Pope Boniface IX believed in a one-man Church, as far as possible. He did not have the patience to be hampered by too numerous a college of cardinals, for example, and it was a pope's right to appoint as many cardinals as he wished. It was more economical and efficient not to have to provide for them than to have to haggle with them, ending by refusing them their expected shares in the Church's revenues. Of the thirteen cardinals who had elected him to the throne of St Peter in 1389, only five had still been alive for the Jubilee of 1400. To replace those who had died, he raised only four priests to the college, all able men Henricus Minutulus, whom he used constantly as a roving papal legate; Bartholomaeus de Uliarius, especially assigned to the court of King Ladislas of Naples; Cosmato de Megliorati (afterwards Pope Innocent VII), whom he used as ambassador between Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, and the republics of Florence and Bologna; and Piero Spina, his bent-nose Sicilian chamberlain, who became adjudicator among the several disputed territories of the papal states.

Baldassare Cossa was awarded a red hat in 1402, in the same ceremonies which created the other new cardinals. It was very early – in the morning, shortly after dinner – when Boniface told his protege that he was to be made a cardinal. As His Holiness solemnly explained the significance of the cardinalate, Cossa told me he found himself remembering the lost beauty of the prodigiously sexual woman who had bedded him so single-mindedly in Perugia, several years before. As his influence at the Vatican had grown, he had been able to institute a series of investigations to find. her meaning that I was given the job of looking for her, but, wherever I looked no one had known her. She had vanished. It was as though Cossa had imagined he had been with her, except that I was his witness that she had once existed. She had a lovely natural perfume. I can smell her still.

Cossa despaired that she had escaped him, such a beautiful woman with long red-hair, pale skin, large green eyes so filled with eager lust as I remember them – that no one, having once seen her, could cast her from memory. Cossa said he had to force himself to listen to the pope instruct him about the cardinalate.

`Because you have no knowledge of theological matters, Cossa,' Boniface said to him,- you have, not been ordained and have spent your life as a lawyer we are going to explain to you what are the duties and the rewards of our cardinals. Our work has its two arms, the curia, which is all the offices which deal with administering our papacy, and our pastoral mission – apart from running Rome and the temporal requirements of the papal states. We need this complex machinery for; as the papal monarch, we claim not only the ownership of all islands, but we are also the feudal lord of many countries. As general overseer, we are entitled to depose princes, release subjects from their oaths of allegiance, confer crowns, making kings,: and to dispose of territories. It is in our powers to order the dispatch of troops in support of a ruler, or we can prohibit further military engagements. We can order the preservation of the legal systems of invaded or conquered countries, or transfer one kingdom to another. By the same powers we are entitled to annul certain laws, such as the Magna Carta in England, on the ground of its interference with royal power. Our papacy acts as a court which ratifies treaties between kings and countries, hence we have the right to prohibit trade where necessary.

`The cardinals are, of course, a part of this – that is, and never fail to remember this, as much a part of it as we, permit them to be. Originally, it was the clergy and the people of Rome who elected the pope, but gradually the defects in that system were adjusted, until the Third Lateran Council in 1179 issued the decree which stated that all cardinals of whatever rank were to be the equal electors and that, for a valid election, a two-thirds majority of their votes was required. And there you have the only function of cardinals – to elect a new pope. And that is where their freedom of decision ends, for, at the moment of a pope's election and his own acceptance, he and he alone has the governing power. Often popes are not even ordained priests, let alone consecrated bishops. Sometimes months pass before a pope is ordained or consecrated.' Boniface leaned forward towards Cossa for emphasis. His voice grew softer. `Let that demonstrate for you the nature of the papal office. It is juristic. It is executive and it is administrative before anything else. You are about to enter the sacred college which is usually – made up of seven cardinal bishops, twenty-eight cardinal priests, and eighteen cardinal deacons. Cardinal deacon will be the rank which you will hold. The head of all the cardinals is the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, who consecrates the pope and anoints the emperor. By custom, and in varying degrees depending upon the policy of the sitting pope, the cardinals participate in all sources of curial incomes as well as sharing in Peter's Pence. This is because the cardinals form "part of the pope's body" modelled on Roman law, which laid down the same intimate connection between: Roman senators and their emperor. By constant adjustment to new contingencies, our vast machinery functions out of the resilience and continuity of a slow evolution which, reaches back across the centuries, founded upon order and based upon law.'

Thus, in February, 1402, when he was thirty-four years old, Baldassare Cossa was created Cardinal of St Eustachius, a cardinal deacon who had never taken holy orders but who was a first-class army commander, a very good canon lawyer, and who had a definite talent when it came to diverting a gold florin from the purse of the faithful.

Decima Manovale was born in 1371, four years after Cossa's birth, seven years before Urban VI became the vicar of Christ and slipped his leash to cause the great schism in the Church. An important figure in Manovale's story is Sir John Hawkwood, the great condotiere, who was knighted in the field by the Black Prince in 1356. Hawkwood was one of the most powerful hired lances in Italian history.

After the Treaty of Bretigny, in 1360, when he became one of the hundreds of surplus captains, he formed his own company of mercenaries and moved southward from Burgundy along the Rhone valley to the papal capital of Avignon – one free company, that is a company whose men elected their leaders, among a horde of 60,000 mercenary soldiers. They had heard about the papal riches and they had decided that, all together, they could scoop it up before moving on. Avignon, to those soldiers, was a museum displaying samples of the booty which was waiting on the other side of the Alps. Avignon was a miniature Italy which glistened with the wealth of the south. The city was packed with merchants, goldsmiths, weavers, musicians, astrologers, prelates, pickpockets, whores, and forty-three branches of Italian banking houses. The papal court was so opulent that cardinals' mules wore gold bits. You can imagine what was gold on the cardinals' whores.

A great river of money rushed into the papal palace from every corner of Christendom in the form of tribute's for annates and media friuctus, the spoilia, visitation fees, dispensations, absolutions, tithes, presents, sales of places, papal loans, taxes on bulls, and benefices. For 45 groschen the King of Cyprus secured permission for his subjects to trade with the Egyptians. There was a graduated scale of prices which permitted the laity to choose their confessor outside their regular parish. The pope could change either canon law or divine law, but the divine law was changed only if there was enough money; money could buy anything to deliver any manner of permission to the petitioner