Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

had many streets paved, many bridges renewed, the Castle of Sant'

Angelo repaired. He lent money to prominent citizens to help them

build palaces that would be an ornament to Rome. At his bidding

Bernardo Rossellino renovated Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni

Laterano, San Paolo and San Lorenzo fuori le mura - outside the

walls- and the forty churches that Gregory I had designated as

stations of the cross. `051516 He made majestic plans for a new

Vatican Palace that, with its gardens, would cover all the Vatican

hill, and would house the pope and his staff, the cardinals, and the

administrative offices of the Curia; he lived to complete his own

chambers (later occupied by Alexander VI and called the Appartamento

Borgia), the library (now the Pinacoteca Vaticana), and the rooms or

stanze later decorated by Raphael. He brought Benedetto Bonfigli

from Perugia, and Andrea del Castagno from Florence, to paint

frescoes- now lost- on the Vatican walls; and he persuaded the aging

Fra Angelico to return to Rome and paint in the Pope's own chapel

the stories of St. Stephen and St. Laurence. He planned to tear down

the old and crumbling basilica of St. Peter, and raise over the

Apostle's tomb the most imposing church in the world; it was left

for Julius II to take up this audacious aim.

All this, he hoped, could be financed from the proceeds of the

jubilee. Nicholas announced this as a celebration of the restored

peace and unity of the Church, and the sentiment went well with the

peoples of Europe. The migration of pilgrims from every quarter of

Latin Christendom was of unprecedented magnitude; eyewitnesses

compared it to the movement of myriads of ants. The crowding in Rome

was so extreme that the Pope limited to five, then three, then two

days the maximum length of any visitor's stay. On one occasion two

hundred persons were killed in a crush that swept many into the Tiber;

Nicholas thereafter tore down houses to widen the approaches to St.

Peter's. As the pilgrims brought rich offerings, the financial returns

from the jubilee exceeded even the Pope's expectations, and covered

the expense of his new buildings and his outlay for scholars and

manuscripts. `051517 The other cities of Italy suffered a shortage

of money because- a Perugian complained- "it all flowed into Rome";

but in Rome the innkeepers, moneychangers, and tradesmen profited

hugely, and Nicholas was able to deposit 100,000 florins ($2,500,000?)

in the bank of the Medici alone. `051518 The countries beyond the Alps

rumbled with discontent at the efflux of gold into Italy.

Even in Rome some disaffection troubled the new prosperity.

Nicholas' government of the city was enlightened and just from his

point of view, and he had made a concession to republican hopes by

nominating four citizens who were to appoint all municipal officials

and control all taxes levied in the city. But the senators and

nobles whose class had ruled Rome during the Avignon papacy and the

Schism fretted under the papal government, and the populace resented

the transformation of the Vatican into a palace fortress secure

against such assaults as had driven Eugenius from Rome. The republican

ideas preached by Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzo still

agitated many minds. In the year of Nicholas' accession a leading

burgher, Stefano Porcaro, made a fiery speech demanding the

restoration of self-government. Nicholas sent him into comfortable

exile as podesta of Anagni, but Porcaro found his way back to the

capital, and raised the cry of liberty before an excited carnival

crowd. Nicholas banished him to Bologna, but left him full freedom

except for the necessity of daily showing himself to the papal

legate there. Nevertheless the undiscourageable Stefano managed,

from Bologna, to organize a complicated plot among three hundred of

his followers in Rome. On the feast of the Epiphany, while the Pope

and the cardinals were at Mass in St. Peter's, an attack was to be

made on the Vatican, its treasury was to be seized to provide funds

for establishing a republic, and Nicholas himself was to be taken

prisoner. `051519 Porcaro secretly left Bologna (December 26, 1452),

and joined the conspirators on the eve of the planned attack. But

his absence from Bologna was noted, and a courier brought warning to

the Vatican. Stefano was traced, found, and imprisoned, and on January

9 he was beheaded in Sant' Angelo. The republicans denounced the

execution as murder, the humanists condemned the plot as monstrous

infidelity to a benevolent pope.

Nicholas was shaken and changed by the discovery that a large

section of the citizenry looked upon him as a despot, however

benevolent. Harrowed with suspicion, embittered by resentment,

tortured by gout, he aged rapidly. When news came to him that the

Turks had entered Constantinople over the corpses of 50,000

Christians, and had turned St. Sophia into a mosque (1453), all the

glory of his pontificate seemed a fitful vanity. He appealed to the

European powers to join in a crusade to recapture the fallen citadel

of Eastern Christianity; he called for a tenth of all the revenue of

Western Europe to finance the effort, and pledged a tenth of papal,

Curial, and other ecclesiastical revenues; and all war between

Christian nations was to cease on pain of excommunication. Europe

hardly listened. People complained that money raised by previous popes

for crusades had been used for other purposes; Venice preferred a

commercial entente with the Turks; Milan took advantage of Venetian

difficulties by retaking Brescia; Florence looked with satisfaction on

Venice's loss of Eastern trade. `051520 Nicholas bowed to reality, and

the lust of life cooled in his veins. Worn out with futile

diplomacy, and punished for the sins of his predecessors, he died in

1455, at the age of fifty-eight.

He had restored peace within the Church, he had restored order and

splendor to Rome, he had founded the greatest of libraries, he had

reconciled the Church and the Renaissance. He had kept his hands

free from war, had avoided nepotism, had struggled to turn Italy

from suicidal strife. Amid unprecedented revenues he himself had led a

simple life, loving the Church and his books, and extravagant only

in his gifts. A grieving chronicler expressed the feeling of Italy

when he described the scholar Pope as "wise, just, benevolent,

gracious, peaceable, affectionate, charitable, humble... endowed

with every virtue." `051521 It was the verdict of love, and Porcaro

might have demurred; but we may let it stand.

III. CALIXTUS III: 1455-8

-

The disunion of Italy determined the papal election that followed:

the factions, unable to agree on an Italian, chose a Spanish cardinal,

Alfonso Borgia, who took the name of Calixtus III. He was already

seventy-seven; he could be depended upon to die soon, and allow the

cardinals another and perhaps more profitable choice. A specialist

in canon law and diplomacy, he had a legalistic mind, and cared little

for the classical scholarship that had enamored Nicholas. The

humanists, who had no indigenous root in Rome, languished during his

pontificate, except that Valia, now quite reformed, was still a

papal secretary.

Calixtus was a good man, who loved his relatives. Ten months after

his coronation he raised to the cardinalate two of his nephews- Luis

Juan de Mila and Rodrigo Borgia- and Don Jayme of Portugal,

respectively twenty-five, twenty-four, and twenty-three years of

age. Rodrigo (the future Alexander VI) had the additional handicap

of being carelessly candid about his mistresses; however, Calixtus

gave him (1457) the most lucrative post at the papal court- that of

vice-chancellor; in the same year he made him also commander in

chief of the papal troops. So began, or grew, the nepotism by which

pope after pope gave church offices to his nephews or other relatives,

who were sometimes his sons. To the anger of the Italians, Calixtus

surrounded himself with men of his own country; Rome was now ruled

by Catalans. The Pope had reasons: he was a foreigner in Rome; the

nobles and republicans were plotting against him; he wished to have

near him men whom he knew, and who would protect him from intrigue

while he attended to his prime interest- a crusade. Moreover, the Pope

was resolved to have friends in a College of Cardinals perpetually

struggling to make the papacy a constitutional as well as an

elective monarchy, subject in all its decisions to the cardinals as

a senate or privy council. The popes opposed and overcame this

movement precisely as the kings fought and defeated the nobles. In

each case absolute monarchy won; but perhaps the replacement of a

local with a national economy, and the growth of international

relations in scope and complexity, required, for the time, a

centralization of leadership and authority. `051521a

Calixtus wore out his last energies in a vain attempt to stir Europe

to resist the Turks. When he died Rome celebrated the end of its

rule by "barbarians." When Cardinal Piccolomini was named his

successor Rome rejoiced as it had not rejoiced over any pope during

the last two hundred years.

IV. PIUS II: 1458-64

-

Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini began his career in 1405 in the town

of Corsignano, near Siena, of poor parents with a noble pedigree.

The University of Siena taught him law; it was not to his taste, for

he loved literature, but it gave keenness and order to his mind, and

prepared him for the tasks of administration and diplomacy. At

Florence he studied the humanities under Filelfo, and from that time

he remained a humanist. At twenty-seven he was engaged as secretary by

Cardinal Capranica, whom he accompanied to the Council of Basel. There

he fell in with a group hostile to Eugenius IV; for many years

thereafter he defended the conciliar movement against the papal power;

for a time he served as secretary to the Antipope Felix V.

Perceiving that he had hitched his wagon to a falling star, he

coaxed a bishop to introduce him to the Emperor Frederick III. Soon he

received a post in the royal chancery, and in 1442 he accompanied

Frederick to Austria. For a while he remained moored.

In those formative years he seemed quite formless- merely a clever

climber who had no sturdy principles, no goal but success. He passed

from cause to cause without losing his heart, and from woman to

woman with a gay inconstancy that seemed to him- and to most of his

contemporaries- the proper training for the obligations of

matrimony. He wrote for a friend a love letter designed to melt the

obstinacy of a girl who preferred marriage to fornication. `051522

Of his several illegitimate children he sent one to his father, asking

him to rear it, and confessing that he was "neither holier than

David nor wiser than Solomon"; `051523 the young devil could quote

Scripture to his purpose. He wrote a novel in the manner of Boccaccio;

it was translated into almost every European tongue, and plagued him

in the days of his sanctity. Though his further advancement seemed

to require taking holy orders, he shrank from the step because, like

Augustine, he doubted his capacity for continence. `051524 He wrote

against the celibacy of the clergy. `051525

Amid these infidelities he remained faithful to letters. That same

sensitivity to beauty which had corrupted his morals enamored him of

nature, delighted him with travel, and formed his style until he had

made himself one of the most engaging writers and eloquent orators

of the fifteenth century. He wrote, nearly always in Latin, in

nearly every species of composition- fiction, poetry, epigrams,

dialogues, essays, histories, travel sketches, geography,

commentaries, memoirs, a comedy; and always with a verve and grace

that rivaled Petrarch's liveliest prose. He could phrase a state

paper, prepare or improvise an address, with persuasive subtlety and

captivating fluency; it is characteristic of the age that Aeneas

Sylvius, beginning almost from nothing, raised himself to the papacy

on the point of his pen. His verses had no enduring depth or worth,

but they were smooth enough to get him the poet's crown from the

hand of the complaisant Frederick III (1442). His essays had a

lighthearted charm that glossed over their author's lack of conviction

or principle. He could pass from a discourse on "The Miseries of Court

Life" ("as rivers flow to the sea, so vices flow to court"), `051526

to a treatise "On the Nature and Care of Horses." It was another

sign of the times that his long letter on education- addressed to King

Ladislas of Bohemia but intended for publication- quoted, with one

exception, only pagan authors and instances, stressed the glory of

humanistic studies, and urged the King to fit his sons for the

hardships and responsibilities of war; "serious matters are settled

not by laws but by arms." `051527 His travel notes are the best of

their kind in Renaissance literature. He described with avid

interest not only cities and rural scenes, but industries, products,

political conditions, constitutions, manners, and morals; and not

since Petrarch had any Italian written so fondly well of the

countryside. He was the only Italian in centuries who loved Germany;

he had a good word for the boisterous burghers who filled the air with

song and themselves with beer instead of murdering one another in

the streets. He called himself varia videndi cupidus, eager to see a

variety of things; `051528 and one of his frequent sayings was: "A

miser is never satisfied with his money, nor a wise man with his

knowledge." `051529 Turning his facile plume to history, he composed

short biographies of illustrious contemporaries ( De viris claris ), a

life of Frederick III, an account of the Hussite wars, and an

outline of universal history. He planned a larger Universal History

and Geography, continued to work on it during his pontificate, and

completed the section on Asia, which Columbus read with

interest. `051530 As pope he composed, from day to day,

Commentarii or memoirs, giving the history of his reign to his final

illness. "He read and dictated till midnight as he lay in bed," says

his contemporary Platina, "nor did he sleep above five or six

hours." `051531 He apologized for giving papal time to literary

composition: "Our time has not been taken from our duties; we have

given to writing the hours due to sleep; we have robbed our old age of

its rest that we might hand down to posterity all that we know to be

memorable." `051532

In 1445 the Emperor sent Aeneas Sylvius as envoy to the Pope. He,

who had a hundred times written against Eugenius, made his apologies

so eloquently that the kindly pontiff readily forgave him; and from

that day the soul of Aeneas belonged to Eugenius. He became a priest

(1446), and at forty-one reconciled himself to chastity; henceforth he

lived an exemplary life. He kept Frederick loyal to the papacy, and by

skillful- sometimes devious- diplomacy restored the allegiance of

the German electors and prelates to the Apostolic See. His visits to

Rome and Siena reawakened his love of Italy; gradually he loosened his

ties with Frederick, and attached himself (1455) to the papal court.

He had always wanted to be back in the excitement and politics of

his native land; in Rome he would be at the very center of things; who

could say but in the tumult and shuffle of events he might not

become pope? In 1449 he was made bishop of Siena; in 1456 he became

Cardinal Piccolomini.

When the time came to choose a successor to Calixtus, the Italians

in the conclave, to prevent the election of the French Cardinal

d'Estouteville, gave their votes to Piccolomini. The Italian cardinals

were resolved to keep the papacy and the Sacred College Italian, not

only for their personal reasons but through fear that a non-Italian

pope might again disrupt Christendom by favoring his own country or

taking the papacy from Italy. No one held against Aeneas the sins of

his youth; the merry Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia cast a decisive vote

for him; the majority felt that Cardinal Piccolomini, though so

recently capped in red, had the qualifications of a man of wide

experience, a successful diplomat well posted on troublesome

Germany, and a scholar whose learning would heighten the luster of the

papacy.

He was now fifty-three, and his adventurous life had taken such toll

of his health that he seemed already an old man. On a voyage from

Holland to Scotland (1435) he had encountered frighteningly rough

seas- taking twelve days from Sluys to Dunbar- and had vowed, if

saved, to walk barefoot to the nearest shrine of the Virgin. This

proved to be at Whitekirk, ten miles away. He kept his vow, walked the

full distance with bare feet on snow and ice, contracted gout, and

suffered severely from it all the rest of his life. By 1458 he had

stone in the kidneys, and a chronic cough. His eyes were sunken, his

face pale; at times, says Platina, "nobody could tell that he was

alive but by his voice." `051533 As pope he lived simply and frugally;

his household expenses in the Vatican were the lowest on record.

When his duties allowed he retired to a rural suburb, where "he

entertained himself not like a pope but as an honest humble

rustic"; `051534 sometimes he held consistories, or received

ambassadors, under shady trees, or amid an olive grove, or by a

cooling spring or stream. He called himself- punning on his name-

silvarum amator, lover of woods.

As pope he took his name from Virgil's recurrent phrase, pius

Aeneas. If we may with custom moderately mistranslate the

adjective, he lived up to it: he was pious, faithful to his duties,

benevolent and indulgent, temperate and mild, and won the affection of

even the cynics of Rome. He had outgrown the sensualism of his

youth, and was morally a model pope. He made no attempt to conceal his

early amours, or his propaganda for the councils against the papacy,

but he issued a Bull of Retraction (1463) humbly asking God and the

Church to forgive his errors and sins. The humanists who had

expected lavish patronage from a humanist pope were disappointed to

find that while he enjoyed their company, and gave several of them

places in the Curia, he dispensed no luscious fees but conserved the

papal funds for a crusade against the Turks. He continued, in his

leisure moments, to be a humanist: he studied the ancient ruins

carefully, and forbade their further demolition; he amnestied the

people of Arpino because Cicero had been born there; he commissioned a

new translation of Homer, and employed Platina and Biondo in his

secretariat. He brought Mino da Fiesole to carve, and Filippino

Lippi to paint, in the churches of Rome. He indulged his vanity by

building, from designs by Bernardo Rossellino, a cathedral and

Piccolomini palace in his native Corsignano, which he renamed Pienza

after himself. He had the poor noble's pride of ancestry, and was

too loyal to his friends and relatives for the good of the Church; the

Vatican became a Piccolomini hive.

Two admirable scholars graced his pontificate. Flavio Biondo, a

papal secretary since Nicholas V, was a symbol of the Christian

Renaissance: he loved antiquity and spent half his life describing its

history and relics, but he never ceased to be a devout, orthodox,

and practising Christian. Pius valued him as guide and friend, and

profited from his company on tours of the Roman remains; for Biondo

had written an encyclopedia in three parts- Roma instaurata, Roma

triumphans, and Italia illustrata - recording the topography,

history, institutions, laws, religion, manners, and arts of ancient

Italy. Greater still was his Historiarum ab inclinatione

Romanorum, an immense Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from

476

to 1250- the first critical history of the Middle Ages. Biondo was

no stylist, but he was a discriminating historian; through his work

the legends that Italian cities had cherished of their Trojan or

like fancied origins died away. The undertaking was too ambitious even

for Biondo's seventy-five years; it was unfinished at his death

(1463); but it set to later historians an example of conscientious

scholarship.

John Cardinal Bessarion was a living vehicle of the Greek culture

that was entering Italy. Born at Trebizond, he received at

Constantinople a thorough schooling in Greek poetry, oratory, and

philosophy; he continued his studies under the famous Platonist

Gemistus Pletho at Mistra. Coming to the Council of Florence as

Archbishop of Nicaea, he took a leading part in the reunion of Greek

and Latin Christianity; returning to Constantinople he and other

"Uniates" were repudiated by the lower clergy and the people. Pope

Eugenius made him a cardinal (1439), and Bessarion moved to Italy,

bringing with him a rich collection of Greek manuscripts. At Rome

his house became a salon of humanists; Poggio, Valla, and Platina were

among his closest friends; Valla called him latinorum graecissimus,

graecorum latinissimus - the most learned Hellenist among the

Latins, the most accomplished Latinist among the Greeks. `051535 He

spent nearly all his income in purchasing manuscripts or having them

copied. He himself made a new translation of Aristotle's

Metaphysics; but as a disciple of Gemistus he favored Plato, and led

the Platonic camp in a hot controversy that raged at the time

between Platonists and Aristotelians. Plato won that campaign, and the

long rule of Aristotle over Western philosophy came to an end. When

Nicholas V appointed Bessarion legate at Bologna, to govern the

Romagna and the Marches, Bessarion acquitted himself so well that

Nicholas called him "angel of peace." For Pius II he undertook

difficult diplomatic missions in a Germany again seething with

revolt against the Roman Church. Toward the end of his life he

bequeathed his library to Venice, where it now forms a precious part

of the Biblioteca Marciana. In 1471 he narrowly missed election to the

papacy. He died a year later, honored throughout the world of

scholarship.

His missions to Germany failed, partly because the efforts of Pius

II to reform the Church were frustrated, and partly because a new

attempt to levy a tithe for a crusade revived transalpine antipathy to

Rome. At the outset of his pontificate Pius appointed a committee of

high prelates to formulate a program of reform. He accepted a plan

submitted by Nicholas of Cusa, and embodied it in a papal bull. But he

found that no one in Rome wanted reform; almost every second dignitary

there profited from one or another immemorial abuse; apathy and

passive resistance defeated Pius; and meanwhile his difficulties

with Germany, Bohemia, and France used up his energy, and the

crusade that he planned absorbed his devotion and cried for funds.

He had to content himself with reproving cardinals for licentious

lives, and with sporadic improvements of monastic discipline. In

1463 he addressed a final appeal to the cardinals:

-

People say that we live for pleasure, accumulate wealth, bear

ourselves arrogantly, ride on fat mules and handsome palfreys, trail

the fringes of our cloaks after us, and show round plump faces beneath

the red hat and the white hood, keep hounds for the chase, spend

much on actors and parasites, and nothing in defense of the Faith. And

there is some truth in their words: many among the cardinals and other

officials of our court do lead this kind of life. If the truth be

confessed, the luxury and pomp at our court is too great. And this

is why we are so detested by the people that they will not listen to

us, even when we say what is just and reasonable. What do you think is

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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