Julian Cesarini

Cesarini was made President of the Council of Basel, in which capacity he successfully resisted the efforts of Eugenius IV to dissolve the council, though later (1437) he withdrew, believing the majority of delegates present were more anxious to humiliate the pope than to accomplish reforms, for his first loyalty was to the idea of church unity. When Eugenius convoked the rival Council of Ferrara, Cesarini was made head of the commission appointed to confer with the Greeks. In 1439, owing to a plague, the council was transferred from Ferrara to Florence, where Cesarini continued to play a prominent part in the negotiations with the Greeks. These negotiations ended in a short-lived ecclesiastical reunion of East and West.

After the council was dissolved, Cesarini was sent as papal legate to Hungary (1442) by Pope Eugenius IV to solve a political crisis that arose after the death of King Albert of Hungary (from the House of Habsburg) in 1439. The widow, Queen Elisabeth of Luxembourg, was left alone with her newborn son, who was crowned as Ladislaus V of Hungary. However, the Turkish wars represented a serious danger to the Kingdom, and the noblemen summoned the young King Władysław of Poland and crowned him as Hungarian King, making him promise that he would defend the state against the Ottomans. On 13 December 1442 Cesarini made the two parties reach an agreement in the city of Győr, where the rights of the baby Ladislas were recognized in the presence of the new King, without endangering the power of the other. After this, Cesarini became the confidant of King Władysław, and in 1443 went to Vienna as his ambassador to the court of Frederick III. Soon he became one of the principal planners of a new crusade against the Ottomans, who had begun to invade Europe. In June 1444, the Hungarian King signed a peace treaty (Peace of Szeged) with the Turkish sultan Murad II that would last for 10 years, but seeing this as a mistake and considering the moment and the circumstances appropriate for a new war, Cesarini insisted that the Hungarian King Władysław should break the treaty. This occurred in September of the same year, when they all marched to the Balkans in a new campaign. It was an unfortunate step and resulted in the disastrous defeat of the papal army at Varna (in eastern Bulgaria) on 10 November 1444, when Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini was slain in the fight. In a letter to the Duke of Milan, his friend Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini tells of reports that, having escaped the fray, though wounded and bleeding, Cesarini was set upon by a band of Hungarians who, in the confusion of defeat, robbed and killed him. "Wounded in the battle, and fainting in his flight through loss of blood, he was slain near a marsh by the impious hands of the Hungarians, not at the instigation of the nobility, but through the rage of the populace; and thus breathed forth that glorious spirit which once with its sweet discourse swayed at will the assembled fathers at Basle"[4]

Rumors that he had escaped proved false. The Roman curia, however, was slow to accept that the cardinal was dead.

His two well-known letters to Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pius II) about the pope's relations to the Council of Basel are printed among the works of Pius II[5] Piccolomini, in his letters, describes Cesarini as unfortunate in war, but he also says the cardinal went straight to heaven upon being martyred by the Turks.

• Christianson, Gerald (1979), Cesarini, the conciliar cardinal: the Basel years, 1431–1438, S[ank]t Ottilien: EOS-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-88096-074-9.

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Giuliano Cesarini