He believed every word of it. He did not choke on any word he spoke. He was a respectable banker.
As the weeks passed and as hourly problems had to be solved, it was necessary for Cossa to lean upon the marchesa for good counsel. She had the vast Medici intelligence organization at her disposal for gathering the information they needed to reach decisions. Cossa seemed to have forgotten that she had betrayed him, but indeed he had not. When we were together, he would speak of his wound and would show me how he had forced it to fester there. Revenge has always been the ultimate luxury of Neapolitans and the premonition of it was so enormously comforting that they could afford to wait. As time went on, the necessity for other revenge outweighed his need to repay the marchesa and Cosimo.
Cossa had his obsession to murder the son of Catherine Visconti to distract him from the day-to-day demands of the papacy, and he had the political distractions of the Church to dull the edges of his grief for Catherine, distractions which the marchesa shepherded across his consciousness. In Prague a clergyman named John Hus was disturbing the peace by attacking, his archbishop. The marchesa said that Hus was greatly disturbing King Sigismund of Hungary, who expected to inherit the throne of Bohemia, and that Sigismund wanted something done to silence the man, if only to embarrass Wenzel, the deposed Holy Roman Emperor and present King of Bohemia, who was Sigismund's half-brother and supported Hus. The marchesa reasoned that, since Cossa needed Sigismund – who could, quite possibly, be the next Holy Roman Emperor and thus head of the largest political unit in Europe, Germany Cossa had to do something about Hus.
Cossa agreed to read the curia's file on Hus. The file told him that Hus was a pastor of purity, a clear-thinking man who was zealous for Church reform, in fact a heroic man.
Hus had preached that the supreme aim of religion was to love God absolutely. `How can the corporate Church comprehend that?' he asked. `They speak only for a political God who exists to be manipulated.' He told his congregations that Christianity; was the totality of predestination, born of God, and that the Church was the mystical body of Christ and the kingdom; of heaven – and not a struggle for power between popes and kings, or a ruse to share riches through what churchmen must think of as `God-given opportunities for taxation. He preached that the Church had become a conspiracy of lawyers. Their determination that the Church be seen and obeyed as, a corporation had allowed-them a more concrete expression of the early ideas of ultimate authority, but it was no longer the authority of God which: they sought but the authority of popes, cardinals and bishops.
He opposed the `insane' priests who exalted themselves above the Holy Mother, who gave birth to the body of Jesus once, while they claimed to do the, same by mumbling over bread and wine day after day, again and again. `To create something is to make it out of nothing,' Hus said from his pulpit. `Only God is a creator, yet this offends the corporate Church. These evil lawyers have abused the term `to believe'. The corporate Church commands that men believe in: the Virgin, Mary, in the saints' and' in the pope. That is, wicked foolishness. We must believe in none but God. Of God we should believe all that the scripture teaches.'
He preached to tens of thousands that his sense of duty cried out when spiritual office was bought or sold for money or favours; That was flagrant abuse by the corps which was the corporate Church, he maintained.
John Hus's archbishop in Prague was a young noble, a well-meaning enough soldier who had been the Canon of Prague since he was fourteen. He had a smattering of theological education but not much because he gave his obedience to Pope Gregory even after Pope Gregory had been cast down at Pisa. King Wenzel had to force him to recognize Pope Alexander and urgently required him to declare that there existed no heresy in Bohemia. The archbishop burned all the books written by Wyclif, the reformer who strongly influenced Hus. Hus protested at this and the archbishop instantly excommunicated him.
Hus enjoyed the constant favour of the court. He was the queen's confessor. The king liked him. There were many nobles who would have protected him against, pope or other adversary. He was the idol of the Bohemian population and worshipped by all the pious ladies of Prague. Cossa solved the Hus problem by sending Cardinal Oddone Colonna to Prague to investigate him. Colonna accepted many presents of money and jewels from the archbishop, then himself excommunicated Hus (following the archbishop's excommunication), but Hus remained a leader of the reform movement. He denounced pride, luxury, avarice, simony and immorality, among both the lay and clerical members of the Church. He denounced the clergy living in concubinage or committing adultery. `We should have more people like, this;' Cossa said to me, `just as we should have a few more plagues. They are an impossibility. When this man became a priest, he took on the obligations of a priest.'
Meanwhile, spurred on, by the marchesa and, numbed by his obsessive thoughts of vengeance upon Catherine Visconti’s son, Cossa issued a bull calling for a crusade against Ladislas of Naples and Pope Gregory XII. The bull promised indulgences to anyone and everyone who would contribute to the crusade. Cossa ordered all prelates, under pain of excommunication, to declare Ladislas a perjurer, schismatic, blasphemer and heretic and, as such, an excommunicate. A second bull commissioned the indulgence sellers and excommunicated Gregory XII as a heretic and schismatic. Of the indulgence sellers appointed, for Bohemia, one was Wenceslas Tiem, a German, born at Mikulov in Moravia. He carried out his commission by farming out whole archdeaconries and parishes to unscrupulous collectors, who in turn exploited the people mercilessly. This nefarious commerce in the forgiveness of sins aroused John Hus's most determined opposition. He repudiated Cossa's bulls, He published two treatises which condemned the inciting of Christians against their brethren: in a fratricidal war and the trafficking in forgiveness of sins which omitted to demand the basic requirement of repentance. He denied the right of any pope to make war, He proclaimed that only God forgives sins and does so of his free grace to such as are of contrite heart. `Problem people like this Hus are never solved,' Cossa said to me. `If I agreed with everything he said today, he would be back tomorrow with new objections. God save us from the theologians.'
Such political encounters apart, Cossa avoided the sacred side of his responsibilities as pope, to a point where he almost stirred up a mutiny among cardinals, the clergy and the people of. Bologna – for, to them, the visible rituals of the papacy were what mattered beyond all else. He was forced to celebrate mass on Sunday and on Holy Days, but he refused to do more. He confessed to no one. His audiences were confined to soldiers and bankers. He slept through; the day, as had his master, Boniface IX, and worked at night (rumour said with a, woman) until the ripples of outrage became high waves battering at the spirituality of Europe. It was as though he had decided to show his contempt for the papacy, which had (somehow) cost him Catherine Visconti, and into which ignoble office; as the vicar of Christ he had been tricked and cheated. He would not attempt to understand his situation. I tried to explain it to him. `What does it matter to you whether you do these things? It comes with the job. It matters to the people who hired you – I mean, to the Italian people and the pilgrims from across the world, the people, the ones who contribute the money to support the Church which pays you so well. When you were a soldier, you had to do a lot of things you didn't like to do. When you were a law student,., you had to do a lot of things you didn't agree with, What is the difference if you don't believe in the things that they expect you to do? It is a part of the job and you must do it.'