His body was embalmed. While it was exposed for several days dressed in sacerdotal robes with gloves on the hands and the feet bare for the kisses of the faithful, Cosimo di Medici arrived in Bologna at the head of the delegation of Florentine, Sienese and Pisan bankers and businessmen. He asked for a private audience with Cardinal Cossa, which was granted at once. The two men greeted each other with warm, affection.

`You look ill, Cossa,' Cosimo said.

`I am ill.' Cossa brought wine. He asked after Cosimo's father. They discussed the wine; Cosimo was famous for discoursing upon wines.

`What brings you over the mountains?' Cossa asked. `I ask you because I know it cannot be what all the rest of Europe is, plaguing me about.' 'You mean that you take the papacy?'

`More than that. They want me to give up the things I do well to take up the one thing which I would do badly.'

`Everyone is agitated, Cossa. But I am here with some bankers. We have come to talk about business, which is to say the peace of Europe. Florence and Pisa are losing 50,000 gold florins a day through the schism; Venice, Milan and Genoa are just as badly off.'

`Time will cure all that.'

`Perhaps. But all of us – all the bankers and the business people – agree on one thing. The schism must be finished and we must elect a strong pope to stand for the meaning of the Church before the world.'

`So it all starts over again. It is no use, Cosimo. I will not be trapped in the papacy,'

Cosimo smiled at him as if Cossa had uttered some brilliant witticism and talked blandly on. `You are probably the only churchman who can really appreciate just how bad three popes are for business. A crisis of confidence is sweeping Europe. The Church is disintegrating. This erodes interlinking business. The loss in real money is simply enormous and all of it has happened because of this schism.'

`Oh, come, Cosimo.'

The banker's face grew hard as he stared into Cossa's eyes. `I am telling you that the business community is in danger. The people who generate the cash which is passed back to the Church:through benefices and servitia and Peter's Pence, the people without whom there would be, no pomp, and luxury which our mutual customers expect from the Church, have suffered and still face crippling losses. Three popes, three colleges and three curias are an intolerable financial burden because they separate and isolate three trading communities from each other. If this trinity continues, commerce and banking will be ruined.'

`Why we? Why always me? I delivered the Council of Pisa for you. I have seen to it that your bank now receives almost sixty per cent of the banking of the Church, and within two years I will have obtained all of it for you. Is it my fault that the obediences of Benedict and Gregory refused to take the solemn rulings of, the Council of Pisa seriously?'

`They will agree when they know that they are going to get at least some of the reforms which they have been demanding for over -a hundred years. The pope who will be chosen at the coming conclave must manage those demands and carry through just enough reform to make him the one central leader of Christendom. If you lead that crusade for reform – up to a point, of course – I tell you that you will be marching straight upward beyond the papacy to canonization after your death. I personally, will see to that.'

'That is hardly the way to turn me. Jesus! To amuse me greatly, yes, but you are taking all the precious solemnity out of our discussion.'

`You would mock the saints?'

`Cosimo, you and I are friends. We understand each other. Do you think anyone who learned to run the Church at the side of Boniface IX could bring himself to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Not me, surely. Let some priest take over as pope.'

Cosimo smiled ruefully. He shrugged mightily. He sighed heavily. 'Well I tried. If you won't listen, then I must accept that.' His eyebrows went up as if startled by some new thought. `My dear Cossa,' he said, `with all my need to` pour out Europe's troubles I have almost forgotten to tell you of your own astounding good fortune. The day I left Florence the bank received an extraordinary conditional deposit in your name.'

`A deposit?'

`A really amazing amount of gold.', `A conditional deposit?' `Yes.,

'Who made it?'

'Two hundred thousand gold florins. An unspeakable amount of money from a client who says that the gold is to be released to you two days after you have been consecrated, as pope.'

`Who signed it?'

`Someone named Carlo Pendini of Castrocaro in Urbino.' His hard eyes moved over Cossa's shattering face.

32

Cossa sat alone, almost stupefied with shock, feeling as if the blood had left his body. They had stopped him. If he rode to Milan that night, Cosimo and the marchesa would share all the gold he had killed so many comrades to get. He could not leave that behind. He could not be mocked by, knowing it had been taken by his enemies. Decima, the woman he had loved even beyond his love for Catherine Visconti, had taken the Pendini gold to Cosimo and, cold-bloodedly, they had dropped it on him from their great height, crushing him with it. He could feel bitterness rise from his bowels and into his throat as if it were gall. He had lost a great army. He was trapped in the papacy, He was just another workman of the Medici.

I said to him, 'At least you know who your enemies are. Not everyone is that lucky. And you have the power to strike back now that you are doomed to be the pope.'

'Who?' he said, as if he didn't know. `How?'

'The Medici and Manovale.'

'Who is Manovale?' Cossa had never heard the name.

'The marchesa. She brought the gold from Castrocaro to the Medici bank to be used against you. And they used it against you. You can't give it up, so you will be pope. They did it to you, then you did it to yourself. Pay them.'

'Pay them?'

'Give the banking of the Church to the Albizzi in Florence. Tell them they can have all the banking if they follow your plan, then tell them how it all works, how the Medici planned to do it. Insist that they give you two tithes for making them the richest family in Europe.'

“If I did that,'' he said, shaking his head despairingly, 'just as sure as we are standing here, either the Medici would have me murdered or the marchesa would.'

"Then we must put together a large escort and ride tonight to Milan, where the duchess will give.

you her army to destroy the Medici. Take Florence. Force Bologna to give you the marchesa. Execute her.'

'I can decide nothing except, that to be pope must be my fate. My father took me away from a business which had been carried on for four generations by the eldest son because he had a vision or a dream that I would be pope one day. Everything has, conspired to make me pope, everything.'

'Don't mock me, Cossa.'

'I do not mock you! I, am helpless and I agree they have done me in, therefore all the more do I want to enjoy whatever you can come up with to repay; them, even if I will never be able to summon the will to do it.'

`You ran do anything. You will be pope. You will send a message to the emperor asking him to strip her of her title. Nothing could be worse for her.

'At the bottom of my soul rests a punishment for every one which is far worse than that, but I thank you for thinking how we might avenge ourselves on my enemies. I can't afford even to think of the Medici and Decima as my enemies. I am trapped by them, but only they can bring food to my cage.' He seemed to drive out his despair. `That was all settled when I was born. I am to be pope, but what am I going to do about Catherine Visconti? She is locked inside a more, terrible cage and she needs me more than I need the Medici.'