The March of Folly (16 page)

This was the last year of Alexander’s life. Hostilities surrounded him. The Orsini with many partisans were fighting an extended war against Cesare. Spanish forces had landed in the south and were fighting the French for control of Naples, which they were shortly to win, establishing Spanish control of the kingdom for the next three and a half centuries. Serious churchmen concerned for the faith were raising more insistently the issue of a Council—a treatise by Cardinal Sangiorgio, one of Alexander’s own appointees, stated that continued papal refusal to call one harmed the Church and scandalized all Christian people, and if all remedies failed, the cardinals themselves had a duty to convene a Council.

In August 1503 at the age of 73, Alexander VI died, not of poison, as was of course the immediate supposition, but probably of susceptibility at his age to Rome’s summer fevers. Public emotion, released as if at the death of a monster, exploded in ghastly tales of a black and swollen corpse with tongue protruding from a foaming mouth, so horrible that no one would touch it, leaving it to be dragged to the grave by a rope fastened around the feet. The late Pontiff was said to have gained the tiara by a pact with the Devil at the price of his soul. Scandal sheets, to which Romans were much given, appeared every day hung around the neck of
Pasquino
, an ancient statue dug up in 1501 which served the Romans as a display center for anonymous satire.

Cesare, for all his military might, proved unable to sustain himself without the support of Rome, where an old enemy had succeeded a fond father. The dragon’s teeth now rose around him. He surrendered at Naples under a Spanish promise of safe conduct, promptly violated by his captors, who took him to prison in Spain. Escaping after two years, he made his way to Navarre and was killed there in a local battle within a year.

So many had been Alexander’s offenses that his contemporaries’
judgments tend to be extreme, but Burchard, his Master of Ceremonies, was neither antagonist nor apologist. The impression from his toneless diary of Alexander’s Papacy is of continuous violence, murders in churches, bodies in the Tiber, fighting of factions, burnings and lootings, arrests, tortures and executions, combined with scandal, frivolities and continuous ceremony—reception of ambassadors, princes and sovereigns, obsessive attention to garments and jewels, protocol of processions, entertainments and horse races with cardinals winning prizes—with a running record throughout of the costs and finances of the whole.

Certain revisionists have taken a fancy to the Borgia Pope and worked hard to rehabilitate him by intricate arguments that dispose of the charges against him as either exaggeration or forgeries or gossip or unexplained malice until all are made to vanish in a cloud of invention. The revision fails to account for one thing: the hatred, disgust and fear that Alexander had engendered by the time he died.

In the history books the pontificate is treated in terms of political wars and maneuvers. Religion, except for an occasional reference to Alexander’s observance of Lenten fasts or his concern to maintain the purity of Catholic doctrine by censorship of books, is barely mentioned. The last word may belong to Egidio of Viterbo, General of the Augustinians and a major figure in the reform movement. Rome under Pope Alexander VI, he said in a sermon, knows “No law, no divinity; Gold, force and Venus rule.”

The papal crown having eluded him twice, Cardinal della Rovere now missed it a third time. His strongest opponent, and an arrogant contender, was the French Cardinal d’Amboise. Cesare Borgia too, controlling a solid group of eleven Spanish cardinals, was a third force grimly bent on the election of a Spaniard who would be his ally. Armed forces of France, Spain, of the Borgia, the Orsini and various Italian factions exerted pressure for their several interests by an intimidating presence. Under the circumstances, the Cardinals retreated for their conclave within the fortress walls of Castel Sant’ Angelo, and only when they had hired mercenary troops for protection, removed to the Vatican.

Might-have-beens haunted the election. Once more an accidental pope emerged when the leading candidates cancelled each other out. The Spanish votes were nullified by tumultuous mobs, shouting hate for the Borgias, which made election of another Spaniard impossible. D’Amboise was cut out by the dire warnings of della Rovere that his election would result in the Papacy being removed to France. The Italian cardinals, although holding an overwhelming majority of the College, were divided in support of several candidates. Della Rovere received a majority of the votes, but two short of the necessary two-thirds. Finding himself blocked, he threw his support to the pious and worthy Cardinal of Siena, Francesco Piccolomini, whose age and ill health indicated a short tenure. In the deadlock Piccolomini was elected, taking the name Pius III in honor of his uncle, the former Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who had been Pius II.

The new Pope’s first public announcement was that reform, beginning at the top with the papal court, would be his earliest care. A cultivated and learned man like his uncle, though of more studious and secluded temperament, Piccolomini had been a Cardinal for over forty years. Active in the service of Pius II, but out of place in the worldliness
of Rome since that time, he had stayed away in Siena through the last pontificates. Though hardly known, he had a reputation for kindness and charity instantly seized upon by the public craving for a “good” Pope who would be the opposite of Alexander VI. The announcement of his election excited tumults of popular rejoicing. Reformist prelates were happy that the government of the Church was at last entrusted to a pontiff who was “the storehouse of all virtues and the abode of the Holy Spirit of God.” All are filled, wrote the Bishop of Arezzo, “with the highest hopes for reform of the Church and the return of peace.” The new Pope’s religious and virtuous life promised “a new era in the history of the Church.”

The new era was not to be. At 64, Pius III was old for his time and debilitated by gout. Under the burden of audiences, consistories and the long ceremonials of consecration and coronation, he weakened daily and died after holding office for 26 days.

The fervor and hope that had welcomed Pius III was a measure of the craving for a change, and warning enough that a Papacy concentrating on temporal aims was not serving the underlying interest of the Church. If this was recognized by perhaps a third of the Sacred College, they were chaff in the wind of a single fierce ambition. In the new election, Giuliano della Rovere, using “immoderate and unbounded promises,” and bribery where necessary, and to the general astonishment sweeping all factions and erstwhile opponents into his camp, secured the papal tiara at last. He was chosen in a conclave of less than 24 hours, the shortest ever recorded. A monumental ego expressed itself in the change of his given name by only a syllable to the papal name of Giulio, or Julius, II.

Julius is ranked among the great popes because of his temporal accomplishments, not least his fertile partnership with Michelangelo—for art, next to war, is the great immortalizer of reputations. He was, however, as oblivious as his three predecessors to the extent of disaffection in the constituency he governed. His two consuming passions, motivated by neither personal greed nor nepotism, were restoration of the political and territorial integrity of the Papal States and embellishment of his See and memorialization of himself through the triumphs of art. He achieved important results in both these endeavors, which, being visible, have received ample notice as the visibles of history usually do, while the significant aspect of his reign, its failure of concern for the religious crisis, has been overlooked as the invisibles of history usually are. The goals of his policy were entirely temporal. For all his dynamic force, he missed his opportunity, as Guicciardini
wrote, “to promote the salvation of souls for which he was Christ’s Vicar on earth.”

Impetuous, hot-tempered, self-willed, reckless and difficult to manage, Julius was an activist, too impatient to consult, hardly able to listen to advice. In body and soul, reported the Venetian Ambassador, he “had the nature of a giant. Anything that he had been thinking overnight has to be carried out immediately next morning and he insists on doing everything himself.” Faced by resistance or contrary views, “he looks grim and breaks off the conversation or interrupts the speaker with a little bell kept on the table next to him.” He, too, suffered from gout, as well as kidney trouble and other ills, but no infirmities of body restrained his spirit. His tight mouth, high color, dark “terrible” eyes, marked an implacable temperament unprepared to give way to any obstacles.
Terribilità
, or awesomeness, was the word Italians used of him.

Having broken the power of Cesare Borgia, he moved on to neutralize the feuding baronial factions of Rome by judicious marriages of della Rovere relatives to Orsinis and Colonnas. He reorganized and stiffened the papal administration, improved order in the city by stern measures against bandits and the paid assassins and duelists who had flourished under Alexander. He hired the Swiss Guard as the Vatican’s protectors and conducted tours of inspection through the papal territories.

His program to consolidate papal rule began with a campaign against Venice to regain the cities of the Romagna, which Venice had seized from the Holy See, and in this venture he brought France to his aid in alliance with Louis XII. Negotiations streamed from him in local and multi-national diplomacy: to neutralize Florence, to engage the Emperor, to activate allies, to dislocate opponents. In their common if conflicting greeds, all participants in the Italian wars had designs on the expanded possessions of Venice, and in 1508 the parties coalesced in a liquid coalition called the League of Cambrai. The wars of the League of Cambrai over the next five years exhibit all the logical consistency of opera librettos. They were largely directed against Venice until the parties shifted around against France. The Papacy, the Empire, Spain and a major contingent of Swiss mercenaries took part in one permutation of alliance after another. By masterful manipulation of finances, politics and arms, aided by excommunication when the conflict grew rough, the Pope succeeded ultimately in regaining from Venice the estates of the patrimony it had absorbed.

In the meantime against all cautionary advice, Julius’ pugnacity extended
to the recovery of Bologna and Perugia, the two most important cities of the papal domain, whose despots, besides oppressing their subjects, virtually ignored the authority of Rome. Announcing his intention of taking personal command, and overriding the shocked objections of many of the cardinals, the Pope stunned Europe by riding forth at the head of his army on its march northward in 1506.

Years of belligerence, conquests, losses and violent disputes engaged him. When in the normal course of Italian politics Ferrara, a papal fief, changed sides, Julius in his rage at the rebellion and the dilatory progress of his punitive forces, again took physical command at the front. In helmet and mail, the white-bearded Pope, lately risen from an illness so near death that arrangements for a conclave had been made, conducted a snow-bound siege through the rigors of a severe winter. Making his quarters in a peasant’s hut, he was continually on horseback, directing deployment and batteries, riding among the troops, scolding or encouraging and personally leading them through a breach in the fortress. “It was certainly a sight very uncommon to behold the High Priest, the Vicar of Christ on earth … employed in person in managing a war excited by himself among Christians … and retaining nothing of the Pontiff but the name and the robes.”

Guicciardini’s judgments are weighted by his scorn for all the popes of this period, but to many others besides himself the spectacle of the Holy Father as warrior and instigator of wars was dismaying. Good Christians were scandalized.

Julius was carried forward in this enterprise by fury against the French, who through a long series of disputes had now become his enemies and with whom Ferrara had joined. The aggressive Cardinal d’Amboise, as determined to be Pope as Julius before him, had persuaded Louis XII to demand three French cardinalships as the price of his aid. Against his will, Julius had complied for the sake of French support, but relations with his old rival were embittered and new disputes arose. The Pope’s relations with the League, it was said, depended on whether his hatred of d’Amboise proved greater than his enmity for Venice. When Julius supported Genoa in its effort to overthrow French control, Louis XII, needled by d’Amboise, made enlarged claims of Gallican rights in appointment of benefices. As the area of conflict spread, Julius realized that the Papal States would never be firmly established while the French exercised power in Italy. Having once been the “fatal instrument” of their invasion, he now bent every effort upon their expulsion. His reversal of policy, requiring a whole new set of alliances and arrangements, awed his compatriots
and even his enemy. Louis XII, reported Machiavelli, then Florentine envoy in France, “is determined to vindicate his honor even if he loses everything he possesses in Italy.” Vacillating between moral and military procedure, the King threatened at times “to hang a Council around [the Pope’s] neck” and at other times, with d’Amboise pressing at his elbow, “to lead an army to Rome and himself depose the Pope.” A vision of not merely succeeding but replacing the Pope lured Cardinal d’Amboise. He too had become infected by the virus of folly—or ambition, its large component.

In July 1510 Julius ruptured relations with Louis, closing the Vatican door to the French Ambassador. “The French in Rome,” gleefully reported the envoy of Venice, “stole about looking like corpses.” Julius, on the contrary, was invigorated by visions of himself winning glory as the liberator of Italy. Thereafter
Fuori i barbari!
(Out with the barbarians!) was his battle cry.

Bold in his new cause, he executed a complete about-face to join with Venice against France. Joined also by Spain, ever eager to drive the French out of Italy, the new combination, designated the Holy League, was given a fighting edge by the addition of the Swiss. Recruited by Julius on terms of a five-year annual subsidy, their commander was the martial Bishop of Sion, Matthäus Schinner. A kindred spirit to the Pope, Schinner hated his overbearing neighbors, the French, even more than Julius hated them and was dedicated in his heart, soul and talents to their defeat. Gaunt, long-nosed, limitless in energy, he was an intrepid soldier and spellbinding orator, whose eloquence before battle moved his troops “as the wind moves the waves.” Schinner’s tongue, complained the next King of France, Francis I, gave the French more trouble than the formidable Swiss pikes. Julius made him a Cardinal on his entering the Holy League. In later days in battle against Francis I, Schinner rode to war wearing his cardinal’s red hat and robes after announcing to his troops that he wished to bathe in French blood.