Download PDF | Nancy Bisaha - From Christians to Europeans. Pope Pius II and the Concept of the Modern Western Identity-Routledge (2023).
300 Pages
Providing the first in-depth examination of Pope Pius II’s development of the concept of Europe and what it meant to be ‘European’, From Christians to Europeans charts his life and work from his early years as a secretary in Northern Europe to his papacy. This volume introduces students and scholars to the concept of Europe by an important and influential early thinker. It also provides Renaissance specialists who already know him with the fullest consideration to date of how and why Pius (1405–1464) constructed the idea of a unified European culture, society, and identity. Author Nancy Bisaha shows how Pius’s years of travel, his emotional response to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the impact of classical ethnography and other works shaped this compelling vision—with close readings of his letters, orations, histories, autobiography, and other works.
Europeans, as Pius boldly defined them, shared a distinct character that made them superior to the inhabitants of other continents. The reverberations of his views can still be felt today in debates about identity, ethnicity, race, and belonging in Europe more generally. This study explores the formation of this problematic notion of privilege and separation—centuries before the modern era, where most scholars have erroneously placed its origins. From Christians to Europeans adds substantially to our understanding of the Renaissance as a critical time of European self-fashioning and the creation of a modern “Western” identity. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the formation of modern Europe, intellectual history, cultural studies, and the history of Renaissance Europe, late medieval Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.
Nancy Bisaha is Professor of History at Vassar College. She works on Renaissance humanism and identity and is the author of Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (2004), and co-author of a translation of Pope Pius II’s Europe, c. 1400–1458 (2013).
Introduction
On September 3, 1458, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was crowned Pope Pius II at the age of fifty-two. Recently returned to Italy after two decades abroad, poor, and prematurely aged by gout, he must have seemed an odd choice to become the new prince of the Church. But he was esteemed by many for his witty and graceful humanist writings, his connections in Northern Europe, and his ardent support for a crusade against the Ottoman Turks. This last quality made him a fitting successor to the hawkish Pope Calixtus III. In his autobiographical Commentaries, Pius described how the Romans, in their usual style, greeted his election with raucous celebration that could turn violent in an instant. On his coronation day, he stated, “he went in solemn procession to the Lateran where he narrowly escaped death in the mob who fought with swords for the horse he had ridden.
He was saved by the mercy of heaven.”1 The fanfare continued with a royal banquet attended by cardinals, princely ambassadors, nobles, and magnates, but when the festivities concluded, he returned to the Vatican palace and went to work. “Among all the concerns that occupied his heart,” the text continues, “none was greater than his desire to arouse Christians against the Turks and wage war on them.”2 Within weeks of his coronation Pius issued a bull calling all Christians to join or support this holy war. At long last, he was in a position to “drive the Turks out of Europe,” as he had repeatedly urged fellow Christians to do—or so he thought.3
Pius would spend his papacy trying to cajole, persuade, and pressure Christian governments to commit to holy war, with no measurable results— until he announced that he himself would go on crusade: “It is not good to say ‘Go’; perhaps they will listen better to ‘Come.’”4 No pontiff before or since has ever done such a thing, but it elicited a response. Thousands of individuals took the cross, and small forces from several regions committed to the crusade, which was set to depart from Ancona, Italy in August 1464. Unfortunately, the bold decision to accompany the campaign in the summer of 1464 was costly to Pius’s fragile health. He received his death wound not in battle, but on the exhausting journey across Italy to join the gathering forces and died at the port of Ancona as Venetian warships docked in the harbor beyond his window. It has been argued that when Pius II died, so did the future of crusading, and his idealistic efforts were little more than “a noble failure.
Likewise, his memory has suffered in the intervening centuries among the general population. Well-known to Renaissance specialists for his learning and ambition, Pius pales in comparison to the flashy, unapologetically corrupt men who succeeded him on the throne of St. Peter.6 The vain and brash warrior Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere) and the sybaritic Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), who boldly brought his illegitimate adult children into the Vatican, have become the stuff of novels, movies, and more than one racy miniseries; Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici), whose wealth and privilege blinded him to the threat posed by a humble monk from Germany named Martin Luther, also stands out for obvious reasons. Among such men, Pius seems an awkward fit: neither hero nor villain in this heady age, he is harder to place on the Hollywood spectrum. Pius II may have been proud, controlling, and somewhat nepotistic, but his failings recede when juxtaposed to those of popes whose actions paved the way for the Protestant Reformation.
Nor can he be numbered among the more glamorous papal builders and patrons like Nicholas V, who created the Vatican Library. But scholars who judge Pius’s impact on both Europe and the Ottoman Empire by his inglorious death and failed crusade are, quite simply, looking in the wrong direction. Their narrow focus on his papal program of crusade ignores Pius’s biggest legacy: his copious, authoritative, and well-circulated writings on Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Asia.7 Pius’s texts contain a compelling vision of Europe whose echoes can still be felt today. “Europe” has become a powerful, yet amorphous, concept—employed without hesitation to designate both a continent and a people. It connotes a cultural, political, or social collective, but it is also a term of exclusion for those deemed unworthy of its lofty pretensions. One measure of Pius’s influence is the adjective “European,” which he appears to have coined.8 This etymological twist was Pius’s attempt to express not only what it meant to be in Europe, but of it. Unfortunately, Pius’s early articulations of European identity are as little known to the broader population as the man himself.
In the past few decades, a good deal of work has been published on the construction of European identity.9 The two periods that receive the most attention, however, are separated by two millennia. Many scholars point to the fifth century BCE when Herodotus described the Greek and Persian wars of his day as the natural outcome of centuries of enmity and difference between “Europe” and “Asia.” Others choose the modern colonial era, when brute imperial force cloaked in post-Enlightenment “reason” enabled writers to brashly position Europe and increasingly, “the West” (a term Pius also freely used), above all other cultures.10 Important though these two eras were, a great deal took place in the centuries that separated them.11 Surely the fifteenth century—when the Ottomans seemed poised to conquer half the continent and humanist scholars offered bold new definitions of culture and society—played a part in the evolution of the concept of Europe?12
In the modern era, one would be hard pressed to find an earlier developed vision of European identity than the one that emerges from Pius’s writings.13 Two key points, in my view, suggest his impact on the way Europeans came to describe themselves: a strong tendency to view the Ottomans as the consummate other, and the use of that same anti-Ottoman discourse to help define the European self. Regarding the first point, consider the way most modern Europeans and Americans view the Ottoman Empire—when they think about it at all. For over five hundred years, the Ottomans were an integral part of Eastern Europe: they profoundly shaped and were shaped by the peoples they ruled, and scholars today see them as part of a “shared world.”14 But for nonspecialists, the historical memory of the Ottoman era is far from settled. A discourse of separation and difference ebbs and flows but never disappears. The tendency to cast the Ottomans as foreign intruders and their reign in Europe as a blip is still pronounced in western countries, and not only in discussions of the deep past: this dogma influences recent debates about immigration, refugees, citizenship, the E.U., and the nationalistic language of some of the world’s most powerful leaders.15 Individuals who insist that the Ottomans never truly belonged in Europe often say the same for non-European peoples today. No one shaped this early mantra of otherness more, I contend, than Pius.
As an imperial secretary in Austria, within days of hearing of the shocking conquest of Constantinople in 1453, he described the sophisticated, successful Ottomans as “a Scythian people from the midst of a barbarous region.”16 One year later, despite his access to reports from Eastern European countries, he upped the ante with a stirring oration at Frankfurt, which later circulated widely, describing the Turks as effeminate, reluctant warriors, and Mehmed as barbaric, unlearned, and full of “Asian arrogance.”17 These examples provide a small taste of the ways in which Pius’s dream to “drive the Turks out of Europe”—or at least the imaginations of many Europeans—arguably came true. Mehmed II and other sultans remained well known to Pius’s contemporaries for several generations, but one wonders if his dismissive rhetoric helped diminish their place in European histories over time. How many sultans can be named today (without a technological crutch) by westerners who easily recite the names and deeds of Roman emperors and Christian kings? Why is Mehmed so little known and admired among the other great premodern conquerors and rulers? Ottomanist Linda Darling frames this paradox by describing the Ottomans as active participants in the Renaissance, while also noting a marked tendency among contemporary observers to view them as distinctly other.
One way that both Christian Europe and the Ottomans dealt with their “increasingly intense and intimate” contact, she states, was to “thicken the imagined wall between them.” That distancing, she adds, “seems to have begun on the European side.”18 This leads to my second point: Europe itself. In order to prove that the Turks did not belong in Europe, Pius first had to define what “Europe” was. Few Christians regularly used the term before Pius was born, preferring the medieval catch-alls “Christians” or “Christendom” instead.19 Different concepts of Europe had been evoked by earlier authors, but before 1400, there was little agreement about what it meant beyond a geographical concept.20 In the fifteenth century, this rapidly began to change, with Pius as one of the leading voices. He passionately described Europe to Christian audiences as “our soil”; he praised the unique attributes of its nations and their potential to work together as an unstoppable team; and he portrayed the continent as the heart and natural leader of the Christian world. As this study will show, Pius ascribed a formidable personality to Europe and “the West”—one that was strong, masculine, highly educated, polished, and almost entirely Christian.21 By the early sixteenth century, it was much more common to speak of “Europe,” to map its features, and even to personify the continent as the mythical Europa.
The self-awareness of Europeans became so pronounced that by 1600 Samuel Purchas claimed that “the Qualitie of Europe exceeds her Quantitie, in this the least, in that best of the world,” touting the superior culture, sciences, and technology of “Europeans.”22 It evoked a feeling of belonging so recognizable that Francis Bacon could confidently pen the phrase “we Europeans” in 1623 without fear of being misunderstood.23 Pius’s exact role in this shift is complicated, and other factors certainly played a part, but he clearly stood at the early stages of the change and, therefore, deserves our attention. Specialists strongly agree. To scholars of the medieval and Renaissance periods, Pius’s importance to the early concept of European identity is widely accepted.
This view has long prevailed among medieval and Renaissance historians, owing in large part to Denys Hay, who called attention to Pius’s rhetoric in 1957 in his wonderfully compact Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. Federico Chabod in 1961 and others also noted Pius’s role.24 More recently, Barbara Baldi usefully discussed Pius’s political vision for Europe and Christendom, particularly his diplomatic efforts as cardinal and pope. Norman Housley remarked on Pius’s efforts to blend his humanism and spiritual leadership in order to promote crusade, calling it “a remarkable achievement of synthesis, with substantial implications for the formation of a European identity.” Anthony Molho, Jacques Le Goff, and others have recently affirmed Pius’s importance here as well, with Karl Enenkel calling him “the father of Europe.”25 More recently, Isabella Walser-Bürgler has also argued strongly for Pius’s impact, stating, “Piccolomni’s significance with regard to the early modern Europe discourse cannot be stressed enough.”26 These studies have been incredibly helpful to my research, yet they open the door to more questions. Is Pius’s part so well known among specialists that it has been taken for granted?
The consensus among so many scholars about Pius’s imprint on the concept of Europe begs a deeper understanding of precisely how and why he developed these strong concepts. What made him, of all his contemporaries, so single-minded and persistent in his quest to comprehend and celebrate Europe? This is the premise of this book. I hope to introduce Pius’s work to scholars of European and “Western” identity who do not know him, and for those who do, to offer an in-depth analysis of how his views evolved and their possible impact on later generations. His writings help us to understand a pivotal moment in time that has been too often overlooked. By rallying Europeans to make common cause against the Ottomans, Pius created and asserted a purportedly unique and superior European identity.
Colonialism, the Protestant Reformation, and other later phenomena helped this notion harden into a truism, but as this study will show, modern writers did not invent these concepts out of thin air. The first clear argument of European greatness and self-determination began in Pius’s time as a bold rallying cry against a superior military and political power. I contend that Pius created a European identity largely for the purpose of excluding the Ottomans, and the notion took on a life of its own in the process. To be clear, less exclusionary and hierarchical notions of Europe certainly existed. The borders between Europe and Asia or “East and West” meant little to people whose worlds were defined more by interaction and coexistence than warfare and harsh rhetoric; many writers continued to prefer the idea of “Christendom” or simply used more localized terms to describe their home writ large. The discourse that Pius helped shape was but one view of European identity, but the consequences of this viewpoint even today are abundantly clear.27
One might reasonably ask if it was unusual for a pope to express such emphatic concern for “Europe.” In this period in history, it was.28 Like other popes before and after him, Pius used terms like “Christendom” and “Roman Catholic Church,” but his vision of Europe was uniquely strong and sometimes startling. In 1459, at a gathering of princes and dignitaries in Mantua to plan a joint crusade, Pope Pius addressed the crowd, at one point urging them: “Let all of Asia and Africa pass away, and let us look only to Europe and take account of the present.”29 One of the great orators of his age, Pius did not mince words. This statement was novel in its preference for the safety of one group of Christ’s followers and its blatant disregard for all the others. It evokes a region that was much smaller than the tri-continental expanse of “Christendom,” and yet larger than the reach of the Roman Catholic Church. Whether Pius held his audience in the Northern Italian city in “rapt attention,” as he later claimed, throughout his three-hour–long oration (in Latin, no less),30 his mantra about the security and common bonds of “Europeans” spread across the continent via copies of this broadly disseminated oration. His conflation of continent and religious faith, here and in other texts, reflect a significant ideological shift.
This is not to claim that Pius stood alone in these concerns. Many other Renaissance humanists vilified the Ottomans and some also gestured to the boundaries of Europe and the West in the process. There is little doubt that Pius was engaging in a discourse that was larger than himself, and it is unlikely that he was the first.31 One can argue, however, that of all his contemporaries, Pius left the biggest imprint. He deserves special attention for three reasons. First, the sheer amount that he wrote on the notion of Europe and the Ottomans (before and after his elevation to the papacy) was unmatched. Second, of all these humanists, only he became pope—an office that lent his pronouncements an authority that few other writers enjoyed. Lastly, Pius was one of the most widely read authors in Western Europe during the Renaissance, and possibly the most widely read humanist of his era.32 A well-known writer before 1458, his attainment of the highest office in Christendom multiplied the circulation of his works, in both manuscript and print. Other voices held forth on the Turks, but Pius’s was the most resounding, and none of his contemporaries spoke in quite the same way to the subjects of European and national identity.
In reality, Pius’s grasp of current affairs in the East was rather shaky. As Mustafa Soykut argues, Pius and other European writers crafted this image of Islam and the Ottomans in a period when access to reliable information about both were in decline. Nonetheless, in their day, they were regarded as trusted sources and “makers of the contemporary public opinion.”33 In addition to Pius’s exceptional circumstances, political and technological developments at the time converged in a way that amplified his message on Europe and the West and facilitated its spread. The fifteenth century was an era of conceptual transition: educated Christians increasingly questioned authorities and notions of identity that had previously seemed solid and fixed. In 1300, the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor were widely regarded as universal spiritual and secular leaders of western “Christendom.” But by 1450, the popes’ move to Avignon and the papal Schism, the emperor’s waning authority over large swathes of central Europe, and the rising power of centralized monarchies had altered that dynamic. Pius offered new concepts of group identity at a time when state boundaries were forcefully contested and apologists for kings and city-states began to tout the special qualities of their peoples, their founding myths, and their political destinies.34 The essential appeal of the words “Europe” and “West,” one imagines, was that they conjured a collective without a clear leader—neither pope, nor emperor, nor king. The benefits of this neutrality only increased as the Protestant Reformation fragmented the Christian fold and exploration and colonization made differentiations between continents and their peoples objects of intense interest.35
Lastly, the printing press played an enormous role in increasing and sustaining Pius’s audience. Within two decades of his death, Pius’s still popular writings began to circulate more rapidly (and affordably) across Europe via this new medium.36 In addition to the printing of separate works and letter collections, his massive Opera omnia was published twice in Basel in the sixteenth century, in 1551 and 1571. This study will examine how Pius’s personal experiences, learning, and major events in his day all came together in his powerful characterization of “Europe,” as an entity that embraced some and excluded many, in ways that reverberate in our time when representations of this continent and the entire “West” are still hotly debated. Wherever our own present moment leads us, the ability of the words “Europe” and “West” to inspire, intimidate, unite, or exclude are unlikely to fade away. As Gerard Delanty has stated, “every age [has] reinvented the idea of Europe in the mirror of its own identity.”37 Thoughtful interrogation of the history of these terms and the ways in which we use them must be ongoing.
Key Themes of Pius’s Life and this Study Three factors in Pius’s life were crucial to the formation of his views of identity—first and foremost, decades of travel and observation of international politics. Before entering the Church, Pius worked as a secretary, taking his first job with a cardinal on his way to the Council of Basel in Switzerland. Apart from a few visits to Italy, Pius remained north of the Alps for over twenty years. As a secretary, he served bishops, cardinals, an anti-pope, and even the Holy Roman Emperor. His work required considerable travel—to France, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Italy, and Bohemia— in addition to years spent living and traveling locally in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. These professional travels gave him chronic arthritis (i.e., gout), nearly shipwrecked him twice, and provided the occasion to sire two children out of wedlock, neither of whom survived infancy—but they also taught him a great deal about his corner of the world. Few men of his age visited as many regions, so carefully observed local inhabitants and cultures, or enjoyed close contact with the most powerful men and women of his time. Even fewer were positioned to receive news and meet visitors from all over Europe and beyond as Pius regularly did in the chanceries where he worked.
His years of travel and diplomatic experience created a storehouse of memories, knowledge, and emotional connections that provided fodder for his later views on Europe, its peoples, and the Ottomans. A second key component in Pius’s evolving cultural views was his humanist education—comprised primarily of grammatical and rhetorical training and the study of ancient texts. While competency in Latin was a professional requirement for many vocations, Pius’s immersion in the language and literature of ancient Rome was far from utilitarian. This passion for ancient learning connected him to a vibrant international community of like-minded scholars whose training in Latin and Greek texts created a rich pool of historical examples, literary references, and shared language to explore and frame the issues of their time.38 In direct opposition to today’s worship of all that is new, to humanists and their readers, a source’s advanced age generally increased its authority. Despite a gap of hundreds of years, in which kingdoms rose and fell, peoples migrated en masse, and great technological and intellectual shifts took place, scholars regularly looked to ancient texts to help navigate contemporary questions. When Pius wrote about the Germans, for instance, he did not prioritize what he had personally observed or read in contemporary sources, but drew heavily from Tacitus’s Germania (98 CE), which flattened differences between the many Germanic tribes and treated them as part barbarian, part noble savage. And when Pius wrote about the Turks, he did not stick to recent reports, but included information from texts over a millennium old like Strabo’s Geography (c. 7 BCE) and the bizarre early medieval Cosmography of Aethicus Ister, who described the supposed ancestors of the Turks in the most lurid terms. Even in the face of the radically new, be it the Ottomans or the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, ancient texts were often consulted like reference books.39 For centuries, the standards that European readers absorbed from classical texts so thoroughly shaped their views of cultural identity and civilization that scholars long mistook these tropes for historical truth.
The Ottomans suffered most unfairly from such comparisons. While they were no less sophisticated than other Renaissance Europeans, many humanists like Pius forged a discourse that set a tone of “Western” superiority for centuries to come. Hence, Pius’s selective use of ancient texts to describe modern peoples is a crucial thread of this study.40 The third and final puzzle piece in Pius’s evolving cultural views was his explosive reaction to the Ottoman advance, particularly the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. He had been idly following the Ottomans’ progress for years and was serving the uninspiring Frederick III in the sleepy town of Graz, Austria, when news of the cataclysm arrived in July. The siege and sack of the second capital of the Roman Empire rocked him to his core: “But what is that horrible news just reported about from Constantinople?” he wrote in letter to Pope Nicholas V. “My hand trembles as I write these things, my spirit shudders, and neither indignation allows me to be quiet, nor does sadness permit me to speak. Alas, poor Christendom.”41 Overnight, the bored secretary stopped seeking an excuse to return to his homeland in Italy and became one of the most vocal and determined advocates of a large-scale crusade, with the emperor as its would-be leader. Something about the sack of this illustrious and ancient Christian city clearly affected Pius in ways that other battles in war-torn Europe had not.42 From this time forward, both the Ottomans and Europe dominated Pius’s compositions. If many had only known him before as a writer of poems, erotic fiction, and elegant letters, they would come to see him now as a serious-minded expert on geopolitical and cultural matters.
The fall of Constantinople quite simply flipped a switch in him: for all his extensive travels around Europe, before 1453 Pius wrote next to nothing about most places he visited and comparatively little about the Ottomans. From the summer of 1453 on, however, he became obsessed not just with crusade, but with a need to define the nature of the Ottomans and the Christian peoples he hoped would stop them. During his cardinalate in Rome, five years later, with the inspiration of ancient ethnographic texts, he became especially prolific. This is not to say Pius’s message about identity and belonging was always neat and clear. Some of his histories and treatises fed early stirrings of national pride with his glib thumbnail sketches of the peoples of Europe and their local peculiarities—a response that undercut Pius’s message of European unity.43 With his oft-times fluid notions of identity, he did not perceive the tensions we identify today between nationalist leanings and cosmopolitanism. As such, Pius contributed to both national myths and a broader notion of Europe as the antithesis of the “Eastern” worlds of Islam and Asia. More important than any one of the preceding components—experience, humanistic studies, or the jolt of 1453—was their combination. Pius’s humanist training and extensive knowledge of contemporary events and peoples from across the continent gave him the means to quickly articulate a forceful response to the fall of Constantinople.
By the same token, the Ottomans provided the impetus for Pius to reexamine his views of Europe and its nation states. It was the Turks—and their heightened threat after May 29, 1453— that awakened Pius to the geographical, political, and cultural significance of the countries he visited years before and inspired him to write copiously about the continent that they inhabited. Without the Turks, I believe that Pius would never have conceived of “Europeans” in the same way. Similarly, without his travels and classical studies, he would not have envisioned the Turks as he did. The joint effect of these three components on Pius’s notions of identity are traced in this study. Having sketched the key components of Pius’s personal history that shaped his views on identity, I want to step back and say a few words about the broader context of the Renaissance as a time of transition. What does it mean to move from Christendom to Europe, and was it, in fact, a clean break? Despite the attention scholars have given to the idea of Europe, the shift away from Christianity as a primary identity is less often examined or problematized—most scholars assume it happened sometime in the Enlightenment and gained momentum through the political and economic forces of imperialism. Pius’s work suggests that this was not an either-or proposition. While much of his worldview resonates with modern secular assumptions about European identity, he also preserved the centrality of Christianity. Since his time, education and other cultural aspects have become less religious in nature, but the Christian components are still palpable.44 Whether or not most European citizens practice Christianity is secondary to the notion that it undergirds society and forms a connection to a mythical shared “Judeo-Christian” past—a past that deliberately erases Muslims, who also lived in Europe from the eighth century onward. As Talal Asad aptly put it, “Muslims [today] are present in Europe and yet absent from it. The problem of understanding Islam in Europe is primarily, so I claim, a matter of understanding how ‘Europe’ is conceptualized by Europeans.”45 These powerful words written in the year 2000 are curiously reminiscent of Pius’s statement in 1458 about the Ottomans in his history of Europe: “The Turkish race is Scythian and uncivilized. Although I may seem to be digressing from my plan, I think it not irrelevant to describe their origin and expansion.”46 Pius’s apology for addressing the Ottomans’ origins in a history of Europe reveals an inability to see them as part of the same continent that he and his audience inhabited. Pius had much less to say about Jews in his works, but his brief mentions of them contain a sense of belonging in European society that is missing in his discussions of Muslims or pagans.47 One last theme that I explore in this book may come as a surprise given my emphasis up to this point on Pius’s ethnocentric views. A subtle, perhaps unconscious, thread also runs through several of his texts: a quiet acknowledgment of the Ottomans’ entrenchment in European society. His discursive efforts to “expel the Turks from Europe” mingle with details, large and small, that undermine his mantra of otherness and separation: their alliances with Christian princes, their reputation as fair rulers, and their seamless integration into European diplomacy and trade. Pius’s obsession with the Ottomans was equal parts fear and fascination—sometimes chauvinistic and exoticizing— but other times it was soberly observational. As a result, Pius’s readers were presented with two contrasting pictures: they could choose to believe one or the other, or remain ambivalent. Pius’s efforts to understand the enemy, with the aim of exiling them from Europe, ironically led to works that made them more familiar to Europeans and showed how embedded they were in the continent. This narrative theme will be discussed throughout the book. In addition, Pius’s controversial letter to Mehmed II, about which I have previously written, receives new consideration as a complicated offer of conversion. Similarly, Pius conveys his ambivalence about the Christians of Europe. While he urged princes to fight the Ottomans together as brothers, he fully recognized the fragility of their loyalties to one another. It is the tensions in many of his works that show him to be a more careful historian than the high-flown rhetoric in his better-known speeches and letters would suggest. This malleability makes for lively and unpredictable reading, and it reveals a nuanced view of Christian Europe. Pius’s mixed feelings about Christian leaders certainly complicate any serious use of the “self and other” paradigm, which ignores a vast middle ground of tense negotiation and belonging.
Approach and Chapter Overview This book is an intellectual biography of Pius II’s notions of cultural, ethnic, and religious identity. I do not examine his works on love, rhetoric, conciliarism, and other topics, nor is it my goal to tell his life story in detail—many other biographers have done an excellent job on that front—but each chapter follows the main arc of his movements and highlights key moments to bring the man, his milieu, and his words to life.49 I explore his influences and theorize about his impact, but my central focus is a close reading of his works that pertain to group identity. By reading Pius’s creative visions of Europe and Asia against the backdrop of his life, one gains a better understanding of the unique blend of experiences that not only shaped his forceful views, but created a receptive audience. Because this is not a traditional biography of Pius, I have taken some liberties with the common practice of parceling out his life decade by decade or work by work. Instead, I have divided it into what I see as distinct intellectual periods vis-à-vis his notions of Europe and its nations, and their perceived opposites. As a result, some of the periods are long and lighter on direct evidence of his evolving cultural views, while other phases are brief, but dense in material. Rather than devoting a chapter to his early life, one to his university years, another to his decade with the Council of Basel, and another to his decade in Austria and Germany serving Frederick III, I have condensed this material into Chapter 1. My reasoning is simple: Pius had far less to say about group identity at this time than one would expect. His views on national, continental, and even religious belonging did not fully cohere until after the fall of Constantinople. Everything that preceded it matters largely in retrospect; hence, it can be covered at a brisk pace with attention to some key themes and texts rather than a host of events. Chapter 2 is devoted to Pius’s reception of the news of Constantinople, his actions in response, and his copious writings from 1453 to 1455—mainly letters and crusade orations.
Chapter 3 focuses on his time in Rome and his elevation to the cardinalate (1455–58)—a period in which he completed three critical works on Germany, Europe, and Bohemia, in addition to letters and orations. Chapter 4 considers his pontificate (1458–64) from the standpoint of his views on identity as seen in his writings and pursuit of crusade. Chief among these works are his crusade bulls and orations, his enigmatic letter to Mehmed II, his treatise on Asia, and his famous autobiography, the Commentaries. This study concludes with an overview of how these periods and influences fit together, along with suggestions of ways that Pius’s writings may have carried forward in time among later writers. I had at one point thought to track Pius’s influence more directly, showing who exactly read him and how, but I feared that any attempt to do this would obscure as much as it revealed. It is very hard to know for certain who read Pius or heard echoes of his rhetoric when they spoke of European identity, or whether they were moved by other authors or sociopolitical factors. Getting a firm grasp of his readership, moreover, would require a large-scale study of its own. Until such a study appears, I hope the timing and spread of Pius’s works, and the growing confidence with which sixteenth-century Europeans described their home and its qualities, provide enough reason to give him a larger place in studies of the discourse of Europe and the West. Whether readers believe that he provoked and shaped or simply participated in this shift, my hope is that they will find Pius “good to think with.”
A Note on Terminology and Language In a study centered on the epistemology of terms like “Europe,” “Asia,” “West,” and “East,” one makes choices on how to use them. Whenever a term appears as a construct, I have tried to signal it in some way or set it apart. Heavy usage of quotation marks, however, can become unruly. I opted for the compromise of limiting straightforward usage of these terms to geographical regions, problematic though that sometimes is. I also needed to choose how to refer to Pius himself and when it was appropriate to use “Aeneas” instead. In this introduction and the conclusion, I have used “Pius” for the sake of consistency and clarity, but in Chapters 1–3, I refer to him as “Aeneas,” switching in Chapter 4 to “Pius” with his elevation to the papacy. I should also address my use of “Turks” as well as “Ottomans.” The Ottoman Empire was comprised of multiple ethnic and religious groups; it is, indeed, more accurate to use “Ottoman” rather than narrower designation “Turk”—a term that is freighted with modern nationalist agendas and which the Ottomans themselves did not use. Yet for Pius and so many of his European contemporaries, “Turk” was the designation that they most often used. In order to convey his viewpoint, it seems useful to employ it as well. Most Europeans thought of “the Turks” as a cohesive ethnic group—misleading though this may have been, it was an essential part of their outlook.50 Regarding language, like most humanists of his time, Pius wrote almost exclusively in Latin, which made his works both more and less accessible. On the one hand, Latin was an international language that enabled Europeans across the continent to read his works. His simple yet elegant Latin style, a refreshing alternative to the ornate prose of some of his humanist contemporaries, contributed to his popularity. Some of Pius’s works, moreover, were translated into German, Italian, and other languages.51 For the most part, however, only the well-educated could read his texts. Given the spread of his works, one could argue that their availability in Latin did not hinder the reception of his ideas—at least during the Renaissance. Over time, as vernaculars started to replace Latin in documents, government records, and literary tastes, humanists like Pius fell further in popularity behind writers like Dante, Tasso, and Machiavelli.52 A decline in the study of Latin in the past century has further contributed to what Christopher Celenza has called, “the lost Italian Renaissance.”53 That being said, we lack a full understanding of the use of Neo-Latin by Renaissance and early modern writers and readers, as WalserBürgler has noted; her study suggests a widespread usage of the concept of Europe in Latin sources of this period that deserves fuller attention.
This book seeks to show that it was during the Renaissance, and not the modern colonial era, when a strong sense of Europe and even “the West” began to emerge in the imagination of Europeans. With Pope Pius II’s works helping to set the tone, many inhabitants of the continent started to see the region and its peoples as having a shared identity—even a personality. This was a huge shift in thinking from previous eras. Before the fifteenth century, both Muslims and Christians spoke of their worlds as separate places, and occasionally Christians spoke of “the East,” yet there was comparatively little use of the words “Europe” or “West,” and rarely in the sense of a group identity. But many of the people who came to be called Western Europeans began to see the world differently after 1453—some marveled at the Ottomans and treated them as neighbors, others regarded them as enemies and sought to distance themselves from them. Definitions of Europe and the West would continue to evolve in the modern period, but the belief in inherent difference and cultural superiority fostered by Pius remained fixed for many thinkers. In that crucial sense, their origins date much earlier—to a time when the Ottomans appeared to have the upper hand, and a humanist pope struggled to turn the tables.
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