turning point in Piccolomini's career; he turned away from his pagan, licentious life to the study of theology, definitely entered the Church, and set before his eyes two great objects: the unity of Roman Catholicism, the rolling back of the tide of Turkish invasion.[93] There can be little question that hope of advancement was his chief motive in this conversion, but his after life as an ecclesiastic seems to show that the nobler spiritual impulse was not altogether lacking. "To him," writes Dean Kitchin, "more than to any man is due the successful healing of the schism of the West." In the next, the fifth fresco, which after the first is the most beautiful of the series, he is Bishop of Siena, presiding at the meeting of the Emperor and his bride Leonora of Portugal outside the Porta Camollia, on February 24th, 1452. Behind the Emperor stand Duke Albert of Austria and the young King Ladislaus of Hungary and Bohemia. We read that the Emperor showed considerable nervousness as he waited for his bride, whom he had never seen before. "At first," writes Enea Silvio himself in his History of Frederick, "the Caesar turned pale, when he saw his bride coming in the distance. But when she drew near, and he beheld more and more her beautiful face and her royal bearing, he became himself again and his colour returned, and he waxed merry, for he found his lovely bride was even more lovely than report had made her, and he perceived that he had not been deceived by words, as often happens to princes who contract marriages by procurators."[94] The fall of Constantinople in 1453 gave Bishop Enea the opportunity of coming forward as the champion of the cause of Christendom against the Moslem, the eloquent advocate of a new crusade. In the sixth history, he receives the Cardinal's hat from Calixtus III. in 1456; two Greek prelates stand conspicuously in the foreground, while Bessarion appears again on our right; though not very like his authentic portrait by Pinturicchio in the Vatican, the Cardinal standing at the Pope's right hand is probably intended for his abominable nephew Roderigo Borgia, afterwards Alexander VI., with whom Enea at this time was on friendly terms. Then, in the seventh, the hero has reached the goal of his earthly ambition, and becomes Pope Pius II. on September 3rd, 1458. He is being carried in procession to give his benediction to the City and the World, while the Master of the Ceremonies burns a piece of tow before him, with the traditional warning: _Sancte Pater, sic transit gloria mundi_. Two Orientals are there to represent the Eastern Question, that the new Pontiff had made his own. The eighth fresco represents the opening of Congress of Mantua, in 1459, where Pius in vain strove to rouse the powers of Christendom to concerted action; as the fresco appropriately lets us perceive, the Pope himself and the suppliant Christians of the East are the only people in earnest in the matter.