A World Lit Only by Fire (8 page)

Blacks and Jews suffered most, but any minority was considered fair game for tyrants. In Moscovy, Ivan III Vasilyevich, the
grand duke of Moscow, proclaimed himself the first czar of Russia and then drove all Germans from Novgorod and enslaved Lithuania.
Fevered Turks swung their long curved swords in Egypt, leaving the gutters of Cairo awash in Arab blood, and then pillaged
Mecca. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros—who would become Spain’s new inquisitor general
—provided Europe with an extraordinary example of medieval genocide. He ordered all Grenadine Moors to accept baptism. Cisneros
wasn’t really seeking converts. He hoped to goad them to revolt, and when they did rise he annihilated them. Any nonconformity,
any weakness, was despised; the handicapped were given not compassion, but terror and pain, as prescribed in
Malleus maleficarum
(
The Witches’ Hammer
), a handbook by the inquisitors Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, which justified the shackling and burning of, among
others, the mentally ill.

These victims were helpless and oppressed, but no one was really safe. In 1500 the eminent Alfonso of Aragon, son-in-law of
a pope, was slain by his wife’s brother; seven years later Alfonso’s killer, who had become brother-in-law of the king of
Navarre, was himself murdered by assassins in the employ of the Count of Lerin. Intrigue thickened in every princely court,
liquidation of enemies was tolerated among all social classes, and because the technology of homicide was in its infancy —
August Kotter, the German gunsmith, did not invent the rifle until 1520—their deaths were often macabre. Perhaps the most
celebrated crime of the Middle Ages had been committed in the Tower of London: the disappearance and, it was thought, the
murder of two young heirs to the English throne in 1483. This outrage was widely believed to be the work of the Duke of Gloucester,
who became King Richard III. But there were other, equally bizarre royal homicides. The reign of King James III of Scotland
ended in his thirty-seventh year when an assassin, disguised as a priest, heard his confession and then eviscerated him. And
in his first sovereign act, the new Ottoman sultan Bayezid ordered his brother, whom he regarded as a threat to his power,
publicly strangled.

Despots, confronted by violence, struck back with equal fury; for every eye lost, they gouged out as many eyes as they could
reach. In gentler times, reformers and protesters are given at least the semblance of a fair hearing. There was none of that
then. In 1510 two former speakers of the House of Commons found themselves in vehement disagreement with Parliament over taxation.
The issues are obscure, but Parliament’s solution of them was not; on the hottest day of that August both men were beheaded.
Six years later, on May Day, London’s street people staged a public demonstration to express exasperation over their plight.
On orders from Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, sixty of them were hanged.

A
T ANY GIVEN MOMENT
the most dangerous enemy in Europe was the reigning pope. It seems odd to think of Holy Fathers in that light, but the five
Vicars of Christ who ruled the Holy See during Magellan’s lifetime were the least Christian of men: the least devout, least
scrupulous, least compassionate, and among the least chaste—lechers, almost without exception. Ruthless in their pursuit
of political power and personal gain, they were medieval despots who used their holy office for blackmail and extortion. Under
Innocent VIII (r. 1484–1492) simony was institutionalized; a board was set up for the marketing of favors, absolution, forged
papal bulls—even the office of Vatican librarian, previously reserved for the eminent—with 150 ducats (about $3,750)
^*
from each transaction going to the pontiff. Selling pardons for murderers raised some eyebrows, but a powerful cardinal explained
that “the Lord desireth not the death of a sinner but rather that he live and pay.” The fact is that everything in the Holy
See was up for auction, including the papacy itself. Innocent’s successor, the Spanish cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, became Alexander
VI (r.1492–1503), the second Borgia pope—Callixtus III had been the first—by buying off the other leading candidates.
He sent his closest rival, Ascanio Cardinal Sforza, four mules laden with ingots of gold.

The Vatican’s permissive attitude toward men convicted of homicide was not entirely illogical. The papal palace itself was
often home to killers and their accomplices. Popes and cardinals hired assassins, sanctioned torture, and frequently enjoyed
the sight of blood. In his official history,
Storia d’Italia
(1561–1564), Francesco Guicciardini noted the remarkable spectacle of “the High Priest, the Vicar of Christ on earth”—in
this instance Julius II—“excited” by a scene in which Christians slaughtered one another, “retaining nothing of the pontiff but the name and the robes.” The Alsatian Johann Burchard was papal
magister ceremoniarum
, or master of ceremonies, from 1483 to 1506. Burchard was one of those rare men historians bless: a diarist. In his
Diarium
, a day-by-day chronicle of pontifical life, he tells how, at one Vatican banquet, another Holy Father “watched with loud
laughter and much pleasure” from a balcony while his bastard son slew unarmed criminals, one by one, as they were driven into
a small courtyard below.

That was recreational homicide. The strangling of Alfonso Cardinal Petrucci with a red silk noose—the executioner was a
Moor; Vatican etiquette enjoined Christians from killing a prince of the Church—was a graver matter. In 1517 Petrucci, who
considered himself ill used by Pope Leo X, had led a conspiracy of several cardinals to dispatch the Holy Father by injecting
poison into his buttock on the pretext of lancing a boil. A servant betrayed them. Petrucci’s accomplices were pardoned after
paying huge fines. The highest, 150,000 ducats, was exacted from Raffaele Cardinal Riario, a great-nephew of a previous pope.

Such grisly tales of pontifical mayhem are found in contemporary diaries, but the details of massacres among the lower Roman
classes are lost to us, though we know they occurred; diplomats stationed there attest to that. An envoy from Lombardy wrote
of “murders innumerable. … One hears nothing but moaning and weeping. In all the memory of man the Church has never been in
such an evil plight.” That plight grew wickeder; a few years later the Venetian ambassador reported that “every night four
or five murdered men are discovered, bishops, prelates, and others.” If such slaughters were remarkable, so was the alacrity
with which the Eternal City forgot them. When the blood on killers’ knives had clotted and dried, when the graves had been
filled in and cadavers removed from the Tiber, the mood tended to be hedonistic. “God has given us the papacy,” Leo X wrote
his brother. “Let us enjoy it.” The prelates of that age had large appetites for pleasure. Pietro Cardinal Riario held “a
saturnalian banquet,” according to one account, “featuring a whole roasted bear holding a staff in its jaws, stags reconstructed
in their skins, herons and peacocks in their feathers, and”—there would be more of this later—“orgiastic behavior by the
guests appropriate to the ancient Roman model.”

In previous centuries, when the cause of Christianity had met with some striking success, their predecessors had opened St.
Peter’s for Te Deums of thanksgiving. Now prayer had become unfashionable. Alexander VI caught the spirit of the new age in
the first year of his reign. Told that Castilian Catholics had defeated the Moors of Granada, this Spanish pontiff scheduled
a bullfight in the Piazza of St. Peter’s and cheered as five bulls were slain. The menu for Riario’s feast and the Borgia
pope’s celebration reveal a Church hopelessly at odds with the preachings of Jesus, whose existence was the sole reason for
its
existence. But sitting in the Piazza of St. Peter’s was more comfortable than kneeling at the altar within, and other diversions
were more entertaining than holy communion. Among them were compulsive spending on entertainment, gambling (and cheating)
at cards, writing dreadful poems and reciting them in public, hiring orchestras to play while the prelates wallowed in gluttony,
applauding elaborate theatrical performances. During the digestive process, the churchmen emptied great flagons of strong
wine, whereupon intoxication inspired their eminences and even His Holiness to improvise bawdy exhibitions with female guests
selected from the city’s brothels—which kept the papal master of ceremonies scribbling in his diary—until dawn brightened
the papal palace and hangovers gave its inhabitants some idea of how merciless God’s vengeance could be.

It was Alexander, the Borgia pope, who first suppressed books critical of the papacy. He was either unaware of Burchard’s
diary or indifferent to it, though there is another possibility: he may have been incapable of appreciating it. Men accept
the values of their time and reject criticisms of them as irrelevant. Moreover, iniquitous regimes do not perpetuate themselves
in disciplined societies, nor does a strong, pure, holy institution, supported by centuries of selflessness and integrity,
abruptly find itself wallowing in corruption. Vice, no less than virtue, arises from precedents. Over the thirteen centuries
since Christianity’s rise to power the Church had lost its way because the wrong criteria had insinuated themselves into its
sanctuaries, turning piety into blasphemy, supplanting worship with scandal, and substituting the pursuit of secular power
for eternal grace.

I
RONICALLY
, the purity of Christ’s vision had been contaminated by its very popularity. As Christianity expanded through mass conversions,
its evangelists had tempered their exhortations, accommodating their message to those whose souls they sought to save. Philanthropy,
one of the Church’s most admirable virtues, had become another source of vitiation. Donations poured in from the faithful,
and the unspent wealth was passed up to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, where it accumulated and led to dissipation, debauchery,
and—because spendthrifts are always running out of funds—demands for still more money. Here a dangerous solution presented
itself, one which, when it was adopted, almost guaranteed future abuse. Ancient German custom offered convicted criminals
a choice; they could be punished or, if they were wealthy, pay fines (
Wehrgeld
). Buying salvation was new to the Church. It was also sacrilegious. Early Christians had atoned for their sins by confession,
absolution, and penance. Now it became possible to erase transgressions by buying indulgences. The papacy, searching for a
scriptural precedent, settled on Matthew 16:19, in which Jesus tells Peter: “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom
of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall
be loosed in heaven.”

On this shakiest of foundations the Holy See built a bureaucracy in which Peter’s power, appropriated by pontiffs, was delegated
to bishops, who passed it on to priests, who sent out friars in pursuit of sinners, empowered to judge the price to be paid
for the sin, from which he deducted his commission. In Rome the contributions were welcomed and, in the beginning, used to
finance hospitals, cathedrals, and crusades. Then other, less admirable causes appeared. Holy Fathers permitted those who
had violated God’s commandments to buy release from purgatory, thus encroaching on the sacrament of penance.

At the same time, the lawlessness and disorders of the Dark Ages—particularly after the papacy had fallen under the dominance
of feudal aristocrats in the ninth century—had led churchmen first to collaborate with secular rulers, and then to seek
their subjugation. Pontiffs began by regulating the behavior of despots. Then they erected awesome cathedrals as symbols of
their secular power, became enmeshed in political manipulations, and, finally, made war on their enemies.