The Renaissance

The secular rule of the popes directly applied to what antiquity had called Latium (now Lazio), a small province lying between Tuscany, Umbria, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Beyond this they claimed also Umbria, the Marches, and the Romagna (the ancient Romania). These four regions together made a broad belt across central Italy from sea to sea; they contained some twenty-six cities, which the popes, when they could, ruled by vicars, or divided among provincial governors. Furthermore, Sicily and the whole Kingdom of Naples were claimed as papal fiefs on the basis of an agreement between Pope Innocent III and Frederick II; and the payment of an annual feudal fee by these states to the papacy became a major source of quarrels between the Regno and the popes. Finally the Countess Matilda had bequeathed to the popes (1107), as her feudal domain, practically all of Tuscany, including Florence, Lucca, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, and Arezzo; over all these the popes claimed the rights of a feudal sovereign, but were rarely able to give effect to their claim.

Harassed by internal corruption, military and fiscal incompetence, and the confusion of European with Italian politics, and of ecclesiastical with secular affairs, the papacy struggled through centuries to preserve its traditional territories from internal usurpation by condottieri, and from external encroachment by other Italian states; so Milan repeatedly tried to appropriate Bologna, Venice seized Ravenna and sought to absorb Ferrara, and Naples stretched tentative tentacles into Latium. To meet these attacks the popes seldom depended on their little army of mercenaries, but played the covetous states one against another in a balance-of-power policy, striving to keep any one of them from growing strong enough to swallow papal terrain. Machiavelli and Guicciardini rightly traced the disunion of Italy in part to this policy of the popes; and the popes rightly pursued it as their only means of sustaining their political and spiritual independence through their temporal power.

As political rulers the popes felt compelled to adopt the same methods as their secular compeers. They distributed—sometimes they sold—offices or benefices to influential persons, even to minors, to pay political debts, or to advance political purposes, or to reward or support men of letters or artists. They arranged marriages for their relatives into politically poweful families. They used armies like Julius II, or the diplomacy of deceit like Leo X.⁵ They put up with—sometimes profited from—a degree of bureaucratic venality probably no greater than that which prevailed in most governments of the time. The laws of the Papal States were as severe as those of others; thieves and counterfeiters were hanged by papal vicars as a more or less bitter necessity of government. Most of the popes lived as simply as the supposedly requisite display of official ceremony would permit; the worst tales we read of them were legends set afloat by irresponsible satirists like Berni, or disappointed place hunters like Aretino, or the Roman agents—e.g., Infessura—of powers in violent or diplomatic conflict with the papacy. As for the cardinals who administered the ecclesiastical and political affairs of the Church, they thought of themselves as senators of a wealthy state, and lived accordingly; many of them built palaces, many patronized letters or arts, some indulged themselves with mistresses; they genially accepted the easy moral code of their reckless time.

As a spiritual power the Renaissance popes faced the problem of reconciling humanism with Christianity. Humanism was half pagan, and the Church had once set herself to destroy paganism root and branch, creed and art. She had encouraged or countenanced the demolition of pagan temples and statuary; the cathedral of Orvieto, for example, had only recently been built with marbles taken partly from Carrara, partly from Roman ruins; a papal legate had sold marble blocks from the Colosseum to be burned for lime;⁶ as late as 1461 the Palazzo Venezia had been begun with further spoliation of that Flavian Amphitheater; Nicholas himself, in his architectural enthusiasm, used twenty-five hundred cartloads of marble and travertine from the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, and other ancient structures to rebuild the churches and palaces of Rome.⁷ To reverse that attitude, to preserve and collect and cherish the remaining art and classics of Rome and Greece, required a revolution in ecclesiastical thought. The prestige of humanism was already so high, the impetus of the neopagan movement was so strong, her own leaders were so deeply tinged with it, that the Church had to find place for these developments in the Christian life, or risk losing the intellectual classes of Italy, perhaps later of Europe. Under Nicholas V she opened her arms to humanism, placed herself bravely and generously on the side, at the head, of the new literature and art. And for an exhilarating century (1447–1534) she gave to the mind of Italy such ample freedom—incredibilis libertas, said Filelfo⁸—and to the art of Italy such discriminating patronage, opportunity, and stimulus that Rome became the center of the Renaissance, and enjoyed one of the most brilliant epochs in the history of mankind.

II. NICHOLAS v: 1447–55

Raised in poverty at Sarzana, Tommaso Parentucelli somehow found means to attend the University of Bologna for six years. When his funds ran out he went to Florence and served as tutor in the homes of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla de’ Strozzi. His purse replenished, he returned to Bologna, continued his studies, and received at twenty-two the doctorate in theology. Niccolò degli Albergati, Archbishop of Bologna, made him controller of the archiepiscopal household, and took him to Florence to attend Eugenius IV in the Pope’s long exile there. In these Florentine years the priest became a humanist without ceasing to be a Christian. He developed a warm friendship with Bruni, Marsuppini, Manetti, Aurispa, and Poggio, and joined their literary gatherings; soon Thomas of Sarzana, as the humanists called him, was aflame with their passion for classical antiquity. He spent almost all his income on books, borrowed money to buy costly manuscripts, and expressed the hope that some day his funds would suffice to gather into one library all the great books in the world; in that ambition the Vatican Library had its origin.⁹ Cosimo engaged him to catalogue the Marcian Library, and Tommaso was happy among the manuscripts. He could hardly know that he was preparing himself to be the first Renaissance pope.

For twenty years he served Albergati in Florence and Bologna. When the Archbishop died (1443) Eugenius appointed Parentucelli to succeed him; and three years later the Pope, impressed by his learning, his piety, and his administrative ability, made him a cardinal. Another year passed; Eugenius passed away; and the cardinals, deadlocked between the Orsini and Colonna factions, raised Parentucelli to the papacy. “Who would have thought,” he exclaimed to Vespasiano da Bisticci, “that a poor bell ringer of a priest would be made pope, to the confusion of the proud?”¹⁰ The humanists of Italy rejoiced, and one of them, Francesco Barbaro, proclaimed that Plato’s vision had come true: a philosopher had become king.

Nicholas V, as he now called himself, had three aims: to be a good pope, to rebuild Rome, and to restore classical literature, learning, and art. He conducted his high office with modesty and competence, gave audience at almost any hour of the day, and managed to get along amicably with both Germany and France. The Antipope Felix V, realizing that Nicholas would soon win all Latin Christendom to his allegiance, resigned his pretensions and was gracefully forgiven; the rebellious but disintegrating Council of Basel moved to Lausanne and dissolved (1449); the conciliar movement was ended, the Papal Schism was healed. Demands for reform of the Church still came from beyond the Alps; Nicholas felt incapable of achieving that reform in the face of all the office-holders who would lose by it; instead he hoped that the Church would regain, as the leader in the revival of learning, the prestige that she had lost at Avignon and in the Schism. Not that his support of scholarship was motivated by political ends; it was a sincere, almost an amorous passion. He had made arduous trips over the Alps in search of manuscripts; it was he who had unearthed at Basel the works of Tertullian.

Now, dowered with the revenues of the papacy, he sent agents to Athens, Constantinople, and divers cities in Germany and England to seek and buy or copy Greek or Latin manuscripts, pagan or Christian; he installed a large corps of copyists and editors in the Vatican; he called almost every prominent humanist in Italy to Rome. “All the scholars in the world,” wrote Vespasiano in fond exaggeration, “came to Rome in the time of Pope Nicholas, partly of their own accord, partly at his request.”¹¹ He rewarded their work with the liberality of a caliph thrilled by music or poetry. The subdued Lorenzo Valla received 500 ducats ($12,500?) for putting Thucydides into Latin dress; Guarino da Verona received 1500 ducats for translating Strabo; Niccolò Perotti 500 for Polybius; Poggio was put to translating Diodorus Siculus; Theodorus Gaza was lured from Ferrara to make a new translation of Aristotle; Filelfo was offered a house in Rome, an estate in the country, and 10,000 ducats to render into Latin the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Pope’s death, however, prevented the execution of this Homeric enterprise. These rewards were so great that some scholars—mirabile dictu— hesitated to accept them; the Pope overcame their scruples by playfully warning them: “Don’t refuse; you may not find another Nicholas.”¹² When an epidemic drove him from Rome to Fabriano he took his translators and copyists with him, lest any of them should succumb to the plague.¹³ Meanwhile he did not neglect what might be called the Christian classics. He offered five thousand ducats to anyone who would bring him the Gospel of St. Matthew in the original tongue. He engaged Gianozzo Manetti and George of Trebizond to translate Cyril, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, and other patrological literature; he commissioned Manetti and aides to make a new version of the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek; this, too, was frustrated by his death. These Latin translations were hurried and imperfect, but they for the first time opened Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus, Appian, Philo, and Theophrastus to students who could not read Greek. Referring to these translations, Filelfo wrote: “Greece has not perished, but has migrated to Italy—which in former days was called Greater Greece.”¹⁴ Manetti, with greater gratitude than accuracy, calculated that more Greek authors were translated during the eight years of Nicholas’ pontificate than in all the preceding five centuries.¹⁵

Nicholas loved the appearance and form as well as the contents of books; himself a calligraphist, he had his translations written carefully upon parchment by expert scribes; the leaves were bound in crimson velvet, secured by silver clasps. As the number of his books mounted—finally to 824 Latin and 352 Greek manuscripts—and these were added to previous papal collections, the problem arose of housing the five thousand volumes—the largest store of books in Christendom—in such a way that their complete transmission to posterity might be assured. The construction of a Vatican Library was one of Nicholas’ dearest dreams.

He was a builder as well as a scholar, and from the outset of his pontificate he had resolved to make Rome worthy of leading the world. A jubilee year was at hand in 1450; a hundred thousand visitors were expected; they must not find Rome a shabby ruin; the prestige of the Church and the papacy required that the citadel of Christianity should confront pilgrims with “noble edifices combining taste and beauty with noble proportions,” which “would immensely conduce to the exaltation of the chair of St. Peter”; so Nicholas, on his deathbed, apologetically explained his aim. He restored the walls and gates of the city, repaired the Acqua Vergine aqueduct, and had an artist construct an ornamental fountain at its mouth. He engaged Leon Battista Alberti to design palaces, public squares, and spacious avenues shielded from sun and rain by arcaded porticoes. He had many streets paved, many bridges renewed, the Castle of Sant’ Angelo repaired. He lent money to prominent citizens to help them build palaces that would be an ornament to Rome. At his bidding Bernardo Rossellino renovated Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni Laterano, San Paolo and San Lorenzo fuori le mura—outside the walls—and the forty churches that Gregory I had designated as stations of the cross.¹⁶ He made majestic plans for a new Vatican Palace that, with its gardens, would cover all the Vatican hill, and would house the pope and his staff, the cardinals, and the administrative offices of the Curia; he lived to complete his own chambers (later occupied by Alexander VI and called the Appartamento Borgia), the library (now the Pinacoteca Vaticana), and the rooms or stanze later decorated by Raphael. He brought Benedetto Bonfigli from Perugia, and Andrea del Castagno from Florence, to paint frescoes—now lost—on the Vatican walls; and he persuaded the aging Fra Angelico to return to Rome and paint in the Pope’s own chapel the stories of St. Stephen and St. Laurence. He planned to tear down the old and crumbling basilica of St. Peter, and raise over the Apostle’s tomb the most imposing church in the world; it was left for Julius II to take up this audacious aim.

All this, he hoped, could be financed from the proceeds of the jubilee. Nicholas announced this as a celebration of the restored peace and unity of the Church, and the sentiment went well with the peoples of Europe. The migration of pilgrims from every quarter of Latin Christendom was of unprecedented magnitude; eyewitnesses compared it to the movement of myriads of ants. The crowding in Rome was so extreme that the Pope limited to five, then three, then two days the maximum length of any visitor’s stay. On one occasion two hundred persons were killed in a crush that swept many into the Tiber; Nicholas thereafter tore down houses to widen the approaches to St. Peter’s. As the pilgrims brought rich offerings, the financial returns from the jubilee exceeded even the Pope’s expectations, and covered the expense of his new buildings and his outlay for scholars and manuscripts.¹⁷ The other cities of Italy suffered a shortage of money because—a Perugian complained—“it all flowed into Rome”; but in Rome the innkeepers, moneychangers, and tradesmen profited hugely, and Nicholas was able to deposit 100,000 florins ($2,500,000?) in the bank of the Medici alone.¹⁸ The countries beyond the Alps rumbled with discontent at the efflux of gold into Italy.

Even in Rome some disaffection troubled the new prosperity. Nicholas’ government of the city was enlightened and just from his point of view, and he had made a concession to republican hopes by nominating four citizens who were to appoint all municipal officials and control all taxes levied in the city. But the senators and nobles whose class had ruled Rome during the Avignon papacy and the Schism fretted under the papal government, and the populace resented the transformation of the Vatican into a palace fortress secure against such assaults as had driven Eugenius from Rome. The republican ideas preached by Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzo still agitated many minds. In the year of Nicholas’ accession a leading burgher, Stefano Porcaro, made a fiery speech demanding the restoration of self-government. Nicholas sent him into comfortable exile as podesta of Anagni, but Porcaro found his way back to the capital, and raised the cry of liberty before an excited carnival crowd. Nicholas banished him to Bologna, but left him full freedom except for the necessity of daily showing himself to the papal legate there. Nevertheless the undiscourageable Stefano managed, from Bologna, to organize a complicated plot among three hundred of his followers in Rome. On the feast of the Epiphany, while the Pope and the cardinals were at Mass in St. Peter’s, an attack was to be made on the Vatican, its treasury was to be seized to provide funds for establishing a republic, and Nicholas himself was to be taken prisoner.¹⁹ Porcaro secretly left Bologna (December 26, 1452), and joined the conspirators on the eve of the planned attack. But his absence from Bologna was noted, and a courier brought warning to the Vatican. Stefano was traced, found, and imprisoned, and on January 9 he was beheaded in Sant’ Angelo. The republicans denounced the execution as murder, the humanists condemned the plot as monstrous infidelity to a benevolent pope.

Nicholas was shaken and changed by the discovery that a large section of the citizenry looked upon him as a despot, however benevolent. Harrowed with suspicion, embittered by resentment, tortured by gout, he aged rapidly. When news came to him that the Turks had entered Constantinople over the corpses of 50,000 Christians, and had turned St. Sophia into a mosque (1453), all the glory of his pontificate seemed a fitful vanity. He appealed to the European powers to join in a crusade to recapture the fallen citadel of Eastern Christianity; he called for a tenth of all the revenue of Western Europe to finance the effort, and pledged a tenth of papal, Curial, and other ecclesiastical revenues; and all war between Christian nations was to cease on pain of excommunication. Europe hardly listened. People complained that money raised by previous popes for crusades had been used for other purposes; Venice preferred a commercial entente with the Turks; Milan took advantage of Venetian difficulties by retaking Brescia; Florence looked with satisfaction on Venice’s loss of Eastern trade.²⁰ Nicholas bowed to reality, and the lust of life cooled in his veins. Worn out with futile diplomacy, and punished for the sins of his predecessors, he died in 1455, at the age of fifty-eight.

He had restored peace within the Church, he had restored order and splendor to Rome, he had founded the greatest of libraries, he had reconciled the Church and the Renaissance. He had kept his hands free from war, had avoided nepotism, had struggled to turn Italy from suicidal strife. Amid unprecedented revenues he himself had led a simple life, loving the Church and his books, and extravagant only in his gifts. A grieving chronicler expressed the feeling of Italy when he described the scholar Pope as “wise, just, benevolent, gracious, peaceable, affectionate, charitable, humble… endowed with every virtue.”²¹ It was the verdict of love, and Porcaro might have demurred; but we may let it stand.

III. CALIXTUS III: 1455–8

The disunion of Italy determined the papal election that followed: the factions, unable to agree on an Italian, chose a Spanish cardinal, Alfonso Borgia, who took the name of Calixtus III. He was already seventy-seven; he could be depended upon to die soon, and allow the cardinals another and perhaps more profitable choice. A specialist in canon law and diplomacy, he had a legalistic mind, and cared little for the classical scholarship that had enamored Nicholas. The humanists, who had no indigenous root in Rome, languished during his pontificate, except that Valla, now quite reformed, was still a papal secretary.

Calixtus was a good man, who loved his relatives. Ten months after his coronation he raised to the cardinalate two of his nephews—Luis Juan de Mila and Rodrigo Borgia—and Don Jayme of Portugal, respectively twenty-five, twenty-four, and twenty-three years of age. Rodrigo (the future Alexander VI) had the additional handicap of being carelessly candid about his mistresses; however, Calixtus gave him (1457) the most lucrative post at the papal court—that of vice-chancellor; in the same year he made him also commander in chief of the papal troops. So began, or grew, the nepotism by which pope after pope gave church offices to his nephews or other relatives, who were sometimes his sons. To the anger of the Italians, Calixtus surrounded himself with men of his own country; Rome was now ruled by Catalans. The Pope had reasons: he was a foreigner in Rome; the nobles and republicans were plotting against him; he wished to have near him men whom he knew, and who would protect him from intrigue while he attended to his prime interest—a crusade. Moreover, the Pope was resolved to have friends in a College of Cardinals perpetually struggling to make the papacy a constitutional as well as an elective monarchy, subject in all its decisions to the cardinals as a senate or privy council. The popes opposed and overcame this movement precisely as the kings fought and defeated the nobles. In each case absolute monarchy won; but perhaps the replacement of a local with a national economy, and the growth of international relations in scope and complexity, required, for the time, a centralization of leadership and authority.^21a

Calixtus wore out his last energies in a vain attempt to stir Europe to resist the Turks. When he died Rome celebrated the end of its rule by “barbarians.” When Cardinal Piccolomini was named his successor Rome rejoiced as it had not rejoiced over any pope during the last two hundred years.

IV. PIUS II: 1458–64

Enea Silvio de’ Piccolomini began his career in 1405 in the town of Corsignano, near Siena, of poor parents with a noble pedigree. The University of Siena taught him law; it was not to his taste, for he loved literature, but it gave keenness and order to his mind, and prepared him for the tasks of administration and diplomacy. At Florence he studied the humanities under Filelfo, and from that time he remained a humanist. At twenty-seven he was engaged as secretary by Cardinal Capranica, whom he accompanied to the Council of Basel. There he fell in with a group hostile to Eugenius IV; for many years thereafter he defended the conciliar movement against the papal power; for a time he served as secretary to the Antipope Felix V. Perceiving that he had hitched his wagon to a falling star, he coaxed a bishop to introduce him to the Emperor Frederick III. Soon he received a post in the royal chancery, and in 1442 he accompanied Frederick to Austria. For a while he remained moored.

In those formative years he seemed quite formless—merely a clever climber who had no sturdy principles, no goal but success. He passed from cause to cause without losing his heart, and from woman to woman with a gay inconstancy that seemed to him—and to most of his contemporaries —the proper training for the obligations of matrimony. He wrote for a friend a love letter designed to melt the obstinacy of a girl who preferred marriage to fornication.²² Of his several illegitimate children he sent one to his father, asking him to rear it, and confessing that he was “neither holier than David nor wiser than Solomon”;²³ the young devil could quote Scripture to his purpose. He wrote a novel in the manner of Boccaccio; it was translated into almost every European tongue, and plagued him in the days of his sanctity. Though his further advancement seemed to require taking holy orders, he shrank from the step because, like Augustine, he doubted his capacity for continence.²⁴ He wrote against the celibacy of the clergy.²⁵

Amid these infidelities he remained faithful to letters. That same sensitivity to beauty which had corrupted his morals enamored him of nature, delighted him with travel, and formed his style until he had made himself one of the most engaging writers and eloquent orators of the fifteenth century. He wrote, nearly always in Latin, in nearly every species of composition—fiction, poetry, epigrams, dialogues, essays, histories, travel sketches, geography, commentaries, memoirs, a comedy; and always with a verve and grace that rivaled Petrarch’s liveliest prose. He could phrase a state paper, prepare or improvise an address, with persuasive subtlety and captivating fluency; it is characteristic of the age that Aeneas Sylvius, beginning almost from nothing, raised himself to the papacy on the point of his pen. His verses had no enduring depth or worth, but they were smooth enough to get him the poet’s crown from the hand of the complaisant Frederick III (1442). His essays had a lighthearted charm that glossed over their author’s lack of conviction or principle. He could pass from a discourse on “The Miseries of Court Life” (“as rivers flow to the sea, so vices flow to courts”²⁶), to a treatise “On the Nature and Care of Horses.” It was another sign of the times that his long letter on education—addressed to King Ladislas of Bohemia but intended for publication—quoted, with one exception, only pagan authors and instances, stressed the glory of humanistic studies, and urged the King to fit his sons for the hardships and responsibilities of war; “serious matters are settled not by laws but by arms.”²⁷ His travel notes are the best of their kind in Renaissance literature. He described with avid interest not only cities and rural scenes, but industries, products, political conditions, constitutions, manners, and morals; and not since Petrarch had any Italian written so fondly well of the countryside. He was the only Italian in centuries who loved Germany; he had a good word for the boisterous burghers who filled the air with song and themselves with beer instead of murdering one another in the streets. He called himself varia videndi cupidus, eager to see a variety of things;²⁸ and one of his frequent sayings was: “A miser is never satisfied with his money, nor a wise man with his knowledge.”²⁹ Turning his facile plume to history, he composed short biographies of illustrious contemporaries (De viris claris), a life of Frederick III, an account of the Hussite wars, and an outline of universal history. He planned a larger Universal History and Geography, continued to work on it during his pontificate, and completed the section on Asia, which Columbus read with interest.³⁰ As pope he composed, from day to day, Commentarii or memoirs, giving the history of his reign to his final illness. “He read and dictated till midnight as he lay in bed,” says his contemporary Platina, “nor did he sleep above five or six hours.”³¹ He apologized for giving papal time to literary composition: “Our time has not been taken from our duties; we have given to writing the hours due to sleep; we have robbed our old age of its rest that we might hand down to posterity all that we know to be memorable.”³²

Fig. 31—GIOVANNI BELLINI: Madonna degli Alberetti; Academy, Venice PAGE 300

Fig. 32—GIOVANNI BELLINI: Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredano; National Gallery, London PAGE 300

Fig. 33—GIORGIONE: Sleeping Venus; Art Gallery, Dresden PAGE 305

Fig. 34—GIORGIONE: Concert Champêtre; Louvre, Paris PAGE 305

Fig. 35—TITIAN: “Sacred and Profane Love”; Borghese Gallery, Rome PAGE 308

Fig. 36—TITIAN: Venus and Adonis; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York PAGE 310

Fig. 37—VITTORE CARPACCIO: The Dream of St. Ursula; Academy, Venice PAGE 302

Fig. 38—TITIAN: Assumption of the Virgin; Frari, Venice PAGE 310

Fig. 39—CORREGGIO: Sts. John and Augustine; from a spandrel in the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma PAGE 329

Fig. 40—CORREGGIO: The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine; Art Institute, Detroit PAGE 328

Fig. 41—PARMIGIANINO: Madonna della Rosa; Picture Gallery, Dresden PAGE 332

Fig. 42—Majolica from Faenza; Left and right are vinegar bottles, center is vase, from Urbino, middle of 16th Century PAGE 338

Fig. 43—RAPHAEL: The Pearl Madonna; Prado, Madrid PAGE 462

LIBRARY, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Fig. 44—RAPHAEL: Portrait of Pope Julius II; Pitti Palace, Florence PAGE 441

Fig. 45—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Pietà; St. Peter’s, Rome PAGE 466

Fig. 46—MICHELANGELO BUONARROT: Creation of Adam, ceiling; Sistine Chapel, Rome PAGE 474

In 1445 the Emperor sent Aeneas Sylvius as envoy to the Pope. He, who had a hundred times written against Eugenius, made his apologies so eloquently that the kindly pontiff readily forgave him; and from that day the soul of Aeneas belonged to Eugenius. He became a priest (1446), and at forty-one reconciled himself to chastity; henceforth he lived an exemplary life. He kept Frederick loyal to the papacy, and by skillful—sometimes devious—diplomacy restored the allegiance of the German electors and prelates to the Apostolic See. His visits to Rome and Siena reawakened his love of Italy; gradually he loosened his ties with Frederick, and attached himself (1455) to the papal court. He had always wanted to be back in the excitement and politics of his native land; in Rome he would be at the very center of things; who could say but in the tumult and shuffle of events he might not become pope? In 1449 he was made bishop of Siena; in 1456 he became Cardinal Piccolomini.

When the time came to choose a successor to Calixtus, the Italians in the conclave, to prevent the election of the French Cardinal d’Estouteville, gave their votes to Piccolomini. The Italian cardinals were resolved to keep the papacy and the Sacred College Italian, not only for their personal reasons but through fear that a non-Italian pope might again disrupt Christendom by favoring his own country or taking the papacy from Italy. No one held against Aeneas the sins of his youth; the merry Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia cast a decisive vote for him; the majority felt that Cardinal Piccolomini, though so recently capped in red, had the qualifications of a man of wide experience, a successful diplomat well posted on troublesome Germany, and a scholar whose learning would heighten the luster of the papacy.

He was now fifty-three, and his adventurous life had taken such toll of his health that he seemed already an old man. On a voyage from Holland to Scotland (1435) he had encountered frighteningly rough seas—taking twelve days from Sluys to Dunbar—and had vowed, if saved, to walk barefoot to the nearest shrine of the Virgin. This proved to be at Whitekirk, ten miles away. He kept his vow, walked the full distance with bare feet on snow and ice, contracted gout, and suffered severely from it all the rest of his life. By 1458 he had stone in the kidneys, and a chronic cough. His eyes were sunken, his face pale; at times, says Platina, “nobody could tell that he was alive but by his voice.”³³ As pope he lived simply and frugally; his household expenses in the Vatican were the lowest on record. When his duties allowed he retired to a rural suburb, where “he entertained himself not like a pope but as an honest humble rustic”;³⁴ sometimes he held consistories, or received ambassadors, under shady trees, or amid an olive grove, or by a cooling spring or stream. He called himself—punning on his name—silvarum amator, lover of woods.

As pope he took his name from Virgil’s recurrent phrase, pius Aeneas. If we may with custom moderately mistranslate the adjective, he lived up to it: he was pious, faithful to his duties, benevolent and indulgent, temperate and mild, and won the affection of even the cynics of Rome. He had outgrown the sensualism of his youth, and was morally a model pope. He made no attempt to conceal his early amours, or his propaganda for the councils against the papacy, but he issued a Bull of Retraction (1463) humbly asking God and the Church to forgive his errors and sins. The humanists who had expected lavish patronage from a humanist pope were disappointed to find that while he enjoyed their company, and gave several of them places in the Curia, he dispensed no luscious fees but conserved the papal funds for a crusade against the Turks. He continued, in his leisure moments, to be a humanist: he studied the ancient ruins carefully, and forbade their further demolition; he amnestied the people of Arpino because Cicero had been born there; he commissioned a new translation of Homer, and employed Platina and Biondo in his secretariat. He brought Mino da Fiesole to carve, and Filippino Lippi to paint, in the churches of Rome. He indulged his vanity by building, from designs by Bernardo Rossellino, a cathedral and Piccolomini palace in his native Corsignano, which he renamed Pienza after himself. He had the poor noble’s pride of ancestry, and was too loyal to his friends and relatives for the good of the Church; the Vatican became a Piccolomini hive.

Two admirable scholars graced his pontificate. Flavio Biondo, a papal secretary since Nicholas V, was a symbol of the Christian Renaissance: he loved antiquity and spent half his life describing its history and relics, but he never ceased to be a devout, orthodox, and practising Christian. Pius valued him as guide and friend, and profited from his company on tours of the Roman remains; for Biondo had written an encyclopedia in three parts—Roma instaurata, Roma triumphans, and Italia illustrata— recording the topography, history, institutions, laws, religion, manners, and arts of ancient Italy. Greater still was his Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum, an immense Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from 476 to 1250—the first critical history of the Middle Ages. Biondo was no stylist, but he was a discriminating historian; through his work the legends that Italian cities had cherished of their Trojan or like fancied origins died away. The undertaking was too ambitious even for Biondo’s seventy-five years; it was unfinished at his death (1463); but it set to later historians an example of conscientious scholarship.

John Cardinal Bessarion was a living vehicle of the Greek culture that was entering Italy. Born at Trebizond, he received at Constantinople a thorough schooling in Greek poetry, oratory, and philosophy; he continued his studies under the famous Platonist Gemistus Pletho at Mistra. Coming to the Council of Florence as Archbishop of Nicaea, he took a leading part in the reunion of Greek and Latin Christianity; returning to Constantinople he and other “Uniates” were repudiated by the lower clergy and the people. Pope Eugenius made him a cardinal (1439), and Bessarion moved to Italy, bringing with him a rich collection of Greek manuscripts. At Rome his house became a salon of humanists; Poggio, Valla, and Platina were among his closest friends; Valla called him latinorum graecissimus, graecorum latinissimus— the most learned Hellenist among the Latins, the most accomplished Latinist among the Greeks.³⁵ He spent nearly all his income in purchasing manuscripts or having them copied. He himself made a new translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; but as a disciple of Gemistus he favored Plato, and led the Platonic camp in a hot controversy that raged at the time between Platonists and Aristotelians. Plato won that campaign, and the long rule of Aristotle over Western philosophy came to an end. When Nicholas V appointed Bessarion legate at Bologna, to govern the Romagna and the Marches, Bessarion acquitted himself so well that Nicholas called him “angel of peace.” For Pius II he undertook difficult diplomatic missions in a Germany again seething with revolt against the Roman Church. Toward the end of his life he bequeathed his library to Venice, where it now forms a precious part of the Biblioteca Marciana. In 1471 he narrowly missed election to the papacy. He died a year later, honored throughout the world of scholarship.

His missions to Germany failed, partly because the efforts of Pius II to reform the Church were frustrated, and partly because a new attempt to levy a tithe for a crusade revived transalpine antipathy to Rome. At the outset of his pontificate Pius appointed a committee of high prelates to formulate a program of reform. He accepted a plan submitted by Nicholas of Cusa, and embodied it in a papal bull. But he found that no one in Rome wanted reform; almost every second dignitary there profited from one or another immemorial abuse; apathy and passive resistance defeated Pius; and meanwhile his difficulties with Germany, Bohemia, and France used up his energy, and the crusade that he planned absorbed his devotion and cried for funds. He had to content himself with reproving cardinals for licentious lives, and with sporadic improvements of monastic discipline. In 1463 he addressed a final appeal to the cardinals:

People say that we live for pleasure, accumulate wealth, bear ourselves arrogantly, ride on fat mules and handsome palfreys, trail the fringes of our cloaks after us, and show round plump faces beneath the red hat and the white hood, keep hounds for the chase, spend much on actors and parasites, and nothing in defense of the Faith. And there is some truth in their words: many among the cardinals and other officials of our court do lead this kind of life. If the truth be confessed, the luxury and pomp at our court is too great. And this is why we are so detested by the people that they will not listen to us, even when we say what is just and reasonable. What do you think is to be done in such a shameful state of things?… We must inquire by what means our predecessors won authority and consideration for the Church…. We must maintain that authority by the same means. Temperance, chastity, innocence, zeal for the Faith… contempt of earth, the desire for martyrdom have exalted the Roman Church, and made her mistress of the world.³⁶

The Pope, who as Aeneas Sylvius had been so uniformly successful as a diplomat, had to bear one setback after another in his dealings with the European powers. Louis XI gave him a brief triumph by revoking the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, but when Pius refused to aid the house of Anjou in its plans for recapturing Naples, Louis in effect revoked his revocation. Bohemia persisted in the revolt that John Huss had started; the Reformation had begun there a century before Luther, and the new king, George Poděbrad, was giving it his powerful support. The German hierarchy continued to league with German princes in resisting collection of the tithe, and renewed the old cry for a general council to reform the Church and sit in judgment upon the pope. Pius responded by issuing (1460) the bull Execrabilis, which condemned and forbade any attempt to convene a general council without papal initiative and consent; if, he argued, such a council could be summoned at any time by opponents of papal policy, papal jurisdiction would be in constant jeopardy, and ecclesiastical discipline would be paralyzed.

These disputes fettered the efforts of the Pope to unify Europe against the Turks. On the very day of his coronation he expressed his horror at the advance of the Moslems along the Danube to Vienna, and through the Balkans into Bosnia. Greece, Epirus, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia were falling to the enemies of Christianity; who could say when they would leap across the Adriatic into Italy? A month after his coronation Pius issued an invitation to all Christian princes to join him in a great congress at Mantua and lay plans to rescue Eastern Christendom from the Ottoman tide.

He himself arrived there on May 27, 1459. Arrayed in the most gorgeous vestments of his office, he was borne through the city on a litter held up by the nobles and vassals of the Church. He addressed great throngs in one of the most moving orations of his career. But no king or prince came from beyond the Alps, and none sent representatives with powers to commit his state to war; nationalism, which was to achieve the Reformation, was already strong enough to make the papacy an ineffectual suppliant before the thrones of the kings. The cardinals urged the Pope to return to Rome; neither did they relish the thought of yielding a tithe of their income to the crusade; some decamped to their pleasures; some asked Pius to his face did he wish them to die of fever in Mantua’s summer heat? The Pontiff waited patiently for the Emperor, but Frederick III, instead of coming to the aid of the man who in the past had served him well, declared war on Hungary in an effort to add to his realm the very nation that was most actively preparing to resist the Turks. France again made its co-operation conditional on papal support of a French campaign against Naples. Venice held back for fear that her remaining possessions in the Aegean would be the first sacrifice in a war of Christian Europe against the Ottomans. At last, in August, an embassy came from Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy; in September Francesco Sforza appeared; other Italian princes followed his lead, and on the 26th the Congress held its first sitting, four months after the arrival of the Pope. Four months more passed in argument; finally, by agreeing to the division of Turkish and formerly Byzantine territory in Europe among the victorious powers, Pius won Burgundy and Italy to his plan for a holy war. All Christian laymen were to contribute to the cause a thirtieth of their income, all Jews a twentieth, all clergy a tenth. The Pope returned to Rome in almost complete exhaustion; but he gave orders for the construction of a papal fleet, and prepared, despite gout and cough and stone, to lead the crusade himself.

And yet his nature shrank from war, and he dreamed of a peaceful victory. Perhaps encouraged by rumors that Mohammed II, born of a Christian mother, had secret leanings toward Christianity, Pius addressed to the Sultan (1461) an earnest appeal to accept the Gospel of Christ. He had never been more eloquent.

Were you to embrace Christianity there is no prince on earth who would surpass you in glory or equal you in power. We would acknowledge you as emperor of the Greeks and the East; and what you have now taken by violence, and retain by injustice, would then be your lawful possession…. Oh, what a fullness of peace it would be! The golden age of Augustus, sung by the poets, would return. If you were to join yourself to us the whole of the East would soon turn to Christ. One will could give peace to the entire world, and that will is yours!³⁷

Mohammed made no reply; whatever his theology, he knew that his final protection against Western arms lay not in the promises of the Pope but in the religious ardor of his people. Pius turned more realistically to collecting the clerical tithe. A windfall sustained him in 1462 when rich deposits of alum were found in papal soil at Tolfa in western Latium; several thousand men were put to work mining the substance so valued by dyers; soon the mines were yielding 100,000 florins per year to the Holy See. Pius announced that the discovery was a miracle, a divine contribution to the Turkish war.³⁸ The Papal States were now the richest government in Italy, with Venice a close second, Naples third, then Milan, Florence, Modena, Siena, Mantua.³⁹

Venice, perceiving the resolute earnestness of the Pope, accelerated its preparations. The other powers held back, or offered merely token aid; the collection of taxes for the crusade met with formidable resistance almost everywhere. Francesco Sforza cooled to the enterprise as promising to strengthen Venice by redeeming her lost possessions and trade. Genoa, which had pledged eight triremes, withheld them. The Duke of Burgundy urged the Pope to wait for a better day. But Pius announced that he would go to Ancona, expect there the union of new papal and Venetian fleets, cross with them to Ragusa, join Skanderbeg of Bosnia and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and lead in person the advance against the Turks. Nearly all the cardinals protested; they had no appetite for marching through the Balkans; they warned the Pope that Bosnia was reeking with heretics and plague. The ailing pontiff nevertheless took the cross of a crusader, bade farewell to Rome, not expecting to see it again, and sailed with his fleet for Ancona (June 18, 1464).

Meanwhile the armies that were supposed to meet him faded away as if by Oriental magic; the troops originally promised by Milan did not come; those which Florence sent were so poorly equipped as to be useless; when Pius reached Ancona (July 19) he found that most of the crusaders who had assembled there had deserted, weary of wating and worried for food. Plague broke out in the Venetian fleet as it left the lagoons, and caused a delay of twelve days. Brokenhearted by the vanishing of his armies and the nonappearance of the Venetian armada, Pius languished at Ancona, sick to the verge of death. Finally the fleet was sighted; the Pope sent his galleys to meet them, and had himself carried to a window from which he could see the harbor. As the combined navies came in sight he died (August 14, 1464). Venice recalled her vessels, the remaining soldiers dispersed, the crusade collapsed. The brilliant and versatile climber who had craved success after success had reached the throne of thrones, had graced it with urbane scholarship and Christian benevolence, and had drunk to the dregs the gall of failure, humiliation, and defeat; but he had redeemed the errors of his youth with the devotion of his maturity, and had shamed the cynicism of his peers with the nobility of his death.

V. PAUL II: 1464–71

The lives of great men oft remind us that a man’s character can be formed after his demise. If a ruler coddles the chroniclers about him they may lift him to posthumous sanctity; if he offends them they may broil his corpse on a spit of venom or roast him to darkest infamy in a pot of ink. Paul II quarreled with Platina; Platina wrote the biography upon which most estimates of Paul depend, and handed him down to posterity as a monster of vanity, pomp, and greed.

There was some truth in the indictment, though not much more than might be found in any biography untempered with charity. Pietro Barbo, Cardinal of San Marco, was proud of his handsome appearance, as nearly all men are. When elected pope he proposed, probably in humor, to be called Formosus—good-looking; he allowed himself to be dissuaded, and took the title of Paul II. Simple in his private life, yet knowing the hypnotic effect of magnificence, he kept a luxurious court, and entertained his friends and guests with costly hospitality. On entering the conclave that elected him he, like the other cardinals, had pledged himself, if chosen, to wage war against the Turks, to summon a general council, to limit the number of cardinals to twenty-four and the number of papal relatives among them to one, to create no man a cardinal under thirty years of age, and to consult the cardinals on all important appointments. Paul, elected, repudiated these capitulations as nullifying time-honored traditions and powers. He consoled the cardinals by raising their yearly revenue to a minimum of 4000 florins ($100,000?). He himself, coming of a mercantile family, relished the security of florins, ducats, scudi, and gems that held a fortune in a ray of light. He wore a tiara that outweighed a palace in worth. As cardinal he had kept the goldsmiths busy with orders for jewels, medals, and cameos; these, and costly relics of classic art, he had collected in the sumptuous Palazzo San Marco which he had built for himself at the foot of the Capitol.* With all his acquisitiveness he stooped to no simony, repressed the sale of indulgences, and governed Rome with justice if not with mercy.

He is worst remembered by his quarrel with the Roman humanists. Some of these were secretaries to the pope or the cardinals; most of them filled less dignified positions as abbreviatores— writers of briefs, or keepers of records, for the Curia. Whether as a measure of economy, or to rid the Collegium Abbreviatorum of the fifty-eight Sienese whom Pius II had appointed to it, Paul disbanded the whole group, gave its work to other departments, and left some seventy humanists jobless or reduced to less lucrative posts. The most eloquent of these dismissed humanists was Bartolommeo de’ Sacchi, who took the Latin name Platina from his native Piadena near Cremona. He appealed to the Pope to re-employ the dismissed men; when Paul refused he wrote him a threatening letter. Paul had him arrested, and kept him for four months in Sant’ Angelo, bound with heavy chains. Cardinal Gonzaga secured his release; but Platina, Paul thought, would bear watching.

The leader of the humanists in Rome was Iulio Pomponio Leto, allegedly the natural son of Prince Sanseverino of Salerno. Coming to Rome in youth, he attached himself to Valla as a disciple, and succeeded him as professor of Latin in the university. He became so enamored of pagan literature that he lived and had his being not in the Rome of Nicholas V or Paul II, but in that of the Catos or the Caesars. He was the first to edit the agricultural classics of Varro and Columella, and he sedulously followed their precepts in tending his vineyard. He remained content in learned poverty, spent half his time among the historic ruins, wept at their spoliation and desolation, Latinized his name to Pomponius Laetus, and walked to his classroom in ancient Roman dress. Hardly any hall could hold the crowd that gathered at dawn to hear his lectures; some students came at midnight to secure a place. He despised the Christian religion, denounced its preachers as hypocrites, and trained his scholars in the Stoic rather than the Christian morality. His home was a museum of Roman antiquities, a meeting place for students and teachers of Roman lore. About 1460 he organized them into a Roman Academy, whose members took pagan names, gave such names to their children in baptism, exchanged the Christian faith for a religious worship of the genius of Rome, performed Latin comedies, and celebrated the anniversary of Rome’s foundation with pagan ceremonies in which the officiating members were termed sacerdotes, and Laetus was called pontifex maximus. Some enthusiastic members dreamed of restoring the Roman Republic.⁴⁰

Early in 1468 a citizen laid before the papal police a charge that the Academy was plotting to depose and arrest the Pope. Certain cardinals supported the charge, and assured the pontiff that a rumor in Rome was predicting his early death. Paul ordered the arrest of Laetus, Platina, and other leaders of the Academy. Pomponius wrote humble apologies and professions of orthodoxy; after due chastening he was released, and resumed his lecturing, but with such careful conformity that when he died (1498) forty bishops attended his funeral. Platina was tortured to elicit evidence of a conspiracy; no such evidence was anywhere found, but Platina, despite a dozen letters of apology, was kept in prison for a year. Paul decreed the dissolution of the Academy as a nest of heresy, and forbade the teaching of pagan literature in the schools of Rome. His successor allowed the Academy to reopen reformed, and gave the penitent Platina charge of the Vatican Library. There Platina found the materials for his graphic and elegant biographies of the popes (In vitas summorum pontificum); and when he came to Paul II he took his revenge. His indictment might with more justice have been reserved for Sixtus IV.

VI. SIXTUS IV: 1471–84

Of the eighteen cardinals who met to choose a new pontiff, fifteen were Italian, Rodrigo Borgia was Spanish, d’Estouteville was French, Bessarion was Greek. One participant later described the election of Cardinal Francesco della Rovere as due to “intrigue and bribery” (ex artibus et corruptelis)⁴¹ but this seems to have meant only that various offices were promised to various cardinals for their votes. The new pope illustrated the admirable equality of opportunity (among Italians) to reach the papacy. He was born of a peasant family at Pecorile, near Savona. Repeatedly ill as a child, he was consecrated to St. Francis by his mother in prayer for his recovery. At nine he was sent to a Franciscan convent, and later entered the Minorite order. For a while he served as tutor in the della Rovere family, whose name he took as his own. He studied philosophy and theology at Pavia, Bologna, and Padua, and taught them there and elsewhere to classes so crowded that almost every learned Italian of the next generation was said to have been his pupil.

When, at fifty-seven, he became Sixtus IV, his reputation was that of a scholar distinguished for learning and integrity. Almost overnight, by one of the strangest transformations in papal history, he became a politician and a warrior. Finding Europe too divided, and its governments too corrupt, for a crusade against the Turks, he decided to confine his secular efforts to Italy. There too, of course, he found division—in the Papal States the authority of the pope largely flouted by local rulers, in Latium a rule by noble violence ignoring the papal power, and in Rome a mob so disorderly that at his coronation it stoned his litter in anger at a crush caused by a stoppage of the cavalcade. Sixtus proposed to restore order in Rome, to reinvigorate legatine authority in the Papal States, and to bring Italy under the unifying rule of the pope.

Surrounded by chaos, distrustful of strangers, and subject to family affection, Sixtus appointed his avid nephews to positions of power and revenue. It was the prime curse of his pontificate that those whom he loved best proved worst, and took such venal advantage of their place that all Italy came to despise them. The favorite nephew was Pietro (or Piero) Riario, a youth of some charm—cheerful, witty, courteous, generous—but so fond of luxury and sensual delights that even the rich benefices bestowed upon him by the Pope failed to finance the tastes of this formerly mendicant friar. Sixtus made him a cardinal at twenty-five (1471), and gave him the bishoprics of Treviso, Senigallia, Spalato, Florence, and other dignities, with a total income of 60,000 ducats ($1,500,000?) a year. Pietro spent all, and more, on vessels of silver and gold, fine raiment, tapestries, embroideries, a pretentious retinue, expensive public games, and the patronage of painters, poets, and scholars. The festivities—including a banquet that lasted six hours—with which he and his cousin Giuliano welcomed to Rome Ferrante’s daughter Eleonora marked a height of extravagance hardly equaled there since Lucullus or Nero. Dizzy with power, Pietro made a triumphal tour of Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, and Milan, enjoying regal honors everywhere as a prince of the blood, displaying his mistresses in costly attire, and making plans to become pope on or before the death of his uncle. But on his return to Rome he died (1474) of his excesses at the age of twenty-eight, having spent 200,000 ducats in two years, and owing 60,000 more.⁴² His brother Girolamo was made commander of the papal armies and lord of Imola and Forli; we have already disposed of him there. Another nephew, Leonardo della Rovere, was made prefect of Rome; and when he died his brother Giovanni succeeded him. The ablest of these innumerable nephews was Giuliano della Rovere, who will require a chapter as Julius II; his life was reasonably decent, and he rose to the papacy over every obstacle by force of intellect and character.

The plans of Sixtus to strengthen the Papal States disturbed the other governments of Italy. Lorenzo de’ Medici, as we have before related, schemed to get Imola for Florence; Sixtus outplayed him, and replaced the Medici with the Pazzi as bankers for the papacy; Lorenzo tried to ruin the Pazzi, they tried to kill him. Sixtus agreed to the conspiracy but deprecated murder; “go and do what you will,” he told the plotters, “provided there be no killing.”⁴³ The result was a war that lasted (1478–80) until the Turks threatened to overrun Italy. When that danger subsided, Sixtus was free to resume his liberation of the Papal States. Late in 1480 the Ordelaffi line of dictators died out at Forli, and the people asked the Pope to take over the city; Sixtus bade Girolamo govern Imola and Forli together. Girolamo suggested taking Ferrara next, and persuaded Sixtus and Venice to join in war upon Duke Ercole (1482). Ferrante of Naples sent troops to defend his son-in-law; Florence and Milan also helped Ferrara; and the Pope, who had begun his reign with plans for European peace, found that he had plunged all Italy into war. Harassed by Naples in the south, by Florence in the north, and by disturbances in Rome, Sixtus came to terms with Ferrara after a year of chaos and bloodshed. When the Venetians refused to follow suit he excommunicated them, and joined Florence and Milan in war upon his late ally.

The nobles of the capital had felt justified, by the example of a warlike pontiff, in renewing their exhilarating feuds. It was one of the polite customs of Rome to plunder the palace of a cardinal just elected to the papacy. In so handling the palace of one of the della, Rovere cardinals, a young aristocrat, Francesco di Santa Croce, had been wounded by a member of the della Valle family. The youth revenged himself by cutting the tendon of della Valle’s heel; della Valle’s relatives revenged him by cleaving Francesco’s head; Prospero di Santa Croce revenged Francesco by killing Piero Margani. The feud spread through the city, the Orsini and the papal forces supporting the Santa Croce, the Colonna defending the Valle. Lorenzo Oddone Colonna was captured, tried, tortured into a confession, and put to death in Sant’ Angelo, though his brother Fabrizio surrendered two Colonna fortresses to Sixtus in the hope of having Lorenzo spared. Prospero Colonna joined Naples in war on the Pope, ravaged the Campagna, raided Rome. Sixtus engaged Roberto Malatesta of Rimini to come and lead the papal troops, Roberto defeated the Neapolitan and Colonna forces at Campo Morto, returned to Rome victorious, and died of fever contracted in the Campagna swamps. Girolamo Riario took his place, and Sixtus officially blessed the artillery that his nephew directed against the Colonna citadels. But while the Pope’s spirit willed war, his body collapsed under the strain of successive crises. In June, 1484, he too came down with fever. On August 11 news came to him that his allies had made peace with Venice over his protests; he refused to ratify it. The next day he died.

Sixtus was in many ways a preview of Julius II, as Girolamo Riario rehearsed the career of Caesar Borgia. A stern imperial priest who loved war and art and power, Sixtus pursued his purposes without scruple or finesse, but with wild energy and unhesitating courage to the end. Like later warrior popes, he made enemies who tried to weaken his arms by blackening his name. Some gossips accounted for his lavish support of Pietro and Girolamo Riario by calling them his sons;⁴⁴ others, like Infessura, called them his lovers, and did not hesitate to term the Pope “a sodomite.”⁴⁵* The picture is bad enough without these incredible and unsupported allegations. After exhausting on his nephews the treasury that Paul II had left full, Sixtus financed his wars by selling ecclesiastical offices to the highest bidder. A hostile Venetian ambassador quotes him as saying that “a pope needs only pen and ink to get whatever sum he wishes”;⁴⁷ but this is equally true of most modern governments, whose interest-bearing bonds correspond in many ways with the salary-bearing sinecures sold by the popes. Sixtus, however, was not content with this scheme. He kept throughout the Papal States a monopoly on the sale of corn; he sold the best abroad, and the rest to his people, at a goodly profit.⁴⁸ He had learned this trick from the other rulers of his time, like Ferrante of Naples; presumably he charged no more than private engrossers would have done, since it is an unwritten law of economics that the price of a product depends on the gullibility of the purchaser; but the poor grumbled forgivably at the thought that their hunger fed the luxuries of the Riarios. Despite these and other devices for raising revenues, Sixtus left debts totaling 150,000 ducats ($3,750,000?).

A substantial portion of his revenues was spent on art and public works. He tried, unsuccessfully, to drain the pestilential marshes around Foligno, and at least dreamt of draining the Pontine swamps. He had the major streets of Rome straightened, widened, and paved; he improved the water supply; restored bridges, walls, gates, and towers; spanned the Tiber with the Ponte Sisto that bears his name; built a new Vatican Library, and the Sistine Chapel above it; founded the Sistine Choir; and rebuilt the ruined Hospital of Santo Spirito, whose main ward, 365 feet long, could accommodate a thousand patients. He reorganized the University of Rome, and opened to the public the Capitoline Museum that Paul II had established; this was the first public museum in Europe. During his pontificate, and largely under the direction of Baccio Pontelli, the churches of Santa Maria della Pace and Santa Maria del Popolo were erected, and many others were repaired. In Santa Maria del Popolo Mino da Fiesole and Andrea Bregno sculptured a noble tomb for Cardinal Cristoforo della Rovere (c. 1477); and in Santa Maria in Aracoeli Pinturicchio pictured the career of San Bernardino of Siena in some of the finest frescoes in Rome (c. 1484).

The Sistine Chapel was designed by Giovannino de’ Dolci, simply and unpretentiously, for semiprivate worship by the popes and high ecclesiastics. It was beautified with a marble sanctuary screen by Mino da Fiesole, and by spacious frescoes recounting on the south wall scenes from the life of Moses, and on the north wall corresponding scenes from the life of Christ. For these paintings Sixtus called to Rome the greatest masters of the time: Perugino, Signorelli, Pinturicchio, Domenico and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Cosimo Roselli, and Piero di Cosimo. Sixtus offered an additional reward for the best picture of the fifteen painted there by these men. Roselli, knowing his own inferiority in design, decided to stake all on brilliant coloring; his fellow artists laughed at his lavish spread of ultramarine and gold; but Sixtus gave him the prize.

The warrior pope brought other painters to Rome, and organized them into a protective guild under the aegis of St. Luke. It was for Sixtus that Melozzo da Forlì did his best work. Coming to Rome about 1472 after studying with Piero della Francesca, he painted in the church of Santi Apostoli a fresco of the Ascension which aroused the enthusiasm of Vasari; all but a few fragments of it disappeared when the church was rebuilt (1702f). Gracious and tender are the Angel and the Virgin of the Annunciation in the Uffizi Gallery, but finer still the Angeli musicanti— one with a viol, one with a lute—in the Vatican. Melozzo’s masterpiece was painted as a fresco in the Vatican Library, and was later transferred to canvas. Against the ornate pillars and ceiling of the Library six figures are portrayed with veracity and power: Sixtus seated, massive and regal; at his right the gay Pietro Riario; standing before him the tall dark Giuliano della Rovere; kneeling before him the high-browed Platina, receiving appointment as librarian; and behind him Giovanni della Rovere and Count Girolamo Riario; it is a living picture of an eventful pontificate.

In 1475 the Vatican Library contained 2527 volumes in Latin and Greek; Sixtus added 1100 more, and for the first time threw the collection open to the public. He restored the humanists to favor, though he paid them with preoccupied irregularity. He called Filelfo to Rome, and that warrior of the pen praised the Pope enthusiastically until his annual salary of 600 florins ($15,000) fell into arrears. Joannes Argyropoulos was invited from Florence to Rome, where his lectures on the Greek language and literature were attended by cardinals, bishops, and foreign students like Reuchlin. Sixtus also brought to Rome the German scientist Johann Müller—Regiomontanus—and commissioned him to correct the Julian calendar; but Müller died a year later (1476), and calendar reform had to wait a century more (1582).

It is remarkable that a Franciscan friar and professor of philosophy and theology should have become the first secularizing pope of the Renaissance —or, more precisely, the first Renaissance pope whose chief interest was to establish the papacy as a strong political power in Italy. Perhaps excepting the case of Ferrara, whose able rulers had faithfully paid their feudal dues, Sixtus was perfectly justified in seeking to make the Papal States papal, and to make Rome and its environs safe for the popes. History might forgive, as it has forgiven Julius II, his use of war for these ends; it might acknowledge that his diplomacy merely followed the amoral principles of other states; but it finds no pleasure in watching a pope conspire with assassins, bless cannon, or wage war with a thoroughness that shocked his time; the death of a thousand men at Campo Morto was a heavier loss of life than any battle yet fought in Renaissance Italy. The morality of the Roman court was further lowered by reckless nepotism and unblushing simony, and the costly indecent revels of his kin; in these and other ways Sixtus IV made straight the way for Alexander VI, and contributed—as he responded—to the moral disintegration of Italy. It was Sixtus who appointed Torquemada to head the Spanish Inquisition; Sixtus who, provoked by the virulence and license of Roman satire, gave the Inquisitors in Rome power to prohibit the printing of any book they did not like. At his death he might have admitted many failures—against Lorenzo, Naples, Ferrara, Venice—and even the Colonna were not yet subdued. Three significant successes he had achieved: he had made Rome a fairer and healthier city, he had given it invigorating drafts of fresh art, and he had restored the papacy to its place among the most powerful monarchies in Europe.

VII. INNOCENT VIII: 1484–92

The failure of Sixtus was confirmed by the chaos that ruled Rome after his death. Mobs sacked the papal granaries, broke into the banks of the Genoese, attacked the palace of Girolamo Riario. Vatican attendants stripped the Vatican of its furniture. The noble factions armed themselves; barricades were thrown up in the streets; Girolamo was forced to quit his campaign against the Colonna and lead his troops back to the city; the Colonna recaptured many of their citadels. A conclave was hastily assembled in the Vatican, and an exchange of promises and bribes⁴⁹ between Cardinal Borgia and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere secured the election of Giovanni Battista Cibò of Genoa, who took the name of Innocent VIII.

He was fifty-two; tall and handsome, kindly and peaceable to the point of complaisant weakness; of moderate intelligence and experience; a contemporary described him as “not wholly ignorant.”⁵⁰ He had at least one son and one daughter, probably more;⁵¹ he acknowledged them candidly, and after taking priestly orders he led an apparently celibate life. Though the Roman wits wrote epigrams about his children, few Romans held it againt the Pope that he had been so fertile in his youth. But they raised eyebrows when he celebrated the marriages of his children and grandchildren in the Vatican.

In truth Innocent was content to be a grandfather, to enjoy domestic affection and ease. He gave Politian two hundred ducats for dedicating to him a translation of Herodotus, but for the rest he hardly bothered his head about the humanists. He continued leisurely, and quite by proxy, the repair and adornment of Rome. He engaged Antonio Pollaiuolo to build the Villa Belvedere in the Vatican gardens, and Andrea Mantegna to paint frescoes in a chapel adjoining it; but for the most part he left the patronage of letters and art to magnates and cardinals. In a similar mood of genial laissez-faire he entrusted foreign policy first to Cardinal della Rovere, then to Lorenzo de’ Medici. The powerful banker offered his richly dowered daughter Maddalena as a bride for the Pope’s son Franceschetto Cibò; Innocent was agreeable, and signed an alliance with Florence (1487); thereafter he allowed the experienced and pacific Florentine to guide the papal policy. For five years Italy enjoyed peace.

The age of Innocent was amused by one of the strangest comedies in history. After the death of Mohammed II (1481) his sons Bajazet II and Djem fought a civil war for the Ottoman throne. Defeated at Brusa, Djem sought to escape death by surrendering to the Knights of St. John in Rhodes (1482). Their Grand Master, Pierre d’Aubusson, held him as a threat over Bajazet. The Sultan agreed to pay the Knights 45,000 ducats yearly, ostensibly for Djem’s maintenance, actually as an inducement not to set up Djem as a pretender to the Turkish sultanate and a useful ally in a Christian crusade. To better safeguard so lucrative a prisoner, d’Aubusson sent him to Knightly custody in France. The Sultan of Egypt, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, Ferrante of Naples, and Innocent himself all offered large sums to d’Aubusson to transfer Djem to their care. The Pope won because, in addition to ducats, he promised the Grand Master a red hat, and helped Charles VIII of France to secure the hand and province of Anne of Brittany. So, on March 13, 1489, the “Grand Turk,” as Djem was now called, was escorted in princely cavalcade through the streets of Rome to the Vatican, and received courteous and luxurious imprisonment. Bajazet, to ensure the honorable intentions of the Pope, sent him three years’ salary for the upkeep of Djem; and in 1492 he dispatched to Innocent what he assured him was the head of the lancet that had pierced the side of Christ. Some cardinals were skeptical, but the Pope arranged that the relic should be brought from Ancona to Rome; when it reached the Porta del Popolo he himself received it and bore it in solemn ceremony to the Vatican. Cardinal Borgia held it aloft for the people’s reverence, and then returned to his mistress.

Despite the Sultan’s contribution to the support of the Church, Innocent found it troublesome to make ends meet. Like Sixtus IV and most of the rulers of Europe, he replenished his coffers by charging fees for appointment to office; and finding this lucrative, he created new offices to sell. By raising the number of papal secretaries to twenty-six, he realized 62,400 ducats; he increased to fifty-two the plumbatores whose heavy task was to place a leaden seal on papal decrees, and received 2500 ducats from each appointee. Such practices might have been no worse than selling annuity insurance, had it not been that the incumbents reimbursed themselves not merely by their salaries but by candid venality in their functions. For example, two papal secretaries confessed that in two years they had forged more than fifty papal bulls granting dispensations; the angry Pope had the men hanged and burned for stealing beyond their station (1489).⁵² Everything in Rome seemed purchasable, from judicial pardons to the papacy itself.⁵³ The unreliable Infessura tells of a man who committed incest with his two daughters, then murdered them, and was let off by paying eight hundred ducats.⁵⁴ When Cardinal Borgia was asked why justice was not done, he is reputed to have answered: “God desires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should pay and live.”⁵⁵ The Pope’s son, Franceschetto Cibò, was an unprincipled scoundrel; he forced his way into private homes “for evil purposes”; he saw to it that of the fines levied in the ecclesiastical courts of Rome a substantial portion should go to himself, and he spent his spoils in gambling. One night he lost 14,000 ducats ($350,000) to Cardinal Raffaelle Riario; he complained to the Pope that he had been cheated, and Innocent tried to recover the sum for him; but the Cardinal professed to have already used up the sum on the immense Palazzo della Cancelleria that he was building.⁵⁶

The secularization of the papacy—its absorption in politics, war, and finance—had filled the college of cardinals with appointees noted for their administrative ability, their political influence, or their capacity to pay for their hats. Despite his promise to keep the College down to twenty-four members, Innocent added to it eight men most of whom were eminently unsuited to such a dignity; so the cardinalate was conferred upon the thirteen-year-old Giovanni de’ Medici as part of a bargain with Lorenzo. Many of the cardinals were men of high education, benevolent patrons of literature, music, drama, and art. A few of them were saintly. Several had taken only minor orders, and were not yet priests. Many of them were frankly secular; their political, diplomatic, and fiscal duties required them to be men of the world, capable of meeting on a level of knowledge and subtlety the similar officials of Italian or transalpine governments. Some of them imitated the Roman nobles, fortified their palaces and retained armed men to protect themselves from these nobles, and the Roman mob, and other cardinals.⁵⁷* Perhaps the great Catholic historian Pastor is a bit too severe on them, in view of their secular functions:

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s low estimate of the College of Cardinals in the time of Innocent VIII was unfortunately only too well founded.… Of the worldly cardinals Ascanio Sforza, Riario, Orsini, Sclafenatus, Jean de la Balue, Giuliano della Rovere, Savelli, and Rodrigo Borgia were the most prominent. All of these were deeply infected with the corruption that prevailed in Italy amongst the upper classes in the age of the Renaissance. Surrounded in their splendid palaces with all the most refined luxury of a highly developed civilization, these cardinals lived the lives of secular princes, and seemed to regard their ecclesiastical garb simply as one of the adornments of their rank. They hunted, gambled, gave sumptuous banquets and entertainments, joined in all the rollicking merriment of the carnival-tide, and allowed themselves the utmost license in morals. This was especially the case with Rodrigo Borgia.⁵⁸

The disorder at the top reflected and enhanced the moral chaos of Rome. Violence, thievery, rape, bribery, conspiracy, revenge were the order of the day. Each dawn revealed, in the alleys, men who had been killed during the night. Pilgrims and ambassadors were waylaid, were sometimes stripped naked, as they approached the capital of Christendom.⁵⁹ Women were attacked in the streets or in their homes. A piece of the True Cross, encased in silver, was stolen from the sacristy of Santa Maria in Trastevere; later the wood, shorn of its setting, was found in a vineyard.⁶⁰ Such religious skepticism was widespread. Over five hundred Roman families were condemned for heresy, but were let off with fines; perhaps the mercenary Curia of Rome was preferable to the mercenary and murderous inquisitors who were now ravaging Spain. Even priests had their doubts; one was accused of substituting, for the words of transubstantiation in the Mass, his own formula: “O fatuous Christians, who adore food and drink as God!”⁶¹ As the end of Innocent’s pontificate approached, prophets appeared who proclaimed impending doom; and in Florence the voice of Savonarola was rising to brand the age as that of Antichrist.

“On September 20,” 1492, says a chronicler, “there was a great tumult in the city of Rome, and the merchants closed their shops. People who were in the fields and vineyards returned home in haste, because it was announced that Pope Innocent VIII was dead.”⁶² Strange stories were told of his dying hours: how the cardinals placed Djem under special guards lest Frances-chetto Cibò should appropriate him; how Cardinals Borgia and della Rovere had almost come to blows beside the deathbed; and the dubious Infessura is our oldest authority for the report that three boys died from giving too much of their blood in a transfusion designed to revive the failing Pope.⁶³ Innocent bequeathed 48,000 ducats ($600,000?) to his relatives, and passed away. He was buried in St. Peter’s, and Antonio Pollaiuolo covered his sins with a splendid tomb.

CHAPTER XVI

The Borgias

1492–1503

I. CARDINAL BORGIA

THE most interesting of the Renaissance popes was born at Xativa, Spain, on January 1, 1431. His parents were cousins, both of the Borjas, a family of some slight nobility. Rodrigo received his education at Xativa, Valencia, and Bologna. When his uncle became a cardinal, and then Pope Calixtus III, a straight path was opened for the young man’s advancement in an ecclesiastical career. Moving to Italy, he respelled his name Borgia, was made a cardinal at twenty-five, and at twenty-six received the fruitful office of vice-chancellor—head of the entire Curia. He performed his duties competently, earned some repute as an administrator, lived abstemiously, and made many friends in either sex. He was not yet—would not be till his thirty-seventh year—a priest.

He was so handsome in his youth, so attractive in the grace of his manners, his sensual ardor and cheerful temperament, his persuasive eloquence and gay wit, that women found it hard to resist him. Brought up in the easygoing morality of fifteenth-century Italy, and perceiving that many a cleric, many a priest, allowed himself the pleasure of women, this young Lothario in the purple decided to enjoy all the gifts that God had given him and them. Pius II reproved him for attending “an immodest and seductive dance” (1460), but the Pope accepted Rodrigo’s apology, and continued him as vice-chancellor and trusted aide.¹ In that year Rodrigo’s first son, Pedro Luis, was born or begotten, and perhaps also his daughter Girolama, who was married in 1482;² their mothers are not known. Pedro lived in Spain till 1488, came to Rome in that year, and died soon afterward. In 1464 Rodrigo accompanied Pius II to Ancona, and there contracted some minor sexual disease “because,” said his doctor, “he had not slept alone.”³ About 1466 he formed a more permanent attachment with Vanozza de’ Catanei, then some twenty-four years old. Unfortunately, she was married to Domenico d’Arignano, but Domenico left her in 1476.⁴ To Rodrigo (who had become a priest in 1468) Vanozza bore four children: in 1474 Giovanni, in 1476 Cesare (whom we shall call Caesar), in 1480 Lucrezia, in 1481 Giofre. These four were ascribed to Vanozza on her tombstone, and were at one time or another acknowledged by Rodrigo as his own.⁵ Such persistent parentage suggests an almost monogamous union, and perhaps Cardinal Borgia, in comparison with other ecclesiastics, may be credited with a certain domestic fidelity and stability.* He was a tender and benevolent father; it was a pity that his efforts to advance his childern did not always bring glory to the Church. When Rodrigo set his eye on the papacy he found a tolerant husband for Vanozza, and helped her to prosperity. She was twice widowed, married again, lived in modest retirement, rejoiced in the rise of her children to fame and wealth, mourned her separation from them, earned a reputation for piety, died at seventy-six (1518), and left all her substantial property to the Church. Leo X sent his chamberlain to attend her ceremonious funeral.⁷

We should betray a lack of historical sense were we to judge Alexander VI from the moral standpoint of our age—or rather of our youth. His contemporaries looked upon his prepapal sexual sins as only canonically mortal, but, in the moral climate of his time, venial and forgivable.⁸ Even in the generation between the reproof given him by Pius II and Rodrigo’s elevation to the papacy, public opinion had become more lenient toward unobtrusive sexual digressions from clerical celibacy. Pius II himself, besides spawning some love children in his presacerdotal youth, had once advocated the marriage of priests; Sixtus IV had had several children; Innocent VIII had brought his into the Vatican. Some condemned the morals of Rodrigo, but apparently no one mentioned them when the conclave met to choose a successor to Innocent. Five popes, including the reasonably virtuous Nicholas V, had granted him lucrative benefices through all these years, had entrusted him with difficult missions and responsible posts, and had apparently (Pius II for a moment excepted) taken no notice of his philoprogenitive exuberance.⁹ What men remarked in 1492 was that he had been vice-chancellor for thirty-five years, had been appointed and reappointed to that office by five successive popes, and had administered the office with conspicuous industry and competence; and that the external magnificence of his palace concealed a remarkable simplicity of private life. Iacopo da Volterra, in 1486, described him as “a man of an intellect capable of anything, and of great sense; he is a ready speaker, is of an astute nature, and has wonderful skill in conducting affairs.”¹⁰ He was popular with the Romans, having amused them with games; when news reached Rome that Granada had fallen to the Christians, he regaled Rome with a bullfight in Spanish style.

Perhaps the cardinals assembling in conclave on August 6, 1492, were also interested in his wealth, for in five administrations he had become the richest cardinal—excepting d’Estouteville—in the memory of Rome. They relied upon him to make substantial presents to those who should vote for him; and he did not fail them. To Cardinal Sforza he promised the vicechancellorship, several rich benefices, and the Borgia palace in Rome; to Cardinal Orsini the see and ecclesiastical revenues of Cartagena, the towns of Monticelli and Soriano, and the governorship of the Marches; to Cardinal Savelli Civita Castellana and the bishopric of Majorca; and so on; Infessura described the process as Borgia’s “evangelical distribution of his goods to the poor.”¹¹ It was not an unusual procedure; every candidate had used it for many conclaves past, as every candidate uses it in politics today. Whether money bribes were also used is uncertain.¹² The decisive vote was cast by Cardinal Gherardo, ninety-six years old, and “hardly in possession of his faculties.”¹³ Finally all the cardinals rushed to the winning side, and made the election of Rodrigo Borgia unanimous (August 10, 1492). When asked by what name he wished to be called as pope, he answered, “By the name of the invincible Alexander.” It was a pagan beginning for a pagan pontificate.

II. ALEXANDER VI

The choice of the conclave was also the choice of the people. Never had any papal election brought so much rejoicing,¹⁴ never had a coronation been so magnificent. The populace delighted in the panoramic cavalcade of white horses, allegorical figures, tapestries and paintings, knights and grandees, troops of archers and Turkish horsemen, seven hundred priests, cardinals colorfully clad, and finally Alexander himself, sixty-one years old but majestically straight and tall, overflowing with health and energy and pride, “serene of countenance and of surpassing dignity,” said an eyewitness,¹⁵ and looking like an emperor even while blessing the multitude. Only a few sober minds, like Giuliano della Rovere and Giovanni de’ Medici, expressed some apprehension lest the new Pope, known to be a fond father, would use his power to aggrandize his family rather than to cleanse and strengthen the Church.

He began well. In the thirty-six days between the death of Innocent and the coronation of Alexander there had been two hundred and twenty known murders in Rome. The new Pope made an example of the first captured assassin; the culprit was hanged, his brother was hanged with him, and his house was pulled down. The city approved this severity; crime hid its head; order was restored in Rome, and all Italy was glad that a strong hand was at the helm of the Church¹⁶

Art and literature marked time. Alexander did considerable building in and out of Rome; financed a new ceiling for Santa Maria Maggiore with a gift of American gold from Ferdinand and Isabella; remodeled the Mausoleum of Hadrian into the fortified Castle of Sant’ Angelo, and redecorated its interior to provide cells for papal prisoners and more comfortable quarters for harassed popes. He built between the Castle and the Vatican a long covered corridor, which gave him refuge from Charles VIII in 1494, and saved Clement VII from a Lutheran noose in the sack of Rome. Pinturicchio was engaged to adorn the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican. Four of these six rooms were restored and opened to the public by Leo XIII. A lunette in one of them contains a vivid portrait of Alexander—a happy face, a prosperous body, gorgeous robes. In another room a Virgin teaching the Child to read was described by Vasari¹⁷ as a portrait of Giulia Farnese, an alleged mistress of the Pope. Vasari adds that the picture also contained “the head of Pope Alexander adoring her,” but no picture of him is there visible.

He rebuilt the University of Rome, called to it several distinguished teachers, and paid them with unheard-of regularity. He liked drama, and was pleased to have the students of the Roman Academy stage comedies and ballets for his family festivals. He preferred light music to heavy philosophy. In 1501 he re-established censorship of publications by an edict requiring that no book might be printed without the approval of the local archbishop. But he allowed a wide freedom of satire and debate. He laughed off the bites of the town wits, and rejected Caesar Borgia’s proposal that such snipers should be disciplined. “Rome is a free city,” he told the Ferrarese ambassador, “where everyone can say or write whatever he pleases. They say much evil of me, but I don’t mind.”¹⁸

His administration of Church affairs was, in the early years of his pontificate, unusually efficient. Innocent VIII had left a debt in the treasury; “it needed all the financial ability of Alexander to restore the papal finances; it took him two years to balance the budget.”^18a The Vatican staff was reduced, and expenses were curtailed, but records were strictly kept, and salaries were promptly paid.¹⁹ Alexander performed the laborious religious ritual of his office with fidelity, but with the impatience of a busy man.²⁰ His magister ceremoniarum was a German, Johann Burchard, who helped to perpetuate the fame and infamy of his employer by recording in a Diavium nearly all that he saw, including much that Alexander would have wished unseen. To the cardinals the Pope gave as he had promised in the conclave, and he was even more generous to those who, like Cardinal de’ Medici, had longest opposed him. A year after his accession he created twelve new cardinals. Several were men of real ability; some were appointed at the request of political powers that it was wise to conciliate; two were scandalously young—Ippolito d’Este, fifteen, and Caesar Borgia, eighteen; one of them, Alessandro Farnese, owed his elevation to his sister Giulia Farnese, who was believed by many to be a mistress of the Pope. The sharp-tongued Romans, not foreseeing that they would one day acclaim Alessandro as Paul III, called him il cardinale della gonnella—the cardinal of the petticoat. The strongest of the older cardinals, Giuliano della Rovere, was displeased to find that he, who had often ruled Innocent VIII, had little influence with Alexander, who made Cardinal Sforza his favorite counselor. In a huff Giuliano retired to his episcopal see at Ostia, and formed a guard of armed men. A year later he fled to France, and besought Charles VIII to invade Italy, summon a general council, and depose Alexander as a shamelessly simoniacal pope.

Meanwhile Alexander was facing the political problems of a papacy caught between the millstones of scheming Italian powers. The Papal States had again fallen into the hands of local dictators who, while calling themselves vicars of the Church, had snatched the opportunity provided by the weakness of Innocent VIII to re-establish the practical independence that they or their predecessors had lost under Albornoz or Sixtus IV. Some papal cities had been seized by neighboring powers; so Naples had taken Sora and Aquila in 1467, and Milan had appropriated Forlì in 1488. Alexander’s first task, then, was to bring these states under a centralized papal rule and taxation, as the kings of Spain, France, and England had subdued the feudal lords. This was the mission that he assigned to Caesar Borgia, who accomplished it with such speed and ruthlessness as made Machiavelli gape with admiration.

Closer to Rome, and more immediately harassing, was the turbulent autonomy of the nobles, theoretically subject, actually hostile and dangerous, to the popes. The temporal weakness of the papacy since Boniface VIII (d. 1303) had allowed these barons to maintain a medieval feudal sovereignty on their estates, making their own laws, organizing their own armies, fighting at will their private and reckless wars, to the ruin of order and commerce in Latium. Soon after Alexander’s accession Franceschetto Cibò sold to Virginio Orsini, for 40,000 ducats ($500,000), estates left him by his father Innocent VIII But this Orsini was a high officer in the Neapolitan army; he had received from Ferrante most of the money for the purchase;²¹ in effect Naples had secured two strategic strongholds in papal territory.²² Alexander reacted by forming an alliance with Venice, Milan, Ferrara, and Siena, raising an army, and fortifying the wall between Sant’ Angelo and the Vatican. Ferdinand II of Spain, fearing that a combined attack upon Naples would end the Aragon power in Italy, persuaded Alexander and Ferrante to negotiate. Orsini paid the Pope 40,000 ducats for the right to retain his purchases; and Alexander betrothed his son Giofre, then thirteen, to Sancia, the pretty granddaughter of the Neapolitan King (1494).

In return for Ferdinand’s happy mediation, Alexander awarded him the two Americas. Columbus had discovered the “Indies” some two months after Alexander’s succession, and had presented them to Ferdinand and Isabella. Portugal claimed the New World by virtue of an edict of Calixtus III (1479), which had confirmed her claim to all lands on the Atlantic coast. Spain retorted that the edict had in mind only the eastern Atlantic. The states were near war when Alexander issued two bulls (May 3 and 4, 1493) allotting to Spain all discoveries west, and to Portugal all those east, of an imaginary line drawn from pole to pole a hundred Spanish leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, in each case on condition that the lands discovered were not already inhabited by Christians, and that the conquerors would make every effort to convert their new subjects to the Christian faith. The “grant” of the Pope, of course, merely confirmed a conquest of the sword, but it preserved the peace of the peninsular powers. No one seems to have thought that non-Christians had any rights to the lands in which they dwelt.

If Alexander might distribute continents he found it difficult to hold the Vatican. When Ferrante of Naples died (1494), Charles VIII decided to invade Italy and restore Naples to French rule. Fearing deposition, Alexander went to the extraordinary step of soliciting help from the Sultan of the Turks. In July, 1494, he sent a papal secretary, Giorgio Bocciardo to warn Bajazet II that Charles VIII was planning to enter Italy, take Naples depose or control the Pope, and use Djem as a pretender to the Ottoman throne in a crusade against Constantinople. Alexander proposed that Bajazet should make common cause with the papacy, Naples, and perhaps Venice, against the French. Bajazet received Bocciardo with Oriental courtesy, and sent him back with the 40,000 ducats due for the maintenance of Djem, and with an envoy of his own to Alexander. At Senigallia Bocciardo was captured by Giovanni della Rovere, brother to the disaffected cardinal; the 40,000 ducats were seized, together with five letters allegedly from the Sultan to the Pope. One letter proposed that Alexander should put Djem to death and send the dead body to Constantinople; upon its receipt the Sultan would pay the Pope 300,000 ducats ($3,750,000), “with which Your Highness may buy some dominions for your children.”²³ Cardinal della Rovere gave copies of the letters to the French King. Alexander claimed that the Cardinal had forged the letters and had invented the whole story. The evidence supports the authenticity of Alexander’s message to Bajazet, but discounts the Sultan’s reply as probably forged.²⁴ Venice and Naples had already entered into similar negotiations with the Turks; Francis I would later do likewise. To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

Charles came, advanced through friendly Milan and frightened Florence, and approached Rome (December, 1494). The Colonna supported him by preparing to invade the capital. A French fleet seized Ostia—Rome’s port at the mouth of the Tiber—and threatened to stop the supply of grain from Sicily. Many cardinals, including Ascanio Sforza, declared for Charles; Virginio Orsini opened his castles to the King; half the cardinals in Rome besought him to depose the Pope.^24a Alexander withdrew to Castel Sant’ Angelo, and sent envoys to treat with the conqueror. Charles did not wish, by attempting to remove the Pope, to rouse Spain against him; his goal was Naples, whose wealth was ever in the thoughts of his officers. He made peace with Alexander on condition of an unimpeded passage for his army through Latium, papal forgiveness of the pro-French cardinals, and the surrender of Djem. Alexander yielded, returned to the Vatican, enjoyed Charles’s three genuflections before him, graciously prevented him from kissing the papal feet, and received from the King the formal “obedience” of France—i.e., all plans for deposing Alexander were withdrawn. On January 25, 1495, Charles moved on to Naples, taking Djem with him. On February 25 Djem died of bronchitis. Gossip said that the subtle Alexander had given him a slow poison, but no one any longer credits that tale.²⁵

Once the French were gone, Alexander recovered his courage. Now, probably, he made up his mind that strong Papal States, a good army, and a good general were necessary to the safety of the popes from secular domination.²⁶ With Venice, Germany, Spain, and Milan he formed a Holy League (March 31, 1495), ostensibly for mutual defense and for war against the Turks, secretly for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Charles took the hint, and retreated through Rome to Pisa; Alexander, to avoid him, sojourned in Orvieto and Perugia. When Charles fled back to France Alexander returned in triumph to Rome. He demanded of Florence that it should join the League, and expel or silence Savonarola, friend of France and foe of the Pope. He reorganized the papal army, put his oldest surviving son Giovanni at its head, and bade him conquer for the papacy the revolted Orsini fortresses (1496). But Giovanni was no general; he was defeated at Soriano, returned to Rome in disgrace, and pursued the careless gallantries that probably caused his early death. Nevertheless Alexander recovered the strongholds sold to Virginio Orsini, and recaptured Ostia from the French. Apparently victorious over all obstacles, he bade Pinturicchio paint on the walls of the papal apartment in Sant’ Angelo frescoes picturing the triumph of the Pope over the King. Alexander was at the top of his curve.

III. THE SINNER

Rome applauded him for his internal administration, and his successful though hesitant diplomacy. It reproved him mildly for his love affairs, vigorously for feathering the nests of his children, bitterly for appointing to office in Rome a host of Spaniards whose alien mien and speech set Italian teeth on edge. A hundred Spanish relatives of the Pope had flocked to Rome; “ten papacies,” said one observer, “would not have sufficed for all these cousins.”²⁷ Alexander himself was by this time fully Italian in his culture, policy, and ways, but he still loved Spain, spoke Spanish too frequently with Caesar and Lucrezia, elevated nineteen Spaniards to the cardinalate, and surrounded himself with Catalan servants and aides. Finally the jealous Romans, half in humor, half in wrath, called him “the marrano Pope,”²⁸ implying his descent from Christianized Spanish Jews. Alexander excused himself on the ground that many Italians, especially in the college of cardinals, had proved faithless to him, and that he had to have about him a nucleus of supporters bound to him by a personal loyalty based on their awareness that he was their sole protector in Rome.

He—and the princes of Europe down to Napoleon—argued likewise in promoting relatives to positions of trust and power.* He hoped for a while that his son Giovanni might help him to protect the Papal States, but Giovanni had inherited his father’s sensitivity to women without Alexander’s capacity to govern men. Perceiving that of his sons only Caesar had in him the iron and gall necessary to play the game of Italian politics in that violent age, Alexander conferred upon him a maze of benefices whose income would finance the youth’s rising power. Even the gentle Lucrezia was an instrument of policy, and found herself promoted to the governorship of a city or the bed of a valuable duke. The Pope’s fondness for Lucrezia led him to such shows of affection that cruel gossip accused him of incest, and pictured him as competing with his sons for her love.²⁹ On two occasions when he had to be absent from Rome, Alexander left Lucrezia in charge of his rooms in the Vatican, with authority to open his correspondence and attend to all routine business. Such delegation of power to a woman was frequent in the ruling houses of Italy—as in Ferrara, Urbino, Mantua—but it mildly shocked even blasé Rome. When Giofre and Sancia arrived from Naples after their wedding, Caesar and Lucrezia went out to meet them; all four then hurried to the Vatican, and Alexander was happy to have them near him. ‘Other popes, to conceal their infamy,” says Guicciardini, “were wont to term their offspring nephews; but Alexander took delight in letting all the world know that they were his children.”³⁰

The city had forgiven the Pope his pristine Vanozza, but marveled at his current Giulia. Giulia Farnese was noted for her beauty, above all for her golden hair; when she let it down, and it hung to her feet, it was a sight that would have stirred the blood of men less mettlesome than Alexander. Her friends called her La Bella. Sanudo speaks of her as “the Pope’s favorite, a young woman of great beauty and understanding, gracious and gentle.”³¹ In 1493 Infessura described her as attending Lucrezia’s nuptial banquet in the Vatican, and called her Alexander’s “concubine”; Matarazzo, the Perugian historian, used the same term for Giulia, but probably copied Infessura; and a Florentine wit in 1494 called her sposa di Cristo, bride of Christ, a phrase usually reserved for the Church.³² Some scholars have sought to clear Giulia on the ground that Lucrezia—who has been made respectable by research—remained her friend to the end, and that Giulia’s husband, Orsino Orsini, built a chapel to her honored memory.³³ In 1492 Giulia gave birth to a daughter Laura, who was officially listed as begotten by Orsini, but Cardinal Alessandro Farnese recognized the girl as Alexander’s child.³⁴* By yet another woman the Pope was credited with having a mysterious son, born about 1498, and known in Burchard’s diary as Infans Romanus.³⁵ It is not certain, but one more or less hardly matters.

There is no question that Alexander was a sensual man, full-blooded to a degree painfully uncongenial to celibacy. When he gave a public festival in the Vatican, at which a comedy was performed (February, 1503), he rumbled with amusement, and was pleased to have fair women crowd about him and seat themselves gracefully on footstools at his feet. He was a man.

He seems to have felt, like many clergymen of the time, that clerical celibacy was a mistake of Hildebrand’s, and that even a cardinal should be permitted the pleasures and tribulations of female company. He showed feelings of husbandly tenderness for Vanozza, and perhaps a paternal solicitude for Giulia. On the other hand his devotion to his children, sometimes overriding his fidelity to the interests of the Church, could well be used to argue the wisdom of the canon law requiring celibacy of a priest.

In these middle years of his pontificate, before Caesar Borgia overshadowed it, Alexander had many virtues. Though he bore himself with proud dignity at public functions, in private he was jovial, good-natured, sanguine, eager to enjoy life, capable of a hearty laugh at seeing, from his window, a parade of masked men “with long false noses of great size in the form of the male member.”³⁶ He was a bit stout now, if we may trust Pinturicchio’s apparently honest picture of him, praying, on the Appartamento wall; and yet all reports concur that he lived frugally, on so plain a fare that the cardinals shunned his table.³⁷ He was unsparing of himself in administration, working till late at night, and watching actively over the affairs of the Church everywhere in Christendom.

Was his Christianity a pretense? Probably not. His letters, even those concerning Giulia, are warm with phrases of piety that were not indispensable in private correspondence.³⁸ He was so much a man of action, and had so thoroughly absorbed the easy morals of his time, that he only sporadically noted any contradiction between Christian ethics and his life. Like most persons completely orthodox in theology, he was completely worldly in conduct. He seems to have felt that in his circumstances the papacy needed a statesman, not a saint; he admired sanctity, but thought it belonged to monasticism and private life rather than to a man compelled to deal at every step with subtle and acquisitive despots or unscrupulous and treacherous diplomats. He ended by adopting all their methods, and the most questionable devices of his predecessors in the papacy.

Needing funds for his government and his wars, he sold offices, took over the estates of dead cardinals, and exploited the jubilee of 1500 to the full. Dispensations and divorces were given as profitable parts of political bargains; so King Ladislaus VII of Hungary paid 30,000 ducats for the annulment of his marriage with Beatrice of Naples; had Henry VIII such an Alexander to deal with he would have remained to the end a Defender of the Faith. When the jubilee threatened to be a financial disappointment because would-be pilgrims stayed home through fear of robbery, pestilence, or war, Alexander, not to be cheated, and following pontifical precedents, issued a bull (March 4, 1500) detailing by what payments Christians might obtain the jubilee indulgence without coming to Rome, at what cost penitents might gain absolution from consanguineous marriages, and how much a clergyman should pay to be forgiven simony and “irregularity.”³⁹ On December 16 he extended the jubilee till Epiphany. The collectors promised payors that the funds gathered in by the jubilee would be used in a crusade against the Turks; the promise was kept in the case of Polish and Venetian collections; but Caesar Borgia used jubilee proceeds to finance his campaigns for the recovery of the Papal States.⁴⁰

To further celebrate the jubilee, Alexander (September 28, 1500) created twelve new cardinals, who paid a total of 120,000 ducats for their appointment; and these promotions, says Guicciardini, were made “not of such as had the most merit, but of those that offered the most money.”⁴¹ In 1503 he named nine additional cardinals at a commensurate price.⁴² In the same year he created ex nihilo eighty new offices in the Curia, and these places, according to the hostile Venetian ambassador Giustiniani, were sold at 760 ducats each.⁴³ A satirist attached to the statue of Pasquino (1503) a stinging pasquinade:

Vendit Alexander claves, altaria, Christum;

vendere iure potest, emerat ipse prius⁴⁴—

“the keys, the altars, Alexander sells, and Christ; with right, since he has paid for them.”

By canon law the property left by an ecclesiastic at his death reverted to the Church, except as the pope might allow otherwise.⁴⁵ Alexander regularly gave such dispensations except in the case of cardinals. Under pressure from the victorious but money-consuming Caesar Borgia, Alexander made it a general principle to appropriate the fortunes left by high ecclesiastics; in this way substantial sums came into the treasury. Some cardinals eluded the Pope by making large gifts in expectation of death, and some, during their lives, deliberately squandered great sums on their funeral monuments. When Cardinal Michiel died (1503), his house was immediately stripped of its wealth by the agents of the Pope, who, if we may believe Giustiniani, netted 150,000 ducats; Alexander complained that only 23,832 were in cash.⁴⁶

Deferring fuller consideration of the alleged poisonings, by Alexander or Caesar Borgia, of high ecclesiastics who took too long to die, we may provisionally accept the conclusion of recent research—that “there is no evidence that Alexander VI poisoned anybody.”⁴⁷ This does not quite clear him; he may have been too clever for history. But he could not escape the satirists, pamphleteers, and other wits who sold their deadly epigrams to his opponents. We have seen how Sannazaro belabored Pope and son with lethal couplets in the strife between the papacy and Naples. Infessura served the Colonna with his scandalmongering pen; and Geronimo Mancione was worth a regiment to the Savelli barons. Alexander, as part of his campaign against the Campagna nobles, issued in 1501 a bull detailing the crimes and vices of the Savelli and the Colonna. Its exaggerations were bettered in Mancione’s famous “Letter to Silvio Savelli,” retailing the vices and crimes of Alexander and Caesar Borgia. This document was widely circulated, and did much to create the legend of Alexander as a monster of perversions and cruelty.⁴⁸ Alexander won the battle of the sword, but his noble foes, unchecked by his enemy Pope Julius II, won the battle of the word, and transmitted their picture of him to history.

He paid too little attention to public opinion, and rarely answered the slanders that so mercilessly multiplied the reality of his faults. He was resolved to build a strong state, and thought that it could not be done by Christian means. His use of the traditional tools of statecraft—propaganda, deception, intrigue, discipline, war—was bound to offend those who preferred a Christian Church to a strong one, and those to whose advantage it was that the papacy and the Papal States should be disorganized and weak among the nobles of Rome and the powers of Italy. Occasionally Alexander stopped to examine his life by evangelical standards, and then he admitted himself to be a simoniac, a fornicator, even—through war—a destroyer of human lives. Once, when his lucky star seemed suddenly to fall, and all his proud and happy world seemed shattered, he lost his Machiavellian amoralism, confessed his sins, and vowed to reform himself and the Church.

He loved his son Giovanni even more than his daughter Lucrezia. When Pedro Luis died, Alexander saw to it that Giovanni should receive the duchy of Gandia in Spain. It was easy to love the lad, he was so handsome, kindly, gay. The fond father did not perceive that the youth was made for Eros, not for Mars; he made him a general, and the young commander proved incompetent. Giovanni thought a beautiful woman more precious than a captured city. On June 14, 1497, he supped with his brother Caesar and other guests at the home of his mother Vanozza. As they were returning, Giovanni parted from Caesar and the rest, saying that he wished to visit a lady of his acquaintance. He was never seen alive again. When his disappearance was noted the anxious Pope sent out an alarm. A boatman confessed that he had seen a body thrown into the Tiber on the night of the 14th; asked why he had not reported it he replied that in the course of his life he had seen a hundred such disposals, and had learned not to trouble himself about them. The river was dragged, the body was found, stabbed in nine places; apparently the young Duke had been attacked by several men. Alexander was so broken with grief that he shut himself up in a private chamber and refused food, and his moans could be heard in the street.

He ordered a search for the murderers, but perhaps he soon reconciled himself to letting the case remain a mystery. The body had been recovered near the castle of Antonio Pico della Mirandola, whose pretty daughter had allegedly been seduced by the Duke; many contemporaries, like the Mantuan ambassador Scalona, ascribed the death to thugs hired by the Count; and this is still the likeliest explanation.⁴⁹ Others, including the Florentine and Milanese ambassadors at Rome, attributed the crime to some member of the Orsini clan, then at war with the Pope.⁵⁰ Some scandal-sippers said that Giovanni had made love to his sister Lucrezia, and had been killed by retainers of her husband Giovanni Sforza.⁵¹ No one at the time accused Caesar Borgia. Caesar, now twenty-two, had apparently been on the best terms with his brother; he was a cardinal, and was moving in his own line of advancement; not till fourteen months later did he turn to a military career; he derived no advantage from his brother’s death; he could hardly have anticipated that Giovanni would leave him on the way home from Vanozza. Alexander, so far from suspecting Caesar at this time, appointed him Giovanni’s executor. The first known mention of Caesar as the possible murderer occurs in a letter written by the Ferrarese ambassador Pigna on February 22, 1498, eight months after the event. Not till Caesar had shown his character in all its ruthless force did popular opinion connect him with the crime; then Machiavelli and Guicciardini agreed in laying it at his door. He might have been capable of it at a later stage of his development, had Giovanni opposed him in some vital policy; but of this particular murder he was almost certainly innocent.⁵²

When the Pope had recovered his self-control he called a consistory of the cardinals (June 19, 1497), received their condolences, told them that he had “loved the Duke of Gandia more than anyone else in the world,” and attributed the blow—“the heaviest that could have befallen” him—to God as a punishment for his sins. He went on: “We on our part are resolved to amend our life, and to reform the Church…. Henceforth benefices shall be given only to deserving persons, and in accordance with the votes of the cardinals. We renounce all nepotism. We will begin the reform with ourselves, and so proceed through all ranks of the Church till the whole work is accomplished.”⁵³ A committee of six cardinals was appointed to draw up a program of reform. It labored earnestly, and presented to Alexander a bull of reform so excellent that if its provisions had been put into effect they might have saved the Church from both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. But when Alexander faced the question how the revenues of the papacy, without the fees paid for ecclesiastical appointments, could finance the papal government, he found no acceptable answer. Meanwhile Louis XII was preparing a second French invasion of Italy, and soon Caesar Borgia proposed to recapture the Papal States from their recalcitrant “vicars.” The dream of a powerful political structure that would give the Church a physical and financial leverage in a rebellious and fluent world absorbed the spirit of the Pope; he deferred the reforms from day to day; at last he forgot them in the exciting successes of a son who was conquering a realm for him and making him every ounce a king.

IV. CAESAR BORGIA

Alexander had many reasons to be proud of his now oldest son. Caesar was blonde of hair and beard, as many Italians wanted to be; keen of eye, tall and straight, strong, and a stranger to fear. Of him, as of Leonardo, the story was told that he could twist a horseshoe with his bare hands. He rode with wild control the spirited horses collected for his stable; he went to the hunt with the eagerness of a hound sniffing blood. During the jubilee he astonished a crowd by decapitating a bull with one stroke in a bullbaiting contest in a Roman square; on January 2, 1502, in a formal bullfight arranged by him in the Piazza San Pietro, he rode into the enclosure with nine other Spaniards, and attacked singlehanded, with his pike, the more ferocious of two bulls let loose there; dismounting, he played torero for a while; then, having sufficiently proved his courage and skill, he left the arena to the professionals.⁵⁴ He introduced the sport into the Romagna as well as at Rome; but after a few amateur matadors had been gored it was sent back to Spain.

To think of him as an ogre is to miss him widely. One contemporary called him “a young man of great and surpassing cleverness and excellent disposition, cheerful, even merry, and always in good spirits”;⁵⁵ another described him as “far superior in looks and wit to his brother the Duke of Gandia.”⁵⁶ Men noted his grace of manner, his simple but costly garb, his commanding glance, and air of one who felt that he inherited the world. Women admired but did not love him; they knew that he took them lightly and lightly cast them aside. He had studied law in the University of Perugia, enough to sharpen the natural shrewdness of his mind. He spared little time for books or “culture,” though like everybody he wrote verses now and then; later he flaunted a poet on his staff. He had a discriminating appreciation of the arts; when Cardinal Raffaello Riario refused to buy a Cupid because it was no antique but the work of an unknown Florentine youth, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Caesar gave a good price for it.

He was clearly not made for an ecclesiastical career, but Alexander, having bishoprics rather than principalities at his disposal, made him archbishop of Valencia (1492), then cardinal (1493). No one took such appointments as religious; they were means of supplying income to youths who had influential relatives, and who might be trained for the practical management of ecclesiastical property and personnel. Caesar took minor orders, but never became a priest. Since canon law excluded bastards from the cardinalate, Alexander, in a bull of September 19, 1493, declared him the legitimate son of Vanozza and d’Arignano. It was inconvenient that in a bull of August 16, 1482, Sixtus IV had described Caesar as the son of “Rodrigo, bishop and vice-chancellor.” The public winked and smiled, accustomed to see legal fictions veil untimely truths.

In 1497, shortly after Giovanni’s death, Caesar went to Naples as papal legate, and had the thrill of crowning a king. Perhaps the touch of a crown stirred his blood. On his return to Rome he importuned his father to let him renounce his ecclesiastical career. There was no way of releasing him from it except through Alexander’s frank admission to the college of cardinals that Caesar was his illegitimate son; it was so done, and the appointment of the young bastard to the cardinalate was duly declared invalid (August 17, 1498).⁵⁷ His illegitimacy restored, Caesar turned with zest to the game of politics.

Alexander hoped that Federigo III, King of Naples, would accept Caesar as husband for his daughter Carlotta, but Federigo had different tastes. Deeply offended, the Pope turned to France, hoping to secure its help in reclaiming the Papal States. An opportunity came when Louis XII asked for the annulment of a marriage that had been forced upon him in his youth, and which, he claimed, had never been consummated. In October, 1498, Alexander sent Caesar to France bearing a decree of divorce for the King, and 200,000 ducats with which to woo a bride. Pleased with the divorce, further pleased by a papal dispensation to marry Anne of Brittany, widow of Charles VIII, Louis offered Caesar the hand of Charlotte d’Albret, sister to the king of Navarre; moreover, he made Caesar duke of Valentinois and Diois, two French territories to which the papacy had some legal claim. In May, 1499, the new Duke—Valentino, as he was henceforth called in Italy—married the good, beautiful, and wealthy Charlotte; and Rome, told the news by Alexander, lit bonfires of rejoicing over the marriage of their prince. The marriage committed the papacy to an alliance with a king who was openly planning to invade Italy and take Milan and Naples. Alexander was as guilty in 1499 as Lodovico and Savonarola had been in 1494. This alliance undid all the work of the Holy League that Alexander had helped to form in 1495, and it prepared the scene for the wars of Julius II. Caesar Borgia was among the notables who escorted Louis XII into Milan on October 6, 1499; Castiglione, who was there, described Duke Valentino as the tallest and handsomest man in all the King’s stately retinue.⁵⁸ His pride matched his appearance. His ring bore the inscription, Fays ce que dois, advien que pourra—“Do what you must, whate’er betide.” His sword was engraved with scenes from the life of Julius Caesar, and bore two mottoes: on one side, Alea iacta est— “The die is cast”; on the other, Aut Caesar aut nullus—”Either Caesar or nobody.”⁵⁹

In this bold youth and happy warrior Alexander found at last the general he had long sought to lead the armed forces of the Church in the reconquest of the Papal States. Louis contributed three hundred French lances, four thousand Gascons and Swiss were recruited, and two thousand Italian mercenaries. It was a small army with which to overcome a dozen despots, but Caesar was eager for the adventure. To add spiritual to military weapons, the Pope issued a bull solemnly declaring that Caterina Sforza and her son Ottaviano held Imola and Forlì—Pandolfo Malatesta held Rimini—Giulio Varano held Camerino—Astorre Manfredi held Faenza—Guidobaldo held Urbino—Giovanni Sforza held Pesaro—only by usurping lands, property, and rights long pertaining in law and justice to the Church; that they were all tyrants who had abused their powers and exploited their subjects; and that they must now resign or be expelled by force.⁶⁰ Possibly, as some charged, Alexander dreamed of welding these principalities into a kingdom for his son; it is unlikely, for Alexander must have known that neither his successors nor the other states of Italy would long tolerate a usurpation more illegal and unwelcome than any that it would have replaced. Caesar himself may have dreamed of such a consummation; Machiavelli hoped so, and would have rejoiced to see so strong a hand unite all Italy and expel all invaders. But to the end of his life Caesar protested that he had no other aim than to win the States of the Church for the Church, and would be content to be governor of the Romagna as a vassal of the pope.⁶¹

In January, 1500, Caesar and his army marched over the Apennines to Forlì. Imola surrendered at once to his deputy, and the citizens of Forlì threw open the gates to welcome him; but Caterina Sforza, as she had done twelve years before, bravely held the citadel with her garrison. Caesar offered her easy terms; she preferred to fight. After a brief siege the papal troops forced their way into the rocca, and put the defenders to the sword. Caterina was sent to Rome, and was lodged as an unwilling guest in the Belvedere wing of the Vatican. She refused to resign her right to rule Forlì and Imola; she tried to escape, and was transferred to Sant’ Angelo. After eighteen months she was released, and entered a nunnery. She was a brave woman, but quite a virago.⁶² “She was a feudal ruler of the worst type, and in her dominions, as elsewhere in the Romagna, Caesar was regarded as an avenger commissioned by Heaven to redress ages of oppression and wrong.”⁶³

But Caesar’s first triumph was brief. His foreign troops mutinied because Caesar had insufficient funds to pay them; they were hardly appeased when Louis XII recalled the French detachment to help him recapture the Milan that Lodovico had for a moment regained. Caesar led his remaining army back to Rome, and received almost the honors of a victorious Roman general. Alexander gloried in his son’s success; “the Pope,” reported the Venetian ambassador, “is more cheerful than ever.”⁶⁴ He appointed Caesar papal vicar for the conquered cities, and began to lean fondly on his son’s advice. The receipts from the jubilee and from the sale of red hats replenished the treasury, and Caesar could now plan a second campaign. He offered a convincing sum to Paolo Orsini to join the papal forces with his armed men; Paolo came, and several other nobles followed suit; with this clever stroke Caesar enlarged his army and protected Rome from baronial raids during the absence of the papal troops beyond the Apennines. Perhaps by similar inducements, and the promise of spoils, he enlisted the services and soldiers of Gianpaolo Baglioni, lord of Perugia, and engaged Vitellozzo Vitelli to lead the artillery. Louis XII sent him a small regiment of lancers, but Caesar was no longer dependent upon French reinforcements. In September, 1500, at Alexander’s urging, he attacked the castles occupied by hostile Colonna and Savelli in Latium. One after another surrendered. Soon Alexander was enabled to make a tour in safety and triumph through regions long lost to the papacy. He was received everywhere with popular acclaim,⁶⁵ for the feudal barons had not been loved by their subjects.

When Caesar set out on his second major campaign (October, 1500), he had an army of 14,000 men, with a retinue of poets, prelates, and prostitutes to service his troops. Anticipating their arrival, Pandolfo Malatesta vacated Rimini, and Giovanni Sforza fled from Pesaro; the two cities welcomed Caesar as a liberator. At Faenza Astorre Manfredi resisted, and the people supported him loyally. Borgia offered generous terms, Manfredi rejected them. The siege lasted all winter; finally Faenza surrendered on Caesar’s promise of leniency to all. He behaved handsomely to the citizens, and was so warm in praising Manfredi’s resolute defense that the defeated apparently fell in love with the victor, and remained with him as part of his staff or retinue. Astorre’s younger brother did the same, though both were free to go wherever they wished.⁶⁶ For two months they followed Caesar in all his wanderings, and were treated with all respect. Then suddenly, on reaching Rome, they were thrown into the Castel Sant’ Angelo. There they remained for a year; then, on June 2, 1502, their bodies were thrown up by the Tiber. What made Caesar—or Alexander—condemn them is not known. Like a hundred other strange events in the history of the Borgias, the case remains a mystery that only the uninformed can solve.

Caesar, now adding duke of Romagna to his titles, studied the map, and decided to complete the task assigned him by his father. Camerino and Urbino remained to be taken. Urbino, though doubtless papal in law, was almost a model state as politics then went; it seemed a disgraceful thing to depose so loved a couple as Guidobaldo and Elisabetta; and perhaps they would now have consented to be papal vicars in fact as well as name. But Caesar argued that the city blocked his easiest avenue to the Adriatic, and might, in hostile hands, cut off his communications with Pesaro and Rimini. We do not know if Alexander agreed; it seems incredible, for about this time he persuaded Guidobaldo to lend the papal army his artillery.⁶⁷ It is more likely that Caesar deceived his father, or changed his own plans. On June 12, 1502, now with Leonardo da Vinci as his chief engineer, he set out on his third campaign, apparently headed for Camerino. Suddenly he turned north, and approached Urbino so rapidly that its invalid ruler had barely time to escape, leaving the city to fall undefended into Caesar’s hands (June 21). If this move was made with Alexander’s knowledge and consent, it was one of the most despicable treacheries in history, though Machiavelli would have been thrilled by its subtlety. The victor treated the inhabitants with feline gentleness, but appropriated the precious art collection of the fallen Duke, and sold it to pay his troops.

Meanwhile his general Vitelli, apparently on his own authority, seized Arezzo, long since an appanage of Florence. The shocked Signory sent the bishop of Volterra, with Machiavelli, to appeal to Caesar at Urbino. He received them with successful charm. “I am not here to play the tyrant,” he told them, “but to extinguish tyrants.”⁶⁸ He agreed to check Vitelli and restore Arezzo to Florentine allegiance; in return he demanded a definite policy of mutual friendliness between Florence and himself. The bishop thought him sincere, and Machiavelli wrote to the Signory with undiplomatic enthusiasm:

This lord is splendid and magnificent, and is so bold that there is no enterprise so great that it does not seem to him small. To gain glory and dominions he robs himself of repose, and knows neither danger nor fatigue. He comes to a place before his intentions are understood. He makes himself well liked among his soldiers, and has chosen the best men in Italy. These things make him victorious and formidable, with the aid of perpetual good fortune.⁶⁹

On July 20 Camerino surrendered to Caesar’s lieutenants, and the Papal States were papal again. Directly or by proxy Caesar gave them such good government as seemed to vindicate his claim to be a deposer of tyrants; later all of them but Urbino and Faenza would mourn his fall.⁷⁰—Hearing that Gianfrancesco Gonzaga (Elisabetta’s brother and Isabella’s husband) had gone with several other prominent men to Milan to turn Louis XII against him, Caesar hurried across Italy, confronted his enemies, and quickly regained the favor of the King (August, 1502). It is deserving of note that up to this point, and even after his most questionable exploit, a bishop, a king, and a diplomat later famous for subtlety, should have joined in admiring Caesar, and accepting the justice of his conduct and his aims.

Nevertheless Italy was dotted with men who prayed for his fall. Venice, though it had made him an honorary citizen (gentiluomo di Venezia), was not happy to see the Papal States so strong again, and controlling so much of the Adriatic shore. Florence fretted at the thought that Forlì, only eight miles from Florentine territory, was in the hands of an incalculable and unscrupulous young genius of statecraft and war. Pisa offered itself to his rule (December, 1502); he politely refused; but what if he changed his course—as on the way to Camerino? The gifts that Isabella sent him were perhaps a blind to disguise the resentment she and Mantua felt against his rape of Urbino. The Colonna and Savelli, and in less degree the Orsini, had been ruined by his victories, and merely bided their time to raise some coalition against him. His own “best men,” who had led his cohorts brilliantly, were not sure but that he might attack their territories next, some of which were also claimed by the Church. Gianpaolo Baglioni trembled for his hold on Perugia, Giovanni Bentivoglio for his rule in Bologna; Paolo Orsini and Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, wondered how long it would be before Caesar would do to the Orsini clan what he had done to the Colonna. Vitelli, raging at being forced to relinquish Arezzo, invited these men, and Oliverotto of Fermo, and Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena, and representatives of Guidobaldo, to meet at La Magione on Lake Trasimene (September, 1502). There they agreed to turn their troops against Caesar, capture and depose him, end his rule in the Romagna and the Marches, and restore the dispossessed lords. It was a formidable plot, whose success would have brought to a sorry issue the best-laid plans of Alexander and his son.

The conspiracy began with brilliant victories. Revolts were organized in Urbino and Camerino, with the support of the people; the papal garrisons there were expelled; Guidobaldo returned to his palace (October 18, 1502); everywhere the fallen lords raised their heads and planned to return to power. Caesar suddenly found that his lieutenants would not obey him, and that his forces were reduced to a point where he could not possibly hold his conquests. In this crisis Cardinal Ferrari opportunely died; Alexander hurriedly appropriated the 50,000 ducats left by him, and sold some of the Cardinal’s benefices; he turned over the receipts to Caesar, who rapidly raised a new army of six thousand men. In the meantime Alexander negotiated individually with the conspirators, made them fair promises, and won so many of them back to obedience that by the end of October they had all made their peace with Caesar; it was an astonishing feat of diplomacy. Caesar received their apologies with silent skepticism; and he noted that though Guidobaldo again fled from Urbino, the Orsini still held the duchy’s strongholds with their troops.

In December Caesar’s lieutenants, at his bidding, besieged Senigallia, on the Adriatic. The town soon yielded, but the governor of the castle refused to surrender it except to Caesar himself. A messenger was sent to the Duke at Cesena; he hastened down the coast, followed by twenty-eight hundred soldiers especially devoted to him. Arriving at Senigallia he greeted with apparent cordiality the four leaders of the conspiracy—Vitellozzo Vitelli, Paolo and Francesco Orsini, and Oliverotto. He invited them to a conference with him in the governor’s palace; when they came he had them arrested; and that very night (December 31, 1502) he had Vitelli and Oliverotto strangled. The two Orsini were kept in prison till Caesar could communicate with his father; apparently Alexander’s views agreed with his son’s; and on January 18 the two men were put to death.⁷¹

Caesar prided himself on his clever stroke at Senigallia; he thought Italy should thank him for ridding it so neatly of four men who were not only feudal usurpers of Church lands but had been reactionary oppressors of helpless subjects. Perhaps he felt a qualm or two, for he excused himself to Machiavelli: “It is proper to snare those who are proving themselves past masters in the art of snaring others.”⁷² Machiavelli fully agreed with him, and considered Caesar, at this time, the bravest and wisest man in Italy. Paolo Giovio, historian and bishop, called the quadruple extinction of the conspirators bellissimo inganno—a “most lovely ruse.”⁷³ Isabella d’Este, playing safe, sent Caesar congratulations, and a hundred masks to amuse him “after the fatigues and struggles of this glorious expedition.” Louis XII hailed the coup as “a deed worthy of the great days of Rome.”⁷⁴

Alexander was now free to express his full rage at the conspiracy against his son and the reclaimed cities of the Church. He claimed to have evidence that Cardinal Orsini had plotted with his relatives to assassinate Caesar;⁷⁵ he had the Cardinal and several other suspects arrested (January 3, 1503); he seized the Cardinal’s palace, and confiscated all his goods. The Cardinal died in prison on February 22, probably through excitement and exhaustion; Rome speculated that the Pope had had him poisoned. Alexander advised Caesar to root out the Orsini completely from Rome and the Campagna. Caesar was not so anxious; perhaps he too was exhausted; he delayed returning to the capital, and then set out unwillingly⁷⁶ to besiege Giulio Orsini’s mighty fortress at Ceri (March 14, 1503). In this siege—perhaps in others—Borgia used some of Leonardo’s war machines; one was a movable tower holding three hundred men and capable of being raised to the top of the enemy’s walls.⁷⁷ Giulio surrendered, and went with Caesar to the Vatican to ask for peace; the Pope granted it on condition that all Orsini castles in papal territory should be given up to the Church; it was done. In the meantime Perugia and Fermo had quietly accepted the governors sent them by Caesar. Bologna was still unredeemed, but Ferrara had joyfully received Lucrezia Borgia as its duchess. Aside from these two major principalities—which would occupy Alexander’s successors—the reconquest of the Papal States was complete, and Caesar Borgia, at twenty-eight, found himself the governor of a realm equaled in size, in the peninsula, only by the Kingdom of Naples. He was now by common consent the most remarkable and powerful man in Italy.

For a time he remained in unwonted quiet at the Vatican. We should have expected him at this point to send for his wife; he did not. He had left her with her family in France, and she had borne him a child during his wars; occasionally he wrote to her and sent her gifts; but he never saw her again. The Duchesse de Valentinois lived a modest and retired life in Bourges, or in the château de La Motte-Feuilly in the Dauphiné, waiting hopefully to be sent for, or to have her husband come to her. When he was ruined and deserted she tried to go to him; when he died she hung her house with black, and remained in mourning for him until her death. Perhaps he would have sent for her later, had he been given more than a few months of peace; more likely he looked upon the marriage as purely political, and felt no obligation to tenderness. There was apparently only a modicum of tenderness in him, and he kept most of that for Lucrezia, whom he loved as much as he could love a woman. Even when hurrying from Urbino to Milan to circumvent his foes with Louis XII, he had gone considerably out of his way to visit his sister at Ferrara, then dangerously ill. Returning from Milan he stopped there again, held her in his arms while physicians bled her, and stayed with her till she was out of danger.⁷⁸ Caesar was not made for marriage; he had mistresses, but none for long; he was too consumed by the will to power to let any woman enter possessively into his life.

In Rome he lived in privacy, almost in concealment. He worked at night and was rarely seen by day. But he worked hard, even in this period of seeming rest; he kept close watch on his appointees in the States of the Church, punished those who misused their position, had one appointee put to death for cruelty and exploitation, and always found time to see men who needed his instructions on the government of the Romagna or the maintenance of order in Rome. Those who knew him respected his shrewd intelligence, his capacity for going directly to the heart of the matter, for seizing every opportunity that chance presented, and for taking quick, decisive, and effective action. He was popular with his soldiers, who secretly admired the saving severity of his discipline. They highly approved of the bribes, stratagems, and deceits by which he reduced the number and persistence of his enemies and the battles and casualties of his troops.⁷⁹ Diplomats were chagrined to find that this swift-moving and fearless young general could outthink them and outreason them in their shrewdest subtleties, and could, at need, match all their charm and tact and eloquence.⁸⁰

His flair for secrecy made him an easy victim for the satirists of Italy, and for the ugly rumors that hostile ambassadors or deposed aristocrats might invent or spread; it is impossible today to separate fact from fiction in these lurid reports. A favorite story was that Alexander and his son made a practice of arresting rich ecclesiastics on trumped up charges, and releasing them on the payment of large ransoms or fines; so, it was alleged, the bishop of Cesena, for a crime whose nature was not divulged, was cast into Sant’ Angelo, and was freed on paying 10,000 ducats to the Pope.⁸¹ We cannot say whether this was justice or robbery; in fairness to Alexander we should bear in mind that it was then the custom of both secular and ecclesiastical courts to make crime pay the court by replacing expensive imprisonment with lucrative fines. According to the Venetian ambassador Giustiniani and the Florentine ambassador Vittorio Soderini, Jews were frequently arrested on charges of heresy, and could prove their orthodoxy only by substantial contributions to the papal treasury.⁸² It is possible; but Rome was known for its relatively decent treatment of the Jews, and no Jew was considered a heretic—or was prosecuted by the Inquisition—for being a Jew.

Many rumors charged the Borgias with poisoning rich cardinals to accelerate the reversion of their estates to the Church. Some such casualties seemed so well attested—rather by repetition than by evidence—that Protestant historians generally accepted them as late as the judicious Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97)’⁸³ and the Catholic historian Pastor believed it “extremely probable that Caesar poisoned Cardinal Michiel in order to obtain the money that he wanted.”⁸⁴ This conclusion was founded on the fact that under Julius II (extremely hostile to Alexander) a subdeacon, Aquino da Colloredo, being put to the torture, confessed that he had poisoned Cardinal Michiel at the behest of Alexander and Caesar.⁸⁵ A twentieth-century historian may be excused for being skeptical of confessions elicited by torture. An enterprising statistician has shown that the death rate among cardinals was no higher in Alexander’s pontificate than before or afterward;⁸⁶ but there is no doubt that Rome, in the last three years of that reign, thought it dangerous to be a cardinal and rich.⁸⁷ Isabella d’Este wrote to her husband to be careful what he said about Caesar, for “he does not scruple to conspire against those of his own blood”;⁸⁸ apparently she accepted the tale that he had killed the Duke of Gandia. Roman gossip talked about a slow poison, cantarella, whose base was arsenic, and which, dropped as a powder upon food or into drink—even into the sacramental wine of the Mass-would produce a leisurely death difficult to trace to its human cause. Historians now generally reject the slow poisons of the Renaissance as legendary, but believe that in one or two cases the Borgias poisoned rich cardinals.⁸⁹* Further research may reduce these cases to zero.

Worse stories were told of Caesar. To amuse Alexander and Lucrezia, we are assured, he released into a courtyard several prisoners who had been sentenced to death, and, from a safe point, showed his bowmanship by shooting fatal arrows into one after another of the convicts as they sought some refuge from his shafts.⁹⁰ Our sole authority for this tale is the Venetian envoy Capello; it is rather less probable that Caesar did this than that a diplomat should lie. Much history of the Renaissance popes has been written on the authority of war propaganda and diplomatic lies.

The most incredible of the Borgia horrors appears in the usually reliable diary of Alexander’s master of ceremonies, Burchard. Under October 30, 1501, the Diarium describes a dinner in the apartment of Caesar Borgia in the Vatican, at which nude courtesans chased chestnuts scattered over the floor while Alexander and Lucrezia looked on.⁹¹ The story appears also in the Perugian historian Matarazzo, who took it not from Burchard (for the Diarium was still secret) but from gossip that ranged out of Rome through Italy; “the thing was known far and wide,” he says.⁹² If so, it is strange that the Ferrarese ambassador, who was in Rome at the time, and was later commissioned to investigate the morals of Lucrezia and her fitness to marry Alfonso, son of Duke Ercole, made no mention of the story in his report, but (as we shall see) gave a most favorable account of her; either he was bribed by Alexander, or he ignored unverified gossip. But how did the story get into Burchard’s diary? He does not profess to have been present, and could hardly be, for he was a man of sturdy morals. Normally he included in his notes only such events as he had witnessed, or such as had been reported to him on good authority. Was the story interpolated into the manuscript? Of the original manuscript only twenty-six pages survive, all concerning the period following Alexander’s final illness. Of the remainder of the Diarium only copies exist. All these copies carry the story. It may have been interpolated by a hostile scribe who thought to liven a dry chronicle with a juicy tale; or Burchard may for once have allowed gossip to creep into his notes, or the original may have marked it as gossip. Probably the story was based on an actual banquet, and the lurid fringe was added by fancy or spite. The Florentine ambassador Francesco Pepi, always hostile to the Borgias since Florence was almost always at odds with them, reported, on the morrow of the affair, that the Pope had stayed up till a late hour in the apartments of Caesar the night before, and there had been “dancing and laughter”;⁹³ there is no mention of the courtesans. It is incredible that a pope who was at this time making every effort to marry his daughter to the heir of the duchy of Ferrara should have risked the marriage and a vital diplomatic alliance by allowing Lucrezia to witness such a spectacle.⁹⁴

But let us look at Lucrezia.

V. LUCREZIA BORGIA: I480-I519

Alexander admired, perhaps feared, his son, but he loved his daughter with all the emotional intensity of his nature. He seems to have taken profounder pleasure in her moderate beauty, in her long golden hair (so heavy that it gave her headaches), in the rhythm of her light form dancing,⁹⁵ and in the filial devotion that she gave him through all contumely and bereavements, than he had ever derived from the charms of Vanozza or Giulia. She was not particularly fair, but she was described in her youth as dolce ciera, sweet face; and amid all the coarseness and looseness of her times and her environment, through all the disillusionments of divorce and the horror of seeing her husband murdered almost before her eyes, she kept this “sweet face” to her pious end, for it was a frequent theme in Ferrarese poetry. Pinturicchio’s portrait of her, in the Borgia apartment of the Vatican, agrees well with this description of her in her youth.

Like all Italian girls who could afford it, she went to a convent for her education. At an unknown age she passed from the house of her mother Vanozza to that of Donna Adriana Mila, a cousin of Alexander. There she formed a lifelong friendship with Adriana’s daughter-in-law Giulia Farnese, alleged mistress of her father. Favored with every good fortune except legitimacy, Lucrezia grew up in a gay and joyous girlhood, and Alexander was happy in her happiness.

This carefree youth was ended by marriage. Probably she was not offended when her father chose a husband for her; that was then normal procedure for all good girls, and produced no more unhappiness than our own reliance on the selective wisdom of romantic love. Alexander, like any ruler, thought that the marriages of his children should advance the interests of the state; this too, doubtless, seemed reasonable to Lucrezia. Naples was then hostile to the papacy, and Milan was hostile to Naples; so her first marriage bound her, at the age of thirteen, to Giovanni Sforza, aged twenty-six, lord of Pesaro and nephew to Lodovico, regent of Milan (1493). Alexander amused himself paternally by arranging a handsome home for the couple in Cardinal Zeno’s palace, close to the Vatican.

But Sforza had to live at Pesaro part of the time, and took his young bride with him. She languished on those distant shores, far from her doting father and the excitement and splendor of Rome; and after a few months she returned to the capital. Later Giovanni joined her there; but after Easter of 1497 he stayed at Pesaro and she at Rome. On June 14 Alexander asked him to consent to an annulment on the ground of the husband’s impotence—the only ground recognized by canon law for annulling a valid marriage. Lucrezia, whether in grief or in shame, or to circumvent scandalmongers, retired to a convent.⁹⁶ A few days later her brother the Duke of Gandia was slain, and the delicate wits of Rome suggested that he had been murdered by agents of Sforza for attempting to seduce Lucrezia.⁹⁷ Her husband denied his impotence, and hinted that Alexander was guilty of incest with his daughter. The Pope appointed a committee, headed by two cardinals, to inquire into whether the marriage had ever been consummated; Lucrezia took oath that it had not, and they assured Alexander that she was still a virgin. Lodovico proposed to Giovanni that he should demonstrate his potency before a committee including the papal legate at Milan; Giovanni forgivably refused. However, he signed a formal admission that the marriage had not been consummated; he returned to Lucrezia her dowry of 31,000 ducats; and on December 20, 1497, the marriage was annulled. Lucrezia, who had borne no offspring to Giovanni, bore children to both her later husbands; but Sforza’s third wife, in 1505, gave birth to a son presumably his own.⁹⁸

It was formerly assumed that Alexander had broken the marriage in order to make a politically more profitable marriage; there is no evidence for this assumption; it is more likely that Lucrezia told the pitiful truth of the matter. But Alexander could not let her remain husbandless. Seeking a rapprochement with the papacy’s bitter enemy, Naples, he proposed to King Federigo the union of Lucrezia with Don Alfonso, Duke of Bisceglie, the bastard son of Federigo’s heir Alfonso II. The King agreed, and a formal betrothal was signed (June, 1498). Federigo’s proxy on this occasion was Cardinal Sforza, uncle to the divorced Giovanni. Lodovico of Milan also had encouraged Federigo to accept the plan.⁹⁹ Apparently Giovanni’s uncles felt no resentment at the annulment of his marriage. In August the wedding was celebrated in the Vatican.

Lucrezia facilitated matters by falling in love with her husband. It helped that she could mother him, for she was eighteen now, and he was a child of seventeen. But it was their misfortune to be important; politics entered even their marriage bed. Caesar Borgia, rejected in Naples, went to France for a bride (October, 1498); Alexander entered into alliance with Louis XII, the declared enemy of Naples; the young Duke of Bisceglie was increasingly ill at ease in a Rome filling up with French agents; suddenly he fled to Naples. Lucrezia was brokenhearted. To appease her and heal the breach, Alexander appointed her regent of Spoleto (August, 1499); Alfonso rejoined her there; Alexander visited them at Nepi, reassured the youth, and brought them back to Rome. There Lucrezia was delivered of a son, who was named Rodrigo after her father.

But again their happiness was brief. Whether because Alfonso was uncontrollably high-strung, or because Caesar Borgia symbolized the French alliance, Alfonso took a passionate dislike to him, which Borgia disdainfully returned. On the night of July 15, 1500, some bravos attacked Alfonso as he was leaving St. Peter’s. He received several wounds, but managed to reach the house of the Cardinal of Santa Maria in Portico. Lucrezia, summoned to him, fainted on seeing his condition; she soon recovered, and, with his sister Sancia, tended him anxiously. Alexander sent a guard of sixteen men to protect him from further injury. Alfonso slowly convalesced. One day he saw Caesar walking in a nearby garden. Convinced that this was the man who had hired his assassins, Alfonso seized bow and arrow, aimed at Caesar, and shot to kill. The weapon narrowly missed its mark. Caesar was not the man to give an enemy a second chance; he called his guards and sent them up to Alfonso’s room, apparently with orders to slay him; they pressed a pillow upon his face until he died, perhaps under the eyes of his sister and his wife.¹⁰⁰ Alexander accepted Caesar’s account of the matter, gave Alfonso a quiet burial, and did what he could to console the inconsolable Lucrezia.

She retired to Nepi, and there signed her letters la injelicissima principessa, “the most miserable princess,” and ordered Masses for the repose of Alfonso’s soul. Strange to relate, Caesar visited her at Nepi (October 1, 1499) only two and a half months after Alfonso’s death, and stayed overnight as her guest. Lucrezia was malleable and patient; she seems to have looked upon the killing of her husband as the natural reaction of her brother to an attempt upon his life. She does not appear to have believed that Caesar had hired the unsuccessful assassins of Alfonso, though this seems the most probable explanation of another Renaissance mystery. During the remainder of her life she gave many proofs that her love for her brother had survived all trials. Perhaps because he too, like her father, loved her with Spanish intensity, the wits of Rome, or rather of hostile Naples,¹⁰¹ continued to accuse her of incest; one synoptic scribe called her “the Pope’s daughter, wife, and daughter-in-law.”¹⁰² This, too, she bore with quiet resignation. All students of the epoch are now agreed that these charges were cruel calumnies,¹⁰³ but such libels formed her fame for centuries.*

That Caesar killed Alfonso with a view to remating her to better political result is improbable. After a period of mourning she was offered to an Orsini, then to a Colonna—matches hardly as advantageous as that with the son of the heir to the Neapolitan throne. Not till November, 1500, do we hear of Alexander proposing her to Duke Ercole of Ferrara for Ercole’s son Alfonso;¹⁰⁴ and not till September, 1501, was she betrothed to him. Presumably Alexander hoped that a Ferrara ruled by a son-in-law, and a Mantua long since bound to Ferrara by marriage, would in effect be papal states; and Caesar seconded the plan as offering greater security for his conquests, and an elegant background for an attack upon Bologna. Ercole and Alfonso hesitated, for reasons already retailed. Alfonso had been offered the hand of the Countess of Angoulême, but Alexander topped his offer with the pledge of an immense dowry, and practical remission of the annual tribute that Ferrara had been paying to the papacy. Even so, it is hardly credible that one of the oldest and most prosperous ruling families in Europe would have received Lucrezia as wife to the future duke had it believed the lurid stories bandied about by the intellectual underworld of Rome. As neither Ercole nor Alfonso had yet seen Lucrezia, they followed customary procedure in such diplomatic matings, and asked the Ferrarese ambassador in Rome to send them a report on her person, her morals, and her accomplishments. He replied as follows:

Illustrious Master: Today after supper Don Gerardo Saraceni and I betook ourselves to the Illustrious Madonna Lucrezia to pay our respects in the name of Your Excellency and His Majesty Don Alfonso. We had a long conversation regarding various matters. She is a most intelligent and lovely, and also an exceedingly gracious, lady. Your Excellency and the Illustrious Don Alfonso—so we were led to conclude—will be highly pleased with her. Besides being extremely graceful in every way, she is modest, lovable, and decorous. Moreover, she is a devout and God-fearing Christian. Tomorrow she is going to confession, and during Christmas week she will receive communion. She is very beautiful, but her charm of manner is still more striking. In short, her character is such that it is impossible to suspect anything “sinister” of her; but on the contrary we look for only the best… Rome, December 23, 1501.…

Your Excellency’s servant,

Joannes Lucas¹⁰⁵

The Excellent and Illustrious Estensi were convinced, and sent a magnificent body of knights to escort the bride from Rome to Ferrara. Caesar Borgia equipped two hundred cavaliers to accompany her, and supplied musicians and buffoons to amuse the arduous travel hours. Alexander, proud and happy, provided her with a retinue of 180 persons, including five bishops. Vehicles especially built for the trip, and 150 mules, carried her trousseau; and this included a dress valued at 15,000 ducats ($187,500?), a hat worth 10,000 and 200 bodices costing a hundred ducats each.¹⁰⁶ On January 6, 1502, having privately taken leave of her mother Vanozza, Lucrezia began her bridal tour across Italy to join her fiancé. Alexander, after bidding her good-by, went from point to point on the line of procession to catch another glimpse of her as she rode on her little Spanish horse all caparisoned in harness of leather and gold; he watched until she and her retinue of a thousand men and women were out of sight. He suspected that he would never see her again.

Rome had probably never witnessed such an exit before, nor Ferrara such an entry. After twenty-seven days of travel, Lucrezia was met outside the city by Duke Ercole and Don Alfonso with a superb cavalcade of nobles, professors, seventy-five mounted archers, eighty trumpeters and fifers, and fourteen floats carrying highborn ladies sumptuously dressed. When the procession reached the cathedral two ropewalkers descended from its towers and addressed compliments to Lucrezia. As the ducal palace was reached all prisoners were given their liberty. The people rejoiced in the beauty and smiles of their future duchess; and Alfonso was happy to have so splendid and charming a bride.¹⁰⁷

VI. THE COLLAPSE OF THE BORGIA POWER

The final years of Alexander were apparently happy and prosperous. His daughter was married into a ducal family, and was respected by all Ferrara; his son had brilliantly accomplished his assignments as general and administrator, and the Papal States were flourishing under excellent government. The Venetian ambassador describes the Pope, in those last years, as cheerful and active, apparently quite easy of conscience; “nothing worries him.” He was seventy years old on January 1, 1501, but, reported the ambassador, “he seems to grow younger every day.”¹⁰⁸

On the afternoon of August 5, 1503, Alexander, Caesar, and some others dined in the open air at the villa of Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, not far from the Vatican. All remained in the gardens till midnight, for the heat indoors was exhausting. On the 11th the Cardinal was attacked by a severe fever, which lasted three days and then subsided. On the 12th both the Pope and his son were bedded with fever and vomiting. Rome, as usual, talked of poison; Caesar, said gossip, had ordered the poisoning of the Cardinal to secure his fortune; by mistake the poisoned food had been eaten by nearly all the guests. Historians now agree with the physicians who treated the Pope, that the cause was malarial infection, invited by prolonged exposure to the night air of midsummer Rome.¹⁰⁹ In that same month malarial fever laid low half the household of the Pope, and many of these cases proved fatal;¹¹⁰ in Rome there were hundreds of deaths from the same cause in that season.

Alexander lingered for thirteen days between life and death, occasionally recovering to the extent of resuming the conferences of diplomacy; on August 13 he played cards. The doctors bled him repeatedly, probably once too much, depleting his natural strength. He died on August 18. Soon afterward the body became black and fetid, lending color to hasty rumors of poison. Carpenters and porters, “joking and blaspheming,” says Burchard, had trouble forcing the swollen corpse into the coffin designed for it.¹¹¹ Gossip added that a little devil had been seen, at the moment of death, carrying Alexander’s soul to hell.¹¹²

The Romans rejoiced at the passing of the Spanish Pope. Riots broke out, the “Catalans” were chased from the city or were killed in their tracks; their houses were plundered by the mob; one hundred dwellings were burned to the ground. The armed troops of the Colonna and the Orsini entered the city on August 22 and 23, over the protests of the college of cardinals. Said Guicciardini, the patriotic Florentine:

The whole city of Rome ran together with incredible alacrity, and crowded about the corpse in St. Peter’s Church, and were not able to satisfy their eyes with the sight of a dead serpent, who, with his immoderate ambition and detestable treachery, with manifold instances of horrid cruelty and monstrous lust, and exposing to sale all things without distinction, both sacred and profane, had intoxicated the whole world.¹¹³

Machiavelli agreed with Guicciardini: Alexander

did nothing but deceive, and thought of nothing else during the whole of his life; nor did any man vow with stronger oaths to observe promises which he afterwards broke. Nevertheless he succeeded in everything, for he was well acquainted with this part of the world.¹¹⁴

These condemnations were based on two assumptions: that the tales told of Alexander in Rome were true, and that Alexander was unjustified in the methods that he used to reclaim the Papal States. Catholic historians, while defending Alexander’s right to restore the temporal power of the papacy, generally join in condemning Alexander’s methods and morals. Says the honest Pastor:

He was universally described as a monster, and every sort of foul crime was attributed to him. Modern critical research has in many points judged him more fairly and rejected some of the worst accusations made against him. But even though we must beware of accepting without examination all the tales told of Alexander by his contemporaries… and though the bitter wit of the Romans found its favorite exercises in tearing him to pieces without mercy, and attributing to him in popular pasquinades and scholarly epigrams a life of incredible foulness, still so much against him has been clearly proved that we are forced to reject the modern attempts at whitewashing him as an unworthy tampering with truth…. From the Catholic point of view it is impossible to blame Alexander too severely.¹¹⁵

Protestant historians have sometimes shown a generous lenience to Alexander. William Roscoe, in his classic Life and Pontificate of Leo X (1827), was among the first to say a good word for the Borgia Pope:

Whatever were his crimes, there can be no doubt that they have been highly overcharged. That he was devoted to the aggrandizement of his family, and that he employed the authority of his elevated station to establish a permanent dominion in Italy in the person of his son, cannot be doubted; but when almost all the sovereigns of Europe were attempting to gratify their ambition by means equally criminal, it seems unjust to brand the character of Alexander with any peculiar and extraordinary share of infamy in this respect. While Louis of France and Ferdinand of Spain conspired together to seize upon and divide the Kingdom of Naples, by an example of treachery that can never be sufficiently execrated, Alexander might surely think himself justified in suppressing the turbulent barons, who had for ages rent the dominions of the Church with intestine wars, and in subjugating the petty sovereigns of the Romagna, over whom he had an acknowledged supremacy, and who had in general acquired their dominions by means as unjustifiable as those which he adopted against them. With respect to the accusation so generally believed, of a criminal intercourse between him and his own daughter… it might not be difficult to show its improbability. In the second place the vices of Alexander were accompanied, though not compensated, by many great qualities, which in the consideration of his character ought not to be passed over in silence…. Even by his severest adversaries he is allowed to have been a man of elevated genius, of a wonderful memory, eloquent, vigilant, and dexterous in the management of all his concerns.¹¹⁶

Bishop Creighton summarized Alexander’s character and achievements in general agreement with Roscoe’s judgment, and far more mercifully than Pastor.¹¹⁷ A later judgment is more favorable still—by the Protestant scholar Richard Garnett in The Cambridge Modern History:

Alexander’s character has undoubtedly gained by the scrutiny of modern historians. It was but natural that one accused of so many crimes, and unquestionably the cause of many scandals, should alternately appear as a tyrant and a voluptuary. Neither description suits him. The groundwork of his character was extreme exuberance of nature. The Venetian ambassador calls him a carnal man, not implying anything morally derogatory, but meaning a man of sanguine temperament, unable to control his passions and emotions. This perplexed the cool unimpassioned Italians of the diplomatic type then prevalent among rulers and statesmen, and their apprehensions have unduly prejudiced Alexander, who in truth was not less but more human than most princes of his time. This excessive “carnality” wrought in him for good and ill. Unrestrained by moral scruples, or by any spiritual conception of religion, he was betrayed by it into gross sensuality of one kind, though in other respects he was temperate and abstemious. In the more respectable guise of family affection it led him to outrage every principle of justice, though even here he only performed a necessary work which could not, as one of his agents said, have been accomplished by “holy water.” On the other hand his geniality and joyousness preserved him from tyranny in the ordinary sense of the term.… As a ruler, careful of the material weal of his people, he ranks among the best of his age; as a practical statesman he was the equal of any contemporary. But his insight was impaired by his lack of political morality; he had nothing of the higher wisdom which comprehends the characteristics and foresees the drift of an epoch, and he did not know what a principle was.¹¹⁸

Those of us who share Alexander’s sensitivity to the charms and graces of woman cannot find it in their hearts to throw stones at him for his amours. His prepapal deviations were no more scandalous than those of Aeneas Sylvius, who fares so well with the historians, or of Julius II, whom time has graciously forgiven. It is not recorded that these two Popes took such care of their mistresses and their children as Alexander did of his. Indeed there was something familial and domestic about Alexander that would have made him a relatively respectable man if the laws of the Church, as well as the customs of Renaissance Italy and Protestant Germany and England, had allowed the marriage of the clergy; his sin was not against nature but against a rule of celibacy soon to be rejected by half of Christendom. We cannot say that his relation with Giulia Farnese was carnal; so far as we know, neither Vanozza, nor Lucrezia, nor Giulia’s husband expressed any objection to it; perhaps it was the simple delight of a normal man in the lure and vivacity of a beautiful woman.

Our judgment of Alexander’s politics must distinguish between his ends and his means. His purposes were entirely legitimate—to recover the “Patrimony of Peter” (essentially the ancient Latium) from disorderly feudal barons, and to regain from usurping despots the traditional States of the Church. The methods used by Alexander and Caesar in realizing these aims were those used by all other states then and now—war, diplomacy, deceit, treachery, violation of treaties, and desertion of allies. Alexander’s abandonment of the Holy League, his purchase of French soldiers and support at the price of surrendering Milan to France, were major crimes against Italy. And those secular means that states use, and consider indispensable, in the lawless jungle of international strife, offend us when employed by a pope pledged to the principles of Christ. Whatever danger the Church ran of becoming subject to some domineering government—as to France at Avignon—if she lost her own territories, it would have been better for her to sacrifice all temporal power, and be as poor again as the Galilean fishermen, than to adopt the ways of the world to achieve her political ends. By adopting them, and financing them, she gained a state and lost a third of Christendom.

Caesar Borgia, slowly recovering from the same illness that had killed the Pope, found himself enmeshed in a dozen unanticipated perils. Who could have foreseen that he and his father would be incapacitated at the same time? While the doctors bled him the Colonna and the Orsini quickly recovered the castles that he had taken from them; the deposed lords of the Romagna, with the encouragement of Venice, began to reclaim their principalities; and the Roman mob, already out of hand, might at any moment, now that Alexander was dead, plunder the Vatican and seize the funds upon which Caesar depended for the payment of his troops. He sent some armed men to the Vatican; they compelled Cardinal Casanuova, at swords’ points, to give up the treasury; so Caesar repeated Caesar after fifteen centuries. They brought back to him 100,000 ducats in gold, and 300,000 ducats’ worth of plate and jewelry. At the same time he sent galleys and troops to prevent his strongest enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, from reaching Rome. He felt that unless he could persuade the conclave to elect a pope favorable to him, he was lost.

The cardinals insisted that the troops of Caesar, the Orsini, and the Colonna should leave Rome before an unintimidated election could be held. All three groups yielded. Caesar retired with his men to Civita Castellana, while Cardinal Giuliano entered Rome and led, in the conclave, the forces hostile to all Borgias. On September 22, 1503, the rival factions in the College chose Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini as a compromise pope. He took the name Pius III, in honor of his uncle Aeneas Sylvius. He was a man of learning and integrity, though he was also the father of a large family.¹¹⁹ He was sixty-four, and suffered from an abscess in his leg. He was friendly to Caesar, and allowed him to return to Rome. But on October 18 Pius III died.

Caesar saw that he could no longer prevent the election of Cardinal della Rovere, who was clearly the ablest man in the College. In a private interview with Giuliano, Caesar effected an apparent reconciliation: he promised Giuliano the support of the Spanish cardinals (who were loyal to Caesar), and Giuliano promised, if elected, to confirm him as Duke of the Romagna and commander of the papal troops. Some other cardinals Giuliano bought with simple bribery.¹²⁰ Giuliano della Rovere was chosen pope (October 31, 1503), and took the name Julius II, as if to say that he too would be a Caesar, and better Alexander. His coronation was postponed till November 26 because the astrologers predicted for that day a propitious conjunction of stars.

Venice did not wait for a lucky star; it seized Rimini, besieged Faenza, and gave every sign of taking over as much of the Romagna as possible before the Church could organize her forces. Julius bade Caesar go to Imola and recruit a new army for the protection of the Papal States. Caesar agreed, and proceeded to Ostia with a view to sailing to Pisa. At Ostia a message from the Pope commanded him to surrender his control of the Romagna fortresses. In a crucial error suggesting that sickness had impaired his judgment, Caesar refused, though it should have been obvious that he was now dealing with a man whose will was at least as strong as his own. Julius ordered him to return to Rome; Caesar obeyed, and was subjected to house arrest. There Guidobaldo, who now not only was restored to Urbino but was the newly appointed commander of the papal armies, came to see the fallen Borgia. Caesar humbled himself before the man whom he had deposed and despoiled, gave him the watchwords of the fortresses, returned to him some precious books and tapestries left from the Urbino pillage, and begged his intercession with Julius. Cesena and Forlì refused to honor the watchwords until Caesar was set at liberty; Julius refused to release him until Caesar persuaded the Romagna castles to yield to the Pope. Lucrezia implored her husband to help her brother; Alfonso (still only heir, not occupant, of the ducal throne) did nothing. She appealed to Isabella d’Este; Isabella did nothing; probably she and Alfonso knew that Julius was immovable. Caesar finally gave the word of surrender to his loyal supporters in the Romagna; the Pope freed him, and he fled to Naples (April 19, 1504).

There he was welcomed by Gonzalo de Córdoba, who gave him a safe-conduct. His courage returning sooner than his good sense, he organized a small force, and was preparing to sail with it to Piombino (near Leghorn) when he was arrested by Gonzalo on orders from Ferdinand of Spain; the “Catholic King” had been urged to the action by Julius, who did not propose to have Caesar start a civil war. In August Caesar was transported to Spain, and fretted in prison there for two years. Lucrezia again sought to have him freed, but in vain. His deserted wife pled for him with her brother Jean d’Albret, King of Navarre; a plan of escape was devised; and in November, 1506, Caesar was again a free man, at the court of Navarre. He soon found a chance to repay d’Albret. The Count of Lerin, a vassal of the King, rebelled; Caesar led part of Jean’s army against the Count’s fortress at Viana; the Count made a sortie, which Caesar repulsed; Caesar pursued the defeated too recklessly; the Count, reinforced, turned upon him, Caesar’s few troops fled; Caesar, with only one companion, stood his ground, and fought till he was cut down and killed (March 12, 1507). He was thirty-one years old.

It was an honorable end to a questionable life. There are many things in Caesar Borgia that we cannot stomach: his insolent pride, his neglect of his faithful wife, his treatment of women as mere instruments of passing pleasure, his occasional cruelty to his enemies—as when he condemned to death not only Giulio Varano, lord of Camerino, but Giulio’s two sons, and apparently ordered the death of the two Manfredi; severities that compare shamefully with the calm mercies of the man whose name he bore. Usually he acted on the principle that the achievement of his purpose justified any means. He found himself surrounded with lies, and managed to lie better than the rest until Julius lied to him. He was almost certainly innocent of his brother Giovanni’s death; he was probably the man who set the thugs upon the Duke of Bisceglie. He lacked—perhaps through illness—the strength to face his own misfortunes with courage and dignity. Only his death brought a gleam of nobility into his life.

But even he had virtues. He must have had extraordinary ability to rise so rapidly, to learn so readily the arts of leadership, negotiation, and war. Given the difficult task of restoring, with only a small force at his command, the papal power in the Papal States, he accomplished it with surprising rapidity of movement, skill of strategy, and economy of means. Empowered to govern as well as to conquer, he gave the Romagna the fairest rule and most prosperous peace that it had enjoyed in centuries. Ordered to clear the Campagna of rebellious and troublesome vassals, he did it with a celerity that Julius Caesar himself could hardly have surpassed. With such achievements mounting to his head, he may well have played with the dream that Petrarch and Machiavelli entertained: to give Italy, if necessary by conquest, the unity that would enable her to stand against the centralized strength of France or Spain.* But his victories, his methods, his power, his dark secrecy, his swift incalculable attacks, made him the terror instead of the liberator of Italy. The faults of his character ruined the accomplishments of his mind. It was his basic tragedy that he had never learned to love.

Except, again, Lucrezia. What a contrast she offered to her fallen brother in the modesty and prosperity of her final years! She who in Rome had been the subject and victim of every scandalmonger was loved by the people of Ferrara as a model of feminine virtue.¹²¹ She tried there to forget all the horrors and tribulations of her past; she recaptured, with due restraint, the joyousness of her youth, and added to it a generous interest in the needs of others. Ariosto, Tebaldeo, Bembo, Tito and Ercole Strozzi praised her profitably in their verse; they called her pulcherrima virgo, “most beautiful maiden,” and no one blinked an eye. Perhaps Bembo tried to play Abélard to her Héloïse, and Lucrezia now became something of a linguist, speaking Spanish, Italian, French, and reading a “little Latin and less Greek.” We are told that she wrote poetry in all these tongues.¹²² Aldus Manutius dedicated to her his edition of the Strozzi poems, and implied, in the preface, that she had offered to underwrite his great printing enterprise.¹²³

Amid all these learned concerns she found time to bear to her third husband four sons and a daughter. Alfonso was well pleased with her in his uneffusive way. In 1506, having occasion to leave Ferrara, he appointed her his regent; and she fulfilled her duties with such good judgment that the Ferrarese were inclined to pardon Alexander for having once left her in charge of the Vatican.

In the last years of her brief life she devoted herself to the education of her children, and to works of charity and mercy; she became a pious Franciscan tertiary. On June 14, 1519, she was delivered of her seventh child, but it was stillborn. She never rose from that bed of pain. On June 24, aged thirty-nine, Lucrezia Borgia, more sinned against than sinning, passed away.

CHAPTER XVII

Julius II

1503–13

I. THE WARRIOR

IF we place before us Raphael’s searching and profound portrait of Julius II, we shall see at once that Giuliano della Rovere was one of the strongest personalities that ever reached the papal chair. A massive head bent with exhaustion and tardy humility, a wide high brow, a large pugnacious nose, grave, deep-set, penetrating eyes, lips tight with resolution, hands heavy with the rings of authority, face somber with the disillusionments of power: this is the man who for a decade kept Italy in war and turmoil, freed it from foreign armies, tore down the old St. Peter’s, brought Bramante and a hundred other artists to Rome, discovered, developed, and directed Michelangelo and Raphael, and through them gave to the world a new St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the stanze of the Vatican. Voilà un homme!—here is a man.

His violent temper presumably characterized him from his first breath. Born near Savona (1443) a nephew of Sixtus IV, he reached the cardinalate at twenty-seven, and fumed and fretted in it for thirty-three years before being promoted to what had long seemed to him his manifest due. He paid no more regard to his vow of celibacy than most of his colleagues;¹ his master of ceremonies at the Vatican later reported that Pope Julius would not allow his foot to be kissed because it was disfigured ex morbo gallico —with the French disease.² He had three illegitimate daughters,³ but he was too busy fighting Alexander to find time for the unconcealed parental fondness that in Alexander so offended the cherished hypocrisies of mankind. He disliked Alexander as a Spanish intruder, denied his fitness for the papacy, called him a swindler and a usurper,⁴ and did all he could to unseat him, even to inviting France to invade Italy.

He seemed made as a foil and contrast to Alexander. The Borgia Pope was jovial, sanguine, good-natured (if we except a possible poisoning or two); Julius was stern, Jovian, passionate, impatient, readily moved to anger, passing from one fight to another, never really happy except at war. Alexander waged war by proxy, Julius in person; the sexagenarian Pope became a soldier, more at ease in military garb than in pontifical robes, loving camps and besieging towns, having guns pointed and assaults delivered under his commanding eyes. Alexander could play, but Julius moved from one enterprise to another, never resting. Alexander could be a diplomat; Julius found it extremely difficult, for he liked to tell people what he thought of them; “often his language overstepped all bounds in its rudeness and violence,” and “this fault increased perceptibly as he grew older.”⁵ His courage, like his language, knew no limits; stricken with illness time and again in his campaigns, he would confound his enemies by recovering and leaping upon them once more.

Like Alexander, he had had to buy a few cardinals to ease his way to the papacy, but he denounced the practice in a bull of 1505. If in this matter he did not reform with inconvenient precipitation, he rejected nepotism almost completely, and rarely appointed relatives to office. In selling church benefices and promotions, however, he followed Alexander’s example, and his grants of indulgences shared with the building of St. Peter’s in angering Germany.⁶ He managed his revenues well, financed war and art simultaneously, and left Leo a surplus in the treasury. In Rome he restored social order, which had declined in Alexander’s later years, and he governed the States of the Church with wise appointments and policies. He allowed the Orsini and the Colonna to reopcupy their castles, and sought to tie these powerful families to loyalty by marriages with his relatives.

When he came to power he found the States of the Church in turmoil, and half the work of Alexander and Caesar Borgia undone. Venice had seized Faenza, Ravenna, and Rimini (1503); Giovanni Sforza had returned to Pesaro; the Baglioni were again sovereign in Perugia and the Bentivogli in Bologna; the loss of revenues from these cities threatened the solvency of the Curia. Julius agreed with Alexander that the spiritual independence of the Church required her continued possession of the Papal States; and he began with Alexander’s mistake by asking the help of France—and of Germany and Spain to boot—against his Italian enemies. France consented to send eight thousand men in exchange for three red hats; Naples, Mantua, Urbino, Ferrara, and Florence pledged small detachments. In August, 1506, Julius left Rome at the head of his own modest force—four hundred cavalry, his Swiss guards, and four cardinals. Guidobaldo, the restored Duke of Urbino, was in military command of the papal troops, but the Pope rode at their head in person—a sight not seen in Italy for many centuries past. Gianpaolo Baglioni, calculating that he could not defeat such a coalition, came to Orvieto, surrendered to the Pope, and asked forgiveness. “I forgive your mortal sins,” growled Julius, “but the first venial sin you commit, I will make you pay for them all.”⁷ Trusting to his religious authority, Julius entered Perugia with only a small guard, and before his soldiers could reach the gates; Baglioni might have ordered his men to arrest him and close the gates, but he dared not. Machiavelli, who was on hand, marveled that Baglioni should lose a chance “to do a deed which would have left an eternal memory. He might have been the first to show priests how little a man is esteemed who lives and rules as they do. He would have done a deed whose greatness would have outweighed all its infamy and all the danger which might have followed.”⁸ Machiavelli, like most Italians, objected to the temporal power of the papacy, and to popes who were also kings. But Baglioni valued his neck, and possibly his soul, more than his posthumous fame.

Julius spent little time in Perugia; his real goal was Bologna. He led his little army over the rough roads of the Apennines to Cesena, and then turned upon Bologna from the east while the French attacked it from the west. Julius reinforced the attack by issuing a bull of excommunication against the Bentivogli and their adherents, and offering a plenary indulgence to any man who should kill any of them; this was a new brand of war. Giovanni Bentivoglio fled, and Julius entered the city borne in a litter on men’s shoulders, and hailed by the people as a liberator from tyranny (Nov. 11, 1506). He bade Michelangelo make a colossal statue of him for the portal of San Petronio, and then returned to Rome. There he rode through the streets in a triumphal car, and was greeted as a victorious Caesar.

But Venice still held Faenza, Ravenna, Rimini, and failed to estimate properly the martial spirit of the Pope. Risking Italy to get the Romagna, Julius invited France, Germany, and Spain to help him subdue the Queen of the Adriatic. We shall see later how vigorously they responded in the League of Cambrai (1508)—seeking not to help Julius but to dismember Italy; in joining them Julius allowed his justifiable resentment against Venice to overcome his love of Italy. While his allies attacked Venice with armies, Julius aimed at her one of the most forthright bulls of excommunication and interdict in history. He won; Venice restored the stolen cities to the Church, and accepted the most humiliating terms; her envoys received absolution, and the removal of the interdict, in a long ceremony that sorely tried their knees (1510). Regretting his invitation to the French, Julius now reversed his policy to expelling them from Italy, and convinced himself that God was reversing the divine policy accordingly. When the French ambassador announced to him a French victory over the Venetians, and added, “God willed it,” Julius angrily retorted, “The devil willed it!”⁹

Now he turned his martial eye to Ferrara. Here was an acknowledged papal fief, but through Alexander’s concessions at Lucrezia’s betrothal it paid only a token tribute to the papacy; moreover Duke Alfonso, after joining in war against Venice at the Pope’s behest, refused to make peace at his behest, and remained an ally of France. Julius resolved that Ferrara must become wholly a papal state. He began his campaign with another bull of excommunication (1510), by which the son-in-law of one pope became to another a “son of iniquity and a root of perdition.” Without much difficulty Julius, with Venetian aid, took Modena. While his troops were resting there the Pope made the mistake of going to Bologna. Suddenly news came to him that a French army, instructed to help Alfonso, was at the gates. The papal forces were too distant to help him; within Bologna were only nine hundred soldiers; and the people of the city, who had been oppressed by the papal legate Cardinal Alidosi, could not be relied upon to offer resistance to the French. Sick abed with fever, Julius for a moment despaired, and thought of drinking poison;¹⁰ he was about to sign a humiliating peace with France when Spanish and Venetian reinforcements arrived. The French retreated, and Julius sped them on their way with a lusty excommunication for one and all.

Meanwhile Ferrara had armed itself so strongly that Julius judged his forces inadequate to take it. Not to be cheated of military glory, he led his troops in person to besiege Mirandola, a northern outpost of the Ferrara duchy (1511). Though now sixty-eight he tramped through deep snow, violated precedent by campaigning in winter, presided over councils of strategy, directed operations and the placement of cannon, inspected his troops, relished the life of a soldier, and let no man surpass him in martial oaths and jests.¹¹ Sometimes the troops laughed at him; more often they applauded his courage. When enemy fire killed a servant at his side, he moved to other quarters; when these too were reached by Mirandola’s artillery, he returned to his first station, shrugging his bent shoulders at the danger of death. Mirandola surrendered after two weeks of resistance. The Pope ordered that all French soldiers found in the city should be put to death; perhaps by mutual arrangement none was found. He protected the city from pillage, and preferred to feed and finance his army by selling eight new cardinalates.¹²

He sought rest in Bologna, but there he was soon again besieged by the French. He fled to Rimini, and the French restored the Bentivogli to power. The people cheered the return of their ousted despots; they demolished the castle that Julius had built, threw down the statue that Michelangelo had made of him, and sold it as bronze scrap to Alfonso of Ferrara; the grim Duke cast it into a cannon, which he christened La Giulia in honor of the Pope. Julius launched another bull, excommunicating all who had shared in the overthrow of papal authority at Bologna. The French troops responded by retaking Mirandola. At Rimini Julius found affixed to the door of San Francesco a document signed by nine cardinals, which summoned a general council to meet at Pisa on September 1, 1511, to examine into the conduct of the Pope.

Julius returned to Rome broken in health, overwhelmed with disaster, but not bowing to defeat. Says Guicciardini:

Though the Pontiff found himself so grossly deceived by his flattering hopes, yet he seemed in his deportment to resemble what the fabulous writers have reported of Antaeus, who, as often as he was disabled by the force of Hercules, on touching the ground recovered still greater strength and vigor. Adversity had the same effect on the Pope; for when he seemed to be most depressed and most dejected, he recovered his spirits, and rose again with greater firmness and constancy of mind, and with more pertinacious resolution.¹³

To counter the disaffected cardinals, he published a call for a general council to meet at the Lateran Palace on April 19, 1512. He labored night and day to build a formidable alliance against France. He was approaching success when he was seized with a severe illness (August 17, 1511). For three days he hovered near death; on August 21 he remained unconscious so long that the cardinals prepared for a conclave to choose his successor; at the same time Pompeo Colonna, Bishop of Rieti, appealed to the Roman people to rise against papal rule of their city, and re-establish Rienzo’s republic. But on the 22nd Julius regained consciousness; overruling his doctors, he drank a substantial draft of wine; he surprised all, and disappointed many, by recovering; the republican movement faded away. On October 5 he announced that he had formed a Holy League of the papacy, Venice, and Spain; on November 17 Henry VIII joined it for England. So reinforced, he deposed from their dignities the cardinals who had signed the summons to Pisa, and forbade such a council to meet. At the command of the French king the Florentine Signory gave permission for the banned council to meet at Pisa; Julius declared war upon Florence, and plotted to restore the Medici. A group of twenty-seven ecclesiastics, with representatives of the king of France and some French universities, met at Pisa (November 5, 1511); but the inhabitants were so threatening, and Florence so reluctant, that the council retired to Milan (November 12). There, under the protection of the French garrison, the schismatic councilors could bear in timid safety the taunts of the people.

Having won this battle of the bishops, Julius turned again to war. He purchased the alliance of the Swiss, who despatched an army to attack the French at Milan; the attack failed, and the Swiss returned to their cantons. On Easter Sunday, April 11, 1512, the French under Gaston de Foix, decisively helped by Alfonso’s artillery, overwhelmed the composite army of the League at Ravenna; practically all the Romagna passed under French control. Julius’ cardinals begged him to make peace; he refused. The council at Milan celebrated the victory by proclaiming the Pope deposed; Julius laughed. On May 2 he was carried in his litter to the Lateran Palace, where he opened the Fifth Lateran Council. He soon left it to its own slow development while he hurried back to battle.

On May 17 he announced that Germany had joined the Holy League against France. The Swiss, repurchased, entered Italy through the Tirol, and advanced to meet a French army disorganized by victory and the death of their leader. Now outnumbered, the French abandoned Ravenna, Bologna, even Milan; and the schismatic cardinals retreated to France. Once more the Bentivogli fled, and Julius was master of Bologna and the Romagna. He seized the opportunity to take also Parma and Piacenza; and now he could hope to win Ferrara, which could no longer rely on aid from France. Alfonso offered to come to Rome and ask for absolution and terms of peace if the Pope would give him a safe-conduct. Julius did, Alfonso came, and was graciously absolved; but when he refused to exchange Ferrara for little Asti, Julius pronounced his safe-conduct invalid, and threatened him with imprisonment and arrest. Fabrizio Colonna, who had conveyed the safe-conduct to the Duke, felt that his own honor was involved; he helped Alfonso to escape from Rome; after arduous adventures Alfonso made his way back to Ferrara, and there resumed the arming of his forts and walls.

And now at last the demonic energy of the warrior Pope ran out. Late in January, 1513, he took to his bed with a complication of ailments. Merciless gossip said that his trouble was an aftermath of the “French disease”; others that it came from immoderate eating and drinking.¹⁴ When no treatment availed to reduce his fever, he reconciled himself to death, gave instructions for his funeral, urged the Lateran Council to go on with its work without interruption, confessed himself a great sinner, bade farewell to his cardinals, and died with the same courage with which he had lived (February 20, 1513). All Rome mourned him, and an unprecedented throng came to bid him good-by, and to kiss the feet of the corpse.

We cannot estimate his place in history until we have studied him as the liberator of Italy, as the builder of St. Peter’s, and as the greatest patron of art that the papacy has ever known. But his contemporaries were right in viewing him chiefly as a statesman and a warrior. They feared his incalculable energy, his terribilità, his curses and apparently unappeasable wrath; but they sensed behind all his violence a spirit capable of compassion and love.* They saw him defending the Papal States as unscrupulously and ruthlessly as the Borgias, but with no view to aggrandize his family; all but his enemies applauded his aims, even when they shuddered at his language and mourned his means. He did not govern the reclaimed states as well as Caesar Borgia had done, for he was too fond of war to be a good administrator; but his conquests were lasting, and the Papal States remained henceforth loyal to the Church until the revolution of 1870 ended the temporal power of the popes. Julius sinned—like Venice, Lodovico, Alexander—by calling foreign armies into Italy; but he succeeded better than his predecessors and successors in freeing Italy from these powers when they had served his turn. Perhaps he weakened Italy in saving it, and taught the “barbarians” that they might fight out their quarrels on the sunny plains of Lombardy. There were elements of cruelty in his greatness; he was misled by acquisitiveness in attacking Ferrara and in taking Piacenza and Parma; he dreamed not only of preserving the legitimate possessions of the Church but of making himself the master of Europe, the dictator to kings. Guicciardini condemned him for “bringing empire to the Apostolic See by arms and the shedding of Christian blood, rather than troubling himself to set an example of holy life”;¹⁶ but it could hardly be expected of Julius, in his place and age, that he should abandon the Papal States to Venice and other assailants, and risk the survival of the Church on purely spiritual grounds, when all the world about him recognized no rights but those that armed themselves with power. He was what he had to be in the circumstances and atmosphere of his time; and his time forgave him.

II. ROMAN ARCHITECTURE: 1492–1513

The most lasting part of his work was his patronage of art. Under him the Renaissance moved its capital from Florence to Rome, and there reached its zenith in art, as under Leo X it would reach its peak in literature and scholarship. Julius did not care much for literature; it was too quiet and feminine for his temperament; but the monumental in art accorded well with his nature and life. So he subordinated all other arts to architecture, and left a new St. Peter’s as an index of his spirit and a symbol of the Church whose secular power he had saved. That he should have financed Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a hundred more, as well as a dozen wars, and have left 700,000 florins in the papal treasury, is one of the wonders of history, and one of the causes of the Reformation.