by G. J. Meyer
The Italians cannot be unified because of the presence of two of the Sacred College’s most formidable members, both of them Roman nobles, both in their mid-forties, and both able to draw on enormous reserves of political, financial, and even military power. Latino Orsini occupies the seat in the college that his family has held for so many centuries that its leaders regard it as theirs by right, as practically their personal property. Among the ornaments on his family tree are three Orsini popes, the first elected in 1191, and the second so notorious for corruption that Dante gave him a small speaking role as one of the damned souls in The Inferno. Latino need look no further than to his clan’s history for lessons in what a boon it can be to put a relative, or someone dependent on one’s relatives, on the papal throne. And for equally compelling examples of how badly things can go when that throne is occupied by an enemy—worst of all, from the Orsini perspective, by a Colonna or a friend of the Colonna.
Proud and potent though Latino is, he is outmatched by his most dangerous rival, Cardinal Prospero Colonna. A nephew of the Oddone Colonna who became Pope Martin V in 1417 and used his office to heap wealth, high office, and noble titles on his kinsmen, Prospero has had a colorful career. He was made a cardinal while still in his teens, was excommunicated after his uncle’s death changed the Colonna from Vatican insiders to undesirables, won his way back into favor, and then was very nearly elected himself. Through three tense days at the conclave of 1447, Prospero remained just two votes short of victory. His inability to get those two votes and the subsequent melting away of his support were due to the loyalty to the Orsini of several cardinals and the uneasiness felt by others because of Prospero’s notorious readiness to use violence in pursuing his objectives. It was this Orsini-versus-Colonna deadlock that led to the surprise election of the conclave’s newest member, the scholarly Tommaso Parentucelli, who had thus become the now-deceased Nicholas V.
The conditions that led to deadlock in 1447 are all in place in 1455. As the cardinals prepare to cast the first round of ballots, it becomes clear that the Italian Domenico Capranica is favored by a number of his colleagues. Objectively, this is an understandable, even a commendable, development. There is nothing objectionable about Capranica and much to recommend him. At fifty-five he is a seasoned senior churchman, having been a bishop for thirty years and a cardinal for more than twenty. He is also one of the Vatican’s leading diplomats and administrators, a humanist scholar of note, a champion of ecclesiastical reform, and so blameless in his personal life that historians of the early Renaissance will one day describe him as saintly.
By the measures that should matter most he is an exceptional candidate. No one could find good grounds for complaining of his election, and his colleagues like the fact that he has been one of them for nearly a generation; many of them feel that, because the late Nicholas had entered the Sacred College mere months before his election, he never developed a proper respect for its importance.
Capranica has a problem all the same, and it proves to be disabling. He began his career as secretary to the Colonna pope Martin V—had been chosen for the post because of his exceptional abilities and outstanding promise—and because of this the Orsini early classified him as an enemy and always treated him accordingly. Over the years he and the Orsini clashed so often and so seriously that there can be no hope of his election in any conclave over which Latino Orsini holds veto power.
Capranica’s cause being thus lost, Latino now puts forth his choice: Pietro Barbo, nephew of the Pope Eugenius IV who had died in 1447 (and who himself had been the nephew of a still earlier pope). Barbo is a fifteen-year veteran of the college in spite of being only thirty-eight years old, and though not as distinguished as Capranica, he is in no way unworthy of consideration. He has the support not only of the Orsini but of Venice and the king of Naples as well. But he too has no chance, and for reasons unrelated to anything he himself has ever said or done. The problem is his late uncle. When Eugenius made Barbo a cardinal at age twenty-three, he did so in Florence, and he was living in Florence because six years earlier he had fled Rome for his life, and his flight from Rome had become necessary when he tried to break the power of the Colonna and instead was overpowered.
The result was humiliation. Three years after his election Eugenius found himself disguised as a monk and floating downstream in a Tiber barge, cowering under a shield as wrathful Romans shouted their contempt and hurled stones, sticks, and rubbish down on him from the banks above. He found refuge in Florence, which welcomed him because its dominant family, the Medici, was closely affiliated with the Orsini, who were always happy to embrace an enemy of the Colonna.
Rome was ultimately retaken by force, not by Eugenius himself but by a commander of the papal army named Giovanni Vitelleschi, who was both a cardinal and one of the most savagely aggressive soldiers of the age. The leader of Rome’s short-lived, Colonna-sponsored republic was dismembered alive by men wielding red-hot tongs, and the city was put under a military occupation designed to make resistance impossible and life intolerable for any Colonna foolish enough to remain. The provinces belonging to the papacy and known as the Papal States were ravaged as well, even the churches of towns disloyal to the exiled pope were razed, and the city of Palestrina, seat of one of the Colonna family’s most powerful branches, was obliterated.
Pietro Barbo had nothing to do with any of this—it is unclear whether even his uncle the pope intended or approved the atrocities committed in his name—but in the eyes of the Colonna he is fatally tainted, absolutely and forever unworthy of trust. If in 1455 Prospero Colonna no longer has sufficient clout to stand as a credible candidate himself, he certainly remains capable of blocking the election of anyone suspected of being a danger to his clan. He is helped by Barbo’s relative youth. Not without reason, cardinals tend to think it unwise to bestow the crown on someone who might possibly wear it for twenty or thirty years. In Barbo’s case a forty-year reign would not be inconceivable.
With Capranica and Barbo eliminated, clearly a compromise is needed, one that Latino and Prospero will accept. Days are passing, and as the cardinals look about them for a solution, several find their attention fixing on an ecclesiastical anomaly. This is Basilios Bessarion, who with his compatriot Isidore of Kiev is one of two Greeks present at the conclave. Both began their careers in the Orthodox Church, rose high in the hierarchy at Constantinople, and in 1434 were appointed delegates to the Roman Church’s Council of Basel, where they showed themselves to be strongly in favor of ending the centuries-old split between the Eastern and Western rites. In 1439, when the council was meeting in Florence, Bessarion and Isidore delighted the papal court and became traitors in the eyes of their Orthodox brethren by defecting to Rome. In short order they were made cardinals. Over the next decade and a half Bessarion won a reputation as one of Europe’s leading humanists and promoters of the new learning, and as a man of solid competence and impeccable moral character. Also in his favor, in the opinion of many cardinals, are the appreciation of the Turkish threat that his Eastern origins have given him and his insistence that the West must respond forcefully.
But he too has no chance of election. The conclave’s French members, no longer keeping silent because what is under discussion is no longer a strictly Italian quarrel, take the lead in complaining that Bessarion is an alien. They make much of the fact that, contrary to the conventions of the Sacred College, he continues, in the Byzantine fashion, to wear a long beard. Even those cardinals who most admire Bessarion find it necessary to agree that expecting him to rule Rome and its Church could end in nothing but calamity.
So … some other compromise has to be found. The cardinals, frustrated and weary and wanting to be set free, find it quickly. Find him quickly. The desire to be done with this tiresome business awakens them at last to the fact that there is in their midst a man of whom no one has a bad word to say. A man who, if not a champion of the new humanism in the manner of Capranica or Bessarion or Pope Nicholas, is an estee
med scholar nevertheless, with two doctorates in law and an international reputation as an authority on the subject.
A good man, untouched by scandal and known to all Rome for his sponsorship of hospitals, his generosity to the elderly and the poor, and the simplicity of his life.
A statesman too, with an impressive career behind him and decades spent at the right hand of one of the greatest kings in Europe.
A peacemaker of the first order, a key player in bringing the Western Schism to an end and settling a long conflict between Naples and Rome.
Known to be loyal to popes rather than councils, and to understand the Turkish threat.
Not greedy—not even ambitious.
And, what matters more in this deadlocked conclave, free of politics: unaffiliated with any of the Sacred College’s factions after ten years as a member, so detached from the intrigues of the papal court that no one—no Orsini, no Colonna, no anyone—has reason to regard him with distrust.
And finally—what’s best of all, the clincher—seventy-six years old and in declining health. It is inconceivable that he will live much longer. This makes him perfect.
And so when Cardinal Bessarion rises to his feet and declares in solemn tones that he is giving his vote to Alonso Borgia, his compeers all but fall over themselves in their haste to do the same. They do so with joyful relief, confident that they are settling on a man who will reign benignly, passively, and above all briefly, soon departing for the hereafter having distressed no one and changed nothing.
Little do they know.
Background
THE ROAD TO ROME
IT IS CURIOUS THAT ALONSO DE BORJA CHOSE A LIFE IN THE Church. Being an only son of landowning parents, he must have been expected to marry, inherit his father’s estate, and carry on the family name. That name carried considerable weight in the old kingdom of Valencia, where Alonso’s life began. A hundred and forty years before his birth, when King Jaime of Aragon drove the Muslims out of Valencia, among the conquistadores in his army were eight men who called themselves de Borja. Possibly they, or some of them, were descended from an ancient family of that name. No less possibly, they just happened to be from the old Roman city of Borja near Zaragoza and had taken its name in the customary way.
The records show that one of Jaime’s Borja soldiers was given responsibility for parceling out conquered lands in and around the Valencian town of Játiva, or Xátiva. He was generous with himself and his kinsmen. Their name became common among the gentry of the neighborhood. The estate of Torre del Canals, where Alonso was born on the last day of 1378, was neither the humblest nor the grandest of the numerous Borja households.
Through much of his long life Alonso was a lawyer more than a churchman, remaining in minor orders rather than being ordained a priest. He entered the University of Lérida at age fourteen, staying to earn doctorates in canon and civil law and in time becoming a lecturer. At age thirty he was a respected and respectable academic—not a whiff of scandal was ever attached to his name—but still a deeply obscure provincial. He was not an intellectual in any true sense of the term, showing no interest in the revival of classical learning that was sweeping across Europe early in the fifteenth century. By all accounts he was honest, hardworking, and able, but one searches in vain for evidence of a colorful personality.
At age thirty-seven, doubtless because of his legal expertise and the appointment he held as a canon of the local cathedral, Borja was chosen as the diocese of Lérida’s representative at the Council of Constance. This assembly of the Church had been convened mainly to deal with the Great Schism, the split in Western Christendom that had begun in 1378 with the almost simultaneous election of two competing popes. (Considering the importance that the schism would play in Borja’s life, it is an interesting coincidence that the two entered the world in the same year.) During the four years of its existence the council deposed two men judged to be “antipopes” because never legitimately elected, accepted the resignation of the claimant whose election was recognized as legitimate (he quit voluntarily in the interests of unity), and chose a single successor, the Colonna who became Martin V. This did not end the schism, however, because a Spaniard calling himself Benedict XIII refused to abandon his claim and was supported by the royal House of Aragon.
Though there is no evidence that Alonso de Borja participated in the council’s debates—no evidence, even, that he attended any of its sessions—its actions presented him with vexing questions. As a loyal subject of Aragon and a junior member of its clergy, he had always been disposed to follow the lead of its rulers, and Benedict like himself was a respected legal scholar and above reproach in his personal life. That Benedict had been repudiated by a general council of the Church, however, was not to be shrugged off lightly. Further complications included the council’s assertion, even as it made Martin V pope, that he was subject to it because councils were the highest authority in the Church, and Martin’s rejoinder that he and not the council was supreme. The result was the greatest challenge to papal authority until the Reformation, which was still a century in the future. The uncertainty to which these disagreements gave rise was offensive to Borja’s lawyerly mind and must be one reason why, at about this point, he began to express two convictions. First, that Church unity was the only alternative to chaos. Second, that unity was impossible if the pope was not supreme.
These beliefs were firmly in place when, in 1417, the fortyish Borja made his first visit to the court of the charismatic young Alfonso V, whose kingdom of Aragon had long since absorbed Valencia. Possibly he had been summoned to explain the decrees coming out of Constance; this would have been natural in light of the support that Alfonso and his father before him had extended to the Spanish antipopes, and the questions of law stirred up by the contest between the council and Martin V. Whatever the reason for the visit, it proved to be important in the king’s life and the great turning point in Borja’s.
Alfonso V at twenty-one was ruler not only of Aragon but of Sicily too. That was enough to make him as powerful as any monarch in Europe, and he was already launched upon the campaigns that would add Corsica and Sardinia to his empire. And he was glamorous as well as important. Short but strongly built, with a small hawklike nose and the penetrating gaze of a born predator, he had a grace and a flair for the theatrical gesture that would win him the honorific “Alfonso the Magnanimous.” He was also intelligent and witty (happy marriage, he said, required that the wife be blind and the husband deaf) and radiated a sunny self-assurance. Clearly he saw something that he liked in the lawyer from Lérida, even if that lawyer was dry and cautious and nobody’s idea of a man of action. Borja for his part must have been flattered to find himself attracting the interest of such a kingly young king, even one whose views were not entirely compatible with his own. When the visitor was offered employment at Alfonso’s court, there can have been little hesitation. His whole life, his place in the world, was utterly transformed. In short order he was the king’s secretary and principal counselor and therefore at the center of European affairs.
Alfonso no less than Borja faced delicate questions. Ridiculous as the current Spanish claimant to the papal crown might appear to be (he called himself Clement VIII and had been elected by three men whom Benedict XIII had proclaimed to be cardinals shortly before his death), he continued to be recognized by the House of Aragon, and a faint aura of prestige clung to him as a result. Though Alfonso stood to gain nothing by keeping the schism alive, abandoning a cause with which his family had long been identified would have been no simple step. If not taken carefully, it could look like an admission of failure. Alfonso had no tolerance for failure.
It fell to his new secretary to find a way forward. And so when in 1421 Alfonso arrived in Naples in response to Queen Joanna II’s appeal for help in fending off a French attack—the childless and only dubiously sane queen had found the perfect way to recruit him, declaring him to be her heir—he immediately and at Borja’s suggestion sent off a letter
offering Pope Martin his friendship. He had every reason to expect a positive response. Martin, having recently returned the pontifical court to the Eternal City after many years of exile, seemed unlikely to want to continue an old and costly feud. He had barely begun the hard task of restoring order in Rome and the adjacent Papal States, and he was encountering enough opposition from the Orsini and others to need no trouble with Spain. Alonso de Borja, who had remained behind in Aragon as head of a council advising Queen Maria, her husband’s regent, must have waited hopefully for word of a rapprochement—and been taken aback to learn that the pope had instead allied himself with Queen Joanna’s enemy, the Frenchman Louis of Anjou, who claimed to be rightful king of Naples. Worse news followed: Alfonso had retaliated by reaffirming Clement VIII as pope. Borja’s plan for reconciliation had come to nothing—had, if anything, made things worse. He had learned that the politics of Italy were too tricky to be managed, or even understood, from where he sat in Spain. Prudent lawyer that he was, he turned his attention to business closer to home and tried to keep it there.
Alfonso V meanwhile threw himself into a war for Naples that dragged on year after year. Its complexities and reversals would require a chapter of their own, and even then would be barely comprehensible. After two years of fighting, Joanna announced that Louis of Anjou, not Alfonso, was now her heir, and therefore her erstwhile rescuer was now an interloper and a foe. As the advantage shifted sporadically from side to side, it began to seem that the bloodshed might continue forever. Atrocities and outrages became almost commonplace. Mercenaries in Louis’s service, having killed Alfonso’s beloved brother Pedro with a lucky shot, celebrated their success by firing his corpse out of a cannon. When in 1423 Alfonso had to return to Spain to deal with an outbreak of hostilities between another brother, Juan king of Navarre, and his brother-in-law Juan king of Castile, he interrupted his voyage to pay a call on Marseilles, the capital of the House of Anjou. He tried twice to set it afire and both times was foiled by rain. He declared that if it happened a third time, he would accept failure as God’s will and move on, but there was no more rain, and Alfonso had the rare satisfaction of reducing a major city to ashes before weighing anchor and continuing on his way.
