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Rh even depose the Pope. This had been defined at Constance in the third session—before it became an œcumenical synod. Wyclif and Hus had appeared, strange antinomian sects already abounded who taught the wildest extravagances and entirely rejected all ecclesiastical authority. The first breath of the great storm that was coming—the Protestant Reformation—was in the air. Eugene IV had sworn at his election to summon yet another council; so unwillingly he had to do so. He opened the synod at Basel on July 23, 1431, through his Legate, Cardinal Cesarini. Then, as very few Fathers came, he dissolved it almost at once and summoned it to Bologna. But the council would not go there, it got out of hand almost at once, demanded the retractation of the bull of dissolution, renewed the decree of Constance that a general council is above the Pope, summoned Eugene to appear before it, then declared him contumacious, deposed him, and set up Duke Amadeus of Savoy as anti-Pope—Felix V. By this time all the moderate members had left Basel; no one wanted a renewal of the time when the Church was torn by the claims of two Popes, Æneas Silvius Piccolomini (afterwards Pius II, 1458–1464) and Nicholas of Cusa, Bishop of Brixen, who were at first the leading spirits at Basel, went over to the Pope's side. The schismatical council, now reduced to about twenty or thirty bishops under Cardinal d'Allemand, Archbishop of Aries, lost the sympathy of every one by its extravagance, and at last even Duke Amadeus went quietly home, and the whole movement whittled out almost unnoticed in 1443.

Meanwhile Eugene IV had again changed the place where his council was to be held, and summoned it from Bologna to Ferrara on September 11, 1437. The bishops at Basel, who made up their number by admitting a crowd of parish priests and doctors of divinity, excommunicated every one who took any part in the proceedings at Ferrara. Eugene excommunicated all the rabble at Basel. The object of the council at Ferrara was to be reunion with the Eastern Churches. It would be, indeed, a triumph for the Pope if he could show the Christian world that just now, when he was at war with what called itself an œcumenical council, he