A Trembling Upon Rome

by Richard Condon

  He told me he thought sometimes that he was two people. One of these was pulled helplessly into the orbit of the woman from Perugia the other knew he belonged to the marchesa for ever. `I still think of that woman whom we left in Perugia, Franco,' he said to me. `Never a day or a night has passed when she has not been vividly in my mind. Even when I am upon the marchesa and almost frantic with the love of her, I think of the woman, whom I left in Perugia. She is with me now. She will probably always be a part of me and I rejoice at that, but the woman who commands my soul is the Marchesa di Artegiana. She consumes me. She is in my mind and in my bones and yet – even I know that she is but one of the two women in my life. I will never see her again that woman in Perugia, but she lives for me while the marchesa blinds me like a sun.'

  `It could be worse,' I said.

  `How could it be worse?'

  'Well- it could be four women. Or ten. But at some point; you would have to start to lose track.'

  He glared at me. `How would you like me to have Palo cut your balls off?' he snapped.

  When Cardinal Cossa had concluded the papal treaty with the Milan Council and was alone in the command tent outside Milan's walls, Carlo Malatesta spoke to him. Malatesta was one of Cossa's generals, called `the best and most loyal of his race’, a man who was married to a daughter of Bernabo Visconti; making him a brotherin-law of the late Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. Cossa had respect for Malatesta as well as affection. They greeted each other warmly and to honour the day, Cossa bade him sit and drink a glass of wine.

  `What brings you here?' Cossa asked. `I am happy to see you always.'

  `Your, Eminence – there is a matter – that is, you may know that my wife's sister is, Catherine Visconti, widow of Gian' Galeazzo.' Cossa nodded.

  `She has asked me to ask you for an audience with her. She is a sensible woman – after all, she is a Visconti – so there is no possibility of embarrassment for, you. And may I also say that Francesco de Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua, a member of the council with whom you have just made the treaty, who is married to yet another sister of Catherine Visconti – there are nine in all – adds his own petition to mine that you grant this request.'

  'My dear fellow! Of course. I would be honoured to meet, such a great lady.'

  `Then she will come to your tent tonight, Eminence.'

  `Out of the question. That would be intolerable. I will, of course, go to her.'

  Malatesta cleared his throat. `That would be indelicate, Eminence. As you have just concluded a treaty with Milan without conquering it, the Milanese would' be offended if you entered the city:

  `Nonetheless,' the cardinal said, `I did conquer the Milanese, and I will not permit the widow of a great man to be humiliated by having to come through a military camp to see me. Please – you yourself, and Gonzaga as well if he wishes, will escort me via some little-used way into the city and take me to where the lady waits. I will dress myself in the Milanese style. No one will notice me.'

  `The duchess wishes to meet you alone, Eminence. I will send you Gonzaga's own man to take you to her.'

  When Malatesta had gone, Cossa asked me what I thought it was all about. `It sounds a lot like she wants to get laid,'' I said. 'New widows are like that.'

  The following night, three hours after darkness fell, Cossa's guide came to the tent and I searched him for weapons. While the cardinal general, dressed as a civilian, rode with the man towards the city walls, I followed them silently.

  When they reached a secondary gate, I caught up and the three of us were allowed by the guard to pass through. The streets had been emptied by curfew.

  `She is in the citadel,' the guide told us. We reached the door of the high, windowless tower and Cossa dismounted. I secured his horse and settled down to wait.

  The man unlocked the door. Cossa went inside. When he returned four hours later, he was an utterly different man. He was very pale as if he had slept with giant bats who had drained him of blood. He appeared to me to be about fifty pounds lighter and he wore a silly coltish grin. He told me what had happened:

  Inside the tower he had faced a spiral staircase ascending into darkness. He climbed the stairs. A few minutes before he reached the top, a door opened above him and the light fell upon him. He kept climbing and entered the open door, closing it behind him.

  Before him, in serene repose, sat the delicately ravenous woman who had occupied his mind since the night in Perugia when he had been an archdeacon and she had seduced him, the woman for whom he had searched until the Marchesa di Artegiana had distracted him from the dream. He reached out for her as if he were stretching out to grasp an apparition. She was solidly real.

  Long after, while she lay in his arms, she sleepily told him her story. In 1380; when she was twelve years old, her father, Bernabo Visconti, had compelled Gian Galeazzo to marry her, hoping in this way to neutralize his rival. She lived with the duke, her first cousin; at the ducal palace in Pavia, the great fortress-palace which his father had built into the north wall of the city. Although her husband was a stranger to honour, she said, he was devoted to art and scholarship. He was secretive: He loved the silent gardens and the woods that stretched away on the other side of the Ticino. He was already a widower but he had had to put away his private grief because having no male heir gave temptation to his rivals. Before he and Catherine were married, Gian Galeazzo had been negotiating a secret betrothal to a Sicilian princess, which would have strengthened his position against Bernabo Visconti. But Bernabo made sure that wedding did not take place. After his marriage to Catherine, Gian Galeazzo was completely at Bernabo's mercy and Bernabo had little mercy.

  Catherine told Cossa that she could see her husband from the tower, at Pavia as he paced with his leopards in the garden, plotting how to rid the world of her father. He had to kill her father, she said. He wanted to rule Milan alone. But more than that he wanted dominion over all of Italy and to do that he had to get at the undivided resources of Milan. So he killed her father and her brothers, then made his triumphal entry into Milan as the people shouted, `Long live the Count of Virtu! Down with taxes!' His coup was so well planned that the Pisan; government voted its congratulations on the same day, and Pisa is 140 miles away.

  `As soon as he was ruler of Milan he made me pregnant by my first son,' she said. `I am telling you this so that you will see that a woman can only find safety under the protection of a great man. You are more of a man than my husband was. He was timid. You are a lion. I can see now – so soon – that everything he held will fall into shards. When there is no strong control – such as you would bring to Milan

  His general's will grab territory to make up for lost booty and pay. Facino Cane is finished in Bologna. You finished him. He will carve out his domain in Piedmonte. Ugo Cavalcabo will seize Cremona. Franchino Rusca will take Como. Ottobuono Terzo will take Parma. Brescia will go to the Guelphs, and your friend Carlo Malatesta will hold Rimini.

  `Well,' Cossa said, `that is how history is made.'

  `Not Visconti history!' she said fiercely. `We hold what we have killed to get. Hear me, my cardinal, my general, my beloved together, you and I, by combining Milan with Bologna, could hold all the power. City by city we would add Perugia, Siena, Padua, Parma – on and on. Then we could consolidate the power and breed the money; whatever you wanted, and whatever the Viscontis wanted, you could have.'

  He lay silent. He was confused. The form of the marchesa rose in his mind so vividly that he felt her beside him. The two women were so different but they were very much the same. Two nights earlier and on this night he had discovered two great lights of women; the Marchesa di Artegiana and now, again, this wanton were destroying his purpose as a soldier and a cardinal. In, their different ways – or perhaps it was in the same way – they were offering him kingdoms. Catherine had touched his deepest ambitions when she had told him he could be the conqueror of Italy – though he would have to agree to relinquish his cardinalate and shame his father. It came to him t
hat, if he had not thought of such an escape, another one as useful would have taken its place.

  It was entirely possible, of course, and certainly in keeping with her family's character, that this woman would have him killed after he had got everything back for her- but more than that, more than anything, he knew as his mind clogged with desire that he was the total captive of the Marchesa di Artegiana and he did not want to be freed:

  As I have always said, Cossa was basically a passive man. All fatalists are.

  `I am a cardinal of the Holy Church,' he said to Catherine as his answer. `I am the servant of His Holiness Pope Boniface IX, whose armies I lead. Let me take the time to consolidate the papal claim upon the papal states and let me think about what I could bring to the alliance you propose, dear lady, and then, please God, we will meet again.'

  He told me all this and I believed him. It was in keeping with his character, for what. he was really saying was that he wanted to have time to think about it all, then to come to a decision, but he did not tell Catherine Visconti that and he wasn't sure if he could come to a decision. He asked me bitterly why an entire qualifying list of particulars had, to go wherever the women went, why they could not just do what everyone wanted to do: make love until they had exhausted themselves, then see how life turned out.

  Every day after that, I was aware of the two women who walked with Cossa. They seemed such entirely different women to me: the one who had been born a high aristocrat but who was a slut; and the other who had been born a slut but who became a high aristocrat. I thought about them for a long time because they were bringing so much force upon Cossa. In the end I saw that they were both offering him more money and more power, that, Cossa wanted those things and nothing else, but that he was within himself, timid. He believed he needed both women to help him get what they all wanted; this was how he was able to deceive himself so mightily.

  18

  Having secured the peace of Milan, Cardinal Cossa returned to Bologna on 10 November 1403, spending the night at the monastery of the Crociari outside the walls of the city. He made his triumphal entry into Bologna in the morning, by the San Mammolo gate, to pass along streets adorned with coloured cloths and silks, embellished with the arms of the Church, the city and the legate, to the cathedral. All the chief citizens and most of the populace came out to meet him, whom they regarded as a long-adopted Bolognese. Hundreds of gleeful people ran to greet him with cheers of `Viva la chiesa!'

  The procession was led by a carroccio drawn by four bulls and hung with scarlet trappings fringed with gold. Above the cart floated the banner of the Church and upon it stood eight doctors of law and eight knights, to whom the legate presented scarlet robes. The city ancients came, then the magistrates and their attendants, with much music.

  Baldassare; Cardinal Cossa, entered the city on prancing horseback as befitted a supreme commander of the papal condottieri, with a scarlet canopy, richly fringed and lined, held over his head by four young nobles acting as his grooms. There surged within him the desire for an instant painting to be made of the entire scene which could be sent as instantly to Procida to make his father marvel at his son, commanding general of the papal armies and a cardinal of the Church.

  At the city gates, to the sounds of trumpets and drums, the keys were handed to him upon a golden salver. Orations and verses in Latin and in the vulgar were proclaimed. Boys dressed as angels, singing shrill hymns, lined the streets to the cathedral and became his escort to witness his welcome by the bishop and the clergy.

  To the extent that he had established the righteousness of Boniface, IX in restraint of the ambitions of Milan, so did Cardinal Cossa, legatus a Latere, seek to control the morality of Bologna when he decreed that its prostitutes and its gambling houses operate only under paid licence. Further, he undertook programmes to strengthen the city's walls, ordered fortresses and citadels in the papal states to be repaired and all connecting roads to be mended. He dismantled the citadel at the San Felice gate and erected a defensive castle at the Galiere gate. The licensing of prostitutes allowed Bernaba to pinpoint the working locations of all new competition which would otherwise have remained unknown to her and allowed Palo to send in his regimes to discourage this. The licensing of the gambling houses, as well as the women, brought in money to the state, in which Cossa had a share of the pope's share, thus increasing his income from both areas by about 9 per cent.

  Otherwise, when he was not busy with defence and taxation, he spent his time with the Marchesa di Artegiana. He was besotted with her, bemooned by her. He sat silent and gaping as she would instruct him in -the ways of power as if she were the Empress Livia and he a shepherd boy from the hills. Her mind dominated his and he was also possessed by her body as she instructed him in its usages, teaching him new and startling sexual doxologies. She was learned about money and about politics and he soon came to accept what she suggested as durable law. When she explained public health to him, he built a large covered sewer for the city, raised the flooring of the muddy, perpetually damp piazza, and paved the entrance to San Petronio. He built for Bologna but he had to force these benefits upon the people. He had to force them to understand the necessity for increased taxation so that the loans from the Medici bank, which made all this civic progress possible, could be repaid and greater loans extended.

  Cossa knew he was a far-seeing governor because the marchesa and her admirer Bernaba Minerbetti never ceased reminding him of the heroic work of state administration which he carried alone on his shoulders. The Bolognese wanted it both ways: they were proud of their up-to-date defences, their improved public health and other modern comforts, but they would not stop keening over the taxes which paid for the benefits.

  Counselled by the marchesa, Cossa introduced a strict system of sales and excise taxes – legal and legitimate – to be shared with the curia in Rome. A tax of 50 per cent was imposed on wine. Taxed bread could only be bought at appointed shops. Gamblers, jugglers, goldsmiths and acrobats were taxed, but moneylenders, were exempted. Cossa became unpopular. He raged about the ingratitude of the people while counting his share of the taxes. City magistrates, council members and nobles were taxed at the same rate as everyone else. He taxed even the outlanders who came to the city with safeconducts from outside rulers; and, if the more powerful and rich citizens complained that an arrangement should have been made to exempt them from such insistent taxation, Cossa made examples of them. Did Mantua, Padua, Parma or Perugia have sewer systems, he would exhort them. Were those cities the headquarters of a papal army which spent its pay there? Let those who would rather suffer without such civilization move to Mantua or Parma and pay fewer, taxes.

  While the contracting companies which were controlled jointly by Cossa and the marchesa won the contracts for the city improvement schemes, the marchesa saw that they delivered value. Also, while Cosimo di Medici had insisted, that Cossa accept a quarter-tithe (soon increased to a half-tithe) on the expanded banking business that the civic projects and the presence of the papal army had j created, and while Cossa participated heavily in the income from Bologna's courtesan business and in the branch businesses Bernaba had established in Siena, Perugia, Mantua and Parma, and while his share of the income from the gambling houses was large, the bald fact was that Cossa gave value for his services to the cities of the papal states, which was how he looked at it. He was probably right. What is money compared to strong public defences, government-inspected whores and tightly supervised gambling houses? The quality of the wine might have suffered from the river water the wine merchants added to it to make up for the taxes, but people got used to it.

  If Bernaba was surprised to find the Marchesa di Artegiana in Cossa's bed at night and at his side for most waking hours, she did not show it. At the first chance, when Cossa was busy elsewhere, she went to visit her old friend. There was much laughter, talk and wine.

  Soon the marchesa warmed to her subject and she outlined how Bernaba might set up a network of courtesan operat
ions throughout the cities of the papal states under Cossa's protection. She told her about the sources of women, how Palo might be instructed to set up protection, how information might be organized at each point of sale and how a network should be formed to get the information back to Cossa in Bologna. It was not only, a wonderful Sunday afternoon, it formed a lasting bond between the two women, and it was profitable – so much so that, when Boniface IX died on 1 October 1404 (to be succeeded by Innocent VII), Cossa had been able to deposit, overall, 100,000 florins to his account in the main Medici bank in Florence, as a result of his stewardship of Bologna and the papal states.

  As soon as Boniface died, the volatile people of Rome rose in revolt. The Colonnas demanded the return of the ancient freedoms and rights to the city, meaning that they and the other great families wanted a. larger share of what Rome earned. There was so much civil turmoil and bloodshed that King Ladislas of Naples, whose astuteness and craftiness the Visconti themselves may well have envied, marched on Rome and had himself appointed as the Rector of Campania and Martina for five years. He permitted the Colonna to ally themselves with him and – most disastrously to hopes for an end of the papal schism – induced Pope Innocent to promise, not to agree – to any plan for the union of the Church which did not include the recognition of Ladislas's title to all of the papal realm. This was a fatal bar to the accommodation of the claims to the throne of Naples by his kinsman, the Duke of Anjou, and thus made impossible the cooperation of France to end the papal schism which had yoked two popes upon the world – Innocent VII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Perpignan (Benedict had defied the authority of the King of France and moved from Avignon). Ladislas's army enforced the peace of Rome with such authority that Ladislas was recognized as Protector of the Holy Roman Church when Gregory XII was elected pope on 30 November 1406.