprus. The substantive driver was the Hundred Years’ War — England’s enemies sided with the French pope, England’s allies with the Roman one. The schism substantially coincided with the Capetian-Valois succession conflict that had triggered the war and with Henry Tudor’s eventual Welsh-Breton exile period.

The substantive ecclesiastical-administrative consequences were extensive. Episcopal appointments, monastic confirmations, marriage annulments, indulgences, judicial appeals — all of these required papal confirmation, and the entire Catholic infrastructure of the period operated through two parallel and mutually-rejecting systems. Universities, religious orders, and parish churches all had to choose sides; some chose pragmatically and switched repeatedly.

The three-pope phase

The 1409 Council of Pisa attempted to resolve the schism by deposing both existing popes and electing a new one (Alexander V, succeeded almost immediately by John XXIII). Neither the Roman nor the Avignon pope accepted the deposition. The Catholic Church now had three popes simultaneously: Gregory XII at Rome, Benedict XIII at Avignon, and John XXIII at Pisa (later Bologna).

The Council of Constance ends it

The schism was resolved by the Council of Constance (1414–1418), the largest church council of the medieval period — approximately 600 prelates, 1,800 monks and friars, and 30,000 laypeople attended at peak — convened by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. The Council deposed John XXIII and Benedict XIII, accepted Gregory XII’s voluntary abdication, and elected the Roman cardinal Oddone Colonna as Pope Martin V in November 1417. Constance also tried and executed Jan Hus (the Bohemian reformer whose theological objections to papal authority had been formed in the schism period) — substantively a parallel attempt to suppress the broader institutional-theological challenges that the schism had let loose.

What it left behind

The schism substantively undermined papal authority for the remainder of the medieval period. The doctrinal claim that general councils held authority over popes (conciliarism, formally articulated at Constance) became a counter-tradition within Catholic constitutional theory through the next two centuries. The institutional fracture made the subsequent national-church developments — Wycliffite reform in England, Hussite reform in Bohemia, eventually the Lutheran reform in Germany — substantively easier to articulate as legitimate ecclesiastical positions rather than mere heresies.

The Great Western Schism is the immediate institutional predecessor of the Protestant Reformation, by exactly one century.