Pope Nicholas V (Latin: Nicolaus V; Italian: Niccolò V; 15 November 1397 – 24 March 1455), born Tommaso Parentucelli, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 6 March 1447 until his death in March 1455. Pope Eugene IV made him a cardinal in 1446 after successful trips to Italy and Germany, and when Eugene died the next year, Parentucelli was elected in his place. He took his name Nicholas in memory of his obligations to Niccolò Albergati. He remains the most recent pope to take the pontifical name "Nicholas".
The pontificate of Nicholas saw the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks and the end of the Hundred Years' War. He responded by calling a crusade against the Ottomans, which never materialized. By the Concordat of Vienna he secured the recognition of papal rights over bishoprics and benefices. He also brought about the submission of the last of the antipopes, Felix V, and the dissolution of the Synod of Basel. A key figure in the Roman Renaissance, Nicholas sought to make Rome the home of literature and art. He strengthened fortifications, restored aqueducts, and rebuilt many churches. He ordered design plans for what would eventually be the Basilica of St. Peter.
Tommaso Parentucelli was born in Sarzana, an important town in Lunigiana, to the physician Bartolomeo Parentucelli and wife Andreola Bosi of Fivizzano. The Lunigiana region had long been fought over by competing Tuscan, Ligurian and Milanese forces. Three years before Parentucelli's birth, the town was captured from the Florentines by the Genoese Republic. His father died while he was young. Parentucelli later became a tutor, in Florence, to the families of the Strozzi and Albizzi, where he met the leading Renaissance humanist scholars.
Parentucelli studied at Bologna and Florence, gaining a degree in theology, in 1422. Bishop Niccolò Albergati was so awestruck with his capabilities that he took him into his service and gave him the chance to pursue his studies further by sending him on a tour through Germany, France and England. He was able to collect books, for which he had an intellectual's passion, wherever he went. Some of them survive with his marginal annotations.
Parentucelli attended the Council of Florence. In 1444, when his patron died, he was appointed Bishop of Bologna in his place. Civic disorders at Bologna were prolonged, so Pope Eugene IV soon named him as one of the legates sent to Frankfurt. He was to assist in negotiating an understanding between the Papal States and the Holy Roman Empire, regarding undercutting or at least containing the reforming decrees of the Council of Basel (1431–1439).
Parentucelli's successful diplomacy gained him the reward, on his return to Rome, of the title Cardinal-Priest of Santa Susanna in December 1446. At the papal conclave of 1447 he was elected pope in succession to Eugene IV on 6 March. He took the name Nicholas in honour of his early benefactor, Niccolò Albergati.
In only eight years, his pontificate delivered important achievements in the political, scientific, and literary history of the world. Politically, he needed to repair relationships which had broken down in the pontificate of Eugene IV. He called the congress which produced the Treaty of Lodi, secured peace with Charles VII of France, and concluded the Concordat of Vienna or Aschaffenburg (17 February 1448) with the German King, Frederick III, by which the decrees of the Council of Basel against papal annates and reservations were abrogated so far as Germany was concerned. In the following year he secured a still greater tactical triumph with the resignation of the Antipope Felix V on 7 April and his own recognition by the rump of the Council of Basel that assembled at Lausanne.
In 1450, Nicholas held a Jubilee at Rome, and the offerings of the numerous pilgrims who thronged to Rome gave him the means of furthering the cause of culture in Italy, which he had so much at heart. In March 1452 he crowned Frederick III as Holy Roman Emperor in St. Peter's, in what was the last imperial coronation held in Rome.
Within the city of Rome, Nicholas introduced the fresh spirit of the Renaissance both intellectually and architecturally. His plans were of embellishing the city with new monuments worthy of the capital of the Christian world. It was in recognition of this commitment to building that Leon Battista Alberti dedicated to Nicholas V his treatise De re aedificatoria.
He is the last pope to date to take the pontifical name "Nicholas".
His first care was practical, to reinforce the city's fortifications, cleaning and even paving some main streets and restoring the water supply. The end of ancient Rome is sometimes dated from the destruction of its magnificent array of aqueducts by 6th-century invaders. In the Middle Ages Romans depended on wells and cisterns for water, and the poor dipped their water from the yellow Tiber. The Aqua Virgo aqueduct, originally constructed by Agrippa, was restored by Nicholas and emptied into a simple basin that Alberti designed, the predecessor of the Trevi Fountain.
He continued restoration of the major Roman basilicas, but also of many other Roman churches including Sant' Apostoli, Sant' Eusebio, San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, Santa Maria in Trastevere, Santa Prassede, San Salvatore, Santo Stefano Rotondo, San Teodoro, and especially San Celso. He rebuilt the Ponte Sant' Angelo which had collapsed in 1450, and supported the redevelopment of the surrounding area as a prestigious business and residential district.
Nicholas V's major focus was on establishing the Vatican as the official residence of the Papacy, replacing the Lateran Palace. He added a substantial new wing including a private chapel to the Vatican, and – according to Giannozzo Manetti, biographer of Nicholas – planned substantial changes to the Borgo district. He also laid up 2,522 cartloads of marble from the dilapidated Colosseum for use in the later constructions.
The Pope's contemporaries criticised his lavish expenditure on building: Manetti drew parallels with the wealth and expenditure of Solomon, suggesting that Papal wealth was acceptable so long as it was expended to the glory of God and the good of the Church. The decoration of the Niccoline Chapel by Fra Angelico demonstrated this message through its depictions of St Lawrence (martyred for refusing to hand to the Roman state the wealth of the Church) and St Stephen.
Under the generous patronage of Nicholas, Renaissance humanism made rapid strides as well. The new humanist learning had been hitherto looked on with suspicion in Rome, a possible source of schism and heresy from an unhealthy interest in paganism. For Nicholas, humanism became a tool for the cultural aggrandizement of the Christian capital, and he sent emissaries to the East to attract Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople. The pope also employed Lorenzo Valla to translate Greek histories, pagan as well as Christian, into Latin. This industry, coming just before the dawn of printing, contributed enormously to the sudden expansion of the intellectual horizon.
Nicholas, with assistance from Enoch of Ascoli and Giovanni Tortelli, founded a library of five thousand volumes, including manuscripts rescued from the Turks after the fall of Constantinople. The Pope himself was a man of vast erudition, and his friend Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, said of him that "what he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge". A lifelong bibliophile, he treasured books: while the Vatican library was still being designed and planned, he kept the rarest books near to him in his bedroom, with the others in a room nearby. Often thinking fondly of his former work as a librarian, he once remarked, "I had more happiness in a day than now in a whole year."
He was compelled, however, to add that the lustre of his pontificate would be forever dulled by the fall of Constantinople, which the Turks took in 1453. Unsuccessful in a campaign to unite Christian powers to come to the aid of Constantinople, just before that great citadel was conquered, Nicholas had ordered 10 papal ships to sail with ships from Genoa, Venice and Naples to defend the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. However, the ancient capital fell before the ships could offer any aid. The Pope bitterly felt this catastrophe as a double blow to Christendom and to Greek letters. "It is a second death", wrote Aeneas Silvius, "to Homer and Plato."