Pope Martin V

Oddone Colonna was born in 1369, most likely at Genazzano in the hill country southeast of Rome, into one of the oldest and most combative baronial families of central Italy ^[1]. The Colonna had produced cardinals, senators, and soldiers for centuries, and had feuded famously with popes: a century before Oddone's birth, members of the family had taken part in the humiliation of Boniface VIII at Anagni. His father, Agapito Colonna, and his mother, Caterina Conti, belonged to the tight circle of Roman nobility whose fortunes rose and fell with papal politics ^[2].

The young Colonna was sent to study law at the University of Perugia, a common training ground for churchmen destined for administrative careers ^[1]. He entered the papal bureaucracy under Urban VI, the pope whose disputed election in 1378 had triggered the very schism Oddone would one day resolve. He served as an apostolic protonotary, a senior notarial post in the curia, and steadily accumulated experience in the machinery of church government ^[3].

Contemporaries described him as capable rather than brilliant, a careful administrator with a lawyer's patience. That reputation for steadiness, combined with his family's Roman roots, would later make him an attractive compromise candidate when Christendom finally sought a way out of its long division ^[2].

Innocent VII raised Colonna to the cardinalate in 1405, naming him cardinal deacon of San Giorgio in Velabro ^[1]. By then the Western Schism was nearly three decades old. Since 1378 there had been two competing lines of popes, one seated in Rome and one in Avignon, each with its own college of cardinals, its own taxation network, and its own bloc of obedient kingdoms. Anyone asking who was Pope Martin V must first understand this crisis, because his entire career was shaped by attempts to end it ^[4].

In 1408 Colonna joined the cardinals who abandoned the Roman claimant Gregory XII in frustration at his refusal to negotiate a joint resignation with his Avignon rival. He took part in the Council of Pisa in 1409, which deposed both existing claimants and elected a third, Alexander V, an act that unintentionally left Europe with three men claiming the papacy at once ^[3]. Colonna remained loyal to the Pisan line and served its second pope, John XXIII, in whose obedience he stayed until the Council of Constance opened in 1414 ^[4].

Constance, summoned under pressure from the emperor-elect Sigismund, gradually cleared the field. John XXIII was deposed in 1415, Gregory XII resigned that same year, and the Avignon claimant Benedict XIII, holed up in Spain, was formally deposed in July 1417 ^[4]. With the see effectively vacant, the council prepared an election unlike any other in church history: the twenty-three cardinals present were joined by thirty deputies drawn from the council's five nations, six from each, so that the whole of Catholic Europe would own the result ^[5].

The conclave assembled in the merchant hall of Constance and, on 11 November 1417, elected Oddone Colonna on the third day of voting ^[1]. Because the election fell on the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, he took the name Martin V. The choice of a Roman noble from neither the French nor the strongly conciliarist camps satisfied nearly everyone, and the news set off celebrations across the city. For the first time in thirty-nine years, Western Christendom had a single pope whose legitimacy almost no one disputed ^[5].

Martin moved quickly to reclaim papal authority from the council that had elected him. He confirmed some reform decrees but resisted the more sweeping claims of conciliar supremacy, and he satisfied the reform party chiefly through separate concordats negotiated nation by nation ^[4]. In the decree Frequens the council had bound future popes to summon councils at regular intervals, and Martin formally complied while working to keep such assemblies weak. He dissolved Constance in April 1418 and began a slow journey toward Italy ^[3].

The road home took over two years. Rome was in chaos, occupied by the condottiere Braccio da Montone and reduced by decades of neglect to a depopulated ruin. Martin waited in Mantua and then in Florence, where he lodged at Santa Maria Novella while his diplomats and hired captains cleared his path ^[2]. He finally entered Rome on 28 September 1420, an event later Romans remembered as the true refounding of their city ^[1].

The most consequential of Pope Martin V achievements was the simple fact of restoration: one pope, resident in Rome, recognized from Portugal to Poland. But he also rebuilt the physical and institutional foundations that made that restoration durable. He found Rome, in the words of contemporaries, so decayed that it scarcely resembled a city, with churches roofless, streets buried in refuse, and wolves reported near the basilicas ^[2]. Martin ordered the repair of roads, bridges, and the great basilicas, revived the office of the magistri viarum to oversee streets and sanitation, and pressed cardinals to restore their titular churches ^[6].

He was an early and discerning patron of the new painting. He brought Gentile da Fabriano to Rome to fresco the nave of Saint John Lateran, a cycle continued after Gentile's death by Pisanello, and artists in the orbit of Masolino and Masaccio also worked on Roman commissions during his reign ^[6]. In the Papal States he reasserted control through a mixture of diplomacy, war, and family alliances, recovering territories that had slipped into the hands of local lords and mercenary captains during the schism. The defeat and death of Braccio da Montone in 1424 removed the most dangerous of these rivals ^[3].

Martin also rebuilt the papal finances and the curial bureaucracy, centralizing appointments and revenues in ways that strengthened the papacy but disappointed reformers who had hoped Constance would curb exactly those practices ^[4]. Among the lesser known Pope Martin V facts is his repeated legislation on behalf of Jewish communities: in bulls of 1422 and 1429 he condemned forced baptism and violent anti-Jewish preaching and ordered that Jews be protected in their persons and property, positions he restated despite pressure from popular preachers ^[7].

Reunion did not end controversy. In Bohemia the followers of Jan Hus, the reformer burned at Constance in 1415, had risen in open revolt, and Martin treated the Hussite movement as the gravest heresy of his age. He proclaimed crusades against the Hussites beginning in 1420, but the imperial and German armies sent into Bohemia were repeatedly and humiliatingly beaten by forces under Jan Zizka and his successors ^[4]. Near the end of his life Martin appointed Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini as legate for yet another campaign, which would collapse at Domazlice months after the pope's death ^[3].

His relations with the conciliar movement remained guarded. Bound by Frequens, he summoned a council to Pavia in 1423, transferred it to Siena when plague struck, and dissolved it in 1424 when attendance stayed thin and its rhetoric grew threatening ^[4]. He then set the next council for Basel seven years later, as the decree required. In February 1431 he duly convoked the Council of Basel and named Cesarini to preside, though he did not live to see it open ^[1].

Martin also worked the diplomatic channels of a Europe still at war. He attempted repeatedly to mediate between England and France in the long conflict later called the Hundred Years' War, with little success, and he negotiated with the Byzantine emperor over a possible council of union between the Latin and Greek churches, discussions that bore fruit only under his successors ^[3].

Martin never separated the papacy from the Colonna. He enriched his brothers and nephews with fiefs carved from the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, making his family for a time the greatest landholders in central Italy ^[2]. Defenders have argued that in a lawless landscape only trusted kinsmen could hold recovered territory; critics, in his own century and since, saw plain nepotism that his successor Eugenius IV would try violently to undo. Both readings capture something true about a pope who thought like a Roman baron as much as like a priest ^[3].

In person he was frugal, hardworking, and reserved, with little of the display that later Renaissance popes cultivated. He kept a modest court, watched the treasury closely, and preferred residences connected with his family, spending long periods at the Colonna palace near Santi Apostoli rather than at the Vatican ^[2]. Humanists found him a cautious rather than generous patron of letters, though he employed scholars such as Poggio Bracciolini in the curia ^[6].

He died in Rome on 20 February 1431, reportedly of a stroke, at about sixty-one years of age ^[1]. He was buried in the basilica of Saint John Lateran, the cathedral he had done so much to restore. His bronze tomb slab, attributed to the Florentine sculptor Simone Ghini and possibly designed with Donatello's involvement, still lies before the high altar, inscribed with the phrase calling him the happiness of his times ^[6].

Martin V's reign closed one era and opened another. By ending the schism and re-establishing the papacy in Rome, he made possible everything the fifteenth-century papacy later became, from the scholarly court of Nicholas V to the building projects of Julius II. Historians often date the beginning of the Renaissance papacy to his return to the city in 1420 ^[6]. The urban recovery he began, modest as it was, reversed a decline that had lasted more than a century.

His institutional legacy is more contested. Martin restored papal monarchy at the expense of the conciliar reform program, and the struggle he postponed erupted under Eugenius IV, when the Council of Basel openly defied the pope ^[4]. Reform of curial abuses, deferred in his reign, remained deferred until the crisis of the sixteenth century. Some scholars therefore treat him as the man who won the battle for papal authority while losing the longer war for the church's credibility ^[3].

Yet his contemporaries judged him kindly, and the essential facts speak for themselves. A church with three popes in 1415 had one in 1417, and it kept one. Rome, nearly abandoned, became a papal capital again. For a figure so consequential, Martin V remains comparatively little known outside specialist literature, which is precisely why the question of who was Pope Martin V rewards a closer look ^[1].