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.
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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.
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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
