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Early in his career, when he still trusted in the power of councils to effect reform, Martin Luther wrote: "[The Romanists] are not empowered to prohibit a council or, according to their pleasure, to determine its decisions in advance, to bind it and to rob it of freedom. But if they do so, I hope to have shown that of a truth they belong to the community of Antichrist and the devil."' Some seventy years before Luther's appeal to the German nobility, however, the Spanish theologian and noted conciliarist, Juan de Segovia, who championed the authority of councils throughout his career, had already drawn a more startling connection between the chief "Romanist" opponent of councils and the spiritual adversaries of Christendom. For, in several works written in the 1450s, Segovia identified Pope Eugenius IV with Lucifer.
Juan de Segovia was no stranger to the papacy in general, nor to Eugenius in particular. In 1421, for example, as a representative of his alma mater, the University of Salamanca, Segovia travelled to the court of Pope Martin V in order to obtain financial support for his institution and papal approbation for the university's constitutions.2 Between 1427 and 1428, Segovia appeared at Martin's court a second time where he served briefly as a referendarius papae and even as a papal emissary.3 In 1431 Segovia was again in Rome on university business-this time at the court of his subsequent adversary, Eugenius IV.4 The Salamancan master tarried in the Eternal City until 1433, pursuing not only school matters but his own affairs as well.5 From Rome, Segovia went directly to the recently opened Council of Basel, where he quickly became a leading, if not the leading, spokesman for the conciliar cause.6 As such, his connection to popes and the papacy remained close. Segovia figured prominently in Basel's deposition of Eugenius IV (1439) and in the subsequent election of the last "anti-pope" in history, Felix V (1440). Indeed, Segovia himself received a respectable number of votes in the election which Amadeus of Savoy ultimately won.7 For his efforts on Basel's behalf, Segovia soon received the cardinal's hat from the new pontiff, and when Felix V left the council some years later, Segovia became the overseer of the papal finances at Basel.8...