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 hi
s 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 t
he 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