Absolute Monarchs (33 page)

Unlike so many of those who preceded or followed him, Nicholas V was untouched by greed or nepotism. Greatness, which he unquestionably possessed, never went to his head. In earlier years he had described himself, to his friend and biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci, as “a mere bell-ringing priest”; and that, in a very real sense, he remained.

ON APRIL 4
the fifteen cardinals who were in Rome assembled for the conclave—and badly missed their chance. They might have elected Cardinal Bessarion, by far the most intelligent and cultivated churchman in Rome. As a former metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, he was better qualified than any of his colleagues to end the four-hundred-year schism, and he would have steered the Papacy in a new and healthier direction. Alas, his Greek origins, which should have counted in his favor, militated against him; the cardinals instead chose a seventy-seven-year-old Catalan jurist, Cardinal Alfonso de Borja—subsequently Italicized to Borgia—who took the name of Calixtus III.

Deeply pious, dry as dust, and crippled by gout, Calixtus devoted his pontificate to two consuming ambitions. The first was to organize a European Crusade that would deliver Constantinople from the Turks; the second, to advance the fortunes of his family and his compatriots. Art and literature interested him not a jot. “See how the treasure of the Church has been wasted!” he is said to have exclaimed on walking into the Vatican Library for the first time. During his three-year pontificate, the Renaissance in Rome was suspended. Painters and sculptors, metalworkers and cabinetmakers were all dismissed. To raise money for his Crusade, Calixtus had no hesitation in selling off many of the most valuable gold and silver works of art in the Vatican Treasury, together with a number of the Papal Library’s most precious books. He built galleys in the boatyards of the Tiber, dispatched preachers across the continent to sell indulgences, and imposed swingeing taxes throughout Western Christendom. The response, however, was lukewarm. The courts of Europe grieved for Constantinople, but they were far too deeply preoccupied with their own concerns to go into battle on its behalf. A combined land and sea force was nevertheless dispatched and was not altogether abortive: the Hungarians under János Hunyadi routed the Turks at Belgrade in July 1456, and a year later a squadron of the Ottoman fleet was destroyed off Lesbos. But neither victory produced further results or was of any long-term importance.

Calixtus pursued his second ambition with similar energy and rather more success. Two of his great-nephews were given red hats; being the grandsons of his sisters, they were first required to italianize their name to Borgia. One of them, Rodrigo, was additionally appointed vice chancellor of the Holy See, a post which placed him in the forefront of Vatican affairs for the next thirty-five years, until his own succession as Pope Alexander VI. On a more humble level, the pope filled his court and Curia with Spanish and Catalan nominees, though few of them survived in their posts for very long after his death. This came on August 6, 1458, and was generally welcomed.

NOBODY HAD LIKED
Pope Calixtus much; everybody liked Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Born one of eighteen children, of an old Sienese family that had gone down in the world, he had pulled himself up by his own efforts and spent eight years in humanistic studies in Siena and Florence; he had then become secretary to various cardinals attending the Council of Basel, one of whom, Cardinal Nicholas Albergati, sent him in 1435 on the greatest adventure of his young life, a secret mission to Scotland.

The purpose of this mission was to try to persuade King James I to launch an attack on England, in yet another attempt to end the Hundred Years’ War. Aeneas had hoped to travel via London, but the English, doubtless suspecting that he was up to no good, refused him permission to land; he was obliged to return to the Continent and take a ship from Sluys direct to Scotland. The journey almost ended in disaster. Violent westerly gales drove the vessel toward the coast of Norway, and the terrified Aeneas vowed, if he survived, to walk barefoot to the nearest shrine of the Virgin Mary. At last, on the twelfth day, the ship, which was now taking on terrifying quantities of water, limped into port near Dunbar, and he duly trudged over the frozen earth to the holy well at Whitekirk. Fortunately for him, the distance was only about five miles and he made it, but after resting there for a time he found that he had lost all sensation in his feet. At first he feared that he might never walk again; in fact, he recovered, but he suffered from arthritis for the rest of his life and for much of his pontificate had to be carried about in a sedan chair.

His
Commentaries
, an account of his life written in the third person, cast an interesting light on early-fifteenth-century Britain:

The cities have no walls. The houses are usually constructed without mortar; their roofs are covered with turf; and in the country doors are closed with oxhides. The common people, who are poor and rude, stuff themselves with meat and fish, but eat bread as a luxury. The men are short and brave; the women fair, charming, and easily won. Women there think less of a kiss than in Italy of a touch of the hand … There is nothing the Scotch like better to hear than abuse of the English.…

Then Aeneas … disguised himself as a merchant and left Scotland for England. A river, which rises in a high mountain, separates the two countries. When he had crossed this in a small boat and had reached a large town about sunset, he knocked at a farmhouse and had dinner there with his host and the parish priest. Many relishes and chickens and geese were served, but there was no bread or wine. All the men and women of the village came running as if to see a strange sight, and as our people marvel at Ethiopians or Indians, so they gazed in amazement at Aeneas, asking the priest where he came from, what his business was, and whether he was a Christian.…

When the meal had lasted till the second hour of the night, the priest and the host together with all the men and children took leave of Aeneas and hastened away, saying that they were taking refuge in a tower a long way off for fear of the Scots, who were accustomed, when the river was low at ebb tide, to cross by night and make raids upon them. They could not by any means be induced to take him with them, although he earnestly besought them, nor yet any of the women, although there were a number of beautiful girls and matrons. For they think the enemy will do them no wrong—not counting outrage a wrong. So Aeneas remained behind with two servants and his one guide among a hundred women.…

But after a good part of the night had passed, two young women showed Aeneas, who was by this time very sleepy, to a chamber strewn with straw, planning to sleep with him, as was the custom of the country, if they were asked. But Aeneas, thinking less about women than about robbers, who he feared might appear at any minute, repulsed the protesting girls … So he remained alone among the heifers and nanny goats, which prevented him from sleeping a wink by stealthily pulling the straw out of his pallet.

Though still a layman, Aeneas returned to work in the Council Secretariat in Basel and soon afterward found himself secretary to the Antipope Felix V. In 1442 Felix sent him to the Diet of Frankfurt, where, almost immediately on his arrival, he caught the attention of the German King Frederick III, whose history he was later to write. The king fully recognized his literary gifts, as well as his outstanding intelligence and efficiency, and appointed him his poet laureate. For the next three years he worked in the royal chancery in Vienna, turning out in his spare time not only a quantity of mildly pornographic poetry
⁴
but also a novel in much the same vein,
Lucretia and Euryalus
, celebrating the amorous adventures of his friend, the Chancellor Caspar Schlick. He himself seems to have been no slouch where amorous adventures were concerned, as several acknowledged bastards could testify.

But such an existence could not continue indefinitely, and in 1445 Aeneas’s life underwent a dramatic change. First he broke with the antipope and was formally reconciled with Eugenius IV; then, in March 1446, he was ordained priest. Thereafter he was a genuinely reformed character, and his progress was fast: Bishop of Trieste in 1447, of Siena in 1450, cardinal in 1456. Two years later he was elected pope and characteristically, remembering Vergil’s
pius Aeneas
, took the name of Pius II and settled down to organize a Crusade.

He should have known better. With all his long diplomatic experience, it should have been clear to him that the princes of Europe were simply not prepared to shelve all their other preoccupations in order to march against the Turk; this, however—as so many of his predecessors had—he refused to accept. Within two months of his accession he issued a bull summoning Christendom to a Holy War and called a Congress of all Christian rulers to meet at Mantua on June 1, 1459. Nearly all of them declined the invitation; those who did not were evasive or noncommittal. Pius arrived at Mantua to find virtually no one there. The sad decline in papal influence could, he decided, be due only to the conciliar movement, of which he himself had previously been a staunch upholder; in January 1460 he promulgated another bull, condemning as heretical all appeals to a General Council. There could hardly have been a more radical about-face.

He refused, however, to be discouraged. If he could not defeat Sultan Mehmet in battle, perhaps he could persuade him by force of reason to see the error of his ways. In 1461 he drafted an extraordinary letter to the sultan in which he included a detailed refutation of the teachings of the Koran, an equally thorough exposition of the Christian faith, and a final appeal to renounce Islam and submit to baptism. It seems that the letter may never have been sent; if it was, it not surprisingly received no reply. But then good news arrived from Venice and Hungary: the states had agreed to join forces in a Crusade. Now all Pius’s hopes revived. The troops, he announced, would rendezvous with the fleet the following summer in Ancona; he himself would march at their head.

The Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral contains a superb cycle of frescoes by Pinturicchio depicting scenes from Pius’s life, the last of which shows his arrival at Ancona. The truth, however, was very far from what the picture suggests. The pope who took the Cross in St. Peter’s and set off on his litter from Rome on June 18, 1464, was already a sick man—so sick indeed that it was a whole month before he reached his destination. And when at last he arrived at Ancona, it was to find only a handful of Crusaders awaiting him. There were no obvious leaders and hardly any equipment. The Venetian fleet, he was told, had been delayed. It eventually sailed into harbor on August 12 with the current doge, Cristoforo Moro, at its head; but instead of the great armada the pope had expected, it consisted of just twelve small galleys. For Pius the disappointment was too great. He turned his face to the wall, and two days later he was dead. His broken heart was interred at Ancona, but his body was brought back to Rome.

It was a sad end to one of the most talented popes of his century. Pius was not above nepotism and filled his court with Sienese compatriots; but his literary and intellectual gifts, his skill as an administrator, his discriminating patronage of the arts, and his long diplomatic experience gave him a distinction matched by few of his contemporaries. He also remains the only pope to have created a city. In just five years between 1449 and 1464 he transformed his birthplace, the little village of Corsignano, redesigning it on classical lines according to all the latest theories of urban planning, giving it a cathedral and a magnificent palazzo for the use of his family, and renaming it after himself: Pienza.

PIUS WAS A
hard act to follow, and his successor, Paul II, was a distinct comedown. Born Pietro Barbo, the scion of a rich family of Venetian merchants, he is said to have thought himself outstandingly good-looking—a view difficult indeed to reconcile with the existing portraits—and had at first tried to call himself Formosus (the Handsome); fortunately, his cardinals had been able to dissuade him. Such physical beauty as he may or may not have possessed was in any case not reflected in his intellectual attainments. Shamelessly uncultured, he lost no time in getting rid of the humanists whom Pius had loved; when their leader, Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, who was subsequently papal librarian and author of
The Lives of the Popes
, protested and talked threateningly of a Council, he spent the next four months in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Several members of the Roman Academy, who professed what the pope regarded as an exaggerated interest in antiquity and insufficient respect for the Church, suffered a similar fate and were released only after the personal intervention of Cardinal Bessarion.

What Paul liked was wealth and display. As a young cardinal—being the nephew of Eugenius IV, he had become a cardinal deacon at twenty-three—he had amassed a superb collection of antiques and works of art. He encouraged carnivals, horse racing, and public entertainments of every kind. The celebrations on the occasion of the visit of the Emperor Frederick III on his second visit to Rome in 1468 were long remembered in the city. And, somewhat surprisingly in view of his treatment of the Academy, he set about the restoration of Rome’s ancient monuments. The Pantheon, the Arches of Titus and Septimius Severus, and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius were all taken in hand. He also built—and inhabited for the last five years of his pontificate—the magnificent Palazzo Venezia (from the first-floor balcony of which Benito Mussolini would later harangue the crowds). Finally, it was thanks to him that two enterprising Germans were allowed to set up the first Roman printing press.

The pope’s sexual proclivities aroused a good deal of speculation. He seems to have had two weaknesses—for good-looking young men and for melons—though the contemporary rumor that he enjoyed watching the former being tortured while he gorged himself on the latter is surely unlikely. The stroke that killed him on July 26, 1471, at the age of only fifty-four is said to have been brought on by a surfeit of both.