A Trembling Upon Rome

by Richard Condon

  The college of cardinals and the entire curia left Bologna with him because this time the papacy was returning to Rome permanently. The removals of the combined households of the papacy, the college and the curia was a spectacularly complex operation. The pope's own household contained 530 people. The household of each cardinal – and there were 11 cardinals travelling in the entourage – comprised about 210 people. The prelates, prebendaries and clerics who constituted the curia accounted for an aggregate household of 600 more. They were all guarded by detachments of 2000 soldiers, which made up a seven-mile long procession of 7000 people. In addition to these came the largest population of the holy hegira, 11,060 more people; not as decorative but equally impressive. There were cooks, provisioners, scullions, children, teachers, quartermasters, blacksmiths, armourers, wheelwrights, carpenters, labourers entertainers: jugglers, whores, actors, musicians, fixers, scribes, gardeners, lottery operators and astrologers; service personnel: accountants, couriers, butlers, housemaids; plus 209 of the nobility of the papal states who had permanently attached themselves to the papal court. All 18,000 of them swarmed across the hedgeless, sun-hammered countryside, accompanied by endless streams of pack-horses and carts slipping and stumbling beneath their monstrous burdens, which included plate, jewels, gold, sacred vessels and cloths, musical instruments, paintings; tools, weapons, breviaries and books, vestments, linen, pots, pans and cooking spits, an inestimable amount of clothing, and beds by the hundreds of dozens.

  On 11 April, at the hour of vespers, they passed through the Porta Sancti Pancrati on the Via Aurelia at the entrance to Rome. The following day, Pope John XXIII rode through the Trastevere quarter, over the island bridge where the jewellers had their stalls, through the Fields of Flowers and across the St Peter's bridge, which led directly to the Vatican. His Holiness entered St Peter's church with the Duke of Anjou, the Marquess of Este and the cardinals, knelt at the high altar in observed reverence, then ordered that the sacred handkerchief of Santa Veronica be displayed to the Roman populace who had assembled at the basilica.

  'My dear Decima,' Cossa wrote from the Vatican to the marchesa in Mainz. `Bologna is in, turmoil. Bernaba and Palo, Dr. Weiler and Father Fanfarone have remained there. Can you recall Corrado Caracciola, whom I once tried to persuade the college to elect as pope? If you cannot, do not chide yourself, for few can. His mother may have had a difficult time remembering him, and he was an only child. But he is sweet-natured, much like Filargi, and I wanted a safe place too stand him, so I made him my legate to Bologna. I had no sooner left when Carlo Malatesta, that tiresomely devout supporter of Gregory, entered the service of Ladislas with an army and at once notified – not dear old Caracciola – but the Bologna City Council,, that he would open hostilities against them. He advanced from Rimini, ravaging the land as he came, as far as San Giovanni in Persiceto, Caracciola tried feebly to persuade him to surrender, then he thought of using force, then – because his time had come and for no other reason – the dear old thing dropped dead. It could have been from the fresh air.

  `So I must appoint another legate, probably Henricus Minultulus (a Neapolitan) but he can't get to Bologna in time to make any difference. Meantime, Bologna is a state without a ruler. Already conspirators, have elected Pietro Cassolini as leader and there was an uprising inside the walls on 11 May. Cassolini has made the whole thing into a holiday after that belly-pinching winter. He rode through the streets on a bare-backed horse yelling, "Hurray for the people and for Art!" and took the palace. The people followed him and they turned out the magistrates and the officials. Eight ancients and a gonfalonier of justice were elected. Envoys were sent to Venice for corn. All of it was a quarrel with the nobility, not with me or the Church. My captain – you remember Uguccione? – was allowed to remain. Bologna continues to pay its tribute to my curia. In fact this "commune" stipulated that the city continue to render "true and due obedience to Pope John". Then they made their peace with Malatesta and paid him two thousand florins.

  `But I am not desolated by such events, which, after all, provide exhilarating entertainment for the Bolognese people.

  The marchesa replied: `… so pleased with how things worked out in promise of Sigismund's loyalty to you, which I must approach,, indirectly inasmuch as he is off fighting some war with Venice. I am proud of the way you have handled the mess in Bologna. Malatesta must be some kind of religious fanatic. You must find Giacomo Isolano, the doctor of learning who has such a stinking breath on him that you'd better keep the windows open when you meet. Promise him a cardinal's hat if he can overthrow Cassolini's government in Bologna. Isolano has the mobility on his side and it is a certainty that the fools who have taken over have already abused their power. I agree that Minultulus is a good choice for legate, but he must work closely as a check on Isolano. But that is just the side show. You must get on with the war against Ladislas.

  `There will be no help available for your war from the Duke of Burgundy or from Sigismund: Until Sigismund's war with Venice is over he will be helpless. He is not a serious man. His mind is continually peeking into mirrors. He preens disgustingly, singing of what a great boy he is, then tripping over his own feet as he chases women. As for your good friend Burgundy, he is nineteen and just married. Nothing will prise him out of the bride and pull him off to war.

  `It appears that there may be peace between the Teutonic order and the Poles. Both sides are winded and need a long rest.

  `Maria Giovanna writes to say that the Florentines are disgusted with the way the Duke of Anjou manages wars, which means they are fearful that they will have to pay for all the troops, but in any event they have no interest in seeking any kind of French rule in Italy. They are about to make a separate peace with Ladislas and will withdraw from their alliance with you and the duke, taking Siena with them. You will have to dig in your heels The duke is penniless. I recommend that you order taxes be increased immediately in Savoy, Portugal and the islands of the Aegean, which have been taxed too lightly in recent years.

  'Each moment I hear a step outside this house, or a horse galloping up to it, my heart leaps into my throat because I am sure it is a courier bringing me news of you, recreating you before me in, an unsatisfactory way but it is the only way we will have until I can get, my business over, and return to your arms. I throb and burn everywhere upon me, thinking of you encircling me and possessing me. Please, Cossa, keep me in your heart.'

  He thought of her, active and vengeful thoughts, but at, night when he slept he dreamed of Catherine Visconti, alive and carnal and possessed by her appetites for him. When he awoke he wanted to return to her, but she was gone. He had only the marchesa.

  39

  Ladislas told his military staff before battle that they were lucky that Paolo Orsini was the senior-general facing them. `For in that way,' he said, `no one can get hurt.'

  Ladislas was an unstable, red-haired man of whom it was said that he maintained such a costly show of arms because he was an arrant coward. He was also an eccentric womanizer, who often left the battlefield with armed guards, to cover some woman his agents had rounded up after the previous day's fighting. He was keen on very stupid, tiny women who would name the children he gave them after him, as they were told to do:

  `It is the feast of the Blessed Maria di Giorgio,' he told his staff officers, `and the false pope, John, is probably out blessing the battle standards to give them into the charge of Paolo Orsini, who makes war as if he had contracted to mend a road. Last year, the only time he ever worked for me, he told me he took pride in fighting battles without the loss of a single soldier on either side.' The officers roared with laughter. `Three years ago he stopped French troops from following up a strong advantage, telling them that it is not the Italian custom to kill too many of the enemy. The way he looks at it is: the more men who survive, the longer he will be able to hire them out to war.

  `Nonetheless,' Arrigo, Count Cipriani, said, `we still face Sforza and he is the most formidable condottie
ri general I ever care to oppose.'

  `Sforza will be facing you, my dear Count.'

  `By 'God, Sforza' has terrible eyes,' the constable, Alberico da Barbiano, said.

  `It is a sight defect,' Ladislas answered. `Anyway, we are in hilly country and they will come at us around the Pontine marshes towards Terracina. They will camp near Ceprano, on the bank of the Garigliano, which will be swollen with the spring foods. The river washes the base of the mountain, below a village called Roccasecca which has a citadel. That is where my headquarters will be. We'll fight on the inner side of the river. Sforza will press the attack, but Orsini will be exhorting the troops to avoid a battle and eventually, because his money is running out, the duke will listen to Sforza.' Roccasecca was strategically placed between Rome and Naples, near Cassino. Whichever side won here would win the other's capital city.

  At vespers, when the 15,000 Neapolitan soldiers were eating their evening meal, the Duke of Anjou led his army across the river and fell upon the enemy. Louis de Logny led the van; the Marquise de Controne and the Seneschal of Eu led the troops which came in at the -flanks. They made a total surprise amid the pitched tents and the gold and silver plate laid out in banquet; for Ladislas, who was frightstruck.

  Hastily, his bodyguard fell into the ruse which had saved him more than once. Six men were dressed and armed identically in the costume and weapons of the king, a breastplate under each royal blue coat worked with golden lilies, and a golden helmet. The king placed Count Arrigo Cipriani in charge of this unit to ensure displays of his honour and bravery, and sent them out into different parts of the fray while he changed with frantic haste into the dress of a slatternly camp follower.

  A desperate hand-to-hand struggle went on for more than an hour before the Neapolitans lost heart and fled. The slaughter of horse and foot was great. Pope Gregory's legate to Naples was captured. So were the Counts of Carrara, Cipriani, Arpino, Celano, Loreto and others; in all, ten counts, many other nobles and hundreds of other men were taken prisoner and held for ransom.

  By the time the dust had settled, Ladislas had made it to the castle of Roccasecca, which stood on a height above its village. He was powerless. The Duke of Anjou and the papacy of John XXIII had won a great battle. French and Italian troops were pillaging. Much gold and silver plate was captured and the soldiers were rich from the 30,000 horses they took. The battle standards of Ladislas and Gregory were sent to Pope John in Rome. Cossa rejoiced. The war was finished. Louis, Duke of Anjou, would now be King of Naples. Cossa ordered a great procession to assemble and make its way across the city and back again; he himself, the sacred college, prelates, deacons and prebendaries took part, dragging the enemy standards through the mud of the streets of Rome while the people shouted, `Long live the sovereign pontiff! Long live the King of the Sicilies!'

  Even as His Holiness distributed his blessings of peace upon the multitude, while rejoicings were at their fullest, news came that Ladislas and a greater part of his troops had escaped the army of the Duke of Anjou and that the great victory had been totally reversed… Cossa went insane with rage as he was forced to mount a horse in mid-procession to rush back to the Vatican and the fortress of Sant Angelo.

  It was pathetic. Had the ducal troops followed up their victory at Roccasecca, they could have captured Ladislas and overrun his kingdom. The war would have been over. Sforza had been in the first wave, then had returned to repair his army while Paolo Orsini came up with fresh troops. Orsini refused to call his men away from the pillaging to pursue the Neapolitans. Orsini, general contractor for the day labourers called condottieri, did not wish to see either Ladislas or the duke so well off that they could do, without his contracting services.

  Nonetheless, through the blood of Cossa's rage, it was the responsibility of the Duke of Anjou to weigh the merits of his generals and to see that the victory was properly consolidated. The duke had thrown away his only chance. He paid for it with the crown of Naples. Cossa was ruined. He would be the first homeless, pope, he told me sardonically. He would have to flee Rome when. Ladislas regrouped and arrived at the city's gates – no matter how convincingly he pretended that the advance could be forestalled. He would be an outcast from Rome. Carlo Malatesta occupied Bologna.

  Take it from me, the disappointment was simply terrible for him because it was so undeserved. His father was an old man. His father and his entire family would not only be disgraced but would now be held hostage by Ladislas. Cossa reminded himself again and again that he could have been operating the family business in the Bay of Naples, clearing a steady 50,000 florins a year and letting all these. round-assed churchmen do the striving. His father had been right only up to a point. There was a profitable career to be made in the Church -providing one had the sense not to rise above the rank of cardinal. Cosimo and the marchesa had lifted him into this ridiculous job of pope, and he had had nothing but trouble from the day he had accepted it.

  I was no great advocate of Cosimo and the marchesa; but I didn't agree with him this time. At the right moment, I thought, Cossa should put them away and keep them away. But this was an emergency. It was no time for anything but plotting our own survival. `Your father's business has to go out of style,' I told him. `Sooner, not later, it will have to be finished because it interferes with other people's business. Who is going to allow his merchandise to be stolen from him on a regular basis? The banks alone will stop it. And don't believe it's better to be a cardinal. You are at the very top of your profession when, you are pope. You are higher than that because there is only one of you in the world – under ordinary circumstances. Think of how many kings and princes and chancellors and dukes there are. Furthermore, they represent only people. A pope represents the actual Christian God on earth. How can you beat that? Listen, Cossa – every business has its good seasons and its bad seasons. You happen to have started off as pope in a bad season. But, and this has actually been proved; a bad beginning means a good ending.'

  He said to me, `I always feel considerably depressed after listening to you, Franco Ellera. You are a bottomless cesspit of advice.'

  I didn't pretend to become offended. I knew he was almost unmanned by the frustration of being pope and of being denied by custom the right to lead his own troops and fight his own wars, free from the excuses of fools such as the Duke of Anjou. I sensed that he was in deep despair because he hated with the force of a great explosion the fact that people who had claimed to be his friends had betrayed and tricked him into accepting the papacy. The only hope he could, hold onto was his conviction that, at the right time, he would avenge the murder of Catherine Visconti, With his Neapolitan fatalism, Cossa didn't feel sorry for himself at any time, but he was beginning to feel, sorry for the rest of the people on earth because the way he felt they had brought all this upon themselves with their ridiculous superstitions about some God who was always hidden, from them: `I can feel no mercy for people who allowed, even implored, the men who had been popes before me dunderheads like Gregory, thieves like Boniface, or murderous tyrants like Robert of Geneva to accept the crown of Peter. How could people possibly have believed that the procession of grasping cardinals and bishops through earlier centuries were the custodians of some sacred fire, the knowledge of which was denied to the very people who paid for those prelates' luxuries?' He thought of Catherine Visconti and all he had lost, making him cherish the marchesa the more because she was what he had left. He sat concentrating purely upon the moment when he would have Catherine's son within his reach and he would demonstrate to him the motions of honest murder, not filthy poison, as he strangled that son and personally, as pope, saw him cast into hell.

  When he had rested, eaten well and changed into a crisp clean uniform, the Duke of Anjou appealed to Cossa for more money to renew the campaign.

  'Give you money?' the holy pontiff shouted. `I would more quickly arm and provision the feeble-minded and aged of Rome and send them out to take Naples. You are useless, you silly cunt! Do you have a glimm
ering of how useless you are? You can thank, God that your parents were royal and that you were born French because, if you were one of my generals, I would hang you.'

  `Take care lest you offend me, Holiness,' the duke spattered.

  `Offend you? I piss on you!'

  The duke stood haughtily with long, thin, wall-eyed dignity. `I shall overlook this tantrum,-' he said coldly, `because you are my pope… But I will point out to you that an Italian general, from one of your best families, is the cause of this disaster.'

  `Orsini? Orsini? Everyone but you knows Orsini is no general. He is a businessman. He hasn't worked fore me in nine years. Don't blame a simple labour broker such as Orsini. If you yourself had pursued Ladislas and captured him the last time you wrecked your own chances, or the time before that, or the time again before that, Ladislas would have told you that Paolo Orsini is an employment agent who seeks to banish the use of all weapons in the conduct of wars because they damage his merchandise. Louis, hear me! I am trembling on the crumbling edge of hanging you, so – please, Louis get out of my sight!'

  On 3 August 1411, I conducted the Duke of Anjou to his galleys at Ripa Grande. No Roman noble was in his escort. He embarked for Ostia, thence sailed to Provence. He reached Paris on 3 January the following year and never again attempted to recover the crown of Naples.

  In the time he had remaining before Ladislas's army arrived, Cossa prepared Rome and the Vatican for the revenge which Ladislas would take. He constructed a walled-in passage from his palace to the fortress of Sant Angelo, while he raised money by forcing loans from nobles and wealthy citizens. He raised the tax on wine from 50 to 100 per cent a; hogshead. He levied a tax on shoeing-smiths, horse marshals, potters and artificers. He altered the value of the currency by issuing more of it than ever before agonizing that the marchesa should hasten to his side to tell him what he must do.