Absolute Monarchs (32 page)
But Eugenius refused to budge, and the ensuing deadlock was broken by King Sigismund. As King of Germany and emperor-to-be, he needed the support of the pope to strengthen his position in North Italy and that of the Council in his struggle against the Hussites. In May 1433 he made his way to Rome, where he was duly crowned by Eugenius, and for the next six months he worked hard on both parties, persuading them to moderate their respective attitudes until, at the end of the year, the two reached an uneasy agreement. It was, in fact, rather more like a papal surrender. Eugenius was obliged to withdraw his Bull of Dissolution and to recognize—with all too few reservations—the primacy of the Council.
Seeing his humiliation, other enemies took full advantage. First were the Colonna. In the spring of 1434, furious at being ordered to return the Church treasures that they had acquired under their kinsman Martin V, they engineered a rising in the streets of Rome, and at much the same time the proconciliar Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan sent two
condottieri
to invade the Papal States. Then, when Eugenius found himself blockaded in the city, the Romans rose again and proclaimed a republic. For the luckless pope, it was all too much. Disguised as a monk but soon identified, and defending himself as best he could under a hail of missiles, he made his escape in a small boat down the Tiber to Ostia and thence transferred to a galley which took him to Pisa. June found him in Florence, where he was soon to be joined by the Sacred College and the Curia.
In Florence, as a guest of Cosimo de’ Medici, he remained for the next nine years, fighting a constant battle against the conciliarists in Basel, who—their numbers now greatly increased by legists and theologians from the universities—were becoming daily more radical and antipapal. For the moment there was little that he could do to resist them, though in the summer of 1436 he circulated a formal denunciation of their pretensions to all the princes of Christendom. On the other hand, he had considerable success in reestablishing his political position. In the Curia was an ex-soldier of long experience named Giovanni Vitelleschi; Eugenius singled him out, promoted him to bishop, and sent him off with a small force to Rome. Energetic and utterly ruthless, Vitelleschi showed no mercy on the rebels and quickly restored order in both Rome and the Papal States.
Basel, however, remained to be dealt with, and the deadlock might have dragged on indefinitely but for a single, immensely significant development: the arrival in the West of John VIII Palaeologus, Emperor of Byzantium.
FACED WITH THE
remorseless advance of the Ottoman Turks, the Byzantine Empire was at its last gasp. Massive military assistance from Western Europe represented its only chance of survival, but all attempts to obtain it foundered on the same rock: the Eastern and Western churches were in schism. Only if that schism was ended could a united Christendom take up arms in the longed-for Crusade.
To John Palaeologus, the Council of Basel seemed to offer a ray of hope. Once again, representatives of all the Christian nations of the West were present; and although the ambassadors of his predecessor, Manuel II, had returned from Constance disappointed, much had happened in the past fifteen years, including a reluctant acceptance by the pope of what the Byzantines had never ceased to maintain: that true union could be achieved only by means of a Council of the whole Church, to be attended by representatives of both East and West. This time, perhaps, a Byzantine appeal might fall on more receptive ears.
But all this would mean a fresh start, and it was obvious that Basel was not the place. The past years had seen too much ill feeling and bitterness; if the new Council was to have any chance of success, a change of venue was essential. The more hidebound of the conciliarists naturally objected—in 1439 going so far as to declare the pope deposed and to elect an antipope in his stead—but this arbitrary renewal of the papal schism cost them what little prestige they had left, and one by one the Christian nations submitted to the authority of Pope Eugenius.
Ideally, John VIII would have liked the new Council to be held in Constantinople, but he was obliged to admit that in present conditions this was not practicable. He therefore willingly accepted the pope’s choice of Ferrara, confirming that he personally, together with his patriarch, would head the imperial delegation. Eugenius, hearing this welcome news, lost no time. By September 1437 his legates were already in Constantinople to work out the details, while others were negotiating with the Venetians for the hiring of a fleet to bring the Byzantine delegation to Ferrara in proper state. Thus it was that John Palaeologus left his brother Constantine as regent and on Wednesday, November 27, embarked on his historic journey, taking with him a party some seven hundred strong, among them the most distinguished group of Eastern churchmen ever to visit the West. There was the patriarch himself, Joseph II, nearly eighty years old, crippled by heart disease but beloved of all who met him; eighteen metropolitans, some of them representing his fellow patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem and also including the brilliant young Metropolitan Bessarion of Nicaea; and a dozen other bishops, including Isidore, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Demetrius in Constantinople, who had been promoted the previous year to Bishop of Kiev and All Russia.
On February 8, 1438, the party reached Venice, where the emperor was greeted by Doge Francesco Foscari and conducted with immense pomp and ceremony up the Grand Canal to the great palace of the Marquis of Ferrara.
4
There he remained for the next three weeks, writing letters to all the European princes, urging them to attend the Council or at least to send representatives. Only at the end of the month did he leave on the last stage of his journey. Compared to his Venetian reception, his arrival in Ferrara was a lackluster affair, not improved by pouring rain. Pope Eugenius gave him a warm welcome, but even that was somewhat clouded when the emperor was informed that his patriarch, on his arrival a few days later, would be expected to prostrate himself and kiss the pontiff’s foot. Of this, he politely pointed out, there could be no question; and at last the pope was obliged to yield. Had he not done so, it is doubtful whether the Council of Ferrara would ever have taken place.
Even then, it got off to a bad start. John had stipulated that four months should pass before the formal discussions on doctrine were begun; one of his principal reasons for attending was to seek help from the other European princes, and he was determined that no important decisions should be taken before their arrival. But spring turned to summer, and no princes appeared. The Latins grew more and more impatient and the pope, who was responsible for the board and lodging of the entire Greek delegation, more and more concerned as his financial reserves fell ever lower.
With August came the plague. Strangely enough, the Greeks appeared immune—the emperor was in any case away from Ferrara most of the time, indulging in his favorite sport of hunting—but there was heavy mortality both among the Latin delegates and in the city as a whole. Meanwhile, the Latins grew even more irritated with their guests. The Greeks, too, were losing patience. They had been away from home for the best part of a year and had so far achieved nothing. Many of them were short of money, for the papal subsidies were becoming increasingly irregular. Finally it became plain that none of the European princes had any intention of showing up, so there was no point in waiting for them any longer. It was to everyone’s relief when deliberations began in earnest on October 8. For the first three months they were concerned almost exclusively with the
filioque
clause—a tricky enough point, having played a major part in the schism four centuries before,
5
but now further complicated by linguistic problems. Few of the delegates spoke any language other than their own, and there were no qualified interpreters. The sessions ended on December 13 with agreement as far away as ever.
At that point the pope managed to persuade the delegates to move to Florence. He gave as his reason the continued presence of the plague in Ferrara, but his true motives were almost certainly financial: the Council had been sitting for eight months, it showed every sign of going on indefinitely, and it had already made alarming inroads on the papal treasury. In Florence, on the other hand, the Medici could be trusted to help out. But the move also proved beneficial in other ways. When the sessions were resumed toward the end of February 1439 the Greeks—tired, anxious, homesick, and quite possibly hungry—seemed distinctly readier to compromise than they had been the previous year. By the end of March they had agreed that the Latin formula according to which the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father
and
the Son meant the same as a recently accepted Greek formula, whereby it proceeded from the Father
through
the Son. It was soon after this breakthrough that Patriarch Joseph finally expired; but then, as one observer rather unkindly remarked, after muddling his prepositions what else could he decently do?
With the
filioque
at last out of the way, the other outstanding questions were quickly settled. The Greeks disapproved of the Roman dogma on Purgatory and the use of unleavened bread at the Sacrament. They also deplored the Latin practice of giving Communion in both kinds to the laity and of forbidding the marriage of nonmonastic priests. But on all these issues they put up only a token opposition. The question of papal supremacy might at other times have caused difficulties, but since the Council of Basel this had been a delicate subject and was consequently glossed over as far as possible. Thanks largely to the emperor himself, who employed persuasion and threats in equal measure to ensure the amenability of his subjects, agreement had been reached by midsummer on every major issue, and on Sunday, July 5, 1439, the official Decree of Union—little more than a statement of the Latin position, apart from one or two concessions permitting Greek usages—was signed by all the Orthodox bishops and abbots except the Metropolitan of Ephesus, who had given in on absolutely nothing but was forbidden by John to exercise a veto. The Latins then added their own signatures, and on the following day the decree was publicly proclaimed in Florence Cathedral, being recited first in Latin by Cardinal Cesarini and then in Greek by Metropolitan Bessarion of Nicaea. The Latin version began with the words
“Laetentur Coeli”
—“Let the heavens rejoice”—but the heavens, as it soon became clear, had precious little reason to do so.
POPE EUGENIUS HAD
won a major victory. On paper, at least, he had brought the Orthodox Church back into the Roman fold.
6
In doing so he had established his personal supremacy. The radical conciliarists at Basel were speechless with rage. First they suspended him, then they deposed him, and finally, on November 5, 1439, they elected an antipope—in the surprising shape of Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy. Amadeus was a deeply pious layman, the founder—and himself a member—of an order of knightly hermits on the Lake of Geneva. He accepted with great reluctance, calling himself Felix V, but he soon had reason to regret his decision, for no one took him seriously. The Council, too, had succeeded only in making itself look ridiculous. From that moment on it gradually dissolved, though it was to limp on until 1449.
After a nine-year absence, in September 1443 Pope Eugenius returned to Rome and set about countering the effects of the schism with the invaluable help of his friend Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. The future Pope Pius II, Piccolomini, although at this time still a layman, had been one of Antipope Felix’s most trusted advisers, but he had now transferred his allegiance, and it was thanks to his diplomatic skill that in 1447 the German princes declared as one man for Eugenius—and just in time, for within a week or two he was dead. His sixteen-year reign had not been easy; more than half of it had been spent in Florentine exile. But his long struggle with the Council of Basel had ended in victory; never again would papal supremacy be challenged from within the Church itself.
1.
“We demand a Roman, or at least an Italian!”
2.
“Even saints were confused about the rights and wrongs of the situation. St. Catherine of Siena supported Urban, St. Vincent Ferrer supported Clement” (Duffy,
Saints and Sinners
, pp. 168–9).
3.
The circumstances of his election and subsequent deposition have denied him a place on the canonical list of popes. It was nonetheless mildly surprising that Cardinal Angelo Roncalli should have adopted the same name on his election to the Papacy in 1958. (See
chapter 28
.)
4.
This thirteenth-century palace, restored with majestic insensitivity in the 1860s and—in consequence of its later history—known today as the Fondaco dei Turchi, still stands on the upper reaches of the Grand Canal, opposite the San Marcuola
vaporetto
station.
6.
No one in the West could have foreseen that by the time the emperor returned to Constantinople in February 1440
Laetentur Coeli
would already be dead in the water, repudiated by the three surviving patriarchs, its signatories condemned as traitors to the faith, castigated throughout the capital, and in some cases physically attacked.
CHAPTER XVII
The Renaissance
I
f, as has been suggested, Martin V was the first Renaissance pope, Eugenius was the second. He was not temperamentally a Renaissance figure—on his deathbed he expressed bitter regrets that he had ever left his hermitage—but his nine years with the Medici in Florence could not have failed to have their effect; and when he returned to Rome—accompanied, incidentally, by Fra Angelico—he devoted himself, in the four years remaining to him, to the continuation of Martin’s work on the city. To bring Rome up to the standards now set by Milan, Genoa, Venice, and the other great cities of the North would have taxed the powers of Hercules, but Eugenius worked hard, and when his apostolic secretary, Flavio Biondo, dedicated to him his three books on the restoration work,
Roma Instaurata
, the compliment was not undeserved.
Artistically and culturally, however, Rome was still something of a backwater when Cardinal Tommaso Parentucelli, the son of a modest physician in Liguria, was elected pontiff in March 1447, taking the name of Nicholas V. Of the previous 140 years the popes had been absent for well over half, and thanks to the consequent chaos the flowering of classical and humanistic learning that had swept away the last vestiges of the Middle Ages from Tuscany and Umbria had left the city almost untouched. A Dante, a Petrarch, a Boccaccio—all of them Florentines—would have been unthinkable in Rome. Although both Boniface VIII in 1303 and Innocent VII a hundred years later had worked hard to give the city the university it deserved, neither had had much success.
With the beginning of the fifteenth century, however, there was a change in the air. First of all, Greek influence had begun to make itself felt. When in 1360 Boccaccio had wished to learn the language, he had had the utmost difficulty in finding anyone in Italy capable of teaching him; he had eventually unearthed an aged Calabrian monk of revolting habits, whom he had lodged in his house for three years, preparing one of the first—and worst—translations of Homer into Latin. But around the turn of the century there had appeared in Florence a first-rate Greek scholar named Manuel Chrysoloras. He had taught there for the next fifteen years until his death, leaving behind him a book,
Erotemata Civas Questiones
, which was essentially a Greek grammar, set out in the form of questions and answers. Among his pupils were two of the most distinguished early Italian humanists, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, who both became members of the Curia and were thus able to inject some of the new learning into the papal court. Soon, too, Chrysoloras was joined by the impressive company of Greek intellectuals who had accompanied John Palaeologus to the Councils of Ferrara and Florence.
These Greeks, of course, brought with them a new awareness of antiquity. For a thousand years the pagan splendors of ancient Rome had been ignored or forgotten, being of no interest to either pope or pilgrim. Then there had been the seventy years of absence in Avignon, followed by the forty years of schism; and disastrous as these years had been in many ways, they did make it possible for subsequent popes to look upon the city with completely fresh eyes—eyes that were shocked by the sight of cattle grazing in the Forum and antique statuary being ground to powder to provide local jerry-builders with cement. That is why, from the middle of the fifteenth century, the entire institution of the Papacy underwent a radical change. Imbued as they were with humanist ideas, the Renaissance popes were ambitious and energetic men of the world, determined not just to revive Rome’s former greatness but to create a new city which would combine the best of both classical and Christian civilizations, bearing witness to their own greatness and that of their families and arousing the admiration and envy of all who saw it.
Like his predecessor, Nicholas V had spent some years in Florence, where he had been tutor to the Strozzi family and had made friends with all the scholars who clustered around the Medici. In consequence he had become far more deeply imbued with Renaissance culture than Eugenius ever was. He was also a good deal less confrontational and far more politically astute, restoring order to Rome and self-government to the Papal States, granting virtual independence to Bologna, and persuading history’s last antipope, Felix V, to abdicate. One of his greatest successes was his declaration of 1450 as Jubilee Year, which brought perhaps a hundred thousand pilgrims, tempted by the offer of plenary indulgence for their sins, flocking to Rome. This completely restored the papal finances. The high point of the celebrations was the canonization of St. Bernardino of Siena, a Franciscan friar who had died only six years before and whose extraordinary charisma had earned him a place in the hearts of Italians comparable, perhaps, to that of Padre Pio in the late twentieth century.
Admittedly, not everything in that Jubilee Year went according to plan. An outbreak of the plague in the early summer caused hundreds of deaths: “all the hospitals and churches,” wrote an eyewitness, “were full of the sick and dying, and they were to be seen in the infected streets falling down like dogs.” On December 19 a pack of horses and mules was frightened by the crowds on the Ponte Sant’Angelo and stampeded; some two hundred pilgrims were trampled to death or drowned in the Tiber. Yet in the long term even these disasters made little difference. The Jubilee Year showed conclusively that, after a century and a half, the Papacy was back on track. Avignon was now past history, and the schism, and all the antipapal excesses of the conciliar movement. The popes were fully and firmly restored to Rome where they belonged; and they had every intention of staying there.
IN 1452 FREDERICK III
of Habsburg
1
crossed the Alps with a suite of more than 2,000, to receive from the pope the crown of the Holy Roman Empire; this was to be combined with the new emperor’s marriage to Donna Leonora, the daughter of the King of Portugal. In every Italian city through which Frederick passed, he was cheered to the echo and deluged with presents. In Ferrara he was greeted not only by the Marquis Borso d’Este but also by Galeazzo Maria Sforza, eldest son of the usurping Duke of Milan, and was obliged to listen to a speech of welcome, “as long as two chapters of St. John’s Gospel,” pronounced by Galeazzo Maria’s eight-year-old brother. In Bologna and Florence the receptions were more elaborate still, and in Siena he met his bride for the first time. The two then rode to Rome together, entering the city on March 9. On the sixteenth Pope Nicholas performed the marriage ceremony in St. Peter’s, after which he crowned Frederick with the Iron Crown of Lombardy; the imperial coronation took place three days later and was followed by the coronation of the young empress with a crown that had been specially made for her. When the service was over, the emperor made a point of bringing the pope’s horse to the door of the basilica and holding his stirrup while he mounted. The festivities ended with a ceremonial banquet at the Lateran.
That ceremony—it was the last imperial coronation ever to take place in Rome—marked the apogee of Nicholas’s pontificate. All too soon came disaster: on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, after a fifty-five-day siege, the army of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II smashed down the walls of Constantinople and put an end to the Christian Empire of the East. The news was received with horror throughout Western Europe. The Byzantine Empire had lasted 1,123 years; although it had never recovered from the Fourth Crusade two and a half centuries before, it had remained the eastern bastion of Christendom. As the refugees spread westward from the conquered city, they carried with them the epic story of its heroic defense, which doubtless lost nothing in the telling. But Western Europe, for all its deep and genuine dismay, was not profoundly changed; indeed, the two states most immediately affected, Venice and Genoa, lost no time in congratulating the sultan and making the best terms they could with the new regime.
In Rome, Pope Nicholas showed none of the cynicism and self-interest of the merchant republics. He did his utmost to galvanize the West for a Crusade, a cause which was enthusiastically supported by the two Greek cardinals, Bessarion and Isidore, who had remained in Italy after the Council of Florence and embraced Catholicism, as also by the papal legate in Germany, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II. But it was no use. Two or three hundred years before, Christian zeal had been enough to launch military expeditions for the recovery of the Holy Places of pilgrimage; with the advent of Renaissance humanism the old religious fire had been extinguished. Europe had dithered, and Byzantium had died. With the Ottoman army stronger now than it had ever been, the old empire was beyond all hope of resurrection.
It was Nicholas’s only important failure. He had no choice but to accept it, and he returned to the two chief interests of his life, books and buildings—the only things, he said, that it was worth spending money on. His two predecessors had both been enthusiastic builders, but neither had shown much interest in literature; Pope Martin, indeed, had generally disapproved of classical—and consequently pagan—authors and had maintained that nothing of antiquity was worth preserving beyond what was contained in the works of St. Augustine. Nicholas, by contrast, was scarcely ever seen without a book in his hand. He read everything that came his way, annotating copiously in the margins in his exquisite handwriting. His legate Piccolomini wrote admiringly:
From his youth he has been initiated into all liberal arts, he is acquainted with all philosophers, historians, poets, cosmographers, and theologians; and is no stranger to civil and canon law, or even to medicine.
Thus, on his accession, Nicholas deliberately set out to create, “for the common convenience of the learned, a library of all books, both in Latin and in Greek, worthy of the dignity of the Pope and the Apostolic See.” He had to start virtually from scratch: the old papal library had been left at Avignon, where most of the volumes had by now been lost or stolen; of the remainder, the Antipope Benedict XIII had carried off a good many after his deposition and taken them to the castle of Peñíscola near Valencia. Now papal agents traveled all over Europe in search of rare manuscripts, and scholars were set to work to make accurate Latin translations of the Greek texts, both Christian and pagan. Forty-five copyists were kept permanently employed. By Nicholas’s death he had spent 30,000 gold florins and had collected some twelve hundred volumes, the nucleus of today’s Vatican Library.
2
Meanwhile, he continued the work of his predecessors in the rebuilding of Rome. He strengthened the old Leonine walls and other more recent defenses, supervised the restoration of forty early Christian churches, repaired aqueducts, paved streets, and initiated a major restoration of the Castel Sant’Angelo. His most important work, however, was on the Vatican—which, he now decided, should replace the Lateran as the principal papal residence—and St. Peter’s. Of the late-thirteenth-century palace, essentially the work of Nicholas III, he restored and enlarged the north and west sides, using Leon Battista Alberti and Bernardo Rossellino as his architects. He also commissioned Fra Angelico, with his assistant Benozzo Gozzoli, to paint the stories of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence in his chapel and study and a further cycle of scenes from the life of Christ in the Chapel of the Sacrament.
3
His plans for St. Peter’s were still more ambitious. Like all the other great buildings of Rome, it had been allowed to fall into decay; the great architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti maintained that its complete collapse was only a matter of time. Nicholas, however, had in mind something more than just a program of repair; he envisaged lengthening the building by about a third and adding transepts and a new apse around the shrine of the Apostle. There was also a plan for a magnificent new space outside, where three great new avenues through the Borgo quarter would converge and where the crowds could congregate for mass blessings. These plans all lapsed at the pope’s death, but it is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if they had been put into effect. Julius II, half a century later, would probably not have ordered the complete rebuilding; on the other hand, we should almost certainly have been deprived of the great Bernini piazza, which to this day remains one of the most magnificent open spaces of Europe.
Pope Nicholas V died in March 1455 at the age of fifty-seven. His pontificate had lasted only eight years, but his influence had been enormous. Martin and Eugenius had both been affected by Renaissance ideas, but neither had wholeheartedly embraced the humanist ethos. Nicholas was the first pope who saw absolutely no contradiction or conflict between humanism and the Christian faith. To him the arts were neither vain nor frivolous; they too bore witness to the glory of God. It was only right, therefore, that the Church give a lead in the artistic field just as it did in the spiritual. Other popes who thought as he did were to follow; but Nicholas, and Nicholas alone, combined his views with a genuine piety, humility, and integrity. It was entirely typical of him that in 1449 he should have ordered a retrial of Joan of Arc, who had been burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, on charges which included heresy and witchcraft. This was to continue for the next seven years, during which 115 witnesses were heard; it ended only in the reign of his successor, who is normally—and most unfairly—given the credit for her complete rehabilitation.
