According to the terms of the Council of Constance calling for periodic ecumenical councils to discuss church policies, Pope Martin V convened a council at Pavia, which was hardly inaugurated on 23 April 1423, when plague broke out at Pavia and the council was hastily adjourned to Siena. At Siena, the procedure of the Council followed that established at Constance. 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, as representatives of the higher clergy. 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 ; and a decree advising greater vigilance against heresy, the easiest target of all. Proposals for genuine institutional reform within the Catholic Church hung fire ominously. French proposals for more local control produced resistance from the loyalists of the Papal Curia. Nothing was accomplished at Siena in that area. On 19 February 1424, Basel was selected as the place of the next Council and the Council dissolved itself the following day. 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", but whether in order to avoid a new schism, or whether on account of fear of the Pope, they departed. The selection of the venue for the next council, far from the armed temporal authority of the Papacy, is significant. The magistrates of Siena took care not to let anyone depart until he had paid his debts.
