Pierre d'Ailly

Pierre d'Ailly (French: [d‿aji]; Latin Petrus Aliacensis, Petrus de Alliaco) (1351 – 9 August 1420) was a French theologian, astrologer, and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.

D'Ailly was born in Compiègne in 1350 or 1351 of a prosperous bourgeois family. He studied in Paris at the Collège de Navarre, receiving the licentiate in arts in 1367 and the masters a year later. and was active in university affairs by 1372. D'Ailly taught the Bible in 1375 and the Sentences of Peter Lombard in 1376–1377, and received the licentiate and doctorate in theology in 1381. He was affiliated with the Collège, serving as rector in 1384; among his pupils were Jean Gerson and Nicholas of Clémanges.

The church's Great Schism, between two popes, arose in 1378. In the spring of 1379 Pierre d'Ailly, in anticipation even of the decision of the University of Paris, had carried to the pope of Avignon, Clement VII the "role" of the French nation, but notwithstanding this prompt adhesion he was firm in his desire to put an end to the schism, and when, on the 20th of May 1381, the university decreed that the best means to this end was to try to gather together a general council, Pierre d'Ailly supported this motion before the king's council in the presence of the duke of Anjou. The dissatisfaction displayed shortly after by the government obliged the university to give up this scheme, and was probably the cause of Pierre d'Ailly's temporary retirement to Noyon, where he held a canonry. There he continued the struggle for his side in a humorous work, in which the partisans of the council are amusingly taken to task by the demon Leviathan.

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