The two popes defaulted again on the third and fourth summonings at these sessions.
While the council deliberated in sanctity, day by day, the marchesa and her apparatus entertained its cardinals, archbishops and bishops by night. Cardinal Spina remained as Pope Gregory's legate at the court of Naples, but Rosa visited. Maria Giovanna in Pisa to help out with providing pleasure. They. used mama's `little house' in Porto Giorgio, inviting Giovanni di Bicci di Medici and his son Cosimo as their set-pieces at the parties, as prelates always found comfort in the presence of bankers.
Helene had rented a small house adjacent to, the quarters of the French delegation to the council. In Paris, in January, she had come to an agreement with Pierre D'Ailly that, if Cossa succeeded in organizing the council to give him the papacy, Cossa would make the bishop a cardinal in return for D'Ailly's active support. To establish his goodwill under the agreement, D'Ailly made an eloquently powerful appeal, before Pisa was convened, for a general council of the Church, which was heard across Europe from his sounding board of the Synod of Aix. He was a gifted orator and he asserted that, since the Church had both a natural and a divine right to its unity, it could and must call a council without papal sanction. D'Ailly, confessor to the King of France and treasurer of the Ste Chapelle, was one of the richest churchmen at Pisa, the magnet who drew cardinals to Helen's dinner parties. At more than one of these dinners, D'Ailly said to the engaged and thoughtful cardinals, `This schism has been a form of civil war within the Church and there is not a churchman today who does not cry out for its end. This council is the means, to end it, to be sure, but, when the man is, named by you as the unitary pope to bind up the wounds of Christendom, he must not be a pastoral pope. He must be a lawyer, an executive and a trained fighter who can weave the Church into one whole piece again, and he must be strong, determined and experienced in battle to be able to quell the partisan feelings among Christians.'
When he was asked to name such a man, D'Ailly would grow thoughtful, stroking his beard. `I would say there is only one such man,' he would answer. `Baldassare Cossa; who even now is beating away the threat of Ladislas so that we may complete the, business of this convention,'
Each of the marchesa's daughters had different spokesmen for Cossa on different nights – and there was not a night throughout the entire session of the council when each of them did not entertain strenuously. Rosa read to six cardinals, two archbishops and four bishops a letter from Cardinal Spina (which she had written herself) in which Spina seemed to consecrate Cossa as `the saviour of the Church who waits for our call from the field of battle to do his duty'. Cosimo di Medici called upon the cardinals for European stability, which had not existed since the schism had fractured the body of the Church. `The scourge of schism can be driven from that body,' he would tell dinner assembly after assembly, `but what have we gained unless the new pope, alone upon the throne of Peter, is able to marshal the powers and weaknesses of the organization of his Church into one seamless garment. That takes a strong man, your Eminences, a soldier rather than a pastor, an executive rather.than a theologian.'
Maria Giovanna or the marchesa would lift Cossa's name into a dinner-table conversation and Cosimo. would seize upon it, brandishing it like a flag, telling them that, `Cossa understands the problems of business. Cossa is a student of finances. Cossa is the only tailor we have to sew up the ragged purse of the Church.'
The marchesa made certain the prelates knew that, if they were firm and continually vocal in the cause of Cossa's candidacy, Cossa would not forget such advocacy. By this she moved such key churchmen as Alaman Adimar, Archbishop of Pisa, John of Portugal, Lucius Aldebrandinus and Guillaume Fillastre to look for Cossa's gratitude. Large amounts of Medici money were spent. Splendid gifts were made: Henricus Minutulus, a Neapolitan' cardinal was given two Irish stallions and six blooded brood mares from France. Francesco Ugoccione of Urbino, Cardinal Priest of the Sainted Quatro Coronati, was given a set of female triplets from the western highlands of Ethiopia. De Anna, Caracciola and Maramaur preferred to accept future benefices in return for their votes for Cossa.
I was neatly split in half by the demands of Cossa and the marchesa. I spent half my time in Pisa: Bernaba was doing an enormous business there and the marchesa wanted me to attend at least parts of every party she or her daughters gave, attend behind screens and at concealed listening posts so that I could hear everything which was being said and done on Cossa's behalf. The other, half of nay time I spent reporting it all back to Cossa in the field.
Cossa listened to my reports with his fullest attention and sometimes he would sigh and say, `I don't know, how the Church ever came to be seen as a spiritual organization.'
24
Cossa and I had the war to fight. Ladislas's army would press north and we would fling it south again. During one such afternoon in the field, Cossa's forces separated eleven units of lances from the body of the Neapolitan army and demolished them, smashing heads as if they were-summer melons. The heat of the battle was succeeded by a damp, cold night. Cossa fell ill. His chest and arms became so weak that he would not move himself and seemed to be on the point of death. I held him down and, to prevent the whole camp from knowing our most guarded secret, I had to bind Cossa's mouth with a cloth, so much did he rave on about dead men and the pope's gold.
The illness lasted in diminishing force for three days; then, at last, he could travel. I took him to Siena, where he was waited upon by the Counts of Sevrino, and Moergeli, the most famous Swiss herbalist.
When Cossa felt strong enough again, we picked up the advance of his army, which was following the Neapolitans. We travelled to Radicofani, then crossed by way of Abbatia and the town of Piano, where in a green meadow the people made us shelters of brushwood and received the cardinal with cheering and rejoicing. He gave them his blessing from horseback and rose on to Aquapendente, then to Bolsena, which had been a populous town destroyed by Hawkwood. Only its rich soil, the convenient lake and its position on the road to Rome had saved it from complete destruction. As we rode towards Orvieto, I told Cossa about what he had babbled in his sickness. Cossa said, `It must be that we live in many places at once. What you tell, me I said seems so real to me that I must have been there at Castrocaro as I said it to you here in a delirium.
The next day we came to the rocky mountain about six stades high, rising in the middle of a valley. The plateau on top was about three miles around. Cliffs, none lower than twenty ells, were its walls. Ladislas had hit the town five days before, leaving half-ruined towers and crumbling rubble, but the church of the Blessed Virgin, the inferior to no church in Italy, stood intact in the middle of the city; its interior walls and floor were of vari-coloured marble and its wide, high facades were filled with statues whose faces stood out from the white marble as if alive. Cossa led his men to the episcopal palace, where he went to bed in the middle of the afternoon and slept until midnight.
I sat at Cossa's bedside until he awoke. `They have a, pretty good cook here,' I told him. `He's no Bocca but he's better than anything we've had since we left Bologna – whenever that could have been.'
`I'm not hungry,' Cossa said. `What else?'
`Four women are staying here. They're not town women. The kitchen people say they just came in here yesterday and took over. They're been throwing a lot of money around.'
‘Women? Cossa said. Alone?’
'They're alone inside this palace, if that's what you mean. They have a troop of soldiers in the north courtyard, maybe fifty men.'