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
