CHAPTER XIII
NAPLES AND THE PAPAL STATES IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The Papal States during the Schism and Ladislas of Naples—Martin V. returns to Rome—Succession question in Naples—Troubles of Eugenius IV.—War in Naples between Réné of Anjou and Alfonso of Aragon—Victory of Alfonso V.—Last years of Eugenius IV.—Nicolas V.—Calixtus III.—Death of Alfonso V. of Naples—Pius II.—Congress of Mantua—War in Naples between Ferrante and John of Calabria—Death of Pius II. at Ancona—Paul II.—Sixtus IV. and his nephews—War with Florence—Relations with Ferrara and Venice—Disorders in Rome—Innocent VIII.—Rising against Ferrante in Naples—Election of Alexander VI.—His alliance with Naples.
Boniface IX. was the ablest and most successful of the Roman popes during the Schism. The impotence into which |The Papal States and Ladislas of Naples.| the temporal authority of the papacy had fallen may be judged by the fact that Boniface found it advisable or necessary to sell the vicariate, i.e. the right to exercise authority in the Pope’s name, to the despots who had usurped lordship in the various cities. Yet this very sale, though it seemed to legalise acts of violence and rebellion, brought with it some advantages besides filling the Pope’s coffers. The purchase of rights was in itself an acknowledgment that the Pope possessed them, and this could be employed some day against the purchasers. And in several ways Boniface directly increased his power. He induced the citizens of Rome, always as greedy of papal wealth as they were jealous of papal rule, to invite him to take up his residence in his capital on terms which ruined the foundations of republican liberties. He aided Ladislas of Naples to gain his final victory over Louis II. of Anjou in 1399 (vide p. [155]), and Ladislas repaid his obligation by helping the Pope to suppress formidable risings of the Roman barons. On the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, he succeeded in recovering for the papacy the towns of Bologna, Perugia, and Assisi, which had fallen under the sway of the duke of Milan. But Boniface bequeathed to his successors one very serious difficulty. Ladislas of Naples, who owed his crown to papal support, conceived the plan of extending his kingdom at the expense of the papacy, and even of reducing the papal states under his personal rule. His first attempt to stir up rebellion in Rome, in order that he might intervene for his own profit in the struggle, resulted in the expulsion of Innocent VII. and the sack of the Vatican, but the citizens hastened to come to terms with the Pope when they discovered that the only alternative to his rule was subjection to Naples (1405). Another opportunity offered itself in 1407, when Gregory XII. left Rome in order to simulate willingness to confer with Benedict XIII. for the closing of the schism. Ladislas had no wish that the schism should end, not only because its continuance facilitated his schemes of aggression, but also because it strengthened his position in Naples. The movement for union had its chief strength in France, and any successful intervention of France in Italy would lead to a new attempt to gain Naples for the younger house of Anjou. In 1408 Ladislas seized Rome, and practically made himself master of the papal states. But to some extent his plan miscarried. Gregory XII., it is true, pleaded events in Rome as a reason for avoiding a conference, but his cardinals deserted him and joined with those of Benedict to hold a council at Pisa (vide p. [199]). The attempt of Ladislas to disperse the Council by invading Tuscany was foiled by the resistance of Florence, and the Assembly proceeded to depose the two existing popes and to elect Alexander V. Baldassare Cossa, the papal legate in Bologna, who combined the training and habits of a condottiere with the office of cardinal, undertook the task of recovering Rome and of punishing the prince who still adhered to the cause of Gregory XII. Rome was captured at the beginning of 1410, but Alexander V. died in May, and the all-powerful Cossa was elected to succeed him as John XXIII. The new pope entered Rome in triumph in 1411, and his first act was to despatch a powerful army under Braccio, Sforza, and other famous generals, to support the cause of Louis of Anjou in Naples. A great victory was won at Rocca-Secca (May 19, 1411), but the delay of the conquerors enabled Ladislas to rally his forces, and before long to gain the upper hand. Louis II. abandoned the enterprise in despair. Attendolo Sforza deserted to the side of the Neapolitan king, and John XXIII. made peace with his enemy in 1412, the one abandoning the cause of Gregory XII., the other promising to disown the duke of Anjou. But Ladislas had no intention of observing the peace. As soon as his preparations were completed, he again marched upon Rome in 1413, and drove John XXIII. in hasty and undignified flight to Florence. This crushing disaster forced the Pope into those appeals for aid to Sigismund, which ultimately led to the summons of the Council of Constance and to his own ignominious deposition. But in August 1414, before the Council had begun its session, Ladislas died, leaving his crown to his sister, Joanna II., and the scheme of subjecting the papal states to Naples perished with him. The citizens of Rome expelled Sforza and his troops from the city, and welcomed the return of a papal legate.
When unity was at last restored to the Church by the election of Martin V., the new Pope had a very cheerless prospect |Martin V., 1417-1431.| before him. His obvious task was to restore to the papacy some measure of the authority and influence which had been forfeited by its experiences during the last hundred years. To do this he must find a residence in which he would be more secure than his recent predecessors from the dictation of secular rulers. Sigismund urged him to reside in some German city, and the French would have welcomed him to Avignon. But Martin, himself a Roman by birth, refused to find a home except in the ancient capital of the world. Rightly or wrongly, he decided that temporal dominion in a state of his own was necessary to secure the independence of the Pope, and that to attain this he must recover and consolidate the papal provinces in Italy. The whole history of the papacy during the fifteenth century was moulded by this decision. The popes became more and more absorbed in the extension of their temporal power, even when their spiritual authority was weakened by it. Nepotism and other evils were the result of this devotion to secular interests, and a revolt of outraged and alienated opinion became inevitable.
But Martin had many difficulties to overcome before he could carry out his intention of taking up his abode in Rome. |Martin returns to Rome.| The departure of John XXIII. to Constance had left the papal states in the condition of anarchy which had become chronic. Neapolitan influence was still strong, but the policy of Naples was no longer directed by the strong will of Ladislas. His sister and successor, Joanna II., was devoid of political capacity, and abandoned herself to sensual indulgence and the guidance of favourites. Through her incompetence the chief influence over the destinies of Naples was allowed to fall into the hands of the two great condottieri, Braccio da Montone and Attendolo Sforza, who had been brought into rivalry by their connection with Neapolitan affairs during the previous reign. Braccio, who had quarrelled with Ladislas, and joined John XXIII., had been left by that Pope as governor of Bologna. After the departure of his employer he seized his native city of Perugia and set himself to carve a private principality out of the states of the Church. In 1417 he actually made himself master of Rome, and was besieging the castle of St. Angelo, when Sforza was despatched from Naples to compel his retirement. These events forced Martin V. on his accession to ally himself with Joanna and Sforza, and a treaty was arranged in 1419 by which Naples was to restore all that had been occupied in the papal states. But a quarrel between Joanna and Sforza deprived this treaty of all importance, and Martin determined to coerce and distract Naples by encouraging internal feuds in that kingdom. As Joanna was childless, the question of the succession to a crown |Succession question in Naples.| which had already been so hotly disputed was certain to give rise to difficulties. Louis II. of Anjou, the rival of Ladislas, had died in 1417; but his eldest son, Louis III., was eager to enforce his father’s claim and to purchase the support of the papacy. Martin V. and Sforza declared their recognition of Louis as heir to the kingdom. But Joanna, indignant at this attempt to force a successor upon her, turned to a family whose rivalry with her own dynasty was older than that of the younger house of Anjou. Alfonso of Aragon had become king of Sicily in 1409, and was not likely to refuse the prospect of a notable increase of his power in the Mediterranean by the acquisition of Naples. He eagerly accepted the offer of Joanna to adopt him as her heir, and he induced Braccio to enter his service in order to oppose Sforza. Thus civil war was kindled in Naples, and its outbreak gave the Pope the opportunity for which he had been waiting. Leaving Florence, where he had resided since his departure from Constance, he made his way to Rome in September 1420. There he set himself to put an |Rule of Martin V.| end to disorders and to strengthen the foundations of papal rule. The exhaustion of the combatants in Naples, and the successive deaths of Braccio and Sforza in 1424, freed him from the danger of any intervention from the south. Alfonso abandoned the contest for a time, and Joanna agreed to recognise the claim of Louis of Anjou to be regarded as her successor. Perugia and the other territories of Braccio returned on his death to their allegiance to the Pope. In Rome itself Martin had one source of strength in the support of his own family of Colonna, though their advancement to places of dignity and importance was certain to create difficulties for his successor. Once secure in his temporal dominions, the Pope was free to turn his attention to the general affairs of the Church. The first council which he was bound to summon by the decrees of Constance met at Siena, and was adroitly managed so as to avoid any further limitation of papal authority. By putting himself at the head of the movement to crush the Hussites, and by appointing a papal legate to lead the armies against the heretics, Martin tried to recover for the papacy the position which it had enjoyed in the time of the great crusades of the Middle Ages. But the crusading spirit was dead in Europe, and the successive victories of the Bohemians not only frustrated his designs, but also compelled him to summon a Council to meet at Basel shortly before his own death on February 20, 1431.
Eugenius IV., who was unanimously elected to succeed Martin V., had a troubled pontificate of sixteen years. He |Troubles of Eugenius IV.| at once set himself to deprive the Colonna family of the predominance which they had acquired in Rome through the favour of his predecessor; but he could only accomplish this by an alliance with the Orsini, and he thus revived the old feuds among the Roman barons which it was the interest and the duty of the popes to check. Very soon after his accession he engaged in a bitter quarrel with the Council of Basel, and he completely failed in his endeavour to detach Sigismund from the cause of the Council as the price of conferring the imperial crown upon that prince. To make matters worse, he allowed his sympathies with his native city of Venice to involve him in a quarrel with Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan. In 1433 the climax of his misfortunes seemed to be reached, when a combination of Milanese hostility with domestic discontent drove him to fly in disguise from Rome, and to seek refuge in Florence. These accumulated disasters compelled him to adopt a humbler tone towards the Council of Basel, which was conducting negotiations with the Bohemians as if its authority completely superseded that of the Pope.
About this time the succession dispute in Naples gave rise to a prolonged war. Louis III. of Anjou died in 1434, but |War of Angevins and Aragonese in Naples.| Joanna made a new will in favour of his younger brother Réné of Provence. Soon afterwards the queen herself died, on February 2, 1435. Alfonso V. at once came forward to assert his own claims against those of Réné, and the Neapolitan baronage was divided into the factions of Anjou and Aragon. It was impossible for the papacy to remain neutral in a struggle which so intimately concerned its own interests. Eugenius began by claiming the kingdom as a fief which had lapsed to its suzerain on the extinction of the line of papal vassals. But he soon dropped this claim and reverted to the normal policy of supporting the Angevin candidate. At first, events seemed to turn decisively in favour of Réné. A Genoese fleet, fighting on his side, won a great naval victory off the island of Ponza, in which Alfonso himself was taken prisoner. But in a personal interview with Filippo Maria Visconti, who claimed the captive by virtue of his suzerainty over Genoa, Alfonso convinced him that it would be impolitic either to strengthen the papacy which was allied with Venice, or to establish French influence in Southern Italy. By these arguments he not only secured his own release, but also laid the foundations of a durable alliance between his own dynasty and the dukes of Milan. From this time the fortunes of war turned steadily in favour of the Aragonese party, though it was not till 1442 that Réné finally abandoned the contest, and Alfonso V. was formally recognised as king of Naples. His accession reunited for a time the crowns of Naples and Sicily, which had been separated since the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 (see p. [25]).
So far Eugenius had met with little but failure and disappointment. He gained an apparent victory over the Council of Basel when he induced the Greeks to conduct the negotiations for a union of eastern and western churches at a rival council which met first at Ferrara, |Later years of Eugenius IV.| and later in Florence. But the treaty which was settled at the Council was repudiated by public opinion in Greece, and the Pope gained little real advantage from the parade of negotiations which proved abortive. Yet the later years of his pontificate were more successful than seemed likely from the beginning. Rome did not long enjoy the republican liberty which the citizens claimed to have recovered on the Pope’s departure. The warlike Cardinal Vitelleschi succeeded by 1435 in reducing the capital to submission. So successful were the rigorous and cruel measures of the legate that Eugenius suspected him of a design to establish his own power in the papal states. In 1440 Vitelleschi was imprisoned and died, either from poison or from the wounds he received in the struggle with his captors. Scarampo, who took his place, maintained his authority by the same means as his predecessor had employed. In 1443 Eugenius was able to quit Florence and to return to Rome in perfect security. He gained the alliance of Naples by recognising the title of Alfonso V. But his greatest triumph was the inauguration of the negotiations with Germany, through the medium of Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, which led to the failure and humiliation of the Council of Basel. The final treaty was practically concluded, though still unsigned, when Eugenius died, on February 23, 1447.
Thomas of Sarzana, who succeeded to the papacy as Nicolas V., had already won a considerable reputation as a |Nicolas V., 1447-1455.| student of ancient literature. Though he was rather a diligent collector of manuscripts and works of art than an original scholar, his patronage made Rome for a time the centre of humanist culture. His greatest work was the foundation of the Vatican library. As a politician Nicolas showed less ability and interest than as a student, but he was a sincere lover of peace, and he was able to maintain the position which Eugenius had won in his later years. He concluded the concordat with Germany, which put an end to the revolt originating with the Council of Basel, and the Council itself came to an ignominious end in 1449. In 1450 Nicolas celebrated the restoration of unity, and conciliated the Roman people, by a grand jubilee which brought the wealth of Europe to the eternal city. In spite of this general rejoicing, the next year witnessed a famous conspiracy against the secular authority of the Pope. Stefano Porcaro was a Roman noble who had won the favour of Nicolas by his devotion to ancient literature. But these studies led Porcaro, as they had previously led Rienzi, to an enthusiastic admiration of republican liberty. When he endeavoured to inspire the people with his opinions he was banished by the Pope to Bologna. Thence he returned secretly to Rome and organised a plot to imprison the Pope and cardinals, and to restore the republic, with Porcaro as tribune. More than four hundred persons were engaged in the scheme, and the number proved fatal to secrecy. Porcaro and nine of his followers were imprisoned in the castle of St. Angelo and executed without trial. After an interval of a few days harsh measures were resumed, and a number of suspected persons shared the same fate. This severity extinguished the last active desire to restore Roman liberty. Papal rule was strengthened by the failure of the plot; but Porcaro’s name, like that of Rienzi, lived long in the affections of the people. No sooner was this crisis passed than the news came that Constantinople had been taken by Mohammed II. in 1453. The empire had long ceased to possess any general authority in Europe, but the papacy still claimed to represent that unity of Christendom, whose disappearance had rendered such a catastrophe possible. It was upon the papacy, therefore, that the chief discredit fell of so notable a triumph for the infidel. But Nicolas V. had no ability to cope with such a vast problem as was involved in the union of the jarring interests of European states for the purpose of joint resistance to the Turks. Unable to devise any practical scheme, he gave himself up to despair, lamented that fate had raised him from a private station, and died in 1455.
After the death of Nicolas V. the choice of the cardinals fell upon Alfonso Borgia, who took the name of Calixtus III. |Calixtus III., 1455-1458.| He was a native of the Aragonese province of Valencia, and had been rewarded with the cardinalate for services rendered to the papacy in negotiations with Alfonso V. Although over seventy years of age, Calixtus showed creditable energy in urging the princes of Europe to war against the Turks, and he had the consolation of hearing of the signal victory of John Hunyadi, when Mohammed II. was repulsed from the walls of Belgrad in 1456. But the pontificate of Calixtus is mainly noteworthy for the elevation of a relative who was destined to involve the papacy in the gravest scandals. Nepotism was a natural result of the secular aims of the fifteenth century popes. As long as the popes had been the active heads of Christendom their energies were fully employed in carrying out a great task. But they were now little more than temporal princes, and their position differed from that of other princes in the impossibility of transmitting their power to a dynasty, and in the brief period of rule which was possible for men elected in advanced years. Hence there was a serious temptation to the popes to aggrandise their relatives at the expense of the Church or of neighbouring princes, and thus to confer those advantages upon their family which a secular prince could bring about by the normal action of hereditary succession. Calixtus had three nephews, the sons of a sister and a man called Lenzuoli. These young men were allowed to take the maternal name of Borgia, and their interests were vigorously forwarded by their uncle. Two were appointed cardinals, to the great scandal of the College and of Roman opinion; and one of these, Rodrigo Borgia, became the notorious Pope Alexander VI. The third nephew received the title of duke of Spoleto, and the offices of Gonfalonier of the Church and prefect of Rome.