Nicholas V

Italian pope (1447-1455)

• Born: November 15, 1397
• Birthplace: Sarzana, Republic of Genoa (now in Italy)
• Died: March 24, 1455
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Nicholas V restored church unity by ending the schism between the Papacy and the conciliar party in Basel. He initiated serious efforts at church reform, helped bring peace to Italy, and sponsored architectural and literary projects in Rome.

Early Life

Tommaso Parentucelli, the future Pope Nicholas V, was born a physician’s son at Sarzana in the Republic of Genoa. Orphaned early, he was forced in his youth to withdraw from the University of Bologna to earn a living as a tutor in Florence. There he met Humanist scholars and artists who enhanced his interest in the classical studies then gaining popularity among the educated classes of northern Italy. In 1419, he was able to return to complete a doctorate in theology. The impressive academic record and serious demeanor of the young priest caught the eye of Niccolò Albergati, the bishop of Bologna, who offered him a position as his assistant. This association, which lasted twenty years, provided Parentucelli with a valuable apprenticeship in church politics.

He accompanied Albergati on many trips, within Italy and beyond. He visited the papal court under Martin V, the first pontiff to reign unchallenged in Rome in more than a century. Parentucelli used every opportunity on his travels to acquire the classical manuscripts that had become his passion. Then, in 1439, his skills in settling a dispute with Greek churchmen at the Florence Council so impressed Pope Eugene IV that, on Albergati’s death in 1443, the pope named Parentucelli to succeed him as bishop of Bologna.

In late 1446, the pope elevated Parentucelli to the cardinalate for his performance as papal diplomat among the German princes. Finally, when Eugene died in March, 1447, Parentucelli was elected his successor by the College of Cardinals. He had been only four years a bishop and less than four months a cardinal, but his spirituality and conciliatory temperament seemed most to have recommended him as a compromise candidate. He took the papal name Nicholas V in honor of his patron Niccolò Albergati. The new pope was a small, homely man of delicate constitution, but he had a driving sense of purpose to confront the problems inherited from Eugene.

The Roman church was in crisis. The Council of Basel, convened half a generation before, continued to reject papal authority, recognizing only its own creation, the antipope Felix V. In Germany, most princes remained either hostile to Rome or neutral in the papal-conciliar struggle. They found effective political leverage in the mutual antagonism of pope and council. In addition, the Church suffered across Europe from scandals and corruptions that went largely unchecked. Simony and concubinage were rife among the clergy, while exotic superstitions beguiled many among the general populace. Some secular lords ruthlessly exploited church property and appointments in their lands. In Italy, the major city-states seemed incapable of peaceful coexistence. Also, the last years of Eugene IV’s troubled pontificate had left Rome and the Papal States dangerously vulnerable and in a state of decay. The papal treasury was empty. The extent to which Nicholas met such challenges and the means that he chose would define his place in papal history.

Life’s Work

Nicholas intensified at once the negotiations with the German princes begun by Eugene IV. Within a year, the new pope had reached a milestone agreement with Austrian emperor Frederick III and most of the princes. The Concordat of Vienna of February, 1448, conceded official imperial recognition of Nicholas V as head of the Church and acknowledged specified papal rights to church revenues and appointments in Germany. In return, the pope accepted certain limits to his taxing and investiture privileges in the German church.

By recognizing the Austrian state as an equal in political negotiations, the pope probably surrendered in the long term more than he received. Yet the Concordat of Vienna in effect sounded the death knell of the Basel Council. With the crumbling of its last major political support, the council declared itself dissolved in April, 1449. Nicholas, the skilled diplomat, had already persuaded the antipope Felix to abdicate in exchange for a generous pension and the official rank of cardinal-bishop, second in honor only to Nicholas himself. All spiritual penalties were annulled, and most conciliarists were reconciled with Rome. On the model of the Vienna agreement, the pope proceeded to individual understandings with the kings of Portugal, Castile, and Poland, as well as with lesser princes.

To celebrate the restored unity of the Western church, Pope Nicholas declared 1450 a jubilee year in which Christians everywhere were invited to Rome. They were offered the spiritual benefits of a rich indulgence (a release from penalties for sins) and the opportunity to visit the sacred places there. The donations of the thousands of pilgrims who swarmed to the papal city filled church coffers to overflowing, which provided Nicholas with the financial means to pursue other major policies.

First, to confront the spiritual neglect, corruption, and schism plaguing the Church at large, the pope in 1450 dispatched a number of cardinal-legates. They were instructed to bring the jubilee indulgence to those unable to come to Rome and, above all, to reform in the name of the Papacy such spiritual deformities as they found. Prominent were the missions to France, northern Italy, and the German empire, including Bohemia.

Most extensive of all was the reform legation through the Germanies of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa; however, the pope’s conciliatory style served more to undermine Nicholas of Cusa’s efforts than to reinforce them. The legate found his decrees against the most serious abuses, such as the cult of bleeding hosts, modified or rescinded by a pontiff fearful of offending German princes and prelates so recently partisans or sympathizers of the Basel Council. Nicholas of Cusa’s legation, the last major reform attempt within the German church before Martin Luther, came to little. The other missions achieved only marginal success.

In providing for the security of Rome and the Papal States, however, Nicholas proved strikingly successful. Recognizing that peace and order at home were the essential preconditions to substantive actions elsewhere, he moved energetically in a number of directions. He built new walls around the city, then dismissed the disruptive mercenaries who had controlled Rome for nearly a decade. They were replaced by strategically located fortifications, manned by new troops under officers chosen for their loyalty and competence. Nicholas imposed similar changes in the Papal States, appointing new governors, usually drawn from the local population. Finally, he granted effective self-government to the city of Rome, conceding rights of taxation and of appointment to civil office to influential local nobles. In such ways, Nicholas peacefully defused the sometimes-furious resentment that the Roman aristocracy had felt toward his predecessor.

With these considerable political and ecclesiastical achievements realized over the first four years of his pontificate, the pope turned full attention to still another realm, the cultural and intellectual. It is for his achievements here that Nicholas would be called the first “Renaissance pope.” Nicholas had once commented that, after God, his greatest love lay in buildings and books. Because of the jubilee donations, he now had the funds to pursue his passions.

It was to proclaim in more visible ways the return of greatness and dignity to the papal city that Nicholas commissioned a sweeping program of architectural construction and renovation. He built new bridges and aqueducts and completed the repair of more than forty dilapidated churches. Most impressive, Nicholas put together an elaborate plan for a project of urban renewal that would encompass both the renovation and the new construction of buildings in the Borgo region adjacent to the Vatican palace and within the palace itself.

In the neoclassical style of the designs, including porticoed streets, round towers, triumphal arches, lush gardens, and fountains, there is evident the close influence of the renowned architectLeon Battista Alberti . Although Nicholas was able to complete only the refurbishing of the Vatican Palace, his plan provided the general framework for future projects, including the completion in the early sixteenth century of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica. Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca were among the painters commissioned by Nicholas to decorate various Vatican buildings, including the walls of his private chapel.

Nicholas also regarded himself as the patron of all who laid claim to Humanist achievement, and he delighted in the company of scholars. He spared no expense in making the papal court a lively center of the new learning and literature. For example, distinguished Humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Poggio were amply compensated for translating the Greek classics of Homer and Thucydides, among others, into a fluid Latin for Western readers.

Nicholas was determined as well to restock a papal library that had in the previous century been dispersed beyond recovery by the upheavals of papal exile and schism. He searched for rare manuscripts, had copies made of others, and donated his private collection. Nicholas left some 1,150 manuscripts, both Latin and Greek, patristic as well as classical. He thereby laid the original foundations of the Vatican library, one of the cultural treasures of Western civilization. After 1453, the pope’s health deteriorated rapidly, marked by recurring and agonizing attacks of gout. To the end, he remained actively engaged in his various endeavors. He was buried in Saint Peter’s Basilica, close to the tomb of his predecessor, Eugene IV.

Significance

The pontificate of Nicholas V constitutes something of a turning point in papal history. His diplomatic successes in ending the conciliar threat, regaining the allegiance of the German princes, and bringing peace to much of Italy portended at least a partial recovery of papal authority and prestige. Further, as a Christian Humanist scholar, bibliophile, and patron of the arts, Nicholas enjoyed considerable success in making Rome for a time the center of art, architecture, and literature in the West. He provided a major stimulus to cultural distinction on the model of the classical past.

The greatest disappointment of his pontificate was the failure after the first few years to carry forward the ambitious program of church reform that he had launched. Particularly discouraging to him was the cold response of the Western states to his plea for a crusade to liberate the Byzantine Empire from the Ottoman Turks.

Yet the reign of Nicholas was, overall, a time of peace, prosperity, and promise after generations of conflict and upheaval in the Church. As the peacemaker pope, Nicholas sought to use all the weapons of papal diplomacy and Renaissance culture he could mobilize to signal the restoration of an unchallenged papal monarchy in Rome and the revived glory of the Western church.

Bibliography

Burroughs, Charles. From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome. Cambridge, Mass.: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991. Burroughs discusses Nicholas’s years as pope and his reputation as a great patron of architecture and city planning. He examines the notion of urbanism in response to Carroll Westfall’s work on the pope’s patronage.

Creighton, Mandell. The Italian Princes, 1464-1518. Vol. 3 in History of the Papacy During the Period of the Reformation. London: Longmans, Green, 1882. Based largely on published sources of the time. The balanced, even-handed treatment has withstood well the test of subsequent scholarship. Especially enlightening on Nicholas’ relations with the Basel Council and with the German Empire, as well as the discussion of the Papacy in its Italian setting.

Pastor, Ludwig von. History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages. Vol. 2. Edited and translated by F. I. Antrobus. St. Louis: Herder Book, 1892. The most detailed study in English of the full range of Nicholas’s activities, including his achievements in cultural patronage, political negotiations, and especially in the extensive reform mission of papal legates in the German empire and neighboring lands. Pastor, among the first scholars granted access to the secret Vatican archives, bases his account largely on manuscript evidence.

Stieber, Joachim W. Pope Eugenius IV, the Council of Basel and the Secular and Ecclesiastical Authorities in the Empire: The Conflict over Supreme Authority and Power in the Church. Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1978. Shows how Nicholas, over the crucial first two years of his pontificate, continued closely certain policies of his predecessor, Eugene IV. Above all, he sought through major concessions to enlist the support of Europe’s secular powers against a conciliar party that sought to reduce the Papacy under the authority of general church councils. In a valuable appendix, Stieber provides a thorough discussion of the main documentary sources for Nicholas’s pontificate.

Stinger, Charles L. The Renaissance in Rome. 1985. Reprint. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Provides in separate segments a clear overview of the main facets of Nicholas’s cultural activities. New preface by author. Updates Pastor’s standard position not only that Nicholas was the first true Renaissance pope but also that his pontificate represents a major turning point in the recovery of the Papacy.

Venchi, Innocenzo, et al. Fra Angelico and the Chapel of Nicholas V. Vatican City State: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 1999. Examines Fra Angelico’s work on the Capella di Niccoló V in Vatican City. Illustrated with photographs by Alessandro Bracchetti.

Vespasiano da Bisticci, Florentino. Renaissance Princes, Popes, and Prelates. Translated by William George and Emily Waters, with an introduction by Myron P. Gilmore. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Contains a lively and very readable short biography of Nicholas by a close friend, the Humanist bibliographer Vespasiano. While the account is invariably laudatory, it offers personal details that provide a vivid sense of the pope’s personality.

Westfall, Carroll W. In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-1455. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. Contends that Nicholas’s vast scheme of renovation for the city of Rome began with the architect Alberti’s concept of urban renewal. Westfall suggests that Alberti’s general designs were adapted by others to specific projects. In the collaboration of pope and architect, Westfall sees a remarkable breakthrough toward a conscious and comprehensive urban design.