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

Church. `051616

Art and literature marked time. Alexander did considerable

building in and out of Rome; financed a new ceiling for Santa Maria

Maggiore with a gift of American gold from Ferdinand and Isabella;

remodeled the Mausoleum of Hadrian into the fortified Castle of

Sant' Angelo, and redecorated its interior to provide cells for

papal prisoners and more comfortable quarters for harassed popes. He

built between the Castle and the Vatican a long covered corridor,

which gave him refuge from Charles VIII in 1494, and saved Clement VII

from a Lutheran noose in the sack of Rome. Pinturicchio was engaged to

adorn the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican. Four of these six

rooms were restored and opened to the public by Leo XIII. A lunette in

one of them contains a vivid portrait of Alexander- a happy face, a

prosperous body, gorgeous robes. In another room a Virgin teaching the

Child to read was described by Vasari `051617 as a portrait of

Giulia Farnese, an alleged mistress of the Pope. Vasari adds that

the picture also contained "the head of Pope Alexander adoring her,"

but no picture of him is there visible.

He rebuilt the University of Rome, called to it several

distinguished teachers, and paid them with unheard-of regularity. He

liked drama, and was pleased to have the students of the Roman Academy

stage comedies and ballets for his family festivals. He preferred

light music to heavy philosophy. In 1501 he re-established

censorship of publications by an edict requiring that no book might be

printed without the approval of the local archbishop. But he allowed a

wide freedom of satire and debate. He laughed off the bites of the

town wits, and rejected Caesar Borgia's proposal that such snipers

should be disciplined. "Rome is a free city," he told the Ferrarese

ambassador, "where everyone can say or write whatever he pleases. They

say much evil of me, but I don't mind." `051618

His administration of Church affairs was, in the early years of

his pontificate, unusually efficient. Innocent VIII had left a debt in

the treasury; "it needed all the financial ability of Alexander to

restore the papal finances; it took him two years to balance the

budget." `051618a The Vatican staff was reduced, and expenses were

curtailed, but records were strictly kept, and salaries were

promptly paid. `051619 Alexander performed the laborious religious

ritual of his office with fidelity, but with the impatience of a

busy man. `051620 His magister ceremoniarum was a German, Johann

Burchard, who helped to perpetuate the fame and infamy of his employer

by recording in a Diarium nearly all that he saw, including much

that Alexander would have wished unseen. To the cardinals the Pope

gave as he had promised in the conclave, and he was even more generous

to those who, like Cardinal de' Medici, had longest opposed him. A

year after his accession he created twelve new cardinals. Several were

men of real ability; some were appointed at the request of political

powers that it was wise to conciliate; two were scandalously young-

Ippolito d'Este, fifteen, and Caesar Borgia, eighteen; one of them,

Alessandro Farnese, owed his elevation to his sister Giulia Farnese,

who was believed by many to be a mistress of the Pope. The

sharp-tongued Romans, not foreseeing that they would one day acclaim

Alessandro as Paul III, called him il cardinale della gonnelia -

the cardinal of the petticoat. The strongest of the older cardinals,

Giuliano della Rovere, was displeased to find that he, who had often

ruled Innocent VIII, had little influence with Alexander, who made

Cardinal Sforza his favorite counselor. In a huff Giuliano retired

to his episcopal see at Ostia, and formed a guard of armed men. A year

later he fled to France, and besought Charles VIII to invade Italy,

summon a general council, and depose Alexander as a shamelessly

simoniacal pope.

Meanwhile Alexander was facing the political problems of a papacy

caught between the millstones of scheming Italian powers. The Papal

States had again fallen into the hands of local dictators who, while

calling themselves vicars of the Church, had snatched the

opportunity provided by the weakness of Innocent VIII to

re-establish the practical independence that they or their

predecessors had lost under Albornoz or Sixtus IV. Some papal cities

had been seized by neighboring powers; so Naples had taken Sora and

Aquila in 1467, and Milan had appropriated Forli in 1488.

Alexander's first task, then, was to bring these states under a

centralized papal rule and taxation, as the kings of Spain, France,

and England had subdued the feudal lords. This was the mission that he

assigned to Caesar Borgia, who accomplished it with such speed and

ruthlessness as made Machiavelli gape with admiration.

Closer to Rome, and more immediately harassing, was the turbulent

autonomy of the nobles, theoretically subject, actually hostile and

dangerous, to the popes. The temporal weakness of the papacy since

Boniface VIII (d. 1303) had allowed these barons to maintain a

medieval feudal sovereignty on their estates, making their own laws,

organizing their own armies, fighting at will their private and

reckless wars, to the ruin of order and commerce in Latium. Soon after

Alexander's accession Franceschetto Cibo sold to Virginio Orsini,

for 40,000 ducats ($500,000), estates left him by his father

Innocent VIII. But this Orsini was a high officer in the Neapolitan

army; he had received from Ferrante most of the money for the

purchase; `051621 in effect Naples had secured two strategic

strongholds in papal territory. `051622 Alexander reacted by forming

an alliance with Venice, Milan, Ferrara, and Siena, raising an army,

and fortifying the wall between Sant' Angelo and the Vatican.

Ferdinand II of Spain, fearing that a combined attack upon Naples

would end the Aragon power in Italy, persuaded Alexander and

Ferrante to negotiate. Orsini paid the Pope 40,000 ducats for the

right to retain his purchases; and Alexander betrothed his son Giofre,

then thirteen, to Sancia, the pretty granddaughter of the Neapolitan

King (1494).

In return for Ferdinand's happy mediation, Alexander awarded him the

two Americas. Columbus had discovered the "Indies" some two months

after Alexander's succession, and had presented them to Ferdinand

and Isabella. Portugal claimed the New World by virtue of an edict

of Calixtus III (1479), which had confirmed her claim to all lands

on the Atlantic coast. Spain retorted that the edict had in mind

only the eastern Atlantic. The states were near war when Alexander

issued two bulls (May 3 and 4, 1493) allotting to Spain all

discoveries west, and to Portugal all those east, of an imaginary line

drawn from pole to pole a hundred Spanish leagues west of the Azores

and Cape Verde Islands, in each case on condition that the lands

discovered were not already inhabited by Christians, and that the

conquerors would make every effort to convert their new subjects to

the Christian faith. The "grant" of the Pope, of course, merely

confirmed a conquest of the sword, but it preserved the peace of the

peninsular powers. No one seems to have thought that non-Christians

had any rights to the lands in which they dwelt.

If Alexander might distribute continents he found it difficult to

hold the Vatican. When Ferrante of Naples died (1494), Charles VIII

decided to invade Italy and restore Naples to French rule. Fearing

deposition, Alexander went to the extraordinary step of soliciting

help from the Sultan of the Turks. In July, 1494, he sent a papal

secretary, Giorgio Bocciardo to warn Bajazet II that Charles VIII

was planning to enter Italy, take Naples depose or control the Pope,

and use Djem as a pretender to the Ottoman throne in a crusade against

Constantinople. Alexander proposed that Bajazet should make common

cause with the papacy, Naples, and perhaps Venice, against the French.

Bajazet received Bocciardo with Oriental courtesy, and sent him back

with the 40,000 ducats due for the maintenance of Djem, and with an

envoy of his own to Alexander. At Senigallia Bocciardo was captured by

Giovanni della Rovere, brother to the disaffected cardinal; the 40,000

ducats were seized, together with five letters allegedly from the

Sultan to the Pope. One letter proposed that Alexander should put Djem

to death and send the dead body to Constantinople; upon its receipt

the Sultan would pay the Pope 300,000 ducats ($3,750,000), "with which

Your Highness may buy some dominions for your children." `051623

Cardinal della Rovere gave copies of the letters to the French King.

Alexander claimed that the Cardinal had forged the letters and had

invented the whole story. The evidence supports the authenticity of

Alexander's message to Bajazet, but discounts the Sultan's reply as

probably forged. `051624 Venice and Naples had already entered into

similar negotiations with the Turks; Francis I would later do

likewise. To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool

of power.

Charles came, advanced through friendly Milan and frightened

Florence, and approached Rome (December, 1494). The Colonna

supported him by preparing to invade the capital. A French fleet

seized Ostia- Rome's port at the mouth of the Tiber- and threatened to

stop the supply of grain from Sicily. Many cardinals, including

Ascanio Sforza, declared for Charles; Virginio Orsini opened his

castles to the King; half the cardinals in Rome besought him to depose

the Pope. `051624a Alexander withdrew to Castel Sant' Angelo, and sent

envoys to treat with the conqueror. Charles did not wish, by

attempting to remove the Pope, to rouse Spain against him; his goal

was Naples, whose wealth was ever in the thoughts of his officers.

He made peace with Alexander on condition of an unimpeded passage

for his army through Latium, papal forgiveness of the pro-French

cardinals, and the surrender of Djem. Alexander yielded, returned to

the Vatican, enjoyed Charles's three genuflections before him,

graciously prevented him from kissing the papal feet, and received

from the King the formal "obedience" of France- i.e., all plans for

deposing Alexander were withdrawn. On January 25, 1495, Charles

moved on to Naples, taking Djem with him. On February 25 Djem died

of bronchitis. Gossip said that the subtle Alexander had given him a

slow poison, but no one any longer credits that tale. `051625

Once the French were gone, Alexander recovered his courage. Now,

probably, he made up his mind that strong Papal States, a good army,

and a good general were necessary to the safety of the popes from

secular domination. `051626 With Venice, Germany, Spain, and Milan

he formed a Holy League (March 31, 1495), Ostensibly for mutual

defense and for war against the Turks, secretly for the expulsion of

the French from Italy. Charles took the hint, and retreated through

Rome to Pisa; Alexander, to avoid him, sojourned in Orvieto and

Perugia. When Charles fled back to France Alexander returned in

triumph to Rome. He demanded of Florence that it should join the

League, and expel or silence Savonarola, friend of France and foe of

the Pope. He reorganized the papal army, put his oldest surviving

son Giovanni at its head, and bade him conquer for the papacy the

revolted Orsini fortresses (1496). But Giovanni was no general; he was

defeated at Soriano, returned to Rome in disgrace, and pursued the

careless gallantries that probably caused his early death.

Nevertheless Alexander recovered the strongholds sold to Virginio

Orsini, and recaptured Ostia from the French. Apparently victorious

over all obstacles, he bade Pinturicchio paint on the walls of the

papal apartment in Sant' Angelo frescoes picturing the triumph of

the Pope over the King. Alexander was at the top of his curve.

III. THE SINNER

-

Rome applauded him for his internal administration, and his

successful though hesitant diplomacy. It reproved him mildly for his

love affairs, vigorously for feathering the nests of his children,

bitterly for appointing to office in Rome a host of Spaniards whose

alien mien and speech set Italian teeth on edge. A hundred Spanish

relatives of the Pope had flocked to Rome; "ten papacies," said one

observer, "would not have sufficed for all these cousins." `051627

Alexander himself was by this time fully Italian in his culture,

policy, and ways, but he still loved Spain, spoke Spanish too

frequently with Caesar and Lucrezia, elevated nineteen Spaniards to

the cardinalate, and surrounded himself with Catalan servants and

aides. Finally the jealous Romans, half in humor, half in wrath,

called him "the marrano Pope," `051628 implying his descent from

Christianized Spanish Jews. Alexander excused himself on the ground

that many Italians, especially in the college of cardinals, had proved

faithless to him, and that he had to have about him a nucleus of

supporters bound to him by a personal loyalty based on their awareness

that he was their sole protector in Rome.

He- and the princes of Europe down to Napoleon- argued likewise in

promoting relatives to positions of trust and power. *05039 He hoped

for a while that his son Giovanni might help him to protect the

Papal States, but Giovanni had inherited his father's sensitivity to

women without Alexander's capacity to govern men. Perceiving that of

his sons only Caesar had in him the iron and gall necessary to play

the game of Italian politics in that violent age, Alexander

conferred upon him a maze of benefices whose income would finance

the youth's rising power. Even the gentle Lucrezia was an instrument

of policy, and found herself promoted to the governorship of a city or

the bed of a valuable duke. The Pope's fondness for Lucrezia led him

to such shows of affection that cruel gossip accused him of incest,

and pictured him as competing with his sons for her love. `051629 On

two occasions when he had to be absent from Rome, Alexander left

Lucrezia in charge of his rooms in the Vatican, with authority to open

his correspondence and attend to all routine business. Such delegation

of power to a woman was frequent in the ruling houses of Italy- as

in Ferrara, Urbino, Mantua- but it mildly shocked even blase Rome.

When Giofre and Sancia arrived from Naples after their wedding, Caesar

and Lucrezia went out to meet them; all four then hurried to the

Vatican, and Alexander was happy to have them near him. "Other

popes, to conceal their infamy," says Guicciardini, "were wont to term

their offspring nephews; but Alexander took delight in letting all the

world know that they were his children" `051630

The city had forgiven the Pope his pristine Vanozza, but marveled at

his current Giulia. Giulia Farnese was noted for her beauty, above all

for her golden hair; when she let it down, and it hung to her feet, it

was a sight that would have stirred the blood of men less mettlesome

than Alexander. Her friends called her La Bella. Sanudo speaks of

her as "the Pope's favorite, a young woman of great beauty and

understanding, gracious and gentle." `051631 In 1493 Infessura

described her as attending Lucrezia's nuptial banquet in the

Vatican, and called her Alexander's "concubine"; Matarazzo, the

Perugian historian, used the same term for Giulia, but probably copied

Infessura; and a Florentine wit in 1494 called her sposa di

Cristo, bride of Christ, a phrase usually reserved for the

Church. `051632 Some scholars have sought to clear Giulia on the

ground that Lucrezia- who has been made respectable by research-

remained her friend to the end, and that Giulia's husband, Orsino

Orsini, built a chapel to her honored memory. `051633 In 1492 Giulia

gave birth to a daughter Laura, who was officially listed as

begotten by Orsini, but Cardinal Alessandro Farnese recognized the

girl as Alexander's child. `051634 *05040 By yet another woman the

Pope was credited with having a mysterious son, born about 1498, and

known in Burchard's diary as Infans Romanus. `051635 It is not

certain, but one more or less hardly matters.

There is no question that Alexander was a sensual man,

full-blooded to a degree painfully uncongenial to celibacy. When he

gave a public festival in the Vatican, at which a comedy was performed

(February, 1503), he rumbled with amusement, and was pleased to have

fair women crowd about him and seat themselves gracefully on

footstools at his feet. He was a man. He seems to have felt, like many

clergymen of the time, that clerical celibacy was a mistake of

Hildebrand's, and that even a cardinal should be permitted the

pleasures and tribulations of female company. He showed feelings of

husbandly tenderness for Vanozza, and perhaps a paternal solicitude

for Giulia. On the other hand his devotion to his children,

sometimes overriding his fidelity to the interests of the Church,

could well be used to argue the wisdom of the canon law requiring

celibacy of a priest.

In these middle years of his pontificate, before Caesar Borgia

overshadowed it, Alexander had many virtues. Though he bore himself

with proud dignity at public functions, in private he was jovial,

good-natured, sanguine, eager to enjoy life, capable of a hearty laugh

at seeing, from his window, a parade of masked men "with long false

noses of great size in the form of the male member." `051636 He was

a bit stout now, if we may trust Pinturicchio's apparently honest

picture of him, praying, on the Appartamento wall; and yet all reports

concur that he lived frugally, on so plain a fare that the cardinals

shunned his table. `051637 He was unsparing of himself in

administration, working till late at night, and watching actively over

the affairs of the Church everywhere in Christendom.

Was his Christianity a pretense? Probably not. His letters, even

those concerning Giulia, are warm with phrases of piety that were

not indispensable in private correspondence. `051638 He was so much

a man of action, and had so thoroughly absorbed the easy morals of his

time, that he only sporadically noted any contradiction between

Christian ethics and his life. Like most persons completely orthodox

in theology, he was completely worldly in conduct. He seems to have

felt that in his circumstances the papacy needed a statesman, not a

saint; he admired sanctity, but thought it belonged to monasticism and

private life rather than to a man compelled to deal at every step with

subtle and acquisitive despots or unscrupulous and treacherous

diplomats. He ended by adopting all their methods, and the most

questionable devices of his predecessors in the papacy.

Needing funds for his government and his wars, he sold offices, took

over the estates of dead cardinals, and exploited the jubilee of

1500 to the full. Dispensations and divorces were given as

profitable parts of political bargains; so King Ladislaus VII of

Hungary paid 30,000 ducats for the annulment of his marriage with

Beatrice of Naples; had Henry VIII such an Alexander to deal with he

would have remained to the end a Defender of the Faith. When the

jubilee threatened to be a financial disappointment because would-be

pilgrims stayed home through fear of robbery, pestilence, or war,

Alexander, not to be cheated, and following pontifical precedents,

issued a bull (March 4, 1500) detailing by what payments Christians

might obtain the jubilee indulgence without coming to Rome, at what

cost penitents might gain absolution from consanguineous marriages,

and how much a clergyman should pay to be forgiven simony and

"irregularity." `051639 On December 16 he extended the jubilee till

Epiphany. The collectors promised payors that the funds gathered in by

the jubilee would be used in a crusade against the Turks; the

promise was kept in the case of Polish and Venetian collections; but

Caesar Borgia used jubilee proceeds to finance his campaigns for the

recovery of the Papal States. `051640

To further celebrate the jubilee, Alexander (September 28, 1500)

created twelve new cardinals, who paid a total of 120,000 ducats for

their appointment; and these promotions, says Guicciardini, were

made "not of such as had the most merit, but of those that offered the

most money." `051641 In 1503 he named nine additional cardinals at a

commensurate price. `051642 In the same year he created ex nihilo

eighty new offices in the Curia, and these places, according to the

hostile Venetian ambassador Giustiniani, were sold at 760 ducats

each. `051643 A satirist attached to the statue of Pasquino (1503) a

stinging pasquinade:

-

Vendit Alexander claves, altaria, Christum;

vendere iure potest, emerat ipse prius- `051644

-

"the keys, the altars, Alexander sells, and Christ; with right,

since he has paid for them."

By canon law the property left by an ecclesiastic at his death

reverted to the Church, except as the pope might allow

otherwise. `051645 Alexander regularly gave such dispensations

except in the case of cardinals. Under pressure from the victorious

but money-consuming Caesar Borgia, Alexander made it a general

principle to appropriate the fortunes left by high ecclesiastics; in

this way substantial sums came into the treasury. Some cardinals

eluded the Pope by making large gifts in expectation of death, and

some, during their lives, deliberately squandered great sums on

their funeral monuments. When Cardinal Michiel died (1503), his

house was immediately stripped of its wealth by the agents of the

Pope, who, if we may believe Giustiniani, netted 150,000 ducats;

Alexander complained that only 23,832 were in cash. `051646

Deferring fuller consideration of the alleged poisonings, by

Alexander or Caesar Borgia, of high ecclesiastics who took too long to

die, we may provisionally accept the conclusion of recent research-

that "there is no evidence that Alexander VI poisoned

anybody." `051647 This does not quite clear him; he may have been

too clever for history. But he could not escape the satirists,

pamphleteers, and other wits who sold their deadly epigrams to his

opponents. We have seen how Sannazaro belabored Pope and son with

lethal couplets in the strife between the papacy and Naples. Infessura

served the Colonna with his scandalmongering pen; and Geronimo

Mancione was worth a regiment to the Savelli barons. Alexander, as

part of his campaign against the Campagna nobles, issued in 1501 a

bull detailing the crimes and vices of the Savelli and the Colonna.

Its exaggerations were bettered in Mancione's famous "Letter to Silvio

Savelli," retailing the vices and crimes of Alexander and Caesar

Borgia. This document was widely circulated, and did much to create

the legend of Alexander as a monster of perversions and

cruelty. `051648 Alexander won the battle of the sword, but his

noble foes, unchecked by his enemy Pope Julius II, won the battle of

the word, and transmitted their picture of him to history.

He paid too little attention to public opinion, and rarely

answered the slanders that so mercilessly multiplied the reality of

his faults. He was resolved to build a strong state, and thought

that it could not be done by Christian means. His use of the

traditional tools of statecraft- propaganda, deception, intrigue,

discipline, war- was bound to offend those who preferred a Christian

Church to a strong one, and those to whose advantage it was that the

papacy and the Papal States should be disorganized and weak among

the nobles of Rome and the powers of Italy. Occasionally Alexander

stopped to examine his life by evangelical standards, and then he

admitted himself to be a simoniac, a fornicator, even- through war-

a destroyer of human lives. Once, when his lucky star seemed

suddenly to fall, and all his proud and happy world seemed

shattered, he lost his Machiavellian amoralism, confessed his sins,

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

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