Florence, November 1439
It had rained since the third hour, and the chapter house held the sound of it, a low wash off the cloister roof that ran under everything the theologians said.
Torquemada, the Master of the Sacred Palace, the Pope's own theologian, had been speaking for most of an hour. He built the way he always built, from the foundation upward, each stone named before he set it: Augustine on the correction of souls, Gregory the Great on the fire that cleanses and does not destroy, the practice of the Church in her masses for the dead, and each authority given in full with its book and its chapter, so that the notaries could keep pace and did. Scholarios listened to the Latin directly, then again as the interpreter rendered it into Greek, and marked where the rendering went soft. It went soft in the usual places. Torquemada said fire, and the interpreter gave them flame, which was smaller.
Mark sat still through all of it with his hands inside his sleeves. He had asked one question at the last session and he would ask it again at this one. Torquemada knew it, and the whole hour of Augustine and Gregory was his way of not answering it.
When the Spaniard finished, Mark inclined his head to him, and waited for the interpreter, and then spoke.
"The Master of the Sacred Palace has given us Augustine, who wondered, and Gregory, who related what was told to him. We venerate both. But a father may be venerated without his every image being made a doctrine, or we should long ago have been obliged to defend things no man here would defend. I asked at the last session where the purifying fire was defined. Which council. Which anathema. I have been given much this morning, and I have still not been given that."
The interpreter carried it across. Torquemada wrote something in his own hand before the rendering was half done, which meant he had understood the Greek.
It was Andrew of Rhodes who answered, and he answered in Greek. A Greek of Constantinople under the Dominican habit these twenty years, archbishop now of the Latin see of Rhodes, and one of the six the Pope had named to answer them.
"Father, you ask where the fire was defined, as though a thing must be defined before it is true. I was raised on the same fathers. I read them still, in our tongue, every day. And I will say that when I read them now I find the fire in more places than I found it as a boy, when I knew what I was expected to find."
"Then the fire is in the reader," Mark said, "and not in the page."
"Or the reader has stopped standing between the page and the light."
It went no further than that. Cesarini's deputy tapped the table, the interpreter caught up, and the session ran out its hour on smaller matters: the order of the written confessions, a disputed rendering of a passage of Basil, the date of the next sitting, which was fixed for the Tuesday following. The rain kept on.
At the breaking up there was the usual slow courtesy, men who had spent the morning against each other gathering papers side by side. Traversari came around the table to the Greek end with a codex wrapped in waxed cloth, the Nazianzen he had borrowed a fortnight past, and he unwrapped it before handing it back, to show it had taken no damage from the weather.
"There is a variant in the second oration," he said to Scholarios, finding the leaf with one finger, gently. "Your copy reads pyri where the two oldest I have seen read phoboi. I do not say it decides anything. I say a man should know what his own book says before he stakes it in argument." He smiled, closing it. "Ours are worse. I have found things in our Latin Gregory that would curl the Holy Father's hair."
Scholarios took the codex. Across the room Tatikios stood by the door with his case under his arm, waiting on Isidore as he always waited, a man so used to being unremarked that the eye went past him and had to be brought back.
The rain went on into the evening. The house the Medici had given them stood on the Via Larga, and it was warmer than a convent and plainer than its street. Cosimo's steward had offered plate and tapestry in the first week; Mark had declined both, and the offer had not been repeated, and the delegation ate off common ware at a long table in a room where the only wealth was a Bible on the shelf, one of the Emperor's papal edition printings, which Cosimo himself had sent as a courtesy.
Supper was done and cleared when Bessarion came. He came in with Tatikios beside him, the cardinal's red and the secretary's grey out of the same wet evening.
"Bessarion," Isidore said, up and out of his chair, arms wide.
"Most reverend lord," Mark said, from where he sat.
Bessarion took the embrace and the correctness with the same face. He was heavier than when Scholarios had last seen him, and the red suited him better than it should have suited a monk of Trebizond, and his eyes went round the table once, counting, before he sat where Isidore put him. Tatikios set his case at the wall and took his usual chair at the foot of the table.
Wine was brought, the thin wine Mark kept.
"Tell me how it goes," Bessarion said. "The sessions. I have read the minutes, but minutes are written by men who want the day to have gone well."
"It goes," Isidore said, and leaned in, and gave him the accounting Scholarios had heard him give in letters home: the common ground banked in the summer, the prayers for the dead agreed by both delegations and signed, the sacraments untouched and untroubled, the whole edifice of what was shared laid out first so that the disputes would sit inside it and not around it. "More is agreed than anyone in the City would believe. I have written it and I do not think they believe it."
"They ask after the fire," Bessarion said.
"The fire is where we are," Mark said. "I have asked one question of them since September. Where is it defined. Today I was given an hour of Augustine and Gregory, and a Rhodian who finds in the fathers whatever he came looking for." He turned his cup a quarter turn and left it. "It is not defined, because it was never defined, and the longer they take to not say so, the more precisely everyone in that room understands it."
"Torquemada is not a fool."
"No. He is very far from a fool, which is why he has not yet answered."
Bessarion nodded slowly, and asked two questions more, session matters, the order of the confessions, whether Cesarini presided evenly. He asked more than he told. Scholarios sat with his hands folded and watched him gather the room the way Traversari gathered manuscripts, gently, by the edges, and thought that whatever the red robe had changed in the man it had not changed that.
"Though I doubt the minutes are why a cardinal rides north in November," Scholarios said.
Bessarion smiled at him, the old schoolroom smile.
"The ships came into Rome on Thursday," he said. "Imperial dispatches, and letters of my own. I have read what His Holiness has read. I thought you should have it from a Greek mouth before you have it from a Florentine street, because the street will have it by Sunday." He set the cup down. "Kütahya has surrendered. The Emperor took the submission of Germiyan; there is a bey there again, sworn to him as vassal, an old claimant restored under Roman oath. The chancery seal of the Ottomans is in the Emperor's baggage." He paused; Scholarios watched him choose the order of it. "And the house of Osman is ended. The last of the line is dead. There is no sultan, and there is no one left to be sultan. It is finished."
The rain filled the room for a moment.
Isidore crossed himself and said, "Glory to God," and said it again.
Mark crossed himself and said nothing.
"So the boy sultan is dead," Scholarios said.
"The Bey of Germiyan brought the body to the Emperor at Kütahya. It is in the dispatch, in the chancery's plainest hand."
Tatikios had not moved from his chair. His case was at the wall. Whatever was in it had come off the same ships, and would go back by the same road. Scholarios kept the thought for later.
"His Holiness," Isidore said. "How did he receive it?"
"Standing," Bessarion said. "He heard it standing, and had it read twice. Then he went to his chapel and was there an hour, and when he came out he had Condulmer send for the treasurer's registers, which I am told is not his habit after prayer." He let Isidore refill his cup.
"His Holiness wishes this commission to succeed. Not to be endured, and not to be honorably adjourned. To succeed. He has wished it for years, but a man wishes differently when the thing he wishes begins to look possible, and since Thursday I have watched the whole palace begin to wish differently."
He turned his cup, mirroring Mark without knowing it. "And I will pass on what is said in Rome, and it is rumoured in the loggias and not in the bulls, so weigh it as that. It is said that His Holiness has begun to speak of a crusade. Not aid for the Emperor; no one speaks of the Emperor as needing aid, those days are gone. The great enterprise. There are men in that palace saying the word Jerusalem who a year ago were saying the word Milan. Milan is settled. The French and the English are talking at Calais instead of burning each other's coasts. And His Holiness has begun to speak of what God has kept him for."
"Jerusalem?" Isidore said, and crossed himself.
"The Emperor has fought two campaigns in three years," Mark said. "He has a wife delivered of a child in the spring and an army that has been in the field since August. He will not want another war soon, and I find it hard to believe he will fight one because Rome has planned it for him."
"You may be right," Bessarion said. "I only tell you what is said."
"Who would pay for it?" Isidore asked. "Crusades are preached for a year and funded for a month; we have all read the histories. Princes promise and princes deduct."
"His Holiness is not short," Bessarion said.
There was a small silence, and in it Scholarios looked at the shelf where the papal Bible stood in its plain binding, the gilt already worn at the spine, one book out of the thousands upon thousands gone out of the presses into every city that could pay, and a tithe of every one of them home to Rome.
"Then it is not a question of money," Scholarios said. "Only of what the union is worth to him."
Bessarion looked at him a moment longer than the remark needed.
"You have not changed," he said.
"I have gotten older and come to Italy. You have gotten rounder and come to it first."
That got the table to laugh, even Mark, briefly, and the talk went where talk goes after weight has been set down: the health of the Patriarch, the Emperor's child, whether the rain would lift for the Tuesday sitting. Bessarion rose before the second candle was changed. He embraced Isidore, and bowed to Mark with great correctness and got great correctness back, and pressed Scholarios's hand and said something about Mystras and the old man in it that Scholarios did not fully hear because he was watching, over the cardinal's shoulder, Tatikios lifting his case from the wall.
They went out together into the corridor, the red robe and the grey secretary, walking in step, already speaking of something in voices pitched for two. The door stood open on the wet dark long enough for the lamp to gutter, and then the servant closed it, and the table began to break up around the empty cups.
Author note:
A word on the Latin bench this chapter: Torquemada was the Pope's official theologian and led the purgatory case against Mark at the actual council (and yes, the Inquisitor was his nephew). Andrew of Rhodes was a Greek from Constantinople who became a Dominican and argued against his old church in its own language. Traversari was the manuscript man of the age, hunting variant readings on both sides. The fight itself is real too: purgatory was the first thing the two churches argued about at Ferrara, and the Greeks really did ask "show us where it was defined" and never got a clean answer.
As for the Pope: of everyone in this story, Eugene IV is the man Constantine has changed the most without ever aiming at him. In real history, the Eugene of November 1439 is a pope in exile: chased out of Rome by a mob in 1434, living in Florence, chronically broke, voted deposed by the Council of Basel that summer, which then elected an antipope against him this same month. Here he sits in Rome with Italy settled in his favor, and every Papacy Edition Bible sold anywhere in Christendom sends a tithe home to him. Thousands upon thousands of copies, year after year. It is an absurd amount of money, and it came to him as a side effect of Constantine's printing efforts. Rome takes the Papacy Edition by the chest from Glarentza, sets its own price, and every bishop, chapter and abbey in the Latin Church has to buy it, because it is the Pope's Bible. Eugene makes more from printing than Constantine does.
One more thing on scale. In real history the book trade exploded within fifty years of Gutenberg: over a thousand presses and something like twenty million books by 1500. Here it started with a better press, better paper and ink, and proper type from the first day, and it is exploding faster and bigger than that.
A pope with no enemies, a full treasury, and a victorious emperor in the East is a pope who starts thinking about his legacy. And we all know what popes want to be remembered for.