Absolute Monarchs (44 page)

To Gregory, however, the calendar would have seemed of relatively minor importance. From the outset he made it clear that the principal objective of his pontificate would be the fight against Protestantism, together with the steadfast promotion of the decrees of the Council of Trent; he would, in other words, continue the policy of his predecessor. Since he was a far more amenable and easygoing character than Pius, he was considerably more successful. It had been proved again and again at Trent that far-reaching reform was impossible without a clergy properly trained in theology and the art of disputation, so he set about building colleges and seminaries. First he enlarged the Jesuit College in Rome, originally founded by Julius III; it now became known as the Gregorian University. The Jesuits were also entrusted with the running of the German College, which proved so effective that more colleges were built in other cities of the empire, including Vienna, Prague, and Fulda in Germany. Rome also saw the establishment of an English seminary, from which a steady stream of missionaries made their perilous way to Elizabethan and Jacobean England, where several found martyrdom. Other colleges were established for Greeks, Maronites, Armenians, and Hungarians.

Had he contented himself with the intellectual and doctrinal training of the new generation of priests and missionaries, Gregory’s record as pope would have been a good deal more distinguished than it was. One could wish, for example, that he had not reacted to the news of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Huguenots by ordering a special Te Deum to be sung and personally attending a Mass of Thanksgiving at the French Church of St. Louis; or that he had not tried to persuade King Philip of Spain to launch an invasion of England from Ireland or the Netherlands; or, when these dreams collapsed, that he had not given active encouragement to a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth of England—“the Jezebel of the North.” Such an act, he had declared, would be hailed as the work of God.

In other enterprises, however, he was more enlightened—and more successful. He replaced the old legates, previously the pope’s official representatives abroad, with a new order whom he called nuncios, normally of archiepiscopal rank, trained diplomats who were henceforth to be the chosen instruments of papal policy in every Catholic country, where they were expected to work long and hard to ensure that their master’s will was done. He won over Poland for the Church, though in Russia his unfortunate nuncio to Tsar Ivan the Terrible was lucky to escape with his life; he sent Jesuit missionaries around the world: westward to Brazil, eastward to India, China, and even Japan. He spent vast sums on the restoration and further improvement of Rome, adorning the city with several new churches including the tremendous church of the Gesù, one of the most spectacular examples of the High Baroque in Europe. In 1578 his scholarly mind was fascinated by the discovery of the Roman catacombs, and he insisted that the early Christian remains which had now suddenly come to light should be subjected to proper scientific study.

By this time, however, Gregory’s extensive building programs and his subsidies to Catholic rulers in their struggle to hold the Protestants at bay—to say nothing of the cost of running all his colleges and foundations—were rapidly emptying the papal coffers. In an effort to remedy the situation, he took to claiming the reversion to himself of any property on papal territory whose occupier could not produce cast-iron evidence of his title; this practice, however, resulted only in a furious body of dispossessed landowners, who took their revenge by resorting to open brigandage. When Gregory died, aged eighty-three, after a thirteen-year pontificate, he left the Papacy almost penniless, the Papal States faced with near anarchy.

Morale, on the other hand, was probably higher than it had been for half a century. The Roman Church was now fighting back. Given new spirit by the Council of Trent, it had launched its own Counter-Reformation, symbolized above all by the city itself: by the new St. Peter’s, not yet finished but not a whit less impressive for that; by the quantity of other great churches springing up on every side; by the vast numbers of seminarists of every race and nation, living proof of the sheer vitality of the new Catholicism. The tens of thousands of pilgrims who flocked to Rome to celebrate the Jubilee Year of 1575, making their solemn visits to the seven great basilicas of the Holy City,
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could not have failed to be impressed, encouraged, and strengthened in their faith.

—

POPE SIXTUS V
, who was elected on April 24, 1585, exactly a fortnight after Gregory’s death, continued where his predecessor had left off, with still greater energy and determination. As Felice Peretti, a farmworker’s son from near Ancona, he had joined the Franciscans at the age of twelve and, thanks to his high intelligence and brilliant gifts as a preacher, had rapidly risen through the Church ranks. In 1557 Paul IV had recognized him as a kindred spirit and sent him to Venice, first to reform the Franciscan monastery of the Frari and then, from 1557, as inquisitor. It was in this last capacity that he had seriously overstepped the mark. The Venetians were devout, conscientious Catholics, but they had always resisted papal attempts to limit their freedom of action. They were merchants; their life was trade, and their commercial prosperity depended on good relations with Protestants and Muslims alike. They refused to allow the pope to tell them what to do. They could not keep out the inquisitors altogether, but they insisted that their own representatives should sit alongside them and when necessary exercise a moderating influence.

This arrangement had worked successfully enough until the appearance of Peretti. He, however, had tried to bully and browbeat them, and their indignation at his severity and arrogance had led to his recall; but Pius IV had characteristically reappointed him three years later, and Pius V had promoted him to vicar general of his order, grand inquisitor, and cardinal. Out of favor under Pope Gregory, he had languished in his villa on the Esquiline Hill preparing what is described by the
Oxford Dictionary of Popes
as “a distinctly uneven edition of St. Ambrose”; but with Gregory’s demise his sheer force of personality made him the obvious choice as successor. He was elected unanimously.

Of all the popes of the Counter-Reformation, Sixtus V was the most alarming. Stern and inflexible, utterly ruthless, brooking no opposition to his will, he ruled Rome as the autocrat he was. The power of the Sacred College was drastically reduced. He fixed the maximum number of cardinals at seventy, at which it remained for the next four hundred years. He then instituted fifteen separate congregations—or, strictly speaking, fourteen, since one of them, the Holy Office, was already in existence—to be concerned with every aspect of government, religious and secular alike. These too would endure well into the twentieth century. One of them was responsible for the university, another for the Vatican printing press, which in 1587 produced a copy of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Testament. This was to be followed by a revised text of the whole Latin Bible, the Vulgate. Sixtus entrusted the task to a special committee of learned cardinals, but their progress was so slow that he eventually took it over himself. Alas, as he had already shown with St. Ambrose, textual analysis was never his strong suit. When the work finally appeared, all serious scholars were horrified; on his death it was immediately withdrawn and was heavily revised before being re-published by Clement VIII in 1592.

The pope was a good deal more successful where Church discipline was concerned. One of the principal issues that had dogged the final sessions of the Council of Trent had been the question of the divine right of bishops: did they derive their authority through the pope or directly from God Himself? This was not a question that many people dared to put to Sixtus V: he now laid it down that every new bishop must submit himself to the pope in Rome before taking up his appointment and must make regular return visits to report on the state of his diocese.

Within two years, thanks to a reign of terror, Sixtus had restored law and order throughout the papal lands. No fewer than seven thousand brigands were publicly executed; there were, we are told, more heads impaled on spikes along the Ponte Sant’Angelo than melons in the market. Meanwhile, to restore the Vatican finances, expenditure was pared to the bone—Sixtus was not a Franciscan for nothing—while food prices were rigidly controlled. New taxes were raised, new loans floated, agriculture encouraged, marshes drained, the wool and silk industries subsidized. His sale of offices—but only bureaucratic and administrative, never ecclesiastical—earned the pope some 300,000 scudi a year. Long before his death, he had become one of the richest princes in Europe.

His foreign policy, like that of his predecessors, was based on his hatred of Protestantism, as the chief obstacle to the realization of his dream of a universal Catholic Church. He promised vast subsidies to Philip II for his projected invasion of England but, after the expedition ended in catastrophe with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, refused to pay them. The following year, he let Philip down for the second time when he relaxed his opposition to the Huguenot King Henry IV of France (whom he had excommunicated in 1585) on Henry’s agreeing to convert to Catholicism in return for the French crown.

But we remember Pope Sixtus V above all for his building. He enabled Giacomo della Porta to complete the dome on St. Peter’s. Meanwhile, his favorite architect, Domenico Fontana, designed a new Lateran Palace, a new papal residence within the Vatican, and a major reconstruction of the Vatican Library. The huge Egyptian obelisk that had once stood in Nero’s Circus was erected, in a scene of considerable drama, in Bernini’s great piazza; on the left bank of the Tiber, three lesser obelisks lent additional majesty to the squares in front of the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, and Santa Maria del Popolo. Broad new avenues connected the main pilgrimage churches. A superb aqueduct, the Acqua Felice, brought water to the city from Palestrina, a good twenty miles away. Two other aqueducts made possible the hundreds of ornamental fountains which soon sprang up all over the city. Sixtus reigned for only five years, but it is to him more than to any other pope that we owe the full baroque splendor of Counter-Reformation Rome.

He deserved well of his city; alas, his arrogance and choleric temper made him generally detested. Few popes since the Middle Ages had been more unpopular. When he died on August 27, 1590, after successive bouts of malaria, there was general rejoicing throughout the city; and his statue on the Capitol was gleefully torn down by the mob, just as Paul IV’s had been thirty-one years before.

THE NEXT SIXTEEN
months saw no fewer than three popes in Rome. In any history of the Papacy, the names of Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX can very largely be ignored. Giambattista Castagna was a wholly admirable churchman and would probably have made an excellent pope; it was not his fault that on the very night after his election he was struck down by malaria and died less than a fortnight later. He rather charmingly left his considerable personal fortune to provide dowries for impecunious Roman girls; by them, at least, he was not forgotten. Gregory, a friend of both Carlo Borromeo and Filippo Neri, pious, well meaning, but as weak as water, is chiefly remembered as a killjoy who prohibited one of the most popular amusements of the citizens of Rome: the betting on papal elections, the duration of pontificates, and the creation of cardinals. Innocent, despite only two months as pope, was arguably the most effective of the three. He forcibly opposed the still-Protestant Henry IV in France, took strong measures against banditry, regulated the course of the Tiber, and did what he could to improve sanitation. A week before Christmas 1591 he fell ill but insisted on making the traditional pilgrimage to the seven basilicas, an act of devotion which unfortunately proved fatal.

Stability returned with Ippolito Aldobrandini, the son of a distinguished Florentine barrister driven from his native city by the Medici. He took the name of Clement VIII. In many ways Clement personified the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. He led a deeply pious life, spending hours daily in prayer and meditation, making daily confession, and visiting the seven pilgrimage churches on foot fifteen times a year. Unfortunately, his austerities proved too much for his health—he was a martyr to gout—and as the years went by he tended to rely more and more on his two nephews Cinzio and Pietro, on both of whom, together with a fourteen-year-old great-nephew, he bestowed red hats. With those two taking much of the weight of the administration off his shoulders, he was free to devote much of his time to scholarship. In 1592 he published a corrected version of the Vulgate—which had been hopelessly mangled by Sixtus V—together with revisions of the pontifical, the breviary, and the missal. Four years later there appeared a greatly enlarged Index, including for the first time a ban on Jewish books. This reflected Clement’s besetting sin, his intolerance. Throughout his pontificate he gave every encouragement to the Inquisition, which in his reign sent more than thirty heretics to the stake; they included the former Dominican Giordano Bruno, who met his death on February 17, 1600, in the Campo dei Fiori, where his statue still stands.

Politically, Clement’s most important decision, made after long hesitation and with deep reluctance, was to recognize Henry IV as King of France. Henry, a former Huguenot, had been received into the Catholic Church in 1593, famously remarking,
“Paris vaut bien une messe.”
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Clement still remained unconvinced; it was only after the king had been crowned at Chartres in the following year that he finally accepted his nuncio’s advice, lifted Sixtus V’s sentence of excommunication, and granted Henry his recognition. He may well have regretted doing so when, on April 13, 1598, Henry published his Edict of Nantes, granting extensive rights to the Huguenots and allowing them free exercise of their religion (except in certain towns, which included Paris) and civil equality with Catholics. This caused, it need hardly be said, a furious outburst from Spain, which he felt strong enough to ignore.