Abstract

Historians have generally concluded that the Council of Constance, although it successfully ended the Great Schism by reuniting the church, failed in its effort to reform the church. The council's negotiations concerning papal taxation of the clergy have often been singled out as an example of incomplete and abortive reform efforts: those reforms that were enacted were merely cosmetic; the rest failed because the cardinals and the newly elected pope were able to outmaneuver the reformers by exploiting the divisions among the nations at the council. I intend to challenge this interpretation by arguing that the council did enact major reforms of papal taxation. Further, I will show that papal opposition was not the sole or even the principal cause for the failure of other proposed tax reforms, and that the national divisions at the council were generally significant only when they coincided with other, more concrete differences of interest