The Swerve

  If he had only the competing factions within the Italian church to deal with, Cossa would probably have been confident that he could evade the fox trap; after all, he had for several years prevailed, or at least managed to maintain his hold upon the papal throne in Rome. The problem was that others, many from beyond the reach of his patronage or his poisons, were streaming into Constance from all over Christendom: some thirty cardinals, three patriarchs, thirty-three archbishops, one hundred abbots, fifty provosts (ecclesiastical officials), three hundred doctors of theology, five thousand monks and friars, and about eighteen thousand priests. In addition to the emperor and his large retinue, there were also, by invitation, many other secular rulers and their representatives: the electors Ludwig von der Pfalz and Rudolph of Saxony, the dukes of Bavaria, Austria, Saxony, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Lorraine, and Teck, the margrave of Brandenburg, the ambassadors of the kings of France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Poland, Naples, and the Spanish realms, along with a vast array of lesser nobles, barons, knights, lawyers, professors, and public officials. Each of these in turn had small armies of retainers, guards, servants, cooks, and the like, and the whole assembly attracted hordes of sight-seers, merchants, mountebanks, jewelers, tailors, shoemakers, apothecaries, furriers, grocers, barbers, scribes, jugglers, acrobats, street singers, and hangers-on of all types. The chronicler Richental estimates that over seven hundred whores came to town and hired their own houses, plus “some who lay in stables8 and wherever they could, beside the private ones whom I could not count.”

  The arrival of somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 visitors put a huge strain on Constance and invited every kind of abuse. Officials tried to combat crime in the usual way—staging public executions9—and set rules for the range and quality of services that visitors should expect: so, for example, “Every fourteen days the tablecloths and sheets and whatever needed washing should be changed for clean.” Food for the visitors (and their 30,000 horses) was a constant concern, but the area was well stocked, and the rivers made it possible to renew supplies. Bakers with movable carts went through the streets with little ovens in which they baked rolls, pretzels, and pastries stuffed with spiced chicken and other meats. In inns and makeshift food stalls set up in booths and tents, cooks prepared the usual range of meats and fowl, along with thrush, blackbirds, wild boar, roe venison, badger, otter, beaver, and hare. For those who preferred fish, there were eels, pike, sturgeon, garfish, bream, whitefish, gudgeons, catfish, bullheads, dace, salt cod, and herring. “There were also frogs10 and snails for sale,” Richental adds with distaste, “which the Italians bought.”

  Once he and his own court had been provided for in suitable style, the practical arrangements were the least of Cossa’s concerns. Against his wishes, the council determined to organize itself and conduct its votes by blocs or “nations”—Italians, French, Germans, Spanish, and English—an arrangement that diminished his own special position and the influence of his core supporters. With his power rapidly melting away he took care to insist on his prestige. If he could hardly claim any moral high ground, he could at least establish his ceremonial significance. He needed to show the whole enormous assembly that he was no mere Neapolitan fox; he was the Vicar of Christ, the embodiment of spiritual radiance and worldly grandeur.

  Clad in white vestments and a white miter, on October 28, 1414, Baldassare Cossa made his entry into Constance on a white horse. Four burghers of the town carried a golden canopy over his head. Two counts, one Roman and the other German, walked by his side, holding his bridle. Behind them rode a man on a great horse from whose saddle rose a long staff bearing a huge umbrella—Richental mistook it for a hat—made of red and gold cloth. The umbrella, broad enough to spread over three horses, was topped by a golden knob on which stood a golden angel holding a cross. Behind the umbrella came nine cardinals on horseback, all in long, red mantles, with red hoods, and all wearing wide red hats. Other clerics and the staff of the curia, including Poggio, followed, along with attendants and servants. And at the front of the procession stretched a line of nine white horses, covered with red saddlecloths. Eight of these were laden with garments—the pope’s wardrobe was evidence of his hold upon his sacred identity—and the ninth, a little bell jingling on its head, bore on its back a casket of silvergilt covered with a red cloth to which were attached two silver candlesticks with burning candles. Within the casket, at once jewel box and tomb, was the Holy Sacrament, the blood and body of Christ. John XXIII had arrived.

  Ending the schism was the council’s most important item of business, but it was not the only one. Two other major issues were the reform of ecclesiastical government—that was also not happy news for John XXIII—and the repression of heresy. The latter held out some promise for the cornered fox, almost the only tactical weapon he could find. The correspondence that the secretaries copied out for their pope attempted to turn the focus away from the schism and from papal corruption and toward someone whose name Poggio must have begun to write in official documents again and again.

  Forty-four-year-old Jan Hus, a Czech priest and religious reformer, had been for some years a thorn in the side of the Church. From his pulpit and in his writings, he vehemently attacked the abuses of clerics, condemning their widespread greed, hypocrisy, and sexual immorality. He denounced the selling of indulgences as a racket, a shameless attempt to profit from the fears of the faithful. He urged his congregants not to put their faith in the Virgin, the cult of the saints, the Church, or the pope, but in God alone. In all matters of doctrine he preached that Holy Scripture was the ultimate authority.

  Hus boldly meddled not with doctrine alone but with the politics of the Church at a moment of growing national restiveness. He argued that the state had the right and the duty to supervise the Church. Laymen could and should judge their spiritual leaders. (It is better, he said, to be a good Christian than a wicked pope or prelate.) An immoral pope could not possibly claim infallibility. After all, he said, the papacy was a human institution—the word “pope” was nowhere in the Bible. Moral probity was the test of a true priest: “If he is manifestly sinful,11 then it should be supposed, from his works, that he is not just, but the enemy of Christ.” And such an enemy should be stripped of his office.

  It is easy to see why Hus had been excommunicated for his teachings in 1410 and why the Church dignitaries who gathered in Constance were exercised about his refusal to submit. Protected by powerful Bohemian noblemen, he continued to disseminate dangerous views, views that threatened to spread. And one can see as well why Cossa, his back to the wall, thought that it might be advantageous to shift the council’s focus to Hus, and not only as a convenient distraction. For the Bohemian, feared and hated by the Church establishment, was articulating as a principle precisely what Cossa’s enemies in that same establishment were proposing to do: to disobey and depose a pope accused of corruption. Perhaps this uneasy mirroring helps to explain a strange charge12 that was circulated in Constance about Hus: that he was an extraordinary magician who could read the thoughts of all who approached him within a certain distance.

  Hus, who had repeatedly asked for the opportunity to explain himself before a Church council, had been formally invited to present his views in person before the prelates, theologians, and rulers at Constance. The Czech reformer had the visionary’s luminous confidence that his truths, should he only be allowed to articulate them clearly, would sweep away the cobwebs of ignorance and bad faith.

  As someone who had been charged with heresy, he was also understandably wary. Hus had recently seen three young men, two of whom were his students, beheaded by the authorities. Before he left the relative safety of his protectors in Bohemia, he applied for and received a certificate of orthodoxy from the grand inquisitor of the diocese of Prague, and he received as well a guarantee of free passage from the emperor Sigismund. The safe-conduct, bearing the large imperial seal, promised “protection and safeguard” and requested that Hus be allowed “freely and securely” to “pa
ss, sojourn, stop, and return.” The Bohemian nobles who accompanied him rode ahead to meet with the pope and ask whether Hus would be allowed to remain in Constance free from the risk of violence. “Had he killed my own brother,” John replied, “not a hair of his head should be touched while he remained in the city.” With these assurances, not long after the grand arrival of the beleaguered pope, the reformer reached Constance.

  Hus’s arrival on November 3 must have seemed a godsend, as it were, to John XXIII. The heretic was hated by the upright in the Church as well as by the crooked. He and his principal associate, Jerome of Prague, were known followers of the English heretic John Wycliffe, whose advocacy of vernacular translations of the Bible, insistence on the primacy of Scripture-based faith over works, and attacks on clerical wealth and the selling of indulgences had led to his condemnation in the previous century. Wycliffe had died in his bed, much to the disappointment of his ecclesiastical enemies, but the council now ordered that his remains be dug up and cast out of consecrated ground. It was not an auspicious sign for their reception of Jan Hus.

  Notwithstanding the assurances that the pope, the council, and the emperor had given him, Hus was almost immediately vilified and denied the opportunity to speak in public. On November 28, barely three weeks after he arrived, he was arrested on order of the cardinals and taken to the prison of a Dominican monastery on the banks of the Rhine. There he was thrown into an underground cell through which all the filth of the monastery was discharged. When he fell seriously ill, he asked that an advocate be appointed to defend his cause, but he was told that, according to canon law, no one could plead the cause of a man charged with heresy. In the face of protests from Hus and his Bohemian supporters about the apparent violation of his safe-conduct, the emperor chose not to intervene. He was, it was said, uncomfortable about what seemed a violation of his word, but an English cardinal had reportedly reassured him that “no faith need be kept with heretics.”

  If Cossa thought that the persecution of Hus would distract the council from its determination to end the schism or silence his own enemies, he was sorely mistaken. As the mood in the papal court turned grim, the pope continued to stage extravagant public displays. Richental describes the spectacles:

  When the Pope was to give13 his blessing, a bishop in a mitre came first into the balcony, carrying a cross, and behind the cross came two bishops in white mitres, carrying two tall burning candles in their hands and set the candles burning in the window. Then came four cardinals, also in white mitres, or sometimes six, or at other times less. Sometimes also our lord King came into the balcony. The cardinals and the King stood in the windows. After them came Our Holy Father the Pope, wearing the most costly priest’s robes and a white mitre on his head. Under the vestments as for Mass he wore one more robe than a priest and had gloves on his hands and a large ring, set with a rare great stone, on the middle finger of his right hand. He stood in the central window, so that everyone saw him. Then came his singers, all with burning candles so that the balcony shone as if it were on fire, and they took their places behind him. And a bishop went up to him and took off his mitre. Thereupon the Pope began to chant….

  But what was going on away from the gawking public was more and more disquieting. Though he continued to preside over the council meetings, the pope had lost control of the agenda, and it was clear that the emperor Sigismund, who had arrived in Constance on December 25, was not inclined to save him.

  Cossa still had allies. At a session of the council on March 11, 1415, discussing how they might obtain a single pope for the whole Church, the archbishop of Mainz stood up and said that he would never obey anyone but John XXIII. But there was no chorus of support, of the kind he must have hoped to trigger. Instead, the patriarch of Constantinople exclaimed, “Quis est iste ipse? Dignus est comburendus!—Who is that fellow? He deserves to be burned!” The archbishop walked out, and the session broke up.

  The fox saw that the trap was about to be sprung. Constance, he said, was not safe. He no longer felt secure. He wanted to move the council to some place more suitable. The king demurred, and the town council of Constance hastened to offer reassurance: “If His Holiness14 had not sufficient security,” the burghers declared, “they would give him more and guard him against all the world, even though a disastrous fate should compel them to eat their own children.” Cossa, who had made comparably extravagant promises to Jan Hus, was evidently not appeased. On March 20, 1415,15 at approximately 1 p.m., he fled. Wearing a gray cape with a gray cowl wrapped around him so that no one could see his face, he rode quietly through the town gates. Next to him rode a crossbowman, along with two other men, both muffled up. In the evening and all through the night, the pope’s adherents—his servants and attendants and secretaries—left town as stealthily as they could. But the word quickly spread. John XXIII was gone.

  In the following weeks Cossa’s enemies, who tracked the fugitive to Schaffhausen where he had fled to an ally’s castle, drew up a bill of indictment against him. As menacing rumors circulated and his remaining allies started to crumble, he fled again, this time too in disguise, and his court—among whom, presumably, was his apostolic secretary, Poggio—was thrown into further confusion: “The members of the Curia16 all followed him in haste and wild disorder,” one of the contemporary chroniclers puts it; “for the Pope was in flight and the rest in flight too, by night, though with no pursuers.” Finally, under great pressure from the emperor, Cossa’s principal protector gave over his unwelcome guest, and the world had the edifying spectacle of a pope put under guard as a criminal.

  Seventy charges17 were formally read out against him. Fearing their effect on public opinion, the council decided to suppress the sixteen most scandalous charges—never subsequently revealed—and accused the pontiff only of simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture, and murder. He was charged with poisoning his predecessor, along with his physician and others. Worst of all—at least among the charges that were made public—was one that his accusers dredged up from the ancient struggle against Epicureanism: the pope was said to have maintained stubbornly, before reputable persons, that there was no future life or resurrection, and that the souls of men perish with their bodies, like brutes.

  On May 29, 1415, he was formally deposed. Stricken from the roster of official popes, the name John XXIII was once again available, though it took more than five hundred years for another pope—the remarkable Angelo Roncalli—to be courageous enough in 1958 to adopt the name for himself.

  Shortly after the deposition, Cossa was briefly imprisoned in Gottlieben Castle on the Rhine, where Hus, near starvation, had been chained in irons for more than two months. It is not known whether the pope and the heretic, so implausibly united in abject misery, were brought together by their captors. At this point,18 if Poggio was still with his master—and the record does not make that clear—he would have parted from him for the last time. All of the former pope’s attendants were dismissed, and the prisoner, soon transferred to another place of confinement, was henceforward surrounded by German-speaking guards with whom he could only communicate in sign language. Effectively cut off from the world, he occupied himself by writing verses on the transitory nature of all earthly things.

  The pope’s men were suddenly masterless. Some scrambled quickly to find employment with one or another of the prelates and princes in Constance. But Poggio remained unemployed, a bystander to events in which he was no longer a party. He stayed on in Constance, but we do not know if he was present when Hus was finally brought before the council—the moment the reformer had longed for and upon which he had staked his life—only to be mocked and shouted down when he attempted to speak. On July 6, 1415, at a solemn ceremony in the cathedral of Constance, the convicted heretic was formally unfrocked. A round paper crown, almost eighteen inches high and depicting three devils seizing a soul and tearing it apart, was placed upon his head. He was led out of the cathedral past a pyre on which his books were in flames, shackled in chains, an
d burned at the stake. In order to ensure that there would be no material remains, the executioners broke his charred bones into pieces and threw them all into the Rhine.

  There is no direct record of what Poggio personally thought of these events in which he had played his small part, the part of a bureaucrat who helps the ongoing functioning of a system that he understands is vicious and hopelessly corrupt. It would have been dangerous for him to speak out, even had he been inclined to do so, and he was, after all, in the service of the papacy whose power Hus was challenging. (A century later, Luther, mounting a more successful challenge, remarked: “We are all Hussites without knowing it.”) But when, some months later, Hus’s associate, Jerome of Prague, was also put on trial for heresy, Poggio was not able to remain silent.

  A committed religious reformer with degrees from the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Heidelberg, Jerome was a famous orator whose testimony on May 26, 1416, made a powerful impression on Poggio. “I must confess,” he wrote to his friend Leonardo Bruni, “that I never saw any one who in pleading a cause, especially a cause on the issue of which his own life depended, approached nearer to that standard of ancient eloquence, which we so much admire.” Poggio was clearly aware that he was treading on dangerous ground, but the papal bureaucrat could not entirely restrain the humanist’s passionate admiration:

  It was astonishing19 to witness with what choice of words, with what closeness of argument, with what confidence of countenance he replied to his adversaries. So impressive was his peroration, that it is a subject of great concern, that a man of so noble and excellent a genius should have deviated into heresy. On this latter point, however, I cannot help entertaining some doubts. But far be it from me to take upon myself to decide in so important a matter. I shall acquiesce in the opinion of those who are wiser than myself.