Pope Nicholas V
Nicholas V founded the Vatican Library, presided over the fall of Constantinople, and was the last pope who could plausibly call a crusade. He was a scholar of modest birth, a tutor and then a bishop, and he was elected in 1447 as a compromise in a church that had just spent forty years arguing about whether councils outranked popes. He ended that argument by outlasting it: the rival pope elected by the Council of Basel abdicated in 1449, the council dissolved itself, and the jubilee of 1450 brought enough pilgrims to Rome to restore both the papal finances and the sense that the office had a single occupant. What he did with the money was build and buy. He began the rebuilding of St Peter's, restored the walls, bridges and aqueducts of a city that had been half-derelict for a century, and employed agents across Europe and the Aegean to buy or copy Greek and Latin manuscripts. The collection he assembled - some twelve hundred volumes, where his predecessor had left about three hundred - is the foundation of the Vatican Library, and the translation programme he paid for put much of Greek historiography and philosophy into Latin for the first time. He is the pope who made the papacy a patron of humanism. In May 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. Nicholas called a crusade, and the response was the Peace of Lodi the following year - an Italian settlement between Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples and the papacy that ended half a century of warfare between them and produced a balance of power lasting forty years, but produced no expedition east. He also issued the bull that authorised the Portuguese crown to reduce non-Christians to perpetual servitude, which supplied the legal argument for the Atlantic slave trade. He died in 1455 saying that he had been a great sinner in the eyes of God.
- Lived: 1397 CE – 1455 CE
- Nationality: Papal
- Roles: head_of_state, religious_leader
