Gregory was an old man with many `nephews' and Ladislas, who intended to rule Italy, surrounded him with a heavy presence. To prepare for his conquest of the papal states, which he saw as merely a bloodless transfer of power, Ladislas prodded the pope to remove Cossa from the command of the papal armies and to issue sharp public rebukes upon Cossa for withholding from Rome more than his share of papal income.
Cossa was ready for an extended argument until the marchesa explained the facts to him. `Why should an old man, new in the papacy, carp about these petty matters when – over all the years you have served the papal curia, the experts on taxation and the proper rate of cash return to the papacy, have never complained about you? Look who bestrides Rome, Cossa. Whom do you see?''
`I don't follow you, Decima.'
`Ladislas! Look at the size of his army occupying Rome! Ladislas plans to shunt you out of the way as if you were some scribe in the Vatican and to take command of the papal armies, then to rule Italy from Naples. What happens then? Do you flee or are you the timid servant of an, old confused pope?'
She had received an urgent letter from Cosimo di Medici that morning. He had laid the peril out before her. 'What do you think will happen to the banking relationship we have with the Church in the papal states if Ladislas is allowed to dictate to the papacy?' the letter said. `Ladislas means to remove Cossa, and if Cossa goes we will lose hundreds of thousands of gold florins of cash deposits from the papal states. Our planning to take over Church banking will be ruined. You've got to light a fire under Cossa. Since he is in no position to throw Ladislas out of Rome, he must be made to understand that he must defy Gregory.'
`You think that is what Gregory has in his mind?' Cossa asked her. `You think the pope would turn on a cardinal, on me? Listen, I bring them more money than all the rest of Italy put together. Are you telling me that the pope would take a chance with an adventurer like Ladislas?'
Realization of the truth came on Cossa so fast that he was incensed. He imagined he could hear his father telling his uncles that he had always been afraid that his son's success had been based on luck, not ability. `I tried to put the boy into a safe niche where he j could have a good living as a lawyer for the Church, and now look at him – he posed as a soldier, as a ruler, but when a real soldier ordered the pope to call him to heel his luck collapsed with his courage.'
`What can I do?' he asked the marchesa. `I am the papal legate. Gregory is my pope, just as Boniface was my pope. I have to take orders. 1 must submit Bologna and the papal states to Ladislas if that is what Gregory commands. What else is there to do?'
`What are you saying, Cossa?' she shouted at him: `You are, a Neapolitan so you are awed by the King of Naples. Forget it! The only people who have anything to say about this are the people whose trust you have accepted the people of the papal states and the Bolognese.'
`If I defy the authority of the pope, then anyone has the right to defy my authority. Gregory is the pope. He isn't a man tome, he is my pope.'
`Then help him! Do you think he wants to give away the papal states to Ladislas? Do you thinks he plans to kill this goose with its golden eggs which you have made so plump for him? What do you I think an old man can do when he is surrounded by Ladislas's army?'
`Well – ah, I see, all right. Then it is Ladislas who oppresses me.'
'You are a leader, my lord. You are the, cardinal and the general and the administrator to all these people after you are the servant of the pope but, nonetheless, you owe them all equally the salvation of your defence. When you summon an emergency meeting of the Bologna Council and explain the peril which seeks their destruction, you will tell them that they must order you to refuse this deadly threat to their rights, even to their lives, which will make this foreign tyrant their master. I can hear your eloquence as you warn them that Ladislas will bring them double their present taxation if they force
you to accept the pope's command. My God, it will make; you the most popular figure this city has ever known.'
His jaw stiffened. `All right. I have, made up my, mind,' he said. `I am going to summon an emergency meeting of the council and get this thing settled."
With the wholehearted support of the people of Bologna, Cossa resisted the pope's, orders. He cast himself adrift from the papacy, knowing well that Gregory would reward him well when Ladislas was driven out of Rome. Just the same, for insurance, he was going to see that the curia got better and better shares of the benefices and necessarily increased taxation – for only by reminding the apostolic chamber that he, Baldassare, Cardinal Cossa, was making such increased income possible would it be able to persuade the pope not to replace him as legatus a Latere. He would be walking; on the crumbling rim of the crust of the Church if he did less.
The Marchesa di Artegiana was fonder of Cossa than she was of other men. Cosimo di Medici was not any part of such feeling; he and the marchesa were mutual extensions of each other. By the quality and; nature of her life, men and women, except for her daughters, were much the same to the marchesa. Sex, which had been her grist for most of her life, she found neither momentous nor interesting. It was her work and there could be neither romance nor sentiment about it or about any other of her relations with men. Nonetheless, Cossa was a special man to her. The simple brutality of his ambition and the harshness of his greed comforted her. Cossa was as natural a leader as she had seen in a lifetime of hundreds and hundreds of men, including Hawkwood and Toreton. The benign respect which other leaders, important men of the highest distinction, gave him, and which the masses of people gave him, had strengthened, and polished his own lust to lead. The Medici hid singled him out as a potential pope. She was Cossa's keeper for the Medici, so she was expected to put him upon the throne of St Peter, When she did, there could be no end to the money. Her tithe would become an ocean of gold from a bottomless source and, because she would have made it clear to Cossa that it had been she, who had won the crown for him, she would also share in his share of the fortunes which were waiting to be made. She would be somebody. She would have lived up to and exceeded' the title the Medici had bought for her, and as her next step up the ladder she intended to be made a duchess, with each of her daughters being named a countess.
If the marchesa felt love (a difficult conception to understand), excepting always the love she felt for her daughters, it was for status. She had waited and toiled for it for many years, working her dignity and self-respect to the bone to get it. But always it had eluded her, until the night Cosimo di Medici had come to her house for the first time. When she thought about the struggles to get within striking distance of the money; she felt momentarily exhausted and empty and she experienced a wistful romantic need to fill all of Cossa's consciousness with herself. She dealt with this aberration by reasoning that it was men who were the romantics, that for all time women had only been trying compassionately to give men what they needed so badly; that, glorious mirror-sense, that achievement of looking into another's heart and seeing oneself with the eyes of the adorer. Not that Cossa was much of a romantic. His experience with women had been constant and compulsive, enjoying the physical profits of one body then moving on to the next. However, as she worked with him, as she managed him and he became more dependent upon her, she sensed his deepening need for her approval; and she knew he would finally recognize the need to call upon love, the blank-eyed mopery of romantic love, to build the echo chamber lined with mirrors, so that as he yearned for her his yearning would be self-fulfilling and he would be able to penetrate his own dreams of self by projecting them upon her, who, by her sighs and her sheep's' eyes, would make him more adoring of Cossa. That was the man's way. It didn't seem possible, but that was the way they wanted it to be.
She would need to build him up to love slowly so that it would be the more lasting. When love occurred to him, it would be what he wanted and it would be useful to her.
In a relatively short time – a pitiably short time, she thought Cossa conditioned himself to beco
me obsessed with love for her. Even he was aware of the wilfulness of this, but he had reached a plateau on his long climb. The power he carried with him kept increasing in weight until some unconscious race memory he possessed, as all men possess, told him that he must find someone worthy enough to be allowed to admire his power and his set He pined for her when he was away from him and, sighed over her when she was near.
Nonetheless, he had to be sure she was worthy. He lived with her, in the present, reflected her into the glass of a fanciful future, and brooded about the possibility of her past. She was the Marchesa di Artegiana, but what did that signify? Who had been the marchese who had brought her to that title? Where were her lands. Where did she go when she told him that she must make long journeys to visit her daughters in Florence, in Paris, and in Mainz? When he gradually came to realize that he knew nothing about her, that made him fearful. He knew only that she had come to him from the Duke of Milan, and he knew it was inevitable that she had been the duke's lover; but where had she been before she knew him? What experience could have trained her to achieve such a man? She told him she was an associate of Cosimo di Medici, and Cossa had been careful to make Cosimo confirm this which Cosimo did with detached admiration and relish. He had asked the marchesa about Cosimo.
`What about him?' she said. 'I am fortunate enough to be paid a small commission from him for bringing new business to his bank.'
`That is all?'
`Cossa! He is intensely married! Besides it was I who brought him together with his only mistress.'
`What about Gian Galeazzo?'
`Whomever I met before I knew you should be meaningless to you. All I really can remember about Gian Galeazzo now is that he would have taken Rome and Italy were it not for your power against him.'
`The plague was the power against him.'
`No! You were in his stars. I – saw you there. Gian Galeazzo was guided by the stars. I served him in many ways, but he believed my real power was that I could read his stars and his fate was there to he seen. You were. there to be seen. How else do you think I knew to go to you if I had not seen it in Gian Galeazzo's stars, the stars which foretold that you would keep him planning in Pavia at the centre of the plague?'
`So you arranged his death with astrology?' he said with mockery, himself greatly confused again.
`Cossa! Who can know who will survive any plague? I ate the same food, drank the same wine, breathed the same air, but I survived it while it killed him. His generals survived it but we were only the appendages of his power. I served him well and he was so grateful that he gave me an estate in Perugia to house me and my family.'
`Why did not your husband, the marchese, provide a house for his family?”
`Ah my dear – he has long been dead and that was in Germany.' `A marchese in, Germany?'
She made an impatient sound. `He was a margrave. Would you prefer me to call myself the Margraviate di Artegiana in Italy?'
`Artegiana isn't a German name.'
'All right! I will insist – since you insist – that you introduce me as the Margraviate di Koenigskuenstgewerbler!' She bugled her indignation so forcefully that he barked with laughter.
He brooded most about her when she went away from him on the long visits to her daughters. While she was away, he threw himself into a frenzy of activity to block anxiety from his mind about what she might be doing.
To force her out of his mind and to fill his time, he moved against treason inside Bologna, ferreting out plots within plots which, always led to Nanne Gozzadini, a man to whom intrigue was as nourishment. Cossa put Gozzadini's brother to death but the succeeding plot exposed Cossa's own trusted captain, Vanello da Montefalco, so he had to die. Cossa drove Gozzadini out of Bologna to Rocca di Cento, where he ran him to earth. Gozzadini's own son, Cossa' s godson, was taken to the plain in front of the fort where Gozzadini was hiding. Cossa stood beside the boy and called out, `Gozzadini! See who is here! It is your only son, Gozzadini: Shall he live or die? Come out, Nanne. Surrender the fort or I will kill our little Gabbione, the son of your heart.'
There was no answer. When a quarter of an hour had passed, Cossa smiled sadly at the small boy, Gabbione, shrugged, turned to Luigi Palo, who was holding, the boy, and said, `Cut his throat.'
Nanne Gozzadini fled to Ferrara. The populace of Bologna sacked his palace at Cossa's orders. Bologna had peace.
As if in an exchange of justice, on the night following Gabbione's execution, Cossa was stricken with ague and fever. He was fearful that his troops would hear of this and judge that God was punishing him because he had, put the boy to death. While he was rational he ordered me to keep everyone out of his tent. He swooned into a coma. The Marchesa di Artegiana had been in Florence conferring with Cosimo about means to consolidate the bank's growth in Bohemia. She returned to Bologna to be told by Bernaba that Cossa was dying. The marchesa went into Cossa's tent in the blackness of the early morning with her satchel of herbs and potions. She and I bathed Cossa, and I was not ashamed to say that I could not stop weeping. '
She held the limp body in her arms and slowly fed a hot, black liquid into him. When he had taken all of it, she told me to go and rest. `We can do nothing but wait,' she told me. 'He will sleep untroubled now. You are spent by your days and nights of nursing g him. I am fresh. Rest while I wait for him here.' I had been awake for two days and three nights. I hardly had command of my senses. I went to a tent and fell into sleep.
At least two years passed before I knew what happened between Cossa and the marchesa that night, but I sensed that something was wrong, so I sent Bernaba to the marchesa to learn the story.
At dawn Cossa had awoken in a frantic flight from the demons which pursued him. He awoke screaming, `Smash their heads, Franco Ellera, be quick!' He struggled against the marchesa; putrid with fever.
`Where are you?' she whispered to him softly.
`Castrocaro!'
`What are you doing?'
He described the night of the pope's gold, the screams of the horses, the blood and the confusions as if he were reading from a huge mural on the wall of his mind.
When I returned to Cossa and the marchesa in that battle tent, he was pale and silent, but he had no fever and the marchesa said that in two days he would be well enough to ride back to Bologna.
20
Cossa recovered in moody silence, resenting the joy he took from the marchesa because he could not be sure that she was Worthy of the monument his love had built around her. In dark flashes, he showed her his fears by his endless questioning, seeking to know the things about her which he had decided must be shadowed by guilt and sin. She ignored his morbidity. She continued his education concerning the world which he had never seen, unravelling the politics of Europe for him. She told him how, Wenzel, the deposed Holy Roman Emperor, was a drunkard and a murderer, how he related to his brother, Sigismund, who was in love with mirrors and every woman, and how they both related to Rupert, poor Rupert, King of the Romans. She took him through the stories of the two popes, then went on to the King of France and the University of Paris. She made clearer for him the allegiances of Ladislas of Naples and Carlo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, to Pope Gregory XII. She traced for him the positions of the Spanish, the English and the Germans on the papal schism, and she made him see that he himself was only a provincial warlord when he could be a part of the great world.
He could not hear what she taught him. The more she taught him about Europe the more he had to find somehow an intimate knowledge of her past which had brought her to such a familiarity with all these people. In the spring of 1408 when she left Bologna again `to visit my daughters', a tour which would keep her away from him for four months, he called in Bernaba and told her that she was to find out everything about the marchesa's past.
`Why don't you ask her yourself, Baldassare?'
`She could lie to me.'
`Why would she lie? She loves you. She came to you of her own accord, a grown woman. Whatever happened t
o her before she met you can have no meaning to you – why should it? It is done, and you cannot expect her to have acted differently because one day she would meet you; she could not know that she was going to meet you. Baldassare, hear me. The Marchesa di Artegiana is a woman of great character.'
`Then all you need do is to confirm that for me, Bernaba. We are not gossiping. Find out the truth and bring it to me.'
Bernaba told me about it. She was worried. `He's not himself, Franco,' she said. `I mean he is out of his mind. What am I going to do?”
`We'll wait. Maybe it will pass. I agree he is out of his mind on this subject.'
Cossa had not seen Bernaba again for two months when he called her to the palace and demanded a report from her. She asked me what she should do. I wasn't much help. `Stall him,' I told her. gust keep him off balance until the marchesa gets back here.' She knows ' how to handle him on things like this.'
`It is very difficult, Baldassare,' she said to Cossa. `There is so little to go on.'
`Are you flaunting me! She is intimately connected with the princes of Europe – in Mainz, in Prague, in Florence and in Paris.' `Well! 1 had no idea you wanted that extensive an investigation.' `I must know all about her!'
`It will be very expensive.'
He took her by the shoulders and shook her. `Have you become stupid? Or are you deliberately trying to misunderstand me? I am the ruler of the papal states of Italy! I have given you an order!"
A Trembling Upon Rome Page 11