Council of Basel
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 brief-lived ecclesiastical reunion of East and West.
After the council was dissolved, Cesarini was sent as papal legate to Hungary (1442) by the Pope Eugene IV to solve a polithical crisis that came to be after the death of the 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 called from Poland the young King Władysław, and crowned him as Hungarian King making him promise he will defend the State against the Ottomans. On December 13, 1442 Cesarini made the two parts reach an agreemet in the city of Győr, were the rights of the baby Ladislas were recognized in front of the new King, without endangering the power of the other. After this, Cesarini became the confident of the King Władysław, and in 1443 went to Viene as his ambassador to the court of Friedrich III. Soon he became one of the principal planners of a new crusade against the Ottomans that started to invade Europa. On 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 appropriated for a new war, Cesarini insisted that the Hungarian King Władysław should break the treaty, and so it happened in September of the same year, when they all marched to the Balcans in a new campaign. It was an unfortunate step and resulted in the disastrous defeat of the Papal army at Varna, November 10, 1444, when Cardinal Giuliano was slain in the fight. Rumors that Cesarini 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 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.
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