R. A. Scotti (16 page)

L
eo had been pope for four exorbitant years, and the Church was about to discover the true cost of his profligacy. For now, though, the constant hectoring by his own cardinal-chamberlain was more annoying to the pope than the distant caviling of an insignificant friar. To the young Medici prince, Raffaele Riario was not a voice of reason and fiscal restraint. He was a mean-spirited old man, too long in the same job, more than thirty years, and acting as if he were more important than the Holy Father. Riario lectured the pope as if he were the supreme pontiff and Leo an errant sinner, and his criticism grew louder as Leo's questionable schemes escalated.

Helpful advice, the cardinal called it. Leo called it feigned concern. He saw it as more della Rovere treachery against the Medici. Vengeance is never forgotten, just laid aside until it can be exacted. Leo's manner was amiable, but his memory was long. He remembered Riario, younger but just as cagey, lurking in the background on the Sunday that his uncle Giuliano de' Medici was murdered in the Florence cathedral and the della Rovere–Pazzi plot to destroy his family was foiled.

Two of Sixtus IV's nephews were implicated in the conspiracy. One was clearly guilty. The other was Raffaele Riario, now the Vatican's chief financial officer and the second most powerful man in Rome. The incident had sparked a tit-for-tat feud between the della Roveres and the Medici, with Riario claiming that he was an innocent bystander who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and Lorenzo imprisoning him for conspiracy. Sixtus had countered by excommunicating the Medici prince. No secular prince possessed a weapon of comparable power, and rather than risk eternal damnation, Lorenzo capitulated. Riario was released after two months but never exonerated in the eyes of the Medici.

A political animal, schooled in the papacies of three artful pontiffs, Cardinal Riario conducted himself like a prince, traveling with a retinue of three hundred and attracting a coterie of intellectuals. His palace across the Tiber was one of the grandest in Rome, and his art collection rivaled his cousin's, which became the basis of the Vatican collection.

Riario was shrewd, prudent, and one of Leo's most persistent critics within the Curia. To add to the intrigue, he was the cardinal protector of the Augustinians, the monastic order to which Leo's other irksome critic, Martin Luther, belonged.

Like his cousin Julius, Riario had a flair for drama and an appetite for risk. He was a gambler by nature as well as a conservative fiscal force within the Vatican. He had built Palazzo Riario with the fortune he pocketed in one memorable night of gambling against another cardinal and papal nephew, the dissolute Franceschetto Cibo.

Riario always chose his game shrewdly. Having learned the cost of profligacy in the pontificate of Alexander VI, he had worked closely with his cousin Julius to solve the fiscal crisis inherited from the Borgias, rebuild the city, and improve living conditions. They had made Rome a power center and the Church not only solvent but wealthy. Now the self-indulgence of the Medici pope threatened to bankrupt it again. The old cardinal sought to stop him but he underestimated Leo's wiles.

Leo, who was always scrambling for new revenue sources, uncovered a novel one: an assassination plot against his own august person, hatched quite conveniently by Riario and another equally wealthy cardinal. Whether it was paranoia, extortion, or a cunning case of sweet revenge, the cardinal-chamberlain and his accomplice, Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci, were charged with conspiring to assassinate “by poison and poignard” His Holiness the Medici pope. They were arrested, taken away in ropes, and imprisoned in Castel Sant'Angelo.

At first, Riario was defiant. Even from his prison cell, he was scornful of the intemperate, undisciplined pope. Confident of his position in the Curia and the city, he was more critical than ever of Leo. Riario was demanding release and an apology when Cardinal Petrucci was strangled in his cell. Fearing the same fate, the seventy-year-old Riario signed away everything except his life. He ceded ownership of his palazzo to the Medici, and agreed to pay an exorbitant price for his freedom.

Leo's demands exceeded even the old cardinal's substantial personal wealth. When he couldn't meet the pope's ransom, Agostino il Magnifico, whom Julius and Riario had made the Midas of Rome, stepped up and paid the Medici piper.

Raffaele Riario would die the same year as Leo, poor, alone, and forgotten by the many “friends” who had once curried favor with him. On the façade of his sumptuous palace, now called La Cancellaria, Leo had ordered the Medici balls emblazoned over the della Rovere oak tree.

 

Silencing Riario did nothing to quiet the storm gathering in the north. Copies of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses were flying off the new printing presses as fast as the indulgences. Gutenberg did not introduce mass communication—the masses were illiterate—but his inky miracle was revolutionizing communications as dramatically as the computer would more than five hundred years later.

Scribes were becoming obsolete. The meticulous work that had kept scribbling monks laboring for months by candlelight could be replaced in minutes by the multiple printed copies that rolled off the presses. Italy had one press in 1465. By 1500, there were 150. The Vatican had Arabic and Hebrew presses, as well as Latin, Greek, and vernacular Italian.

Without the power of the printing press to spread his message and the encouragement of German princes hoping to break free of Rome, Luther would have been just another lone, if irksome, voice carping in the wilderness. But printed pamphlets disseminated the complaints of the obscure Augustinian monk far beyond Saxony.

Pesky priests had gotten under the skin of princes before. When Henry II of England asked, “Will no one rid me of this priest?” Thomas à Becket was murdered the next night in Canterbury Cathedral. More recently, Alexander VI had answered the Florentine friar Savonarola's bonfire of the vanities with his own bonfire and tossed the friar on the pyre. Luckily for Luther, when he began decrying Rome, a gentler Medici was pontiff.

Although he could compose clever verses in Latin and Greek, Leo could not parse the message from Wittenberg Cathedral. The monk's screed was a veiled attack on the authority of the pope. Martin Luther did not emerge from a void or preach to a hostile audience. German princes were abetting him, and disgruntled Catholics, already paying the priest from cradle to grave, were growing restive. When Luther's Theses reached Rome, the Curia warned that the fuss over the indulgences was just the smoke. But Leo's interest in what was happening north of Rome stopped at Tuscany. Instead of curbing his feckless tax-and-spend habits, the pope ignored the growing protest.

Ensconced in his golden cocoon, Leo continued to scandalize. On the feast of St. Augustine, August 28, 1519, he officiated at the wedding of Agostino Chigi to Francesca Ordeaschi, a grocer's daughter from Venice. Fourteen cardinals and most of Roman society attended the wedding, which was the most lavish event of the summer. The bride had been Chigi's mistress for eight years, and the loving couple was attended by their four children.

Luther's attacks grew more rancorous. Branding the pope the Antichrist and Rome the whore of Babylon, he denounced the indulgences as “pious frauds of the faithful” and the Basilica of St. Peter as an outrage.

Like Nero fiddling as Rome burned, Leo dithered as the Church sundered. He spent more time on pageants and boar hunts than on the annoying monk and his laundry list of complaints. The clamor echoing across the Alps had less urgency than the horn of his huntsman, Domenico Boccamazza, or the baying of his hounds. Leo kept seventy or eighty prize hunting dogs in kennels near the Vatican. The hounds lived better than many of the poor souls who were spending their pennies on the spurious indulgences.

Although hunting was his passion, Leo's method was bizarre. Because he was too myopic and corpulent to ride to the hunt, he would watch from a stand through his monocle. Waving a white flag, he would signal the start of the chase to his cardinals, who had exchanged their cassocks and skullcaps for gray jackets and sombreros. Occasionally, a boar was lured into a penned area so that the pope could deliver the coup de grâce.

On the afternoon of June 15, 1520, while hunting in the hills of the
campagna
north of Rome, Leo paused in his curious entertainment just long enough to sign a papal bull,
Exsurge domine,
condemning the tiresome monk as a heretic.

Rome's troubles were just beginning.

 

Intent on immediate gratification and with little apparent concern for the future, Leo X presided over what would be both the apogee and the final act of the Renaissance. The history of Rome was repeating itself. Renaissance Rome had not only rediscovered classical culture, it had embraced the licentiousness that precipitated the fall of the imperial city.

When Leo was consecrated pope, Romans anticipated a second Golden Age of Augustus to crown the imperium of the second Julius. The Medici prince had seemed the ideal choice. He was a young man of noble intentions, refined taste, and the best education, excessively generous to friends and artists. By his death in 1521, his reign had been shown to be fool's gold.

“As of his pontificate, everything began going bad, and from bad to worse,” Girolamo Seripando, who would become one of the strongest voices in the Council of Trent, wrote, “whether we're dealing with the war against the Turks, or the empire [the Papal States], of which we lost a large part: Modena, Reggio Emilia, Parma, Piacenza. Or morals, of which every light had gone out, or of reputation, which has never been worse in the minds of men. Or authority, which has never been less, to the point where it has almost evaporated in a joke.”

By the end of Leo's disastrous, eight-year pontificate, all the main players in the first building phase of St. Peter's were dead: Giuliano della Rovere, Donato Bramante, Giuliano da Sangallo, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, Raphael Sanzio, and Agostino Chigi. The Church was impoverished, spiritually and fiscally, and the future of the Basilica was very much in doubt.

I
f the Renaissance had been a heady, hedonistic time for the humanists and hierarchy in Rome, it had been a less happy time for the faithful who expected their priests to be pastors. Many pilgrims, especially travelers from Britain and Germany, had been shocked by the dissoluteness of the clergy. One wag quipped that the northern countries “were too poor to rival Italy in immorality.”

A participant in the Lateran Council that Julius convened in 1512 deplored the abasement of the Church: “How many of the clergy,” he asked rhetorically, “do not wear clothes laid down by the sacred canons, how many keep concubines, are simoniacal and ambitious? How many carry weapons like soldiers?…How many go to the altar with their own children around them? How many hunt and shoot with crossbows and guns?”

Catholics in the north countries were losing respect for the papacy and growing resentful of the constant demands for more and more generous contributions. All their money was flowing to Rome with no return. Whether blind to its own shortcomings, scornful of its critics, or bored by the prospect of cleaning house, the Medici papacy had underestimated the divide that was looming.

When the cardinals met in papal conclave in the final days of 1521, the writing was on the wall. They realized that stringent measures were necessary to appease the restive Christians in the north and avert the looming “agony of Catholicism.” Turning away from the dissolute Roman prelates, they elected Adrian of Utrecht, a strict monk who had been tutor to the emperor Charles V. He kept his given name.

Adrian VI was an aberration in the Roman Renaissance, like John Ashcroft on a Stones road trip or Grandma Moses at a Mapplethorpe opening. A northerner and a man of rigid strictures, he had no tolerance for moral lapses. Taking his mandate seriously, he addressed the German protestors:

Adrian was preaching to closed minds. The dissidents didn't trust his sincerity, and Rome wasn't ready for such drastic self-improvement. After a few months of the no-nonsense Dutchman, Romans began looking back nostalgically to the pampered Medici prince. Humanists deplored the day that the Church had chosen a non-Italian to sit on the throne of Peter.

Adrian “took no delight in pictures, sculptures, or in any other good thing,” Vasari reports. He did not see beauty as a reflection of truth, or art as an instrument of religion, and he stopped work on all the painting and architecture that Julius and Leo had ordered. Raphael's assistants, who were finishing his frescoes in the Great Hall of the papal palace, were dismissed, and construction of the Basilica halted.

Conceived as
the
glorious monument to God and his Vicar, the Basilica of St. Peter came to look increasingly like Julius's Folly. It had become a financial nightmare, an administrative quagmire, and a burr abrading the faithful. Adrian closed down operations. The teeming work yard was silent. The lime furnaces were cold. Oxcarts and mule wagons no longer crowded the Ponte Sant'Angelo with loads of timber and travertine. Without the lush papal patronage that had made many of them wealthy, artists began to look for contracts outside the city.

“Driven to despair” and “almost like to die of hunger,” they were beginning to leave Rome, when “by the will of God,” Vasari writes, the foreign pope died.

The pontificate of the dour Dutchman lasted twenty-one months, interrupting, but not breaking, the Medici grip on Rome. When the cardinals met to elect his successor, they chose Leo's bastard cousin and confidant Giulio de' Medici. He took the name Clement VII, “and with him all the arts…were restored to life in one day.”

Elected in the moral backlash against Leo's dissolute style, Adrian served as an ellipsis between the two Medici papacies. Although his pontificate was so joyless that 450 years would elapse before the throne of Peter was given to another foreigner,
*
the Renaissance Church was in dire need of an Adrian—or some equally unpleasant medicine.

License has a limited life span. Rome was cavorting on the edge of a precipice. Whether brought down by outside forces—the unholy alliance of politics and religion forming in the north—or by self-destruction, the end of the Church appeared inevitable.