ZABARELLA, FRANCESCO. — Jurist, cardinal, b. at Piove di Sacco (Padua) on 10 Aug. 1360, d. at Constance on 26 Sept. 1417.
He studied law at Padua and Bologna, where he was a pupil of Giovanni di Lignano, and obtained his licentiate in 1383. Vicar of Bishop Acciaiuoli at Florence, where he taught and received ecclesiastical benefices, he was later consulted in Rome by Boniface IX concerning the schism. Having become a doctor of both laws, he taught at Padua, where he was archpriest of the Cathedral and held the abbey of Praglia in commendam for a short time. A friend of Pier Paolo Vergerio, he absorbed the inspiration of the emerging humanism; he was also Padua’s orator for its submission to Venice after the fall of the Carraresi.
Like the rest of the Veneto, he adhered to Giovanni XXIII and to the Pisan party, which on 18 July 1410 appointed him bishop of Florence; he left that see when that Pope created him cardinal deacon of SS. Cosma e Damiano on 6 June 1411. He never received major orders. Generous, temperate, and astute in affairs, and endowed with an enterprising spirit, he played a considerable part in the ecclesiastical events of those years. He took part in the Council that Giovanni XXIII held in Rome in 1413, where he succeeded in deflecting the reform proposals considered, at that time, premature. In the effort to put an end to the schism, on the one hand he insisted that the Emperor had the duty of convoking the ecumenical Council when the College of Cardinals did not wish or was unable to do so—a theory that prevailed precisely at Constance; on the other, he acknowledged that power was fundamentally vested in the Christian community and that the Pope was merely its principal minister, that is, the «caput ministeriale». The Sacred College, in turn, was to be regarded as a permanent commission entrusted with the government of the Church and intended to limit the pontiff’s arbitrary power.
From Florence he was sent, together with Cardinal de Challant, by Giovanni XXIII to the Emperor Sigismund at Como to determine the site of the ecumenical Council, Constance (v.). He was present there with the Pope at the opening on 5 Nov. 1414 and took an active part in its proceedings. On 15 Feb. 1415 he read the message in which Giovanni XXIII declared himself ready to renounce the papacy provided that his adversaries did likewise. After Giovanni XXIII’s flight, Z. read the decree on the continuation of the Council on 26 March and participated in the debates on the Council’s powers, which concluded on the 30th with the three articles concerning the authority of the Council. Z. did not abandon obedience to Giovanni XXIII until the latter, in May, showed himself reluctant to accept the Council’s authority; he was then one of the promoters of his deposition. An advocate of «reform in head and members», he followed the Council’s proceedings concerning the trial of Hus and his doctrines and the controversy over tyrannicide. He died before the election of the new pontiff, and the Emperor attended his funeral.
Works: Commentaria in V. libros Decretalium, Venice 1502; Lectura super Clementinis, Rome 1477 ff.; Consilia, Pescia 1490 ff.; Repetitiones, Venice 1587; De Schismate sui temporis, written in 1403–1408, printed several times and prohibited donec corrigatur; Acta in Conciliis Pisano et Constantienii; he also wrote a treatise De felicitate, Padua 1655; Epistolae et sermones collected in A. Kneer, K. Z., Münster 1891.