A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (28 page)

Rodrigo Borgia indicated early on that he had the makings of a great Renaissance pontiff. He was only twelve when he reportedly committed his first murder, stabbing to death another boy his age. His uncle, Pope Callistus III, assured Rodrigo’s place in the Church by making him a cardinal when he was twenty-five and vice-chancellor of the Holy See a year later. Thanks to the offices provided by Uncle Cal, Rodrigo soon became a very rich man.

“He is enormously wealthy,” a contemporary wrote, “and through his connections with kings and princes, commands great influence. He has built a beautiful and comfortable place for himself between the bridge of Sant’ Angelo and the Campo di Fiori. His revenues from his papal offices, his abbeys in Italy and Spain, his three bishoprics of Valencia, Portus, and Cartagena, are vast. . . . His plate, his stuffs embroidered with silk and gold, his books are all of such quality as would befit a king or pope. I hardly need mention the sumptuous bed-hangings, trappings for his horses and similar things of gold, silver, and silk, nor the vast quantity of gold coin which he possesses.”

Rodrigo Borgia’s money would later come in handy when he set out to buy himself the papacy. In the meantime, he settled into his luxurious lifestyle as a prince of the Church with his mistress, Vannozza de’ Catanei. In addition to the children he had from previous affairs, Vannozza bore him four more illegitimate children over the next twenty years. Two of them, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, would become as infamous as their dad.

Much as he loved Vannozza, however, Rodrigo eschewed monogamy as vigorously as he had celibacy. His extravagant sex life was greeted with a wink by his uncle Pope Callistus, but after Callistus died in 1458, his successor Pius II took a less favorable view. No slouch in the sack himself, having sired two children of his own, Pius was nevertheless shocked by Cardinal Borgia’s behavior.

“Beloved Son,” the pope wrote Rodrigo after hearing of a particularly lusty evening. “We have heard that, four days ago, several ladies of Sienna—women entirely given over to worldly frivolities—were assembled in the gardens of Giovanni di Bichis and that you, quite forgetful of the high office with which you are invested, were with them from the seventeenth to the twenty-second hour. With you was one of your colleagues whose age alone, if not the dignity of his office, ought to have recalled him to his duty. We have heard that the most licentious dances were indulged in, none of the allurements of love were lacking and you conducted yourself in a wholly worldly manner. Shame forbids mention of all that took place—not only the acts themselves but their very names are unworthy of your position. In order that your lusts might be given free rein the husbands, fathers, brothers and kinsmen of the young women were not admitted. . . . All Sienna is talking about this orgy. . . . Our displeasure is beyond words. . . . A cardinal should be beyond reproach.”

Between the orgies, Cardinal Borgia continued to accumulate vast wealth. He made lots of money selling pardons for all manner of crimes, even the most heinous. After hearing protests over his paid reprieve of a father who murdered his daughter, he retorted, “It is not God’s wish that a sinner should die, but that he should live—and pay!”

Borgia had more than enough money to take a stab at the papacy. Although popes were no longer elevated to the office by powerful Roman families or Christian emperors, the palms of the cardinals who elected them took plenty of greasing. In the conclave of 1484, after the death of Sixtus IV, Borgia lost the coveted crown to Innocent VIII, the great witch hunter. After Innocent died in 1492, however, Borgia was determined that he would not be cheated of the world’s ultimate throne again. He nearly bankrupted himself in the process.

It was a tight race, but Borgia had plenty of money. He even boasted that he had sacks of gold enough to fill the Sistine Chapel. And though he was a hated foreigner (both Borgia and his uncle Callistus III were Spanish), the price was right for many of the obdurate Roman cardinals.

One persistent rival stood in his way, however. Cardinal Ascario Sforza was also enormously wealthy and came from the ruling dynasty of the Duchy of Milan, which would give him much support. Taking Sforza aside, Borgia bluntly asked him what it would take to withdraw. Sforza settled for the lucrative office of vice chancellor and a huge cash payment. The next day, four mule-loads of bullion were on their way to Sforza’s palace. Now Borgia needed only one more vote, which was purchased from the cardinal of Venice. Though the amount was a pittance compared to what Borgia had spent on the others, it was certainly more than the ninety-six-year-old cardinal could ever hope to spend in the time he had left.

The election was held and, as expected, Rodrigo Borgia won. The new Alexander VI could barely contain his glee. “I am pope, I am pope,” he exclaimed as he donned his sumptuous new papal vestments. “We are now in the clutches of perhaps the most savage wolf the world has ever seen,” remarked Giovanni di Medici, the future Pope Leo X. “Either we flee or he will, without a doubt, devour us.”

After an extravagant, debauched coronation ceremony that bordered on the pagan, Alexander VI settled right into his new position. He traded his long-term mistress Vannozza for the much younger and fresher Giulia Farnese, who was about sixteen at the time; the pope was pushing sixty. Giulia was immediately dubbed “the Pope’s Whore” and “the Bride of Christ” by the snickering Roman populace, but her position garnered power and she was able to get her brother, the future Pope Paul III, a plush position as a cardinal.

Usually the office was very expensive to acquire, and Alexander VI fed his coffers by constantly making new cardinals. After they paid for the position, the pope was known to have them poisoned to make room for more. (One exception was Alexander’s teenage son, Cesare, who got his post for free.) Ironically, Pope Alexander himself fell victim to a deadly potion, most probably intended for someone else. His grotesque demise in 1503, at age seventy-three, was vividly recorded by his aide John Burchard.

As the pope lingered on his bed, unable to swallow, his face turned the color of mulberry and his skin started to peel off. The fat of his belly liquified, while his bowels bled. Alexander finally died after hours of agony, but the indignity he faced was only just beginning. As the pope’s blackened corpse started to putrefy, the tongue swelled and forced open the mouth, which, according to Burchard, was foaming like a kettle over a fire. The bloated body, growing as wide as it was long, finally burst, emitting sulphurous fumes from every orifice. It was, the Venetian ambassador wrote, “the ugliest, most monstrous and horrible dead body that was ever seen, without any form or likeness of humanity.” The same could be said of the Church that was by now ripe for Reformation.

 

 

P
ope Leo X ignored all the signs of the Church fraying around him. He was too busy having fun. “Now I can really enjoy myself,” the pope wrote to his cousin right after his election in 1513. And indeed he did. A lavish entertainer, Leo spent enormous sums on food, wine, and after-dinner diversions. He loved the company of young men, indulging in “those pleasures which cannot, with decency, be mentioned,” as the Florentine statesman Francesco Guicciardini wrote. Maybe that’s why this pope never had any “nephews.”

He was a grand patron of the arts, who “would have been a perfect pope,” one contemporary historian wrote, “if to these [artistic] accomplishments he had added even the slightest knowledge of religion.” This assessment of Leo’s spirituality was not entirely fair, however. After all, he was sensitive enough to know that he could never order a Christian to execute a cardinal who had conspired against him. In a great display of piety, he hired a Muslim to do the job.

Leo had elaborate building plans to monumentalize his papacy. The greatest of all was the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, which had been razed by his predecessor Julius II. He wanted the new structure to be the biggest and grandest church in all the world. His ambitions, however, required a constant influx of cash, and Leo was always short. To remedy the situation, he settled on an age-old papal prerogative—the sale of indulgences to fill his coffers.

The notion that people could actually buy their way into heaven by paying off the pope enraged a German monk by the name of Martin Luther. In an act of bold defiance against this form of papal abuse, Luther took a hammer and nailed his
Ninety-Five Theses Upon Indulgences
to the doors of the cathedral at Wittenberg in 1517. “The Pope’s wealth far exceeds that of all other men,” Luther wrote. “Why does he not build the Church of St. Peter with his own money instead of the money of poor Christians?” Leo X recognized the danger to the papacy Luther represented, excommunicating him and ordering him burned in effigy, but he died without doing anything to reform the Church that was continuing to unravel by dissent.

 

 

U
nlike Leo, Paul IV wasn’t about to sit around the Vatican pleasuring himself while kings and commoners alike gave Rome the collective finger. Elected at age seventy-nine, this vile-tempered, foul-mouthed Vicar of Christ was probably too old—and way too mean—to enjoy himself anyway. Instead, this pope was a fierce reactionary determined to reassert the supreme power of the papacy.

Paul started with a little house cleaning. He was so disgusted by the nudes Michelangelo had created in the Sistine Chapel that he ordered clothes painted on a swath of them. The artist who completed this task, Daniele da Volterra, became known as “The Britches Maker.” In his fury at the Reformation that was sweeping Christendom, Paul reignited the fires of the Roman Inquisition. Often presiding over heresy trials himself, the pope dared anyone to challenge him or his authority. Even Ignatius Loyola, the great soldier turned saint, “trembled in every bone” at the thought of crossing Paul.

In his drive to maintain orthodoxy, the pope created the
Index of Forbidden Books
, a landmark in thought control that would linger well into the twentieth century. Among the first entries were the works of the Dutch scholar Erasmus and all Bibles not written in Latin. In time, authors added to the list would include everyone from Boccaccio to Galileo, who was persecuted by Pope Urban VIII in the next century for daring to suggest that the earth revolved around the sun—not the other way around.

As much as Paul IV hated dissent, though, he hated Jews even more. While the papacy had never been a model of tolerance—cursing the Jews for having killed Christ—Paul took to persecuting them with an unprecedented ferocity. In a preview of Nazi policy still almost four hundred years away, he herded all the Jews of Rome into ghettos and forced them to sell their property to Christians at ridiculously low prices. He also ordered them to wear distinctive yellow headgear and forbade them to marry Christians or attend to them as physicians. Jewish synagogues were destroyed and sacred texts burned.

And though he was the most despised pope of the century—upon his death in 1559, joyful crowds rampaged through Rome smashing his statues—Paul IV’s legacy of intolerance lingered for centuries. It took a far greater pope in the twentieth century to begin to atone for all the hatred and injustice that had been sown. “The Mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads,” the gentle and beloved Pope John XXIII wrote in a prayer. “Across the centuries, our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy Love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.”

A
ll things must pass, it is true, but it seems the Grim Reaper got a little giddy when it came to swatting down royalty. With all that pomp and pretense just begging to be punctured, how could he resist? Certainly Death was diabolically inventive in the variety of undignified demises he concocted for his royal victims, but, clever as he was, there were some notable occasions when the Great Leveler truly outdid himself.

At bottom, Edward II meets a ghastly end.

 

 

W
illiam the Conqueror was an impressive figure at the turn of the last millennium, a fearsome warrior whose life seemed to be one spectacular triumph after another. He defied the taint of illegitimacy at an early age—back when they still called him William the Bastard—to become the Duke of Normandy. Out-maneuvering dangerous relatives, subduing restless nobles, and checking the territorial ambitions of neighboring states, Duke William consolidated his power and then set his sights on Britain. There he easily defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and became the first of the long line of monarchs who have ruled Britain ever since. But two decades later he died, and things didn’t go so well after that.