Callixtus III

Alfons de Borja was a canon lawyer from the Valencian countryside who had spent his career in the service of the kings of Aragon, who had talked the last antipope of the Great Schism, Clement VIII, into resigning in 1429. Bishop of Valencia for that service and cardinal in 1444, he was seventy-six and gouty when the conclave of April 1455, deadlocked between the Orsini and Colonna factions, chose him on the eighth as a caretaker.

He had one obsession: Constantinople had fallen two years earlier, and he had vowed on his election to recover it. He melted down the plate and sold the bindings from Nicholas V's beloved manuscripts to pay for galleys, sent preachers across Europe, and ordered every church bell in Christendom rung at noon to call the faithful to pray for the crusaders, the origin of the midday Angelus. The one victory came at Belgrade in July 1456, where John Hunyadi and the friar John of Capistrano broke the Ottoman siege; His fleet under Cardinal Scarampo took a few Aegean islands. The princes of Europe, as they would for the next fifty years, stayed home.

His other legacy was the family. He made two nephews cardinals in 1456, among them the twenty-five-year-old Rodrigo Borgia, and installed a third, Pedro Luis, as captain-general of the church and prefect of Rome, filling the city with Catalans whom the Romans loathed. He also reopened the trial of Joan of Arc and, on 7 July 1456, declared her condemnation void. When he died on 6 August 1458 the Romans hunted the Catalans out of the city; Rodrigo stayed, and became Alexander VI.