Absolute Monarchs (43 page)

He began as he meant to go on. Here once again was a typical Renaissance pope, shamelessly self-indulgent and nepotistic, whose banquets—it was widely whispered in Rome—tended to deteriorate into homosexual orgies after the principal guests had taken their leave. He lavished vast sums on his exquisite country villa, the Villa Giulia;
⁷
he took an active interest in Michelangelo’s work on St. Peter’s; he appointed Palestrina choirmaster and
magister puerorum
of his personal chapel. He was, perhaps surprisingly, a staunch believer in the need for Church reform—he encouraged the Jesuits and certainly did everything he could to keep the Council of Trent firmly on the rails—and he genuinely rejoiced when, with the succession of Mary I to the English throne, her country returned to the Catholic fold. But there can be no doubt that his principal object was the pursuit of pleasure. For a man notorious—inter alia—for his gluttony, there was a certain poetic justice in his end: his digestive system ceased to function, and on March 23, 1555, he died, effectively of starvation.

CARDINAL MARCELLO CERVINI
was a humanist and scholar. He had translated Greek works into Latin and Latin works into Italian; he had been appointed bishop of three successive sees, where, despite long absences, he had assiduously promoted reforms; he had been one of the three copresidents of the Council of Trent; and he had reorganized the Vatican Library. When, after a short conclave in which, thanks to a stalemate between the French and imperialists, he was elected as a compromise candidate, he chose to keep his own name and became Pope Marcellus II. He was a reformer through and through. He cut his coronation expenses to a minimum and pared his court to the bone. Such was his horror of nepotism that he forbade all members of his family to show their faces in Rome. Aged only fifty-three at the time of his coronation, he might have achieved great things; alas, after just twenty-two days in office he suffered a massive stroke which killed him. Palestrina’s
Missa Papae Marcelli
is his only lasting memorial.

On his election on May 23 as Pope Paul IV, Giampietro Carafa was seventy-eight years old—the oldest pope of the sixteenth century and by far the most terrifying. In his intolerance, his bigotry, his refusal to compromise or even to listen to any opinions other than his own, he was a throwback to the Middle Ages. He suspended the Council of Trent, replacing it with a commission of cardinals and theologians; he introduced the Index of Forbidden Books, including on it the complete works of Erasmus;
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he took a special delight in the Inquisition, never missing its weekly meeting; finally, he opened the most savage campaign in papal history against the Jews, to the point where, in the five short years of his pontificate, the Jewish population of Rome was halved.

Anti-Semitism had first manifested itself in Rome soon after Constantine the Great adopted Christianity in the fourth century, and with succeeding centuries it had grown steadily worse. But it was under Paul IV that the Jews were first rounded up into a ghetto, forbidden to trade in any commodity except food and secondhand clothing, permitted only a single synagogue in each city—in Rome seven were demolished—compelled to speak only Italian or Latin, and obliged to wear yellow hats in the street. The bull
Cum Nimis Absurdum
of July 17, 1555, which laid down these and innumerable similar regulations, was to remain in force for the next three centuries.

Next to the Jews, Paul IV hated the Spaniards. Coming as he did from an old Neapolitan family, this was hardly surprising; but his immoderation led him, as always, to go too far. He had never forgiven the Emperor Charles for concluding the Peace of Augsburg, which in 1555 pacified Germany by conceding to the Lutherans all the areas which had Lutheran rulers. Two years later, abandoning the neutrality of his immediate predecessors and ignoring the fact that Charles was now the principal champion of the Catholic Reformation, he allied himself with Henry II of France and declared war on Spain. The result was disaster. The Spanish Viceroy of Naples, the Duke of Alba, led an army north, and the Romans prepared for yet another siege; fortunately for the pope, Alba proved merciful, taking Ostia but sparing Rome itself. The duke was generous, too, in the terms of the Treaty of Cave which followed. But Paul refused to be mollified. His hatred of the Habsburgs even led him to quarrel with Charles’s daughter-in-law Queen Mary I of England, who had restored her country to Catholicism. He deprived the estimable Cardinal Pole of his legateship, summoning him back to Rome to answer charges of heresy, and generally made himself so unpleasant as greatly to facilitate the efforts of Queen Elizabeth I—Mary’s half sister and successor—to return her realm to the Protestant religion.

The blame for some of the pope’s actions, especially where Spain was concerned, can perhaps be laid at the door of his two worthless nephews, Carlo—on whom he also bestowed a red hat—and Giovanni, whom he made Duke of Paliano. Both were deeply venal, but he trusted them both implicitly—until, some six months before his death, the scales at last fell from his eyes. He immediately stripped them of all their offices and honors and expelled them from Rome, but it was too late; the damage was done. He himself never recovered from the shock. He died on August 18, 1559, a broken man and the most generally detested pope of the sixteenth century. As the news was carried through Rome, the populace exploded with joy. First they attacked the headquarters of the Inquisition, smashing the building to pieces and releasing all its prisoners; then they marched to the pope’s statue on the Capitol, tore it down, knocked its head off, and threw it into the Tiber.

There followed a long conclave. For four months the French and Spanish cardinals were deadlocked, and it was not until Christmas Day that the new pope was finally elected. Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Medici—he was a humble notary’s son from Milan, no relation to his grand Florentine namesakes—took the name of Pius IV and proved as different from his alarming predecessor as any pope could possibly be. Paul, for all his faults, had been a figure of irreproachable integrity; Pius took little trouble to conceal his three natural children. Paul’s austerity had been such that when he strode through the Vatican, sparks were said to fly from his feet; Pius was convivial and relaxed. He restarted the Council of Trent; he mended his fences with the Habsburgs, opening up friendly relations with Charles’s son Philip II of Spain and his brother the Emperor Ferdinand I;
⁹
he restricted the powers of the Inquisition; he cut the Papal Index, which had already proved itself unworkable, down to size; Paul’s two dreadful nephews, one of whom, the Duke of Paliano, had his wife strangled on suspicion of adultery, personally stabbing her presumed lover, he arrested. After the wife had been proved innocent, both were executed.

Not that Pius scorned a little nepotism himself; but he was a good deal luckier in his nephew. Charles Borromeo, later to be canonized, whom he created Cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, was to prove one of the greatest reformers and administrators of his day, dominating the final sessions of the Council of Trent. In Milan his firm discipline aroused a good deal of hostility, but he worked tirelessly among the poor and the sick, notably during the terrible plague year of 1576. Nowadays the nephew’s reputation tends to overshadow that of the uncle, but Pius’s own achievements were impressive enough. It was he who, through the archbishop, guided the Council to its conclusion, who confirmed its decrees in the bull
Benedictus Deus
, and who was largely responsible for its acceptance throughout the Catholic world. He also began a compilation of the catechism and a reform of the missal and breviary, though these were still unfinished at his death. Last but not least, he revived the Renaissance tradition, encouraging artists and scholars, founding universities and printing presses, and enriching Rome with more fine buildings, including the Porta Pia and (in the Baths of Diocletian) the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli.

Pius’s principal failure was in his attempts to check the spread of Protestantism in England and France. In England he refused to excommunicate Queen Elizabeth in the vain hope that he could persuade her to maintain the fanatical Catholicism of Mary. Meanwhile, he sent large subsidies to the King of France for use in his struggle against the Huguenots. He was naturally disappointed when Elizabeth continued to uphold her father’s Church of England staunchly and when the strength of the Huguenots continued to grow; but when he died in December 1565, he could nevertheless look back on six remarkably successful years—and congratulate himself on having left the Church in a considerably better state than he had found it.

THEN, ALAS, THE
pendulum swung again. Archbishop Charles Borromeo, having made it clear that he was not interested in the Papacy for himself, eventually recommended the formidable Cardinal Michele Ghislieri. Ghislieri had begun life as a shepherd—which was, metaphorically at least, a suitable qualification for the Papacy. Later, however, Paul IV had appointed him inquisitor general, which was not. Pius V—one is somehow surprised that he did not take the name of Paul—was cast very much in the Carafa mold. Deeply ascetic himself—he continued as pope to wear a hair shirt and the rough habit of a Dominican friar under his papal robes, regularly walking barefoot and bareheaded in penitential processions—he expected a similar asceticism from all those around him. In a whole series of decrees he sought to stamp out blasphemy—rich blasphemers were heavily fined, poor ones flogged—and to ensure the proper observance of holy days and fasts. Doctors were forbidden to treat patients who had not confessed or lately received the sacraments.

Sex was, as always, a particular bugbear. Finding that he could not abolish prostitution altogether, the pope decreed that all unmarried prostitutes must be whipped and all men found guilty of sodomy burned at the stake. He was only with difficulty persuaded not to make adultery a capital offense. As it was, no bachelor might employ a female servant; no nun might keep a male dog. Women were barred from the classical sculpture in the Vatican collections. The figures of Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment
in the Sistine Chapel were chastely overpainted. After a few months of this the Romans were complaining that he wanted to turn their city into one enormous monastery.

While perhaps lacking the worst of Paul IV’s extremism, Pius had spent long years as an inquisitor; and an inquisitor, essentially, he remained. He continued his predecessor’s tradition of personally attending all sessions of the Roman Inquisition and frequently extended his visits to include the torture chamber, from which he would emerge utterly unmoved. Those found guilty of heresy he had no hesitation in sentencing to death. The general commanding the small papal army which he sent to France to help the king in his religious war had special instructions to kill all Huguenot prisoners. With the Jews, too, he kept up Paul’s policy of persecution; outside the Roman ghetto and another small one in Ancona, they were banned from all papal territories.

Throughout his pontificate, the pope had one overriding objective: to keep the dread infection of Lutheranism out of Italy. And in this, whatever may be said of his methods, he was remarkably successful. Across the Alps in Germany, it was true that the fighting had been more or less over since the Peace of Augsburg; but over half of Germany was now Lutheran. France was being torn in two, as was the Spanish Netherlands, where the Dutch Calvinists were steadily increasing their hold. England and Scotland were lost; Pius’s excommunication and “deposition” of Queen Elizabeth in 1570 succeeded only in making life more difficult for her Catholic subjects. Outside Italy, only the Spain of Philip II stood firmly for the faith. Besides, Protestantism was not the only enemy. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, Venice was forced in 1570 to cede Cyprus to the Turks, and even when in October of the following year the combined fleets of Spain, Venice, and the Papacy destroyed the Ottoman navy at Lepanto—the last great naval engagement in history to be fought by oared galleys—the victory was to have no lasting effect: only seventeen years later came the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and in the following century Crete was to go the way of Cyprus.

Pope Pius V lived for just seven months after Lepanto. He had been a dedicated reformer, and he had done much to impose upon Christendom the findings and decisions of the Council of Trent; but he was too extreme, too narrow-minded, too bigoted for the good of his flock. Not, on the other hand, for his own: he is the only pope between the mildly ridiculous Celestine V (1294–1296) and the wholly admirable Pius X (1903–1914) to have been made—unaccountably—a saint.

CARDINAL UGO BONCOMPAGNI
, who after an unusually short conclave now mounted the papal throne under the name of Gregory XIII, was a seventy-year-old Bolognese of still-undiminished energy. Starting his career as a lecturer in canon law, he had soon found himself a leading figure at the Council of Trent; in recognition of his services there he had received his red hat and had been sent as legate to Philip II in Spain. There he had once again distinguished himself, winning the confidence and trust of the pathologically suspicious Philip II, and on his return to Rome he was generally agreed to be the obvious choice for pope.

Gregory’s name is chiefly remembered today in the Gregorian calendar, which he introduced in a bull of 1582. The old Julian calendar, which dated from 46
B.C.
, was now ten days behind the solar year; the Gregorian therefore cut ten days out of the year 1582, so that October 4 was followed immediately by October 15. Fine-tuning was provided by naming as leap years only years of centuries divisible by four. (Thus 1600 had 366 days; 1700 did not.) Desirable as it was, the reform could hardly have been worse timed. With Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox already at one another’s throats, it was at first adopted only by the states in the Roman obedience. Broadly speaking, the Protestants accepted the reform at various times during the eighteenth century—Great Britain and her American colonies in 1752—while Russia, Greece, and the Balkan States delayed until the twentieth.