Louis III. of Anjou, had disputed the throne of Naples with Joan II., daughter of Charles Durazzo. Delivered from Louis by Alphonso V. king of Arragon, Joan adopted the Arragonese monarch, and her liberator was to become her heir. Subsequently some misunderstanding between Alphonso and Joan determined her to revert to Louis of Anjou, and to revoke in his favour the act of adoption obtained by Alphonso. Joan and Louis died: and, two competitors present themselves to reign over Naples, Alphonso and Reni, the brothers of Louis. Pope Eugene declares for Alphonso, precisely because Reni, more acceptable to the Neapolitans, and to Italy generally, would have been too formidable a neighbour for the Holy See. This is the principal affair purely political in which the pontiff concerned himself. He however obliged Uladislaus, king of Poland and Hungary, to break a peace with the Turks, sworn to on the Evangelists and on the Koran. A rupture fatal as it was perfidious, and which drew after it, in 1444 near Varne, the defeat and death of Uladislaus.
Eugene retained to his death the title of pope, although the counsel of Basle had conferred it on the duke of Savoy, Amadeus VIII. whose papal name was Felix V. This duke afterwards abdicated the tiara, and the church had at last but one head Nicholas V., the successor of Eugene; Nicholas, a pacific prelate; the friend of literature, and founder of the Vatican library, and one of the most generous protectors of the learned Greeks, who took refuge in Italy after Mahomet II. had taken Constantinople in 1446.
We have seen that during the first half of the fifteenth century, the priesthood, divided, had no means of very seriously threatening great empires. This opportunity ought to have been seized on for effecting those reformations, provoked by the corruptions which the false decretals had produced in the ecclesiastical discipline.
The ancient rules left to the clergy, to the people, and to the sovereign, an active part in the election of bishops, and the new law reserved to the pope the institution of the incumbents. Excommunications, formerly rare and confined to matters altogether spiritual, were multiplied after the tenth century against emperors and kings, whose power they shook. The popes of the eight first centuries never thought of enacting tributes from the newly elected bishops; now, the pope demands first fruits of them. Before the decretals, the ecclesiastics were in civil and criminal cases amenable to the secular tribunals: after the decretals, the pope wished to become, in all sorts of causes, the supreme judge of every member of the priesthood. In fine, dispensations, pardons, reservations and reversions, and appeals to the Holy See, were perpetual; the abuses, become excessive, wearied France in an especial manner.