Chapter VI
.
[2] Their father, Galeotto Manfredi, had been murdered in 1488 by their mother, Francesca Bentivogli. Of Astorre's death Guicciardini writes: 'Astorre, che era minore di diciotto anni e di forma eccellente ... condotto a Roma, saziata prima (secondo che si disse) la libidine di qualcuno, fu occultamente insieme con un suo fratello naturale privato della vita.' Nardi (_Storie Florentine_, lib. iv. 13) credits Cesare with the violation and murder of the boy. How far, we may ask, were these dark crimes of violence actuated by astrological superstition? This question is raised by Burckhardt (p. 363) apropos of Sigismondo Malatesta's assault upon his son, and Pier Luigi Farnese's violation of the Bishop of Fano. To a temperament like Alexander's, however, mere lust enhanced by cruelty, and seasoned with the joy of insult to an enemy, was a sufficient motive for the commission of monstrous crime.
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.[1] 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.[2] 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 horrendâ febrium incensione absorptum_.[3] 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.
[1] The story is related by Cinthio in his _Ecatommithi_, December 9, November 10.
[2] The various accounts of Alexander's death have been epitomized by Gregorovius (_Stadt Rom_, vol. vii.), and have been discussed by Villari in his edition of the Giustiniani Dispatches, 2 vols. Florence, Le Monnier. Gregorovius thinks the question still open. Villari decides in favor of fever against poison.
[3] Reprinted by R. Garnett in _Athenæum_, Jan. 16, 1875.
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.[1] '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,[2] 'vanished even as smoke in air, or foam upon the water.'
[1] 'Morto chel fu, il corpo cominciò a bollire, e la bocca a spumare come faria uno caldaro al focho, assì perseverò mentre che fu sopra terra; divenne anchor ultra modo grosso in tanto che in lui non apparea forma di corpo humano, ne dala larghezza ala lunghezza del corpo suo era differenzia alcuna' (letter of Marquis of Mantua).
[2] _Commentari_, lib, v.
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.[1] 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.
[1] Cesare, it must be remembered, had ostensibly reduced the cities of Lombardy, Romagna, and the March, as Gonfalonier of the Church.
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.[1] 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.
[1] 'Fatale instrumento e allora e prima e poi de' mali d'Italia,' says Guicciardini, _Storia d'Italia_, vol. i. p. 84. 'Der Retter des Papstthums,' says Burckhardt, p. 95.
Leo X. succeeded Julius in 1513, to the great relief of the Romans, wearied with the continual warfare of the old _Pontifice 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 tempora; tempora Mavors Olim habuit; sua nunc tempora 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 Jehovah; 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.[1] These figures are only interesting when we remember that the mountains of gold which they denote were squandered in æsthetic 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, poichè Dio ce l' ha dato_.[2]' 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 ragouts 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.
[1] See Gregorovius, _Stadt Rom_, book xiv. ch. 3.
[2] 'Relazione di Marino Giorgi,' March 17, 1517. Alberi, series ii. vol. iii. p. 51.
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.[1] 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.
[1] He would have given it to Giuliano, but Giuliano was an honest man and remembered what he owed to the della Rovere family. See the 'Relazione' of Marino Giorgi (_Rel. Ven._ ser. ii. vol. iii. p. 51).
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.'[1] Adrian VI. came to Rome for the first time as Pope.[2] 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.'[3] 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 patriæ Senatus Populusque Romanus_.
[1] See Greg. _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. pp. 382, 383. The details about Adriano are chiefly taken from the _Relazioni_ of the Venetian embassadors, series ii. vol. iii. pp. 75-120.
[2] His father's name was Florus or Flerentius, of the Flemish family, it is supposed, of Dedel. Berni calls him a carpet-maker. Other accounts represent him as a ship's carpenter. The Pope's baptismal name was Adrian.
[3] See the passage quoted from the _Lettere de Principi_, Rome, March 17, 1523, by Burckhardt, p. 99, note.
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.[1] 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.[2]
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:[3] '_Quare de vulvâ 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.
[1] See, for instance, Berni's sonnets. In one of these, Berni very powerfully describes the vacillation and irresolution of Clement's state-policy.
[2] See Varchi's picture of the state of Rome, _St. Fior._ ii.
[3] So Luigi Guicciardini in his account of the sack of Rome relates.
It is well known that at this crisis the Emperor seriously thought of putting an end to the State of the Church. His councilors advised him to restore the Pope to his original rank of Bishop, and to make Rome again the seat of Empire.[1] But to have done this would have been impossible under the political conditions of the sixteenth century, and in the face of Christendom still Catholic. His deliberations, therefore, cost Rome the miseries of the sack; but they were speedily superseded by the determination to strengthen the Papal by means of the Imperial authority in Italy. Florence was given as a make-peace offering to the contemptible Medici; and it remains the worst shame of Clement that he used the dregs of the army that had sacked Rome for the enslavement of his mother-city.
[1] See the authorities in Greg. _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. pp. 569, 575.
Internally, the Papal State had learned by its misfortunes the necessity of a reform. Sadoleto, writing in the September of that memorable year to Clement, reminds him that the sufferings of Rome have satisfied the wrath of God, and that the way was now open for an amelioration of manners and laws.[1] No force of arms could prevent the Holy City from returning to a better life, and proving that the Christian priesthood was not a mere mockery and sham.[2] In truth the Counter-Reformation may be said to date historically from 1527.
[1] It was universally recognized in Italy that the sack of Rome was a punishment inflicted by Providence upon the godless city. Without quoting great authorities like Sadoleto or the Bishop of Fossombrone, one of whose letters gives a really awful picture of Roman profligacy (_Opere di M.G. Guidiccioni_, Barbera, vol. i. p. 193), we find abundant testimony to this persuasion regarding the intolerible vice of Rome, even in men devoid of moral conscience. Aretino (_La Cortegiana_, end of
## Act i. Sc. xxiii.) writes: 'Io mic redeva che il castigo, che
l' ha dato Cristo per mano degli Spagnuoli, l'avesse fatta migliore, et è più scellerata che mai.' Bandello (_Novelle_, Parte ii. xxxvii.) alluding to the sack, remarks in a parenthesis, 'benche i peccati di quella città meritassero esser castigati.' After adducing two such witnesses, it would weaken the case to cite Trissino or Vettori, both of whom expressed themselves with force upon the iniquities of Papal Rome.
[2] Compare _Lettere de' Princ._ ii. 77; Cardinal Cajetanus, and other testimonies quoted by Greg. _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. pp. 568, 578.
##