In the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries the authority of the Popes, both as Heads of the Church and as temporal rulers, had been impaired by exile in France and by ruinous schisms.  A new era began with the election of Nicholas V. in 1447, and ended during the pontificate of Clement VII. with the sack of Rome in 1527.  Through the whole of this period the Popes acted more as monarchs than as pontiffs, and the secularization of the See of Rome was earned to its utmost limits.  The contrast between the sacerdotal pretensions and the personal immorality of the Popes was glaring; nor had the chiefs of the Church yet learned to regard the liberalism of the Renaissance with suspicion.  About the middle of the sixteenth century the Papal States had become a recognized kingdom; while the Popes of this later epoch were endeavoring by means of the inquisition and the educational orders to check the free spirit of Italy.

The history of Italy has at all times been closely bound up with that of the Papacy; but at no period has this been more the case than during these eighty years of Papal worldliness, ambition, depotism, and profligacy, which are also marked by the irruption of the European nations into Italy and by the secession of the Teutonic races from the Latin Church.  In this short space of time a succession of Popes filled the Holy Chair with such dramatic propriety ­displaying a pride so regal, a cynicism so unblushing, so selfish a cupidity, and a policy so suicidal as to favor the belief that they had been placed there in the providence of God to warn the world against Babylon.  At the same time the history of the Papal Court reveals with peculiar vividness the contradictions of Renaissance morality and manners.  We find in the Popes of this period what has been already noticed in the despots ­learning, the patronage of of the arts, the passion for magnificence, and the refinements of polite culture, alternating and not unfrequently combined with barbarous ferocity of temper and with savage and coarse tastes.  On the one side we observe a Pagan dissoluteness which would have scandalized the parasites of Commodus and Nero; on the other, a seeming zeal for dogma worthy of S. Dominic.  The Vicar of Christ is at one time worshiped as a god by princes seeking absolution for sins or liberation from burdensome engagements; at another he is trampled under foot, in his capacity of sovereign, by the same potentates.  Undisguised sensuality; fraud cynical and unabashed; policy marching to its end by murders, treasons, interdicts, and imprisonments; the open sale of spiritual privileges; commercial traffic in ecclesiastical emoluments; hypocrisy and cruelty studied as fine arts; theft and perjury reduced to system ­these are the ordinary scandals which beset the Papacy.  Yet the Pope is still a holy being.  His foot is kissed by thousands.  His curse and blessing carry death and life.  He rises from the bed of harlots to unlock or bolt the gates of heaven and purgatory.  In the midst of crime he believes himself to be the representative of Christ on earth.  These anomalies, glaring as they seem to us, and obvious as they might be to deeper thinkers like Machiavelli or Savonarola, did not shock the mass of men who witnessed them.  The Renaissance was so dazzling by its brilliancy, so confusing by its rapid changes, that moral distinctions were obliterated in a blaze of splendor, an outburst of new life, a carnival of liberated energies.  The corruption of Italy was only equaled by its culture.  Its immorality was matched by its enthusiasm.  It was not the decay of an old age dying, so much as the fermentation of a new age coming into life, that bred the monstrous paradoxes of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries.  The contrast between mediaeval Christianity and renascent Paganism ­the sharp conflict of two adverse principles, destined to fuse their forces and to recompose the modern world ­made the Renaissance what it was in Italy.  Nowhere is the first effervescence of these elements so well displayed as in the history of those Pontiffs who, after striving in the Middle Ages to suppress humanity beneath a cowl, are now the chief actors in the comedy of Aphrodite and Priapus raising their foreheads once more to the light of day.

The struggle carried on between the Popes of the thirteenth century and the House of Hohenstauffen ended in the elevation of the Princes of Anjou to the throne of Naples ­the most pernicious of all the evils inflicted by the Papal power on Italy.  Then followed the French tyranny, under which Boniface VIII. expired at Anagni.  Benedict XI. was poisoned at the instigation of Philip lé Bel, and the Papal see was transferred to Avignon.  The Popes lost their hold upon the city of Rome and upon those territories of Romagna, the March, and S. Peter’s Patrimony which had been confirmed to them by the grant of Rodolph of Hapsburg (1273).  They had to govern their Italian dependencies by means of Legates, while, one by one, the cities which had recognized their sway passed beneath the yoke of independent princes.  The Malatesti established themselves in Rimini, Pesaro, and Fano; the house of Montefeltro confirmed its occupation of Urbino; Camerino, Faenza, Ravenna, Forlì, and Imola became the appanages of the Varani, the Manfredi, the Polentani, the Ordelaffi, and the Alidosi. The traditional supremacy of the Popes was acknowledged in these tyrannies; but the nobles I have named acquired a real authority, against which Egidio Albornoz and Robert of Geneva struggled to a great extent in vain, and to break which at a future period taxed the whole energies of Sixtus and of Alexander.

While the influence of the Popes was thus weakened in their states beyond the Apennines, three great families, the Orsini, the Savelli, and the Colonnesi, grew to princely eminence in Rome and its immediate neighborhood.  They had been severally raised to power during the second half of the thirteenth century by the nepotism of Nicholas III., Honorius IV., and Nicholas IV.  This nepotism bore baneful fruits in the future; for during the exile at Avignon the houses of Colonna and Orsini became so overbearing as to threaten the freedom and safety of the Popes.  It was again reserved for Sixtus and Alexander to undo the work of their predecessors and to secure the independence of the Holy See by the coercion of these towering nobles.

In the States of the Church the temporal power of the Popes, founded upon false donations, confirmed by tradition, and contested by rival despots, was an anomaly.  In Rome itself their situation, though different, was no less peculiar.  While the factions of Orsini and Colonna divided the Campagna and wrangled in the streets of the city, Rome continued to preserve, in form at least, the old constitution of Caporioni and Senator.  The Senator, elected by the people, swore, not to obey the Pope, but to defend his person.  The government was ostensibly republican.  The Pope had no sovereign rights, but only the ascendency inseparable from his wealth and from his position as Primate of Christendom.  At the same time the spirit of Arnold of Brescia, of Brancaleone, and of Rienzi revived from time to time in patriots like Porcari and Baroncelli, who resented the encroachments of the Church upon the privileges of the city.  Rome afforded no real security to the members of the Holy College.  They commanded no fortress like the Castello of Milan, and had no army at their disposition.  When the people or the nobles rose against them, the best they could do was to retire to Orvieto or Viterbo, and to wait the passing of the storm.

Such was the position of the Pope, considered as one of the ruling princes of Italy, before the election of Nicholas V. His authority was wide but undefined, confirmed by prescription, but based on neither force nor legal right.  Italy, however, regarded the Papacy as indispensable to her prosperity, while Rome was proud to be called the metropolis of Christendom, and ready to sacrifice the shadow of republican liberty for the material advantages which might accrue from the sovereignty of her bishop.  How the Roman burghers may have felt upon this point we gather from a sentence of Leo Alberti’s, referring to the administration of Nicholas:  ’The city had become a city of gold through the jubilee; the dignity of the citizens was respected; all reasonable petitions were granted by the Pontiff.  There were no exactions, no new taxes.  Justice was fairly administered.  It was the whole care of the Pontiff to adorn the city.’ The prosperity which the Papal court brought to Rome was the main support of the Popes as princes, at a time when many thinkers looked with Dante’s jealousy upon the union of temporal and spiritual functions in the Papacy. Moreover, the whole of Italy, as we have seen in the previous chapters, was undergoing a gradual and instinctive change in politics; commonwealths were being superseded by tyrannies, and the sentiments of the race at large were by no means unfavorable to this revolution.  Now was the proper moment, therefore, for the Popes to convert their ill-defined authority into a settled despotism, to secure themselves in Rome as sovereigns, and to subdue the States of the Church to their temporal jurisdiction.

The work was begun by Thomas of Sarzana, who ascended the Chair of S. Peter, as Nicholas V., in 1447.  One part of his biography belongs to the history of scholarship, and need not here be touched upon.  Educated at Florence, under the shadow of the house of Medici, he had imbibed those principles of deference to princely authority which were supplanting the old republican virtues throughout Italy.  The schisms which had rent the Catholic Church were healed; and finding no opposition to his spiritual power, he determined to consolidate the temporalities of his See.  In this purpose he was confirmed by the conspiracy of Stefano Porcari, a Roman noble who had endeavored to rouse republican enthusiasm in the city at the moment of the Pope’s election, and who subsequently plotted against his liberty, if not his life.  Porcari and his associates were put to death in 1453, and by this act the Pope proclaimed himself a monarch.  The vast wealth which the jubilee of 1450 had poured into the Papal coffers he employed in beautifying the city of Rome and in creating a stronghold for the Sovereign Pontiff.  The mausoleum of Hadrian, used long before as a fortress in the Middle Ages, was now strengthened, while the bridge of S. Angelo and the Leonine city were so connected and defended by a system of walls and outworks as to give the key of Rome into the hands of the Pope.  A new Vatican began to rise, and the foundations of a nobler S. Peter’s Church were laid within the circuit of the Papal domain.  Nicholas had, in fact, conceived the great idea of restoring the supremacy of Rome, not after the fashion of a Hildebrand, by enforcing the spiritual despotism of the Papacy, but by establishing the Popes as kings, by renewing the architectural magnificence of the Eternal City, and by rendering his court the center of European culture.  In the will which he recited on his death-bed to the princes of the Church, he set forth all that he had done for the secular and ecclesiastical architecture of Rome, explaining his deep sense of the necessity of securing the Popes from internal revolution and external force, together with his desire to exalt the Church by rendering her chief seat splendid in the eyes of Christendom.  This testament of Nicholas remains a memorable document.  Nothing illustrates more forcibly the transition from the Middle Ages to the worldliness of the Renaissance than the conviction of the Pontiff that the destinies of Christianity depended on the state and glory of the town of Rome.  What he began was carried on amid crime, anarchy, and bloodshed by successive Popes of the Renaissance, until at last the troops of Frundsberg paved the way, in 1527, for the Jesuits of Loyola, and Rome, still the Eternal City, cloaked her splendor and her scandals beneath the black pall of Spanish inquisitors.  The political changes in the Papacy initiated by Nicholas had been, however, by that date fully accomplished, and for more than three centuries the Popes have since held rank among the kings of the earth.

Of Alfonso Borgia, who reigned for three years as Calixtus III., little need be said, except that his pontificate prepared for the greatness of his nephew, Roderigo Lenzuoli, known as Borgia in compliment to his uncle.  The last days of Nicholas had been imbittered by the fall of Constantinople and the imminent peril which threatened Europe from the Turks.  The whole energies of Pius II. were directed towards the one end of uniting the European nations against the infidel.  AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, as an author, an orator, a diplomatist, a traveller, and a courtier, bears a name illustrious in the annals of the Renaissance.  As a Pope, he claims attention for the single-hearted zeal which he displayed in the vain attempt to rouse the piety of Christendom against the foes of civilization and the faith.  Rarely has a greater contrast been displayed between the man and the pontiff than in the case of Pius.  The pleasure-loving, astute, free-thinking man of letters and the world has become a Holy Father, jealous for Christian proprieties, and bent on stirring Europe by an appeal to motives which had lost their force three centuries before.  Frederick II. and S. Louis closed the age of the Crusades, the one by striking a bargain with the infidel, the other by snatching at a martyr’s crown.  AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini was the mirror of his times ­a humanist and stylist, imbued with the rhetorical and pseudo-classic taste of the earlier Renaissance.  Pius II. is almost an anachronism.  The disappointment which the learned world experienced when they discovered that the new Pope, from whom so much had been expected, declined to play the part of their Maecenas, may be gathered from the epigrams of Filelfo upon his death: ­

  Gaudeat orator, Musae gaudete Latinae;
    Sustulit e medio quod Deus ipse Pium. 
  Ut bene consuluit doctis Deus omnibus aeque,
    Quos Pius in cunctos se tulit usque gravem. 
  Nunc sperare licet.  Nobis Deus optime Quintum
    Reddito Nicoleon Eugeniumve patrem.

and again: ­

  Hac sibi quam vivus construxit clauditur arca
    Corpore; nam Stygios mens habet atra lacus.

Pius himself was not unconscious of the discrepancy between his old and his new self. AEneam rejicite, Pium recipite, he exclaims in a celebrated passage of his Rétractation, where he declares his heartfelt sorrow for the irrevocable words of light and vain romance that he had scattered in his careless youth.  Yet though Pius II. proved a virtual failure by lacking the strength to lead his age either backwards to the ideal of earlier Christianity or forwards on the path of modern culture, he is the last Pope of the Renaissance period whom we can regard with real respect.  Those who follow, and with whose personal characters, rather than their action as Pontiffs, we shall now be principally occupied, sacrificed the interests of Christendom to family ambition, secured their sovereignty at the price of discord in Italy, transacted with the infidel, and played the part of Antichrist upon the theater of Europe.

It would be possible to write the history of these priest-kings without dwelling more than lightly on scandalous circumstances, to merge the court-chronicle of the Vatican in a recital of European politics, or to hide the true features of high Papal dignitaries beneath the masks constructed for them by ecclesiastical apologists.  That cannot, however, be the line adopted by a writer treating of civilization in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  He must paint the Popes of the Renaissance as they appeared in the midst of society, when Lorenzo de’ Medici called Rome ‘a sink of all the vices,’ and observers so competent as Machiavelli and Guicciardini ascribed the moral depravity and political decay of Italy to their influence.  It might be objected that there is now no need to portray the profligacy of that court, which, by arousing the conscience of Northern Europe to a sense of intolerable shame, proved one of the main causes of the Reformation.  But without reviewing those old scandals, a true understanding of Italian morality, and a true insight into Italian social feeling as expressed in literature, are alike impossible.  Nor will the historian of this epoch shrink from his task, even though the transactions he has to record seem to savor of legend rather than of simple fact.  No fiction contains matter more fantastic, no myth or allegory is more adapted to express a truth in figures of the fancy, than the authentic well-attested annals of this period of seventy years, from 1464 to 1534.

Paul the Second was a Venetian named Pietro Barbi, who began life as a merchant.  He had already shipped his worldly goods on board a trading vessel for a foreign trip, when news reached him that his uncle had been made Pope under the name of Eugenius IV.  His call to the ministry consisted of the calculation that he could make his fortune in the Church with a Pope for uncle sooner than on the high seas by his wits.  So he unloaded his bales, took to his book, became a priest, and at the age of forty-eight rose to the Papacy.  Being a handsome man, he was fain to take the ecclesiastical title of Formosus; but the Cardinals dissuaded him from this parade of vanity, and he assumed the tiara as Paul in 1464.  A vulgar love of show was his ruling characteristic.  He spent enormous sums in the collection of jewels, and his tiara alone was valued at 200,000 golden florins.  In all public ceremonies, whether ecclesiastical or secular, he was splendid, delighting equally to sun himself before the eyes of the Romans as the chief actor in an Easter benediction or a Carnival procession.  The poorer Cardinals received subsidies from his purse in order that they might add luster to his pageants by their retinues.  The arts found in him munificent patron.  For the building of the palace of S. Marco, which marks an abrupt departure from the previous Gothic style in vogue, he brought architects of eminence to Rome, and gave employment to Mino da Fiesole, the sculptor, and to Giuliano da San Gallo, the wood-carver.  The arches of Titus and Septimius Severus were restored at his expense, together with the statue of Marcus Aurelius and the horses of Monte Cavallo.  But Paul showed his connoisseurship more especially in the collection of gems, medals, precious stones, and cameos, accumulating rare treasures of antiquity and costly masterpieces of Italian and Flemish gold-work in his cabinets.  This patronage of contemporary art, no less than the appreciation of classical monuments, marked him as a Maecenas of the true Renaissance type. But the qualities of a dilettante were not calculated to shed luster on a Pontiff who spent the substance of the Church in heaping up immensely valuable curiosities.  His thirst for gold and his love of hoarding were so extreme that, when bishoprics fell vacant, he often refused to fill them up, drawing their revenues for his own use.  His court was luxurious, and in private he was addicted to sensual lust. This would not, however, have brought his name into bad odor in Rome, where the Holy Father was already regarded as an Italian despot with certain sacerdotal additions.  It was his prosecution of the Platonists which made him unpopular in an age when men had the right to expect that, whatever happened, learning at least would be respected.  The example of the Florentine and Neapolitan academies had encouraged the Romans to found a society for the discussion of philosophical questions.  The Pope conceived that a political intrigue was the real object of this club.  Nor was the suspicion wholly destitute of color.  The conspiracy of Porcari against Nicholas, and the Catilinarian riots of Tiburzio which had troubled the pontificate of Pius, were still fresh in people’s memories; nor was the position of the Pope in Rome as yet by any means secure.  What increased Paul’s anxiety was the fact that some scholars, appointed secretaries of the briefs (Abbreviatori) by Pius and deprived of office by himself, were members of the Platonic Society.  Their animosity against him was both natural and ill-concealed.  At the same time the bitter hatred avowed by Laurentius Valla against the temporal power might in an age of conjurations have meant active malice.  Leo Alberti hints that Porcari had been supported by strong backers outside Rome; and one of the accusations against the Platonists was that Pomponius Laetus had addressed Platina as Holy Father.  Now both Pomponius Laetus and Valla had influence in Naples, while Paul was on the verge of open rupture with King Ferdinand.  He therefore had sufficient grounds for suspecting a Neapolitan intrigue, in which the humanists were playing the parts of Brutus and Cassius.  Yet though we take this trouble to construct some show of reason for the panic of the Pope, the fact remains that he was really mistaken at the outset; and of the stupidity, cruelty, and injustice of his subsequent conduct there can be no doubt.  He seized the chief members of the Roman Academy, imprisoned them, put them to the torture, and killed some of them upon the rack.  ’You would have taken Castle S. Angelo for Phalaris’ bull,’ writes Platina; ’the hollow vaults did so resound with the cries of innocent young men.’  No evidence of a conspiracy could be extorted.  Then Paul tried the survivors for unorthodoxy.  They proved the soundness of their faith to the satisfaction of the Pope’s inquisitors.  Nothing remained but to release them, or to shut them up in dungeons, in order that the people might not say the Holy Father had arrested them without due cause.  The latter course was chosen.  Platina, the historian of the Popes, was one of the abbreviatori whom Paul had cashiered, and one of the Platonists whom he had tortured.  The tale of Papal persecution loses, therefore, nothing in the telling; for if the humanists of the fifteenth century were powerful in anything it was in writing innuendoes and invectives.  Among other anecdotes, he relates how, while he was being dislocated on the rack, the inquisitors Vianesi and Sanga held a sprightly colloquy about a ring which the one said jestingly the other had received as a love-token from a girl.  The whole situation is characteristic of Papal Rome in the Renaissance.

Paul did not live as long as his comparative youth led people to anticipate.  He died of apoplexy in 1471, alone and suddenly, after supping on two huge watermelons, duos praegrandes pepones.  His successor was a man of base extraction, named Francesco della Rovere, born near the town of Savona on the Genoese Riviera.  It was his whim to be thought noble; so he bought the goodwill of the ancient house of Rovere of Turin by giving them two cardinals’ hats, and proclaimed himself their kinsman.  Theirs is the golden oak-tree on an azure ground which Michael Angelo painted on the roof of the Sistine Chapel in compliment to Sixtus and his nephew Julius.  Having bribed the most venal members of the Sacred College, Francesco della Rovere was elected Pope, and assumed the name of Sixtus IV.  He began his career with a lie; for though he succeeded to the avaricious Paul who had spent his time in amassing money which he did not use, he declared that he had only found 5,000 florins in the Papal treasury.  This assertion was proved false by the prodigality with which he lavished wealth immediately upon his nephews.  It is difficult even to hint at the horrible suspicions which were cast upon the birth of two of the Pope’s nephews and upon the nature of his weakness for them.  Yet the private life of Sixtus rendered the most monstrous stories plausible, while his public treatment of these men recalled to mind the partiality of Nero for Doryphorus. We may, however, dwell upon the principal features of his nepotism; for Sixtus was the first Pontiff who deliberately organized a system for pillaging the Church in order to exalt his family to principalities.  The weakness of this policy has already been exposed:  its justification, if there is any, lies in the exigencies of a dynasty which had no legitimate or hereditary succession.  The names of the Pope’s nephews were Lionardo, Giuliano, and Giovanni della Rovere, the three sons of his brother Raffaello; Pietro and Girolamo Riario, the two sons of his sister Jolanda; and Girolamo, the son of another sister married to Giovanni Basso.  With the notable exception of Giuliano della Rovere, these young men had no claim to distinction beyond good looks and a certain martial spirit which ill suited with the ecclesiastical dignities thrust upon some of them.  Lionardo was made prefect of Rome and married to a natural daughter of King Ferdinand of Naples.  Giuliano received a Cardinal’s hat, and, after a tempestuous warfare with the intervening Popes, ascended the Holy Chair as Julius II.  Girolamo Basso was created Cardinal of San Crisogono in 1477, and died in 1507.  Girolamo Riario wedded Catherine, a natural daughter of Galeazzo Sforza.  For him the Pope in 1473 bought the town of Imola with money of the Church, and, after adding to it Forlì, made Girolamo a Duke.  He was murdered by his subjects in the latter place in 1488, not, however, before he had founded a line of princes.  Pietro, another nephew of the Riario blood, or, as scandal then reported and Muratori has since believed, a son of the Pope himself, was elevated at the age of twenty-six to the dignities of Cardinal, Patriarch of Constantinople, and Archbishop of Florence.  He had no virtues, no abilities, nothing but his beauty, the scandalous affection of the Pope, and the extravagant profligacy of his own life to recommend him to the notice of posterity.  All Italy during two years rang with the noise of his debaucheries.  His official revenues were estimated at 60,000 golden florins; but in his short career of profligate magnificence he managed to squander a sum reckoned at not less than 200,000.  When Leonora of Aragon passed through Rome on her way to wed the Marquis of Ferrara, this fop of a Patriarch erected a pavilion in the Piazza de’ Santi Apostoli for her entertainment. The square was partitioned into chambers communicating with the palace of the Cardinal.  The ordinary hangings were of velvet and of white and crimson silk, while one of the apartments was draped with the famous tapestries of Nicholas V., which represented the Creation of the World.  All the utensils in this magic dwelling were of silver ­even to the very vilest.  The air of the banquet-hall was cooled with punkahs; ire mantici coperti, che facevano continoamemte vento, are the words of Corio; and on a column in the center stood a living naked gilded boy, who poured forth water from an urn.  The description of the feast takes up three pages of the history of Corio, where we find a minute list of the dishes ­wild boars and deer and peacocks, roasted whole; peeled oranges, gilt and sugared; gilt rolls; rosewater for washing; and the tales of Perseus, Atalanta, Hercules, etc., I wrought in pastry ­tutte in vivande.  We are also told how masques of Hercules, Jason, and Phaedra alternated with the story of Susannah and the Elders, played by Florentine actors, and with the Mysteries of San Giovan Battista decapitato and quel Giudeo che rosfi il corpo di Cristo.  The servants were arrayed in silk, and the seneschal changed his dress of richest stuffs and jewels four times in the course of the banquet.  Nymphs and centaurs, singers and buffoons, drank choice wine from golden goblets.  The most eminent and reverend master of the palace, meanwhile, moved among his guests ‘like some great Caesar’s son.’  The whole entertainment lasted from Saturday till Thursday, during which time Ercole of Este and his bride assisted at Church ceremonies in S. Peter’s, and visited the notabilities of Rome in the intervals of games, dances, and banquets of the kind described.  We need scarcely add that, in spite of his enormous wealth, the young Cardinal died 60,000 florins in debt.  Happily for the Church and for Italy, he expired at Rome in January 1474, after parading his impudent debaucheries through Milan and Venice as the Pope’s Legate.  It was rumored, but never well authenticated, that the Venetians helped his death by poison. The sensual indulgences of every sort in which this child of the proletariat, suddenly raised to princely splendor, wallowed for twenty-five continuous months, are enough to account for his immature death without the hypothesis of poisoning.  With him expired a plan which might have ended in making the Papacy a secular, hereditary kingdom.  During his stay at Milan, Pietro struck a bargain with the Duke, by the terms of which Galeazzo Maria Sforza was to be crowned king of Lombardy, while the Cardinal Legate was to return and seize upon the Papal throne. Sixtus, it is said, was willing to abdicate in his nephew’s favor, with a view to the firmer establishment of his family in the tyranny of Rome.  The scheme was a wild one, yet, considering the power and wealth of the Sforza family, not so wholly impracticable as might appear.  The same dream floated, a few years later, before the imagination of the two Borgias; and Machiavelli wrote in his calm style that to make the Papal power hereditary was all that remained for nepotism in his days to do. The opinion which had been conceived of the Cardinal of San Sisto during his two years of eminence may be gathered from the following couplets of an epigram placed, as Corio informs us, on his tomb: ­

  Fur, scortum, leno, moechus, pedico, cynaedus,
  Et scurra, et fidicen cedat ab Italia: 
  Namque illa Ausonii pestis scelerata senatus,
  Petrus, ad infernas est modo raptus aquas.

After the death of Pietro, Sixtus took his last nephew, Giovanni della Rovere, into like favor.  He was married to Giovanna, daughter of Federigo di Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and created Duke of Sinigaglia.  Afterwards he became Prefect of Rome, upon the death of his brother Lionardo.  This man founded the second dynasty in the Dukedom of Urbino.  The plebeian violence of the della Rovere temper reached a climax in Giovanni’s son, the Duke Francesco Maria, who murdered his sister’s lover with his own hand when a youth of sixteen, stabbed the Papal Legate to death in the streets of Bologna at the age of twenty, and knocked Guicciardini, the historian, down with a blow of his fist during a council of war in 1526.

Sixtus, however, while thus providing for his family, could not enjoy life without some youthful protege about his person.  Accordingly in 1463 he made his valet, a lad of no education and of base birth, Cardinal and Bishop of Parma at the age of twenty.  His merit was the beauty of a young Olympian.  With this divine gift he luckily combined a harmless though stupid character.

With all these favorites to plant out in life, the Pope was naturally short of money.  He relied on two principal methods for replenishing his coffers.  One was the public sale of places about the Court at Rome, each of which had its well-known price. Bénéfices were disposed of with rather more reserve and privacy, for simony had not yet come to be considered venial.  Yet it was notorious that Sixtus held no privilege within his pontifical control on which he was not willing to raise money:  ’Our churches, priests, altars, sacred rites, our prayers, our heaven, our very God, are purchasable!’ exclaims a scholar of the time; while the Holy Father himself was wont to say, ’A pope needs only pen and ink to get what sum he wants.’ The second great financial expedient was the monopoly of corn throughout the Papal States.  Fictitious dearths were created; the value of wheat was raised to famine prices; good grain was sold out of the kingdom, and bad imported in exchange; while Sixtus forced his subjects to purchase from his stores, and made a profit by the hunger and disease of his emaciated provinces.  Ferdinand, the King of Naples, practiced the same system in the south.  It is worth while to hear what this bread was like from one of the men condemned to eat it:  ’The bread made from the corn of which I have spoken was black, stinking, and abominable; one was obliged to consume it, and from this cause sickness frequently took hold upon the State.’

                   Venalia nobis
      Templa, sacerdotes, altaria, sacra, coronae,
      Ignes, thura, preces, coelum est vénale, Deusque.

Soriano, the Venetian ambassador, ap.  Alberi i, , writes:  ’Conviene ricordarsi quello che soleva dire Sisto IV., che al papa bastava solo la mano con la penna e l’inchiostro, per avère quella somma che vuole.’  Cp.  Aen.  Sylv.  Picc. Ep. :  ’Nihil est quod absque argento Romana Curia dedat; nam et ipsae manus impositiones et Spiritus Sancti dona venduntur, nec peccatorum venia nisi nummatis impenditur.’

But Christendom beheld in Sixtus not merely the spectacle of a Pope who trafficked in the bodies of his subjects and the holy things of God, to squander basely gotten gold upon abandoned minions.  The peace of Italy was destroyed by desolating wars in the advancement of the same worthless favorites, Sixtus desired to annex Ferrara to the dominions of Girolamo Riario.  Nothing stood in his way but the House of Este, firmly planted for centuries, and connected by marriage or alliance with all the chief families of Italy.  The Pope, whose lust for blood and broils was only equaled by his avarice and his libertinism, rushed with wild delight into a project which involved the discord of the whole Peninsula.  He made treaties with Venice and unmade them, stirred up all the passions of the despots and set them together by the ears, called the Swiss mercenaries into Lombardy, and when finally, tired of fighting for his nephew, the Italian powers concluded the peace of Bagnolo, he died of rage in 1484.  The Pope did actually die of disappointed fury because peace had been restored to the country he had mangled for the sake of a favorite nephew.

The crime of Sixtus which most vividly paints the corruption of the Papacy in his age remains still to be told.  This was the sanction of the Pazzi Conjuration against Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici.  In the year 1477 the Medici, after excluding the merchant princes of the Pazzi family from the magistracy at Florence and otherwise annoying them, had driven Francesco de’ Pazzi in disgust to Rome.  Sixtus chose him for his banker in the place of the Medicean Company.  He became intimate with Girolamo Riario, and was well received at the Papal Court.  Political reasons at this moment made the Pope and his nephew anxious to destroy the Medici, who opposed Girolamo’s schemes of aggrandizement in Lombardy.  Private rancor induced Francesco de’ Pazzi to second their views and to stimulate their passion.  The three between them hatched a plot which was joined by Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa, another private foe of the Medici, and by Giambattista Montesecco, a captain well affected to the Count Girolamo.  The first design of the conspirators was to lure the brothers Medici to Rome, and to kill them there.  But the young men were too prudent to leave Florence.  Pazzi and Salviati then proceeded to Tuscany, hoping either at a banquet or in church to succeed in murdering their two enemies together.  Bernardo Bandini, a man of blood by trade, and Francesco de’ Pazzi were chosen to assassinate Giuliano.  Giambattista Montesecco undertook to dispose of Lorenzo. The 26th of April 1478 was finally fixed for the deed.  The place selected was the Duomo. The elevation of the Host at Mass-time was to be the signal.  Both the Medici arrived.  The murderers embraced Giuliano and discovered that this timid youth had left his secret coat of mail at home.  But a difficulty, which ought to have been foreseen, arose.  Monteseoco, cut-throat as he was, refused to stab Lorenzo before the high altar:  at the last moment some sense of the religio loci dashed his courage.  Two priests were then discovered who had no such silly scruples.  In the words of an old chronicle, ’Another man was found, who, being a priest, was more accustomed to the place and therefore less superstitious about its sanctity.’  This, however, spoiled all.  The priests, though more sacrilegious than the bravos, were less used to the trade of assassination.  They failed to strike home.  Giuliano, it is true, was stabbed to death by Bernardo Bandini and Francesco de’ Pazzi at the very moment of the elevation of Christ’s body.  But Lorenzo escaped with a slight flesh-wound.  The whole conspiracy collapsed.  In the retaliation which the infuriated people of Florence took upon the murderers, the Archbishop Salviati, together with Jacopo and Francesco de’ Pazzi and some others among the principal conspirators, were hung from the windows of the Palazzo Pubblico.  For this act of violence to the sacred person of a traitorous priest, Sixtus, who had upon his own conscience the crime of mingled treason, sacrilege, and murder, ex-communicated Florence, and carried on for years a savage war with the Republic.  It was not until 1481, when the descent of the Turks upon Otranto made him tremble for his own safety, that he chose to make peace with these enemies whom he had himself provoked and plotted against.

Another peculiarity in the Pontificate of Sixtus deserves special mention.  It was under his auspices in the year 1478 that the Inquisition was founded in Spain for the extermination of Jews, Moors, and Christians with a taint of heresy.  During the next four years 2,000 victims were burned in the province of Castile.  In Seville, a plot of ground, called the Quemadero, or place of burning ­a new Aceldama ­was set apart for executions; and here in one year 280 heretics were committed to the flames, while 79 were condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and 17,000 to lighter punishments of various kinds.  In Andalusia alone 5,000 houses were at once abandoned by their inhabitants.  Then followed in 1492 the celebrated edict against the Jews.  Before four months had expired the whole Jewish population were bidden to leave Spain, carrying with them nothing in the shape of gold or silver.  To convert their property into bills of exchange and movables was their only resource.  The market speedily was glutted:  a house was given for an ass, a vineyard for a suit of clothes.  Vainly did the persecuted race endeavor to purchase a remission of the sentence by the payment of an exorbitant ransom.  Torquemada appeared before Ferdinand and his consort, raising the crucifix, and crying:  ’Judas sold Christ for 30 pieces of silver; sell ye him for a larger sum, and account for the same to God!’ The exodus began.  Eight hundred thousand Jews left Spain ­some for the coast of Africa, where the Arabs ripped their bodies up in search for gems or gold they might have swallowed, and deflowered their women ­some for Portugal, where they bought the right to exist for a large head-tax, and where they saw their sons and daughters dragged away to baptism before their eyes.  Others were sold as slaves, or had to satisfy the rapacity of their persecutors with the bodies of their children.  Many flung themselves into the wells, and sought to bury despair in suicide.  The Mediterranean was covered with famine-stricken and plague-breeding fleets of exiles.  Putting into the Port of Genoa, they were refused leave to reside in the city, and died by hundreds in the harbor. Their festering bodies, bred a pestilence along the whole Italian sea-board, of which at Naples alone 20,000 persons died.  Flitting from shore to shore, these forlorn specters, the victims of bigotry and avarice, everywhere pillaged and everywhere rejected, dwindled away and disappeared.  Meanwhile the orthodox rejoiced.  Pico della Mirandola, who spent his life in reconciling Plato with the Cabala, finds nothing more to say than this:  ’The sufferings of the Jews, in which the glory of the Divine justice delighted, were so extreme as to fill us Christians with commiseration.’  With these words we may compare the following passage from Senarega:  ’The matter at first sight seemed praiseworthy, as regarding the honor done to our religion; yet it involved some amount of cruelty, if we look upon them, not as beasts, but as men, the handiwork of God.’  A critic of this century can only exclaim with stupefaction:  Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum! Thus Spain began to devour and depopulate herself.  The curse which fell upon the Jew and Moor descended next upon philosopher and patriot.  The very life of the nation, in its commerce, its industry, its free thought, its energy of character, was deliberately and steadily throttled.  And at no long interval of time the blight of Spain was destined to descend on Italy, paralyzing the fair movements of her manifold existence to a rigid uniformity, shrouding the light and color of her art and letters in the blackness of inquisitorial gloom.

Most singular is the attitude of a Sixtus ­indulging his lust and pride in the Vatican, adorning the chapel called after his name with masterpieces, rending Italy with broils for the aggrandizement of favorites, haggling over the prices to be paid for bishoprics, extorting money from starved provinces, plotting murder against his enemies, hounding the semi-barbarous Swiss mountaineers on Milan by indulgences, refusing aid to Venice in her championship of Christendom against the Turk ­yet meanwhile thinking to please God by holocausts of Moors, by myriads of famished Jews, conferring on a faithless and avaricious Ferdinand the title of Catholic, endeavoring to wipe out his sins by the blood of others, to burn his own vices in the autos da fe of Seville, and by the foundation of that diabolical engine the Inquisition to secure the fabric his own infamy was undermining. This is not the language of a Protestant denouncing the Pope.  With all respect for the Roman Church, that Alma Mater of the Middle Ages, that august and venerable monument of immemorial antiquity, we cannot close our eyes to the contradictions between practice and pretension upon which the History of the Italian Renaissance throws a light so lurid.

After Sixtus IV. came Innocent VIII.  His secular name was Giambattista Cibo.  The sacred College, terrified by the experience of Sixtus into thinking that another Pope, so reckless in his creation of scandalous Cardinals, might ruin Christendom, laid the most solemn obligations on the Pope elect.  Cibo took oaths on every relic, by every saint, to every member of the conclave, that he would maintain a certain order of appointment and a purity of election in the Church.  No Cardinal under the age of thirty, not more than one of the Pope’s own blood, none without the rank of Doctor of Theology or Law, were to be elected, and so forth.  But as soon as the tiara was on his head, he renounced them all as inconsistent with the rights and liberties of S. Peter’s Chair.  Engagements made by the man might always be broken by the Pope.  Of Innocent’s Pontificate little need be said.  He was the first Pope publicly to acknowledge his seven children, and to call them sons and daughters. Avarice, venality, sloth, and the ascendency of base favorites made his reign loathsome without the blaze and splendor of the scandals of his fiery predecessor.  In corruption he advanced a step even beyond Sixtus, by establishing a Bank at Rome for the sale of pardons. Each sin had its price, which might be paid at the convenience of the criminal:  150 ducats of the tax were poured into the Papal coffers; the surplus fell to Franceschetto, the Pope’s son.  This insignificant princeling, for whom the county of Anguillara was purchased, showed no ability or ambition for aught but getting and spending money.  He was small of stature and tame-spirited:  yet the destinies of an important house of Europe depended on him; for his father married him to Maddalena, the daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in 1487.  This led to Giovanni de’ Medici receiving a Cardinal’s hat at the age of thirteen, and thus the Medicean interest in Rome was founded; in the course of a few years the Medici gave two Popes to the Holy See, and by their ecclesiastical influence riveted the chains of Florence fast. The traffic which Innocent and Franceschetto carried on in theft and murder filled the Campagna with brigands and assassins. Travelers and pilgrims and ambassadors were stripped and murdered on their way to Rome; and in the city itself more than two hundred people were publicly assassinated with impunity during the last months of the Pope’s life.  He was gradually dozing off into his last long sleep, and Franceschetto was planning how to carry off his ducats.  While the Holy Father still hovered between life and death, a Jewish doctor proposed to reinvigorate him by the transfusion of young blood into his torpid veins.  Three boys throbbing with the elixir of early youth were sacrificed in vain.  Each boy, says Infessura, received one ducat.  He adds, not without grim humor:  ’Et paulo post mortui sunt; Judaeus quidem aufugit, et Papa non sanatus est.’  The epitaph of this poor old Pope reads like a rather clever but blasphemous witticism:  ’Ego autem in Innocentia mea ingressus sum.’

Meanwhile the Cardinals had not been idle.  The tedious leisure of Innocent’s long lethargy was employed by them in active simony.  Simony, it may be said in passing, gave the great Italian families a direct interest in the election of the richest and most paying candidate.  It served the turn of a man like Ascanio Sforza to fatten the golden goose that laid such eggs, before he killed it ­in other words, to take the bribes of Innocent and Alexander, while deferring for a future time his own election.  All the Cardinals, with the exception of Roderigo Borgia, were the creatures of Sixtus or of Innocent.  Having bought their hats with gold, they were now disposed to sell their votes to the highest bidder.  The Borgia was the richest, strongest, wisest, and most worldly of them all.  He ascertained exactly what the price of each suffrage would be, and laid his plans accordingly.  The Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan, would accept the lucrative post of Vice-Chancellor.  The Cardinal Orsini would be satisfied with the Borgia Palaces at Rome and the Castles of Monticello and Saviano.  The Cardinal Colonna had a mind for the Abbey of Subbiaco with its fortresses.  The Cardinal of S. Angelo preferred the comfortable Bishopric of Porto with its palace stocked with choice wines.  The Cardinal of Parma would take Nepi.  The Cardinal of Genoa was bribable with the Church of S. Maria in Via Lata.  Less influential members of the Conclave sold themselves for gold; to meet their demands the Borgia sent Ascanio Sforza four mules laden with coin in open day, requesting him to distribute it in proper portions to the voters.  The fiery Giuliano della Rovere remained implacable and obdurate.  In the Borgia his vehement temperament perceived a fit antagonist.  The armor which he donned in their first encounters he never doffed, but waged fierce war with the whole brood of Borgias at Ostia, at the French Court, in Romagna, wherever and whenever he found opportunity. He and five other Cardinals ­among them his cousin Raphael Riario ­refused to sell their votes.  But Roderigo Borgia, having corrupted the rest of the college, assumed the mantle of S. Peter in 1492, with the ever-memorable title of Alexander VI.

Rome rejoiced.  The Holy City attired herself in festival array, exhibiting on every flag and balcony the Bull of the house of Borgia, and crying like the Egyptians when they found Apis: ­

  Vive diu Bos!  Vive diu Bos!  Borgia vive! 
    Vivit Alexander:  Roma beata manet.

In truth there was nothing to convince the Romans of the coming woe, or to raise suspicion that a Pope had been elected who would deserve the execration of succeeding centuries.  In Roderigo Borgia the people only saw, as yet, a man accomplished at all points, of handsome person, royal carriage, majestic presence, affable address.  He was a brilliant orator, a passionate lover, a demigod of court pageantry and ecclesiastic parade ­qualities which, though they do not suit our notions of a churchman, imposed upon the taste of the Renaissance.  As he rode in triumph toward the Lateran, voices were loud in his praise.  ’He sits upon a snow-white horse,’ writes one of the humanists of the century, ’with serene forehead, with commanding dignity.  As he distributes his blessing to the crowd, all eyes are fixed upon him, and all hearts rejoice.  How admirable is the mild composure of his mien! how noble his countenance! his glance how free!  His stature and carriage, his beauty and the full health of his body, how they enhance the reverence which he inspires!’ Another panegyrist describes his ’broad forehead, kingly brow, free countenance full of majesty,’ adding that ’the heroic beauty of his whole body’ was given him by nature in order that he might ’adorn the seat of the Apostles with his divine form in the place of God.’  How little in the early days of his Pontificate the Borgia resembled that Alexander with whom the legend of his subsequent life has familiarized our fancy, may be gathered from the following account: ’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.’  These, we must remember, are the testimonies of men of letters, imbued with the Pagan sentiments of the fifteenth century, and rejoicing in the advent of a Pope who would, they hoped, make Rome the capital of luxury and license.  Therefore they require to be received with caution.  Yet there is no reason to suppose that the majority of the Italians regarded the elevation of the Borgia with peculiar horror.  As a Cardinal he had given proof of his ability, but shown no signs of force or cruelty or fraud.  Nor were his morals worse than those of his colleagues.  If he was the father of several children, so was Giuliano della Rovere, and so had been Pope Innocent before him.  This mattered but little in an age when the Primate of Christendom had come to be regarded as a secular potentate, less fortunate than other princes inasmuch as his rule was not hereditary, but more fortunate in so far as he could wield the thunders and dispense the privileges of the Church.  A few men of discernment knew what had been done, and shuddered.  ’The king of Naples,’ says Guicciardini, ’though he dissembled his grief, told the queen, his wife, with tears ­tears which he was wont to check even at the death of his own sons ­that a Pope had been made who would prove most pestilent to the whole Christian commonwealth.’  The young Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, again, showed his discernment of the situation by whispering in the Conclave to his kinsman Cibo:  ’We are in the wolf’s jaws; he will gulp us down, unless we make our flight good.’  Besides, there was in Italy a widely spread repugnance to the Spanish intruders ­Marrani, or renegade Moors, as they were properly called ­who crowded the Vatican and threatened to possess the land of their adoption like conquerors.  ’Ten Papacies would not suffice to satiate the greed of all this kindred,’ wrote Giannandrea Boccaccio to the Duke of Ferrara in 1492:  and events proved that these apprehensions were justified; for during the Pontificate of Alexander eighteen Spanish Cardinals were created, five of whom belonged to the house of the Borgias.

It is certain, however, that the profound horror with which the name of Alexander VI. strikes a modern ear was not felt among the Italians at the time of his election.  The sentiment of hatred with which he was afterwards regarded arose partly from the crimes by which his Pontificate was rendered infamous, partly from the fear which his son Cesare inspired, and partly from the mysteries of his private life, which revolted even the corrupt conscience of the sixteenth century.  This sentiment of hatred had grown to universal execration at the date of his death.  In course of time, when the attention of the Northern nations had been directed to the iniquities of Rome, and when the glaring discrepancy between Alexander’s pretension as a Pope and his conduct as a man had been apprehended, it inspired a legend which, like all legends, distorts the facts which it reflects.

Alexander was, in truth, a man eminently fitted to close an old age and to inaugurate a new, to demonstrate the paradoxical situation of the Popes by the inexorable logic of his practical impiety, and to fuse two conflicting world-forces in the cynicism of supreme corruption.  The Emperors of the Julian house had exhibited the extreme of sensual insolence in their autocracy.  What they desired of strange and sweet and terrible in the forbidden fruits of lust, they had enjoyed.  The Popes of the Middle Ages ­Hildebrand and Boniface ­had displayed the extreme of spiritual insolence in their theocracy.  What they desired of tyrannous and forceful in the exercise of an usurped despotism over souls, they had enjoyed.  The Borgia combined both impulses toward the illimitable.  To describe him as the Genius of Evil, whose sensualities, as unrestrained as Nero’s, were relieved against the background of flame and smoke which Christianity had raised for fleshly sins, is justifiable.  His spiritual tyranny, that arrogated Jus, by right of which he claimed the hemisphere revealed by Christopher Columbus, and imposed upon the press of Europe the censure of the Church of Rome, was rendered ten times monstrous by the glare reflected on it from the unquenched furnace of a godless life.  The universal conscience of Christianity is revolted by those unnamable delights, orgies of blood and festivals of lust, which were enjoyed in the plenitude of his green and vigorous old age by this versatile diplomatist and subtle priest, who controlled the councils of kings, and who chanted the sacramental service for a listening world on Easter Day in Rome.  Rome has never been small or weak or mediocre.  And now in the Pontificate of Alexander ’that memorable scene’ presented to the nations of the modern world a pageant of Antichrist and Antiphysis ­the negation of the Gospel and of nature; a glaring spectacle of discord between humanity as it aspires to be at its best, and humanity as it is at its worst; a tragi-comedy composed by some infernal Aristophanes, in which the servant of servants, the anointed of the Lord, the lieutenant upon earth of Christ, played the chief part.  It may be objected that this is the language not of history but of the legend.  I reply that there are occasions when the legend has caught the spirit of the truth.

Alexander was a stronger and a firmer man than his immediate predecessors.  ‘He combined,’ says Guicciardini, ’craft with singular sagacity, a sound judgment with extraordinary powers of persuasion; and to all the grave affairs of life he applied ability and pains beyond belief.’ His first care was to reduce Rome to order.  The old factions of Colonna and Orsini, which Sixtus had scotched, but which had raised their heads again during the dotage of Innocent, were destroyed in his Pontificate.  In this way, as Machiavelli observed, he laid the real basis for the temporal power of the Papacy.  Alexander, indeed, as a sovereign, achieved for the Papal See what Louis XI. had done for the throne of France, and made Rome on its small scale follow the type of the large European monarchies.  The faithlessness and perjuries of the Pope, ’who never did aught else but deceive, nor ever thought of anything but this, and always found occasion for his frauds,’ when combined with his logical intellect and persuasive eloquence, made him a redoubtable antagonist.  All considerations of religion and morality were subordinated by him with strict impartiality to policy:  and his policy he restrained to two objects ­the advancement of his family, and the consolidation of the temporal power.  These were narrow aims for the ambition of a potentate who with one stroke of his pen pretended to confer the new-found world on Spain.  Yet they taxed his whole strength, and drove him to the perpetration of enormous crimes.

Former Pontiffs had raised money by the sale of bénéfices and indulgences:  this, of course, Alexander also practiced ­to such an extent, indeed, that an epigram gained currency:  ’Alexander sells the keys, the altars, Christ.  Well, he bought them; so he has a right to sell them.’  But he went further and took lessons from Tiberius.  Having sold the scarlet to the highest bidder, he used to feed his prelate with rich bénéfices.  When he had fattened him sufficiently, he poisoned him, laid hands upon his hoards, and recommenced the game.  Paolo Capello, the Venetian Ambassador, wrote in the year 1500:  ’Every night they find in Rome four or five murdered men, Bishops and Prelates and so forth.’  Panvinius mentions three Cardinals who were known to have been poisoned by the Pope; and to their names may be added those of the Cardinals of Capua and of Verona. To be a prince of the Church was dangerous in those days; and if the Borgia had not at last poisoned himself by mistake, he must in the long-run have had to pay people to accept so perilous a privilege.  His traffic in Church dignities was carried on upon a grand scale:  twelve Cardinals’ hats, for example, were put to auction in a single day in 1500. This was when he wished to pack the Conclave with votes in favor of the cession of Romagna to Cesare Borgia, as well as to replenish his exhausted coffers.  Forty-three Cardinals were created by him in eleven promotions:  each of these was worth on an average 10,000 florins; while the price paid by Francesco Soderini amounted to 20,000 and that paid by Domenico Grimani reached the sum of 30,000.

Former Popes had preached crusades against the Turk, languidly or energetically according as the coasts of Italy were threatened.  Alexander frequently invited Bajazet to enter Europe and relieve him of the princes who opposed his intrigues in the favor of his children.  The fraternal feeling which subsisted between the Pope and the Sultan was to some extent dependent on the fate of Prince Djem, a brother of Bajazet and son of the conqueror of Constantinople, who had fled for protection to the Christian powers, and whom the Pope kept prisoner, receiving 40,000 ducats yearly from the Porte for his jail fee.  Innocent VIII. had been the first to snare this lucrative guest in 1489.  The Lance of Longinus was sent him as a token of the Sultan’s gratitude, and Innocent, who built an altar for the relique, caused his own tomb to be raised close by.  His effigy in bronze by Pollajuolo still carries in its hand this blood-gift from the infidel to the High Priest of Christendom.

Djem meanwhile remained in Rome, and held his Moslem Court side by side with the Pontiff in the Vatican.  Dispatches are extant in which Alexander and Bajazet exchange terms of the warmest friendship, the Turk imploring his Greatness ­so he addressed the Pope ­to put an end to the unlucky Djem, and promising as the price of this assassination a sum of 300,000 ducats and the tunic worn by Christ, presumably that very seamless coat over which the soldiers of Calvary had cast their dice. The money and the relique arrived in Italy and were intercepted by the partisans of Giuliano della Rovere.  Alexander, before the bargain with the Sultan had been concluded by the murder of Djem, was forced to hand him over to the French king.  But the unlucky Turk carried in his constitution the slow poison of the Borgias, and died in Charles’s camp between Rome and Naples.  Whatever crimes may be condoned in Alexander, it is difficult to extenuate this traffic with the Turks.  By his appeal from the powers of Europe to the Sultan, at a time when the peril to the Western world was still most serious, he stands attained for high treason against Christendom, of which he professed to be the chief; against civilization, which the Church pretended to protect; against Christ, whose vicar he presumed to style himself.

Like Sixtus, Alexander combined this deadness to the spirit and the interests of Christianity with zeal for dogma.  He never flinched in formal orthodoxy, and the measures which he took for riveting the chains of superstition on the people were calculated with the military firmness of a Napoleon.  It was he who established the censure of the press, by which printers were obliged, under pain of excommunication, to submit the books they issued to the control of the Archbishops and their delegates.  The Brief of June 1, 1501, which contains this order, may be reasonably said to have retarded civilization, at least in Italy and Spain.

Carnal sensuality was the besetting vice of this Pope throughout his life. This, together with his almost insane weakness for his children, whereby he became a slave to the terrible Cesare, caused all the crimes which he committed.  At the same time, though sensual, Alexander was not gluttonous.  Boccaccio, the Ferrarese Ambassador, remarks:  ’The Pope eats only of one dish.  It is, therefore, disagreeable to have to dine with him.’  In this respect he may be favorably contrasted with the Roman prelates of the age of Leo.  His relations to Vannozza Catanei, the titular wife first of Giorgio de Croce, and then of Carlo Canale, and to Giulia Farnese, surnamed La Bella, the titular wife of Orsino Orsini, were open and acknowledged.  These two sultanas ruled him during the greater portion of his career, conniving meanwhile at the harem, which, after truly Oriental fashion, he maintained in the Vatican.  An incident which happened during the French invasion of 1494 brings the domestic circumstances of a Pope of the Renaissance vividly before us.  Monseigneur d’Allegre caught the ladies Giulia and Girolama Farnese, together with the lady Adriana de Mila, who was employed as their duenna, near Capodimonte, on November 29, and carried them to Montefiascone.  The sum fixed for their ransom was 3,000 ducats.  This the Pope paid, and on December 1 they were released.  Alexander met them outside Rome, attired like a layman in a black jerkin trimmed with gold brocade, and fastened round his waist by a Spanish girdle, from which hung his dagger.  Lodovico Sforza, when he heard what had happened, remarked that it was weak to release these ladies, who were ‘the very eyes and heart’ of his Holiness, for so small a ransom ­if 50,000 ducats had been demanded, they would have been paid.  This and a few similar jokes, uttered at the Pope’s expense, make us understand to what extent the Italians were accustomed to regard their high priest as a secular prince.  Even the pageant of Alexander seated in S. Peter’s, with his daughter Lucrezia on one side of his throne and his daughter-in-law Sancia upon the other, moved no moral indignation; nor were the Romans astonished when Lucrezia was appointed Governor of Spoleto, and plenipotentiary Regent of the Vatican in her father’s absence.  These scandals, however, created a very different impression in the north, and prepared the way for the Reformation.

The nepotism of Sixtus was like water to the strong wine of Alexander’s paternal ambition.  The passion of paternity, exaggerated beyond the bounds of natural affection, and scandalous in a Roman Pontiff, was the main motive of the Borgia’s action.  Of his children by Vannozza, he caused the eldest son to be created Duke of Gandia; the youngest he married to Donna Sancia, a daughter of Alfonso of Aragon, by whom the boy was honored with the Dukedom of Squillace.  Cesare, the second of this family, was appointed Bishop of Valentia, and Cardinal.  The Dukedoms of Camerino and Nepi were given to another John, whom Alexander first declared to be his grandson through Cesare, and afterwards acknowledged as his son.  This John may possibly have been Lucrezia’s child.  The Dukedom of Sermoneta, wrenched for a moment from the hands of the Gaetani family, who still own it, was conferred upon Lucrezia’s son, Roderigo.  Lucrezia, the only daughter of Alexander by Vannozza, took three husbands in succession, after having been formally betrothed to two Spanish nobles, Don Cherubino Juan de Centelles, and Don Gasparo da Procida, son of the Count of Aversa.  These contracts, made before her father became Pope, were annulled as not magnificent enough for the Pontiff’s daughter.  In 1492 she was married to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro.  But in 1497 the pretensions of the Borgias had outgrown this alliance, and their public policy was inclining to relations with the Southern Courts of Italy.  Accordingly she was divorced and given to Alfonso, Prince of Biseglia, a natural son of the King of Naples.  When this man’s father lost his crown, the Borgias, not caring to be connected with an ex-royal family, caused Alfonso to be stabbed on the steps of S. Peter’s in 1501; and while he lingered between life and death, they had him strangled in his sick-bed, by Michellozzo, Cesare’s assassin in chief.  Finally Lucrezia was wedded to Alfonso, crown-prince of Ferrara, in 1502. The proud heir of the Este dynasty was forced by policy, against his inclination, to take to his board and bed a Pope’s bastard, twice divorced, once severed from her husband by murder, and soiled, whether justly or not, by atrocious rumors, to which her father’s and her brother’s conduct gave but too much color.  She proved a model princess after all, and died at last in childbirth, after having been praised by Ariosto as a second Lucrece, brighter for her virtues than the star of regal Rome.

History has at last done justice to the memory of this woman, whose long yellow hair was so beautiful, and whose character was so colorless.  The legend which made her a poison-brewing Maenad has been proved a lie ­but only at the expense of the whole society in which she lived.  The simple northern folk, familiar with the tales of Chriemhild, Brynhild, and Gudrun, who helped to forge this legend, could not understand that a woman should be irresponsible for all the crimes and scandals perpetrated in her name.  Yet it seems now clear enough that not hers, but her father’s and her brother’s, were the atrocities which made her married life in Rome a byword.  She sat and smiled through all the tempests which tossed her to and fro, until she found at last a fair port in the Duchy of Ferrara.  Nursed in the corruption of Papal Rome, which Lorenzo de’ Medici described to his son Giovanni as ’a sink of all the vices,’ consorting habitually with her father’s concubines, and conscious that her own mother had been married for show to two successive husbands, it is not possible that Lucrezia ruled her conduct at any time with propriety.  It is even probable that the darkest tales about her are true.  The Lord of Pesaro, we must remember, told his kinsman, the Duke of Milan, that the assigned reasons for his divorce were false, and that the fact was what can scarcely be recorded. Still, there is no ground for supposing that, in the matter of her first husband’s divorce and the second’s murder, she was more than a passive agent in the hands of Alexander and Cesare.  The pleasure-loving, careless woman of the Renaissance is very different from the Medea of Victor Hugo’s romance; and what remains most revolting to the modern conscience in her conduct is complacent acquiescence in scenes of debauchery devised for her amusement. Instead of viewing her with dread as a potent and malignant witch, we have to regard her with contempt as a feeble woman, soiled with sensual foulness from the cradle.  It is also due to truth to remember that at Ferrara she won the esteem of a husband who had married her unwillingly, attached the whole state to her by her sweetness of temper, and received the panegyrics of the two Strozzi, Bembo, Ariosto, Aldo Manuzio, and many other men of note.  Foreigners who saw her surrounded by her brilliant Court exclaimed, like the French biographer of Bayard:  ’J’ose bien dire que, de son temps, ni beau coup avant, il ne s’est point trouve de plus triomphante princesse; car elle était belle, bonne douce, et courtoise a toutes gens.’

Yet even at Ferrara tragedies which might remind her of the Vatican continued to surround her path.  Alfonso, rude in manners and devoted to gun-foundry, interfered but little with the life she led among the wits and scholars who surrounded her.  One day, however, in 1508, the poet Ercole Strozzi, who had sung her praises, was found dead, wrapped in his mantle, and pierced with two-and-twenty wounds.  No judicial inquiry into this murder was made.  Rumor credited both Alfonso and Lucrezia with the deed ­Alfonso, because he might be jealous of his wife ­Lucrezia, because her poet had recently married Barbara Torelli.  Two years earlier another dark crime at Ferrara brought the name of Borgia before the public.  One of Lucrezia’s ladies, Angela Borgia, was courted by both Giulio d’ Este and the Cardinal Ippolito.  The girl praised the eyes of Giulio in the hearing of the Cardinal, who forthwith hired assassins to mutilate his brother’s face.  Giulio escaped from their hands with the loss of one of his eyes, and sought justice from the Duke against the Cardinal in vain.  Thereupon he vowed to be revenged on both Ippolito and Alfonso.  His plot was to murder them, and to place Ferdinand of Este on the throne.  The treason was discovered; the conspirators appeared before Alfonso:  he rushed upon Ferdinand, and with his dagger stabbed him in the face.  Both Giulio and Ferdinand were thrown into the dungeons of the palace at Ferrara, where they languished for years, while the Duke and Lucrezia enjoyed themselves in its spacious halls and su ny loggie among their courtiers.  Ferdinand died in prison, aged sixty-three, in 1540.  Giulio was released in 1559 and died, aged eighty-three, in 1561.  These facts deserve to be recorded in connection with Lucrezia’s married life at Ferrara, lest we should pay too much attention to the flatteries of Ariosto.  At the same time her history as Duchess consists, for the most part, in the record of the birth of children.  Like her mother Vannozza, she gave herself, in the decline of life, to works of charity and mercy.  After this fashion the bright and baleful dames of the Renaissance saved their souls.

But to return to the domestic history of Alexander.  The murder of the Duke of Gandia brings the whole Borgia family upon the scene.  It is related with great circumstantiality and with surprising sangfroid by Burchard, the Pope’s Master of the Ceremonies.  The Duke with his brother Cesare, then Cardinal Valentino, supped one night at the house of their mother Vannozza.  On their way home the Duke said that he should visit a lady of their acquaintance.  He parted from Cesare and was never seen again alive.  When the news of his disappearance spread abroad, a boatman of the Tiber deposed to having watched the body of a man thrown into the river on the night of the Duke’s death, the 14th of June; he had not thought it worth while to report this fact, for he had seen ’a hundred bodies in his day thrown into the water at the said spot, and no questions asked about them afterwards.’  The Pope had the Tiber dragged for some hours, while the wits of Rome made epigrams upon this true successor of S. Peter, this new fisher of men.  At last the body of the Duke of Gandia was hauled up:  nine wounds, one in the throat, the others in the head and legs and trunk, were found upon the corpse.  From the evidence accumulated on the subject of the murder it appeared that Cesare had planned it; whether, as some have supposed, out of a jealousy of his brother too dreadful to describe, or, as is more probable, because he wished to take the first place in the Borgia family, we do not know exactly.  The Pontiff in his rage and grief was like a wild beast driven to bay.  He shut himself up in a private room, refused food, and howled with so terrible a voice that it was heard in the streets beyond his palace.  When he rose up from this agony, remorse seemed to have struck him.  He assembled a Conclave of the Cardinals, wept before them, rent his robes, confessed his sins, and instituted a commission for the reform of the abuses he had sanctioned in the Church.  But the storm of anguish spent its strength at last.  A visit from Vannozza, the mother of his children, wrought a sudden change from fury to reconcilement.  What passed between them is not known for certain; Vannozza is supposed, however, to have pointed out, what was indisputably true, that Cesare was more fitted to support the dignity of the family by his abilities than had been the weak and amiable Duke of Gandia.  The miserable father rose from the earth, dried his eyes, took food, put from him his remorse, and forgot together with his grief for Absalom the reforms which he had promised for the Church.

Henceforth he devoted himself with sustained energy to building up the fortunes of Cesare, whom he released from all ecclesiastical obligations, and to whose service he seemed bound by some mysterious power.  Nor did he even resent the savageness and cruelty which this young hell-cat vented in his presence on the persons of his favorites.  At one time Cesare stabbed Perotto, the Pope’s minion, with his own hand, when the youth had taken refuge in Alexander’s arms:  the blood spirted out upon the priestly mantle, and the young man died there. At another time he employed the same diabolical temper for the delectation of his father.  He turned out some prisoners sentenced to death in a court-yard of the palace, arrayed himself in fantastic clothes, and amused the papal party by shooting the unlucky criminals.  They ran round and round the court crouching and doubling to avoid his arrows.  He showed his skill by hitting each where he thought fit.  The Pope and Lucrezia looked on applaudingly.  Other scenes, not of bloodshed, but of groveling sensuality, devised for the entertainment of his father and his sister, though described by the dry pen of Burchard, can scarcely be transferred to these pages.

The history of Cesare’s attempt to found a principality belongs properly to another chapter. But the assistance rendered by his father is essential to the biography of Alexander.  The vision of an Italian sovereignty which Charles of Anjou, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, and Galeazzo Maria Sforza had successively entertained, now fascinated the imagination of the Borgias.  Having resolved to make Cesare a prince, Alexander allied himself with Louis XII. of France, promising to annul his first marriage and to sanction his nuptials with Ann of Brittany, if he would undertake the advancement of his son.  This bribe induced Louis to create Cesare Duke of Valence and to confer on him the hand of Charlotte of Navarre.  He also entered Italy and with his arms enabled Cesare to subdue Romagna.  The system adopted by Alexander and his son in their conquests was a simple one.  They took the capitals and murdered the princes.  Thus Cesare strangled the Varani at Camerino in 1502, and the Vitelli and Orsini at Sinigaglia in the same year:  by his means the Marcscotti had been massacred wholesale in Bologna; Pesaro, Rimini, and Forlì had been treated in like manner; and after the capture of Faenpza in 1501, the two young Manfredi had been sent to Rome; where they were exposed to the worst insults, drowned or strangled. A system of equal simplicity kept their policy alive in foreign Courts.  The Bishop of Cette in France was poisoned for hinting at a secret of Cesare’s (1498); the Cardinal d’Amboise was bribed to maintain the credit of the Borgias with Louis XII.; the offer of a red hat to Briconnet saved Alexander from a general council in 1494.  The historical interest of Alexander’s method consists of its deliberate adaptation of all the means in his power to one end ­the elevation of his family.  His spiritual authority, the wealth of the Church, the honors of the Holy College, the arts of an assassin, the diplomacy of a despot, were all devoted systematically and openly to the purpose in view.  Whatever could be done to weaken Italy by foreign invasions and internal discords, so as to render it a prey for his poisonous son, he attempted.  When Louis XII. made his infamous alliance with Ferdinand the Catholic for the spoliation of the house of Aragon in Naples, the Pope gladly gave it his sanction.  The two kings quarreled over their prey:  then Alexander fomented their discord in order that Cesare might have an opportunity of carrying on his operations in Tuscany unchecked.  Patriotism in his breast, whether the patriotism of a born Spaniard or the patriotism of an Italian potentate, was as dead as Christianity.  To make profit for the house of Borgia by fraud, sacrilege, and the dismemberment of nations, was the Papal policy.

It is wearisome to continue to the end the catalogue of his misdoings.  We are relieved when at last the final crash arrives.  The two Borgias, so runs the legend of their downfall, invited themselves to dine with the Cardinal Adriano of Corneto in a vineyard of the Vatican belonging to their host.  Thither by the hands of Alexander’s butler they previously conveyed some poisoned wine.  By mistake, or by the contrivance of the Cardinal, who may have bribed this trusted agent, they drank the death-cup mingled for their victim.  Nearly all contemporary Italian annalists, including Guicciardini, Paolo Giovio, and Sanudo, gave currency to this version of the tragedy, which became the common property of historians, novelists, and moralists. Yet Burchard who was on the spot, recorded in his diary that both father and son were attacked by a malignant fever; and Giustiniani wrote to his masters in Venice that the Pope’s physician ascribed his illness to apoplexy. The season was remarkably unhealthy, and deaths from fever had been frequent.  A circular letter to the German Princes, written probably by the Cardinal of Gurk, and dated August 31, 1503, distinctly mentioned fever as the cause of the Pope’s sudden decease, ex hoc seculo horrenda febrium incensione absorptum. Machiavelli, again, who conversed with Cesare Borgia about this turning-point in his career, gave no hint of poison, but spoke only of son and father being simultaneously prostrated by disease.

At this distance of time, and without further details of evidence, we are unable to decide whether Alexander’s death was natural, or whether the singularly circumstantial and commonly accepted story of the poisoned wine contained the truth.  On the one side, in favor of the hypothesis of fever, we have Burchard’s testimony, which does not, however, exactly agree with Giustiniani’s, who reported apoplexy to the Venetian senate as the cause of death, and whose report, even at Venice, was rejected by Sanudo for the hypothesis of poison.  On the other side, we have the consent of all contemporary historians, with the single and, it must be allowed, remarkable exception of Machiavelli.  Paolo Giovio goes even so far as to assert that the Cardinal Corneto told him he had narrowly escaped from the effects of antidotes taken in his extreme terror to counteract the possibility of poison.

Whatever may have been the proximate cause of his sickness, Alexander died, a black and swollen mass, hideous to contemplate, after a sharp struggle with the venom he had absorbed. ‘All Rome,’ says Guicciardini, ’ran with indescribable gladness to view the corpse.  Men could not satiate their eyes with feeding on the carcass of a serpent who, by his unbounded ambition and pestiferous perfidy, by every demonstration of horrible cruelty, monstrous lust, and unheard-of avarice, selling without distinction things sacred and profane, had filled the world with venom.’  Cesare languished for some days on a sick bed; but in the end, by the aid of a powerful constitution, he recovered, to find his claws cut and his plans in irretrievable confusion.  ‘The state of the Duke of Valence,’ says Filippo Nerli, ‘vanished even as smoke in air, or foam upon the water.’

The moral sense of the Italians expressed itself after Alexander’s death in the legend of a devil, who had carried off his soul.  Burchard, Giustiniani, Sanudo, and others mention this incident with apparent belief.  But a letter from the Marquis of Mantua to his wife, dated September 22, 1503, gives the fullest particulars:  ’In his sickness the Pope talked in such a way that those who did not know what was in his mind thought him wandering, though he spoke with great feeling, and his words were:  I will come; it is but right; wait yet a little while.  Those who were privy to his secret thought, explained that, after the death of Innocent, while the Conclave was sitting, he bargained with the devil for the Papacy at the price of his soul; and among the agreements was this, that he should hold the See twelve years, which he did, with the addition of four days; and some attest they saw seven devils in the room at the moment that he breathed his last.’  Mere old wives’ tales; yet they mark the point to which the credit of the Borgia had fallen, even in Italy, since the hour when the humanists had praised his godlike carriage and heroic mien upon the day of his election.

Thus, overreaching themselves, ended this pair of villains ­the most notable adventurers who ever played their part upon the stage of the great world.  The fruit of so many crimes and such persistent effort was reaped by their enemy, Giuliano della Rovere, for whose benefit the nobles of the Roman state and the despots of Romagna had been extirpated. Alexander had proved the old order of Catholicity to be untenable.  The Reformation was imperiously demanded.  His very vices spurred the spirit of humanity to freedom.  Before a saintly Pontiff the new age might still have trembled in superstitious reverence.  The Borgia to all logical intellects rendered the pretensions of a Pope to sway the souls of men ridiculous.  This is an excuse for dwelling so long upon the spectacle of his enormities.  Better than any other series of facts, they illustrate, not only the corruption of society, and the separation between morality and religion in Italy, but also the absurdity of that Church policy which in the age of the Renaissance confined the action of the head of Christendom to the narrow interests of a brood of parvenus and bastards.

Of Pius III., who reigned for a few days after Alexander, no account need be taken.  Giuliano della Rovere was made Pope in 1503.  Whatever opinion may be formed of him considered as the high-priest of the Christian faith, there can be no doubt that Julius II. was one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance, and that his name, instead of that of Leo X., should by right be given to the golden age of letters and of arts in Rome.  He stamped the century with the impress of a powerful personality.  It is to him we owe the most splendid of Michael Angelo’s and Raphael’s masterpieces.  The Basilica of S. Peter’s, that materialized idea, which remains to symbolize the transition from the Church of the Middle Ages to the modern semi-secular supremacy of Papal Rome, was his thought.  No nepotism, no loathsome sensuality, no flagrant violation of ecclesiastical justice, stain his pontificate.  His one purpose was to secure and extend the temporal authority of the Popes; and this he achieved by curbing the ambition of the Venetians, who threatened to absorb Romagna, by reducing Perugia and Bologna to the Papal sway, by annexing Parma and Piacenza, and by entering on the heritage bequeathed to him by Cesare Borgia.  At his death he transmitted to his successors the largest and most solid sovereignty in Italy.  But restless, turbid, never happy unless fighting, Julius drowned the peninsula in blood.  He has been called a patriot, because from time to time he raised the cry of driving the barbarians from Italy:  it must, however, be remembered that it was he, while still Cardinal di San Pietro in Vincoli, who finally moved Charles VIII. from Lyons; it was he who stirred up the League of Cambray against Venice, and who invited the Swiss mercenaries into Lombardy; in each case adding the weight of the Papal authority to the forces which were enslaving his country.  Julius, again, has been variously represented as the saviour of the Papacy, and as the curse of Italy. He was emphatically both.  In those days of national anarchy it was perhaps impossible for Julius to magnify the Church except at the expense of the nation, and to achieve the purpose of his life without inflicting the scourge of foreign war upon his countrymen.  The powers of Europe had outgrown the Papal discipline.  Italian questions were being decided in the cabinets of Louis, Maximilian, and Ferdinand.  Instead of controlling the arbiters of Italy, a Pope could only play off one against another.

Leo X. succeeded Julius in 1513, to the great relief of the Romans, wearied with the continual warfare of the old Pontífice terribile.  In the gorgeous pageant of his triumphal procession to the Lateran, the streets were decked with arches, emblems, and inscriptions.  Among these may be noticed the couplet emblazoned by the banker Agostino Chigi before his palace: 

  Olim habuit Cypris sua témpora; témpora Mavors
    Olim habuit; sua nunc témpora Pallas habet.

’Venus ruled here with Alexander; Mars with Julius; now Pallas enters on her reign with Leo.’  To this epigram the goldsmith Antonio di San Marco answered with one pithy line: 

  Mars fuit; est Pallas; Cypria semper ero: 

‘Mars reigned; Pallas reigns; Venus’ own I shall always be.’

This first Pope of the house of Medici enjoyed at Rome the fame of his father Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence.  Extolled as an Augustus in his lifetime, he has given his name to what is called the golden age of Italian culture.  As a man, he was well qualified to represent the neo-pagan freedom of the Renaissance.  Saturated with the spirit of his period, he had no sympathy with religious earnestness, no conception of moral elevation, no aim beyond a superficial polish of the understanding and the taste.  Good Latinity seemed to him of more importance than true doctrine:  Jupiter sounded better in a sermon than Jéhovah; the immortality of the soul was an open topic for debate.  At the same time he was extravagantly munificent to men of culture, and hearty in his zeal for the diffusion of liberal knowledge.  But what was reasonable in the man was ridiculous in the pontiff.  There remained an irreconcilable incongruity between his profession of the Primacy of Christianity and his easy epicurean philosophy.

Leo, like all the Medici after the first Cosimo, was a bad financier.  His reckless expenditure contributed in no small measure to the corruption of Rome and to the ruin of the Latin Church, while it won the praises of the literary world.  Julius, who had exercised rigid economy, left 700,000 ducats in the coffers of S. Angelo.  The very jewels of Leo’s tiara were pledged to pay his debts, when he died suddenly in 1521.  During the heyday of his splendor he spent 8,000 ducats monthly on presents to his favorites and on his play-debts.  His table, which was open to all the poets, singers, scholars, and buffoons of Rome, cost half the revenues of Romagna and the March.  He founded the knightly Order of S. Peter to replenish his treasury, and turned the conspiracy of the Cardinal Petrucci against his life to such good account ­extorting from the Cardinal Riario a fine of 5,000 ducats, and from the Cardinals Soderini and Hadrian the sum of 125,000 ­that Von Hutten was almost justified in treating the whole of that dark business as a mere financial speculation.  The creation of thirty-nine Cardinals in 1517 brought him in above 500,000 ducats.  Yet, in spite of these expedients for getting gold, the bankers of Rome were half ruined when he died.  The Bini had lent him 200,000 ducats; the Gaddi, 32,000; the Ricasoli, 10,000; the Cardinal Salviati claimed a debt of 80,000; the Cardinals Santi Quattro and Armellini, each 150,000. These figures are only interesting when we remember that the mountains of gold which they denote were squandered in aesthetic sensuality.

When the Pope was made, he said to Giuliano (Duke of Nemours):  ’Let us enjoy the Papacy since God has given it us ­godiamoci il Papato, poiché Dio ce l’ ha dato.’ It was in this spirit that Leo administered the Holy See.  The keynote which he struck dominated the whole society of Rome.  At Agostine Chigi’s banquets, prelates of the Church and Apostolic secretaries sat side by side with beautiful Imperias and smooth-cheeked singing-boys; fishes from Byzantium and ragoûts of parrots’ tongues were served on golden platters, which the guests threw from the open windows into the Tiber.  Masques and balls, comedies and carnival processions filled the streets and squares and palaces of the Eternal City with a mimicry of pagan festivals, while art went hand in hand with luxury.  It seemed as though Bacchus and Pallas and Priapus would be reinstated in their old realm, and yet Rome had not ceased to call herself Christian.  The hoarse rhetoric of friars in the Coliseum, and the drone of pifferari from the Ara Coeli, mingled with the Latin declamations of the Capitol and the twang of lute-strings in the Vatican.  Meanwhile, amid crowds of Cardinals in hunting-dress, dances of half-naked girls, and masques of Carnival Bacchantes, moved pilgrims from the North with wide, astonished, woeful eyes ­disciples of Luther, in whose soul, as in a scabbard, lay sheathed the sword of the Spirit, ready to flash forth and smite.

A more complete conception may be formed of Leo by comparing him with Julius.  Julius disturbed the peace of Italy with a view to establishing the temporal power of his see.  Leo returned to the old nepotism of the previous Popes, and fomented discord for the sake of the Medici.  It was at one time his project to secure the kingdom of Naples for his brother Giuliano, and a Milanese sovereignty for his nephew Lorenzo.  On the latter he succeeded in conferring the Duchy of Urbino, to the prejudice of its rightful owners. With Florence in their hands and the Papacy under their control, the Medici might have swayed all Italy.  Such plans, however, in the days of Francis I. and Charles V. had become impracticable; nor had any of the Medicean family stuff to undertake more than the subjugation of their native city.  Julius was violent in temper, but observant of his promises.  Leo was suave and slippery.  He lured Gianpaolo Baglioni to Rome by a safe-conduct, and then had him imprisoned and beheaded in the Castle of S. Angelo.  Julius delighted in war and was never happier than when the cannons roared around him at Mirandola.  Leo vexed the soul of his master of the ceremonies because he would ride out a-hunting in topboots.  Julius designed S. Peter’s and comprehended Michael Angelo.  Leo had the wit to patronize the poets, artists and historians who added luster to his Court; but he brought no new great man of genius to the front.  The portraits of the two Popes, both from the hand of Raphael, are exceedingly characteristic.  Julius, bent and emaciated, has the nervous glance of a passionate and energetic temperament; though the brand is hoar with ashes and more than half burned out, it glows and can inflame a conflagration.  Leo, heavy jawed, dull-eyed, with thick lips and a brawny jowl, betrays the coarser fiber of a sensualist.

It has often been remarked that both Julius and Leo raised money by the sale of indulgences with a view to the building of S. Peter’s, thus aggravating one of the chief scandals which provoked the Reformation.  In that age of maladjusted impulses the desire to execute a great work of art, combined with the cynical resolve to turn the superstitions of the people to account, forced rebellion to a head.  Leo was unconscious of the magnitude of Luther’s movement.  If he thought at all seriously of the phenomenon, it stirred his wonder.  Nor did he feel the necessity of reformation in the Church of Italy.  The rich and many-sided life of Rome and the diplomatic interests of Italian despotism absorbed his whole attention.  It was but a small matter what barbarians thought or did.

The sudden death of Leo threw the Holy College into great perplexity.  To choose the new Pope without reference to political interests was impossible; and these were divided between Charles V. and Francis I. After twelve days spent by the Cardinals in conclave, the result of their innumerable schemes and counter-schemes was the election of the Cardinal of Tortosa.  No one knew him; and his elevation to the Papacy, due to the influence of Charles, was almost as great a surprise to the electors as to the Romans.  In their rage and horror at having chosen this barbarian, the College began to talk about the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, seeking the most improbable of all excuses for the mistake to which intrigue had driven them.  ’The courtiers of the Vatican and chief officers of the Church,’ says an eyewitness, ’wept and screamed and cursed and gave themselves up to despair.’  Along the blank walls of the city was scrawled:  ‘Rome to let.’  Sonnets fell in showers, accusing the cardinals of having delivered over ’the fair Vatican to a German’s fury.’ Adrian VI. came to Rome for the first time as Pope. He knew no Italian, and talked Latin with an accent unfamiliar to southern ears.  His studies had been confined to scholastic philosophy and theology.  With courts he had no commerce; and he was so ignorant of the state a Pope should keep in Rome, that he wrote beforehand requesting that a modest house and garden might be hired for his abode.  When he saw the Vatican, he exclaimed that here the successors, not of Peter, but of Constantine should dwell.  Leo kept one hundred grooms for the service of his stable; Adrian retained but four.  Two Flemish valets sufficed for his personal attendance, and to these he gave each evening one ducat for the expenses of the next day’s living.  A Flemish serving woman cooked his food, made his bed and washed his linen.  Rome, with its splendid immorality, its classic art and pagan culture, made the same impression on him that it made on Luther.  When his courtiers pointed to the Laocoon as the most illustrious monument of ancient sculpture, he turned away with horror, murmuring:  ‘Idols of the Pagans!’ The Belvedere, which was fast becoming the first statue-gallery in Europe, he walled up and never entered.  At the same time he set himself with earnest purpose, so far as his tied hands and limited ability would go, to reform the more patent abuses of the Church.  Leo had raised about three million ducats by the sale of offices, which represented an income of 348,000 ducats to the purchasers, and provided places for 2,550 persons.  By a stroke of his pen Adrian canceled these contracts and threw upon the world a crowd of angry and defrauded officials.  It was but poor justice to remind them that their bargain with his predecessor had been illegal.  Such attempts, however, at a reformation of ecclesiastical society were as ineffectual as pin-pricks in the cure of a fever which demands blood-letting.  The real corruption of Rome, deeply seated in high places, remained untouched.  Luther meanwhile had carried all before him in the North, and accurate observers in Rome itself dreaded some awful catastrophe for the guilty city.  ’This state is set upon the razor-edge of peril; God grant we have not soon to take flight to Avignon or to the ends of the ocean.  I see the downfall of this spiritual monarchy at hand.  Unless God help, it is all over with us.’ Adrian met the emergency, and took up arms against the sea of troubles by expressing his horror of simony, sensuality, thievery and so forth.  The result was that he was simply laughed at.  Pasquin made so merry with his name that Adrian vowed he would throw the statue into the Tiber; whereupon the Duke of Sessa wittily replied:  ’Throw him to the bottom, and, like a frog, he’ll go on croaking.’  Berni, again, wrote one of his cleverest Capitoli upon the dunce who could not comprehend his age; and when he died, his doctor’s door was ornamented with this inscription:  Liberatori patriae Senatus Populusque Romanus.

Great was the rejoicing when another Medici was made Pope in 1523.  People hoped that the merry days of Leo would return.  But things had gone too far toward dissolution.  Clement VII. failed to give satisfaction to the courtiers whom his more genial cousin had delighted:  even the scholars and the poets grumbled. His rule was weak and vacillating, so that the Colonna faction raised its head again and drove him to the Castle of S. Angelo.  The political horizon of Italy grew darker and more sullen daily, as before some dreadful storm.  Over Rome itself impended ruin ­

                              as when God
  Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison
  In the sick air.

At last the crash came.  Clement by a series of treaties, treacheries, and tergiversations had deprived himself of every friend and exasperated every foe.  Italy was so worn out with warfare, so accustomed to the anarchy of aimless revolutions and to the trampling to and fro of stranger squadrons on her shores, that the news of a Lutheran troop, levied with the express object of pillaging Rome, and reinforced with Spanish ruffians and the scum of every nation, scarcely roused her apathy.  The so-called army of Frundsberg ­a horde of robbers held together by the hope of plunder ­marched without difficulty to the gates of Rome.  So low had the honor of Italian princes fallen that the Duke of Ferrara, by direct aid given, and the Duke of Urbino, by counter-force withheld, opened the passes of the Po and of the Apennines to these marauders.  They lost their general in Lombardy.  The Constable Bourbon, who succeeded him, died in the assault of the city.  Then Rome for nine months was abandoned to the lust, rapacity, and cruelty of some 30,000 brigands without a leader.  It was then discovered to what lengths of insult, violence, and bestiality the brutal barbarism of Germans and the avarice of Spaniards could be carried.  Clement, beleaguered in the Castle of S. Angelo, saw day and night the smoke ascend from desolated palaces and desecrated temples, heard the wailing of women and the groans of tortured men mingle with the jests of Lutheran drunkards and the curses of Castilian bandits.  Roaming its galleries and leaning from its windows he exclaimed with Job: ’Quare de vulva eduxisti me? qui utinam consumptus essem, ne oculus me videret.’  What the Romans, emasculated by luxury and priest rule, what the Cardinals and prelates, lapped in sensuality and sloth, were made to suffer during this long agony, can scarcely be described.  It is too horrible.  When at last the barbarians, sated with blood, surfeited with lechery, glutted with gold, and decimated by pestilence, withdrew, Rome raised her head a widow.  From the shame and torment of that sack she never recovered, never became again the gay licentious lovely capital of arts and letters, the glittering gilded Rome of Leo.  But the kings of the earth took pity on her desolation.  The treaty of Amiens (August 18, 1527), concluded between Francis I. and Henry VIII. against Charles V., in whose name this insult had been offered to the Holy City of Christendom, together with Charles’s own tardy willingness to make amends, restored the Papacy to the respect of Europe.