An Alpine See Between Two Worlds

Trent was chosen for a general council because of where it sat rather than what it was. A council to answer the Reformation had been demanded for two decades, and the two parties wanted it in different places: the emperor wanted it inside the Empire, the pope wanted it in Italy and under his own hand. Trent, a prince bishopric within the Empire but Italian in language and lying on the road over the Brenner pass, satisfied both descriptions well enough to open in December 1545 under its prince bishop Cristoforo Madruzzo. It sat in three separated periods, 1545 to 1547, 1551 to 1552 and 1562 to 1563, with the sessions moved briefly to Bologna in a dispute over control that the emperor treated as a papal manoeuvre.

Attendance was thin at the start, with about thirty voting bishops, and heavily Italian throughout, which is one of the standing criticisms of it. Protestant representatives were present only during the second period and left without engaging, since the council had already decided the questions they wanted reopened. Eighteen years passed between the first session and the last, four popes died in the course of it, and the men who closed it in December 1563 were mostly not the men who had opened it.