Introduction

According to twentieth-century historiography, Spain played a crucial role in shaping the Counter-Reformation: Emperor Charles V supported Rome against the Lutheran Reformation and the Spanish bishops led the Council of Trent.Footnote ¹ In recent decades, early modern scholars have begun to revise this historical interpretation. Scholars of political history have highlighted the diplomatic and military activity that Charles V developed to limit the authority of the pope in temporal matters.Footnote ² Historians of political thought have emphasized that Spanish political thought questioned the primacy of the pope within the church.Footnote ³ However, the connections between Spanish political thought and Charles V’s policies regarding the papacy remain largely unexplored, thus overlooking the fact that the same Spanish jurists and theologians who produced this political thought served in different capacities in the imperial administration.

Alfonso Álvarez Guerrero (ca. 1502–76) was a Spanish jurist who spent his whole professional career serving the imperial administration in the Kingdom of Naples. He is an example of a new social class made up of letrados, men trained in the law who reached high administrative positions thanks to their juridical training and writing.Footnote ⁴ He used his legal training to take care of urgent and immediate problems of imperial policy, such as reforming the justice system in the Kingdom of Naples, justifying war against Francis I, and creating the procedures for convening a general council. The political purpose of such treatises, which was obvious to the readership for whom they were intended, is not always apparent to historians. The accumulation of direct quotations from canon law and the silence surrounding contemporary figures and events suggests that these works were exercises in academic scholarship with no implications for contemporary politics. This is the case of the first juridical book published by Álvarez Guerrero, the Tractado de la forma que se ha de tener en la celebración del general concilio y acerca de la reformación de la Iglesia (Treatise on the manner in which a general council is to be held and about the Reformation of the church), published in April 1536 by a Valencian printing house specializing in legal texts. The first edition of the treatise, other than being dedicated to Charles V, makes no reference to the historical context of the time. Nonetheless, it reveals its political function when the courtly and diplomatic context for which it was conceived is taken into account.

In the following pages, I shall examine the professional career of Alfonso Álvarez Guerrero, present the conciliarist doctrine in his Tractado, and set out the political and diplomatic circumstances in which the work was conceived and circulated and the reasons why a work with these characteristics might have been welcomed, both at the court of the emperor and among some Spanish clergymen. By explaining the aims of this treatise and its reception, I shall demonstrate that this legal literature should be included in studies on imperial government and politics.

Álvarez Guerrero’s Life and Works

Even though little is known about his life, it is possible to reconstruct Álvarez Guerrero’s rise through the imperial court through the posts to which he was appointed and the context of his writings.Footnote ⁵ He was born in Toledo, probably in 1502.Footnote ⁶ He studied civil and canon law, although I have been unable to determine at which university.Footnote ⁷ During the second half of 1519, he was in Barcelona, where Charles V was at the time. It was, in fact, in Barcelona, in June 1519, that news arrived that Charles had been elected future king of the Romans by the prince-electors. This was the context in which Álvarez Guerrero wrote his first book, which was made up of two long poems: Las Doscientas del Castillo de la Fama (The two hundred of the castle of fame) and Las Cincuenta del Laberinto contra Fortuna (The fifty of the labyrinth against fortune). These two poems are imitations of the Laberinto de Fortuna (Labyrinth of fortune, 1444) and the Coronación al Marqués de Santillana (Crowning of the Marquis of Santillana, 1438), respectively, both by the poet Juan de Mena (1411–56), who continued to enjoy extraordinary prestige in Castile. The book closes with a prose treatise that includes brief biographies of all the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire from Otto the Great (912–73) until Charles himself. This book must have served as a sort of letter of introduction to the court, since it was printed a matter of weeks before Charles left Barcelona, on 25 January 1520.Footnote ⁸ At a time when Castile was rejecting the imperial election and revolts in the kingdoms of Valencia and Castile were looming, a work like Las Doscientas del Castillo de la Fama, which placed the dignity of the emperor and of the king of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, on an equal footing, would have been welcomed at court.Footnote ⁹

Álvarez Guerrero attended the coronation of the emperor in Bologna, in February 1530. Two weeks later, in the same city, he published a second book of poetry, which also comprises two extensive works in verse form: the Palacio de la Fama (Palace of fame) and the Historia de las Guerras de Italia (History of the wars in Italy). The work was commissioned directly by Alfonso d’Avalos (1502–46), the highest-ranking representative of the Spanish nobility in Italy.Footnote ¹⁰ The narration of part of the Italian Wars included in this volume—from the siege of Marseilles by the imperial troops in 1524 to the Peace of Cambrai in 1529—is a panegyric to the generals of the imperial side, as well as to d’Avalos himself, and presents a point of view on the Roman Curia that anticipates the content of his treatise on the general council.

The d’Avalos lineage was one of the most influential and extensive in the Kingdom of Naples, where the family had been settled since the time of Alphonse the Magnanimous (1396–1458). This link with Alfonso d’Avalos may explain Álvarez Guerrero’s involvement—although it is not known in what capacity—in “the government of the provinces of Otranto and Bari” between 1530 and 1532.Footnote ¹¹ The governor general of those provinces between 1519 and 1532 was Alfonso Castriota (d. 1544), one of the Neapolitan nobles who supported the policies of the viceroy of Naples, Pedro de Toledo, after the latter had been appointed to the position in September 1532.Footnote ¹² It is possible that Castriota recommended Álvarez Guerrero to the viceroy, although this is a hypothesis that I have been unable to corroborate. Indeed, I have not been able to gather any information about any possible post held by Álvarez Guerrero in the viceregal administration between 1533 and 1539, the year when he was appointed president for life of the Camera di Sommaria, the main organ of administrative and fiscal control in the Kingdom of Naples.Footnote ¹³ However, a post of such responsibility would not have been awarded to someone who was unfamiliar with the political and financial situation in the kingdom, so that it is quite plausible that Álvarez Guerrero would have occupied a post of some responsibility in the years immediately before he was appointed. Furthermore, the content of his first juridical treatises, published in the mid-1530s, also places the author in the political context of Naples.

His first treatise was the Tractado on the general council and the reform of the church. The first edition was published in Valencia on the presses of Francisco Díaz Romano, a well-known printer of legal texts, on 29 April 1536.Footnote ¹⁴ A reissue of the first edition came off the same presses on 16 December 1536.Footnote ¹⁵ A third edition, with significant stylistic changes, some additions, and a lengthy new chapter on imperial and papal legal powers, was published in the printing house of Antonio Bellono in Genoa four months later, on 30 April 1537. It is recorded that Álvarez Guerrero set off from Rome for Northern Italy in spring 1536, so that it is possible that he was still part of the court retinue at the time when Charles V was staying in Genoa between September and November 1536. The publication of the treatise in this city, which may have appeared later than the author envisaged, has to be connected to the emperor’s stay there. Notwithstanding, three editions of a treatise on ecclesiology in a single year suggest that the work aroused considerable interest.

The second treatise was the Liber Aureus Perutilis ac Necessarius de Administratione et Executione Iustitiae (Excellent, very useful and necessary book on the administration and execution of justice). It was also printed in Valencia by Francisco Díaz Romano, dated 1 September 1536, and dedicated to Emperor Charles V.Footnote ¹⁶ This was a treatise on procedural law, both civil and criminal, with a first chapter devoted to setting out the universal jurisdiction of the emperor along Ghibelline lines. The work must have been written in the context of the reform of justice undertaken in the Kingdom of Naples between 1532 and 1536 by Pedro de Toledo. The judicial system in the cities and feudal domains of the barons alike was marked by corruption, and the viceroy’s reforms set out to centralize the administration of justice and guarantee its efficiency by reforming the courts and disciplinary procedures.Footnote ¹⁷ Álvarez Guerrero’s text takes on full meaning in this context of reform and it is possible that the viceroy himself commissioned its composition.

Álvarez Guerrero must have soon shown that he had little aptitude for the basically administrative work that the post of president of the Camera involved. In August 1541, the deputy of the Camera, Bartolomeo Camerario (1497–1564), asked Charles V to dismiss Álvarez Guerrero from the post because he did not possess the requisite qualities for the office and begged Charles to find an ecclesiastical benefice for Álvarez Guerrero.Footnote ¹⁸ In January 1542, Álvarez Guerrero himself wrote to Francisco de los Cobos (ca. 1477–1547) applying for the vacant bishopric of Caserta: “I beg of you to grant me the boon of recommending me to His Majesty so that he will command that I be proposed for this church with which I may, as I say, be better able to serve and pray to God for Your Lordship’s most illustrious person.”Footnote ¹⁹ His petitions went unheeded, which indicates that he did not have sufficient influence to obtain the ecclesiastical benefice that he aspired to, but does nonetheless confirm that Álvarez Guerrero was trusted by the viceroy since he maintained him in the position after Camerario, who had been Álvarez Guerrero’s immediate superior, fell from grace in 1547.Footnote ²⁰ That the viceroy sponsored the next two juridical works by the author, which were printed in the Neapolitan printing house of Ambrosio Manzaneda, situated within the Castel Nuovo itself, confirms that his position was one of influence, and also suggests that Álvarez Guerrero expected some kind of remuneration for these treatises—both dedicated to Charles V—which probably did not materialize.

The first of the two treatises printed in the Castel Nuovo is the Aureus et Singularis Tractatus de Bello Iusto et Iniusto (Excellent and unique treatise on the just and unjust war). The edition is dated October 1543, although there is a manuscript copy dated 1542.Footnote ²¹ The French monarch had declared war on the emperor on 12 July 1542. The casus belli was the assassination of the French ambassador, of Spanish origin, Antonio Rincón, on 4 July 1541, near the city of Pavia. During the following months, various attacks were perpetrated against imperial interests: in the north against Luxemburg, and from Montpellier, in the south, against Perpignan. Álvarez Guerrero’s treatise was written in this context to justify Charles V declaring war on the French king, which finally occurred on 22 June 1543.Footnote ²² The justification occupies only the last chapter and the rest of the treatise is an exposition of the just-war theory. The doctrine presented in the work is the one that was widely circulated at the beginning of the sixteenth century in encyclopedias such as the Summa Sylvestrina (1516) by Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio (ca. 1456–1527).Footnote ²³ The second treatise, Tractatus de Modo et Ordine Generalis Concilii Celebrandi et de Reformatione Ecclesiae Dei (Treatise on the manner and order in which a general council should be held and on the reform of the church), was a Latin version of the Tractado on the general council published in the thirties. This is a complete reworking of the text of the first edition and more than twice the length of the original—increasing from 60 to 140 pages—and includes six new chapters on the reform of the church.Footnote ²⁴

The appeals of the author to be granted an ecclesiastical benefice that would release him from his post as president went unheeded. He was still appearing in the official records as president of the Camera in 1572, just four years before he died.Footnote ²⁵ It seems that the publication of his most ambitious work, the Thesaurus Christianae Religionis et Speculum Sacrorum Summorum Pontificum Imperatorum ac Regum et Sanctissimorum Episcoporum (Treasury of the Christian religion and mirror of the sacred supreme pontiffs, emperors, kings, and most holy bishops), counted for nothing; the first edition appeared in 1559 in the Venetian printing house of Comin da Trino di Monferrato (ca. 1510–ca. 1573). This encyclopedic work was dedicated to Philip II (1527–98) and included a dedication in the preliminaries to his wife, Queen Mary I of England (1516–58). In the Thesaurus, Álvarez Guerrero reissued some chapters from his treatises on procedural law, the law of war, and on the council and church reform in his Latin version—although omitting the conciliarist component in the original text—and added new chapters, principally on matters of canon law. This volume was reissued twice more with additions during the author’s lifetime.Footnote ²⁶

From Gaeta, he wrote two brief memorials to Philip II, in September and December 1560, the first on the need to fortify the city of Brindisi against the Turks—recalling the visits of Fernando de Alarcón (1466–1540) to the area in 1532Footnote ²⁷ —and the second about the general council and reform of the church.Footnote ²⁸ Another report of a historical kind about the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan, also addressed to Philip II, is probably from this time.Footnote ²⁹ In 1572, he was finally appointed bishop of Monopoli. According to the correspondence of the papal nuncio in Naples, he died in June 1576.Footnote ³⁰

A Conciliarist Treatise

Álvarez Guerrero’s Tractado on the general council expressed many of the same concerns as other literature at the time that was demanding a general council to correct the abuses observed in the church and to put an end to the Lutheran Reformation. Álvarez Guerrero calls for bishops to live in their bishoprics, to end pluralism in benefices and the dispensations that legitimated the practice, and for the best-qualified candidates to be selected for vacant posts. The same ideas can be found in the Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia (Report on the reform of the church), produced in 1537 by a committee presided over by Cardinal Gaspar Contarini (1483–1543) and commissioned by Paul III (1468–1549).Footnote ³¹ Álvarez Guerrero’s treatise, however, has one characteristic that distinguishes it from that Consilium and other similar texts: his ecclesiology is based on the Haec Sancta decree, the document that crystallized conciliarist doctrine, promulgated at the fifth session of the Council of Constance (1415). For Álvarez Guerrero, the council represents “the Catholic Church militant” and it “has power immediately from Christ” and is above the pope “in those matters which pertain to the faith,” the eradication of the “schism” and the “general reform” of the church “in head and members.”Footnote ³² He makes no reference to the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) or to the Pastor Aeternus bull (1517), which abrogated the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) and reasserted the supremacy of the pope over the council: “For it is clearly established that only the contemporary Roman pontiff, as holding authority over all councils, has the full right and power to summon, transfer and dissolve councils.”Footnote ³³ He does, however, state that the Haec Sancta decree was promulgated by a legitimate general council approved by Pope Martin V (1369–1431) and ratified at the Council of Basel (1431–49), so that its validity as dogma was indisputable.Footnote ³⁴ The work, in this respect, is conceived as an invitation to Charles V to conclude the project of reform in capite et membris (in head and members) initiated at Constance and interrupted at Basel: “the reform was supposed to be carried out at the Council of Constance and was not because of business arising, but they gave the order and agreed that the reform would be carried out at the first council.” In the third edition of the treatise, the author adds: “and it remains to be done to this day.”Footnote ³⁵

The first edition of Álvarez Guerrero’s treatise comprises fifteen chapters. The work is concerned with three general questions: the convening of the general council (chapters 1–5), the objectives of the council and relations between the council and the pope (chapters 6–9), and, finally, aspects of the administration of the church that should be reformed by a council (chapters 10–15). I shall summarize the main ideas of the Tractado, citing the sources adduced by the author where they are significant for identifying the doctrinal tradition of conciliarism.

The councils are the instrument used by the church to enact reform, end heresies or schisms, and ensure that the decrees and canons of previous councils have been fulfilled.Footnote ³⁶ It is the pope who should normally call a general council.Footnote ³⁷ Originally, the emperors “assembled and authorized the general council,” although later “decrees were issued in which the pontiffs wanted nobody except themselves or their legates with special power to have authority to convene the council.”Footnote ³⁸ A pope, however, could be “a heretic, schismatic or incorrigible” and refuse to convene the council, even when the emperor requested it.Footnote ³⁹ In such cases, the authority to convene it would pass into the hands of the College of Cardinals.Footnote ⁴⁰ If they failed to convene one, power would pass directly to the emperor since the emperor, as “the chief prince of the secular princes” and “advocate of the universal church,” may “convene a general council if there is negligence in the church. This is stated by the Cardinal Zabarella … and also by Felino Sandeo.” If the pope resists, the emperor “could wage war on the person of the pope. This is stated by Niccolò de’ Tudeschi.”Footnote ⁴¹ In this respect, if the pope “were to order that a council not be convened” when it is necessary to convene one, “he is not to be obeyed, because Innocent IV stated that when evils and harm arise from the pope’s commandment, and when that commandment causes scandal in the church, he is not to be obeyed, and those who do obey him sin.”Footnote ⁴²

The council represents the whole of the church and receives its power directly from Christ.Footnote ⁴³ As Saint Jerome said, “the world is greater than the city”—in other words, the church is composed of all true believers and therefore the pope is nothing without the council.Footnote ⁴⁴ When Christ said “upon this rock I will build my Church” (Matthew 16:18), by “church” he meant not only Peter but all the apostles, who were the representatives of the church at that time.Footnote ⁴⁵ The successors of the apostles are the bishops and they therefore represent the universal church.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this respect, “if neither the pope nor his legate were present at the council because the council was convened due to the failure of the pope, … the power and authority to judge, determine and ordain would be with the bishops who went to the council. … The Doctors of Law conclude that even if only one bishop attended, complete authority and power to ordain and judge would rest with him.”Footnote ⁴⁷ As promulgated at the Council of Constance, the council is above the pope in those matters that pertain to the faith, the eradication of schisms, and the general reform of the church in both head and members.Footnote ⁴⁸ In these three matters, “the ruling and judgment of the council as the judgment of a superior must be preferred … over the judgment of the pope. So says the Abbott in his most elegant treatise on the Council of Basel.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The pope may err, but “the universal Church cannot err … in faith or articles of faith,” which explains why the council may “condemn the pope for heresy,” as was confirmed in the case of Pope Anastasius (d. 498) and in the glosses to the canon Si Papa.Footnote ⁵⁰ Finally, concerning the frequency of the councils, the popes were not respecting the Frequens decree promulgated at the thirty-ninth session (1417) of the Council of Constance, according to which councils had to be convened every ten years, because holding them was “the only way that the true reformation of the Christian religion could be comfortably carried out.”Footnote ⁵¹

The human lineage is governed by two laws: natural law found in the Decalogue and the Gospels, and positive law.Footnote ⁵² The canons and decrees of the councils would be examples of positive law. Nonetheless, “they were ordained through the intervention of the grace of the Holy Spirit, because the general council receives power inmediate a Christo [directly from Christ] … which is why the pope, kings and emperor should respect all matters contained and established in the laws and approved in councils,” just as “the law of the Gospel” is respected.Footnote ⁵³ The pope has fullest authority and is “above the council” only in “matters of positive law,” as stated by Niccolò de’ Tudeschi, although this power does not permit him to “dispense without cause,” because otherwise “through such dispensation, the law is violated and public interest stricken”; although the pope is “above the law,” he is “not above the law of God.”Footnote ⁵⁴ “The reformation of the Christian religion” occurs so that “the pontiff, as the head of the building, will observe and have reverence for the decrees and statutes of the Fathers of the Church, for they were established and ordained with the universal Church being congregated together in council.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This is the only way to put an end to pluralism in ecclesiastical benefices, clergy who do not reside in them, bribery in processing papal dispensations and exemptions, papal nepotism, papal appropriation of episcopal property and revenues as sees fall vacant, and the absence of meritocracy in assigning posts.Footnote ⁵⁶

The meaning and scope of the Haec Sancta decree has been comprehensively debated, particularly after Paul de Vooght and Hans Küng asserted its validity as dogma during the years of the Vatican II council.Footnote ⁵⁷ Some historians, such as Joseph Gill, question the validity of the decree, because it was never explicitly approved by any pope.Footnote ⁵⁸ For other historians, such as Hubert Jedin or Walter Brandmüller, it was basically an emergency measure to resolve the extraordinary situation of having three candidates—Gregory XII (1326–1417), John XXIII (ca. 1370–1419), and Benedict XIII (1328–1423)—in contention for the papal throne.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is an interpretation that Charles V himself must have heard in 1531 during a meeting with the papal legate Uberto da Gambara (1489–1549), in which he would have been told that the Lutherans had interpreted the decree to suit their own interests by not taking into account that there was, at the time, not one but “three who were calling themselves the pope.”Footnote ⁶⁰ For historians like Francis Oakley, however, Haec Sancta was a decree promulgated “for any legitimately assembled council in the future,” where what was being proclaimed was “the attribution to the general council—even one acting apart from the pope—of a jurisdictional authority in certain crucial matters superior to that possessed by the pope alone.”Footnote ⁶¹ The content of the Haec Sancta decree was unequivocally interpreted in these terms in the fifteenth century, which was the reason why those who defended the papal monarchy, starting with Juan de Torquemada (1388–1468), tried their utmost to question its legal and dogmatic validity.Footnote ⁶² Given this context, it is no coincidence that Álvarez Guerrero insistently reminds his readers of the validity of the decree as an article of faith: “this opinion was approved at the Council of Constance and the authority of the Council of Basel also intervened. Hence, trying to say the opposite would be tantamount to saying that everyone was a heretic and that the council erred on matters of faith, which must not be admitted. And this was determined in the fourth session of the Council at Constance,Footnote ⁶³ and this decree was approved at the eighteenth session of the Council of Basel.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The Frequens decree, on the other hand, appealed to the need to convene a general council “every ten years for ever,”Footnote ⁶⁵ which can be interpreted as “an attempt to translate into disciplinary regulation the conviction which underlay Haec Sancta.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The text did not necessarily imply a conciliarist position, but it did favor periodic control of the pope’s action of governance by the council, a possibility that was clearly attractive to the rulers, as can be observed in various of the documents produced in Castile in the months previous to the beginning of the Lateran Council; all these texts coincide point for point with Álvarez Guerrero’s diagnosis of the practices that had to be eradicated from the church.Footnote ⁶⁷

Conciliarist doctrine left a deep impression on European ecclesiology and political thought. Most studies have focused on Northern European thinkers like Jacques Almain (1480–1515) and John Mair (1467–1550).Footnote ⁶⁸ Little is known about Spanish conciliarism after the Council of Basel. In fact, Jedin posited: “Was the Iberian peninsula also infected with the spirit of the conciliar theory? By no means.” And he added: “As far as we know, at the turn of the fifteenth century it found scarcely any adherents in the peninsula.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Later, Goñi Gaztambide, in the only overall view of conciliarism in Spain, argued that conciliarism “declined rapidly” after the Council of Basel and that “the conciliarist current had been swept from Spain by the beginning of the sixteenth century.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In “the classic land of Catholic reform,” there was no room for a doctrine that questioned the superiority of the pope over the council.Footnote ⁷¹ My analysis of Álvarez Guerrero’s Tractado demonstrates that this conclusion does not correspond to reality.

Political Context

Although the first edition of the treatise lacks specific historical references that would enable an approximate date of composition to be determined,Footnote ⁷² the circumstances of Italian politics in the winter of 1535–36, as I shall explain in this section, suggest that the text was written during the months immediately prior to its publication. There is certainly a possibility that the work was written earlier; nonetheless, that Álvarez Guerrero sought a publisher for his manuscript at the beginning of 1536 clearly suggests that the author regarded the text as appropriate to that specific political context. Even though the book was printed in Valencia—Álvarez Guerrero must have had some personal or academic connection with the city from a very early date—it was in all probability written in Italy, and not only as a result of his connections with the Kingdom of Naples, discussed above. A letter sent by Gabriel Sánchez, ambassador in Rome, to Ferdinand I, dated 30 June 1536, indicates that Álvarez Guerrero was traveling with the emperor’s court in June 1536.Footnote ⁷³ It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that Álvarez Guerrero was in Naples in the winter of 1535–36 and that he accompanied the emperor’s retinue on its long journey from Naples, leaving on March 21, to Provence. My hypothesis is that the text was ready before Charles V arrived in Naples on 25 November 1535, and that the author circulated the text at court in manuscript form during the months when the emperor was living in the city.

At this point, three aspects of the political context during the fall and winter of 1535–36 need to be analyzed in order to highlight the possible objectives that drove a work such as the Tractado. After an analysis of Pope Paul III’s policy toward the summoning of a general council, the two positions on the matter at the Neapolitan court will be examined to identify the court faction that shared Álvarez Guerrero’s views about the pope and the general policy that the emperor should follow in relation to the papacy. Finally, I shall consider who might have been the immediate target audience of this treatise on ecclesiology written in Spanish.

Charles V disembarked in Trapani, Sicily, on 20 August 1535, after the victory in Tunis and La Goleta. The emperor, together with his court, advanced northwards through Italy. The itinerary he followed reflected his overall purpose of consolidating and increasing his clientelist networks with the various local elites and so reinforcing his presence as emperor on Italian territory.Footnote ⁷⁴ When the court arrived in Rome on 6 April 1536, there were several topics of Italian and European politics that the emperor had to discuss with Paul III. Apart from the succession to the Duchy of Milan, the French invasion of the Duchy of Savoy, the question of the Duchy of Camerino, and continuing the fight against the Turk, the summoning of a general council was also on the table.Footnote ⁷⁵ The two weeks that the emperor spent in Rome were sufficient to agree to call a council in Mantua for May 1537. After Charles left for Siena on April 18, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle (1486–1550) and Francisco de los Cobos, the emperor’s two most influential advisers, remained for a further week to review the draft bull of the call, prepared by Girolamo Aleandro (1480–1542). Once the document had been approved, the two left for Siena on the 25th,Footnote ⁷⁶ just four days before the first edition of Álvarez Guerrero’s Tractado was printed in the printing house of Francisco Díaz Romano in Valencia.

The promulgation of the bull Ad Dominici Gregis Curam on 2 June 1536 convening the general council in Mantua must have taken some by surprise. Clement VII (1478–1534), who had suffered the humiliation of the Sack of Rome in 1527 and imprisonment by imperial troops, had always avoided calling a general council. According to Cardinal García de Loaysa (1478–1546), an imperial official in Rome from 1530 to 1538, to utter the word council was like invoking the devil.Footnote ⁷⁷ A significant part of the College of Cardinals took not the slightest interest in it: “These great lords are so absorbed in their pleasures and ambitions that they know nothing of what is happening in far-off Germany.”Footnote ⁷⁸ When Paul III pointed out in his first consistory that the council was the only way to resolve the Lutheran conflict and irregularities in the functioning of the church, it was expected that many of those who listened would interpret his words as devoid of any commitment.Footnote ⁷⁹ The papal nuncio in France strove to persuade Francis I (1494–1547) that Paul III “does not negotiate in the old way.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In spite of the fact that the correspondence of the papal nuncios in 1535 and 1536 shows Paul III’s determination to hold the council—“he wants it, he wants it, he wants it” wrote the nuncio Vergerio in Februrary 1536Footnote ⁸¹ —Clement VII’s policy of evasiveness remained present in the minds of many political agents of the time.Footnote ⁸²

The correspondence between advisers and courtiers in Rome and the court of Naples during the winter of 1535–36 highlights that there were two points of view on the imperial side about the intentions of Pope Paul III with respect to convening the council and the general interests of imperial policy. During that winter in Naples, Granvelle and Cobos showed openness and a willingness to have talks with the papal legates, Pier Luigi Farnese (1503–47)—the illegitimate son of Paul III—and Marino Caracciolo (1468–1536).Footnote ⁸³ On the other hand, the courtier Juan de Valdés (ca. 1500–41), the righthand man of the viceroy Pedro de Toledo and also a protegé of Cobos, and Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga (1505–63), who informed the imperial court from Rome of the pope’s movements, did not trust the pope.Footnote ⁸⁴ Valdés, for example, wrote sarcastically that, at court, “they believe what the pope says of the council as if he were an evangelist,”Footnote ⁸⁵ and expressed his concern at the credence given to Pier Luigi Farnese: “I see that they hold Pedro Luis in high esteem, both the emperor and these others,” alluding to Granvelle and Cobos.Footnote ⁸⁶ “I don’t understand them,” he concludes on various occasions.Footnote ⁸⁷ Still, in March 1536, he wrote that he would like to prepare a report on “what we can expect from the Pope.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Cardinal Gonzaga’s warnings about the pope’s negotiations with France also went unheeded, so that when the cardinal notified the imperial court in Naples that a 200,000 escudo bill of exchange, which had to be drawn on the bank of the Strozzis, had arrived for the pope from the king of France, neither Granvelle nor Cobos gave credence to the news and assumed that the statement by the legate Caracciolo denying “the matter of the two hundred thousand escudos” was true.Footnote ⁸⁹ Granvelle had promised Gonzaga that Piero Luigi’s goodwill toward imperial affairs would one day be demonstrated, although the cardinal was skeptical: “we will see which of us will be deceived.”Footnote ⁹⁰ From Rome, on the other hand, the imperial legate, Vicente Lunel, minister general of the Franciscan order, confirmed Gonzaga’s suspicions by pointing out that news of the Roman Curia arriving from Naples did not match reality: “there is no shortage of writers and speakers interpreting what they see in the worst light.”Footnote ⁹¹

Like other powerful men in Italy, such as Cardinal Benedetto Accolti (1497–1549) or ambassador Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–75), the position of Valdés and Gonzaga was not circumstantial.Footnote ⁹² From the early years of the empire, there had been a faction at court, headed by the grand chancellor Gattinara (1465–1530), that defended the need to maintain an aggressive stance toward Francis I and the Roman Curia and to consolidate the political power of the emperor in the Italian Peninsula, with the Duchy of Milan as the key element of control. Gattinara wrote to Charles V in 1526, “With the love of [Italy], you will be able to control the whole world.”Footnote ⁹³ The propaganda campaign against Clement VII and the College of Cardinals that preceded the Sack of Rome in 1527 exemplifies the terms of the anti-French and antipapal policy. The ideology of this faction drew on the medieval juridical principles of Ghibellinism, with some jurists and advisers to the new composite monarchy of the Habsburgs seeing it as an opportunity to legitimate Charles V’s ambitions to establish political hegemony over Europe. Fully implementing this Ghibelline policy meant ending the Papal States and its army, because the temporal sovereignty of the pope was incompatible with the Ghibelline conception of imperial power.Footnote ⁹⁴ As Juan de Valdés put it in a letter to Ercole Gonzaga, the emperor had to remain in Italy for as long as it took “to order the world and the Church.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Cobos and Granvelle were somewhat distanced from the Ghibelline faction at the imperial court during the winter of 1535–36; nevertheless, they were not, as might appear from the letters of Juan de Valdés, the heirs to the so-called Flemish route, whose major actors were the viceroy of Naples, Charles de Lanoy (ca. 1487–1527), and the Flemish advisers of the emperor during the 1520s, a faction within the court that had supported a policy of understanding with Francis I.Footnote ⁹⁶ The objective pursued by Charles V with the help of his advisers was to persuade Pope Paul III to break his neutrality and to openly side with him in the struggle between the Habsburgs and the Valois. Thus, Cobos openly expressed his dissatisfaction at the pope’s neutrality to the papal nuncio in Februrary 1536 and added, three years after the Statute in Restraint of Appeals was passed by the English Parliament, that “the Pope loves the Emperor without fear of losing the obedience of Spain, and he also loves the King of France, and yet, he is afraid of losing it.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Charles V was negotiating with the French monarch over the succession to the Duchy of Milan from December 1535 and mobilized his armies to strategic areas after the French invasion of the Duchy of Savoy in January 1536, but deferred any decision until his meeting with Pope Paul III in Rome,Footnote ⁹⁸ an interval that would also have allowed money from Castile to arrive.Footnote ⁹⁹ That winter’s correspondence reflects Charles’s conviction that Paul III would not make any decision about France until his arrival in Rome, and likewise that he had hopes of securing his support on this particular question.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Valdés and Gonzaga were convinced that that was the wrong strategy and events were to prove them right. In a letter to Isabel, Charles explained that, in the meeting that he had had with the pope on April 6, he had not managed to persuade the pope to declare war against Francis I. Charles pressed the matter, but finally gave up—“we did not want to push him further”—when he realized that the pope “was determined to remain … in this neutrality.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Alfonso Álvarez Guerrero was undoubtedly a member of the Ghibelline faction at the imperial court. Both the treatise on the general council as well as his other juridical works confirm his political and doctrinal affiliation. The Tractado, with its recurrent hypothesis of a pope unwilling to call a general council, shows the same distrust of the actions of Paul III as that expressed in the correspondence of figures such as Valdés and Gonzaga. The name of Álvarez Guerrero is not mentioned in the correspondence of Valdés, Gonzaga, or other contemporary figures linked to the Kingdom of Naples; nevertheless, it is possible that some of the courtiers encouraged Álvarez Guerrero to publish his Tractado, and those belonging to the Ghibelline faction would have used his text to try and promote more aggressive negotiations with the pope. The connection with that court faction might explain the choice of Spanish rather than Latin. The work would not be aimed at the political agents of Europe at the time—who often did not know Spanish—but at Charles V; the heavyweights in the emperor’s entourage, such as Granvelle and Cobos (who did not know Latin); and the Spanish audience in the different courts that formed the composite monarchy of Charles V. Significant in this respect is the notice of a copy of the work being dispatched from Rome to the Viennese court of Ferdinand I in the letter by Gabriel Sánchez, mentioned above.Footnote ¹⁰²

In his Tractado, Alfonso Álvarez Guerrero wrote a sort of private report for the emperor, although in the form of a typical legal treatise on ecclesiology. Mixed in with the legal arguments are insertions typical of a private report, such as “it is necessary for your majesty to send someone to negotiate” or “it concerns and is in your majesty’s interests to press for and obtain the universal good of Christianity.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Charles V did not follow the advice of Álvarez Guerrero, which does not mean that he disapproved of it or did not consider it opportune; indeed, he never made the least attempt to suppress the antipapal position defended by important members of the imperial court. If he did not share all the implications of this course of political action, he did consider it strategically useful.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It should be remembered that, years later, the viceroy of Naples, whom the emperor trusted absolutely, became the patron of the Latin edition of this treatise.

The Politics of Conciliarism

Why did Álvarez Guerrero defend a conciliarist view of the relations between the pope and the council? The need to convene a general council to improve the way the church functioned and to resolve the problem of the Lutheran Reformation had been repeatedly and emphatically called for in many different sectors of European society since the 1520s. Nonetheless, this position did not have to be linked to a conciliarist understanding of the relations between the pope and the council. Some of the most caustic diatribes against corruption in the church were written by men like Erasmus who questioned neither the superiority of the pope over the council nor papal infallibility.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Not even the propaganda documents drawn up by Gattinara or his secretaries—where the priority was to decide whether the pope, cardinals, or emperor should convene the council, not relations between the council and the pope—defended the conciliarist doctrine.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As I shall explain below, conciliar government of the church, as proposed by the Tractado, represented a means of increasing the capacity for influence of the emperor over the papacy and also over the national churches of the respective territories subject to his Crown.

There is no standard way to characterize conciliarist theory, since it encompassed lines of thought that were not always perceived as necessarily connected. The biographical contexts of individual authors also, on occasion, decisively influenced the way the theory was formulated.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This variety of formulations and implications was noticeable both at Constance and Basel, as well as among those authors who defended conciliarism in later periods. The appearance of the conciliarist doctrine in Álvarez Guerrero’s Tractado should be understood specifically in the context of power relations between the empire and the papacy, rather than as an ecclesiological debate about the internal organization of the church. His conciliarism is the expression of what, in relation to early sixteenth-century conciliarism in Europe, James H. Burns called “an alliance with royal power against papal pretensions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This circumstance explains the peaceful coexistence of conciliarism and Ghibellinism in the Tractado, as well as the author’s deliberate silence about possible parallels between ecclesiastical order and civil political order. The alliance that Burns mentions does not, however, mean that early sixteenth-century conciliarism was always expressed in these terms. Not all contemporary conciliarist authors would have accepted an approach like Álvarez Guerrero’s; treatises like those by Giovanni Gozzadini (d. 1517), a member of the papal court, or Jacques Almain, a Sorbonne theologian, shared a set of ideas in common with Álvarez Guerrero, but were written with very different objectives in mind.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Although Gozzadini and Almain, like Álvarez Guerrero, base their doctrine on “the most holy Councils of Constance and Basel,” neither of them would have backed a treatise in which conciliarist doctrine and church reform were inseparable from imperial political interests.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Weakening the position of the papacy in view of the celebration of a general council had important consequences for the imperial court. Bearing in mind that Charles V was counting on personally choosing the bishops from the Habsburg territories who would attend the future council, constituting a general council in which bishops were not subordinate to papal authority was the best way to ensure that imperial interests would be satisfied.Footnote ¹¹¹ In the specific case of the Kingdom of Naples, which was important because of its strategic position in the peninsula, the viceroy, Pedro de Toledo, intended to follow the same policy, as can be seen years later in March 1545 when he gave the order that only four bishops—those of Gaeta, Castellammare di Stabia, San Marco, and Lanciano—could attend the Council of Trent, to the protests of other prelates in Naples.Footnote ¹¹² As the Italian historian Francesco Becchetti (1743–1814) pointed out, “this was tantamount to wanting to reduce an ecumenical council to a few votes, and these, as might be feared, were even more dependent on the man making the selection.”Footnote ¹¹³ A council set up in these terms would have had an impact on two major issues significant to anyone familiar with the day-to-day business of imperial politics in Rome: on the one hand, the implementation of royal patronage in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile and, on the other, negotiating the subsidies that the ecclesiastical estate of the two kingdoms granted the Crown for the fight against the Turk.

Historiography has repeatedly indicated the extent to which Pope Eugene IV managed to secure the support of the secular princes at the Council of Basel by ceding them control over their respective national churches. This did not, however, mean the defeat of conciliarism.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In situations of political weakness, successive popes would see themselves obliged to make concessions to different secular rulers by ceding control over ecclesiastical appointments and the management of church benefices. In the case of Castile, the bulls of donation issued by Alexander VI (1431–1503) after Columbus (1451–1506) reached the Americas are well known. Years later, through the bull Eximie Devotionis Affectu (1523), Adrian VI (1459–1523) granted Charles V the right to patronage and to nominate suitable candidates for all vacancies in all the bishoprics, priories, abbeys, and major benefices in Navarre, Castile, and Aragon. Francis I had obtained a similar concession as a result of the concordat of Bologna in 1516.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Clement VII ratified the latter concession in the bull Etsi Ea Quae, dated Bologna, 11 January 1530.

Nevertheless, the papal concessions did not mean that Charles V had complete control over appointments to vacant positions or over church revenues. So, for example, two days after the death in Rome of the bishop of Jaen, Esteban Gabriel Merino, on 28 July 1535, Pope Paul III appointed his grandson, Alessandro Farnese (1520–89), as administrator of the bishopric, even though he was only fifteen years old. As the protonotary apostolic Ambrogio Recalcati acknowledged in a letter dated September 3 to Alberto Pio (1475–1531), the pope had proceeded “without having waited for any agreement from his Majesty.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The question of the bishopric of Jaen was the central topic of all diplomatic talks in Naples and Rome, both in the negotiations between the papal legate, Per Luigi Farnese, and Charles V, and in the case of Ambassador Cifuentes in the Roman Curia.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the treatise by Álvarez Guerrero, the subject is broached in terms that suggest that the author might have had the specific instance of the bishopric in Jaen in mind: “And in Spain, the pope is doing something else that detracts from the beauty of religion and its well-being, because, with the bishop dead, he installs a collector and carries off the fruits of the bishopric until the arrival of the new bishop, which is not to build but to destroy; for, since it is a constant that the fruits of any bishopric that are superfluous to the needs of the bishop for his necessary expenses must be distributed among the poor, it appears that the pope wants the poor to die of hunger and not to eat while the episcopal seat is empty.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ So, despite the ratification of Clement VII, one of the matters that Charles would have to negotiate with Paul III during his stay in Rome in April 1536 would be precisely a new statement about “our patronage right in any churches of Spain that might become vacant in this court of Rome … to avoid other similar doubts, contention and provisions like the one in the bishopric of Jaen that the College and others in the Council of His Holiness wanted to defend and uphold for major and obvious reasons, which His Holiness had legally provided for.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

The Crown, moreover, did not have direct control over the revenues of the church of Castile. Rulers did not “simply impose a levy on the church,” but often “had to negotiate with the clergy for the contribution.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Sean Perrone has highlighted the difficult negotiations that the Crown held with the Congregación del Clero, or Assembly of the Clergy, which was charged with voting on the church’s financial contribution to the Crown. First the pope endowed the Crown with a monetary contribution—the so-called subsidy—which ranged from a tenth to a half of the ecclesiastical revenues obtained by the church of Castile in one year. Afterward, the assembly negotiated downward the percentage that the pope would grant. Finally, the pope had to approve the amount eventually stipulated by the assembly, a power that enabled him to continue hampering the “princes’ ability to gain control over the national church’s financial resources.”Footnote ¹²¹ Perrone’s study of the negotiations between Crown and assembly shows that “the Assembly defended ecclesiastical liberties and hampered royal attempts to extract more money from the church.”Footnote ¹²² So, for example, just three years before the Tractado was published, negotiations about the subsidy that the assembly had to contribute to the Crown, which was nominally earmarked for financing the fight against the Turk, broke down in the face of requests—half the year’s rents, according to Clement VII’s bull—that were considered a threat to ecclesiastical liberties. The church went so far as to suspend Divine Offices in June 1533 as a way of applying pressure; they had done so in 1519 and would do so again in 1556.Footnote ¹²³

In a context of tension between the Crown and the church of Castile, a treatise such as Álvarez Guerrero’s would have had obvious implications for the members of the imperial court. The scenario envisaged by Álvarez Guerrero reduced the power of the pope and increased that of the general council, where a significant number of bishops were going to represent the interests of the emperor himself. When it came to settling the amount and payments of the annual subsidies, for example, it might mean modifying the ground rules on which the negotiations between the Crown and the Assembly of the Clergy, and also the pope, were based. Álvarez Guerrero was more explicit about the fiscal implications of his ecclesiology in the third edition of the treatise, where he stated that the pope should finance the emperor’s campaign against the Turk by “giving all the treasure of the Church,” because it would be lawful in these circumstances “to sell the heritage of the Church” and “compel the bishops, other clergy and the monasteries to give all the money and jewels that they have stored in abundance so that it can be spent on defending the Christian religion.”Footnote ¹²⁴ A decade earlier, in the context of preparations for the Crusade against the Turk, Chancellor Gattinara had already pointed to the need to negotiate with the pope for “other means with which to extract as much money as possible from the clergy,” which included, apart from the appropriate subsidy, “giving part of the fruits and revenues from their benefices,” the partial sale “of their goods and the roots of said benefices,” or to hand over directly some of “the treasure that the churches have in gold and silver.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The consequences of Álvarez Guerrero’s demands would have been very clear to any reader at the imperial court who still remembered the difficult negotiations with the Assembly of the Clergy: “the clergy are furious,” the ambassador, Martín de Salinas, wrote in 1533.Footnote ¹²⁶ Furthermore, his explicit aggressiveness toward the temporal power of the church would have been welcomed by those who supported an openly Ghibelline political agenda like the one sustained by Gattinara years before.

From Episcopalism to Conciliarism

The political significance of conciliarism in Álvarez Guerrero’s Tractado is patently obvious. Nevertheless, the desire to legitimate a course of political action that had support within the imperial court does not in itself explain the presence of conciliarism in the Tractado. It would have been difficult for the Tractado to achieve its objectives as an argumentative text if conciliarism had not been an acceptable ecclesiological position within the Spanish church. Three editions of the Tractado in a single year suggest that the work was well received and that its brand of conciliarism was welcomed by its target audience; it would not have made much sense otherwise to prepare a Latin edition twice the length of the original. In this section, I propose that the absence of condemnation of conciliarism can be explained by the presence of episcopalist positions in the Spanish academic and religious world.

Hubert Jedin pointed out that “the Spaniards were not interested in the question of authority as such” and that “their sole concern was the practical problem of making sure that the reform of Councils would be convened at frequent intervals and their decrees carried into effect.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Jedin arrived at this conclusion after reading some of the documents drawn up in Castile reacting to the beginning of the Council of Pisa, and in the months beforehand to the beginning of the Fifth Lateran Council. Jedin considered that this position “held by the ecclesiastical-political advisers of Ferdinand the Catholic” was a symptom of the “proud episcopalism, deeply charged with national feelings, of the men who later on were to represent Spain at the Council of Trent.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Jedin pointed out an important nuance—namely, that it was consistent to argue the validity of the Frequens decree and the obligation of the pope to comply with the decisions of a council without thereby defending the superiority of the council over the pope. Nonetheless, that approach did not imply, as Jedin suggests, that there was no debate about “authority as such” within the Castilian church. Episcopalism, in fact, took shape precisely as a reaction to a certain interpretation of the authority of the pope in relation to the bishops, which explains why conciliarism might come to be regarded as a possible development of this “proud episcopalism.”

The key to the matter lay in the way defenders of the papalist position interpreted the distinction between the power of jurisdiction, or government (potestas iurisdictionis), which was what enabled a diocese to be governed, and the power of order (potestas ordinis), the power to administer the sacraments. The second power was granted to the bishops by virtue of having been ordained, and nobody could take it away from them because it was based on divine law. The first power, however, was not granted to the bishops directly by Christ, but by the pope as Peter’s successor, and whether it was granted or refused depended therefore completely on the will of the pope. This distinction, developed in the thirteenth century by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, and later adopted by canonists to defend papal supremacy, reached its fullest expression in the fifteenth century in Juan de Torquemada’s Summa de Ecclesia (Summa on the church, 1453), and later defenders included Thomas de Vio, Francisco Suárez, and Robert Bellarmine.Footnote ¹²⁹

Episcopalism implied resistance to this doctrine. The episcopalist position interpreted the Gospel passage where Christ hands Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16:18–19) as meaning that the bishops had received the same power of jurisdiction from Christ as that received by Peter. This interpretation was already in some passages of the Decretum, but it was in the context of conciliarist doctrine—starting with Guillaume Durand the Younger at the beginning of the fourteenth century—that its implications were explored in the framework of the relations “between the authority inhering in the Universal Church and the powers attributed to its earthly head, the Pope.”Footnote ¹³⁰ From this point of view, it is understandable that some Castilian bishops and prelates should be interested in a doctrine that upheld, among other things, the infallibility of the general council, the necessary submission of popes and cardinals to legislation passed by the councils, the justification of disobedience in the face of unjust papal laws or dispensations, and the restoration of episcopal authority and the resulting elimination of papal exemptions from episcopal jurisdiction. Defending some of these episcopalist positions did not imply defending the validity of Haec Sancta as dogma. Francisco de Vitoria’s relection on the power of the pope and the council shows that point of view quite clearly.Footnote ¹³¹ Nonetheless, as Alfonso Álvarez Guerrero’s Tractado highlights, it was but a short step from episcopalism to conciliarism.

A study of texts written by Spanish authors during the first decades of the sixteenth century about the need for the general council and church reform would uncover other examples of this shift in position. I shall confine myself to just two examples. In the general congregation of the Council of Trent held on 19 November 1546, the bishop of Astorga, Diego de Álava y Esquivel (d. 1552), argued in favor of the council’s autonomy—“the council enjoys full power to decide in its own affairs”—after the pope appointed a secretary, an advocate, and an abbreviator, which the bishop regarded as an attempt to influence the course of proceedings.Footnote ¹³² After his participation in the Council of Trent, Álava y Esquivel also wrote a treatise on the general council and the reform of the church rejecting the supremacy of the council over the pope. Nevertheless, in the same treatise, going against the Pastor Aeternus bull of the Fifth Lateran Council, he defended the power of the emperor to call a general council given the failure of the pope and the College of Cardinals, demanded that arrangements about annates approved at the Councils of Constance and Basel be observed, and highlighted the need to bear in mind the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in its prohibition of appealing directly to the pope “omisso medio,” that is, without going through intermediate courts.Footnote ¹³³ Five years later, the imperial fiscal advocate at Trent, Francisco de Vargas (d. 1566), pointed out that the Pastor Aeternus bull did not abrogate the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges and that France therefore continued to regard the Council of Basel in all its phases as a legitimate council.Footnote ¹³⁴ Likewise, in a handwritten report addressed to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517–86), he denied the ecumenical nature of the Fifth Lateran Council and defended the dogmatic character of the Haec Sancta decree.Footnote ¹³⁵

These testimonies record that conciliarism as an ecclesiological doctrine—and not just a doctrinal weapon in the hands of imperial or monarchic powers—did not disappear from Castile in the first half of the sixteenth century. Its presence is confirmed in authors like Álvarez Guerrero who openly supported the superiority of the council over the pope and the dogmatic validity of the Haec Sancta decree, and also in authors who did not accept that critical doctrinal point but did accept other constituent elements of it. These examples highlight the need to study this history of conciliarism in parallel with the history of episcopalism in the early modern age.

Conclusions

The Tractado by Álvarez Guerrero is an attempt to endorse deep reform of the relationship between papal power and imperial power by means of canon law. The convening of the council by the emperor or the inferiority of the pope with respect to the general council went against papal legislation and the predominantly papalist position in the Roman Curia. The Tractado is dedicated to Charles V and was conceived in order to justify the legality of the emperor taking unilateral action with respect to calling a general council. The work was aligned therefore with the objectives of the Ghibelline political faction at the imperial court, which favored the suppression of the temporal power of the church and the political control of the Italian Peninsula by the emperor. The successive reprints and enlargements of the treatise suggest that it was widely circulated in the courtly centers of the empire.

The conciliarism of Álvarez Guerrero was based on two traditions deeply rooted in Castilian political and ecclesiological thought: on the one hand, the monarchy’s desire to increase royal patronage and ensure that the ecclesiastical subsidies would be granted, and on the other, the desire of Castilian episcopalism to safeguard its jurisdictional autonomy against papal interference. The Castilian basis of his ideas explains why relations between the pope and the church of Castile predominated in his work, even though the reform of the church would be undertaken by Charles V as emperor, as could not be otherwise. That defense of the royal patronage and the demands of episcopalism were linked together in Álvarez Guerrero’s treatise does not necessarily mean that the clergy were faithful allies of the political objectives of the monarch, as the difficult negotiations between Charles V and the Assembly of the Clergy demonstrate. Every formulation in this direction should be analyzed with the profile of the author in mind, the context in which the ideas are presented, and the possible recipients. As I have explained in this study, the context of European politics during the winter of 1535–36 are key to understanding the objectives of this Tractado.