The great object of Callixtus’ policy has…
August 1458 CE
The great object of Callixtus’ policy has been the urging of a crusade against the Turks, who had captured Constantinople in 1453, but he has not found the Christian princes responsive to his call despite his every effort.
He has made two of his nephews cardinals, one of whom, Roderic de Borgia, will in 1492 become Pope Alexander VI and gain infamy for corruption.
The primary accomplishment of Callixtus, who dies at seventy-nine on August 6, 1458, has been the ordering of a new trial for St. Joan of Arc (circa 1412–1431), summoned by French king Charles VII, at which she was posthumously vindicated after being controversially tried and executed.
The cardinals enter into conclave on August 10.
The wealthy cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville of Rouen, though a Frenchman and of apparently exceptionable character, seems certain to be elected, but the cardinals instead choose Enea Silvio Piccolomini, an unscrupulous lay adventurer and licentious novelist not fifteen years earlier, named by Pope Nicholas V as Bishop of Trieste in 1447 and subsequently serving as Bishop of Siena, Piccolomini had in his capacity as a papal diplomat brought strong recommendations from the Emperor and King Ladislaus of Hungary for his nomination to the cardinalate, but delays had arisen from the Pope's resolution to promote his own nephews first, and he did not attain the object of his ambition until December of 1456.
Piccolomini begins his papacy on August 29, taking the reign name Pius II.