Pius II Elected Pope

1458

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, a Sienese humanist poet who had once fathered illegitimate children and written erotic fiction, was elected pope. He immediately called for a new crusade against the Turks. Nobody answered. He would die in Ancona waiting for ships that never came to carry him east. Before election he had authored histories, geographies, and erotic novellas, offering one of the richest literary portraits of fifteenth-century life.