CHAPTER SIX

IN THE LIE FACTORY

FOR AN AMBITIOUS provincial upstart like Poggio, the swirling, swollen orbit of the pope was the principal magnet, but Rome held out other opportunities. The powerful Roman noble families—most prominently, the Colonna or the Orsini—could always find some way to make use of someone endowed with excellent Latin and exquisite handwriting. Still more, the bishops and cardinals residing in Rome had their own smaller courts, in which a notary’s ability to draft and pen legal documents was a sought-after skill. Upon his arrival, Poggio found a place in one of these courts, that of the cardinal of Bari. But this was only a brief halt on the way to the higher goal of papal service—whether in the palace (the palatium) or the court (the curia). Before the year was out, the staunchly republican Salutati had pulled enough strings at the court of the reigning pope, Boniface IX, to help his prized pupil get what he most wanted, the coveted position of scribe—apostolic scriptor.

Most of the papal bureaucrats were from Rome and its surroundings; many of them, like Poggio, had some training in the law. Though scriptors were expected to attend mass every day before work, their post was a secular one—they busied themselves principally with the business side of the papacy, the side that entailed rationality, calculation, administrative skill, and legal acumen. The pope was (or at least claimed to be) the absolute ruler of a large swath of central Italy, extending north into the Romagna and to the territories controlled by the Venetian Republic. Many of the cities over which he ruled were perennially restive, the policies of the surrounding states were as aggressive, treacherous, and grasping as his own, foreign powers were always poised to make their own armed incursions into the peninsula. To hold his own, he needed all of the diplomatic cunning, money, and martial ferocity he could muster, and hence he needed and maintained a large governmental apparatus.

The pope was, of course, the absolute ruler of a much larger spiritual kingdom, one that extended, in principle at least, to the entire human race and affected to shape its destiny both in this world and in the next. Some of those he claimed as his subjects professed surprise at his presumption—as did the New World peoples whom the pope in the late fifteenth century grandly signed over en masse to be vassals of the kings of Spain and Portugal—and others, such as the Jews or the Eastern Orthodox Christians, stubbornly resisted. But the great majority of Christians in the West, even if they lived in distant regions, or were ignorant of the Latin in which he conducted his affairs, or knew something of the spectacular moral failings that stained his office, believed that they stood in a special relationship to the pope’s unique authority. They looked to the papacy to determine points of doctrine in a dogmatic religion that claimed these points were crucial for the fate of the soul and enforced this claim with fire and sword. They sought papal dispensations—that is, exemptions from the rules of canon law—in such matters as marriages and annulments and a thousand other delicate social relations. They jockeyed for appointment to various offices and confirmation of valuable benefices. They looked for everything that people hope an immensely wealthy and powerful lawmaker, landowner, and spiritual leader will confer upon them or deny to their rivals. In the early fifteenth century, when Poggio got his bearings in Rome, cases came into the papal court for settlement at the rate of two thousand a week.

All of this activity—far exceeding any other chancery court in Europe—required skilled personnel: theologians, lawyers, notaries, clerks, secretaries. Petitions had to be drawn up in the proper form and filed. Minutes had to be carefully kept. Decisions had to be recorded. Orders were transcribed and copied. Papal bulls—that is, decrees, letters patent, and charters—were copied and sealed. Abbreviated versions of these bulls were prepared and disseminated. The bishop of Rome had a large household staff, as befitted his princely rank; he had a huge entourage of courtiers, advisers, clerks, and servants, as befitted his political office and his ceremonial significance; he had an enormous chancery, as befitted his juridical power; and he had a massive religious bureaucracy, as befitted his spiritual authority.

This was the world Poggio entered and in which he hoped to thrive. A position in the curia could serve as a step toward highly remunerative advancement in the Church hierarchy, but those who aspired to such advancement became churchmen. Poggio certainly understood that ordination was the route to wealth and power, and, unmarried as he was, there was no obstacle to his taking it. (He may already have had a mistress and illegitimate children, but that certainly was no obstacle). And yet he held back.

He knew himself¹ well enough to understand that he lacked a religious vocation. That, of course, did not stop many of his contemporaries, but he did not like what he observed in those who had made this choice anyway. “I am determined² not to assume the sacerdotal office,” he wrote to his friend Niccoli, “for I have seen many men whom I have regarded as persons of good character and liberal dispositions, degenerate into avarice, sloth, and dissipation, in consequence of their introduction into the priesthood.” This degeneration would, he thought, almost certainly be his own fate, one he was determined to avoid: “Fearing lest this should be the case with myself, I have resolved to spend the remaining term of my pilgrimage as a layman.” He was, to be sure, turning his back on a particularly comfortable and secure existence in a very insecure world, but for Poggio the cost of this security was too high: “I do not think³ of the priesthood as liberty, as many do,” he confided to Niccoli, “but as the most severe and oppressive form of service.” The life course he opted for instead may seem to us a peculiarly constrained one—a lay bureaucrat in the service of the pope—but to Poggio the refusal of orders evidently felt liberating, as if he were guarding an inner core of independence.

He needed every bit of independence that he could muster. The Roman curia was, from a moral perspective, a notoriously perilous place, a peril deftly summed up⁴ by a Latin proverb of the time: Curialis bonus, homo sceleratissimus (“Good curialist, wickedest of men”). The atmosphere he breathed is most brilliantly conveyed by a strange work of the 1430s, written when Poggio was still very much at the center of the curia. The work, entitled On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court, is by a younger humanist contemporary, the Florentine Lapo da Castiglionchio. It is a dialogue, in the style of Cicero, a form much favored at the time by writers who wished to air controversial and even dangerous views without taking full responsibility for them. Hence, at the start of Lapo’s imaginary conversation, a character called Angelo—not Lapo himself, of course, heaven forbid—violently assails the moral bankruptcy of the curia, a place “in which crime,⁵ moral outrage, fraud, and deceit take the name of virtue and are held in high esteem.” The thought that this sink of hypocrisy makes a claim to religious faith is grotesque: “What can be more alien⁶ to religion than the curia?”

Lapo, professing to speak in his own voice, rises to the defense of the papal court. The place attracts crowds of petitioners, to be sure, but we know that God wants to be worshipped by multitudes. Therefore he must be particularly gratified by the magnificent spectacles of worship staged in His honor by the richly dressed priests. And for ordinary mortals, the curia is the best place to acquire the virtue known as prudence, since there are so many types of people in attendance from all over the world. Just to observe the wide array of outlandish costumes and accents and ways of wearing one’s beard is in itself a valuable lesson in the range of human customs. And the court is also the best place to study the humanities. After all, Lapo writes, as “the pope’s domestic secretary”⁷ (and hence a very influential figure), “there is Poggio of Florence, in whom there is not only the highest erudition and eloquence, but also a unique gravity, seasoned with plenty of great wit and urbanity.”

True, he concedes, it is disturbing that bribery and corruption lie at the heart of the curia, but these problems are the work of a small group of miserable thieves and perverts who have brought the place into disrepute. Perhaps the pope will notice the scandal one day and undertake to clean his house, but in any case one should in life always keep in mind what was intended, not what is actually done.

Angelo, evidently persuaded by these arguments, begins to wax enthusiastic over the cunning of the lawyers in the curia, with their subtle grasp of the weaknesses and intimate secrets of everyone and their ability to exploit all opportunities to make money. And, given the huge sums that are paid for bits of paper with papal seals, what fantastic profits are reaped! The place is a gold mine. There is no need any longer to affect the poverty of Christ: that was necessary only at the beginning in order to avoid the imputation of bribing people to believe. Times have changed, and now riches, so essential for any important enterprise, are in order for whoever can acquire them. Priests are allowed to amass all the wealth they want; they only have to be poor in spirit. To want high priests actually to be poor, rather than the immensely rich men that they are, displays a kind of “mindlessness.”⁸

So the dialogue runs on, with deadpan seriousness and wide-eyed enthusiasm. The curia, the friends agree, is a great place not only for serious study but also for lighter amusements such as gaming, horsemanship, and hunting. Just think of the dinner parties at the papal court—witty gossip, along with fantastic food and drink served by beautiful, young, hairless boys. And for those whose tastes do not run in the direction of Ganymede, there are the abundant pleasures of Venus. Mistresses, adulterous matrons, courtesans of all descriptions occupy a central place in the curia, and appropriately so, since the delights they offer have such a central place in human happiness. Lewd songs, naked breasts, kissing, fondling, with small white lap-dogs trained to lick around your groin to excite desire—and all for remarkably low prices.

This expansive enthusiasm for outrageously corrupt behavior and the frantic pursuit of wealth must be a sly satirical game. Yet On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court is a very peculiar satire, and not merely because its gushing praise for what the reader is presumably meant to despise evidently took in some contemporaries.⁹ The problem is that when he wrote the work, Lapo was busily seeking appointment in the curia for himself. It is possible, of course, that he felt ambivalent about his attempt: people often despise the very institutions they are frantically trying to enter. But perhaps compiling this inventory of the vices of the curia was something more than an expression of ambivalence.

There is a moment in the work in which Lapo praises the gossip, obscene stories, jokes, and lies that characterize the conversation of the apostolic scribes and secretaries. No matter, he says, whether the things that are reported are true or false. They are all amusing and, in their way, instructive:

No one is spared,¹⁰ whether he is absent or present, and everyone is equally attacked, to the great guffawing and laughter of all. Dinner parties, tavern life, pandering, bribes, thefts, adultery, sexual degradation, and shameful acts are publicly revealed. From this one acquires not only pleasure but also the greatest utility, since the life and character of all is thus placed before your eyes.

Lapo is no doubt being ironic, but he is also, in the very manner of his irony, showing that he gets the cynical joke and thereby demonstrating his suitability to participate in the conversations he pillories. This was in effect a way of presenting himself to the members of the curia, and above all to “Poggio of Florence.”

By the time Lapo came on the scene, in the 1430s, Poggio had risen from scriptor to the much more powerful and remunerative position of papal secretary. At any one time there were about a hundred scriptors in the papal court, but only six apostolic secretaries. The latter had direct access to the pope himself and hence far greater influence. A careful suggestion here, a well-timed word there, could make all the difference in the outcome of an important case or the disposition of a wealthy benefice.

Among the secretaries, there was one in particular who was known as the secretarius domesticus or secretus, that is, the pope’s private or intimate secretary. This coveted position was the golden apple, and, after years of maneuvering, Poggio—whose father had once fled from Arezzo a step ahead of his creditors—finally plucked it. When ambitious Lapo or any other office seeker surveyed the court, it was easy enough to see that Poggio was foremost among “the pope’s men.”

But why then should Lapo have thought to ingratiate himself with Poggio by painting a slyly ironic picture of the corrupt institution to which he hoped to be appointed? Because already in the 1430s, and probably for a long time before this, Poggio had established himself at the very center of what he called “the Bugiale,” the Lie Factory. There, in a room at the court, the papal secretaries would regularly gather to exchange stories and jokes. “Nobody was spared,”¹¹ Poggio wrote, in a phrase echoed by Lapo, “and whatever met with our disapprobation was freely censured; oftentimes the Pope himself was the first subject-matter of our criticism.” The chatter, trivial, mendacious, sly, slanderous, often obscene, was the kind of speech that is almost forgotten before its sound fades away, but Poggio seems not to have forgotten any of it. He went back to his desk and, in his best Latin, fashioned the conversations he had had in the Lie Factory into something he entitled the Facetiae.

It is almost impossible for jokes that are centuries old to retain any life. The fact that a few of the jokes of Shakespeare or Rabelais or Cervantes continue to make us smile is something of a miracle. Almost six hundred years old, Poggio’s Facetiae is by now largely interesting only as a symptom. These relics, like the remains of long-dead insects, tell us what once buzzed about in the air of the Vatican. Some of the jokes are professional complaints, of the sort secretaries must always have had: the boss routinely claims to detect mistakes and demands rewriting, but, if you bring him the identical document, which you pretend to have corrected, he will take it into his hand, as if to peruse it, give it a glance, and then say, “Now it is all right:¹² go, seal it up….” Some are stories, half-skeptical, half-credulous, about popular miracles and prodigies of nature. A few reflect wryly on Church politics, as when Poggio compares the pope who conveniently forgot his promise to end the schism to a quack from Bologna who announced that he was going to fly: “At the end of the day,¹³ when the crowd had watched and waited, he had to do something, so he exposed himself and showed his ass.”

Most of the stories in the Facetiae are about sex, and they convey, in their clubroom smuttiness, misogyny mingled with both an insider’s contempt for yokels and, on occasion, a distinct anticlerical streak. There is the woman¹⁴ who tells her husband that she has two cunts (duos cunnos), one in front that she will share with him, the other behind that she wants to give, pious soul that she is, to the Church. The arrangement works because the parish priest is only interested in the share that belongs to the Church. There is the clueless priest who in a sermon against lewdness (luxuria) describes practices that couples are using to heighten sexual pleasure; many in the congregation take note of the suggestions and go home to try them out for themselves. There are dumb priests who, baffled by the fact that in confession almost all the women say that they have been faithful in matrimony and almost all the men confess to extramarital affairs, cannot for the life of them figure out who the women are with whom the men have sinned. There are many tales about seductive friars and lusty hermits, about Florentine merchants nosing out profits, about female medical woes magically cured by lovemaking, about cunning tricksters, bawling preachers, unfaithful wives, and foolish husbands. There is the fellow humanist—identified by name as Francesco Filelfo—who dreams that he puts his finger into a magic ring that will keep his wife from ever being unfaithful to him and wakes to find that he has his finger in his wife’s vagina. There is the quack doctor who claims that he can produce children of different types—merchants, soldiers, generals—depending on how far he pushes his cock in. A foolish rustic, bargaining for a soldier, hands his wife over to the scoundrel, but then, thinking himself sly, comes out of hiding and hits the quack’s ass to push his cock further in: “Per Sancta Dei Evangelia,”¹⁵ the rustic shouts triumphantly, “hic erit Papa!” “This one is going to be pope!”

The Facetiae was a huge success.

If Poggio’s work—the best known jokebook of its age—captures anything of the atmosphere of the papal court, it is less surprising that Lapo tried to call attention to himself by signaling openly a strange blend of moral outrage and cynicism. (As it turned out, a few months after he penned his Dialogue in Praise of the Papal Court, poor Lapo died of plague at the age of thirty-three.) By the sixteenth century, the Catholic hierarchy, deeply alarmed by the Protestant Reformation, would attempt to stamp out within its own ranks this current of subversive humor. Poggio’s Facetiae was on a list,¹⁶ alongside books by Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Machiavelli, that the Church wished to burn. But in the world Poggio inhabited, it was still permissible, even fashionable, to reveal what was, in any case, widely understood. Poggio could write of the institution where he spent most of his working life that “there is seldom room¹⁷ for talent or honesty; every thing is obtained through intrigue or luck, not to mention money, which seems to hold supreme sway over the world.”

Ambitious young intellectuals, living by their wits, the papal scribes and secretaries looked about and felt that they were cleverer, more complex, more worthy of advancement than the overstuffed prelates they served. Theirs was, predictably, a world of resentment: we complained, Poggio writes, “of the inadequate men¹⁸ who hold the highest dignities of the Church, discreet and learned men being left out in the cold, whilst ignorant and worthless persons are exalted.”

Theirs was also, equally predictably, a world of intense sniping, competitiveness, and backbiting. We have, in the snide remarks about Poggio’s parentage, already had a taste of what they dished out to one another, and Poggio’s own “jokes” about his enemy, the rival humanist Filelfo, are cut from the same cloth:

At a meeting¹⁹ of the Pope’s Secretaries, in the Pontifical palace, attended, as usual, by a number of men of great learning, conversation had turned upon the filthy and disgusting life led by that villain, Francesco Filelfo, who was, on all sides, charged with numerous outrages, and someone inquired if he was of noble extraction,—“To be sure,” said one of his fellow-countrymen, assuming a most earnest look, “to be sure he is, and his nobility is even most illustrious; for his father constantly wore silk in the morning.”

And then, eager to make sure that his readers get the point of the wisecrack, Poggio adds an explanatory note (always a sign of a damp squib): “meaning by that that Filelfo was the bastard of a priest. When officiating, priests are generally clothed with silk.”

At this distance, much of this squabbling seems childish. But these were adults intent on drawing blood, and on occasion the blows were not only rhetorical. In 1452, Poggio had been having a running quarrel with another papal secretary, the notoriously morose humanist George of Trebizond, over the burning question of who deserved more credit for several translations of ancient texts. When Poggio screamed at his rival that he was a liar, George struck Poggio with his fist. The two sulked back momentarily to their desks, but then the fight resumed, the seventy-two-year-old Poggio grabbling the fifty-seven-year-old George’s cheek and mouth with one hand while attempting to gouge out his eye with the other. After it was over, in an angry note to Poggio about the fracas, George represented himself as having acted with exemplary restraint: “Rightly I could have²⁰bitten off the fingers you stuck in my mouth; I did not. Since I was seated and you were standing, I thought of squeezing your testicles with both hands and thus lay you out; I did not do it.” The whole thing seems a grotesque farce, akin to one of the stories in Poggio’s jokebook, except for its real-world consequences: with his better contacts and more genial manner, Poggio had George expelled from the curia. Poggio ended his life covered with honors; George died obscure, resentful, and poor.

In a celebrated nineteenth-century book on “the revival of learning,” John Addington Symonds, recounting these gladiatorial struggles among humanist scholars, suggests that “they may be taken²¹ as proof of their enthusiasm for their studies.” Perhaps. However wild their insults, the arguments swirled around fine points of Latin grammar, accusations of mistakes in diction, subtle questions of translation. But the extravagance and bitterness of the charges—in the course of a quarrel over Latin style, Poggio accused the younger humanist Lorenzo Valla of heresy, theft, lying, forgery, cowardice, drunkenness, sexual perversion, and insane vanity—discloses something rotten in the inner lives of these impressively learned individuals.

Though he was knocking at the door trying to gain admission, Lapo seems to have understood and analyzed the sickness of the whole environment. The problem was not only a matter of this or that difficult personality; it was structural. The papal court had, to serve its own needs, brought into being a class of rootless, ironic intellectuals. These intellectuals were committed to pleasing their masters, on whose patronage they utterly depended, but they were cynical and unhappy. How could the rampant cynicism, greed, and hypocrisy, the need to curry favor with perverse satraps who professed to preach morality to the rest of mankind, the endless jockeying for position in the court of an absolute monarch, not eat away at whatever was hopeful and decent in anyone who breathed that air for very long? What—apart from attempts at character assassination and outright assassination—could be done with the seething feeling of rage?

One way that Poggio dealt with the sickness—to which he himself had quickly succumbed and from which he was never entirely cured—was through laughter, the abrasive, obscene laughter of the Facetiae. The laughter must have given him some relief, though evidently not enough. For he also wrote a succession of dialogues—On Avarice, Against the Hypocrites, On Nobility, On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, On the Misery of Human Life, and so forth—in which he adopted the stance of a serious moralist. There are clear links between the jokes and the moral essays, but the moral essays allowed Poggio to explore the issues only hinted at in the comical anecdotes.

The essay Against the Hypocrites, for example, has its share of stories of clerical seducers, but the stories are part of a larger, much more serious analysis of an institutional dilemma: why churchmen, and especially monks, are particularly prone to hypocrisy. Is there a relation, Poggio asks, between religious vocation and fraud? A full answer would certainly involve sexual motives, but those motives alone cannot adequately account for the swarms of hypocrites in a place such as the curia, including monks notable for their ostentatious piety and their ascetic pallor who are feverishly seeking benefices, immunities, favors, privileges, positions of power. Nor can sexual intrigues adequately explain the still larger swarms of robed hypocrites in the world outside the curia, charismatic preachers who mint money with their sonorous voices and their terrible threats of hellfire and damnation, Observant friars who claim to adhere strictly to the Order of St. Francis but have the morals of bandits, mendicant friars with their little sacks, their long hair and longer beards, and their fraudulent pretense of living in holy poverty, confessors who pry into the secrets of every man and woman. Why don’t all these models of extravagant religiosity simply shut themselves up in their cells and commit themselves to lives of fasting and prayer? Because their conspicuous professions of piety, humility, and contempt for the world are actually masks for avarice, laziness, and ambition. To be sure, someone in the conversation concedes, there are some good and sincere monks, but very, very few of them, and one may observe even those slowly drawn toward the fatal corruption that is virtually built into their vocation.

“Poggio,” who represents himself as a character in the dialogue, argues that hypocrisy is better at least than open violence, but his friend Aliotti, an abbot, responds that it is worse, since everyone can perceive the horror of a confessed rapist or murderer, but it is more difficult to defend oneself against a sly deceiver. How is it possible then to identify hypocrites? After all, if they are good at their simulations, it is very difficult to distinguish the frauds from genuinely holy figures. The dialogue lists the warning signs. You should be suspicious of anyone who

displays an excessive purity of life;²²

walks barefoot through the streets, with a dirty face and shabby robes;

shows in public a disdain for money;

always has the name of Jesus Christ on his lips;

wants to be called good, without actually doing anything particularly good;

attracts women to him to satisfy his wishes;

runs here and there outside his monastery, seeking fame and honors;

makes a show of fasting and other ascetic practices;

induces others to get things for himself;

refuses to acknowledge or return what is given to him in trust.

Virtually any priest or monk who is at the curia is a hypocrite, writes Poggio, for it is impossible to fulfill the highest purposes of religion there. And if you happen at the curia to see someone who is particularly abject in his humility, beware: he is not merely a hypocrite but the worst hypocrite of all. In general, you should be wary of people who seem too perfect, and remember that it is actually quite difficult to be good: “Difficile est bonum esse.”

Against the Hypocrites is a work written not in the wake of Martin Luther by a Reformation polemicist but a century earlier, by a papal bureaucrat living and working at the center of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. It indicates that the Church, though it could and did respond violently to what it perceived as doctrinal or institutional challenges, was willing to tolerate extremely sharp critiques from within, including critiques from secular figures like Poggio. And it indicates too that Poggio and his fellow humanists in the curia struggled to channel their anger and disgust into more than obscene laughter and violent quarrels with one another.

The greatest and most consequential work in this critical spirit was written by Poggio’s bitter enemy, Lorenzo Valla. Valla famously used his brilliant command of Latin philology to demonstrate that the “Donation of Constantine,” the document in which the Roman emperor purportedly gave possession of the Western Empire to the pope, was a forgery. After the publication of this piece of detective work, Valla was in considerable danger. But the Church’s tolerance for internal critique extended, at least for a brief period in the fifteenth century, even to this extreme edge: the humanist pope Nicholas V eventually appointed Valla to the post of apostolic secretary, and thus this most independent and critical of spirits was, like Poggio, employed by the curia he had so relentlessly exposed and ridiculed.

Poggio lacked Valla’s radicalism and originality. One of the speakers in Against the Hypocrites briefly floats an argument that might have led in a perilous direction, moving from the theatrical pretense of holiness in the Catholic Church to the fraudulent use of oracles in pagan religion as a means to overawe and manipulate the vulgar. But the subversive link—which Machiavelli would exploit to shocking effect in the next century in constructing a disenchanted analysis of the political uses of all religious faith—is never quite made, and Poggio’s work merely ends with a fantasy of stripping the hypocrites of their protective cloaks. In the afterlife, we are told, the dead, in order to enter the infernal kingdom, have to pass through gates of different diameters. Those who are known by the custodian to be clearly bad or good pass through the wide gates; through the narrow ones go those about whom it is not clear whether they are honest or hypocritical. The honest souls pass through, with only minimal scratching; the hypocrites have their skin entirely lacerated.

This fantasy of laceration manages to combine Poggio’s aggression and his pessimism: the hypocrites will all be exposed and definitively punished, but it is not until the afterlife that it is possible even to reveal who they are. If anger always hovers within him just beneath the surface of his laughter, so too despair—at the impossibility of reforming abuses, at the steady loss of everything worth treasuring, at the wretchedness of the human condition—hovers just beneath his anger.

Like many of his colleagues, Poggio was an indefatigable letter writer, and through these letters we glimpse him grappling with the cynicism, disgust, and worldweariness that seems to have afflicted everyone in the papal entourage. Monasteries, he writes to a friend, are “not congregations²³ of the faithful or places of religious men but the workshops of criminals”; the curia is “a sink of men’s vices.” (158) Everywhere he looks around Rome, people are tearing down ancient temples to get the lime from the stones, and within a generation or two most of the glorious remains of the past, so much more precious than our own miserable present, will be gone. He is wasting his life and must find an escape route: “I must try everything,²⁴ so that I may achieve something, and so stop being a servant to men and have time for literature.”

Yet though he indulged at moments in fantasies of changing his life—“to abandon²⁵ all these worldly concerns, all the empty cares, annoyances, and daily plans, and to flee into the haven of poverty, which is freedom and true quiet and safety”—Poggio recognized sadly that such a route was not open to him. “I do not know²⁶ what I can do outside the Curia,” he wrote to Niccoli, “except teach boys or work for some master or rather tyrant. If I had to take up either one of these, I should think it utter misery. For not only is all servitude a dismal thing, as you know, but especially so is serving the lusts of a wicked man. As for school teaching, may I be spared that! For it would be better to be subject to one man than to many.” He would stay at the curia, then, in the hope that he would make enough money to enable him to retire early: “My one ambition:²⁷ by the hard work of a few years to achieve leisure for the rest of my life.” As it turned out, the “few years” would prove to be fifty.

The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life. But Poggio did not succumb to it, though he had every reason to do so. He lived in a world not only pervaded by corruption and greed but also repeatedly battered by conspiracies, riots, wars, and outbreaks of plague. He worked in the Roman curia, but the curia was not even stable in its location in Rome, since the pope and his entire court repeatedly were forced to flee the city. He grappled, as everyone in his world had to grapple, with the constant presence of pain—from which there was no medical relief—and with the constant threat of death. He could easily have contracted into brittle, defensive cynicism, relieved only by unfulfilled fantasies of escape.

What saved him was an obsessive craving, his book mania.

In 1406, when he learned that his great mentor Salutati had died, Poggio was grief-stricken. The great old man had seized upon anyone in whom he had seen “some gleam of intellect”²⁸ and had helped those whom he had so identified with instruction, guidance, letters of recommendation, money, and, above all, the use of his own books. “We have lost a father,” he wrote; “we have lost the haven and refuge of all scholars, the light of our nation.” Poggio claimed that he was weeping as he wrote his letter, and there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of his words: “Express my sympathy to his sons,” he wrote to Niccoli in Florence, “and tell them that I am plunged in grief. This too I want to find out from you: what you think will happen to his books.”

“I was upset and terrified,”²⁹ Poggio wrote Niccoli in July 1449, “by the death of Bartolomeo de Montepulciano,” the close friend with whom he had explored the monastic libraries of Switzerland. But a moment later his mind shifts to what he had just discovered at Monte Cassino: “I found a book³⁰ containing Julius Frontinus’ De aquaeductu urbis.” And in a letter written a week later, the same pattern recurs. He begins by mentioning two ancient manuscripts that he has copied and that he wishes, he notes, “to be ruled in red³¹ and bound.”

I could not write you this from the City on account of my grief over the death of my dearest friend and on account of my confusion of spirit, deriving partly from fear and partly from the sudden departure of the Pope. I had to leave my house and settle all my things; a great deal had to be done at once so that there was no opportunity for writing or even for drawing breath. There was besides the greatest grief, which made everything else much harder. But to go back to the books.

“But to go back to the books …” This is the way out, the escape from the pervasive fear and bafflement and pain. “My country has not yet³² recovered from the plague which troubled it five years ago,” he writes in September, 1430; “Now again it seems that it will succumb to a massacre equally violent.” And then a moment later: “But let us get back to our own affairs. I see what you write about the library.” If it is not plague that threatens, it is war: “Every man waits his destined hour; even the cities are doomed to their fate.” And then the same note: “Let us spend³³ our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire.” In the north the powerful Visconti of Milan are raising an army; Florentine mercenaries are besieging Lucca; Alfonso in Naples is stirring up trouble, and the emperor Sigismond is applying intolerable pressure on the pope. “I have already decided³⁴ what I shall do even if things turn out as many people fear; namely, that I shall devote myself to Greek literature….”

Poggio was highly self-conscious about these letters, and expected them to circulate, but his book mania, expressed again and again, seems unguarded, candid, and authentic. It was the key to a feeling he characterized with a word that otherwise seems singularly inappropriate to a papal bureaucrat: freedom. “Your Poggio,”³⁵ he wrote, “is content with very little and you shall see this for yourself; sometimes I am free for reading, free from all care about public affairs which I leave to my superiors. I live free as much as I can.” Freedom here has nothing to do with political liberty or a notion of rights or the license to say whatever he wished or the ability to go wherever he chose. It is rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the world—in which he himself was so ambitiously engaged—and ensphering himself in a space apart. For Poggio, that experience was what it meant to immerse himself in an ancient book: “I am free for reading.”

Poggio savored the feeling of freedom at those times when the usual Italian political disorder became particularly acute or when the papal court was in an uproar or when his own personal ambitions were thwarted or, perhaps equally threatening, when those ambitions were realized. Hence it was a feeling to which he must have clung with particular intensity when sometime after 1410,³⁶ having amply displayed his gifts as a humanist scribe, a learned writer, and a court insider, he accepted the most prestigious and most dangerous appointment of his career: the post of apostolic secretary to the sinister, sly, and ruthless Baldassare Cossa, who had been elected pope.