Absolute Monarchs (42 page)

And so, on November 5, 1529, Charles V made his formal entry into Bologna, where, in front of the Basilica of San Petronio, Pope Clement was waiting to receive him. After a brief ceremony of welcome, the two retired to the Palazzo del Podestà across the square, where neighboring apartments had been prepared for them. There was much to be done, many outstanding problems to be discussed and resolved, before the coronation could take place. It was, after all, only two years since papal Rome had been sacked by imperial troops, with Clement himself a virtual prisoner of Charles in the Castel Sant’Angelo; somehow, friendly relations had to be reestablished. Next there were the individual peace treaties to be drawn up with all the Italian ex-enemies of the empire. Only then, when peace had been finally consolidated throughout the peninsula, would Charles feel justified in kneeling before Clement to receive the imperial crown. Coronation Day was fixed for February 24, 1530, and invitations dispatched to all the rulers of Christendom. Charles and Clement had given themselves a little under four months to settle the future of Italy.

Surprisingly, it proved enough. And so the peace was signed, and on the appointed day, in San Petronio, Charles received from the papal hands the sword, orb, scepter, and finally the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. It was the last time in history that a pope was to crown an emperor; on that day the seven-hundred-year-old tradition, which had begun when Pope Leo III had laid the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne, was brought to an end. The empire was by no means finished, but never again would it be received, even symbolically, from the hands of the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

THERE REMAINED THE
problem of Henry VIII’s annulment. The king was determined to get it: he desperately needed a son, which Catherine was increasingly unlikely to produce. Fortunately for him, there seemed to be a way out. Catherine was the widow of his elder brother, Arthur, and canon law forbade marriage to a deceased brother’s wife. Julius II had stretched a point and given him a special dispensation to marry her; Henry now pleaded that the prohibition was the law of God rather than simply that of the Church. The dispensation was thus itself uncanonical and his marriage consequently invalid. His and Catherine’s inability to have a son was clearly a sign of divine displeasure.

For the pope, one would have thought, the granting of the annulment was a small price to pay to keep England in the Catholic fold. There was, however, one insuperable problem: the king’s unwanted wife was the aunt of the emperor whom he had so recently crowned. It was safer to declare Henry excommunicate; which, on July 11, 1533—when the king had forced Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to declare his marriage to Catherine null and void and had already married Anne Boleyn—he finally did. And Henry fought back. Defender of the Faith he may have been; but he now unhesitatingly broke with Rome and established the Church of England, placing himself at its head.

Yet, despite all his misfortunes—for many of which he had been himself responsible—the pope never forgot that he was a Medici and a Renaissance prince. He was a patron of Cellini and Raphael, and he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment on the east wall of the Sistine Chapel, as well as completing his work on the Medici tombs in San Lorenzo. His family had fought its way back into Florence in 1530, and the city was now ruled by Alessandro, generally believed to have been the bastard son of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s grandson Lorenzo II.
³
Now, within a year of his death, Clement achieved the only real diplomatic success of his career: a double marriage, linking the Medici with the two most powerful—yet always bitterly opposed—royal houses of Europe, the Valois and the Habsburg. The first of these was between Lorenzo II’s daughter Catherine and Henry, Duke of Orleans, son of Francis I and future King Henry II of France; the second was between Alessandro and Margaret of Austria, the natural daughter of Charles V. It was to officiate at the first of these that the pope traveled to Marseille in October 1533;
⁴
when he returned to Rome at the end of the year, he was already a sick man. He never recovered his health, and on September 25, 1534, he died.

1.
The abbreviation
Fid. Def.
(or the initials
F.D.
) appears to this day on British coins.

2.
See
chapter 16
.

3.
Several historians, however, have suggested that he was the son of Clement himself.

4.
Fourteen years later, his kinswoman was Queen of France. The second marriage was less successful, Alessandro being assassinated in 1537 by his distant cousin Lorenzino.

CHAPTER XX

The Counter-Reformation

C
ardinal Alessandro Farnese, who on October 13, 1534, was elected as Pope Paul III, was the senior member of the Sacred College. He was only sixty-six, but he had not worn well. Bent almost double, with a long white beard and hobbling on a stick, he gave the impression of being at least a decade older; it comes as something of a surprise to learn that he was elected unanimously after only two days and was to reign for the next fifteen years. Already in 1522, at the conclave which had elected Hadrian VI, he had been an early favorite, but his character assassination by Cardinal Egidio had utterly destroyed his chances. By now, however, he had distanced himself from his former life and Egidio’s objections had been forgotten; moreover, Farnese had made meticulous plans in advance to pave the way to the Papacy.

Paul had been known in former days as the “petticoat cardinal,” since—according to popular belief—he owed his red hat entirely to the fact that his sister Giulia had been a favorite mistress of Alexander VI. From the start, however, he made it clear that he was to be no petticoat pope. Like Giulia, he was a child of the Renaissance, reared in the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent; as Egidio had been at pains to point out, although a cardinal at twenty-five he had since cheerfully fathered a number of offspring. He was equally shameless in his nepotism, raising two of his grandsons to the Sacred College at the ages of sixteen and fourteen, respectively. He revived the Carnival in 1536; Rome resounded to the cheers of bullfights, horse races, and fireworks displays, the Vatican to the music of balls and banquets. Yet—and this is what makes Paul III one of the most interesting popes of the sixteenth century—he turned out to be a man of strong moral conscience and a reformer.

Let us look at his worldly side first. Architecturally, his supreme achievement is the Palazzo Farnese in Rome.
¹
He had begun it in 1517; but such were its size and splendor that it was not completed till 1589, forty years after his death. One of its four architects was Michelangelo, whom Paul also commissioned to redesign the Campidoglio (Capitol)—into which the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was now moved to provide a centerpiece—and to succeed Antonio da Sangallo as architect of St. Peter’s. Michelangelo worked on the new basilica for seventeen years, during which he designed the great dome, until his death at the age of eighty-nine. Throughout that time he refused all fees; it was, he said, an offering to God.

Dynastically, like all Renaissance popes, Paul III was determined to further his family fortunes. The Farnese were an old and distinguished family of
condottieri
with estates around Viterbo and Lake Bolsena, but they were not aristocrats like the Orsini or Colonna. Clearly, there was room for improvement: Paul first appointed his notoriously dissolute son Pierluigi as Captain General of the Church.
²
Next he invested Pierluigi’s son Ottavio as Duke of Camerino; then, in 1538, he married Ottavio to Margaret of Austria, the fifteen-year-old widow of the assassinated Alessandro de’ Medici.
³
Finally in 1545, he created Pierluigi Duke of Parma and Piacenza, a dynasty that was to continue for almost two centuries.

But these artistic and dynastic considerations, important as they were, took up relatively little of his time. Most of it was taken up by the Church and the perils that beset it. One of the greatest problems was posed by the Turks. Under their brilliant Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent they were not only steadily advancing through Central Europe, they were threatening the coasts of Italy as well as the remaining Christian outposts in the eastern Mediterranean. If they could be defeated at all, it could only be by a concerted effort of all the Catholic nations. Somehow, therefore, those two archrivals, Francis of France and the Emperor Charles, must be reconciled.

The other peril was Protestantism. It was by now far too late to eradicate it: most of northern Europe had already been engulfed in the tide. Paul could concentrate only on damage limitation. The more he considered how best to contain the surge, the more convinced he became that the prime necessity was for a General Council—and one that would include a strong contingent of Lutherans. Objections, inevitably, were raised on all sides. The cardinals saw any reform as a threat to their own comfortable lifestyles; the emperor, terrified that the proposed Council might take so rigid a stand on doctrine as to make a compromise with his Protestant subjects impossible, preferred that it leave aside all theological questions and confine itself to measures of reform; the Lutherans demanded a totally uncommitted meeting of all Christians and steadfastly refused to attend any assembly that was held on Italian soil or presided over by the pope. As for the King of France, he was only too pleased to see Charles enmeshed in religious problems and had no wish to see them resolved.

But Paul persisted; meanwhile he summoned a special commission, which he ordered to report on all the ills of the Church and to recommend measures that should be taken to remedy them. It was composed of a number of cardinals, specially admitted to the Sacred College for the task; they included the devout English humanist Reginald Pole, a cousin of Henry VIII, and Giampietro Carafa—the future Paul IV—an elderly Neapolitan who had served as papal nuncio in England and had subsequently founded the Theatine order.
⁴
The commissioners submitted their report in March 1537. One of our leading church historians
⁵
describes it in a single word: dynamite. It listed the current abuses and laid the blame for all of them—the sale of indulgences and Church benefices, the sinecures, stockpiling of bishoprics, and countless others—squarely on the Papacy. The result of all this had been the Protestant Reformation, and no wonder: had the Church kept its house in order, the Reformation would never have occurred. The horrified Curia—deliberately unrepresented on the commission—did all it could to sweep the report under the carpet; but a copy was leaked, and before long a German translation was going the rounds of the Lutheran churches.

Now at last reform—serious reform—was in the air, and Pope Paul did everything he could to encourage it. He gave an enthusiastic reception to the young priest Filippo Neri, whose mission was concentrated in the seedy inns and whorehouses of the Roman underworld; and a few years later he accorded a similar welcome to the rather older Ignatius Loyola, a Basque who had arrived with half a dozen like-minded colleagues from Spain, grouped together in what they called the Society of Jesus. In 1540 the pope issued a bull giving the Society his official approval. The Jesuits, with no distinctive dress for their order, no fixed headquarters, and no choral prayer, were bound together by two things only: strict discipline and unconditional obedience. As we shall see, they were to have a checkered history, but they were the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation.

Finally the pope had his reward: on December 13, 1545, the long-delayed Council opened at Trent, a city recommended by the emperor because it lay safely in imperial territory. It got off to a shaky start, its first sessions being attended by only a single cardinal, four archbishops, and thirty-one bishops, but it was gradually to gather momentum and continue on and off for the next eighteen years. It was overwhelmingly weighted in favor of the Italians; even when it was best attended, with over 270 bishops, the Germans never numbered more than 13. But the important thing about the Council was that—in the teeth of all the opposition—it actually happened; moreover, it showed itself ready to defy the emperor and fearlessly to debate the hoary old questions of doctrine: justification by faith, transubstantiation, Purgatory, and many more.

It was never to be more than a partial success. When it was at last dissolved, the Protestants, who understandably saw it as little more than a Roman puppet show, naturally remained unsatisfied—how could they have been anything else? Even for the Catholics its reforms were less radical and comprehensive than many had hoped for. Not a word was said, for example, about the reform of the Papacy, which was far more necessary than anything else. Owing largely to the undiminished mutual hostility of the emperor and the King of France (Francis I was succeeded by Henry II in 1547) it sat only intermittently, often without the French contingent. It never came near to being the ecumenical council of union for the whole of Western Christianity that had been for so long hoped and prayed for; it was simply the confessional council of the Counter-Reformation, with the purpose of re-Catholicizing Europe, if necessary by force. The results were all too evident: in France no fewer than eight civil wars against the Huguenots (more than three thousand of whom perished in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris in 1572); a war between Spain and the Netherlands that lasted for more than eighty years; and the nightmare Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which caused untold devastation through northern Europe.

But the Council nonetheless established a solid basis for the renewal of discipline and spiritual life in the Church, which emerged a good deal stronger and more focused than before. It was thanks to the Council of Trent that the Protestant tide was eventually halted and thanks to the vision and determination of Pope Paul III that it was held at all.

Had Pope Paul died at the end of 1545, he would probably have closed his eyes a happy man; sadly for him, he was to live another four years, during which personal tragedy struck. In September 1547 the people of Piacenza rose up against his son Pierluigi and assassinated him; then, to escape papal vengeance, they sought the emperor’s protection. Charles granted it; once Piacenza was under his guardianship it was virtually his, and if he played his cards right he might soon acquire Parma as well. For Paul this was a betrayal of trust. His initial reaction was angrily to reclaim Parma as papal territory, only to find that Pierluigi’s son Ottavio refused to give it up and that his other grandson—one of his own cardinals—had taken Ottavio’s side. Ottavio was beyond his jurisdiction; the cardinal was not so lucky. Summoned to the papal presence, he felt his biretta snatched from his head and hurled to the ground. But the pope was by now in his eighty-second year, and the emotion was too much for him. A few hours later he was dead.

PAUL III HAVING
died in mid-November, the conclave to elect his successor was held during the following winter. Despite the hardships involved, it lasted nearly three months. In the fifteenth century conclaves had been attended only by those members of the Sacred College who formed part of the Curia and were consequently in Rome; by the sixteenth, cardinals were summoned from all over Europe—although this did not mean that their colleagues necessarily waited for them. During the early stages in 1548 the dominant figure was the Englishman Reginald Pole: on the first round he secured twenty-five votes out of the twenty-eight required. Had he been prepared to lobby in his own interest, he would probably have swept the board; but that was not his way. He made no effort to convince the xenophobe Italians, who were determined on one of their own number, and the conclave was still undecided when the French cardinals arrived. Horrified at the thought of an English pope, they accused Pole of heresy and managed to alienate several of his supporters. Pole’s principal champion, the former pope’s grandson Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, proposed the magnificently Machiavellian ploy of a late-night scrutiny during which the majority would be too sleepy (or drunk) to take much interest, but that was not Pole’s way either. If, he said, he was to enter the Vatican, he would do so through the open door, not like a thief in the night.

This conclave was probably the only one in papal history that incorporated a deliberate tease. The victim was Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, whose brother had already made a fool of himself by being caught scrambling over the roof of the Sistine Chapel in a vain attempt to eavesdrop on what was going on. The cardinal was at that moment suffering from an unfortunate condition in which his hair and beard were falling out in handfuls. The cause, as everyone knew perfectly well, was almost certainly alopecia, but he was arraigned before his fellows, who strongly hinted that the problem was due to syphilis. Indignantly, poor d’Este fell into the trap and protested that he had led a life of exemplary chastity for over a year. After that he was no longer considered a serious contender.

Finally, after the usual intrigues, the French and Italian factions agreed, despite the emperor’s opposition, on a relative nonentity. Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte—henceforth to be known as Julius III—was a competent canon lawyer who had suffered grievously during the sack of Rome a quarter of a century before
⁶
and had later been copresident at the opening of the Council of Trent; he was, however, better known for his infatuation with a seventeen-year-old boy, somewhat inappropriately named Innocenzo, whom he had picked up in the streets of Parma two years before and whom on his accession he instantly made a cardinal.