This more opinion than review. After waiting 37 years to read this book, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. ( )

A Trembling Upon Rome is a historical novel about the man whom the Vatican subsequently designated as the Antipope John XXIII, Baldassare Cossa (1367-1419), son of an ambitious Neapolitan pirate-cum-merchant, turned nobleman, told largely through the eyes of his personal slave, a German Jew later made cardinal named Franco Ellera; this being a Richard Condon book, it is bawdy, frequently funny, jaundiced, learned, and almost inordinately interested in laying bare the wheels-within-wheels cooked up by its largely historical characters. It also frequently reads like a heist yarn; it certainly bears not a little similarity to a more traditional crime family saga (say, Condon's own Prizzi's Honor, for example), which is to be expected given how it deals with the rise and fall of the Cossas, the termination of the Western Schism, and the rise of the Medicis. (The Medicis' fall is outside the scope of Condon's narrative.) It doesn't hurt that Baldassare Cossa, a Neapolitan, makes a mortal enemy in a Sicilian cardinal, Piero Spina, just as he is beginning his ascent in the Vatican hierarchy that will culminate in his being maneuvered into accepting the Throne of St. Peter.

A Trembling Upon Rome is chockablock with almost always interesting historical detail; it certainly casts a persuasive light on the Medicis' role in ending the Western Schism, and the real reasons why the Vatican (and the Medicis...) wanted to put an end to the heretical preachings of (as he is called here) John Hus. (Then too, as Condon portrays the Vatican of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the reader will be hard-pressed to disagree with the statement that "[Hus] preached that the Church had become a conspiracy of lawyers" [p. 201; Chapter 39].)

On the other hand, the fact that Condon persists on viewing the politics, secular and otherwise, of the day almost exclusively through the lens of money gives his narrative an off-key, anachronistic cast. To Condon, the only people with true religious convictions are holy fools (Hus being no exception): everyone else is on the make and, at one point or another, everyone is a sucker who gets taken in one sense or another. Indeed, one of the cardinals who persuades Cossa to accept the papal tiara as the Antipope Alexander V is sinking, brushes aside Cossa's demurral that he is "'a layman in all but title'" with, "'What would we do with a pastoral pope at a time like this?'" (p. 175; Chapter 34). (As a corollary, anyone who allows his or her lust to distill into love almost always learns to regret it.) That Condon is unwilling to consider that at least some of the movers and shakers were truly devout and on the make and more than willing to be brutally violent in pursuit of their usually selfish and self-serving aims diminishes his narrative: A Trembling Upon Rome is still a fine romp, but one wishes that it was more than that.

That said, the biographical notes on the major characters at the beginning of the book and the historical and bibliographical notes at the end of the book serve as great springboards to further reading about the period; in particular, I may have to look up Georgina Masson's Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975) one of these days. ( )