A Criminal History of Mankind (57 page)

It was a realistic assessment. Like the Old Man of the Mountain, Cesare had created so much hatred and disgust that he was regarded as a poisonous spider. Three years earlier the Venetian ambassador had reported: ‘Every night, four or five murdered men are discovered - bishops, prelates and others - so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed by the duke Cesare.’ Now that the pope was dead, Rome was determined to have no further cause to tremble. Cesare took refuge in the Castel Sant Angelo to avoid the daggers of his enemies. Lucrezia, safe in Ferrara, wrote to the king of France to ask him to allow Cesare to take up his dukedom there; but for the French, Cesare was now an embarrassment. For a while it looked as if his star was rising again; the new pope was forced to confirm him as head of the papal armies and sent him off to quell rebellions. Then he changed his mind and had Cesare arrested and brought back to the Vatican as a prisoner - he was kept in the room where Lucrezia’s second husband had been strangled. The Spaniards, who had been backing Cesare, realised that he was too dangerous to be allowed to raise an army. When Cesare escaped from Rome and hurried to his allies in Naples, the Spanish king Ferdinand had him arrested and put in prison on the island of Ischia. After two months there, he was forced to agree to give up his conquests in Romagna. Everything he had gained was now lost. Then he was allowed to go to Spain. But he had forgotten that his brother Juan had left a widow, and that she was determined to revenge her husband’s murder. Cesare was arrested again and imprisoned at Cincilla. The Spaniards had only one reason for keeping him alive: he was a valuable pawn to use against the pope. To have Cesare in prison was like having a plague germ in a bottle. In 1506, Cesare escaped, and succeeded in joining his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, who was engaged in a territorial dispute in Spain. Cesare again became a commander - of a mere hundred troops. Determined to demonstrate that he was as bold as ever, he rode ahead of the rest of the army and engaged the enemy. Luck had deserted him. He was badly wounded and left to die of thirst, stripped naked. It was 12 March 1507, and Cesare Borgia was still under thirty-one years of age.

Cesare had only three mourners: his mother Vannozza, his sister Lucrezia, and his one-time adviser, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat who began to make his mark shortly after the execution of Savonarola; the son of a poverty-stricken lawyer, he felt - like most of these Renaissance men - that success was the only thing that mattered. Being interested in power, he studied the gigantic chessboard of Renaissance Italy with fascination. When the Medicis came back to power, aided by the pope and the Spaniards, Machiavelli fell from favour and decided to write a book to try to ingratiate himself with the younger Lorenzo de Medici. Arrested, tortured and finally released, he spent his retirement producing
The Prince
, a work that has baffled generations of scholars. Its advocacy of cynical opportunism is so extraordinary that it seems inconceivable that he wrote it without some ulterior motive. It has been suggested that it is intended as satire - like Swift’s pamphlet suggesting that the people of Ireland should overcome starvation by eating their own children - or that he hoped to lure the younger Lorenzo to his own downfall. Both suggestions overlook the essential simplicity of Machiavelli’s outlook. He had no more inclination towards religion than Cesare Borgia had - or Rodrigo. Therefore, life was a question of how to achieve your objectives as economically as possible. For Machiavelli, the only worthwhile political objective was Italian unity. Cesare had brought that closer by conquering Romagna, and if it had not been for his bad luck in falling ill in 1503, he might have conquered the whole of Italy. With objectives as important as this, what did a little poisoning and a little treachery matter?

The argument sounds quite plausible - until we study the life of Cesare Borgia. Then we see that Machiavelli’s argument has one serious flaw. Cesare was a half-insane sadist, a Right Man driven by an outsize ego. Whatever success he achieved, the inner worm would have finally destroyed him - the total inability to control his own negative emotions. Even his political policies were short-sighted; his ruthlessness made him dangerous and therefore hated. Cesare was a symbolic figure; but not, as Machiavelli thought, of the ideal Renaissance Prince. He was, quite simply, the archetypal criminal, the man who spends his life taking short-cuts. Nothing is worse for a criminal than early success; it trains his reflexes to develop the lightning-grab. And without a counterbalancing self-control, he is bound to go too far. On one occasion when Cesare lost his temper with a cardinal in front of the pope, he drew his sword and actually stabbed the man so that blood splashed on the pope’s robes. (The. cardinal survived.) This was not the quality of a ‘man of iron’; it was mere lack of self-control. The death of his father made him realise that he had never possessed real power; he had been standing on his father’s shoulders. This is what he meant when he told Machiavelli that he had died on the same day as his father. The megalomaniac dream was over.

It becomes possible to see why reformers all over Europe were longing for the downfall of the Church. It was not simply that it had become corrupt - that could be remedied. It was that the Church had nothing whatever to do with religion. Rodrigo Borgia was not a particularly bad man. Apart from conniving at the murder of a few cardinals, he did nothing very wicked. But he had no more to do with the teaching of Jesus than Tiberius had. He was simply an updated Caesar. The Church was on to a good thing, and he knew it.

We have seen that history seems to be a story of the pendulum-swings of the human spirit between evolutionary purpose and mere materialism - that is, between religion and crime. Man needs material prosperity; it is basic to his survival. But when he has achieved material security, he finds himself oddly dissatisfied and confused. An instinct tells him that it is now time to turn to more important matters. This instinct aims ultimately at control: control of his own conscious processes. He recognises intuitively that such control can only be achieved if he can attach himself to some greater purpose, like a water-skier to a speedboat. And, absurdly enough, that he could achieve this aim more satisfactorily in a monastery cell or on a mountain top than in a palace. This is why Petrarch and Boccaccio became famous all over Europe, in spite of the fact that their books had to be copied by hand. Petrarch is remembered as the first man who climbed to a hilltop merely to look at the view. And when Boccaccio described his young men and women telling their risque stories in the midst of trees and flowers, he was giving expression to a new form of human longing - the same longing that had swept the Mediterranean world thirteen centuries earlier when the preacher from Nazareth announced the end of the world and a ‘new deal’ for the human race. What man wanted instinctively was a ‘new deal’. The plague only focused and intensified that longing. And the soul of man could begin to grasp its meaning on mountain tops or in the midst of woods and streams. Yet no one could deny the practical need for palaces - and hovels.

It must have seemed to these men of the late Middle Ages that the Persian prophet Mani was obviously right when he said that man consists of two warring principles, body and spirit. And this is why movements like the Cathars were so dangerous to the Church, and were stamped out with such murderous ferocity. To us, it seems obvious that the Cathars had oversimplified the problem to the point of absurdity. We know that man
does
possess two egos, that they appear to be associated with the double-brain, and that their purpose is to co-operate with each other like two lumberjacks at either end of a double-handed saw. The Cathars believed that the two principles were engaged in a war to the death, and that religion demanded that we should starve and humiliate the conscious ego. Naturally, then, they believed that the popes, with all their wealth, were on the devil’s side without knowing it. The popes were more reasonable and, in a logical sense, closer to the truth. They felt that man must learn to balance on a tightrope between body and spirit, and try to give each its due. They also recognised that man is ignorant and undisciplined and needs some kind of authority to give his life a basic semblance of order. Since the Cathars wanted to destroy that authority, they could not be treated with tolerance.

John Wycliffe was another spiritual reformer, the religious equivalent of Petrarch, expressing the same craving for simplicity and deeper purpose. It was on a visit to Bruges in 1374, as an ambassador to the papal court, that he was shocked by the worldliness of the Catholic clergy. The impulse that drove him was identical to the impulse that drove the abbots of Cluny and St Francis of Assisi - a desire to give people a sense of religious purpose. In Rome, he might well have started his own religious movement within the Church and ended by being canonised. But he happened to be an Englishman who lived in a time when the pope was a pawn of the king of France, and England was at war with France. John of Gaunt used him as a pawn in his own political machinations. So Wycliffe, by a historical accident, became the first ‘Protestant’. He happened to concentrate his attack on what was, for the Church, a particularly dangerous point: the notion that the consecrated wafer does not really turn into the flesh of Christ. For Wycliffe, it was self-evident nonsense. But for the Church it meant that, if the blessed sacrament is a fraud, then a priest is not necessary to administer it. The priest would be superfluous. This is why the Church wanted to burn Wycliffe - who, fortunately, being in England, was beyond its reach. Besides, with two popes, the Church was too divided to do much harm.

The Bohemian reformer Jan Hus was less lucky. He was deeply influenced by Wycliffe, and ten years after Wycliffe’s death (in 1384) was delivering lectures at the University of Prague in which he called for Church reform. The Church leaders were horrified, but the common people agreed it was a time for change. In 1410, the archbishop of Bohemia became so incensed at the constant use of Wycliffe’s name that he had two hundred copies of his books burnt on a bonfire. But two years later Hus became rector of Prague University and went on repeating his heresies. There were, he pointed out, now three popes claiming to be the head of Christendom - not all of them could be infallible.

In 1414, the Church itself recognised that this farce of too many popes had to be brought to an end as quickly as possible; so a council of bishops was convened at Constance. Hus was asked to go and explain himself. He refused until the Holy Roman Emperor, who also happened to be king of Bohemia, gave him a solemn promise that he had nothing to fear and a safe conduct. Hus went to Constance, and was immediately arrested. Dragged into the council hall, he was ordered to renounce his heresies. He refused, although he knew it meant death. The Church made this as horrible as possible by burning him alive. The Church council went on to declare Wycliffe a heretic in retrospect and ordered that his bones should be dug up and burned.

The Council of Constance finally healed the breach within the Church; Martin V was made pope. He proclaimed a crusade against Hussites and Lollards (Wycliffites), and an army marched into Bohemia, where the murder of Hus (and his friend Jerome of Prague) had aroused powerful national feelings. But three ‘crusades’ all failed to break the resistance of the Bohemians; their land was ravaged; all kinds of atrocities were committed; but the invaders were driven out.

In Italy, crime had become as commonplace and as widespread as in England before the Black Death. In its state of constant war, things could not have been otherwise. In Parma in 1480, the governor was intimidated by threats of murder into throwing open all the public jails and letting out the criminals; the natural consequence was an epidemic of burglary and murder - some houses were even besieged and demolished by the armed gangs. One priest called Don Niccolo de Pelagati carried the materialistic principles of Pope Rodrigo to an absurd extreme. On the day he celebrated his first mass he also committed a murder, but received absolution upon a suitable payment. He then began a career of crime that included killing four men and marrying two wives, with whom he travelled. As the historian Jacob Burckhardt says in his
Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
: ‘He afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and shelter by every sort of violence.’ Don Niccolo was caught and hung up in an iron cage outside San Giuliano in Ferrara in 1495. Yet he had done nothing that Cesare Borgia had not done on a far larger scale.

In the year 1500, Pope Rodrigo Borgia declared a Jubilee, a year in which all pilgrims who made the journey to Rome should receive total absolution for their sins. The idea, we may recall, had been devised by Pope Boniface VIII, who needed croupiers to rake in the coins from the tomb of St Peter. In 1500, Rodrigo Borgia needed money for Cesare’s wars and decided that some new attraction should be provided. He ordered that a special door, a Holy Door, should be made in St Peter’s, and circulated the story that it had always existed but that it was bricked up after every Jubilee and reopened a century later... The result was that the Jubilee of 1500 brought in larger sums than ever before, all of which instantly vanished into the Borgia coffers.

The Jubilee also involved a minor drawback that the pope had overlooked. Pilgrims who arrived in Rome and discovered that it was virtually a sixteenth-century Las Vegas or Monte Carlo - a city geared to making money at top speed - were bound to feel disillusioned about the Church. They were bound to compare these Roman churches with their small church at home, with its underpaid priest. Why
should
Rome be the automatic recipient of a river of gold? It was the feeling that had fuelled the Hussite revolt of a century ago; now it began to smoulder again.