A Trembling Upon Rome

by Richard Condon

  As soon as they ceased their shocking agitations – I do not mean that I was-shocked by what they were doing but by the extent to which they were doing it – I pulled him off her, probably because I was not an Italian. As I lifted him away, I veiled into his dazed ear, `We must travel, Cossa. As it is we will scarcely make it.' He, kissed the lady's tattered mouth and left the room.

  We were two hours on our way, with Cossa riding along, staring like a sheep at the, horizon, when he remembered some terrible omission. He tried to wheel his horse, but I grabbed the reins. `I don't know her name!' he wailed. `We must go back! How will I ever find her again?'

  Wherever she was going, she has gone,' I told him: `I will send a man back to talk to the innkeeper. But, wherever she is headed,, she doesn't have an appointment with the pope.'.

  He actually began to weep. He moaned that he couldn't live without her, that I didn't understand things. like that – while I kept him riding a good distance ahead of the escort lest they discover what a fool he had become.

  We reached the Lateran eighteen minutes, before Cossa's appointment. A guards captain took Cossa into the palace. Boniface did business only at night. It was an unusual meeting, Cossa told me. The pope was engaged in quarterly accounting audits and apologized that he wouldn't be able to give Cossa much time. He said he wanted from Cossa an estimate quantifying the costs of raising an army of mercenaries for Bologna. Mercenaries, the slogging condottieri of Italy, fought all its wars. Boniface instructed him sternly never to forget that most of the funding would come from the Council of Ten in Florence. `Be aware that a small part will come from our papal states,' Boniface said, `and' we expect you to keep our forced contribution to this project to a minimum. I expect you to make up for our financial losses by doing a considerable amount of looting and hostage-taking.

  'Me?' Cossa asked.

  `The Duke of Este is growing too old to lead troops,' the pope said, `and, as the Florentines will be paying the bulk of the costs, they insist upon choosing the commander and they have chosen you.’

  `Who are we fighting?' Cossa said,

  'I don't need to tell you that this is not to cause a shift in your loyalties, Cossa,' Boniface said sternly. `It is only a temporary campaign to contain the Duke of Milan: to get him out of Bologna, to keep him out of the papal states, and to thwart his ambitions for the conquest of Italy…’

  The Duke of Milan was Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The Visconti had been rulers of Milan since the end of the thirteenth century. Their power was so well established and their reputation so great that they had been able to rise from the status of Lombardy bandits and hired lances to intermarry with, the royal houses of England and France, and with the princes of Germany. When Galeazzo II died, in 1378, his heirs, were his son, Gian Galeazzo, and his brother Bernabo, as ruthless a ruffian as anyone ever had for a relative.

  Bernabo worked plot after plot to get rid of his nephew, but without effort the nephew managed to detect and defeat these deadly schemes. In perfidy and dissimulation the young man was more than a match for his uncle.

  All at once, Gian Galeazzo became absorbed in devotion to the Holy, Spirit. He visited churches, rosary in hand, spent hours of devotion before statues of saints, and tripled his bodyguard. In May 1385 he let it be known widely that he was going to pray at the shrine of the Madonna del Monte at Varese, near Lake Maggiore, which was within his uncle's territory. His bodyguard was commanded by Jacopo del Verme and Antonio Porro, pitiless men.

  Bernabo Visconti and his two sons joined Gian Galeazzo at the shrine. Nephew and uncle embraced each other tenderly. Gian Galeazzo held onto his uncle tightly and gave the order, in German, to murder his relatives. Thus did Gian Galeazzo Visconti become the head of the Visconti family and the sole Lord of Lombardy.

  His wealth exceeded that of the Holy Roman Emperor who shivered in dripping northern forests. When Gian Galeazzo made war, he hired the best condottieri. When he made peace, he told Europe, he had dismissed his generals, but kept them on half-pay on the condition that they ravage only the lands of his enemies and leave his own untouched. He conquered Padua and Verona. He ruled Bologna. By 1386, the Vipers of his blazonry were -hoisted on the Adriatic and his flags flew over the belfries of Venice. He wrested Pisa away from Florence. In Italy, only Florence, the papal states, Rome and Naples were not possessed by him. It was a matter of desperation to him that they fall before him. He had been preparing for the attack for years and made no effort to conceal his intentions.

  `Your real career is in my hands,' Boniface told Cossa. Remember’

  `I am only the servant of Your Holiness,' Cossa answered.

  `I tell you that the Florentines have asked for you because you should know who is putting the wine in your glass.' They say you are almost a Bolognese.' He looked at Cossa suspiciously, then smiled. 'What do they know of Neapolitans?'

  `It is all a mystery to me, Holiness.'

  `I doubt that. The son of Giovanni di Bicci di Medici is waiting for you in the anteroom. His name is Cosimo, a lad of seventeen or eighteen years. He will assist you in this compilation, and our people

  will see that you have ample working space with sufficient scriptors, correctors, abbreviators and counters. I want your report in five days. We will meet here again at four o'clock next Thursday morning.'

  The pope swept out of the room attended by a chamberlain who held up a sheet of numbers, under papal eyes as the two of them walked away from Cossa.

  Cossa found Cosimo' di Medici to be a wonderfully agreeable young fellow to whom nothing seemed to be a problem. Cosimo was drawn to Cossa. He later told his father that he had been entirely right, that Cossa was the kind of up-and-coming Church executive that they had been waiting for. Though my wife never agreed with me on this, I thought that Cossa and Cosimo even looked like each other. They were both middle-sized with pronounced noses and, rosy-olive complexions. They both had receding hair and beautiful teeth. Cosimo was the graver of the two, but after all he was a banker, and the more professionally kindly. Cossa had his extraordinary smile, and behind everything he did was a permanent sardonicism as befits a man whom God had absent-mindedly placed in the wrong niche. Cosimo appeared to be the gentler, but he believed more strongly than Cossa that states are not ruled by paternoster`s.

  Together they turned out a solid plan: Even Cossa's Uncle Tomas was impressed. The plan explained how the condottieri would be recruited, armed, fed and deployed, and how much it would cost to turn Gian Galeazzo back to Milan.

  We went back to Bologna. Using Este's army, Cossa moved harshly to clean out any pockets of treason within the city. Bologna was a part of the state of Milan, Gian Galeazzo's fief. Cossa wrested away the possession of the citadel. He seized all thee strong towns which surrounded Bologna and strengthened the line of the papal states immediately to the south. He moved so boldly and with such force that Gian Galeazzo did not march to retake Bologna, and more time was bought when Florence and Bologna struck: a military alliance with the ring of France.

  The real proof of Cossa's success was in the speech which Cosimo's father made before the Signoria, the Council of Florence, which said, in part, 'There is so much worth in this man, Cossa, for having from his boyhood applied himself to letters and, having worked so hard he became not only a celebrated orator and poet but a philosopher also – he turned his mind to other matters – he made himself master-at-arms to a city where he is now esteemed as one of the first soldiers of Italy. Of course, Giovanni di Bicci di Medici was justifying the cost of Cossa to Florence when many other soldiers would have done the job as, well, but sponsoring other soldiers wouldn't have promoted Cossa towards that place where he could realize those enormous gains for the Medici.

  When he had secured Bologna, the Medicis' poet-philosopher, Cossa, was recalled to Rome by, his pope to become one of his three private chamberlains. The night before we left, Is said to him that he was about to begin his career at the pinnacle of the Church, at the right hand of its pontiff., I
told him that the time had come to forget soldiering and politics and to begin to think of God.

  He said to me, `Do you think, Franco Ellera, if there were a God there would be any need for the complexities of this Church? If God were anywhere, he would be within man, don't you think? But instead we are given a counterfeit of this, glorious friendship, styled by cold popes and bishops whose only work has been to build a cage around their God who, by virtue of his omniscience and omnipotence, should not exist if he exists at all – to live in such a cage. God is the sublime idea of man. The Church is, an expanding corruption of functionaries tangled haphazard rules which define religion, not God. Religion is only, political bargaining for souls of which they have no knowledge. But God, if he existed, would be subjective, infusing all selves, the selves which are both heaven and hell, reward everlasting.'

  10

  Cossa was placed at the pope's right hand, at the heart of the apostolic chamber which administered the papal finances, Boniface's most urgent interest, in that it yielded income which was about three times the income of the King of France.

  The chamberlains worked wherever Boniface worked or slept – at the Vatican palace or at the Lateran – in three separate eight-hour shifts. Cossa worked at night, from midnight until eight in the morning. The second chamberlain, a sombre Sicilian, Bishop Luca Salvadore, worked in the day to execute the papal decisions taken at night. The third chamberlain served from four in the afternoon until midnight. He was Piero Spina. Spina handled the legates and ambassadors of foreign princes. He breakfasted with the pope every afternoon at four. He set the pope's appointments, but Cossa had the place of power.

  As senior chamberlain, Cossa was placed to keep an eye on bishops everywhere in Christendom. He could, when he chose, warn them when they were likely to be transferred, and earned a rich crop of first fruits from this when he intervened with the pope to prevent changes of diocese which would have been costly or inconvenient for the incumbents. Sometimes, the threatened transfers existed only in Cossa's imagination. He had come to Rome a wealthy man. He became wealthier: The money he won was invested fruitfully: it is my experience that whatever Italians earn they save.

  The day all three new chamberlains began their tours, Boniface gave them breakfast, at 4.00 p.m., a working breakfast, and laid down the basic rules of the operation, the most important of which was that, if he was resting, he could only be disturbed if at least two out of the three of them could agree that it was necessary. He made sure they understood. `No cardinal has the right: The curia and the sacred college have been told that together you are an extension of our own being, aware of our requirements and immovable where our comfort is concerned.'

  The chamberlains chewed politely and waited.

  `You were carefully chosen. Spina is known throughout Rome as the most devious man in the Church, an astonishing feat: It is said that he can think the same thought four ways at the same time, which bespeaks the caution we require in all things. Luca Salvadore is our financial wizard. He will send out our decisions across Christendom to bring; in the money, Cossa is a condottieri general, a tested negotiator and a man of much cunning, who will sit with me at all appointments and confirm my judgements.'

  After breakfast, Luca Salvadore remained with the Holy Father while Cossa and Spina strolled in the gardens to become acquainted.

  `You seem to have had a bad accident with your nose,' Cossa said.

  'Yes. A freak thing. When I was a lad my mother asked me to get a travelling case down from a high shelf and it slipped and came down on my nose.'

  'It must have been damned painful.'

  'One forgets such things. I must say you are the first to have shown enough interest, to ask about it.'

  'It wasn't just idle curiosity,'' Cossa said. `I thought I could help. I have a cousin who is a surgeon. He does wonderful work with the men of my father's fleet.'

  `How kind of you, Cossa'. You know I have the feeling we have met before.'

  'I don't think so. I certainly would have remembered it. Of course, it's possible. We are both southerners – countrymen.''

  `Southerners, yes,' Spina said. `But not countrymen. Sicily is a separate place.'

  Cossa was senior chamberlain to Pope Boniface IX for sixteen months. On the 14 July 1402, Bologna came again under the sway of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. He also held Padua and Pisa, and had Florence surrounded. When it fell, he would march to conquer Italy.

  The Florentine delegation reached Rome almost as soon as the first dispatch about Bologna came to the pope. Sombre with anxiety, they sat down to luncheon at one o'clock in the morning at the Vatican. When the servants had withdrawn, the pope invited Cosimo to speak his mind.

  "Cosimo told of Gian Galeazzo's preparations in Pavia. He concluded the report by saying that his committee, representing the Dieci and the Signoria of Florence, wished to make recommendations which they hoped would be welcomed by His Holiness.

  `Why not?' the pope said.

  `It is our opinion, Holiness, that Baldassare Cossa should lead the papal forces with the money Florence, Siena, Mantua and Parma will provide.'

  `Well, you liked his work last time,' the pope answered.

  'Yes. As well, we propose that you make Cossa a cardinal and, when the time comes, your legate to sit in Bologna. This would provide proper proportions of risk for Gian Galeazzo, while lending a stateliness to the alliance, which includes France, against the Duke of Milan.'

  The pope sighed. `Cossa is so useful to us in this work. But the sacred college has been depopulated by the deaths of so many cardinals. I will do as you wish. Cossa is a valuable man to all of us.'

  He spoke the truth, of course. But he underestimated it by perhaps a thousandfold if Cossa's value, as a cardinal, to Giovanni di Bicci di Medici were to be measured: The Medici bank considered that it had done a slick piece of business that night. They were one step closer to pocketing the Holy Mother Church as a valued banking client.

  11

  Cosimo later told Cossa that he had been sexually aroused by thinking about the possibility of the bank getting so much money. After the meeting, as he was being escorted out of the palace with much deference by a captain of the papal guard, a moustached Swiss named Ueli Miinger, from Winterthur, near, the German border, Cosimo asked Munger where he could find pleasure in Rome. Munger winked at him, a startling act from such a martial figure. 'There is a new mezzana in Rome,' he said. `A very handsome woman, herself. Big, you know what I mean.'

  `Is that so? Cosimo said, adjusting his clothing.

  'She set up a new house ten days ago. She has sensational girls. And they are also cultured. No whistling or catcalls when you go upstairs at Signora Manovale's.'

  'You mean a brothel?' Cosimo asked him.

  'Oh, no, Don't get me wrong, sir. Signora Manovale is a broker, not a ruffiana. She is an intermediary – you know, a mezzana between very beautiful, lonely women and the men who sometimes feel they need pleasure. It is all very high class, believe me. You can dine there, just talking to some beautiful, woman, or you can listen to music or poetry, or you can fuck. It is the meeting place right now, sir. Very refined, and very expensive.'

  I had been there. I wasn't married when I was in Rome with Cossa. Bernaba, who later, became my wife, had given, me a written introduction to Signora Manovale which I had composed and written myself, reading it back to Bernaba, who had never learned to write. I never stayed with any of the courtesans Captain Munger spoke about but I had a good thing going with the doorkeeper, a very sincere nymphomaniacal sort of a woman.

  On slow nights I sat around with Signora Manovale and her daughters because Manovale was a good personal and professional friend of Bernaba's and Bernaba always wanted site best for me. As I did for her, of course, but it wasn't the same, if you catch my meaning. I never knew Manovale when she was a ruffuana but I think her experience in that job was the key to her character. A ruffiana doesn't only deal in women; she sells love potions and sometim
es these potions are poison because that is what happens to love sometimes and women would go to her to pay for the poisons. To become a successful mezzana, she had had to acquire polish and this tended to conceal what she was. One might think that this would have changed her character, even her appearance, but Manovale was the most extraordinary woman of her time, of her century. Manovale could not be measured by any usual standards. No ones ambition, including Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's, ever looked so high.

  'It sounds charming,' Cosimo said to Captain Monger. `Perhaps you could assign a man to guide me there.'

  `Give me a few minutes,' Captain Monger said.

  The captain was having a low-pitched talk with a young priest – when the other Florentines in Cosimo's party, emerged from the palace. Their escort, bringing the horses, arrived at the same time to meet them. Cosimo said that he must part company with them. 'I am going to call on a beautiful lady who has several beautiful friends,' he told them, `if any of you would like to come along.' Only one man, Count Giuliano Rizzo, took up the invitation, but he had enjoyed so much of the pope's wine that, when the hostler handed him up into the saddle, he kept going right over the top and landed heavily on the stones on the far side of the horse, which put him instantly to sleep. Rizzo was not a banker, but later became a cardinal.

  Cosimo and his bodyguard mounted their horses. The young priest led the way out of the palace courtyard, across the bridge over the night-laden Tiber and into the city, running barefoot ahead of them, They clattered on for about twenty minutes, then came to a halt before a handsome building. The priest ran to its massive door and knocked heavily. My friend, the doorkeeper, opened the door, dressed in pantaloons and a tailed coat, a mockery on such a figure. The priest went to her and spoke into her ear. She told me later that even she knew what a Medici was. She bowed to the men, still horsed, and went into the house, leaving the door open, for which Signora Manovale gave her proper hell the next morning.