The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

TO SERVE AS the pope’s apostolic secretary was the pinnacle of curial ambition: though he was only in his early thirties, Poggio’s skills had taken him from nothing to the top of the heap. And the heap at this moment was swarming with diplomatic maneuvers, complex business transactions, rumors of invasion, heresy hunts, threats, feints, and double-dealing, for Baldassare Cossa—Pope John XXIII, as he called himself—was a master of intrigue. Poggio would have been involved in controlling access to the pontiff, digesting and passing along key information, taking notes, articulating policies that had only been roughly sketched, crafting the Latin missives sent to princes and potentates.