The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Since then, Holy War had lost credibility when trade with the infidel was profitable and Italian states negotiated regularly for the Sultan’s aid against each other.

The failure has been ascribed to the outbreak of civil conflict in Hungary and a renewal of dispute between France and the Empire, but these are pretexts for the absent impulse. No Holy War was to glorify Innocent’s pontificate.

A brother of the Sultan and a defeated but still dangerous contender for the Ottoman throne, Djem had escaped fraternal revenge and taken refuge across the gulf of creed with the Knights of St. John in Rhodes.

Innocent’s intention was to use Djem as a means of war on the Sultan, on a vague understanding that if assisted to his throne by the Christians, Djem would withdraw Turkish forces from Europe including Constantinople.

His brother’s presence in papal custody at least served to restrain the Sultan, while Djem lived, from further attack on Christian territory. To that extent Innocent achieved something, but lost more. The general public was bewildered by the relationship, and papal status was compromised in the public mind by the strange comity extended to the Grand Turk.

Innocent’s bouts of illness grew more frequent until the end was apparent in 1492. Summoning the cardinals to his deathbed, he asked forgiveness for his inadequacy and exhorted them to choose a better successor. His dying wish suffered the same futility as his life.

WHEN RODRIGO BORGIA WAS 62, after 35 years as Cardinal and Vice-Chancellor, his character, habits, principles or lack of them, uses of power, methods of enrichment, mistresses and seven children were well enough known to his colleagues in the College and Curia to evoke from young Giovanni de’ Medici at his first conclave the comment on Borgia’s elevation to the Papacy, “Flee, we are in the hands of a wolf.”

His frame of mind was heartily temporal: to celebrate the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain, in 1492, the year of his election, he staged not a Te Deum of thanksgiving but a bullfight in the Piazza of St. Peter’s with five bulls killed.

After serving under five popes and losing the last election, Borgia was not this time going to let the tiara pass from him. He simply bought the Papacy outright over his two chief rivals, Cardinals della Rovere and Ascanio Sforza.

Borgia was himself the beneficiary of nepotism, having been made Cardinal at 26 by his aged uncle Pope Calixtus III, who had been elected at age 77 when signs of senility suggested the likelihood of another choice soon.

Borgia was said never to have missed a consistory, the business meeting of cardinals, in 35 years except when ill or away from Rome. There was nothing about the workings and opportunities of the papal bureaucracy that he did not grasp.

As described by contemporaries, he was usually smiling and good-tempered, even cheerful, and liked “to do unpleasant things in a pleasant way.” An eloquent speaker and well-read, he was witty and “took pains to shine in conversation,” was “brilliantly skilled in conducting affairs,” combined zest with self-esteem and Spanish pride and had an amazing gift for exciting the affections of women, “who are attracted to him more powerfully than iron to a magnet,” which suggests that he made his desire for them strongly felt.

When Pedro died young, his title, lands and fiancée passed to his stepbrother Juan, his father’s favorite, destined for a death of the kind that was to make the Borgia family a byword.

The paternity of an eighth child named Giovanni, born during the Borgia Papacy, seems to have been uncertain even within the family. Two successive papal Bulls legitimized him first as the son of Cesare and then of the Pope himself, while public opinion considered him a bastard child of Lucrezia.

While a licentious private life was no scandal in the high Renaissance, this liaison between an old man, as he was considered at 59, and a girl forty years younger was offensive to Italians, perhaps because they found it inartistic.

Streets were decorated with garlands of flowers, triumphal arches, living statues formed by gilded naked youths and flags displaying the Borgia arms, a rather apt red bull rampant on a field of gold.

At this point, the shadow of France could be felt lengthening over Italy, preliminary to the era of foreign invasions that were to accelerate the decline of the Papacy and subject Italy to outside control. They were to ravage the peninsula for the next seventy years, wreck its prosperity, seize pieces of territory, diminish sovereignty and postpone the conditions for Italian unity by 400 years—all for no permanent gain to any of the parties involved.

No economic need propelled the invasions, but war was still the assumed activity of the ruling class, indemnities and expected revenues from taxable conquered territories its source of profit, as well as the source of payment for the cost of the campaign itself.

In Italy, the scandal of Alexander’s election might have suggested to him that it would be useful to give some time and thought to religious governance. Instead, he immediately set about attending to his political fences.

Prevailing over their bitter resistance, Alexander named eleven new cardinals including Alessandro Farnese, brother of his mistress; a scion of the d’Estes, age fifteen; and his own son Cesare, whose unsuitability to an ecclesiastical career was so patent that he soon resigned it for the more congenial occupations of war, murder and associated skills.

The Papacy’s detachment from religion over the preceding fifty years, its sinking reputation and aversion to reform, gave the French plans for invasion an added impulse. In the general weakening of papal authority and revenues caused by the suction of the national churches over the past century, the French Church had won considerable autonomy.

In 1493, when the campaign to make good the French royal claim to Naples was under discussion, Charles VIII summoned a commission at Tours to prepare a program which would validate his march through Italy as a crusade for reform, with the understood if not explicit intention of calling a Council to depose Alexander VI on grounds of simony.

According to Guicciardini, no admirer of the popes, reform was to Alexander a thought “terrible beyond anything else.” Considering that as time went on, Alexander poisoned, imprisoned or otherwise immobilized inconvenient opponents, including cardinals, it is a wonder that he did not lock up della Rovere, but his enemy and successor was already too outstanding, and besides, he was careful to stay outside Rome and take up his residence in a fortress.

Ferrante of Naples, whose kingdom was the French objective, engaged in a blizzard of deals and counter-deals with the Pope and princes, but, as a life-long conspirator, he could not wean himself from secretly arranging to undercut his own alliances. He died of his efforts within a year, succeeded by his son Alfonso.

Ludovico allied himself with the disaffected barons of Naples who shared this aim, and, to make sure of the outcome, he invited Charles VIII to enter Italy and establish his claim to the Neapolitan throne. This was taking a serious risk, because the French monarchy through the Orléans line had a stronger claim to Milan than to Naples, but Ludovico, an adventurer at heart, felt confident he could contain that threat. That was an error as events proved.

Charles’ advisers, doubtful of the enterprise, caused the King so much worry by stressing the difficulties that lay ahead and the untrustworthiness of Ludovico and Italians in general that he halted his army when it was already on the march. The timely appearance of della Rovere, fervent in exhortation, rekindled his enthusiasm. In September 1494, a French army of 60,000 crossed the Alps carrying with them, in Guicciardini’s words, for once not exaggerated, “the seeds of innumerable calamities.”

Alexander joined a league of defense with Florence and Naples, which came apart as soon as made. Florence defected owing to a crisis of nerves on the part of Piero de’ Medici, eldest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who had died two years earlier. Suddenly fainthearted in the face of the enemy, Piero secretly arranged terms for opening his city to the French.

Alexander held firm against two demands: he refused to deliver Castel Sant’ Angelo into French hands, or formally to invest Charles with the crown of Naples.

The one subject that was not at issue during all the sessions was reform. Despite constant prodding by Cardinal della Rovere and his party, the frayed, fumbling French King was no man to shoulder a Council, sponsor reform or depose a Pope.

With Spain and the Empire as allies, the Papacy and Milan could now safely turn against France. When even Venice joined, a combination called the League of Venice, later called the Holy League, came into being in 1495, causing the French, who had made themselves hated in Naples, to fear being cut off in the Italian boot.

Although no one, least of all France, emerged with profit from this momentous if senseless adventure, the powers, undeterred by empty result, returned again and again to the same arena to compete over Italy’s body.

There were certain historic consequences, some important, some minor but memorable: the Florentines, outraged by Piero’s surrender, rose against him, threw out the Medici and declared a republic; the Spanish-Hapsburg marriage produced in the future Emperor Charles V the controlling factor of the next century; Ludovico il Moro, the hotspur of Milan, paid for his folly in a French prison, where he died; at Pavia in the most famous battle of the wars, a King of France, Francis I, was captured and grasped immortality in the quotation books with “All is lost save honor.”

Otherwise, the Italian wars are significant for their effect in further politicizing and debasing the Papacy.

Continually engaged in the quid pro quos of one alliance or another, they neglected more than ever the internal problems of the Church and the religious community and hardly noticed the signs of coming crisis in their own sphere.

In Florence, beginning in 1490, the frenzied preaching of a Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, prior of San Marco, was a voice of religious distress which Alexander managed to ignore for seven years while it took control of an entire city and aroused echoes throughout Italy.

Preaching neither doctrinal reform nor separation from Rome, he poured wrath upon the sins of the people and clergy, whose source he traced to the wickedness of popes and hierarchy.

His prophecy that Lorenzo the Magnificent and Innocent VIII would both die in 1492, which they shortly did, endowed him with awesome power. He inspired bonfires into which crowds with sobs and hysteria threw their luxuries and valuables, their paintings, fine garments and jewelry. He roused bands of children to scour the city for “vanities” to be burned.

That there was some truth in this verbiage did not excite Rome, long accustomed to censorious zealots. Savonarola became politically dangerous, however, when he hailed Charles VIII as the instrument of reform sent by the Lord, “as I have long predicted,” to cure the ills of Italy and reform the Church.

At first, Alexander attempted to silence Savonarola quietly by simply forbidding him to preach, but prophets filled with the voice of God are not easily silenced.

Public sentiment had by now turned against Savonarola owing to a test by fire into which he was drawn by his enemies and could not sustain.

To the howls and hisses of the mob, he was hanged and burned in 1498. The thunder was silenced but the hostility to the hierarchy it had voiced remained.

Anyone who assumed a mission to preach reform could be sure of an audience. They were not a new phenomenon. As a form of entertainment for the common people, one of the few they had, lay preachers and preaching friars had long wandered from town to town attracting huge multitudes who listened patiently for hours at a time to lengthy sermons held in the public squares because the churches could not hold the throngs.

A favorite prophecy as the century turned was of an “angelic Pope” who would initiate reform, to be followed, as Savonarola had promised, by a better world. A group of some twenty working-class disciples in Florence elected their own “pope,” who told the followers that until reform was accomplished, it was useless to go to confession because there were no priests worthy of the name.

Conceiving that marriage ties to the royal family of Naples would be in his interest, Alexander annulled the marriage of his daughter Lucrezia to Giovanni Sforza in order to marry her to Alfonso, the Neapolitan heir. The outraged husband, fiercely denying the charge of non-consummation, resisted the divorce loudly and publicly, but under heavy political and financial pressures engineered by the Pope was forced to give way, and even to return his wife’s dowry.

In the year of Lucrezia’s remarriage, the Pope’s eldest surviving son, Juan, Duke of Gandia, was found floating one morning in the Tiber, his corpse pierced by nine stab wounds. Although he had numerous enemies, owing to the large slices of papal property bestowed upon him by his father, no assassin was identified.

“The most grievous danger for any Pope,” he told a consistory of cardinals, “lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth about his own person and ends by not wishing to hear it.” It was an unheard message to every autocrat in history.

He at once appointed a commission of several of the most respected cardinals to draw up a program, but, except for a provision to reduce plural benefices, it hardly went to the heart of the matter. Beginning with the cardinals, it required reduction of incomes, which had evidently climbed, to 6000 ducats each; reduction of households to no more than eighty (of whom at least twelve should be in holy orders) and of mounted escorts to thirty; greater restraint at table with only one boiled and one roast meat per meal and with entertainment by musicians and actors to be replaced by reading of Holy Scriptures.

In 1499, the French under a new King, Louis XII, returned, now claiming through the Orléans line the succession to Milan. Another churchman, the Archbishop of Rouen, as the King’s chief adviser, was the mover behind this effort.

Cesare’s unprecedented resignation of the red hat, antagonizing many of the cardinals, evoked from a Venetian diarist of events a sigh that summarized the Renaissance Papacy. “Thus now in God’s Church tutto va al contrario” (everything is upside-down). In return for 30,000 ducats and support for Cesare’s project, the Pope granted Louis’ annulment plus a dispensation to marry Anne of Brittany and threw in a red hat for the Archbishop of Rouen, who became Cardinal d’Amboise.

Acting for Spain, Portuguese envoys visited the Pope to reprimand him for his nepotism, simony and French policy, which they said endangered the peace of Italy and indeed of all Christendom. They, too, raised the threat of a Council unless he changed course. He did not.