“I was upset and terrified,”29 Poggio wrote Niccoli in July 1449, “by the death of Bartolomeo de Montepulciano,” the close friend with whom he had explored the monastic libraries of Switzerland. But a moment later his mind shifts to what he had just discovered at Monte Cassino: “I found a book30 containing Julius Frontinus’ De aquaeductu urbis.” And in a letter written a week later, the same pattern recurs. He begins by mentioning two ancient manuscripts that he has copied and that he wishes, he notes, “to be ruled in red31 and bound.”
I could not write you this from the City on account of my grief over the death of my dearest friend and on account of my confusion of spirit, deriving partly from fear and partly from the sudden departure of the Pope. I had to leave my house and settle all my things; a great deal had to be done at once so that there was no opportunity for writing or even for drawing breath. There was besides the greatest grief, which made everything else much harder. But to go back to the books.
“But to go back to the books …” This is the way out, the escape from the pervasive fear and bafflement and pain. “My country has not yet32 recovered from the plague which troubled it five years ago,” he writes in September, 1430; “Now again it seems that it will succumb to a massacre equally violent.” And then a moment later: “But let us get back to our own affairs. I see what you write about the library.” If it is not plague that threatens, it is war: “Every man waits his destined hour; even the cities are doomed to their fate.” And then the same note: “Let us spend33 our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire.” In the north the powerful Visconti of Milan are raising an army; Florentine mercenaries are besieging Lucca; Alfonso in Naples is stirring up trouble, and the emperor Sigismond is applying intolerable pressure on the pope. “I have already decided34 what I shall do even if things turn out as many people fear; namely, that I shall devote myself to Greek literature….”
Poggio was highly self-conscious about these letters, and expected them to circulate, but his book mania, expressed again and again, seems unguarded, candid, and authentic. It was the key to a feeling he characterized with a word that otherwise seems singularly inappropriate to a papal bureaucrat: freedom. “Your Poggio,”35 he wrote, “is content with very little and you shall see this for yourself; sometimes I am free for reading, free from all care about public affairs which I leave to my superiors. I live free as much as I can.” Freedom here has nothing to do with political liberty or a notion of rights or the license to say whatever he wished or the ability to go wherever he chose. It is rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the world—in which he himself was so ambitiously engaged—and ensphering himself in a space apart. For Poggio, that experience was what it meant to immerse himself in an ancient book: “I am free for reading.”
Poggio savored the feeling of freedom at those times when the usual Italian political disorder became particularly acute or when the papal court was in an uproar or when his own personal ambitions were thwarted or, perhaps equally threatening, when those ambitions were realized. Hence it was a feeling to which he must have clung with particular intensity when sometime after 1410,36 having amply displayed his gifts as a humanist scribe, a learned writer, and a court insider, he accepted the most prestigious and most dangerous appointment of his career: the post of apostolic secretary to the sinister, sly, and ruthless Baldassare Cossa, who had been elected pope.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A PIT TO CATCH FOXES
TO SERVE AS the pope’s apostolic secretary was the pinnacle of curial ambition: though he was only in his early thirties, Poggio’s skills had taken him from nothing to the top of the heap. And the heap at this moment was swarming with diplomatic maneuvers, complex business transactions, rumors of invasion, heresy hunts, threats, feints, and doubledealing, for Baldassare Cossa—Pope John XXIII, as he called himself—was a master of intrigue. Poggio would have been involved in controlling access to the pontiff, digesting and passing along key information, taking notes, articulating policies that had only been roughly sketched, crafting the Latin missives sent to princes and potentates. He was necessarily privy to secrets and to strategies, for the apostolic secretary had to be initiated into his master’s plans for dealing with the two rival claimants1 to the papal throne, with a Holy Roman Emperor determined to end the schism, with heretics in Bohemia, with neighboring powers poised to seize territories controlled by the Church. The sheer quantity of work on Poggio’s desk must have been enormous.
Yet during this period Poggio found the time to copy in his beautiful handwriting the three long books of Cicero’s On the Laws (De legibus), along with his oration on Lucullus. (The manuscript is in the Vatican Library: Cod. Vatican lat. 3245.) Somehow then he managed to hold on at least to moments of what he called his freedom. But that freedom—the plunging back into the ancient past—appears always to have heightened his alienation from the present. To be sure, his love for classical Latin did not lead him to idealize, as some of his contemporaries did, ancient Roman history: Poggio understood that history to have had its full measure of human folly and wickedness. But he was aware that the city in which he lived was a pathetic shadow of its past glory.
The population of Rome, a small fragment of what it had once been, lived in detached settlements, one at the Capitol where the massive ancient Temple of Jupiter had once stood, another near the Lateran whose old imperial palace had been given by Constantine to the bishop of Rome, yet another around the crumbling fourth-century Basilica of St. Peter’s. Between these settlements2 spread a wasteland of ruins, hovels, rubble-strewn fields, and the shrines of martyrs. Sheep grazed in the Forum. Armed thugs, some in the pay of powerful families, others operating on their own, swaggered through dirty streets, and bandits lurked outside the walls. There was virtually no industry, very little trade, no thriving class of skilled artisans or burghers, no civic pride, and no prospect of civic freedom. One of the only spheres of serious enterprise was the trade in digging out the metal clasps that had knitted the ancient buildings together and in peeling off the thin sheets of marble veneer so that they could be reused in churches and palaces.
Though most of Poggio’s writings come from later in his career, there is no indication that he ever felt anything other than a kind of soul-sickness at the contemporary world in which he was immersed. His career triumph in the pontificate of John XXIII must have given him some pleasure, but it only intensified this immersion and hence intensified both the soul-sickness and the fantasy of an escape. Like Petrarch before him, Poggio cultivated an archaeologist’s sense of what had once existed, so that vacant spaces and the jumble of contemporary Rome were haunted by the past. “The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit,” he wrote, “was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and tributes of so many nations.” Now just look at it:
This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! How changed! How defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill…. The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect magistrates, is now inclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes.
The relics of the fallen greatness only made the experience of the present more melancholy. In the company of his humanist friends, Poggio could try to conjure up what it all must once have looked like: “Cast your eyes3 on the Palatine hill, and seek, among the shapeless and enormous fragments, the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticoes of Nero’s palace.” But it was to the shattered present that, after his brief imaginary excursions into antiquity, the papal bureaucrat always had to return.
That present, in the turbulent years that Rome was ruled by John XXIII, must have threatened not only to extinguish the occasional “freedom” Poggio prized but also to drag him into cynic
ism so deep that there could be no escape. For the question with which Poggio and others in Rome grappled was how they could retain even the shreds of a moral sensibility while living and working in the court of this particular pope. A decade older than his apostolic secretary Poggio, Baldassare Cossa had been born on the small volcanic island of Procida, near Naples. His noble family held the island as its personal possession, the hidden coves and well-defended fortress evidently well suited to the principal family occupation, piracy. The occupation was a dangerous one: two of his brothers were eventually captured and condemned to death. Their sentence was commuted, after much pulling of strings, to imprisonment. It was said by his enemies that the young Cossa participated in the family business, owed to it his lifelong habit of wakefulness at night, and learned from it his basic assumptions about the world.
Procida was far too small a stage for Baldassare’s talents. Energetic and astute, he early displayed an interest in what we might call higher forms of piracy. He studied jurisprudence at the University of Bologna—in Italy it was legal studies rather than theology that best prepared one for a career in the Church—where he obtained doctorates in both civil and canon law. At his graduation ceremony, a colorful affair in which the successful candidate was conducted in triumph through the town, Cossa was asked what he was going to do now. He answered, “To be Pope.”4
Cossa began his career, as Poggio did, in the court of his fellow Neapolitan Boniface IX, whom he served as private chamberlain. In this capacity he helped to oversee the open sale of Church offices and the feverish market in indulgences. He also helped to organize the hugely profitable jubilee when pilgrims to Rome’s principal churches were granted a plenary indulgence, that is, a remission of the horrible pain of purgatorial fires in the afterlife. The massive crowds filled the city’s inns, patronized the taverns and brothels, filed across the narrow bridges, prayed at the sacred shrines, lit candles, gawked at wonder-working pictures and statues, and returned home with talismanic souvenirs.
The original idea was that there would be a jubilee once every hundred years, but the demand was so great and the consequent profits so enormous that the interval was shortened first to fifty years, then thirty-three, and then twenty-five. In 1400, shortly before Poggio arrived on the scene, the huge numbers of pilgrims drawn to Rome by the dawning of a new century led the pope to issue a plenary indulgence, though only a decade had passed since the last jubilee. To enhance its profits, the Church came up with a variety of offers that may reflect Cossa’s practical intelligence. Hence, for example, people who desired5 the spiritual benefits conferred by the pilgrimage to Rome—exemption from thousands of years of postmortem torments in Purgatory—but who wanted to avoid the difficult journey over the Alps could obtain the same indulgences by visiting certain shrines in Germany, provided that they paid what the longer trip would have cost.
Cossa’s gifts were not limited to clever marketing schemes. Appointed governor of Bologna, he proved himself to be a highly successful civil and military commander, as well as a vigorous orator. He was in many ways the embodiment of those qualities—astute intelligence, eloquence, boldness in action, ambition, sensuality, limitless energy—that together form the ideal of the Renaissance man. But even for an age accustomed to a gap between religious professions and lived realities, the cardinal deacon of Bologna, as Cossa was called, seemed an unusual figure to be wearing clerical vestments. Though he was, as Poggio’s friend Bruni remarked, a hugely gifted man of the world, it was obvious that he did not have a trace of a spiritual vocation.
This widespread perception of his character helps account for the peculiar blend of admiration, fear, and suspicion that he aroused and that led people to believe that he was capable of anything. When on May 4, 1410, Pope Alexander V died immediately after a visit to Bologna for a dinner with his friend the cardinal deacon, it was widely rumored that he had been poisoned. The suspicions did not prevent Cossa’s faction of fellow cardinals from electing him to succeed Alexander as pope. Perhaps they were simply frightened. Or perhaps it seemed to them that Cossa, only forty years old, had the skills needed to end the disgraceful schism in the Church and to defeat the rival claims by the doggedly inflexible Spaniard Pedro de Luna, who styled himself Pope Benedict XIII, and the intransigent Venetian Angelo Correr, who styled himself Pope Gregory XII.
If this was the cardinals’ hope, they were soon disappointed, but they could not have been altogether surprised. The schism had already lasted more than thirty years and had eluded all attempts at resolution. Each of the claimants had excommunicated the followers of the others and had called down divine vengeance upon them. Each combined attempts to seize the moral high ground with thuggish tactics. Each had powerful allies but also strategic weaknesses that made achieving unity through military conquest impossible. Everyone understood that the situation was intolerable. The competing national factions—the Spanish, French, and Italians each backing a different candidate—undermined the claim to the existence of a catholic, that is, universal, church. The spectacle of multiple squabbling popes called the whole institution into question. The situation was embarrassing, distasteful, dangerous. But who could solve it?
Fifteen years earlier, the theologians at the University of Paris had placed a large chest in the cloister of the Mathurins and asked anyone who had any idea how to end the schism to write it down and drop it in the slot that had been cut in the lid. More than ten thousand notes were deposited. Fifty-five professors, assigned to read through the notes, reported that three principal methods had been proposed. The first, the so-called “Way of Cession,” required the simultaneous abdication of those who claimed to be pope, followed by the proper election of a single candidate; the second, the “Way of Compromise,” envisaged arbitration at the end of which one of the existing claimants would emerge as the sole pope; the third, the “Way of Council,” called for the convening of the bishops of all of the Catholic world who would, by formal vote in an ecumenical assembly, have the final authority to resolve the dispute.
The first two methods had the advantage of being relatively simple, cost-effective, and straightforward; however, they had, like military conquest, the disadvantage of being impossible. Calls for simultaneous abdication met with the predictable results, and attempts to set the preconditions for arbitration inevitably broke down into hopeless squabbling. That left the option of the “Way of Council,” strongly supported by the Holy Roman Emperor-elect, King Sigismund of Hungary, who was at least nominally allied to Cossa’s faction in Rome.
Surrounded by his cardinals and secretaries, in the massive pagan mausoleum that had been converted into the fortified Castel St. Angelo, the wily pope could see no reason to accede to pressure to convene an ecumenical assembly. Such an assembly, which would inevitably unleash long-standing hostility to Rome, could only threaten his position. So he temporized and delayed, busying himself with making and unmaking alliances, with maneuvering against his ambitious enemy to the south, Ladislas, king of Naples, and with filling the papal coffers. After all, there were innumerable petitions to be considered, bulls to be issued, the papal states to defend, administer, and tax, Church offices and indulgences to be sold. Poggio and the other secretaries, scriptors, abbreviators, and minor court bureaucrats were kept very busy.
The stalemate might have continued indefinitely—that, in any case, is what the pope must have hoped for—had it not been for an unexpected turn of events. In June 1413, Ladislas’s army suddenly broke through Rome’s defenses and sacked the city, robbing houses, pillaging shrines, breaking into palaces and carting off treasures. The pope and his court escaped to Florence, where they could count on some limited protection: the Florentines and the Neapolitans were enemies. But to survive as pope, Cossa now absolutely needed the support of Sigismund—then residing in Como—and urgent negotiations made clear that this support would only come if the pope agreed to convoke a general council.
His back to the wall, Cossa proposed that the council be he
ld in Italy, where he could marshal his principal allies, but the emperor objected that the long journey across the Alps would be too difficult for the more elderly bishops. The council, he declared, should be in Constance, a city in his territory, nestled in the mountains between Switzerland and Germany on the shores of the Bodensee. Though the location was hardly to the pope’s liking, by the fall of 1413 his agents—exploratores—were in Constance, inquiring about lodging and provisions, and by the following summer the pope and his court were on the move, as were powerful churchmen and their servants from everywhere in Europe, all converging on the one small South German town.
A citizen of Constance,6 Ulrich Richental, was fascinated enough by what was going on around him to write a circumstantial chronicle of the events. From Richental we learn that the pope traveled over the Alps with an enormous retinue, some six hundred men. From other sources,7 we know that among this group (or shortly to join them) were the greatest humanists of the time: Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Cencio Rustici, Bartolomeo Aragazzi da Montepulciano, Zomino (Sozomeno) da Pistoia, Benedetto da Piglio, Biagio Guasconi, Cardinals Francesco Zaba rella, Alamano Adimari, Branda da Castiglione, the archbishop of Milan Bartolomeo della Capra, and his future successor Francesco Pizzolpasso. The pope was a thug, but he was a learned thug, who appreciated the company of fine scholars and expected court business to be conducted in high humanist style.
The trip across the mountains was never easy, even in late summer. At one point the pope’s carriage tipped over, dumping him in the snow. When, in October 1414, he looked down at Constance and its lake ringed by mountains, he turned to his train—among whom, of course, was Poggio—and said, “This is the pit where they catch foxes.”
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