The Council of Pisa of 1511: Agrippa as theologian between pope and king

In 1511 Agrippa came down into Italy with a role that placed him at the centre of one of the gravest crises of the early sixteenth-century Church. He was called as a theologian to the council that opened in Pisa in the autumn of that year, an assembly summoned against the will of the pope. For the young scholar, still under imperial protection, it was the start of a long Italian stay that would last until 1518.

A council against the pope

The Council of Pisa arose from the clash between Pope Julius II and King Louis XII of France during the Italian Wars. A group of dissident cardinals, supported by the French king and initially also by Emperor Maximilian, convened the assembly by appealing to the old doctrine that a general council held authority over the pontiff. Among the most prominent promoters was the Spanish cardinal Bernardino López de Carvajal, known as the cardinal of Santa Croce.

It was Carvajal himself, according to the letters, who called Agrippa as a theologian. The young German had a reputation for learning, and his ties with the imperial court made him a useful figure. We do not know precisely what contribution he made to the proceedings, nor whether he spoke in the sessions. His role was probably that of one adviser among many.

Failure and Rome's response

The Pisan assembly had a short and difficult life. The citizens of Pisa, then under Florentine rule, received the council fathers with hostility, and after only a few sessions the council moved to Milan, controlled by the French, where its work continued in a climate of growing isolation. Julius II responded by summoning the Fifth Lateran Council in Rome, which opened in May 1512, and struck the rebel cardinals with censures. Maximilian, meanwhile, distanced himself from the French cause.

With the military defeat of the French in 1512 and their withdrawal from the Milanese, the experience of the conciliabulum, as its opponents called it, came to an end. The dissident cardinals were later reconciled with Julius II's successor, Leo X. For Agrippa, taking part had no serious consequences, but it tied him for a time to a losing cause and taught him how risky it was, for a scholar without means, to bind himself to the fortunes of a single party.

What it meant for Agrippa

The Pisa experience brought Agrippa into contact with high ecclesiastical politics and the senior Italian clergy. It also showed him, at close range, the gap between the ideals of Church reform and the interests of rulers. Many years later, in the De vanitate scientiarum, he would harshly criticise the corruption of the curia and the ambition of prelates, and it is not hard to imagine that those memories played a part.

The Italian stay that began at Pisa was decisive for his culture. In Italy Agrippa deepened his knowledge of Marsilio Ficino's Neoplatonism, of the philosophy of Pico della Mirandola and of the Hermetic texts, on which he would lecture at Pavia a few years later. The council was thus only the entrance: what really mattered were the libraries, the teachers and the patrons he met in the cities of the peninsula.