The Swerve (20 page)

That was the path on which Niccoli had decisively embarked, casting aside everything else in his life. Poggio, for his part, was happy to join him, but he had somehow to make a living. He
had
fantastic skill as a scribe, but that would hardly have supported him in the manner he hoped to live. His command of classical Latin would have enabled him to embark on a career as a teacher, but this was a life with very few of the amenities he sought. Universities generally lacked buildings, libraries, endowments; they consisted of scholars and masters, and humanists were usually paid much less than professors of law and medicine. Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons. Poggio had had the opportunity to witness such lives, and they did not appeal to him. He wanted something much more stable and settled.

At the same time Poggio lacked the patriotic zeal—the passion for the city and for republican liberty—that inspired Salutati and had been stirred in Bruni. And he lacked as well the calling that might have led him to take religious orders and embark on the life of a priest or a monk. His spirit was emphatically secular and his desires were in and of the world. Still, he had to do something. In the fall of 1403, armed with a letter of recommendation from Salutati, the twenty-three-year-old Poggio set off for Rome.

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 himself
¹
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 determined
²
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 think
³
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 up
⁴
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 alien
⁶
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: