The purpose of this mission was to try to persuade King James I to launch an attack on England, in yet another attempt to end the Hundred Years’ War. Aeneas had hoped to travel via London, but the English, doubtless suspecting that he was up to no good, refused him permission to land; he was obliged to return to the Continent and take a ship from Sluys direct to Scotland. The journey almost ended in disaster. Violent westerly gales drove the vessel toward the coast of Norway, and the terrified Aeneas vowed, if he survived, to walk barefoot to the nearest shrine of the Virgin Mary. At last, on the twelfth day, the ship, which was now taking on terrifying quantities of water, limped into port near Dunbar, and he duly trudged over the frozen earth to the holy well at Whitekirk. Fortunately for him, the distance was only about five miles and he made it, but after resting there for a time he found that he had lost all sensation in his feet. At first he feared that he might never walk again; in fact, he recovered, but he suffered from arthritis for the rest of his life and for much of his pontificate had to be carried about in a sedan chair.
His Commentaries, an account of his life written in the third person, cast an interesting light on early-fifteenth-century Britain:
The cities have no walls. The houses are usually constructed without mortar; their roofs are covered with turf; and in the country doors are closed with oxhides. The common people, who are poor and rude, stuff themselves with meat and fish, but eat bread as a luxury. The men are short and brave; the women fair, charming, and easily won. Women there think less of a kiss than in Italy of a touch of the hand … There is nothing the Scotch like better to hear than abuse of the English.…
Then Aeneas … disguised himself as a merchant and left Scotland for England. A river, which rises in a high mountain, separates the two countries. When he had crossed this in a small boat and had reached a large town about sunset, he knocked at a farmhouse and had dinner there with his host and the parish priest. Many relishes and chickens and geese were served, but there was no bread or wine. All the men and women of the village came running as if to see a strange sight, and as our people marvel at Ethiopians or Indians, so they gazed in amazement at Aeneas, asking the priest where he came from, what his business was, and whether he was a Christian.…
When the meal had lasted till the second hour of the night, the priest and the host together with all the men and children took leave of Aeneas and hastened away, saying that they were taking refuge in a tower a long way off for fear of the Scots, who were accustomed, when the river was low at ebb tide, to cross by night and make raids upon them. They could not by any means be induced to take him with them, although he earnestly besought them, nor yet any of the women, although there were a number of beautiful girls and matrons. For they think the enemy will do them no wrong—not counting outrage a wrong. So Aeneas remained behind with two servants and his one guide among a hundred women.…
But after a good part of the night had passed, two young women showed Aeneas, who was by this time very sleepy, to a chamber strewn with straw, planning to sleep with him, as was the custom of the country, if they were asked. But Aeneas, thinking less about women than about robbers, who he feared might appear at any minute, repulsed the protesting girls … So he remained alone among the heifers and nanny goats, which prevented him from sleeping a wink by stealthily pulling the straw out of his pallet.
Though still a layman, Aeneas returned to work in the Council Secretariat in Basel and soon afterward found himself secretary to the Antipope Felix V. In 1442 Felix sent him to the Diet of Frankfurt, where, almost immediately on his arrival, he caught the attention of the German King Frederick III, whose history he was later to write. The king fully recognized his literary gifts, as well as his outstanding intelligence and efficiency, and appointed him his poet laureate. For the next three years he worked in the royal chancery in Vienna, turning out in his spare time not only a quantity of mildly pornographic poetry4 but also a novel in much the same vein, Lucretia and Euryalus, celebrating the amorous adventures of his friend, the Chancellor Caspar Schlick. He himself seems to have been no slouch where amorous adventures were concerned, as several acknowledged bastards could testify.
But such an existence could not continue indefinitely, and in 1445 Aeneas’s life underwent a dramatic change. First he broke with the antipope and was formally reconciled with Eugenius IV; then, in March 1446, he was ordained priest. Thereafter he was a genuinely reformed character, and his progress was fast: Bishop of Trieste in 1447, of Siena in 1450, cardinal in 1456. Two years later he was elected pope and characteristically, remembering Vergil’s pius Aeneas, took the name of Pius II and settled down to organize a Crusade.
He should have known better. With all his long diplomatic experience, it should have been clear to him that the princes of Europe were simply not prepared to shelve all their other preoccupations in order to march against the Turk; this, however—as so many of his predecessors had—he refused to accept. Within two months of his accession he issued a bull summoning Christendom to a Holy War and called a Congress of all Christian rulers to meet at Mantua on June 1, 1459. Nearly all of them declined the invitation; those who did not were evasive or noncommittal. Pius arrived at Mantua to find virtually no one there. The sad decline in papal influence could, he decided, be due only to the conciliar movement, of which he himself had previously been a staunch upholder; in January 1460 he promulgated another bull, condemning as heretical all appeals to a General Council. There could hardly have been a more radical about-face.
He refused, however, to be discouraged. If he could not defeat Sultan Mehmet in battle, perhaps he could persuade him by force of reason to see the error of his ways. In 1461 he drafted an extraordinary letter to the sultan in which he included a detailed refutation of the teachings of the Koran, an equally thorough exposition of the Christian faith, and a final appeal to renounce Islam and submit to baptism. It seems that the letter may never have been sent; if it was, it not surprisingly received no reply. But then good news arrived from Venice and Hungary: the states had agreed to join forces in a Crusade. Now all Pius’s hopes revived. The troops, he announced, would rendezvous with the fleet the following summer in Ancona; he himself would march at their head.
The Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral contains a superb cycle of frescoes by Pinturicchio depicting scenes from Pius’s life, the last of which shows his arrival at Ancona. The truth, however, was very far from what the picture suggests. The pope who took the Cross in St. Peter’s and set off on his litter from Rome on June 18, 1464, was already a sick man—so sick indeed that it was a whole month before he reached his destination. And when at last he arrived at Ancona, it was to find only a handful of Crusaders awaiting him. There were no obvious leaders and hardly any equipment. The Venetian fleet, he was told, had been delayed. It eventually sailed into harbor on August 12 with the current doge, Cristoforo Moro, at its head; but instead of the great armada the pope had expected, it consisted of just twelve small galleys. For Pius the disappointment was too great. He turned his face to the wall, and two days later he was dead. His broken heart was interred at Ancona, but his body was brought back to Rome.
It was a sad end to one of the most talented popes of his century. Pius was not above nepotism and filled his court with Sienese compatriots; but his literary and intellectual gifts, his skill as an administrator, his discriminating patronage of the arts, and his long diplomatic experience gave him a distinction matched by few of his contemporaries. He also remains the only pope to have created a city. In just five years between 1449 and 1464 he transformed his birthplace, the little village of Corsignano, redesigning it on classical lines according to all the latest theories of urban planning, giving it a cathedral and a magnificent palazzo for the use of his family, and renaming it after himself: Pienza.
PIUS WAS A hard act to follow, and his successor, Paul II, was a distinct comedown. Born Pietro Barbo, the scion of a rich family of Venetian merchants, he is said to have thought himself outstandingly goo
d-looking—a view difficult indeed to reconcile with the existing portraits—and had at first tried to call himself Formosus (the Handsome); fortunately, his cardinals had been able to dissuade him. Such physical beauty as he may or may not have possessed was in any case not reflected in his intellectual attainments. Shamelessly uncultured, he lost no time in getting rid of the humanists whom Pius had loved; when their leader, Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, who was subsequently papal librarian and author of The Lives of the Popes, protested and talked threateningly of a Council, he spent the next four months in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Several members of the Roman Academy, who professed what the pope regarded as an exaggerated interest in antiquity and insufficient respect for the Church, suffered a similar fate and were released only after the personal intervention of Cardinal Bessarion.
What Paul liked was wealth and display. As a young cardinal—being the nephew of Eugenius IV, he had become a cardinal deacon at twenty-three—he had amassed a superb collection of antiques and works of art. He encouraged carnivals, horse racing, and public entertainments of every kind. The celebrations on the occasion of the visit of the Emperor Frederick III on his second visit to Rome in 1468 were long remembered in the city. And, somewhat surprisingly in view of his treatment of the Academy, he set about the restoration of Rome’s ancient monuments. The Pantheon, the Arches of Titus and Septimius Severus, and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius were all taken in hand. He also built—and inhabited for the last five years of his pontificate—the magnificent Palazzo Venezia (from the first-floor balcony of which Benito Mussolini would later harangue the crowds). Finally, it was thanks to him that two enterprising Germans were allowed to set up the first Roman printing press.
The pope’s sexual proclivities aroused a good deal of speculation. He seems to have had two weaknesses—for good-looking young men and for melons—though the contemporary rumor that he enjoyed watching the former being tortured while he gorged himself on the latter is surely unlikely. The stroke that killed him on July 26, 1471, at the age of only fifty-four is said to have been brought on by a surfeit of both.
THERE WAS GENERAL surprise when his successor, Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, took the name of Sixtus IV; Sixtus III had died in 440, more than a thousand years before. The new pope had been a Franciscan—indeed, general of the order—and as a distinguished theologian was deeply respected by Cardinal Bessarion and other senior churchmen. Much in demand as a preacher, he had to all appearances been zealous for reform. Franciscans are noted for their love of poverty; it can only be said that Sixtus, on becoming pope, proved an exception to the rule. From one day to the next, his whole character changed. He spent money like water; his coronation tiara alone cost 100,000 ducats, more than a third of the Papacy’s annual income. To raise additional funds, he sold plenary indulgences on a scale previously unparalleled, together with high-sounding papal titles and sinecures. He bestowed the see of Milan on an eleven-year-old and the archbishopric of Lisbon on a boy of eight. His nepotism was on a similar scale. Among his first actions was the bestowal of red hats on two of his eleven nephews, Giuliano della Rovere and Pietro Riario (who was widely rumored to be the pope’s son by his own sister). A third nephew, Girolamo Basso della Rovere, had to wait a year or two, until after his cousin, Cardinal Pietro, had died of dissipation at twenty-eight. Four more nephews and two nieces were married into the ruling houses of Milan, Naples, and Urbino and to the Orsini and Farnese families in Rome.
Meanwhile, the rebuilding went on. Sixtus continued where Nicholas V had stopped. He gave the city its first new bridge across the Tiber—the Ponte Sisto—since the days of antiquity, to ensure that there was no repetition of the disaster of 1450; he was also responsible for the churches of Santa Maria della Pace and Santa Maria del Popolo, which was to effectively become the mausoleum of the della Rovere family. He revived the Roman Academy. He restored the Hospital of Santo Spirito—still a hospital today—and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol. He carved out new piazzas, replacing the medieval labyrinths of narrow alleys with broad new thoroughfares. He left Rome a Renaissance city. Within the Vatican, he carried on Nicholas’s work in the library, trebling it in size and appointing the formerly disgraced Platina as its librarian.
But above all the name of Sixtus lives on in the Sistine Chapel, the greatest of all his benefactions, intended primarily for the holding of conclaves but also for the regular services attended by the cappella papalis, the exalted group of cardinals and other dignitaries who accompanied the pope at his devotions. When the basic construction was completed in 1481, a whole troop of painters was brought in to provide the frescoes. Chief among them were Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino, though several others, including Pintoricchio and Signorelli, also contributed. (Michelangelo was only six at the time; it was to be another twenty-seven years before he was reluctantly persuaded by Julius II to take over the east wall and the ceiling.)
It is ironic indeed that the originator of one of the most beautiful buildings in the world should also have been the inspiration for one of its most odious institutions. In Spain the Reconquista—the recovery of those parts of the country that had been conquered by the Moors—was almost complete, but there was grave concern over the many thousand forcibly baptized Jews, the Marranos. In the previous reign, that of King Henry IV, they had enjoyed considerable power, reaching high positions in government, in business and finance, and even in the Church. Now the suspicion was growing that a large number of them were tenaciously clinging to their old beliefs. Accordingly, in 1478, Sixtus issued a bull ordering a major inquiry. This was the beginning of the notorious Spanish Inquisition, which enabled the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada to introduce, with the full approval of the monarchs, Ferdinand II and Isabella, a regime of brutality and terror unparalleled in Spain until the twentieth century and the Civil War.5
Where Italy was concerned, Sixtus could perfectly well have elected to stand aside from the power struggle that continued to lacerate the peninsula as Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples, and other, lesser powers endlessly jockeyed for supremacy; alas, he did not. He plunged in and by doing so did untold damage to the moral prestige of the Holy See, which became just another party to the eternal squabble. Historians are still debating how far he was implicated in the so-called Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, the purpose of which was to replace the Medici as the de facto rulers of Florence with the pope’s nephew Girolamo Riario.
Already in 1473, the Pazzi bank—a lesser rival of that of the Medicis—had lent Sixtus most of the purchase price of 40,000 ducats for the town of Imola, which the pope wanted for two of his nephews. The Medici, who had already for their own reasons refused the loan, were predictably furious, and more furious still in the following year when Sixtus dismissed them as his principal bankers, adding insult to injury by appointing to the archbishopric of Pisa, which was under Florentine authority, one of the closest associates of the Pazzi, Francesco Salviati. Lorenzo de’ Medici (“the Magnificent”) refused to recognize the appointment, forbidding the new archbishop entry into Pisa or even into Florence itself; Sixtus replied by threatening excommunication and an interdict of the whole Florentine state.
And so, as relations between the two factions grew steadily worse, the plot was hatched; and on Sunday, April 26, 1478, principally on the orders of Francesco de’ Pazzi and Archbishop Salviati, it went into operation. At a prearranged moment—it was, typically, the ringing of the bell marking the elevation of the Host—in the course of High Mass in Florence Cathedral, a whole team of assassins (including Francesco) fell upon Lorenzo’s younger brother Giuliano, stabbing him in the chest and back at least a dozen times (some witnesses say nineteen). A moment later it was the turn of Lorenzo. He, however, seized his short sword and fought back before leaping over a low rail into the choir and taking refuge in the sacristy. He was quite badly hurt, but his wounds were not life-threatening; Giuliano, on the other hand, was dead.
Immed
iately, all Florence was up in arms. The conspirators were quickly rounded up and were shown no mercy. The official place of execution outside the eastern walls was ignored; the punishments, Lorenzo decided, must be exemplary. Jacopo Bracciolini, son of the great humanist Poggio, was hanged from a high window overlooking the Piazza della Signoria; Francesco de’ Pazzi met a similar fate from a top window of the Loggia de’ Lanzi, as did the archbishop and his brother Jacopo Salviati. Angelo Poliziano, the humanist and classical scholar who was a protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici, reports that, presumably through some involuntary spasm, the dying archbishop, hanging as he was next to Francesco, bit into him so savagely that long after his death his teeth remained locked in the other’s chest.
Was Pope Sixtus embroiled in the conspiracy? Certainly he must have known about it and quite probably gave it his active encouragement, for no one was more anxious than he to dislodge the Medici once and for all. He is said to have insisted that there should be no bloodshed, but since the object of the conspiracy was assassination, it is difficult to see how he could have had it both ways. And now at last he decreed the excommunication of the Medici which he had long threatened and the interdict over Florence—and all Italy flared up in war.
The attempted coup had failed—just. But if Lorenzo had been a little less lucky and had suffered the fate of his brother, the successful conspirators could easily have brought about a change of government in Florence; and no one would have applauded the change more heartily than Pope Sixtus IV.
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