A Trembling Upon Rome

by Richard Condon

  `This is different,' I told him. `They're coming from all over Europe. You've got to give them time to get here. They have a lot of travelling to do and a lot of them wouldn't be too upset to miss a couple of weeks of straight masses and processions anyhow.'

  `What are you saying? This council was built up to the heavens. If they were going to take it seriously,` they would be here, but nobody cares.' I knew that Cossa wanted desperately to believe that. For the first time, I realized how frightened Cossa was frightened ofsuch aconcentration of power around him, frightened of the future.

  'We aren't exactly poor,' I told him. "We can always retire. Let's see what happens.'

  He looked at me -as if I were getting senile.

  Even the people of Konstanz and the few pilgrims who had arrived for the great events were disappointed at the showing. Only 15 cardinals, 2 patriarchs, 23 archbishops and some 300 minor prelates had passed in swaying procession into the cathedral. This time, when the mass was over, I mounted the pulpit and rumbled out in a, profound voice that the first active session of the council would be held on Friday 16 November.

  `It is as good a date as any,' Cossa told the marchesa as they worked over projections of income at the papal residence, formerly the bishop's palace, across from the cathedral.

  `Cossa, get it out of your head that no one is coming to this. The people are starting to come in. Peace has broken out temporarily somehow so the roads are free from troops and their followers. And the weather is good.'

  `It was the same two weeks ago, but nobody got here,' Cossa said insistently. `And it is also winter. The Italians are dropping into sick beds. Count Weiler says there could be an epidemic We should capitalize on that and spread the word as far and as wide as we can that it is dangerous to come to Konstanz.' The return of his fear that they would charge him, and try him, and burn him, brought on an obsession. He would not listen to anyone who, believed that the nations would come to Konstanz.

  On 16 November, after the mass and the anthem, after the silent and the audible, prayers; and the litany, which was followed by the benediction and the gospel, Pope John XXIII then preached a sermon on the words `Speak ye every man the truth with his neighbour; execute the judgement of truth and peace at your gates."

  At its close he intoned the Veni Creator Spiritus. I then stood beside the pope and read the bull which set forth that the work of reform had been postponed after Pisa for three years, when it had been taken up; by the Council of, Rome. At Rome it had again been postponed because the wars had meant that relatively few delegates could attend. The bull did not itself institute reform but put it decisively on the agenda. The officers of the council were then nominated. The second session was fixed for 17 December.

  The following day, a deputation of cardinals led by Pierre d'Ailly called upon the pope at his palace. D'Ailly complained officially to the pope that he was wanting in correctness and decorum. `Your Holiness the Supreme Pontiff cuts masses short. He will not give proper audiences. He avoids the processions which the people so enjoy. Most of the time he chooses to be jocose.'

  Cossa stared at D'Ailly, Spina and his own nephew, his sister's boy, Brancacci, with contempt. He had made the fortunes of these men. They knew that all the endless ritual movements of the Church were what the Church was to practising, Christians. It was their entertainment! What did it matter to them who performed the movements and intoned the gibberish – except, of course, that they enjoyed seeing prelates of high rank doing these things because they could then tell their friends that they had actually prayed with so-and-so, and had been within fifty feet of the pope. By sparing his appearances, he was preserving the wonderment value of the papacy, and each time he was absent from the gargled foolishness he was only adding: to the pleasure of those occasions when he was visible to the faithful. These robbers knew that. Indeed, the people themselves knew the whole thing was a mockery of a past which had been dead for a thousand years.

  `You go beyond jocosity,' he said to D'Ailly, trying to control his outrage.

  `His Holiness himself must prescribe for all the world to know,' Spina said gravely, `the certain hours for the recitation of his office, for saying and hearing of mass – indeed, my Lord, – for being shriven -for attending the sick and the dying; and he must allow, of no emergency to break in upon these hours. The people worship what you stand for. They have come hundreds of miles to see you and to be put at peace by you.'

  `What do I have cardinals for? You are the so-called churchmen! You do some of the work for a change! I am a lawyer, not a priest, and you knew that when you elected me your pope. I am a soldier, not a chanter of rituals.'

  D'Ailly ground on. `A Roman pontiff is expected to hold secret consistories. It is the customary thing for a pope to maintain the pagnotta, the public alms collection of everything taken from his table when he has finished eating.'

  `The pope is required to appoint three or four referendaries to inspect all petitions. It is only right,' Cossa's nephew, Brancacci,

  'If I had turned to the referendaries before appointing you as a cardinal because my father requested it, little nephew,' Cossa spat at him, 'you would still be playing among the catamites of Naples and ignoring that there was a church in the city.'

  `You Cossa!' Spina snarled. 'We are talking about you who should be holding a public audience after every mass and at vespers three times a week – if only to show that you occasionally go to mass and vespers. These are northern people who surround us; they are not complaisant Italians. They send in the greatest bulk of the income of the Church. They have paid over and over again whenever they were assessed and re-assessed, and they deserve to get from their pope what they have paid for.'

  `Where lords are slack, the steward cannot be expected to be particular,' D'Ailly said smoothly. `A lord should rise before his servants and be the last to bed. Above all, his responses to any event should be couched in kindly terms lest he make enemies.

  `But you do not heed your own counsel, my lords!' Cossa exclaimed, extending his hands to them palms upward, then clenching these into fists.

  `Counsel – Holy Father?'

  `Your ancient wisdom about making enemies. You have made a hungry enemy today.' He turned to Spina. `You must take care, Spina, lest your reputation among popes becomes as smashed as your nose.' He smiled slyly. `We really must have a long talk about that nose of yours some day. I never could believe that story of how it happened to you.' He turned to the two other cardinals. `Did you know that thirty-one men once took their consecutive pleasure upon our lord Spina's body, Eminences? Now you would not have thought he would have been such a morsel, would you? But that is the typical Sicilian every time, isn't it?'

  Spina tottered forward, grabbing at a table in front of him, then standing, leaning it upon it with both arms, drawing air into his body in great sucking gasps. His face was blank white with two vivid scarlet spots high on the cheekbones. Intensely white sputum discharged from the corners of his mouth. He tried to speak but he could make no sound. It was an insane tableau: the Holy Father in his whitest of albs and snowy zucchetto standing amiably before a man suffocating with humiliation, beside two gorgeously robed princes of the Church. At last, Spina was able to lift a hand from the table top, keeping the other there to support himself. He lifted the arm and extended a long, brown, palsied finger at his pontiff, eyes wide with horror. `You knew Minerbetti!' he croaked. `Where is she?'

  `Get him out of here,' the pope said, for the moment recreating the enormous amiability of Boniface IX. `All of you, carrion, fallen upon the purse of the Church – get out of my sight!'

  That evening, when he had almost finished the delight of re-telling the story to me, a letter bearing Cardinal Spina's seal arrived. Cossa told me to read it to him. 'It is a cheery message, I am sure,' he said, `with which Spina will hang himself'

  `Cossa,' I read from the letter; `we can come to an arrangement. You tell me where I may find Minerbetti and I will become your agent inside the D'Ail
ly faction which intends to bring you down. Iput this in writing. I place my future in your hands, so that you will know that I must find Bernaba Minerbetti.''

  `Jesus Christ!' I exploded. `Spina must have lost his mind.'

  49

  Sigismund and Barbara kissed the skull of Charlemagne at Aix minster, and while the Te Deum was sung, Sigismund lay prostrate on the floor with outstretched arms, his queen kneeling at his side. Since daylight, processions had filled the streets of the town and, at eleven minutes after nine on the morning of 8 November 1414, Sigismund was crowned King of the Romans by the new Archbishop of Cologne. Sigismund himself, wearing an alb and dalmatic, read the gospel and with visible awe held the great relics in his hands – an undergarment of the Blessed Virgin and St Joseph's stockings, which he had taken off to swaddle the Holy Infant at the moment of its miraculous birth 1414 years earlier.

  Maria Louise Sterz had kept close by Sigismund through his travels and ceremonies. She greatly attracted Sigismund's wife by her distant gelidness, but it was of no avail to the queen. Maria Louise listened and watched everything with seeming indifference and reported to her mother by courier each week. A fortnight after the coronation; she wrote: The king and queen made joyous, entry into Frankfurt today en route to Konstanz. Then the news arrived that John Hus had ignored the king's cone and that he attend the council only in the king's train. Sigismund is enraged by this. He had given Hus a safe conduct from Prague to Konstanz and then he was told the impossible news that Hus had been arrested in Konstanz by the Bishops of Augsberg and Trent, in league with the Burgomaster of Konstanz, and taken to prison.

  `Sigismund regards this as a flagrant outrage against his honour. He cannot believe that the bishops surrounded the house where Hus was staying. Sigismund keeps saying that Hus knew that his safety depended on his joining the king's entourage at Spier so that he could journey to Konstanz under the king's protection. The second horrendous mistake was to ignore the king's instructions that he was not to say anything except in the royal presence. I tell you, Sigismund is in a hurricane of fury about this, although much of it is play-acting. He fears, deeply that any business against Hus may grow into a serious political matter in Bohemia and he recognizes that the cardinals have shown their stark intention to keep the power in the council.

  `Sigismund swears to every newcomer who enters the room that he will have Hus out of jail if he has to break down the prison doors himself He is certain that Cossa is behind the Hus arrest in order to embarrass and humiliate him and to place his own possible future accession to the throne of Bohemia in jeopardy in Prague. His people answer him only with their conviction that Hus's arrest is the cardinal's signal that they, not the princes, must dominate the Council of Konstanz.'

  The sworn escort of John Hus, the Bohemian knight John of Chlum, demanded an audience with His Holiness to protest at the Hus arrest. Cossa received him with me as witness. `Holy Father,' Chlum said after the blessing was done, `your cardinals have cast John Hus into prison and this is not what your paternity promised'

  `I call upon Cardinal Ellera to bear witness,' Cossa said. `I have never ordered the cardinals nor anyone to take John Hus prisoner'

  `It was an act hostile to His Holiness,' I said, causing my voice to emerge as from the bowels of the planet. `They try to force disgrace upon the Holy Father by keeping Hus in captivity.'

  Chlum ignored me, a massive achievement. He spoke hotly to Cossa. `You endorsed Sigismund's safe conduct for Hus,' he said.

  ‘You guaranteed his safety. Is what you offer me now to be considered satisfaction?'

  `Hus is my son, as you are. I sought his safety and I still seek it. But what has happened is there for, the world to see – he is being used as a pawn in a larger game.'

  `Order his release!'

  `These are delicate times, Chlum. The council is just beginning. I must move carefully.'

  `You have breached your word,' Chlum said harshly,, 'I shall go though this city showing the king's safe conduct and your endorsement of it to all who can read. I will nail a manifesto to the cathedral door to charge you with vilifying the safe conduct and the protection which it granted to Master Hus.' He stalked out of the audience.

  'Well,' Cossa said to me. `This looks like a bad start, but it could be worse. It is going to make far more trouble for Sigismund than it can for me.’

  I repeated the conversation to Bernaba, who passed it to the marchesa, who shared it with Cosimo di Medici. `I cannot imagine Cossa taking such outrageous conduct from a common knight,' the marchesa said sadly. `Cossa isn't the man he was at Pisa. Not mentally or physically. His body has thickened with the weight of the gout and his mind, cannot rest long upon any choice he thinks he is making.'

  `We will help him,' Cosimo said, smiling. `Nothing has gone right for him since Roccasecca. Besides, I don't think Hus is heavy on his mind. But he knows already what Sigismund has yet to find out: that the council is stronger than either of them. Hus is the one with the serious problem. Cossa doesn't dare to offend the council.''

  Despite the commands of the pope and Sigismund's endless dispatches, Hus remained in custody in a cell eight foot square by nine foot high, under a leaking community latrine of the Dominican cloister at the edge of the lake. He wholeheartedly believed that some technical error had been made which would soon be put right. He knew he could trust John of Chlum to do all possible to rectify the error and have his freedom restored.

  After a week, Hus fell sick with fever from the oppression of the dripping latrine. The vaguely seen shapes of men came to him in his delirium with extracts from his treatise De ecclesia demanding to know if he had written them. Slowly it came to him that there was not to be the academic discussion to which he had looked forward as he set out for Konstanz from Prague. These men seemed to be preparing to try him – so he rejoiced in the knowledge of the protection of his many friends. Not only were there the multitudes in Prague to whom he had preached, and who loved and revered him as a prophet sent from God, but there stood in his mind, above all others, the immense figure of Sigismund, who had granted him safe conduct.

  The pope sent his own physician, Count Weiler, to treat Hus and he was soon restored to health. Hus applied for the counsel of a lawyer but it was refused. Under canon law no aid could be given to a heretic, so the preliminary inquiry was conducted by three judges appointed by the pope.

  The witnesses these judges examined were, extraordinarily, only those men who had long held the opinion that Hus's beliefs were heretical. On 1 December, the council appointed a commission of greater powers to deal with the growing charges of Hus's heresy, made up of Piero Spina, Pierre d'Ailly. and Cardinal Chalant, assisted, by a Dominican, a Franciscan friar and six learned doctors of the law.

  Hus's protector, King Sigismund of Hungary, King of the Romans, did not arrive in Konstanz until early Christmas morning. Hus could hear the great procession go by in the night as the king made his way to mass at the cathedral, but Hus remained in the underground cell at the monastery until 3 March.

  50

  When Sigismund's great train had reached Ueberlingen, a courier had been sent to the pope to ask him to delay Christmas mass till the next morning so that the king could be present at the cathedral. The city council of Konstanz sent greetings to Ueberlingen and ordered that the council chamber be heated. On Christmas Day at two o'clock in the morning most of Konstanz was awake to watch the royal fleet, lighted with innumerable torches, sweep past the island of Mainu and round the corner of the bridge within hail of the Dominican monastery. The enormous party came ashore: King Sigismund himself, Queen Barbara, Maria Louise Sterz, the Queen of Bosnia, who was the king's sister, Countess Elizabeth of Wirtenberg, who was Sigismund's niece, Duke Ludwig of Saxony, their households, and a thousand drunken Hungarian horsemen. It was bitterly cold. The king was to be lodged at the House with the Steps near the cathedral, but the royal party was first taken to the warm council chamber to thaw out for an hour, where they drank hot M
almsey wine, while the prelates awaited their arrival to begin Christmas mass in the icy cathedral.

  When he was rested and refreshed the king and his entourage were escorted under canopies held by local nobles, through the torch-lit darkness to the cathedral, where he was welcomed by the pope under a mitre glistening with gold and precious stones. The procession made its way into the cathedral: the canons of Kreuzlingen, monks of Petershausen and of the Schotten monastery, and the priests of St Paul, all carrying candles. Members of the three begging orders, schoolchildren led by men carrying on golden poles the crest of each school, chaplains, monks, abbots, priors, archbishops and cardinals followed in the train. Behind each cardinal came, a priest who carried the hem off his gown. All were dressed in white overcoats and the cardinals wore unadorned white mitres; Then followed the pope's singers, a priest with the Cross and a priest with the Holy Sacrament, and small boys carrying tall candles: I was dressed as deacon, and walked immediately before my pope carrying a gold cloth held breast-high. Cossa was dressed as a priest in white, wearing two overcoats and a white mitre. Four citizens of Konstanz carried the golden canopy above him. King Sigismund followed with the electors, the queen, the princes, the Johanniter and Teutonic orders, then dukes, marquesses, counts, barons, knights, soldiers, people and women.

  Cossa sat on a throne at the side of the high altar. At his right, the king sat among noble attendants who carried a golden rose donated by the city, the imperial sceptre and the drawn sword. The king had changed into the stole and dalmatic of a deacon to allow himself to take part in the holy office. The Holy Father celebrated the mass, but the king read the gospel. During the mass, the pope blessed the golden rose, and formally presented it to Sigismund. After the first mass, hymns were sung. The pope celebrated a second mass, Lux fulgebit, then the Prime, Terz and Sext were sung until six o'clock in the morning. The third mass, Puer natus est nobis, went on until eleven o'clock. After the last mass, the pope, Sigismund, eleven cardinals, other prelates and seven princes climbed the steep flight of stairs to the tower, from whose spacious balcony the pope showed the golden rose to the crowd and blessed the people with it. It was not until well past noon that the congregation dispersed.