Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  After a nine-year absence, in September 1443 Pope Eugenius returned to Rome and set about countering the effects of the schism with the invaluable help of his friend Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. The future Pope Pius II, Piccolomini, although at this time still a layman, had been one of Antipope Felix’s most trusted advisers, but he had now transferred his allegiance, and it was thanks to his diplomatic skill that in 1447 the German princes declared as one man for Eugenius—and just in time, for within a week or two he was dead. His sixteen-year reign had not been easy; more than half of it had been spent in Florentine exile. But his long struggle with the Council of Basel had ended in victory; never again would papal supremacy be challenged from within the Church itself.

  1. “We demand a Roman, or at least an Italian!”

  2. “Even saints were confused about the rights and wrongs of the situation. St. Catherine of Siena supported Urban, St. Vincent Ferrer supported Clement” (Duffy, Saints and Sinners, pp. 168–9).

  3. The circumstances of his election and subsequent deposition have denied him a place on the canonical list of popes. It was nonetheless mildly surprising that Cardinal Angelo Roncalli should have adopted the same name on his election to the Papacy in 1958. (See chapter 28.)

  4. This thirteenth-century palace, restored with majestic insensitivity in the 1860s and—in consequence of its later history—known today as the Fondaco dei Turchi, still stands on the upper reaches of the Grand Canal, opposite the San Marcuola vaporetto station.

  5. See chapter 5.

  6. No one in the West could have foreseen that by the time the emperor returned to Constantinople in February 1440 Laetentur Coeli would already be dead in the water, repudiated by the three surviving patriarchs, its signatories condemned as traitors to the faith, castigated throughout the capital, and in some cases physically attacked.

  CHAPTER XVII

  The Renaissance

  If, as has been suggested, Martin V was the first Renaissance pope, Eugenius was the second. He was not temperamentally a Renaissance figure—on his deathbed he expressed bitter regrets that he had ever left his hermitage—but his nine years with the Medici in Florence could not have failed to have their effect; and when he returned to Rome—accompanied, incidentally, by Fra Angelico—he devoted himself, in the four years remaining to him, to the continuation of Martin’s work on the city. To bring Rome up to the standards now set by Milan, Genoa, Venice, and the other great cities of the North would have taxed the powers of Hercules, but Eugenius worked hard, and when his apostolic secretary, Flavio Biondo, dedicated to him his three books on the restoration work, Roma Instaurata, the compliment was not undeserved.

  Artistically and culturally, however, Rome was still something of a backwater when Cardinal Tommaso Parentucelli, the son of a modest physician in Liguria, was elected pontiff in March 1447, taking the name of Nicholas V. Of the previous 140 years the popes had been absent for well over half, and thanks to the consequent chaos the flowering of classical and humanistic learning that had swept away the last vestiges of the Middle Ages from Tuscany and Umbria had left the city almost untouched. A Dante, a Petrarch, a Boccaccio—all of them Florentines—would have been unthinkable in Rome. Although both Boniface VIII in 1303 and Innocent VII a hundred years later had worked hard to give the city the university it deserved, neither had had much success.

  With the beginning of the fifteenth century, however, there was a change in the air. First of all, Greek influence had begun to make itself felt. When in 1360 Boccaccio had wished to learn the language, he had had the utmost difficulty in finding anyone in Italy capable of teaching him; he had eventually unearthed an aged Calabrian monk of revolting habits, whom he had lodged in his house for three years, preparing one of the first—and worst—translations of Homer into Latin. But around the turn of the century there had appeared in Florence a first-rate Greek scholar named Manuel Chrysoloras. He had taught there for the next fifteen years until his death, leaving behind him a book, Erotemata Civas Questiones, which was essentially a Greek grammar, set out in the form of questions and answers. Among his pupils were two of the most distinguished early Italian humanists, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, who both became members of the Curia and were thus able to inject some of the new learning into the papal court. Soon, too, Chrysoloras was joined by the impressive company of Greek intellectuals who had accompanied John Palaeologus to the Councils of Ferrara and Florence.

  These Greeks, of course, brought with them a new awareness of antiquity. For a thousand years the pagan splendors of ancient Rome had been ignored or forgotten, being of no interest to either pope or pilgrim. Then there had been the seventy years of absence in Avignon, followed by the forty years of schism; and disastrous as these years had been in many ways, they did make it possible for subsequent popes to look upon the city with completely fresh eyes—eyes that were shocked by the sight of cattle grazing in the Forum and antique statuary being ground to powder to provide local jerry-builders with cement. That is why, from the middle of the fifteenth century, the entire institution of the Papacy underwent a radical change. Imbued as they were with humanist ideas, the Renaissance popes were ambitious and energetic men of the world, determined not just to revive Rome’s former greatness but to create a new city which would combine the best of both classical and Christian civilizations, bearing witness to their own greatness and that of their families and arousing the admiration and envy of all who saw it.

  Like his predecessor, Nicholas V had spent some years in Florence, where he had been tutor to the Strozzi family and had made friends with all the scholars who clustered around the Medici. In consequence he had become far more deeply imbued with Renaissance culture than Eugenius ever was. He was also a good deal less confrontational and far more politically astute, restoring order to Rome and self-government to the Papal States, granting virtual independence to Bologna, and persuading history’s last antipope, Felix V, to abdicate. One of his greatest successes was his declaration of 1450 as Jubilee Year, which brought perhaps a hundred thousand pilgrims, tempted by the offer of plenary indulgence for their sins, flocking to Rome. This completely restored the papal finances. The high point of the celebrations was the canonization of St. Bernardino of Siena, a Franciscan friar who had died only six years before and whose extraordinary charisma had earned him a place in the hearts of Italians comparable, perhaps, to that of Padre Pio in the late twentieth century.

  Admittedly, not everything in that Jubilee Year went according to plan. An outbreak of the plague in the early summer caused hundreds of deaths: “all the hospitals and churches,” wrote an eyewitness, “were full of the sick and dying, and they were to be seen in the infected streets falling down like dogs.” On December 19 a pack of horses and mules was frightened by the crowds on the Ponte Sant’Angelo and stampeded; some two hundred pilgrims were trampled to death or drowned in the Tiber. Yet in the long term even these disasters made little difference. The Jubilee Year showed conclusively that, after a century and a half, the Papacy was back on track. Avignon was now past history, and the schism, and all the antipapal excesses of the conciliar movement. The popes were fully and firmly restored to Rome where they belonged; and they had every intention of staying there.

  IN 1452 FREDERICK III of Habsburg1 crossed the Alps with a suite of more than 2,000, to receive from the pope the crown of the Holy Roman Empire; this was to be combined with the new emperor’s marriage to Donna Leonora, the daughter of the King of Portugal. In every Italian city through which Frederick passed, he was cheered to the echo and deluged with presents. In Ferrara he was greeted not only by the Marquis Borso d’Este but also by Galeazzo Maria Sforza, eldest son of the usurping Duke of Milan, and was obliged to listen to a speech of welcome, “as long as two chapters of St. John’s Gospel,” pronounced by Galeazzo Maria’s eight-year-old brother. In Bologna and Florence the receptions were more elaborate still, and in Siena he met his bride for the first time. The two then rode to Rome together, entering the city o
n March 9. On the sixteenth Pope Nicholas performed the marriage ceremony in St. Peter’s, after which he crowned Frederick with the Iron Crown of Lombardy; the imperial coronation took place three days later and was followed by the coronation of the young empress with a crown that had been specially made for her. When the service was over, the emperor made a point of bringing the pope’s horse to the door of the basilica and holding his stirrup while he mounted. The festivities ended with a ceremonial banquet at the Lateran.

  That ceremony—it was the last imperial coronation ever to take place in Rome—marked the apogee of Nicholas’s pontificate. All too soon came disaster: on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, after a fifty-five-day siege, the army of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II smashed down the walls of Constantinople and put an end to the Christian Empire of the East. The news was received with horror throughout Western Europe. The Byzantine Empire had lasted 1,123 years; although it had never recovered from the Fourth Crusade two and a half centuries before, it had remained the eastern bastion of Christendom. As the refugees spread westward from the conquered city, they carried with them the epic story of its heroic defense, which doubtless lost nothing in the telling. But Western Europe, for all its deep and genuine dismay, was not profoundly changed; indeed, the two states most immediately affected, Venice and Genoa, lost no time in congratulating the sultan and making the best terms they could with the new regime.

  In Rome, Pope Nicholas showed none of the cynicism and self-interest of the merchant republics. He did his utmost to galvanize the West for a Crusade, a cause which was enthusiastically supported by the two Greek cardinals, Bessarion and Isidore, who had remained in Italy after the Council of Florence and embraced Catholicism, as also by the papal legate in Germany, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II. But it was no use. Two or three hundred years before, Christian zeal had been enough to launch military expeditions for the recovery of the Holy Places of pilgrimage; with the advent of Renaissance humanism the old religious fire had been extinguished. Europe had dithered, and Byzantium had died. With the Ottoman army stronger now than it had ever been, the old empire was beyond all hope of resurrection.

  It was Nicholas’s only important failure. He had no choice but to accept it, and he returned to the two chief interests of his life, books and buildings—the only things, he said, that it was worth spending money on. His two predecessors had both been enthusiastic builders, but neither had shown much interest in literature; Pope Martin, indeed, had generally disapproved of classical—and consequently pagan—authors and had maintained that nothing of antiquity was worth preserving beyond what was contained in the works of St. Augustine. Nicholas, by contrast, was scarcely ever seen without a book in his hand. He read everything that came his way, annotating copiously in the margins in his exquisite handwriting. His legate Piccolomini wrote admiringly:

  From his youth he has been initiated into all liberal arts, he is acquainted with all philosophers, historians, poets, cosmographers, and theologians; and is no stranger to civil and canon law, or even to medicine.

  Thus, on his accession, Nicholas deliberately set out to create, “for the common convenience of the learned, a library of all books, both in Latin and in Greek, worthy of the dignity of the Pope and the Apostolic See.” He had to start virtually from scratch: the old papal library had been left at Avignon, where most of the volumes had by now been lost or stolen; of the remainder, the Antipope Benedict XIII had carried off a good many after his deposition and taken them to the castle of Peñíscola near Valencia. Now papal agents traveled all over Europe in search of rare manuscripts, and scholars were set to work to make accurate Latin translations of the Greek texts, both Christian and pagan. Forty-five copyists were kept permanently employed. By Nicholas’s death he had spent 30,000 gold florins and had collected some twelve hundred volumes, the nucleus of today’s Vatican Library.2

  Meanwhile, he continued the work of his predecessors in the rebuilding of Rome. He strengthened the old Leonine walls and other more recent defenses, supervised the restoration of forty early Christian churches, repaired aqueducts, paved streets, and initiated a major restoration of the Castel Sant’Angelo. His most important work, however, was on the Vatican—which, he now decided, should replace the Lateran as the principal papal residence—and St. Peter’s. Of the late-thirteenth-century palace, essentially the work of Nicholas III, he restored and enlarged the north and west sides, using Leon Battista Alberti and Bernardo Rossellino as his architects. He also commissioned Fra Angelico, with his assistant Benozzo Gozzoli, to paint the stories of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence in his chapel and study and a further cycle of scenes from the life of Christ in the Chapel of the Sacrament.3

  His plans for St. Peter’s were still more ambitious. Like all the other great buildings of Rome, it had been allowed to fall into decay; the great architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti maintained that its complete collapse was only a matter of time. Nicholas, however, had in mind something more than just a program of repair; he envisaged lengthening the building by about a third and adding transepts and a new apse around the shrine of the Apostle. There was also a plan for a magnificent new space outside, where three great new avenues through the Borgo quarter would converge and where the crowds could congregate for mass blessings. These plans all lapsed at the pope’s death, but it is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if they had been put into effect. Julius II, half a century later, would probably not have ordered the complete rebuilding; on the other hand, we should almost certainly have been deprived of the great Bernini piazza, which to this day remains one of the most magnificent open spaces of Europe.

  Pope Nicholas V died in March 1455 at the age of fifty-seven. His pontificate had lasted only eight years, but his influence had been enormous. Martin and Eugenius had both been affected by Renaissance ideas, but neither had wholeheartedly embraced the humanist ethos. Nicholas was the first pope who saw absolutely no contradiction or conflict between humanism and the Christian faith. To him the arts were neither vain nor frivolous; they too bore witness to the glory of God. It was only right, therefore, that the Church give a lead in the artistic field just as it did in the spiritual. Other popes who thought as he did were to follow; but Nicholas, and Nicholas alone, combined his views with a genuine piety, humility, and integrity. It was entirely typical of him that in 1449 he should have ordered a retrial of Joan of Arc, who had been burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, on charges which included heresy and witchcraft. This was to continue for the next seven years, during which 115 witnesses were heard; it ended only in the reign of his successor, who is normally—and most unfairly—given the credit for her complete rehabilitation.

  Unlike so many of those who preceded or followed him, Nicholas V was untouched by greed or nepotism. Greatness, which he unquestionably possessed, never went to his head. In earlier years he had described himself, to his friend and biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci, as “a mere bell-ringing priest”; and that, in a very real sense, he remained.

  ON APRIL 4 the fifteen cardinals who were in Rome assembled for the conclave—and badly missed their chance. They might have elected Cardinal Bessarion, by far the most intelligent and cultivated churchman in Rome. As a former metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, he was better qualified than any of his colleagues to end the four-hundred-year schism, and he would have steered the Papacy in a new and healthier direction. Alas, his Greek origins, which should have counted in his favor, militated against him; the cardinals instead chose a seventy-seven-year-old Catalan jurist, Cardinal Alfonso de Borja—subsequently Italicized to Borgia—who took the name of Calixtus III.

  Deeply pious, dry as dust, and crippled by gout, Calixtus devoted his pontificate to two consuming ambitions. The first was to organize a European Crusade that would deliver Constantinople from the Turks; the second, to advance the fortunes of his family and his compatriots. Art and literature interested him not a jot. “See how the treasure of the Church has been wasted!” he is s
aid to have exclaimed on walking into the Vatican Library for the first time. During his three-year pontificate, the Renaissance in Rome was suspended. Painters and sculptors, metalworkers and cabinetmakers were all dismissed. To raise money for his Crusade, Calixtus had no hesitation in selling off many of the most valuable gold and silver works of art in the Vatican Treasury, together with a number of the Papal Library’s most precious books. He built galleys in the boatyards of the Tiber, dispatched preachers across the continent to sell indulgences, and imposed swingeing taxes throughout Western Christendom. The response, however, was lukewarm. The courts of Europe grieved for Constantinople, but they were far too deeply preoccupied with their own concerns to go into battle on its behalf. A combined land and sea force was nevertheless dispatched and was not altogether abortive: the Hungarians under János Hunyadi routed the Turks at Belgrade in July 1456, and a year later a squadron of the Ottoman fleet was destroyed off Lesbos. But neither victory produced further results or was of any long-term importance.

  Calixtus pursued his second ambition with similar energy and rather more success. Two of his great-nephews were given red hats; being the grandsons of his sisters, they were first required to italianize their name to Borgia. One of them, Rodrigo, was additionally appointed vice chancellor of the Holy See, a post which placed him in the forefront of Vatican affairs for the next thirty-five years, until his own succession as Pope Alexander VI. On a more humble level, the pope filled his court and Curia with Spanish and Catalan nominees, though few of them survived in their posts for very long after his death. This came on August 6, 1458, and was generally welcomed.

  NOBODY HAD LIKED Pope Calixtus much; everybody liked Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Born one of eighteen children, of an old Sienese family that had gone down in the world, he had pulled himself up by his own efforts and spent eight years in humanistic studies in Siena and Florence; he had then become secretary to various cardinals attending the Council of Basel, one of whom, Cardinal Nicholas Albergati, sent him in 1435 on the greatest adventure of his young life, a secret mission to Scotland.