Basel

The council that opened at Basel in 1431 was the last serious attempt to make general councils the governing organ of the western church. The idea had force behind it: a council at Constance had just ended a schism in which three men claimed the papacy, and had decreed that councils should meet at regular intervals and that their authority came directly from Christ. Basel set out to act on that.

It legislated on clerical discipline and on the reform of papal finance, and it negotiated with the Hussites of Bohemia, granting them the cup in the agreement known as the Compacta, which is a real achievement in a century not much given to compromise with heretics. But it also fought the pope continuously, and when Eugene IV transferred the council to Ferrara in order to negotiate with the Greeks, the fathers who remained at Basel declared him deposed and elected a replacement, a widowed duke of Savoy who took the name Felix V.

He was the last antipope. Support drained away, the rump moved to Lausanne, and Felix resigned in 1449. The effect of the whole episode was the reverse of what its participants intended: by making conciliar government look like schism, Basel discredited the movement and left the papal monarchy stronger than it had been, which is one of the conditions of everything that happened in the following century.

Basel's printing houses drew Erasmus, and in 1516 the press of Johann Froben produced his edition of the New Testament in Greek with a fresh Latin translation beside it and annotations underneath. It was the first Greek New Testament to be published, assembled in haste from a handful of late manuscripts, and its faults are well known, including a passage in Revelation that Erasmus retranslated back into Greek from Latin because his manuscript lacked the final leaves. It was also the book Luther translated from, and the text type behind it dominated European Bibles for three centuries.

Erasmus wanted reform without rupture, and when Luther forced the issue he wrote in 1524 in defence of free will. Luther's reply, on the bondage of the will, was the more powerful book and ended any prospect of the two working together.

When Basel adopted the Reformation in 1529 under Oecolampadius, Erasmus left for Freiburg rather than take sides. He came back in 1535 and died in the city the following year, and he is buried in the cathedral of a church he never joined.

Three centuries later Basel became a missionary capital. The Basel Mission, founded in 1815, trained and sent workers to Ghana, Cameroon, India and China, where alongside preaching they set up printing presses, schools and trading companies, and produced grammars and dictionaries that fixed the written form of several languages.