Papal travels

In 1435 a young Tuscan poet and diplomat visited the court of James I in Edinburgh. The purpose of his mission remains something of a mystery. But he was impressed by the women of the country, whom he described as ‘fair, charming and easily won’. It also did not take him long to discover that ‘there is nothing the Scotch like better to hear than abuse of the English’.

The writer was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pius II, and the book in which he recorded his experiences (in the third person, in imitation of Julius Caesar) his astonishingly frank autobiography, the Commentaries, available in unexpurgated form (and translated into English by Florence Gragg) only in modern times.

Piccolomini returned to the Continent, passing through England in disguise. Leaving behind the exotic savagery and promiscuous customs of the natives of the far north, it was only when arriving at Newcastle that ‘for the first time he seemed to see again a familiar world and a habitable country’.