[1] The bank of the Medici alone held 100,000 florins for the Pope. Vespasiano, _Vit, Nic. V._
Of Alfonso Borgia, who reigned for three years as Calixtus III., little need be said, except that his pontificate prepared for the greatness of his nephew, Roderigo Lenzuoli, known as Borgia in compliment to his uncle. The last days of Nicholas had been imbittered by the fall of Constantinople and the imminent peril which threatened Europe from the Turks. The whole energies of Pius II. were directed towards the one end of uniting the European nations against the infidel. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, as an author, an orator, a diplomatist, a traveller, and a courtier, bears a name illustrious in the annals of the Renaissance. As a Pope, he claims attention for the single-hearted zeal which he displayed in the vain attempt to rouse the piety of Christendom against the foes of civilization and the faith. Rarely has a greater contrast been displayed between the man and the pontiff than in the case of Pius. The pleasure-loving, astute, free-thinking man of letters and the world has become a Holy Father, jealous for Christian proprieties, and bent on stirring Europe by an appeal to motives which had lost their force three centuries before. Frederick II. and S. Louis closed the age of the Crusades, the one by striking a bargain with the infidel, the other by snatching at a martyr's crown. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini was the mirror of his times--a humanist and stylist, imbued with the rhetorical and pseudo-classic taste of the earlier Renaissance. Pius II. is almost an anachronism. The disappointment which the learned world experienced when they discovered that the new Pope, from whom so much had been expected, declined to play the part of their Mæcenas, may be gathered from the epigrams of Filelfo upon his death[1]:--
Gaudeat orator, Musæ gaudete Latinæ; Sustulit e medio quod Deus ipse Pium. Ut bene consuluit doctis Deus omnibus æque, Quos Pius in cunctos se tulit usque gravem. Nunc sperare licet. Nobis Deus optime Quintum Reddito Nicoleon Eugeniumve patrem.
Hac sibi quam vivus construxit clauditur arca Corpore; nam Stygios mens habet atra lacus.
Pius himself was not unconscious of the discrepancy between his old and his new self. _Æneam rejicite, Pium recipite_, he exclaims in a celebrated passage of his Retractation, where he declares his heartfelt sorrow for the irrevocable words of light and vain romance that he had scattered in his careless youth. Yet though Pius II. proved a virtual failure by lacking the strength to lead his age either backwards to the ideal of earlier Christianity or forwards on the path of modern culture, he is the last Pope of the Renaissance period whom we can regard with real respect. Those who follow, and with whose personal characters, rather than their action as Pontiffs, we shall now be principally occupied, sacrificed the interests of Christendom to family ambition, secured their sovereignty at the price of discord in Italy, transacted with the infidel, and played the part of Antichrist upon the theater of Europe.