Each of the marchesa's daughters had different spokesmen for Cossa on different nights – and there was not a night throughout the entire session of the council when each of them did not entertain strenuously. Rosa read to six cardinals, two archbishops and four bishops a letter from Cardinal Spina (which she had written herself) in which Spina seemed to consecrate Cossa as `the saviour of the Church who waits for our call from the field of battle to do his duty'. Cosimo di Medici called upon the cardinals for European stability, which had not existed since the schism had fractured the body of the Church. `The scourge of schism can be driven from that body,' he would tell dinner assembly after assembly, `but what have we gained unless the new pope, alone upon the throne of Peter, is able to marshal the powers and weaknesses of the organization of his Church into one seamless garment. That takes a strong man, your Eminences, a soldier rather than a pastor, an executive rather.than a theologian.'
Maria Giovanna or the marchesa would lift Cossa's name into a dinner-table conversation and Cosimo. would seize upon it, brandishing it like a flag, telling them that, `Cossa understands the problems of business. Cossa is a student of finances. Cossa is the only tailor we have to sew up the ragged purse of the Church.'
The marchesa made certain the prelates knew that, if they were firm and continually vocal in the cause of Cossa's candidacy, Cossa would not forget such advocacy. By this she moved such key churchmen as Alaman Adimar, Archbishop of Pisa, John of Portugal, Lucius Aldebrandinus and Guillaume Fillastre to look for Cossa's gratitude. Large amounts of Medici money were spent. Splendid gifts were made: Henricus Minutulus, a Neapolitan' cardinal was given two Irish stallions and six blooded brood mares from France. Francesco Ugoccione of Urbino, Cardinal Priest of the Sainted Quatro Coronati, was given a set of female triplets from the western highlands of Ethiopia. De Anna, Caracciola and Maramaur preferred to accept future benefices in return for their votes for Cossa.
I was neatly split in half by the demands of Cossa and the marchesa. I spent half my time in Pisa: Bernaba was doing an enormous business there and the marchesa wanted me to attend at least parts of every party she or her daughters gave, attend behind screens and at concealed listening posts so that I could hear everything which was being said and done on Cossa's behalf. The other, half of nay time I spent reporting it all back to Cossa in the field.
Cossa listened to my reports with his fullest attention and sometimes he would sigh and say, `I don't know, how the Church ever came to be seen as a spiritual organization.'
24
Cossa and I had the war to fight. Ladislas's army would press north and we would fling it south again. During one such afternoon in the field, Cossa's forces separated eleven units of lances from the body of the Neapolitan army and demolished them, smashing heads as if they were-summer melons. The heat of the battle was succeeded by a damp, cold night. Cossa fell ill. His chest and arms became so weak that he would not move himself and seemed to be on the point of death. I held him down and, to prevent the whole camp from knowing our most guarded secret, I had to bind Cossa's mouth with a cloth, so much did he rave on about dead men and the pope's gold.
The illness lasted in diminishing force for three days; then, at last, he could travel. I took him to Siena, where he was waited upon by the Counts of Sevrino, and Moergeli, the most famous Swiss herbalist.
When Cossa felt strong enough again, we picked up the advance of his army, which was following the Neapolitans. We travelled to Radicofani, then crossed by way of Abbatia and the town of Piano, where in a green meadow the people made us shelters of brushwood and received the cardinal with cheering and rejoicing. He gave them his blessing from horseback and rose on to Aquapendente, then to Bolsena, which had been a populous town destroyed by Hawkwood. Only its rich soil, the convenient lake and its position on the road to Rome had saved it from complete destruction. As we rode towards Orvieto, I told Cossa about what he had babbled in his sickness. Cossa said, `It must be that we live in many places at once. What you tell, me I said seems so real to me that I must have been there at Castrocaro as I said it to you here in a delirium.
The next day we came to the rocky mountain about six stades high, rising in the middle of a valley. The plateau on top was about three miles around. Cliffs, none lower than twenty ells, were its walls. Ladislas had hit the town five days before, leaving half-ruined towers and crumbling rubble, but the church of the Blessed Virgin, the inferior to no church in Italy, stood intact in the middle of the city; its interior walls and floor were of vari-coloured marble and its wide, high facades were filled with statues whose faces stood out from the white marble as if alive. Cossa led his men to the episcopal palace, where he went to bed in the middle of the afternoon and slept until midnight.
I sat at Cossa's bedside until he awoke. `They have a, pretty good cook here,' I told him. `He's no Bocca but he's better than anything we've had since we left Bologna – whenever that could have been.'
`I'm not hungry,' Cossa said. `What else?'
`Four women are staying here. They're not town women. The kitchen people say they just came in here yesterday and took over. They're been throwing a lot of money around.'
‘Women? Cossa said. Alone?’
'They're alone inside this palace, if that's what you mean. They have a troop of soldiers in the north courtyard, maybe fifty men.'
`Well, I woke up too late to do anything about four women, but at least the idea makes me hungry. Tell the cook I'm coming down.'
In the anteroom before the dining hall, Cossa found the Duchess of Milan seated on a sofa facing the door as he entered. Two ladies-in-waiting were standing behind her; another was beside her on the sofa.
'Good evening, my lord cardinal,' the duchess said, and at that moment the ladies withdrew from the room. Cossa stood still with astonishment. All at once, again, he was bewitched by the demanding sexuality of the woman. The inexplicable feeling which he had spoken to me about two days earlier – about the human mind being capable of inhabiting places in separate worlds simultaneously with the present world – returned to him. Surely each time he saw this woman he had left reality behind? He was hallucinating under the power of the loose lasciviousness of her mouth and the feverish glitter in her eyes, as she seemed to offer her body and withdraw it at the same instant. They had had only two encounters before that night, the latest five years earlier in the tower above Milan, but she was still compellingly sensual, even if time and the Visconti blood had left hawks marks, on her face.
`The world has stopped,' he said.
‘Of the two times we were together, only once was it an accident,' she said. `Now again, as the last time, I have to talk to you.'
`Speak quickly so that we may return to our destiny,' he said.
`When it was confirmed to me by Filargi; the Archbishop of Milan, that the Council of Pisa was on the verge of electing you as their pope, I was so distraught that I swooned away for two days. I could not believe that you would allow such an imprisonment to happen to you.'
`You could not believe that I could be pope?' he asked.
`I could believe in an instant that all the world was capable of conspiring to, persuade you to be pope but I could find no sane reason why you would agree to give your life over to saying endless masses, to mumbling perpetual benedictions morning and night, to wrapping yourself insides the stink of sanctity.'
`I do not see it that way,' he lied.
`You are a man, and you are a great soldier. There is nothing more for you to be.'
He tried to make light of it, but the inferences and their consequences which she rained upon him began to shake him. He had never thought of the papacy except as a business, but what she said it was – what it had been even for Boniface – even for Boniface. They would ordain him and he would spend the rest of his life within a cloud of holy incense disputing with old men, about the number of angels on a pinhead. They would demand that he confess to them every day so that he could be purified to accept communion every d
ay. He could not contemplate that. He had too little to confess, there were only things like never telling his father about what rested in Carlo Pendini's grave – and too much time left to waste it on ecclesiastical nonsense.
`You loved me,' she said. `Your body said you loved me. We have a greater destiny together than the papacy.'
`My bones creak,' he said. `I am lame with gout.'
`We can rule Italy.'
I have come upon you too quickly tonight. I can think only of one thing, one close, passionate thing – not shadows in the distance:' '
`My lord cardinal,' she said with urgency. `If Pisa dissolves this schism – if France, agrees to go along with that sacred notion they will be intent only upon the reform of the Church. What you desire from a papacy will be ignored. When they elect you, they will do so believing that they control a model pope – a disciplined lawyer and soldier, who by their special conjuring will have been transformed into someone devoutly religious, concerned with stroking away the Christian disappointments of Europe. You – a man trained to dip his hands into the treasure chests of the Church, a man to whom lust is far more natural than piety – will have to turn your back upon life. You will have to move and speak only as they tell you to move and speak. Your freebooting days will be done.'
He stared at her, his desire for her building higher.
`My lord, hear me.' Her face hardened with her will. 'I offer you command of the Milanese armies. They are still loyal to me; commanders and troops. My son is being prepared to show his disloyalty and to go along, with ambitious men who are not Visconti. You are being backed into a corner. Deny the Council of Pisa their choice and you will be cast into a corner of oblivion within the Church. You need what I have. I need what you have. We will share everything. You will cast out the interlopers and you will retrain my sons to be what their father was. Ruler of the north of Italy you will be and ruler of more than that if you but choose it.'
`Leave the sacred college?' he said. `Give up my place at Bologna?'
`Cossa, I speak to you of real power. You will leave nothing. You will give up nothing. We will lay down the terms of how the Church should be run and, if you wish to be first among the cardinals, they will confer: that upon you to win our favour. You will be the temporal ruler of Italy. And that is your true meaning. Combined with the gold of Milan, and with the force that it can buy, you will tell them what it is you want, not the other way round.'
His mind began to soften. He had almost agreed, mindlessly, with the marchesa and Cosimo because his father had imprinted upon his purpose so long ago that he was being sent away to become a lawyer so that he could go to great heights in the Church. He had put the two outsides together, sides which were in no way any part of him, and he had. accepted the banker's dream of a merchants' world because the marchesa had sold it to him.
If he were ever to accept the papacy, he might as well have agreed to become an alchemist or a werewolf. But he needed time to think about the destiny which this woman was offering to him. They would become intertwined if he agreed. There could be bitter troubles in that. Besides, if he told, her right now that he would accept what she offered, that would be the end of lovemaking for this night and perhaps for many nights to come…
While she lay asleep in, the darkness, before dawn the next morning, he crept out of her room, dressed, roused me and was out, riding off at the head of his lances before she awoke.
25
The Marchesa di Artegiana went from Pisa to join Cossa and brief him in full on what had been accomplished on his behalf at the council. It was the second such journey she had made since the meetings had begun. She spent an afternoon and a night with him at Montanta, a walled hill town off the beaten way between Siena and Viterbo, protected by cliffs. Its main piazza slanted upwards, houses huddling around a church which hugged the skirts of a towering castle where Cossa waited for her.
They were in a room with brilliant, bare, white walls. She was a good briefing officer. She reported on the finances – she had insisted that Cossa put up one fifth of the money needed to marry all of them in the enterprise, then she gave him a tally of his support and opposition among the cardinals, with her analysis of the state of mind of the general council, which, she said, was intent upon Church reform – at least the French were, and they dominated the meeting. She detailed the several current European national positions, as these could affect his candidacy or present problems after his election. She delivered head-counts of the informal caucuses within the sacred college, then projected a combined caucus of her own estimation as to how the election would go. She told him, last, that Sicily had been rejoined with the kingdom of Naples. When she had finished, she said simply, 'This time next month you will be pope.'
`You can never be sure of such things,' he said dryly.
`We can be sure. We are sure. It is done.'
'Do I not have the right to change my mind?' he said. 'To say, flatly, that if they offer it I won't accept it.'
`No joking, please,' she said. `This is important business.'
`Listen, Decima. I am grateful for all you have done on this thing, and you can be sure I'm going to see that the money you believe you have lost will be made available to you in some other way. But I have thought deeply about this and I am not the right man to be pope. I am a soldier, not a reformer. I am a lawyer, not a priest. They want a religious man and that certainly leaves me out. The whole thing, the way you have organized it, is the greatest kind of a compliment to you. You have accomplished the impossible, but if I took that job it would destroy me.'
She clung to the necessity to appear calm. She felt ill enough to vomit, but she had to remain serene and in charge of the discussion. The expression which went out to him from her huge dark blue eyes, behind which chaos danced drunkenly, was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. `Have you thought how what you have just said could affect Cosimo and the other bankers of Europe? Do you have any idea how this is going to hit the investments of D'Ailly and the King of France and the Archbishop of Mainz and all the other people who have bet fortunes on you to have this schism over?'
`I am sorry about that,' he said. `Let them make other plans with some other puppet.'
`Cossa! For Christ's' sake!' You will make enemies in the Church whom you will never be able to overcome. There are rich, powerful men waiting for you in Pisa now who expect you to make them cardinals.'
`Too bad.'
`What are you going to do when they come after you?'
`I'll think of something. I do have a few thousand soldiers, don't I?'
'Cossa – listen to me – no one is meant to be pope,' the marchesa said desperately. `But when a man devotes his life to the service of his Church so successfully-that his cardinal peers choose him and elect him pope – then he serves.'
`Stop playing with me like a fish, Decima.' We have a business arrangement. You and Cosimo outmanoeuvred and outslicked the cardinals and the princes and the businessmen – who don't give a damn who is pope so long as the common policy is to eliminate the schism. Why not? It was good policy for you and Cosimo. You get a tithe of my share and you probably have a tithe of Cosimo's share, and we can be sure that any businessmen who want to do business with the new set-up would have to pay you off. Never mind. Cosimo wants the Church's banking. Let me do it my way, let me put my own man in as pope and I'll see that the Medici get what they want. Cosimo's way isn't the only way. I have a better way. You'll make even more money when we do it my way.'
She wanted to die… For the first time in all her years on God's earth she wanted to die.
Cossa had been thinking of the alternatives ever since leaving Catherine Visconti. He would need the leverage of an enormous amount of money if he ever expected to achieve a kind of equality with Visconti. Then he would have to maintain it until, gradually, he no longer needed her for the conquest of Italy, nor to handle the German politicians. His plan to acquire wealth which would win him greater power when he' agreed to take over the armies
and the fortunes of Milan had slowly evolved and shaped itself.
`First of all, I would hate to be the reformer who tries to take away from those cardinals and bishops what they have considered to be their own for a thousand years. But a mild pass at reform has to be made. A very religious, saintly, holy man has to be propped up at the top, where all Christendom can watch him pray while the reformers are carrying on the usual systematic looting inside the Church. That saintly fellow certainly isn't me, Decima. Or am I wrong again?'
`You mean it. You mean all of it.'
`When did I ever lie to you?'
`Who is going to tell Cosimo di Medici?'
`It depends on what you tell him, doesn't it? Look here, my darling woman, because of all the work you've done in Pisa, when I go into that conclave as a voting cardinal, I'll be in a position to name the next pope. Before I make him pope, I'll make sure that he knows who got it for him. We will make a deal. He'll do all the praying and the swaying in the processions and the confessing, while I run the show for him. I will be the first among his cardinals because' he won't be able to operate the Church without me. I will run his curia and the benefices and be in charge of the taxes. Now are you beginning to follow me?'
He would be his own man instead of being ever ones lackey, Cossa thought, marvelling at his own ingenuity… He would not, need to take the marchesa's offer or Catherine Visconti's offer. He had been within tantalizing reach of the papal purses for twenty years.
He knew that the man who controlled the pope controlled' the papal armies and the pope's purse. The world of the bankers, princes, businessmen and ecclesiastical plotters would need to rally around him or be punished by his indifference and, through: him, the indifference of the new and saintly pope.
A Trembling Upon Rome Page 14