A Trembling Upon Rome

by Richard Condon

  `Are you asking me to convert?'

  `Why, should you convert? I make the rules and if I the pope, choose to make you a cardinal, then you are a cardinal.'

  A cardinal,' I said sadly, shaking 'my head. With your influence you could have had me made Chief Rabbi of Bologna:'

  'A lot of things would have been different if we both had been religious men.'

  'My uniforms alone are going to cost you a pretty florin, Two kinds of hats, red shoes, white shoes, dalmatics, copes, chasubles. and nibs.,

  'You have the figure for them, Franco Ellera. What counts most is that you start promptly. Youwill have to move fast. Time is everything.'

  `What about expenses?'

  `A generous per diem,'

  `For the horses, the liveries, the provisions, the bedding, plate, hangings,, secretaries – the entire household?'

  Cossa nodded. `Absolutely,' he said.

  `Speaking of my household, do you think Bernaba could come along? The trip would do her good and she could rehearse me in my lines. Bernaba and I had been married for nine years, but we still hadn't told Cossa.

  'I don't see. why not,' His Holiness answered. `And we will see that you will be welcomed before the gates of Mainz where your embassy mast make solemn entry. You must be met at some distance from the place of your reception by persons of rank and distinction appropriate to your position as a prince of the Church, as well as a papal ambassador.'

  36

  John of Nassau was the great-grandson of the Emperor Adolf. On 19 October 1396, at the death of Conrad Archbishop of Mainz, John had been a candidate to succeed him in the post. The then emperor, Wenzel, favoured the claim of Joffrid of Leiningen, so a committee of five chose Joffrid to be recommended to the pope. John of Nassau went directly to Rome, paid Boniface 40,000 gold florins and was immediately confirmed as the Archbishop of Mainz, and so became the senior elector of empire.

  He also became the open and bitter enemy of Wenzel. Without pausing for as much as a benediction, he established alliances with the Count Palatine, with the Bishops of Bamberg and Eichstadt, with the Burggraf of Nuernberg, the Markgraf of Meissen, the Count of Henneberg, and with the leaders of the cities of Nuernberg, Rotenberg, Windesheim and Weissenberg, electors all, and organized the downfall of Wenzel.

  The reasons which the electors gave for Wenzel's overthrow would not bear close examination. Even though Wenzel was a drunkard and a murderer, they charged him only with having done nothing to end the schism and of betraying the interests of the empire. His true offences were that he had opposed John of Nassau's intention to become archbishop and that he had not shared the bribe of 50,000 florins which Gian Galeazzo Visconti had paid to Wenzel for making, Gian Galeazzo Duke of Milan.

  The day after the electors declared Wenzel deposed, they proclaimed the Count Palatine, Rupert III, to be King of the Romans; the title which lighted the way to the imperial throne.

  I must explain the difference between being King of the Romans and being Holy Roman Emperor. In 1316, Pope John XXII was determined to bring the Holy Roman Empire, which was Germany, the largest state by far in Europe, under tighter control. He took the position that, since Christ had invested Peter with the temporal no less than with the spiritual kingdom of this world, it followed that what the pope had given the establishment of the empire – the pope could also take away; that, when the emperor died, the jurisdiction of the empire reverted to the pope and that it was for him to appoint a new, emperor, thus altering the constitution of the empire.

  The Germans contended that it was for the electors to choose the, future emperor and for the pope only to crown the object of their, choice, that in the event of a contested election it was for the God of Battles to decide between rival candidates.

  The claim of the pope was not one which the electors could pass over in silence. They met at Rense and at Frankfurt in 1338 and resolved that the prince elected by them became King of the Romans without further ceremony, without need for further confirmation. However, it was understood that, to become the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of the Romans needed to be crowned by a pope at Rome.

  Though torn by schism, wars and internal conflicts, the people of Christendom still thought of themselves as one society and, in a collectively aberrant way, as Romans, because no one liked remembering that Rome had fallen a thousand years before and that they, Christendom, represented the barbarians who had. pulled it down. The liberal German intellectuals liked to speak of their people as Roman., the populus romanus. Germany – where no Roman legion had ever tarried for fear of becoming the principal object of the brutally pagan German rites – called its king King of the Romans; with the expectation that he would subsequently be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope at Rome, and continued to elect him – because. it would have keen unseemly to allow the throne of Caesar, which was the temporal lordship of the world, to be passed on by inheritance like somebody's. house. So, a thousand years after the

  Romans had vanished from the earth, it was the custom of Christendom that:the.Holy, Roman Emperor was a drenched, red-nosed German princeling.

  When the electors deposed Wenzel, they created a schism in the empire to co-exist with the schism in the Church. The three main contenders for the imperial throne were: Wenzel, now King of Bohemia, where he put it about that he was known as Good King Wenceslas, a local joke; Rupert, now King of the Romans; and Sigismund, King of Hungary, Wenzel's half-brother. As King of the Romans, Rupert was in line to be the next Holy Roman Emperor but, if anything happened to him, Sigismund was the coming man politically – at least he had most certainly become so by the time I left Mainz.

  Sigismund's father Charles, a previous emperor; was said to be the greatest secular ruler of the fourteenth century because he founded the University of Prague in 1348, almost succeeded in uniting the Latin and Greek churches and, by his Golden Bull, brought organization and order to the principles of election to the imperial throne, thus holding Germany; together. For his three sons: Wenzel, Sigismund, and John of Moravia, he turned his life's work upside down, emptying it of wisdom. Against his own Golden

  Bull, which called for an independent succession brought about by the electors he had named, he gave the imperial crown to Wenzel,then seventeen,, and died.

  If Wenzel grew into a dangerous, murdering drunkard (which he did), Sigismund, seemed consciously to have designed a life for himself in which he was tossed about upon a noisy, splattering, whirlwind of random events. He had been betrothed when he was a small boy to Mary, infant daughter of Louis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland. Because of that marriage, Sigismund eventually succeeded to the Hungarian throne. Mary died in 1392 and, on his return from an utterly disastrous war with the Turks (securing his place in history by leading the last, Crusade, which required him merely to step across his own frontier to kill the infidel), Sigismund was imprisoned for five months by the outraged Hungarian barons, Solely as a result of Pippo Span's wit and daring, he escaped, but he was then seized by his own brother, messy Wenzel, because he had (also) pushed his way into Bohemian affairs and Wenzel was by then King of Bohemia.

  In 1390, Boniface IX proclaimed Ladislas of Naples King of Hungary, inciting him against Sigismund, who, although ever-ready to pick up new titles like potatoes in a field, was passionate about retaining his used ones. Sigismund not only crushed Ladislas at Raab, but he ordered both Hungary and Bohemia to cease paying any money to the papal treasury.

  He led a whirligig of a life because he knew he would not be either welcome or safe if he stayed in any one place too long. He travelled constantly with a gaudy escort. He entered towns encouraged by music large bands or a few fiddlers. He was an unscrupulous royal adventurer whose juggled sense of success was only slightly muted b his: second wife, Barbara. She was called the Hungarian Messalina a formidable combination of labels, and stayed mightily busy keeping Sigismund bobbing within, the eye of a storm of cuckoldry, Sigismund shrugged, that off. He himself was constantly being tripped
and falling into the arms of passing women.

  At one time, after defeating the Venetian at Motta, Sigismund forced their captain to hack off the right hands of 180 of his own men and fling them into the sea. Before that, while still the, young Hungarian king, Sigismund had disciplined some of the Hungarian nobles by calling thirty-one of them into his tent one by one and beheading them there. The slaughter stopped only because the rest of them refused to enter when they saw the blood of their comrades running out under the bottom flap of the tent. Sigismund always did things in the extreme, not only because he had no sense of proportion, but because he was never quite sure that what he was doing would be viewed as kingly enough. After Nicopolis, nearly dying of fever, he had himself hung up by his feet for twenty hours to let the sickness trickle out of his mouth, while hundreds of his subjects filed past; wondering about him.

  Sigismund ploughed through his life flush with promise but slow of payment. He lived like a housefly, ever on the move lest some circumstance strike at him. Outstanding in his character was his instability. Within his flaccid self he was a creature of flighty impulse and indulgence, yet every exterior inch of him showed him to be a monarch among men – tall, majestic, handsome; manly, with a flowing yellow beard which turned grey in later years. His wife was wilfully pagan, a fair and graceful woman, although her face was marred with spots. Each time he strayed from her bed, she left his for two other women, three men and a stable boy, but in all this her husband never interfered. His magpie interest was kindled only by the glitter of material things.

  More than anything else it was his amour-propre, somewhat of a lesser thing than ambition, which drove him to seek the position of Holy Roman Emperor, as the co-equal with the sort of people who had not existed since Boniface VIII. It was Sigismund's intention, when the great day came, not to admit even the pope as his peer. His father had `almost' re-established the unity of the Latin and Greek churches. Sigismund took it as his destiny to be hailed as the one man whose leadership would restore the unity of the Church by ending its schism. Sigismund, the most barbaric, ruthless and left-handed of the princes, the grinning knave of German royalty, was obsessed and besotted with the idea of the abolition of the offending schism in the church.

  Sigismund's great-shield, his cloak of respectability and instant honour was the Holy Church. When all else failed, he knew that by rushing to its defence – whether to seal off its enemies, or to heal its schism, or to cry out for its reform by attacking its heretics and simoniacs or battling Turks – he could keep his lustre from fading.

  To place Sigismund upon the imperial throne suited the First Elector, the Archbishop of Mainz, who had eliminated Wenzel. Rupert had alienated his support by destroying nine castles in Wetterau in order to clean out nests of freebooters who had been pillaging the merchants of Swabia, Thuringia and Hesse. These castles, as it happened, were within the jurisdiction of the archbishop and paid full tribute to him. What the marchesa had known before she had proposed my expedition to Mainz was that the archbishop had decided to depose Rupert as King of the Romans. The pope's support, of Sigismund would be, for the archbishop, a political coup.

  Therefore the marchesa knew that, when my embassy train reached Mainz in the autumn of 1410 with its household of 128 people, there to be joined with the mission of Cosimo di Medici, who had travelled with a staff of fifty-six; the Archbishop of Mainz was already inclined towards the views we would present. Cosimo was suitably impressed with my explicit authority. So was I. I had learned my part well, but the fact is, I have always had explicit authority and, if I couldn't stare down a little runt like Cosimo, what would be the sense of Cossa making me a cardinal in the first place?

  I spoke only in German to Nassau and in Latin to Cosimo, easily dominating both men with genuinely rumbling dignity at banquets, masses and other occasions of state – more impressive in my scarlet robes, white beard and tragic eye swags than any of the candidates for emperor. Thank God it wasn't in Cossa's power to make me emperor. I persuaded Cosimo to allow me to outline for the archbishop; the generalities of the tremendous financial opportunity which was about to be offered to the First Elector, then at once turned to the subject of Pope John's deep thoughts on the erasure of the, schism by bringing Sigismund's youth and power into the awful breach. What was wanted, I told them, was that Sigismund should be elected, first; King of the Romans, then emperor, but, of equal importance, that Sigismund should know well that it had been the pope who had sponsored him with the electors.

  A coup of statesmanship was struck. Cossa could believe that he was again preventing the reform of the Church while, at the same time, acquiring via Sigismund military protection on his northern and eastern flanks. Cosimo intended, however, that it would be through stringent Church reform that the strategy which he and the marchesa had so carefully developed would sweep the schism into history, eliminate the three present popes and sustain Europe as a stable place for the sensible conduct of business affairs. I warned Cossa about those people until I was blue in the nose, but he only shrugged and mouthed nonsense like `What will be will be.' The fact was that, as pope, Cossa was making more money than he had ever made in his life, and that was where contentment rested for him. Things like the Medici's determination to bring about structural and religious reform in the Church were indefinite and always far in the future. The only reform Cosimo truly believed in was that which would bring about an end to the schism for the benefit of European business. Cosimo was charming to Cossa at all times; while the marchesa fulfilled his sexual needs and satisfied his lust for power – but more important, their advice was making him an enormous amount of money. I warned him that it all had to end in our ruin. I told him again and again; but popes have never listened to their cardinals.

  37

  In late 1410, Rupert, King of the Romans, died. The marchesa convinced Cossa that it was, of infinite importance to him that the future King of the Romans should bring all Germany under the obedience of Pope John XXIII. This obedience depended upon the Council of Pisa, whose authority the dead Rupert had opposed and which King Sigismund of Hungary had not acknowledged.

  The marchesa's daughter Maria Louise, Sterz transmitted the news to her mother from Mainz when Sigismund was provisionally elected king in Rupert's place, saying that John of Nassau had made it clear to Sigismund, that it was the sponsorship of Pope John XXIII which, had decided the matter in his favour against the candidacies of his two brothers, Wenzel and John. Maria Louise advised her mother that Sigismund would send the Count of Ozoro, Pippo Span, as his ambassador to Bologna to show his appreciation to the pope.

  This was Sigismund's first recognition of Cossa's papacy over the claims of Gregory – whom the king had previously supported, and Cossa needed Sigismund. In return, Cossa removed the sentence of closure on the churches of Hungary; which had been passed on 6 April 1404. Intercourse between Sigismund and the curia was renewed and the possibly heretical acts of Sigismund were indirectly legalized. Bishop Branda of Piacenza was sent as papal legate, to Hungary to arrange for the institution of a university and to correct certain abuses – and abolish certain privileges, which certain bishops had received from Gregory XII. At the special desire of the king, Cossa agreed to the creation of new benefices on the borders of Sigismund's kingdom. '

  Even before she told Cossa the news, the marchesa sent a messenger to her daughter Rosa, with Spina in Naples, to tell her that she must travel at once to Bologna on family business. Rosa reached Bologna three days before the Count of Ozoro.

  `Let me tell you about Pippo Span,' the marchesa said to her daughter. 'He is Sigismund's favourite. Seven years ago, when Sigismund was seized by his nobles in the Hall of Audience at Buda, Pippo Span defended him with drawn sword and would have been killed if the Bishop of Strigonia had not thrown his robe over Pippo's head and declared him to be his prisoner. Pippo raised troops to free Sigismund. He wrote to the king constantly in prison. When Sigismund was freed, he gave Pippo a castle and made him a g
eneral, out of gratitude.'

  `Oh, God! How wonderful!'

  'Oh, yes, dear. He is a really romantic figure.'

  `But' what an odd name.'

  'He, is the Count of Ozoro. Pippo is short for Filippo. Span is the Hungarian for captain of a district. He has thee most lustrous dark eyes – and such a sweet, shy smile.'

  `When will I meet him?'

  `As soon as he gets here, dear. Did you know, in the war with Bosnia, when Sigismund became panic-stricken and fled, Pippo snatched his crown, put it on his own head, rallied the troops, and won a victory.: For that, Sigismund promoted him to a general of 20,000 horse. And what is also interesting, he is very rich and quite noble – he belongs to an old family of Buondelmonte – although his parents were rather poor.'

  `I am so tired of old men, mama. It seems as though I have spent my entire life with old men. How old is, he?'

  'Oh, young. Quite young. And I am sure he will adore you.'

  A soft flush settled like light rouge under her olive cheeks. Her loveliness moved her mother because neither of them would be this young ever again.

  `Spina threw himself into a towering rage when I left,' Rosa said.

  `What did you tell him?'

  `I said that you wanted to tell me; so I could tell him before the pope could tell him, about a very special satisfaction you had secured for him.'

  `Well, then. I must think of something. I must speak to Cossa about some benefices which have become available in Sicily.'

  `I don't know why he carries on like that about me. He is not only old, he is obsessed by a woman named Bernaba Minerbetti anyway. He wakes up in the middle of the night screaming her name.

  `Really?'

  `And he hasn't seen her in almost twenty years. He has such hatred for her that I am sure he loves her.'