A Trembling Upon Rome

17

Cossa was besotted with the marchesa. I had seen him almost as insanely affected years before, when we had left the red-haired woman on the bed in Perugia and I had made him ride on to Rome; but he was older now and, after the stint at the Vatican, a far more worldly man, who, anyone would have thought, should have been less paralytically susceptible than the marchesa had revealed him to be. He wanted her at his side at all times. He could not keep his hands off her. He could stare at her for embarrassingly long, moments, as a hen stares at a white chalk line on the ground. He heaped jewels on her. When the temperature dropped, he ordered furs to be brought for her. He was on her and in her like an unbalanced satyr, moaning, talking brokenly. I must have lost two hours' sleep every night because of the noises he made on that woman.

He told me he thought sometimes that he was two people. One of these was pulled helplessly into the orbit of the woman from Perugia the other knew he belonged to the marchesa for ever. `I still think of that woman whom we left in Perugia, Franco,' he said to me. `Never a day or a night has passed when she has not been vividly in my mind. Even when I am upon the marchesa and almost frantic with the love of her, I think of the woman, whom I left in Perugia. She is with me now. She will probably always be a part of me and I rejoice at that, but the woman who commands my soul is the Marchesa di Artegiana. She consumes me. She is in my mind and in my bones and yet – even I know that she is but one of the two women in my life. I will never see her again that woman in Perugia, but she lives for me while the marchesa blinds me like a sun.'

`It could be worse,' I said.

`How could it be worse?'

'Well- it could be four women. Or ten. But at some point; you would have to start to lose track.'

He glared at me. `How would you like me to have Palo cut your balls off?' he snapped.

When Cardinal Cossa had concluded the papal treaty with the Milan Council and was alone in the command tent outside Milan's walls, Carlo Malatesta spoke to him. Malatesta was one of Cossa's generals, called `the best and most loyal of his race’, a man who was married to a daughter of Bernabo Visconti; making him a brotherin-law of the late Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. Cossa had respect for Malatesta as well as affection. They greeted each other warmly and to honour the day, Cossa bade him sit and drink a glass of wine.

`What brings you here?' Cossa asked. `I am happy to see you always.'

`Your, Eminence – there is a matter – that is, you may know that my wife's sister is, Catherine Visconti, widow of Gian' Galeazzo.' Cossa nodded.

`She has asked me to ask you for an audience with her. She is a sensible woman – after all, she is a Visconti – so there is no possibility of embarrassment for, you. And may I also say that Francesco de Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua, a member of the council with whom you have just made the treaty, who is married to yet another sister of Catherine Visconti – there are nine in all – adds his own petition to mine that you grant this request.'

'My dear fellow! Of course. I would be honoured to meet, such a great lady.'

`Then she will come to your tent tonight, Eminence.'

`Out of the question. That would be intolerable. I will, of course, go to her.'

Malatesta cleared his throat. `That would be indelicate, Eminence. As you have just concluded a treaty with Milan without conquering it, the Milanese would' be offended if you entered the city:

`Nonetheless,' the cardinal said, `I did conquer the Milanese, and I will not permit the widow of a great man to be humiliated by having to come through a military camp to see me. Please – you yourself, and Gonzaga as well if he wishes, will escort me via some little-used way into the city and take me to where the lady waits. I will dress myself in the Milanese style. No one will notice me.'

`The duchess wishes to meet you alone, Eminence. I will send you Gonzaga's own man to take you to her.'

When Malatesta had gone, Cossa asked me what I thought it was all about. `It sounds a lot like she wants to get laid,'' I said. 'New widows are like that.'

The following night, three hours after darkness fell, Cossa's guide came to the tent and I searched him for weapons. While the cardinal general, dressed as a civilian, rode with the man towards the city walls, I followed them silently.

When they reached a secondary gate, I caught up and the three of us were allowed by the guard to pass through. The streets had been emptied by curfew.

`She is in the citadel,' the guide told us. We reached the door of the high, windowless tower and Cossa dismounted. I secured his horse and settled down to wait.

The man unlocked the door. Cossa went inside. When he returned four hours later, he was an utterly different man. He was very pale as if he had slept with giant bats who had drained him of blood. He appeared to me to be about fifty pounds lighter and he wore a silly coltish grin. He told me what had happened:

Inside the tower he had faced a spiral staircase ascending into darkness. He climbed the stairs. A few minutes before he reached the top, a door opened above him and the light fell upon him. He kept climbing and entered the open door, closing it behind him.

Before him, in serene repose, sat the delicately ravenous woman who had occupied his mind since the night in Perugia when he had been an archdeacon and she had seduced him, the woman for whom he had searched until the Marchesa di Artegiana had distracted him from the dream. He reached out for her as if he were stretching out to grasp an apparition. She was solidly real.

Long after, while she lay in his arms, she sleepily told him her story. In 1380; when she was twelve years old, her father, Bernabo Visconti, had compelled Gian Galeazzo to marry her, hoping in this way to neutralize his rival. She lived with the duke, her first cousin; at the ducal palace in Pavia, the great fortress-palace which his father had built into the north wall of the city. Although her husband was a stranger to honour, she said, he was devoted to art and scholarship. He was secretive: He loved the silent gardens and the woods that stretched away on the other side of the Ticino. He was already a widower but he had had to put away his private grief because having no male heir gave temptation to his rivals. Before he and Catherine were married, Gian Galeazzo had been negotiating a secret betrothal to a Sicilian princess, which would have strengthened his position against Bernabo Visconti. But Bernabo made sure that wedding did not take place. After his marriage to Catherine, Gian Galeazzo was completely at Bernabo's mercy and Bernabo had little mercy.

Catherine told Cossa that she could see her husband from the tower, at Pavia as he paced with his leopards in the garden, plotting how to rid the world of her father. He had to kill her father, she said. He wanted to rule Milan alone. But more than that he wanted dominion over all of Italy and to do that he had to get at the undivided resources of Milan. So he killed her father and her brothers, then made his triumphal entry into Milan as the people shouted, `Long live the Count of Virtu! Down with taxes!' His coup was so well planned that the Pisan; government voted its congratulations on the same day, and Pisa is 140 miles away.

`As soon as he was ruler of Milan he made me pregnant by my first son,' she said. `I am telling you this so that you will see that a woman can only find safety under the protection of a great man. You are more of a man than my husband was. He was timid. You are a lion. I can see now – so soon – that everything he held will fall into shards. When there is no strong control – such as you would bring to Milan

His general's will grab territory to make up for lost booty and pay. Facino Cane is finished in Bologna. You finished him. He will carve out his domain in Piedmonte. Ugo Cavalcabo will seize Cremona. Franchino Rusca will take Como. Ottobuono Terzo will take Parma. Brescia will go to the Guelphs, and your friend Carlo Malatesta will hold Rimini.

`Well,' Cossa said, `that is how history is made.'

`Not Visconti history!' she said fiercely. `We hold what we have killed to get. Hear me, my cardinal, my general, my beloved together, you and I, by combining Milan with Bologna, could hold all the power. City by city we would add Perugia, Siena, Padua, Parma – on and on. Then we could consolidate the power and breed the money; whatever you wanted, and whatever the Viscontis wanted, you could have.'

He lay silent. He was confused. The form of the marchesa rose in his mind so vividly that he felt her beside him. The two women were so different but they were very much the same. Two nights earlier and on this night he had discovered two great lights of women; the Marchesa di Artegiana and now, again, this wanton were destroying his purpose as a soldier and a cardinal. In, their different ways – or perhaps it was in the same way – they were offering him kingdoms. Catherine had touched his deepest ambitions when she had told him he could be the conqueror of Italy – though he would have to agree to relinquish his cardinalate and shame his father. It came to him that, if he had not thought of such an escape, another one as useful would have taken its place.

It was entirely possible, of course, and certainly in keeping with her family's character, that this woman would have him killed after he had got everything back for her- but more than that, more than anything, he knew as his mind clogged with desire that he was the total captive of the Marchesa di Artegiana and he did not want to be freed:

As I have always said, Cossa was basically a passive man. All fatalists are.

`I am a cardinal of the Holy Church,' he said to Catherine as his answer. `I am the servant of His Holiness Pope Boniface IX, whose armies I lead. Let me take the time to consolidate the papal claim upon the papal states and let me think about what I could bring to the alliance you propose, dear lady, and then, please God, we will meet again.'

He told me all this and I believed him. It was in keeping with his character, for what. he was really saying was that he wanted to have time to think about it all, then to come to a decision, but he did not tell Catherine Visconti that and he wasn't sure if he could come to a decision. He asked me bitterly why an entire qualifying list of particulars had, to go wherever the women went, why they could not just do what everyone wanted to do: make love until they had exhausted themselves, then see how life turned out.

Every day after that, I was aware of the two women who walked with Cossa. They seemed such entirely different women to me: the one who had been born a high aristocrat but who was a slut; and the other who had been born a slut but who became a high aristocrat. I thought about them for a long time because they were bringing so much force upon Cossa. In the end I saw that they were both offering him more money and more power, that, Cossa wanted those things and nothing else, but that he was within himself, timid. He believed he needed both women to help him get what they all wanted; this was how he was able to deceive himself so mightily.

18

Having secured the peace of Milan, Cardinal Cossa returned to Bologna on 10 November 1403, spending the night at the monastery of the Crociari outside the walls of the city. He made his triumphal entry into Bologna in the morning, by the San Mammolo gate, to pass along streets adorned with coloured cloths and silks, embellished with the arms of the Church, the city and the legate, to the cathedral. All the chief citizens and most of the populace came out to meet him, whom they regarded as a long-adopted Bolognese. Hundreds of gleeful people ran to greet him with cheers of `Viva la chiesa!'

The procession was led by a carroccio drawn by four bulls and hung with scarlet trappings fringed with gold. Above the cart floated the banner of the Church and upon it stood eight doctors of law and eight knights, to whom the legate presented scarlet robes. The city ancients came, then the magistrates and their attendants, with much music.

Baldassare; Cardinal Cossa, entered the city on prancing horseback as befitted a supreme commander of the papal condottieri, with a scarlet canopy, richly fringed and lined, held over his head by four young nobles acting as his grooms. There surged within him the desire for an instant painting to be made of the entire scene which could be sent as instantly to Procida to make his father marvel at his son, commanding general of the papal armies and a cardinal of the Church.

At the city gates, to the sounds of trumpets and drums, the keys were handed to him upon a golden salver. Orations and verses in Latin and in the vulgar were proclaimed. Boys dressed as angels, singing shrill hymns, lined the streets to the cathedral and became his escort to witness his welcome by the bishop and the clergy.

To the extent that he had established the righteousness of Boniface, IX in restraint of the ambitions of Milan, so did Cardinal Cossa, legatus a Latere, seek to control the morality of Bologna when he decreed that its prostitutes and its gambling houses operate only under paid licence. Further, he undertook programmes to strengthen the city's walls, ordered fortresses and citadels in the papal states to be repaired and all connecting roads to be mended. He dismantled the citadel at the San Felice gate and erected a defensive castle at the Galiere gate. The licensing of prostitutes allowed Bernaba to pinpoint the working locations of all new competition which would otherwise have remained unknown to her and allowed Palo to send in his regimes to discourage this. The licensing of the gambling houses, as well as the women, brought in money to the state, in which Cossa had a share of the pope's share, thus increasing his income from both areas by about 9 per cent.

Otherwise, when he was not busy with defence and taxation, he spent his time with the Marchesa di Artegiana. He was besotted with her, bemooned by her. He sat silent and gaping as she would instruct him in -the ways of power as if she were the Empress Livia and he a shepherd boy from the hills. Her mind dominated his and he was also possessed by her body as she instructed him in its usages, teaching him new and startling sexual doxologies. She was learned about money and about politics and he soon came to accept what she suggested as durable law. When she explained public health to him, he built a large covered sewer for the city, raised the flooring of the muddy, perpetually damp piazza, and paved the entrance to San Petronio. He built for Bologna but he had to force these benefits upon the people. He had to force them to understand the necessity for increased taxation so that the loans from the Medici bank, which made all this civic progress possible, could be repaid and greater loans extended.

Cossa knew he was a far-seeing governor because the marchesa and her admirer Bernaba Minerbetti never ceased reminding him of the heroic work of state administration which he carried alone on his shoulders. The Bolognese wanted it both ways: they were proud of their up-to-date defences, their improved public health and other modern comforts, but they would not stop keening over the taxes which paid for the benefits.

Counselled by the marchesa, Cossa introduced a strict system of sales and excise taxes – legal and legitimate – to be shared with the curia in Rome. A tax of 50 per cent was imposed on wine. Taxed bread could only be bought at appointed shops. Gamblers, jugglers, goldsmiths and acrobats were taxed, but moneylenders, were exempted. Cossa became unpopular. He raged about the ingratitude of the people while counting his share of the taxes. City magistrates, council members and nobles were taxed at the same rate as everyone else. He taxed even the outlanders who came to the city with safeconducts from outside rulers; and, if the more powerful and rich citizens complained that an arrangement should have been made to exempt them from such insistent taxation, Cossa made examples of them. Did Mantua, Padua, Parma or Perugia have sewer systems, he would exhort them. Were those cities the headquarters of a papal army which spent its pay there? Let those who would rather suffer without such civilization move to Mantua or Parma and pay fewer, taxes.

While the contracting companies which were controlled jointly by Cossa and the marchesa won the contracts for the city improvement schemes, the marchesa saw that they delivered value. Also, while Cosimo di Medici had insisted, that Cossa accept a quarter-tithe (soon increased to a half-tithe) on the expanded banking business that the civic projects and the presence of the papal army had j created, and while Cossa participated heavily in the income from Bologna's courtesan business and in the branch businesses Bernaba had established in Siena, Perugia, Mantua and Parma, and while his share of the income from the gambling houses was large, the bald fact was that Cossa gave value for his services to the cities of the papal states, which was how he looked at it. He was probably right. What is money compared to strong public defences, government-inspected whores and tightly supervised gambling houses? The quality of the wine might have suffered from the river water the wine merchants added to it to make up for the taxes, but people got used to it.

If Bernaba was surprised to find the Marchesa di Artegiana in Cossa's bed at night and at his side for most waking hours, she did not show it. At the first chance, when Cossa was busy elsewhere, she went to visit her old friend. There was much laughter, talk and wine.

Soon the marchesa warmed to her subject and she outlined how Bernaba might set up a network of courtesan operations throughout the cities of the papal states under Cossa's protection. She told her about the sources of women, how Palo might be instructed to set up protection, how information might be organized at each point of sale and how a network should be formed to get the information back to Cossa in Bologna. It was not only, a wonderful Sunday afternoon, it formed a lasting bond between the two women, and it was profitable – so much so that, when Boniface IX died on 1 October 1404 (to be succeeded by Innocent VII), Cossa had been able to deposit, overall, 100,000 florins to his account in the main Medici bank in Florence, as a result of his stewardship of Bologna and the papal states.

As soon as Boniface died, the volatile people of Rome rose in revolt. The Colonnas demanded the return of the ancient freedoms and rights to the city, meaning that they and the other great families wanted a. larger share of what Rome earned. There was so much civil turmoil and bloodshed that King Ladislas of Naples, whose astuteness and craftiness the Visconti themselves may well have envied, marched on Rome and had himself appointed as the Rector of Campania and Martina for five years. He permitted the Colonna to ally themselves with him and – most disastrously to hopes for an end of the papal schism – induced Pope Innocent to promise, not to agree – to any plan for the union of the Church which did not include the recognition of Ladislas's title to all of the papal realm. This was a fatal bar to the accommodation of the claims to the throne of Naples by his kinsman, the Duke of Anjou, and thus made impossible the cooperation of France to end the papal schism which had yoked two popes upon the world – Innocent VII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Perpignan (Benedict had defied the authority of the King of France and moved from Avignon). Ladislas's army enforced the peace of Rome with such authority that Ladislas was recognized as Protector of the Holy Roman Church when Gregory XII was elected pope on 30 November 1406.

Gregory was an old man with many `nephews' and Ladislas, who intended to rule Italy, surrounded him with a heavy presence. To prepare for his conquest of the papal states, which he saw as merely a bloodless transfer of power, Ladislas prodded the pope to remove Cossa from the command of the papal armies and to issue sharp public rebukes upon Cossa for withholding from Rome more than his share of papal income.

Cossa was ready for an extended argument until the marchesa explained the facts to him. `Why should an old man, new in the papacy, carp about these petty matters when – over all the years you have served the papal curia, the experts on taxation and the proper rate of cash return to the papacy, have never complained about you? Look who bestrides Rome, Cossa. Whom do you see?''

`I don't follow you, Decima.'

`Ladislas! Look at the size of his army occupying Rome! Ladislas plans to shunt you out of the way as if you were some scribe in the Vatican and to take command of the papal armies, then to rule Italy from Naples. What happens then? Do you flee or are you the timid servant of an, old confused pope?'

She had received an urgent letter from Cosimo di Medici that morning. He had laid the peril out before her. 'What do you think will happen to the banking relationship we have with the Church in the papal states if Ladislas is allowed to dictate to the papacy?' the letter said. `Ladislas means to remove Cossa, and if Cossa goes we will lose hundreds of thousands of gold florins of cash deposits from the papal states. Our planning to take over Church banking will be ruined. You've got to light a fire under Cossa. Since he is in no position to throw Ladislas out of Rome, he must be made to understand that he must defy Gregory.'

`You think that is what Gregory has in his mind?' Cossa asked her. `You think the pope would turn on a cardinal, on me? Listen, I bring them more money than all the rest of Italy put together. Are you telling me that the pope would take a chance with an adventurer like Ladislas?'

Realization of the truth came on Cossa so fast that he was incensed. He imagined he could hear his father telling his uncles that he had always been afraid that his son's success had been based on luck, not ability. `I tried to put the boy into a safe niche where he j could have a good living as a lawyer for the Church, and now look at him – he posed as a soldier, as a ruler, but when a real soldier ordered the pope to call him to heel his luck collapsed with his courage.'

`What can I do?' he asked the marchesa. `I am the papal legate. Gregory is my pope, just as Boniface was my pope. I have to take orders. 1 must submit Bologna and the papal states to Ladislas if that is what Gregory commands. What else is there to do?'

`What are you saying, Cossa?' she shouted at him: `You are, a Neapolitan so you are awed by the King of Naples. Forget it! The only people who have anything to say about this are the people whose trust you have accepted the people of the papal states and the Bolognese.'

`If I defy the authority of the pope, then anyone has the right to defy my authority. Gregory is the pope. He isn't a man tome, he is my pope.'

`Then help him! Do you think he wants to give away the papal states to Ladislas? Do you thinks he plans to kill this goose with its golden eggs which you have made so plump for him? What do you I think an old man can do when he is surrounded by Ladislas's army?'

`Well – ah, I see, all right. Then it is Ladislas who oppresses me.'

'You are a leader, my lord. You are the, cardinal and the general and the administrator to all these people after you are the servant of the pope but, nonetheless, you owe them all equally the salvation of your defence. When you summon an emergency meeting of the Bologna Council and explain the peril which seeks their destruction, you will tell them that they must order you to refuse this deadly threat to their rights, even to their lives, which will make this foreign tyrant their master. I can hear your eloquence as you warn them that Ladislas will bring them double their present taxation if they force

you to accept the pope's command. My God, it will make; you the most popular figure this city has ever known.'

His jaw stiffened. `All right. I have, made up my, mind,' he said. `I am going to summon an emergency meeting of the council and get this thing settled."

With the wholehearted support of the people of Bologna, Cossa resisted the pope's, orders. He cast himself adrift from the papacy, knowing well that Gregory would reward him well when Ladislas was driven out of Rome. Just the same, for insurance, he was going to see that the curia got better and better shares of the benefices and necessarily increased taxation – for only by reminding the apostolic chamber that he, Baldassare, Cardinal Cossa, was making such increased income possible would it be able to persuade the pope not to replace him as legatus a Latere. He would be walking; on the crumbling rim of the crust of the Church if he did less.

The Marchesa di Artegiana was fonder of Cossa than she was of other men. Cosimo di Medici was not any part of such feeling; he and the marchesa were mutual extensions of each other. By the quality and; nature of her life, men and women, except for her daughters, were much the same to the marchesa. Sex, which had been her grist for most of her life, she found neither momentous nor interesting. It was her work and there could be neither romance nor sentiment about it or about any other of her relations with men. Nonetheless, Cossa was a special man to her. The simple brutality of his ambition and the harshness of his greed comforted her. Cossa was as natural a leader as she had seen in a lifetime of hundreds and hundreds of men, including Hawkwood and Toreton. The benign respect which other leaders, important men of the highest distinction, gave him, and which the masses of people gave him, had strengthened, and polished his own lust to lead. The Medici hid singled him out as a potential pope. She was Cossa's keeper for the Medici, so she was expected to put him upon the throne of St Peter, When she did, there could be no end to the money. Her tithe would become an ocean of gold from a bottomless source and, because she would have made it clear to Cossa that it had been she, who had won the crown for him, she would also share in his share of the fortunes which were waiting to be made. She would be somebody. She would have lived up to and exceeded' the title the Medici had bought for her, and as her next step up the ladder she intended to be made a duchess, with each of her daughters being named a countess.

If the marchesa felt love (a difficult conception to understand), excepting always the love she felt for her daughters, it was for status. She had waited and toiled for it for many years, working her dignity and self-respect to the bone to get it. But always it had eluded her, until the night Cosimo di Medici had come to her house for the first time. When she thought about the struggles to get within striking distance of the money; she felt momentarily exhausted and empty and she experienced a wistful romantic need to fill all of Cossa's consciousness with herself. She dealt with this aberration by reasoning that it was men who were the romantics, that for all time women had only been trying compassionately to give men what they needed so badly; that, glorious mirror-sense, that achievement of looking into another's heart and seeing oneself with the eyes of the adorer. Not that Cossa was much of a romantic. His experience with women had been constant and compulsive, enjoying the physical profits of one body then moving on to the next. However, as she worked with him, as she managed him and he became more dependent upon her, she sensed his deepening need for her approval; and she knew he would finally recognize the need to call upon love, the blank-eyed mopery of romantic love, to build the echo chamber lined with mirrors, so that as he yearned for her his yearning would be self-fulfilling and he would be able to penetrate his own dreams of self by projecting them upon her, who, by her sighs and her sheep's' eyes, would make him more adoring of Cossa. That was the man's way. It didn't seem possible, but that was the way they wanted it to be.

She would need to build him up to love slowly so that it would be the more lasting. When love occurred to him, it would be what he wanted and it would be useful to her.

In a relatively short time – a pitiably short time, she thought Cossa conditioned himself to become obsessed with love for her. Even he was aware of the wilfulness of this, but he had reached a plateau on his long climb. The power he carried with him kept increasing in weight until some unconscious race memory he possessed, as all men possess, told him that he must find someone worthy enough to be allowed to admire his power and his set He pined for her when he was away from him and, sighed over her when she was near.

Nonetheless, he had to be sure she was worthy. He lived with her, in the present, reflected her into the glass of a fanciful future, and brooded about the possibility of her past. She was the Marchesa di Artegiana, but what did that signify? Who had been the marchese who had brought her to that title? Where were her lands. Where did she go when she told him that she must make long journeys to visit her daughters in Florence, in Paris, and in Mainz? When he gradually came to realize that he knew nothing about her, that made him fearful. He knew only that she had come to him from the Duke of Milan, and he knew it was inevitable that she had been the duke's lover; but where had she been before she knew him? What experience could have trained her to achieve such a man? She told him she was an associate of Cosimo di Medici, and Cossa had been careful to make Cosimo confirm this which Cosimo did with detached admiration and relish. He had asked the marchesa about Cosimo.

`What about him?' she said. 'I am fortunate enough to be paid a small commission from him for bringing new business to his bank.'

`That is all?'

`Cossa! He is intensely married! Besides it was I who brought him together with his only mistress.'

`What about Gian Galeazzo?'

`Whomever I met before I knew you should be meaningless to you. All I really can remember about Gian Galeazzo now is that he would have taken Rome and Italy were it not for your power against him.'

`The plague was the power against him.'

`No! You were in his stars. I – saw you there. Gian Galeazzo was guided by the stars. I served him in many ways, but he believed my real power was that I could read his stars and his fate was there to he seen. You were. there to be seen. How else do you think I knew to go to you if I had not seen it in Gian Galeazzo's stars, the stars which foretold that you would keep him planning in Pavia at the centre of the plague?'

`So you arranged his death with astrology?' he said with mockery, himself greatly confused again.

`Cossa! Who can know who will survive any plague? I ate the same food, drank the same wine, breathed the same air, but I survived it while it killed him. His generals survived it but we were only the appendages of his power. I served him well and he was so grateful that he gave me an estate in Perugia to house me and my family.'

`Why did not your husband, the marchese, provide a house for his family?”

`Ah my dear – he has long been dead and that was in Germany.' `A marchese in, Germany?'

She made an impatient sound. `He was a margrave. Would you prefer me to call myself the Margraviate di Artegiana in Italy?'

`Artegiana isn't a German name.'

'All right! I will insist – since you insist – that you introduce me as the Margraviate di Koenigskuenstgewerbler!' She bugled her indignation so forcefully that he barked with laughter.

He brooded most about her when she went away from him on the long visits to her daughters. While she was away, he threw himself into a frenzy of activity to block anxiety from his mind about what she might be doing.

To force her out of his mind and to fill his time, he moved against treason inside Bologna, ferreting out plots within plots which, always led to Nanne Gozzadini, a man to whom intrigue was as nourishment. Cossa put Gozzadini's brother to death but the succeeding plot exposed Cossa's own trusted captain, Vanello da Montefalco, so he had to die. Cossa drove Gozzadini out of Bologna to Rocca di Cento, where he ran him to earth. Gozzadini's own son, Cossa' s godson, was taken to the plain in front of the fort where Gozzadini was hiding. Cossa stood beside the boy and called out, `Gozzadini! See who is here! It is your only son, Gozzadini: Shall he live or die? Come out, Nanne. Surrender the fort or I will kill our little Gabbione, the son of your heart.'

There was no answer. When a quarter of an hour had passed, Cossa smiled sadly at the small boy, Gabbione, shrugged, turned to Luigi Palo, who was holding, the boy, and said, `Cut his throat.'

Nanne Gozzadini fled to Ferrara. The populace of Bologna sacked his palace at Cossa's orders. Bologna had peace.

As if in an exchange of justice, on the night following Gabbione's execution, Cossa was stricken with ague and fever. He was fearful that his troops would hear of this and judge that God was punishing him because he had, put the boy to death. While he was rational he ordered me to keep everyone out of his tent. He swooned into a coma. The Marchesa di Artegiana had been in Florence conferring with Cosimo about means to consolidate the bank's growth in Bohemia. She returned to Bologna to be told by Bernaba that Cossa was dying. The marchesa went into Cossa's tent in the blackness of the early morning with her satchel of herbs and potions. She and I bathed Cossa, and I was not ashamed to say that I could not stop weeping. '

She held the limp body in her arms and slowly fed a hot, black liquid into him. When he had taken all of it, she told me to go and rest. `We can do nothing but wait,' she told me. 'He will sleep untroubled now. You are spent by your days and nights of nursing g him. I am fresh. Rest while I wait for him here.' I had been awake for two days and three nights. I hardly had command of my senses. I went to a tent and fell into sleep.

At least two years passed before I knew what happened between Cossa and the marchesa that night, but I sensed that something was wrong, so I sent Bernaba to the marchesa to learn the story.

At dawn Cossa had awoken in a frantic flight from the demons which pursued him. He awoke screaming, `Smash their heads, Franco Ellera, be quick!' He struggled against the marchesa; putrid with fever.

`Where are you?' she whispered to him softly.

`Castrocaro!'

`What are you doing?'

He described the night of the pope's gold, the screams of the horses, the blood and the confusions as if he were reading from a huge mural on the wall of his mind.

When I returned to Cossa and the marchesa in that battle tent, he was pale and silent, but he had no fever and the marchesa said that in two days he would be well enough to ride back to Bologna.

20

Cossa recovered in moody silence, resenting the joy he took from the marchesa because he could not be sure that she was Worthy of the monument his love had built around her. In dark flashes, he showed her his fears by his endless questioning, seeking to know the things about her which he had decided must be shadowed by guilt and sin. She ignored his morbidity. She continued his education concerning the world which he had never seen, unravelling the politics of Europe for him. She told him how, Wenzel, the deposed Holy Roman Emperor, was a drunkard and a murderer, how he related to his brother, Sigismund, who was in love with mirrors and every woman, and how they both related to Rupert, poor Rupert, King of the Romans. She took him through the stories of the two popes, then went on to the King of France and the University of Paris. She made clearer for him the allegiances of Ladislas of Naples and Carlo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, to Pope Gregory XII. She traced for him the positions of the Spanish, the English and the Germans on the papal schism, and she made him see that he himself was only a provincial warlord when he could be a part of the great world.

He could not hear what she taught him. The more she taught him about Europe the more he had to find somehow an intimate knowledge of her past which had brought her to such a familiarity with all these people. In the spring of 1408 when she left Bologna again `to visit my daughters', a tour which would keep her away from him for four months, he called in Bernaba and told her that she was to find out everything about the marchesa's past.

`Why don't you ask her yourself, Baldassare?'

`She could lie to me.'

`Why would she lie? She loves you. She came to you of her own accord, a grown woman. Whatever happened to her before she met you can have no meaning to you – why should it? It is done, and you cannot expect her to have acted differently because one day she would meet you; she could not know that she was going to meet you. Baldassare, hear me. The Marchesa di Artegiana is a woman of great character.'

`Then all you need do is to confirm that for me, Bernaba. We are not gossiping. Find out the truth and bring it to me.'

Bernaba told me about it. She was worried. `He's not himself, Franco,' she said. `I mean he is out of his mind. What am I going to do?”

`We'll wait. Maybe it will pass. I agree he is out of his mind on this subject.'

Cossa had not seen Bernaba again for two months when he called her to the palace and demanded a report from her. She asked me what she should do. I wasn't much help. `Stall him,' I told her. gust keep him off balance until the marchesa gets back here.' She knows ' how to handle him on things like this.'

`It is very difficult, Baldassare,' she said to Cossa. `There is so little to go on.'

`Are you flaunting me! She is intimately connected with the princes of Europe – in Mainz, in Prague, in Florence and in Paris.' `Well! 1 had no idea you wanted that extensive an investigation.' `I must know all about her!'

`It will be very expensive.'

He took her by the shoulders and shook her. `Have you become stupid? Or are you deliberately trying to misunderstand me? I am the ruler of the papal states of Italy! I have given you an order!"

`If you knew it was going to take all that time and travel,' Bernaba said stubbornly, `how could you expect the answers in such a short time?'

`All right. I will put Palo onto it.'

`I don't think you want that, Baldassare. if I do it, the information, whatever it is, will be safe with me, but if Palo does it – well, he is Palo.'

`So you do think she is concealing something important. Why' should there be anything, to conceal? This is a routine state investigation. As her cardinal, I seek only to prevent the remote possibility of any censure by putting her true, past on the record.'

'Ah, well, then,' she said. `If it is only routine and for the state, perhaps you should put Palo onto it.'

His expression became deadly. `You refuse to do this?' he said.

She could read his eyes and his face. She knew he was ready to kill her or to have her killed by Palo. She. sighed. `I will do it.'

`I need time.'

`How much time?'

`People will need to be found and bribed. I'll have to travel. The ' marchesa is a brilliant woman, and if she chooses to hide her past it is possible that…”

He struck her heavily. Very slowly she regained her feet and stood before him again, betraying neither her hurt nor her hopelessness. He struck her again, then he smiled at her, that wonderful smile. `You have ninety days,' he said, `beginning now.'

Bernaba had stayed out of sight for almost a month when he summoned me to demand news of her. I was heavy and sullen. `In this whole world,' I told him, `we don't have another friend as good as Bernaba. But you not only struck her, you sent her on a wild goose chase. Where is she? What do you care? She could be dead.'

`I am a prince of the Church!' he; shouted. `I will not be talked to in this way by a slave. Are you a part of this conspiracy, or are you pleading with me to bring Palo into this, who will rip out eyeballs to get at the truth? I have had enough of this! I am going to send Palo after Bernaba.'

‘Cossa?'

“I will send you to the, slave market at Bari!'

'Cossa,' I said to him, `You must be insane or you would never say such things to your friends. You believe that, if you can learn terrible things, true or not, about the marchesa, you can break the spell you think she has put upon you and make yourself her master. But after you find out the worst you want to, know, even if you are reduced to having Palo deliver it to you as a fabric of lies, won't you, wish you were dead?'

'Franco, my friend, forgive me, please forgive me. But I have to know about her.'

'Then ask her.'

'How can I ask her? What can I say – are you a spy for Ladislas? Or – what was your life before you gave your body to Gian Galeazzo? Do I ask her – since you sold Milan to me so easily, will you just as easily sell me and the papal states to Naples?'

`if that is what you want to know, then that is what you must ask her.'

Cossa slumped into a chair. 'I could lose her.''

'If you will not ask her yourself, then only Palo can find out for you. After Palo is through with her, she will either be dead or you will banish her. She will be gone from you. And, as desperate as you are before me today, you will be more desperate trying to find her again. But if you must know, then you yourself must ask her – at least, that way, there is a chance for you, Cossa.'

The marchesa found him in the tower room of the palace. His face was grey. A-sheaf of papers lay on his lap. He looked up at her hopelessly as she came into the room as if, despite his love for her, she had forced him to destroy her.

'Cossa? Are you ill?' she asked.

' I know, Decima. I know everything about you. You sold whores in Rome. You dealt in boys with degenerates. You told fortunes as a heretical witch, made charms arid, amulets, and sold poisons to vengeful women:' He leaped to his feet scattering the papers. 'Don't deny it!'

She stared at, him with such contempt that he almost lost the certainty of his judgment. 'How can such things matter to you?' she asked him.

'How? You dare to ask me how?'

`You have taken money from the whores of Bologna for almost fifteen years and from the whores of the cities of the papal states for almost two.' She stared at him with distaste.

'Bernaba told you that! It is a lie! I helped her when I was a student and out of gratitude she set up those women to get me information to advance my position.'

'You took money from whores.' 'I was a boy!'

`You still take money from whores but you aren't a boy; you are a prince of the Church.'

We were talking about you, not me.'

'We will soon, of course, Cossa. But not yet. Let us talk instead about the night you murdered sixteen men to steal the pope's gold.' `Franco Ellera!' he screamed in pain.

`No one else living knew that.'

'Oh, yes, they did.'

`Who?'

'You.'

'Me?'

'Last; winter, when you were dying of fever after murdering that little boy at Rocco di Cento, you told, me everything. You ranted in my arms because, you told me, the men you had killed had come back to murder you.'

He held up his hands to make her stop speaking.

'I said to myself,' the marchesa went on, 'that, if that were the kind of man you are, then that must be what drew me to you. What else could the son of a pirate know to do? What else could be expected of a general of condottieri? I saw that, if you believed you owned a part of those whores, you had to take money from them because that was your share, as you saw it. You didn't need the money, but that is how a pirate or pitiless condottiere would think. Everything is a share in the loot which costs human bodies. You came from the sea. The pope's gold convoy was no different to you from a convoy of poorly armed merchant ships. You took the pope's gold then, as a natural conclusion for a brutalized man; you killed all the witnesses, your own people, because you feared the pope's vengeance. That explained everything to me, but it changed nothing. You are still a whoremonger and a pimp. You are still a thief and a murderer, which is rare enough work for a cardinal of the Holy Church: But we are what we become, Cossa, not what we think we are.'

His eyes became opaque with pain, trying to blind himself to this vile knowledge of himself. He wanted to find just enough light to show himself to himself as he had always seen himself. Deadly things lurked beyond such light. Because he could not shut out the truth of how she saw him and how he mast now see himself, he began to weep, sitting with his face clutched in his hands so he later confessed.

She knelt beside him and stroked his head. `I would have told you anything you wanted to know,' she said to him. 'If I couldn't conceal my life from myself, how could I hide it from you whom I love?' He reached out blindly to touch her cheek. 'Come" the marchesa said, – 'it is night. I have travelled a long way and I have been too long away from your arms.'

The marchesa had travelled over the mountains from Florence, where Cosimo di Medici had told her that his father had decided that the time had come to get the papacy for Cossa and end the schism in the Church. While the schism still existed, the Medici dream of getting one consolidated church banking account could never be realized. Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's plan was now the plan of the Marchesa di Artegiana because she was expected to execute it. She had had to be severe with Cossa about his boyish anxieties. He had to be, lifted into his saddle and sent off to his glory. There was a lot of money to be made.

21

With his mind revolving like a prayer wheel ten thousand times, Cossa told me where he had allowed his life to take a wrong turning. It happened, he thought – and of course he was wrong – during one winter's night when he was in bed with the marchesa at the Anziani palace in Bologna. The eternal rat moved across the bedchamber, where a single, foot-thick, half-spent candle burned at the centre of the room, twelve feet away from the bottom of the bed. Its melted wax piled up at its base like heaps of fallen angels. The bed stank of him and it mingled with the smell of the blind sanctity of the candle and the marchesa's faint smell, like sea moss.

She must have felt the golden hawk of her ambition, which was always perched inside her, fly in upward spirals across her chest, higher and higher from deep within her, until it was a nearly imperceptible thing in her sky but from such an elevation that it could see everything in the future. She listened to Cossa's hoarse, shallow breathing gradually subside. She turned towards him, brushing his arm with her breasts, and whispered into his ear, `You can be pope,'

His answer was a thick, contemptuous grunt.

She waited, thinking of the, enormity of the room and of the rooms around it, all nested into the size of the palace she had taken. She willed him to answer her.

`There are already two popes,' he said.

`The treasure of the Italian people is the papacy, Cossa,' she said harshly. `The French have their, university. The English have their kings. The Germans have the Holy Roman Emperor. The Italians must have their popes:'

'They have Angel Corrario, whose ancient body is called Pope Gregory XII'

`He is Ladislas's servant! We have a pope who cannot even hold Rome because he is eighty-one years old. And da Luna, the other great pope! Da Luna composes his ancient and tiny body – his dapper, tidy, neat and tiny body in Perpignan. He is Pope Benedict for the Spaniards and the Scots.'

She got out of bed with one lithe movement of her long legs and pulled a fur robe over herself, a powerfully made, tall, blonde woman of thirty-seven years – youthful, with cheekbones like kneecaps and a large soft mouth against, porcelain skin. I can see her carnal glory in my mind's eye. She strode around the bed and pulled a stool close to it at Cossa's side. She looked down at his shut eyelids, rectangular upon his square brown face. She leaned over, close to him, and spoke. `History has changed itself, Cossa„' she said. `The people of ltaly speak different languages, eat different food and think differently from the people of the other nations, except that they all want an end to this long ruinous papal schism.'

He grunted.

`Do you know: what this schism is doing to business in Europe, Cossa? How it is devastating the politics of the nations? Money and the power of the, Church are being thrown away instead of increasing themselves by a steady expansion of business. And, with the strength of the papacy split in half the nations are being ruled more and more by the princes… Not by popes. Not by the businessmen who understand what is best for all. This weakening must stop. You must stop it. You must dissolve the schism by uniting the Church under one people themselves. Not stable; papal, authority and containment, nor even the iron rule of princes, but rule by the people who are as hostile to the princes – with whom the Church can at least deal – as they will most certainly become to the popes.'

“This is something I must think about, Decima.,'

Her eyes hardened with her heart as she thought of Cosimo di Medici, with his own purity and sense of devout piety, actually believing that one needed only to offer the papacy on a platter and the nominee would reach for it eagerly and gratefully. This provincial bandit of the Church needed to be made more aware of his position on the games board. It has been a mistake to set him up as the Adonis of my desiring love, she thought, because that makes men who are naturally lazy lazier. She would need to chill him down if they were to get anywhere with the greatest opportunity she would ever be offered by God or man in her lifetime.

`No, Cossa,' she said. You don t need to think about it. I spoke of you in Germany to the electors. They share my view that you are the man who could end the schism. They want the schism ended because only the one pope in Rome can consecrate their Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of Germany. The three great archbishops of the, Rhine represent the German Church the Archbishop of Mainz, Archchancellor of Germany; the Archbishop of Cologne, Archchancellor of Italy;, and the Archbishop of Trier, Archchancellor of Burgundy. Then there are the King of Bohemia, cupbearer of the emperor; the Count Palatine, who is grand-seneschal; the Duke of Saxony, who is grand marshal; and the Markgraf of Brandenburg, who is grand chamberlain. They are seven men whose single reason for collecting is to elect the King of the Romans, who will be crowned as emperor by one single pope. I was with D'Ailly and Gerson in Paris and they – and remember they are French – agree that you are the single figure in the Church around whom the Galllcans would rally to end the schism if the reform of the Church followed. Floret – holds the same views. Piero Spina is the pope's ambassador to Naples and, as you know, that means my daughter, Rosa, is there. Rosa can prepare Spina to prepare Ladislas to take his armies into the field against you so that, while the prelates pray and orate for the end of the schism: at our council, you will be defending the Church against a mortal enemy in whose interest it is to continue the schism for ever – because, with the world behind one pope, Ladislas could never conquer Italy.'

`You talked about me with strangers? As if I were some boy you were trying to find a place for?'

`They are not strangers to me. They are pivotal men in Europe and they have investments to protect. What do you imagine happens when there is a need for a new pope, in this case one unified papacy? Do you believe that the people who run Europe do not confer with each other so that the man most suitable to them be chosen?'

`Aaah -get into bed.'

`When we have this settled.'

`All right! It's settled. A council will be called.'

'Where?'

'You must have thought about that.'

`Pisa, I think. I was born in Pisa.'

`Pisa, then. Now get into bed.'

`When will you call the council?'

He closed his eyes and lay very still to prevent his anger from dissolving the erection which had grown upon him because he had been staring at her beautiful breasts and at the sanctuary within that V of black hair above a passage which must be made of writhing snakes and gripping chains contained by catapults. He said, 'The two schismatic popes must be advised that a council is to be called.'

`Neither will answer.'

"I will also need time to assemble quorums of the colleges of cardinals from the schismatic curias. They will send out proclamations of the convention of the council and set its starting date. If everything works out, the council will meet in one year's tune.'

She stripped the fur robe from her body and stood over him. 'Ah, God,' she said, `there has never been such an exciting man as you,' then fell upon him.

22

At the end of my life – I am nearer the end than the beginning in these calm late-autumn days, I have been befriended by the marchesa's daughter, Maria Giovanna. She talks to me for hours as I sit in the garden at Cosimo's great house, doing my needlepoint. She remembers her mother and her sisters. Yesterday, she remembered the exciting days before the Council of Pisa.

In the sweet summer-like October of 1408, Rosa Dubramonte was twenty-two years old, the youngest of the four daughters of the Marchesa di Artegiana. She had a passionate nose, whose thrust was surrounded by a lascivious face of certain beauty, all supported by a professionally effulgent body. Maria Giovanna was the most womanly of the daughters; Maria Louise the most cunning; Helene the most vividly intellectual; but Rosa was the most intelligent. She thought her way through life's illusions and sensations and would trust in none of them, except at her mother's command, and unless she had good reason. Rosa had a mind which could herd mice at a crossroads, the Irish abbot MacMahon once said of her.

Rosa rode with an escort of six armed men from the establishment of her protector, Piero, Cardinal, Spina, through a countryside of vineyards and olive groves. Among the vineyards there were trees, including a great number of pomegranates which punctuated the distance with vivid colour. She rode under a broad scarlet straw hat, wearing slippers embroidered with pearls and a light, yellow riding cloak over a lime-green Chinese silk dress. She was travelling from Naples to a family conference in Perugia called by her mother. Her manufactured blondeness flashed in the wine-light of the lantern sun which hung at the eastern edge of the world. She would soon be with her family. They were almost across the valley, more than a thousand feet below the Etruscan walls of Perugia. Little of the town could be seen, but soon the climb towards its frescoes would begin, up the steep road that looped through the olive groves.

The marchesa's house in Perugia was set beyond the prior's palace, near the eastern wall of the city, standing at the end of a straight tree-lined drive whose entrance was flanked by stone figures of Juno and Venus. The main building was in two storeys, built partly in travertine, partly in Assisi limestone, with red and white marble from Bettona. It had a fine entrance doorway with a round arch, richly decorated by the Sienese artist Shanon Philippi, and in the lunette was a statue of St Ercolano, patron saint of Perugia, holding the hand of St Catherine of Pisa. There were lower recessed wings on either side of the central building; each end of these was flanked by curved buttresses. The whiteness of the architectural rhythm was emphasized by the stands of tall cypresses behind it.

Within the house, the piano noble was divided into rooms for the marchesa's daughters, arranged around a cruciform hall, each with a coved ceiling At the top of the cross, a square salon had been formed, from which a line of rooms extended to the left and right along the garden. The walls and ceilings of these rooms into the salon were decorated with frescoes by Giacomo Ricardo Blaca and painted at the zenith of his powers. The frescoes, masterpieces of trompe l'oeil, made each room appear to have been placed within open arcades overlooking the marchesa's native Pisan countryside on a perfect summer's day. Level valleys soothed beneath blue-tinged mountains, with vineyards, olive groves and chestnut trees, offering shade and peace.

At the base of the cruciform was the, main room. On the coved ceiling of the aula, Blaca had achieved a supreme triumph of illusionistic painting, in which an enormous figure of the marchesa, clothed in coloured silk, soared across the painted sky in a vastly calming composition, with the imagined heavens around her filled with a host of cherubims, flying or seated upon banks of clouds, all their small figures in the likenesses of the marchesa's daughters as babies.

On each side of the walls of the great rectangular room the Blaca frescoes depicted the same infants grown into the glowing, beauty of their childhood, all trooping away from the garden; entrance, but as they came nearer the main door they were each seen as having grown into youthful maturity, striding out to find the precious moments of their lives. It hadn't been like that in reality, but it gave them joy to see that that was how mama wanted it to be remembered.

The family assembled at noon in the main room, crowding around the marchesa, who had arrived last from Bologna. All of them were fashionably turned out in long, close-fitting laced or buttoned dresses with short-waisted bodices, wide low V- necks and wide belts under the arms and breasts. The border of the marchesa's skirt was gay with brocade. Each woman wore a small fashionable dagger at her girdle. They pulled chairs into a small circle so that the girls could face their mother.

`Frederick of Austria sends you special greetings, mama,' Maria Louise said. `I had no idea you were, up to something with him,'

`I can't tell you what it means to me to see all of you together,' the marchesa replied blandly.

'And how wonderful to have a few days; away from the insatiable Spina,' Rosa murmured.

'It isn't so much that Spina is insatiable,' the marchesa observed, 'but that.he is so determined to get his money's worth.'

`He wears a different disguise each time he does it!'

'Rosa! You know he needs to feel that perhaps you are not sure that, it is he in bed with you, so that he may deny it should you bring it up later. He is a cardinal, after all.'

'Really, you don't know, any of you. Spina is so devious that he will not allow a mirror in our bedroom, because if he saw himself reflected in one of those disguises he would have to accuse me of infidelity.'

The sisters all exploded with laughter.

`Sometimes I wish I had a lover like that,' Maria Giovanna said. 'My Cosimo is so careful that he won't make love in the daytime unless the shutters and blinds are closed and the curtains are drawn. Oh, don't misunderstand, please. He is merely very, very careful about everything.'

`He has a great deal to be careful about,' the marchesa said. `What is happening in Paris, Helene?'

'Never mind Paris. Paris will keep. Please, mama, why are we all here?'

The marchesa smiled a dangerous smile. `We are going to end the schism in the Church,' she said, `and elect Baldassare Cossa as the one true pope. And we are going to be richer and more influential than ever before.'

`Have you told Cosimo we will end the schism, mother?' Maria Giovanna asked.

`It was his father's idea and they will finance everything, so that, when it is done, the Medici bank will be the only bankers for the Church and they will be the richest bankers in the world. And this time we are going to have a real share in the action – a tithe of the bank's share and a tithe of Cossa's share as pope.'

Her audience was unable to speak or perhaps they were counting. Helene found her voice first. 'No woman has ever negotiated such a fee from her protectors,' she said with awe.

`Mama is the greatest courtesan who ever lived,' Rosa said proudly.

'Oh, mama!' Maria Giovanna cried. 'You are the idol of all womanhood,'

`Where do you begin with such a task?' Maria Louise asked. 'And how do we fit into it?'

`You are the keys to it,' the marchesa said. `As Cosimo has pointed out, Cossa controls the support of the canon lawyers, the theologians and the juridical faculty of the university. They are going to publish and justify – before the fact – the decision of the cardinals of both obediences to call a council of the Church.'

`Where will it happen?' Helene asked.

`Pisa. Everything is right for Pisa on this. It is close enough by sea from France yet it is in Italy, close to Florence, for the convenience of the Medici. Right now, Cossa is organizing the Bolognese jurists to lead an embassy to Florence to secure their agreement for a council at Pisa. Cosimo has everyone prepared in Florence. Helene will need to engage the University of Paris to persuade the king to intercede with all the princes of Europe to announce their neutrality towards the present popes.'

'Yes, mama,' Helene said,

`When the two popes are neutralized and left without any partisan support, they can be backed into supporting our council for the election of a single pope. What about that, Helene? Will the university, take the position. that only a pope may call such a council or do you agree with us that one may be called by a congress of the cardinals from both obediences?'

`I think it is safe to say,' Helene answered carefully, `that the university will advise the king that the head of the Church is Christ, not any pope. The chancellor will hold, I am quite sure of it – that only the. Church can assemble a council. I shall, point out to Gerson that the Council of Jerusalem was not presided over by Peter but by its bishop, James.'

'Excellent!'

`I think what you want to-see applied here, mama, is that the right of the Church was never abrogated. That right is to be exercised not only by bishops and cardinals but by all believers who, by reason of their urgent exhortation, have the power to represent all those who work for the unity of the. Church.'

`You are, sure, dear?'

`Well, I am, sure that Gerson enjoys the pleasure of demonstrating the superiority of theology over canon-law. Oh, it will be quite legal to convoke a council without the authority or, intervention of the popes:'

`Most of the electors will side with Cossa,' Maria Louise said. 'But that still leaves Rupert, King of the Romans, who supports Gregory, and Sigismund, King of Hungary, who only wants to end the schism and who doesn't hold any opinion on anything for longer than fifteen minutes, particularly if a woman walks through the room while he is pondering it.

`Then we know how to cope with Sigismund,' the marchesa said.

But I would prefer to avoid the direct approach right now.' `There is Pippo Span,' Maria Louise said. `He is the Hungarian army general who is closest to Sigismund.' `Yes. Rosa would like him.'

`Why should I be the one to like him?'

`You know you adore young men:'

`Mama!' Rosa blushed beautifully. Rosa was the young woman her mother would have been, her mother often thought. Being a courtesan was a temporary thing in Rosa's mind, like a childish garment which is cast away when it is outgrown. Rosa wanted what mama believed that she herself would never attain. Rosa wanted love – romantic, true, pure, young love. Maria Giovanna wanted power as her lover. Maria Louise wanted property, possessions and status. Helene wanted to be ravished by intellects, and mama – wanted all of those things and had possessed them all, except love.

Servants brought in hare; cooked in a rich sweet and sour sauce of vinegar, sugar, chocolate and raisins. It was Tuscan food. There were hearts of artichoke cooked with mushrooms and cauliflower in a sauce of milk, butter and cheese. They drank old red wine made of Sangiovese grapes. The marchesa said, `The Medici must be kept far in the background on this, of course.'

Everyone sagely agreed.

`Florence wants one pope so badly,' Maria Giovanna said, `that they will agree on Pisa. And I think Gino Capponi is the man to work for the desertion of Gregory by his cardinals. He is only a Florentine, not a Sicilian, but he is nearly as devious as Spina.'

`And Benedict?' the marchesa asked.

'He has problems,' Helene said. `Seven of his cardinals, have already left him He is a difficult, stingy old man. An eighth cardinal has just disappeared. The ninth died. The tenth, Louis de Bar, who told me all this, has returned to the court in France. Only three cardinals are left and does not trust one of them,'

`Cosimo's father must know that, of course: That could be why he has chosen to act. What will Benedict do?'

'De Bar says he will raise up five more cardinals. He wants eight for his grand council at Perpignan.'

'His grand council?' the marchesa asked indignantly. `Cosimo's father must have known about that, as well. Why are people so secretive? When will his council happen?'.

'November, de Bar thinks.'

`Then we can't hope to be first. So we must be the biggest all means, Maria Giovanna, help Gino Capponi to persuade those old men to desert. You are so good with old: men.'

`Yes, mama.' Maria Giovanna wanted to be all the things her mother was. She wanted mama's instant brutality, the impatience of her greed, the sensations of her lusts, and her knowledge. Maria Giovanna often dreamed of hearing her mother's last will being read, to learn with exaltation that mama had left to her eldest daughter her soul.

`What of Ladislas's new war?’

'The new war will help everything,' the marchesa said contentedly. `It will show Cossa as the strongest of all of the cardinals, the only actual defender of the Church, out on the field of battle risking his life while the rest of them ponder the schism: in Pisa.'

23

The tiny, stately, neat-as-a-button Pope Benedict XIII descended with grace and splendour from the castle of Perpignan to the church de la Real to open his grand council on 15 November 1408. His nine cardinals were present, with four, patriarchs, three archbishops, thirty-three bishops and many prelates from Gascony, Savoy and Lorraine, Had there not been a royal prohibition on attendance at the council, there. would have been many more from France. Some did come in disguise to elude the guards set to stop them on the roads. Including the foreign ambassadors, there were fewer than 300 people present. The pope himself celebrated the mass, the Dominican Bishop of Oleron preached and King Martin of Aragon was the protector.

The first and second sessions were ceremonial but, at the opening of the third, Benedict rose and spoke on the importance of ecumenical councils, regretting that the Babylonian confusions of the time prevented him from calling one while he was under the domination of France. He had assembled this council, he told them, to reform the Church and to terminate the unfortunate schism. He explained that, in order to refute the lies which had been spread against him, he had written a full account of all of his works to date, which Cardinal de Chalant would now read.

It took from the third to the ninth session to get through the accounting.

On 21 November, the pope asked for the advice. of the assemblage as to his future conduct towards the resolution of the great schism, feeling that he might safely trust them with this inasmuch as the majority present were as Spanish as he was. The answers were supposed to be forthcoming on the 12 December but, due either to the difficulty of the question or to the long deliberation necessary, there was no reply until 1 February 1409. By that time, most of the members attending the council had departed. Only ten were left. They resolved that Benedict was free from all reproach for heresy or schism but that he should send a delegation to the forthcoming Council of Pisa empowered to effect his abdication in case of the removal of his rival, Gregory XII, for any cause.

The tiny, ancient, outraged pope answered them. `I shall do none of these things,' he said. He threatened to imprison Cardinal de Chalant, who led the delegation, in a place where he would never see the light of the sun again. In his reply to the world at large, and in particular to the delegation from Pisa who offered him safe conduct for thirteen months, he threatened to excommunicate anyone who took any measures to his prejudice or who dared to elect a new pope while, he was alive.

Meanwhile, at the New Year, 1409, the King of Naples had again maddened himself into a warlike intensity, urged on by Cardinal Spina, who called for the protection of his pope at Rome, the cardinal having been urged on by Rosa Dubramonte as her part in the marchesa's plan. For a handsome consideration, and to Cossa's consternation, Pope Gregory had transferred a deed to the papal states to Ladislas; and the king now had to attempt to take possession of the holding before reaching out to grab Florence„ Pisa and Bologna. In December he had amassed an army of 10,000 cavaliers and a large body of foot soldiers to march to besiege Baldassare Cossa at Bologna.

Cossa turned them back by March 1409, but Ladislas's army kept Cossa pinned down, preventing him from attending all but the last three sessions of the Council of Pisa, which opened in late March.

Nonetheless, and on a daily basis, the council was well advised of Cossa's sacrifices in their defence. They knew because the marchesa, her daughters and her agents told them that only Cossa's bravery and brilliance as the greatest soldier in Europe stood between them and their humiliation by a bloodthirsty king.

The lovely old city of Pisa was at this time under Florentine control, so anything which would bring money into the city was welcomed by the Medici. The Pisan duomo was one of the wonders of the world. Where could there be found so fitting an edifice for the meeting of such a council? Giovanni di Bicci di Medici marvelled.

After the war with Florence, which followed the transfer of the city by Gian Galeazzo Visconti to the Florentines, 6000 Pisans had joined Ladislas's army so there was plenty of accommodation for the congress of the spiritual and lay worlds. Embassies from England, France, Bohemia, Poland, Portugal and Cyprus attended. The entourages of the Dukes of Brabant, Anjou, Burgundy, Austria, Lorraine and Holland' were there. Almost every kingdom in Christendom was represented, except Scandinavia.

There were 18 cardinals in Pisa on the day before the council opened. 4 patriarchs, 10 archbishops, 70 bishops were on scene and 80 more represented, the leaders of 70 monasteries in addition to 120 who appeared by deputy, 300 abbotts and 200 masters of theology., The Universities of Oxford, Paris, Bologna and Prague were represented, together with the Generals of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers. Of the more than 600 ecclesiastics who were present, two fifths were French. The benevolent and guiding hand of Baldassare, Cardinal Cossa, was apparent in everything, as the marchesa and her agents reached out to all the holy men, spreading his messages. intentions, wishes and all, positive interpretations of these.

On the morning of 25 March 1409, the council assembled at the church of St Martin, south of the Arno river. Arrayed in their albs and copes, crowned with white mitres, the cardinals and prelates formed in procession and moved, lurching and swaying with lawyers' solemnity across the Ponte Vecchio until they turned off to the Piazza degli Anziani. Skirting the archbishop's palace, they reached the cathedral, which had been completed nearly 300 years before. On the long seat at the level of the great altar sat the cardinal bishops, the cardinal priests and the cardinal deacons. Behind them was a picture of Christ painted by Cimabue. Facing the cardinals were the royal ambassadors who were prelates. Behind them, on both sides of the nave, glorious with their layers of black and white marble, were the seats extending down to the door of the church for prelates in order of their seniority. Stools were provided for envoys from chapters and convents.

When all had taken their places, the mass of the Holy Spirit was celebrated by the aged Cardinal of Palestrina. The council was opened.

At the end of the second meeting, after the prelates had, knelt with their heads to the ground;, mitres before them, for the length of the miserere, after the deacon and sub-deacon had read the litany, after a prayer from the Cardinal' of Palestrina, they rose. The Cardinal of Salutes, habited as a deacon, read the Gospel. The Veni Creator was sung by the entire assembly, kneeling, then they put on their mitres and took their seats. The business of the council had begun.

The presiding cardinal deputed two cardinal bishops, two archbishops and two bishops to discover whether the popes, Benedict XIII and Gregory XII, were present at the council. Accompanied by notaries, they went to the doors of the cathedral and called out to Petrus da Luna and Angelus Corrario in Latin and in the vulgar that they in person, or their fully empowered protectors, should appear at once. The call was repeated three times without result.

The two popes defaulted again on the third and fourth summonings at these sessions.

While the council deliberated in sanctity, day by day, the marchesa and her apparatus entertained its cardinals, archbishops and bishops by night. Cardinal Spina remained as Pope Gregory's legate at the court of Naples, but Rosa visited. Maria Giovanna in Pisa to help out with providing pleasure. They. used mama's `little house' in Porto Giorgio, inviting Giovanni di Bicci di Medici and his son Cosimo as their set-pieces at the parties, as prelates always found comfort in the presence of bankers.

Helene had rented a small house adjacent to, the quarters of the French delegation to the council. In Paris, in January, she had come to an agreement with Pierre D'Ailly that, if Cossa succeeded in organizing the council to give him the papacy, Cossa would make the bishop a cardinal in return for D'Ailly's active support. To establish his goodwill under the agreement, D'Ailly made an eloquently powerful appeal, before Pisa was convened, for a general council of the Church, which was heard across Europe from his sounding board of the Synod of Aix. He was a gifted orator and he asserted that, since the Church had both a natural and a divine right to its unity, it could and must call a council without papal sanction. D'Ailly, confessor to the King of France and treasurer of the Ste Chapelle, was one of the richest churchmen at Pisa, the magnet who drew cardinals to Helen's dinner parties. At more than one of these dinners, D'Ailly said to the engaged and thoughtful cardinals, `This schism has been a form of civil war within the Church and there is not a churchman today who does not cry out for its end. This council is the means, to end it, to be sure, but, when the man is, named by you as the unitary pope to bind up the wounds of Christendom, he must not be a pastoral pope. He must be a lawyer, an executive and a trained fighter who can weave the Church into one whole piece again, and he must be strong, determined and experienced in battle to be able to quell the partisan feelings among Christians.'

When he was asked to name such a man, D'Ailly would grow thoughtful, stroking his beard. `I would say there is only one such man,' he would answer. `Baldassare Cossa; who even now is beating away the threat of Ladislas so that we may complete the, business of this convention,'

Each of the marchesa's daughters had different spokesmen for Cossa on different nights – and there was not a night throughout the entire session of the council when each of them did not entertain strenuously. Rosa read to six cardinals, two archbishops and four bishops a letter from Cardinal Spina (which she had written herself) in which Spina seemed to consecrate Cossa as `the saviour of the Church who waits for our call from the field of battle to do his duty'. Cosimo di Medici called upon the cardinals for European stability, which had not existed since the schism had fractured the body of the Church. `The scourge of schism can be driven from that body,' he would tell dinner assembly after assembly, `but what have we gained unless the new pope, alone upon the throne of Peter, is able to marshal the powers and weaknesses of the organization of his Church into one seamless garment. That takes a strong man, your Eminences, a soldier rather than a pastor, an executive rather.than a theologian.'

Maria Giovanna or the marchesa would lift Cossa's name into a dinner-table conversation and Cosimo. would seize upon it, brandishing it like a flag, telling them that, `Cossa understands the problems of business. Cossa is a student of finances. Cossa is the only tailor we have to sew up the ragged purse of the Church.'

The marchesa made certain the prelates knew that, if they were firm and continually vocal in the cause of Cossa's candidacy, Cossa would not forget such advocacy. By this she moved such key churchmen as Alaman Adimar, Archbishop of Pisa, John of Portugal, Lucius Aldebrandinus and Guillaume Fillastre to look for Cossa's gratitude. Large amounts of Medici money were spent. Splendid gifts were made: Henricus Minutulus, a Neapolitan' cardinal was given two Irish stallions and six blooded brood mares from France. Francesco Ugoccione of Urbino, Cardinal Priest of the Sainted Quatro Coronati, was given a set of female triplets from the western highlands of Ethiopia. De Anna, Caracciola and Maramaur preferred to accept future benefices in return for their votes for Cossa.

I was neatly split in half by the demands of Cossa and the marchesa. I spent half my time in Pisa: Bernaba was doing an enormous business there and the marchesa wanted me to attend at least parts of every party she or her daughters gave, attend behind screens and at concealed listening posts so that I could hear everything which was being said and done on Cossa's behalf. The other, half of nay time I spent reporting it all back to Cossa in the field.

Cossa listened to my reports with his fullest attention and sometimes he would sigh and say, `I don't know, how the Church ever came to be seen as a spiritual organization.'

24

Cossa and I had the war to fight. Ladislas's army would press north and we would fling it south again. During one such afternoon in the field, Cossa's forces separated eleven units of lances from the body of the Neapolitan army and demolished them, smashing heads as if they were-summer melons. The heat of the battle was succeeded by a damp, cold night. Cossa fell ill. His chest and arms became so weak that he would not move himself and seemed to be on the point of death. I held him down and, to prevent the whole camp from knowing our most guarded secret, I had to bind Cossa's mouth with a cloth, so much did he rave on about dead men and the pope's gold.

The illness lasted in diminishing force for three days; then, at last, he could travel. I took him to Siena, where he was waited upon by the Counts of Sevrino, and Moergeli, the most famous Swiss herbalist.

When Cossa felt strong enough again, we picked up the advance of his army, which was following the Neapolitans. We travelled to Radicofani, then crossed by way of Abbatia and the town of Piano, where in a green meadow the people made us shelters of brushwood and received the cardinal with cheering and rejoicing. He gave them his blessing from horseback and rose on to Aquapendente, then to Bolsena, which had been a populous town destroyed by Hawkwood. Only its rich soil, the convenient lake and its position on the road to Rome had saved it from complete destruction. As we rode towards Orvieto, I told Cossa about what he had babbled in his sickness. Cossa said, `It must be that we live in many places at once. What you tell, me I said seems so real to me that I must have been there at Castrocaro as I said it to you here in a delirium.

The next day we came to the rocky mountain about six stades high, rising in the middle of a valley. The plateau on top was about three miles around. Cliffs, none lower than twenty ells, were its walls. Ladislas had hit the town five days before, leaving half-ruined towers and crumbling rubble, but the church of the Blessed Virgin, the inferior to no church in Italy, stood intact in the middle of the city; its interior walls and floor were of vari-coloured marble and its wide, high facades were filled with statues whose faces stood out from the white marble as if alive. Cossa led his men to the episcopal palace, where he went to bed in the middle of the afternoon and slept until midnight.

I sat at Cossa's bedside until he awoke. `They have a, pretty good cook here,' I told him. `He's no Bocca but he's better than anything we've had since we left Bologna – whenever that could have been.'

`I'm not hungry,' Cossa said. `What else?'

`Four women are staying here. They're not town women. The kitchen people say they just came in here yesterday and took over. They're been throwing a lot of money around.'

‘Women? Cossa said. Alone?’

'They're alone inside this palace, if that's what you mean. They have a troop of soldiers in the north courtyard, maybe fifty men.'

`Well, I woke up too late to do anything about four women, but at least the idea makes me hungry. Tell the cook I'm coming down.'

In the anteroom before the dining hall, Cossa found the Duchess of Milan seated on a sofa facing the door as he entered. Two ladies-in-waiting were standing behind her; another was beside her on the sofa.

'Good evening, my lord cardinal,' the duchess said, and at that moment the ladies withdrew from the room. Cossa stood still with astonishment. All at once, again, he was bewitched by the demanding sexuality of the woman. The inexplicable feeling which he had spoken to me about two days earlier – about the human mind being capable of inhabiting places in separate worlds simultaneously with the present world – returned to him. Surely each time he saw this woman he had left reality behind? He was hallucinating under the power of the loose lasciviousness of her mouth and the feverish glitter in her eyes, as she seemed to offer her body and withdraw it at the same instant. They had had only two encounters before that night, the latest five years earlier in the tower above Milan, but she was still compellingly sensual, even if time and the Visconti blood had left hawks marks, on her face.

`The world has stopped,' he said.

‘Of the two times we were together, only once was it an accident,' she said. `Now again, as the last time, I have to talk to you.'

`Speak quickly so that we may return to our destiny,' he said.

`When it was confirmed to me by Filargi; the Archbishop of Milan, that the Council of Pisa was on the verge of electing you as their pope, I was so distraught that I swooned away for two days. I could not believe that you would allow such an imprisonment to happen to you.'

`You could not believe that I could be pope?' he asked.

`I could believe in an instant that all the world was capable of conspiring to, persuade you to be pope but I could find no sane reason why you would agree to give your life over to saying endless masses, to mumbling perpetual benedictions morning and night, to wrapping yourself insides the stink of sanctity.'

`I do not see it that way,' he lied.

`You are a man, and you are a great soldier. There is nothing more for you to be.'

He tried to make light of it, but the inferences and their consequences which she rained upon him began to shake him. He had never thought of the papacy except as a business, but what she said it was – what it had been even for Boniface – even for Boniface. They would ordain him and he would spend the rest of his life within a cloud of holy incense disputing with old men, about the number of angels on a pinhead. They would demand that he confess to them every day so that he could be purified to accept communion every day. He could not contemplate that. He had too little to confess, there were only things like never telling his father about what rested in Carlo Pendini's grave – and too much time left to waste it on ecclesiastical nonsense.

`You loved me,' she said. `Your body said you loved me. We have a greater destiny together than the papacy.'

`My bones creak,' he said. `I am lame with gout.'

`We can rule Italy.'

I have come upon you too quickly tonight. I can think only of one thing, one close, passionate thing – not shadows in the distance:' '

`My lord cardinal,' she said with urgency. `If Pisa dissolves this schism – if France, agrees to go along with that sacred notion they will be intent only upon the reform of the Church. What you desire from a papacy will be ignored. When they elect you, they will do so believing that they control a model pope – a disciplined lawyer and soldier, who by their special conjuring will have been transformed into someone devoutly religious, concerned with stroking away the Christian disappointments of Europe. You – a man trained to dip his hands into the treasure chests of the Church, a man to whom lust is far more natural than piety – will have to turn your back upon life. You will have to move and speak only as they tell you to move and speak. Your freebooting days will be done.'

He stared at her, his desire for her building higher.

`My lord, hear me.' Her face hardened with her will. 'I offer you command of the Milanese armies. They are still loyal to me; commanders and troops. My son is being prepared to show his disloyalty and to go along, with ambitious men who are not Visconti. You are being backed into a corner. Deny the Council of Pisa their choice and you will be cast into a corner of oblivion within the Church. You need what I have. I need what you have. We will share everything. You will cast out the interlopers and you will retrain my sons to be what their father was. Ruler of the north of Italy you will be and ruler of more than that if you but choose it.'

`Leave the sacred college?' he said. `Give up my place at Bologna?'

`Cossa, I speak to you of real power. You will leave nothing. You will give up nothing. We will lay down the terms of how the Church should be run and, if you wish to be first among the cardinals, they will confer: that upon you to win our favour. You will be the temporal ruler of Italy. And that is your true meaning. Combined with the gold of Milan, and with the force that it can buy, you will tell them what it is you want, not the other way round.'

His mind began to soften. He had almost agreed, mindlessly, with the marchesa and Cosimo because his father had imprinted upon his purpose so long ago that he was being sent away to become a lawyer so that he could go to great heights in the Church. He had put the two outsides together, sides which were in no way any part of him, and he had. accepted the banker's dream of a merchants' world because the marchesa had sold it to him.

If he were ever to accept the papacy, he might as well have agreed to become an alchemist or a werewolf. But he needed time to think about the destiny which this woman was offering to him. They would become intertwined if he agreed. There could be bitter troubles in that. Besides, if he told, her right now that he would accept what she offered, that would be the end of lovemaking for this night and perhaps for many nights to come…

While she lay asleep in, the darkness, before dawn the next morning, he crept out of her room, dressed, roused me and was out, riding off at the head of his lances before she awoke.

25

The Marchesa di Artegiana went from Pisa to join Cossa and brief him in full on what had been accomplished on his behalf at the council. It was the second such journey she had made since the meetings had begun. She spent an afternoon and a night with him at Montanta, a walled hill town off the beaten way between Siena and Viterbo, protected by cliffs. Its main piazza slanted upwards, houses huddling around a church which hugged the skirts of a towering castle where Cossa waited for her.

They were in a room with brilliant, bare, white walls. She was a good briefing officer. She reported on the finances – she had insisted that Cossa put up one fifth of the money needed to marry all of them in the enterprise, then she gave him a tally of his support and opposition among the cardinals, with her analysis of the state of mind of the general council, which, she said, was intent upon Church reform – at least the French were, and they dominated the meeting. She detailed the several current European national positions, as these could affect his candidacy or present problems after his election. She delivered head-counts of the informal caucuses within the sacred college, then projected a combined caucus of her own estimation as to how the election would go. She told him, last, that Sicily had been rejoined with the kingdom of Naples. When she had finished, she said simply, 'This time next month you will be pope.'

`You can never be sure of such things,' he said dryly.

`We can be sure. We are sure. It is done.'

'Do I not have the right to change my mind?' he said. 'To say, flatly, that if they offer it I won't accept it.'

`No joking, please,' she said. `This is important business.'

`Listen, Decima. I am grateful for all you have done on this thing, and you can be sure I'm going to see that the money you believe you have lost will be made available to you in some other way. But I have thought deeply about this and I am not the right man to be pope. I am a soldier, not a reformer. I am a lawyer, not a priest. They want a religious man and that certainly leaves me out. The whole thing, the way you have organized it, is the greatest kind of a compliment to you. You have accomplished the impossible, but if I took that job it would destroy me.'

She clung to the necessity to appear calm. She felt ill enough to vomit, but she had to remain serene and in charge of the discussion. The expression which went out to him from her huge dark blue eyes, behind which chaos danced drunkenly, was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. `Have you thought how what you have just said could affect Cosimo and the other bankers of Europe? Do you have any idea how this is going to hit the investments of D'Ailly and the King of France and the Archbishop of Mainz and all the other people who have bet fortunes on you to have this schism over?'

`I am sorry about that,' he said. `Let them make other plans with some other puppet.'

`Cossa! For Christ's' sake!' You will make enemies in the Church whom you will never be able to overcome. There are rich, powerful men waiting for you in Pisa now who expect you to make them cardinals.'

`Too bad.'

`What are you going to do when they come after you?'

`I'll think of something. I do have a few thousand soldiers, don't I?'

'Cossa – listen to me – no one is meant to be pope,' the marchesa said desperately. `But when a man devotes his life to the service of his Church so successfully-that his cardinal peers choose him and elect him pope – then he serves.'

`Stop playing with me like a fish, Decima.' We have a business arrangement. You and Cosimo outmanoeuvred and outslicked the cardinals and the princes and the businessmen – who don't give a damn who is pope so long as the common policy is to eliminate the schism. Why not? It was good policy for you and Cosimo. You get a tithe of my share and you probably have a tithe of Cosimo's share, and we can be sure that any businessmen who want to do business with the new set-up would have to pay you off. Never mind. Cosimo wants the Church's banking. Let me do it my way, let me put my own man in as pope and I'll see that the Medici get what they want. Cosimo's way isn't the only way. I have a better way. You'll make even more money when we do it my way.'

She wanted to die… For the first time in all her years on God's earth she wanted to die.

Cossa had been thinking of the alternatives ever since leaving Catherine Visconti. He would need the leverage of an enormous amount of money if he ever expected to achieve a kind of equality with Visconti. Then he would have to maintain it until, gradually, he no longer needed her for the conquest of Italy, nor to handle the German politicians. His plan to acquire wealth which would win him greater power when he' agreed to take over the armies and the fortunes of Milan had slowly evolved and shaped itself.

`First of all, I would hate to be the reformer who tries to take away from those cardinals and bishops what they have considered to be their own for a thousand years. But a mild pass at reform has to be made. A very religious, saintly, holy man has to be propped up at the top, where all Christendom can watch him pray while the reformers are carrying on the usual systematic looting inside the Church. That saintly fellow certainly isn't me, Decima. Or am I wrong again?'

`You mean it. You mean all of it.'

`When did I ever lie to you?'

`Who is going to tell Cosimo di Medici?'

`It depends on what you tell him, doesn't it? Look here, my darling woman, because of all the work you've done in Pisa, when I go into that conclave as a voting cardinal, I'll be in a position to name the next pope. Before I make him pope, I'll make sure that he knows who got it for him. We will make a deal. He'll do all the praying and the swaying in the processions and the confessing, while I run the show for him. I will be the first among his cardinals because' he won't be able to operate the Church without me. I will run his curia and the benefices and be in charge of the taxes. Now are you beginning to follow me?'

He would be his own man instead of being ever ones lackey, Cossa thought, marvelling at his own ingenuity… He would not, need to take the marchesa's offer or Catherine Visconti's offer. He had been within tantalizing reach of the papal purses for twenty years.

He knew that the man who controlled the pope controlled' the papal armies and the pope's purse. The world of the bankers, princes, businessmen and ecclesiastical plotters would need to rally around him or be punished by his indifference and, through: him, the indifference of the new and saintly pope.

`Cossa, you rotten Neapolitan shit of Satan, we almost killed ourselves getting the, papacy for you! Cosimo has spent tens of thousands of florins on this. He has wrung gold out of all of the bankers of Europe to put you into the papacy!'

`Nothing will be wasted,' Cossa answered calmly. 'They are bankers. They want money. By going along with me, they will get their; money and so will you.'

`What do I tell the cardinals?'

`The cardinals and I are of one spirit. I will tell them. Even Spina will welcome what I will tell him.'

She clapped her ivory hand to her porcelain forehead saying, `The deals we will have to unmake! The arrangements which will have to be undone.' Cossa knew he had won. He felt kind and loving towards her.

`Who will be pope, then?'

'Pietro Filargi.'

`Milan? That old man?'

`He is old but he was once a holy friar. He studied theology at Norwich, Oxford and Paris. He was a, holy hermit on Candia, then his life took him to Lombardy. He became a tutor to Gian Galeazzo's on, then Archbishop of Milan, then a cardinal. He is fond of wine and knows nothing of the business of the curia. He trusts me.' Cossa smiled broadly. `And I insist that it be you who, take the news of his, accession, to him so that all your future clients will realize that you know such things first – before all others – before the inside of the inside. Do you follow me, dear one?'

`Dear one, my ass, you double-crossing, two-faced son-of a-bitch.'

26

When the marchesa left Cossa's bed the next morning, she was affectionate and blandly understanding but, as she rode northwards to Pisa, her mind was hard and her spirit cold. She had been cheated. A tithe of the benefices taken from Cossa as a first cardinal, no matter how much, was far from being a tithe of Cossa's potential share as pope. Standing at the right hand of a first cardinal was no improvement of position for herself or her daughters. She marked that Cossa's excuses for rejecting the papacy were admissions of weakness.

It was reflexive with the marchesa to exploit weakness. She was determined to control Cossa as pope in exactly the same way that Cossa intended to control Filargi. Cosimo di Medici had many rightful claims to realizing an influence over the papacy, but even his claims were very nearly invalid compared with the rightness of her own claim, because seeing that all Church deposits went into the Medici bank was only a part of what she would control when she controlled Cossa's papacy.

When she stopped for the night at Siena, she` wrote a letter to Cosimo: It was a harsh, blunt report of what Cossa had told her. She ended the letter with, `It is too late to reverse his decision, so fearful is

he of sitting on the throne of St Peter. Filargi will be elected. He is an – old, old man. You have my consecrated word that Cossa has not yet escaped the papacy.

When she reached Pisa, the marchesa sent a letter to her dear friend, the Cardinal Filargi, Archbishop of Milan, asking for an audience. He summoned her to lunch the following day. He was such a hearteningly amiable, crinkly-faced, brown-skinned, toothless old man, she thought. If he had a fault in the world it could only be that he spent half his day at table and maintained a staff of 400 female servants, all clad in his house livery, among whom were four of Bernaba's failed courtesans who kept her informed of what was happening, as a matter of habit.

As she entered his dining hall, Filargi seemed to be very nearly engulfed by the ministering women. As each did her stint, smiling dotingly; others seemed to appear from trapdoors, crevices, cup-boards and crannies to bring more comforts – cushions, wine, foot stools, hand cream, sweeties and cooling, fans.

`Praise to God!' the old man cried out from beneath the screens of muffling women. `How wonderful to see you again, my dearest Decima. It is like the wonderful old days in Milan when Gian Galeazzo was still alive, and you and I would lunch so elegantly every Tuesday.' Three young women lifted him to his feet and braced him while he flung open his arms to receive her. After the embrace they lowered him into his chair and settled him down sweetly among the cushions.

They lunched on busecca alla Milanese, a tripe soup containing – cabbage, tomatoes, celery, beans, onions, potatoes, leeks and crusts of bread, flavoured with saffron, sage, parsley and garlic, and sprinkled with cheese.

`When I spent that impossibly cold time at Oxford, then an even colder time in Paris which is surely the coldest place on dear God's earth – their faces went blank when I pleaded for this magnificent soup to get myself warm again; and I vowed to St Gregory of s Nazianus (the supreme theologian of the Trinity, but a saint who wrote more than four hundred touchingly beautiful poems – just as this soup is a poem to the living) that I would, if I ever returned to the advanced civilization of Italy, start every meal of my remaining days with busecca alla Milanese. You and I know what is right to set upon a table, my dear. One of the things we were born for was to be each other's eating companion. After the wonderful soup, I have asked for the special sausage, eh? Your favourite and mine, am I right? Where else but in Milan would veal be sliced so thinly, then filled with such infinitesimally chopped veal, pork, ham, breadcrumbs and the cheese of Parma – all bound together with egg yolk and flavoured with garlic and nutmeg, then cooked in butter with a little broth and served in its own dear sauce? Please! We shall drink Virgil's own wine – Rhaetic – red, robust, rich and rewarding Rhaetic from the hills above Verona – such a pleasant change from the heavy wines of Latium.'

`You will make me fat,' the marchesa protested weakly.

`Fat is a phase of life,' the cardinal explained. 'I was thin, then God made me fat but, when he grew tired of seeing me fat, he made me thin again. Always the same five meals a day, the same wines, the same sweets… here, here, you lazy girls the marchesa's glass is almost empty.

They ate and drank. The cardinal talked on and on like a sweet bird perched upon the brow of life singing its praises. As suddenly as he did everything else…, he said, 'Have you come to tell me something, Decima'?'

She nodded happily.

`Is it a private matter?'

She nodded conspiratorially.

`Lazy girls!' he called to his staff. `Tidy me up, then leave us.' Four liveried young women scrambled forward. Two washed his little hands. A third touched tenderly at his mouth with a soft, damp,

scented cloth, as the fourth arranged his hair. Then they were gone. He leaned back and nodded to the marchesa. – `I have just returned from Cardinal Cossa's field headquarters,'

she said. `He entrusted me with a message for you.'

The old cardinal raised one eyebrow.

`He is aware that the council and the cardinals – are speaking of him as our next pope.'

'Ah, that is true, Decima. These are times when a man of Cossa's strength is sorely needed.'

`Yes. Oh, yes, Eminence. But he spoke most forthrightly to me. He told me that such expectancies as those of the council alarm him because he is not as you are – a holy man. He sees himself only as a man of action, and he is painfully anxious that his experience and abilities as a Church administrator after all that long and careful training under Pope Boniface would be lost if he were to accept the post.’

`He would refuse?'

`He wants only to serve God and his pope where God has shown him that he is meant to serve, my Lord. Therefore, because I have his trust and yours, he has asked me to tell you that his support – all of it – will be put behind your candidacy.'

Filargi stared at her steadily, without expression. His crinkled face with its horny skin made him seem like a gentle lizard upon a rock in the warn sun.

`Cardinal Cossa wants to serve you,' the marchesa continued simply. `More than anything else, he wants me to make that wholly clear to you. He offers his services to you humbly, as your first cardinal, as your administrator of the curia and the Church through-out Christendom as military protector of your person and of the papal states, as steward and cherisher of the Church's treasures everywhere,; and as the host to your serenity.'

Two small tears rolled down Filargi's leather cheeks. `Lazy girls,' he called out, `fetch me any jewel chest.' In moments one appeared with an iron-bound chest. He scoured out a key from a hidden pocket of his dress and unlocked the chest set before him. He opened its lid. It was filled with gold jewellery which shone blindly, set with precious stones.

`My lady; Decima he said with emotion, `I ask you to choose the ornament which most pleases you. You have brought to me that which honours all the dead of my family and which will exalt my spirit: to eternal salvation.'

Although the marchesa did not hesitate, she did not appear to have considered which jewelled item she would choose, but her ruffian's eye had decided which object would most benefit herself and, her heirs by choosing a gold ring bearing a sapphire as blue as the Virgin's robes within a setting of diamonds.

`I thank you, my lord,' she said humbly.

27

The next session of the Council of Pisa was held on Saturday, 15 June 1409, beginning with the celebration of high mass by Philippe de Thury, Archbishop of Lyons. The sermon was preached by the Bishop of Novara on the appropriate text, Eligite meltorem et eum ponite super soturn, exhorting the cardinals to proceed to the unanimous choice of a good and worthy ruler. This was now necessary because the council had finally deposed both schismatic popes, Gregory and Benedict.

At vespers, the twenty-four cardinals, including Baldassare Cossa, entered the archbishop's palace, 110 yards west of the leaning tower, and were there immured in conclave under the guard of the Grand Master of Rhodes, and other prelates, not to issue thence until a new pope should have been chosen. Fourteen of the cardinals had belonged to the, obedience of Gregory, ten to that of Benedict.

Throughout the city, stories of exceptional bribery were rife, that every cardinal had, promised to the servants of others, that the French court had lavished money, that the cousin of the King of France, Louis de Bar, Cardinal of St Agatha, might be chosen, or the 'domestic prophecy' of Cardinal de Thury might be fulfilled, or that Simon de Cramaud, Patriarch of Alexandria, might at last obtain the tiara for which he had sighed so long and worked so ardently.

Two halls and two chapels were set apart for the conclave in the larger chapel, cells were constructed in which the cardinals might eat and sleep; the smaller was reserved for discussion and for the election of a pope.

On the first day nothing was done but settle in with greatest comfort. On the fourth day, after sufficient lip service had been paid to the ambitions of the more earnestly yearning cardinals, the conclave turned to Baldassare Cossa. After a result of scrutiny was announced, it was customary for the cardinals to sit and talk together in case any wished to change his mind and transfer the vote he had given to another – for in this way they could more easily reach an agreement. This procedure was omitted after the submission of Cossa's scrutiny.

Cossa stood before them and addressed his response to the senior cardinal. 'Your Eminence of Ostia,' he said gravely, `your opinion of me, as I understand it, is much higher than my own, when you attribute to me any more than the qualities which should be held by a soldier of the Church: I am not ignorant that our own imperfection is far more, general. I realize that our failings in these crucial days of schism include a lack of vital religious capacities which evolve out of a life of meditation and prayer; something which has not been my lot in my life of action. These failings must declare me to be utterly unworthy. Therefore, with fallen heart over my weaknesses which must bar me from ever reaching the glory of the papacy, we must disobey the summons of the Holy Ghost which was made with your voices.’

There was a great outburst of protest in the chapel but Cossa quieted this when he said, `If following the dictates of your consciences which seek to heal the wounds suffered from this tragic schism, you will attribute the summons of a single, binding pope, to God Himself, you will cast your eyes about you seeking the holiest man among you. That man of holiness whom we should raise up as pope does indeed sit among us. He is Petrus Filargi, Archbishop of Milan and Cardinal of the Twelve Apostles. Beyond his precious sanctity, I remind you that he is neither Frenchman nor Italian and is by that freedom alone a healing balm for Christendom. He is known by all of us to be an able man and a most active, prelate in the affairs of this historic council. He might not know who were his father or his mother but that will save him from the trouble and temptation of providing for his relatives. He might not be profoundly based in canon and civil law, as he is a scholar of theology, but it was no ordinary man who could win the confidence and trust of that astute tyrant, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. Petrus Filargi truly fits the throne of Peter, for he is able, saintly and proven to be incorruptible.'

The new pope, Petrus Filargi, took the name of Alexander V. The news of his election was received with joy in Milan, Florence and Bologna, but not in Rome, which was occupied by Ladislas's troops.; The election of Cardinal Filargi was also a triumph for France because both he and his chief adviser, Cardinal Cossa, were devoted to the French alliance – that confraternity of French cardinals, the King of France and the papacy which managed to prosper so well.

Although the Council of Pisa had deposed Popes Gregory and Benedict and had elected Pope Alexander to end the great schism in the Church, there was still much before the council to do. There was the desperate question of Church reform if the council were to satisfy the hopes of Christendom, from Scandinavia to Greece, from England to Warsaw. While the council sat, most of Europe had discussed little else but the. reform of the Church but, until that reform actually happened, the multitudinous Church outside was ruled by a minuscule handful of the Church within the cardinals and the curia, without whom nothing could be done which had to be done.

The reform for which the Christian world had clamoured for over a century, for which the prelates and priests of the Church in every country but Italy had wanted for perhaps even longer, was many-sided. It involved the elimination of images and pictures from the churches, and an end to the solemnization of new festivals and of the building of yet more sacred edifices. Reform demanded an end to the canonization of saints and the prohibition of all work on feast days. Reform called for an end to simony not only within the papacy, the college and the Curia, but by parish priests who milked their poor parishioners. This Churchly vice had, put many of the faithful under ban of excommunication because they were unable to pay for justice. Corpses lay in the field ‘unhouseled, unannealed, no reckoning made because relatives could not pay priests for a Christian burial. However, despite the continuing demand for Church reform, the Council of Pisa felt that, by electing a new pope, they had done the one-thing which was absolutely needful.

Catastrophically, the great schism in the Church had not been terminated by the signing of conciliar decrees. Although the council had deposed two popes and had elected one pope, it had not proclaimed in writing to all the nations and to the people that the schism was over.

This thunderbolt crashed down upon the Church and upon Christendom. To the horror of the world, it soon became clear that merely one more pope had been added to the pope at Perpignan and to the pope who had fled Rome and now lived under the protection of Carlo Malatesta at Rimini. Incredible to Christendom, it was slowly and agonizingly understood that, although most of the prelates of Christendom had laboured mightily over their intentions,, all they had succeeded in doing was to bring one more pope into a world which was already overcrowded with popes.

All three papacies held their individual obediences in a deathgrip while, relentlessly, they collected their dues and tithes, their spoilias and servitias from the triply split parishes of the, world. Although the latest pope, Alexander V, was obeyed by the greatest part of Christendom, Benedict XIII had the obediences of Spain, Scotland, Sardinia, Corsica and Armagnac. The city-state of Rimini, parts of Germany, and the northern kingdoms were faithful to Gregory XII.

The twentieth; session of the Council of Pisa opened on 1 July, under the presidency of Alexander V. This was marked by greatly increased solemnity. Cardinal de Thury again celebrated high mass. The pope pronounced the benediction. Those parts of the service which had formerly been taken by a cardinal bishop were now performed by His Holiness. The Orate and the Erigite Vos, instead of being proclaimed by a simple chaplain or deacon; were now pronounced by a cardinal-deacon, and the pope was assisted by cardinals of that rank, including Baldassare Cossa, in white dalmatics and mitres. After the litany, Alexander himself read the remaining prayers and intoned the Veni Creator Spiritus. A, lofty seat, had been placed for him in front; of the, high altar and facing him were the Patriarchs of Alexander, Antioch and Jerusalem.

After the office had been concluded, the Cardinal of Chalant, assisted by three bishops, ascended the pulpit and published the decree which told that the pope had been unanimously elected by all the cardinals. A prayer for the welfare of the new pontiff and of the Holy Church was then put up, and the pope preached a sermon on the text Fiet unum ovile unus pastor, signifying that there would be one fold and, one shepherd, which was more than slightly in error.

At the, pope's order, Cardinal Cossa rose and read newly formed decrees which ratified all the business that the cardinals had done from 3 May. The two colleges of cardinals, those formerly of Benedict; and those formerly of Gregory, were amalgamated into a single college. Deposed, the two popes had no ecclesiastical supporters because, as popes, they no longer existed. The next decree related to

the reformation of the Church in its head and its members. The pope requested that different nations appoint men of probity, age and capacity to consult with him and his cardinals in the matter.

Sunday 7 July 1409, was fixed for Alexander's coronation: The newest of the three sitting popes assisted by cardinals and prelates in their long pluviales and white mitres, celebrated mass, then emerged from the western door of the cathedral of Pisa to the high throne which had been erected on the steps facing the baptistery. The epistles and the gospel were read in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The triple crown was set upon Alexander's head by the Cardinal of Saluces. Then the, patriarchs, archbishops; bishops and mitred abbots mounted their steeds caparisoned in white cloths and, trappings. Last of all came, the pope on a white mule, wearing full pontificals, with the tiara on his head. The mule was led by Cardinal Cossa.

The procession rode solemnly through the streets of Pisa. The two rival pope's were burned in effigy. The Jews; as was traditional, met the pope as he rode and petitioned for a confirmation of their privileges. They presented him with a book of their law, which he was required to throw backwards over his shoulder, saying that he had a better law as his guide. Arriving at his palace, the pope dismounted and the Captain of Pisa took the mule and its trappings as his perquisite.

On the last day of the council, on the, authority of God, St Peter and St Paul; and on his own authority, Alexander bestowed plenary absolution upon all who had attended the council, and on the

servants who had been with them, and this was to avail up to the hours of their deaths.

28

Three months after the accession of Pope Alexander V, after he had established his own curia out of nothing, had implemented the arms of the Church – organizing department after department where there had been no apparatus whatever before – Cossa sent me to Milan with a message to Catherine Visconti, asking her to entrust to me her choice of a meeting place in three months' time.

He had much work to do before he could meet her to settle anything. On 1 October, he led the pope's armies and allied troops under the command of the Duke of Anjou and entered Rome, where he took possession of the Vatican after driving Ladislas south, back to Naples. It had been six years since Cossa was in Rome. Those years had formed him into the greatest cardinal of Urbanist obedience. He had originated and engineered the Council of Pisa, had secured the election of, a holy man to the papacy, and was himself the power behind the papal throne.

Cossa's accomplishment in recreating in Bologna all the machinery formerly at Rome had been a vast executive achievement. To begin with, although delegations of city magistrates and leading citizens came to him with rich gifts to plead that he persuade the pope to return the papacy to Rome, and although he knew Alexander was much inclined to that, Cossa was against it. He listened to the committees gravely, and accepted their gifts with sensitive regard for their motives, but he had no intention of permitting Alexander to go to Rome to stand at the mouths of Ladislas's cannon. Also, he had much in mind the many commercial enterprises which he, the marchesa and Cosimo di Medici controlled in Bologna which were enhanced, b, the presence of the papacy and the curia. It became necessary for him to remind Alexander of his promise, on election, to work for the recovery of the papal states. Bologna was Cossa's fief, so it would have to do for the old man as well. Without further murmur, Alexander settled luxuriously into Bologna with his immense retinue of female servants, holy, happy and unhorrified.

Alexander was an old man without experience of papal affairs. He never understood that he was a prisoner of the papacy. He devoted himself to holy worship,, undertaking every imaginable ritualistic chore and carrying the people of Bologna and all pilgrims along wide him in his daily exhibitions of belief, which were as necessary to the collective spirit as the inner nourishment of, its faith. As he lived only to worship his God with the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Mother and the saints, he welcomed Cossa's vigour and intelligence and the experience of churchcraft and statecraft which he brought to the papacy. To outsiders, it appeared that a scramble by the cardinals for offices and privileges had begun, but these benefits were stringently controlled by Cossa and shared only with those who had acted in support of his wishes at the Council of Pisa.

Early in March 1410, when he was sure that the machinery of the Church was working smoothly, that the cardinals knew who their master was, Cossa slipped away to a palace at Mirandola, between Ferrara and Parma, which Gian Galeazzo had acquired in his labours: of some years before. It was called the Castello di Natale – it was the birthplace of the Duke of Rusconi – and Catherine Visconti had chosen it as a well-hidden meeting place with Cossa.

She was waiting when he arrived. The servants were dismissed and they made love vigorously before they prepared for dinner. After dinner they began the slow, deliberate process of working out the treaty they would hold with each other.

`I cannot explain how high my heart lifted when I was brought the news that you had rejected the papacy,' she said. 'I knew that I was saved and that my children were saved. What enormous courage and strength you had to tell the conclave that you would not accept their summons, and I cannot tell you how much I recognize what you have done for me – for us – so that you may come to our alliance with an open heart.'

'My heart is open to you,' he said. `We will move Europe, but not until I have seen to my duty to Alexander and have set his house entirely in order so that the Church may function and prosper. There

are obligations to cardinals and to princes which I must meet but,

within six months from this day, we will join our intentions, reclaim your sons from those who would subvert them; and begin the expansion of the state of Milan.'

`How much money should I have ready for you?'

`There will be a matter of gifts within the Church no need to persuade the pope so, but each cardinal should understand that any own place as a prince of the Church must not be disturbed. The bankers must be given assurances that we will favour them and that we, will not threaten what they hold now, after we begin to expand. We shouldn't forget that there are princes and churchmen at our flanks and backs outside Italy requiring that we remember them with gold florins. Naturally, the state of Milan must pay to raise the condottieri necessary for the conquest, but it can do so with the loans from cooperative banks until we may realize the returns of war. Therefore, for immediate capital, if you will have twenty thousand gold florins ready in two months' time, I will send my man Franco Ellera for it.'

'And what do you give to our alliance?' she asked.

`No money. I have only a simple soldier's purse,' he said with a straight face. `But I have given my chance of papacy to our dream and, by leaving the pope to join you in conquest, I may be losing my red hat.'

They walked slowly along the high terrace behind the fortress walls of the castle and each was fulfilled by what they foresaw. Catherine had a warrior in her bed once again. Her children could now be prevented from turning upon her. She would preserve Milan for the Visconti and grind into the dust every one of her husband's commanders who had turned on her after Gian Galeazzo had fallen. Cossa could now be certain that he would spend the rest of his life as a great condottieri general, while showing respect to his father's ambition by remaining a, high churchman. He would use Catherine's money to ensure that the pope appointed him Archbishop of Milan and that no one in the-hierarchy would see fit to object to that. He would be rich from the loot of Italy, Baldassare, Cardinal-General-Archbishop, while the marchesa began to soften up the electors with a view to making him King of the Romans when Rupert was dead. At no point in his considerations of his future could he imagine functioning without the marchesa. He needed her cunning. He could not proceed beyond Italy without her experience and knowledge of Germany, France, Spain and England. He would need all her craft to divert Sigismund of Hungary from ideas, of competing with him, perhaps going to war against him,, to stop him from being crowned Holy Roman Emperor. All this was in Cossa's mind when he sealed his treaty with Catherine Visconti with two glorious nights in his bed.

He had about as much chance of being made King of the Romans and all, the rest of it as he had of being elected the most holy churchman in all history. He couldn't get enough of the woman, so he tied to himself about the other things. He wanted to be Alexander's first cardinal in charge of everything in the Church, and that was what he was.

29

I was as unaware as Cossa was of the dangers he had created by refusing the papacy. Neither the Medici, his great, sponsors, nor the marchesa trusted him any longer. The signs must have been there to sense these things, then to prove them, then to convince Cossa of the danger, but I suspected nothing. Business was better than ever.

Cosimo di Medici was aware that Cossa had slipped away to a secret meeting with Catherine Visconti because the Marchesa di Artegiana had kept Cossa under perpetual surveillance ever since the evening he had, told her he would not accept the papacy. His betrayal of all she had done to secure the papacy for him (and the Medici) had been a severe shock because she could not puzzle out who had helped him to arrive at such a wildly destructive decision. She was confident that Cossa, left on his own, would have done as he, was told and agreed to become pope, always providing; that he had what looked like the lion's share. Someone had managed to get close enough to tamper with him. Someone had made him what had looked at the time like a better offer.

The Marchesa had reasoned her way through the maze. She decided that, if Cossa had met secretly or otherwise with anyone, it would have happened at some time during the five weeks between her leaving him in the field and her return to confer with him again. When she had left, he had been growing more and more enthusiastic about the plan to make him pope. He had cross-questioned her about the tactics for, handling the, cardinals and princes in Pisa, frequently correcting the strategy and. improving upon it, always having a sure touch for designing bribes. Whatever had occurred had occurred during that five-week period, and the Marchesa realized that the only person who could reveal whom Cossa had spoken to was me.

She understood me too well to ask such things directly, so she went to Bernaba and explained what Cossa had done to cheat them all, and principally himself, out of vast fortunes and the papacy. To Bernaba, next to the money involved, the papacy was the crowning jewel of mankind, and, since she knew Cossa, as well as she did, she wanted the papacy for him; she was even able to construct a fantasy whereby he, as pope, would become her confessor. She listened to the marchesa's insistence that Cossa would still one day be pope and, admiring popes as she did, loving her husband and not being able to

imagine how high he would rise if Cossa became pope, admiring the marchesa more than any ruffian in Italy; she naturally agreed to get the information.

The marchesa was astonished, not jealous, when she weighed up what Bernaba had passed to her from me. Even she thought it was strange that she a dealer in women all her life, had never considered the possibility that another woman could have been the force which had deflected Cossa from the papacy. When she sifted through what 1 had told Bernaba about what they had talked about in that single night which had brought on the great upset in Pisa, she ordered a twenty-four-hour surveillance on Cossa. The barren reports came to her every day, but she was a patient woman who knew that, sooner or later, either Cossa or Catherine Visconti would have to make their move.

She talked to Cosimo about it: `After all,' she said, `soldiering is his natural bent. The Church, is just an acquired talent. But surely he must know that this woman is a Visconti who will have him

assassinated as soon as he gets everything done that she wants done.' `Now we know,' Cosimo said, `but it's too late. Filargi is the pope.' 'It certainly is not too late,' the marchesa protested. `What can we do?'

`Filargi is an old man.'

`Old men die.,' If this old man dies, then I, say it becomes your problem to make sure that Cossa will accept at the next conclave.' `That is too indefinite for my father, Decima.' 'Perhaps it can be made definite.'

How do you mean? No, no! Don't tell me.' He held up both hands before himself in alarm, his face grown pale. 'We have never spoken of this.'

'I have studied hard how to bring pressure on Cossa to make him accept. I have worked out the single uncontestable solution in this world. You, will easily be able to, persuade Cossa to be pope.' 'How?'

She told him how, and irrevocably – although I did not know it until much later – they became my enemies.

Since the day she had brought him the good news, the marchesa had lunched every Friday with the pope at his palace. She brought him delicious gossip from the world; titbits which her daughters had searched out in the corners of all the high places in Europe, and the sweet old pope was enormously entertained by the merry innocence of it all. Gossip was not all she brought with her. She brought powders which she had commanded since her earliest days as a ruffian, when young women had come to her crying for vengeance against men whose lives they wished to put away without suspicion being cast upon themselves. Between the peals of his laughter and the sips of his, wine, the marchesa palmed her potions into his drink and poisoned Pope Alexander V to death. This I know, for I was in the room when she admitted it.

30

On 2 May 1410, Cossa and I were in Forlimpopolo, beyond Forli on.the way to Ravenna, besieging 200 horse and 200 foot of Ladislas's stragglers, when he was recalled to Bologna because the pope was dying. When we reached the papal palace, Alexander was sinking fast. Cossa didn't go into the sick room to see the pope immediately. On the way to his apartments, he found a committee of senior cardinals waiting for him in the anteroom. Covered with dust and wearing war gear, he excused himself. I went into the pope's room, and spoke to the doctors, then I went to Cossa, in his apartment, and said, `The pope is finished and the word is out.'

'What does that mean?'

`It means that couriers' have come in to say that Pierre D'Ailly and the Duke of Burgundy are on their way from France, and John of Nassau is coming from Mainz.'

`How did they find out the pope was dying that far away.'

`He's been ill for about three weeks. Now we know he's dying.'

'There is something very odd going on here,' Cossa said.

'That's not all. Cosimo di Medici is on his way from Florence.'

'What do they all want, for Christ's sake?'

'On the surface it's a crisis, isn't it? I mean, in a sense, it's the natural thing to do. They are running out of popes. They have to keep up the inventory.'

`Help me out of this gear. Tell those old farts to come in here in ten minutes. Tell them I'm having a bath.' As an afterthought he said, 'Every one of them has been bribed to the hairline.'

`After Pisa last year, you should know,' I told him.

When the committee came in, Cossa was ready for them. As ready as he would ever be, I thought. While he was dressing, he had told me he was soaked by a premonition of loss, except that he hadn't lost anything. He said he was trying to think of Catherine Visconti and the Milan gold which would buy him all the condottieri he needed to bring him to power in Italy, then make him perhaps King of the Romans, then perhaps Holy Roman Emperor: I didn't laugh at him. It was real to him. But he said that even that beautiful thought wouldn't stay with him because he knew the cardinals and the bankers and the princes wanted to make him pope.

He greeted the cardinals as they entered the room and apologized for keeping them waiting. They rumbled their acknowledgements. There were four of them: Jean de Brogny, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, most senior; Antonius Calvus,; Cardinal of Mileto; Pierre Gerard, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum; Ladulfus Maramaur, Cardinal Deacon of San Nicolo in Cacere Tulliano, a Neapolitan. They were quite accustomed to having me at all meetings. Privately, they called me the Witness.

`His Holiness grows weaker and weaker,' de Brogny said:' `An excellent man in the whole course of his life, gifted in sweetness and prayer. But he has very few hours left.'

`He shines with goodness,' Cossa said.

`Cossa, in a few hours your Church will need you,' Maramaur said in the Neapolitan dialect. Cossa stared at him coldly. He began to feel the stirrings of panic. He had; been about to begin his march upon the conquest of Italy but these old men were going to insist upon something else for him.

`Soon there will be a conclave,' de Brogny said. `We must have the assurance of your consent to your election as pope, as should have happened in Pisa.'

Cossa sat down heavily. `Please – he said, `sit down, my friends.' He took a deep breath as they remained standing in a semi-circle around him. `My reasons are the best reasons,' he said. `I am not fit for the papacy. I lack the holiness.'

`We will surround you with holiness like high walls,' de Brogny said. 'We will elevate you as upon a cloud which will hold you above all on earth, shining with holiness.'

'Three would be no one to run the Church.'

'You will run the Church.' The pope. As it should be.'

`The Church is in shards,' Antonius Calves said harshly. 'At this moment the Church, must have a leader who is more of a king than a pope. Holiness is the last thing which is required during this terrible confusion of triple schism. We need a strong man who will dispose of two anti-popes where the Council of Pisa and Alexander failed. We need a great lawyer. We need a soldier.'

`Elect Caracciola.'

`We choose you.'

`You are priests,' Cossa said, his voice rising as the Panic inundated him. `I am a lawyer, not a churchman. I am a layman in all but title.'

`All the more reason!' Maramaur said. `They are pressing us for reform! It is a serious thing! Everyone is after reform, from the King of France to the coalmine owners in Silesia and bankers in Greece. Do we want reform? No, they want it. We have to live with the church on an hour-to-hour basis but they want reform. Reform for the businessman is the end of the schism. Reform for the theologians is something else, but Church reform we can cope with. We have to have a cunning lawyer – you – to stand them off effecting compromises. Can a priest be of any, use at that? What would we do with a pastoral pope at a time like this?'

`I – please give me time. I must think about this.'

Luca Salvadore, Cardinal of Santa Giovanna di Cernobbio, came into the room, stricken. `Alexander is nearly on his way to God,'

The cardinals turned away from Cossa and left the room.

Cossa nearly ran through the rooms to the private door behind an arras which led to the private staircase to the marchesa's `office': She was sitting in front of a mirror brushing her short, darkening hair. `Filargi is nearly, gone,' he said numbly. `They are pressing down upon me.’

Did you accept?' she asked mildly.

`Accept?’

'Never mind, Cossa. You will be turned around just the same and without a word from me.'

`Bitch! Whore!' he shouted.

`Please make. up your mind what you want from me, Cossa. If I speak, you tell me I am trying to force you against your will, or now – that I am a bitch-whore. If I stay silent, you scream at me because I must speak about the one thing on which we don't agree. You are frightened. I won't ask you why, but you have lost' your nerve.'

`Frightened? All right! Yes!, I am frightened of having to say two masses a day for the rest of my life and being expected to pour out my sins to some smelly Franciscan every time I have an unclean thought.'

'You have heard everything I have to say on this.'

`What has happened to everyone?' he asked wildly. `Who is going to defend the papacy against Ladislas? Who will lead the armies, run – the curia, bring in the money which every one of us and the Church has to have? Those ramshackle wrecks who were just in there making their insane demands would be the first to scream if reform cut off their servitia.'

`Then it's clear, isn't it? They want someone else to handle the fighting while you concentrate on protecting the Church from reformers and on building up the benefices which have been reduced to so little for them. The popes are now men of peace, Cossa. The days of the fighting popes, the days of Gelasius II and Calixtus, were nearly three hundred years ago.

'What about the war? If Ladislas takes over here, what goodwill a few extra florins be to the cardinals? To keep, whatever he can take, he will agree to all the reforms the princes demand.'

`The Duke of Anjou will handle those battles. The Florentines and the Sienese will handle the funding to seal off Ladislas in the south. The electors will give you Sigismund in the north to protect the benefices and keep the peace, Italy and the Church will be held together for you, giving you all the room and security you will need as pope, and you will rule.'

`No! I won't be trapped in this! I have other: plans.' `What plans?'

`Big plans!'

`Cossa, hear me… If you reject this papacy, you won't get out of this alive. If you deny the people who will be knocking down your doors to convince you to accept the papacy, then be sure of one thing another council will be forced upon us, which will probably elect a fourth sitting pope to rule over an even weaker Church. The French will get their reform,' D'Ailly will get his red hat, and at that council your desperate supporters will see to it that you are found a heretic and they will burn you to death.'

'I won't be there for anything like that.'

`Listen to me just one more time, for I have counselled you well over the years. I say to you that, if you decide to mock the powerful men who travelled across Europe to persuade you to save the Church in this desperate hour, then you must believe me that your days are numbered.'

31

The Piazza Maggiore in front of the Anziani palace looked is if it had been turned into a country fair. Knots of people were everywhere, all across it, in front of the church of San Petronio and the podesta's palace on the long side. Street bands played, courtesans under affected parasols strolled among the men. There were many uniforms forms of different countries.

We overlooked the huge piazza from the short, west side and I watched more and more of them troop in through the street at the corner of the Portico di Banchi, each one bringing his small contribution to the widening chaos in Cossa's mind.

He received the Duke of Burgundy, John of Nassau, Pierre D'Ailly, Count Pippo Span, representing Sigismund, King of Hungary, a delegation of French bankers, his own father and his Uncle Tomas, 230 Benedictine monks, a committee of 28 German commercial guilds, 300 Carmelite nuns, 34 officers of the armies of the papal states, and an international delegation of learned lawyers, at intervals of two hours over the next day and a half, and replied to their urgent proposals with more conciliatory words than he had used upon the marchesa. I was there. I listened to all of it.

Anjou and Nassau spoke to him in almost the same words, in different meetings, conveying views as worldly as Cossa's.

`I can name you eight men,' each said to him differently, `military commanders who are your equal. I in fact, am one of them. As for the administration of the day-to-day business of the Church, you have already staffed that with the best people in Christendom they are the same people who have run the chancellery and the chamber, who have run everything as if they had the memory of God since the year 380, when Christianity was made the official religion of the empire. As you know, the college trusts you to manage their benefices, but let us not ever doubt that every single member of it knows money almost as well as you do. You have everything backwards, Cossa. What the Church needs is a famous general who is a famous administrator and a famous lawyer as well as being a famous statesman. It needs a strong man who has the habit of winning. That is why only you must accept the papacy.'

Pierre D'Ailly, still Bishop of Cambrai, not the cardinal he had expected to be at Pisa, although he knew that Cossa could have compelled Alexander to confer the red hat upon him, spoke out resolutely, for the King of France and the theologians at the University of Paris. `What must be implemented is the strong reform of the Church in its head and its members, Cossa,' he said. `If there is no immediate reform then we all know that the Gallican Church will go back to Benedict and, we know you don't want that. By, bringing reform, you can go down in history as a great pope. You have come too far in your career as a churchman to turn back. You can only go forward. Nor can you believe that, if you refuse the Church's cry for help, you will be able to go anywhere at all.'

`What does that mean?' Cossa said with the old hostility.

`I am sure you know exactly what it means,'

'All right, Bishop,' Cossa snarled at him, `tell your people that I have absorbed their words. I am a soldier. I have a horror of being a prisoner of the papacy, yet I hear you, I am sympathetic to what you have said to me. Will that do you?'

`Where is that golden future which used to smile upon me every morning as I opened, my eyes?' he asked me. `It has turned to brass, Franco. If old Filargi were alive in this palace, we would have owned the world. And if I couldn't keep him alive forever, I could have had him stuffed to sit there behind his beautiful, benign smile, a hand raised in benediction. Well, we are not going, to wait here and let them spring the trap which will drop me into the papacy. We are going to get out of Bologna and make the run to Milan as soon as possible. Tell our people to prepare – Bernaba, Palo, Bocca – all of them. Tell Ueli Munger to pick a troop of 200 of the most loyal men in the guard, We'll be safe and back in business in Milan in a few days' time with one half of the gold florins in the papal treasury in the chests of our train…I earned that money, so I am certainly entitled to half of it. We'll be, back in business: We'll take over this whole peninsula. Catherine Visconti will be beside herself with joy and nothing, nothing or nobody, is going to persuade me to ruin what is left of my life by accepting the papacy. Get them ready. We will leave immediately after I have had one last meeting with Cosimo, who is on his way here now.'

He went on with his plans, talking excitedly, and looking like the old-time Cossa. He would answer the outcry which the Medici would organize in Florence, Siena, Perugia and throughout the papal states by raising an army in Milan before they could try to come to get him. With an army between himself and the papacy, between himself and the Medici and all their bankers and businessmen; he would use Catherine Visconti's gold to buy back the favour of the college of cardinals and, in good time, whoever was to be pope would appoint him Archbishop of Milan. He thought of that and it brought him sadness because, by walling off the Medici, he would be separating himself from the marchesa, but Catherine had lived as royalty all her life and she could counsel him on the correct political moves. He would be free, a cardinal of the Church and ruler of Italy. He would lead condottieri in a force which would, multiply and multiply until he was the greatest power of Europe. With Catherine Visconti, her gold and her army, he could win anything.

That night, Alexander made a good end, summoning his cardinals around his bed and saying, `Let not your heart be troubled. I ascend to my Father and to your Father.' He commended France and the University of Paris to their care and said that any decree made at the Council of Pisa had been founded on justice and integrity without deceit or fraud. `Peace I give unto you. Peace I leave with you.' Shortly after, midnight on 4 May he died. He had reigned for ten months.

His body was embalmed. While it was exposed for several days dressed in sacerdotal robes with gloves on the hands and the feet bare for the kisses of the faithful, Cosimo di Medici arrived in Bologna at the head of the delegation of Florentine, Sienese and Pisan bankers and businessmen. He asked for a private audience with Cardinal Cossa, which was granted at once. The two men greeted each other with warm, affection.

`You look ill, Cossa,' Cosimo said.

`I am ill.' Cossa brought wine. He asked after Cosimo's father. They discussed the wine; Cosimo was famous for discoursing upon wines.

`What brings you over the mountains?' Cossa asked. `I ask you because I know it cannot be what all the rest of Europe is, plaguing me about.' 'You mean that you take the papacy?'

`More than that. They want me to give up the things I do well to take up the one thing which I would do badly.'

`Everyone is agitated, Cossa. But I am here with some bankers. We have come to talk about business, which is to say the peace of Europe. Florence and Pisa are losing 50,000 gold florins a day through the schism; Venice, Milan and Genoa are just as badly off.'

`Time will cure all that.'

`Perhaps. But all of us – all the bankers and the business people – agree on one thing. The schism must be finished and we must elect a strong pope to stand for the meaning of the Church before the world.'

`So it all starts over again. It is no use, Cosimo. I will not be trapped in the papacy,'

Cosimo smiled at him as if Cossa had uttered some brilliant witticism and talked blandly on. `You are probably the only churchman who can really appreciate just how bad three popes are for business. A crisis of confidence is sweeping Europe. The Church is disintegrating. This erodes interlinking business. The loss in real money is simply enormous and all of it has happened because of this schism.'

`Oh, come, Cosimo.'

The banker's face grew hard as he stared into Cossa's eyes. `I am telling you that the business community is in danger. The people who generate the cash which is passed back to the Church:through benefices and servitia and Peter's Pence, the people without whom there would be, no pomp, and luxury which our mutual customers expect from the Church, have suffered and still face crippling losses. Three popes, three colleges and three curias are an intolerable financial burden because they separate and isolate three trading communities from each other. If this trinity continues, commerce and banking will be ruined.'

`Why we? Why always me? I delivered the Council of Pisa for you. I have seen to it that your bank now receives almost sixty per cent of the banking of the Church, and within two years I will have obtained all of it for you. Is it my fault that the obediences of Benedict and Gregory refused to take the solemn rulings of, the Council of Pisa seriously?'

`They will agree when they know that they are going to get at least some of the reforms which they have been demanding for over -a hundred years. The pope who will be chosen at the coming conclave must manage those demands and carry through just enough reform to make him the one central leader of Christendom. If you lead that crusade for reform – up to a point, of course – I tell you that you will be marching straight upward beyond the papacy to canonization after your death. I personally, will see to that.'

'That is hardly the way to turn me. Jesus! To amuse me greatly, yes, but you are taking all the precious solemnity out of our discussion.'

`You would mock the saints?'

`Cosimo, you and I are friends. We understand each other. Do you think anyone who learned to run the Church at the side of Boniface IX could bring himself to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Not me, surely. Let some priest take over as pope.'

Cosimo smiled ruefully. He shrugged mightily. He sighed heavily. 'Well I tried. If you won't listen, then I must accept that.' His eyebrows went up as if startled by some new thought. `My dear Cossa,' he said, `with all my need to` pour out Europe's troubles I have almost forgotten to tell you of your own astounding good fortune. The day I left Florence the bank received an extraordinary conditional deposit in your name.'

`A deposit?'

`A really amazing amount of gold.', `A conditional deposit?' `Yes.,

'Who made it?'

'Two hundred thousand gold florins. An unspeakable amount of money from a client who says that the gold is to be released to you two days after you have been consecrated, as pope.'

`Who signed it?'

`Someone named Carlo Pendini of Castrocaro in Urbino.' His hard eyes moved over Cossa's shattering face.

32

Cossa sat alone, almost stupefied with shock, feeling as if the blood had left his body. They had stopped him. If he rode to Milan that night, Cosimo and the marchesa would share all the gold he had killed so many comrades to get. He could not leave that behind. He could not be mocked by, knowing it had been taken by his enemies. Decima, the woman he had loved even beyond his love for Catherine Visconti, had taken the Pendini gold to Cosimo and, cold-bloodedly, they had dropped it on him from their great height, crushing him with it. He could feel bitterness rise from his bowels and into his throat as if it were gall. He had lost a great army. He was trapped in the papacy, He was just another workman of the Medici.

I said to him, 'At least you know who your enemies are. Not everyone is that lucky. And you have the power to strike back now that you are doomed to be the pope.'

'Who?' he said, as if he didn't know. `How?'

'The Medici and Manovale.'

'Who is Manovale?' Cossa had never heard the name.

'The marchesa. She brought the gold from Castrocaro to the Medici bank to be used against you. And they used it against you. You can't give it up, so you will be pope. They did it to you, then you did it to yourself. Pay them.'

'Pay them?'

'Give the banking of the Church to the Albizzi in Florence. Tell them they can have all the banking if they follow your plan, then tell them how it all works, how the Medici planned to do it. Insist that they give you two tithes for making them the richest family in Europe.'

“If I did that,'' he said, shaking his head despairingly, 'just as sure as we are standing here, either the Medici would have me murdered or the marchesa would.'

"Then we must put together a large escort and ride tonight to Milan, where the duchess will give.

you her army to destroy the Medici. Take Florence. Force Bologna to give you the marchesa. Execute her.'

'I can decide nothing except, that to be pope must be my fate. My father took me away from a business which had been carried on for four generations by the eldest son because he had a vision or a dream that I would be pope one day. Everything has, conspired to make me pope, everything.'

'Don't mock me, Cossa.'

'I do not mock you! I, am helpless and I agree they have done me in, therefore all the more do I want to enjoy whatever you can come up with to repay; them, even if I will never be able to summon the will to do it.'

`You ran do anything. You will be pope. You will send a message to the emperor asking him to strip her of her title. Nothing could be worse for her.

'At the bottom of my soul rests a punishment for every one which is far worse than that, but I thank you for thinking how we might avenge ourselves on my enemies. I can't afford even to think of the Medici and Decima as my enemies. I am trapped by them, but only they can bring food to my cage.' He seemed to drive out his despair. `That was all settled when I was born. I am to be pope, but what am I going to do about Catherine Visconti? She is locked inside a more, terrible cage and she needs me more than I need the Medici.'

'That will solve itself. What is important now is – what are you going to do about the marchesa?'

Hopelessness filled Cossa's face. `I am lost to her. She is lost to me because of what she has done in the guise of a lover and a dear friend. I shall withdraw from her slowly, waiting for my chance to do to her what she did to me. I will use her body when I need it to reassure her that I have forgiven her and that nothing has changed: I need her cunning now, more than ever before. I need her knowledge of` Europe. But I will possess all that from her and, when I do, and when she is standing naked one day, I will repay her for this betrayal.'

Late in the night, after Cossa had finally fallen into a troubled sleep, the marchesa came into the room, fully dressed, stained by travel. She shook him awake gently. She was as pale as the moonlight. He came awake instantly and stared up into her sombre face. A single huge candle flickered in the centre of the room and it cast the marchesa's shadow high upon the wall.

'Cossa, I bring bad news,' she said.

He stared.

`My daughter, Helene, has just come from Milan… She caught up with me a, quarter of the way to Perugia and I turned back to bring comfort to you.'

'What is it?'

'The Duchess of Milan has been murdered by, her son. Poisoned in the citadel. The regents have taken over the city.'

'No!' he screamed.

'Milan is going to give its allegiance to Pope Gregory.'

'Leave me,' he said harshly.

`She has been dead for three days' or more, and I -'

`Leave me!'

Cossa covered his face with his hands, and turned away from her.

He rolled over in the bed, sat up and faced her. 'I want you to use all your cunning,' he told her harshly. ' I want you to devise a way for us to get that murdering son out of Milan and into my keeping: I will give him to Palo and keep him alive through every agony deserved by a poisoner, deserved a thousand times by a son who has murdered such a mother.' She held out her arms, to comfort him, but he turned away from her again and she left him.