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Chapter Three k The Basel Years Juan Alfonso de Segovia did not merely attend the Council of Basel: he was one of its most active members. Respected at Salamanca already, at Basel he earned an international reputation and became one of Europe’s leading intellectuals. He served numerous times as envoy of the council to assemblies in France and the Empire, and he held a number of administrative roles, particularly after 1436.1 He was also heavily involved with the more theoretical and scholarly aspects of the council’s activity, producing forty-eight works during the council, not including letters, extracts he compiled from other works, and collaborative works for which he was a minor contributor.2 In addition to the works he wrote on the various issues it considered, Segovia left posterity a history of the council, Historia gestorum generalis synodi Basiliensis, which his contemporaries and modern scholars have praised for its thoroughness and balance. It remains an important source on the council’s activities.3 He was probably the person best qualified to write such a history. An active member almost since the council’s first sessions, he remained until the end, well after other senior members had withdrawn their support. Well acquainted with the council’s objectives, he emerged, as Antony Black asserted, as “the chief theoretical exponent of Basle conciliarism.”4 95 This chapter explores Segovia’s work during the years in which his main labors were on behalf of the Council of Basel and its objectives . One goal is to underscore the continuity, in thought and in personal qualities, linking his years at Salamanca and the last years of his life, when he turned more earnestly to the Turkish question. As his 1426 intervention in the power plays at Salamanca had suggested, he was sympathetic to conciliar aims—at least broadly construed as subjecting those in the clerical hierarchy to decisions enacted by collective , representative bodies—before arriving at Basel. He was active in articulating the conciliar agenda early in his years there, indeed practically immediately after his arrival. His arguments from this period show, as many conciliarists’ writings did, a reliance on the Bible as the primary inspiration for ideas about how Christians should live and govern their church. It would be the main source, as well, for his proposals on how Christians should counter the threat of the Turks. In both areas of his thought, he was persistent in calling for greater faithfulness to the teachings of the gospel and the practices of the early church. This tendency to look to the example of the early church, which may well have been strengthened during his years at Basel, is one he shared with other conciliarists. As in Salamanca, he showed a willingness to speak truth to power, take up unpopular positions, and defy high-ranking church authorities , all the while apparently commanding the respect of colleagues with diverse positions on the issues. The habit of doing these things so regularly at Basel probably helped to make him less reluctant than most to take another unpopular stance later—against war as a response to the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Turks. His work on behalf of the council and his correspondence lend support to a comment from one of his accomplished peers. In his first account of the proceedings at Basel, future pope Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini described a particularly contentious debate, at which Segovia was granted a hearing “amid so many noises, and so stormy an outcry” because “the conciliarists heard him with eagerness as being one of themselves, and the others even unwillingly respected the man’s virtue and great goodness.”5 If his character and his political and theological orientation were remarkably consistent with his activity at Salamanca, Basel gave Juan 96 Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace de Segovia new frames of reference for thinking about Muslims. The Turks could not have seemed much of an immediate threat to a Castilian living in Salamanca. In fact, Segovia’s years there included some in which it seemed to a relieved Europe that Turkish power was diminishing , especially when the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (1389–1403) was defeated and captured by the Mongol leader Tamerlane in 1402, who proceeded to dismantle much of the Ottoman state. Still, while Segovia was still in Castile, the Turkish empire regained ascendancy, and Murad II (1421–51) was able to subject Constantinople to siege in 1422 and wage war with Venice for the rest...

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