A Trembling Upon Rome

1

I am Franco Ellera, who has been the chamberlain, companion, bodyguard and counsellor to a pope. I became a cardinal of the universal church as a service to my master. I was born a Jew, I have lived as a Jew, and I will die a Jew. My master's lifetime is over, my own is nearly done. The Church accused my lord of a catena of crimes – heresy and simony; murder, sodomy and fornication – when he was merely a man who put power and its sensuality foremost among the things which people need.

His story must be told to raise up his memory so that his life may be seen for what it was, an achievement and an adventure. His place is among the great men of his time. We lived among them and beside all of them: the kings, the popes, the cardinals and the great soldiers. I knew Cosimo di Medici well, and Sigismund, King of Hungary, King of the Romans, King of Bohemia, and the Marchesa di Artegiana. I knew the great cardinals D'Ailly and Spina. I supped with the woman who rid this earth of King Ladislas of Naples. I knew the warrior archbishop John of Nassau and the Duke of Anjou. These people, were the keys to the kingdoms of earth in our time.

The estate of a pope has no peer: an emperor follows him and a king is correspondent; a high cardinal next in dignity: then a king's son, an archbishop his equal; a duke of the blood royal; a bishop, a marquis and earl co-equal; then a viscount, legate, baron, suffragan and mitred abbot; down through doctor of divinity and protonotary to master of chancery, parson, vicar and yeoman of the crown; to worshipful merchants and rich artificers, gentlemen well nurtured and with good manners.

But, a pope is supreme. The Apostles said, 'Behold here are two swords, and the God of Christendom replied that this was enough but not too many. He who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of peter wrongly interprets the word of the Lord when He says, `Put up thy sword in its scabbard.' Both swords, the spiritual and the material, are in the power of the Church; the one, indeed, must be wielded for the Church, the other by the Church; the one by the hand of the pope, the other by the hand of kings and knights, but at the will and sufferance of the pope. The ecclesiastical power is verified by the prophecy of a Jew, Jeremiah, who said, `See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms – and the other things which follow. Therefore, if the earthly power err, it shall be judged by the spiritual power; if the lesser spiritual power err, then it shall be judged by the greater, a pope. A spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one, Every human creature is subject to a pope.

That is how the Christians were all taught that it should be. But that is not how the mockery of time saw it happen.

Baldassare Cossa, my master, a great condottiere, the eldest son of the feared pirate family of Procida, creator of the papacy of Alexander V, friend of kings and Cosimo di Medici, the scourge of Ladislas and thus the saviour of Italy, the shatterer of the great schism of the Church, the beloved of countless women and ruler of Christendom which is the world of men, became Pope John XXIII.

I was born in Hamburg in 1355, twelve years before my master. Our city, with others in the league, served as an intermediary between Western Europe and the East – as did Italy. But the Italian East and our East were different things. Their East was older and richer. Ours was in the process of colonization. Russia – if one could call it that and not Western Tibet, for the Mongols ruled there – was in a state of primitive barbarism, covered with forests and fringed by a sea rendered inaccessible by ice.

My father, a cannoneer, was killed at Helsingborg defending the league against Waldemar IV. I was ten years old when my mother, with about a hundred other young German widows, took me aboard a Hanseatic cog in a convoy of six cogs and two escort ships, to sail for the island of Sicily, where husbands were waiting for them. When we were well into the Mediterranean Sea, two ships of the Cossa private fleet attacked us. Our cogs were sunk. My mother drowned. I remember her so well and I love her to this day. I was pulled out of the sea and thrown like a fish into the bottom of a boat. I slept there until I was flung ashore, dragged to a warehouse and locked in, alone and frightened. That is what I remember about my origins.

In time, I was told that I was the slave of Baldassare Cossa, the eldest son of the Duke of Santa Gata, whose pirates had drowned my mother. All the German women who survived were sent off to the slave market at Bari to be sold. My mother escaped that disgrace.

Baldassare Cossa, my master, was five years old. I was seventeen. The duke gave me my new name. I had a serviceable and honourable name Franz Heller which my family had defended throughout time, but to the duke I was nameless. He said at my Christian Baptism ceremony; laid on to entertain his crew ashore, and which I could do nothing to prevent, ‘Ellera means ivy in the Italian language and this Franco Ellera will cling to my son.'

All the Cossas had been pirates for three generations, marauding from the two mile long island of Procida in the Bay of Naples. which they possessed entirely. I was happy on Procida. They were kind, hearty people who lived out their good health on top of their skins. They ate constantly and well. They made love without shame.

The two peaks of Vesuvius rose into the perfect sky south-east of us. Sometimes it sent up columns of smoke which the Cossas told me was proof that there was a hell. It was such an Italian claim to make. They had murdered my mother yet they insisted that we were looking all day at the proof of hell:

The Cossas were large-scale pirates, putting to sea in two great war galleys. La Palazzina was eighty feet long with an overall breadth of nineteen feet. Its oars were arranged on two levels. It was fitted with two masts and lateen sails, manned by a hundred oarsmen and fifty soldiers, all of whom had been sworn in on the gospels. Its poop was protected with fortified towers and, at the bow, there was a castle equipped for offence and defence. With the second galley, three carracks and seven smaller craft, the Cossa stronghold at Procida numbered 766 people, counting sailors, rowers and fighting men, with land-based chandlers, armourers, agents, ecrivains, spies, merchants, slave masters, priests, nuns, wives and children. Baldassare Cossa's father, head of the family, was not only a Neapolitan duke but held four baronies in the kingdom of Naples. His titles, conferred upon his family by popes and kings, included Conte di Troja, Signore di Procida, and Marchese nel suo Libero de Protonotari Partecipanti, as well as Duke of Santa Gata. Baldassare Cossa was his heir.

My five-year-old master instructed me to call him Cossa. He never changed those orders. His father told me, `He has no mother. I could have found a woman to raise him, but clearly God meant him not to have a mother so I prefer that he be raised in the company of fighting men. That will serve him better as he grows older. You will be in charge of him.'

My work was to see that Baldassare Cossa was clean and that he worked at his studies. Our teacher was a young priest named Father Fanfarone, a very stupid fellow, who had good Latin and no interest in religion whatsoever. He had become a priest because he was so lazy. We learned Latin, Italian, history, writing, numbers and singing. I had a magnificent voice. Cossa had a fair voice. He was young.

Cossa taught me the Neapolitan dialect. I taught him German. He was only a child but as he grew, I gave diligent attendance on him. I was certain to be courteous, glad of cheer, quick of hearing in every way, and ever on the lookout for things to do him pleasure. In the morning, against my lord should rise, I took care that his linen should be clean. I would hold out to him his tunic, then his doublet while he put, in his arms, then his vamps and socks so that he should go warm all day. I would draw on his sock and his hose by the fire and lace or buckle his shoes, and truss him up to the height that suited him, put round his neck and on his shoulders a kerchief, then gently comb his head with an ivory comb and give him water wherewith to wash his hands and face. This and more I would do for him from the time he was five years old until his death long, long years after. He knew from the beginning that I was his slave but, through our lifetimes, never treated me as else than his true friend. for as I was kind and good to him as a child, he was kind and sweet and good to me as a man.

The Duke of Santa Gata's captains taught us the arts of war on land and sea. I was included in this instruction so that I might protect the boy wherever he went. On our third raiding voyage aboard La Palazzina, when Cossa was ten years old (I was twenty-two, very big and strong, and as tall as any soldier in the crew), the ship we attacked, a Dutchman, had a company of fighting men waiting for us in its hold. They put up a bitter battle before, that prize was taken.

I stowed Cossa in a deck locker while the fighting swirled all over the ship. A swordsman backed me across the deck. As we fought, I tripped going backwards. He rushed in to kill me. I was in bad trouble. Cossa stepped out, struck a dagger into his back, had the coolness to pull it out, then stepped back into the locker: a classical exercise for a boy that young. He saved my life that day, and he would save it again. How much I wanted to be like him.

In 1379, when our education-at-war was as complete as a going business had the time to make it, his father told Cossa that he had been awarded an appointment to the University of Bologna to study law.

The molten sun bore down with heavy heat upon the shed which was the port captain's office on Procida when Cossa and I stood before the duke's table, myself two paces to the rear of Cossa. The duke said, in a voice like chains falling on stones, `Piero Tomacelli, Bishop of Santa Grazia di Traghetto, is our man in the Lateran palace. It was he who interceded with His Holiness Pope Urban to get you the appointment to Bologna. Over the years we have paid Tomacelli a lot of money to keep us well with the Church and to guide the throne of Naples to view our business benevolently.'

He smiled with that enormously pleasing family smile which burst out of the saturnity of Cossa faces to win anything they chose. The duke had a magnificent smile, but his teeth were old. Cossa's smile until he was an old man was a really beautiful thing to see. His teeth were perfect white and, even. It was said of Attila the Hun that he was one of the most charming men in history. Cossa's smile, in the same sense, seldom meant what it seemed to convey which was loving regard, open honesty and an entreaty for sincere friendship.

`I have written to your Uncle Tomas in Rome,' the duke said. `He will arrange a meeting with Tomacelli, Don't waste time trying to flatter him or to fool this bishop. He is the complete Neapolitan whom I hope one day you will become. Now – Baldassare – hear me well. As you excel at Bologna, Tomacelli will be watching you from Rome. As your excellence assures him of your promise as a lawyer, Tomacelli will be plotting for you, and advancing your cause with the pope.'

'But we worked hard to excel at arms,' Cossa protested. `How can that serve me if you make me a become a lawyer?'

`Wait and see,' the duke said. 'Do you think you know anything outside Procida? You are going from a life of freedom to one that will be dominated. So did every other successful man. Never forget that the Church has run all the lives in Europe for a thousand years. The Church didn't get where it is on theology, my son. The hierarchy of the Church is a hierarchy of lawyers. Rich bishops, princely cardinals and sainted popes – all of them are lawyers.' He got up suddenly. `The carrack is waiting for you at the quay. It will take you, the escort, horses and some gold to the mainland. Tomas is waiting for you in Rome.' He embraced his son and held him closely. He stared at me intently and spoke to me over Cossa's shoulder. `He can go to any heights in the Church if he learns to think like the rest of this family,' he said.

Our carrack ploughed across the Gulf of Gaeta, cutting through the August heat to the mainland at Terracina, where we unloaded horses, food, gold and men: Cossa's armed escort, (of which I was in charge) were the companions and servants of his lifetime, but casual employers, not so close to him as I was. Father Fanfarone, always referred to as his `chaplain', was Cossa's favourite priest because Fanfarone had so little interest in religion that he never annoyed Cossa with urgings that he confessor attend mass and because he was so blissfully stupid He was a fairly good forger and was assigned to keep up a cheerful correspondence with the duke in Cossa's name and writing. The duke had decided that a chaplain with Cossa's permanent household would create a most favourable impression upon the university prelates who would report student progress to Rome.

The second man in our entourage, as far as I was concerned, was Geoffredano Bocca, the master cook of the Cossa fleet. His bracioline made with beef, ham, breadcrumbs and parsley were the finest sausages I have ever eaten and within me was the sausage-eating compulsion of hundreds of thousands of frozen Germans. I tell you that, when he laid out layers of wide noodles with-alternating layers composed of that same compelling bracioline in minced form, then added his own secret sauce, then hard-boiled egg and two kinds of those cheeses which have made Italy the triumph of body and mind that it is, then sprinkled with what he says is just grated cheese but which anyone who has ever tasted it knows is the powder of a master alchemist, I renounced once again – it happened every day I ate Bocca's cooking – Germany and all the world except Naples. Before each meal he cooked for me, he would say with that mysterious smile, `I am going to put something secret in your food. I will not say what it is, but after you eat it you are going to be able to do things like you have never done them before.'

The third man was a silent physician from the Adige (which the Italians consider as being far to the north!), Count Abramo Weiler, a healer who was bound to the Cossas because of his compulsion for ruinous gambling. The duke cured him by taking him aside and telling him that he would kill hire if he ever gambled again. He said that, whether he killed hint himself on Procida or in Naples, or whether he had to send men to kill him wherever Count Weiler chose to gamble, he would disembowel him and leave him to die in terrible pain, alone. Weiler told me that he totally lost interest in gambling after, that, but still continued to calculate the odds on almost everything, if only in his head.

The last man, deservedly so on any list, was Luigi Palo, who did Cossa's (our) dirty work. He carried the title of Cossa's squire. He was a villain who would steal, maim, traduce, procure or kill for Cossa, a specialist humbly offering his specialities. The duke had reasoned that, during the ten years Cossa would study at Bologna, lie would occasionally meet people who would offend him gravely. This being certain, given Cossa's particular character, the duke did not want it to happen that Cossa (or I) take any direct revenge personally – for that could go against Cossa's record in Rome – so Palo was sent along as the surrogate avenger of affronts and to undertake any necessary task that could be potentially damaging to Cossa's honour.'

The age of the members of Cossa's permanent party was, on average ten years older than Cossa, but he was the leader: Dr Weiler was the oldest, Cossa the youngest; Father Fanfarone the stupidest, Cossa the wiliest; Bocca the most garrulous, Cossa the most laconic; Palo thee cruellest, Cossa the most deadly. How would I rate myself against Cossa now that I have graded the others? I was the most serious, Cossa the most devious.

2

We rode into Latium, Fanfarone complaining about his backside all the way, through. Cisterna di Latima to Velletri and Albano to Rome. We rode through a land which had settled into four social divisions just as in Germany: knights and their retainers, who lived in castles or keeps;: merchants, artificers, tradesmen and their dependants, who filled the towns, farmers, who lived in wattled huts under the protection of their lord., spiritual and/or temporal; and the clergy. The world was divided into an uncounted but gigantic mass of Christians and Mahometans with, here and there, pockets of Jews. The knights, merchants and farmers took their places by right of birth and inheritance. The clergy had to work then way up by the devious rules of the Church.

When we reached Rome, I as leader of our party (even if Cossa wasn't aware of that, but his father had put the entire expedition in my charge, sought out the house of Cossa's uncle in the Via Artanis, off the Tiber across from Vatican hill. Rome was a collection of shanties, thieves and vermin. The Black Death had reduced its population by one third, to 17,000. The city was wracked with factional strife among -the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Gaetani, Copocci, Stefaneschi and Annabaldi families. As we rode along the river on our first night, on a guided tour of the city by Cossa's Uncle Tomas, we saw wolves wandering near St. Peter's. `If this is Rome,' Cossa said, 'Bologna must be only a clearing in the forest.

`Bologna was a city when Rome was a, village,' his uncle said. `Rome looks like this because: it has lived off the papal interests like a mendicant. The whole population has allowed itself to depend on the hordes of pilgrims and litigants the papacy brings to Rome.'

Tomas Cossa was a one-eyed man who had been a sea captain it the family business, but whom the duke had judged to be too smart to stay at sea, there being plenty of other men to do his job. Tomas was a ruffian who was burned to dark leather by his lifetime in the sun. He had a hanging left eyelid which had frightened many people before he had killed them. His voice was coarsely hoarse from drinking Greek olive oil. He was the Cossas' chief intelligence agent and employed dozens of sub-agents in the seaports of Germany, France, England, Spain and North Africa, to locate and evaluate shipping destined for the Mediterranean. He passed this complex information to the Cossas on Procida. Knowing when and where the Cossa fleet would sail out and plunder these ships. Tomas was probably responsible for my mother's drowning, but he was a Cossa and death meant nothing to him. Baldassare Cossa was the same, throughout his life. He killed at will but he offered his own life as forfeit if he failed; The family trade must have brought all the Cossas to that view.

3

The popes! The cardinals! The bishops! The curia! All because of the Jews and Constantine. Christianity was the religion of a Jewish sect who saw themselves as the true Jews: they thought God had granted them the right to bring the saving work of the people of the Old Covenant to a conclusion because they had found the Messiah. The other Jews merely referred to them as `the Nazarenes'. Questions of agonizing urgency began to bother this sect, but the biggest question was whether Christianity should supplant Jewish orthodoxy or whether it should remain distinct from but closely linked with the Jewish community, its synagogue and its traditions. By the third century Anno Domini, by their counting, they were regarded as a heretical sect by other Jews. These Christians, disowned by the Jewish people, at last, three hundred years after their leader had died, called out to convert the whole of mankind to their Lord's message, in order to survive. Then the whole thing. the entire misunderstanding, was made legitimate by a politicians accident.

It is almost impossible to believe that because Constantine claimed to attribute his cavalry victory at the Milvian bridge to the God of the Christians, who had been nurtured so feebly in Rome by a handful of renegade Jewish fanatics, we must now suffer hundreds of cardinals, thousands of bishops and tens of thousands of indolent priests and monks, in all of the arrogance of their plump wealth; it is almost enough to shatter the spirit. But Constantine, the shrewdest of all the politicians, on the 28 October 312, AD, became the father of institutional Christianity in the crass version by which we now, late in the fourteenth century, know it, by rigorously enforcing its dogmas and-doctrines across the face of Europe -although he himself did not bother to become a Christian until he had fallen into a coma and the eager priests baptized him on his deathbed.

That about sums up Christianity, in my humble opinion. It has changed a great, deal since then, but if they didn't know they had a good thing when they were Jewish, I – mean, as my father told me, why try to improve on the real thing? How could a few centuries, more or less, be expected to accomplish; anything except to make the countless executives of the church worse? Worse they became, believe me.

By the time we made it that far through our lives to get to the Vatican palace, Christianity had become complicated, complex, big business. Bishop Piero Tomacelli, the Cossa family's unofficial representative to the papacy, worked only at night in the new papal palace on Vatican hill, near St Peter's. He was the curia] officer in charge of the administration of the rota romana, preparing cases for appeals to the pope from all over Christendom. His department, the audientia litterarum contradictarum, had maintained diligent files over the centuries. It examined and, ruled on objections and exceptions to appeals.

At midnight on the day after our arrival, Tomas took us to the Vatican palace for a private audience with Bishop Tomacelli, the expensive friend of the Cossa family. Tomacelli was the blandest man I have ever met or seen. He was tall, elegant and handsome; of a noble Neapolitan family, although not of the Cossa family's rank. He was ten years older than Cossa, which made him two years younger than me. `Tomacelli is not over-learned,' the duke had explained to us, `but he is courteous and affable and certainly knows where the money is.' '

The luxury in which the bishop lived impressed us deeply. I could see Cossa shivering with the pleasure of imagining how cardinals must live. Seeing Tomacelli, a young man, covered with jewels and line clothing, surrounded by so many servants in such an opulent setting must have settled the matter of Cossa entering the Church in his own mind. It had never been real to him before. The Church was the place for sandalled dolts such as Father Fanfarone, but this – this was living! I would have to agree with him if living without women was living.

'How I long to see Naples again,' the bishop said: `But you and I by our service, Baldassare, must put that past behind us. You have been chosen by His Holiness to study at Bologna, to transform yourself into an instrument of the Church.' Tomacelli's voice rode upon exquisite Latin, although a few years later, after I had perfected my own, I didn't rate it so highly. He was striking a bargain with Cossa.

`There is no career to equal what the Church can offer a brilliant young lawyer,' Tomacelli said. `Canon law is the skeletal structure of the Church. It is the oil which, has been rubbed into her by her lawyers, keeping her agile for more than a thousand years.'

We crossed the bridge of Sant' Angelo at about one fifteen in the morning. The horses were lively in the night air. Cossa was still excited by the audience. `Did you notice his shoes?' he asked us. `At first I thought they were painted on his feet but after a while I saw that they were made of silk.'

`Shoes?' I said. `What about the furniture? How about the paintings?'

`Yes!' he said. `And I thought to myself that Margaret of Durazzo, ruler of Naples, cannot have better than that. Where are we headed, Uncle?'

`Your father told me to put you on a woman,' Tomas said. `That's where we're going.'

`A woman?'

`You'll like it, my lord,' I told him.

`You've mounted women?' he asked me with astonishment. `Well, after all, I am twenty-two years old,' I told my thirteen year-old master.

`Who."

A couple of your cousins.'

We clattered through the night streets past the closely packed houses of the burgo, with their gables and sloping roofs facing the streets, most of them made from pilfered Roman ruins. Tomas stopped us in front of a two-storey house which had an outside marble staircase to the upper floor, in the street of the Blessed Santa Denisetta di Grellou. It had a small garden in front of the house with one olive tree, one fig tree and one apple tree. Tomas led Cossa up the outside stairway. Halfway up, Cossa stopped him. 'What's her name?' he asked.

`What do you care?'

'I have to know the name.'

`Bernaba.'

'Bernaba what?'

`Are you going to marry her or just wrestle with her: Her name is Bernaba Minerbetti. She comes from Bari, the pope's home town. She's so new to Rome that hardly anybody knows she's in business. You are lucky – she is a beautiful little piece with a lot of life in her. The reason you are going to get to have her at this time of night is because her protector – if you can imagine a fellow who thinks he has bought a whore all for himself – is a Sicilian protonotary apostolic named Piero Spina who works the night shift at the Vatican.'

`I wouldn't want her to be too much of a whore.' Cossa said.

`She'll be whatever you want her to be,' Tomas told him. `That's her business.'

Tomas knocked at the door at the top of the stairs. They waited. `Why is she taking so long?' Cossa asked.

The door opened. A tiny, dark, very pretty sixteen-year-old woman wearing a sheepskin, and holding a guttering candle opened the door. `Where you been?'she said. 'You got me all horny waiting for you.'

Tomas patted his nephew on the shoulder. `I have a virgin for you, he said to the girl.

`Ah, Uncle Tomas,' Cossa said. He didn't want to say that he had screwed many of his cousins because one of them was Tomas's daughter.

Tomas pushed him and the girl pulled him inside the door. It closed on my upturned face at the bottom of the stairs.

Tomas went home. I fell asleep in the garden waiting for Cossa to finish: Several hours later I was awakened by a racket above me.

Cossa told me later what had happened. He and the girl fell asleep in each other's arms after he had done four or five times what she had found out he could do quite well (and he spent the rest of his life perfecting it). They came out of sleep the same time I did, like stones from a catapult, when the door splintered open and two violent men broke into the room.

The girl sat straight up. `Spina!' she yelled. It was the protonotary apostolic who was paying the rent. Cossa told me Spina's eyes were popping out of his head at the horror of his personal disgrace. He had been conditioned to react this way: he was Sicilian.

'Sfregia!' Spina shouted.

The girl moaned like the night wind. 'Sfregia?' Cossa said blankly.

'He's going to cut up my face!' the girl shrilled, moving backwards and upwards in the bed. 'No, Spina! This is only a boy. He is from my village. He is my brother, Spina. He had no place to sleep.'

Spina took out a knife. He moved slowly around the bed towards the girl's side, motioning to his companion to move in on Cossa. The other man took out a knife and moved towards Cossa. By this time I had made it to the top of the stairs. I banged the companion over the head. He went down. Cossa,, naked, had leaped out of bed, picked up a heavy wooden chair and charged at, Spina, holding the chair before him like the horns of a fighting bull, running over the top of the bed to crash the chair into the soft front of Spina's head. and knocking him to the floor unconscious.

'Do something!' the girl yelled, as if we had just been standing around. 'He is a Sicilian! He will hold a trentuno to get his revenge! Oh, shit, and I just set up business in this town.'

'What's a trentuno?' Cossa asked.

'He will come back here with thirty men from the Vatican and they'll rape me one after the other.' 'Impossible!' Cossa said.

'You have destroyed his honour and he brought his own witness to see it,' Bernaba keened. ''Listen he is the most rabid kind of Sicilian. It could even be a trentuno reale, a continuous rape by seventy-nine men. I won't be able to work for two weeks! Then he will burn the house down. Oh, shit, those poor people downstairs.'

'Get dressed,' Cossa said. 'You'll come with us,'

'Where?'

'Bologna.'

'Over the mountains? Where it snows?'

'If you want a trentuno reale, then stay here.'

`Ah, shit.’

Cossa scrambled into his clothes: I kicked both, men in the head to make sure they stayed unconscious. Cossa wrote a note.

`Get me a pin,' he said.

`What are you writing?'

He took the pin from her and knelt beside Spina's broken face. He pinned the note to Spina's chest. 'It's in the best Latin,' he said, grinning, and he had such a smile, as I said, that the girl, despite all the trouble she thought she was in had to, smile as if somebody had handed her a gold florin. `Listen to this,' Cossa said. 'The entire male family of Bernaba Minerbetti have just performed a trentuno upon every orifice of your body. You have lost your honour. We are revenged."

`You knew my name!' the girl said with. immense pleasure. `But that really does it. Spina will spend the rest of his life trying to avenge this.'

`Let's get out of here,' I: said.

We left Rome with the escort one hour before dawn. We reached Bologna four days later without incident.

4

As we were riding north, 1 said to him, 'Your father wouldn't like it if he knew that, on, our second night in Rome, you made an enemy of someone in the Vatican.'

`It being the second night in Rome had nothing to do with it,' Cossa said. 'The fact that I was there on my second night in Rome is my father's fault. He wanted me to have a woman. As for making an enemy in the Vatican, the man came at me with a knife, so he must have been my enemy before I could be his. You might as well blame my Uncle Tomas for not taking me to an ugly girl who had no friends.'

As you car, see, it was always difficult to talk about serious, moral things with Cossa because the nature of his mind resisted them.

'Was she kidding about snow in Bologna?'

Well, in the winter, sure.'

`And I suppose the dialect is different?'' `Why not?'

'How's the food?'

I shouted to Palo, who had previously been sent to Bologna by Cossa's father to get everything set up for us, `Hey, Palo! How is the food in Bologna?'

'You are not going to believe it until you taste it,' Palo yelled. 'It is like ninety times better than Neapolitan food.'

'Well, they have snow so they should have better food, 'Cossa said.

Aeneas had not crossed into Italy, Ascanius had not built Alba nor Romulus Rome, when Bologna was already the noblest town in Tuscany, the chief city of the Etruscans. It extended as far as the foot of the Apennines, flourishing and fruitful, abounding in vineyards and olive groves. Unpolluted by marshy vapours, its soil was fertile, producing more than enough for the people of the plain: eater was brought into the city by the Canale di Reno. The city was famous for its square towers even more than for its arcaded streets. There were more than 950 towers; for the most part built of wood, often within five feet of their neighbours. The upper stories of the houses projected over crooked, narrow streets, the more pretentious made of brick decorated with terra cotta. There was no marble.

Ancient Bologna, on the Aemilian Way; was at the intersection of four provinces: Lombardy, the March of Verona, the Romandiola and Tuscany. It was the point at which the great lines of communication between the northern entrances of Italy and its centre converged. Students of the law from Norway to Greece who were to take their places in power throughout Christendom became our friends there.

The University of Bologna was the most famous centre of learning in southern Europe. Its rivals were Oxford and Paris. It taught the codification and administration of the laws on which the Church had survived for a millennium. It ignored theological speculation. Religious thought, which would have been only an illusion in the lives of these fledgling canon lawyers, had no substance. Theology was theoretical. The law took its nature from the material opportunities it represented. The student lawyers would graduate as doctors of canon law, then go on to become prelates bishops, archbishops and cardinals of the Church, stoically unaware of the spiritual side of the extraordinary complex they served, yet preserving and extending it by the attributes of their legal practice.

By banishing theological speculation from its curriculum, the university also banished all heresy to which such speculation gives rise and extinguished all interest in the purpose and meaning of the religion which the young lawyers were being trained to serve. The scholastic year lasted from October to the end of the following August. We needed to write no lies about Cossa's scholastic accomplishments in the letters which I dictated to Father Fanfarone for forgery into Cossa's hand. Cossa was renowned as a scholar.

Bernaba had brought her own money and a small collection of jewels. Spina had been generous. She thanked Cossa for his offer of hospitality in the same spacious, well-furnished house as we occupied, which Palo had found, four streets from the university. She told us she had to leave to get her business organized. `It's always hard to get started,' she said, `'but. I did it before and this looks like a pretty lively town.'

`You need a manager,' Cossa told her.

'A pimp?' she asked, without resentment.

'Watch your language, Bernaba,' I told her.

'Then what does he want to manage?' she asked. Am I a singer?'

'I have introductions to a lot of important people in Bologna,' Cossa said… `After I establish myself with them, I could introduce them to you.’

'What do you get out of this?'

`Information.'

'No money?'

'Information is money.'

`Then you won't take my money?'

`You're goddam right he won't take your money,' I told her.

`I didn't say that,' Cossa told her smoothly. 'Franco Ellera said it. That is business. You are a talented woman at your kind of work. I'll put up the money to set you up in style – see what I mean? It's like my father fitting out a ship for raiding. We'll agree on how much you earned in Rome and I'll allow you that much free and clear. But I'll take fifty per cent of whatever, you make over that, because of my investment and my key introductions, which will, after all establish you in business in a strange town.'

'What about trouble – you know, complaints, noisy drunks and women beaters?'

`We have Palo for that.'

`It sounds all right to me,' Bernaba said. `I will need all the protection I can get. But I'm not clear on, what kind of information you want.'

'That will develop naturally,' Cossa said. 'Let's concentrate on the business side for now. Like maybe you could add two or three more hot-looking cortegiani to your stable. We would finance that and protect their operation under you and take twenty-five per cent of what they make. You provide them with our money and our muscle and a nice place to work – and keep the other twenty-five per cent for yourself.'

`Cossa, hold on a minute, here,' I said.

`What's the matter?' he had the arrogance to ask me.

`I want to get something straight with you. This has nothing to do with fitting out a ship for your father's business. Even if it did I would still say that to make money from the business which drowned my mother is better than living off the shame of a woman who rents her body to men for the uses of their filthy lusts.'

`Filthy?' he said indignantly.

`Shame?' Bernaba said with shocked astonishment. `I am eating now! I have a, place to live and I had that before I met the two of you.'

`This is not personal, Bernaba; I said. `I want to be sure that Cossa understands. something important.'

`I do understand,' Cossa said. `We were cast into these roles. I am the son of a line of pirates. You are the son of a woman who was aboard a ship which my father took. Her fate was to drown, because, of all the women aboard those ships – about a hundred women only three of them drowned, so that was their fate. Bernaba was poor. You heard her. Until she went into her business as a courtesan, she didn't have enough to eat or maybe even a roof. We saved her from mutilation in the course of her work, yes, but we cost her a valuable client. So we owe her something. If we do nothing, if we turn her out upon the streets of a strange city, would that be right when you know we can help her? But, and this is the important point, Franco Ellera; the moment we help her on a large scale then she is obliged to give us a share in that business.'

`I'll count it when I see it,' Bernaba said.

`It will work,' he told her. `You will be a rich woman as long as you remember that I have nothing to do with any of this. Franco Ellera will be your contact. Franco Ellera will run Palo. We never had this conversation. If I am ever connected with this, a trentuno reale will be nothing to what will happen to you.'

Bernaba yawned theatrically.

`You understand me?'

`Yes. It makes a lot of sense.'

Bernaba moved into a very comfortable house which I found for her in Castelleto Street, where there was a market for the caviar-eyed Cyprian women who were forbidden to live near churches or monasteries – from what I have seen, at closest quarters, of church-men and monks, it would have. represented too much wear and tear on the, girls. The street was named after a celebrated brothel in Venice at the end of the Rialto bridge which I saw later on and ours was better.

Cossa, who was exactly like his father, could never see anything wrong in anything which produced money. If, for example, 2000 people lived in a forest which grew many hundreds of kinds of medicinal plants of benefit to mankind, and if the forest contained dozens, of animals and maybe insects which were the only food for those people, and Cossa or his father had a good money offer for the wood, they would cut down the entire forest immediately and feel it had been a good transaction. They knew instinctively that one of the things about a lot of money is that it eliminates moral nagging instantly. They were just as direct about the pursuit of power. Cossa was committed to spending ten years studying law because, if he excelled at it, he would' be invited to enter the doorway to power through the Church.

5

The university was a key to Cossa in more ways than mere academic achievement. Thousands and thousands of students had flocked there since it had been established, but Cossa was possibly; the only one who exploited every opportunity. He became scholastically accomplished and he won scholastic honours while he was turning over in his mind how the university worked and how he could use that to move his career along.

Within the university was the universitas, an association in the world of learning which corresponded to a guild in the world of commerce, a union among students possessing common interests to protect and advance. By the beginning of his fourth year at Bologna, Cossa dominated all the Cisalpine student unions – which included his own Neapolitan-Sicilian group as well as the Lombards, the Tuscans and the Romans- and several of the transalpine unions, by his bribery of the rectors who governed each union. I handled the direct bribery. Palo handled the threats. This, in addition to the amazingly personal information which Bernaba and her cortegiani amassed for him every night, about the many powerful citizens of Bologna, gave Cossa early standing with the city council and an important identity within the local Church which, in turn, reelected his growing eminence in its reports to Rome.

Cossa had his own money, never used, from his father. He had a substantial income from Bernaba' s, business. But he made a lot of money by organizing and supplying protection for the gambling houses of the city, called baratterie, and, Be bribed his way to greatness with that.

The baratterie were scattered throughout the city. They offered dice, draughts, knucklebones and skittles. Cossa arranged for Palo to form troops of street fighters from neighbouring towns and villages to begin quarrels in the gambling houses leading to violent brawls which broke up the baratterie. I would go in after the second time, it happened in each place, bringing with me outrage and sympathy, and grad; ally working out a system which guaranteed the owner total security from such disturbances, if he paid the fees.

Cossa took only 50 per cent of this weekly income. Palo and I got 15 per cent each and the rest, was divided among the troops. No one could connect any of these illegalities with Cossa. He was the model student, the most promising lawyer in the student body. He was certain to rise in the Church.

The amazing thing was that the climate agreed with all of us but, most of all, it agreed with Cossa. 'I feel like working here,' he said. 'I can do twice as much work and the food is so good that I may never eat a pizza again.'

'You don't miss Procida?' -

`I miss the freedom. But what is freedom, if it doesn't get you anywhere? I found out here, in Bologna; that I like to work. It is clear in my head that if I work, I am going to have the same freedom but I am also going to be one of the people who tells the other people what to do.'

I grinned at him. 'That's one thing you don't need,' I said, Since you could talk, you've been telling people what to do.'

Nearly all the servants of the royal and ducal courts – the diplomats, the consaglieri to great nobles, the architects and the entire tribe of lawyers were ecclesiastics. The civilization owed its development to canon law and its elaborate system of written precedents and.codes, its judicial evidence and its established procedures. The tie which bound the Church and the Law was Latin, the language of all educated people throughout Europe.

I speak Latin very well. Not as well as Cosimo di Medici but better than Cossa, who coarsened every language he spoke with a brutalizing Neapolitan accent.

Bishop Tomacelli, however, was the ultimate Neapolitan; so he had the ultimate accent. He was so devious as to be almost invisible. He was consecrated as a cardinal in 1384, and thereby was in a position to encourage the Bologna government's; appreciation of Cossa's gifts by making sure that Cossa; was invited to the only three dinners which he gave, as cardinal, in Bologna, over a two-year period. At these dinners Cossa was seated at his right hand.

When Tomacelli was elected pope on 11 November 1389, taking the name of Boniface IX, Cossa consolidated all that good will and saw that the word was spread among, the politicians of Bologna that he was the new pontiff's `nephew'. When a pope acknowledged someone as his nephew, it was always his illegitimate son. This made Cossa more powerful in the city.

Gliding forward into his papacy with smoothest affability, Tomacelli reinstated the cardinals whom Urban VI, his predecessor, had ejected, and set to work to win the temporalities of the Church.

Boniface must be explained because he was the gateway to Cossa's career,, making possible Cossa's highest rank, his great power as a condottiere, and his earliest riches. He brought Cossa together with the young Cosimo di Medici. That friendship was Cossa's ultimate fulfilment, positive and negative, and the substance of his immortality because, when Cossa was dead, it was Cosimo who commissioned Donatello to design, for, eternal placement in the baptistery at Florence, Cossa's tomb, which will honour his memory forever. Cossa in his turn, realized Cosimo's father's dream to gather the finances of the entire Church into one consolidated banking account, which they will retain for ever, you may be sure. Cosimo di Medici loved Cossa. He respected Cossa because he had had to use him so badly in his secret way. I think that speaks well for Cosimo. Other men, having used Cossa like that, would have had to detest him.

As soon as Tomacelli was made pope, he welcomed the overtures of the throne of Naples, which had paid him a fortune over the years; he sent a cardinal to Gaeta to anoint and crown the new king, young Ladislas. From that day hence it was the policy of the King of Naples to support the pope at Rome, without question, ignoring the other pope at Avignon.

Boniface sat down most agreeably with the noble families of the papal states: Este, Montfeltre, Malatesta, Alidosi, Manfredi and Ordelaffi. He convinced them that it would be to their best advantage if, they acknowledged his overlordship. Then, with ineffable bland patience, he persuaded Rome itself to abandon republican independence and to admit his full dominion. The Vatican was fortified. The papal states were rearmed and fully reinstated to their former strengths:

Although Boniface was one of the most successful popes ever to fill the chair of St Peter (from an: executive standpoint, for he took an enfeebled Church and remade it into a magnificent piece of machinery his success required much: money to reach fruition – more money by half than the Church had. For there was another. pope, Clement VII, commanding separate allegiances at Avignon, exacting his dues and tithes (and more) from his part of the obedience of Christendom. The deep schismatic wound of the Church had a mournful history. The popes had been in France for eighty-four years, but the actual schism which had produced two popes simultaneously had begun with Urban VI, Bonifaces' immediate predecessor.

I am not an ignorant man, as you have seen plainly since the beginning of this narrative. One would have immediately supposed that Cossa was highly educated and that I was untrained. But I educated myself. I used books. I studied Cossa's books and I insisted on being the only one to drill him in his studies because; had I not educated myself, he would have outgrown me and even the small influence such as I had with him would have been greatly diminished. But, further than the fact that I knew the law without being privy to its honours, I was better educated than Cossa because the only history he cared about was military history and whatever Church history was required to get his diploma.

I devoured history. Everything about history depended on money. It was the money which made the history; so I tried hard to understand money while not expecting to get any of it. Cossa, having so much of it, never had to study money. He took it for granted and, no matter how much he had, he always needed more.

6

If there is anybody within 5000 miles of where I am writing this who hasn't heard about the schism in the only Church they'll ever have, I don't believe it. But maybe if I wrap this manuscript well and hide it

in a good place, somebody will read this story a hundred years iron now and maybe they won't remember what started the whole schism which spilt their Church in half and was also very bad for business.

This is how the schism happened and how the papacy was moved from Rome to France.

In 1292, when Nicholas IV passed into God's fullest grace, there was a deadlock in the sacred college for twenty-seven months before his successor could be elected, and even then it happened by a cruel trick. There were only nine cardinals left in that college and only three of those were independent, the others were either Orsini or Colonna. Pope Nicholas had been an Orsini. The Orsini would not accept the loss of the papacy but the Colonna were determined to take it away from them, and you may be sure that the three remaining cardinals were unwilling to offend either family, both of whom had wilfully scattered murder throughout the streets of Rome.

The cardinals disputed who should be elected pope until the plague came to Rome, and they withdrew to the mountains of Perugia, still deadlocked.

One of the neutrals – a cardinal who was neither an Orsini nor a Colonna – was Cardinal Gaetani; the greatest canon lawyer of his time. He was a cold, pinguescent man whose height was such that he could tower over everyone (except me, had I been there). He carried his weight as daintily as a hippopotamus; he had eyes like knives, the determination of an assassin, and delicate hands.

To break the deadlock in his own devious way, Gaetani told Latino Malabranca, Cardinal of Ostia – therefore the senior cardinal that he had received a `letter of fire' from a holy hermit, Peter of Morone, which prophesied the vengeance of God upon all of them if a pope were not soon elected.

This was July 1294. Malabranca was a very religious fellow. He took the forgery which Gaetani had handed him with devout seriousness. He prayed. He contemplated. Then, on 5 July, he summoned the handful of cardinals, read them the letter which he believed had come from the holy hermit; demanding a vote instantly, he was so carried away by his own visions that he cried out, `In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I elect brother Peter of Morone.' The deadlock was broken by the logic of demonstrating to Colonna and Orsini alike that neither of them needed to prevent the other from winning.

Not that the cardinals of either family bothered to make the journey to Abruzzi to meet the new pope, to kiss his feet as ever tradition of the sacred college required. But, it, being only the villain of every piece who is certain of what he wants, Cardinal Gaetani did go to Abruzzi to pay his homage. With him were the King of Naples and an enormous following of ordinary people. In a bleak cave in the Abruzzi mountains, Gaetani told the holy hermit that he had been made Vicar of Christ on earth. The confused frightened old man, who had never seen so many people in his life, nodded to the statement because Gaetani had bellowed at him from that great height, in those rich and beautiful scarlet robes covering that barrel' chest and hogshead belly, commanding that Peter now nod his head to signify his acceptance of God's glory. Emaciated, hardly understanding Latin, much less the condition, Peter accepted the rulership of Christendom filled with mortal terror because he would have to leave his cave. He refused to go to Rome. He would rule from Naples. At Gaetani's, suggestion, he chose the name Celestine V. From that day forward, Gaetani served the pope as his lawyer and soothed him by creating a replica of the hermit's mountain cell in the Castel Nuovo, which had become the Lateran palace of Naples.

Celestine belonged to an order called the Spiritualists, who now brought terrible pressure upon him to bring pure love to the world. Gaetani saw to it that the tough, cynical bureaucrats of the curia jockeyed around the new pope.

Gaetani's consideration in duplicating, Celestine's cold, wet mountain cave within the Castel Nuovo was a hidden speaking tube which he had installed in the ceiling of the cell. Deep in the night, while Celestine prayed for divine guidance, Gaetani sat at the working end of the tube and, in the sepulchral tones which soared out of that great belly, warned his pope to abdicate the throne or face the flames of hell. After suffering the agonies of several nights of this, the poor old man turned to his eminent lawyer. Gaetani, lot advice on how such an abdication could be arranged. Piously Gaetani piloted his client's request through dangerous legal shoals.

The news leaked out. There was an uproar. Along with his consuming fear that if he didn't get out before he died he would be damned to an eternity in hell, Celestine had to cope with the ferocities of his fellow Spiritualist monks, who knew the abdication would prevent the long-awaited reign of eternal love and take away from them their new privileges. They stirred up the populace of Naples until the king afraid that the capital of Christendom would leave Naples as a result of the abdication, battered upon the old man to change his mind.

Celestine pretended to reconsider, while Gaetani's legal machinery ground on, but fifteen weeks after his coronation the miserable, addled old man summoned his last consistory and read out the prepared deed of renunciation to his cardinals. Slowly, to favour his old legs, he descended from the throne and stripped himself of his imprisoning robes.

Gaetani was elected to the papacy ten days later, as the compromise candidate, taking the name of Boniface VIII. His first act as pope was to order the arrest of Celestine, whom he sentenced to death.

Boniface VIII was consecrated and crowned at St Peter's in Rome. He witnessed the archdeacon throw the scarlet robe over him, confer his papal name and declare, `I invest you with the Roman Church.' Boniface was seated upon the sedes stercoraria, a true night commode, so that all would see that their pope was demonstrating I Kings 2.8: `He raiseth up the poor out of the dust and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill to set them among princes:'

Boniface had burdened himself with many nephews to allay his agony as a spiritual ruler, which was although the papal range was greater than any king's that he was denied the right to transmit his power and his possessions to his children. He acquired rich cities and contiguous, territories in the name of Gaetani. One quarter of the revenue of his reign was poured into buying these. His dynastic ambitions began to shove the great families to one side. Inevitably, he had to confront the Colonna, who ruled their domain from the hilltop city of Palestrina, twenty-two miles east of Rome.

The Colonna took their case against Boniface to the common people, instilling the belief that his election could not have been legal because it had been secured by the people's loss of heaven on earth when Pope Celestine, chosen of the Holy Ghost, had been usurped by him. They might have won with that argument, but Stephen Colonna raided and sacked a column of the pope's gold which was being sent to Caserta to buy yet another city for the Gaetani dynasty. Boniface, almost insane with rage, jailed two of the Colonna cardinals.

The Colonna offered to return the gold but Boniface wanted not only revenge on Stephen Colonna: but to install garrisons inside the chief Colonna cities. To the Colonna, papal garrisons would be Gaetani garrisons. At dawn the next day, Colonna heralds posted manifestos attacking the legitimacy of Boniface's election all over Rome, leaving one tacked to the high altar of St, Peter's. That evening, Boniface issued the bull In excelso throno, which expanded savagely upon the injuries the papacy had received at Colonna hands. It excommunicated the two imprisoned Colonna cardinals and every member of the cardinals' branches of the family unto the fourth generation. He charged them with heresy and, by putting them beyond the law, identified them as legitimate prey for all who could overcome them. By mid-August he had extended this to include all Colonnas. In November, he proclaimed a religious crusade against the Colonna, using money from all over Europe which had been intended to finance the Crusades in the Holy Land to buy the Knights Templar to crush the Colonna strongholds, The Colonna women and children: were thus to be killed or sold into slavery. By the summer of 1298, all the Colonna cities had fallen except Palestrina. Boniface offered a pardon for everyone it they would yield the city. When the Colonna agreed and surrendered, Boniface destroyed Palestrina. It was not a token destruction such as the demolition of a short section of the city's wall; Palestrina was razed to the ground, and the hideous Roman ritual of the plough and the salt was re-enacted to leave the place eternally barren. The Colonna went to France in exile.

Then, at the crest of his position as `father of kings… ruler of the world', in order to demonstrate his power over princes, Boniface forbade the King of France to tax the French clergy.

The French king took this stricture so badly that he in turn forbade the export of all money to the pope. He forbade foreigners to live in France, which excluded members of the curia. Warming to his task, he called an estates-general to charge the pope with infidelity, loss of the Holy Land, the murder of Celestine V, heresy, fornication, simony, sodomy, sorcery and idolatry in a list of twenty-nine charges -all of them the sort employed when some faction wants to rid the Church of a pope, many of them quite- valid. The only weapon Boniface had was the solemn excommunication of the King of France, which would release the French people from their allegiance to the king. The publication of this fatal bull was planned for 8 September 1303 from Agnani, the pope's summer palace.

The bull had to be stopped. It could have stirred up cataclysmic turmoil in France. The king sent William of Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna into Italy, where 2000 troops had been raised to storm Agnani and to drag Boniface to France to be tried.

Agnani was the capital of the Gaetani family's domain, as Palestrina had been the home and capital of the Colonna' s. Somebody inside the city opened the gates to Sciarra Colonna and 200 men. With drawn sword, Colonna raced into the papal palace to find Boniface, now almost eighty, seated on his throne clad in his robes, with the three tiered tiara on his head, cross in one hand and keys to St Peter's in the other. If Sciarra was shaken by this serenity, lie did not show it. He told his men to strip Boniface naked. Sciarra jammed the tiara down over the pope's eyes and, knocking him down, had his men drag him by the feet across the stones, down a granite stairway, to be flung into a narrow, lightless dungeon where Sciarra ordered the men to urinate on him. They left him locked in there to fight off the rats. Two nights later, the people of Agnani expelled the French and rescued Boniface. It was six days before he could travel. He reached, the Vatican on 18 September and died twenty-four days later. The Church was never the same again, thank God. Benedict X was elected pope but he died within ten months. A relentless bargaining conclave followed, which took months to elect Clement V he was Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, a man who had never set foot in Italy and as it turned out, never would. He was controlled by the King of France:

Clement V was crowned at Lyons in November 1305 but there were a lot of bad omens. During his procession he was thrown from his horse, a wall fell on him and w rare jewel in his crown was lost. One of his brothers and ten barons lost their lives under that wall. He settled at Avignon, finally, in 1309, and was succeeded by six French popes who, at the will of the French king, remained in France. The Church was still under a single papacy, three quarters of a century away from the schism, but it wasn't until 1377, sixty-eight years later, that the papacy returned to Rome, when Gregory VI went to Italy to save the papal states for the Church; he died suddenly in Rome, probably poisoned.

Of the sixteen cardinals in his college, eleven were French, four were Italian, and one was Spanish. The city magistrates warned the cardinals that their lives would be at stake if an Italian pope were not elected. The Romans were desperate lest the papacy should return to France. They had become poor people in an Italian country town which had grass growing in its streets since their big business had been moved to Avignon. They had missed out on the profits from about two million pilgrims to Rome since Clement V was elected and the French had got all that money. As the cardinals entered the upper. storey of the building to hold their conclave a prodigious electrical storm came on. The wild-eyed Roman mob; stirred up by the thought of the money they might lose for ever if the papacy remained outside Rome, pressed upon the cardinals on their way into the building, screaming for an Italian pope, chanting, Romano; Romano, volemo la papa, o almanco.Italian!" There were thousands of them and, while the conclave deliberated, it, must have been able to hear the mob bellowing outside. Drunken rioters forced their way into the lower room and set fire to it. They shoved lances through the ceiling into the conclave room above and, when three cardinals came out to parley; they were threatened with being torn to pieces if they didn't elect a Roman or at least, an Italian.

The conclave chose the safest-pope – Archbishop Bartolomeo Prigano of Bari, a Neapolitan who had been vice chancellor at the University of Avignon. He was a small, fussy man who disapproved of everything, but most of all he disapproved of French curial extravagances. At Avignon, he would fling inkwells at the walls in frustration, yelling that the cardinals were turning the Church into a pawnshop. Prigano took the name of Urban VI. When this petty bureaucrat realized that the awesome, unknowable duties of the papacy had fallen upon him, his sanity slipped its leash. Total madness came only a short time later. The cardinals had chosen him swiftly but there are some Church histories which say that Prigano had been forced upon them by the murderous mob. That was not so. Prigano had been one of their curia through the old days at Avignon, When he was consecrated, all of them gave, him homage and got many favours from him. The guardian at Sant' Angelo had strict orders not to give up the keys to the new pope until six cardinals still at Avignon consented, and those six ordered that the keys be placed in Urban's hands. There was not a single objection or hesitation or dissatisfaction with the election of Urban VI until he held his first consistory and attacked the cardinals with ferocity, screaming at them in street Neapolitan, venting the spleen accumulated over all of his years in the chancery at Avignon against their simonies: He told them there would be no more shares in the sevitia for them, an impossible condition for cardinals because it attacked their right to an assured unearned income. The servitia was equal to one third of the income of all of the bishops in Christendom. At the first consistory he singled out each cardinal in turn, reviling him individually and by name. He cited the instances of their corruption. He limited their food and drink. He forbade their acceptance of pensions, provisions and gifts of money.

Of course, he doomed himself. One by one, the cardinals left Rome and assembled at Agnani; a fated and fateful city for the papacy. The same college of cardinals which, had just elected Prigano now met and voted the election null and void on the ground that they had been coerced into electing him in fear of the violence of the Roman mob.

It seems hard to believe but they elected in his place a brute named Robert, Cardinal of Geneva – he who was called. the Butcher of Cesena because he had ordered his troops to put 3000 women and children to the sword when they objected to the rape of sixty women by his transient soldiers. The Butcher took the name of Clement VII, whereupon Urban VI excommunicated him, then he excommunicated Urban, and the great schism of the Church had begun. There were two popes; who ruled Christendom simultaneously: – Urban in Rome, Clement at Avignon. The Cossa family's advocate, Piero Tomacelli, succeeded Urban as Boniface IX. To restore the weakened Church Boniface undertook the sale of

offices and benefices. As I have said before, much money was needed. The ordinary income, such as Peter's Pence, was grossly insufficient. Papal expenses' were higher than they had ever been. In addition to a pope's usual duties-fixing points of doctrine and discipline, granting dispensations, confirming, benefices and maintaining manifold external relations with foreign courts Boniface had an immense amount of work to do as the ultimate spiritual and temporal court of appeal.

In 1350, the period between Jubilees – the times at which special indulgences were granted and pilgrims flocked to Rome – had been reduced from one hundred to fifty years by Clement VI. The period was reduced still-further; to thirty-three years, the length of the life of Christ, by Urban VI, who appointed 1390 to be a Jubilee year. Boniface XI reduced the period to ten years; he reaped enormous wealth from the Jubilees of 1390 and 1400. He never flinched from prostituting the spiritual to the temporal.

Under his rule, simony reached its great climax. He multiplied the sale of indulgences. It was useless for a poor man to appear before a papal court of law. Income for the Church was sought from cacti and every source. Everything, even a signature, had to be paid for: if one man had bought a place on the ladder of influence and a second man made a better offer, the second offer was accepted also, the grant was antedated and the first man lost; his place. Although gorged with money, to his dying day Boniface was never filled. He piled tax upon tax, graft upon graft, simony upon simony. He taxed the papal states, demanded fees for appointments and annual dues from those ordained to political office. He appropriated the entire income from benefices and brought all benefices under papal patronage. He appropriated the property left in the vast estates of cardinals and bishops when they died.There were special taxes for alienation from holy orders, for the creation of new orders and congregations; for personal honours and promotion, and for any other privilege.

Boniface's fiscal policies were typical of his country at the tithe. Italy was sunk in vice and violence. The common man cast about frantically to achieve his own destruction. There was little devotion in the Church. Money was the deity. The laity; had no faith, no piety, no modesty and no moral discipline. Men cursed their neighbours. Most people's hope had failed them because of the sins they saw in high places.

In the ninth year of Cossa's studies at Bologna, when he was twenty-two years old, something happened which changed our lives for ever

We had received as letter from Cossa's father with news of everyone – at Procida, which always elated Cossa (and me), so we had had a little party, drinking wine and reading the letter again and again, with Cossa remembering two stories for every name which his father mentioned in the letter. Therefore, I was sleeping well (however alertly) in the hall outside Cossa's door – my preferred place of rest – when Bernaba sent one of her girls, Enrichetta, a luscious thing with a body like a pasta statue, to tell me to come at once to Castelleto Street. Enrichetta and I went out into the black night, moving through alleys to avoid patrols, and, on the way – I will never forget it – we did it standing up in an arcade. I am still convinced that Emrichetta was in love with me during the time it took her to turn the trick.

Bernaba took me into her room and locked the door. She seemed awestruck a condition which I had thought to be unattainable by this dear woman. `Franco, listen to me,' she said, almost piteously eager to shift whatever, she knew to somebody else, `I have a papal agent drunk in there, Giovanni Brisoni, a papal pawnbroker. In wine, the truth – right? Well, he told me that a shipment of gold has left the Vatican. It will pass through Bologna in three days' time on the way to Venice.'

I didn't understand what she, was implying. I didn't make the connection.

`Franco! For Christ's' sake! A mule train carrying sacks of gold made to look as if they were sacks of grain. The soldiers are dressed like farmers. They are so sure the ruse will work that the escort is even smaller than it should be.'

`How much money?'

`Two hundred thousand gold florins. What do you think I wet my pants for?'

'Where does the pope get that kind of money?'

'You can have fifty guesses. Why are you still standing there? Run and tell Cossa!'

`He's asleep.'

`Are you an idiot? Have you forgotten Cossa's family profession?'

I made the connection. I am slow but I am thorough. I questioned her about the strength of the escort, the routing of, the shipment, the number of mules in the train, its route and departure time from Rome. Bernaba had all the answers. I left through a window into an alley and went back to Cossa's house by the shortest way. Cossa was quite interested when I awoke, him and gave him the information, – which was not startling considering the amount of money involved.

`Twelve men, is a lot of protection,' he, said – 'But I'll have surprise and night on my side.'

`Our side,' I told him.

`Round up ten of Palo's regime,' he said. `Tell them nothing except where they are to meet me.'

'Where?'

`One mile south on the road out of the west gate. One hour from now.'

`Only ten men?'

`With me it's eleven,' he said. `And I make it twelve.'

`You're not coming, Franco Ellera. And Palo isn't coming. Some of our lads won't survive tomorrow night. They will take the gold to a hiding place but after that I'm going to have to kill them all because there will be a gigantic reward out from the pope. So you stay out of it.'

‘You mean you would have to kill me?'

For argument's sake, isn't it logical? Listen to me, the pope will go half crazy with rage about this. He may order the torture of everyone in the papal states to find out who stole his gold: Who can hold out against an expert?'

'Cossa, you don't need that money.'

'Two hundred thousand gold florins?'

'You'll have to wait until he is dead before you can bank it or spend it. They will keep looking, for that money as long as Boniface lives.'

`Franco Ellara – I am surprised at you,' he said to me tenderly. 'Where would my family be if they had taken this attitude? Of course, money is important for its own sake, but what puts one set of people above all the others is in their boldness in taking the money. As you point out, we have two going businesses here but we have them only because of our bold approach. You want me to be a bishop, right? Do you think we have enough money to give to Boniface to make me a bishop? Not yet, we haven't. So I've got to think like a bishop. I've got to grasp my chances with courage and… really, Franco Ellera, even a philosophy student would reckon two hundred thousand gold florins worth a big risk.'

`This is a big mistake, Cossa. This could put us into prison if it doesn't get us killed. Don't do it. This could undo your whole life. Put it out of your mind.'

'I am going to take that money. That's enough. No more talk…'

'I am more scared of your father than I will ever be of you and he made me take a solemn oath to protect you. If you won't listen to reason, I am going on the raid.'

Palo's men, led by a reliable brute named Venta, rode out ahead of going south-west. Cossa and I rode due south-south east for thirty-four miles and, to the south of the mountain village of Castrocaro, bought a small-holding in the name of Carlo Pendini from the agent of the Duke of Urbino. We studied the terrain between Aqualagna and Fossombrone. On either side of the lonely road were harsh grey hills scarred with gashes lions a millennium of erosion. The sparse fields gave such a hard living that few farmers would reach for it. The fields were so untended and rocky as to be indistinguishable from the mountainsides.

Our appointed meeting with Venta and his men was at the opening of a gorge four miles south of Fossombrone. Steep slopes bracketed the main road to Bologna for about four hundred yards. 'This is sweet,' Cossa said… `It is like one of papa's coves.' To him, it would be no different from raiding a merchant ship.` That night, he waited with five men at the south, side of the pass which ran roughly from east to west. I waited on the north side with Venta and the five other men. It was very dark.

Cossa worked with a-handled German boar spear. It had a sharp, ten-and-a-half-inch blade tip with a hole just below it for a transverse bar to prevent deep penetration so the spear would come out easily. In the other hand he had a Sienese dagger with a nine-inch blade notched to entangle and snap an opponent's knife. His raiding crew was spaced out on either side of him and I could see them as the torchlight of the train came into the gorge. Each of the men carried a poled halberd, a combination of a spear and a battle axe, five feet long, which gave footfighters a better chance of winning when they fought men on horseback. We would attack on foot.

Cossa had instructed the men to dig an eight-foot-deep pit across the width of the road. They had covered it with light tree limbs, leaves and heavy dust. The train would fall right into it in the night.

The heavy procession was headed by four mounted soldiers, followed by the mules, then more soldiers. What were probably a captain and a sergeant rode on either side of the train. With a wild scream, Cossa led his charge down the slope as the first horses and soldiers fell into the road trap. Cossa hacked at the legs of the leading horses, taking one leg off each horse and sending the rider forward into the pit, where one of our lads bashed his, brains out. My crew attacked the legs of the rear-of-column horses, running the riders through as they fell. The terrible sounds of the horses' screams, the fearful shouts of the guard and the muleteers, and the shrieks of pain and terror were only to be expected from such an action. I worked my way forward along the smashed column while Cossa worked his way back, When

we met, we were drenched in blond, but within a few minutes every member of the train's escort party was dead. The only survivors of both sides were Cossa, three of our lads, all of the mules, and me. The gold was intact. We dragged all the bodies, and those of the horses, into the wide deep road pit, and shovelled in dirt to level it off. We took the gold to Cossa's new holding at Castrocaro.

The lads were exhausted from the emotion and exertion of the slaughter. 'They moved mechanically as they lowered sack after sack of the heavy gold into the great hole which they had dug earlier at the

small-holding. He was gentle with them, encouraging them with soft promises as they shovelled in the earth to cover; the sacks. When half the deep pit had been filled, and their heads appeared just over its edge, Cossa nodded to me and we struck hard with the sides of the shovels at the backs of their heads, knocking them flat into the hole. Cossa leaped into it and ran them through the hearts and throats with his German spear. He. climbed out so wearily that I reached down and lifted him out. We took up the shovels again, covering everything in the pit with soil, levelling the ground up to two inches of the top of the pit, then Cossa turned to the low stack of turf rectangles which he and his men had earlier stripped so carefully off the ground and began to lay them back in place, while I went to the shed and lifted up the heavy tombstone we had brought from Bologna and carried it across the ground to imbed it at the head of the newly dug common grave. It said:

HERE LIES

THE FAMILY OF

CARLO PENDINI

TAKEN BY THE PLAGUE

`That should keep any ghouls out,' Cossa said.

'See?' I told him as we stumbled off to our horses for the ride back to Bologna. `You couldn't have done it without me.'

8

In 1390 the Duke of Santa Gata. attended his son's graduation from the University of Bologna. Cossa was, twenty-three years old, a leading student of his class, the most potent factor in the university life of his time, and a notable figure, in Bolognese politics. He was seated in the magisterial chair, the book of law was handed to him, the gold ring was slurped upon his finger, the lawyer's biretta put upon his head, and he was pronounced a Doctor Utriusque Juris. He had entered an order of intellectual nobility which had as distinct and definite a place in the hierarchical system of Christendom as the priesthood or the knighthood. The duke, smiling the family smile, expressed his enormous pleasure that Cossa was now ready for his life, and told us that Pope Boniface IX had named his brilliant son to be Archdeacon of the University of Bologna and Chancellor of the University (from. which Cossa had graduated about eleven minutes before). `It was his own idea,' the duke said. `He summoned me to an audience and he explained that as an archdeacon you would be starting your career in the Church as a prelate, no less. Naturally, it wasn't free. I had to pay a hundred florins for such a benefice, which you and I will share equally after you have paid me back the hundred florins. You should be able to earn that back in the first two years.'

With the greatest of ease, Cossa made the job earn the money back in the first eight months. He made administrative changes. No one could be graduated without his consent. He controlled all examinations and their results. Only he had the power to confer the licences without which graduates could not teach practise law throughout the world. He reorganized all university systems beginning with student lodgings. He instituted: a chair-leasing tradition in the classrooms, a `head tax' upon each student, annual fees for `materials and certificates', examination fees, and, a charge for `the review of graduation applications', as well as a final fee for the processing of licences to practise. The, curia allowed him to keep 35 per cent of all the money he collected biannually and, at the end of his first year as archdeacon, Cossa received the congratulations of the pope for the fine work he was doing to raise university standards. At the end of the second year, Cossa instituted a `field privileges' system which permitted senior students to gain experience in drawing up wills, land deeds and contracts to be certified by the chancellor's office after the payment of a graduated-scale of fees to the university. His executive ability, as well as the audible appreciation of the Church for his leadership, bound him even closer than before to the Bologna City Council.

Mysteriously (we thought at the time), the Medici bank in Bologna let the council know that Cossa came from `a famous family of warriors' in Naples,, and within a short time he was appointed a deputy commander, under the old Duke of Este, of the Bolognese military, such as they were at the time. Cossa won fame as a soldier for his leadership of the successful massacre at Rocco di Estia, which eliminated a pocket of troublemakers who had refused to pay taxes. Cossa enjoyed leading troops. He was as good at it, as he was at everything else: his secret was that everything he did was important to him when he did it, before he did it and after he did it. The Church, wars and women exemplified this talent.

I have had many opportunities to talk to Cossa over the years about the feverish nature of his relations with women and, essentially, our debate all came down to this. I would point out to him – for instance, after he became pope – that love was God's, and that the proper place for fornication and sodomy, with their burden of sin, was marriage; they had not been designed for constant promiscuous pleasure. I reasoned with him within the tenets of his own religion (which was not mine) that every golden moment of the Christian existence had to measure up to the profound philosophical preconceptions and prejudices of its founding fathers. Using the trick of his sweet smile which even though I fully understood its use, I could not resist – he would answer me that, because religious and secular law were practically one tissue, the 'morality' of sex had become imbedded in religious law. Having created-guilt and blamed it on Adam and Eve, the founding fathers of the Church saw that the easiest way to remind people of their guilt was by putting restraints on all human pleasures. He told me, patiently, that the `morality' of sex was, therefore, an important factor in social control. He admired the founding fathers for having had the genius to separate sexual relationships from all other human relationships, then to give sex a permanent stain of inner-felt unholiness. But, he said, God or nature has a far stronger influence over us than the ambitions of clergymen, and God insists that the most, important act of our lives is to reproduce ourselves. This desire to do the right thing in God's eyes is so strong in us – certainly in me, he said, it may be different with you Germans – that it cannot be overcome by slanted doctrines from covetous minds.

He became angry with Bernaba during the first year he was chancellor because she said he should allow her to send women to him – he most certainly had received carnally other wives and daughters of Bologna- and that he should stay away from Castelleto Street because it just didn't look right for a man of his dignity, an archdeacon as well as chancellor, and therefore a promising prelate of the Church, to be seen by students entering and leaving a whorehouse. They got into a hot argument over that. Bernaba was a woman of strong character and she recognized no difference between herself and Cossa – or anyone else. Cossa told her to run her whores and keep her advice to herself, so she called. him as stupid donkey and he told Palo to take her outside and beat her. Palo started to get her, but I stepped on his feet, and when he fell down I stumbled over him somehow and tell on his head with my knees, somewhat heavily. Bernaba enjoyed it but it made Cossa even angrier.

`Listen,' I told him, 'Bernaba is one of the oldest friends we have. We don't want anyone – particularly Palo – getting the idea that he can beat her.' I stared at him until he got the point. At last he smiled and said, `I'm sorry. I just lost my temper. It's been a long day.'

She ran across the room, put her arms around him and gave him a big kiss. `Just stay out of Castelleto Street,' she told him. `I'll send you all the women you can handle. You're the chancellor. You have to, give a good impression.'

They were pals again,; but, some years later, when I married Bernaba, she wanted our marriage to be kept secret. `Listen, Franco,' she said tome, `Cossa thinks you are only alive to serve him. He would break all the furniture if we told him.'

`My God, Bernaba,' I said. `How can I keep a secret from Cossa?'

`There is one easy way to do it, Franco. Keep remembering that he is capable of sending me to his father to be sold in the slave market at Bari. He is a nice man. But why should he know?'

I must explain how I can write down this history of my friends or autobiography, depending on how you see it. It would be too easy to allow my own life to dominate this narrative. But this is Cossa's story. I have the feeling that Church history isn't going to deal well with Cossa, but we have to remember that, for all his gestures of action, Cossa was a passive fatalist who allowed things to happen to him. Villains are never like that. Villains always know what they want and they, move to get it. There were villains on every side of Baldassare Cossa and not all of them inside the Church.

I have known Cosimo di Medici almost as long as I have known Cossa. Cosimo was a few years younger than Cossa, Boniface I was ten years older than Cossa, and I was senior to all of them. Cosimo is a banker so, he doesn't talk much unless he needs something, or its plotting something, but he has told me plenty. After I became a cardinal everybody wanted to tell me everything they knew. It's a kind of bragging on their part. The ones who knew the most about things which should be buried deep in the ground were Bernaba's friend Decima Manovale and her four daughters. The daughters told Manovale and Manovale told Bernaba.

Bernaba was my wife for over twenty years. She is dead now. Bernaba was in a business which gave her the keys to a lot of closets. Some things she didn't tell me until the year she died. She wasn't concealing anything. Whatever I asked her, she told me. After most of the people in our lives were gone, I knew everything she knew about them before I wrote this book.

For example, Decima Manovale. When Cosimo's father began to take an interest in Cossa, Manovale told Bernaba about it. That is so long ago that, at the time, the Medici was only the third, ranking bank in Florence after the Bardi and the Albizzi. The Bardi were ruined by loans they made to the English crown. The Albizzi favoured the rich. So the Medici had no choice but to go after the business of the middle classes and the poor, and that wasn't easy. Cosimo's father was the most ambitious man in Europe. His son was just a son when he started in the bank, and he couldn't really make much of himself until his father died… By that time, they were the biggest bank in the world. The old man was called Giovanni di Bicci di Medici. He worked every corner. He operated farms, manufactured silk, traded with, Europe; Russia and Islam, which was against the Church law – but his ruthless ambition was some day to become the banker for the Church.

Cosimo di Medici told Manovale's daughter Maria Giovanna that his father's obsession with Church banking dated from the day when he found out from some country.bankers in Cahors that the papal treasury at Avignon had 18,000,000 gold florins and 7,000,000 more worth of plate and jewellery on deposit with them. Gold florins were the most desirable currency in Europe. One gold florin was worth three and a half English pounds and old man Medici probably considered all of it to be family money because it was named after the republic of Florence.

Cosimo di Medici's father's one overwhelming desire was to attract the Church's banking away from the different Sienese, Roman, Venetian and foreign banks into one central depository, of all Church income and capital controlled by him,, because he believed that those other banks didn't understand how to use the power of such an opportunity.

The Church was the great industry of Christendom. Its bankable deposits flowed not only from the Vatican but also from the holy sees and religious orders, and from the obediences of the princes who were dependent upon the Church and that meant all of them. The old man used to get furious (Cosimo told Manovale who told Bernaba who told me) because nobody seemed; o realize that the Church income and capital should be centrally organized.

Giovanni di Bicci di Medici had another, invisible, advantage. The papal tax-collecting organization naturally favoured Italian employees, for this established and maintained the predominance of Italian banks throughout Europe. Even business in and around the North Sea and the Baltic was largely financed by them. He kept repeating to his son that if one bank had everything the Church deposited. any pope could be made content, even happy, and the bank therefore could, prosper beyond anything any banker (except Giovanni di Bicci di Medici)' had ever dreamed of. With a few happy popes leaning on every see, every prince, every religious order, to bank with one single bank's branches – which would be conveniently located everywhere, – a banker could have a really flourishing business…

Therefore, Cosimo di Medici's father was always redrawing his mental maps to try to create new alleys or highways which could lead to financial influence with any pope, however casual the approaches might seem to be. That explained the Medici: interest in Cossa, a young churchman, on the way up who might provide some levers.

The Medici baking branch in Bologna gathered and passed along to the head office in Florence raw information, even gossip, about what was happening in the city The Medici were keener than most governments on intelligence operations., The Bologna branch routinely reported the new organization of whores and the baratterie, but their operations were so expertly shielded, (by me) that, at first, the Medici weren't able to find out who had created the whole thing. But they kept trying. Florence was interested in people who had an instinct about money and knew how to make it. It took the Bologna branch a long time to find out that Cossa was the man. Luigi Palo probably took some money to tell them.

When Cosimo's father knew that a mere law student at the university – and a student of canon law at that – was responsible, he was so impressed that he told his son to work with the Bologna branch on building up a running file on Cossa. Cosimo had to find the right man at the Vatican from whom to buy Cossa's record, and the man just happened to be Piero Spina, then still a protonotary apostolic (who was still searching for Bernaba and the man who had broken his nose, even though he had no idea who that roan was), which could put people in awe of the combinations God plays with.

When the Medici read the Vatican file, they had two sets of information, not exactly matching. The Vatican file said Cossa was a prize student who had a future in the Church, that he was the eldest son of the Duke of Santa Gata, and – interesting to old man Medici – from a line-of pirates and slavers. They put this together with the information about organizing the whores and the gambling houses and his bribery of the rectors of the student unions, which had created local political influence, and they liked what they read. So they, instructed their branch manager in Bologna to have a quiet conversation with Bolognese city councilmen and remind them that Cossa would be the next Duke of Santa Gata an impressive matter to politicians – and that he should be considered for the job of one of the Duke of Este's commanders of the Bologna military Therefore, and not at all as mysteriously as Cossa thought, it happened that, while continuing as chancellor of the university, (and with the permission of Rome), Cossa had become a condottieri leader while Cosimo's father continued his plotting to move him into the Vatican. The invisible can cast long shadows.

One afternoon while Cossa was working out a series of complicated positions in a fleshy pile with Enrichetta and two new girls from Lucca, a letter arrived from the pope, summoning him to Rome. He lost all interest in completing the coilings within the coilings. When the women had gone, he said to me (I had been keeping notes on and, sketching the more impossible couplings), `Read this. What the hell can he want?'

`He wants to promote you.'

'It doesn't work that way, Franco. If he wanted to transfer me upstairs, I'd get word from the bishop here and the bishop of wherever they're sending me.'

`Correct. Except that the bishop who is going to get you outranks the bishop here. What is the pope? He is the Bishop of Rome.' Jesus.' he said, `suppose they have worked out who took the gold from them at Fossombrone?'

'How could they work it out? It went into a hole at Castrocaro. How could they trace it to you? And if they did, they'd dispatch a squad of soldiers to pick you up; they wouldn't send you a flowery letter.,

`I'd hate to walk into a trap.'

'Cossa, please! Don't pretend to have suddenly discovered that you have a conscience. Who do you want to come with us?'

`Leave Father Fanfarone` here. He might be arrested as an enemy agent if he ever fell into conversation with a real priest at the Vatican. Bocca, of course – but only Bolognese and Venetian food. No Neapolitan food. Palo stays here to protect the business. Lay on a bodyguard. We'll leave tomorrow morning.'

9

In his lifetime – beginning with his cousins on Procida – Cossa, seduced 317 matrons, virgins, widows, circus performers and nuns that I know of. That figure does not include courtesans, except for my wife. He was a healthy man who had a natural view of women. The way Cossa looked at it, he needed everything he got. -

Out of the 317, only two were important to him, involved with him mystically and emotionally. We met the first woman on that journey from Bologna to Rome to see the pope.

As we rode away from, Bologna, Cossa kept saying he was tired, which meant he was still worried about whether the pope had found out who took the gold. When we arrived at Perugia, about halfway, he was welcomed, as the chancellor of the university, to stay at the house maintained by the Duke of Milan for official travellers. He told me to take care of the horses, to have my dinner with whom I chose, and to call him at dawn for the journey to Rome.

The next-day he told me what happened, to him after that. He was walking in the garden to consider the best time to take the gold safely out of the ground at Castrocaro, when he heard someone close by call him by name. He turned and saw a beautiful woman with commanding red hair whose eyes, he said, were painted with lust. When he left her bed at dawn the next day, Cossa was insane with love. When I finally forced my way into the room after exhorting him through the door, pleading that the pope was waiting for him, he was dressed, wearing chest armour with weapons strapped to his person so that even if he were, to be overcome with the need to mount the woman again, it would be too painful a possibility for both of them. But it became even more of an impossibility for him to separate from her without one more go so he tore off the armour and loosed his manhood from its cradle of chainmail and leaped upon her again with such incredible speed that had not the time to stop him; he was thrusting and grunting while she cried out as if in excruciating pain, which I knew could not be the case.

As soon as they ceased their shocking agitations – I do not mean that I was-shocked by what they were doing but by the extent to which they were doing it – I pulled him off her, probably because I was not an Italian. As I lifted him away, I veiled into his dazed ear, `We must travel, Cossa. As it is we will scarcely make it.' He, kissed the lady's tattered mouth and left the room.

We were two hours on our way, with Cossa riding along, staring like a sheep at the, horizon, when he remembered some terrible omission. He tried to wheel his horse, but I grabbed the reins. `I don't know her name!' he wailed. `We must go back! How will I ever find her again?'

Wherever she was going, she has gone,' I told him: `I will send a man back to talk to the innkeeper. But, wherever she is headed,, she doesn't have an appointment with the pope.'.

He actually began to weep. He moaned that he couldn't live without her, that I didn't understand things. like that – while I kept him riding a good distance ahead of the escort lest they discover what a fool he had become.

We reached the Lateran eighteen minutes, before Cossa's appointment. A guards captain took Cossa into the palace. Boniface did business only at night. It was an unusual meeting, Cossa told me. The pope was engaged in quarterly accounting audits and apologized that he wouldn't be able to give Cossa much time. He said he wanted from Cossa an estimate quantifying the costs of raising an army of mercenaries for Bologna. Mercenaries, the slogging condottieri of Italy, fought all its wars. Boniface instructed him sternly never to forget that most of the funding would come from the Council of Ten in Florence. `Be aware that a small part will come from our papal states,' Boniface said, `and' we expect you to keep our forced contribution to this project to a minimum. I expect you to make up for our financial losses by doing a considerable amount of looting and hostage-taking.

'Me?' Cossa asked.

`The Duke of Este is growing too old to lead troops,' the pope said, `and, as the Florentines will be paying the bulk of the costs, they insist upon choosing the commander and they have chosen you.’

`Who are we fighting?' Cossa said,

'I don't need to tell you that this is not to cause a shift in your loyalties, Cossa,' Boniface said sternly. `It is only a temporary campaign to contain the Duke of Milan: to get him out of Bologna, to keep him out of the papal states, and to thwart his ambitions for the conquest of Italy…’

The Duke of Milan was Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The Visconti had been rulers of Milan since the end of the thirteenth century. Their power was so well established and their reputation so great that they had been able to rise from the status of Lombardy bandits and hired lances to intermarry with, the royal houses of England and France, and with the princes of Germany. When Galeazzo II died, in 1378, his heirs, were his son, Gian Galeazzo, and his brother Bernabo, as ruthless a ruffian as anyone ever had for a relative.

Bernabo worked plot after plot to get rid of his nephew, but without effort the nephew managed to detect and defeat these deadly schemes. In perfidy and dissimulation the young man was more than a match for his uncle.

All at once, Gian Galeazzo became absorbed in devotion to the Holy, Spirit. He visited churches, rosary in hand, spent hours of devotion before statues of saints, and tripled his bodyguard. In May 1385 he let it be known widely that he was going to pray at the shrine of the Madonna del Monte at Varese, near Lake Maggiore, which was within his uncle's territory. His bodyguard was commanded by Jacopo del Verme and Antonio Porro, pitiless men.

Bernabo Visconti and his two sons joined Gian Galeazzo at the shrine. Nephew and uncle embraced each other tenderly. Gian Galeazzo held onto his uncle tightly and gave the order, in German, to murder his relatives. Thus did Gian Galeazzo Visconti become the head of the Visconti family and the sole Lord of Lombardy.

His wealth exceeded that of the Holy Roman Emperor who shivered in dripping northern forests. When Gian Galeazzo made war, he hired the best condottieri. When he made peace, he told Europe, he had dismissed his generals, but kept them on half-pay on the condition that they ravage only the lands of his enemies and leave his own untouched. He conquered Padua and Verona. He ruled Bologna. By 1386, the Vipers of his blazonry were -hoisted on the Adriatic and his flags flew over the belfries of Venice. He wrested Pisa away from Florence. In Italy, only Florence, the papal states, Rome and Naples were not possessed by him. It was a matter of desperation to him that they fall before him. He had been preparing for the attack for years and made no effort to conceal his intentions.

`Your real career is in my hands,' Boniface told Cossa. Remember’

`I am only the servant of Your Holiness,' Cossa answered.

`I tell you that the Florentines have asked for you because you should know who is putting the wine in your glass.' They say you are almost a Bolognese.' He looked at Cossa suspiciously, then smiled. 'What do they know of Neapolitans?'

`It is all a mystery to me, Holiness.'

`I doubt that. The son of Giovanni di Bicci di Medici is waiting for you in the anteroom. His name is Cosimo, a lad of seventeen or eighteen years. He will assist you in this compilation, and our people

will see that you have ample working space with sufficient scriptors, correctors, abbreviators and counters. I want your report in five days. We will meet here again at four o'clock next Thursday morning.'

The pope swept out of the room attended by a chamberlain who held up a sheet of numbers, under papal eyes as the two of them walked away from Cossa.

Cossa found Cosimo' di Medici to be a wonderfully agreeable young fellow to whom nothing seemed to be a problem. Cosimo was drawn to Cossa. He later told his father that he had been entirely right, that Cossa was the kind of up-and-coming Church executive that they had been waiting for. Though my wife never agreed with me on this, I thought that Cossa and Cosimo even looked like each other. They were both middle-sized with pronounced noses and, rosy-olive complexions. They both had receding hair and beautiful teeth. Cosimo was the graver of the two, but after all he was a banker, and the more professionally kindly. Cossa had his extraordinary smile, and behind everything he did was a permanent sardonicism as befits a man whom God had absent-mindedly placed in the wrong niche. Cosimo appeared to be the gentler, but he believed more strongly than Cossa that states are not ruled by paternoster`s.

Together they turned out a solid plan: Even Cossa's Uncle Tomas was impressed. The plan explained how the condottieri would be recruited, armed, fed and deployed, and how much it would cost to turn Gian Galeazzo back to Milan.

We went back to Bologna. Using Este's army, Cossa moved harshly to clean out any pockets of treason within the city. Bologna was a part of the state of Milan, Gian Galeazzo's fief. Cossa wrested away the possession of the citadel. He seized all thee strong towns which surrounded Bologna and strengthened the line of the papal states immediately to the south. He moved so boldly and with such force that Gian Galeazzo did not march to retake Bologna, and more time was bought when Florence and Bologna struck: a military alliance with the ring of France.

The real proof of Cossa's success was in the speech which Cosimo's father made before the Signoria, the Council of Florence, which said, in part, 'There is so much worth in this man, Cossa, for having from his boyhood applied himself to letters and, having worked so hard he became not only a celebrated orator and poet but a philosopher also – he turned his mind to other matters – he made himself master-at-arms to a city where he is now esteemed as one of the first soldiers of Italy. Of course, Giovanni di Bicci di Medici was justifying the cost of Cossa to Florence when many other soldiers would have done the job as, well, but sponsoring other soldiers wouldn't have promoted Cossa towards that place where he could realize those enormous gains for the Medici.

When he had secured Bologna, the Medicis' poet-philosopher, Cossa, was recalled to Rome by, his pope to become one of his three private chamberlains. The night before we left, Is said to him that he was about to begin his career at the pinnacle of the Church, at the right hand of its pontiff., I told him that the time had come to forget soldiering and politics and to begin to think of God.

He said to me, `Do you think, Franco Ellera, if there were a God there would be any need for the complexities of this Church? If God were anywhere, he would be within man, don't you think? But instead we are given a counterfeit of this, glorious friendship, styled by cold popes and bishops whose only work has been to build a cage around their God who, by virtue of his omniscience and omnipotence, should not exist if he exists at all – to live in such a cage. God is the sublime idea of man. The Church is, an expanding corruption of functionaries tangled haphazard rules which define religion, not God. Religion is only, political bargaining for souls of which they have no knowledge. But God, if he existed, would be subjective, infusing all selves, the selves which are both heaven and hell, reward everlasting.'

10

Cossa was placed at the pope's right hand, at the heart of the apostolic chamber which administered the papal finances, Boniface's most urgent interest, in that it yielded income which was about three times the income of the King of France.

The chamberlains worked wherever Boniface worked or slept – at the Vatican palace or at the Lateran – in three separate eight-hour shifts. Cossa worked at night, from midnight until eight in the morning. The second chamberlain, a sombre Sicilian, Bishop Luca Salvadore, worked in the day to execute the papal decisions taken at night. The third chamberlain served from four in the afternoon until midnight. He was Piero Spina. Spina handled the legates and ambassadors of foreign princes. He breakfasted with the pope every afternoon at four. He set the pope's appointments, but Cossa had the place of power.

As senior chamberlain, Cossa was placed to keep an eye on bishops everywhere in Christendom. He could, when he chose, warn them when they were likely to be transferred, and earned a rich crop of first fruits from this when he intervened with the pope to prevent changes of diocese which would have been costly or inconvenient for the incumbents. Sometimes, the threatened transfers existed only in Cossa's imagination. He had come to Rome a wealthy man. He became wealthier: The money he won was invested fruitfully: it is my experience that whatever Italians earn they save.

The day all three new chamberlains began their tours, Boniface gave them breakfast, at 4.00 p.m., a working breakfast, and laid down the basic rules of the operation, the most important of which was that, if he was resting, he could only be disturbed if at least two out of the three of them could agree that it was necessary. He made sure they understood. `No cardinal has the right: The curia and the sacred college have been told that together you are an extension of our own being, aware of our requirements and immovable where our comfort is concerned.'

The chamberlains chewed politely and waited.

`You were carefully chosen. Spina is known throughout Rome as the most devious man in the Church, an astonishing feat: It is said that he can think the same thought four ways at the same time, which bespeaks the caution we require in all things. Luca Salvadore is our financial wizard. He will send out our decisions across Christendom to bring; in the money, Cossa is a condottieri general, a tested negotiator and a man of much cunning, who will sit with me at all appointments and confirm my judgements.'

After breakfast, Luca Salvadore remained with the Holy Father while Cossa and Spina strolled in the gardens to become acquainted.

`You seem to have had a bad accident with your nose,' Cossa said.

'Yes. A freak thing. When I was a lad my mother asked me to get a travelling case down from a high shelf and it slipped and came down on my nose.'

'It must have been damned painful.'

'One forgets such things. I must say you are the first to have shown enough interest, to ask about it.'

'It wasn't just idle curiosity,'' Cossa said. `I thought I could help. I have a cousin who is a surgeon. He does wonderful work with the men of my father's fleet.'

`How kind of you, Cossa'. You know I have the feeling we have met before.'

'I don't think so. I certainly would have remembered it. Of course, it's possible. We are both southerners – countrymen.''

`Southerners, yes,' Spina said. `But not countrymen. Sicily is a separate place.'

Cossa was senior chamberlain to Pope Boniface IX for sixteen months. On the 14 July 1402, Bologna came again under the sway of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. He also held Padua and Pisa, and had Florence surrounded. When it fell, he would march to conquer Italy.

The Florentine delegation reached Rome almost as soon as the first dispatch about Bologna came to the pope. Sombre with anxiety, they sat down to luncheon at one o'clock in the morning at the Vatican. When the servants had withdrawn, the pope invited Cosimo to speak his mind.

"Cosimo told of Gian Galeazzo's preparations in Pavia. He concluded the report by saying that his committee, representing the Dieci and the Signoria of Florence, wished to make recommendations which they hoped would be welcomed by His Holiness.

`Why not?' the pope said.

`It is our opinion, Holiness, that Baldassare Cossa should lead the papal forces with the money Florence, Siena, Mantua and Parma will provide.'

`Well, you liked his work last time,' the pope answered.

'Yes. As well, we propose that you make Cossa a cardinal and, when the time comes, your legate to sit in Bologna. This would provide proper proportions of risk for Gian Galeazzo, while lending a stateliness to the alliance, which includes France, against the Duke of Milan.'

The pope sighed. `Cossa is so useful to us in this work. But the sacred college has been depopulated by the deaths of so many cardinals. I will do as you wish. Cossa is a valuable man to all of us.'

He spoke the truth, of course. But he underestimated it by perhaps a thousandfold if Cossa's value, as a cardinal, to Giovanni di Bicci di Medici were to be measured: The Medici bank considered that it had done a slick piece of business that night. They were one step closer to pocketing the Holy Mother Church as a valued banking client.

11

Cosimo later told Cossa that he had been sexually aroused by thinking about the possibility of the bank getting so much money. After the meeting, as he was being escorted out of the palace with much deference by a captain of the papal guard, a moustached Swiss named Ueli Miinger, from Winterthur, near, the German border, Cosimo asked Munger where he could find pleasure in Rome. Munger winked at him, a startling act from such a martial figure. 'There is a new mezzana in Rome,' he said. `A very handsome woman, herself. Big, you know what I mean.'

`Is that so? Cosimo said, adjusting his clothing.

'She set up a new house ten days ago. She has sensational girls. And they are also cultured. No whistling or catcalls when you go upstairs at Signora Manovale's.'

'You mean a brothel?' Cosimo asked him.

'Oh, no, Don't get me wrong, sir. Signora Manovale is a broker, not a ruffiana. She is an intermediary – you know, a mezzana between very beautiful, lonely women and the men who sometimes feel they need pleasure. It is all very high class, believe me. You can dine there, just talking to some beautiful, woman, or you can listen to music or poetry, or you can fuck. It is the meeting place right now, sir. Very refined, and very expensive.'

I had been there. I wasn't married when I was in Rome with Cossa. Bernaba, who later, became my wife, had given, me a written introduction to Signora Manovale which I had composed and written myself, reading it back to Bernaba, who had never learned to write. I never stayed with any of the courtesans Captain Munger spoke about but I had a good thing going with the doorkeeper, a very sincere nymphomaniacal sort of a woman.

On slow nights I sat around with Signora Manovale and her daughters because Manovale was a good personal and professional friend of Bernaba's and Bernaba always wanted site best for me. As I did for her, of course, but it wasn't the same, if you catch my meaning. I never knew Manovale when she was a ruffuana but I think her experience in that job was the key to her character. A ruffiana doesn't only deal in women; she sells love potions and sometimes these potions are poison because that is what happens to love sometimes and women would go to her to pay for the poisons. To become a successful mezzana, she had had to acquire polish and this tended to conceal what she was. One might think that this would have changed her character, even her appearance, but Manovale was the most extraordinary woman of her time, of her century. Manovale could not be measured by any usual standards. No ones ambition, including Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's, ever looked so high.

'It sounds charming,' Cosimo said to Captain Monger. `Perhaps you could assign a man to guide me there.'

`Give me a few minutes,' Captain Monger said.

The captain was having a low-pitched talk with a young priest – when the other Florentines in Cosimo's party, emerged from the palace. Their escort, bringing the horses, arrived at the same time to meet them. Cosimo said that he must part company with them. 'I am going to call on a beautiful lady who has several beautiful friends,' he told them, `if any of you would like to come along.' Only one man, Count Giuliano Rizzo, took up the invitation, but he had enjoyed so much of the pope's wine that, when the hostler handed him up into the saddle, he kept going right over the top and landed heavily on the stones on the far side of the horse, which put him instantly to sleep. Rizzo was not a banker, but later became a cardinal.

Cosimo and his bodyguard mounted their horses. The young priest led the way out of the palace courtyard, across the bridge over the night-laden Tiber and into the city, running barefoot ahead of them, They clattered on for about twenty minutes, then came to a halt before a handsome building. The priest ran to its massive door and knocked heavily. My friend, the doorkeeper, opened the door, dressed in pantaloons and a tailed coat, a mockery on such a figure. The priest went to her and spoke into her ear. She told me later that even she knew what a Medici was. She bowed to the men, still horsed, and went into the house, leaving the door open, for which Signora Manovale gave her proper hell the next morning.

The young priest bade Cosimo dismount. Cosimo told his bodyguard to return for him in three hours, then turned to the entrance as the mezzana filled the doorway. She was dressed splendidly. She was a blonde who had become blonde, my friend the doorkeeper told me, by cutting the crown out of a black hat, putting the brim on her head and arranging all her dark hair upon it for exposure to the sun for weeks and weeks. She was a vividly beautiful woman who had just reached thirty. She had the art, all her life, of seeming to stare directly at whatever, was the greatest strength or weakness of a man whether that be his money, his conscience, or his weariness.

`Cosimo di Medici!' she said fondly, making the name a declarative sentence and conveying a prodigious sense of reunion. She gazed at him so longingly that he could have been standing upon all the money in the world. Cosimo walked forward but the young priest was close enough behind to jostle him so Cosimo put a small gold coin into his hand. Signora Manovale curtsied as Cosimo came into her house and asked him what his pleasure would be, as my friend closed the door behind them.

`Some simple food,' he said. `Some wine. And perhaps some company.’

She took him up a marble staircase and left him with two young attendants whom she said would bathe him. She returned to the main floor and summoned a female butler, ordering supper for two for the gentleman who was waiting in her own apartment. `Send Maria Giovanna to me,' she said.

She sat and looked into the wood-fire, her bold, high cheekbones almost concealing her sea-blue eyes. Her wide, full mouth smiled the pleasure of her thoughts, showing her small, very white, cat teeth.

Upstairs, the two silent maidens eluded Cosimo when he tried to, bring them down. He was bathed, massaged and titillated, if that is possible to do to a banker. They dressed him and vanished as soon as there came a knock upon the door. Tables of food were carried in. Behind them came Signora Manovale and a young woman so startling in her beauty that Cosimo, in his elevated state, thought she must be the most thrilling woman he had ever seen. `I offer you this repast, my lord,' Manovale said, `as I offer you my daughter:'

Cosimo gaped.

`She is the jewel of my collection,' Manovale said. 'At fifteen, she is more learned in the women's arts than anyone in Rome – or in Florence. She is the perfect concubine – a concubine, not a courtesan. Do you like her?'

He nodded, flushed.

`She is for lease, my lord’

`Lease?'

'Let me tell you about her.' Manovale satin a chair beside him so as not to distract his attention from Maria Giovanna, who stood before him in the clear. `She is a linguist; which is something more than being merely a mistress of tongues,' Manovale said lewdly. `She is a musician and a profound astrologer. She can read and write in Latin, Italian, French, German and English, and converse upon all classical or current subjects, weightily or frivolously. You observe the beauty of her face. I cannot describe to you the beauty of her body. But these things are not for rent, my lord. Maria Giovanna is for lease.'

On the spot, Cosimo convinced himself that this young woman, could take over all of his important business entertaining in Florence He was betrothed to marry but it was impossible for his future wife to do what this young woman could do for the bank. This family is a secret weapon, he marvelled to himself.

'I will have this lease,' he said.

The following morning, Cosimo signed a written lease which, in return for Maria Giovanna's companionship in Florence or wherever else he might specify, provided her with a clothing and jewellery allowance of 700 florins a year, a small but elegant house to be freely held in her name as her property, with an emolument of 2000 florins a year, payable quarterly in advance; it, was agreed that the money be deposited at the Medici main bank in Florence as a joint account in the names of Maria Giovanna Toreton and Decima Manovale, payable only in, gold florins.

When the deal was struck, Cosimo said to Manovale, 'Now – perhaps you and I can come to some arrangement.'

She pretended to misunderstand him. `But I am not a courtesan, my lord,' she said. She later told Bernaba that she could not see the shape of her future just then but that she could feel, its presence and it had the thrilling smell of money. This was Cosimo di Medici who had just leased her daughter. To carry away what his family had would require more men than even she had known in her lifetime,

`After this day,' he said, 'I shall hardly need a courtesan again.'

`You don't need me to write love letters for you.'

`We can be useful to each other. It is tiresome for me to have to travel to Rome so often on banking matters, yet people I could send in my place are not sufficiently – ah – sophisticated to understand the sort of persuasion which might be required. You have a feeling for such things. I want you to be our bank's special representative in Rome.'

'Business?

'Very much so '

`Business is money.'

`How much?'

'Not possible. I don't want you to negotiate for me, I want you as a persuader.'

`Try me as a negotiator. I shall work for nothing for three months so you can measure whether I am worth a tithe.'

'Only my father has the authority to do that. Perhaps you would like to meet him at the bank in Florence.' His father took a longer view than anyone else. He went for the golden florins not for nice customs and traditions.

Mother, daughter and Cosimo left for Florence the following morning. Both Decima, Manovale and.Cosimo di Medici were part of a mutating European spirit which was turning itself away from power

by force towards the more reasonable yet deadlier channels of power through manipulation. They used force when there was no alternative. They were a century ahead of their time. That they had found each other so relatively early was an immense circumstance for both of them. For the time left to them together,; they would think in parallel, anticipating the clink of money and the exertions of power, each able to operate in places and with people whereof the other could not.

12

Pope Boniface IX believed in a one-man Church, as far as possible. He did not have the patience to be hampered by too numerous a college of cardinals, for example, and it was a pope's right to appoint as many cardinals as he wished. It was more economical and efficient not to have to provide for them than to have to haggle with them, ending by refusing them their expected shares in the Church's revenues. Of the thirteen cardinals who had elected him to the throne of St Peter in 1389, only five had still been alive for the Jubilee of 1400. To replace those who had died, he raised only four priests to the college, all able men Henricus Minutulus, whom he used constantly as a roving papal legate; Bartholomaeus de Uliarius, especially assigned to the court of King Ladislas of Naples; Cosmato de Megliorati (afterwards Pope Innocent VII), whom he used as ambassador between Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, and the republics of Florence and Bologna; and Piero Spina, his bent-nose Sicilian chamberlain, who became adjudicator among the several disputed territories of the papal states.

Baldassare Cossa was awarded a red hat in 1402, in the same ceremonies which created the other new cardinals. It was very early – in the morning, shortly after dinner – when Boniface told his protege that he was to be made a cardinal. As His Holiness solemnly explained the significance of the cardinalate, Cossa told me he found himself remembering the lost beauty of the prodigiously sexual woman who had bedded him so single-mindedly in Perugia, several years before. As his influence at the Vatican had grown, he had been able to institute a series of investigations to find. her meaning that I was given the job of looking for her, but, wherever I looked no one had known her. She had vanished. It was as though Cossa had imagined he had been with her, except that I was his witness that she had once existed. She had a lovely natural perfume. I can smell her still.

Cossa despaired that she had escaped him, such a beautiful woman with long red-hair, pale skin, large green eyes so filled with eager lust as I remember them – that no one, having once seen her, could cast her from memory. Cossa said he had to force himself to listen to the pope instruct him about the cardinalate.

`Because you have no knowledge of theological matters, Cossa,' Boniface said to him,- you have, not been ordained and have spent your life as a lawyer we are going to explain to you what are the duties and the rewards of our cardinals. Our work has its two arms, the curia, which is all the offices which deal with administering our papacy, and our pastoral mission – apart from running Rome and the temporal requirements of the papal states. We need this complex machinery for; as the papal monarch, we claim not only the ownership of all islands, but we are also the feudal lord of many countries. As general overseer, we are entitled to depose princes, release subjects from their oaths of allegiance, confer crowns, making kings,: and to dispose of territories. It is in our powers to order the dispatch of troops in support of a ruler, or we can prohibit further military engagements. We can order the preservation of the legal systems of invaded or conquered countries, or transfer one kingdom to another. By the same powers we are entitled to annul certain laws, such as the Magna Carta in England, on the ground of its interference with royal power. Our papacy acts as a court which ratifies treaties between kings and countries, hence we have the right to prohibit trade where necessary.

`The cardinals are, of course, a part of this – that is, and never fail to remember this, as much a part of it as we, permit them to be. Originally, it was the clergy and the people of Rome who elected the pope, but gradually the defects in that system were adjusted, until the Third Lateran Council in 1179 issued the decree which stated that all cardinals of whatever rank were to be the equal electors and that, for a valid election, a two-thirds majority of their votes was required. And there you have the only function of cardinals – to elect a new pope. And that is where their freedom of decision ends, for, at the moment of a pope's election and his own acceptance, he and he alone has the governing power. Often popes are not even ordained priests, let alone consecrated bishops. Sometimes months pass before a pope is ordained or consecrated.' Boniface leaned forward towards Cossa for emphasis. His voice grew softer. `Let that demonstrate for you the nature of the papal office. It is juristic. It is executive and it is administrative before anything else. You are about to enter the sacred college which is usually – made up of seven cardinal bishops, twenty-eight cardinal priests, and eighteen cardinal deacons. Cardinal deacon will be the rank which you will hold. The head of all the cardinals is the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, who consecrates the pope and anoints the emperor. By custom, and in varying degrees depending upon the policy of the sitting pope, the cardinals participate in all sources of curial incomes as well as sharing in Peter's Pence. This is because the cardinals form "part of the pope's body" modelled on Roman law, which laid down the same intimate connection between: Roman senators and their emperor. By constant adjustment to new contingencies, our vast machinery functions out of the resilience and continuity of a slow evolution which, reaches back across the centuries, founded upon order and based upon law.'

Thus, in February, 1402, when he was thirty-four years old, Baldassare Cossa was created Cardinal of St Eustachius, a cardinal deacon who had never taken holy orders but who was a first-class army commander, a very good canon lawyer, and who had a definite talent when it came to diverting a gold florin from the purse of the faithful.

13

Decima Manovale was born in 1371, four years after Cossa's birth, seven years before Urban VI became the vicar of Christ and slipped his leash to cause the great schism in the Church. An important figure in Manovale's story is Sir John Hawkwood, the great condotiere, who was knighted in the field by the Black Prince in 1356. Hawkwood was one of the most powerful hired lances in Italian history.

After the Treaty of Bretigny, in 1360, when he became one of the hundreds of surplus captains, he formed his own company of mercenaries and moved southward from Burgundy along the Rhone valley to the papal capital of Avignon – one free company, that is a company whose men elected their leaders, among a horde of 60,000 mercenary soldiers. They had heard about the papal riches and they had decided that, all together, they could scoop it up before moving on. Avignon, to those soldiers, was a museum displaying samples of the booty which was waiting on the other side of the Alps. Avignon was a miniature Italy which glistened with the wealth of the south. The city was packed with merchants, goldsmiths, weavers, musicians, astrologers, prelates, pickpockets, whores, and forty-three branches of Italian banking houses. The papal court was so opulent that cardinals' mules wore gold bits. You can imagine what was gold on the cardinals' whores.

A great river of money rushed into the papal palace from every corner of Christendom in the form of tribute's for annates and media friuctus, the spoilia, visitation fees, dispensations, absolutions, tithes, presents, sales of places, papal loans, taxes on bulls, and benefices. For 45 groschen the King of Cyprus secured permission for his subjects to trade with the Egyptians. There was a graduated scale of prices which permitted the laity to choose their confessor outside their regular parish. The pope could change either canon law or divine law, but the divine law was changed only if there was enough money; money could buy anything to deliver any manner of permission to the petitioner

For a king to carry his sword on Christmas Day -150 groschen

To legitimatize illegitimate children – 60 groschen

For giving a converted Jew permission to visit his parents.- 40 groschen

To free 'a bishop from an archbishop – 30 groschen

To divide a dead man and put him in two graves 30 groschen

To permit a nun to have two maids-20 groschen

To obtain immunity from excommunication-6 groschen

To receive stolen goods to the value of 1000 groschen – 50 groschen

Avignon might have been a freebooter's dream of a-city to be sacked but it had the strongest fortifications in Europe. Pope Innocent contemplated the vast encampment across the river and decided to pay the mercenary armies to persuade them to go away, preferably to Italy. He included a plenary. indulgence for all of them, as part of the price, which wiped out a teeming population of sins.

Hawkwood's White Company, so named because they kept their armour shining, was hired by Pisa to defend it. Hawkwood invented the designation 'lance' as a system of accounting for troops in Italy. Lances fought on foot. With 2000 of them in the field, 1000 page boys called ragazzi held the horses at a safe distance in the rear. Two men held each lance, standing in units of twenty or thirty lances, balled together like porcupines. When these defence/attack units broke the enemy, the ragazzi would run forward with the horses so that the men within the lance unit could take up hot pursuit, hoping to take prisoners who could be held for ransom.

The murderous complement to the lances were the archers on their flanks. A First-class archer could loose six arrows a minute, have the sixth in the air before the first hit the target, and. kill at 200 yards. It was the secret weapon of the White Company because it was exclusively an English weapon which was irreplaceable in Italy.

The administration of the White Company was organized under, the prevalent military code, an observation which is relevant to Decima Manovale's story. Hawkwood's principal lieutenants in the field were Albert Sterz and an aristocratic Englishman, Andrew de Belmonte, whom the Italians called Dubramonte. The key figure after Hawkwood was the company treasurer, William Tureton, to whom the Hawkwood clients paid over the agreed costs for defence. Toreton, as the Italians called him, ran the money, the paperwork and the intelligence system, and, he needed a large Italian staff. He was also Hawkwood's lawyer, diplomat and banker. Manovale said he was a beefy man, very tall, with very red cheeks and an insatiable lust early in the morning. She said that, if she really wanted something from him, she was always careful to ask in the afternoon – or over she'd go. He liked very young women, between the ages of ten and fourteen. – After that, it was hard for a woman to hold his attention.

Toreton acquired Decima Manovale, tenth child of sixteen children, when she was twelve years old, from her father, for five florins and the agreement that he would teach her to read and write. She was a healthy, handsome girl, and when she was thirteen she had her first child, called Maria Giovanna Toreton then, late the same year, her second child, Maria Louise Sterz. Her third was Helene MaCloi (by Chevalier MaCloi, Chief of Staff to the Duke of Anjou), born when Decima was fourteen, and Rosa, fathered by Andrew de Belmonte, was born the following year. Decima learned to speak Latin and the languages of the four men who had fathered her children. English, German and French, which she taught to her children.

Children born out of wedlock were commonplace and accepted. Decima worked on at Toreton's headquarters while she took care of the children, learning how to run wars, conclude treaties, direct and collect intelligence, and to judge men. She developed an understanding of power and the necessity for ruthlessness when she was very young. Cossa didn't know the first things about power compared to Manovale but, as I have said, he was a passive type, a very Italian kind of a fatalist.

When Decima was seventeen, and Toreton never went near her for diddling even in the early morning but listened to her notions when it came to business, Hawkwood deserted Pisa, Decima's homeland, and sold, the company's services to Florence, Pisa's enemy. Decima took her children, five, four, three and two years old, to Rome. She knew Toreton would be glad to see her go. He had his eye on a nine-year- old girl whose father had been sending her into the camp with firewood.

Toreton was fond of Manovale and felt responsible for her (and her four children). He saw to it that each of the fathers of the children, including himself, contributed, 100 gold florins to the Manovale travelling fund and, in addition, he gave her seven cups of pure gold from the loot stores, three valuable tapestries and five good rugs. Manovale had enough capital to support her family well for the next four years.

Although she was beautiful and accomplished – and, I am telling you, when you,… if you think about spectacular, stately women, it would be nearly impossible to conceive of a woman who was more beautiful up to the moment I last saw her – and although there wasn't much else for her to work at to support her four small children, she refused to become a courtesan. She became a ruffiana instead. She deal in women, boys, potions, poisons, fortune telling and stolen goods, and she prospered.

Later, when they could understand, she told her children, `You were sired by great men. The strength of their characters and mine have joined to form your characters. Had I become a courtesan, it could have been said that we didn't know, who your fathers were, so varied are the seeds that are scattered over a courtesan's fields until it is nearly impossible to know whose seeds take root.' However, she trained and raised her daughters to be courtesans. The first two helped bet, to teach the others.

Such young women were called courtesans because they were the companions of the cortegiani, the courtiers at the courts of Italy. They had been raised from the street title of whores by an official government designation of meretrix honesta, or `honourable whore'. Courtesan was a title for the convenience of their patrons, usually men of station but always men of funds. Whore would have been a gratuitously rude label for the companions of such esteemed men.

Rosa, the youngest, became a courtesan when she was thirteen. Her youth and virginity, both endlessly extended by mama, were not her only attractions. Like her sisters she could read and write, sing, paint, think, wear clothes and jewels, and play musical instruments. Mama's central commandments to Rosa and her sisters were as the Words which had tumbled out of: the burning bush to Moses.

'A whore is not a woman,' Manovale taught them. 'She is a whore. It is what you make of the work and not the label which counts. We are the ants who hoard up the summers of our beauty and our art against the dread winter. Woe to the one who has no brains, for that is where the art lives. You must be able to burst into tears while a man is taking his pleasure from you – tears without reason – enough to make him stop what he is doing – that is the great test of the art – to make him beg of you why you weep. You answer with broken words and sobs. "I cannot make you love me!" you tell him or words to that effect… "That is my fate, a life without your love." Of course there are many variations, but the men swell, with pride that a woman is lovesick for them. Occasionally, you must weep when they arrive: so that they will believe you weep far joy at seeing them again. Love is not for us. Oh, as a caprice, yes – here today, gone this afternoon. Neither is lust for us. She who keeps drinking never feels thirsty., But all the best in this life can be yours if you dress yourself becomingly and are always ready and cheerful, hardly ever laughing outright, which shows teeth and gullet like a street whore, but cultivating a sweet and attractive smile because you are a woman of quality. As the men come to you, you will entertain them cleverly and never play dishonest tricks on them. You will never drink too much – men detest that in others – nor will you stuff yourself with food.

`My dearest, talk if you feel like talking but only when you are with your family. When you are with the man who engaged you, please,

I beg of you, talk no more than is necessary and, when it is time to lie down, do nothing roughly or carelessly. Work to captivate your lover and make him love you more. And remember! It is not enough to have beautiful eyes and lovely hair. Only your art which is your brain will pull you through. The difficulty is in keeping lovers, not in getting them. Only make promises you know you can keep, nothing more, and whatever other good opportunity comes your way never shut your door in the face of the one who is entitled to sleep with you. You must swear an oath daily that you will take many little baths as often as you can, then wash and wash again, for if there is loving advantage in giving oneself to many, the least we can do is to stay clean.'

When Rosa was discovered by the tenebrous Cardinal Spina, mama's own place in the carnal garden had long. before been transplanted from the ruffiana parterres to a sunlit terrace of the mezzana -mistress of the latest love songs on the lute and viola da braceio, writer of elegant love letters for her clients in the best Latin, French or German,' and a brilliant artist of transactions which made rich old men believe it was they who were being placed within the proximity of seemingly unattainable beautiful women. She moved her family into a small palazzo in Rome to make comfortable the wealthy churchmen; rich businessmen and condottieri generals from all over Italy who were her clients.

Touchingly, Cardinal Spina's discovery of Rosa had been made to happen in a church. Selective church attendance was the best advertising for a courtesan. It showed off her beauty as well as her clothes and jewels, which were tributes to her desirability. Young and poor men jostled each other outside church doors to watch the women enter, preceded by pages and menservants, surrounded by supporters, while still more servants closed in at the rear. In May 1401, on the feast day of Santa Grazia di Traghetto, all the space between the altar itself and the cardinals' seats was occupied by courtesans, including Rosa.

Previous to setting his hooded eyes upon Rosa, Spina had made his carnal discoveries at night, prowling the streets in disaffecting cloaks and huge disguising hats to move into the beds of the women his agents had put aside for his pleasure, while he carried out his endless search for Bernaba Minerbetti. It was not because he was in any way ashamed of his desires (or of Romans becoming aware of them) but rather from his devious conviction that his right testicle must never know what his left testicle was doing. Since the night Bernaba Minerbetti had deserted him, disgracing and humiliating him, he had been searching for her. He was prepared to spend the rest of his life searching for her because she must pay for what she had done. She had not returned to Bari his agents had sought her out there and found nothing. She must be in Rome. He had paid for her and had not yet finished with her. He had vowed to inflict sfregia upon her if she went with another man. It was his duty to his honour, to his being a Sicilian, to accomplish that vow, He roamed the streets at night looking for her. The discovery of Rosa: did not change the need to find Bernaba Minerbetti and to ruin her face; but Rosa could fulfil other needs. He would maintain her. An occasional arrangement at first was best for testing these women, he sensed. It was not a matter of sampling, but of character. Also, he had refused to establish any courtesan under his permanent protection because he could not live with the idea of unseen people attempting to get her to get him to do things for them. Even after spending most of my life around churchmen, I can still say that I have never met a man as devious as Piero Spina.

14

Decima Manovale taught her daughters to search for their clients' oddnesses, weaknesses between man and woman – so when Rosa was brought together with Spina, she acted out convincing terror at the possibility of being known to Rome as a cardinal's lover because then it could be bruited about that she was a courtesan, which he knew she was not. No! And he was to tell her nothing of his life, for women were weak and their tongues wagged. She would place her long, silken hand over his mouth when he offered her as much as a good evening, because why did she need to know anything except her love for him, or to feel anything apart from the madness which came over her when he touched her? She always wept when she returned to him and when they parted.

Because all his life Spina had persevered in never telling anyone his inner (or outer) thoughts of what he was doing, had done or planned to do – he had been unable to trust anyone until his dear little shepherdess had wandered into his life – he had to tell her everything. Spina became an extraordinary source of information for Manovale.

`Never cease exploring the vastness of self-doubt and uncertainty within your clients,' Manovale instructed her daughters, `for these, lead to gold and power. Great wealth is the source of friendship and praise, of fame and authority, for the individual as for the state. A family must erect and decorate buildings, possess beautiful books, much power and fine horses.'

The day after her arrival in Florence with her daughter and Cosimo di Medici, Signora Manovale, feet together, hands in her lap, eyes (frequently) cast down, sat in the Medici house in the Piazza del Duomo of Florence, facing Giovanni di Bicci di Medici.

Behind the senior Medici, beyond the windows, were the almost imperceptibly rising walls and dome of the cathedral, which, the city of Florence intended to be grander than any yet built. Cosimo sat soberly at his father's right hand, thinking pure thoughts, no doubt.

When my son told me of his plans for you,' the father said to Manovale, 'I rejected them. At least I thought I had, but my son and I think alike, I have trained him so, and your possible usefulness – women are not usually such useful objects – began to emerge as I studied your dossier. I asked old Toreton the condottiere to come to see me. He remembers you as what he called "the most promising soldier on his staff What do you say to that?'

`I knew him, of course. He was a kind man. He taught me so much of what little I know.'

`About war?'

She shrugged. `About war. War was for men. Mainly about how to gather intelligence and how to use it.'

'I will pay you ten gold florins a month.'

Manovale told Bernaba that she had tried not to laugh but she couldn't help it. She laughed, rocking in her seat, holding a handkerchief to her face, with her left hand holding her side. She laughed with disappointment, which is almost the equal of despair. She laughed at the waste of her time. When she was able to regain control of herself, she wiped her eyes and said, `And, of course, you would expect me to give up my business as a mezzana to work for you?'

He looked at her steadily, `We misunderstood each other,' he said, `I offered the ten gold florins a month during the first three months in which you offered to work for nothing,'

`Ah. Such a difference.'

Signora – we have been after a piece of northern business for almost four, years. Church business Church business is important wherever it is to be found, and this happens to be a large matter involving the Archbishop of Mainz, who will go to Rome to see the pope in one month's time. There is French Church business which is also important. We have learned that the Bishop: of Cambrai, who is the confessor to the King of France and a close adviser to Benedict, the Avignon pope, will go to Rome to see Pope Boniface on a most secret mission shortly after Mainz's visit. We must always remain several steps ahead, of the other banks – here and elsewhere. Is all of this comprehensible to you so far?'

She smiled.

`Let us discuss the Bishop of Cambrai, Pierre d'Ailly, a greedy fellow. He has the look of a, sleek pack rat and he has served almost as many sides as there are in France. He supports anyone from whom he can gain, short term or long. When I spoke of Pope Benedict as being the pope at Avignon, that usage could seem to oppose our pope at Rome. Well, we are bankers, and there are two popes in this world, but Benedict is no longer at Avignon. He is defying the French crown or the Mediterranean coast. He is a very stubborn man who wants to be independent of the French king. The Bishop of Cambrai, our same Pierre D'Ailly, will go to Rome for him – as secretly as possible, of course, to discuss with Boniface the sharing out of certain, benefices in Poland, Hungary and Greece. These are open territories and both popes feel they should share in them. Cardinal Spina will be the pope's negotiator. Do you know him?'

She nodded.

`How well do you know him?'

`My youngest daughter is his mistress,' the signora said.

He smiled at her for the first time. `Now, then,' the banker said, `working on the theory that you can be useful to us, we will propose that friends of ours in Paris work on D'Ailly's lust for comfort and pleasure by offering to arrange for him to stay at your house in Rome. No one must know he is there, you understand. The pleasures, however unusual they may be, must be brought to him privately, you understand. His weakness with women has to do with talking. He makes classical conversation with beautiful woman – beautiful young women and those kind of conversationalists are hard to find.'

Signora Manovale made her eyes opaque. `What about that northern business you have been after for so long?' she asked pleasantly. `The Archbishop of Mainz, is it?'

`May we feel secure about D'Ailly?'

What do you want from D'Ailly?'

`Well, I know what I want in a limited sense. I want those benefices in Poland, Hungary and Greece to be told by whichever pope is involved to bank with our bank. But there could be a larger opportunity there. Pope Benedict is breaking away from the King of France. He therefore must keep his money, sooner or later, independent of French bankers: We would like to be his bankers.'

'Please tell me about the Archbishop' of Mainz.'

`He is John, Count of Nassau, Archbishop of Mainz, as un-ordained as the rest of them, a ferocious warrior, and the richest churchman north of the Alps. He is the First Elector of the Holy Roman Empire and, if he can be induced to bank with us to the exclusion of the other bankers, that could lead to the banking business of all the electors of the empire, as well as that of the kings and princes of the north and the businessmen who seek their goodwill.’

Manovale returned to Rome and called her daughters Maria Louise and Helene to her. `The time has come for our first great harvest,' she told them. `The harvest of years of work is about to be reaped. I shall set you each a refresher course of studies. You, Maria Louise, are going into great riches to live among your father's people, the Germans, as mistress of a warrior-count who is also the Archbishop of Mainz. Helene goes to Paris, to her father's France, as the mistress of the richest bishop in France. Maria Giovanna is at the side of a rich banker in Florence. We will be one entity which will interchange information in order to rise and to continue to prosper.'

At the appointed time, John of Nassau, Archbishop of Mainz, arrived at the Manovale house in Rome, a long string of a man who resembled a famished eagle. His face was scarlet, his eyes shining black, his hair prematurely white with streaks of brass. I knew him well, not then but later, and cultivated him for Cossa. He was charming when one was alone with him, or when two or three other men were present, but be became offensive as soon as there were women in the room and impossible if the women were pretty.

He came to the Villa Manovale dressed in blood-red ecclesiastical garments under polished battle armour. He wore spurs to the dinner table. He stared at Manovale's body as if it were unclothed. She felt encouraged in her task.

`You are the Medici representative in Rome?' he asked mockingly.

She smiled at him. She allowed the smile to begin gently, then, with experienced control, she slowly increased its heat to lasciviousness.

`I understand,' he said.

On the day after his arrival, a papal messenger, brought an invitation to the archbishop suggesting that he join. His Holiness at dinner at two o'clock the following morning at the Vatican.

Unwilling to consider going to bed to be reawakened, the archbishop asked Signora Manovale if she would lay on a `merry luncheon' at ten o'clock in the evening before his meeting with the pope.

The signora invited Paolo Orsini, the industrial condottiere, so that the archbishop would have someone with whom he could talk shop if he chose. She brought in the famous actor Alghieri Melvini and Giovanni di Gianni, a man who controlled the grain in Rome and who was a new client of the Medici bank, recruited by her. There were women to set these men off but, seated at the archbishop's left, speaking in both Latin and German, was Maria Louise Sterz whom the signora introduced only to her guest of honour. He was soon so delighted with her that he made it clear that he wished to speak to no one else at the table.

John, of Nassau remained in Rome for eleven days, six days longer than his original intention. He saw the pope once again and spent the rest of his stay with Marie Louise. When she was absent – seeing her dressmaker, she said – her mother comforted the archbishop with fine wine and soon established a relationship for him with the Medici bank. She assured him that the Medicis would be so honoured to have big account that they would immediately open a branch for his convenience in Mainz as well as, she was hopeful, for the convenience of the Church's considerable banking business in Swabia and for the bank deposits of those dioceses which neighboured on the archbishop's jurisdiction and which looked to him for protection from the Teuton and Polish princes. His Eminence, Archbishop and Count, wanted something from her, so the matter of which Italian bank held his money was of little interest to him. Therefore, when the Count of Nassau left Rome, the signora had made a banking coup which delivered over 500,000 florins each year to the new Medici branch at Mainz and 25,000 gold florins to Decima Manovale, at the commission of 5 per cent which had been arranged by the bank to come into effect immediately when she produced the business.

15

The Archbishop of Mainz departed from Rome at the head, of his troop of 600 horsemen, with his household of 192 people, and with Maria Louise Sterz, whom he had leased from Signora Manovale at terms no more strenuous than those she had secured from Cosimo di Medici for Maria Giovanna Toreton.

That night, Pierre D'Ailly, the Bishop of Cambrai, arrived in Rome after his journey from France. He had travelled with only ten men. I worked with D'Ailly several years later. It was a cheerless task, like trying to touch a man by addressing his reflection in a mirror. He was a smart fellow who had seen everything and had done everything. He never lost sight of himself.

Manovale received him in the company of an exclamatorily attractive young woman of seventeen, whom she introduced as Mademoiselle Helene MaCloi. Everyone spoke French. The. two women dined with the bishop that night and soon he and Mademoiselle MaCloi were into a dense discourse which excited the bishop. He drank much wine and insisted, when the evening came to an end, that the young woman take him to his bed.

Each day at one o'clock, Cardinal Spina (disguised) came to the house, a few minutes before luncheon was served for two in the bishop's apartment. Each day, Cardinal Spina remained with the bishop until 4.45 p.m. They met for three consecutive days. Signora Manovale observed and listened to their conversations through a gallery slit, high up in the room and reported them by courier to Cosimo di Medici.

After Spina left each day, the bishop napped until seven o'clock, after which he bathed and did calisthenic exercises. When he dressed for the evening's dinner with the two ladies, he did not don ecclesiastic robes but wore a fashionable knight's surcoat made of fabrics of great sophistication and garments which were extremely short and padded with a mighty codpiece. His hose were laced to his upper garments. Buttons ran in long rows up and down his arms: As he gazed longingly into his looking glass, he combed his hair in radiation from the centre of his crown with the line at the back dipping well below the cropped fringe on his forehead. He wore the long, pointed shoes which his king, Charles VI, had forbidden to be worn in France because they made it impossible for the wearer to kneel in prayer. By the time he was well scented, Mademoiselle MaCloi was waiting for him with her mother in the large salon. There, they discussed French literature: Guillaume de Dole; the idealistic conception of human love as portrayed in Roman de la Rose, and Gautier de Coinci's Les Miracles de la Sainte Vierge.

Dinner was served on a balcony overlooking an inner garden, where the bishop said that not anywhere in France, not even in Paris, had he encountered a woman who so combined beauty with intellectuality, who not only understood the true culture but had the ability to listen, as did Mademoiselle MaCloi. `I am too old by far for such things,' he said; `but were I not, I should have to say that I have lost my heart to you.'

`We love with our minds, you and I,' the young woman said fervently., `Although,' she added, blushing skilfully, `you have not allowed it to stop there.'

`Oh, I can race for a bit, but then I am exhausted,' the bishop said. 'Such a body as yours requires constant worship.'

`But your mind is an instrument of prodigious skill at lovemaking,' she protested. `When you fill my heart with the poems of Eustache Deschamps and Olivier de la Marche, fighting the battle of realism against idealism, you are wooing with the strength of youth for the love of all women.'

He patted her absent-mindedly. `I must leave for Paris,' he said. `I have lain awake nights plotting how I can take you with me yet still know that you will be served well with love in those years which lay in wait before me like brigands.'

`It is a problem for the mind,' she said gently. `Therefore you will find a solution.'

`I have done so,' he answered softly, reaching out to hold her hand, oblivious of Manovale's presence.

'Please --tell me.'

`I hesitate.''

`But – why?'

`It is unorthodox.'

`You aren't capable of a flawed solution – is he, signora?'

`Let us hear him,' the signora said:

D'Ailly smiled ruefully. `When I was Chancellor of the University of Paris,' he said, `I had a student who was so brilliant in his kindness and so generous with his intelligence that, when I became a bishop of the Holy Church, I went to the king and persuaded him to name this student in my place as chancellor,'

`That is friendship,' Helene said.

`It is my history,' D'Ailly said. `Because I desire to have you near me – for the rare quick race and for the ecstatic talk and response, I am proposing that, for long-enduring lovemaking as well as for the

fulfilment of minds, you allow yourself to be shared by my student, the Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson.'

`In the same bed?' she asked shyly.

`Sometimes. Sometimes not. But could such a paradise be possible?'

`Mademoiselle MaCloi is my daughter, my lord bishop,' Manovale said.

`What? My dear woman, how titillating."

Helene rose. `You two will need to talk,' she said.

`Does your mother speak for you?' the bishop asked blandly. `She speaks for me.' Helene turned to leave the room. `Wait!'

Helene turned back to him.

`Before your mother and I may speak,' the bishop said, `I must know where your heart and mind rest.'

She stared down at him, silent for several moments, then she spoke to him alone in a low, caressing voice, saying:

‘Slender, lovely, darling friend,

When shall I have you in my power?

Were I to sleep with you one night,

And give you love’s kiss,

Know it: I'd have such desire

To hold you in another's place,

If you'd promise me to do

Everything I'd want you to.'

`From "Estate ai greu cossirier"!' the bishop cried.

Manovale made Bishop D'Ailly a profitable. variation of her daughter-leasing deal. Later that evening, when Mademoiselle MaCloi was packing for her departure for France with the bishop on the next morning, the signora and D'Ailly arrived at a banking arrangement, whereby, for the payment of a quarter-tithe to the bishop, and for another quarter-tithe to be paid into the account of Pope Benedict XIII into a branch of the Medici hank to be opened at Perpignan, all the funds received daily from that part of the pope's Christian obedience which was outside France would be deposited in the same Medici bank.'

Four months later, in the autumn of 1402, Manovale was summoned to Florence to meet with Cosimo. 'My lather is enormously pleased with your work. This new business with Perpignan and Mainz is entirely in the direction of fulfilling his most cherished dream.'

'How happy that makes me, my lord,' Manovale murmured.

'He has extraordinary plans for you. He wants to establish a branch in Milan and in Pavia and he wants the state of Milan to put its money there. A war is coming.'

'Good,'' she said blandly. `.When Milan goes to war against your own Florence and the pope, the Duke of Milan will need to find a lot of money. Where better than from our bank?'

`You will be introduced to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, with safe conducts from the King of France, and from the Emperor, Wenzel, Gian Galeazzo's patron. To establish you as closely and as favourably as possible with the Duke of Milan – he is a colossal snob, and you are a woman who will be made the more, ah, credible for such an adornment – for a certain, ah, sum which my father has paid to him, the emperor has conferred upon you the title, if not the estates, of the Marchesa di Artegiana. My dear Decima! – You are now a marchesa and there are letters patent to prove it.'

' My lord Cosimo!' Manovale said, clutching her throat in wonder me and awe. She was overwhelmed for the only time in her life. A peasant woman who now Holy Sweet Mother of God! she was not only a marchesa, she was on her way to becoming a rich marchesa!

'Don't get it confused, Decima,' Cosimo said with soft amusement. `The title is only a banking tool. You will have to take Gian Galeazzo in hand from this point onwards and make him see what is best for all of us. There will be danger. If he misunderstands your purpose, he will have you executed as a spy, be sure of that; but if you can persuade the duke to bank with us and to give up Pisa to Florence peacefully – my father will advance your share of all future work to a full ten per cent.'

She smiled at him blissfully, happier than she would ever be again.

`Our agents are at work in Mantua, Perugia and Siena, preparing the ground;' Cosimo told her. 'We will' appear to be the allies of the pope, even to financing his military expedition when it eventually happens perhaps a year or two from now. When you have Gian Galeazzo ready, you will give him those cities, delivered from within, in exchange for Pisa going to Florence. When he has those cities of the papal states, Gian Galeazzo will be ready to move south to take Rome, then Naples. He needs to be able to think that he can do that.'

Becoming a marchesa changed everything for Manovale. I know it changed life for me and Bernaba. We were still her friends, but we saw, her in a different light. It hardly seemed possible that she had been a ruffiana and a mezzana, that I had thought of her as Manovale; never as Signora Manovale, that she had run whores and had dealt in the bodies of boys, mixed potions, sold poisons, handled stolen goods and told fortunes. Her title changed everything but the woman herself. She continued to be as she always had been aristocratic, noble, serene and ruthless.

16

In Rome, Cossa prepared his defence of the papal states and his counter-attack into Visconti territory. On 27 May 1403, the Milanese troops at Bologna were reinforced. On 2 June 1403, commanding an alliance of such condottieri generals as Carlo Malatesta and the constable Alberigo da Barbiano, Cossa took over command from Nicholas of Este, Marquis of Ferrara, as commander of the papal armies. Cossa was the pope's legate to the city-state of Bologna as well. He arrived with his force before Bologna's walls on 9 July and ordered his army to dig in to besiege the city.

In the third week of the siege of Bologna, Cossa worked at a field desk deep within his army of 16,000 men, 4000 horses, 7300 camp followers, 177 priests, 59 spies and a musical group of general entertainers from Rimini who were taking in money hand over fist. It had been confirmed that Gian Galeazzo was preparing to march from Padua to relieve the city. Cossa ate the meal which Geofreddano Bocca had prepared for him, then played cards with me for about half an hour.

`The change in the drinking water gave me the runs,' he said.

'What do you expect?' I said, losing the hand.

'The water is better in Rome. It is the only thing that is better.' He dealt the cards out rapidly as if he were doing required exercises.

'You'll get used to the water here.'

`I know. But it's rather a shock to know that there are animals in the drinking water in a great place like this and not in Rome.' He won two more hands, then turned in for the night.

I made a bed at the entrance to his tent and went straight to sleep as always. Some time later, a gentle hand shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes and had the surprise of my life. It was the doorkeeper from the Manovale house in Rome. `What are you doing here?' was the first thing I asked her, then the real question came to me. `How the hell did you get here through the lines?'

`How do you think I got here? I rubbed the lads a little. Franco, listen to me. This is important. My mistress, the Marchesa di Artegiana, has to talk to the cardinal. Believe me, it is very important.'

'Who is the Marchesa di Artegiana?'

`Didn't you hear? She is Signora Manovale! The emperor made her a marchesa!'

Manovale?'

'Franco, we can't talk here all night. She is waiting out there and a patrol might come upon her and stick a sword into her just for fun.'

'All right. Okay. Bring her here.

The doorkeeper, her name was Michela, went back into the darkness, then reappeared a few minutes later with Manovale that is to say, with the Marchesa di Artegiana.!

'Franco!' she said softly, putting her arms around me and kissing me full on the lips, rubbing her crotch into mine as if we were longtime lovers. I had shaken hands with her a couple of times, but no more. 'How wonderful to see you again.' It was nice, and skilfully done. She let me go and stepped backwards only slightly. 'I have information that can change the war,' she said. `I must talk to the cardinal.'

'Are you really a marchesa?' I asked her mockingly.

She nodded solemnly. `The emperor honoured me,' she said simply.

I went into the tent to awaken Cossa.

'Franco Ellera! For Christ's sake, it is still dark!' he said.

`There is a woman here, Cossa,' Franco Ellera said urgently. `Very beautiful. Very rich. She passed right through our lines and no one stopped her. It must have cost her a fortune. She came right to this tent. She knew the right tent. She is unarmed I made sure of that. She wants to talk to you. She says she has information which could change the war.'

'Beautiful and rich? Send her in in ten minutes.'

When Cossa was dressed, he opened the flap of the tent and motioned to me. I showed in the marchesa, a tall, hooded fgure, and left them. The doorkeeper and I got back to old times and her hips had never lost their skill.

This is what happened inside the tent at the first meeting between Cossa and Decima Manovale. It is exactly as Cossa told it to me.

The marchesa threw back her hood and Cossa was axed, by her beauty. She was tall, large and deep-chested, having a cap of odd-looking golden hair, very white skin dusted with sun spots and large deep-blue eyes which came up like stars behind her high cheekbones. Cossa stared into her face and she became imprinted, upon his mind and spirit. It may have been the light, the wood fire and two candles. It may have been the fault of his transformation from the half-death of sleep into a place which seemed like a dream, but the strange beauty of the woman had a bewitching force upon him. Cossa had forgotten his army and his rewarding Church. He had forgotten the woman who had felled him at Perugia. He had almost forgotten, his ambitions. He stared at her like a country boy peering from behind a barn as she dropped the cloak, showing him the strong, white outline of her shoulders and the rising, half-bare bodice above a shimmering green dress.

`Your Eminence,' she said with a Pisan accent, speaking as if she were unaware of her effect upon him. She reached for the, hand which hung at his side, lifted it and kissed his ring. Returning the hand to its limp place, she said, `I am the Marchesa di Artegiana, at your orders.'

Cossa came to himself again. He pulled her down upon a bench and sat close to her, smelling her, touching, her arms and hands. `Why did you come here?' he asked.

She held his hand loosely, caressing the soft flesh under his wrist, and peered out at him from over the tops of her cheekbones like a sniper working high up from behind a rock, let her lips, slacken into an expression of sincere lust and said, `Last night in Padua, Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, died in my arms, of the plague. A huge comet appeared in, the sky as he lay dying.."I thank God," he said, "that the sign of my recall appears in the heavens for all men to see." Gian Galeazzo is dead, Eminence,' she said in a soft, provoking voice. `I have come to tell you to march on Milan with your army. My; people have already seen to it that, if you march by Reggio and Parma, they will greet you as their liberator. The citizens of Brescia, Cremona, Lodi, Placentia and Bergamo will revolt from Milan and take their independence. In Milan, the duchess and her son will wall themselves up in the citadel, but she will tell the city to come to terms with you because, the wives of your generals are her sisters.'

`How do you know these things?'

`I was close to Gian Galeazzo. My department ranked with Francesco Barbavara's who ran his chancery.'

`Your department?' He leered at her, giving it lewd meaning, as if he were startled that a department which called for laying on her back with her legs spread wide, with her knees lifted, could have ranked with Barbavara's.

'It is right that you mock me,' she said, `but I ran Galeazzo's agents who supplied political information from all over Italy and Europe. I ran his agents in Aragon, Burgundy, Germany, and twice among the Turks. I ran his agents at the court of Sigismund, King of Hungary, and close to Wenzel, the emperor.' Cossa believed her story; but I didn't when it was told to me.'

`What did you learn about me?'

`That you adore women. That thoughts of coupling are on your mind most of the time.'

He showed her what a Cossa smile really was.

When the marchesa had stood away from Gian Galeazzo's corpse, she had seen what she must do, she told Bernaba months later. She had secured Milan for the Medici bank, but if the papal armies conquered the north of Italy because Gian Galeazzo's talisman was not there to ward them off, then all that good work, and her tithe, could-go to waste. Better to protect the new Milanese deposits by persuading the commander of the papal armies to transfer the money of Bologna and all the cities of the papal states into the Medici bank along with Milanese florins. Gian Galeazzo's death had been necessary. She was now established at the Medici bank as being entitled to a full tithe. She could now advance Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's plan to secure all the Church's banking. She saw that she must go instantly to the papal army's commander. The commander would have to be grateful to her. He would have to cooperate with the Medici bank.

That the commander turned out to be a wiry, compact, elegant ruffian who was also a cardinal amused her and stimulated her the more.

`Where will you go from here?' he asked.

'I go with you, my lord, to aid in your conquest.'

He put his hands into her bodice and lifted out her breasts. Better our conquest than anyone's, dear lady,' he said.

Cossa left a token force at the gates of Bologna to remind the

occupying Milanese troops that their work: was: over. He rode through the cities between Bologna and Milan taking cheers. A peace was written with the Council of Milan. The pope instructed Cossa not to include his allies, the Florentines, in the peace, although they had expended 80;000 florins on the war, because he had learned that `a Florentine bank' had financed Gian Galeazzo in making the war, and also he did not wish to share Cossa's loot and ransom money with them. Despite this betrayal, the Florentines showed no rancour towards Cossa, because the Marchesa di Artegiana had confirmed to Cosimo di Medici that she saw qualities in Cossa which could be fortunate for the bank, so Giovanni di Bicci di Medici extolled Cossa eloquently in his speech before the Signoria of Florence.