The March of Folly (11 page)

To understand the popes we must look at the princes. When the subjects of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, ruler of Milan, murdered him in a church for his vices and oppressions, his brother, Ludovico il Moro, threw the heir, his nephew, into prison and seized the rule of Milan for himself. When the Pazzi family of Florence, antagonists of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent, could endure the frustrations of their hatred no longer, they plotted to murder him and his handsome brother Giuliano during High Mass in the cathedral. The signal was to be the bell marking the elevation of the Host, and at this most solemn moment of the service, the swords of the attackers flashed. Giuliano was killed but Lorenzo alertly saved himself by his long sword and survived to direct a revenge of utter annihilation upon the Pazzi and their partisans. Assassinations were frequently planned to take place in churches, where the victim was less likely to be surrounded by an armed guard.

Most unpleasant of all were the kings of the Aragon house who ruled Naples. Ferrante (Ferdinand I), unscrupulous, ferocious, cynical and vindictive, concentrated all his efforts until his death in 1494 on the destruction of his opponents and in this process initiated more harm to Italy through internecine war than any other prince. His son and successor, Alfonso II, a brutal profligate, was described by the contemporary French historian Comines as “the cruelest, worst, most vicious and base man ever seen.” Like others of his kind he openly avowed his contempt for religion. The condottieri on whom the princes’ power rested shared the sentiment. As mercenaries, who fought for money, not loyalty, they were “full of contempt for all sacred things … caring nothing whether or not they died under the ban of the Church.”

Rulers’ habits could not fail of emulation by their subjects. The case of a physician and surgeon of the hospital of St. John Lateran, all the more grisly for being reported in the unemotional monotone of John Burchard, master of ceremonies of the papal court, whose daily
record is the indispensable source, reveals Renaissance life in Rome. He “left the hospital every day early in the morning in a short tunic and with a cross bow and shot everyone who crossed his path and pocketed his money.” He collaborated with the hospital’s confessor, who named to him the patients who confessed to having money, whereat the physician gave these patients “an effective remedy” and divided the proceeds with his clerical informer. Burchard adds that the physician was subsequently hanged with seventeen other evil-doers.

Arbitrary power, with its inducements to self-indulgence and unrestraint and its chronic suspicions of rivals, tended to form erratic despots and to produce habits of senseless violence as often in the satellite rulers as in the great. Pandolfo Petrucci, tyrant of Siena in the 1490s, enjoyed a pastime of rolling down blocks of stone from a height regardless of whom they might hit. The Baglioni of Perugia and Malatesta of Rimini recorded sanguinary histories of feud and fratricidal crime. Others like the d’Este of Ferrara, the oldest princely family, and the Montefeltri of Urbino, whose court Castiglione celebrated in
The Courtier
, were honorable and well-conducted, even beloved. Duke Federigo of Urbino was said to be the only prince who moved about unarmed and unescorted or dared to walk in an open park. It is sadly typical that Urbino was to become the object of naked military aggression by one of the six popes, Leo X, who wished to acquire the duchy for his own nephew.

Alongside the rascals and the scandals, decency and piety existed as ever. No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society. Many people of all classes in the Renaissance still worshipped God, trusted in the saints, wanted spiritual reassurance and led non-criminal lives. Indeed, it was
because
genuine religious and moral feeling was still present that dismay at the corruption of the clergy and especially of the Holy See was so acute and the yearning for reform so strong. If all Italians had lived by the amoral example of their leaders, the depravity of the popes would have been no cause for protest.

In the long struggle to end the chaos and dismay spread by the Schism and to restore the unity of the Church, laymen and churchmen resorted to the summoning of General Councils of the Church, supposed to have a supremacy over the Holy See, which that institution, whoever its occupant, violently resisted. Throughout the first half of the 15th century, the conciliar battle dominated Church affairs, and although Councils succeeded at last in establishing a single pontiff, they failed to bring any of the claimants to acknowledge conciliar supremacy. Successive popes gripped their prerogatives, dug in their
heels and by virtue of divided opposition maintained their authority intact, though not unquestioned. Pius II, better known as the admired humanist and novelist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, had been a Council advocate in his early career, but in 1460 he delivered as Pope the fearsome Bull
Exsecrabilis
threatening to excommunicate anyone who appealed from the Papacy to a General Council. His successors continued to regard Councils as hardly less dangerous than the Turk.

Reestablished in Rome, the popes became creatures of the Renaissance, outshining the princes in patronage of the arts, believing like them that the glories of painting and sculpture, music and letters, ornamented their courts and reflected their munificence. If Leonardo da Vinci adorned the court of Ludovico Sforza at Milan and the poet Torquato Tasso the court of the d’Este at Ferrara, other artists and writers flocked to Rome, where the popes were lavish in patronage. Whatever their failings in office, they bequeathed to the world immortal legacies in the works they commissioned: the Sistine ceiling by Michelangelo, the Vatican
stanze
by Raphael, the frescoes for the Cathedral Library in Siena by Pinturicchio, the Sistine wall frescoes by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Signorelli. They repaired and beautified Rome, which, deserted during the Avignon exile, had dwindled to unkempt and underpopulated shabbiness. They uncovered its classical treasures, restored churches, paved the streets, assembled the incomparable Vatican Library and, as the crown of papal prestige—and, ironically, the trigger of the Protestant revolt—initiated the rebuilding of St. Peter’s with Bramante and Michelangelo as architects.

Through visible beauties and grandeur, they believed, the Papacy would be dignified and the Church exert its hold upon the people. Nicholas V, who has been called the first Renaissance Pope, made the belief explicit on his deathbed in 1455. Urging the Cardinals to continue the renovation of Rome, he said, “To create solid and stable conviction there must be something that appeals to the eye. A faith sustained only by doctrine will never be anything but feeble and vacillating.… If the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings … all the world would accept and revere it. Noble edifices combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions would immensely exalt the chair of St. Peter.” The Church had come a long way from Peter the fisherman.

Until the election in 1471 of Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, former General of the Franciscan Order, who took the name Sixtus IV, the popes of the early Renaissance, if without zeal for spiritual renewal, had maintained on the whole nominal respect for the dignity of their office. Sixtus introduced the period of unabashed, unconcealed, relentless pursuit of personal gain and power politics. He had attained prominence as a preacher and lecturer in theology at the universities of Bologna and Pavia, and as General of the Franciscans had acquired a reputation as an able and severe administrator. As a friar, he was supposedly chosen Pope in reaction to the worldliness of his predecessor, Paul II, a Venetian patrician and former merchant. In fact, he owed his election rather to the skillful maneuvering of the ambitious, unprincipled and very rich Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to acquire the papal tiara for himself. Borgia’s support of Sixtus was in itself something of a character reference, and history has recognized the link by calling them, together with Innocent VIII, who came in between, the “three evil geniuses.”

The Franciscan’s gown concealed in Sixtus a hard, imperious, implacable character; a man of strong passions and a large, poor and exigent family. He proceeded to enrich its members and, using all the resources now at his command, to endow them with high office, papal territories and titled spouses. Upon taking office, he shocked public opinion by appointing as Cardinals two of his eleven nephews, Pietro and Girolamo Riario, both in their twenties, who rapidly became notorious for mad and spendthrift behavior. Before he had finished, Sixtus had conferred the red hat on three more nephews and a grandnephew, made another a Bishop, married four nephews and two nieces into the ruling families of Naples, Milan, Urbino, and to Orsinis and Farneses. Non-clerical relatives were placed in high positions of civil power as Prefect of Rome, Governor of Castel Sant’ Angelo and to governorships of several of the Papal States with access to their revenues. He raised nepotism to a new level.

He packed the College of Cardinals with his personal appointees, creating no fewer than 34 in his thirteen-year papacy, although the College had been fixed at 24, and leaving at his death only five not beholden to him for their appointment. He made an established practice of political selection for the purpose of favoring this or that prince or sovereign, often choosing lords or barons or younger sons of great families without regard to merit or clerical qualification. He gave the archiepiscopal see of Lisbon to a child of eight and the see of Milan to a boy of eleven, both sons of princes. He so thoroughly secularized the College that his successors followed his example as if it were the rule. In the twenty years under Innocent VIII and Alexander VI, no fewer than fifty sees were given to youths under the canonical age for consecration.

Led by the wild behavior of Pietro Riario, the favorite nephew, whom the new fortunes of his family seem almost to have unbalanced, and augmented by the horde of newly rich della Roveres, the habit of unbridled extravagance became a fixed feature of the papal court. Cardinal Riario’s excesses reached a peak in 1480 at a saturnalian banquet featuring a whole roasted bear holding a staff in its jaws, stags reconstructed in their skins, herons and peacocks in their feathers, and orgiastic behavior by the guests appropriate to the ancient Roman model. Reports of the affair were all the more shocking at a time of general dismay caused by the Turks having actually landed on the heel of Italy, where they seized Otranto, although they were not to hold it long. The advance of the Turks since the fall of Constantinople was generally considered to have been allowed by God in punishment for the sins of the Church.

Licentiousness in the hierarchy was promoted but not initiated by the della Roveres; it was already a problem in 1460 when Pius II, in a letter to Cardinal Borgia, reproved him for a party he had given in Siena where “none of the allurements of love was lacking,” and “in order that lust be unrestrained,” the husbands, fathers and brothers of the ladies present were not invited. Pius warned of the “disgrace” to the holy office. “This is the reason the princes and powers despise us and the laity mock us.… Contempt is the lot of Christ’s Vicar because he seems to tolerate these actions.” The situation under Sixtus was not new; the difference was that while Pius was concerned to arrest the deterioration, his successors neither tried nor cared.

Antagonism slowly gathered around Sixtus, especially in Germany, where anti-Romanism born of resentment of the clerical appetite for money was now aggravated by the financial exactions of the Papal Curia, the administrative arm of the Papacy. In 1479 the Assembly of Coblenz despatched to Rome a
gravamina
, or list of grievances. In
Bohemia, home of the Hussite dissent, a satiric manifesto appeared equating Sixtus with Satan priding himself on “total repudiation of the doctrine of Jesus.” Accustomed to carping from one source or another for fifteen centuries, the Church had grown too thick a skin to bother about such straws blown in on the wind from the Empire.

To ensure efficient collection of revenues, Sixtus created an Apostolic Chamber of 100 lawyers to supervise the financial affairs of the Papal States and the law cases in which the Papacy had a financial interest. He devoted the income to multiplying the estates of his relatives and to embellishing the external glories of the Holy See. Posterity owes to him the restoration of the Vatican Library, whose holdings he increased threefold and to which he summoned scholars to register and catalogue them. He reopened the Academy of Rome, invited men of renown to its halls, encouraged dramatic performances, commissioned paintings. His name endures in the Sistine Chapel, built at his command for the renovation of old St. Peter’s. Churches, hospitals, fallen bridges and muddy streets benefited from his repairs.

If admirable in his cultural concerns, he exhibited the worst qualities of the Renaissance prince in his feuds and machinations, conducting wars on Venice and Ferrara and an inveterate campaign to reduce the Colonna family, the dominant nobles of Rome. The most scandalous of his dealings was involvement in and possible instigation of the Pazzi plot to murder the Medici brothers. Allied to the Pazzi by complex family interests, he approved of or even shared in the conspiracy, or so it was widely charged and believed owing to the extremity of his reaction when the plot failed by half. In a rage at the violence of the Medicis’ revenge upon the Pazzi, which had included the hanging of an Archbishop in violation of clerical immunity, he excommunicated Lorenzo de’ Medici and all of Florence. This use of spiritual sanction for temporal motives, though certainly not new in Church practice, earned Sixtus wide discredit because of the harm done to the Florentines and their commerce and because of the suspicions it aroused of the Pope’s personal involvement. Pious Louis XI, King of France, wrote worriedly, “Please God that Your Holiness is innocent of crimes so horrible!” The idea of the Holy Father plotting murder in a cathedral was not yet acceptable, though before long it would hardly seem abnormal.