`Franco Ellera – really; this is absurd. That is, at first it is going to sound absurd to you, but the marchesa has convinced me that I must make several strong military and political alliances through the electors of empire.'
`So? Why not?'
`I'm glad you agree. All right. I will put it to you straight. The marchesa is going to Florence to tell Cosimo di Medici that he must go to Mainz, taking with him certain financial opportunities for the electors. She feels that you should go directly to Mainz to get the electors ready for Cosimo's proposals and thereby secure the election of – ah – our candidate as the next emperor.'
'You can do-it – I know you can do it.'
`Cossa! You have a building full of cardinals for things like that.'
'The marchesa has thought it all through,' Cossa said patiently. `You have great German, almost as good as mine. Your voice and your belly and your black eyeflags are very impressive. When you put on the costume, you will be a really formidable figure. You will be taught what to do, never fear – how to act the role of the pope's procurator and what to look for at every turning.' '
`It will never work.'
‘Not so. And, to make sure it will work, I am going to make you Cardinal Deacon of the Church of Santa Amalia di Angeli, at Fribourg. You will be travelling in the robes of your office and with a cardinal's entourage.'
`Baldassare! I am a Jew!'
`I know that and you know that. But who else knows it?'
'Well, my rabbi for one.'
`Well! He of all people will certainly understand considering our lifelong friendship and the kind of a title you are going to get you'll be a prince of the Church, Franco Ellera!'
`Are you asking me to convert?'
`Why, should you convert? I make the rules and if I the pope, choose to make you a cardinal, then you are a cardinal.'
A cardinal,' I said sadly, shaking 'my head. With your influence you could have had me made Chief Rabbi of Bologna:'
'A lot of things would have been different if we both had been religious men.'
'My uniforms alone are going to cost you a pretty florin, Two kinds of hats, red shoes, white shoes, dalmatics, copes, chasubles. and nibs.,
'You have the figure for them, Franco Ellera. What counts most is that you start promptly. Youwill have to move fast. Time is everything.'
`What about expenses?'
`A generous per diem,'
`For the horses, the liveries, the provisions, the bedding, plate, hangings,, secretaries – the entire household?'
Cossa nodded. `Absolutely,' he said.
`Speaking of my household, do you think Bernaba could come along? The trip would do her good and she could rehearse me in my lines. Bernaba and I had been married for nine years, but we still hadn't told Cossa.
'I don't see. why not,' His Holiness answered. `And we will see that you will be welcomed before the gates of Mainz where your embassy mast make solemn entry. You must be met at some distance from the place of your reception by persons of rank and distinction appropriate to your position as a prince of the Church, as well as a papal ambassador.'
36
John of Nassau was the great-grandson of the Emperor Adolf. On 19 October 1396, at the death of Conrad Archbishop of Mainz, John had been a candidate to succeed him in the post. The then emperor, Wenzel, favoured the claim of Joffrid of Leiningen, so a committee of five chose Joffrid to be recommended to the pope. John of Nassau went directly to Rome, paid Boniface 40,000 gold florins and was immediately confirmed as the Archbishop of Mainz, and so became the senior elector of empire.
He also became the open and bitter enemy of Wenzel. Without pausing for as much as a benediction, he established alliances with the Count Palatine, with the Bishops of Bamberg and Eichstadt, with the Burggraf of Nuernberg, the Markgraf of Meissen, the Count of Henneberg, and with the leaders of the cities of Nuernberg, Rotenberg, Windesheim and Weissenberg, electors all, and organized the downfall of Wenzel.
The reasons which the electors gave for Wenzel's overthrow would not bear close examination. Even though Wenzel was a drunkard and a murderer, they charged him only with having done nothing to end the schism and of betraying the interests of the empire. His true offences were that he had opposed John of Nassau's intention to become archbishop and that he had not shared the bribe of 50,000 florins which Gian Galeazzo Visconti had paid to Wenzel for making, Gian Galeazzo Duke of Milan.
The day after the electors declared Wenzel deposed, they proclaimed the Count Palatine, Rupert III, to be King of the Romans; the title which lighted the way to the imperial throne.
I must explain the difference between being King of the Romans and being Holy Roman Emperor. In 1316, Pope John XXII was determined to bring the Holy Roman Empire, which was Germany, the largest state by far in Europe, under tighter control. He took the position that, since Christ had invested Peter with the temporal no less than with the spiritual kingdom of this world, it followed that what the pope had given the establishment of the empire – the pope could also take away; that, when the emperor died, the jurisdiction of the empire reverted to the pope and that it was for him to appoint a new, emperor, thus altering the constitution of the empire.
The Germans contended that it was for the electors to choose the, future emperor and for the pope only to crown the object of their, choice, that in the event of a contested election it was for the God of Battles to decide between rival candidates.
The claim of the pope was not one which the electors could pass over in silence. They met at Rense and at Frankfurt in 1338 and resolved that the prince elected by them became King of the Romans without further ceremony, without need for further confirmation. However, it was understood that, to become the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of the Romans needed to be crowned by a pope at Rome.
Though torn by schism, wars and internal conflicts, the people of Christendom still thought of themselves as one society and, in a collectively aberrant way, as Romans, because no one liked remembering that Rome had fallen a thousand years before and that they, Christendom, represented the barbarians who had. pulled it down. The liberal German intellectuals liked to speak of their people as Roman., the populus romanus. Germany – where no Roman legion had ever tarried for fear of becoming the principal object of the brutally pagan German rites – called its king King of the Romans; with the expectation that he would subsequently be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope at Rome, and continued to elect him – because. it would have keen unseemly to allow the throne of Caesar, which was the temporal lordship of the world, to be passed on by inheritance like somebody's. house. So, a thousand years after the
Romans had vanished from the earth, it was the custom of Christendom that:the.Holy, Roman Emperor was a drenched, red-nosed German princeling.
When the electors deposed Wenzel, they created a schism in the empire to co-exist with the schism in the Church. The three main contenders for the imperial throne were: Wenzel, now King of Bohemia, where he put it about that he was known as Good King Wenceslas, a local joke; Rupert, now King of the Romans; and Sigismund, King of Hungary, Wenzel's half-brother. As King of the Romans, Rupert was in line to be the next Holy Roman Emperor but, if anything happened to him, Sigismund was the coming man politically – at least he had most certainly become so by the time I left Mainz.
Sigismund's father Charles, a previous emperor; was said to be the greatest secular ruler of the fourteenth century because he founded the University of Prague in 1348, almost succeeded in uniting the Latin and Greek churches and, by his Golden Bull, brought organization and order to the principles of election to the imperial throne, thus holding Germany; together. For his three sons: Wenzel, Sigismund, and John of Moravia, he turned his life's work upside down, emptying it of wisdom. Against his own Golden