7
It surely makes sense, before arriving at conclusions about the first accusation of scandalous misconduct ever leveled at Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, to pause and consider just what it is that we actually know about the incident.
We know that in June 1460 Pope Pius II was still lingering in Tuscany, where he and his entourage had stopped en route back to Rome from Mantua. And that on the eleventh day of that month, from the retreat where he was taking the waters, the pope sent a letter to Rodrigo in Siena. This letter is unique; we know of no similar communication, no comparably stern and explicit rebuke, ever addressed by a reigning pope to a member of the Sacred College on a matter of personal behavior. The matters with which it deals, the things it reveals, and the ease with which editing can manipulate its meaning require that it be considered in full.
Beloved Son,
We have learned that three days ago a large number of the women of Siena, adorned with all worldly vanity, gathered in the gardens of our well-beloved son Giovanni de Bichis, and that your Eminence, in contempt of the dignity of your position, remained with them from one o’clock until six o’clock in the afternoon; and that you had in your company another Cardinal to whom at least his age, if not the honor of the Holy See, should have recalled his duty. We are told that the dances were immodest and the seductions of love beyond bounds and that you yourself behaved as if you were one of the most vulgar young men of the age. In truth I should blush to set down in detail all I have been told of what happened. Not only these things themselves, but the mere mention of them, are a dishonor to the office you hold. In order to have more freedom for your amusements you forbade entry to the husbands, fathers, brothers, and relations who came with these young women. You two, with a handful of attendants, were the sole organizers and instigators. It seems that at this moment no other thing is spoken of in the town of Siena and that you are the laughingstock of everybody. Assuredly here, in the baths, where there is a great crowd of ecclesiastics and laymen, you are on everybody’s tongue. If I said I was not angry at these matters, I should commit a grave error. We are more angry than we can say, for it is a cause of dishonor to the ecclesiastical state and contempt for our ministry; it gives a pretext to those who accuse us of using our wealth and our high office for orgies, it is such things as these that cause the small esteem in which we are held by princes and powers, the daily mockery of the laity, and the reprobation hurled at our own conduct when we undertake to reprove others. The Vicar of Christ himself is an object of scorn because it is believed that he closes his eyes to these excesses.
You preside, my dear son, over the Church of Valencia, one of the most important in Spain; likewise you rule over the pontifical Chancellory; and what renders your act more reprehensible is that you are stationed close to the Sovereign Pontiff as Counselor of the Holy See. We leave it to your own judgment to say if it befits your high degree to pay compliments to women, to be sending them fruit, to drink a mouthful of wine and then have the glass carried to the woman who pleases you most, to spend a whole day as a delighted spectator of all kinds of games; and finally, for the sake of your liberty, to exclude from the gathering the husbands and relations of the women who are invited.
Your faults reflect upon us, and upon Calixtus, your uncle of happy memory, who is accused of a great fault of judgment for having laden you with undeserved honors. Your youth is not to be alleged in your defense, for it is not so tender and you are capable of realizing the responsibilities that your dignity places upon your shoulders. It behooves a cardinal to be irreproachable, to be a salutary example to all in the morality of his life, and the model of an existence which not only is edifying and profitable to the soul but is so exteriorly as well. We are indignant when secular princes approach us for dishonorable reasons, when they do us wrong by coveting our properties and our benefices, and when we must bend to their demands. It is ourselves who inflict upon us the wounds from which we suffer when we so act that the authority of the Church is less respected from day to day. We bear the shame of our conduct in this world, and we shall suffer the punishment we have deserved in the world to come.
Let your Eminence then decide to put an end to these frivolities; you must remember your dignity and cease to appear among your youthful contemporaries in the likeness of a man of pleasure. If such acts were repeated we should be obliged to show that they happen totally in spite of us and against our will; and our reproaches would be cast in such terms as would put you to the blush. We have always loved you and regarded you as worthy of our protection, because we have taken you for a model of gravity and modesty. Let us long keep this opinion and this conviction, and to this end you must without delay enter upon a much more serious way of life. Your youth, the pledge of amendment, causes us to warn you paternally. If you had allowed yourself such things at the age of your companion, we should no longer be able to do you this charitable service.
The explosive word here, the one that seizes attention by crystallizing things otherwise left implicit, is of course orgies. Is it possible to read it without imagining two clerics, naked perhaps except for their red hats, flitting from one giggling lady to another among Signore de Bichis’s shrubs while the husbands, fathers, and brothers of those same ladies loiter disconsolately on the other side of the garden wall? Could we hope for better proof of the libertine that Cardinal Rodrigo was in his prime—of his inability to keep his appetites in check even when the failure to do so put his future at risk and betrayed the pope who had become almost a father to him?
We could, actually. To understand why, it is necessary to distinguish between what Pius himself knew when, in a burst of understandable anger, he wrote his letter, and what he was supposing to be true. And between what we as readers actually learn from his letter, and what his words merely lead us to surmise. The first thing to note is that, though Pius’s pain at what he has been told about the conduct of his “beloved son” has so destroyed not only his composure but the usual polish of his Latin prose that the letter has sometimes been dismissed as a forgery, he acknowledges even as he unburdens himself that he is dealing with hearsay—with what “I have been told.”
Note also what Pius, who cares passionately about maintaining high standards and has been living and working in close association with Rodrigo for perhaps five years, reveals in his letter about what experience has taught him to expect of his young protégé. Far from saying that enough is enough and habitual mischievous antics have crossed a line and become intolerable, he declares that one reason for his shock is the fact the reported outrages have been committed by a man who has always seemed to him “a model of gravity and modesty.”
Consider finally the inherent credibility of the tale that Pius in his anger has leaped to believe. We know from other sources that the party had been arranged because a child was being baptized—one whose parents were of sufficient status to have their invitations accepted by two of the cardinals who had accompanied the pope to Tuscany. Because of the rank of the people involved, the party took place in the gardens of an esteemed friend of the pope’s, a “well-beloved son.” But we are asked to believe that, upon arriving for the festivities, the male guests (individuals of considerable social standing) were turned away while their ladies (including unmarried girls) were allowed to enter. And that for the next five hours these ladies disported themselves with the cardinals—one of whom at least has long been known to the pontiff to be a man of good character—in ways that Pius would “blush to set down in detail.” These were the womenfolk of the Sienese elite, mind you, at a time when gentlemen carried swords and were prepared to kill over questions of honor. Yet this horrific episode somehow became merely Tuscany’s joke of the hour, with no harm done except to the already sullied reputation of the clergy.
The best that can be said of such a story is that it pushes credulity to the breaking point. It sounds ludicrous to twenty-first-century ears and would have been even more implausible in Renaissance Italy. And it is, for that matter, pretty thoroughly undermined by what happened after Pius’s explosion. A few days later he sent a second message, this time in response to something Rodrigo had written after receiving the first. It shows the pope to be in a considerably altered frame of mind. He has, he says,
received your Eminence’s letter and taken note of the explanation you give. Your action, my dear child, cannot be free from fault, though it may perhaps be less grave than I was first told. We exhort you to refrain henceforth from such indiscretions and to take the greatest care of your reputation. We grant you the pardon you ask; if we did not love you as a son of predilection we should not have uttered our affectionate reproaches for it is written: “Whom I love, him I rebuke and punish.” So long as you do good and live in modesty, you will have in me a father and a protector whose blessing will be showered likewise upon those who are dear to you.
We still don’t know what happened at that party—the ladies’ displays of their dancing skills touched the bounds of propriety, perhaps?—but Pius is satisfied that it was not what he had first been told. Orgies have been demoted to indiscretions, and instead of hurt and anger the pope is directing “affectionate reproaches” at Rodrigo. Any suspicion that something truly scandalous has transpired, or that Pius has decided after reflection that boys will be boys and not too much should be expected of his young favorite, now looks distinctly implausible. It cannot be without significance that, in the weeks following the notorious garden party, Pius II saw no need to depart Siena or send Rodrigo away. They did not go until the end of September, after the summer heat had loosened its grip on Rome, and departed then only because called away by developments too serious to be ignored.
It is likewise impossible to believe that, if anything seriously offensive had occurred, Pius in the years following would have taken Rodrigo with him when returning to Siena. But he did, and without hesitation. And it is curious that, when the pope’s two letters came to light many years later, Rodrigo’s answer or answers were not found with them. It would have been customary for the letters from both correspondents to remain together in the archives. When one considers the extent to which various records came to be tampered with in order to blacken the Borgia legend—see About the Character of Alexander VI, this page—it is not far-fetched to wonder if whatever Rodrigo wrote in his own defense may have been intentionally destroyed.
This episode merits such close examination because of the light the pope’s comments throw on the reputation of the clergy at this time and his high regard for Cardinal Rodrigo, and also because, as the only Borgia scandal of which there will be even a hint until many years later, it serves as a kind of prototype for the rough ways in which the reputations of Rodrigo and his kin will be handled through the centuries. For now, one further example must suffice. There has probably never been a detailed account of Rodrigo’s life that did not—quite understandably—include this description of him by a man who had once been his teacher, one Gaspar of Verona: “He is handsome, of a most glad countenance and joyous aspect, gifted with honeyed and choice eloquence. The beautiful women on whom his eyes are cast he lures to love him, and moves them in a wondrous way, more powerfully than the magnet influences iron.” Such a dazzling word-picture, rich not only in detail but in innuendo, merits repetition. But in the truncated form in which it usually appears it encourages rather lurid speculation. This renders inexcusable the omission, by one writer after another, of Gaspar’s concluding sentence: “But it is admitted, to be sure, that he sends them off untouched.”
Gaspar’s description is typical of those left to us by people who knew Rodrigo. Without exception they emphasize the magnetism, the extraordinary vitality and appeal, of his person. Witnesses comment repeatedly on how multidimensional he was, and how fascinating to know. Physically he was imposing, tall and athletically built in his prime, and he carried himself with a dignity that must have been intimidating. But this simply added to the surprise of what he revealed in interacting with others: he turned out to be affable, accessible, kindly, and unfailingly charming. No one ever accused him of being less than a dutiful and hardworking vice-chancellor and cardinal. It has often been noted that he was never absent from consistories except when out of Rome or ill—which, thanks to his hardy constitution, he almost never was. But even when immersed in work he remained good-humored, even jovial. He was rather stolidly conservative in his religious beliefs—entirely comfortable with established dogma and no friend of theological or philosophical innovation—but he showed marked tolerance in dealing with those whose views were not as orthodox as his own, on one occasion making the lame joke that “the Lord requires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may pay and live.” Late in his career, when the Jews were being expelled from Spain, Rodrigo would annoy Ferdinand and Isabella by making the refugees welcome in Rome.
Throughout his life he seemed incapable of taking offense at even the most outrageous slanders, even when their source was a figure as incendiary as Friar Savonarola, whom we shall encounter later. His reputation has suffered permanently from his indifference to an anonymous pamphlet that appeared a few years before his death and declared him to be a “monster” and “an abyss of vice” under whose influence “the bestiality and savagery of Nero and Caligula are surpassed.” The ease with which he laughed such things off, brushing aside the complaints of relatives who urged him to forbid their circulation and punish the parties responsible, shows one of the most attractive sides of his personality. It has also, however, freed other writers to come to the unwarranted assumption that Rodrigo failed to defend himself because he knew his conduct to be indefensible. This encouraged further and more specific slanders—for example, the preposterous assertion of the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini (who was still twenty-three years from being born when the Siena garden party took place) that Rodrigo was “mightily lustful of both sexes, publicly keeping boys and girls, but mostly girls.”
All his life Rodrigo had an almost childish love of pomp, ceremony, and public splendor, and he agreed with the popes he served that it was part of a cardinal’s duty both to maintain the dignity of the college by maintaining a splendid front and to help make Rome the most magnificent city in the world. He could be reckless in his spending for such purposes. On Palm Sunday 1461, when all Rome turned out for the arrival of what was supposedly the long-lost head of the apostle Andrew, St. Peter’s brother, Rodrigo became the talk of the town by turning not only his own palace but its surroundings into a display of magnificent extravagance. Pius II in his Memoirs, after describing the contributions to the celebration by other cardinals and dignitaries, notes delightedly that “all were far outstripped in expense and effort and ingenuity by Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor. His huge towering house which he had built on the site of the ancient mint was covered with rich and wonderful tapestries, and besides this he had raised a lofty canopy from which were suspended many and various marvels. He had decorated not only his own house but those nearby, so that the square all about them seemed a kind of park full of sweet songs and sounds, or a great palace gleaming with gold such as they say Nero’s palace was.”
If all this was wasteful, it had the ecstatic approval of the man to whom Rodrigo owed his position and his income. If it was foolish, it was also expected—practically required. If it was self-serving in the sense of enhancing Rodrigo’s prestige in an era when it was considered shameful for holders of high office not to indulge in ostentatious display, it also carries a note of generosity. Certainly it was not the mark of a greedy, still less a miserly, man. And behind these bursts of ostentation, Rodrigo lived simply, even abstemiously. It comes as a surprise to learn that associates regarded it as a misfortune to be a guest at his table. The fare was so plain, Ferrara’s ambassador reported, that “it is disagreeable to have to dine with him.” So much for bacchanalian feasts.
The word that sums up Rodrigo Borgia is gusto. He loved life, enjoyed people, and found satisfaction even in the most challenging duties, but he was capable also of putting the cares of his work out of mind whenever time permitted. Zest would suit him also. And joie de vivre. The German Ludwig Pastor, who spent most of his life in Rome and wrote a forty-volume history of the papacy, observed that “nothing can be more false than the ordinary conception of Borgia as a morose and inhuman monster.” A twentieth-century historian, Michael Mallett, summed up the consensus of five hundred years in writing of how even people with reasons to dislike Rodrigo “were often reconciled by his friendliness and boisterous good humor.”
To round out the picture it is worthwhile to return to Guicciardini, who hated what he knew or thought he knew of Rodrigo and went far beyond the bounds of fairness in attempting to sully his name. Even Guicciardini conceded that as vice-chancellor Rodrigo was “prudent, vigilant, and maturely reflective,” as well as exceptionally persuasive and effective in the management of difficult matters. Juxtaposed against how Rodrigo is usually depicted, even by Guicciardini himself, such words become rather baffling. It may have been bafflement that caused a more recent historian to throw up his hands at what he took to be Rodrigo’s “strange many-sidedness” and call him “an enigma to his contemporaries.” He was no such thing. People who knew him appear to have taken him at face value, and with few and explainable exceptions they liked what they saw.
When Pope Pius finally consented to bid adieu to Siena, three years remained to his life. They would be consumed by two things that commonly come together: war and money trouble. There was a continuing war in Naples, where Ferrante, with the help of reinforcements sent by Pius, Milan, and Skanderbeg of Albania, was clawing his way back from the brink of ruin. As the rebellious barons and the Angevin invaders slowly ran out of fight and Ferrante’s situation became less dire, he was freed to reveal facets of his character that earlier had been concealed—except, perhaps, from those who knew him best, onetime intimates like Alonso Borgia. It was at about this time, according to stories from credible sources, that he created the prison-cum-museum in which the embalmed bodies of defeated foes were displayed alongside cages in which living captives were either starved to death or left to slowly go insane. As his political position became secure, Ferrante became nearly as powerful a force in Italian politics as his father Alfonso had been. It would become clear soon enough that he was also just as meddlesome.
War went on in the Romagna too, where the rebellious warlord Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini was proving to be a maddeningly able soldier and impossible to bring to heel. But the conflict that was costing Pius the most, both financially and in emotional terms, was not a real but a hoped-for one. It was the fight he wanted to carry to the Ottoman Turks, the crusade he had pledged to launch in 1464 in spite of the failure of the congress of Mantua. It became the source of his, and then of Rodrigo’s, worst money troubles. The sending of envoys to every part of Europe on a fund-raising campaign proved a serious financial drain—the crowned heads would have been insulted if the pope’s men failed to arrive in grand style—and the returns were scarcely commensurate with the costs. Pius like Calixtus before him was meanwhile emptying the papal treasury to build galleys and hire crews. He found himself in such financial straits that he introduced a practice that would continue to have a corrosive effect on the Church long after his reign was over: he began selling positions in the Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy.
Rodrigo was not merely feeling the pinch—he appears to have been going broke. He was doing so in spite of the fact that Pius, even more than his uncle Calixtus, rained benefices on him: bishoprics, abbeys, a share in the revenues generated by the sale of offices, sources of ecclesiastical income of almost every possible kind. Once again, it was a matter of his income being needed for the discharge of his responsibilities. At this time as much as at any in his life, that income was proving to be woefully inadequate for the purpose.
Cumulatively, the demands on Rodrigo’s purse were of crushing weight. He was paying to construct the episcopal palace that he had “volunteered” to contribute to Pius’s remaking of Pienza, and to provide a fully equipped galley with crew for the pope’s crusade. (Such a warship was so costly that only the wealthiest entities in the Papal States—the city of Bologna, for example, and the duke of Ferrara—could possibly be asked to finance one.) He was also expected to contribute a troop of thirty armed men and ten horses to the pope’s war with Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, and it was taken for granted that as one of Rome’s most prominent cardinals he would maintain himself in a style worthy of a prince—a style involving the establishment and maintenance of a residence, a palace, that reflected glory on the Church and its capital. Beyond all this it was his responsibility to provide salaries, workplaces, and perhaps even accommodations for a good many of the men employed in the chancery and the Rota as well.
While Calixtus was still alive, Rodrigo had purchased from the Vatican for two thousand florins a row of old buildings across the Tiber from St. Peter’s between the Piazza di Spagna and the bridge at the Castel Sant’Angelo. He then began converting these buildings, among them a derelict structure that once had housed the papal mint, into a suitably grand home with space for his subordinates and the conduct of the chancery’s business—a palace. This became yet another chronic and painful financial drain.
It all proved to be too much. In 1462, unable to meet his obligations, Rodrigo offered to sell his unfinished palace back to the papal treasury, the camera, for the original purchase price plus what he had spent on improvements. But the camera too was insolvent. Rather than letting what had become the chancery’s headquarters go to a third party, Rodrigo mortgaged it. A year later he was still under such pressure financially that Pius granted him temporary permission to tax the beneficiaries of his diocese of Valencia—those clergymen receiving stipends as deans, canons, and the like. He was also allowed to sell at a discount, in return for an immediate infusion of cash, the next three years of his own revenues as Valencia’s bishop. We will see him resorting to similar expedients in decades to come even as he is supposedly amassing a fortune of almost inconceivable size.
With the kings and high churchmen of all Europe reluctant to contribute more than token quantities of money and men, the pope’s dream of a crusade would have had to be abandoned except for an event so unexpected, indeed so utterly improbable, that Pius declared it a miracle. It was the discovery, on land belonging to the papacy in the wooded hills of Tolfa about sixty miles north of Rome, of huge deposits of high-quality alum—potassium aluminum sulfate, the same humble substance sold today in the form of styptic pencils to stop the bleeding from shaving cuts.
Until some two hundred years ago, when a way of synthesizing it was discovered, alum was a quasi-precious substance with many uses, the most important involving the tanning of leather and the dyeing of wool and other fibers. Mines at the southern end of the Balkan peninsula had long been Europe’s only source, and after the Turks moved into the Balkans, it could be obtained only at extortionate prices. This came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1462, thanks to a onetime dyer named Giovanni di Castro, who had fled Constantinople when it fell to the Turks and become a minor official in the Papal States. One day, exploring the hills inland from Civitavecchia between Florence and Rome, Castro noticed the prevalence of a species of tree rarely seen in Italy but common around the alum mines of the Balkans. Investigating further, he made his great discovery. He hurried to Rome and in great excitement announced to the pope that “today I bring you victory over the Turk. Every year they wring from the Christians more than three hundred thousand ducats for the alum with which we dye wool … But I have found seven mountains so rich in this material that they could supply seven worlds … This mine will supply you with the sinews of war, money, and take them from the Turks.”
About the value of what he had found, Castro was not exaggerating. In short order thousands of men were at work in new mines at Tolfa; they would remain in operation for three and a half centuries. The profits climbed rapidly toward a hundred thousand ducats per year. Pius decreed that all of it was to be spent to make war on the Turks.
Thus it became possible for the crusade preparations to continue. The need remained obvious: a year after Castro’s discovery, Sultan Mehmed invaded Bosnia and conquered it with frightening ease, taking his empire another step closer to Vienna, to Italy, to the nerve centers of southeastern Europe. Even after this loss, however, Pius could find support in only two places. First in Venice, resigned at last to the inevitability of war with the Turks, and then among the common people of the north. Even in places where the leaders of church and state had no interest in sacrificing anything for the sake of a distant campaign—in Germany and the Low Countries, in France and Spain, and as far away as Scotland—ordinary people responded to the pope’s call. From pulpits across Europe, preachers dispatched from Rome were telling the faithful that all available men should prepare to report for duty in the summer of 1464. They should assemble in Venice, or better yet they should make their way farther down Italy’s east coast and join the pope at the port city of Ancona. There—so the plan went—they would be taken aboard a great fleet of mostly Venetian galleys for transportation to the East and the great showdown with Islam.
It was a doomed enterprise, insufficiently funded and without political support. It was kept alive by little more than the pope’s refusal to admit that the obstacles were too great to be overcome. In September 1463, with his launch date now less than a year away, Pius called the cardinals together in a consistory at which he complained in angry, bitter terms that neither Europe’s leaders nor its people were rallying to the cause. He was right about the leaders and undoubtedly should have called the whole thing off, but he had become a man obsessed. In an act so deeply foolish that it can only have been intended to shame the crowned heads of Christendom, Pius announced that he was going to lead the crusade personally. He had already recruited the brilliant Skanderbeg to take charge of military operations; this new pledge to inject himself into the expedition in spite of his complete lack of military experience and indifferent health looks less like an effort to inspire than an outburst of spite and defiance.
Nine months later, on June 18, 1464, Pius set out for Ancona and the fulfillment of his great dream. Some of Rome’s leading citizens, the memory of the disorders that had erupted during the pope’s previous long absence still fresh in their minds, had objected with considerable heat when informed of his plans. To placate them he promised to leave the pontifical administration at home, its leadership intact. This removed any possibility that Cardinal Borgia, the central figure in that administration, might be expected to go with the pontiff to war. He did, however, set off to accompany the pope to Ancona. It was a brutally hot summer, and Pius, who had been feverish for some time, found himself capable of traveling only in short, slow stages with frequent stops for recuperation. Rodrigo caught up with him at Terni, and they pushed on together from there. They arrived at Ancona on July 19 to find it a boiling cauldron of confusion and pestilence, overrun with amateur crusaders from all parts of Europe. The town had no way to shelter so many visitors, too little food, even a desperate shortage of drinking water. There was no sign of the Venetian fleet, which was overdue, and as plague broke out, many of the volunteers who did not fall sick began to flee. The pope, too weak to leave his room overlooking the harbor, watched for the arrival of Venice’s galleys as his ragtag volunteer army melted away. By August 9 Rodrigo too was ill—which fact has given rise to another ridiculously insubstantial Borgia scandal.
This one rises out of a letter written on August 10 by the marquess of Mantua’s ambassador to the papal court. He informs his master of Rodrigo’s sickness, adding that “the physician who saw him first says that he has little hope for him, principally because he had, shortly before, not slept alone in bed.” This has been interpreted as meaning that Rodrigo had been indulging in sexual adventures since arriving in Ancona and was dying as a result. But of course there never has been a venereal disease that kills or even incapacitates in a matter of days, and the most dangerous of such diseases, syphilis, is generally believed to have been unknown in Europe before Columbus’s return from his first voyage of discovery in 1493. As for the cardinal’s not sleeping alone, as recently as the nineteenth century it was not uncommon even for men of importance to share beds, and it may very well have been necessary for senior members of the pope’s entourage to do so in the grossly overcrowded conditions of Ancona that summer.
Rodrigo’s symptoms, in any case, are on record. They included earache and a swelling under his left arm. These are consistent with the bubonic plague, which was rampant in the March of Ancona at this time and gets its name from the phenomenon called buboes, a swelling of the lymphatic glands in armpit and groin. Here again we see that no stick is too crooked to be used in whipping a Borgia.
Four days after the Mantuan envoy wrote his letter, the Venetian fleet sailed into Ancona’s harbor with the doge Cristoforo Moro in command. On that same day, the death of Pope Pius was so obviously imminent that those cardinals not too sick to move were called to his bedroom to say their goodbyes. He died the next day, and it was probably with deep relief that Moro, after seeing the state of affairs in Ancona and conferring with the cardinals who remained able to function (Rodrigo was not among them), declared that proceeding to the East had become impossible. He returned to his fleet and was rowed home to Venice.
It was necessary for the cardinals to return to Rome, for the burial of Pius and the election of the next pope.
Background
IL PAPA
IN ROME IN THE FIRST CENTURY OR TWO OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA, the Church may or may not have been led by a man who functioned more or less as a bishop even if not yet bearing that title.
The first Roman bishops—assuming that there were such things in the generations following the death of Saint Peter—may have regarded themselves as the apostle’s successors and therefore as leaders not only of the local church but of all Christians everywhere.
Or they may not have. The idea of a single head of the whole Church may not have emerged until centuries later, inside the heads of Dark Age bishops eager to fill the vacuum created by the killing of Rome’s last emperor.
These questions have answers. The problem is that the answers vastly outnumber the questions. Catholics have their answers, various Protestant denominations have theirs, et cetera ad infinitum. It is inconceivable that these conflicting interpretations of early Christianity will ever be reconciled.
Anyone acquainted with the facts, however, is likely to agree that the story of how the papacy of the Renaissance came into existence is, for better or worse, one of the most colorful in all history. It can be inspiring and disgusting, exciting or depressing, beautiful or horrible, depending on which part of it is under examination and the preconceptions of the examiner. No one wanting to prove that the papacy is the Whore of Babylon will ever be embarrassed by a lack of supporting evidence. Much the same is true for anyone wanting to believe that the pope is everything he claims to be.
The story of the popes can be taken up, for our purposes, early in the fourth century, by which time there was indeed a bishop of Rome. When the Emperor Constantine departed to establish a new capital in the ancient Greek city of Byzantium (and rename it after himself), he left the Eternal City in the charge of its bishop and gave him the imperial palace, the Lateran, as his residence. Constantine being among the greatest of all Roman emperors, and Rome at this point being still the capital of the world, this act of delegation radically increased the bishop’s prestige. It added to the stature he already possessed as prelate of the only apostolic church in the Western Empire—the only one established by one of the twelve apostles—at a time when Christianity’s birthplace, Jerusalem, was in ruins.
This prestige was further enhanced in the following century when the Western Empire collapsed. In the absence of an emperor, and with the European kingdoms of the Middle Ages not yet in existence, almost no unifying principle was available to the Church’s scattered bishops except their colleague in the old capital. And so Rome’s bishop, once not much more than the custodian of pilgrimage sites, became a unique source of support and guidance. Gradually he began to claim to be, and to be accepted as, the man in overall command.
Rome, helpless, was sacked three times in the fifth century. But even then the intruders from the north showed themselves to be in awe of the great city, if no longer terrified of its might, and to regard it as quasi-sacred. Their reverence grew rather than diminished with the passage of time. When the Lombards made themselves masters of much of Italy in the sixth century, they kept clear of Rome, putting it off limits even to themselves. When they were converted to Christianity, their respect for the place was extended to its overlord as well, and as the number of Christendom’s bishops increased, the title Il Papa was reserved for the one who presided in Rome.
When in the eighth century Pepin the Short led his Frankish warriors southward to supplant the Lombards, he did so not as just another barbarian intruder but at the invitation of Pope Stephen II, who had given him the title Patrician of Rome. Pepin then introduced a new element into history by bestowing an extensive portion of his newly conquered territories on the pontiff. He thereby transformed the bishop of Rome into what his successors would remain into the nineteenth century: one of the most important temporal rulers in Italy, monarch of the Papal States, capable of joining in the power games of Venice, Naples, and Milan. Papal prestige rose to unprecedented heights. When Pepin’s son Charles the Great—Charlemagne—was crowned as imperator in Rome in 800, he received his crown from Pope Leo III after approaching the pontiff on his knees and kissing his slippered feet.
The next seven centuries were a wild ride in which bursts of real glory alternated with episodes of appalling degradation. The prestige that had brought Charlemagne to his knees was taken away and recovered, thrown away and recovered again, lost and regained repeatedly in a cycle that seemed destined to continue to the end of time. Few things on earth were rarer than a happy and successful papal reign. Eight decades after the death of the pontiff who crowned Charlemagne, Pope Stephen VI was strangled in Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo by people infuriated at him for having his predecessor’s body dragged out of its tomb, put on trial, and thrown into the Tiber. In 974 Benedict VI died in the same way in the same place, and ten years later John XIV perished in the Castel of poisoning or starvation.
The deaths of Stephen VI and John XIV bracketed the so-called “Pornocracy,” a long and ugly interlude during which the papacy was virtually the property of a family of Roman consuls and senators called the Theophylacti. The tenor of the period can be inferred from the career of a member of this family named Marozia. She is alleged—by hostile sources, it must be acknowledged—to have been the lover first of Pope Sergius III (by whom she supposedly had a son who grew up to become Pope John XI) and later of John X (whom she is supposed to have had murdered). She was the grandmother of John XII (himself a murderer, elected at age eighteen and said to have made his niece his mistress and blinded his confessor), the great-grandmother of Benedict VIII and John XIX (who was a layman when elected), and the great-great-grandmother of Benedict IX. This last pontiff, no more than twenty when given the crown, has several distinctions. He is the first pope known with certainty to have been homosexual, and the only man ever to become pope three times. He was deposed in favor of an antipope twenty years after his election, was restored to his office a year later only to sell it, then changed his mind and took the crown back from the buyer. In the end he was deposed permanently.
Such depths were never to be reached again. The reigns of even the most admired and formidable popes, however, were invariably laden with grief if not outright tragedy. In 1077 the reformer Gregory VII, whose zeal for purging the Church of corruption bordered on fanaticism, triumphed so completely over his archenemy Emperor Henry IV that the poor man was reduced to donning a hair shirt and standing barefoot in the snow for three days in a desperate bid to win release from a bull of excommunication. It was a never-to-be-forgotten display of papal power, but it did not save Gregory from later being deposed (as was Henry) and dying in exile. The tragic futility of the centuries-long struggle between papacy and Holy Roman Empire was again made clear in the mid-thirteenth century, when Innocent IV defeated and destroyed the spectacularly brilliant Emperor Frederick II, known to contemporaries as the Wonder of the World, only to find himself at the end of his life losing a war with Frederick’s illegitimate son. Another peak was reached in the reign of Boniface VIII, who at the dawn of the fourteenth century was so engorged with pride and self-importance that he would greet pilgrims in Rome by shouting Ego, ego sum imperator! (“I, I am the emperor!”) In 1302 he issued the bullUnam Sanctam, which declared that no one who failed to submit to the authority of the pope could achieve salvation. This sparked such a violent reaction—from the king of France, among others—that Boniface found himself languishing in prison.
Just seven years later the so-called Babylonian Captivity began, with the pope resident at Avignon and becoming almost an adjunct of the French crown. During this period 113 of the 134 appointees to the College of Cardinals were French, and so much Church money went into the French king’s treasury that German relations with the papal court were permanently poisoned. After that came the Great or Western Schism, which began in 1378 with the election of an antipope and over the next four decades never offered the faithful fewer than two men simultaneously claiming to be the rightful pontiff.
The papacy that Martin V brought back to the wrecked city of Rome in 1420 was itself, therefore, a scarred and tattered thing. It was virtually bankrupt, had barely escaped being discredited beyond possibility of repair, was unloved by the people of Rome, and controlled almost none of its supposed territories. Those of its neighbor states that were not its enemies were also not its friends.
It was from these wretched beginnings that the papacy of the Renaissance would rise for another period in the sun.