1
It is the third of April, and springtime is in full force.
We are in Rome, which in this year of 1455 is neither the glorious world capital it had been under the emperors of old nor the great city it will become once again in a few generations. Instead it is a dilapidated backwater of thirty or perhaps forty thousand souls.
At the Vatican, dominated by the thousand-year-old and slowly disintegrating St. Peter’s Basilica, the cardinals are assembling. They are doing so because ten days have passed since the death of Pope Nicholas V. Of “apoplexy,” the attending physicians have declared, thereby revealing that they haven’t the faintest idea of what it was that caused him to grow feebler week after week until finally, aged only fifty-seven, he himself announced that his end was at hand.
The death of this particular pontiff at this particular time is a deeply worrisome thing. As for the fact that the time has come to elect his successor—it is so snarled up in difficulties and dangers as to scarcely bear thinking about.
Officially and as usual, the first nine days after the pope’s death were reserved for the obsequies with which deceased pontiffs are launched into the afterlife: one requiem mass per day, each presided over by a different cardinal. But in fact, and inevitably, the days and the nights as well have been filled with backstairs politicking, mainly to see who can put together the most potent blocs of votes. In the midst of all this, Nicholas’s wizened little body has been sealed up in the traditional three coffins, one of cypress inside another of lead inside still another of fine-grained and polished elm. It was then laid to rest in the crypt under the basilica, a structure so alarmingly decrepit that in the last few years of the pope’s reign 2,500 cartloads of stone had been stripped from the Colosseum and hauled across the Tiber for use in shoring it up.
By the time the last Ite, missa est brought the last mass to an end, the windows of one wing of the pontifical palace were boarded up in the customary way. Austere little cells, each containing a cot, a stool, and a small table, have been hammered together inside. The fifteen available cardinals (six others are too far from Rome to attend) are now reporting for duty. As they file inside, the doors are bolted behind them. Guards are posted, and the conclave of 1455 is formally in session.
Deprived of natural light, the cardinals are dependent on candles and oil lamps for illumination. With no ventilation and wood fires the only source of morning warmth, the air they breathe will soon be foul. But conclaves are not supposed to be pleasant. Physical discomfort long ago proved its value. It encourages the princes of the Church to get on with their business, announce the results, and go home.
Every part of the process is governed by customs that have evolved over a millennium and a half. At various times the choosing of popes has been under the control of Roman emperors, Byzantine emperors, and Holy Roman emperors from beyond the Alps. Sometimes popes have been able to nominate their successors, and there have been periods when no one would dare take the throne without the approval of the clergy—even the people—of Rome. But in 1059 a papal decree conferred the right of election on the College of Cardinals. Eighty years later another decree gave that right to the cardinals exclusively, meaning that no further approvals were needed once the Sacred College had made its choice. Forty years after that, a two-thirds majority of votes cast became necessary for election.
With that, the pattern was set. Though there have been other changes—an attempt, for example, to force fast action by reducing the cardinals’ rations if they fail to reach a decision within three days and reducing them again if a pope has not been elected after five—the essential rules could hardly be simpler. Whoever can get the votes of ten of the men now locked together inside the palace will assume the full powers of the papacy from the moment of his election. He will do so even if the whole outside world disapproves.
Simple rules are no assurance of an easy outcome, however. Choosing a pope is always a complicated affair, because much is always at stake and so many competing forces invariably come into play. Things rarely go smoothly. As the cardinals settle into their cubicles and begin to talk among themselves, they know that this election is unlikely to be an exception.
Not that Nicholas has left them with a mess. To the contrary, he was in no way a bad or even a careless pope. By the standards of the time he was a good one. Anyone comparing him with his immediate predecessors might find reason to call him an almost great one. Raised in humble circumstances in northwestern Italy, he had risen in the Church purely on the basis of merit—first as one of the leading humanist scholars of his time, then through success as a diplomat. His election was a fluke; he became a cardinal only a few months before the conclave that made him pope, and it never could have happened if the most powerful factions in the College of Cardinals had not deadlocked. But the eight years of his reign proved to be rich in achievement and free of scandal. He contributed greatly to bringing peace and a measure of stability not only to Italy but to Germany as well, ended a last outbreak of schism, found honest ways to replenish the Vatican’s treasury, and resumed the oft-interrupted process of trying to restore the decayed city of Rome to its lost splendor.
Even more remarkably, he appointed only a single relative, a half-brother, to the College of Cardinals and did nothing to enrich his kin. All in all, his reign has been an impressive step forward in the rebuilding of the papacy—in restoring its ancient importance and prestige. Whether this will continue or now come to a stop is likely to depend, everyone knows, on who is chosen to succeed him.
The problems facing the cardinals go much deeper than anything Nicholas did or failed to do. They are the residue of the century and a half of discord that preceded his reign: generation after generation of exile, of schism, of a deeply damaging struggle to decide whether the pope is the supreme head of the Church or subordinate to general councils. Some of the great questions are by now settled, or at least appear to be, but ugly memories are still fresh, deep wounds unhealed. Nicholas’s election came only four years after the return of the last exiled pope to Rome, and it was not until two years after his election that the last antipope abandoned his claim to the throne. A mere two years separate Nicholas’s death from the latest plot to overthrow papal rule and restore republican government in Rome. That he escaped unharmed does not mean that all danger has passed. That too is likely to depend, at least in part, on who takes his place.
If all Italy is at peace in 1455, this again is a departure from recent history and a fragile one. The peninsula last erupted in general war as recently as 1452, when Venice attacked Milan; Florence, Genoa, Bologna, and Mantua all came to Milan’s assistance; and Naples threw in with Venice. The pope, to his credit, kept Rome neutral, thereby leaving himself free to help broker a settlement and bring the belligerents together in what he called the Italian or Most Holy League. This league is without precedent in Italian history, a defensive alliance encompassing the whole peninsula, obliging longtime enemies to embrace each other as friends and aimed at establishing a balance of power stable enough to preserve the peace. It became effective only weeks before Nicholas’s death, when the troublesome king of Naples finally signed on, and was the crowning achievement of the pope’s career. It is supposed to remain in effect for twenty-five years, but the realities of Italian political life make its chances of doing so vanishingly small. The part that Nicholas played in making it all happen, coupled with his departure from the stage, adds to the sense that the conclave now in session matters more than most.
The existence of the league requires the most powerful princes in Italy to pledge to do things that they are unaccustomed to doing: respect existing frontiers, join forces to punish any state that breaks the peace, and work together to keep foreign powers out. It obliges the most ruthless and ambitious of these princes to abandon—to defer, anyway—long-cherished dreams of subduing their neighbors and seizing their domains. Few of them would have agreed to any such thing if not for one of the supreme political catastrophes of the late Middle Ages: the capture by the Ottoman Turks, just twenty-three months before Nicholas’s death, of the fabled city of Constantinople.
For eleven hundred years Constantinople had been the capital of the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, and incomparably richer and more important than Rome. It had also, for half a millennium, been the seat of the Orthodox Church. But after centuries of decline and generations of being dismantled piecemeal by the relentlessly expanding empire of the Turks, nothing remained but a pale shadow of what it had been at its zenith. Its end was tragic: after a siege of less than two months, a defense force of seven thousand troops was overwhelmed by eighty thousand Islamic invaders. This was followed by three days of horror, as Sultan Mehmed II (“Mehmed the Conqueror,” only twenty-one years old) rewarded his men by allowing them to pillage, rape, and kill at their pleasure. As many as fifty thousand of the proud old city’s inhabitants were put to the sword, and the survivors disappeared into the slave markets of the East. It was a world-changing event, and it chilled the blood of every Christian who understood its significance.
The West had no right to be shocked, actually; its leaders could not claim to have been caught off guard. They had stood by passively through all the years when the Turks drew ever closer to Constantinople. The city’s emperors had sent ever more desperate appeals for help, and Europe not only failed to respond but contributed to making collapse inevitable. If at midcentury the Turks controlled much of the Balkan peninsula and Hungary south of the Danube, this was not a new state of affairs: all of Bulgaria, along with much of Serbia, had been seized more than fifty years before. That Constantinople itself had become the Turks’ prime objective could not have been more obvious. When they cut off the Bosporus, the great waterway connecting Constantinople to the Black Sea and the world beyond, the city was caught in a stranglehold, its doom clearly imminent. Its last emperor—whose name, rather sadly, was Constantine, and who would die fighting when the Turks came swarming over his walls—got little from the West except bombastic words of encouragement and promises that meant nothing. Nicholas V made some effort to organize a rescue expedition, but nothing came of it. His failure to do more would be seen by many as the one disgrace of his reign.
In taking Constantinople the Turks gained not only a glorious new capital for their empire—the Hagia Sophia, one of the architectural wonders of classical times, was converted from a church to a mosque—not only one of the world’s most magnificent harbors, but a platform from which to threaten central and southern Europe. Venice, its fabulous wealth dependent on access to eastern markets, is the most threatened of the Italian states, but this too has long been the case, and Venice has been slow to take alarm. Its merchant princes grew up thinking of Constantinople as their principal commercial rival, not as a bulwark against Muslim aggression, and they took foolish satisfaction in its decline. They nursed hopes of taming the Turks and turning them into business partners. The folly of such thinking was not exposed until the Turks sank a Venetian ship trying to pass through the Bosporus, beheaded all the crewmen who had not drowned, and put the body of its captain on display after killing him by impalement. But by then, at least where Constantinople was concerned, it was already too late.
That Venice is not alone in its peril became clear when Sultan Mehmed, after taking Constantinople, added “Roman Caesar” to his list of titles. No one has mistaken this for a joke; if Constantinople could fall, so could Rome. And if Rome fell, who could say that Christian civilization was not doomed? It is questions like this, and the grimness of the only credible answers, that have caused the leading Italian powers to put aside their quarrels and come together in the Holy League.
These are the issues that hang over Italy, the Church, and Europe in April 1455, creating an urgent need for leadership. Human nature being what it is, however, they are not necessarily the issues that matter most to the cardinals sequestered in the Vatican. Domestic rivalries loom larger, and some at least of the cardinals can be depended upon to care more about getting an advantage over their rivals, or stopping their rivals from getting an advantage over them, than about anything as abstract as the fate of Western civilization. Coiled like a serpent at the heart of the conclave, capable of poisoning everything, is the blood feud that almost from time immemorial has kept Rome’s two greatest families at each other’s throats. Without the hatred of the Orsini for the Colonna and the Colonna for the Orsini, the seven Italians who make up the conclave’s largest national contingent could expect to have little difficulty recruiting the three additional votes needed to deliver the papacy to one of their own. Because of that hatred, the election of an Italian is going to be difficult at best.
This is no trivial matter. Since the return of the papal court from what is called the Babylonian Captivity, when for sixty-seven years it remained at Avignon in Provence and so completely under the thumb of the kings of France that seven consecutive popes were Frenchmen, there has been a return also to the assumption that popes should be Roman, and if not Roman then at least Italian. The people of the Eternal City take this idea seriously indeed. The cardinals know that the election of an outsider is likely to bring angry crowds into the streets, and that the election of someone from what the Romans regard as the barbarian world beyond the Alps would be certain to do so. Though the city has been fairly tranquil since the failure of the republican conspiracy of 1453, thanks largely to the pains taken by Nicholas V to deal even-handedly with the ever-jealous Orsini and Colonna and other baronial clans, not a great deal is ever needed to spark an explosion in Rome. The separation of the Italian cardinals into irreconcilable camps, and the consequent possibility of a non-Italian pope, are further causes of anxiety.
The Italians cannot be unified because of the presence of two of the Sacred College’s most formidable members, both of them Roman nobles, both in their mid-forties, and both able to draw on enormous reserves of political, financial, and even military power. Latino Orsini occupies the seat in the college that his family has held for so many centuries that its leaders regard it as theirs by right, as practically their personal property. Among the ornaments on his family tree are three Orsini popes, the first elected in 1191, and the second so notorious for corruption that Dante gave him a small speaking role as one of the damned souls in The Inferno. Latino need look no further than to his clan’s history for lessons in what a boon it can be to put a relative, or someone dependent on one’s relatives, on the papal throne. And for equally compelling examples of how badly things can go when that throne is occupied by an enemy—worst of all, from the Orsini perspective, by a Colonna or a friend of the Colonna.
Proud and potent though Latino is, he is outmatched by his most dangerous rival, Cardinal Prospero Colonna. A nephew of the Oddone Colonna who became Pope Martin V in 1417 and used his office to heap wealth, high office, and noble titles on his kinsmen, Prospero has had a colorful career. He was made a cardinal while still in his teens, was excommunicated after his uncle’s death changed the Colonna from Vatican insiders to undesirables, won his way back into favor, and then was very nearly elected himself.Through three tense days at the conclave of 1447, Prospero remained just two votes short of victory. His inability to get those two votes and the subsequent melting away of his support were due to the loyalty to the Orsini of several cardinals and the uneasiness felt by others because of Prospero’s notorious readiness to use violence in pursuing his objectives. It was this Orsini-versus-Colonna deadlock that led to the surprise election of the conclave’s newest member, the scholarly Tommaso Parentucelli, who had thus become the now-deceased Nicholas V.
The conditions that led to deadlock in 1447 are all in place in 1455. As the cardinals prepare to cast the first round of ballots, it becomes clear that the Italian Domenico Capranica is favored by a number of his colleagues. Objectively, this is an understandable, even a commendable, development. There is nothing objectionable about Capranica and much to recommend him. At fifty-five he is a seasoned senior churchman, having been a bishop for thirty years and a cardinal for more than twenty. He is also one of the Vatican’s leading diplomats and administrators, a humanist scholar of note, a champion of ecclesiastical reform, and so blameless in his personal life that historians of the early Renaissance will one day describe him as saintly.
By the measures that should matter most he is an exceptional candidate. No one could find good grounds for complaining of his election, and his colleagues like the fact that he has been one of them for nearly a generation; many of them feel that, because the late Nicholas had entered the Sacred College mere months before his election, he never developed a proper respect for its importance.
Capranica has a problem all the same, and it proves to be disabling. He began his career as secretary to the Colonna pope Martin V—had been chosen for the post because of his exceptional abilities and outstanding promise—and because of this the Orsini early classified him as an enemy and always treated him accordingly. Over the years he and the Orsini clashed so often and so seriously that there can be no hope of his election in any conclave over which Latino Orsini holds veto power.
Capranica’s cause being thus lost, Latino now puts forth his choice: Pietro Barbo, nephew of the Pope Eugenius IV who had died in 1447 (and who himself had been the nephew of a still earlier pope). Barbo is a fifteen-year veteran of the college in spite of being only thirty-eight years old, and though not as distinguished as Capranica, he is in no way unworthy of consideration. He has the support not only of the Orsini but of Venice and the king of Naples as well. But he too has no chance, and for reasons unrelated to anything he himself has ever said or done. The problem is his late uncle. When Eugenius made Barbo a cardinal at age twenty-three, he did so in Florence, and he was living in Florence because six years earlier he had fled Rome for his life, and his flight from Rome had become necessary when he tried to break the power of the Colonna and instead was overpowered.
The result was humiliation. Three years after his election Eugenius found himself disguised as a monk and floating downstream in a Tiber barge, cowering under a shield as wrathful Romans shouted their contempt and hurled stones, sticks, and rubbish down on him from the banks above. He found refuge in Florence, which welcomed him because its dominant family, the Medici, was closely affiliated with the Orsini, who were always happy to embrace an enemy of the Colonna.
Rome was ultimately retaken by force, not by Eugenius himself but by a commander of the papal army named Giovanni Vitelleschi, who was both a cardinal and one of the most savagely aggressive soldiers of the age. The leader of Rome’s short-lived, Colonna-sponsored republic was dismembered alive by men wielding red-hot tongs, and the city was put under a military occupation designed to make resistance impossible and life intolerable for any Colonna foolish enough to remain. The provinces belonging to the papacy and known as the Papal States were ravaged as well, even the churches of towns disloyal to the exiled pope were razed, and the city of Palestrina, seat of one of the Colonna family’s most powerful branches, was obliterated.
Pietro Barbo had nothing to do with any of this—it is unclear whether even his uncle the pope intended or approved the atrocities committed in his name—but in the eyes of the Colonna he is fatally tainted, absolutely and forever unworthy of trust. If in 1455 Prospero Colonna no longer has sufficient clout to stand as a credible candidate himself, he certainly remains capable of blocking the election of anyone suspected of being a danger to his clan. He is helped by Barbo’s relative youth. Not without reason, cardinals tend to think it unwise to bestow the crown on someone who might possibly wear it for twenty or thirty years. In Barbo’s case a forty-year reign would not be inconceivable.
With Capranica and Barbo eliminated, clearly a compromise is needed, one that Latino and Prospero will accept. Days are passing, and as the cardinals look about them for a solution, several find their attention fixing on an ecclesiastical anomaly. This is Basilios Bessarion, who with his compatriot Isidore of Kiev is one of two Greeks present at the conclave. Both began their careers in the Orthodox Church, rose high in the hierarchy at Constantinople, and in 1434 were appointed delegates to the Roman Church’s Council of Basel, where they showed themselves to be strongly in favor of ending the centuries-old split between the Eastern and Western rites. In 1439, when the council was meeting in Florence, Bessarion and Isidore delighted the papal court and became traitors in the eyes of their Orthodox brethren by defecting to Rome. In short order they were made cardinals. Over the next decade and a half Bessarion won a reputation as one of Europe’s leading humanists and promoters of the new learning, and as a man of solid competence and impeccable moral character. Also in his favor, in the opinion of many cardinals, are the appreciation of the Turkish threat that his Eastern origins have given him and his insistence that the West must respond forcefully.
But he too has no chance of election. The conclave’s French members, no longer keeping silent because what is under discussion is no longer a strictly Italian quarrel, take the lead in complaining that Bessarion is an alien. They make much of the fact that, contrary to the conventions of the Sacred College, he continues, in the Byzantine fashion, to wear a long beard. Even those cardinals who most admire Bessarion find it necessary to agree that expecting him to rule Rome and its Church could end in nothing but calamity.
So … some other compromise has to be found. The cardinals, frustrated and weary and wanting to be set free, find it quickly. Find him quickly. The desire to be done with this tiresome business awakens them at last to the fact that there is in their midst a man of whom no one has a bad word to say. A man who, if not a champion of the new humanism in the manner of Capranica or Bessarion or Pope Nicholas, is an esteemed scholar nevertheless, with two doctorates in law and an international reputation as an authority on the subject.
A good man, untouched by scandal and known to all Rome for his sponsorship of hospitals, his generosity to the elderly and the poor, and the simplicity of his life.
A statesman too, with an impressive career behind him and decades spent at the right hand of one of the greatest kings in Europe.
A peacemaker of the first order, a key player in bringing the Western Schism to an end and settling a long conflict between Naples and Rome.
Known to be loyal to popes rather than councils, and to understand the Turkish threat.
Not greedy—not even ambitious.
And, what matters more in this deadlocked conclave, free of politics: unaffiliated with any of the Sacred College’s factions after ten years as a member, so detached from the intrigues of the papal court that no one—no Orsini, no Colonna, no anyone—has reason to regard him with distrust.
And finally—what’s best of all, the clincher—seventy-six years old and in declining health. It is inconceivable that he will live much longer. This makes him perfect.
And so when Cardinal Bessarion rises to his feet and declares in solemn tones that he is giving his vote to Alonso Borgia, his compeers all but fall over themselves in their haste to do the same. They do so with joyful relief, confident that they are settling on a man who will reign benignly, passively, and above all briefly, soon departing for the hereafter having distressed no one and changed nothing.
Little do they know.
Background
THE ROAD TO ROME
IT IS CURIOUS THAT ALONSO DE BORJA CHOSE A LIFE IN THE Church. Being an only son of landowning parents, he must have been expected to marry, inherit his father’s estate, and carry on the family name. That name carried considerable weight in the old kingdom of Valencia, where Alonso’s life began. A hundred and forty years before his birth, when King Jaime of Aragon drove the Muslims out of Valencia, among the conquistadores in his army were eight men who called themselves de Borja. Possibly they, or some of them, were descended from an ancient family of that name. No less possibly, they just happened to be from the old Roman city of Borja near Zaragoza and had taken its name in the customary way.
The records show that one of Jaime’s Borja soldiers was given responsibility for parceling out conquered lands in and around the Valencian town of Játiva, or Xátiva. He was generous with himself and his kinsmen. Their name became common among the gentry of the neighborhood. The estate of Torre del Canals, where Alonso was born on the last day of 1378, was neither the humblest nor the grandest of the numerous Borja households.
Through much of his long life Alonso was a lawyer more than a churchman, remaining in minor orders rather than being ordained a priest. He entered the University of Lérida at age fourteen, staying to earn doctorates in canon and civil law and in time becoming a lecturer. At age thirty he was a respected and respectable academic—not a whiff of scandal was ever attached to his name—but still a deeply obscure provincial. He was not an intellectual in any true sense of the term, showing no interest in the revival of classical learning that was sweeping across Europe early in the fifteenth century. By all accounts he was honest, hardworking, and able, but one searches in vain for evidence of a colorful personality.
At age thirty-seven, doubtless because of his legal expertise and the appointment he held as a canon of the local cathedral, Borja was chosen as the diocese of Lérida’s representative at the Council of Constance. This assembly of the Church had been convened mainly to deal with the Great Schism, the split in Western Christendom that had begun in 1378 with the almost simultaneous election of two competing popes. (Considering the importance that the schism would play in Borja’s life, it is an interesting coincidence that the two entered the world in the same year.) During the four years of its existence the council deposed two men judged to be “antipopes” because never legitimately elected, accepted the resignation of the claimant whose election was recognized as legitimate (he quit voluntarily in the interests of unity), and chose a single successor, the Colonna who became Martin V. This did not end the schism, however, because a Spaniard calling himself Benedict XIII refused to abandon his claim and was supported by the royal House of Aragon.
Though there is no evidence that Alonso de Borja participated in the council’s debates—no evidence, even, that he attended any of its sessions—its actions presented him with vexing questions. As a loyal subject of Aragon and a junior member of its clergy, he had always been disposed to follow the lead of its rulers, and Benedict like himself was a respected legal scholar and above reproach in his personal life. That Benedict had been repudiated by a general council of the Church, however, was not to be shrugged off lightly. Further complications included the council’s assertion, even as it made Martin V pope, that he was subject to it because councils were the highest authority in the Church, and Martin’s rejoinder that he and not the council was supreme. The result was the greatest challenge to papal authority until the Reformation, which was still a century in the future. The uncertainty to which these disagreements gave rise was offensive to Borja’s lawyerly mind and must be one reason why, at about this point, he began to express two convictions. First, that Church unity was the only alternative to chaos. Second, that unity was impossible if the pope was not supreme.
These beliefs were firmly in place when, in 1417, the fortyish Borja made his first visit to the court of the charismatic young Alfonso V, whose kingdom of Aragon had long since absorbed Valencia. Possibly he had been summoned to explain the decrees coming out of Constance; this would have been natural in light of the support that Alfonso and his father before him had extended to the Spanish antipopes, and the questions of law stirred up by the contest between the council and Martin V. Whatever the reason for the visit, it proved to be important in the king’s life and the great turning point in Borja’s.
Alfonso V at twenty-one was ruler not only of Aragon but of Sicily too. That was enough to make him as powerful as any monarch in Europe, and he was already launched upon the campaigns that would add Corsica and Sardinia to his empire. And he was glamorous as well as important. Short but strongly built, with a small hawklike nose and the penetrating gaze of a born predator, he had a grace and a flair for the theatrical gesture that would win him the honorific “Alfonso the Magnanimous.” He was also intelligent and witty (happy marriage, he said, required that the wife be blind and the husband deaf) and radiated a sunny self-assurance. Clearly he saw something that he liked in the lawyer from Lérida, even if that lawyer was dry and cautious and nobody’s idea of a man of action. Borja for his part must have been flattered to find himself attracting the interest of such a kingly young king, even one whose views were not entirely compatible with his own. When the visitor was offered employment at Alfonso’s court, there can have been little hesitation. His whole life, his place in the world, was utterly transformed. In short order he was the king’s secretary and principal counselor and therefore at the center of European affairs.
Alfonso no less than Borja faced delicate questions. Ridiculous as the current Spanish claimant to the papal crown might appear to be (he called himself Clement VIII and had been elected by three men whom Benedict XIII had proclaimed to be cardinals shortly before his death), he continued to be recognized by the House of Aragon, and a faint aura of prestige clung to him as a result. Though Alfonso stood to gain nothing by keeping the schism alive, abandoning a cause with which his family had long been identified would have been no simple step. If not taken carefully, it could look like an admission of failure. Alfonso had no tolerance for failure.
It fell to his new secretary to find a way forward. And so when in 1421 Alfonso arrived in Naples in response to Queen Joanna II’s appeal for help in fending off a French attack—the childless and only dubiously sane queen had found the perfect way to recruit him, declaring him to be her heir—he immediately and at Borja’s suggestion sent off a letter offering Pope Martin his friendship. He had every reason to expect a positive response. Martin, having recently returned the pontifical court to the Eternal City after many years of exile, seemed unlikely to want to continue an old and costly feud. He had barely begun the hard task of restoring order in Rome and the adjacent Papal States, and he was encountering enough opposition from the Orsini and others to need no trouble with Spain. Alonso de Borja, who had remained behind in Aragon as head of a council advising Queen Maria, her husband’s regent, must have waited hopefully for word of a rapprochement—and been taken aback to learn that the pope had instead allied himself with Queen Joanna’s enemy, the Frenchman Louis of Anjou, who claimed to be rightful king of Naples. Worse news followed: Alfonso had retaliated by reaffirming Clement VIII as pope. Borja’s plan for reconciliation had come to nothing—had, if anything, made things worse. He had learned that the politics of Italy were too tricky to be managed, or even understood, from where he sat in Spain. Prudent lawyer that he was, he turned his attention to business closer to home and tried to keep it there.
Alfonso V meanwhile threw himself into a war for Naples that dragged on year after year. Its complexities and reversals would require a chapter of their own, and even then would be barely comprehensible. After two years of fighting, Joanna announced that Louis of Anjou, not Alfonso, was now her heir, and therefore her erstwhile rescuer was now an interloper and a foe. As the advantage shifted sporadically from side to side, it began to seem that the bloodshed might continue forever. Atrocities and outrages became almost commonplace. Mercenaries in Louis’s service, having killed Alfonso’s beloved brother Pedro with a lucky shot, celebrated their success by firing his corpse out of a cannon. When in 1423 Alfonso had to return to Spain to deal with an outbreak of hostilities between another brother, Juan king of Navarre, and his brother-in-law Juan king of Castile, he interrupted his voyage to pay a call on Marseilles, the capital of the House of Anjou. He tried twice to set it afire and both times was foiled by rain. He declared that if it happened a third time, he would accept failure as God’s will and move on, but there was no more rain, and Alfonso had the rare satisfaction of reducing a major city to ashes before weighing anchor and continuing on his way.
He was still in Spain when, a year later, news of the defeat of his army in Naples and the killing of its commander had an improving effect on his view of the situation. He decided that fighting a pope who had the support of most of Europe and insisting on the legitimacy of a powerless and largely forgotten Spaniard were never going to get him anywhere, and that a fresh approach was in order. Alonso de Borja agreed heartily—had long, in fact, been suggesting a change of course. He appealed to the king not by invoking Church unity, which was unlikely to matter greatly to an energetic young monarch bent on conquest, but by pointing to the practical advantages of getting the pope to endorse his claim to Naples. There was nothing to be lost, and so the king freed his secretary to see what diplomacy might accomplish.
It accomplished great things. Negotiations began, the pope was receptive, and a tentative settlement was worked out. Martin conceded, somewhat obliquely, that Alfonso just might have a valid claim to Naples. Borja, and through him Alfonso, acknowledged that Martin just might be the true pope. Building on this, in 1429 Borja went to the trouble of seeking out Antipope Clement at his hideaway in the remote Valencian town of Peníscola. There, offering as inducement the bishopric of Palma on the island of Mallorca, he persuaded Clement to make submission to Rome. With this, the royal House of Aragon abandoned its long repudiation of the Roman popes, king and pontiff were reconciled, and after almost half a century the Great Schism was at an end at last. A grateful pope announced Borja’s appointment as bishop of Valencia. This must have been deeply gratifying: Valencia was not only one of Spain’s richest sees but the Borja family’s home diocese. The appointment raised the Borja name to an eminence never before achieved, and it made Alonso a hero to his relatives. Among these relatives were his widowed sister and her children, who took up residence in Valencia’s grand episcopal palace. In order to become bishop, he had to take a step he had until now neglected: have himself ordained a priest.
The leaders of the Council of Constance had been ready to adjourn since 1418, but they feared that by disbanding they would free the pope to repudiate everything they had done. As a preventive measure they decreed that a new council must be convened after five years, with another seven years after that, and others every ten years thereafter. Pope Martin, though no friendlier to councils than his predecessors had been and his successors would be, found it impossible to avoid calling one in 1423. This new assembly, however, was so paralyzed by political divisions as to be unable to act. It accomplished little beyond reaffirming the supremacy of councils and scheduling another gathering for the Swiss city of Basel in 1431.
Martin died early in 1431 and was succeeded by the wealthy and handsomely aristocratic Cardinal Gabriele Condulmer of Venice, who became Eugenius IV. He was only forty-seven, some six years younger than the fledgling bishop of Valencia. Devoid of political experience and gifts, almost from the first day of his reign he began committing blunders. Ultimately, as we saw earlier, he so undermined his own position as to be obliged to depart Rome under a barrage of sticks and stones.
After years in exile, an exasperated Eugenius excommunicated everyone associated with Basel and called for an alternative assembly to convene at Ferrara. In response, the council denounced him as a heretic and voted to depose him. As replacement, it elected a new antipope, the onetime duke of Savoy, who had taken holy orders after the death of his wife and now styled himself Felix V. In all this the council was supported by the duke of Milan and, to the chagrin of Alonso de Borja, by Alfonso V. Everything the bishop had accomplished late in the reign of Martin V was thus in ruins, and disorder seemed to be spreading by the day. Fate almost seemed to be mocking him for attaching such importance to unity and a strong papacy.
When Alfonso V returned to Italy and took up once again the war for Naples, he brought Borja with him. Unhappy with almost everything that was happening, the bishop nevertheless continued the management of his master’s affairs and undertook a reform of the judicial system in the territories Alfonso controlled. Among his responsibilities was overseeing the education of Alfonso’s illegitimate son Ferdinand, who was in his early teens. This boy, known as Ferrante, was already a significant figure because his father’s marriage to the sickly and sadly unattractive Princess Maria of Castile had produced no offspring. Alfonso, resigned to the fact that when he died most of his sprawling empire would be inherited by his brother Juan or Juan’s son Ferdinand, was becoming obsessed with the thought that the great kingdom of Naples, if he could win it, should go to Ferrante. Meanwhile Borja was getting to know Ferrante and forming an opinion of the boy’s character that would have consequences in years to come.
The bishop refused to conceal his disapproval of the king’s friendliness toward the Council of Basel and its antipope. When Alfonso appointed him envoy to Basel, he took the astonishing step of refusing to go. When Eugenius ordered the council to move to Florence and some of the delegates obeyed while others remained defiantly in Basel, Borja signaled his support of the pope by going to Florence in person, possibly without the king’s approval. It is testimony to how much Alfonso valued the bishop’s services that he retained him as chief minister in spite of their differences on such a painfully divisive question.
The war for Naples appeared to have ended in disaster for Alfonso when, in the mid-1430s, another lost battle caused him to become the prisoner of Milan’s vicious Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, a supporter of Louis of Anjou and always an eager troublemaker. Almost miraculously, considering that to fall into the sadistic Filippo Maria’s hands often meant either a gruesome death or lifelong imprisonment under unspeakable conditions, Alfonso talked the duke into releasing him. He did so by arguing—his success shows the force of his personality—that it would be better for Milan if he became king of Naples and the Angevins were expelled.
Alfonso’s release marked a turning point in his fortunes. When in 1442 he finally crushed his Angevin rivals and sent them scurrying back to France, the way was cleared for the resolution of an array of long-festering issues. By the time he entered the city of Naples, the Council of Basel had lost all credibility. Though it remained in session, even Felix V had tired of its sterile debates and departed. With both council and antipope reduced to near-irrelevance, Alfonso V (now Alfonso I of Naples as well) and Pope Eugenius were free to turn their attention to each other. What they saw—what Alonso de Borja encouraged them to understand—was that they had more to gain by coming to terms than by continuing their dispute. Because Naples was recognized by all Europe as a papal fief, no one could legitimately rule it without the approval of—without being formally invested in it by—the Roman pontiff. Alfonso would never be accepted as its king until some pope recognized him as such, the sooner the better. Felix, from Geneva, offered to do the investing, but he had so little standing by this time that the suggestion could not be taken seriously.
Eugenius for his part would be denying reality if he refused to accept the Aragonese conquest of Naples. Nothing could come of that but more years of trouble. All the elements needed for agreement were obviously in place, and so negotiations got under way with Borja once again representing the king. By the terms of the resulting Treaty of Terracina, Alfonso recognized Eugenius as pope and received investiture as king of Naples. For the second time in a decade and a half, Alonso de Borja had reunited the Western Church. Eugenius felt it safe to return to Rome, which during his years of exile had sunk into a wretched state of lawlessness.
Pope and king embarked upon a political honeymoon. In 1444 the grateful Eugenius made Borja a cardinal and presbyter of the church of Santi Quattro Coronati on Rome’s Coelian Hill. He did so not in response to any appeal from Alfonso V or as a political favor to Naples but in recognition of Borja’s services to the Church. That same year, assenting to something that his new royal friend desired almost as urgently as he had wanted Naples, Eugenius legitimated the twenty-one-year-old Ferrante. Alfonso celebrated this as a coup, one that opened the way for Ferrante to succeed him on the throne of Naples. Cardinal Borja was not the only legal scholar to find this a dubious proposition; there were old and widespread doubts about whether legitimization brought with it a right of succession.
In 1445 Borja took up residence in Rome. Presumably he was expected to serve as Alfonso’s representative at the papal court, but it is likely that he felt he had done quite enough for an insatiably ambitious king and was weary of being asked to untangle his affairs. In any case, once settled in an old palace in a quiet quarter between the ruins of the Colosseum and the almost as ancient Basilica of St. John Lateran, he showed less interest in political matters than in his gardens. The only issue that could still draw him out was the old, perennially unresolved question of papal authority. When a dispute between the Vatican and the German Church was settled toward the end of Eugenius’s life, Borgia (as his name was now spelled in Rome) was one of only two cardinals to complain that too much had been conceded that rightfully belonged to the pope. For the most part he lived the life of a retired and beneficent dignitary, a patron of charitable institutions rather than of artists, architects, and scholars. As a Spaniard he was very much an outsider, but he seems to have been content with that. He kept to the margins of Roman society, staffing his residence with countrymen from Spain and opening it, unenthusiastically on the whole, to the relatives who were migrating to Italy in the hope that having a kinsman who was a cardinal could put opportunities in their path.
When in February 1447 Eugenius IV died at age sixty-two, Borgia was already sixty-eight. And though he now was, because a cardinal, eligible for election, at no point in that year’s conclave was he mentioned as a possible candidate. Nor does he appear to have taken any significant part in the politicking, even when the Orsini-Colonna deadlock made it impossible for either family’s candidate to be chosen. The winner who ultimately emerged, the famously brilliant Cardinal Tommaso Parentucelli, was only forty-nine years old, young enough to be Borgia’s son. Though small and oddly shriveled in appearance, with tiny dark birdlike eyes, the new Pope Nicholas was in good enough health, lived simply, and had great plans both for the papacy and for the city of Rome. There could have seemed little possibility that the elderly Cardinal Borgia would live to see another conclave, and no possibility at all that he would ever be in contention for the papal crown.