R. A. Scotti (3 page)

As a historical entity, the Church of Rome is unparalleled. It has operated without interruption for more than two thousand years—no other institution is even a close second. Never a monolith that spoke with a single voice, it always had room for the beatific and the base. At no time in its often unedifying history has it seemed more wanton and wondrous, more earthy and existential than in the era of the Renaissance popes, and no pontiff has embodied those excesses more extravagantly than il Terribilis, Julius Secondo.

Giuliano della Rovere was elected supreme pontiff of the Church of Rome in a single ballot, having taken the prudent step of crossing the palms of key cardinals with silver. As pope he chose the name Julius, not for the sainted Pope Julius I, but for the original Julius, the conquering Caesar and empire builder who made Rome glorious.

Now, on the very spot where Peter was buried, the Christian Caesar was building a citadel of faith for God and eternity. The enterprise was audacious, but so were the times. Gutenberg had invented the printing press, Columbus had stumbled on a new continent, and the Renaissance was in full bloom. Before the new Basilica was finished, Magellan's fleet would sail around the world; Henry VIII would take six wives and dispose of four; Shakespeare would make all the world a stage, the
Mayflower
would drop anchor off Plymouth Rock, and Europeans would taste chocolate and coffee for the first time.

But from the foundation stone, Peter's new house was both a splendor and a scandal. One thousand two hundred years before, the emperor Constantine had raised a shrine to the apostle on the very same ground. To destroy Constantine's basilica—a hallowed site almost as old as the Church of Rome—was a desecration.

The scandal that his plan provoked only steeled the pope's resolve. Julius imagined the new Basilica as the centerpiece of a Christian Rome more magnificent and mighty than the city of the Caesars. And the fact that the original St. Peter's was the most revered shrine in Europe, the repository of a millennium of sacred history and art, be damned. He would rip it down and replace it with something more immense, immutable. A new edifice for a new age.

A
ccording to the historian Tacitus, thirty years after Jesus of Nazareth was sentenced to death by crucifixion for inciting rebellion in the empire of the Caesars, his followers had spread to Rome and were attracting a devout group of converts. Although the messianic cult was not much bigger than a storefront church today, the emperor Nero viewed it with mistrust.

Nero was notorious for his public debauchery and lethal family squabbles. He had poisoned his half brother, assassinated his mother, and sentenced his wife to death. When a suspicious fire scorched Rome, blazing unchecked for nine days and nights in the summer of
A.D.
64, angry Romans blamed him. Pliny the Elder charged, “Nero has burned Rome,” torching the old city to build a new and grander one. The historian Suetonius described the emperor playing the lyre as he watched the distant fire from a tower: “Charmed by the beauty of the flames, he sang of the ruin…in theatrical costume.”

To quiet the outcry against him, the emperor needed to deflect blame for the controversial fire, and the Christians made a convenient scapegoat. On August 1, across the river from the charred city in Caligula's imperial Circus in the Vatican field, Nero slaughtered the alleged arsonists. It was history's first pogrom.

In the first century, the spectacle of surly slaves, clever rivals, or fickle wives tossed into an arena with hungry beasts was enjoyed with the unabashed enthusiasm that twenty-first-century Europeans lavish on soccer matches. But even to a populace for whom blood sport was an afternoon's diversion, the treatment of the Christians seemed sadistic.

Tacitus describes the scene in the fifteenth book of his
Annales
:

Although the disciples Peter and Paul may have been in Rome at the time, they escaped the first purge. Three years later, in another lethal Roman summer, the two old proselytizers were apprehended and killed. Paul, according to legend, was beheaded on his way to the port of Ostia. Peter was captured inside the city and forced to follow his own Via Dolorosa.

The old fisherman, his face tanned to leather by years of wind and sea, carried his cross through the Vatican field. His executioners walked behind him, and behind the soldiers, a jeering mob pressed forward. By the Circus of Caligula, beside the killing fields of Nero, he staggered. And it was there that the cross was raised, and Simon Peter was hung upside down, according to his wish, because at the end he knew, as he had always believed, that he was an unworthy proxy for Jesus.

Subsequent emperors continued the persecutions that Nero instigated with varying degrees of zeal. Suspected believers were tortured and killed in an assortment of grisly ways—boiled in oil and roasted on spits. Christianity became an outlaw religion, practiced in tunnels or catacombs beneath the streets of the imperial city.

All that changed in
A.D.
312 with the cross, the Milvian bridge, and the young general who would be emperor. Leading an army to Rome to claim the throne of the Caesars, Constantine saw the cross in the sky over Ponte Milvio: “By this sign you will conquer.” With his rival's head on a pike, he entered the city and was crowned emperor. It was the answer to a mother's prayers.

 

The Christian Church is usually viewed as a father-son narrative, yet at critical junctures in the Old and New Testaments and beyond, it is a tale of mothers and sons: Eve and her boys Abel and Cain, Jacob protected and warned by his mother, Mary standing by her accused son, Jesus, and Helena, whose faith moved an empire. Helena was Constantine's mother, and Christianity's most influential convert. Convinced that Christ had brought her son victory, she prevailed on him to accept the faith and make it legal.

Because Constantine's reign was unchallenged then, he could afford to humor his mother. He made Christianity respectable and built a basilica to honor Simon Peter, Christ's first apostle and first pope. The site he chose was both symbolic and pragmatic.

Ager Vaticanus was the very spot where Christians believed Peter had been crucified and buried. It was at the foot of the Vatican hill, opposite the main marketplace of the Foro Romano yet far enough away from the imperial city—outside the walls and across the Tiber—not to offend Rome's pagan aristocracy. Taking up a shovel, the emperor broke the ground himself. According to Roman lore, he filled twelve bags with soil, one for each of Christ's apostles.

Once Constantine gave it his imprimatur, Christianity spread across the empire. Against a pantheon of arbitrary deities who hurled retribution from a distant mountaintop, loosed plagues on a whim, and never listened, Christ was a refreshing change. He was one deity in place of many, and he was a man—not aloof and authoritarian like the emperor, but a God-Man, who could sit down to supper with ignorant fishermen or hold his own against the smartest priests in the temple.

The new religion made God man and man God. “One day you will be with me in Paradise” was a giddy, radical notion. Every man could lift himself up from the exhausting slog of mortality and share a sweet slice of heaven. The path to paradise was straight and true. There were no more lambs to be slaughtered or virgins offered to humor the gods. Just a couple of simple rules that applied equally to all: “Love thy God and thy neighbor.”

Christianity began as a simple faith for simple people. But once it was embraced by an emperor, it was only a matter of time before faith got mixed up with politics. When the Roman empire fell in
A.D.
476, the Church that Constantine had legitimized filled the power vacuum. For centuries—through the invasions of Huns, Goths, and Vandals, and the Dark Ages of Europe—the Church preserved Western civilization. It trained the teachers and the scholars; built the universities; inspired and subsidized the arts; and anointed the kings and emperors, giving them a moral imperative through the divine authority it claimed. No European head of state could rule unless he paid obeisance to the pope in Rome.

As the Church became the dominant force in Europe, the simple message of faith grew more complicated, buried under the weight of excuses, exceptions, exemptions, clarifications, and amendments. An entire discipline, canon law, was formed to interpret them. The straight line from God to man became a circuitous road, obscure and obfuscated. The plot thickened, the main story line darkened.

By the Middle Ages, the shame of Good Friday had overshadowed the promise of paradise. The medieval Church became a dour taskmaster, demanding atonement through piety, penance, and hair shirts. The temporal sway of the Church grew with its spiritual authority, and the temptations of power and pelf became as alluring as the snake in the Garden of Eden.

In 1309, the archbishop of Bordeaux was elected to the Holy See, and instead of moving to Rome, he brought the papacy to France. In their sojourn in Avignon, a period that became known as the Babylonian Captivity, the popes lived like kings, their cardinals like courtiers.

With court life, inevitably, came corruption, sloth, and all the other cardinal sins. Church wealth was counted not by the number of faithful Christians but by how much money they contributed. “Oh Rome, Rome,” St. Bridget lamented, “now I can say of thee what the prophet said of Jerusalem! In your garden, the roses and lilies are choked with thistles; the ten commandments are compressed into a single maxim: give money!”

The papacy in Avignon was as far from the Church of Peter as hell from heaven. Prelates savored the high life and forgot about saving souls. Pomp and pageantry bred self-indulgence. Morals loosened. The Holy See luxuriated in Avignon, and, bereft of the papacy, Rome collapsed. No central authority governed the city. In the Quattrocento, while Florence was basking in the Renaissance, Rome, the city of the Caesars and cradle of Christianity, was a hellhole, the imperial relics overgrown, buried, or turned into animal lairs.

Wolf packs bayed on the Gianicolo and slunk down the slopes of the Vatican hill. They slipped through the broken walls that Pope Leo IV had built to keep the barbarian hordes at bay and pawed the broken earth, digging for the bones of the first Christians buried centuries before in the necropolis beneath Constantine's basilica of St. Peter. The stench of refuse—rotting fish heads, goats' hooves, excrement, and entrails—fouled the narrow streets, more alleys than imperial avenues now.

The city built on seven hills hunkered close to the riverbanks or clustered around the gates and basilicas, and nature reclaimed the famous hillsides. Vineyards sprawled across the Palatine, concealing the remains of the palaces that had given the area its name. The Roman Forum had become Campo Vaccino, the cow field, and goats grazed in such number on the Capitoline, once the center of government life, that it was called Monte Caprino.

A few farmhouses still dotted the hillsides, but little else remained. Pagan monuments and Christian churches crumbled. The yellowing hulk of the Colosseum gaped like a decayed molar on the landscape of the city. Writing in 1431, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini lamented that the imperial city “is now so ruined that not a shadow remains that can be identified as anything but wild wasteland.”

The cramped neighborhoods were rimmed with watchtowers that guarded the strongholds of the landed families, chief among them the Colonna and Orsini—the Hatfields and McCoys of fifteenth-century Rome. They feuded among themselves and filled the power vacuum with turf battles fought by hired ruffians who tossed one another into the Tiber and terrorized at will, extorting what they could and decapitating whom they dared.

In the city once famous for its aqueducts, there was no clean water and little sanitation. Butchers, fishmongers, tailors, and skinners tossed their detritus into the streets. The piazzas were fetid garbage heaps. In the jerry-built neighborhoods, like the Borgo Vaticano, stairways and balconies stuck out from houses and shops at random angles, making the narrow streets almost impassable.

Rome,
caput mundi
—“center of the world”—had become a ghost town. But what ghosts.

 

In 1447, the election of Nicholas V, an enthusiastic humanist and sincere Christian, brought a new spirit to the Church. The intellectual corollary to the artistic renaissance, humanism embraced the paganism of Greece and Rome. Long-forgotten classical texts offered a perspective on man and the universe dramatically different from the stern proscriptions of the medieval Church. The romantic ideals of man and nature, celebrated in ancient Athens, were an aphrodisiac after the absolute authority of a punitive, omnipotent God—the prime mover and first cause posited by the philosopher Thomas Aquinas almost two centuries before. The ideas of Aquinas and his Scholastics derived from the philosophy of Aristotle. Humanism embraced the thought of Plato. In essence a rebellion against the Church, it switched the focus from the divine to the human. Man, not God, became the measure of all things. Even the ideal architecture mirrored the proportions of the human body.

Glossing over the inherent contradictions, humanists welcomed Nicholas as Plato's philosopher-king. A bookworm, a bibliophile, and a scholar, once the librarian in Lorenzo de' Medici's palace, Nicholas was a slight, nondescript man. By some accounts, he was as small as St. Paul, who may have stood just fifty inches, but he had two passions: books and building.

Whether it was a naturally optimistic temperament, the profundity of his faith, or his zeal to build, after the sumptuousness of Avignon, Nicholas settled the papacy in the squalor of Rome. Previous popes had tried to return and been forced to retreat, but nothing would budge Nicholas. Because the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the traditional church of Rome and palace of the popes, was uninhabitable, Nicholas made the Vatican palace, once a guesthouse for visiting emperors and kings, the official seat of the Holy See. He resolved the Great Schism that had been threatening the unity of the Church since 1377 (at one point, three popes, each backed by a rival political faction, claimed to be the legitimate heir to Peter and excommunicated the other two), and he proclaimed 1450 a Jubilee or Holy Year.

In spite of the desolation, pilgrims descended on Rome from all over Europe. Many journeyed for months. They came over land and sea, on foot, on horseback, by oxcart and river barge. They braved the Channel crossing, trudged over the Alps, and sailed down the Tiber to visit the five basilicas of Rome and earn a pardon from their sins.

The perils multiplied as they neared the city. Pirate ships lurked along the riverbanks and coastlines, and the only law in the
campagna,
the rough countryside north of the city, was the outlaw. Bandits and thieves terrorized at will, and the city offered no sanctuary. The walls enclosed as many terrors as they excluded.

For the pious travelers who survived the hazards, Rome was much more than its broken-down basilicas. It was the soul of Christendom, the rock on which Peter had founded his Church. The plot of earth marked by Constantine's basilica was the most sacred soil. In their eagerness to reach the shrine of Peter, pilgrims swarmed across the single narrow bridge, Ponte Sant'Angelo. Two hundred were killed in the crush, and in the summer heat, thousands more died of the plague.