The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [43]
He addressed the Pope with scorn and open insults while his agents stirred rebellion in the various Papal States. Endeavoring to cope with uprisings and conflicts in many places at once, Innocent vacillated and procrastinated. He drew up a Bull to excommunicate the King and Kingdom of Naples, but shrank from issuing it. The envoy of Ferrara reported comments in 1487 on “the pusillanimity, helplessness and incapacity of the Pope,” which if not dispelled by some infusion of courage, he said, would have serious consequences. These were averted when Ferrante in another total about-face called off the war and offered an amicable settlement, which the Pope, despite all his humiliations, was only too glad to accept. To seal the brittle friendship, Ferrante’s grandson was married to Innocent’s niece.
Such were the combats of Italy, but though essentially frivolous and even meaningless, they were destructive, and the Papacy did not escape their consequences. The most serious was a lowering of status. Throughout the conflict with Naples the Papal States were treated like a poor relation and the Pope personally with diminished respect, reflecting Ferrante’s insolence. Pamphlets distributed by the Orsini in Rome called for the Pope’s overthrow, calling him a “Genoese sailor” who deserved to be thrown into the Tiber. Encroachments by the foreign powers on papal prerogatives increased, with the national churches filling benefices with their own appointees, withholding revenues, disputing obedience to papal decrees. Innocent was lax in resistance.
He built the famous villa and sculpture gallery on Vatican hill, named the Belvedere for its superb view over the Eternal City, and commissioned frescoes by Pinturicchio and Andrea Mantegna, which have since disappeared, as if to reflect their sponsor’s place in history. Innocent lacked the time, funds and perhaps interest for much else in the patronage of arts, or for the pressing problem of reform. His concern in that sphere was concentrated on the least of its needs, crusade.
Public opinion, it is true, believed in crusade as the great restorative. Preachers to the Vatican who came by invitation about twice a month to address the court as Sacred Orators invariably included crusade in their exhortations. It was the Holy Father’s duty and an essential part of his office, they reminded the incumbent, to bring peace among Christians; Pax-et-Concordia was the purpose of pontifical government. An end to strife among the Christian nations was the most frequent plea of the Orators, invariably coupled with a call to turn the arms of the Christian kings against the infidel. Only when dissuaded from their wars could the secular rulers unite against the common enemy, the Turk, the “beast of the Apocalypse,” in Nicholas of Cusa’s words, “the enemy of all nature and humanity.” Offensive war against the Turks, it was argued, was the best defense of Italy. Constantinople and the Holy Places and other lost Christian territory could be regained. Religious unity of mankind under Christianity was the ultimate goal, and this too required the defeat of the Sultan. The whole enterprise would lift the Church from sin and initiate—or alternatively crown—reform.
Innocent made strenuous efforts to engage the powers in crusade, as had Pius II even more devotedly when the impact of the fall of Constantinople was still fresh. Yet the same deficiency which defeated Pius and others before him, disunity among the European powers equal to that among the princes of Italy, remained. “What mortal power,” Pius had written, “could bring into harmony England and France, Genoese and Aragonese, Hungarians and Bohemians?” Neither Pope nor Emperor could any longer exert supremacy. Who then could persuade discordant and even hostile powers to join in a common venture? Without overall command and a single discipline, any army large enough to be effective would dissolve in its own chaos. Beyond these difficulties, a more fundamental impulse was missing: not defense but offense and an aggressive faith had