Introduction

Poet Laureate and imperial secretary to Frederick III. of the Holy Roman Empire, apostolic secretary to two popes and an anti-pope, Bishop of Trieste and of Siena, Cardinal-Presbyter of S. Sabina, and at last Pope Pius II.; Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was marked out from birth for something extraordinary, and he fulfilled his destiny. In his Commentaries he tells of miraculous escapes from death in childhood, and from shipwreck in early manhood, and of Frederick’s prophecy before Rome:

I seem to see you as a Cardinal, nor will your good fortune stop there. A higher lot awaits you—the Chair of St. Peter. See that you despise me not, when you have attained that honour; to which Aeneas replied: I do not ask to be Pope nor yet Cardinal. But I, broke in the Emperor, see that it will be so.

Aeneas tells us that he took these words as a joke, though by that time (1452) he may in truth have shared the Emperor’s prophetic vision. But had anyone told him, thirty years before, when he rode to Basel with Cardinal Capranica, penniless and without a jot of influence behind him, that the day would come when all the problems of the Church of Rome would lie heavy on his shoulders, he might well have laughed. For this future Pope avoided holy orders till he was over forty, dreading the mere responsibility of continentia, a virtue which, as he wrote to his friend Piero da Noceto, ‘it is easier to talk about than to observe, and one better suited to philosophers than poets.’

Aeneas was less of a poet than he liked to imagine, but that he was, in youth, a man most unfitted for the priesthood, there can be no doubt. In 1435 he visited Scotland, and left behind him a pignus amoris which fortunately died; and in 1443, a year before he wrote the Tale of Two Lovers, he had loved an English woman, by name Elizabeth, and had by her a son, whom he asked his father to look after for him, ‘till he is a little older (he was not born then) and can come to me and be educated by me.’ And when we read his sententious remarks to Marianus about old age and the unseemliness of Marianus’s request for a tale of love from him, ‘who am past the noonday of life, and going on towards evening,’ it is well to remember that he wrote that very year to Piero da Noceto, who had just married, asking if he could not find a wife for him, ‘si quid inveneris meae opinioni conveniens.’

Born in 1405 at Corsignano, near Siena, he studied at Siena and at Florence, under Filelfo the Greek scholar. He made his name first at the Council of Basel as an orator, and as one of the bitterest and most persuasive of the enemies of Pope Eugenius IV., but soon betook himself to the Court of the Emperor Frederick III. and was reconciled with the Roman Curia: thereafter he devoted his energies to bringing Germany over to the Pope, thus dealing the deathblow to the Council that had trained him and the anti-pope he had served.

He was a prolific writer upon many subjects, always in Latin, and prided himself especially on his verse, for which Frederick crowned him Poet Laureate. At Vienna, where Gaspar Schlick, the Chancellor, played pandar to the Emperor’s imperially extravagant desires, Aeneas found his amatory vein highly appreciated, and by far his most popular work was this romance, the De Duobus Amantibus, written at the request of Mariano de’ Sozzini, a Sienese of considerable learning and dissolute habits, but dedicated to Gaspar Schlick. For Gaspar was the Euryalus of Aeneas’ tale; he had visited Italy with the Emperor Sigismund, and was with him when the Sienese kept him in their city, ‘shut up like a beast in a cage’; and the author was not thinking of literary criticism—of which, indeed, the Chancellor was not capable—when he asked Gaspar in his dedication to ‘see if I have told it aright.’ The story ran through many editions. Years later, the Pope would have suppressed this indiscretion of his youth, and failed: it was a best seller.

This was, however, about the last indiscretion that Aeneas permitted himself. Already the tone of his letters was changing, and in 1449 he wrote to a friend that he had received a benefice, and would soon be ordained. He could see, by this time, that his career pointed to the Church, and the part he played in the Diet of Frankfurt settled it. He was now a man of some importance in Europe, but he had gained his position as a defender of the Church; it was as a churchman he must maintain it. Besides, other changes had been taking place. The poverty and hardship of his youth, as well as his ineradicable habit of burning the candle at both ends, had told upon his health. At forty, he was bald and old beyond his years. Writing to a friend in 1444 (the very years of Gaspar’s story), he had said: ‘You, my dear John, are going on towards evening with me: for you nor me, no good can come from women: we are a fable and a mockery.’ Two years later his tone had become definitely severe.

‘I know what you will say: why, how strait-laced Aeneas is; now he writes to me of chastity from Vienna, but in Neustadt be spoke otherwise. I don't deny it, dearest John, but time slips away, day by day; we are older, the day of our death draws near, and now we must consider not how to live, but how to die... For me, John, I have sinned enough, and too much. Now I know myself, and may it not be too late. For now I am forty, and the day of salvation, the time for repentance is at hand...’

Yet Aeneas’ words have never carried conviction. When he was Pope, he still must mourn that people would not forget Aeneas for Pius. The young man had made too deep an impression for the old one to erase it, and even now the metamorphosis must be explained as either hypocrisy or senile decay. Voigt, the virtuous German, calls Aeneas’ conversion a Bordell-Comödie. For those that have passed their life in piety and lived safely do not like to think that the adventurer and the libertine may also, at the end, know the spiritual joys for which they have sacrificed all the rest. While those who admire the young and dashing Aeneas, the sceptical author of the Tale of Two Lovers, despise him for his betrayal of himself, seeing in his belated piety the signs of a weakening mind. Old age, they say, and failing strength brought out the mediaeval strain latent in his youth, and certainly Aeneas was, in some measure, mediaeval. The two ages met in him, and he reminds us at times rather of a highly successful wandering scholar than a man of the Renaissance. The Lucretia of his love-story is a perfect product of the new attitude towards life. ‘Who is there could stop loving, just when he has learned the prudence and the wisdom of his mistress?... For my part, while I read, I loved you the more, perceiving that to your great beauty and honesty was added learning.’ Thus Euryalus wrote to her, and his words rank him with the men who loved Isotta degli Atti, Vittoria Colonna, and la belle Lionnoise. But, as Aeneas aged, the older element rose to the surface; ‘Woman is an imperfect creature... without faith, without fear, without constancy, without piety!’ and ‘When you see a woman, think that you see a devil.’

But to be mediaeval is, in itself, no stigma, and he did, at least, live a very natural life. In youth he loved and adventured, studied and made a name; delighting in his wits and in his body, denying neither. In the middle years, he turned his thoughts to his future, in this world and the next. And at the end he filled his high position as nobly as he knew how. There is a certain quality in making every part of life harmonious, and Aeneas had a supreme contempt for ‘old age pursuing love, but lacking strength.’ And, after all, whether his conversion was due to worldly ambition, feebler powers, or a very natural desire for something permanent after the long, blind, mad adventure of his youth, will matter little to readers of this tale. Its author was Aeneas Sylvius, the layman. The bishop, the Cardinal, and the Pope, enemy incarnate of the Infidel, have nothing to do with Lucretia and Euryalus. Pius II. denied them.

AENEAS SYLVIUS OF SIENA, poet laureate and man of renown, to Gaspar Schlick, knight, that he may read it, thus felicitously begins his tale of the two lovers.