Absolute Monarchs (39 page)

By far Julius’s most important legacy was as a patron of the arts. He had a passion for classical statuary, enriching the Vatican collections with masterpieces such as the
Apollo Belvedere
and the
Laocoön.
(The latter had been accidentally unearthed in 1506 by a man digging in his vine-yard.) But he is nowadays chiefly remembered for his decision to replace the old Basilica of St. Peter with a new building, infinitely more magnificent than its predecessor. The plans for this he eventually entrusted to Donato Bramante,
⁵
who, abandoning his original design for a Greek cross-in-square church with the tomb of St. Peter directly beneath a vast dome, eventually decided on a more traditional Latin basilica with nave and aisles, together with a portico derived from the Pantheon. Away went the ancient mosaics, the icons, the huge medieval candelabra; it was not long before the architect had acquired a new nickname, Il Ruinante. The work on St. Peter’s alone would have kept him fully employed for the rest of his life, but Julius also made him responsible for a radical redesign of the Vatican Gardens.

The pope also gave encouragement and employment to the twenty-six-year-old Raphael, whom he commissioned to fresco his own apartments—he refused absolutely to inhabit those of the hated Alexander—and to Michelangelo, whom, as we know, he had to bully mercilessly (“I’m a sculptor, not a painter,” the artist protested) into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It has been suggested that, despite the bullying, the two men were lovers. Both, certainly, were homosexual, and Julius, although he had engendered three daughters while still a cardinal, was widely accused of sodomy. On the whole, the idea seems improbable; but we shall never know.

Excessive modesty was never one of the failings of Pope Julius II, and as early as 1505 he also commissioned Michelangelo to design his tomb. This was originally intended to stand thirty-six feet high and to contain forty statues, all of them over life size; according to Vasari, the principal reason for his decision to rebuild St. Peter’s was in order to provide suitable accommodation for it. Unfortunately, the money ran out and the project had to be radically revised. A far more modest version can now be seen in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome; but Julius was actually buried in what there was of his new St. Peter’s—as, doubtless, he would have wished.

1.
Not to be confused with Ferdinand, husband of Isabella.

2.
Shortly afterward the statue was toppled by the Bolognese. They sold it for scrap to the Duke of Ferrara, who recast it into a huge cannon which he affectionately christened Julius.

3.
It was on January 21 of that same year that the Swiss Guard, a permanent corps of mercenary soldiers to protect the person of the pope, was founded. During Julius’s pontificate they certainly earned their keep.

4.
“Oh, what a ruin is ours!”

5.
His real name was Donato d’Angelo Lazzari. He was nicknamed “Bramante”—the word means “soliciting” in Italian—since he was constantly seeking out jobs for himself.

CHAPTER XIX

The Medici Pair

P
ope Leo X, who followed Julius after a short and trouble-free conclave untinged for once by simony, was born Giovanni de’ Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. “God has given us the Papacy,” the thirty-seven-year-old pope is said to have written to his brother Giuliano soon after his accession, “now let us enjoy it.” The words themselves may or may not be apocryphal, but they are an accurate enough summing up of the new pope’s attitude to his office and indeed of his whole outlook on life. At the same time, they are open to misconstruction. It was not in Leo’s nature to enjoy his pontificate as Alexander VI had done. There were to be no orgies, no unseemly roistering. The sale of indulgences and Church appointments went on as it always had—money had to be raised somehow—but for all that Leo remained genuinely pious: he took his religious duties seriously and fasted twice a week.

The fact remains that he was less a pope than a Renaissance prince. Homosexual like his predecessor, he was a cultivated and polished patron of the arts, far more magnificent than his father, Lorenzo, had ever dared to be. A passionate huntsman, he would ride out with an entourage of three hundred; an insatiable gourmet, he gave lavish banquets and willingly attended those given by his friends. In 1494, when his family was exiled from Florence, he had traveled to France, Germany, and the Netherlands, where he had met Erasmus; but six years later he was back in Rome, rapidly acquiring political influence in the Curia, and by 1512 he had successfully reestablished Medici control in Florence, of which he was to be the effective ruler throughout his pontificate.

He began as he meant to continue—with a procession from the still-unfinished St. Peter’s to the Lateran, a procession which for sheer sumptuous extravagance surpassed anything Rome had ever seen. Though suffering agonies from fistula and piles, he rode on a snow-white horse escorted by 112 equerries—to say nothing of countless cardinals, prelates, ambassadors, and detachments of both cavalry and infantry, while papal chamberlains flung gold coins into the crowd. But even that was only the beginning. He ordered tapestries of gold and silken thread from Brussels—based on Raphael’s cartoons now in the Victoria and Albert Museum—at a cost of 75,000 ducats, then willingly paid out double that sum for the festivities attendant on the wedding of his brother Giuliano to Filiberta of Savoy, aunt of King Francis I of France. He commissioned from Michelangelo a new façade for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, where three generations of his family were already buried, building a road running for 120 miles to a Tuscan quarry; and when this project had to be abandoned—the money ran out, and Leo complained, understandably, that the artist was impossible to work with—instituted another: the Medici Chapel in the same building, which was finally to be completed during the pontificate of his cousin Pope Clement VII.

And there was intellectual and scientific work also to be done. Leo revived Rome’s university, the Sapienza, which had not functioned for the past thirty years, appointing nearly a hundred professors and substantially increasing the number of subjects offered—which now included medicine, mathematics, botany, and astronomy. He founded chairs of Greek and Hebrew, each with its own printing press. He even encouraged the theater—till now nonexistent in Rome—staging, among much else, a surprisingly sexy comedy by his close friend Cardinal Bernardo Bibbiena.

Leo’s biographer Paolo Giovio saw his reign as a golden age. The city’s most powerful banker, Agostino Chigi, had erected a huge triumphal arch beneath which the procession passed, inscribed with the words “The time of Venus has passed, and the time of Mars. Now is the rule of Minerva.” The Romans had no difficulty in identifying the reigns of Alexander VI and Julius II; the reference to Minerva, goddess of wisdom, was perhaps rather more problematical. Leo, highly educated and sophisticated as he was, could hardly have been described as wise. However many indulgences he sold, however many new offices he created, he remained permanently in hock to the bankers of Rome and Florence, and the Papacy fell further and further into debt.

Politically, too, Leo was an incorrigible waverer. When in 1515 King Francis marched on Milan, the pope joined the Holy League to resist him, but in the ensuing Battle of Marignano—in which the French army destroyed that of the League—the papal troops, though entrenched only fifty miles away, took no part, and Leo subsequently hurried off to meet the victorious king at Bologna. The result, which he hardly deserved, was a concordat in which the Papacy surrendered Parma and Piacenza but the continuation of Medici rule in Florence was assured.

Florence, however, was no longer enough. Leo had benefited from unbridled nepotism in his own youth, and did all he could to continue the tradition to the next generation. Two of his cousins and three of his nephews he had made cardinals; but for his favorite nephew, Lorenzo, the son of his deceased elder brother, Piero, he intended something more: the Duchy of Urbino. The present duke—he was Francesco della Rovere, nephew of Julius II—had rebelled in 1508 against his papal suzerain; now, in 1516, Leo simply excommunicated him, seizing and torturing the envoy whom he sent to Rome to protest. The war that followed lasted for two years and cost 800,000 ducats; by the time it was finished Lorenzo, its intended beneficiary, was dead. (His daughter, Catherine, however, was to win a far greater prize than Urbino: she married Henry, son and successor of Francis I, and became Queen of France.)

IN THE SUMMER
of 1517 Rome was rocked by the most scandalous, but at the same time the most mysterious, chapter in Leo’s pontificate. The pope suddenly announced—and the announcement itself must have been embarrassing enough—that he had discovered a conspiracy by several cardinals, led by Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci (who was widely believed to be the pope’s lover) to assassinate him. They had, it seemed, bribed a Florentine doctor named Vercelli to inject him with poison while operating on his fistula. Interrogated under torture, Vercelli not surprisingly confessed and was immediately hanged, drawn, and quartered. Petrucci suffered similar treatment and implicated a number of other cardinals. He too was sentenced to death. Because it was unlawful for a Christian to lay hands upon a prince of the Church, he was strangled by a Moor with a cord made of crimson silk. The lives of the other cardinals were spared—on payment of huge fines.

The accusations seem improbable in the extreme. Each of the accused cardinals had small grievances against Leo, but none had any that could be accepted as a motive for assassination. And even had they wished to murder the pope, would they really have selected that particular method of doing so? Of them all, only Petrucci had made any attempt to flee, yet, curiously enough, they all confessed. We shall never know the truth; popular opinion in Rome, however, persisted in believing that there had in fact been no conspiracy and that Leo had fabricated the whole thing for the sake of the fines he was able to exact. At all events the Papacy was still further discredited, and Leo’s subsequent creation of no fewer than thirty-one new cardinals, who together paid him half a million ducats for their red hats, did little to restore its prestige.

Nor, apparently, did the pope have the faintest comprehension of how much that prestige needed restoring. Like many of his predecessors, he paid lip service to the idea of reform; reading of his pontificate, one tends to forget that for the first four years of it the Fifth Lateran Council was in progress. But the Council achieved virtually nothing. There was no sense of urgency in its deliberations nor any sign that it received any firm direction from the pope. Meanwhile, the shameless extravagance, the blatant marketing of indulgences and offices, the sexual shenanigans—for Leo had long since given up any attempt to conceal his preferences and was now positively flaunting his latest catamite, the singer Solimando, son of Prince Cem—all these abuses, and many others besides, had given still greater strength to the reform movement, and it was by now plain to any unprejudiced observer that, unless the Church quickly buckled down and cleaned out its own stables, a serious rebellion could not be long in coming.

It was on October 31, 1517—just at the time when, in the aftermath of the Petrucci conspiracy, Pope Leo was appointing his thirty-one new cardinals—that Martin Luther nailed his notice to the church door at Wittenberg, announcing that he was prepared to defend, in open debate, ninety-five theses which claimed to establish the invalidity and illegality of indulgences. It would not have been a difficult task. The idea that a spiritual grace could be sold commercially for hard cash was obviously nonsense, and in recent times new and improved indulgences had come onto the market. It was now possible, for example, to acquire them in respect of sins not yet committed—to lay up, as it were, a credit balance of advance absolution; alternatively, indulgences could be bought on behalf of deceased relatives: the more money paid, the shorter their time in Purgatory.

By now the Church was teetering on the edge of an abyss, yet still Leo failed to see that Luther’s crusade was more than a “monkish squabble.” The man was clearly an irritant; but Savonarola had been a good deal worse and was now almost forgotten. This tiresome German would doubtless go the same way. Meanwhile, in November 1518 the pope published a bull: all who denied his right to grant and issue indulgences would be excommunicated. But no one in Germany took any notice. Reverence for the Papacy, as Guicciardini lamented, “had been utterly lost in the hearts of men.” Halfheartedly, Leo tried to enlist the help first of the General of the Augustinian Order and then of Luther’s protector, the Elector Frederick III of Saxony, to bring the monk to order; but neither attempt was successful. Then, in 1520, he published another bull,
Exsurge Domine
, condemning Luther on forty-one separate counts. This Luther publicly burned—and was consequently excommunicated. On October 11, 1521, the pope bestowed the title Fidei Defensor
¹
—Defender of the Faith—on King Henry VIII of England, in recognition of his book
The Defence of the Seven Sacraments Against Martin Luther.

ON NEW YEAR’S
Day 1515 King Louis XII of France died in Paris. Just over a year later, on January 23, 1516, King Ferdinand of Aragon followed him to the grave. These deaths brought two young men, still relatively unknown, to the forefront of European affairs. They could hardly have been more unlike. King Francis I was twenty years old at the time of his succession and in the first flush of his energy and virility. He was already an accomplished ladies’ man—not particularly handsome, perhaps, but elegant and dashing, with a quick mind, a ready wit, a boundless intellectual curiosity, and an unfailing memory which astonished all who knew him. He loved spectacle and ceremonial, pomp and parade; and his subjects, bored out of their minds by a long succession of dreary, colorless sovereigns, took him to their hearts.

Charles of Habsburg, born in 1500 to the Emperor Maximilian’s son Philip the Handsome and Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Joanna the Mad, had inherited neither of his parents’ primary attributes. His appearance was ungainly, with the characteristically huge Habsburg chin and protruding lower lip; he suffered also from an appalling stammer and showered his interlocutors with spittle. He had little imagination and no ideas of his own; few rulers have ever been so utterly devoid of charm. What saved him was an innate goodness of heart and, as he grew older, a tough sagacity and shrewdness. Though by far the most powerful man in the civilized world, he never enjoyed his empire in the way that Francis I and Henry VIII enjoyed their kingdoms—or Leo X his pontificate.

At the age of sixteen, Charles, already ruler of the Netherlands, had assumed the regency of Aragon and the Two Sicilies on behalf of his mother, now hopelessly insane. Three years later came the death of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian. The empire remained elective, and the succession of Charles was by no means a foregone conclusion. There were still many who preferred his younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand. A still more formidable rival was Francis I—who, in the early stages of his candidature, had the enthusiastic support of Pope Leo. (Henry VIII of England also, at one moment, threw his cap into the ring, but no one took him very seriously.) Fortunately for Charles, the German electors hated the idea of a French emperor; the Fuggers—a hugely rich banking family from Augsburg—lined as many pockets as was necessary, and at the last moment Leo withdrew his opposition. On June 28 Charles was elected, and on October 23 of the following year he was crowned—not in Rome but in the old Carolingian capital of Aachen—as the Emperor Charles V. In addition to the Netherlands and Spain, Naples and Sicily, and the New World, there now devolved on him all the old empire, comprising most of modern Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Milan, Bohemia, and western Hungary were to follow a little later. For a man of modest talents and mediocre abilities, here was an inheritance indeed.