As a Pope, he claims attention for the single-hearted zeal which he displayed in the vain attempt to rouse the piety of Christendom against the foes of civilization and the faith.

Rarely has a greater contrast been displayed between the man and the pontiff than in the case of Pius.
The pleasure-loving, astute, free-thinking man of letters and the world has become a Holy Father, jealous for Christian proprieties, and bent on stirring Europe by an appeal to motives which had lost their force three centuries before.

Frederick II.

and S.Louis closed the age of the Crusades, the one by striking a bargain with the infidel, the other by snatching at a martyr's crown.

AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini was the mirror of his times--a humanist and stylist, imbued with the rhetorical and pseudo-classic taste of the earlier Renaissance.