The Papal conclave of 1458: an insider’s view

Pope Pius II depicted in a fresco, located in the “Piccolomini library” in Siena, painted by Pinturicchio c. 1507.

In the lead-up to this year’s papal election we heard a lot about the conditions of secrecy binding the participants. A code of secrecy has been in force since 1274. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of a conclave information about the proceedings may seep out unofficially. Indeed, we have a dramatic account written by the pope elected in 1458 that gives Conclave, Robert Harris’s 2016 novel-turned-film, a run for its money.

This is a conclave, not a war

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was made cardinal in 1456 when he was about 50 years old. Two years later he became Pope Pius II (r. 1458-1464). Aeneas’ career is unusually well-documented by his many writings, but most of all by his extensive Commentaries, a vivid self-justificatory autobiography, unique in its kind and circumstances. It was probably just as well that the Commentaries were not published until 1584. The behaviour of some of the cardinals during the conclave and the “bitter arguments” Aeneas’s autobiography recounts are less than edifying.[1]

In contrast to the 133 electors of the recent conclave, only eighteen took part in the four-day conclave of 1458. An Italian, Aeneas was widely considered to be the front runner. “The whole city waited in suspense for the outcome.” After the first vote, the chief rival to Aeneas emerges: a French cardinal, Guillaume d’Estouteville of Rouen. Aeneas portrays him as relying on his power and wealth, indeed promising to buy support, “How will a destitute pope restore a destitute church, or an ailing pope a church that is sick? … I have many friends and great resources I can draw on to relieve the Church of her poverty.” Clearly, a “poor church” is not for Rouen.

Aeneas acerbically described the impact of this pitch: “A good number of cardinals were swayed by Rouen’s splendid promises; like flies, they were the victims of their own appetites.”

A conspiracy in the latrines

That night there is plotting behind the scenes in favour of Rouen: “A large group of cardinals gathered in the latrines.”

Aeneas comments: “A perfect place to elect such a pope: where better to strike a filthy bargain than in the latrines!”

The plotters have 11 votes (12 were needed to win) and wait for the next day. But a friend wakes Aeneas at midnight and tells him he should add his own vote to theirs. Then the new pope will favour him too. Aeneas vehemently refuses, partly because he regards Rouen as “the arm of the devil” and wants a clean conscience, partly because of the strong rivalry between the French and Italian cardinals and the Italians’ fear that the papacy would return to Avignon.

The next day Aeneas started campaigning in earnest. He approaches the Italian cardinals who have sided with Rouen, and tells them that they are betraying Italy by supporting a French contender. Pietro Barbo, cardinal of San Marco, initiates a counterplot on Aeneas’s behalf. He gathers together all the Italians in the cardinal of Genoa’s cell and “There he revealed the conspiracy made in the latrines. If Rouen obtained the papacy, he said, the Church would be ruined and Italy a slave forever more.” That makes seven votes promised to Aeneas.

The subsequent voting proved to be as dramatic as the plotting. Rouen was appointed one of the vote tellers and he deliberately misreported the count to his peers—declaring that Aeneas had won eight votes rather than the actual nine. He himself received only six. Each ballot was read out as it was taken out of the chalice into which it had been put and all the cardinals were taking notes to avoid fraud.

Next, to get a quick result, they decide to use another customary method—public declaration—instead of a secret ballot

“Silence fell again. … By now it seemed certain that Aeneas would be pope.… Some who feared this result left the conclave, pretending physical needs, but really with the intent of frustrating what destiny had decreed would happen that day.”

Another person rose to support Aeneas leaving him only one vote short of the twelve required. But when “Cardinal Prospero Colonna decided to seize for himself the honor of acclaiming the next pontiff,” Rouen and one of his supporters, the famous Greek Cardinal Bessarion, seized him and tried to drag him out of the room. This last desperate measure to prevent Aeneas’s victory was in vain and the conclave finally elected the Italian Pope Pius II.

Pope Pius II

Frances Muecke FAHA translated Biondo Flavio’s “Rome in Triumph”. Biondo Flavio (1392–1463) was a humanist and historian and a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity.

Once elected, as Pope Pius II tells it in the Commentaries, he turned all his efforts to what he and many others saw as the greatest danger of the age, the Ottoman Turks. In the last years of his life, crippled by arthritis and gout, he attempted unsuccessfully to co-ordinate a pan-European resistance to their encroaching threat in the Council of Mantua. Since the Ottoman’s shattering conquest of Constantinople in 1453 they had advanced even closer to the western Christian world with war reaching Hungary and Serbia. “The terrible trials we fear the Turks are preparing for us” weighed on the minds of the more responsible of the cardinals as they struggled to make their choice in the conclave. Ultimately, owing to the reluctance of the Christian leaders to put aside their other personal and political aims and unite in a common project, to provide men and arms to fight the Turks, Pius’s congress failed.

Aeneas’s rhetorical flare and written Latin is as lively as revealed in the English translation of Commentaries published by Harvard University Press in I Tatti Renaissance Library and cited here. Each of the now one hundred volumes in the Library is a significant literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific work of the Italian Renaissance written in Latin and containing a new or revised Latin text with translation. Some have been translated into English for the first time. I am currently translating for the series Biondo Flavio’s (1392-1463) Roma triumphans (Rome in Triumph), a massive treatise on Roman civilisation dedicated to Pius II.

In the dedication Biondo compares Pius II’s distinction in speaking and writing Latin to that of the first two Roman pontiffs named Leo (r. 440-461 and r. 682-683). Roma triumphans was completed in 1459 at the Council of Mantua. Biondo presents his work as timely, hoping that by reading of the achievements of the ancients all “noble spirits” will be stimulated to undertake the great and glorious expedition Pius is preparing against the Turks.

[1] All quotations are drawn from Book I, chapter 36 of the translation from the Latin in Pius II Commentaries Vol. 1, edited by M. Meserve and M. Simonetta, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2003, 176-203.

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