Pope Pius II

Anyone asking who was Pope Pius II must begin far from Rome, in the small Tuscan village of Corsignano, where Enea Silvio Piccolomini was born on 18 October 1405. The Piccolomini were an old Sienese noble family that had lost most of its wealth and had been pushed out of the city's government, so Enea grew up working the land alongside his father, Silvio, while his mother, Vittoria Forteguerri, raised a large household in modest circumstances ^[1].

At eighteen he left the countryside for Siena, where he studied law without much enthusiasm and literature with a great deal of it. He later moved to Florence to hear the humanist teacher Francesco Filelfo, absorbing the classical Latin culture that would shape everything he wrote afterward ^[2]. The young Piccolomini was witty, sociable, and ambitious, and he understood early that his pen, not his purse, would have to carry him upward.

His chance came in 1431, when Cardinal Domenico Capranica passed through Siena on his way to the Council of Basel and needed a secretary. Enea took the post, crossed the Alps, and entered the turbulent world of church politics that would occupy the rest of his life ^[1].

Basel made Piccolomini's career. He served a succession of masters at the council, sat on its committees, and for a time backed the conciliar party against Pope Eugenius IV, even serving the antipope Felix V as secretary ^[2]. During these years he also traveled widely on diplomatic errands, including a winter journey to Scotland in 1435 on a secret mission for Cardinal Niccolo Albergati, an adventure that nearly killed him at sea and left him with lasting rheumatic pain after he walked barefoot ten miles across frozen ground to fulfil a vow ^[1].

In 1442 he moved to the imperial court, where King Frederick III crowned him poet laureate and employed him in the chancery under Kaspar Schlick ^[3]. At Vienna he wrote the works that made him famous across Europe: the Latin love novella Historia de duobus amantibus (The Tale of Two Lovers), a comedy called Chrysis, and a stream of letters, orations, and histories admired for their vivid, classical style ^[2]. He lived, by his own later admission, a thoroughly worldly life in this period and fathered at least two illegitimate children.

A serious illness around 1445 marked a turning point. Piccolomini reconciled with Eugenius IV, took holy orders in 1446, and threw his diplomatic skill into ending the schism between the papacy and the German princes. His work helped produce the settlement completed under Nicholas V, and the rewards followed quickly: the bishopric of Trieste in 1447, the see of his native Siena in 1450, and the cardinal's hat from Calixtus III in 1456 ^[1][3].

When Calixtus III died in August 1458, the conclave deadlocked between factions until the cardinals turned to the fifty-two-year-old Sienese humanist. Piccolomini was elected on 19 August 1458 and took the name Pius, a deliberate echo of Virgil's phrase pius Aeneas, matching his baptismal name Enea to the hero of the Aeneid ^[2].

One cause dominated his pontificate. The Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 had shaken Latin Christendom, and Pius made a crusade to recover the city and check Sultan Mehmed II the central project of his reign ^[4]. In 1459 he summoned the princes of Europe to a congress at Mantua to plan the campaign. The meeting was a humiliation: rulers arrived late or not at all, promised troops and taxes they never delivered, and pursued their own quarrels while the pope pleaded ^[1][4].

Pius kept trying. He wrote a remarkable open letter to Mehmed II around 1461, urging the sultan to accept baptism and offering him legitimacy as a Christian emperor, a document scholars still debate as either sincere persuasion or literary exercise ^[5]. When diplomacy failed, the aging pope announced in 1463 that he would lead the crusade in person, hoping his example would shame the princes into action ^[4].

Among the most consequential Pope Pius II achievements was the bull Execrabilis, issued at Mantua in January 1460. It condemned as erroneous and detestable any appeal from a papal judgment to a future general council, striking directly at the conciliar theory Piccolomini himself had once defended at Basel ^[1][6]. Critics then and since have noted the irony, and Pius answered them in 1463 with the bull In minoribus agentes, telling readers bluntly to reject Aeneas and accept Pius: the errors of his youth, he argued, should not bind the pope he had become ^[2].

His temporal politics were stormy. He fought a long war against Sigismondo Malatesta, the lord of Rimini, whom he denounced in extraordinary terms and subjected to a formal canonization in reverse, condemning him to hell while still alive. He backed Ferrante of Aragon in the contested succession to the throne of Naples against the Angevin claim, a choice that soured relations with France ^[1].

France presented another persistent problem. The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438 had limited papal authority over the French church, and Pius pressed steadily for its revocation. Louis XI abolished it in 1461, hoping for papal support in Naples in return, and relations cooled sharply when that support did not come ^[3]. In 1462, after alum deposits were discovered at Tolfa in the Papal States, Pius channeled the profits of this valuable mineral, essential to the cloth trade, toward his crusading fund ^[4].

No pope before or since has left a self-portrait like the Commentaries, the autobiography Pius composed in Latin during his pontificate. Its thirteen books mix candid political narrative, sharp portraits of contemporaries, and lyrical descriptions of the Italian countryside, and they remain a primary source for the fifteenth century as well as a literary landmark ^[5]. Modern editions and translations, including the Harvard I Tatti series, have kept the work in scholarly circulation ^[5].

His other great personal monument is built of stone. Beginning in 1459, Pius commissioned the architect Bernardo Rossellino to transform his birthplace of Corsignano into an ideal Renaissance town, renamed Pienza in his own honor. Around a trapezoidal piazza rose a cathedral, the Palazzo Piccolomini, a town hall, and a bishop's palace, all conceived as a unified humanist design ^[7]. UNESCO inscribed the historic centre of Pienza as a World Heritage Site in 1996, recognizing it as the first application of Renaissance urban planning ideas ^[7].

Pius also wrote geography and history as pope, including a description of Asia that Christopher Columbus later read and annotated, and he issued a bull in 1462 condemning the enslavement of newly baptized peoples in the Canary Islands ^[2][6]. For all his classical tastes, he could be austere in office, and he disappointed some fellow humanists who expected a shower of patronage that never quite came.

By 1464 Pius was visibly failing, worn by fever, gout, and the strain of a project almost no one else believed in. He took the cross publicly and left Rome on 18 June 1464, traveling slowly toward the Adriatic port of Ancona, where the crusading forces were supposed to gather and Venetian ships were to carry them east ^[4].

The scene at Ancona was grim. A disorganized crowd of poorly equipped volunteers had drifted to the port, many without arms or supplies, and most melted away while the Venetian fleet delayed. The pope, now gravely ill, watched from his sickbed as the doge's galleys finally appeared in the harbor on 12 August ^[1][4].

He never sailed. Pius II died at Ancona on the night of 14 to 15 August 1464, and the crusade dissolved with him. His body was returned to Rome, and his monument now stands in the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle. His nephew Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini later reigned briefly as Pius III in 1503, and the frescoed Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral, painted by Pinturicchio, narrates scenes from the elder pope's life ^[3][7].

Any balanced Pope Pius II biography has to hold two reputations together. To historians of the papacy he is the pope of Execrabilis, the man who helped bury conciliarism and restore monarchical authority in the church, even at the cost of repudiating his own younger self ^[6]. To historians of literature he is Aeneas Sylvius, the finest Latin stylist to occupy the papal throne, whose letters, novella, and Commentaries opened a window on the fifteenth century that no other pope provided ^[2][5].

His crusade failed, and some scholars read the Ancona expedition as theater, a gesture designed to preserve papal honor once real war had become impossible. Others see genuine conviction in a man who spent his final strength on the journey ^[4]. Either way, the episode fixed the image of a Europe too divided to answer the Ottoman advance, a theme Pius himself analyzed with unusual clarity in his own writings.

The most visible legacy is Pienza, still intact on its Tuscan ridge, studied by architects and visited by travelers as the built expression of humanist ideals ^[7]. Among the basic Pope Pius II facts, perhaps the most telling is the simplest: a farmer's son from Corsignano wrote his way to the papacy, then wrote the story of how he did it, and both the town and the book survive.