`Then it's clear, isn't it? They want someone else to handle the fighting while you concentrate on protecting the Church from reformers and on building up the benefices which have been reduced to so little for them. The popes are now men of peace, Cossa. The days of the fighting popes, the days of Gelasius II and Calixtus, were nearly three hundred years ago.

'What about the war? If Ladislas takes over here, what goodwill a few extra florins be to the cardinals? To keep, whatever he can take, he will agree to all the reforms the princes demand.'

`The Duke of Anjou will handle those battles. The Florentines and the Sienese will handle the funding to seal off Ladislas in the south. The electors will give you Sigismund in the north to protect the benefices and keep the peace, Italy and the Church will be held together for you, giving you all the room and security you will need as pope, and you will rule.'

`No! I won't be trapped in this! I have other: plans.' `What plans?'

`Big plans!'

`Cossa, hear me… If you reject this papacy, you won't get out of this alive. If you deny the people who will be knocking down your doors to convince you to accept the papacy, then be sure of one thing another council will be forced upon us, which will probably elect a fourth sitting pope to rule over an even weaker Church. The French will get their reform,' D'Ailly will get his red hat, and at that council your desperate supporters will see to it that you are found a heretic and they will burn you to death.'

'I won't be there for anything like that.'

`Listen to me just one more time, for I have counselled you well over the years. I say to you that, if you decide to mock the powerful men who travelled across Europe to persuade you to save the Church in this desperate hour, then you must believe me that your days are numbered.'

31

The Piazza Maggiore in front of the Anziani palace looked is if it had been turned into a country fair. Knots of people were everywhere, all across it, in front of the church of San Petronio and the podesta's palace on the long side. Street bands played, courtesans under affected parasols strolled among the men. There were many uniforms forms of different countries.

We overlooked the huge piazza from the short, west side and I watched more and more of them troop in through the street at the corner of the Portico di Banchi, each one bringing his small contribution to the widening chaos in Cossa's mind.

He received the Duke of Burgundy, John of Nassau, Pierre D'Ailly, Count Pippo Span, representing Sigismund, King of Hungary, a delegation of French bankers, his own father and his Uncle Tomas, 230 Benedictine monks, a committee of 28 German commercial guilds, 300 Carmelite nuns, 34 officers of the armies of the papal states, and an international delegation of learned lawyers, at intervals of two hours over the next day and a half, and replied to their urgent proposals with more conciliatory words than he had used upon the marchesa. I was there. I listened to all of it.

Anjou and Nassau spoke to him in almost the same words, in different meetings, conveying views as worldly as Cossa's.

`I can name you eight men,' each said to him differently, `military commanders who are your equal. I in fact, am one of them. As for the administration of the day-to-day business of the Church, you have already staffed that with the best people in Christendom they are the same people who have run the chancellery and the chamber, who have run everything as if they had the memory of God since the year 380, when Christianity was made the official religion of the empire. As you know, the college trusts you to manage their benefices, but let us not ever doubt that every single member of it knows money almost as well as you do. You have everything backwards, Cossa. What the Church needs is a famous general who is a famous administrator and a famous lawyer as well as being a famous statesman. It needs a strong man who has the habit of winning. That is why only you must accept the papacy.'

Pierre D'Ailly, still Bishop of Cambrai, not the cardinal he had expected to be at Pisa, although he knew that Cossa could have compelled Alexander to confer the red hat upon him, spoke out resolutely, for the King of France and the theologians at the University of Paris. `What must be implemented is the strong reform of the Church in its head and its members, Cossa,' he said. `If there is no immediate reform then we all know that the Gallican Church will go back to Benedict and, we know you don't want that. By, bringing reform, you can go down in history as a great pope. You have come too far in your career as a churchman to turn back. You can only go forward. Nor can you believe that, if you refuse the Church's cry for help, you will be able to go anywhere at all.'

`What does that mean?' Cossa said with the old hostility.

`I am sure you know exactly what it means,'

'All right, Bishop,' Cossa snarled at him, `tell your people that I have absorbed their words. I am a soldier. I have a horror of being a prisoner of the papacy, yet I hear you, I am sympathetic to what you have said to me. Will that do you?'

`Where is that golden future which used to smile upon me every morning as I opened, my eyes?' he asked me. `It has turned to brass, Franco. If old Filargi were alive in this palace, we would have owned the world. And if I couldn't keep him alive forever, I could have had him stuffed to sit there behind his beautiful, benign smile, a hand raised in benediction. Well, we are not going, to wait here and let them spring the trap which will drop me into the papacy. We are going to get out of Bologna and make the run to Milan as soon as possible. Tell our people to prepare – Bernaba, Palo, Bocca – all of them. Tell Ueli Munger to pick a troop of 200 of the most loyal men in the guard, We'll be safe and back in business in Milan in a few days' time with one half of the gold florins in the papal treasury in the chests of our train…I earned that money, so I am certainly entitled to half of it. We'll be, back in business: We'll take over this whole peninsula. Catherine Visconti will be beside herself with joy and nothing, nothing or nobody, is going to persuade me to ruin what is left of my life by accepting the papacy. Get them ready. We will leave immediately after I have had one last meeting with Cosimo, who is on his way here now.'

He went on with his plans, talking excitedly, and looking like the old-time Cossa. He would answer the outcry which the Medici would organize in Florence, Siena, Perugia and throughout the papal states by raising an army in Milan before they could try to come to get him. With an army between himself and the papacy, between himself and the Medici and all their bankers and businessmen; he would use Catherine Visconti's gold to buy back the favour of the college of cardinals and, in good time, whoever was to be pope would appoint him Archbishop of Milan. He thought of that and it brought him sadness because, by walling off the Medici, he would be separating himself from the marchesa, but Catherine had lived as royalty all her life and she could counsel him on the correct political moves. He would be free, a cardinal of the Church and ruler of Italy. He would lead condottieri in a force which would, multiply and multiply until he was the greatest power of Europe. With Catherine Visconti, her gold and her army, he could win anything.

That night, Alexander made a good end, summoning his cardinals around his bed and saying, `Let not your heart be troubled. I ascend to my Father and to your Father.' He commended France and the University of Paris to their care and said that any decree made at the Council of Pisa had been founded on justice and integrity without deceit or fraud. `Peace I give unto you. Peace I leave with you.' Shortly after, midnight on 4 May he died. He had reigned for ten months.