Pope Nicholas V

Tommaso Parentucelli (b. 1397–d. 1455) was born in Sarzana, on the cusp of Genoese and Florentine spheres of influence, educated at Bologna and Florence, and ascended the ecclesiastical ladder under the aegis of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati. In 1438–1439 he was heavily involved in the Council of (Ferrara-)Florence, after which Pope Eugenius IV appointed him as bishop of Bologna in 1444 and made him a cardinal in 1446. He was elected as Eugenius’s successor in 1447 and took the papal name of Nicholas in memory of Albergati, who had died four years earlier. The previous pontificate had been so blighted by conciliarism that a rival pope had been elected by the Council of Basel. Nicholas healed the schism by appointing “Felix V” as one of his new cardinals. It was a mark of improved relations with at least one secular power that a concordat was signed with Frederick III in 1448, that same prince receiving his imperial coronation in Rome in 1452. All this can be traced in various Reference Works and Overviews. If more detailed information is required, a range of primary sources can be found under A Pope and His Contemporaries, though the sheer quantity of such material means that further texts are cited in later sections of this article. A synthesis of these sources exists in the sole modern Biography of Nicholas V. As with primary sources, so with conference papers: some are brought together and cited under Collections of Papers, while more specialized collections appear in subsequent sections. The first of those sections is devoted to the Vatican Library, which traces its continuous history back to this pope. He was a humanist, a student of the literature of Antiquity, and housed the papal library in two rooms of the Apostolic Palace—one devoted to Latin literature, the other to Greek. The plan was to collect the world’s knowledge in the world’s capital, Rome, but the city’s buildings and infrastructure had been much neglected. Thus, Nicholas set about Reviving the Vatican and, beyond its walls, Rebuilding Rome more generally. His architectural initiatives have been the subject of considerable scholarly interest. There was, however, no escaping the fact that the papal prince, the papal monarch, was heir to the emperors of Antiquity, not to Republican Rome. That was why another student of ancient Rome, Stefano Porcari, attempted to overthrow the papal regime in January 1453. Four months later Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, forcing Nicholas to concentrate on matters far Beyond Rome.

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