Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

to be done in such a shameful state of things?... We must inquire by

what means our predecessors won authority and consideration for the

Church.... We must maintain that authority by the same means.

Temperance, chastity, innocence, zeal for the Faith... contempt of

earth, the desire for martyrdom have exalted the Roman Church, and

made her mistress of the world. `051536

-

The Pope, who as Aeneas Sylvius had been so uniformly successful

as a diplomat, had to bear one setback after another in his dealings

with the European powers. Louis XI gave him a brief triumph by

revoking the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, but when Pius refused to

aid the house of Anjou in its plans for recapturing Naples, Louis in

effect revoked his revocation. Bohemia persisted in the revolt that

John Huss had started; the Reformation had begun there a century

before Luther, and the new king, George Podebrad, was giving it his

powerful support. The German hierarchy continued to league with German

princes in resisting collection of the tithe, and renewed the old

cry for a general council to reform the Church and sit in judgment

upon the pope. Pius responded by issuing (1460) the bull

Execrabilis, which condemned and forbade any attempt to convene a

general council without papal initiative and consent; if, he argued,

such a council could be summoned at any time by opponents of papal

policy, papal jurisdiction would be in constant jeopardy, and

ecclesiastical discipline would be paralyzed.

These disputes fettered the efforts of the Pope to unify Europe

against the Turks. On the very day of his coronation he expressed

his horror at the advance of the Moslems along the Danube to Vienna,

and through the Balkans into Bosnia. Greece, Epirus, Macedonia,

Serbia, Bosnia were falling to the enemies of Christianity; who

could say when they would leap across the Adriatic into Italy? A month

after his coronation Pius issued an invitation to all Christian

princes to join him in a great congress at Mantua and lay plans to

rescue Eastern Christendom from the Ottoman tide.

He himself arrived there on May 27, 1459. Arrayed in the most

gorgeous vestments of his office, he was borne through the city on a

litter held up by the nobles and vassals of the Church. He addressed

great throngs in one of the most moving orations of his career. But no

king or prince came from beyond the Alps, and none sent

representatives with powers to commit his state to war; nationalism,

which was to achieve the Reformation, was already strong enough to

make the papacy an ineffectual suppliant before the thrones of the

kings. The cardinals urged the Pope to return to Rome; neither did

they relish the thought of yielding a tithe of their income to the

crusade; some decamped to their pleasures; some asked Pius to his face

did he wish them to die of fever in Mantua's summer heat? The

Pontiff waited patiently for the Emperor, but Frederick III, instead

of coming to the aid of the man who in the past had served him well,

declared war on Hungary in an effort to add to his realm the very

nation that was most actively preparing to resist the Turks. France

again made its co-operation conditional on papal support of a French

campaign against Naples. Venice held back for fear that her

remaining possessions in the Aegean would be the first sacrifice in

a war of Christian Europe against the Ottomans. At last, in August, an

embassy came from Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy; in September

Francesco Sforza appeared; other Italian princes followed his lead,

and on the 26th the Congress held its first sitting, four months after

the arrival of the Pope. Four months more passed in argument; finally,

by agreeing to the division of Turkish and formerly Byzantine

territory in Europe among the victorious powers, Pius won Burgundy and

Italy to his plan for a holy war. All Christian laymen were to

contribute to the cause a thirtieth of their income, all Jews a

twentieth, all clergy a tenth. The Pope returned to Rome in almost

complete exhaustion; but he gave orders for the construction of a

papal fleet, and prepared, despite gout and cough and stone, to lead

the crusade himself.

And yet his nature shrank from war, and he dreamed of a peaceful

victory. Perhaps encouraged by rumors that Mohammed II, born of a

Christian mother, had secret leanings toward Christianity, Pius

addressed to the Sultan (1461) an earnest appeal to accept the

Gospel of Christ. He had never been more eloquent.

-

Were you to embrace Christianity there is no prince on earth who

would surpass you in glory or equal you in power. We would acknowledge

you as emperor of the Greeks and the East; and what you have now taken

by violence, and retain by injustice, would then be your lawful

possession.... Oh, what a fullness of peace it would be! The golden

age of Augustus, sung by the poets, would return. If you were to

join yourself to us the whole of the East would soon turn to Christ.

One will could give peace to the entire world, and that will is

yours! `051537

-

Mohammed made no reply; whatever his theology, he knew that his

final protection against Western arms lay not in the promises of the

Pope but in the religious ardor of his people. Pius turned more

realistically to collecting the clerical tithe. A windfall sustained

him in 1462 when rich deposits of alum were found in papal soil at

Tolfa in western Latium; several thousand men were put to work

mining the substance so valued by dyers; soon the mines were

yielding 100,000 florins per year to the Holy See. Pius announced that

the discovery was a miracle, a divine contribution to the Turkish

war. `051538 The Papal States were now the richest government in

Italy, with Venice a close second, Naples third, then Milan, Florence,

Modena, Siena, Mantua. `051539

Venice, perceiving the resolute earnestness of the Pope, accelerated

its preparations. The other powers held back, or offered merely

token aid; the collection of taxes for the crusade met with formidable

resistance almost everywhere. Francesco Sforza cooled to the

enterprise as promising to strengthen Venice by redeeming her lost

possessions and trade. Genoa, which had pledged eight triremes,

withheld them. The Duke of Burgundy urged the Pope to wait for a

better day. But Pius announced that he would go to Ancona, expect

there the union of new papal and Venetian fleets, cross with them to

Ragusa, join Skanderbeg of Bosnia and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary,

and lead in person the advance against the Turks. Nearly all the

cardinals protested; they had no appetite for marching through the

Balkans; they warned the Pope that Bosnia was reeking with heretics

and plague. The ailing pontiff nevertheless took the cross of a

crusader, bade farewell to Rome, not expecting to see it again, and

sailed with his fleet for Ancona (June 18, 1464).

Meanwhile the armies that were supposed to meet him faded away as if

by Oriental magic; the troops originally promised by Milan did not

come; those which Florence sent were so poorly equipped as to be

useless; when Pius reached Ancona (July 19) he found that most of

the crusaders who had assembled there had deserted, weary of waiting

and worried for food. Plague broke out in the Venetian fleet as it

left the lagoons, and caused a delay of twelve days. Brokenhearted

by the vanishing of his armies and the nonappearance of the Venetian

armada, Pius languished at Ancona, sick to the verge of death. Finally

the fleet was sighted; the Pope sent his galleys to meet them, and had

himself carried to a window from which he could see the harbor. As the

combined navies came in sight he died (August 14, 1464). Venice

recalled her vessels, the remaining soldiers dispersed, the crusade

collapsed. The brilliant and versatile climber who had craved

success after success had reached the throne of thrones, had graced it

with urbane scholarship and Christian benevolence, and had drunk to

the dregs the gall of failure, humiliation, and defeat; but he had

redeemed the errors of his youth with the devotion of his maturity,

and had shamed the cynicism of his peers with the nobility of his

death.

V. PAUL II: 1464-71

-

The lives of great men oft remind us that a man's character can be

formed after his demise. If a ruler coddles the chroniclers about

him they may lift him to posthumous sanctity; if he offends them

they may broil his corpse on a spit of venom or roast him to darkest

infamy in a pot of ink. Paul II quarreled with Platina; Platina

wrote the biography upon which most estimates of Paul depend, and

handed him down to posterity as a monster of vanity, pomp, and greed.

There was some truth in the indictment, though not much more than

might be found in any biography untempered with charity. Pietro Barbo,

Cardinal of San Marco, was proud of his handsome appearance, as nearly

all men are. When elected pope he proposed, probably in humor, to be

called Formosus- good-looking; he allowed himself to be dissuaded, and

took the title of Paul II. Simple in his private life, yet knowing the

hypnotic effect of magnificence, he kept a luxurious court, and

entertained his friends and guests with costly hospitality. On

entering the conclave that elected him he, like the other cardinals,

had pledged himself, if chosen, to wage war against the Turks, to

summon a general council, to limit the number of cardinals to

twenty-four and the number of papal relatives among them to one, to

create no man a cardinal under thirty years of age, and to consult the

cardinals on all important appointments. Paul, elected, repudiated

these capitulations as nullifying time-honored traditions and

powers. He consoled the cardinals by raising their yearly revenue to a

minimum of 4000 florins ($100,000?). He himself, coming of a

mercantile family, relished the security of florins, ducats, scudi,

and gems that held a fortune in a ray of light. He wore a tiara that

outweighed a palace in worth. As cardinal he had kept the goldsmiths

busy with orders for jewels, medals, and cameos; these, and costly

relics of classic art, he had collected in the sumptuous Palazzo San

Marco which he had built for himself at the foot of the

Capitol. *05035 With all his acquisitiveness he stooped to no

simony, repressed the sale of indulgences, and governed Rome with

justice if not with mercy.

He is worst remembered by his quarrel with the Roman humanists. Some

of these were secretaries to the pope or the cardinals; most of them

filled less dignified positions as abbreviatores - writers of briefs,

or keepers of records, for the Curia. Whether as a measure of economy,

or to rid the Collegium Abbreviatorum of the fifty-eight Sienese

whom Pius II had appointed to it, Paul disbanded the whole group, gave

its work to other departments, and left some seventy humanists jobless

or reduced to less lucrative posts. The most eloquent of these

dismissed humanists was Bartolommeo de' Sacchi, who took the Latin

name Platina from his native Piadena near Cremona. He appealed to

the Pope to re-employ the dismissed men; when Paul refused he wrote

him a threatening letter. Paul had him arrested, and kept him for four

months in Sant' Angelo, bound with heavy chains. Cardinal Gonzaga

secured his release; but Platina, Paul thought, would bear watching.

The leader of the humanists in Rome was Iulio Pomponio Leto,

allegedly the natural son of Prince Sanseverino of Salerno. Coming

to Rome in youth, he attached himself to Valla as a disciple, and

succeeded him as professor of Latin in the university. He became so

enamored of pagan literature that he lived and had his being not in

the Rome of Nicholas V or Paul II, but in that of the Catos or the

Caesars. He was the first to edit the agricultural classics of Varro

and Columella, and he sedulously followed their precepts in tending

his vineyard. He remained content in learned poverty, spent half his

time among the historic ruins, wept at their spoliation and

desolation, Latinized his name to Pomponius Laetus, and walked to

his classroom in ancient Roman dress. Hardly any hall could hold the

crowd that gathered at dawn to hear his lectures; some students came

at midnight to secure a place. He despised the Christian religion,

denounced its preachers as hypocrites, and trained his scholars in the

Stoic rather than the Christian morality. His home was a museum of

Roman antiquities, a meeting place for students and teachers of

Roman lore. About 1460 he organized them into a Roman Academy, whose

members took pagan names, gave such names to their children in

baptism, exchanged the Christian faith for a religious worship of

the genius of Rome, performed Latin comedies, and celebrated the

anniversary of Rome's foundation with pagan ceremonies in which the

officiating members were termed sacerdotes, and Laetus was called

pontifex maximus. Some enthusiastic members dreamed of restoring the

Roman Republic. `051540

Early in 1468 a citizen laid before the papal police a charge that

the Academy was plotting to depose and arrest the Pope. Certain

cardinals supported the charge, and assured the pontiff that a rumor

in Rome was predicting his early death. Paul ordered the arrest of

Laetus, Platina, and other leaders of the Academy. Pomponius wrote

humble apologies and professions of orthodoxy; after due chastening he

was released, and resumed his lecturing, but with such careful

conformity that when he died (1498) forty bishops attended his

funeral. Platina was tortured to elicit evidence of a conspiracy; no

such evidence was anywhere found, but Platina, despite a dozen letters

of apology, was kept in prison for a year. Paul decreed the

dissolution of the Academy as a nest of heresy, and forbade the

teaching of pagan literature in the schools of Rome. His successor

allowed the Academy to reopen reformed, and gave the penitent

Platina charge of the Vatican Library. There Platina found the

materials for his graphic and elegant biographies of the popes ( In

vitas summorum pontificum ); and when he came to Paul II he took his

revenge. His indictment might with more justice have been reserved for

Sixtus IV.

VI. SIXTUS IV: 1471-84

-

Of the eighteen cardinals who met to choose a new pontiff, fifteen

were Italian, Rodrigo Borgia was Spanish, d'Estouteville was French,

Bessarion was Greek. One participant later described the election of

Cardinal Francesco della Rovere as due to "intrigue and bribery"

( ex artibus et corruptelis ), `051541 but this seems to have meant

only that various offices were promised to various cardinals for their

votes. The new pope illustrated the admirable equality of

opportunity (among Italians) to reach the papacy. He was born of a

peasant family at Pecorile, near Savona. Repeatedly ill as a child, he

was consecrated to St. Francis by his mother in prayer for his

recovery. At nine he was sent to a Franciscan convent, and later

entered the Minorite order. For a while he served as tutor in the

della Rovere family, whose name he took as his own. He studied

philosophy and theology at Pavia, Bologna, and Padua, and taught

them there and elsewhere to classes so crowded that almost every

learned Italian of the next generation was said to have been his

pupil.

When, at fifty-seven, he became Sixtus IV, his reputation was that

of a scholar distinguished for learning and integrity. Almost

overnight, by one of the strangest transformations in papal history,

he became a politician and a warrior. Finding Europe too divided,

and its governments too corrupt, for a crusade against the Turks, he

decided to confine his secular efforts to Italy. There too, of course,

he found division- in the Papal States the authority of the pope

largely flouted by local rulers, in Latium a rule by noble violence

ignoring the papal power, and in Rome a mob so disorderly that at

his coronation it stoned his litter in anger at a crush caused by a

stoppage of the cavalcade. Sixtus proposed to restore order in Rome,

to reinvigorate legatine authority in the Papal States, and to bring

Italy under the unifying rule of the pope.

Surrounded by chaos, distrustful of strangers, and subject to family

affection, Sixtus appointed his avid nephews to positions of power and

revenue. It was the prime curse of his pontificate that those whom

he loved best proved worst, and took such venal advantage of their

place that all Italy came to despise them. The favorite nephew was

Pietro (or Piero) Riario, a youth of some charm- cheerful, witty,

courteous, generous- but so fond of luxury and sensual delights that

even the rich benefices bestowed upon him by the Pope failed to

finance the tastes of this formerly mendicant friar. Sixtus made him a

cardinal at twenty-five (1471), and gave him the bishoprics of

Treviso, Senigallia, Spalato, Florence, and other dignities, with a

total income of 60,000 ducats ($1,500,000?) a year. Pietro spent

all, and more, on vessels of silver and gold, fine raiment,

tapestries, embroideries, a pretentious retinue, expensive public

games, and the patronage of painters, poets, and scholars. The

festivities- including a banquet that lasted six hours- with which

he and his cousin Giuliano welcomed to Rome Ferrante's daughter

Eleonora marked a height of extravagance hardly equaled there since

Lucullus or Nero. Dizzy with power, Pietro made a triumphal tour of

Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, and Milan, enjoying regal honors

everywhere as a prince of the blood, displaying his mistresses in

costly attire, and making plans to become pope on or before the

death of his uncle. But on his return to Rome he died (1474) of his

excesses at the age of twenty-eight, having spent 200,000 ducats in

two years, and owing 60,000 more. `051542 His brother Girolamo was

made commander of the papal armies and lord of Imola and Forli; we

have already disposed of him there. Another nephew, Leonardo della

Rovere, was made prefect of Rome; and when he died his brother

Giovanni succeeded him. The ablest of these innumerable nephews was

Giuliano della Rovere, who will require a chapter as Julius II; his

life was reasonably decent, and he rose to the papacy over every

obstacle by force of intellect and character.

The plans of Sixtus to strengthen the Papal States disturbed the

other governments of Italy. Lorenzo de' Medici, as we have before

related, schemed to get Imola for Florence; Sixtus outplayed him,

and replaced the Medici with the Pazzi as bankers for the papacy;

Lorenzo tried to ruin the Pazzi, they tried to kill him. Sixtus agreed

to the conspiracy but deprecated murder; "go and do what you will," he

told the plotters, "provided there be no killing." `051543 The

result was a war that lasted (1478-80) until the Turks threatened to

overrun Italy. When that danger subsided, Sixtus was free to resume

his liberation of the Papal States. Late in 1480 the Ordelaffi line of

dictators died out at Forli, and the people asked the Pope to take

over the city; Sixtus bade Girolamo govern Imola and Forli together.

Girolamo suggested taking Ferrara next, and persuaded Sixtus and

Venice to join in war upon Duke Ercole (1482). Ferrante of Naples sent

troops to defend his son-in-law; Florence and Milan also helped

Ferrara; and the Pope, who had begun his reign with plans for European

peace, found that he had plunged all Italy into war. Harassed by

Naples in the south, by Florence in the north, and by disturbances

in Rome, Sixtus came to terms with Ferrara after a year of chaos and

bloodshed. When the Venetians refused to follow suit he excommunicated

them, and joined Florence and Milan in war upon his late ally.

The nobles of the capital had felt justified, by the example of a

warlike pontiff, in renewing their exhilarating feuds. It was one of

the polite customs of Rome to plunder the palace of a cardinal just

elected to the papacy. In so handling the palace of one of the della

Rovere cardinals, a young aristocrat, Francesco di Santa Croce, had

been wounded by a member of the della Valle family. The youth revenged

himself by cutting the tendon of della Valle's heel; della Valle's

relatives revenged him by cleaving Francesco's head; Prospero di Santa

Croce revenged Francesco by killing Piero Margani. The feud spread

through the city, the Orsini and the papal forces supporting the Santa

Croce, the Colonna defending the Valle. Lorenzo Oddone Colonna was

captured, tried, tortured into a confession, and put to death in Sant'

Angelo, though his brother Fabrizio surrendered two Colonna fortresses

to Sixtus in the hope of having Lorenzo spared. Prospero Colonna

joined Naples in war on the Pope, ravaged the Campagna, raided Rome.

Sixtus engaged Roberto Malatesta of Rimini to come and lead the

papal troops, Roberto defeated the Neapolitan and Colonna forces at

Campo Morto, returned to Rome victorious, and died of fever contracted

in the Campagna swamps. Girolamo Riario took his place, and Sixtus

officially blessed the artillery that his nephew directed against

the Colonna citadels. But while the Pope's spirit willed war, his body

collapsed under the strain of successive crises. In June, 1484, he too

came down with fever. On August 11 news came to him that his allies

had made peace with Venice over his protests; he refused to ratify it.

The next day he died.

Sixtus was in many ways a preview of Julius II, as Girolamo Riario

rehearsed the career of Caesar Borgia. A stern imperial priest who

loved war and art and power, Sixtus pursued his purposes without

scruple or finesse, but with wild energy and unhesitating courage to

the end. Like later warrior popes, he made enemies who tried to weaken

his arms by blackening his name. Some gossips accounted for his lavish

support of Pietro and Girolamo Riario by calling them his

sons; `051544 others, like Infessura, called them his lovers, and

did not hesitate to term the Pope "a sodomite." `051545 *05036 The

picture is bad enough without these incredible and unsupported

allegations. After exhausting on his nephews the treasury that Paul II

had left full, Sixtus financed his wars by selling ecclesiastical

offices to the highest bidder. A hostile Venetian ambassador quotes

him as saying that "a pope needs only pen and ink to get whatever

sum he wishes"; `051547 but this is equally true of most modern

governments, whose interest-bearing bonds correspond in many ways with

the salary-bearing sinecures sold by the popes. Sixtus, however, was

not content with this scheme. He kept throughout the Papal States a

monopoly on the sale of corn; he sold the best abroad, and the rest to

his people, at a goodly profit. `051548 He had learned this trick from

the other rulers of his time, like Ferrante of Naples; presumably he

charged no more than private engrossers would have done, since it is

an unwritten law of economics that the price of a product depends on

the gullibility of the purchaser; but the poor grumbled forgivably

at the thought that their hunger fed the luxuries of the Riarios.

Despite these and other devices for raising revenues, Sixtus left

debts totaling 150,000 ducats ($3,750,000?)

A substantial portion of his revenues was spent on art and public

works. He tried, unsuccessfully, to drain the pestilential marshes

around Foligno, and at least dreamt of draining the Pontine swamps. He

had the major streets of Rome straightened, widened, and paved; he

improved the water supply; restored bridges, walls, gates, and towers;

spanned the Tiber with the Ponte Sisto that bears his name; built a

new Vatican Library, and the Sistine Chapel above it; founded the

Sistine Choir; and rebuilt the ruined Hospital of Santo Spirito, whose

main ward, 365 feet long, could accommodate a thousand patients. He

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