Humanist Conspiracy

People are endlessly fascinated by Popes, the papacy and the Vatican, the sacred seat of power on the Tiber. Think of Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian (Hadrian the Seventh), Robert Hugh Benson’s Silvester III (Lord of the World), Morris West’s Kiril I (Shoes of the Fisherman) and Anthony Burgess’s Gregory XVII (Earthly Powers), or recent riffs on Vatican intrigue such as Ralph McInerny’s The Third Revelation or Piers Paul Read’s The Death of a Pope. This is but a modest sampling; and these are but fictional popes and fictional events.

Anthony F. D’Elia’s Paul II, in contrast, is the stuff of history. Be assured, however, that this pope had no less a fraught life than these fictional equivalents.

A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome is a skillful investigation by this Queen’s University historian into the circumstances surrounding an alleged plot to assassinate the pope in 1468. The conspirators plotted to kill the pontiff during the height of the carnival festivities. The would-be assassins were led by members of the Roman Academy, scholars whose humanist love for classical philosophy and sexual liberality ensured papal distrust and hostility. The ringleaders were arrested, imprisoned and tortured.

Mardi Gras was to be the day of the deed. Not surprisingly, having been informed at the penultimate moment, Pietro Barbo, or Paul II, is gripped with a “sudden terror”:

More precisely, this pope. After all, the idea of murdering a pope—indeed, the act of murdering a pope—had been tried in the past, and on occasion with success. It is not the novelty that is surprising.

What is surprising are the reasons. Ascertaining the why is D’Elia’s task. But the how of how he came to this undertaking is as intriguing as the investigation:

An amalgam of interconnected but discrete factors is advanced with great care and with scrupulous attention to the voices of the players themselves. D’Elia quotes regularly and at great length from the letters as well as other contemporary sources to build up his case for the conspiracy. But, more importantly still, he crafts his argument in such a way as to allow the reader to move beyond the various reasons themselves to glimpse the personalities behind the plot. Conspiracies are often elusive phenomena, as much the result of a deliberate alliance of several forces to achieve an agreed-upon end as a neat construct to explain a chain of actions otherwise inexplicable. Sometimes, they are the product of fear, both individual and collective.

Undoubtedly, Paul II had his enemies and had reason to be on guard. Several of his immediate predecessors—Eugene IV, Nicholas V and Pius II—were not unaccustomed to plots, near escapes, exile, triumphant returns, and military and political treacheries of Shakespearean dimensions. It was the way of the papacy and had been for some time. After all, the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy, also known as the years of the Avignon Papacy (1309–77), followed by the Great Schism (1378–1417), marked a low point in papal history. It was only with the Council of Constance (1414–18) that some measure of closure was brought to this prolonged period of disunity, warring antipopes and chronic institutional instability.

Paul II was a legitimate pope, resident in Rome and not in the Palais des Papes in the south of France, but he still had to deal with the rising influence of the cardinalate, the intellectual appeal of conciliarism (a notion that sought to subordinate papal power to that of a council), the shifting priorities of the larger realms of France and the Holy Roman Empire, and the external threat of the Ottoman Turks under the brilliant and fearsome Sultan Mehmet II. If that were not enough, he had heresy and apostasy growing like weeds in the Eternal City itself.

And then he had the Roman Academy, a body of humanist scholars, with which to contend. One of their number, Platina, a dismissed papal secretary who had lobbied for a council with the express intention of deposing Paul II, was a formidable critic of the papal monarchy who kept company with the likes of Filippo Buonaccorsi or Callimachus, a love poet of provocative verse designed to subvert Catholic morality. Everywhere he looked, Paul II saw a threat: the members of the Roman Academy were a treasonous crowd in collusion with the “perfidious Turk,” dissolute purveyors of homoerotic poetry, staunch advocates of the ideals of republicanism, sworn opponents of papal rule in Rome and thankless sycophants with an eye to personal advantage. They also detested Paul’s “unsavoury” proclivities, which included a fondness for grandiose festivities, tiresomely exhortatory parrots and crushingly ornate tiaras, to say nothing of his vainglorious obsession with his physical beauty and the application of rouge when appearing in public. Paul was not much of an ascetic.

And, as D’Elia notes,

Paul was convinced they would go all the way. Shrove Tuesday would be their undoing. Tortured and incarcerated in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the humanists wrote desperate letters pleading their cause of innocence, arguing for clemency, defending the papacy against its detractors, employing the classical Dialogue as a tool to remonstrate, defend and edify by showing how pagan philosophy and Christian theology can coexist and, finally, through simple self-abasement, begging for succour from Christ’s Vicar.

Although there is no conclusive evidence that a conspiracy to murder Paul II was afoot on the eve of Lent 1468, D’Elia painstakingly establishes the plausibility of such a conspiracy by deftly employing an array of distinct but related causes and showing how they could easily coalesce to bring down the Barbo pontificate. And in doing this he paints a portrait of mid 15th-century Rome that is illuminating and serves as a corrective to those who hold the jaundiced and indefensible view that the papacy is constitutionally irreformable and that things have never been worse in Rome than they are now.