This Day in Catholic History (Birth of Pius IV: Compromise Conclave Choice, Arts Patron and Counter-Reformation Pontiff)

 

Mar. 31, 1499— Gian Angelo Medici, who as Pope Pius IV brought to a successful conclusion a council that would guide Church doctrine and practices for the next four centuries, exerted a moderating influence on policy, and served as a patron of Renaissance artists, was born to an impoverished family in Milan, Italy.

Mark that place of birth—this branch of the Medicis did not partake of the activities of the flamboyant Florentine family who, as mercantile princes, cut a wide swath through Renaissance commerce and the arts. The papacy had three successors to Saint Peter (Leo X, Clement VII, and Leo XI) who came from the latter portion of the clan—and their accomplishments were dubious (the first two) when not minimal (the third).

The obliviousness of Pius’ 16^th-century predecessors had left the Church vulnerable to the challenges of Martin Luther and other key figures of the Protestant Reformation. As historian Barbara Tuchman noted in The March of Folly:

“The folly of the popes was not pursuit of counter-productive policy so much as rejection of any steady or coherent policy either political or religious that would have improved their situation or arrested the rising discontent. Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them was a primary folly. They were deaf to disaffection, blind to the alternative ideas it gave rise to, blandly impervious to challenge, unconcerned by the dismay at their misconduct and the rising wrath at their misgovernment, fixed in refusal to change, almost stupidly stubborn in maintaining a corrupt existing system. They could not change it because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.”

The history of these popes reminds me at times of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos, complete with tangled family relations, power struggles, revenge, and even violence. It reached a particular depth with the reign of Pius' immediate predecessor, Paul IV, who not only waged war on Spain himself but appointed to high church offices two nephews who (without his knowledge) looted their coffers, engaged in philandering, and even ordered the  assassination of an alleged lover of one of their wives.

In terms of his own background, Gian Angelo Medici might not have seemed a particularly holy man. But by comparison with Paul, he was quite an upgrade. 

His initial instincts led him towards the law, where he excelled, but his brother persuaded him to take up holy orders.

He then worked successively as a governor in the Papal States, Commissioner of the papal military forces in Hungary and Transylvania, and vice–legate to Bologna before being named a cardinal by Pope Paul III in 1549.

A decade later, Medici emerged the victor in the conclave called to name Paul IV’s successor. I had always thought that the 1924 Democratic National Convention—the one requiring 104 ballots over 16 days to produce a Presidential nominee—was the most preposterously long contest I’d ever heard of for high office.

But it took four months—once the doors of the Vatican’s Sala Regia were locked— before Medici received the gift of the papacy. 

The College of Cardinals was supposed to be sequestered, but that didn’t stop the French and Spanish factions from furious politicking. With riots following the death of Paul in Rome, considerable money was spent on security measures to keep the population in check.

One of the 47 electors died in this tense period, while two others became ill and had to be taken away. (See Katharine Fellows’s review of Mary Hollingsworth’s Conclave 1559 in the November 2021 issue of History Today for more background on this.)

I don’t think you’ll be surprised to hear that, after Medici emerged as the compromise choice acceptable to the factions and he took the name of Pius IV, he instituted measures to ensure that no such electoral madness occurred again.

As far as popes go, Pius was more pragmatist than zealot. He was no stranger to sins that beset other Renaissance popes, including lack of chastity (three illegitimate children before his election as pope on Christmas Day 1559) and nepotism.

But in the case of the latter defect, it could have been far worse as far as Pius was concerned. If you’re Artie from The Larry Sanders Show or J. B. Biggley of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, you pick a relative manifestly unfit for his duties.

But Pius not only passed over any of his progeny for Church offices, but among the nephews he did favor, one was Carlo (Charles) Borromeo, as remarkable for his administrative ability as for concern for his flock.

In other words, the worldly pontiff selected one of the most important and beloved saints in the 2,000-year history of the Roman Catholic Church. (See my blog post from 15 years ago on how Borromeo—by this time, an archbishop—survived an assassination attempt.)

In addition to charging Borromeo with governing the Papal States, Pius named him Secretary of State, where he supervised the Council of Trent. Though this ecumenical council had been called originally back in 1545, it had only proceeded in stops and starts, and had not convened at all since 1552.

With Pius reconvening members in 1562 and Borromeo working with enormous energy, the third period adjourned in December 1563. By this time, nearly a half century since Luther had challenged Church authority with his 95 Theses, Pius and the council members had given up any hope of bringing the Protestants back into the fold.

However, Pius was able to prevent more members lost to the new European sects by reforming Church practices and governance in some cases while reaffirming fundamental doctrine in others, including through:

*The first catechism for the Church;

*Limiting the practice of indulgences (the abuse that had launched Luther’s original protest) without completely forbidding their use;

*Reaffirming the number of sacraments as seven and salvation coming through faith and good works;

*Formally defining as dogma the concept of purgatory while warning against "unnecessary speculations concerning the nature and duration of purgatorial punishments";

*Rejecting calls that the Church modify its ban on clerical celibacy;

*Defining the relative authority of bishops and the pope.

By leaving implementation of the decrees in the hands of the pope, the council also boosted the primacy of the pope in Church affairs.

The Council of Trent kick-started the Counter-Reformation, resulting in a Catholic Church culture that was more:

*Emotional, often marked by tearful contrition, pathos in depicting martyrdom, and emphasizing the transitory nature of life on tombstones;

*Puritanical, with even Michelangelo’s nude figures on “The Last Judgment” covered with fig leaves (but, as I explained in this prior post, such proscriptions defanged fanatics who, alarmed by "lascivious" and "pagan" subjects proscribed, allowing religious imagery to continue flourishing);

*Mystical, particularly with reference to saints;

*Devotional, including in more frequent reception of the Eucharist.

As with so much of Church history, reform and reaction alternated under the Renaissance popes. In contrast to Paul IV, for instance, Pius avoided harshness and persecution.

Though Queen Elizabeth of England was favoring Protestantism, Pius did not excommunicate her. The worst excesses of the Index of Forbidden Books and the Inquisition were curtailed, though not completely abandoned. He moderated, and in some cases eliminated, restrictions on Jews that had been implemented under Paul. Non-believers could move around more freely than they could under Paul.

Like other Renaissance popes, Pius genuinely believed in the power of art to further the Church’s mission. He gave Michelangelo one of his last commissions: turning a large hall of Diocletian's Baths into the church of S. Maria degli Angeli.

Pius died at age 66 in 1565, serving only five years—less than the seven-year average for pontiffs. But it was long enough to re-energize a Church rocked by tumult and corruption.

This Day in Catholic History (Fiery Pope Urban Sermon Launches Crusades)

Nov. 27, 1095—Having already issued decrees over the prior eight days that sought to curb simony, corruption and other deviations from church practice, Pope Urban II electrified a crowd of thousands in a French marketplace with a sermon calling for a continental military mission to deliver Jerusalem from Moslem control.

Urban’s fervent summons to his listeners, a motley group of priests, knights and peasants, spurred the Crusades, a series of expeditions that not only lasted beyond the remaining four years of his reign but into the 13^th century.

The goal of reducing the geographic reach of Islam in the Middle East was not achieved by all the subsequent massive expenditure of blood and treasure. Nevertheless, as with the great majority of wars, it produced unexpected consequences before the clash of arms faded.

A Hot Historical Debate

For centuries, the Western and Muslim worlds viewed the Crusades through sharply different lenses, a result of each sphere’s ethnocentricity. Increased contacts, rather than uniformly leading to greater tolerance and understanding, often only highlighted these profound differences.

From the Western side, the origin of “Crusade” bears witness to the religious fervor evoked by Pope Urban. The word blends the Middle French croisade and the Spanish cruzada, with both ultimately derived from the Latin cruc- or crux—i.e., “cross.” It was the symbol of a faith encircled and under siege.

With the rise of multicultural studies, the term began to take on more complicated overtones. Virtually nobody in the West blinked an eye, for instance, when Dwight D. Eisenhower titled his 1948 memoir on delivering Europe from Fascist tyranny Crusade in Europe.

But 53 years later—five days after 9/11—George W. Bush’s statement at a press conference referring to the war on terrorism as “this crusade” was assailed by many progressives as an ignorant gaffe certain to trigger the anger of an Islamic world with a long memory for ancient wrongs.

All of this has also, in the past 50 years, taken place within the context of constant Mideast tensions and terror, an era in which the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” has been accompanied by a clash of historians. This historiographical debate has “long remained a dialogue of the distinctly hard of hearing,” wrote historian Francis Robinson in an essay on “Islam and the West” in the May 1986 issue of History Today Magazine.

Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun and commentator on comparative religion, epitomized the greater sympathy for Islam among scholars with Islam: A Short History, a revisionist history which argues that “it was Christians who had instigated a series of brutal holy wars against the Muslim world.” In this and Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World, she traced many ills of the 20^th century—including the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict—back to the Crusades.

Revisionists such as Armstrong have been countered by the late Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, who argued that “the original justification for crusading was Muslim aggression.” More important, Riley-Smith and the school of historians who followed in his wake reappraised the scope and longevity of the Crusades and the motives of the men who inspired and waged it.

The Council of Clermont: The Background and Fallout

The latter took their cue from Pope Urban, who delivered his sermon--perhaps the most crucial of the Middle Ages--at the Council of Clermont in central France. 

A reforming pope in the tradition of his mentor, Pope Gregory VII, he had convened this meeting in keeping with his longstanding vision of a church that would be “catholic, chaste and free: catholic in faith and the communion of saints, chaste from all contagion of evil, and free from all secular power.”

You will notice one word missing from this sentence: “collegial.” For all his idealism, Urban was not particularly interested in hearing the views of the 200 bishops present. He expected them to listen to and obey his new strictures against clerical misconduct and amassing of power. When finished with them, he turned to the princes of Europe, pointedly using the word “anathema” to warn them against interfering with church affairs.

But then he called for the great military mission in the Holy Land, and the conference took a different turn altogether.

Urban spoke against a backdrop of spreading Islamic military conquests and fractured Christian unity. The Byzantine Empire, sundered politically and even religiously from the West, increasingly shrank in the face of Muslim armies. Altogether, Islam held sway from the coast of modern Portugal to the Hindu Kush. Even in Italy, Rome had been attacked twice and the Emirate of Sicily had been established.

Then, early in 1095, Byzantine Emperor Alexius I made a special appeal to Urban for help, citing Muslim atrocities and the reduction of Christians to slavery and dhimmi (i.e., legal protection in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of taxes).

There was neither audiovisual equipment nor a stenographer on hand to record Urban's exact words. But five eyewitness accounts passed down through the years mention the kind of abuses cited by Alexius, including the following from Balderic, archbishop of Dol:

“Our Christian brothers, members in Christ, are scourged, oppressed, and injured in Jerusalem, in Antioch, and the other cities of the East. Your own blood brothers, your companions, your associates (for you are sons of the same Christ and the same Church) are either subjected in their inherited homes to other masters, or are driven from them, or they come as beggars among us; or, which is far worse, they are flogged and exiled as slaves for sale in their own land. Christian blood, redeemed by the blood of Christ, has been shed, and Christian flesh, akin to the flesh of Christ, has been subjected to unspeakable degradation and servitude. Everywhere in those cities there is sorrow, everywhere misery, everywhere groaning (I say it with a sigh). The churches in which divine mysteries were celebrated in olden times are now, to our sorrow, used as stables for the animals of these people!”

The varying accounts agree that at the conclusion of Urban’s address, the multitude of listeners took up the cry, “God wills it!”

Those who heeded Urban's call took the movement in directions he could not halt. He had anticipated that knights would provide the military force needed for the reconquest, but had not foreseen the extent to which the entire populace would be called on to sustain it through provisioning or, more actively, through taking up arms. (Eventually, an army of between 60,000 and 100,000 was raised.)

Moreover, Urban regarded this mission as so all-consuming that he extended a plenary indulgence (the remission of all penance for sin) to those who aided Christians in the East. He never foresaw how these indulgences would undermine his objective of ridding the Church of abuses, furnishing a major cause for the Protestant Reformation.

The army Urban called into being was big enough to eventually take Jerusalem on the first crusade, but with so many undisciplined recruits, it seized lands and wantonly killed on the way to the Holy Land. Urban died in 1099, before the news of the military success and abuse of power could make its way back to him.

The Crusades, however, survived him, because those initial gains were lost. It took centuries before weariness and disillusion finally wore down the will to sustain the struggle, prompting bitter laments like this from Renaissance scholar-philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam in his Consultatio (1530):

“Every time that this farce has been acted out by the popes, the result has been ridiculous. Either nothing came of it, or the cause actually deteriorated. The money, people say, stays stuck to the hands of the popes, cardinals, monks, dukes, and princes. Instead of the wages, the ordinary soldier is given license to pillage. So many times we have heard the announcement of a crusade, of the recovery of the Holy Land; so many times we have seen the red cross surmounted on the papal tiara, and the red chest; so many times we have attended solemn gatherings and heard lavish promises, splendid deeds, the most sweeping expectations. And yet the only winner has been money. We are informed by the proverb that it is shameful to hit yourself on the same stone twice; so how can we trust such  promises, however splendid, when we have been tricked more than thirty times, misled so often and so openly?”

Many Far-Ranging Consequences

Nevertheless, no different than other movements of such widespread and long-lasting influence, the Crusades produced multiple, diverse consequences, including:

*A redrawn map of Europe. Riley-Smith and the historians he influenced encouraged seeing the Crusades as more than the merely eight (or, by some counts, nine) that had been traditionally counted. A chronology in a work he edited, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, also used the word “crusade” in places like Spain, Germany, Estonia, Finland, and Poland—where Muslim armies threatened. The Christian reconquest of Spain in 1492 may have been the most important, as it allowed King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to use money formerly allocated for military purposes to Christopher Columbus’ transformative first voyage to the New World later that year.

*The formation of a broader European identity. The creation of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne in the year 800 attempted to provide a unity on the continent that had been missing since the fall of the Roman Empire. But the threat of a common enemy fostered cooperation, however inconsistent and faltering, among quarreling princes.

*Stronger papal leadership. Gregory VII’s conflict with Emperor Henry IV represented a watershed moment in church-state relations on the continent. Urban’s assumption of moral leadership expanded on the perilous foothold his predecessor had maintained. Subsequent popes continued to leverage their moral authority and expanded their diplomatic and even military influence.

*Absentee leadership at the national level. Campaigns involving leading armies across vast areas, laying siege to Muslim strongholds, and negotiating peace terms meant that European monarchs were out of their country for long stretches of time. In the meantime, they had to deputize others to act in their stead, sometimes with deleterious results. Prince John, for instance, schemed against Chancellor William Longchamp while John’s older brother Richard the Lionheart was fighting the Third Crusade.

*A heavier taxation burden to finance expeditions. Then as now, long wars were exorbitant. The Crusades not only involved the normal provisioning of a mass army but dealing with the unexpected fortunes of war. (The capture of Louis IX of France while on his first crusade in 1250 brings new meaning to the term “king’s ransom.” In the end, historian Simon Lloyd estimates, expenses for Louis’s crusades amounted to roughly 12 times the monarch’s budgetable annual income.) Although exploitation of material rights and possessions may have helped, greater secular and ecclesial taxes were required to fill the gap—engendering natural resentment.

*The mass involvement of all segments of society in the war effort. It wasn’t simply the soldiers who sustained the war, but financiers, preachers, cooks, and wives.

*Poisoned Christian-Jewish relations. The first pogrom in Western European history occurred from December 1095 to July 1096, with Crusaders attacking Jewish communities in Germany and France. Over time, such outbreaks became more frequent and worrisome.

*Heavy casualties. Andrew Holt, a historian out of Florida State College, is certainly correct in using the word “futility” to describe any attempt to pinpoint the number of casualties in the Crusades when the estimates range wildly, from one to nine million. But there is a larger point that can be fairly made: the loss in life (and, for the wounded, diminished subsequent lives) was enormous for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.

*Improved medical practices. Western medics brought back with them what they learned about trauma during the Crusades. In addition, subsequent hospital practices were heavily influenced by what was learned in dealing with the wounded.

*Greater trade. Merchants passed often between Damascus and the Christian port of acre. Mamluk sultans eventually traded with Venice and Genoa.

*First-hand knowledge of lands beyond one’s community. One of the interesting aspects of American history is the way in which service personnel who had never been outside their towns or cities were exposed through the Civil War and World Wars I and II into areas thousands of miles away. They never forgot what they saw there. Documentation is far sparser for the Crusades than these latter conflicts. But it is hard to believe that the soldiers in the Crusades, who were considerably more isolated than later soldiers, were not similarly transformed by their experiences.

This Day in Catholic History (St. Charles Borromeo Survives Assassination Attempt)

October 26, 1569—St. Charles Borromeo narrowly escaped the fate that befell England’s Thomas Becket for asserting ecclesiastical authority at the expense of civil law: martyrdom. 

The Archbishop of Milan, a prime mover behind the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation as an architect of the Council of Trent, was saved from assassination in his chapel when the fired bullet grazed him slightly.

Nowadays, the Renaissance Popes are remembered for their venality and abuses, very much including the practice of nepotism, while the city-states of Italy are mostly recalled for the glories of the art and artists of the time.

But all of that culture mixed almost inextricably with more objectionable tendencies, and in that respect the Papacy was as much shaped as shaper of its era. 

Orson Welles’ shadowy Harry Lime put it best in The Third Man: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The larger Renaissance culture was frequently cutthroat, and, as I discussed in a prior post on the “conspiracy of the privies” involving the election of 15th-century pope Pius II, the Vatican was not much different.

Add to that the fact that many cardinals felt no loyalty to each succeeding pope and you can begin to understand why pontiffs began, to an alarming degree, appointing nephews to key church posts. After all, if they couldn’t trust their own family, who could they trust?

You might liken nepotism, in its way, to Abraham Lincoln’s use in the Civil War of "political generals"—the patronage practice of according senior army positions to key regional and ethnic constituencies necessary for the war effort. Many of these “political generals” were hapless soldiers, but two turned out to be the best commanders on the Northern side: Grant and Sherman.

And so it was when Pius IV named his nephew Carlo, or Charles, Borromeo as his secretary of state. A tireless worker, trained in civil and canon law, Borromeo combined formidable administrative skills with a bone-deep personal asceticism that made him a model for the reforms he wanted to implement from the Council of Trent—ideas that quickly put him at odds with civil authorities when he took over the Archdiocese of Milan at the age of 28.

As Borromeo interpreted it, little fell outside his ken: hospitals, hunger relief, orphanages, colleges, catechisms, priestly formation—and clipping the wings of religious orders who had had their way, without any archbishop supervising them for 80 years. 

One of these orders was known as the Umiliati, or “Humble Ones”—who, if later accounts are to be believed, had become anything but that over the years. Eventually, members plotted to do away with the young archbishop.

Borromeo was with his staff in his chapel at Martins at 1 o’clock AM. In light of the events about to take place, English translations of lyrics to hymns being sung took on far greater weight: “It is time I return to Him who sent me” and “Let not your hearts be troubled."

The chosen assassin, Geronimo Donato, agreed to the hit for the price of 40 crowns. Those who hired him probably felt afterward that they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth. Oh, he rushed into the chapel, all right, and fired an arquebuse at the kneeling archbishop. The bullet did no serious damage to Archbishop Borromeo.

The young cardinal forgave Donato and interceded to have his life spared, but Pius V, who had succeeded Borromeo’s uncle as pontiff, was having none of it, and not long after he was apprehended, Donato was sentenced to death.

Already indefatigable, Borromeo must have felt that God had given him a reprieve. He lived another 15 years after the failed assassination. The archbishop’s identification with his flock only strengthened, as he sold some church property to care for the poor and stayed in the city to tend to the sick during a plague. He died utterly spent from his labors.

It’s significant that, when Eugenio Roncalli selected the date for his installation as Pope John XXIII, he chose it to coincide with the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo, another cleric who had engineered a revolution in the church through a major council.

This Day in Catholic History (Humanist Pius II Elected Pope in Unholy Manner)

August 19, 1458—They ate and slept alone in dark cells specially built for their irregular meetings. They huddled in the hall and even in the privies, engaging in zenophobia, browbeating, bribery, and maybe a couple of prayers. When they were finished, the College of Cardinals had elected Aeneus Silvius Piccolomini, a humanist and reformed roué, who took the name Pius II.

That brief description only hints at what happened in the papal conclave. In its way, Pius’ election was as much a free-for-all and scandal as the American elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, 1960, and 2000.

In choosing Pius, the 19 cardinals assembled picked an aging poet who epitomized “The New Learning” of the Renaissance, a descendant of an aristocratic Italian family fallen on hard times—a marked contrast to his chief opponent, Guillaume d'Estouteville of Rouen, a Frenchman not above using family wealth and the power of the French king to his advantage.

Men both holier and more corrupt than Piccolomini have succeeded to the ancient leadership position once held by St. Peter. Few, however, have exceeded Pius in strength of intellect, complexity of character, or the surprising twists of his life.

How can I give you an idea of what he was like? Okay, try this: a cross between Geoffrey Chaucer and St. Thomas Becket.

Were he alive in the 20th century, I suspect Piccolomini would probably have spent the first part of his life as an auteur of the kind of Italian sex comedies that featured actresses such as Sophia Loren, Laura Antonelli, and Monica Bellucci. Instead, living in the High Renaissance, he made do with poetry, and especially De Duobus Amantibus (“A Tale of Two Lovers”), which readers couldn’t wait to snap up at the time. (Years later, after becoming pope, he attempted to round up and put out of circulation as many copies of this now-embarrassing work as possible. To his regret, nobody wanted to part with it.)

Verses, dialogues and letters poured from his pen. (Even one of his uncompleted works-- Historia rerum ubique gestarum—served a useful purpose as a vast compendium of scientific and geographic knowledge of the day, and was heavily annotated by Christopher Columbus as he sought to persuade one royal patron after another to back his voyage to the Indies.) Even the poet’s first name reminded humanist admirers of the recovery of ancient civilization.

By the time he turned 40, Piccolomini’s romantic exertions (including liaisons with a Scotswoman and an English lady that produced children) had physically and spiritually exhausted him. He was not only ready to renounce women for good (“Women is an imperfect creature…without faith, without fear, without constancy, without piety!”) but to take a step he’d been avoiding for years: holy orders. His rise through the upper ranks of the Vatican after that point was inexorable, rendering him papabile (like it sounds, “pope-able,” or a potential Pope candidate).

On opening day of the 1458 conclave, the odds-on favorite of the cardinals, Domenico Capranica, died suddenly, and factions formed quickly to seize his supporters. The principal point at issue was the rising influence of the French king in the wake of the Hundred Years War.

One of the fullest—albeit most biased—contemporary accounts of the ensuing events was a chapter in Pius’ autobiography, heavily redacted by Vatican censors after his death. His summary of d'Estouteville’s campaign pitch, in Secret Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope, reeks of the latter's naked ambition: “I am learned in pontifical law and can boast of royal blood. I am rich in friends and resources with which I can succour the impoverished Church. I hold also not a few ecclesiastical benefices, which I shall distribute among you and the others, when I resign them.”

In what Pius would call “the conspiracy of the privies,” d'Estouteville’s cabal among the cardinals met in the toilets because it was secluded. “A fit place for such a Pope to be elected!” Pius fumed. “For where could one more appropriately enter into a foul covenant than in privies?”

If Pius had given up on lust, he was not without pride, sometimes to an absurdly unself-conscious degree (“it was common talk that Aeneas, Cardinal of Siena, would be Pope, since no one was held in higher esteem,” he observes about his standing with the people). Now that stood him in good stead, as he faced down d'Estouteville’s pledged supporters.

One by one, he peeled them off, until he stood tantalizingly close to becoming pope. In particular, Aeneas played on the international situation, shrewdly appealing to the patriotism of the Italian cardinals, warning that d'Estouteville could very easily shift Vatican operations to France altogether.

The French cardinal had one last trick up his sleeve. As one of the three appointed to certify the accuracy of each vote, he announced at one point that Aeneas had eight votes. Nobody spoke until Aeneas urged the counters to “look more carefully at the ballots.” They did, and discovered that he had nine votes.


When one of the voters, Cardinal Prospero Colonna, changed his mind and decided to cast his lot with Aeneas, supporters of d'Estouteville tried to push him out of the room by force. But it was too late.

Pius was about to embark on a term short (five years) but not without fireworks (in one extraordinary confrontation, he wheeled on one of his tormenters among the cardinals, who had claimed that he should be made a saint, and announced that he'd do so, all right-- he would “canonize him to hell!”) or consequences (he was about to lead another Crusade when he caught fever and died).