SEVEN
Patron and advocate of Rome's new age, Nicholas V appeared peculiarly ill suited for his role. Small, pale and withered, he walked with bent shoulders, his black eyes darting nervous glances around him, his large and prominent mouth pursed as though in disapproval. Yet no one doubted his generosity and kindliness, just as all who knew him praised his learning, his determination to reconcile the Church with the secular culture of the burgeoning Renaissance and to make Rome once again worthy of its past as the glory of the ancient world and the focus of Christianity. The son of a Ligurian doctor, he had been forced by poverty to abandon his studies at the University of Bologna and to go to work as a tutor in Florence. Amiable and witty, he had made many friends and impressed them with the breadth of his knowledge. ‘What he does not know,’ said one of them, his fellow humanist, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, ‘is outside the range of human understanding.’ He had become Pope in 1447.
Both his predecessors, Martin V and Eugenius IV, the austere, dignified and extremely tall son of a rich merchant, had done what they could to restore the ravaged city. Pope Martin had revived the ancient office of Overseer of the Public Thoroughfares with a view to clearing away the rubbish and filth that filled the streets and poisoned the air. He had restored several churches and other public buildings; reconstructed the aqueducts which were in such a ruinous condition that many citizens had no idea what their original purpose had been; and, after rebuilding the Acqua Vergine, he had erected a fountain facing the Piazza dei Crociferi which was to be transformed in the eighteenth century into one of Rome's most celebrated sights, the Trevi Fountain.1 Pope Martin had also summoned to Rome the great Tuscan master, Masaccio, and had brought from Ostia the relics of St Augustine's mother, St Monica, whose tomb can now be seen in the church of S. Agostino.2 Yet when Pope Eugenius had returned to Rome in 1443, having been driven from it after quarrelling with his predecessor's family, the Colonna, the city was still in the most parlous condition. S. Maria in Domnica and S. Pancrazio both remained on the verge of collapse; S. Stefano had no roof, and many other churches were in as bad or worse a state. Several lanes in the Borgo were avoided by the prudent citizen because of the ever-present danger of tumbling masonry. The streets, filthy as ever, still resembled those of a country village in which cattle, sheep and goats, driven by their owners in long country capes and knee-boots, wandered from wall to wall.
24. Pope Nicholas V, founder of the Vatican Library, who died in Rome in 1455.
You must have heard of the condition of this city from others, so I will be brief [wrote a visitor, Alberto de' Alberti, in March 1444]. There are many splendid palaces, houses, tombs and temples, and other edifices in infinite number, but all are in ruins. There is much porphyry and marble from ancient buildings, but every day these marbles are destroyed by being burnt for lime in scandalous fashion. What is modern is poor stuff, that is to say, the new buildings; the beauty of Rome lies in what is in ruins. The men of the present day, who call themselves Romans, are very different in bearing and in conduct from the ancient inhabitants. Breviter loquendo, they all look like cowherds.
Other visitors wrote of moss-grown statues, of defaced and indecipherable inscriptions, of ‘parts within the walls that look like thick woods’, caves where forest animals were wont to breed, of hares and deer being caught in the streets, of the daily sight of heads and limbs of men who had been quartered being nailed to doors, placed in cages or impaled on spears.
Eugenius had continued Martin's work of restoration. He had repaired the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, renovated the Lateran Palace, carried out extensive works at Castel Sant’ Angelo, restored walls and bridges as well as numerous churches. He had ordered the removal of piles of rubbish and wooden shanties from around the Pantheon, forbade the extraction of masonry from the Colosseum and other ancient monuments under the severest penalties, paved streets, constructed, a mint near St Peter's, and commissioned the imposing bronze doors from the Florentine Filarete which are still to be seen in the central portal of the present basilica and which were among the first examples of Renaissance work in Rome.3
Yet, despite all the work that his predecessors had done, Nicholas V found that Rome was still for the most part a crumbling, dirty medieval city, bitterly cold in winter when the tramontana blew across the frozen marshes, unhealthy in summer and autumn when malaria was rife. The inhabitants, a large proportion of them foreigners and most of the rest born outside the city, numbered now no more than about forty thousand, less than a twentieth of the population in the days of Nero and ten thousand less than the Florence of the Medici. Had it not been for the pilgrims who came to Rome each year and provided the city with its one highly profitable trade, there would have been fewer inhabitants even than this.
The Pope set about his task with characteristic resolution, in accordance with his belief that if the faith of the people was to be strong, they must have visual encouragement, ‘majestic buildings, lasting memorials, witnesses to their faith planted on earth as if by the hand of God’. Several more churches were, therefore, repaired, including S. Stefano Rotondo and S. Teodoro.4 The Senatorial Palace was again rebuilt, as was the Vatican Palace, which thereafter became the principal papal residence. Work also began on a new basilica to replace old St Peter's whose southern wall, now leaning outwards almost five feet from its base, was in danger of collapse. Having consulted Leon Battista Alberti, whom he had known in Florence, Pope Nicholas decided upon a domed basilica with a nave and double aisles, and, disregarding his predecessor's prohibition, had no less than 2,500 wagonloads of materials from the Colosseum carted across the Ponte Sant' Angelo.
By the beginning of 1449 Pope Nicholas considered that the restoration of Rome and the peaceful state of the Church justified his declaring that the year 1450 would be a Universal Jubilee. Plenary indulgences – remission of punishments due for past sins – were to be given to all who came to Rome and paid daily visits over a specified period to the city's four principal churches, St Peter's, St Paul's, the Lateran Basilica and S. Maria Maggiore. Italians had to remain in Rome for fourteen days to qualify; those who came from beyond the Alps for eight. Romans had to make the peregrination of the churches every day for a month.
Tens of thousands of pilgrims consequently made their way to Rome from all over Europe. ‘Countless multitudes of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Armenians, Dalmatians and Italians were to be seen hastening to Rome as to the refuge of all the nations of the earth,’ wrote one who made the journey. ‘They were full of devotion and chanting hymns in their different languages.’ Another eyewitness compared the thronging multitudes to a flight of starlings or a swarm of ants. From Danzig (Gdánsk) in Germany alone as many as two thousand men, women and children took the road to the south.
A greater crowd of Christians was never known to hasten to any Jubilee [recorded an enthusiastic chronicler from Brescia]. Kings, dukes, marquesses, counts and knights, people of all ranks in Christendom, daily arrived in such huge crowds in Rome that there were millions in the city. And this continued for the whole year, excepting in the summer on account of the plague which carried off innumerable victims. But almost as soon as the epidemic abated at the beginning of the cold season the influx again began.
All the most popular shrines were crowded to the doors. At all hours of the day hundreds of pilgrims jostled and pushed and craned their necks in the catacombs beneath the church of St Sebastian, in St Peter's, where the Pope, who was frequently seen walking barefoot between the stations, gave his benediction every Sunday, and in those other sacred places where the heads of the Apostles, the handkerchief of St Veronica and the other precious relics of Rome were displayed. There was a special attraction this year, the canonization of St Bernardine of Siena, the Franciscan friar and ‘people' preacher’. This took place on Whit Sunday in St Peter's, where a lofty throne was installed for the Pope beneath two hundred wax-lights. Surrounded by fourteen cardinals and twenty-four bishops, all magnificently arrayed in the richest vestments, he carried out the rite with the ‘greatest exactness, solemnity and splendour’.
The surge of pilgrims to Rome in 1450 brought immense profits to the Church, enabling the Pope to deposit 100,000 golden florins in the Medici bank alone and to continue confidently with his restoration of the city. Huge sums were also made by numerous Roman citizens, particularly money-changers, apothecaries, innkeepers and artists who painted pictures of the holy handkerchief and other relics. But the numbers of pilgrims were far too great for the authorities to cope with adequately. The additional food brought into the city from the Papal States proved utterly insufficient for the thousands of mouths to be fed. Millers ran out of grain, bakers out of flour, dealers out of wine and cheese, fruit and salted meat. Prices rose steeply. Many hungry pilgrims were forced to depart before their obligations had been completed. The Florentine pilgrim, Giovanni Rucellai, estimated that there were 1,022 inns in Rome – though a census of 1527 records no more than 236 – but they were soon all full, ‘and every house became an inn’.
Pilgrims begged for the love of God to be taken in on payment of a good price, but it was not possible. They had to spend the nights out of doors. Many perished from cold; it was dreadful to see. Still such multitudes thronged together that the city was actually famished. Every Sunday numerous pilgrims left Rome, but by the following Saturday all the houses were again fully occupied. If you wanted to go to St Peter's it was impossible on account of the masses of men that filled the streets. St Paul's, St John Lateran, and S. Maria Maggiore were filled with worshippers. All Rome was filled, so that one could not go through the streets. When the Pope gave his solemn blessing, all spaces in the neighbourhood of St Peter's, even the surrounding vineyards, from which the loggia of the benediction could be seen, were thick with pilgrims, but those who could not see him were more numerous than those who could, and this continued until Christmas.
After Christmas there was a slight lull, but then in Lent the crowds surged in again to such an extent that many of them had to camp out in the vineyards, there being no other sleeping-places left.
In Holy Week the throngs coming from St Peter's or going there were so enormous that they were crossing the bridge over the Tiber until the second or third hour of the night [wrote the contemporary Roman chronicler, Paolo di Benedetto di Cola dello Mastro]. The crowd was here so great that the soldiers of Sant' Angelo, together with other young men – I was often there myself – had frequently to hasten to the spot and separate the masses with sticks in order to prevent serious accidents. At night many of the poor pilgrims were to be seen sleeping beneath the porticoes, while others wandered about in search of missing fathers, sons, or companions; it was pitiful to see them. And this went on until the feast of the Ascension, when the multitudes of pilgrims again diminished because the plague came to Rome. Many people then died, especially many of these pilgrims; all the hospitals and churches were full of the sick and dying, and they were to be seen in the infected streets falling down like dogs. Of those who with great difficulty, scorched with heat and covered with dust, departed from Rome, a countless number fell a sacrifice to the terrible pestilence, and graves were to be seen all along the roads, even in Tuscany and Lombardy.
After the plague there was another fearful disaster on 19 December when a larger crowd than ever had assembled to see the holy handkerchief and receive the papal benediction. About four o'clock it was announced that, due to the lateness of the hour, the benediction could not be given that day. So all the people hurried away over the Ponte Sant' Angelo which was encumbered with shopkeepers' booths. At the far end of the bridge a number of horses and mules took fright, blocking the passage of the pedestrians. Unaware that the bridge was for the moment impassable, other pilgrims pushed forward on to it, pressing those in front of them into the now struggling mass of bodies, several of whom fell and were trampled underfoot. Soon panic broke out. People were squashed to death or pushed screaming through the booths and over the railings into the river. For a whole hour the confusion continued as people struggled to get off the bridge, while others forced their way on to it to drag away the dead and wounded. Soon over 170 bodies were laid out in the nearby church of SS. Celsoe e Giuliano5 and a further thirty lay drowned in the Tiber. People who escaped had their clothes torn to pieces.
Some were to be seen running about in their doublets, some in shirts, and others almost naked [a Florentine pilgrim reported to Giovanni de' Medici]. In the terrible confusion all had lost their companions, and the cries of those who sought missing friends were mingled with the wailing of those who mourned for the dead. As night came on, the most heartrending scenes were witnessed in the church of San. Celso which was full of people up to 11 o'clock; one found a father, one a brother, and another a son among the dead. An eyewitness says that men who had gone through the Turkish war had seen no more ghastly sight.
The disaster did, however, have one good outcome: to prevent such accidents in future Pope Nicholas ordered a row of houses in front of the bridge to be cleared away, the demolition of the ruinous Arch of Gratian, Valentinian and Theodosius6 and the creation of an open space, the Piazza di Ponte Sant' Angelo.
As well as endeavouring to make Rome architecturally worthy of her position as the focus of Christianity, Pope Nicholas tried to make her worthy of it artistically, too. He made it a leading centre for goldsmiths and silversmiths and for tapestry makers, calling upon Renaud de Maincourt to come from Paris and to open a tapestry workshop in the city. He also employed Fra Angelico, the small and saintly friar from Florence who knelt to pray before starting to paint each morning, who was so overcome by emotion when depicting Christ upon the cross that tears poured down his cheeks, and who was so modest and unworldly that when Nicholas asked him to dinner he excused himself from eating meat without the permission of his prior, it never occurring to him that the Pope's authority in the matter might suffice. For Nicholas, Fra Angelico decorated the lovely private chapel in the Vatican as well as the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, and painted the altarpiece of the high altar of S. Maria sopra Minerva. He died in Rome in 1455 and was buried in this church.
With works of art came books. Agents were sent all over Europe in pursuit of manuscripts and volumes, and generously rewarded humanist scholars came to Rome to translate and copy ancient texts. At the Pope's desire Homer, Herodotus and Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Ptolemy and Diodorus were all translated into Latin. And at his death this librarian manqué, himself a gifted calligrapher, was able to bequeath over a thousand volumes to the Vatican Library, his own foundation.7
In the short pontificate of Pope Nicholas's successor, the Spaniard Alfonso de Borgia who became the first of the Borgia Popes as Calixtus III in 1455, the vigour of artistic and scholarly life in Rome diminished. An elderly, gouty compromise between candidates backed by the Colonna and the Orsini, Calixtus III condemned his predecessor for spending so much money on restoration, works of art and books when he should have been concentrating on a crusade against the Saracens. He himself sold works of art and even pawned his mitre to fight the Turks and raised a pontifical fleet to free various Aegean islands from their control. But most of his time was spent as an invalid in the Vatican, surrounded by relations who passed in and out of his candle-lit bedroom and who invited other Spaniards to come to Rome to share their good fortune. To the undisguised relief of the Romans, exasperated by the invasion of those they called ‘the Catalans’ and by the Spanish accents and fashions to be seen and heard in the streets, Pope Calixtus died three years after his elevation. So, once again, cardinals from all over Europe converged upon Rome to play their parts in a conclave which was to elect a pope in whom the papacy and Rome, by now indissolubly interwoven, could both take pride.
One of the cardinals making his way to Rome that hot summer of 1458 was Guillaume d'Estouteville, the rich and wily Archbishop of Rouen who, intent upon being elected himself, began promising positions of honour and profit immediately upon his arrival. In the latrines of the Vatican, recognized as the safest places in which to conduct intrigues, his supporters gathered, discussing ways by which their candidate could be assured of the necessary two-thirds majority. Confident as they were at first, it soon became clear that most of the eighteen cardinals present favoured another candidate, the equally ambitious Bishop of Siena, who described in his autobiography the dramatic scenes in the conclave when the time for the second scrutiny drew near, the first vote having proved inconclusive.
The cardinals assembled in the Chapel of St Nicholas where, upon the altar, was the golden cup into which they were to place their slips of paper. The cup was guarded by three cardinals, one of them d'Estouteville who was trembling with excitement. Into the cup, in order of seniority, the cardinals dropped their votes, and when all had done so the cup was emptied. The papers were unfolded and the names read out. D'Estouteville then declared the result. But the Bishop of Siena, who had been prudently making notes of the names as they had been announced, objected that his rival had miscounted the number of votes cast for him. And so he had. But even so the Bishop of Siena had not acquired the sufficient majority; and it was decided that the Sacred College would have to resort to the method known as per accessum by which, during discussion, it could be discovered whether or not any of the voters might be prepared to transfer their support to another candidate for the sake of agreement.
‘All sat in their places, silent, pale, as though they had been struck senseless,’ recalled the Bishop of Siena in his account of the final stages of the conclave. ‘No one spoke for some time, no one so much as moved a muscle apart from his eyes which glanced this way, then that. The silence was astonishing.’ Suddenly the young Rodrigo Borgia, who had been appointed cardinal (at the age of twenty-five) by his uncle, Calixtus III, stood up to announce, ‘I accede to the Bishop of Siena.’ But, after this declaration, all fell into silence once more. Two cardinals, afraid to vote in this open manner, hurriedly left the room, ‘pleading the calls of nature’. Then another cardinal rose to announce his support of the Bishop of Siena. Yet even this did not secure the two-thirds majority: one more vote was wanted. Still no one spoke. At length the aged Prospero Colonna unsteadily rose to his feet and ‘would have given his voice solemnly [in favour of the Bishop of Siena] but he was seized about the waist [by d'Estouteville] who rebuked him harshly. And when he persisted in his intention d'Estouteville tried to drag him out of the room. Provoked by this indignity, Colonna called out in loud protest, “I also accede to Siena and I make him Pope!’”
In Rome there were rejoicings that night that an Italian had been chosen. ‘Everywhere was laughter, joy, voices crying, “Siena! Siena! Oh, fortunate Siena!”… Bonfires blazed at every crossroads… Neighbour feasted neighbour. There was not a place where horns and trumpets did not sound, not a quarter of the city that was not alive with public joy. The older men said they had never seen in Rome such popular rejoicings.’
The Pope, who chose the title Pius II, was disappointed only by the Roman mob who had, as custom allowed, ransacked his apartments. Some of the looters, mistaking the name announced from a high window of the palace, had rushed away to the house of the rich Archbishop of Genoa where they were delighted with their plunder. Those who burst into the real Pope's rooms, however, found little of value, though they took away everything they could carry, even the marble statues.
The Pope had been born poor. The son of an impoverished nobleman who farmed his own land beyond the yellow stone walls of the small Tuscan village of Corsignano, he was the eldest of eighteen children. Before his birth, his mother had had a startling dream that she was bringing into the world a baby with a mitre on his head. And since miscreant clerics were made to wear paper mitres while being tortured or executed, since miterino (‘worthy of a mitre’) was rudely applied to those whom such a fate might be expected to befall, his mother naturally feared that her son would come to some disgraceful end. Indeed, although he turned out to be a good child, willing to help his father till the grey and stony soil, and to be a conscientious, though amorous and high-spirited student, it was not until he became Bishop of Trieste that she felt able to place a more favourable interpretation upon her vision. Attractive, clever, witty and eloquent, her son advanced rapidly in the world. Already a diplomat of exceptional persuasiveness when he entered the Church, as well as a renowned orator, poet and conversationalist, he had become a bishop a mere two years after taking holy orders. He had entered the conclave with quiet confidence that he would be elected; and, while prepared to promote the interests and indulge the whims of his friends and family in the manner of so many of his predecessors, he was also determined to become a worthy occupant of his holy office and to bear always in mind the words he had spoken to a friend when he was ordained deacon and accepted that the chastity he confessed to dread must now replace his former licentiousness, ‘I do not deny my past. I have been a great wanderer from what is right, but at least I know it and hope that the knowledge has not come too late.’
25. The humanist Pope Pius 11(1405–64), who did his best to protect the city's monuments from spoliation.
Steeped as he was in classical literature and moved as he was by beauty in architecture as well as in nature, Pius II had a deep and abiding interest in the antiquities of ancient Rome; and he frequently inspected these remains and described them with enthusiasm. While yet a cardinal he had composed the well-known epigram:
Oh Rome! Your very ruins are a joy,
Fallen is your pomp; but it was peerless once!
Your noble blocks wrench'd from our ancient walls
Are burn'd for lime by greedy slaves of gain.
Villains! If such as you may have their way
Three ages more, Rome's glory will be gone.
He did his best to protect the city's monuments from further spoliation, and in a bull of April 1462 forbade the breaking down of ancient buildings in Rome and in the Campagna even on private property. In his Commentaries he describes himself overcome by rage on seeing a man digging up stones from the Appian Way, ‘smashing large boulders into small pieces with which to build a house at Genzano’. He reproved the man angrily, and gave orders that the road must never again be plundered in this way. Yet Pius himself was not above pillaging a monument when a building of his own inspiration needed good pieces of stone. Thus marble slabs from the Colosseum and the Forum were used for the steps leading up to the new tribune for the Papal Benediction which the Pope constructed at St Peter's.
These steps and the tribune were one of the few ambitious enterprises which Pope Pius undertook in Rome, for he had in mind a great crusade, and the resources of the Church, even though pilgrims and jubilees were so highly profitable, were severely limited. The Papal States made the Pope a sovereign prince, but they did not produce much revenue; Rome itself produced far less; while the taxes of Church property outside Italy and the first year's revenues, known as annates, which holders of benefices had been required to pay to the papacy since the beginning of the fourteenth century, had been severely reduced by what was known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. This decree, issued by the French clergy in 1438, upheld the right of the French Church to administer its temporal property independently of the papacy and reduced annates by four fifths. It was not superseded until 1516 when the papacy and the French king agreed to the Concordat of Bologna. Throughout his pontificate, therefore, Pius II had financial worries. The Curia as the repository of the Church's archives, the administrator of her justice, the superintendent of her finances, diplomacy and policies, and Christendom's final court of appeal, was an extremely expensive organization to run, even though there were steady fees and charges to support its organization and officials. The Pope was alone responsible for the payment of the magistrates and the costly administration of Rome which, although there was still a Senator who paraded about the city clothed in crimson gown and brocaded cloak, carrying an ivory sceptre and attended by four servants, His Holiness now ruled monarchically with the help of a Governor.
There were still occasional revolts against this rule. There had been one in 1436 when Pope Eugenius had been forced to flee and to restore order, first through his crafty, cruel, awesome representative, Giovanni Vitelleschi, Bishop of Recanati, and then through the equally worldly and despotic Cardinal Lodovico Scarampo, in whose time various priests found guilty of theft were exposed for several days in a cage in the Campo dei Fiori. The ringleader, a canon, was seated on an ass and, wearing a mitre decorated with figures of devils, was hanged on a tree in the Piazza S. Giovanni; and two of his principal accomplices were burned to death. Again, in the reign of Nicholas V, there had been disturbances when an arrogant citizen, Stefano Porcari, in emulation of Cola di Rienzo, had attempted to overthrow papal rule and establish a Republic; he had been executed together with his brother-in-law, Angelo de Maso, and Angelo's eldest son. And now, in Pius II's time, while the Pope and most members of the Curia were out of Rome, having gone north to a congress at Mantua, Angelo de Maso's two younger sons, Tiburzio and Valeriano, rose up against papal rule and, collecting a gang of three hundred young men, mostly from noble families, rampaged about the city, forcing the intimidated Senator to flee from his palace in the Campo dei Fiori and seek safety in the Vatican. Thereafter citizens were seized and held to ransom; women were violated and then drowned; the houses of supporters of papal rule were ransacked. One of the gang kidnapped and raped a girl on her way to her wedding. This so outraged the citizens that the Governor felt obliged to take strong action. Tiburzio de Maso was induced to quit the city which he left for one of the castles of his relations, the Savelli, ‘swaggering like some great prince through the streets’, saluting the crowds who had gathered to see him depart.
When Pope Pius returned to Rome, the de Maso brothers, encouraged in their revolt by the Colonna family and the condottiere leader, Giacomo Piccinino, were stirring up further trouble. And Pius knew that in order to restore order and firm papal government in the city they would have to be destroyed. Tiburzio, who had made his way back into Rome through a gap in the walls near the Baths of Diocletian, was arrested and, with several of his companions, sentenced to death. The Senator, Cardinal Tebaldo, proposed that men guilty of ‘such atrocious crimes’ should be tortured before they were executed. But the Pope intervened: death was punishment enough, and priests could accompany the condemned men to the scaffold. He wept from pity when they were hanged.
He was now fifty-five years old. Persistent gout, stone and a constant cough had long since aged him prematurely. His hair was almost white, his small frame bowed and shrunken; and he was quickly roused to anger, though the outbursts were soon controlled. He worked as hard as ever, rising at daybreak and saying or hearing Mass before attending to his papers. Audiences and interviews with cardinals and officials of the Curia occupied his time before a scanty midday meal followed by a brief siesta. Dictation, literary work and more audiences took up the afternoon until supper-time. Before going to bed he said the remainder of his office, and when in bed he called his secretaries for further dictation before five or six hours' sleep.
Preoccupied with the threat to Christendom from the Turks – who had captured Constantinople in 1453, pushed their frontiers as far as the Danube, and in 1480 were to establish a bridgehead in southern Italy by capturing Otranto – Pope Pius had been bitterly disappointed by the failure of the Congress he had called at Mantua to discuss a great crusade. He had returned to Rome and, standing on the steps of St Peter's, had displayed pieces of the skull of the Apostle Andrew to the assembled multitude as he vowed to deliver the Christian world from its enemies. In the summer of 1464, racked with gout and fever, he had set out for Ancona where the forces of Christendom were to assemble for a Holy War. But once again his hopes were not to be realized. When he arrived at Ancona there were only two ships in the harbour; and by the time a few others sailed down the Adriatic from Venice he had but a few hours left to live. No sooner was he dead than the Venetian galleys set sail for home; and the cardinals, thankful to be spared the discomfort of a crusade, returned to Rome to elect his successor.