A Trembling Upon Rome

by Richard Condon

'The Duchess of Milan has been murdered by, her son. Poisoned in the citadel. The regents have taken over the city.'

  'No!' he screamed.

  'Milan is going to give its allegiance to Pope Gregory.'

  'Leave me,' he said harshly.

  `She has been dead for three days' or more, and I -'

  `Leave me!'

  Cossa covered his face with his hands, and turned away from her.

  He rolled over in the bed, sat up and faced her. 'I want you to use all your cunning,' he told her harshly. ' I want you to devise a way for us to get that murdering son out of Milan and into my keeping: I will give him to Palo and keep him alive through every agony deserved by a poisoner, deserved a thousand times by a son who has murdered such a mother.' She held out her arms, to comfort him, but he turned away from her again and she left him.

  Part Three

  33

  On Friday, 15 May 1410, the cardinals entered the conclave. They were bricked up in the great hall of the podesta's palace in Bologna, which was surmounted by a square battlemented tower which, since 1245, had been the residence of city magistrates.

  Seventeen cardinals went into conclave at ten o'clock at night, their beds arranged in cubicles divided by curtains of fine silk and adorned with flowers and sweet-smelling herbs. The crest of each cardinal was posted outside, each apartment. The windows were walled up, leaving small peepholes for light. A strong guard of soldiers was posted outside the palace under the command of Malatesta of Pesaro and Nicolo Roberti of Ferrara.

  At midday on 17 May, the cross appeared outside the palace, signifying that an election had been made. The cardinals issued from the conclave and announced that Baldassare Cossa, Cardinal Deacon of St Eustachius, was to be the future pope and that he would take the name of Pope John XXIII, Our Most Holy Lord, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Primate of Italy, Patriarch of the West, Head of the Universal Church – Johannus Episcopus servus servorum Dei.

  He was the pope, he thought, when – if he had had any resolve or purpose – he would have moved to Milan months before everything which was essential to his continuance. He would have been with her and prevented her murder by the son whom he would torture – and kill for having taken away such a woman into the darkness of death, changing history, changing and shortening his own life.

  The following Sunday, 24 May, three chamberlains dressed Cossa for his coronation in the large room inn the Anziani palace where Alexander V had died. I stood with Palo, watching the stream of garments being lowered upon him. The meeting in the dramatic circumstances had been my idea, because of the effect it would have on Palo, to get through to Palo that there would be a change in business procedures.

  As they dressed, him, Cossa spoke to us amiably. He was in the best of health, apart from his gout, a spare, strongly built man with clear sharp features, dark skin, white teeth, a smile of glorious effect, and the dead, dry eyes of a hopeless man. I knew how he was suffering the loss of Catherine Visconti but he now sat upon the throne of St Peter high above all the people of Christendom, and his life had to go on. At the moment of his election, he had fallen into fatalism, a characteristic of people from Naples, an earthquake zone. He was pope and there was nothing he could do about it, so I was able to force him to get down to business. We spoke in the Neapolitan dialect so that his chamberlains could not understand us.

  `Palo – Bernaba will operate her business as she always has and handle her own money as she always has, but you will protect the women and the gambling in Bologna, Perugia, Siena, Reggio, Modena and Parma. She will recruit the women and run them. You will collect the money and bring it to Franco Ellera. You understand?'

  `Yes Holiness.' Palo wasn't simple-minded or anything thing like that.

  He was a criminal.

  `From today on, Franco Ellera is out of that operation except to get the money from you. I will need him with me. You understand?' He smiled and Palo grinned back at him. Cossa said, `From today on, you get an extra five per cent. You are going to be a rich man, Luigi.'

  'He is a good man,' I said, `but he needs to be told what'to do. He will get into trouble if he doesn't have someone standing over him.'

  `He knows that,' Cossa said amiably. 'He knows he will be dead if he doesn't do the job the way he always did it when you were telling him what to do. Isn't that right, Luigi?'

  `I understand everything, Holiness. It is the most exalting thing of my life to execute the personal business of my pope and you can count on me not to fuck up.'

  'Good,' Cossa said. `Am I ready now?' he asked the chamberlains. They bowed. Cossa smiled at them as though the sun itself were blessing them. He swept out of the room the chamberlains following. I stayed behind to talk to Palo thumping my forefinger into his chest.

  Led by a snake of scarlet cardinals, by whited patriarchs and purpled bishops in chanted unctiousness, lawyers all, lurching and swaying to the clink of aspergilia, Pope John XXIII, beneath a blood-red mitre bordered with white, became the centre of a holy procession and was followed by archbishops and abbots, attended by great numbers of clergy, by Florentine bankers, Milanese generals, Venetian traders, and Pisan. Perugian and Parmesan businessmen, by throngs of citizens, all proceeding to the church of San Pietro Maggiore – and, after the sacrament had been administered he sat upon a golden throne so that all might kiss his feet.

  He had been ordained a priest the previous morning, six days after his accession. He had been consecrated as a bishop that same Saturday, in the church of San Petronio. Cardinal Giuliano Rizzo was deacon.

  The new pope went on to celebrate high mass in the cathedral, with John of Nassau and Cosimo di Medici holding the basin for him. Nassau was attended by fifty-four cavaliers dressed in crimson and azure and by eight fiddlers and five trumpeters playing sweet music.

  A lofty platform with a cloth of gold was erected in the piazza against a wall of the church. Pope John XXIII was brought out and seated upon a throne and, in the presence of his sponsors, his family and the multitudes, he was crowned pope by his fellow countryman and nephew, his Uncle Tomas's boy, Arrigo Brancacci, a cardinal newly made for the occasion and as inverted and degenerate a young man as might be found in Italy.

  The Archdeacon Melvini threw a scarlet robe over Cossa, conferred his papal name upon him and declared, `I invest you with the Roman Church.' The prior of the cardinal deacons removed the episcopal mitre from Cossa's head and replaced it, with the regnum, a mitre modified by two rings to symbolize the papal power in the two relevant spheres, making it a mitre and a crown. Archdeacon Melvini intoned to him, 'Take the tiara and know that thou art the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the vicar on earth of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, whose honour and glory shall endure throughout eternity.'

  The archdeacon gave the new pope a rod, symbol of justice. He girded him with a red belt, from which hung twelve seals symbolizing the twelve apostles, a clear demonstration of papalism against episcopalism. The Pallium that sign of Papal power, was given to him by Melvini, while the cardinal bishops were kept ostentatiously in the background to prevent any suggestion that the pope received power from any cardinal or bishop. They had only elected him. What a business!

  Cossa stared out beyond the crowd and wondered what was going to become of him, he told me late that night. He sat in the trap and thought, I am not the least mad among then, but I am a part of the word and the world makes no effort to be rational. Like everyone else, I think I am pacing attention to my own sanity but who can tell? What do they expect from me a man, who has learned everything he knows at the elbow of the master simoniac, Boniface IX, who milked the preferments of all the kingdoms. I have been drilled not to pass over such opportunities. Cosimo di Medici, a most religious than, and the Bishop of Cambrai, the Archbishop of Mainz, the King of France, the Duke of Anjou and the sacred college knew – everything about me and my philosophy when they rushed in to lift me upon the throne of Peter:` Now I am flung, he thou
ght, among the superstitions of avaricious priests and an overwhelming horde of tens of thousands of clerics; bishops, curates, cardinals and prelates – all lying about among their empty wine bottles, sucking on chicken bones, nourished by the tyranny of Christianity. Here I am, he thought, marooned inside this alb, pinned under this tiara; their pope, condemned to perform like a street actor for the gullible, shuffling, and swaying towards my death, gliding towards the Church's promises of forever: chanting and intoning.

  Why am I here? I am a condottiere who should be out in' battle, doing honest-killing. But I know why I am here. The woman I trusted betrayed me to the man I believed was my friend, who wants me here for every profit he can take from it. They have both declared themselves to be my enemies. I must learn how to prepare myself so that I may destroy them as subtly as they have ruined my life.

  The guns in the piazza were fired. All the church bells of the city were rung. To remind the new pope that he was but mortal, tufts of tow were thrice lighted and thrice extinguished before him by six cardinals, who warned him as the fire went out, `Holy Father, thus passeth away the glory of the world.'

  As soon as he was crowned pope, Cossa raised many lower clergy to higher rank in Italy to secure his own majority in any council which might be called – while, at the same time, by discouraging prelates from attending, he sought to weaken the council he had been forced to call in Rome because of Alexander's promise at Pisa to seek Church reform. War, of course, (and other hazardous conditions) prevented the Council of Rome from convening as scheduled but when it finally, met – for twenty-one days – Cossa dismissed the few prelates present and agreed to call another council at `some other time' to discuss the reform of the Church `in its head and its members', which was the evasive description of reform at that time. He had far more important things on his mind, he told me. The Medici had just included him in the most important and promising of their hundreds of other current business projects.

  I said to him, `Sometimes I think you would like to be remembered in history as a businessman.'

  `They are the leaders of our society,' he said blandly.

  `Where do they ever lead us,' I asked him, `except to the poorhouse?'

  He told me what the Medici had offered him: a model business proposition based on grabbing what someone, else had developed from nothing. The previous century had brought industrial machinery into Europe on a scale which no civilization had ever known.

  Across Europe, the Cistercian order had established water-powered mills: factories which were grinding corn, tanning leather, crushing olives, making paper and performing dozens of other industrial functions. Monasteries in Sweden and Hungary, separated by thousands of miles, had almost identical water-powered systems. The Cistercians worked on a rigid timetable towards maximum industrialization.

  `Most of what the marketplace needs comes from these factories,' Cosimo had explained to Cossa, `so naturally there are, always crowds in front of them. Just as naturally, the prostitutes work the same ground for their business.'

  `Why not?' Cossa shrugged.

  `Bernard, the Cistercian abbot, threatened to close the factories because they were attracting that sort of person. He's dead now, but what would have happened to the banking business – all business – if that had happened? Can you imagine this society returning to manual labour after we have achieved such mechanization?'

  `Did the Church kill his objection?'

  `Yes. But suppose it hadn't? Suppose we found ourselves with some so-called holy pope who supported Bernard against prostitution? Business could have been set back two hundred years.' He contemplated Cossa; so gravely that, Cossa told me, he thought for a moment Cosimo was going to ask him for his stand on prostitution. Instead he-said, `You have been a good friend, Your, Holiness. Therefore, even though it may become the most profitable single proposition we have ever organized, my father and I want to invite you to invest with us in a network of much advanced, versions of these factories, totally independent of the Cistercians – and when we get them going, perhaps you will even want to prevail upon the Cistercians gradually to withdraw from that kind of activity.'

  Very clever, Cosimo,' Cossa said. He was always willing, to take their money, but he was never deceived by their cunning:

  `We have decided to accept local investment to spread goodwill around. The local people will invest fifty per cent of the capital requirement, representing fifty shares. Our group, the prime financing source, will provide the energizing money to establish the network.'

  `How much do you want from me?'

  A token three gold florins for three full shares. That investment should earn you close to a hundred thousand florins.'

  Cossa's smile lighted up the room.

  `How much will you put in?' he asked.

  `Our bank will receive fifteen percent of the prime holding of one hundred per cent for the basic concept and the energizing money. We are going to treble the number of existing, mills in the next twenty-five years.'

  `How much money will you invest?'

  `Bankers don't invest money. You know that,' he said reproachfully. `We are money managers. We invest services. We are at the point of forging iron in these mills. My people have acquired the rights to an invention by two Englishmen which, instead of providing only a rotary movement to drive millstones as needed by corn mills for example – a reciprocal motion can be produced mechanically, by cams projecting from the axle of the waterwheel which raises and releases a pivoting trip-hammer. Can you imagine what it will do for arms sales? Well! It will change the direction of Europe.'

  Cossa told me, some considerable time later, that the talk with Cosimo had, more than anything else, driven home to him that he had lost the great dream of Catherine Visconti forever. The fantasy, that adventure which had never happened and would never happen, was over. The chains around his wrists and the fetters around his legs were now driven solidly into the granite of time – where he would be chained for the rest of his life, sentenced by his dear friends to live with their onerous reality. But he also learned, he told me, that each time the Medici; or the marchesa for the Medici, asked him for something and he granted it – always small things at first but growing to the supreme consideration, the total banking of the Church – they gave him much bigger things in the form of opportunities which brought him more and more money. The marchesa had read in Cossa's eyes and gestures that money was his substitute for courage in the face of what he saw as his helpless immobility. The Medici piled gold and more gold on his shoulders until he could not strike out at them in vengeance for their betrayal of him for fear of displacing the great load of gold and being crushed by the weight of such courage.

  Cossa's papacy remained in Bologna, but he needed the counsel and support of a wider experience of cardinals. The college was small and diminishing. Four cardinals had died during the early months of his pontificate, four more were in failing health, and two were absent on legatine duty. With the marchesa's counsel, which she assured him had the benefit of her own as well as the Medici intelligence services; Cossa created fourteen new cardinals from the most important men of every kingdom. Only six cardinals remaining in the college were Italians, therefore he appointed six more Italians to join them. Eight were appointed from countries outside Italy. Kings and princes were consulted. John, Archbishop of Lisbon, was appointed at the request of the King of Portugal. George of Lichtenstein, who had been Bishop of Trent since 1391, was a close friend of Sigismund, King of Hungary, so he was named, although he was never strong enough to come to Rome to receive his red hat. Gordon Manning, educated at Cambridge, in his youth attached to John of Gaunt (who made him his executor) had been made Canon of York in 1400 and dean the following year. He would have been made a cardinal by Innocent VII when Manning became Archbishop of York, but the pope was offended by his execution of the previous Archbishop Scrope. Manning never came to Rome to take his place in the college because the King of England could not spare him. Of Manning it wa
s said that he loved not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn from his wickedness and live.

  Three of the remaining cardinals were French. The first of these, recommended by the King of France, was Pierre d'Ailly – It went down hard with Cossa to name him a cardinal, for the simple reason that he did not like him or trust him, but the marchesa said he must do it or alienate France from his papacy. She pressed him hard and he buckled. She pressed him because D'Ailly was in deadly earnest about Church reform, which the Medici wanted as earnestly, and the marchesa was there to get whatever the Medici wanted.

  D'Ailly was a politician of the rational sort. He wrote a tractate on physical geography, the Imago Mundi, and another against the superstitions of astrology, the Tractatus de legibus et sectis contra superstitionos astronomos. He was an ardent student of divine philosophy, interpreting, it after the school of William of Ockham. D'Ailly preached dogmatic theology rather than a gospel of morality and had all the theologian's fine contempt for canon lawyers, of which group Cossa had become the leading representative in the world.

  All in all, D'Ailly was a practical man who could recognize the occasional utility of corruption. However, before he would accept the red hat which everyone knew he wanted so badly, he wrote a letter to Cossa pointing out in no uncertain way, that it was the duty of, the Church to reform its head first – `in justice, and morals' – before reforming its numbers.

  34

  Cosimio and I were sitting together in Mainz after a long business meeting with the archbishop, when he actually said these words to me: `Bankers can do so much for God's world, your Eminence. If every man had the piety of my father – or even my own compulsion to serve God and his children – what an Eden this Europe would be. That we should be allowed to profit from giving service to God is not surprising, for does not every man who serves God profit in one way or, another ' But money is more the raw material and the by-product of banking which our family uses only for good works. The profit which is yielded by our bank is really only the profit of opportunity to serve God and to hope that Europe may prosper too and that this prosperity may trickle-benignly downward upon the masses of the less fortunate. This is the natural way to bless the poor.