`How much do you want from me?'
A token three gold florins for three full shares. That investment should earn you close to a hundred thousand florins.'
Cossa's smile lighted up the room.
`How much will you put in?' he asked.
`Our bank will receive fifteen percent of the prime holding of one hundred per cent for the basic concept and the energizing money. We are going to treble the number of existing, mills in the next twenty-five years.'
`How much money will you invest?'
`Bankers don't invest money. You know that,' he said reproachfully. `We are money managers. We invest services. We are at the point of forging iron in these mills. My people have acquired the rights to an invention by two Englishmen which, instead of providing only a rotary movement to drive millstones as needed by corn mills for example – a reciprocal motion can be produced mechanically, by cams projecting from the axle of the waterwheel which raises and releases a pivoting trip-hammer. Can you imagine what it will do for arms sales? Well! It will change the direction of Europe.'
Cossa told me, some considerable time later, that the talk with Cosimo had, more than anything else, driven home to him that he had lost the great dream of Catherine Visconti forever. The fantasy, that adventure which had never happened and would never happen, was over. The chains around his wrists and the fetters around his legs were now driven solidly into the granite of time – where he would be chained for the rest of his life, sentenced by his dear friends to live with their onerous reality. But he also learned, he told me, that each time the Medici; or the marchesa for the Medici, asked him for something and he granted it – always small things at first but growing to the supreme consideration, the total banking of the Church – they gave him much bigger things in the form of opportunities which brought him more and more money. The marchesa had read in Cossa's eyes and gestures that money was his substitute for courage in the face of what he saw as his helpless immobility. The Medici piled gold and more gold on his shoulders until he could not strike out at them in vengeance for their betrayal of him for fear of displacing the great load of gold and being crushed by the weight of such courage.
Cossa's papacy remained in Bologna, but he needed the counsel and support of a wider experience of cardinals. The college was small and diminishing. Four cardinals had died during the early months of his pontificate, four more were in failing health, and two were absent on legatine duty. With the marchesa's counsel, which she assured him had the benefit of her own as well as the Medici intelligence services; Cossa created fourteen new cardinals from the most important men of every kingdom. Only six cardinals remaining in the college were Italians, therefore he appointed six more Italians to join them. Eight were appointed from countries outside Italy. Kings and princes were consulted. John, Archbishop of Lisbon, was appointed at the request of the King of Portugal. George of Lichtenstein, who had been Bishop of Trent since 1391, was a close friend of Sigismund, King of Hungary, so he was named, although he was never strong enough to come to Rome to receive his red hat. Gordon Manning, educated at Cambridge, in his youth attached to John of Gaunt (who made him his executor) had been made Canon of York in 1400 and dean the following year. He would have been made a cardinal by Innocent VII when Manning became Archbishop of York, but the pope was offended by his execution of the previous Archbishop Scrope. Manning never came to Rome to take his place in the college because the King of England could not spare him. Of Manning it was said that he loved not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn from his wickedness and live.
Three of the remaining cardinals were French. The first of these, recommended by the King of France, was Pierre d'Ailly – It went down hard with Cossa to name him a cardinal, for the simple reason that he did not like him or trust him, but the marchesa said he must do it or alienate France from his papacy. She pressed him hard and he buckled. She pressed him because D'Ailly was in deadly earnest about Church reform, which the Medici wanted as earnestly, and the marchesa was there to get whatever the Medici wanted.
D'Ailly was a politician of the rational sort. He wrote a tractate on physical geography, the Imago Mundi, and another against the superstitions of astrology, the Tractatus de legibus et sectis contra superstitionos astronomos. He was an ardent student of divine philosophy, interpreting, it after the school of William of Ockham. D'Ailly preached dogmatic theology rather than a gospel of morality and had all the theologian's fine contempt for canon lawyers, of which group Cossa had become the leading representative in the world.
All in all, D'Ailly was a practical man who could recognize the occasional utility of corruption. However, before he would accept the red hat which everyone knew he wanted so badly, he wrote a letter to Cossa pointing out in no uncertain way, that it was the duty of, the Church to reform its head first – `in justice, and morals' – before reforming its numbers.
34
Cosimio and I were sitting together in Mainz after a long business meeting with the archbishop, when he actually said these words to me: `Bankers can do so much for God's world, your Eminence. If every man had the piety of my father – or even my own compulsion to serve God and his children – what an Eden this Europe would be. That we should be allowed to profit from giving service to God is not surprising, for does not every man who serves God profit in one way or, another ' But money is more the raw material and the by-product of banking which our family uses only for good works. The profit which is yielded by our bank is really only the profit of opportunity to serve God and to hope that Europe may prosper too and that this prosperity may trickle-benignly downward upon the masses of the less fortunate. This is the natural way to bless the poor.
`For what God has done for my family, we are determined to protect his people from ugliness. My father has shown me that it is a thrifty investment for the bank, to give our fine painters their daily lasagne, for example, in exchange for beautifying our city. Sculptors as well, of course. Let our clients come to Florence and be impressed not only with this beauty but by, what we must have spent to bring these artists to Florence for our clients' pleasure.
`It is my own feeling, and in this I believe my father concurs, that the greatest artist we, will ever bring to Florence is the Marchesa di Artegiana. Where is nothing the marchesa would not be willing to undertake for our bank. We are determined to save Europe from the Turks by keeping Europe strong, by building her industry, trade and commerce, and by preserving God's Church to preserve God's people. There is no nobler aim.'
He believed every word of it. He did not choke on any word he spoke. He was a respectable banker.
As the weeks passed and as hourly problems had to be solved, it was necessary for Cossa to lean upon the marchesa for good counsel. She had the vast Medici intelligence organization at her disposal for gathering the information they needed to reach decisions. Cossa seemed to have forgotten that she had betrayed him, but indeed he had not. When we were together, he would speak of his wound and would show me how he had forced it to fester there. Revenge has always been the ultimate luxury of Neapolitans and the premonition of it was so enormously comforting that they could afford to wait. As time went on, the necessity for other revenge outweighed his need to repay the marchesa and Cosimo.
Cossa had his obsession to murder the son of Catherine Visconti to distract him from the day-to-day demands of the papacy, and he had the political distractions of the Church to dull the edges of his grief for Catherine, distractions which the marchesa shepherded across his consciousness. In Prague a clergyman named John Hus was disturbing the peace by attacking, his archbishop. The marchesa said that Hus was greatly disturbing King Sigismund of Hungary, who expected to inherit the throne of Bohemia, and that Sigismund wanted something done to silence the man, if only to embarrass Wenzel, the deposed Holy Roman Emperor and present King of Bohemia, who was Sigismund's half-brother and supported Hus. The marchesa reasoned that, since Cossa needed Sigismund – who could, quite possibly, be the next Holy Roman Emperor and thus head of the largest political unit in Europe, Germany Cossa had to do something about Hus.
Cossa agreed to read the curia's file on Hus. The file told him that Hus was a pastor of purity, a clear-thinking man who was zealous for Church reform, in fact a heroic man.
Hus had preached that the supreme aim of religion was to love God absolutely. `How can the corporate Church comprehend that?' he asked. `They speak only for a political God who exists to be manipulated.' He told his
