Pius II
Enea Silvio Piccolomini · 1458 – 1464
A Renaissance humanist and former conciliarist who reversed his own earlier positions and died trying to launch a crusade.
Piccolomini was one of the most literary men ever to sit on Peter's chair. A poet, historian, novelist, and diplomat, he had served as secretary to the Council of Basel and championed conciliarism, the theory that councils outrank popes. After his election in 1458, he publicly repudiated his earlier views, issuing the bull Execrabilis, which forbade appeals to a council over the pope's head. He spent most of his pontificate trying to organize a crusade to reclaim Constantinople from the Ottomans. When no European monarch would commit, Pius decided to lead the crusade himself. He traveled to the port of Ancona in the summer of 1464, already gravely ill with fever. He died there on August 14, watching the harbor for ships that mostly never came.
Reject What I Was
Pius famously wrote: 'Reject Aeneas, accept Pius.' He publicly disowned his own earlier conciliarist writings. It takes a certain kind of courage to tell the world you were wrong. Execrabilis settled the conciliarist question firmly in Rome's favor.
Death at Ancona
Pius dragged himself to the coast to lead a crusade because no one else would. He was dying and he knew it. The fleet never properly assembled. But he went anyway, because he believed someone had to try. He died looking out at the harbor. It's hard not to admire a man who keeps walking toward something he knows he won't reach.