Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455)

The first Renaissance pope

With Nicholas V, the papacy changed its face. The pontiffs of the fifteenth century had been jurists, monks or men of war; Parentucelli was first of all a man of letters, a bibliophile, at home in the humanist circles of Florence.^[11][12] Once pope, he made the Roman court a home of the patronage of letters and arts without equal since Antiquity: translators, copyists, philologists and architects found a protector there. Under him was born the idea of a Christian Rome rivalling in beauty the Rome of the Caesars, the visible capital of Christendom.^[13][14]

The pope who closed the Western Schism

Nicholas V's second title to glory is ecclesial. Since 1378, the West had known up to three rival claimants to the papacy; the Council of Constance (1414-1418) had restored unity, but the Council of Basel, grown rebellious, had elected in 1439 an antipope, Felix V.^[15][16] Obtaining in 1449 the abdication of Felix V and the dissolution of the council, Nicholas V extinguished the last ember of the conciliar schism and fully restored the authority of the Apostolic See.

The founder of the Vatican Library

Finally, Nicholas V is the founder of the Vatican Library, one of the greatest intellectual institutions in the history of the Church.^[17][18] At his death, he left a collection of more than a thousand manuscripts, Latin, Greek and Hebrew — a treasure without precedent in the West, conceived not as a private reserve but as a library of the pontifical court open to scholars. It is the birth certificate of the BAV.

Table of witnesses

Nicholas V has the rare good fortune, for a pope of the late Middle Ages, of having been described by contemporary humanist witnesses who knew him personally. The table below presents the principal sources and the caution each requires.

Manetti, Vespasiano and the humanist biographers

Two humanists fixed the image of Nicholas V for posterity. The first is Giannozzo Manetti, apostolic secretary, author of a De vita ac gestis Nicolai V summi pontificis written in the very year of the pope's death: it is an official biography in three books, the third of which reports the pontiff's testament and final speech.^[19] The second is Vespasiano da Bisticci, the great Florentine bookseller who supplied all learned Europe with manuscripts, and who devoted to Nicholas V a Vita full of first-hand detail.^[20] These two texts are precious, but they are eulogies: they must be read as a historian reads, cross-checking their claims against the modern critical entries.

The primary sources and the modern entries

Beyond the biographers, the pontificate is documented by its acts: the crusade bull Etsi ecclesia Christi (1453), the text of the Concordat of Vienna (1448), the bulls Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455).^[21][22][23] The reference entries — the Catholic Encyclopedia, Treccani's Enciclopedia dei Papi, the Encyclopaedia Britannica — supply the critical framework, while Ludwig von Pastor's great History of the Popes remains, for narrative detail, the foundational work.^{[24][25][26][27]}

A modest birth at Sarzana

Tommaso Parentucelli was born on 15 November 1397 at Sarzana, a small Ligurian city then attached to the Republic of Genoa.^[28][29] His father, Bartolomeo, was a physician; the family was respectable but without fortune or birth. Nothing in this modest origin destined the child for the tiara: everything he became, he owed to his intelligence and his work. It is one of the traits that make him a typically Renaissance figure — the man whom merit, not blood, raised to the summit.

The student of Bologna and the tutor of Florence

Young Tommaso studied at the University of Bologna, the most prestigious in Italy. His father's premature death obliged him to interrupt his studies for lack of means: he became, around 1415-1419, tutor to the children of two great Florentine families, the Strozzi and the Albizzi.^[30][31] This stay in Florence was decisive: he breathed the air of the first humanism there, frequented learned circles, and formed his taste for books and fine letters. Back in Bologna, he obtained his master's degree in theology in 1422.^[32][33]

Twenty years in the service of Cardinal Albergati

His life changed when he entered the service of Niccolò Albergati, the holy Carthusian bishop of Bologna, created cardinal. For more than twenty years, Parentucelli was his steward, his confidant, his right hand in diplomatic missions.^[34][35] In the cardinal's service he travelled through Germany, France and England, observed courts and chanceries, and acquired that concrete knowledge of Christendom's affairs which would later make him a diplomat pope. On Albergati's death in 1443, he inherited his experience and his network.

Bishop of Bologna and cardinal (1444-1446)

In 1444, Parentucelli was named bishop of Bologna, succeeding Albergati — but the troubles of the city prevented him from really taking possession of it.^[36] Eugenius IV, who appreciated his talents, entrusted him with delicate missions, notably to the Diet of Frankfurt (1446), where he worked for rapprochement between the papacy and the Empire. As a reward for this success, Eugenius IV created him cardinal-priest of Santa Susanna in December 1446.^[37][38] The cardinalate lasted only a few weeks: three months later, the conclave made him pope.

The death of Eugenius IV and the Minerva conclave

Eugenius IV died on 23 February 1447.^[39] The conclave met at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in Rome. Of twenty-four living cardinals, eighteen were present.^[40] The context was grave: a pope was needed who could liquidate the Basel schism, calm an Italy torn by the wars between Milan, Venice, Florence and Naples, and restore pontifical finances. On 6 March 1447, after a few days, the cardinals set their choice on the most recent among them, the Cardinal of Bologna.^[41][42]

The choice of the name Nicholas

Once elected, Parentucelli took the name of Nicholas — not in memory of a prestigious predecessor, but out of filial piety towards his benefactor, Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, to whom he owed everything.^[43][44] The gesture reveals the man: the loyalty of a grateful spiritual son. He was crowned on 19 March 1447.^[45]

A programme: peace and letters

The new pope arrived with a clear design. His reputation as a scholar was such that the future Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, would say of him that he knew all that a man can know.^[46] But Nicholas V was not only a scholar: he was a peacemaker. He intended to restore peace in the Church, in Italy and in the City, then to employ that recovered peace in a great work of intellectual and monumental restoration of Rome. The eight years that followed would realise, in large part, this programme.

The antipope Felix V and the Council of Basel

The greatest service Nicholas V rendered the Church was to close the last wound of the schism. The Council of Basel, opened in 1431, had risen against Eugenius IV, claiming that the council was superior to the pope; in 1439, in its rebellious phase, it had deposed Eugenius IV and elected an antipope, Amadeus VIII of Savoy, under the name of Felix V.^[47][48] Europe had divided; but the conciliar cause was exhausting itself, deprived of real support among the princes.

The abdication of Felix V (7 April 1449)

Nicholas V inherited a situation already ripe for peace, and he gathered it with tact. By patient diplomacy, he obtained the rallying of the last princes and isolated the antipope. On 7 April 1449, Felix V abdicated; the Council of Basel, withdrawn to Lausanne, rallied and dissolved.^[49][50] To spare the vanquished, Nicholas V named Amadeus of Savoy cardinal and recognised the validity of several acts of the council. The conciliar schism died without bloodshed.

“Asking little and conceding much”

The manner in which Nicholas V won this victory is as remarkable as the victory itself. Where an intransigent pope would have demanded a humiliating capitulation, he preferred reconciliation through generosity.

“He restored peace in the Church by asking little and conceding much.” — analysis of the settlement of the schism after the Encyclopaedia Britannica^[51]

This wisdom — preferring recovered unity to satisfied self-love — is the signature of his whole government. In 1454-1455 he likewise favoured the Peace of Lodi and the Italic League which finally united Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples and Rome in a general truce.^[52][53]

The Concordat of Vienna (1448)

Reconciling the Church with the Empire also meant settling relations with the Church in Germany, long tempted by conciliar theses. This was the object of the Concordat of Vienna, concluded on 17 February 1448 between Nicholas V and the King of the Romans, Frederick III.^[54][55] The agreement was prepared by two first-rate diplomats: Enea Silvio Piccolomini, in the service of Frederick III, and the pontifical legate Juan de Carvajal, who signed it.

The concordat settles a minute sharing of ecclesiastical appointments and revenues, summarised in the following table.

This text, a balance between Roman authority and imperial interests, remained the charter of relations between Rome and Germany until the Reformation and beyond.^[56][57]

The coronation of Frederick III (1452)

On 19 March 1452, Nicholas V solemnly crowned Frederick III of Habsburg emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at Rome.^[58][59] The event has a double meaning. It is the first Habsburg girded with the imperial crown, inaugurating that house's long domination over the Empire. And it is — posterity has remembered it — the last imperial coronation celebrated in Rome: after Frederick III, no emperor ever returned to receive the crown from the pope's hands in the City. An age was ending at the very moment Nicholas V seemed to crown it.

The holy year of reconciliation

To celebrate recovered unity, Nicholas V proclaimed a Jubilee for the year 1450.^[60] The holy year took on the value of a feast of reconciliation: the schism was closed, peace was returning, and Christendom pressed towards the tombs of the Apostles. The crowds were immense — among the greatest in the whole history of jubilees. The pilgrims' offerings filled the pontifical treasury and would later supply part of the means for the pope's great works.

The Sant'Angelo Bridge disaster

The crowds had their price. Shortly before Christmas 1450, a crowd of pilgrims found itself blocked on the Sant'Angelo Bridge, the narrow passage leading from the City to the Vatican basilica. Panic broke out; the crush trampled and cast into the Tiber a great number of the faithful.^[61][62] The sources differ on the toll: the Catholic Encyclopedia speaks of “more than two hundred pilgrims”, the Enciclopedia dei Papi of “more than one hundred and seventy”, other chronicles of about 172 dead.^[63][64][65] Deeply moved, Nicholas V had the approaches to the bridge cleared and widened and the houses blocking its entrance demolished, so that such a tragedy would never happen again.

The conspiracy of Stefano Porcari (1453)

The reign was not only erudition and buildings. In January 1453, the Roman nobleman Stefano Porcari, nostalgic for ancient republican liberty and steeped in memories of Cola di Rienzo, hatched a conspiracy to overthrow the pontifical government and seize the pope.^[66][67] The plot was discovered: Porcari and his accomplices were arrested, and the leader hanged at Castel Sant'Angelo. The episode reveals the fragility of the popes' temporal power in a Rome still worked by factions, and it darkened the last years of a pontiff hitherto inclined to clemency.

The fall of Constantinople (1453)

But the most tragic trial came from the East. On 29 May 1453, after a siege of several weeks, Constantinople fell into the hands of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II.^[68][69] The millennial capital of the Christian Empire of the East, the city of Constantine and Justinian, ceased to exist as a Christian city. The news struck the West with stupor. For Nicholas V, who had worked for rapprochement between Rome and the Greeks, it was a spiritual disaster as much as a political one. The paradox is cruel: it was also the flight of Greek scholars towards Italy that would nourish the Renaissance the pope favoured.

The call to crusade: Etsi ecclesia Christi

Nicholas V reacted as pope of Christendom. On 30 September 1453, he published the great crusade bull Etsi ecclesia Christi, which called all Christian princes to rise in defence of the faith.^[70] The text is of prophetic gravity: it describes Mehmed II as a “second Mohammed” and a forerunner of the Antichrist, and enjoins the sovereigns to “defend Christendom with their lives and their money”, granting plenary indulgence to those who would take the cross within six months.^[71]

“Let the Christian princes defend Christendom with their lives and their goods.” — bull Etsi ecclesia Christi, Nicholas V, 30 September 1453^[72]

The call, alas, remained a dead letter. The princes of the West, divided and distrustful, did not rise; the small pontifical fleet sent towards the East arrived too late.^[73] The crusade dreamed of by Nicholas V never took place, and the pope died without having seen Eastern Christendom rise again. His successor Callixtus III would make it the great affair of his own pontificate.

“Books and building”

If the soul of Nicholas V had to be summed up in one sentence, it would be the one reported by his bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci: his two great passions were books and building.^[74] These two loves were not, in him, mere tastes of a cultivated prince: they formed a coherent programme. Restoring knowledge and restoring stone were for this pope a single work — giving the Church and Rome a visible dignity capable of strengthening the faith of the faithful. All his cultural policy flowed from this conviction.

The foundation of the Vatican Library

The most lasting work of Nicholas V is his library. He dreamed of a great public library of the pontifical court, after the pattern of those of Antiquity, where the treasures of Greek, Latin and Christian thought would be gathered and preserved. At his accession, the pontifical collection counted a few hundred volumes; at his death, he left more than a thousand.^[75][76] Precise estimates vary: a detailed count reports 807 Latin and 353 Greek manuscripts (about 1,160), while tradition retains the round figure of “more than 1,200 manuscripts”.^[77][78] It is the founding nucleus of the Vatican Apostolic Library, which his successor Sixtus IV would officially organise twenty years later.

The humanists and the Greek translations

To build this treasure, Nicholas V employed a veritable team of scholars: copyists, philologists and translators flocked to Rome, drawn by his generosity. There were found the greatest names of humanism: Lorenzo Valla, George of Trebizond, Giannozzo Manetti, Poggio Bracciolini, Niccolò Perotti, Theodore Gaza.^[79][80] The pope financed immense campaigns of translation from Greek into Latin: Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo, but also the Greek Fathers of the Church — a cultural transfer that saved whole tracts of the ancient heritage for the West. His liberality towards scholars remained proverbial.

“Do not hesitate to accept: you will not always have a Nicholas among you.” — words attributed to Nicholas V to overcome the scruples of a scholar he wished to reward^[81]

The great plan for rebuilding Rome

Nicholas V's other passion, stone, gave birth to the first great plan of Christian urbanism of the Renaissance. The pope undertook to restore the walls and bridges of Rome, to put back into service the ancient aqueduct of the Aqua Virgo — which would later feed the Trevi Fountain — and to raise from their ruins the great station churches of the City.^[82][83] He also conceived the redevelopment of the Borgo, the fortified curial city around the Vatican, a design that largely remained a project. His vision: to make Rome a capital worthy of the Apostolic See, where the majesty of buildings would proclaim to all eyes the greatness of the Church.

St Peter's, Rossellino and Fra Angelico's Niccoline Chapel

At the heart of this design stands the boldest project: the rebuilding of St Peter's Basilica. The venerable Constantinian basilica, more than a thousand years old, was threatening ruin. Nicholas V entrusted the first studies to the architect Bernardo Rossellino; tradition also associates with this project the great theorist Leon Battista Alberti, although his participation is not documented with certainty.^[84][85] The works, barely begun, were interrupted by the pope's death — but the idea was launched: a century and a half later would rise the present St Peter's Basilica.

If few stones were laid, one marvel remains: the Niccoline Chapel (Cappella Niccolina), the pope's private oratory in the Apostolic Palace, which Fra Angelico adorned around 1447-1449, assisted by his workshop including the young Benozzo Gozzoli.^[86] The Dominican painter deployed there, in a golden light, the parallel lives of St Stephen and St Lawrence, the two great deacon martyrs. It is one of the masterpieces of the early Quattrocento, and the finest surviving testimony to the patronage of Nicholas V.

No honest article on Nicholas V can pass over in silence the two bulls that weigh heaviest in his historical trial: Dum Diversas (18 June 1452) and Romanus Pontifex (8 January 1455), addressed to the King of Portugal.^[87][88] The first authorises King Afonso V to “invade, capture, vanquish and subdue the Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ” and to reduce them to perpetual servitude; the second confirms these rights and extends them to Portugal's African explorations. These texts are real, their historical scope was grave, and it would be dishonest to ignore them.

Three distinctions, developed at length in the Ignispedia dossier on Black Slavery, allow their exact scope to be understood without yielding either to apologia or to indictment. First, the criterion retained by the bulls is religious and military, not racial: the “Saracens and infidels” are defined by their opposition to Christendom in the logic of medieval crusade — the concept of hereditary racial slavery did not yet exist.^[89] Second, the historian John Francis Maxwell showed that these bulls were never formally invoked by slave-trading jurists and merchants as the legal foundation of the Atlantic trade, which relied on economic arguments and the theory of just war.^[90] Finally, Nicholas V never revoked the bull Sicut Dudum of his predecessor Eugenius IV (1435), which threatened with excommunication those who enslaved the inhabitants of the Canaries: the mid-fifteenth-century papacy therefore did not form a bloc favourable to slavery.^[91]

📖 See the full dossier: Black Slavery and the Catholic Church treats these bulls in detail, with the pontifical condemnations (1435, 1537, 1639, 1839) and the six principal objections.

The testament reported by Manetti

Nicholas V died in Rome on 24 March 1455, at fifty-seven, worn down by gout and weighed upon by the fall of Constantinople.^[92][93] On his deathbed, surrounded by the cardinals, he pronounced — according to Giannozzo Manetti's account — a long testament-speech in which he justified his work as a builder. The most famous page, transmitted by Ludwig von Pastor, deserves to be quoted in full, for it delivers the spiritual key to his whole pontificate:

“To create in the minds of the uncultured masses solid and stable convictions, something is needed that speaks to the eyes; a popular faith, sustained by doctrines alone, will never be but weak and wavering. But if the authority of the Holy See manifested itself visibly in majestic buildings, imperishable monuments and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God Himself, faith would grow and strengthen like a tradition, from generation to generation, and the whole world would accept and revere it.” — Nicholas V, deathbed speech, reported by Giannozzo Manetti^[94]

The pope specifies that it was “neither from ambition, nor from pomp, nor from vainglory” that he built, but for the greater authority of the Roman Church and the dignity of the Apostolic See.^[95] This theology of the visible may be debated; its coherence and grandeur cannot be denied it.

A frieze of the pontificate

The successor: Callixtus III

Nicholas V was succeeded by the old Catalan cardinal Alfonso Borgia, under the name of Callixtus III — the first pope of the Borgia house, whose great-nephew would be the sadly famous Alexander VI.^[96] Callixtus III, less lettered than his predecessor, neglected humanist patronage to devote all his strength to the crusade against the Turks which Nicholas V had called for without obtaining it.

What to retain of Nicholas V?

Nicholas V occupies a pivotal place in the history of the papacy. Behind him ends the Middle Ages of councils and antipopes; before him opens the Roman Renaissance, with its splendours and, soon, its scandals. He was the pope who closed the schism, pacified Italy and the Empire, and founded the greatest library of Christendom. He was also the one who watched, powerless, the fall of Constantinople and signed the controversial bulls of Portuguese expansion. Lights and shadows mingle in him as in his century.

The spiritual lesson: beauty in the service of faith

The deepest legacy of Nicholas V lies perhaps in his dying intuition: visible beauty can be a path towards God. In an age that readily opposes the purity of faith and the pomp of art, this pope recalls that the Church has always built cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts not from pride, but to raise souls through the senses towards the invisible. The grandeur of stones, like the richness of books, has meaning only as referred to God.

The risk of this path is real — art can become an end in itself, and the Roman Renaissance would sometimes succumb to it. But the intuition remains just: “Beauty is the splendour of truth,” as tradition says. Nicholas V, a physician's son made pope by his sole love of knowledge, wished the faith of the Christian people to find, in the beauty of Rome and of its books, a sensible and lasting support. In this, he was, in the noblest sense, the first Renaissance pope.

• Pope Eugenius IV — predecessor of Nicholas V, deposed by the Council of Basel, whose cause was vindicated by the end of the schism.
• The Western Schism — the long division closed by the abdication of Felix V in 1449.
• The fall of Constantinople (1453) — the disaster in the East which marked the pontificate and called for a crusade that never came.
• The Christian Renaissance — the great cultural movement of which Nicholas V was the first pontifical protector.
• The building of the present St Peter's Basilica — the outcome, a century and a half later, of the plan sketched under Nicholas V.
• Black Slavery and the Catholic Church — the full dossier on the bulls Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex.
• The decline of the Borgia popes — the house of his successor Callixtus III.