by G. J. Meyer
He was still in Spain when, a year later, news of the defeat of his army in Naples and the killing of its commander had an improving effect on his view of the situation. He decided that fighting a pope who had the support of most of Europe and insisting on the legitimacy of a powerless and largely forgotten Spaniard were never going to get him anywhere, and that a fresh approach was in order. Alonso de Borja agreed heartily—had long, in fact, been suggesting a change of course. He appealed to the king not by invoking Church unity, which was unlikely to matter greatly to an energetic young monarch bent on conquest, but by pointing to the practical advantages of getting the pope to endorse his claim to Naples. There was nothing to be lost, and so the king freed his secretary to see what diplomacy might accomplish.
It accomplished great things. Negotiations began, the pope was receptive, and a tentative settlement was worked out. Martin conceded, somewhat obliquely, that Alfonso just might have a valid claim to Naples. Borja, and through him Alfonso, acknowledged that Martin just might be the true pope. Building on this, in 1429 Borja went to the trouble of seeking out Antipope Clement at his hideaway in the remote Valencian town of Peníscola. There, offering as inducement the bishopric of Palma on the island of Mallorca, he persuaded Clement to make submission to Rome. With this, the royal House of Aragon abandoned its long repudiation of the Roman popes, king and pontiff were reconciled, and after almost half a century the Great Schism was at an end at last. A grateful pope announced Borja’s appointment as bishop of Valencia. This must have been deeply gratifying: Valencia was not only one of Spain’s richest sees but the Borja family’s home diocese. The appointment raised the Borja name to an eminence never before achieved, and it made Alonso a hero to his relatives. Among these relatives were his widowed sister and her children, who took up residence in Valencia’s grand episcopal palace. In order to become bishop, he had to take a step he had until now neglected: have himself ordained a priest.
The leaders of the Council of Constance had been ready to adjourn since 1418, but they feared that by disbanding they would free the pope to repudiate everything they had done. As a preventive measure they decreed that a new council must be convened after five years, with another seven years after that, and others every ten years thereafter. Pope Martin, though no friendlier to councils than his predecessors had been and his successors would be, found it impossible to avoid calling one in 1423. This new assembly, however, was so paralyzed by political divisions as to be unable to act. It accomplished little beyond reaffirming the supremacy of councils and scheduling another gathering for the Swiss city of Basel in 1431.
Martin died early in 1431 and was succeeded by the wealthy and handsomely aristocratic Cardinal Gabriele Condulmer of Venice, who became Eugenius IV. He was only forty-seven, some six years younger than the fledgling bishop of Valencia. Devoid of political experience and gifts, almost from the first day of his reign he began committing blunders. Ultimately, as we saw earlier, he so undermined his own position as to be obliged to depart Rome under a barrage of sticks and stones.
After years in exile, an exasperated Eugenius excommunicated everyone associated with Basel and called for an alternative assembly to convene at Ferrara. In response, the council denounced him as a heretic and voted to depose him. As replacement, it elected a new antipope, the onetime duke of Savoy, who had taken holy orders after the death of his wife and now styled himself Felix V. In all this the council was supported by the duke of Milan and, to the chagrin of Alonso de Borja, by Alfonso V. Everything the bishop had accomplished late in the reign of Martin V was thus in ruins, and disorder seemed to be spreading by the day. Fate almost seemed to be mocking him for attaching such importance to unity and a strong papacy.
When Alfonso V returned to Italy and took up once again the war for Naples, he brought Borja with him. Unhappy with almost everything that was happening, the bishop nevertheless continued the management of his master’s affairs and undertook a reform of the judicial system in the territories Alfonso controlled. Among his responsibilities was overseeing the education of Alfonso’s illegitimate son Ferdinand, who was in his early teens. This boy, known as Ferrante, was already a significant figure because his father’s marriage to the sickly and sadly unattractive Princess Maria of Castile had produced no offspring. Alfonso, resigned to the fact that when he died most of his sprawling empire would be inherited by his brother Juan or Juan’s son Ferdinand, was becoming obsessed with the thought that the great kingdom of Naples, if he could win it, should go to Ferrante. Meanwhile Borja was getting to know Ferrante and forming an opinion of the boy’s character that would have consequences in years to come.
The bishop refused to conceal his disapproval of the king’s friendliness toward the Council of Basel and its antipope. When Alfonso appointed him envoy to Basel, he took the astonishing step of refusing to go. When Eugenius ordered the council to move to Florence and some of the delegates obeyed while others remained defiantly in Basel, Borja signaled his support of the pope by going to Florence in person, possibly without the king’s approval. It is testimony to how much Alfonso valued the bishop’s services that he retained him as chief minister in spite of their differences on such a painfully divisive question.
The war for Naples appeared to have ended in disaster for Alfonso when, in the mid-1430s, another lost battle caused him to become the prisoner of Milan’s vicious Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, a supporter of Louis of Anjou and always an eager troublemaker. Almost miraculously, considering that to fall into the sadistic Filippo Maria’s hands often meant either a gruesome death or lifelong imprisonment under unspeakable conditions, Alfonso talked the duke into releasing him. He did so by arguing—his success shows the force of his personality—that it would be better for Milan if he became king of Naples and the Angevins were expelled.
Alfonso’s release marked a turning point in his fortunes. When in 1442 he finally crushed his Angevin rivals and sent them scurrying back to France, the way was cleared for the resolution of an array of long-festering issues. By the time he entered the city of Naples, the Council of Basel had lost all credibility. Though it remained in session, even Felix V had tired of its sterile debates and departed. With both council and antipope reduced to near-irrelevance, Alfonso V (now Alfonso I of Naples as well) and Pope Eugenius were free to turn their attention to each other. What they saw—what Alonso de Borja encouraged them to understand—was that they had more to gain by coming to terms than by continuing their dispute. Because Naples was recognized by all Europe as a papal fief, no one could legitimately rule it without the approval of—without being formally invested in it by—the Roman pontiff. Alfonso would never be accepted as its king until some pope recognized him as such, the sooner the better. Felix, from Geneva, offered to do the investing, but he had so little standing by this time that the suggestion could not be taken seriously.
Eugenius for his part would be denying reality if he refused to accept the Aragonese conquest of Naples. Nothing could come of that but more years of trouble. All the elements needed for agreement were obviously in place, and so negotiations got under way with Borja once again representing the king. By the terms of the resulting Treaty of Terracina, Alfonso recognized Eugenius as pope and received investiture as king of Naples. For the second time in a decade and a half, Alonso de Borja had reunited the Western Church. Eugenius felt it safe to return to Rome, which during his years of exile had sunk into a wretched state of lawlessness.
Pope and king embarked upon a political honeymoon. In 1444 the grateful Eugenius made Borja a cardinal and presbyter of the church of Santi Quattro Coronati on Rome’s Coelian Hill. He did so not in response to any appeal from Alfonso V or as a political favor to Naples but in recognition of Borja’s services to the Church. That same year, assenting to something that his new royal friend desired almost as urgently as he had wanted Naples, Eugenius legitimated the twenty-one-year-old Ferrante. Alfonso celebrated this as a coup, one that opened the way for Ferrante to succeed him on the
throne of Naples. Cardinal Borja was not the only legal scholar to find this a dubious proposition; there were old and widespread doubts about whether legitimization brought with it a right of succession.
In 1445 Borja took up residence in Rome. Presumably he was expected to serve as Alfonso’s representative at the papal court, but it is likely that he felt he had done quite enough for an insatiably ambitious king and was weary of being asked to untangle his affairs. In any case, once settled in an old palace in a quiet quarter between the ruins of the Colosseum and the almost as ancient Basilica of St. John Lateran, he showed less interest in political matters than in his gardens. The only issue that could still draw him out was the old, perennially unresolved question of papal authority. When a dispute between the Vatican and the German Church was settled toward the end of Eugenius’s life, Borgia (as his name was now spelled in Rome) was one of only two cardinals to complain that too much had been conceded that rightfully belonged to the pope. For the most part he lived the life of a retired and beneficent dignitary, a patron of charitable institutions rather than of artists, architects, and scholars. As a Spaniard he was very much an outsider, but he seems to have been content with that. He kept to the margins of Roman society, staffing his residence with countrymen from Spain and opening it, unenthusiastically on the whole, to the relatives who were migrating to Italy in the hope that having a kinsman who was a cardinal could put opportunities in their path.
When in February 1447 Eugenius IV died at age sixty-two, Borgia was already sixty-eight. And though he now was, because a cardinal, eligible for election, at no point in that year’s conclave was he mentioned as a possible candidate. Nor does he appear to have taken any significant part in the politicking, even when the Orsini-Colonna deadlock made it impossible for either family’s candidate to be chosen. The winner who ultimately emerged, the famously brilliant Cardinal Tommaso Parentucelli, was only forty-nine years old, young enough to be Borgia’s son. Though small and oddly shriveled in appearance, with tiny dark birdlike eyes, the new Pope Nicholas was in good enough health, lived simply, and had great plans both for the papacy and for the city of Rome. There could have seemed little possibility that the elderly Cardinal Borgia would live to see another conclave, and no possibility at all that he would ever be in contention for the papal crown.
2
Surprises, Disappointments, Hope
There is reason to surmise that one man only may have been less than flabbergasted by Cardinal Alonso Borgia’s elevation to the pontifical throne, and that the man in question was Alonso himself.
This possibility arises out of virtually the only interesting story about Alonso’s early life to have come down to us—a tale that must have some sort of basis in fact, because Alonso himself appears to have believed it.
According to this story, at some point in his boyhood Alonso crossed paths with a famous holy man and preacher named Vincente Ferrer, a Spanish friar descended through his father from Scottish nobility. That such an encounter took place is in no way implausible. Ferrer, famous for working wonders and for converting huge numbers of Jews using methods that would raise eyebrows in later centuries, was a celebrated figure in Valencia in the late fourteenth century, attracting crowds wherever he appeared. He also took a doctorate in theology at the same University of Lérida where Alonso would later study and teach law.
Be all that as it may, upon meeting Alonso, Ferrer is supposed to have declared that the child would one day achieve “the highest authority which mortal man can obtain”—words that any educated European of the time would have understood as referring to the papacy. Alonso is said to have taken the prophecy to heart, and to have waited serenely for its fulfillment as men younger and still younger than himself were elected instead. All we know with certainty is that, as one of his first acts after becoming Pope Calixtus III, he saw to it that Vincente Ferrer was canonized. Today a handsome church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan bears his name.
Calixtus’s reign got off to a fast start. It was also a rocky start: on the day of the new pope’s coronation, packs of toughs affiliated with the Orsini and the Colonna roamed the streets of Rome claiming to be offended that a “Catalan” had become pope, looking for opportunities to make trouble. They so disrupted one procession that the aged pontiff was nearly thrown from his horse. The trouble was worst, predictably, wherever rival prowling gangs collided. It rose to a fever pitch when the chief of the Bracciano branch of the Orsini, Napoleone by name, tried to use the growing disorder to take revenge on an old foe. By the time the papal retinue with its eighty bishops all dressed in white had moved past the ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum and reached the Basilica of St. John Lateran, it was inching its way through something between a full-blown riot and a miniature war. Houses were being looted and set on fire. Onlookers were being attacked, even killed.
The former Alonso Borgia, a man known for nothing so much as for being “peaceable and kindly,” the dark-horse candidate who had been made pope precisely because none of his fellow cardinals could imagine him interfering in their affairs, turned to the proud and powerful Cardinal Latino Orsini, who as it happened was Napoleone’s brother, and ordered him to control his family. Now. Or else. Order was restored, the pope had put his mark on his first day in office with a forcefulness he had rarely if ever displayed in Rome, and the Orsini had been given a foretaste of the half-century of Borgia difficulties that lay in store for them.
That was nothing compared to the surprises that followed, and the speed with which Calixtus began producing them. His health so poor that on many mornings he was unable to get out of bed, he nevertheless began drawing upon previously unsuspected reserves of energy—and upon a long agenda of things he was determined to accomplish. He summoned secretaries to his bedside one after another, gave them instructions or dictated letters and bulls in a seemingly endless flow, and sent them bustling off on a bewildering variety of missions. At the center of this whirlwind, overshadowing everything else, was a subject to which Calixtus’s predecessor Nicholas V had paid the necessary lip service but rarely given real priority: the Turks.
By the time of Calixtus III’s election, the Turks had been in Europe for more than a century. With the exception of a brief period around 1400, when Mongol hordes swept through the Middle East on a vast raid that threw everything into disorder until the invaders abruptly turned around and galloped back to eastern Asia, the Ottoman armies were as voracious and seemingly unstoppable as a plague of locusts. By stages they devoured so much of the old Byzantine Christian Empire that at midcentury almost nothing remained of it except the capital, Constantinople, enfeebled almost to the point of helplessness.
Sultan Mehmed II, only twenty-three when Calixtus became pope but already as feared as anyone then living, was a worthily warlike link in a chain of land-hungry fathers and sons whose empire would ultimately encompass substantial parts of three continents and last more than six hundred years. His forefathers had emerged in the thirteenth century as heads of one of the ten or so little principalities that came to dot Anatolia (in what is now Turkey) as the Eastern Christian Empire lost its grip there. The dynasty that would take its name from the second man to head it, the emir Osman I, was consistently both more aggressive and more successful than its neighbors and began absorbing them one by one. Osman’s grandson Murad I achieved such eminence that by the 1370s he was minting his own coins and using the title “sultan”—a word connoting sovereignty, and religious as well as political authority.
Mehmed II was Murad I’s great-grandson, and by the time of his birth in 1432 the unique phenomenon that was Ottoman culture was pretty much fully formed. Among the striking features of that culture were a pervasive and remarkably creative use of slavery, polygamy on an epic scale, royal fratricide as government policy, and ingenious ways of controlling subject populations vastly more numerous than the Turks themselves. Slavery, so integral to the empire that at its zenith one in every five residents of Constantinople was officiall
y in bondage, took such novel forms under the sultans that it became a major source of their strength. Osman I and his descendants made the improbable discovery that prisoners of war, especially the youngest of them, could be turned not only into useful fighting men but into fiercely loyal ones. This led to the creation of a system for recruiting talent on a massive scale through systematic abduction. Every five years the sultan’s troops would scour his Christian domains (Serbia and Bulgaria, for example, and the Greek communities of Anatolia), round up thousands of boys between ten and perhaps fifteen years of age, select the strongest and brightest, and carry them off. They would be lodged with Turkish families long enough to learn the language and receive basic instruction in Islam, and then be placed on the bottom rungs of career ladders leading to the most powerful positions in the army and navy, the imperial bureaucracy, and municipal and provincial government. Legally these youngsters remained slaves, but they were slaves with far more opportunities than most of the supposedly free people of the time. Eventually the empire came to be managed mainly by men whose careers had begun with their being stolen from their parents. They could be considered slaves only in the sense of being—like everyone else in the empire—absolutely subject to the will of the sultan.