Council of Siena

Right at the start, certain formalities of the safe conducts issued by the city for the members of the Council were the cause of jurisdictional friction with papal prerogatives.Attendance to the Council was sparse, specially for high ranking prelates from transalpine regions; at the opening session of November 6, the Council only counted with two cardinals and twenty-five mitred prelates (bishops), as representatives of the higher clergy.[1] Nevertheless, on the eighth of November four decrees were published, all of them directed against easy targets: against the followers of the heretical reformers, Jan Hus, recently burnt at the stake at the Council of Constance despite a promise of safe conduct, and against the English followers of John Wycliffe, who claimed that the highest authority was the Bible; against the followers of the schismatic Antipope Benedict XIII; a decree postponing the negotiations with the Greeks and other Eastern Orthodox churches (which were later worked into acceptable compromises in the long working sessions of the Council of Florence, 1438 to 1445); and a decree advising greater vigilance against heresy, the easiest target of all.[2] Proposals for genuine institutional reform within the Catholic Church hung fire ominously.The French members would have preferred to continue the Council until a thorough reform of the church had been accomplished, both "in capite et in membris" ("in its head and its members"), but whether in order to avoid a new schism, or whether on account of fear of the Pope (since Siena in southern Tuscany was near the Papal States), they departed.