In the early years of the fifteenth century, the European universities achieved what was probably the height of their influence within the Western Church, an influence accorded final sanction by their independent representation at the two general councils of Pisa (1409) and Constance (1414-18). Both of these assemblies had been summoned in the hope of terminating the Great Schism, the division of the Latin Church which had erupted with the rival elections of Urban VI and Clement VII as popes in 1378. During the course of the subsequent debates seeking a resolution to the dispute, the universities and their members had taken a prime role in formulating theories intended to find a way out of the dilemma of having two popes, each supposedly legitimate. Their scope for concrete, independent action was, however, limited: whatever their aspirations for a role on the wider stage of the medieval Church, the universities had to exist within the narrower confines of individual political entities, for the most part monarchies, whose rulers had their own conceptions of the appropriate place of scholars in the scheme of things.