Rome was a ruin. Its monuments – the Colosseum, the tombs of Augustus and Hadrian – were now fortified as the headquarters of gangsterish feuding clans, Colonnas and Orsinis. In the nine years of his reign, the pope, flush with money channelled from wars in Italy, tithes from Europe, alum, and a cult of pilgrimage, started to restore Rome, a project that would be one of the engines of a new intellectual radiance. This was the florescence heralded by Petrarch in the darkest days of the plague that had broken Europe but also cracked the mould of its structures and ideas – just as the competition of European states encouraged new technologies of war, new media of information and new conceptions of humanity and beauty. At its heart was a gradual shift from belief in total divine agency to the idea that humanity itself was sacred and beautiful, worthy of expression and improvement.* All of this engendered an invincible sense of possibility that, while expressed as a return to classical knowledge, was actually all new, bracingly brutal and brash, shiny and shameless, based on new technologies – ships, guns, voyages and an invention that allowed ordinary people to read all about it: the printing press.*
Nicholas V and Cosimo de’ Medici were uninhibited by contradictions between Christian glory and pagan grandeur: all was to be mobilized for the greater glory of God and God’s pontiff and God’s banker. Nicholas converted Hadrian’s mausoleum into his papal fortress, Castel Sant’Angelo, restored the Leonine walls plus forty old churches and Roman viaducts and moved his residence from the Lateran Palace to the Vatican. An innovator, he survived Roman conspiracies to assassinate him, but he was also a European player, eliminating the last anti-pope, appeasing France and, in March 1452, anointing the new German king, Frederick III, the first Habsburg actually crowned emperor by the pope.
The thirty-seven-year-old Frederick was a dull, somnolent and soon obese plodder who would ironically be the architect of the rise of the Habsburgs, but his slim, beautiful Portuguese bride Eleanor, who would find his Viennese court tedious and philistine and loved dancing and gambling, no doubt helped her brother, King Afonso V, procure papal backing for new African expeditions – in return for help in a more urgent crisis in the east.
In April 1453, Mehmed II, the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan, surrounded Constantinople with an army of 160,000, including thousands of elite arquebusiers, a flotilla of 110 ships and 70 cannon, including one so huge it took sixty oxen to pull it. The age of the cannon and firearm had truly arrived.
THE THROAT -CUTTER AND THE CONQUEROR: THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE
Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos appealed for European help. Pope Nicholas V dispatched a flotilla, partly funded by the Portuguese, under Isidore, metropolitan of Kyiv, and 2,000 Genoese volunteers rushed to aid Constantinople. The city, home now to just 50,000 Romaioi, had long been the coveted prize of the Ottomans.
Tamerlane had almost destroyed the sultanate, but Mehmed’s father Murad II, energetic, able but inconsistent, unstable and distracted, had exhausted himself fighting: in the Turkish marches, where the beys seized independence, backed by Tamerlane’s son Shahrukh;* in the Balkans, where Hungary, Venice and Serbia rebelled. On the Aegean coast, Gjergj Kastrioti, a Christian princeling coverted to Islam, brought up at the Ottoman court – where he was known as Iskender Beg – had served as a governor. Now he rebelled, recoverted to Christianity, declared himself Lord of Albania and defied Murad for twenty-five years, calling himself Scanderbeg. But the sultan improved his forces, commissioning cannon and something new: handheld, shoulder-fired firearms, successors to the Chinese fire-javelins, later known as arquebuses. These were the earliest muskets, first used by Murad’s Janissaries and soon adopted by their Christian opponents.
In 1444, at Varna, after ostentatiously kneeling to pray in the midst of battle, Murad defeated the Hungarians and killed their king. But then the forty-year-old sultan suffered a personal crisis. He called his son Mehmed, aged only twelve, to the capital Edirne (Adrianople) and abdicated. Mehmed was girded with the sword of Osman. But in 1448 the Hungarians, Poles and Wallachians advanced, and Mehmed, exasperated by his father’s midlife crisis, told him, ‘If
