Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (31 page)

The Renaissance popes were determined to change all that, and set about planning new streets and raising buildings to perpetuate their own and their families’ names, buildings which would be worthy both of the centre of the Church and of the greatest of all earthly cities, the mother of Europe. The fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Rome were the age of Humanism, a great age of renewed classical learning, the rediscovery of the principles of classical art, the flowering of creativity in painting, sculpture and architecture, and of a delight in life and beauty which represented not just lavish extravagance, but a renewed sense of the glory of creation. It was a religious vision in its own right: to understand it, we need to consider the first and in some ways the most attractive of the Humanist popes, Nicholas V (1447–55).

Nicholas, who had been a cardinal for less than three months before his election, became pope at an auspicious moment. A month before his election the princes of Germany had abandoned their support for the Council of Basle and the Antipope Felix V, and had recognised Pope Eugenius IV (1431–47). The Conciliar movement was running out of steam, as European monarchs made their own advantageous
arrangements for control of their national churches with the papacy, and withdrew their support for ecclesiastical rebellion. Within two years, with the help of France, Nicholas was able to win over Felix V He was also able to consolidate the rapprochement with Germany, and to recover some of the papal rights and revenues forfeited during the previous hundred years. In 1452 he crowned the German King Frederick III as emperor in Rome, the last imperial coronation ever to take place there.

These pacific measures were symptomatic of his whole reign. The pontificate of Eugenius IV had been stormy, with the Pope at odds not only with the Conciliarists and with the kings of France, Germany and Naples, but also with the city of Rome itself, with towns and regions in the Papal States like Bologna and the March of Ancona which had achieved virtual independence during the Great Schism, and above all with the mighty Colonna family. Martin V had been a Colonna, and his family had rapidly acquired control of vast tracts of papal territory, ostensibly as a way of reclaiming it for the papacy, but in fact for their own enrichment. Eugenius’ attempts to force them to disgorge these ill-gotten gains led to his own nine-year banishment from Rome, which ended only in the autumn of 1443.

Nicholas was a less confrontational personality, and was able to resolve all these conflicts. Neapolitan and German ambassadors took part in his coronation, and he told the Germans that the popes had ‘stretched their arms out too far, and have left scarcely any power to other bishops … It is my firm purpose not to impair the rights of the bishops who are called to share my cares.’
¹
Before the end of his pontificate the principal rulers of Italy had signed the Peace of Lodi (1454) and an unaccustomed (if short-lived) peace had broken out. In the breathing space all this gained, Nicholas was able to turn his attention to his real love, the creation of a renewed Rome. As a student at Bologna and especially as a private tutor in the Strozzi household in Florence he had absorbed the love of antiquity, learning and the arts which was considered the mark of a civilised man. He became an ardent book-collector. While still a poor priest, supplementing his income by ringing the bells in the churches of Florence, he declared that books and buildings were the only things worth spending money on.

These had become unfamiliar sentiments for a pope. Martin V had himself made an energetic start on the repair of Rome’s devastated churches and public amenities, but he profoundly distrusted Renaissance
learning, especially its obsession with pagan authors. He had a low opinion of what Gratian had called ‘the literature of the damned’, and thought that everything worth preserving from antiquity was contained in the works of St Augustine. His suspicion was not entirely unfounded, for some of the work of the Humanists, as the leading thinkers of the Renaissance were called, was quite explicitly anti-papal. In 1440 the great scholar Lorenzo Valla used Humanist techniques of textual and historical criticism in a devastating demolition job on the
Donation of Constantine
, proving that it was an eighth-century forgery. Valla was a client of King Alfonso I, ruler of Sicily, who was currently the Pope’s enemy, so he was not entirely without an agenda. Nevertheless, he found a ready audience when he argued that the temporal claims derived from the bogus Donation had made the popes not the Father of the Faithful, but the oppressor of Christians – ‘so far from giving food and bread to the household of God … they have devoured us as food … the Pope himself makes war on peaceable people, and sows discord among states and princes.’
²

These remarks summarised a long tradition of Christian unease at the worldliness which the establishment of the Church had brought. They were aimed at Eugenius IV, whose nine years in Tuscany had, nevertheless, brought him into contact with more appealing aspects of the Renaissance. When the Pope returned to Rome, he brought the great Tuscan Dominican painter Fra Angelico with him. It was left to Nicholas V, however, to put Renaissance concerns at the centre of the papal programme. In the aftermath of the councils, reform was on everyone’s lips. Nicholas believed that the literature, the buildings and the arts of ancient Greece and Rome could provide a source of renewal for the present. He determined to create ‘for the common convenience of the learned, a library of all books both in Latin and in Greek that is worthy of the dignity of the Pope and the Apostolic See’. Papal emissaries were sent to the far ends of Europe in search of rare manuscripts, and the Pope made it a particular concern to commission good Latin translations of the Greek pagan and Christian classics. The rediscovery of Greek science, literature and philosophy was one of the most powerful engines driving Renaissance thought and art. One of the fruits of the union between the Churches of East and West achieved at the Council of Florence was the arrival in the West of John Bessarion, former Archbishop of Nicaea, whom Eugenius made a cardinal. The ‘Cardinal of Nicaea’
became a magnet for Greek scholars seeking patronage in the West, and his protégés became crucial to Nicholas’ project. In time, Nicholas created a library of over a thousand precious volumes in Greek and Latin, the core of the future Vatican Library.

Nicholas also inaugurated the physical transformation of Rome. He symbolised the recovery of papal control in the city by restoring the Castel Sant’ Angelo and repairing the medieval Palace of the Senators on the Capitol. His major works were at the Vatican, however, which he now made the chief papal residence, abandoning the run-down Lateran. He added a new wing to the Vatican Palace, decorated with frescoes by Fra Angelico. He rebuilt and extended the Leonine walls. Most daringly of all, he planned the radical reconstruction of St Peter’s itself. In the thousand years since Constantine, the basilica had shared in the city’s dilapidation. According to the great architect Alberti, who worked in the Curia under Nicholas, collapse was only a matter of time. Nicholas planned to add transepts and a new apse round the shrine of the Apostle, to accommodate the crowds of pilgrims – the alterations would have extended the length of the church by a third. He also planned a new piazza for grand papal blessings in front of St Peter’s, in which would be placed the obelisk from the Circus of Nero near which Peter had been crucified.

Nicholas did not live to complete his many projects, but in a speech to the cardinals from his deathbed in 1455 he emphasised the religious vision that underlay them. His buildings were to be sermons in stone, laymen’s books. The learned who had studied antiquity could truly understand the greatness and authority of Rome, but:

These words in many ways provided the programme for the Renaissance papacy.

Nicholas’ sensitivity to the ‘uncultured masses’ from ‘all the world’ was almost certainly shaped by his experience of the Jubilee Year of
1450. The Jubilee, a year during which truly penitent pilgrims to Rome could gain a ‘plenary Indulgence’ which wiped away all the penance incurred by their sins, had first been instituted by Boniface VIII in 1300. The Jubilee of 1450, however, was a landmark event. For the first time since 1300 Rome had a resident pope, unchallenged by any rival, and the Jubilee became a symbol of the restored unity and peace of the Church.

From its inauguration on Christmas Day 1449 it was a huge success. Tens of thousands of pilgrims flooded into Rome, so many that bands of volunteer militia armed with staves had to be organised to keep order in the streets. There were not enough beds in the city to accommodate everybody, and thousands camped out in fields and vineyards. The Pope, endlessly in demand for papal blessings, ordered that the great relics of Rome – the enshrined heads of the Apostles Peter and Paul, and the handkerchief with which Veronica was supposed to have wiped the face of Christ on the way to Calvary, – should be exposed every weekend, for the veneration of each new wave of pilgrims. Endless queues shuffled in and out of the basilicas till late into the night, and as provisions ran out the Pope was obliged to shorten the required stay in Rome from eight to three days.

The Jubilee had its disasters: in the summer a plague raged, the graveyards filled up, and the pilgrim routes of Italy were lined with corpses. The plague eventually cleared and the flood of pilgrims resumed, but on 19 December, in the last week of the Jubilee, a bucking mule caused a stampede among the crowds pressing home to their lodgings in the late afternoon across the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. In the crush, at least 200 people were trampled to death or drowned in the swollen Tiber. The nearby church of San Celso became a makeshift mortuary, where the dead were laid out in rows for identification.

Despite these horrifying events, the Jubilee was a formative event for the Renaissance papacy. After the long traumas of the schism and the anti-papal propaganda of the Conciliar movement, it confirmed beyond argument the centrality of Rome and the Pope in popular Catholicism. With a sure instinct, Nicholas sealed this link by choosing the centre-point of the Jubilee year, Whit Sunday 1450, to stage the canonisation of St Bernardino of Siena, who had died only six years earlier. Bernardino was a highly controversial Franciscan, whose unconventional revivalist rallies and salty vernacular pulpit style had swept Italy and made him the best-known preacher of his
day. His canonisation allied the papacy with the current of popular religious feeling and captured something of Bernardino’s prestige for the institution. More mundanely, the Jubilee pilgrim offerings provided a bonanza which restored papal finances and funded Nicholas’ various projects. The Pope is said to have lodged 100,000 gold florins in the Medici bank alone, more than a third of his normal annual income, and almost as much as his entire secular revenue from the Papal States.

The Jubilee also became an instrument of papal reform. The Conciliar movement had called for the reform of the Church, in ‘head and members’, in practice giving priority to the institutional reform – by which was meant reduction – of the role of Pope and Curia. Concern for the removal of other abuses, however, was widespread, and Nicholas extended the Jubilee and signalled his support for reform in 1451 by sending special legates through Europe to preach reconciliation and renewal. The legate for Germany was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Archbishop of Brixen. Cusa had once been a pillar of the Conciliar movement, and his
De Concordantia Catholica
was probably its most enduring theological product. He had been appalled by the revolutionary proceedings of the Council of Basle, however, and had become an ardent defender of the papal cause. Alongside the revival of personal piety encouraged by the Jubilee Indulgence, he was to enforce clerical and especially monastic reform, and he launched a vigorous campaign to improve lay religious knowledge. All this was accompanied by elaborate ceremonial, including solemn processions in which Cusa carried the Blessed Sacrament through the streets, and presided over the veneration of local relics. He also concerned himself, however, with curbing superstition, preaching against the sale of indulgences, and attacking suspect devotions, such as the pilgrimage to the Holy Blood of Wilsnack. His activities in Germany were matched by the similar though shorter legatine mission of John of Capistrano to Austria. Capistrano was an observant Franciscan and had been a close friend of St Bernardino’s, and the temperature of his preaching was correspondingly warmer. Crowds of the sick flocked to be touched with the relics of St Bernardino, and in the wake of Capistrano’s vehement sermons ‘bonfires of vanities’, including backgammon tables and playing cards, were made outside the churches. Capistrano was also responsible for the return to Catholicism of many followers of Hus.
And everywhere, like Cusa, he was greeted ‘as ambassador of the Pope and preacher of truth’, and the people flocked to him ‘as if St Peter or St Paul or some other Apostle were passing by.’
⁴
These attempts at papal reform were perfectly genuine, and achieved much good. To many people, however, they seemed no more than cosmetic tinkering, attempts to buy off more radical demands with a few piffling gestures. The call for a council, and the reform of the papacy and Curia, as the root of the Church’s ills, continued.

The last years of Nicholas V were overshadowed by his grief over the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and by the discovery in the same year of a Roman republican plot to murder the Pope. The marriage he had made between the papacy and Renaissance art and learning, however, endured. It survived his immediate successor, the elderly Spaniard Callistus III (1455–8), whose main preoccupation was the recovery of Constantinople from the Turks, and for whom everything else was a waste of money. Callistus called a halt to all Nicholas’ building projects, and is reported to have cried out on walking into his predecessor’s library, ‘See how the treasure of the Church has been wasted.’ He is said to have sold the precious bindings from Nicholas’ books to finance the fleet he built against the Turks.