CHAPTER SEVEN

A PIT TO CATCH FOXES

TO SERVE AS the pope’s apostolic secretary was the pinnacle of curial ambition: though he was only in his early thirties, Poggio’s skills had taken him from nothing to the top of the heap. And the heap at this moment was swarming with diplomatic maneuvers, complex business transactions, rumors of invasion, heresy hunts, threats, feints, and doubledealing, for Baldassare Cossa—Pope John XXIII, as he called himself—was a master of intrigue. Poggio would have been involved in controlling access to the pontiff, digesting and passing along key information, taking notes, articulating policies that had only been roughly sketched, crafting the Latin missives sent to princes and potentates. He was necessarily privy to secrets and to strategies, for the apostolic secretary had to be initiated into his master’s plans for dealing with the two rival claimants¹ to the papal throne, with a Holy Roman Emperor determined to end the schism, with heretics in Bohemia, with neighboring powers poised to seize territories controlled by the Church. The sheer quantity of work on Poggio’s desk must have been enormous.

Yet during this period Poggio found the time to copy in his beautiful handwriting the three long books of Cicero’s On the Laws (De legibus), along with his oration on Lucullus. (The manuscript is in the Vatican Library: Cod. Vatican lat. 3245.) Somehow then he managed to hold on at least to moments of what he called his freedom. But that freedom—the plunging back into the ancient past—appears always to have heightened his alienation from the present. To be sure, his love for classical Latin did not lead him to idealize, as some of his contemporaries did, ancient Roman history: Poggio understood that history to have had its full measure of human folly and wickedness. But he was aware that the city in which he lived was a pathetic shadow of its past glory.

The population of Rome, a small fragment of what it had once been, lived in detached settlements, one at the Capitol where the massive ancient Temple of Jupiter had once stood, another near the Lateran whose old imperial palace had been given by Constantine to the bishop of Rome, yet another around the crumbling fourth-century Basilica of St. Peter’s. Between these settlements² spread a wasteland of ruins, hovels, rubble-strewn fields, and the shrines of martyrs. Sheep grazed in the Forum. Armed thugs, some in the pay of powerful families, others operating on their own, swaggered through dirty streets, and bandits lurked outside the walls. There was virtually no industry, very little trade, no thriving class of skilled artisans or burghers, no civic pride, and no prospect of civic freedom. One of the only spheres of serious enterprise was the trade in digging out the metal clasps that had knitted the ancient buildings together and in peeling off the thin sheets of marble veneer so that they could be reused in churches and palaces.

Though most of Poggio’s writings come from later in his career, there is no indication that he ever felt anything other than a kind of soul-sickness at the contemporary world in which he was immersed. His career triumph in the pontificate of John XXIII must have given him some pleasure, but it only intensified this immersion and hence intensified both the soul-sickness and the fantasy of an escape. Like Petrarch before him, Poggio cultivated an archaeologist’s sense of what had once existed, so that vacant spaces and the jumble of contemporary Rome were haunted by the past. “The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit,” he wrote, “was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and tributes of so many nations.” Now just look at it:

This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! How changed! How defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill…. The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect magistrates, is now inclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes.

The relics of the fallen greatness only made the experience of the present more melancholy. In the company of his humanist friends, Poggio could try to conjure up what it all must once have looked like: “Cast your eyes³ on the Palatine hill, and seek, among the shapeless and enormous fragments, the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticoes of Nero’s palace.” But it was to the shattered present that, after his brief imaginary excursions into antiquity, the papal bureaucrat always had to return.

That present, in the turbulent years that Rome was ruled by John XXIII, must have threatened not only to extinguish the occasional “freedom” Poggio prized but also to drag him into cynicism so deep that there could be no escape. For the question with which Poggio and others in Rome grappled was how they could retain even the shreds of a moral sensibility while living and working in the court of this particular pope. A decade older than his apostolic secretary Poggio, Baldassare Cossa had been born on the small volcanic island of Procida, near Naples. His noble family held the island as its personal possession, the hidden coves and well-defended fortress evidently well suited to the principal family occupation, piracy. The occupation was a dangerous one: two of his brothers were eventually captured and condemned to death. Their sentence was commuted, after much pulling of strings, to imprisonment. It was said by his enemies that the young Cossa participated in the family business, owed to it his lifelong habit of wakefulness at night, and learned from it his basic assumptions about the world.

Procida was far too small a stage for Baldassare’s talents. Energetic and astute, he early displayed an interest in what we might call higher forms of piracy. He studied jurisprudence at the University of Bologna—in Italy it was legal studies rather than theology that best prepared one for a career in the Church—where he obtained doctorates in both civil and canon law. At his graduation ceremony, a colorful affair in which the successful candidate was conducted in triumph through the town, Cossa was asked what he was going to do now. He answered, “To be Pope.”⁴

Cossa began his career, as Poggio did, in the court of his fellow Neapolitan Boniface IX, whom he served as private chamberlain. In this capacity he helped to oversee the open sale of Church offices and the feverish market in indulgences. He also helped to organize the hugely profitable jubilee when pilgrims to Rome’s principal churches were granted a plenary indulgence, that is, a remission of the horrible pain of purgatorial fires in the afterlife. The massive crowds filled the city’s inns, patronized the taverns and brothels, filed across the narrow bridges, prayed at the sacred shrines, lit candles, gawked at wonder-working pictures and statues, and returned home with talismanic souvenirs.

The original idea was that there would be a jubilee once every hundred years, but the demand was so great and the consequent profits so enormous that the interval was shortened first to fifty years, then thirty-three, and then twenty-five. In 1400, shortly before Poggio arrived on the scene, the huge numbers of pilgrims drawn to Rome by the dawning of a new century led the pope to issue a plenary indulgence, though only a decade had passed since the last jubilee. To enhance its profits, the Church came up with a variety of offers that may reflect Cossa’s practical intelligence. Hence, for example, people who desired⁵ the spiritual benefits conferred by the pilgrimage to Rome—exemption from thousands of years of postmortem torments in Purgatory—but who wanted to avoid the difficult journey over the Alps could obtain the same indulgences by visiting certain shrines in Germany, provided that they paid what the longer trip would have cost.

Cossa’s gifts were not limited to clever marketing schemes. Appointed governor of Bologna, he proved himself to be a highly successful civil and military commander, as well as a vigorous orator. He was in many ways the embodiment of those qualities—astute intelligence, eloquence, boldness in action, ambition, sensuality, limitless energy—that together form the ideal of the Renaissance man. But even for an age accustomed to a gap between religious professions and lived realities, the cardinal deacon of Bologna, as Cossa was called, seemed an unusual figure to be wearing clerical vestments. Though he was, as Poggio’s friend Bruni remarked, a hugely gifted man of the world, it was obvious that he did not have a trace of a spiritual vocation.

This widespread perception of his character helps account for the peculiar blend of admiration, fear, and suspicion that he aroused and that led people to believe that he was capable of anything. When on May 4, 1410, Pope Alexander V died immediately after a visit to Bologna for a dinner with his friend the cardinal deacon, it was widely rumored that he had been poisoned. The suspicions did not prevent Cossa’s faction of fellow cardinals from electing him to succeed Alexander as pope. Perhaps they were simply frightened. Or perhaps it seemed to them that Cossa, only forty years old, had the skills needed to end the disgraceful schism in the Church and to defeat the rival claims by the doggedly inflexible Spaniard Pedro de Luna, who styled himself Pope Benedict XIII, and the intransigent Venetian Angelo Correr, who styled himself Pope Gregory XII.

If this was the cardinals’ hope, they were soon disappointed, but they could not have been altogether surprised. The schism had already lasted more than thirty years and had eluded all attempts at resolution. Each of the claimants had excommunicated the followers of the others and had called down divine vengeance upon them. Each combined attempts to seize the moral high ground with thuggish tactics. Each had powerful allies but also strategic weaknesses that made achieving unity through military conquest impossible. Everyone understood that the situation was intolerable. The competing national factions—the Spanish, French, and Italians each backing a different candidate—undermined the claim to the existence of a catholic, that is, universal, church. The spectacle of multiple squabbling popes called the whole institution into question. The situation was embarrassing, distasteful, dangerous. But who could solve it?

Fifteen years earlier, the theologians at the University of Paris had placed a large chest in the cloister of the Mathurins and asked anyone who had any idea how to end the schism to write it down and drop it in the slot that had been cut in the lid. More than ten thousand notes were deposited. Fifty-five professors, assigned to read through the notes, reported that three principal methods had been proposed. The first, the so-called “Way of Cession,” required the simultaneous abdication of those who claimed to be pope, followed by the proper election of a single candidate; the second, the “Way of Compromise,” envisaged arbitration at the end of which one of the existing claimants would emerge as the sole pope; the third, the “Way of Council,” called for the convening of the bishops of all of the Catholic world who would, by formal vote in an ecumenical assembly, have the final authority to resolve the dispute.

The first two methods had the advantage of being relatively simple, cost-effective, and straightforward; however, they had, like military conquest, the disadvantage of being impossible. Calls for simultaneous abdication met with the predictable results, and attempts to set the preconditions for arbitration inevitably broke down into hopeless squabbling. That left the option of the “Way of Council,” strongly supported by the Holy Roman Emperor-elect, King Sigismund of Hungary, who was at least nominally allied to Cossa’s faction in Rome.

Surrounded by his cardinals and secretaries, in the massive pagan mausoleum that had been converted into the fortified Castel St. Angelo, the wily pope could see no reason to accede to pressure to convene an ecumenical assembly. Such an assembly, which would inevitably unleash long-standing hostility to Rome, could only threaten his position. So he temporized and delayed, busying himself with making and unmaking alliances, with maneuvering against his ambitious enemy to the south, Ladislas, king of Naples, and with filling the papal coffers. After all, there were innumerable petitions to be considered, bulls to be issued, the papal states to defend, administer, and tax, Church offices and indulgences to be sold. Poggio and the other secretaries, scriptors, abbreviators, and minor court bureaucrats were kept very busy.

The stalemate might have continued indefinitely—that, in any case, is what the pope must have hoped for—had it not been for an unexpected turn of events. In June 1413, Ladislas’s army suddenly broke through Rome’s defenses and sacked the city, robbing houses, pillaging shrines, breaking into palaces and carting off treasures. The pope and his court escaped to Florence, where they could count on some limited protection: the Florentines and the Neapolitans were enemies. But to survive as pope, Cossa now absolutely needed the support of Sigismund—then residing in Como—and urgent negotiations made clear that this support would only come if the pope agreed to convoke a general council.

His back to the wall, Cossa proposed that the council be held in Italy, where he could marshal his principal allies, but the emperor objected that the long journey across the Alps would be too difficult for the more elderly bishops. The council, he declared, should be in Constance, a city in his territory, nestled in the mountains between Switzerland and Germany on the shores of the Bodensee. Though the location was hardly to the pope’s liking, by the fall of 1413 his agents—exploratores—were in Constance, inquiring about lodging and provisions, and by the following summer the pope and his court were on the move, as were powerful churchmen and their servants from everywhere in Europe, all converging on the one small South German town.

A citizen of Constance,⁶ Ulrich Richental, was fascinated enough by what was going on around him to write a circumstantial chronicle of the events. From Richental we learn that the pope traveled over the Alps with an enormous retinue, some six hundred men. From other sources,⁷ we know that among this group (or shortly to join them) were the greatest humanists of the time: Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Cencio Rustici, Bartolomeo Aragazzi da Montepulciano, Zomino (Sozomeno) da Pistoia, Benedetto da Piglio, Biagio Guasconi, Cardinals Francesco Zaba rella, Alamano Adimari, Branda da Castiglione, the archbishop of Milan Bartolomeo della Capra, and his future successor Francesco Pizzolpasso. The pope was a thug, but he was a learned thug, who appreciated the company of fine scholars and expected court business to be conducted in high humanist style.

The trip across the mountains was never easy, even in late summer. At one point the pope’s carriage tipped over, dumping him in the snow. When, in October 1414, he looked down at Constance and its lake ringed by mountains, he turned to his train—among whom, of course, was Poggio—and said, “This is the pit where they catch foxes.”

If he had only the competing factions within the Italian church to deal with, Cossa would probably have been confident that he could evade the fox trap; after all, he had for several years prevailed, or at least managed to maintain his hold upon the papal throne in Rome. The problem was that others, many from beyond the reach of his patronage or his poisons, were streaming into Constance from all over Christendom: some thirty cardinals, three patriarchs, thirty-three archbishops, one hundred abbots, fifty provosts (ecclesiastical officials), three hundred doctors of theology, five thousand monks and friars, and about eighteen thousand priests. In addition to the emperor and his large retinue, there were also, by invitation, many other secular rulers and their representatives: the electors Ludwig von der Pfalz and Rudolph of Saxony, the dukes of Bavaria, Austria, Saxony, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Lorraine, and Teck, the margrave of Brandenburg, the ambassadors of the kings of France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Poland, Naples, and the Spanish realms, along with a vast array of lesser nobles, barons, knights, lawyers, professors, and public officials. Each of these in turn had small armies of retainers, guards, servants, cooks, and the like, and the whole assembly attracted hordes of sight-seers, merchants, mountebanks, jewelers, tailors, shoemakers, apothecaries, furriers, grocers, barbers, scribes, jugglers, acrobats, street singers, and hangers-on of all types. The chronicler Richental estimates that over seven hundred whores came to town and hired their own houses, plus “some who lay in stables⁸ and wherever they could, beside the private ones whom I could not count.”

The arrival of somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 visitors put a huge strain on Constance and invited every kind of abuse. Officials tried to combat crime in the usual way—staging public executions⁹—and set rules for the range and quality of services that visitors should expect: so, for example, “Every fourteen days the tablecloths and sheets and whatever needed washing should be changed for clean.” Food for the visitors (and their 30,000 horses) was a constant concern, but the area was well stocked, and the rivers made it possible to renew supplies. Bakers with movable carts went through the streets with little ovens in which they baked rolls, pretzels, and pastries stuffed with spiced chicken and other meats. In inns and makeshift food stalls set up in booths and tents, cooks prepared the usual range of meats and fowl, along with thrush, blackbirds, wild boar, roe venison, badger, otter, beaver, and hare. For those who preferred fish, there were eels, pike, sturgeon, garfish, bream, whitefish, gudgeons, catfish, bullheads, dace, salt cod, and herring. “There were also frogs¹⁰ and snails for sale,” Richental adds with distaste, “which the Italians bought.”

Once he and his own court had been provided for in suitable style, the practical arrangements were the least of Cossa’s concerns. Against his wishes, the council determined to organize itself and conduct its votes by blocs or “nations”—Italians, French, Germans, Spanish, and English—an arrangement that diminished his own special position and the influence of his core supporters. With his power rapidly melting away he took care to insist on his prestige. If he could hardly claim any moral high ground, he could at least establish his ceremonial significance. He needed to show the whole enormous assembly that he was no mere Neapolitan fox; he was the Vicar of Christ, the embodiment of spiritual radiance and worldly grandeur.

Clad in white vestments and a white miter, on October 28, 1414, Baldassare Cossa made his entry into Constance on a white horse. Four burghers of the town carried a golden canopy over his head. Two counts, one Roman and the other German, walked by his side, holding his bridle. Behind them rode a man on a great horse from whose saddle rose a long staff bearing a huge umbrella—Richental mistook it for a hat—made of red and gold cloth. The umbrella, broad enough to spread over three horses, was topped by a golden knob on which stood a golden angel holding a cross. Behind the umbrella came nine cardinals on horseback, all in long, red mantles, with red hoods, and all wearing wide red hats. Other clerics and the staff of the curia, including Poggio, followed, along with attendants and servants. And at the front of the procession stretched a line of nine white horses, covered with red saddlecloths. Eight of these were laden with garments—the pope’s wardrobe was evidence of his hold upon his sacred identity—and the ninth, a little bell jingling on its head, bore on its back a casket of silvergilt covered with a red cloth to which were attached two silver candlesticks with burning candles. Within the casket, at once jewel box and tomb, was the Holy Sacrament, the blood and body of Christ. John XXIII had arrived.

Ending the schism was the council’s most important item of business, but it was not the only one. Two other major issues were the reform of ecclesiastical government—that was also not happy news for John XXIII—and the repression of heresy. The latter held out some promise for the cornered fox, almost the only tactical weapon he could find. The correspondence that the secretaries copied out for their pope attempted to turn the focus away from the schism and from papal corruption and toward someone whose name Poggio must have begun to write in official documents again and again.

Forty-four-year-old Jan Hus, a Czech priest and religious reformer, had been for some years a thorn in the side of the Church. From his pulpit and in his writings, he vehemently attacked the abuses of clerics, condemning their widespread greed, hypocrisy, and sexual immorality. He denounced the selling of indulgences as a racket, a shameless attempt to profit from the fears of the faithful. He urged his congregants not to put their faith in the Virgin, the cult of the saints, the Church, or the pope, but in God alone. In all matters of doctrine he preached that Holy Scripture was the ultimate authority.

Hus boldly meddled not with doctrine alone but with the politics of the Church at a moment of growing national restiveness. He argued that the state had the right and the duty to supervise the Church. Laymen could and should judge their spiritual leaders. (It is better, he said, to be a good Christian than a wicked pope or prelate.) An immoral pope could not possibly claim infallibility. After all, he said, the papacy was a human institution—the word “pope” was nowhere in the Bible. Moral probity was the test of a true priest: “If he is manifestly sinful,¹¹ then it should be supposed, from his works, that he is not just, but the enemy of Christ.” And such an enemy should be stripped of his office.

It is easy to see why Hus had been excommunicated for his teachings in 1410 and why the Church dignitaries who gathered in Constance were exercised about his refusal to submit. Protected by powerful Bohemian noblemen, he continued to disseminate dangerous views, views that threatened to spread. And one can see as well why Cossa, his back to the wall, thought that it might be advantageous to shift the council’s focus to Hus, and not only as a convenient distraction. For the Bohemian, feared and hated by the Church establishment, was articulating as a principle precisely what Cossa’s enemies in that same establishment were proposing to do: to disobey and depose a pope accused of corruption. Perhaps this uneasy mirroring helps to explain a strange charge¹² that was circulated in Constance about Hus: that he was an extraordinary magician who could read the thoughts of all who approached him within a certain distance.

Hus, who had repeatedly asked for the opportunity to explain himself before a Church council, had been formally invited to present his views in person before the prelates, theologians, and rulers at Constance. The Czech reformer had the visionary’s luminous confidence that his truths, should he only be allowed to articulate them clearly, would sweep away the cobwebs of ignorance and bad faith.

As someone who had been charged with heresy, he was also understandably wary. Hus had recently seen three young men, two of whom were his students, beheaded by the authorities. Before he left the relative safety of his protectors in Bohemia, he applied for and received a certificate of orthodoxy from the grand inquisitor of the diocese of Prague, and he received as well a guarantee of free passage from the emperor Sigismund. The safe-conduct, bearing the large imperial seal, promised “protection and safeguard” and requested that Hus be allowed “freely and securely” to “pass, sojourn, stop, and return.” The Bohemian nobles who accompanied him rode ahead to meet with the pope and ask whether Hus would be allowed to remain in Constance free from the risk of violence. “Had he killed my own brother,” John replied, “not a hair of his head should be touched while he remained in the city.” With these assurances, not long after the grand arrival of the beleaguered pope, the reformer reached Constance.

Hus’s arrival on November 3 must have seemed a godsend, as it were, to John XXIII. The heretic was hated by the upright in the Church as well as by the crooked. He and his principal associate, Jerome of Prague, were known followers of the English heretic John Wycliffe, whose advocacy of vernacular translations of the Bible, insistence on the primacy of Scripture-based faith over works, and attacks on clerical wealth and the selling of indulgences had led to his condemnation in the previous century. Wycliffe had died in his bed, much to the disappointment of his ecclesiastical enemies, but the council now ordered that his remains be dug up and cast out of consecrated ground. It was not an auspicious sign for their reception of Jan Hus.

Notwithstanding the assurances that the pope, the council, and the emperor had given him, Hus was almost immediately vilified and denied the opportunity to speak in public. On November 28, barely three weeks after he arrived, he was arrested on order of the cardinals and taken to the prison of a Dominican monastery on the banks of the Rhine. There he was thrown into an underground cell through which all the filth of the monastery was discharged. When he fell seriously ill, he asked that an advocate be appointed to defend his cause, but he was told that, according to canon law, no one could plead the cause of a man charged with heresy. In the face of protests from Hus and his Bohemian supporters about the apparent violation of his safe-conduct, the emperor chose not to intervene. He was, it was said, uncomfortable about what seemed a violation of his word, but an English cardinal had reportedly reassured him that “no faith need be kept with heretics.”

If Cossa thought that the persecution of Hus would distract the council from its determination to end the schism or silence his own enemies, he was sorely mistaken. As the mood in the papal court turned grim, the pope continued to stage extravagant public displays. Richental describes the spectacles:

When the Pope was to give¹³ his blessing, a bishop in a mitre came first into the balcony, carrying a cross, and behind the cross came two bishops in white mitres, carrying two tall burning candles in their hands and set the candles burning in the window. Then came four cardinals, also in white mitres, or sometimes six, or at other times less. Sometimes also our lord King came into the balcony. The cardinals and the King stood in the windows. After them came Our Holy Father the Pope, wearing the most costly priest’s robes and a white mitre on his head. Under the vestments as for Mass he wore one more robe than a priest and had gloves on his hands and a large ring, set with a rare great stone, on the middle finger of his right hand. He stood in the central window, so that everyone saw him. Then came his singers, all with burning candles so that the balcony shone as if it were on fire, and they took their places behind him. And a bishop went up to him and took off his mitre. Thereupon the Pope began to chant….

But what was going on away from the gawking public was more and more disquieting. Though he continued to preside over the council meetings, the pope had lost control of the agenda, and it was clear that the emperor Sigismund, who had arrived in Constance on December 25, was not inclined to save him.

Cossa still had allies. At a session of the council on March 11, 1415, discussing how they might obtain a single pope for the whole Church, the archbishop of Mainz stood up and said that he would never obey anyone but John XXIII. But there was no chorus of support, of the kind he must have hoped to trigger. Instead, the patriarch of Constantinople exclaimed, “Quis est iste ipse? Dignus est comburendus!—Who is that fellow? He deserves to be burned!” The archbishop walked out, and the session broke up.

The fox saw that the trap was about to be sprung. Constance, he said, was not safe. He no longer felt secure. He wanted to move the council to some place more suitable. The king demurred, and the town council of Constance hastened to offer reassurance: “If His Holiness¹⁴ had not sufficient security,” the burghers declared, “they would give him more and guard him against all the world, even though a disastrous fate should compel them to eat their own children.” Cossa, who had made comparably extravagant promises to Jan Hus, was evidently not appeased. On March 20, 1415,¹⁵ at approximately 1 p.m., he fled. Wearing a gray cape with a gray cowl wrapped around him so that no one could see his face, he rode quietly through the town gates. Next to him rode a crossbowman, along with two other men, both muffled up. In the evening and all through the night, the pope’s adherents—his servants and attendants and secretaries—left town as stealthily as they could. But the word quickly spread. John XXIII was gone.

In the following weeks Cossa’s enemies, who tracked the fugitive to Schaffhausen where he had fled to an ally’s castle, drew up a bill of indictment against him. As menacing rumors circulated and his remaining allies started to crumble, he fled again, this time too in disguise, and his court—among whom, presumably, was his apostolic secretary, Poggio—was thrown into further confusion: “The members of the Curia¹⁶ all followed him in haste and wild disorder,” one of the contemporary chroniclers puts it; “for the Pope was in flight and the rest in flight too, by night, though with no pursuers.” Finally, under great pressure from the emperor, Cossa’s principal protector gave over his unwelcome guest, and the world had the edifying spectacle of a pope put under guard as a criminal.

Seventy charges¹⁷ were formally read out against him. Fearing their effect on public opinion, the council decided to suppress the sixteen most scandalous charges—never subsequently revealed—and accused the pontiff only of simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture, and murder. He was charged with poisoning his predecessor, along with his physician and others. Worst of all—at least among the charges that were made public—was one that his accusers dredged up from the ancient struggle against Epicureanism: the pope was said to have maintained stubbornly, before reputable persons, that there was no future life or resurrection, and that the souls of men perish with their bodies, like brutes.

On May 29, 1415, he was formally deposed. Stricken from the roster of official popes, the name John XXIII was once again available, though it took more than five hundred years for another pope—the remarkable Angelo Roncalli—to be courageous enough in 1958 to adopt the name for himself.

Shortly after the deposition, Cossa was briefly imprisoned in Gottlieben Castle on the Rhine, where Hus, near starvation, had been chained in irons for more than two months. It is not known whether the pope and the heretic, so implausibly united in abject misery, were brought together by their captors. At this point,¹⁸ if Poggio was still with his master—and the record does not make that clear—he would have parted from him for the last time. All of the former pope’s attendants were dismissed, and the prisoner, soon transferred to another place of confinement, was henceforward surrounded by German-speaking guards with whom he could only communicate in sign language. Effectively cut off from the world, he occupied himself by writing verses on the transitory nature of all earthly things.

The pope’s men were suddenly masterless. Some scrambled quickly to find employment with one or another of the prelates and princes in Constance. But Poggio remained unemployed, a bystander to events in which he was no longer a party. He stayed on in Constance, but we do not know if he was present when Hus was finally brought before the council—the moment the reformer had longed for and upon which he had staked his life—only to be mocked and shouted down when he attempted to speak. On July 6, 1415, at a solemn ceremony in the cathedral of Constance, the convicted heretic was formally unfrocked. A round paper crown, almost eighteen inches high and depicting three devils seizing a soul and tearing it apart, was placed upon his head. He was led out of the cathedral past a pyre on which his books were in flames, shackled in chains, and burned at the stake. In order to ensure that there would be no material remains, the executioners broke his charred bones into pieces and threw them all into the Rhine.

There is no direct record of what Poggio personally thought of these events in which he had played his small part, the part of a bureaucrat who helps the ongoing functioning of a system that he understands is vicious and hopelessly corrupt. It would have been dangerous for him to speak out, even had he been inclined to do so, and he was, after all, in the service of the papacy whose power Hus was challenging. (A century later, Luther, mounting a more successful challenge, remarked: “We are all Hussites without knowing it.”) But when, some months later, Hus’s associate, Jerome of Prague, was also put on trial for heresy, Poggio was not able to remain silent.

A committed religious reformer with degrees from the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Heidelberg, Jerome was a famous orator whose testimony on May 26, 1416, made a powerful impression on Poggio. “I must confess,” he wrote to his friend Leonardo Bruni, “that I never saw any one who in pleading a cause, especially a cause on the issue of which his own life depended, approached nearer to that standard of ancient eloquence, which we so much admire.” Poggio was clearly aware that he was treading on dangerous ground, but the papal bureaucrat could not entirely restrain the humanist’s passionate admiration:

It was astonishing¹⁹ to witness with what choice of words, with what closeness of argument, with what confidence of countenance he replied to his adversaries. So impressive was his peroration, that it is a subject of great concern, that a man of so noble and excellent a genius should have deviated into heresy. On this latter point, however, I cannot help entertaining some doubts. But far be it from me to take upon myself to decide in so important a matter. I shall acquiesce in the opinion of those who are wiser than myself.

This prudent acquiescence did not altogether reassure Bruni. “I must advise you henceforth,” he told Poggio in reply, “to write upon such subjects in a more guarded manner.”

What had happened to lead Poggio, ordinarily careful not to court real danger, to write so unguardedly to his friend? In part, the rashness might have been provoked by the trauma of what he had just seen: his letter is dated May 30, 1416, which is the day that Jerome was executed. Poggio was writing in the wake of witnessing something particularly horrible, as we know from the chronicler Richental who also recorded what happened. As the thirty-seven-year-old Jerome was led out of the city, to the spot where Hus was burned and where he too would meet his end, he repeated the creed and sang the litany. As had happened with Hus, no one would hear his confession; that sacrament was not granted to a heretic. When the fire was lit, Hus cried out and died quickly, but the same fate, according to Richental, was not granted to Jerome: “He lived much longer²⁰ in the fire than Hus and shrieked terribly, for he was a stouter, stronger man, with a broad, thick, black beard.” Perhaps these terrible shrieks explain why Poggio could not any longer remain discreetly silent, why he felt compelled to testify to Jerome’s eloquence.

Shortly before he was so unnerved by Jerome’s trial and execution, hoping to cure the rheumatism in his hands (a serious concern for a scribe), Poggio decided to visit the celebrated medicinal baths at Baden. It was not an altogether easy trip from Constance: first twenty-four miles on the Rhine by boat to Schaffhausen, where the pope had fled; then, because the river descended steeply at that point over cliffs and rocks, ten miles on foot to a castle called Kaiserstuhl. From this spot, Poggio saw the Rhine cascading in a waterfall, and the loud sound made him think of classical descriptions of the fall of the Nile.

At the bathhouse in Baden, Poggio was amazed by what he saw: “Old women²¹ as well as younger ones,” he wrote to a friend in Florence, “going naked into the water before the eyes of men and displaying their private parts and their buttocks to the onlookers.” There was a sort of lattice between the men’s and women’s baths, but the separation was minimal: there were, he observed, “many low windows, through which the bathers can drink together and talk and see both ways and touch each other as is their usual custom.”

Poggio refused to enter the baths himself, not, he insisted, from any undue modesty but because “it seemed to me ridiculous that a man from Italy, ignorant of their language, should sit in the water with a lot of women, completely speechless.” But he watched from the gallery that ran above the baths and described what he saw with the amazement that someone from Saudi Arabia might bring to an account of the beach scene at Nice.

There were, he observed, bathing suits of some sort, but they concealed very little: “The men wear nothing but a leather apron, and the women put on linen shifts down to their knees, so cut on either side that they leave uncovered neck, bosom, arms, and shoulders.” What would cause a crisis in Poggio’s Italy and perhaps trigger violence seemed simply to be taken for granted in Baden: “Men watched their wives being handled by strangers and were not disturbed by it; they paid no attention and took it all in the best possible spirit.” They would have been at home in Plato’s Republic, he laughed, “where all property was held in common.”

The rituals of social life at Baden seemed dreamlike to Poggio, as if they were conjuring up the vanished world of Jove and Danae. In some of the pools, there was singing and dancing, and some of the girls—“good looking and well-born and in manner and form like a goddess”—floated on the water while the music was playing: “They draw their clothes slightly behind them, floating along the top of the water, until you might think they were winged Venuses.” When men gaze down at them, Poggio explains, the girls have a custom to ask playfully for something. The men throw down pennies, especially to the prettiest, along with wreaths of flowers, and the girls catch them sometimes in their hands, sometimes in their clothes, which they spread wider. “I often threw pennies and garlands,” Poggio confessed.

Confident, easy in themselves, and contented, these are people “for whom life is based on fun, who come together here so that they may enjoy the things for which they hunger.” There are almost a thousand of them at the baths, many drinking heavily, Poggio wrote, and yet there is no quarreling, bickering, or cursing. In the simple, playfully unselfconscious behavior before him, Poggio felt he was witnessing forms of pleasures and contentment that his culture had lost:

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.

He is describing the scenes at the baths, he tells his friend, “so that you may understand from a few examples what a great center of the Epicurean way of thinking this is.”

With his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans, Poggio believed he glimpsed for a moment the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. He knew perfectly well that this pursuit ran counter to Christian orthodoxy. But in Baden it was as if he found himself on the threshold of a mental world in which Christian rules no longer applied.

In his reading, Poggio had frequently stood on that threshold. He never ceased to occupy himself with the pursuit of lost classical texts. Judging from a remark by Niccoli, he spent some of his time in Constance looking through library collections—there in the monastery of St. Mark he evidently found a copy of an ancient commentary²² on Virgil. In the early summer of 1415, probably just after his master had been formally deposed and he found himself definitively out of work, he made his way to Cluny, in France, where he found a codex with seven orations by Cicero, two of which had been unknown. He sent this precious manuscript to his friends in Florence and also made a copy in his own hand, inscribed with a remark deeply revealing of his mood:

These seven orations²³ by Marcus Tullius had through the fault of the times been lost to Italy. By repeated searches through the libraries of France and Germany, with the greatest diligence and care, Poggio the Florentine all alone brought them out of the sordid squalor in which they were hidden and back into the light, returning them to their pristine dignity and order and restoring them to the Latin muses.

When he wrote these words, the world around Poggio was falling to pieces, but his response to chaos and fear was always to redouble his immersion in books. In the charmed circle of his bibliomania, he could rescue the imperiled legacy of the glorious past from the barbarians and return it to the rightful heirs.

A year later, in the summer of 1416, in the wake of the execution of Jerome of Prague and shortly after the interlude at Baden, Poggio was once again out book-hunting, this time accompanied by two other Italian friends on a visit to the monastery of St. Gall, about twenty miles from Constance. It was not the architectural features of the great medieval abbey that drew the visitors; it was a library of which Poggio and his friends had heard extravagant rumors. They were not disappointed: a few months later Poggio wrote a triumphant letter to another friend back in Italy, announcing that he had located an astonishing cache of ancient books. The capstone of these was the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutes, the most important ancient Roman handbook on oratory and rhetoric. This work had been known to Poggio and his circle only in fragmentary form. To recover the whole of it seemed to them wildly exciting—“Oh wondrous treasure! Oh unexpected joy!” one of them exclaimed—because it gave them back a whole lost world, a world of public persuasion.

It was the dream of persuading an audience through the eloquence and conviction of public words that had drawn Hus and Jerome of Prague to Constance. If Hus had been shouted down, Jerome, dragged from the miserable dungeon where he had been chained for 350 days, managed at least to make himself heard. For a modern reader, there is something almost absurd about Poggio’s admiration for Jerome’s “choice of words” and the effectiveness of his “peroration”—as if the quality of the prisoner’s Latin were the issue; but it was precisely the quality of the prisoner’s Latin that unsettled Poggio and made him doubt the validity of the charges against the heretic. For he could not, at least at this strange moment of limbo, disguise from himself the tension between the bureaucrat who worked for the sinister John XXIII and the humanist who longed for the freer, clearer air, as he imagined it, of the ancient Roman Republic. Poggio could find no real way to resolve this tension; instead, he plunged into the monastic library with its neglected treasures.

“There is no question,” Poggio wrote, “that this glorious man, so elegant, so pure, so full of morals and wit, could not much longer have endured the filth of that prison, the squalor of the place, and the savage cruelty of his keepers.” These words were not a further lapse into the kind of imprudent admiration of the eloquent, doomed Jerome that alarmed Leonardo Bruni; they are Poggio’s description of the manuscript of Quintilian that he found at St. Gall:

He was sad²⁴ and dressed in mourning, as people are when doomed to death; his beard was dirty and his hair caked with mud, so that by his expression and appearance it was clear that he had been summoned to an undeserved punishment. He seemed to stretch out his hands and beg for the loyalty of the Roman people, to demand that he be saved from an unjust sentence.

The scene he had witnessed in May appears still vivid in the humanist’s imagination as he searched through the monastery’s books. Jerome had protested that he had been kept “in filth and fetters, deprived of every comfort”; Quintilian was found “filthy with mold and dust.” Jerome had been confined, Poggio wrote to Leonardo Aretino, “in a dark dungeon, where it was impossible for him to read”; Quintilian, he indignantly wrote of the manuscript in the monastic library, was “in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon … where not even men convicted of a capital offense would have been stuck away.” “A man worthy of eternal remembrance!” So Poggio rashly exclaimed about the heretic Jerome whom he could not lift a finger to save. A few months later in the monastery of St. Gall, he rescued another man worthy of eternal remembrance from the barbarians’ prison house.

It is not clear how conscious the link was in Poggio’s mind between the imprisoned heretic and the imprisoned text. At once morally alert and deeply compromised in his professional life, he responded to books as if they were living, suffering human beings. “By Heaven,” he wrote of the Quintilian manuscript, “if we had not brought help, he would surely have perished the very next day.” Taking no chances, Poggio sat down and began copying the whole lengthy work in his beautiful hand. It took him fifty-four days to complete the task. “The one and only light²⁵ of the Roman name, except for whom there was no one but Cicero and he likewise cut into pieces and scattered,” he wrote to Guarino of Verona, “has through our efforts been called back not only from exile but from almost complete destruction.”

The expedition to the monastery was expensive, and Poggio was perennially short of money: such was the consequence of his decision not to take the profitable route of priesthood. Back in Constance his money worries deepened, as he found himself dangling, without work and without clear prospects. His deposed master, Baldassare Cossa, was desperately negotiating a quiet retirement for himself. After spending three years in prison, he eventually bought his release and was made a cardinal in Florence, where he died in 1419, his elegant tomb by Donatello erected in the baptistry of the Duomo. Another pope Poggio had earlier worked for, the deposed Gregory XII, died during this same period. The last thing he said was “I have not understood the world, and the world has not understood me.”

It was high time for a prudent, highly trained bureaucrat, almost forty years old, to look out for himself and find some stable means of support. But Poggio did nothing of the kind. Instead, a few months after his return from St. Gall, he left Constance again, this time apparently without companions. His craving to discover and to liberate whatever noble beings were hidden in the prison house had evidently only intensified. He had no idea what he would find; he only knew that if it was something ancient and written in elegant Latin, then it was worth rescuing at all costs. The ignorant, indolent monks, he was convinced, were locking away traces of a civilization far greater than anything the world had known for more than a thousand years.

Of course, all Poggio could hope to find were pieces of parchment, and not even very ancient ones. But for him these were not manuscripts but human voices. What emerged from the obscurity of the library was not a link in a long chain of texts, one copied from the other, but rather the thing itself, wearing borrowed garments, or even the author himself, wrapped in gravecloths and stumbling into the light.

“We accept Aesculapius as belonging among the gods because he called back Hippolytus, as well as others from the underworld,” Francesco Barbaro wrote to Poggio after hearing of his discoveries;

If people, nations,²⁶ and provinces have dedicated shrines to him, what might I think ought to be done for you, if that custom had not already been forgotten? You have revived so many illustrious men and such wise men, who were dead for eternity, through whose minds and teachings not only we but our descendants will be able to live well and honourably.

Books that had fallen out of circulation and were sitting in German libraries were thus transformed into wise men who had died and whose souls had been imprisoned in the underworld; Poggio, the cynical papal secretary in the service of the famously corrupt pope, was viewed by his friends as a culture hero, a magical healer who reassembled and reanimated the torn and mangled body of antiquity.

Thus it was that in January 1417, Poggio found himself once again in a monastic library, probably Fulda. There he took from the shelf a long poem whose author he may have recalled seeing mentioned in Quintilian or in the chronicle compiled by St. Jerome: T. LUCRETI CARI DE RERUM NATURA.