NICHOLAS V. (Tomaso Parentucelli or Tomaso da Sar zana), pope from March to March 24, 1455, was born at Sarzana, where his father was a physician, in 1398. In 1444 he was made bishop of'Bologna by Pope Eugenius IV., who sent him to Frankfort to negotiate an understanding between the Holy See and the empire with regard to the reforming decrees of the council of Basel. On his return to Rome, he was made cardinal priest of Sta. Susanna (December 1446). He was elected pope in suc cession to Eugenius IV. on March 6, With the German king, Frederick III., he made the Concordat of Vienna, or Aschaffenburg (Feb. 17, 1448), by which the decrees of the council of Basel against papal annates and reservations were abrogated so far as Germany was concerned; and in the following year he secured a still greater triumph when the resig nation of the anti-pope Felix V. (April 7), and his own recognition by the rump of the council of Basel, assembled at Lausanne, put an end to the papal schism. The next year, 1450, Nicholas held a jubilee at Rome. In March 1452 he crowned Frederick III. as
emperor in St. Peter's, the last occasion of the coronation of an emperor at Rome. Under the generous patronage of Nicholas humanism made rapid strides. He employed hundreds of copy ists and scholars, giving as much as ten thousand gulden for a metrical translation of Homer, and founded a library of nine thousand volumes. He restored the walls and numerous churches of Rome and began the rebuilding of the Vatican and St. Peter's.
In 1452 a formidable conspiracy for the overthrow of the papal government, under the leadership of Stefano Porcaro, was dis covered and crushed. This revelation of disaffection, together with the fall of Constantinople, darkened the last years of Nicholas; "As Thomas of Sarzana," he said, "I had more happiness in a day than now in a whole year." He died on March 24, See Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie fur protestantische Theologie and Kirche, vol. xiv. (1904), with full references; Cambridge Modern History, i. 76-78; and M. Creighton, History of the Papacy (London, 1882), vol. ii.