The March of Folly (15 page)

It was when he castigated the Church that Savonarola’s outrage rang fiercest. “Popes and prelates speak against pride and ambition and they are plunged in it up to their ears. They preach chastity and keep mistresses.… They think only of the world and worldly things; they care nothing for souls.” They have made the Church “a house of ill-fame … a prostitute who sits upon the throne of Solomon and signals to the passers-by. Whoever can pay enters and does what he wishes, but he who wishes for good is thrown out. Thus, O prostituted Church, you have unveiled your abuse before the eyes of the entire world and your poisoned breath rises to the heavens.”

That there was some truth in this verbiage did not excite Rome, long accustomed to censorious zealots. Savonarola became politically dangerous, however, when he hailed Charles VIII as the instrument of reform sent by the Lord, “as I have long predicted,” to cure the ills of Italy and reform the Church. Championship of the French was his fatal move, for it made him a threat to the new rulers of Florence and brought him unpleasantly to the notice of the Pope. The former demanded his suppression, but Alexander, anxious to avoid a popular outcry, took action only when Savonarola’s denunciations of himself and the hierarchy became too pointed to ignore, most especially when Savonarola called for a Council to remove the Pope on grounds of simony.

At first, Alexander attempted to silence Savonarola quietly by simply forbidding him to preach, but prophets filled with the voice of
God are not easily silenced. Savonarola defied the order on the ground that Alexander, by his crimes, had lost his authority as Holy Father and “is no longer a Christian. He is an infidel, a heretic and as such has ceased to be Pope.” Alexander’s answer was excommunication, which Savonarola promptly defied by giving communion and celebrating Mass. Alexander then ordered the Florentine authorities to silence the preacher themselves under pain of excommunicating the whole city. Public sentiment had by now turned against Savonarola owing to a test by fire into which he was drawn by his enemies and could not sustain. Imprisoned by the authorities of Florence and tortured to extract a confession of fraud, tortured again by papal examiners for a confession of heresy, he was turned back for execution by the civil arm. To the howls and hisses of the mob, he was hanged and burned in 1498. The thunder was silenced but the hostility to the hierarchy it had voiced remained.

Itinerant preachers, hermits and friars took up the theme. Some fanatic, some mad, all had disgust with the Church in common and responded to a widespread public sentiment. Anyone who assumed a mission to preach reform could be sure of an audience. They were not a new phenomenon. As a form of entertainment for the common people, one of the few they had, lay preachers and preaching friars had long wandered from town to town attracting huge multitudes who listened patiently for hours at a time to lengthy sermons held in the public squares because the churches could not hold the throngs. In 1448 as many as 15,000 were reported to have come to hear a famous Franciscan, Roberto da Lecce, preach for four hours in Perugia. Lashing the evils of the time, exhorting the people to lead better lives and abandon sin, the preachers were important for the popular response they evoked. Their sermons usually ended with mass “conversions” and gifts of gratitude to the speaker. A favorite prophecy as the century turned was of an “angelic Pope” who would initiate reform, to be followed, as Savonarola had promised, by a better world. A group of some twenty working-class disciples in Florence elected their own “pope,” who told the followers that until reform was accomplished, it was useless to go to confession because there were no priests worthy of the name. His words spread as token of some great approaching change.

Borgia family affairs had now succeeded in scandalizing an age inured to most excesses. Conceiving that marriage ties to the royal family of Naples would be in his interest, Alexander annulled the marriage of his daughter Lucrezia to Giovanni Sforza in order to marry her to Alfonso,
the Neapolitan heir. The outraged husband, fiercely denying the charge of non-consummation, resisted the divorce loudly and publicly, but under heavy political and financial pressures engineered by the Pope was forced to give way, and even to return his wife’s dowry. Amid revelry in the Vatican, Lucrezia was married to a handsome new husband, whom according to all accounts she genuinely loved, but the insult to the Sforzas and offense to the marriage sacrament increased Alexander’s disrepute. Giovanni Sforza added to it with the charge that Alexander had been activated by incestuous desire for his own daughter. Though hard to sustain in view of her rapid remarriage, the tale aided the accretion of ever more lurid slanders that clustered around Alexander and gathered credibility from the vices of his son Cesare.

In the year of Lucrezia’s remarriage, the Pope’s eldest surviving son, Juan, Duke of Gandia, was found floating one morning in the Tiber, his corpse pierced by nine stab wounds. Although he had numerous enemies, owing to the large slices of papal property bestowed upon him by his father, no assassin was identified. The longer the mystery and whispers lasted, the more suspicion came to rest on Cesare based on a supposed desire to supplant his brother in the paternal largesse or, alternatively, as the outcome of an incestuous triangle with brother and sister. In the bubbling stew of Rome’s rumors, no depravity appeared beyond the scope of the Borgias (although historians have since absolved Cesare of the murder of his brother).

Stunned with grief at—or perhaps frightened by—the death of his son, Alexander was afflicted with remorse and a sudden rare introspection. “The most grievous danger for any Pope,” he told a consistory of cardinals, “lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth about his own person and ends by not wishing to hear it.” It was an unheard message to every autocrat in history. In his moral crisis the Pope further announced that the blow he had suffered was God’s judgment upon him for his sins and that he was resolved to amend his life and reform the Church. “We will begin the reform with ourselves and so proceed through all levels of the Church till the whole work is accomplished.” He at once appointed a commission of several of the most respected cardinals to draw up a program, but, except for a provision to reduce plural benefices, it hardly went to the heart of the matter. Beginning with the cardinals, it required reduction of incomes, which had evidently climbed, to 6000 ducats each; reduction of households to no more than eighty (of whom at least twelve should be in holy orders) and of mounted escorts to thirty; greater restraint at table with only one boiled and one roast
meat per meal and with entertainment by musicians and actors to be replaced by reading of Holy Scriptures. Cardinals were no longer to take part in tournaments or carnivals or attend secular theatricals or employ miscellaneous “youths” as body servants. A provision that all concubines were to be dismissed within ten days of publication of the Bull embodying the reforms may have modified the Holy Father’s interest in the program. A further provision calling for a Council to enact the reforms was enough to bring him back to normal. The proposed Bull,
In apostolicae sedis specula
, was never issued and the subject of reform was dropped.

In 1499, the French under a new King, Louis XII, returned, now claiming through the Orléans line the succession to Milan. Another churchman, the Archbishop of Rouen, as the King’s chief adviser, was the mover behind this effort. He was himself moved by ambition to be Pope and believed he could make a great thrust in the papal stakes through French control of Milan. Alexander’s role in the new invasion, doubtless affected by his experience in the last, was entirely cynical. Louis had applied for an annulment of his marriage to his sad, crippled wife, Jeanne, sister of Charles VIII, in order to marry the much coveted Anne of Brittany, widow of Charles VIII, for the sake of finally attaching her duchy to the French Crown.

Although Louis’ plea for annulment was furiously condemned by Oliver Maillard, the late King’s Franciscan confessor, and resented by the French people, who warmly sympathized with the discarded Queen, Alexander was indifferent to public opinion. He saw a means toward gold for his coffers and advancement for Cesare, who, having renounced his ecclesiastical career, had ambitions to marry the daughter of Alfonso of Naples, a ward and resident of the French court. Cesare’s unprecedented resignation of the red hat, antagonizing many of the cardinals, evoked from a Venetian diarist of events a sigh that summarized the Renaissance Papacy. “Thus now in God’s Church
tutto va al contrario
” (everything is upside-down). In return for 30,000 ducats and support for Cesare’s project, the Pope granted Louis’ annulment plus a dispensation to marry Anne of Brittany and threw in a red hat for the Archbishop of Rouen, who became Cardinal d’Amboise.

In this second scandalous annulment and its consequences, folly was compounded. In ducal splendor, Cesare bearing the dispensation journeyed to France, where he discussed with the King the projected campaign for Milan on the basis of papal support. Alexander’s partnership with France, arranged for the sake of his maligned son, whom he
now described as more dear to him than anything else on earth, angered a field of opponents—the Sforzas, the Colonnas, the rulers of Naples and, of course, Spain. Acting for Spain, Portuguese envoys visited the Pope to reprimand him for his nepotism, simony and French policy, which they said endangered the peace of Italy and indeed of all Christendom. They, too, raised the threat of a Council unless he changed course. He did not. Sterner Spanish envoys followed on the same mission, ostensibly for the welfare of the Church although their motive—to frustrate France—was as political as Alexander’s. Conferences were heated; reform by Council was again used as a threat. A wrathful envoy told Alexander to his face that his election was invalid, his title as Pope void. In return, Alexander threatened to have him thrown into the Tiber, and scolded the Spanish King and Queen in insulting terms for their interference.

When Cesare’s marriage fell through, owing to the princess’ stubborn aversion to her suitor, the French alliance threatened to crumble, leaving Alexander deserted. He felt so endangered that he held audiences accompanied by an armed guard. Rumors circulated in Rome of withdrawal of obedience by the powers and a possible schism. The French King, however, arranged another marriage for Cesare with the sister of the King of Navarre, rejoicing Alexander, who in return endorsed Louis’ claim to Milan and joined France in a league with Venice, always ready to oppose Milan. The French army crossed the Alps once more, reinforced by Swiss mercenaries. When Milan fell to this assault, Alexander expressed delight regardless of the odium this aroused throughout Europe. In the midst of war and turmoil, pilgrims arriving in Rome for the Jubilee Year of 1500 found no security, but instead public disorder, robberies, muggings and murders.

Cesare was now embarked on a full military career to regain control of those regions of the Papal States which had strayed too far into autonomy. That his objective was a temporal domain, even a kingdom for himself in central Italy, was the belief of some contemporaries. The cost of his campaigns drained huge sums from the papal revenues, amounting in one period of two months to 132,000 ducats, about half the Papacy’s normal income, and in another period of eight months to 182,000 ducats. In Rome he was overlord, callous in tyranny, an able administrator served by spies and informers, strong in the martial arts, capable of beheading a bull at one blow. He too loved art, patronized poets and painters, yet did not hesitate to cut off the tongue and hand of a man reported to have repeated a joke about him. A Venetian supposed to have circulated a slanderous pamphlet about the Pope
and his son was murdered and thrown into the Tiber. “Every night,” reported the helpless Venetian Ambassador, “four or five murdered men are discovered, bishops, prelates and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the Duke.” Sinister and vindictive, the Duke disposed of opponents by the most direct means, sowing dragon’s teeth in their place. Whether for self-protection or to hide the blotches that disfigured his face, he never left his residence without wearing a mask.

In 1501 Lucrezia’s second husband, Alfonso, was attacked by five assailants but escaped although severely wounded. While devotedly nursed by Lucrezia, he was convinced that Cesare was the perpetrator and would try to finish the deed by poison. In this fear Alfonso rejected all physicians and was nevertheless recovering when he saw from a window his hated brother-in-law walking below in the garden. Seizing a bow and arrow, he shot at Cesare and fatally missed. Within minutes he was hacked to death by the Duke’s bodyguard. Alexander, perhaps by now himself intimidated by the tiger he had reared, did nothing.

For his son-in-law the Pope suffered no further spasms of morality. Rather, judging from Burchard’s diary, the last inhibitions, if any, dropped away. Two months after Alfonso’s death, the Pope presided over a banquet given by Cesare in the Vatican, famous in the annals of pornography as the Ballet of the Chestnuts. Soberly recorded by Burchard, fifty courtesans danced after dinner with the guests, “at first clothed, then naked.” Chestnuts were then scattered among candelabra placed on the floor, “which the courtesans, crawling on hands and knees among the candelabra, picked up, while the Pope, Cesare and his sister Lucrezia looked on.” Coupling of guests and courtesans followed, with prizes in the form of fine silken tunics and cloaks offered “for those who could perform the act most often with the courtesans.” A month later Burchard records a scene in which mares and stallions were driven into a courtyard of the Vatican and equine coupling encouraged while from a balcony the Pope and Lucrezia “watched with loud laughter and much pleasure.” Later they watched again while Cesare shot down a mass of unarmed criminals driven like the horses into the same courtyard.

The Pope’s expenses emptied the treasury. On the last day of 1501, Lucrezia, robed in gold brocade and crimson velvet trimmed with ermine and draped in pearls, was married off for the third time to the heir of the d’Estes of Ferrara in a ceremony of magnificent pomp followed by a week of joyous and gorgeous festivities, feasts, theatricals, races and bullfights to celebrate the Borgia tie to the most distinguished
family of Italy. Alexander himself counted out 100,000 ducats of gold to the bridegroom’s brothers for Lucrezia’s dowry. To finance such extravagance as well as Cesare’s continuing campaigns, the Pope, between March and May 1503, created eighty new offices in the Curia to be sold for 780 ducats each, and appointed nine new cardinals at one blow, five of them Spaniards, realizing from their payments for the red hat a total of 120,000 to 130,000 ducats. In the same period, great wealth was seized on the death of the rich Venetian Cardinal, Giovanni Michele, who expired after two days of violent intestinal illness, generally believed to have been poisoned for his money by Cesare.