Download PDF | (Toronto Italian Studies) Emily O'Brien - The 'Commentaries' of Pope Pius II (1458-1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy-University of Toronto Press (2015).
350 Pages
Acknowledgments
This book was built on the generous support and guidance of many people. Chief among them are the two scholars I consider my mentors: Anthony Molho and Riccardo Fubini. They, more than anyone else, taught me the historian’s craft and equipped me with the tools necessary to tackle this project. From them I learned what it means to scrutinize a document; how to listen for conversations among humanist texts; and why historical context is so important to unlocking their meaning. For the patient, thoughtful, and expert guidance of these two scholars, I am deeply grateful. I hope this book stands as a testament to the valuable lessons they have taught me. The example of good scholarship alone did not fuel this book.
My project would not have been possible without the support of grants and fellowships from several institutions. At various stages, the research and writing of this book were funded by the Fulbright Foundation, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by Simon Fraser University. A grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences has aided its publication. The ideas in this book were nurtured by many libraries and their skilful staffs. For several years, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana was my intellectual home as I worked on this project. I am indebted to the librarians and other staff members there who helped me to get my bearings and who made working there one of the most rewarding and enjoyable experiences of my career. I am particularly grateful to the former prefect, Leonard Boyle, who made the library so welcoming to young scholars and who generously assisted me in my investigations.
I would also like to thank the staff and librarians of the American Academy in Rome, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. Finally, special thanks are due to the exceptionally resourceful interlibrary loan librarians at Simon Fraser University. They have worked tirelessly on my behalf to bring Renaissance Italy to the shores of British Columbia. While writing and revising this book, I have benefited greatly from the insights and suggestions of a host of fellow scholars. I am especially grateful to Anthony D’Elia and Thomas Izbicki, who offered thoughtful and careful readings of drafts of the book. Christopher Celenza, Joanna Drell, Gary Ianziti, and Timothy Kircher also gave me expert advice on both the book’s arguments and its structure. A much broader community of scholars has contributed more indirectly to the development of this project.
They are the colleagues who have inspired me through their own accomplishments and who, in various ways, have offered support, friendship, and frequent reminders of the worth of our scholarly labours. Everyone mentioned to this point belongs in this group. So do Nancy Bisaha, Scott Blanchard, Gerald Christianson, Una Roman D’Elia, Frances Gage, Kenneth Gouwens, Anne Leader, Liza McCahill, Margaret Meserve, David Mirhady, Susanne Saygin, Simonetta Serra, Marcello Simonetta, Saundra Weddle, and Leah Whittington. To the University of Toronto Press and my two editors, Ron Schoeffel and Suzanne Rancourt, I, in turn, owe many thanks. When I first submitted my manuscript for review, Ron was the editor of the Italian Studies Series. I was incredibly fortunate to have such an expert as my guide; and I am deeply grateful for all he did to shepherd me through the review process. Suzanne has been an invaluable resource in the later stages of the book’s production and generous above all with her patience.
I must also thank my copy editor, Kate Baltais, for her careful reading of the manuscript and for her thoughtful suggestions. Finally, I thank my friends and my family for the myriad ways they have contributed to this book. I am especially grateful to Ilaria Brancoli Busdraghi Broucke, Willeen Keough, Katie Johnson, Carmen O’Brien, David O’Brien, Michael Owler, Meg Penner, Jane Rosenzweig, Julie Rosenbaum, Ligaya Temperatura, and most of all, Joanna Drell. In so many ways, her friendship has been the anchor of this book. To my husband, Paul Garfinkel, my gratitude is boundless. As a fellow historian, he patiently read numerous drafts of the manuscript, offered expert advice, and was always there to give me the encouragement and perspective that I needed. He also gave me the gift of time by keeping our son Michael happily entertained on the many days I worked downstairs at my desk. Without him, writing and completing this book would have been, quite simply, impossible.
In his own important way, little Michael also contributed to this book. The sound of his feet overhead was the music by which I wrote; and his hugs, smiles, and zest for life have been my greatest source of energy and inspiration. My deepest debt is to my parents, Anne and Michael O’Brien. It was they who first introduced me to Italy, who taught me their love of language, who kindled my interest in Renaissance history, and who, as academics themselves, inspired me to follow in their footsteps. They were my greatest champions and my best friends; and their presence is everywhere in this book. I cannot know the joy of showing it to them, but I do have the honour of dedicating it to their memory.
Introduction
The deceitful tongue that did not spare so many of Christ’s vicars, nor Christ himself, will not spare Pope Pius II. While he lives among us, Pius II is accused and condemned. When he is dead, he will be praised … [T]he truth will come forth again, and Pius will be counted among the illustrious popes.1 The author of this bold and confident prediction was none other than Pope Pius II himself. The words appear in the preface to his Commentarii rerum memorabilium quae temporibus suis contigerunt (1462–64), the thirteen-book account of his life, his pontificate, and the age in which he lived. Pius casts himself in this passage as the victim of vicious persecution, and through his parallel to Jesus, a persecution from which, in time, he is destined to be saved. “In the meantime,” he goes on to say, “we will write the history of his papacy.”2 Pius’s words here suggest that he sees himself participating in this process of salvation: it is through the Commentaries , in other words, that “the truth” about Pope Pius II will at last begin to “come forth.”
Historians continue to view the Commentaries as one of the most important humanist texts of Renaissance Italy, but they have grown more wary of it as “truth.” Rather than an objective account, they now categorize the text as an apology or defence, as propaganda, and as a carefully calculated work of selfpromotion. What purpose this defence serves, how it is constructed, and how we should understand its larger significance, both historically and historiographically, are the driving questions of this book. What makes these questions worth answering is, in part, the author himself. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini – Pius II, as pope – was one of the most accomplished humanists and influential public figures in fifteenth-century Europe, and long before he took the papal throne. Born in 1405 in the village of Corsignano, and into a noble but impoverished Tuscan family, he trained in law and letters at the University of Siena. An accomplished diplomat and statesman, he served as secretary, ambassador, and close adviser to several cardinals, three popes, an anti-pope, and the Holy Roman emperor.
After taking orders late in his career (1446), he rose swiftly through the ecclesiastical hierarchy as bishop (1447–56), cardinal (1456–58), and eventually pope (1458–64). In these various capacities, he participated in some of the most pivotal events in European politics, both secular and ecclesiastical. He was a prominent figure at the Council of Basel (1431–49), a powerful and controversial assembly that deposed the sitting pope and precipitated a decade-long schism in the Western Church. Pius, then Aeneas, played a pivotal role in resolving that schism and, in so doing, helped to shape the religious landscape of Europe on the eve of the Reformation. He also stood at the forefront of the European response to one of the defining events of the century: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in May 1453.
A vocal proponent of the crusade, Aeneas spent much of his career as cardinal and bishop exhorting popes, princes, and the Holy Roman emperor to unite in launching such an expedition. He continued those efforts relentlessly during his pontificate (1458–64) and made his own leadership of a crusade one of the central aims of his papacy. Ultimately, Pius exercised his most powerful and lasting influence through what he wrote more than what he did. His vast corpus of humanist writings includes orations, treatises, dialogues, poetry, a novella, a comedy, numerous historical works, and an extensive epistolary. Most of them, including the Commentaries , engage directly or indirectly with the turbulent political and ecclesiastical worlds in which he played out his career. In his own day, Pius earned a reputation for his incisive and incomparable eloquence. In ours, he ranks alongside Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Leonardo Bruni, and Poggio Bracciolini as one of the most distinguished and influential humanists of his age. Studying the Commentaries , then, promises to illuminate a truly towering figure of Renaissance culture and politics.
It also promises to do something much broader in scope: to elucidate a pivotal moment in the history of the papacy. Pius’s pontificate and his pre-papal career coincided with a period of profound crisis, change, and uncertainty for the papal monarchy.3 Like their medieval predecessors, the popes of the mid-fifteenth century still claimed sovereignty over a universal church, but their formidable titles masked a very different reality. A new system of states was coalescing across Europe and effectively replacing the respublica christiana as the defining framework of the West. The concurrent changes in spiritual topography were just as substantial. The rulers of these states were rapidly assuming control in their territories over what had traditionally been papal prerogatives – judicial, fiscal, and administrative; and as they did, they were sharply curtailing the power, influence, and very relevance of the pope as a universal monarch. Still more dangerous to papal sovereignty was the different and corporate model of ecclesiastical government that was threatening to transform the institution from an absolute to a limited monarchy. Conciliar doctrine located ecclesiastical sovereignty not in the pope, but instead in the church as a whole as represented by a general council. When Pius’s papacy began, the conciliar movement was more than just an abstract threat. Through a series of legal instruments, it restricted papal authority in practice; and by drawing on a formidable array of theoretical weapons, it continued to erode papal claims to sovereignty. With its powerful following, moreover, and, in the eyes of many, with the best remedy for solving the problems of the contemporary church, the conciliar model left the future of the papal monarchy uncertain. The instability and uncertainty of papal authority also extended into its temporal realm. The hallmark of the fifteenth-century papacy was the development of the Papal States into a powerful principate, but when Pius took the throne, that transformation was only just underway. Its progress to date had been uneven and its successes tenuous. As princes of the Papal States, the popes of mid-century struggled to subdue rebellious communes and signori protective of their own independence; and despite their efforts to take the lead in Italian diplomacy, they remained vulnerable to the territorial ambitions of neighbouring states. Even the papacy’s claims to temporal authority remained insecure, in large part because many questioned the value and viability of a pope who would also be prince. In short, the institution that stands at the centre of Pius’s Commentaries was immersed in an unprecedented crisis of authority, legitimacy, and identity. Studying this text allows us to open a window onto that crisis, and an extraordinary window at that. Penned by the very man who sat on the papal throne, the Commentaries afford a view from within the eye of the storm. At the same time, this text tells us something about how the papacy responded to that crisis: it shows us how one pope sought to construct his own self-portrait when the papacy’s very identity was under fire. As a case study of papal imagery, Pius’s Commentaries are no less valuable. What was a turning point in the history of the papacy has also been identified as a watershed moment in how the papacy envisioned and represented its authority. In his now magisterial Il sovrano pontefice , Paolo Prodi distils from existing scholarship an important claim: that beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the papacy began drawing on the language, imagery, and ideals of temporal politics to conceptualize both its spiritual and its temporal authority. As a result, the Renaissance popes in both their literary and artistic representations began to take on the appearance of contemporary Italian signori . 4 For many reasons, Pius’s Commentaries are crucial to exploring and understanding this significant shift in papal imagery. Written when these developments were in their early stages, the text offers us the opportunity to investigate both the initial causes of this transformation and its earliest substantial expressions. What makes the Commentaries still more valuable for such a study is that they reflect the views not just of the papal curia but of the very man occupying the papal throne. While the Commentaries intersect with significant developments in papal imagery, they also belong to an equally dynamic and important period in Western historiography. Traditionally, the fifteenth century, and in Italy especially, has been hailed as the dawn of a new critical approach to writing about the past and the birthplace of “modern” historical methods. 5 While these views continue to shape current understandings of Renaissance historiography, recent scholarship has illuminated a more complex picture of how historians in this period constructed the past. Their methodology, it has been argued, was in many ways more akin to that of their medieval predecessors; and in many cases, their new critical methods were shaped primarily by political forces and turned to political ends.6 A careful study of the Commentaries , Pius’s most important historical work, will help to situate their author in the context of these important developments, and, at the same time, will do something more. As one of the most prolific and influential historians of his age, Pius II occupies an important position in the landscape of Renaissance historiography; and scholars today concur that his Commentaries are among the most important historical works of this period. Studying this text, therefore, affords us an opportunity to learn about more than just Pius the historian: it will also help us to understand the broader historiographical contours of his age.
Given their considerable significance, both historical and historiographical, how is it that the Commentaries still require further study? Until a few decades ago, the main reasons were practical and logistical. While scholarship on the work’s manuscript tradition grew in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until the mid-1980s that the first modern edition of the Latin text appeared. Until then, most historians were forced to rely on a heavily censored editio princeps from the sixteenth century, the partial publication of its missing fragments, and Italian and English translations. 7 Further complicating the study of the text was the similar fate suffered by Pius’s other writings: most were accessible only in early, often unreliable printed editions or in manuscript form. Perhaps the greatest challenge to studying the Commentaries as an apology, however, has been an incomplete understanding of the context from which it emerged. To be sure, Ludwig von Pastor’s richly detailed account of Pius’s pontificate (and of the fifteenth-century papacy more generally) provides an indispensable foundation for such an investigation. For all its wealth of archival material, however, The History of the Popes is limited, in particular, by one of its chief non-archival sources: for Pastor, as for Jacob Burckhardt before him and for biographers of Pius writing well into the twentieth century, the Commentaries themselves serve as a principal fount of information. Classifying the text as a set of memoirs or a diary, these scholars tend to treat the work in the way Pius himself suggests in his preface: as a reliable record of historical fact. 8 If scholarship has handicapped the study of the Commentaries as an apology, so in some sense has the text itself. To even the most seasoned scholar of Italian humanism, Pius’s text is a formidable work. Running twelve books in length with a fragment of a thirteenth, its size alone is daunting. 9 Still more so is its scope. As the full title suggests, the Commentaries on Memorable Things that Happened in [Pius’s] Age is meant to be more than simply the res gestae of his papacy. The events and accomplishments of Pius’s pontificate and his pre-papal career remain the text’s primary focus; but they are positioned in a detailed and widereaching narrative of temporal and ecclesiastical politics. This narrative, moreover, often takes centre stage: the account of Pius’s papacy yields frequently to often lengthy excursus – geographical, historical, ethnographic, or biographical in nature. Particular attention is given to chronicling the dynastic struggles of recent and contemporary European princes and to describing in detail the chronic wars that ravaged the continent. Structurally, therefore, the Commentaries is a challenging text to navigate, while substantively it can be overwhelming. Just how – or if – its various components fit together into an organic whole, let alone into a unified apology, is a complicated problem to resolve. The building blocks and composition of the Commentaries only add to its complexity. Pius’s source base was both textual and documentary. To construct the account of his papacy, he depended in part on the records of the papal chancery, but he also drew on historical, literary, and geographical writings; on verse as well as prose; on ancient and medieval authors; and on the works of contemporary humanists – including his own. Indeed, Pius’s vast corpus of writings (and his letters, orations, and histories in particular) served as one of the most important sources for his account. Identifying these varied documents and texts, and listening to the Commentaries ’ often subtle conversations with them, is a formidable task. Nor is it the only way that the text’s composition complicates its interpretation. Pius’s work is a contemporary history: he shaped his record of events only shortly after they had transpired and, in many cases, while they were still happening. Writing under these conditions is challenging for any historian, but Pius’s circumstances made it particularly so: he was constructing an apology for his pontificate without knowing how it would end. Years earlier, when composing a history of the Council of Basel, Pius had explicitly noted the challenge of writing contemporary history. “I must change many things,” he reports in 1450, in a letter to Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, “because things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would. And so for this reason it is dangerous to write the history of current events.”10 How Pius confronted these “dangers” in the Commentaries , and how they shaped the substance, structure, and interpretive framework of his text, are still other important questions to which students of his apology must attend. For all these reasons, the Commentaries are an exceptionally complicated text both to study as an organic whole and to unravel as a work of apology. The myriad challenges of the work may help to explain why the pontiff’s magnum opus, while still widely acknowledged as one of the most important texts of Renaissance Italy, and while frequently the subject of more circumscribed studies, has yet to receive the rigorous, comprehensive analysis that it so deserves.11 Within the last few decades, however, scholarship has opened a wide door to such an investigation. The Latin text of the Commentaries , once so difficult to access, exists now in four critical editions, two with accompanying translations.12 There is also a wealth of new editions and translations of Pius II’s other writings.13 At the same time, historians have developed a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the events, aims, and tensions that defined Pius’s papacy. Particularly valuable are the studies that explore his pontificate within the broader context of ecclesiastical and secular politics – a context that is central to the Commentaries ’ own portrayal of Pius’s papacy – and that examine his relationship to the intricate diplomatic dynamics of the Italian peninsula.14 In turn, scholars have offered a variety of tools with which to confront the particular challenges posed by the text. Studies of humanist historiography, especially works of apologetic history, provide invaluable models for analysing Pius’s own self-defence in the Commentaries . 15 So, in turn, does new research on Renaissance papal historiography, and on Nicholas V in particular, 16 and on humanism at the courts of Martin V and Eugenius IV.17 Meanwhile, fresh studies of Pius’s other historical writings help to illuminate his methodology, interpretive frameworks, and in particular, the political resonances of his work.18 Finally, many of the studies devoted to individual themes, sections, and features of the Commentaries have begun to uncover the nature and construction of the work. Among other topics, these studies investigate the Commentaries ’ reception of certain ancient and contemporary authors,19 its use of documentary sources,20 its portrait of Pius,21 its portrayal of important allies and opponents of the papacy,22 and its sixteenth-century legacy.23 If a comprehensive analysis of the Commentaries is now more possible than ever before, it also seems more necessary. This need has grown first and foremost out of recent scholarly reassessments of Pius II and his pontificate. Over the course of the last century, Pius earned from many historians the label of a backwards-looking idealist. In an age that saw Europe fracturing both politically and spiritually, Pius persistently defended and promoted the waning universal powers of papacy and empire. After ascending the papal throne, moreover, he continued to embrace this world view. The centrepiece of his policy, a crusade against the Ottoman Turks, has until recently been read as a product of that world view and as a naive attempt to resuscitate what was a fundamentally medieval and long-moribund concept.24 Thanks, in part, however, to new research on Pius II’s pre-papal writings, on his pontificate more generally, and on his plans for a crusade specifically, these interpretations have been largely dismissed. Instead, scholars now maintain that Pius was profoundly aware of the disintegration of the old political and spiritual order – indeed, that from his own experience he had a better understanding than most of the centrifugal forces reshaping Europe. Rather than a symbol of his backwards-looking vision, they read his program for a crusade as the design of an astute and practised politician, and one fully engaged with the ecclesiastical and political challenges of his age.25 In the wake of this revisionist scholarship, it seems more necessary than ever to explore the Commentaries – a work that not only offers Pius’s own account of his papacy, but that also places at the forefront of that account his unwavering commitment to crusade. It is, thus, as grateful beneficiary of this recent scholarship and in continuous dialogue with it that this book takes up a topic both urgently needed and ripe for study: the anatomy of the apology that is Pius II’s Commentaries . It answers its first and most fundamental question – what purpose does this defence serve? – by reading and analysing the text in sustained conversation with the context of crisis in which it took shape. It understands that crisis to be both institutional and individual: it was not only the papal monarchy that needed defending but also the pontificate of Pope Pius II himself. It was, moreover, not just his actions as pope that made him vulnerable: over the course of his long pre-papal career Pius, then Aeneas, had done much, and especially with his pen, to exacerbate the crisis in which the papacy was embroiled. Reconstructing these different and interrelated vulnerabilities is, thus, a crucial preliminary step to understanding how the Commentaries function as a work of apology. That task is both substantial and complex. As this book will go on to argue, Pius responded in a detailed way in the Commentaries to the many threats facing both himself and the papacy. If we are to understand the subtleties and nuances of his defence, we must first become familiar with the specifics of the crisis that prompted it. For this reason, the first half of this book is devoted to mapping out – and more fully than ever before – what exactly Pius and the papacy needed to defend themselves against. Chapter 1 illuminates the vulnerabilities of the institution of papal monarchy on the eve of Pius II’s pontificate. It makes the case that when he took the papal throne, the authority, legitimacy, and relevance of the papacy remained under heavy assault. Chapters 2 and 3 consider Pius’s own complex and changing relationship to this multi-level crisis. Their primary aim is to elucidate the various ways he contributed to it over the course of his three-decade career. The vulnerabilities and liabilities these three chapters point up then become crucial tools for the textual analysis unfolded in the subsequent three. Only by reading the Commentaries against this detailed map of crisis can we detect the text’s broader apologetic rhythms and hear the defensive resonances of particular images, passages, and words. There is still another reason why this book is structured as two parts. In assessing Pius II’s own contributions to the crisis engulfing the fifteenth-century papacy, chapters 2 and 3 put forward a series of new interpretations of Pius’s pontificate. They do so, in large part, by building on recent studies of Pius’s six years on the papal throne and, first and foremost, on the archival research of Barbara Baldi.26 Still more extensively, these two chapters revise long-standing perceptions of Aeneas and his views on papal authority in the years before he became pope. They argue that Aeneas was at odds with the Roman Church far longer than he is traditionally thought to have been; and that his conciliarist past was only one of several ways his pre-papal career threatened him as pope. These new arguments grow out of a fresh and rigorous study of hundreds of his letters and more than half a dozen texts that he wrote during this period. Developing and defending these important claims is difficult to do effectively in the middle of an analysis of the Commentaries . For this reason, too, then, these arguments are separated out from that analysis into discrete chapters. To help the reader integrate these sequenced interpretations of context and text, there are frequent references in chapters 4, 5, and 6 to the specific details of the arguments put forward in the preceding three. My reading of the Commentaries is guided by other scholars’ interpretations of the fifteenth-century papacy as well as by my own. In particular, it is informed by a new wave of studies that significantly reassesses the conciliar movement. Over the last two decades, historians have increasingly and convincingly rejected the traditional narrative of papal history that states that by the middle of the fifteenth century, the papacy had definitively triumphed over the conciliar threat.27 New studies have emphasized instead the popes’ ongoing vulnerability to the conciliar movement through the fifteenth century and beyond and, in so doing, have made a persuasive case for the fundamental instability of the “Restoration” papacy.28 To understand how the Commentaries serve as an apology, thus, requires us to determine how and to what extent they respond to this significant conciliar threat. What makes this question especially germane to the study of this particular text is its author’s own shifting relationship to the conciliar movement. For years, Pius, then Aeneas, had been one of the most prominent and vocal conciliarists of his generation. First introduced to conciliar theory in 1432 at the Council of Basel, he spent the next decade making a name for himself as diplomat, orator, and publicist in support of the conciliar cause. He was hardly the only conciliarist to abandon camp for the papalists, nor was he the most distinguished of these converts. None of them, however, had embraced the radicalism of the Basel council – or had promoted that radicalism in writing – in the way that he had. None, moreover, had gone on to become pope. For these reasons, conciliarism represented the most formidable threat Pius faced on the papal throne. With this in mind, this book pays particular attention to the conciliar dimension of the crisis of the fifteenth-century papacy; and it devotes an entire chapter to exploring how the Commentaries respond to that threat. Scholarship of a different kind informs the second line of inquiry this book takes up: how does Pius construct his apology? Recent studies of his writings have demonstrated how he mined his sources selectively, eliminating some parts while amplifying others, and in a way that served specific political needs.29 This book seeks to build on those findings by elucidating still further the methodology Pius employed when constructing his politically charged Commentaries . Like these other studies, it does so in part by considering how Pius used historical sources, and in particular, how he adopted and adapted his own earlier accounts of the events he discusses in the text. At the same time, it brings into focus other aspects of his methodology, and necessarily so: much of what Pius discusses in the Commentaries he experienced firsthand, and consequently, he did not need to rely on written accounts to discuss them. In these instances, this analysis will, when possible, compare Pius’s account in the Commentaries with other sources documenting the same events. At the same time, this book aims to illuminate other dimensions of Pius’s methodology. In particular, it seeks to identify the specific techniques or strategies he relied on the most when writing historical narrative. It is in the context of this methodological investigation that this book engages current interpretations of the evolution of papal imagery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As noted earlier, those arguments identify in representations of papal authority the imprint of secular political culture and, in particular, the figure of the contemporary Italian signore . To what extent do the Commentaries participate in and contribute to those developments? This book will answer this question by considering how the image Pius constructs of papal authority relates both to the ideas and practices of secular rule and to literary and historical representations of contemporary secular rulers. At the same time as it maps out this relationship, it seeks to explain it. Prodi coordinates these shifts in papal imagery with concurrent changes in the temporal dimension of papal authority: it was during this period that the papacy was consolidating its power in the Papal States and transforming these territories into a principate. Working largely from studies about the sixteenth-century papacy, he explains that the new princely image of papal authority reflected the new reality of its temporal power.30 This explanation cannot, however, account for any political imprint we might find in the representations of papal authority in the Commentaries ; the text was written at a time when the popes’ temporal authority was unstable and, indeed, when the institution as a whole was in crisis. Accordingly, one of the aims of this book is to consider other possible reasons why Pius might or might not have adopted the language of secular rule when constructing his vision of papal authority in the Commentaries . In particular, it will consider how, in making these choices, he was responding to the crisis of temporal and spiritual authority in which he and the papacy were immersed. Following these two main lines of inquiry, then, this book puts forward a series of interrelated claims. The Commentaries , it argues, constitute a far more ambitious and aggressive work of defence than has yet been realized. The narrative Pius unfolds therein serves, for one, to shield the fifteenth-century papacy from the serious assaults it endured to its authority, legitimacy, and relevance. At the same time, it functions as a still more rigorous rehabilitation of Pius II’s own pontificate, which had seen the crisis engulfing the papal monarchy worsen on its three main fronts. Crucial to these institutional and personal defences is the text’s portrayal of Aeneas – that is, Pius before he took the papal throne. In the Commentaries , he is systematically stripped of the views and actions that proved so dangerous both to his reputation and record as pope and to the papacy more generally. Of all the threats facing Pius II and the institution of papal monarchy, the Commentaries offer their most sustained response to conciliarism. Chapter 4 presents a detailed analysis of the text’s comprehensive and forceful assault against the papacy’s formidable enemy. Chapter 5 looks instead at how the Commentaries defend against other forces weakening papal sovereignty in its spiritual and temporal realms. It argues that in the way he constructs his relationship with Europe’s secular princes, Pius responds directly to the specific threats these rulers posed to his spiritual authority. At the same time, it shows how his account shores up the particular liabilities he faced as a temporal prince. Detailed, nuanced, and remarkably thorough, this multilayered apology dominates Pius’s Commentaries , and from beginning to end. While it is pervasive, it is not always unified: at times, Pius’s defence of his pontificate clashes with his defence of papal monarchy more generally; at other points, he shores up his temporal authority at the expense of his spiritual. Chapters 4 and 5 both point up and interpret this pattern of tensions and, in so doing, illuminate still further the text’s complex apologetic dynamics. How do the Commentaries construct this wide-ranging and complicated defence? They do so primarily, this book argues, by consistently concealing, erasing, and misrepresenting the weaknesses plaguing Pius II’s papacy and the institution of papal monarchy. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 elucidate both where and how the text builds such a narrative. Together, they argue that while Pius’s apologetic toolbox was well stocked, he tended to favour some tools more than others. As they unfold the layers of his apology, these chapters identify those tools; and in many cases, they also trace their presence in Pius’s earlier writings. In so doing, they illuminate how, as a work of apology, the Commentaries are integrally linked to the broader corpus of Pius’s writings. Among the most important tools Pius used to build his defence, this book argues, were the images and ideals of secular politics. The language and culture of secular power are imprinted on fundamental aspects of Pius’s self-portrait and in a way that significantly enhances the image of the popes as strong sovereigns in both their temporal and spiritual spheres. These parallels help Pius not only to project an image of strong authority: they also help him to legitimize his own and the popes’ sovereign power and to make a case for the institution’s continued relevance in the changing landscape of fifteenth-century Europe. Chapter 5 begins to make this argument by examining how the ideals of secular authority inform aspects of Pius II’s spiritual leadership. Chapter 6 argues this claim far more extensively. It does so by comparing Pius’s self-portrait in the Commentaries with representations of contemporary secular rulers and by illuminating the considerable common ground they share. Both chapters emphasize the apologetic benefits of constructing papal authority in the language of secular power. At the same time, they connect the princely features of this papal imagery to Pius’s – and Aeneas’s – own experiences in secular politics. Together, these arguments allow us to bring into sharper focus both the historical and historiographical significance of Pius II’s magnum opus. The Commentaries , this book argues, are not so much an account of what happened in Pius’s papacy as they are his vision of what he had hoped his pontificate would achieve: a papal monarchy secure in its authority as both temporal and spiritual sovereign. In fulfilling this purpose, the Commentaries exemplify the very kind of history that Renaissance historians were long thought to have abandoned. The fact that such a text was written by one of the premiere historians of the fifteenth century suggests we should define Renaissance historiography still more as a fundamentally political act. If this analysis brings out the broader historiographical significance of the Commentaries , it also reveals the important position the work occupies in other dimensions of intellectual culture. As much as it is a work of political history, the Commentaries must be considered a vital contribution to the debate over ecclesiastical authority that dominated the fifteenth-century church. In particular, Pius’s text represents a powerful weapon in the papacy’s long and arduous struggle against conciliarism. Finally, this study identifies in the Commentaries a turning point in the evolution of papal imagery. By infusing his portrait of the papacy with distinctly secular ideals, Pius II helped to reconceptualize traditional representations of papal authority. His reasons for doing so serve to complicate current understandings of why this shift happened. If in the sixteenth century such imagery reflected the reality of the popes’ secular rule, in the midfifteenth it shored up their weaknesses as both temporal and spiritual sovereigns.
The focus of this book and the claims it puts forward require some concluding remarks about the source at the centre of investigation. While it is unnecessary to review in detail the extensive scholarship on the manuscript tradition of the Commentaries , it is important to explain here the edition of the text adopted in this study and to consider issues of audience and composition that relate directly to its argument.31 Of the three completed critical editions of the Commentaries , this book works from that of Luigi Totaro.32 Totaro’s edition is based on ms. Corsiniano 147 in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia dei Lincei, the manuscript generally considered by scholars to be the version to which Pius gave his final approval. 33 Cors. 147 includes all twelve complete books of the Commentaries but not the fragment of the thirteenth.34 This splendidly illuminated parchment codex was copied for Pius by Giovanni Gobellino in elegant humanist hand in the spring of 1464 and was completed 12 June of that year – only six days before the pontiff left for Ancona to launch a crusade. The manuscript contains corrections in the hand of Agostino Patrizi, Pius II’s secretary, and Gobellino; notes by Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini (Pope Pius III, r. 1503), the pontiff’s nephew and the manuscript’s heir; and other notes dating to the sixteenth century, when Francesco Bandini Piccolomini, archbishop and relative of Pius, used the manuscript when preparing his printed and heavily censored edition of 1584. Also in this manuscript – and clearly meant by Pius as a complement to his own text – is a letter his secretary and confidant Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini received from Giannantonio Campano, Pius’s close adviser, court poet, and the man he had tapped to review and revise his work.35 Campano’s letter explicitly states that his intervention in Pius’s text was minimal, thus offering further evidence that Cors. 147 represents the work of the original author rather than the revisions of another. Cors. 147 is predated by Vaticano Reginense Latino 1995, a paper codex located in the Vatican Library and the working copy of the Commentaries . 36 While Reg. Lat. 1995 is written for the most part in the hand of papal secretary Agostino Patrizi, to whom Pius II dictated much of the work, the pontiff’s own hand has been identified on numerous pages making corrections, additions, and penning passages of the original text. 37 Such markings are valuable evidence of the work’s compositional techniques; but they also reveal that while Pius composed the Commentaries quickly (between the summer of 1462 and the spring of 1464), he revised it carefully, thoughtfully, and repeatedly.38 Reg. Lat. 1995 includes the unfinished fragment of Book Thirteen, which presumably was interrupted by Pius’s sudden death in August 1464.39 It is clear from this continuation that he was planning to extend the Commentaries , but it is also clear from the finished nature of Cors. 147 that he considered the twelve previous books to be a distinct work, complete in itself. Although the few other differences between Cors. 147 and Reg. Lat. 1995 are overwhelmingly stylistic in nature and are considered by most scholars to be minor (it is presumed that these represent Campano’s corrections), nevertheless Cors. 147 offers the most accurate image of how Pius II wanted to be remembered.40 The idea of the Commentaries as memory raises the important question of audience: for whom did Pius II leave this self-portrait? And did it, in fact, reach its intended readers? Pius’s sudden death in Ancona only two months after Gobellino had completed his copy and the antagonism between Pius’s followers and his successor, Paul II, have made it difficult to answer this question with certainty. The elegance of Cors. 147 has led one expert on Pius II to suggest that this manuscript might have been the archetypus from which other transcriptions were to be made.41 If this was, in fact, Pius’s intention, then it was never fulfilled. The radical change in circumstances at the papal court after Pius’s death on 15 August 1464 made circulation of the text almost an impossibility. The manuscript tradition that has been established to date attests to this reality: other than Reg. Lat. 1995 and Cors. 147, there are no known fifteenth-century manuscripts of the text. Moreover, the vast majority of those dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries descend from Reg. Lat. 1995, a pattern that suggests that Cors. 147 circulated for some time only in very restricted circles.42 While the Commentaries themselves may have been seen by only a few eyes in the fifteenth century, there is ample evidence that the image they contained continued to circulate. Ianziti has argued through a comparative analysis of Pius’s text and Giovanni Simonetta’s De rebus gestis Francisci Sfortiae commentarii that the Milanese court was familiar with at least parts of Pius’s text, that it recognized it as a work of self-promotion, and that Pius’s choice of genre directly influenced Simonetta’s.43
Moreover, recent scholarship on the letters, poems, and other writings composed by Pius’s circle of humanists after his death (including Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini, Giannantonio Campano, and Leodrisio Crivelli) has repeatedly suggested that their flattering portraits of the pontiff, shaped in response to attacks on his memory, originated in the Commentaries . 44 So, in turn, did the frescoes Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini (Pius III) commissioned for the Piccolomini library in the cathedral of Siena, where Pius’s library was to be housed.45 The Commentaries , it is important to note, were not meant as propaganda according to the usual understanding of that word, nor did they serve this purpose in the end. The term propaganda implies a level of publicity incongruous with the intellectual culture of this age. On the other hand, the text’s apologetic style, the nature of Cors. 147, and the similarities between Pius II’s self-portrait and the images promoted by his humanist followers together suggest that the Commentaries were not only meant to be a work of self-promotion with a controlled circulation, but that, at least to some extent, they succeeded in fulfilling this goal.
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