40

Ladislas's advance troops, despite the man's immediate excommunication and the crusade which Cossa had preached against him, were occupying the monastery of St Agnes directly outside the walls of Rome. Cossa had no commander he could trust, no marchesa to advise him, and he wondered grimly if Ladislas would dare put him in prison. Cossa's situation was not only desperate politically and militarily – Ladislas's army besieging Rome, Carlo Malatesta closing off the north of Italy, Naples lost, Sforza deserted, Bologna in revolt, and famine in Rome but his father, leading the enormous

Cossa family, that forest of grasping hands, was waiting for him three rooms away.

'Don't fathers know that they may only be revered when they are far away?' Cossa cried. `And he has brought the whole, fucking family with him’

He sat glumly and allowed me to wind a flannel strip around his throat to suggest to his family that his voice had failed. If he could not talk, then he could agree to less.

'You will be the spokesman but you will say nothing, you understand?' he told me. He often spoke to other cardinals as brusquely, so I took no offence. I sought to comfort him.

'I understand, Cossa. But this is your own family. Can it, hurt if you say a couple of words to them?'

`Please! No advice!'

He breathed unevenly for a moment or two but, regained control. `And don't let my father frighten you. You are a prince of the Church. Has the small throne been set, up in there?'

`There is even a nice cushion on it.'

Cossa stood up. He motioned to me to precede him to the door of the chamber. We went into the corridor, where I motioned to four deacons, dressed severely in black and white, and six of the palace guard, commanded by the greying Captain Munger, in full uniform. The guard led the procession. I wore my scarlet robes. His Holiness wore a white alb. The four deacons closed the rear. The procession moved solemnly about fifty feet down the hall, where its outriders flung open the double doors on the left side. The swaying snake glided into the room. Cossa went to the throne at the far wall and seated himself, a soldier and a deacon on either side of him. I stood where I could command the best view of the room.

Cossa postponed his first look at what he expected to be an ocean of Cossas, but when he looked up only his father and his Uncle Tomas were standing there next to a stranger.

`Where is the rest of the family?' Cossa asked blankly in a perfectly sound voice.

`First, the blessing, Baldassare,' his father said, `then the business.'

Cossa glanced at me with bewilderment. I gave him a small benign. shrug. Cossa blessed the two old men and the stranger, then chairs were brought in and they sat down directly in front of him.

`Send everyone out of the room except Franco Ellera,' the Duke of Santa Gata rasped. The pope signalled and the deacons and the soldiers left.

'Poppa, where is the rest of the family?' Cossa said with some disappointment,

`What you see of your family is in Rome,' his father said. 'The rest of your family is being held in prison in Naples, and all our possessions and fortunes are forfeit unless you come to an agreement with this noble lord,' he nodded towards the stranger. 'What's wrong with your throat?'

'My throat? Ah. Oh, yes. I am almost recovered. Who are you?' he asked the stranger.

The man managed to bow, while seated. `I am ambassador-procurator of His Royal Highness Ladislas, King of the Two Sicilies, who wishes to extend peace to Rome.'

'Peace?'

`Yes, Holiness.'

`Did the swine King of Naples need to expose my father to the pain of such a journey at his age?'

`Your father has exhausted a cook, a courtesan, a cask of wine and me,' the ambassador said.

`Where is the rest of my family?'

`Safe and living in comfort at Ladislas's expense. They have at least a week before the first of them will be killed. But, of course, no one need come to any harm if we can, conclude a treaty of peace.'

Cossa called a consistory of cardinals to discuss the treaty. It was proposed through me to the Neapolitan ambassador that the King of Naples should acknowledge Pope John XXIII ass the only pope in Christendom. To Cossa's surprise, this was received well-because a possible ally, the King of France, had advised Ladislas to abandon Pope Gregory, and because Sigismund, whom, Ladislas feared, had. endorsed Cossa.

Returning to Naples, Ladislas assembled a hand-picked council, of prelates and nobles, then declared that, because of their advice, he had hitherto been mistaken in believing that Pope Gregory XII had been canonically elected; therefore, he forever renounced him and proclaimed the ascendancy of Pope John XXIII with the, obedience of all Neapolitan dominions. He volunteered to release all Cossa's relatives and all officers held captive in his realm.

‘You see?' I told Cossa. `What did I tell you? Every business has its good seasons and its bad seasons.'

Cossa, on his side, renounced Louis of Anjou, recognized Ladislas as King of the Two Sicilies, and appointed him to be, Grand Gonfalonier of the Holy Roman Church. He was also forced to pledge to pay Ladislas 120,000 gold florins and had to give as security for the payment the towns of Ascoli, Viterbo, Perugia and Benevento.

Ladislas, in his part, offered to repay all the arrears in papal revenues which were overdue from the kingdom of Naples and agreed to induce Gregory to renounce his claims to the papacy within three months. If he refused, Ladislas volunteered to send him off as a prisoner to Provence

In the finale haggling, forty-one days after the first treaty meeting, it was agreed through the Neapolitan ambassador that Ladislas would keep a hundred lances for the service of the Church in exchange for his appointment as the legate to the March of Ancona and the payment of 50,000 florins: a somewhat one-sided arrangement, Cossa thought bitterly.

The treaty was finally signed: a sad, if not utterly disreputable, alliance built with the cement of perfidy and the stones of faithlessness. But Cossa wrote to the marchesa, now in Milan, that the advantage was on his side. `I acquired a substantial territorial increase which must acknowledge my obedience,' he wrote. `Because of that, and because of the treaty, the price of grain fell in Rome to half its former price, something which I had the sense to profit from in the grain markets before it happened.'

To characterize the mockery of the treaty, it was not long before Ladislas sent Sforza north to close off any surprise aid to Cossa from the Florentines or the Sienese, dispatched the Neapolitan fleet to blockade the mouth of the Tiber, and sent word ahead that he was marching to re-take Rome with a mighty army. The prices of grain and wine soared again. Cossa made another small fortune, but it became clearer and clearer that he would soon be a fugitive.

Pope John XXIII and the Roman nobles enacted a brief but uplifting tableau when the pope announced Ladislas's imminent conquest of the city. He said unto them, `I place you on your own feet and ask you to act well and faithfully by your Holy Mother Church,' not to fear Ladislas, nor any man in this world, for I am ready to die with you for the sake of the Holy Church and the Roman people.' His household was fully packed and he was ready to run when he had finished the speech. The Romans, frantic to move him on his way so that they could welcome Ladislas, said unto Pope John XXIII, `Holy Father, doubt not but that the whole of Rome is ready to die with you. Romans would rather eat their children than be subject to the King-of Naples.'

On the night of 7 June 1412, Cossa, with thirteen cardinals, the entire curia and a combined household of 1100 people, albeit with far fewer camp followers on his way out than on his way in, fled from Rome. The next night the city was taken by Ladislas. The main body of the fugitives, less a few of the elderly who had been overpowered by the heat or were too feeble to ride, reached Sutri beyond Lake Bracciano, but Cossa didn't feel safe there. Before morning he set out again with his great baggage for Viterbo, famed for its handsome fountains and beautiful women, where he was told that instructions had been received from his pursuers that they were not to be done any injury.