'Me?' Cossa asked.

`The Duke of Este is growing too old to lead troops,' the pope said, `and, as the Florentines will be paying the bulk of the costs, they insist upon choosing the commander and they have chosen you.’

`Who are we fighting?' Cossa said,

'I don't need to tell you that this is not to cause a shift in your loyalties, Cossa,' Boniface said sternly. `It is only a temporary campaign to contain the Duke of Milan: to get him out of Bologna, to keep him out of the papal states, and to thwart his ambitions for the conquest of Italy…’

The Duke of Milan was Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The Visconti had been rulers of Milan since the end of the thirteenth century. Their power was so well established and their reputation so great that they had been able to rise from the status of Lombardy bandits and hired lances to intermarry with, the royal houses of England and France, and with the princes of Germany. When Galeazzo II died, in 1378, his heirs, were his son, Gian Galeazzo, and his brother Bernabo, as ruthless a ruffian as anyone ever had for a relative.

Bernabo worked plot after plot to get rid of his nephew, but without effort the nephew managed to detect and defeat these deadly schemes. In perfidy and dissimulation the young man was more than a match for his uncle.

All at once, Gian Galeazzo became absorbed in devotion to the Holy, Spirit. He visited churches, rosary in hand, spent hours of devotion before statues of saints, and tripled his bodyguard. In May 1385 he let it be known widely that he was going to pray at the shrine of the Madonna del Monte at Varese, near Lake Maggiore, which was within his uncle's territory. His bodyguard was commanded by Jacopo del Verme and Antonio Porro, pitiless men.

Bernabo Visconti and his two sons joined Gian Galeazzo at the shrine. Nephew and uncle embraced each other tenderly. Gian Galeazzo held onto his uncle tightly and gave the order, in German, to murder his relatives. Thus did Gian Galeazzo Visconti become the head of the Visconti family and the sole Lord of Lombardy.

His wealth exceeded that of the Holy Roman Emperor who shivered in dripping northern forests. When Gian Galeazzo made war, he hired the best condottieri. When he made peace, he told Europe, he had dismissed his generals, but kept them on half-pay on the condition that they ravage only the lands of his enemies and leave his own untouched. He conquered Padua and Verona. He ruled Bologna. By 1386, the Vipers of his blazonry were -hoisted on the Adriatic and his flags flew over the belfries of Venice. He wrested Pisa away from Florence. In Italy, only Florence, the papal states, Rome and Naples were not possessed by him. It was a matter of desperation to him that they fall before him. He had been preparing for the attack for years and made no effort to conceal his intentions.

`Your real career is in my hands,' Boniface told Cossa. Remember’

`I am only the servant of Your Holiness,' Cossa answered.

`I tell you that the Florentines have asked for you because you should know who is putting the wine in your glass.' They say you are almost a Bolognese.' He looked at Cossa suspiciously, then smiled. 'What do they know of Neapolitans?'

`It is all a mystery to me, Holiness.'

`I doubt that. The son of Giovanni di Bicci di Medici is waiting for you in the anteroom. His name is Cosimo, a lad of seventeen or eighteen years. He will assist you in this compilation, and our people

will see that you have ample working space with sufficient scriptors, correctors, abbreviators and counters. I want your report in five days. We will meet here again at four o'clock next Thursday morning.'

The pope swept out of the room attended by a chamberlain who held up a sheet of numbers, under papal eyes as the two of them walked away from Cossa.

Cossa found Cosimo' di Medici to be a wonderfully agreeable young fellow to whom nothing seemed to be a problem. Cosimo was drawn to Cossa. He later told his father that he had been entirely right, that Cossa was the kind of up-and-coming Church executive that they had been waiting for. Though my wife never agreed with me on this, I thought that Cossa and Cosimo even looked like each other. They were both middle-sized with pronounced noses and, rosy-olive complexions. They both had receding hair and beautiful teeth. Cosimo was the graver of the two, but after all he was a banker, and the more professionally kindly. Cossa had his extraordinary smile, and behind everything he did was a permanent sardonicism as befits a man whom God had absent-mindedly placed in the wrong niche. Cosimo appeared to be the gentler, but he believed more strongly than Cossa that states are not ruled by paternoster`s.

Together they turned out a solid plan: Even Cossa's Uncle Tomas was impressed. The plan explained how the condottieri would be recruited, armed, fed and deployed, and how much it would cost to turn Gian Galeazzo back to Milan.

We went back to Bologna. Using Este's army, Cossa moved harshly to clean out any pockets of treason within the city. Bologna was a part of the state of Milan, Gian Galeazzo's fief. Cossa wrested away the possession of the citadel. He seized all thee strong towns which surrounded Bologna and strengthened the line of the papal states immediately to the south. He moved so boldly and with such force that Gian Galeazzo did not march to retake Bologna, and more time was bought when Florence and Bologna struck: a military alliance with the ring of France.

The real proof of Cossa's success was in the speech which Cosimo's father made before the Signoria, the Council of Florence, which said, in part, 'There is so much worth in this man, Cossa, for having from his boyhood applied himself to letters and, having worked so hard he became not only a celebrated orator and poet but a philosopher also – he turned his mind to other matters – he made himself master-at-arms to a city where he is now esteemed as one of the first soldiers of Italy. Of course, Giovanni di Bicci di Medici was justifying the cost of Cossa to Florence when many other soldiers would have done the job as, well, but sponsoring other soldiers wouldn't have promoted Cossa towards that place where he could realize those enormous gains for the Medici.

When he had secured Bologna, the Medicis' poet-philosopher, Cossa, was recalled to Rome by, his pope to become one of his three private chamberlains. The night before we left, Is said to him that he was about to begin his career at the pinnacle of the Church, at the right hand of its pontiff., I told him that the time had come to forget soldiering and politics and to begin to think of God.

He said to me, `Do you think, Franco Ellera, if there were a God there would be any need for the complexities of this Church? If God were anywhere, he would be within man, don't you think? But instead we are given a counterfeit of this, glorious friendship, styled by cold popes and bishops whose only work has been to build a cage around their God who, by virtue of his omniscience and omnipotence, should not exist if he exists at all – to live in such a cage. God is the sublime idea of man. The Church is, an expanding corruption of functionaries tangled haphazard rules which define religion, not God. Religion is only, political bargaining for souls of which they have no knowledge. But God, if he existed, would be subjective, infusing all selves, the selves which are both heaven and hell, reward everlasting.'