6

Surviving

Calixtus was not yet dead when the contempt of the Roman citizenry for the Spanish interlopers they called “Catalans” rose to a murderous pitch.

The pontiff was not himself an object of this hatred or of the blood-lust to which it gave rise. Though the Romans sometimes called him a “barbarian” pope, this was less because he had done anything to give offense—or was perceived as an offensive figure, even—than because he was not Italian, had come to Rome as a man of advanced years, and so would always be an outsider. Against a man who lived as simply and virtuously as Calixtus did, one so determined to go on doing his duty as the infirmities of old age bore down on him, not even the Romans could work up much hostility.

Although he was left to die almost alone as the members of his largely Spanish household slipped fearfully away, Calixtus was therefore never in danger. No one objected to letting him expire in peace.

It was different for his countrymen, most different of all for the young Borgias whom he had raised to princely status. They were marked men. Pedro Luis, prefect of Rome and captain-general of the papal troops, master in his uncle’s name of more towns and territories than anyone could readily name or even count, was in danger from the moment the pope’s illness became widely known. By the first days of August it was no longer possible to be confident that Pedro Luis was going to escape with his life.

This part of our story would be simpler if more were known about what kind of man Pedro Luis actually was. But the evidence is too thin and too dubious to bring him into focus. That he was raised high at a precocious age, and was bitterly resented by those who saw his advancement as an affront and a threat, we have already seen. What is not clear is whether and to what extent he had done anything to justify the hatred that was directed at him. Did it happen simply because he was a Spaniard and a Borgia and conscientious in the execution of the duties assigned to him by the pope? Or was he in fact the kind of man who would have been hated even if he had been Roman from birth?

Down the centuries, Pedro Luis has often been depicted as everyone’s image of a Spanish nobleman-warrior in the age of the conquistadores: proud, arrogant, cruel, and therefore despised by decent people. He has also been described as self-defeatingly stupid—a defect not often found among the Borgias—and doomed for that reason. Possibly he was all these things, but it is equally possible that he was none of them. Practically all of the unflattering accounts of his character can be traced no further back than to people who had never met him, people who were not alive when he was but had political or religious reasons to think him a typically evil member of a uniquely vicious clan. In Pedro Luis we encounter for the first time the great challenge of Borgia history: the need to distinguish between what can be accepted as true or at least probable on the basis of credible evidence and what was fabricated after the fact but has been endlessly repeated because of its usefulness in showing yet another Borgia to have been odious. What is known for sure about Pedro Luis is sufficient neither to condemn him nor to declare him grievously misunderstood. It is difficult to judge even his performance as a military commander, so little being known about the opposition he faced, the resources he had at his disposal, or how he conducted himself while in action.

On August 5, 1458, in any case, the truth about Pedro Luis’s character and conduct was far less urgent than the question of his survival. On the previous day, with Calixtus visibly losing his grip on life and the clans rampaging in the streets, a delegation of cardinals had called on the captain-general and demanded that he surrender the one absolutely secure place of refuge in Rome, the Castel Sant’Angelo. He had agreed, but only after being promised the twenty-two thousand gold ducats that he claimed were owed him by the pontifical treasury. (There is no way of judging the legitimacy of this debt, but it is entirely plausible that Pedro Luis expended this much or more out of his own pocket in the discharge of his many duties.) A deal having been struck, attention shifted to getting him out of Rome.

This turned out to require both guile and a show of force. Between them, Cardinal Rodrigo as de facto Vatican war minister and Pedro Luis as captain-general were able to muster some three thousand mounted troops and two hundred infantry. This little army, after being formed into a protective phalanx around the mounted Pedro Luis, was paraded with attention-compelling ostentation out of the Vatican and across the Milvian Bridge, obviously headed out of the city. But as it approached the Porta del Popolo, a major exit point known to be in the hands of the Orsini, Rodrigo and a friend from the College of Cardinals, Pietro Barbo, slipped away with a smaller, less conspicuous company of troops, taking a disguised Pedro Luis with them. Upon reaching the Porta San Paolo, having determined that the road ahead was clear, the two cardinals bade Pedro Luis farewell and turned back into the city. Pedro Luis galloped downriver toward Ostia on the coast, taking his gold with him. There he waited to be picked up by a galley that never came, finally hiring a fishing boat that took him the forty miles up the coast to the papal fortress of Civitavecchia, which he commanded as captain-general.

Rodrigo returned to the Vatican—an act of some courage under the circumstances—and was with his uncle when he died the following day. Rome was in a state of near-anarchy. Rodrigo did nothing to protect his “palace”—still little more than a strung-together assortment of recently derelict buildings, used mainly as a workplace for the employees of the papal chancery—and so it was stripped bare. He must have had relatively little worth stealing at this point, and trying to hold off the mob could only have inflamed its wrath. By in effect throwing open his doors he relieved some of the hostility directed at him as a Catalan, a Borgia, and the dead pontiff’s fellow barbarian.

Attention now turned, to the extent that anyone could focus his attention in the midst of so much disorder, to the ceremonials involved in burying a pope and preparing for the election of a successor. It could go without saying that there was not the smallest possibility of Rodrigo Borgia being chosen or even considered; his youth would have disqualified him had there been no other negatives. By the time of Calixtus’s interment, those cardinals hopeful of election were well along with their campaigning. There was considerable expectation—probably proclaimed most strongly by the candidate himself—that the all-but-certain winner was Guillaume d’Estouteville, cardinal of Rouen. He was fabulously wealthy, a cousin of the king of France, openly ambitious for the throne, haughty, vain, of dubious moral character—and for all these reasons disliked by more of his fellow cardinals than he appears to have understood. In the days just after Calixtus’s death, the most popular contender had been Domenico Capranica, the same admired theologian whose candidacy had been blocked by Latino Orsini at the conclave of 1455. This time his chances looked better, but just three days before the opening of the conclave he threw everyone’s calculations into confusion by unexpectedly dying, aged fifty-eight. No doubt this confirmed for Estouteville that God himself was clearing a path to his election. The next five days, however, would demonstrate the wisdom of an ancient proverb: he who enters the conclave a pope, exits a cardinal.

The first secret ballot, taken after two days of discussion, produced a surprising result. Estouteville received not a single vote, meaning that he hadn’t voted for himself. This may have been an obscure strategic move on the Frenchman’s part, but it also sheds light on just how little his election was desired. Enea Silvio Piccolomini of Siena and Filippo Calandrini of Bologna received five votes each. The remaining ballots were scattered among an essentially random assortment of cardinals, none of whom had a chance of being elected.

That night Estouteville went into action, lobbying hard, offering bribes, and threatening retribution to any who declined to cooperate. He told his colleagues one by one, in feigned confidence, that he was a single vote short of the needed two-thirds majority, and he painted an enticing picture of the rewards that awaited the man who put him over the top. Obviously he was setting the stage for an overwhelming show of support in the next day’s voting. What happened next cannot be told better than in the words of the man who was about to emerge as Estouteville’s sole rival, Cardinal Piccolomini. In his written account of the conclave—a document unique in history, no cardinal before or since having produced anything comparable—Piccolomini refers to himself in the third person as “Enea.” He recounts how offended he was, on the night of August 18, to discover that Estouteville had stationed himself in the latrine (“a fit place for such a pope to be elected!” he exclaims) and was using every possible promise and threat in a bare-knuckles push for votes. And how, after being warned that he himself had better get on the bandwagon before it was too late, Piccolomini went to bed resolved to launch a stop-Estouteville campaign upon rising the next morning. His memoir continues:

Enea went at daybreak to Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor, and asked whether he had sold himself to Rouen. “What would you have me do?” he answered. “The thing is settled. Many of the cardinals have met in the privies and decided to elect him. It is not for my advantage to remain with a small minority out of favor with a new pope. I am joining the majority and I have looked out for my own interests. I shall not lose the chancellorship; I have a note from Rouen assuring me of that. If I do not vote for him, the others will elect him anyway and I shall be stripped of my office.”

Enea said to him, “You young fool! Will you then put an enemy of your nation in the Apostle’s chair? And will you put faith in the note of a man who is faithless? You will have the note; Avignon [another French cardinal] will have the chancellorship. For what has been promised you has been promised him also and solemnly affirmed. Will faith be kept with him or with you? Will a Frenchman be more friendly to a Frenchman or to a Catalan? Will he be more concerned for a foreigner or for his own countryman? Take care, you inexperienced boy! Take care, you fool! And if you have no thought for the Church of Rome, if you have no regard for the Christian religion and despise God, for whom you are preparing such a vicar, at least take thought for yourself, for you will find yourself among the hindmost, if a Frenchman is pope.”

He notes that Rodrigo “listened patiently to these words of his friend.” He had certainly given the vice-chancellor much food for thought.

Filippo Calandrini, one of the two leaders in the previous day’s balloting, dropped out before the next vote was taken. A hardworking but undistinguished Curia official who owed his place in the Sacred College to his half-brother Pope Nicholas V, Calandrini threw his support to Piccolomini. The next surprise, when the results of the latest round of voting became known, was that Estouteville, far from winning election or being barely short of victory as he had been telling everyone, received only six votes. The leader was his indignant antagonist Piccolomini, whose nine votes left him three short of the needed total.

At this point the conclave voted to try to bring matters to a conclusion “by accession,” a traditional recourse when secret balloting failed to produce a winner. It involved sitting together in silence and waiting to see if any of the electors found themselves moved to change their minds. Estouteville needed to double his vote, making his prospects dim at best. Even Piccolomini, needing three, appeared to have limited prospects against so intimidating an opponent. The cardinals sat for what seemed a long time, the tension building, no one speaking or making a move. Then at last Rodrigo Borgia rose to his feet. “I accede,” he said, “to the cardinal of Siena.” To Piccolomini, that is, moving him to within two votes of election. At that point, in a desperate attempt to disrupt the proceedings, Cardinals Isidore of Greece and Torquemada of Spain (an enemy of Piccolomini’s since the two had clashed over questions of theology at the Council of Basel) bolted from their seats and flounced out of the room. When no one followed, they decided that they had better return. They did so in time to see Cardinal Tebaldi of Santa Anastasia, a longtime protégé of Calixtus III and brother of the late pope’s favorite physician, stand up and repeat Rodrigo’s words.

One vote more was still needed. When Cardinal Prospero Colonna started to rise, Estouteville on one side and Basilios Bessarion on the other seized him by the arms and literally tried to drag him away. He threw them off, shouting that he too acceded to the election of Cardinal Piccolomini. Until that moment Colonna had opposed Piccolomini, but when he saw an opportunity to deliver the decisive vote and so put the next pope in his debt, he was too good a politician not to seize it. It was Rodrigo, however, who had broken the deadlock, acting first, alone, and at greatest risk to himself. Piccolomini—now Pope Pius II—understood what a difference he had made. If he had stayed with Estouteville, the whole accession process might have led to a very different result.

One must make of this episode what one will. It can be interpreted as showing Rodrigo to be a self-serving cynic, initially lining up with Estouteville for no nobler reason than the expectation that by doing so he would bring himself the most good. It is likewise possible to see him as showing weakness of character, a willingness to vote for the Frenchman when he seemed unbeatable and then to abandon him as soon as his vulnerability became plain. It is nonetheless true that in the end he voted for the clearly better man, and that he did so when no one else would and his action could have carried a high cost. When one considers the effect of this election on Rodrigo’s own career—he came out of it a favorite protégé of the new pope—it can fairly be considered an early demonstration of his political skill. What is most striking in Piccolomini’s account of their early morning conversation is the candor with which Rodrigo acknowledged not only that he was supporting Estouteville but that he was doing so out of sheer self-interest. Such candor is disarming even in an adversary. It will be characteristic of Rodrigo over the next forty-five years, helping to explain his almost uncanny ability to win the affection of almost everyone who came within his reach.

Rodrigo and Piccolomini had first become friends during the reign of Calixtus, both of them having open and affectionate natures combined with a voracious appetite for work. What had happened in conclave propelled their relationship to a deeper level. It took on something of the character of a father-son connection. The new pope was not only the older of the two by a quarter of a century but had vastly more experience of the world. He had much to teach, and the physically big, unfailingly cheery Rodrigo was nothing if not an eager and able learner. The liking that the two had for each other, the respect that each had for the other’s character and ability, removed any possibility that Pius might prefer a different vice-chancellor.

The new pope was a remarkable man with an unusual background. Fifty-two years old at the time of his election, a cultivated lawyer with no personal wealth to speak of, he had not embarked upon a clerical career until he was well into his thirties (by which time he had, in Germany and Scotland, fathered illegitimate children who died in infancy). He had grown up the eldest of the eighteen children of a couple who, though of noble origins, were so poor that as a boy he had to labor in his father’s fields. After schooling by a local priest he began university at age eighteen, late for those times, and went on to spend most of the next decade studying first literature and then the law. A revealing episode occurred when he was twenty-five: he announced that he wanted to enter the monastic life, but was dissuaded by friends who dismissed the idea as absurd for someone with the young Piccolomini’s attraction to the pleasures of the flesh. Obviously he took the religious vocation seriously—so much so that he was unwilling to commit himself to it until he was satisfied that he could observe the required vows. While serving first as legal counsel to prominent figures at the Council of Basel, then as a diplomat handling assignments across Europe, he remained unmarried but a layman. In 1435 a winter voyage to Scotland, at the northernmost edge of the known world, proved so hair-raisingly hazardous that he vowed, if delivered safely ashore, to walk barefoot to the nearest shrine to the Virgin Mary. Keeping this pledge turned out to involve a ten-mile trek through ice and snow, causing so much tissue damage that he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Though at Basel he had served men hostile to Pope Eugenius IV and actively supported the antipope Felix V, ultimately joining the entourage of Felix’s patron the Hapsburg emperor Frederick III, when about forty he yielded to the old call to the religious life. A year after taking his first, conditional vows, he played a significant role in negotiations that settled long-standing disputes between Eugenius and the princes of Germany. By 1452, when he returned to Italy for Frederick III’s marriage and coronation, he was not only a priest but bishop of Siena. Thereafter he remained in Italy, representing the emperor at the papal court, and in 1456, at the urging of Frederick and the king of Hungary, he was appointed by Calixtus to the College of Cardinals. When elected pope just twenty months later, he was both a man of the world, accustomed to doing business with some of the most powerful people in Europe, and a devoted son of the Church, certain of its unique importance. There is significance in the fact that such a man showed no hesitation in making the young Cardinal Borgia not only one of his closest companions but virtually a junior partner. That Pius II embraced Rodrigo so unreservedly is the best indication we have of what kind of man the latter must have been, in terms not only of talent but of conduct, as he entered his thirties.

Pius and Rodrigo were a team from the day of the election and went into action quickly. Among the matters requiring immediate attention was the Pedro Luis problem. Pius dispatched Rodrigo to Civitavecchia to persuade his brother of the impossibility, in a climate of such intense resentment, of his holding on to the offices and properties that his uncle had conferred upon him. This accomplished, the brothers presumably agreed that Pedro Luis should return to Spain. Both surrendered their positions in the papal military, which went to a nephew of Pius’s. One of the Colonna succeeded Pedro Luis as prefect of Rome. Whether or not this was a gesture of thanks for Prospero Colonna’s climactic vote, Rodrigo must have been relieved that the job had not been returned to the Orsini. So soon after Calixtus’s death, a papacy allied with the Orsini would have made Rodrigo’s situation impossible.

Instead, his situation was enviable indeed. By remaining vice-chancellor, Rodrigo kept sole charge not only of one of the three largest branches of the Curia but of the only one whose functions were so essential that it could not be shut down for summer holidays. It included the office known as the Dataria, which received all requests and petitions and drafted letters and grants; the more than one hundred scriptori, expert in the preparation of various pontifical documents; and the notaries, lawyers responsible for preparing papal bulls and maintaining registries of all the correspondence and official documents arriving at and being sent out from the Vatican. The vice-chancellor’s oversight of the Rota, the supreme court, gave him control of judicial favors, platoons of lawyers and clerks, and considerable sums of money.

Anyone who used this great office skillfully could make himself one of the most important men in Europe. No one would ever use it more skillfully than Rodrigo Borgia, or do so for such a long time. And it was far from his only responsibility; he was repeatedly given other major assignments as well, evidence of the confidence he inspired. When on September 26 news reached Rome of the death of Pedro Luis, probably of malaria, Pius sent the suddenly twice-bereaved Rodrigo back to Civitavecchia to see to the interment of his brother’s remains, settle his affairs, and take possession of the fortress in the pope’s name. It has long been said that what the cardinal inherited from his uncle and his brother provided the foundation of his later colossal wealth. There is in fact no evidence that even together the two left enough to place Rodrigo among the wealthiest cardinals—or for that matter, that Rodrigo ever managed to hold on to much of his very impressive income. Great as his revenues would be from all the offices conferred on him during his years as vice-chancellor, he appears to have spent them—usually for official or at least political purposes—at least as fast as they came in and sometimes alarmingly faster.

Among the issues carried over from Calixtus’s reign, two were particularly vexing: the unsettled questions of who should succeed Alfonso V as king of Naples, and what should be done about the Turks. Perhaps because the second question was growing more urgent every year—in 1458 Athens fell to the Turks—Pius decided to put the first to rest. Having been persuaded by Francesco Sforza of Milan that life would be easier for both of them if the royal families of France and Spain were kept out of Naples, he put aside Calixtus’s objections and invested Ferrante with the crown. This did not spare Ferrante from being challenged on two fronts; France’s House of Anjou launched a fresh military campaign for the conquest of Naples, and Il Regno’s barons rose up in rebellion. But these were not the pope’s problems, at least not directly. He joined with Sforza in sending troops to aid Ferrante and trusted that that would suffice.

The problem of the Ottoman Turks, by contrast, would torment Pius to the end of his life. He addressed it first by preparing a letter to Sultan Mehmed, offering to recognize all the Turks’ conquests in return for their conversion to Christianity. The Vatican’s archives contain no indication that this offer was ever sent, or that if sent it received an answer. In all likelihood Pius set it aside upon realizing that it was futile to the point of absurdity and more likely to make him seem desperate and foolish than to produce a positive result. Next he wrote to all the nations of Europe, inviting them to send representatives to the city of Mantua in the summer of 1459. As conceived by Pius, this was to be the first meeting of the whole of Europe’s secular leadership ever called for a single purpose—that purpose being the planning of a three-year crusade. The crusade was to be financed by a special levy on every churchman and church in Europe, and by contributions from the various crowned heads. Pius chose Mantua because, being in the far north of Italy, it was convenient for the great figures he hoped to attract from beyond the Alps. Also, the enormous palaces of Mantua’s prince, Ludovico Gonzaga, could accommodate not only the papal court but all the dignitaries to whom Pius expected to be playing host.

When Pius set out for Mantua early in 1459, Rodrigo was among the five cardinals who went with him. The journey became a festive procession, with people lining the roadside to cheer the pontiff as he passed. It took them to his birthplace, the hamlet of Corsignano in the Tuscan hills. There he stopped for a long sentimental visit, in the course of which he took actions that would raise doubts about just how serious he was in demanding shared sacrifices for the sake of his crusade. He gave Corsignano the new name Pienza, a derivation of Pius, and promoted it from village to town. He declared it the seat of a diocese, meaning that henceforth it would have a bishop and require a cathedral. He pledged himself, or rather the pontifical treasury, to pay for building the cathedral and made it known that he expected all the cardinals to build summer retreats there. Rodrigo as vice-chancellor found himself committed to financing the construction of an episcopal palace. It was a strange episode, an early, autocratic, and ill-timed exercise in urban renewal, recognizable to anyone ever pressured to contribute to a boss’s pet cause.

When the papal party pushed on to Mantua, it found that not one of the invited rulers had arrived or even sent a representative. Pius and the cardinals had to wait all through the summer, and even when enough delegates had assembled for formal discussions to begin, their number remained low and few showed any real enthusiasm. The Venetians were opposed to a crusade, clinging to the hope of reaching an understanding with the Turks. The French were uncooperative because they were offended by Pius’s failure to support the Angevins in Naples, and when René count of Anjou showed up in person, he provoked indignation by trying to recruit allies for his war on Naples. Francesco Sforza, though his capital of Milan was less than a hundred miles from Mantua, was four months late in arriving. By the end of the year nothing had been accomplished, and there was clearly no hope that anything would be. In January 1460, just before departing, Pius issued two bulls. One was a proclamation—a somewhat forlorn one under the circumstances—that against all odds there was in fact going to be a crusade, and it would embark from the east coast of Italy in the summer of 1464.

The other bull, destined to be known by its opening word Execrabilis, dealt in bold terms with a matter that had been preying on Pius’s mind since the years when he was involved in the squabbles at the Council of Basel. It declared that anyone appealing over the head of the pope to a council of the Church was, simply by virtue of having done so, a heretic and a traitor. It was prompted—an example of the arcane quarrels that plagued the reign of every pope—by an old and exasperating dispute with France over what was called the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. In signing this irksome document, dating back to 1438, France’s king had endorsed the Council of Basel’s declaration that councils were superior to popes. He had also happily agreed with the council that the selection of bishops should rest with the crown, not with the Vatican, that a king’s decisions could only rarely be appealed to Rome, and that various revenues traditionally sent to Rome should go to the king instead. By Pius II’s time the Pragmatic Sanction had been a source of friction for a generation. When King Charles VII sent ambassadors to Mantua rather than attending himself, and when those ambassadors made a display of their disdain for Pius’s crusade, the pope vented his frustration by declaring the Sanction to be null. The aged Charles, at the end of his life now and disgruntled by the pope’s support of Ferrante in Naples, responded by threatening to summon a new council. Execrabilis was Pius’s answer. While not ending the dispute—the French received it with snorts of contempt—the bull would not be without effect. It drew a line under the generations of conflict between popes and councils. From now on the great battles would be between popes and kings, and sometimes between popes and cardinals.

Pius II was a restless spirit who had spent much of his life on diplomatic missions, and he loved to travel and had no affection for Rome. He also loved the land of his birth, Tuscany. Upon leaving Mantua, having no wish to return to a Vatican from which he had already been absent for some eight months, he now led his party to Siena. Like the previous year’s visit to his home village, this was a sentimental journey; Pius had spent happy if impoverished years as a student in Siena, and much later he had been the city’s bishop, albeit a usually absent one. He settled in for what he hoped would be a long and pleasant stay, seeking relief for his damaged feet at the nearby hot baths. He paid little attention to reports that Rome, as invariably happened in the absence of the pope and his court, was showing signs of disorder. Rodrigo cannot have shared his relaxed attitude; as vice-chancellor he had to keep abreast of developments back in Rome. The chancery’s affairs were too essential to the papacy itself, and raised too many questions of policy, to be left in the hands of functionaries. Couriers would have been galloping to and fro between Siena and Rome, carrying Rodrigo’s paperwork.

The disappointments of Mantua turned out to be almost trivial compared with the troubles that came down on Pius’s head during this second sojourn in Tuscany. His chances of mounting a crusade of sufficient magnitude to accomplish anything of importance were dealt a serious setback—though Pius refused to admit it, probably even to himself—when Duke Philip of Burgundy (then an autonomous and immensely wealthy state) sent word that he would not be able to join the other participants until a year after the projected launch. Actually this was a polite way for Philip to drop out without admitting that he was doing so; he was being pressed to withdraw by his kinsman the king of France. Everyone understood that his postponement was actually a thinly veiled cancellation.

Other disappointments followed. Ferrante of Naples had met the Angevin invaders and his rebellious barons in battle and been whipped by them soundly; he was in serious jeopardy as a result, raising the possibility that Pius had made a costly mistake in recognizing him as king. And suddenly, up in the Romagna, the pope had a war of his own to fight, thanks to a troublesome vassal named Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini. Worse still, from Rome came reports of a new conspiracy to expel the papal government and declare a republic. If the pope didn’t return soon, he was warned, he could find himself in exile like Eugenius IV twenty years before.

As a crowning blow—the reader familiar with the reputation of the Borgias has perhaps been expecting something of this kind—Pius was visiting the healing waters of Petriolo when word reached him that back in Siena his right hand, his brilliant and beloved young vice-chancellor, had become embroiled in an absolutely outlandish scandal.

The dark side of the Borgia legend was at last beginning to unfold.

Background
 
 THE ETERNAL CITY, ETERNALLY REBORN

NO ONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURPRISED THAT SUCH PUBLIC order as the city of Rome enjoyed at the end of the 1450s began to disintegrate when Pius II removed the papal court to Mantua and did not return for almost a year and a half.

It was becoming all too clear, by this time, that Rome could not function—could not even survive as more than a crime-infested backwater—in the absence of the papal court. That whenever a pope was away for more than brief interludes, the city actually began to die. And that when the popes returned, its heart began to beat again. The so-called Eternal City was, ironically, the least stable, least vital, and least self-sufficient of Italy’s great capitals.

The Rome of Pius II’s time would not be recognizable to visitors from the twenty-first century any more than to visitors from the first. Its population, which totaled a million or more in the days of the Caesars and had dwindled to a pathetic twenty-five thousand at the start of the fifteenth century, cannot have been much more than fifty thousand in the 1460s. The remains of the old imperial capital were of course in ruins, most of the oldest palaces and churches having been either dismantled for their stone or transformed into makeshift fortifications behind which frightened families huddled for protection. Most of the people lived in squalor, crowded into the tangle of dark, narrow, and filthy streets that had taken shape helter-skelter around the Pantheon. Only one of the magnificent viaducts that once had supplied the city with water was still in working order, and few of the churches and palaces that are the glory of the city today had yet been built. St. Peter’s Basilica was falling apart, and most of the fabled Roman hills had been given over to crops and livestock. Anyone looking down from one of those hills would have been struck first by the innumerable towers that studded the landscape. There were towers at the ends of the bridges across the Tiber, towers on what remained of the city wall, towers rising out of the fortress-homes of every family that could afford one. They were expressions of fear, these towers—of the need for vigilance in a chronically lawless place.

“The city is for the most part in ruins,” the poet Giannantonio Campano reported upon seeing it for the first time at midcentury, “and in such terrible condition that tears came to my eyes. The inhabitants are more like barbarians than Romans; they are repellent of aspect and speak the most different dialects.” Such words become all the more striking when one realizes that they were written fully a generation after Pope Martin V began the city’s revival. At the time they were written Nicholas V’s drive to restore Rome’s splendor was fully under way.

The Rome of the early Renaissance did have one important thing in common with the capital of the Caesars. Both were parasite cities, devourers rather than creators of wealth. As the historian Theodor Mommsen observed, “there has perhaps never been a great city so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome.” Through all the centuries when it was the center of the known world, it gave rise to no important banking institutions or manufacturing operations or anything except the bureaucracies needed for the management of a great empire. And so when the empire ceased to exist, there was no longer much reason for Rome. It was far from alone in imploding—that was the fate of urban Europe generally, one of the things that made the Dark Ages dark. But when other cities once again began to show signs of economic life, growing and generating wealth, Rome was left behind. Lacking merchants and bankers of consequence, it failed to share in the benefits brought to other places by the emergence of a commercial middle class. Finally nothing much remained but a semirural population scattered rather wretchedly among decaying ruins and at the mercy of gangster-like clans.

These clans were a constant of Roman history from the Dark Ages onward. They accumulated wealth and power while successive popes were occupied with beating back German emperors as they invaded Italy and beating down attempts to establish republican government in the city. By the late thirteenth century the clan chiefs, titled nobility or “barons” now, had nearly succeeded in making the papacy their personal property and were exploiting it ruthlessly to their own advantage.

The endless, grinding street wars in which the clans fought one another for dominance made Rome literally ungovernable for a very long time. The withdrawal of the papacy to Avignon allowed the barons to go unchallenged except by one another through much of the fourteenth century. A chronicler described the Rome of that time as “everywhere lust, everywhere evil, no justice, no law; there was no longer any escape; the man who was strongest with the sword was the most in the right. A person’s only hope was to defend himself with the help of his relatives and friends; every day groups of armed men were formed.” And every night those same groups ventured out to kill one another in the streets.

The feeble communal government that was pretending to rule Rome collapsed when Martin V brought the papacy back to the city in 1420. The clans, however, remained strong, and would plague every pope for the next two centuries. Conditions began to improve all the same; by introducing a modicum of law and order, Martin sparked a process of recovery. That process gathered momentum until 1434, when the Colonna drove Eugenius IV into his eight years of exile. He had not been gone long when the city again began descending into anarchy, but a measure of stability was restored with his return. As the papacy gradually recovered its strength, drawing money to the Vatican and creating increasing numbers of jobs, Rome recovered with it. Its evolution into a leading center of Renaissance culture was interrupted briefly by the republican conspiracy against Nicholas V in 1453, more seriously at the end of that decade when Pius II departed for Mantua and stayed away too long.

Eventually the people of Rome, even the barons, resigned themselves to the truth: the city had no place in the world except as the seat of a monarchy sufficiently important to bring riches from the outside world, a monarchy on which its subjects could feed. Thus there was no substitute for the papacy, and the republican dream was pure folly, leading to nothing but disorder and decline. This was not a particularly welcome truth, but it was inescapable all the same. Once it was understood, opposition to papal rule was finished. It became impossible to muster popular support for any other kind of regime.

The barons, however, remained determined to preserve their power. Every new pope had to work out his own way of dealing with them.