Chapter I
Index
Part I — The Rupture (1378)
Conclave of Smoke
The Cry in the Square
Oath in Anagni
The Second Throne
Ink and Betrayal
Ottone’s Cipher
Avignon Couriers
The Merchant’s Lady
Double-Edged Tongues
The Fall of Baldeschi
Ashes of the Protector
The Threshold of the Two Shadows
Part II — The Game of Courts (1380s–90s)
13. The Two-Faced Court
14. The Merchant of Avignon
15. The Amber Courtier
16. Letters That Burn
17. The Price of a Secret
18. Dance of Ambassadors
19. Beatrice’s Night
20. Velvet Rivals
21. The Council That Never Was
22. Shadow Over Avignon
23. The Deception Uncovered
24. Two Popes, No Path
Part III — Council of Pisa (1409)
25. Summons to Pisa
26. Three Empty Chairs
27. The New Candidate
28. Voices in the Conclave
29. The Weight of Ottone
30. Sforzini’s Letter
31. The Price of Silence
32. A Third Throne
33. Fracture of Loyalties
34. The Leap into the Void
35. Beatrice on the Scales
36. Pisa in Ashes
Part IV — Council of Constance (1414–1417)
37. The Emperor Summons
38. Neutral Ground
39. Anselmo Returns
40. The Ghost of Sforzini
41. Trial of John XXIII
42. Flight of the Pisan Pope
43. Letters from Avignon
44. Benedict’s Last Resort
45. Beatrice, Widow
46. Anselmo’s Confession
47. Sforzini Settles Scores
48. Gregory’s Resignation
49. A Single Throne
50. The Pope of the Three Shadows
PROLOGUE
Rome, 1420, a few days after a quiet burial.
Beatrice Perotti kept a single object hidden at the bottom of a wooden chest—one that her husband had never wanted to burn alongside his other papers: an unsigned letter, written in a cipher she could not read, dated 1378.
She did not know what it said. She had never asked, and now that Anselmo was gone, she suspected she never would.
Yet she knew the story surrounding that worn parchment — she knew Ottone Baldeschi, the young Bolognese scribe who had grown, over the years, into a man capable of serving and betraying four different popes without ever losing, until very late, the certainty that survival was the only virtue that truly mattered.
This is that story. The story of an ordinary man, caught in the middle of the greatest fracture Western Christendom had ever known, who learned—at a devastating price—the difference between merely surviving and truly living.
Part I
Chapter I — Conclave of Smoke
Rome, April 1378.
The smoke escaping from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel was not entirely white. Anselmo Perotti watched it from the courtyard, squeezed among the crowd that had spent three days refusing to disperse, and thought that not even the sky seemed capable of making up its mind.
— White, — said a man beside him, a weaver judging by the smell of damp wool he gave off. — It’s white.
— It’s gray, — Anselmo replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the column dissolving into the still afternoon air. — And gray doesn’t choose popes.
He had spent two years serving as a minor scribe in the curia, copying papal bulls that no one would read twice and watching—always watching—with the patience of a man who knows his advancement will come not from his quill, but from his eyes. Ottone Baldeschi, the cardinal who had pulled him out of a scriptorium in Bologna and brought him to Rome, had taught him that above all else: in this city, the one who sees first, survives.
And what Anselmo saw now was a public square on the verge of turning into a pyre.
The crowd had been shouting since dawn. Romano, romano, lo volemo o al manco italiano — they wanted a Roman pope, or at least an Italian one, after seventy years of French popes ruling from Avignon as if Rome were a forgotten province. The cardinals, sixteen in all, locked in conclave for three days, knew precisely what would happen if they emerged with a name that wasn't Italian. Anselmo had seen a group of Romans armed with torches roaming the Vatican walls that very morning, and had heard enough to know those torches weren't just meant for lighting the dark.
— They ought to give them what they're asking for, — muttered the weaver.
— They will, — Anselmo said. — The question is what they'll ask for next.
A murmur rippled through the square like a wave. The chapel doors were swinging open. Anselmo elbowed his way toward the front, aided by his slight frame, until he was a few meters from the portico where the cardinal protodeacon would appear to announce the name. He searched the crowd for Baldeschi’s scarlet cassock among the emerging figures, but could not find it; his mentor must have stayed inside, negotiating until the final moment.
The protodeacon raised his arms.
— Habemus papam!
The silence that followed was of the kind Anselmo had only felt right before a storm, when the air grows heavy and the whole world seems to hold its breath.
— Bartolomeo Prignano, — the cardinal announced, — Archbishop of Bari, who shall take the name Urban the Sixth.
A flicker of confusion swept through the square. The name did not belong to a cardinal—he was the Archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan of humble birth, a man of the curia but never a member of the College. Anselmo felt the people around him waver between disappointment and relief: he wasn't Roman, but at least he was Italian; at least he wasn't French. That was enough. The hesitation turned into cheers, and the cheers into a roar that shook the entire square.
Anselmo did not cheer. He stared up at the Vatican windows, where he thought he caught, for just a second, the face of Baldeschi looking down with an expression that wasn't triumph. It was calculation.
That night, when the crowd finally dispersed and the torches went out one by one, Anselmo found his mentor alone in his study, the window cracked open and an untouched glass of wine resting on the table.
— Eminence? — he said, closing the door behind him.
Baldeschi did not turn around immediately. When he did, his face carried the pallor of a man who had witnessed something he wished he hadn't.
— We have chosen a man who believes he owes a debt to no one, Anselmo, — he said at last. — And such a man, sitting in that chair, will not take long to show us why we have always chosen, until now, one of our own.
— Do you fear he will make a bad pope?
— I fear, — said Baldeschi, and for the first time since Anselmo had known him, his voice trembled slightly, — that he is the pope who will break the Church in two.
Outside, someone was still singing victory through the streets of Rome, oblivious to the fact that, in that dimly lit room, the first prophecy of the schism had already been spoken.
