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November 11 - November 16, 2020
Within these sixty years Copernicus worked out the true relationship of the earth to the sun, Portuguese vessels brought slaves, spices, gold dust and ivory from Africa, Cortés conquered Mexico, the Fuggers of Germany, investing profits from the wool trade in commerce, banking and real estate, created the wealthiest mercantile empire of Europe while the son of their founder, called Jacob the Rich, distilled the spirit of the time in his boast that he would continue to make money as long as there was breath in his body. His Italian counterpart, Agostino Chigi of Rome, employed 20,000 men in the
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Strangely, the efflorescence in culture reflected no comparable surge in human behavior but rather an astonishing debasement. Partly, this was owed to the absence in Italy of central authority in a monarch, which left the five major regions—Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples and the Papal States—plus the minor city-states like Mantua, Ferrara and the rest, in unrestrained and unending mutual conflict.
Seizures, poison plots, treachery, murder and fratricide, imprisonment and torture were everyday methods employed without compunction.
When the subjects of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, ruler of Milan, murdered him in a church for his vices and oppressions, his brother, Ludovico il Moro, threw the heir, his nephew, into prison and seized the rule of Milan for himself. When the Pazzi family of Florence, antagonists of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent, could endure the frustrations of their hatred no longer, they plotted to murder him and his handsome brother Giuliano during High Mass in the cathedral. The signal was to be the bell marking the elevation of the Host, and at this most solemn moment of the service, the swords of the
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Most unpleasant of all were the kings of the Aragon house who ruled Naples. Ferrante (Ferdinand I), unscrupulous, ferocious, cynical and vindictive, concentrated all his efforts until his death in 1494 on the destruction of his opponents and in this process initiated more harm to Italy through internecine war than any other prince.
The case of a physician and surgeon of the hospital of St. John Lateran, all the more grisly for being reported in the unemotional monotone of John Burchard, master of ceremonies of the papal court, whose daily record is the indispensable source, reveals Renaissance life in Rome. He “left the hospital every day early in the morning in a short tunic and with a cross bow and shot everyone who crossed his path and pocketed his money.” He collaborated with the hospital’s confessor, who named to him the patients who confessed to having money, whereat the physician gave these patients “an effective
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Arbitrary power, with its inducements to self-indulgence and unrestraint and its chronic suspicions of rivals, tended to form erratic despots and to produce habits of senseless violence as often in the satellite rulers as in the great.
Pandolfo Petrucci, tyrant of Siena in the 1490s, enjoyed a pastime of rolling down blocks of stone from a height regardless of whom they might hit.
If all Italians had lived by the amoral example of their leaders, the depravity of the popes would have been no cause for protest.
UNTIL THE ELECTION in 1471 of Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, former General of the Franciscan Order, who took the name Sixtus IV, the popes of the early Renaissance, if without zeal for spiritual renewal, had maintained on the whole nominal respect for the dignity of their office.
As a friar, he was supposedly chosen Pope in reaction to the worldliness of his predecessor, Paul II, a Venetian patrician and former merchant. In fact, he owed his election rather to the skillful maneuvering of the ambitious, unprincipled and very rich Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to acquire the papal tiara for himself.
The Franciscan’s gown concealed in Sixtus a hard, imperious, implacable character; a man of strong passions and a large, poor and exigent family. He proceeded to enrich its members and, using all the resources now at his command, to endow them with high office, papal territories and titled spouses.
Before he had finished, Sixtus had conferred the red hat on three more nephews and a grandnephew, made another a Bishop, married four nephews and two nieces into the ruling families of Naples, Milan, Urbino, and to Orsinis and Farneses.
He made an established practice of political selection for the purpose of favoring this or that prince or sovereign, often choosing lords or barons or younger sons of great families without regard to merit or clerical qualification. He gave the archiepiscopal see of Lisbon to a child of eight and the see of Milan to a boy of eleven, both sons of princes.
Led by the wild behavior of Pietro Riario, the favorite nephew, whom the new fortunes of his family seem almost to have unbalanced, and augmented by the horde of newly rich della Roveres, the habit of unbridled extravagance became a fixed feature of the papal court.
Cardinal Riario’s excesses reached a peak in 1480 at a saturnalian banquet featuring a whole roasted bear holding a staff in its jaws, stags reconstructed in their skins, herons and peacocks in their feathers, and orgiastic behavior by the guests appropriate to the ancient Roman model.
The advance of the Turks since the fall of Constantinople was generally considered to have been allowed by God in punishment for the sins of the Church.
The situation under Sixtus was not new; the difference was that while Pius was concerned to arrest the deterioration, his successors neither tried nor cared.
In Bohemia, home of the Hussite dissent, a satiric manifesto appeared equating Sixtus with Satan priding himself on “total repudiation of the doctrine of Jesus.”
To ensure efficient collection of revenues, Sixtus created an Apostolic Chamber of 100 lawyers to supervise the financial affairs of the Papal States and the law cases in which the Papacy had a financial interest. He devoted the income to multiplying the estates of his relatives and to embellishing the external glories of the Holy See.
If admirable in his cultural concerns, he exhibited the worst qualities of the Renaissance prince in his feuds and machinations, conducting wars on Venice and Ferrara and an inveterate campaign to reduce the Colonna family, the dominant nobles of Rome.
In a rage at the violence of the Medicis’ revenge upon the Pazzi, which had included the hanging of an Archbishop in violation of clerical immunity, he excommunicated Lorenzo de’ Medici and all of Florence.
The idea of the Holy Father plotting murder in a cathedral was not yet acceptable, though before long it would hardly seem abnormal.
In 1481 the noise of reform sounded close at hand. Archbishop Zamometic, an envoy of the Emperor, arrived in Rome, where he voiced harsh criticisms of Sixtus and the Curia.
Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom.
the hated practice of ad commendam, by which temporary appointments, often of laymen, could be made “on recommendation” without the appointee’s being required to fulfill their duties.
One of those issues that arouse passion peculiar to their ages, ad commendam was a device that Sixtus could easily have prohibited, thereby earning himself immense credit with the reform movement.
Cibo reached a bishopric at 37 and office in the Papal Curia under Sixtus, who, appreciating his malleable nature, made him one of his stable of Cardinals in 1473.
Elevation to the Papacy of this rather dim and mediocre person was the unplanned outcome, as often occurred when two fiercely ambitious candidates blocked each other’s chances.
As domineering and contentious as his uncle, but more effective, Giuliano, known as the Cardinal of St. Peter in Vincoli, could not as yet gather the votes of a majority of the College. Nor could Borgia, despite bribes of up to 25,000 ducats and promises of lucrative promotion spread among his colleagues.
When Barbo came within five votes of election, Borgia and della Rovere joined forces behind the unassuming Cibo, indifferent to the affront to reformers of electing a pope with acknowledged children.
As Pope, Innocent was distinguished chiefly by his extraordinary indulgence of his worthless son Franceschetto, the first time the son of a pope had been publicly recognized.
Riches for Franceschetto, who was both greedy and dissolute, given to roaming the streets at night with bad companions for lewd purposes, absorbed Innocent’s primary attention.
In 1486, he succeeded in arranging his son’s marriage to a daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici and celebrated it in the Vatican with a wedding party so elaborate that he was obliged, owing to chronic shortage of funds, to mortgage the papal tiara and treasures to pay for it.
Even the office of Vatican Librarian, hitherto reserved for merit, was put up for sale. A bureau was established for the sale of favors and pardons at inflated prices, of which 150 ducats of each transaction went to the Pope and what was left over to his son.
In 1488, halfway through Innocent’s tenure, several high officials of the papal court were arrested, and two of them executed, for forging for sale fifty papal bulls of dispensation in two years.
Cardinals at that time did not have to be priests—that is, qualified by ordination to administer the sacraments, and celebrate communion and the spiritual rites—though some of them might be. Those appointed from the episcopate, the highest level of the priesthood, continued to hold their sees, but the majority belonged to the officialdom of the Church without priestly function.
As secularization advanced, appointments went more frequently to laymen, sons and brothers of princes or designated agents of monarchs with no ecclesiastical careers behind them. One, Antoine Duprat, lay chancellor of Francis I, made a Cardinal by the last of the Renaissance six, Clement VII, entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.
Regarding themselves as princes of the realm of the Church, the cardinals considered it their prerogative, not to mention their duty, to match in dignity and splendor the princes of the lay realm. Those who could afford to lived in palaces with several hundred servants, rode abroad in martial attire complete with sword, kept hounds and falcons for hunting, competed when they paraded through the streets in the number and magnificence of their mounted retainers, whose employment provided each prince of the Church with a faction among Rome’s persistently riotous citizens.
They gambled at dice and cards—and cheated, according to a complaint by Franceschetto to his father after he had lost 14,000 ducats in one night to Cardinal Raffaele Riario.
To arrest the thinning of their influence, the cardinals insisted as a condition of Innocent’s election on a clause restoring their number to 24. As vacancies appeared, they refused consent to new appointments, limiting Innocent’s scope for nepotism.
Illegitimacy was a canonical bar to ecclesiastical office which Sixtus had already overlooked on behalf of Cardinal Borgia’s son Cesare, whom he started on the ecclesiastical ladder at age seven. Legitimizing a son or nephew became routine for the six Renaissance popes—yet another principle of the Church discarded.
After complying with Lorenzo’s wish, Innocent, firm for once, insisted that the boy must wait three years before taking his place, devoting the time to the study of theology and canon law. The candidate was already more learned than most, Lorenzo having seen to a good education by distinguished tutors and scholars.
Warning of the evil influences of Rome, “that sink of all iniquity,” Lorenzo urged his son “to act so as to convince all who see you that the well-being and honor of the Church and the Holy See are more to you than anything else in the world.” After this unique advice, Lorenzo does not neglect to point out that his son will have opportunities “to be of service to our city and our family,” but he must beware the seductions to evil-doing of the College of Cardinals, which “is at this moment so poor in men of worth.… If the Cardinals were such as they ought to be, the whole world would be better
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If the cardinals had been worthy men they would have elected worthier popes, but both were parts of the same body. The popes were the cardinals in these sixty years, elected out of the Sacred College and in turn appointing cardinals of their own kind.
If Innocent was ineffectual, it was partly owing to the perpetual discord of the Italian states and of the foreign powers as well.
The worst of his troubles was a campaign of brutal harassment periodically deepening into warfare by the unpleasant King of Naples, whose motive seems no more precise than simple malignity.
The shadow of France frightened Ferrante, who suddenly, just when his siege of Rome had brought the city to desperation, agreed to a treaty of peace. His concessions to the Pope, which seemed amazing, were better understood when he later violated all of them, repudiated the treaty and returned to aggression.
Such were the combats of Italy, but though essentially frivolous and even meaningless, they were destructive, and the Papacy did not escape their consequences. The most serious was a lowering of status. Throughout the conflict with Naples the Papal States were treated like a poor relation and the Pope personally with diminished respect, reflecting Ferrante’s insolence.
Innocent made strenuous efforts to engage the powers in crusade, as had Pius II even more devotedly when the impact of the fall of Constantinople was still fresh. Yet the same deficiency which defeated Pius and others before him, disunity among the European powers equal to that among the princes of Italy, remained.