Pius II

Italian pope (1458-1464)

• Born: October 18, 1405
• Birthplace: Corsignano, Republic of Siena (now Pienza, Italy)
• Died: August 14/15, 1464
• Place of death: Ancona, Papal States (now in Italy)

Through his elegant rhetoric and skilled diplomacy, Pius II reconciled differences among Christians to bring some peace to Western Christendom and tried vainly to mobilize a Crusade to liberate Constantinople from the Turks.

Early Life

Pius (PI-uhs) II was born Enea Silvio Piccolomini in the village of Corsignano (which changed its name to Pienza when its most famous son was elected to the Papacy) of a noble but poor family. Piccolomini left home to begin his studies at the University of Siena in 1423, but he really began his career in 1431, when he accompanied Domenico Capranica to the Council of Basel. For the next four years, Enea learned his trade, polishing his rhetorical skills in speaking and writing and earning the trust of others, for whom he conducted many diplomatic errands. On one of his missions to Scotland, he fulfilled a vow to walk barefoot for ten miles to a shrine; as a result, he froze his feet so badly that he was disabled for the rest of his life.

In 1436, he obtained a seat on the Council of Basel, which soon moved to Florence. At Florence, he participated in the election of Amadeus VIII of Savoy as Pope Felix V. As ecclesiastical conflicts raged and Felix was declared an antipope, Piccolomini left Rome in 1442 to enter into the diplomatic service of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III of Habsburg. Welcomed by Frederick, who promptly named him poet laureate, Piccolomini wrote most of his pagan poetry and prose during this time. Writing in the style of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galeotto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620), Piccolomini wrote a play, Chrysis (1444), and a more substantial prose romance, De duobus amantibus Eurialo et Lucresia (1444; The Tale of Two Lovers , 1560), which endeared him to the literary Humanists of the Italian Renaissance.

All this activity ended, to the skepticism of his peers, when in 1446 Piccolomini announced that he was “forsaking Venus for Bacchus,” by which he meant that he was renouncing sexual license for the wine of the Eucharist. He took holy orders as a deacon and was reconciled to the church hierarchy by Pope Eugene IV. After that, ascent was swift. Pope Nicholas V appointed him bishop of Trieste in 1447 and promoted him to the bishopric of Siena in 1449. Callistus III made him cardinal in 1456. Finally, on August 19, 1458, a sharply divided College of Cardinals looked for a peacemaker and elected Piccolomini pope; he boldly chose the name of a second century saint, Pius, to be “reminiscent of pious Aeneas.”

Life’s Work

Pius II faced an enormous challenge. Surrounded on all sides by rivals and enemies, he would need all his diplomatic skills to play his enemies against one another. From the northeast there was the Papacy’s oldest rival, the Holy Roman Empire which people had long since declared to be neither “holy” nor “Roman” nor an “empire,” but which remained powerful. Pius relied on his previously congenial diplomatic service with Frederick to defuse this threat. From the northwest there was the Papacy’s most dangerous enemy, the kingdom of France, which nearly fifty years earlier had been forced to give up its Avignon antipope and which, a half century hence, would invade Italy. Pius would fight his fiercest battle with King Louis XI.

On the Italian peninsula itself, in the north, the commercial city-state republics of Venice, Florence, and others defied papal pretensions; in the south, the shaky throne of Naples was attracting the covetous attention of both Spanish Aragon and French Anjou. Pius could ignore the northern threat; he tried to mediate between the latter claimants. Overriding all other threats for the leader of Western Christendom, however, were two supreme challenges: one from within conciliarism and one from without the calamitous fall of the capital of Eastern Christianity, Constantinople, to the Turks in 1453.

During the first four years of his reign, Pius persuaded France’s new king, Louis XI, to withdraw his support for the Pragmatic Sanction in order to gain papal support for the French claim to the kingdom of Naples. This diplomatic coup was designed to nullify simultaneously the conciliarism and the enmity of France. The Pragmatic Sanction of 1438 represented the high point of the conciliar movement, the ecclesiastical movement to subordinate the pope to the church councils. The French kings and most French clergy had supported the sanction because they hated the clerical power of Rome. Pius had inherited his predecessors’ policy, which supported the Aragonese claim to Naples, but he suggested to the French king that he could back the Angevin claim in exchange for some concessions. This diplomatic feat was Pius’s only political success, and he was unable to capitalize on it.

The diplomatic situation was complicated because there were other players in the game. In fact, Louis’s repudiation of the conciliar movement stemmed more from his fear of his own clergy in France (called Gallicans) than from any foreign policy consideration. The Gallican clergy opposed many aspects of monarchical rule. Louis was also fighting the Burgundian duke who claimed the French throne. Unfortunately, Pius was unable to follow through on his bargain with Louis. Finding that he needed Spanish support for his greater enterprise, the pope was compelled to turn to Burgundy, making concessions that solidified French hostility. The conciliar movement, however, was mortally wounded, and Pius deserves partial credit for administering its coup de grâce.

For the last two years of his reign, Pius prepared for the Crusade to liberate Constantinople from the Ottoman Turks. Eight centuries of fighting had culminated in the city’s capture in 1453, only five years before Pius’s election. In his eyes, a crusade was essential to vindicate his life, his career, and his faith. At the personal level, a crusade was the only way that Pius could prove to his public, to his skeptical Humanist peers who were angry at his desertion and to the anxious religious constituents who were not yet convinced of his piety and faith, that he was what he professed to be: a true Christian. At the political level, this was the best way that Pius could protect the Papacy from its internal enemies.

In Commentarii (1464; The Commentaries of Pius II , 1936-1937), which he wrote in the last years of his life, Pius had four themes, which were largely political. On the Italian peninsula, to recover papal territory and support the anti-French candidate to the throne of Naples, Sigismondo Malasta of Rimini had to be fought. On the Continent, the pope had to curb France, but he also had to intervene judiciously in the turmoil of the empire, where Frederick III was embattled. In the moral realm, there was the nonreligious materialism of the Venetians, Florentines, and even Sienese as dangerous as the outright heresy of the Hussites in Bohemia. Finally, there was what many considered the greatest menace of all: the Turks.

Pope Pius’s Crusade was a failure. Providentially finding alum mines in Italy to help raise money, he decided to lead the Crusade himself. Carried on a litter because of his ruined feet, he embarked on June 18, 1464. Accompanied by a handful of loyal troops from Rome, Pius crossed to the shores of the Adriatic Sea. At the rendezvous, there were virtually no Italians. Louis XI from France did not come; the Aragonese from Spain and Naples, the Burgundians, and Emperor Frederick III did not come. During the night of August 14/15, at Ancona on the Adriatic Sea, far from Constantinople, Pius died.

Significance

The question still lingers: Who was dominant? Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Renaissance Humanist and man of letters, or Pope Pius II, Crusader and would-be martyr? Pius was not a mystic like Joan of Arc, whose accomplishments and martyrdom streaked across the European landscape when Piccolomini was in his twenties. He was not a poet or scholar like his idols and peers, whose literary achievements were transforming Europe throughout his lifetime. He was not a charismatic reformer capable of cleansing the Church from the inside. All he had learned from his formal education was to write elegantly and speak persuasively to educated people. All he had inherited from his medieval profession was the desire to protect the papal office and to start a crusade.

History has remembered neither the Humanist nor the pope, and scholars who study him in the context of other pursuits have not been kind. In a speech to a group of cardinals, Pius frankly observed that the Europe of his day had rejected the medieval concept of a crusade without having yet awakened to the Turkish threat to Western civilization. When he said this in 1462 (before he was committed to his futile project), he was aware of his own variety of motives, both practical and idealistic. Nevertheless, he did decide to mobilize the gigantic defense operation necessary to save Christian Europe from the Turks although he did not know how to proceed. All he could manage was to be carried in the direction of the battle and wait for either natural or supernatural intervention. He waited in vain.

What remains, then, are his writings. Although he ranks as a second-rate writer of the Italian Renaissance, being neither as good a storyteller as Boccaccio nor as incisive politically as Niccolò Machiavelli nor as philosophically profound as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, he was adept enough to rise from poverty in a world of elegant Humanists. In addition, he was concerned enough to perceive that the greatest peril of the day emanated not from antipopes but from materialism in the West and the Turks from the East. He was brave enough to act on his observations with courage and commitment to the very end.

Bibliography

Abulafia, David. “Ferrante I of Naples, Pope Pius II, and the Congress of Mantua (1459).” In Montjoie: Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer, edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Rudolf Hiestand. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1997. Essay discussing Ferrante I, who Pius had preferred for the throne of Naples over the claims of the French House of Anjou, and the consequences of that preference for the pope’s attempts to mount a crusade in 1459. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Ady, Cecilia M. Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini) the Humanist Pope. London: Methuen, 1913. This older study was written by an authority on late medieval and Renaissance Italy. It is favorable and sympathetic to someone caught in the predicament of being both a Humanist intellectual and a political leader of an institution not respected by Humanist intellectuals. Outdated.

Gragg, Florence A., and Leona C. Gabel. Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope. New York: Putnam, 1959. Gragg and Gabel delineate four major themes in the introduction to this abridged translation of The Commentaries of Pius II: Italian political conflicts, both between the pope and secular opponents and between two factions for the throne of Naples; France’s malevolent presence; the disintegration of the amorphous Holy Roman Empire; and the planned Crusade against the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered Constantinople in 1453.

Kallendorf, Craig W., ed. and trans. Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Collects three significant fifteenth century Humanist treatises, including Pius II’s “The Education of Boys,” as well as writings by Pier Paolo Vergerio and Battista Guarino. Useful, not only for Pius’s primary text, but also for the juxtaposition of two competing contemporary visions of Humanist education that help to place the pope’s thought in its larger context. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Martels, Zweder von, and Arjo Vanderjagt, eds. Pius II, “el Più Expeditivo Pontifice”: Selected Studies on Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, 1405-1464. Boston: Brill, 2003. Collection of papers presented at an academic workshop on Pius II in the Netherlands. Essays discuss the pope’s educational program, his ethics, his historical and geographical publications, and court culture. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Pius II. Commentaries. Edited by Margaret Meserve and Macello Simonetta. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Volume 1 only. A new and comprehensive collection of Pius’s autobiographical writings. Includes maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Rowe, John Gordon. “The Tragedy of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini.” Church History 30 (1961): 288-313. A savage critique of Pius as a Humanist and as a pope. This review is valuable to balance the usually positive view of Pius II. Unless a pope was spectacularly villainous as many were in this period most are sympathetically treated by both popular and academic critics. Since the literature in English on Pius is limited, this critique must serve. Ample bibliography.

Woodward, William Harrison. Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators. 1897. Reprint. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964. Woodward devotes most of his attention to Vittorino da Feltre. Although Pius is placed in his historical context, he is portrayed as not very important. No bibliography.