Abstract
Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, was the most outspoken humanist supporter of a fifteenth-century crusade after the fall of Constantinople. In his crusade writings from 1456–58, Piccolomini argued that that King Alfonso V of Aragon and Naples was the ideal figure to lead the crusade, portraying Alfonso as a Spanish imperator whose qualities matched or exceeded even the Pope and the Emperor, using classical rhetoric popular with Neapolitan humanists like Bartolomeo Facio. Even after Alfonso's death, Piccolomini celebrated the king as an exemplary ruler whose Spanish virtues brought peace to Italy and Spain and which could have restored Constantinople and healed a politically divided respublica Christiana.
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