If, as has been suggested, Martin V was the first Renaissance pope, Eugenius was the second. He was not temperamentally a Renaissance figure—on his deathbed he expressed bitter regrets that he had ever left his hermitage—but his nine years with the Medici in Florence could not have failed to have their effect; and when he returned to Rome—accompanied, incidentally, by Fra Angelico—he devoted himself, in the four years remaining to him, to the continuation of Martin’s work on the city. To bring Rome up to the standards now set by Milan, Genoa, Venice, and the other great cities of the North would have taxed the powers of Hercules, but Eugenius worked hard, and when his apostolic secretary, Flavio Biondo, dedicated to him his three books on the restoration work, Roma Instaurata, the compliment was not undeserved.
Artistically and culturally, however, Rome was still something of a backwater when Cardinal Tommaso Parentucelli, the son of a modest physician in Liguria, was elected pontiff in March 1447, taking the name of Nicholas V. Of the previous 140 years the popes had been absent for well over half, and thanks to the consequent chaos the flowering of classical and humanistic learning that had swept away the last vestiges of the Middle Ages from Tuscany and Umbria had left the city almost untouched. A Dante, a Petrarch, a Boccaccio—all of them Florentines—would have been unthinkable in Rome. Although both Boniface VIII in 1303 and Innocent VII a hundred years later had worked hard to give the city the university it deserved, neither had had much success.
With the beginning of the fifteenth century, however, there was a change in the air. First of all, Greek influence had begun to make itself felt. When in 1360 Boccaccio had wished to learn the language, he had had the utmost difficulty in finding anyone in Italy capable of teaching him; he had eventually unearthed an aged Calabrian monk of revolting habits, whom he had lodged in his house for three years, preparing one of the first—and worst—translations of Homer into Latin. But around the turn of the century there had appeared in Florence a first-rate Greek scholar named Manuel Chrysoloras. He had taught there for the next fifteen years until his death, leaving behind him a book, Erotemata Civas Questiones, which was essentially a Greek grammar, set out in the form of questions and answers. Among his pupils were two of the most distinguished early Italian humanists, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, who both became members of the Curia and were thus able to inject some of the new learning into the papal court. Soon, too, Chrysoloras was joined by the impressive company of Greek intellectuals who had accompanied John Palaeologus to the Councils of Ferrara and Florence.
These Greeks, of course, brought with them a new awareness of antiquity. For a thousand years the pagan splendors of ancient Rome had been ignored or forgotten, being of no interest to either pope or pilgrim. Then there had been the seventy years of absence in Avignon, followed by the forty years of schism; and disastrous as these years had been in many ways, they did make it possible for subsequent popes to look upon the city with completely fresh eyes—eyes that were shocked by the sight of cattle grazing in the Forum and antique statuary being ground to powder to provide local jerry-builders with cement. That is why, from the middle of the fifteenth century, the entire institution of the Papacy underwent a radical change. Imbued as they were with humanist ideas, the Renaissance popes were ambitious and energetic men of the world, determined not just to revive Rome’s former greatness but to create a new city which would combine the best of both classical and Christian civilizations, bearing witness to their own greatness and that of their families and arousing the admiration and envy of all who saw it.
Like his predecessor, Nicholas V had spent some years in Florence, where he had been tutor to the Strozzi family and had made friends with all the scholars who clustered around the Medici. In consequence he had become far more deeply imbued with Renaissance culture than Eugenius ever was. He was also a good deal less confrontational and far more politically astute, restoring order to Rome and self-government to the Papal States, granting virtual independence to Bologna, and persuading history’s last antipope, Felix V, to abdicate. One of his greatest successes was his declaration of 1450 as Jubilee Year, which brought perhaps a hundred thousand pilgrims, tempted by the offer of plenary indulgence for their sins, flocking to Rome. This completely restored the papal finances. The high point of the celebrations was the canonization of St. Bernardino of Siena, a Franciscan friar who had died only six years before and whose extraordinary charisma had earned him a place in the hearts of Italians comparable, perhaps, to that of Padre Pio in the late twentieth century.
Admittedly, not everything in that Jubilee Year went according to plan. An outbreak of the plague in the early summer caused hundreds of deaths: “all the hospitals and churches,” wrote an eyewitness, “were full of the sick and dying, and they were to be seen in the infected streets falling down like dogs.” On December 19 a pack of horses and mules was frightened by the crowds on the Ponte Sant’Angelo and stampeded; some two hundred pilgrims were trampled to death or drowned in the Tiber. Yet in the long term even these disasters made little difference. The Jubilee Year showed conclusively that, after a century and a half, the Papacy was back on track. Avignon was now past history, and the schism, and all the antipapal excesses of the conciliar movement. The popes were fully and firmly restored to Rome where they belonged; and they had every intention of staying there.
IN 1452 FREDERICK III of Habsburg1 crossed the Alps with a suite of more than 2,000, to receive from the pope the crown of the Holy Roman Empire; this was to be combined with the new emperor’s marriage to Donna Leonora, the daughter of the King of Portugal. In every Italian city through which Frederick passed, he was cheered to the echo and deluged with presents. In Ferrara he was greeted not only by the Marquis Borso d’Este but also by Galeazzo Maria Sforza, eldest son of the usurping Duke of Milan, and was obliged to listen to a speech of welcome, “as long as two chapters of St. John’s Gospel,” pronounced by Galeazzo Maria’s eight-year-old brother. In Bologna and Florence the receptions were more elaborate still, and in Siena he met his bride for the first time. The two then rode to Rome together, entering the city on March 9. On the sixteenth Pope Nicholas performed the marriage ceremony in St. Peter’s, after which he crowned Frederick with the Iron Crown of Lombardy; the imperial coronation took place three days later and was followed by the coronation of the young empress with a crown that had been specially made for her. When the service was over, the emperor made a point of bringing the pope’s horse to the door of the basilica and holding his stirrup while he mounted. The festivities ended with a ceremonial banquet at the Lateran.
That ceremony—it was the last imperial coronation ever to take place in Rome—marked the apogee of Nicholas’s pontificate. All too soon came disaster: on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, after a fifty-five-day siege, the army of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II smashed down the walls of Constantinople and put an end to the Christian Empire of the East. The news was received with horror throughout Western Europe. The Byzantine Empire had lasted 1,123 years; although it had never recovered from the Fourth Crusade two and a half centuries before, it had remained the eastern bastion of Christendom. As the refugees spread westward from the conquered city, they carried with them the epic story of its heroic defense, which doubtless lost nothing in the telling. But Western Europe, for all its deep and genuine dismay, was not profoundly changed; indeed, the two states most immediately affected, Venice and Genoa, lost no time in congratulating the sultan and making the best terms they could with the new regime.
In Rome, Pope Nicholas showed none of the cynicism and self-interest of the merchant republics. He did his utmost to galvanize the West for a Crusade, a cause which was enthusiastically supported by the two Greek cardinals, Bessarion and Isidore, who had remained in Italy after the Council of Florence and embraced Catholicism, as also by the papal legate in Germany, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II. But it was no use. Two or three hundred years before, Christian zeal had been enough to launch military expeditions for the recovery of the Holy Places of pilgrimage; with the advent of Renaissance humanism the old religious fire had been extinguished. Europe had dithered, and Byzantium had died. With the Ottoman army stronger now than it had ever been, the old empire was beyond all hope of resurrection.
It was Nicholas’s only important failure. He had no choice but to accept it, and he returned to the two chief interests of his life, books and buildings—the only things, he said, that it was worth spending money on. His two predecessors had both been enthusiastic builders, but neither had shown much interest in literature; Pope Martin, indeed, had generally disapproved of classical—and consequently pagan—authors and had maintained that nothing of antiquity was worth preserving beyond what was contained in the works of St. Augustine. Nicholas, by contrast, was scarcely ever seen without a book in his hand. He read everything that came his way, annotating copiously in the margins in his exquisite handwriting. His legate Piccolomini wrote admiringly:
From his youth he has been initiated into all liberal arts, he is acquainted with all philosophers, historians, poets, cosmographers, and theologians; and is no stranger to civil and canon law, or even to medicine.
Thus, on his accession, Nicholas deliberately set out to create, “for the common convenience of the learned, a library of all books, both in Latin and in Greek, worthy of the dignity of the Pope and the Apostolic See.” He had to start virtually from scratch: the old papal library had been left at Avignon, where most of the volumes had by now been lost or stolen; of the remainder, the Antipope Benedict XIII had carried off a good many after his deposition and taken them to the castle of Peñíscola near Valencia. Now papal agents traveled all over Europe in search of rare manuscripts, and scholars were set to work to make accurate Latin translations of the Greek texts, both Christian and pagan. Forty-five copyists were kept permanently employed. By Nicholas’s death he had spent 30,000 gold florins and had collected some twelve hundred volumes, the nucleus of today’s Vatican Library.2
Meanwhile, he continued the work of his predecessors in the rebuilding of Rome. He strengthened the old Leonine walls and other more recent defenses, supervised the restoration of forty early Christian churches, repaired aqueducts, paved streets, and initiated a major restoration of the Castel Sant’Angelo. His most important work, however, was on the Vatican—which, he now decided, should replace the Lateran as the principal papal residence—and St. Peter’s. Of the late-thirteenth-century palace, essentially the work of Nicholas III, he restored and enlarged the north and west sides, using Leon Battista Alberti and Bernardo Rossellino as his architects. He also commissioned Fra Angelico, with his assistant Benozzo Gozzoli, to paint the stories of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence in his chapel and study and a further cycle of scenes from the life of Christ in the Chapel of the Sacrament.3
His plans for St. Peter’s were still more ambitious. Like all the other great buildings of Rome, it had been allowed to fall into decay; the great architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti maintained that its complete collapse was only a matter of time. Nicholas, however, had in mind something more than just a program of repair; he envisaged lengthening the building by about a third and adding transepts and a new apse around the shrine of the Apostle. There was also a plan for a magnificent new space outside, where three great new avenues through the Borgo quarter would converge and where the crowds could congregate for mass blessings. These plans all lapsed at the pope’s death, but it is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if they had been put into effect. Julius II, half a century later, would probably not have ordered the complete rebuilding; on the other hand, we should almost certainly have been deprived of the great Bernini piazza, which to this day remains one of the most magnificent open spaces of Europe.
Pope Nicholas V died in March 1455 at the age of fifty-seven. His pontificate had lasted only eight years, but his influence had been enormous. Martin and Eugenius had both been affected by Renaissance ideas, but neither had wholeheartedly embraced the humanist ethos. Nicholas was the first pope who saw absolutely no contradiction or conflict between humanism and the Christian faith. To him the arts were neither vain nor frivolous; they too bore witness to the glory of God. It was only right, therefore, that the Church give a lead in the artistic field just as it did in the spiritual. Other popes who thought as he did were to follow; but Nicholas, and Nicholas alone, combined his views with a genuine piety, humility, and integrity. It was entirely typical of him that in 1449 he should have ordered a retrial of Joan of Arc, who had been burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, on charges which included heresy and witchcraft. This was to continue for the next seven years, during which 115 witnesses were heard; it ended only in the reign of his successor, who is normally—and most unfairly—given the credit for her complete rehabilitation.
Unlike so many of those who preceded or followed him, Nicholas V was untouched by greed or nepotism. Greatness, which he unquestionably possessed, never went to his head. In earlier years he had described himself, to his friend and biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci, as “a mere bell-ringing priest”; and that, in a very real sense, he remained.
ON APRIL 4 the fifteen cardinals who were in Rome assembled for the conclave—and badly missed their chance. They might have elected Cardinal Bessarion, by far the most intelligent and cultivated churchman in Rome. As a former metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, he was better qualified than any of his colleagues to end the four-hundred-year schism, and he would have steered the Papacy in a new and healthier direction. Alas, his Greek origins, which should have counted in his favor, militated against him; the cardinals instead chose a seventy-seven-year-old Catalan jurist, Cardinal Alfonso de Borja—subsequently Italicized to Borgia—who took the name of Calixtus III.
Deeply pious, dry as dust, and crippled by gout, Calixtus devoted his pontificate to two consuming ambitions. The first was to organize a European Crusade that would deliver Constantinople from the Turks; the second, to advance the fortunes of his family and his compatriots. Art and literature interested him not a jot. “See how the treasure of the Church has been wasted!” he is said to have exclaimed on walking into the Vatican Library for the first time. During his three-year pontificate, the Renaissance in Rome was suspended. Painters and sculptors, metalworkers and cabinetmakers were all dismissed. To raise money for his Crusade, Calixtus had no hesitation in selling off many of the most valuable gold and silver works of art in the Vatican Treasury, together with a number of the Papal Library’s most precious books. He built galleys in the boatyards of the Tiber, dispatched preachers across the continent to sell indulgences, and imposed swingeing taxes throughout Western Christendom. The response, however, was lukewarm. The courts of Europe grieved for Constantinople, but they were far too deeply preoccupied with their own concerns to go into battle on its behalf. A combined land and sea force was nevertheless dispatched and was not altogether abortive: the Hungarians under János Hunyadi routed the Turks at Belgrade in July 1456, and a year later a squadron of the Ottoman fleet was destroyed off Lesbos. But neither victory produced further results or was of any long-term importance.
Calixtus pursued his second ambition with similar energy and rather more success. Two of his great-nephews were given red hats; being the grandsons of his sisters, they were first required to italianize their name to Borgia. One of them, Rodrigo, was additionally appointed vice chancellor of the Holy See, a post which placed him in the forefront of Vatican affairs for the next thirty-five years, until his own succession as Pope Alexander VI. On a more humble level, the pope filled his court and Curia with Spanish and Catalan nominees, though few of them survived in their posts for very long after his death. This came on August 6, 1458, and was generally welcomed.
NOBODY HAD LIKED Pope Calixtus much; everybody liked Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Born one of eighteen children, of an old Sienese family that had gone down in the world, he had pulled himself up by his own efforts and spent eight years in humanistic studies in Siena and Florence; he had then become secretary to various cardinals attending the Council of Basel, one of whom, Cardinal Nicholas Albergati, sent him in 1435 on the greatest adventure of his young life, a secret mission to Scotland.
The purpose of this mission was to try to persuade King James I to launch an attack on England, in yet another attempt to end the Hundred Years’ War. Aeneas had hoped to travel via London, but the English, doubtless suspecting that he was up to no good, refused him permission to land; he was obliged to return to the Continent and take a ship from Sluys direct to Scotland. The journey almost ended in disaster. Violent westerly gales drove the vessel toward the coast of Norway, and the terrified Aeneas vowed, if he survived, to walk barefoot to the nearest shrine of the Virgin Mary. At last, on the twelfth day, the ship, which was now taking on terrifying quantities of water, limped into port near Dunbar, and he duly trudged over the frozen earth to the holy well at Whitekirk. Fortunately for him, the distance was only about five miles and he made it, but after resting there for a time he found that he had lost all sensation in his feet. At first he feared that he might never walk again; in fact, he recovered, but he suffered from arthritis for the rest of his life and for much of his pontificate had to be carried about in a sedan chair.
His Commentaries, an account of his life written in the third person, cast an interesting light on early-fifteenth-century Britain:
The cities have no walls. The houses are usually constructed without mortar; their roofs are covered with turf; and in the country doors are closed with oxhides. The common people, who are poor and rude, stuff themselves with meat and fish, but eat bread as a luxury. The men are short and brave; the women fair, charming, and easily won. Women there think less of a kiss than in Italy of a touch of the hand … There is nothing the Scotch like better to hear than abuse of the English.…
Then Aeneas … disguised himself as a merchant and left Scotland for England. A river, which rises in a high mountain, separates the two countries. When he had crossed this in a small boat and had reached a large town about sunset, he knocked at a farmhouse and had dinner there with his host and the parish priest. Many relishes and chickens and geese were served, but there was no bread or wine. All the men and women of the village came running as if to see a strange sight, and as our people marvel at Ethiopians or Indians, so they gazed in amazement at Aeneas, asking the priest where he came from, what his business was, and whether he was a Christian.…
When the meal had lasted till the second hour of the night, the priest and the host together with all the men and children took leave of Aeneas and hastened away, saying that they were taking refuge in a tower a long way off for fear of the Scots, who were accustomed, when the river was low at ebb tide, to cross by night and make raids upon them. They could not by any means be induced to take him with them, although he earnestly besought them, nor yet any of the women, although there were a number of beautiful girls and matrons. For they think the enemy will do them no wrong—not counting outrage a wrong. So Aeneas remained behind with two servants and his one guide among a hundred women.…
But after a good part of the night had passed, two young women showed Aeneas, who was by this time very sleepy, to a chamber strewn with straw, planning to sleep with him, as was the custom of the country, if they were asked. But Aeneas, thinking less about women than about robbers, who he feared might appear at any minute, repulsed the protesting girls … So he remained alone among the heifers and nanny goats, which prevented him from sleeping a wink by stealthily pulling the straw out of his pallet.
Though still a layman, Aeneas returned to work in the Council Secretariat in Basel and soon afterward found himself secretary to the Antipope Felix V. In 1442 Felix sent him to the Diet of Frankfurt, where, almost immediately on his arrival, he caught the attention of the German King Frederick III, whose history he was later to write. The king fully recognized his literary gifts, as well as his outstanding intelligence and efficiency, and appointed him his poet laureate. For the next three years he worked in the royal chancery in Vienna, turning out in his spare time not only a quantity of mildly pornographic poetry4 but also a novel in much the same vein, Lucretia and Euryalus, celebrating the amorous adventures of his friend, the Chancellor Caspar Schlick. He himself seems to have been no slouch where amorous adventures were concerned, as several acknowledged bastards could testify.
But such an existence could not continue indefinitely, and in 1445 Aeneas’s life underwent a dramatic change. First he broke with the antipope and was formally reconciled with Eugenius IV; then, in March 1446, he was ordained priest. Thereafter he was a genuinely reformed character, and his progress was fast: Bishop of Trieste in 1447, of Siena in 1450, cardinal in 1456. Two years later he was elected pope and characteristically, remembering Vergil’s pius Aeneas, took the name of Pius II and settled down to organize a Crusade.
He should have known better. With all his long diplomatic experience, it should have been clear to him that the princes of Europe were simply not prepared to shelve all their other preoccupations in order to march against the Turk; this, however—as so many of his predecessors had—he refused to accept. Within two months of his accession he issued a bull summoning Christendom to a Holy War and called a Congress of all Christian rulers to meet at Mantua on June 1, 1459. Nearly all of them declined the invitation; those who did not were evasive or noncommittal. Pius arrived at Mantua to find virtually no one there. The sad decline in papal influence could, he decided, be due only to the conciliar movement, of which he himself had previously been a staunch upholder; in January 1460 he promulgated another bull, condemning as heretical all appeals to a General Council. There could hardly have been a more radical about-face.
He refused, however, to be discouraged. If he could not defeat Sultan Mehmet in battle, perhaps he could persuade him by force of reason to see the error of his ways. In 1461 he drafted an extraordinary letter to the sultan in which he included a detailed refutation of the teachings of the Koran, an equally thorough exposition of the Christian faith, and a final appeal to renounce Islam and submit to baptism. It seems that the letter may never have been sent; if it was, it not surprisingly received no reply. But then good news arrived from Venice and Hungary: the states had agreed to join forces in a Crusade. Now all Pius’s hopes revived. The troops, he announced, would rendezvous with the fleet the following summer in Ancona; he himself would march at their head.
The Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral contains a superb cycle of frescoes by Pinturicchio depicting scenes from Pius’s life, the last of which shows his arrival at Ancona. The truth, however, was very far from what the picture suggests. The pope who took the Cross in St. Peter’s and set off on his litter from Rome on June 18, 1464, was already a sick man—so sick indeed that it was a whole month before he reached his destination. And when at last he arrived at Ancona, it was to find only a handful of Crusaders awaiting him. There were no obvious leaders and hardly any equipment. The Venetian fleet, he was told, had been delayed. It eventually sailed into harbor on August 12 with the current doge, Cristoforo Moro, at its head; but instead of the great armada the pope had expected, it consisted of just twelve small galleys. For Pius the disappointment was too great. He turned his face to the wall, and two days later he was dead. His broken heart was interred at Ancona, but his body was brought back to Rome.
It was a sad end to one of the most talented popes of his century. Pius was not above nepotism and filled his court with Sienese compatriots; but his literary and intellectual gifts, his skill as an administrator, his discriminating patronage of the arts, and his long diplomatic experience gave him a distinction matched by few of his contemporaries. He also remains the only pope to have created a city. In just five years between 1449 and 1464 he transformed his birthplace, the little village of Corsignano, redesigning it on classical lines according to all the latest theories of urban planning, giving it a cathedral and a magnificent palazzo for the use of his family, and renaming it after himself: Pienza.
PIUS WAS A hard act to follow, and his successor, Paul II, was a distinct comedown. Born Pietro Barbo, the scion of a rich family of Venetian merchants, he is said to have thought himself outstandingly good-looking—a view difficult indeed to reconcile with the existing portraits—and had at first tried to call himself Formosus (the Handsome); fortunately, his cardinals had been able to dissuade him. Such physical beauty as he may or may not have possessed was in any case not reflected in his intellectual attainments. Shamelessly uncultured, he lost no time in getting rid of the humanists whom Pius had loved; when their leader, Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, who was subsequently papal librarian and author of The Lives of the Popes, protested and talked threateningly of a Council, he spent the next four months in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Several members of the Roman Academy, who professed what the pope regarded as an exaggerated interest in antiquity and insufficient respect for the Church, suffered a similar fate and were released only after the personal intervention of Cardinal Bessarion.
What Paul liked was wealth and display. As a young cardinal—being the nephew of Eugenius IV, he had become a cardinal deacon at twenty-three—he had amassed a superb collection of antiques and works of art. He encouraged carnivals, horse racing, and public entertainments of every kind. The celebrations on the occasion of the visit of the Emperor Frederick III on his second visit to Rome in 1468 were long remembered in the city. And, somewhat surprisingly in view of his treatment of the Academy, he set about the restoration of Rome’s ancient monuments. The Pantheon, the Arches of Titus and Septimius Severus, and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius were all taken in hand. He also built—and inhabited for the last five years of his pontificate—the magnificent Palazzo Venezia (from the first-floor balcony of which Benito Mussolini would later harangue the crowds). Finally, it was thanks to him that two enterprising Germans were allowed to set up the first Roman printing press.
The pope’s sexual proclivities aroused a good deal of speculation. He seems to have had two weaknesses—for good-looking young men and for melons—though the contemporary rumor that he enjoyed watching the former being tortured while he gorged himself on the latter is surely unlikely. The stroke that killed him on July 26, 1471, at the age of only fifty-four is said to have been brought on by a surfeit of both.
THERE WAS GENERAL surprise when his successor, Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, took the name of Sixtus IV; Sixtus III had died in 440, more than a thousand years before. The new pope had been a Franciscan—indeed, general of the order—and as a distinguished theologian was deeply respected by Cardinal Bessarion and other senior churchmen. Much in demand as a preacher, he had to all appearances been zealous for reform. Franciscans are noted for their love of poverty; it can only be said that Sixtus, on becoming pope, proved an exception to the rule. From one day to the next, his whole character changed. He spent money like water; his coronation tiara alone cost 100,000 ducats, more than a third of the Papacy’s annual income. To raise additional funds, he sold plenary indulgences on a scale previously unparalleled, together with high-sounding papal titles and sinecures. He bestowed the see of Milan on an eleven-year-old and the archbishopric of Lisbon on a boy of eight. His nepotism was on a similar scale. Among his first actions was the bestowal of red hats on two of his eleven nephews, Giuliano della Rovere and Pietro Riario (who was widely rumored to be the pope’s son by his own sister). A third nephew, Girolamo Basso della Rovere, had to wait a year or two, until after his cousin, Cardinal Pietro, had died of dissipation at twenty-eight. Four more nephews and two nieces were married into the ruling houses of Milan, Naples, and Urbino and to the Orsini and Farnese families in Rome.
Meanwhile, the rebuilding went on. Sixtus continued where Nicholas V had stopped. He gave the city its first new bridge across the Tiber—the Ponte Sisto—since the days of antiquity, to ensure that there was no repetition of the disaster of 1450; he was also responsible for the churches of Santa Maria della Pace and Santa Maria del Popolo, which was to effectively become the mausoleum of the della Rovere family. He revived the Roman Academy. He restored the Hospital of Santo Spirito—still a hospital today—and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol. He carved out new piazzas, replacing the medieval labyrinths of narrow alleys with broad new thoroughfares. He left Rome a Renaissance city. Within the Vatican, he carried on Nicholas’s work in the library, trebling it in size and appointing the formerly disgraced Platina as its librarian.
But above all the name of Sixtus lives on in the Sistine Chapel, the greatest of all his benefactions, intended primarily for the holding of conclaves but also for the regular services attended by the cappella papalis, the exalted group of cardinals and other dignitaries who accompanied the pope at his devotions. When the basic construction was completed in 1481, a whole troop of painters was brought in to provide the frescoes. Chief among them were Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino, though several others, including Pintoricchio and Signorelli, also contributed. (Michelangelo was only six at the time; it was to be another twenty-seven years before he was reluctantly persuaded by Julius II to take over the east wall and the ceiling.)
It is ironic indeed that the originator of one of the most beautiful buildings in the world should also have been the inspiration for one of its most odious institutions. In Spain the Reconquista—the recovery of those parts of the country that had been conquered by the Moors—was almost complete, but there was grave concern over the many thousand forcibly baptized Jews, the Marranos. In the previous reign, that of King Henry IV, they had enjoyed considerable power, reaching high positions in government, in business and finance, and even in the Church. Now the suspicion was growing that a large number of them were tenaciously clinging to their old beliefs. Accordingly, in 1478, Sixtus issued a bull ordering a major inquiry. This was the beginning of the notorious Spanish Inquisition, which enabled the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada to introduce, with the full approval of the monarchs, Ferdinand II and Isabella, a regime of brutality and terror unparalleled in Spain until the twentieth century and the Civil War.5
Where Italy was concerned, Sixtus could perfectly well have elected to stand aside from the power struggle that continued to lacerate the peninsula as Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples, and other, lesser powers endlessly jockeyed for supremacy; alas, he did not. He plunged in and by doing so did untold damage to the moral prestige of the Holy See, which became just another party to the eternal squabble. Historians are still debating how far he was implicated in the so-called Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, the purpose of which was to replace the Medici as the de facto rulers of Florence with the pope’s nephew Girolamo Riario.
Already in 1473, the Pazzi bank—a lesser rival of that of the Medicis—had lent Sixtus most of the purchase price of 40,000 ducats for the town of Imola, which the pope wanted for two of his nephews. The Medici, who had already for their own reasons refused the loan, were predictably furious, and more furious still in the following year when Sixtus dismissed them as his principal bankers, adding insult to injury by appointing to the archbishopric of Pisa, which was under Florentine authority, one of the closest associates of the Pazzi, Francesco Salviati. Lorenzo de’ Medici (“the Magnificent”) refused to recognize the appointment, forbidding the new archbishop entry into Pisa or even into Florence itself; Sixtus replied by threatening excommunication and an interdict of the whole Florentine state.
And so, as relations between the two factions grew steadily worse, the plot was hatched; and on Sunday, April 26, 1478, principally on the orders of Francesco de’ Pazzi and Archbishop Salviati, it went into operation. At a prearranged moment—it was, typically, the ringing of the bell marking the elevation of the Host—in the course of High Mass in Florence Cathedral, a whole team of assassins (including Francesco) fell upon Lorenzo’s younger brother Giuliano, stabbing him in the chest and back at least a dozen times (some witnesses say nineteen). A moment later it was the turn of Lorenzo. He, however, seized his short sword and fought back before leaping over a low rail into the choir and taking refuge in the sacristy. He was quite badly hurt, but his wounds were not life-threatening; Giuliano, on the other hand, was dead.
Immediately, all Florence was up in arms. The conspirators were quickly rounded up and were shown no mercy. The official place of execution outside the eastern walls was ignored; the punishments, Lorenzo decided, must be exemplary. Jacopo Bracciolini, son of the great humanist Poggio, was hanged from a high window overlooking the Piazza della Signoria; Francesco de’ Pazzi met a similar fate from a top window of the Loggia de’ Lanzi, as did the archbishop and his brother Jacopo Salviati. Angelo Poliziano, the humanist and classical scholar who was a protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici, reports that, presumably through some involuntary spasm, the dying archbishop, hanging as he was next to Francesco, bit into him so savagely that long after his death his teeth remained locked in the other’s chest.
Was Pope Sixtus embroiled in the conspiracy? Certainly he must have known about it and quite probably gave it his active encouragement, for no one was more anxious than he to dislodge the Medici once and for all. He is said to have insisted that there should be no bloodshed, but since the object of the conspiracy was assassination, it is difficult to see how he could have had it both ways. And now at last he decreed the excommunication of the Medici which he had long threatened and the interdict over Florence—and all Italy flared up in war.
The attempted coup had failed—just. But if Lorenzo had been a little less lucky and had suffered the fate of his brother, the successful conspirators could easily have brought about a change of government in Florence; and no one would have applauded the change more heartily than Pope Sixtus IV.
IT IS SOMEHOW characteristic of Pope Sixtus that his death, on August 12, 1484, should have been generally attributed to frustration at having peace forced upon him by the princes of Italy. He certainly died unlamented; indeed, the news of his death caused two weeks of rioting in Rome, inspired by his greatest Roman enemies, the Colonna. Characteristic too is his superb free-standing bronze tomb by Pollaiuolo in the Vatican—probably the most magnificent of any pope, if we except that by Michelangelo which was planned by his nephew Giuliano (the future Julius II) for himself but never properly completed.
It need hardly be said that Giuliano had his eye on the Papacy; so, too, did Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. Neither, however, despite offers of huge bribes and lucrative promotions, was able to raise the necessary degree of support in the Sacred College. And so, rivals as they were, they worked together to ensure that at the ensuing conclave the cardinals’ choice would fall on some second-rate puppet whom they could dominate. It can only be said that they succeeded. The Genoese Cardinal Giambattista Cibo, Pope Innocent VIII, was a hopeless nonentity. He too was much given to nepotism, with the difference that the beneficiaries were not his nephews but his own children by a Neapolitan mistress—one of whom, his hopelessly dissolute son Franceschetto, he was to marry off to the daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent in return for the grant of a red hat to Lorenzo’s thirteen-year-old son, Giovanni.6 When, three years later, Giovanni took his place in the College, his father wrote to him warning him of the evils of Rome, “that sink of all iniquity,” and urging him “to act so that you convince all who see you that the well-being and honor of the Church and the Holy See are more to you than anything else in the world.” Above all he must beware of the temptations to evildoing among the College of Cardinals, which is “at this moment poor in men of worth.… If the cardinals were such as they ought to be, the whole world would be better for it, for they would always elect a good pope and thus secure the peace of Christendom.”
Sixtus had left the Papacy with enormous debts, and when it came to spending Innocent himself was no slouch; despite, therefore, the continued sale of indulgences, offices, and titles, his financial situation would certainly have become desperate but for a sudden windfall from a most unexpected source: the Ottoman Empire. On the death of an Ottoman sultan, the usual practice—to avoid any dispute over the succession—was for his eldest son instantly to have all his brothers garrotted, but when Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, died in 1481, his son and successor, Bayezit II, had unaccountably failed to dispatch his younger brother Cem,7 who also made a bid for the throne. He lost and fled for his life, taking refuge on Rhodes with the Knights of St. John whose grand master, Pierre d’Aubusson, had become famous all over Europe for his successful defense of the island against Cem’s father, Mehmet, in 1480. D’Aubusson welcomed him but secretly came to an agreement with the sultan to keep him under guard in return for an annual subsidy of 40,000 ducats. Soon, realizing that Rhodes was too close to Ottoman lands for comfort, d’Aubusson sent him on to one of the Knights’ commanderies in France. There Cem remained until 1489, when Pope Innocent took him over—he was, after all, an invaluable diplomatic and political asset—in return for red hats for d’Aubusson and a nominee of the French king. On his arrival in Rome he was given a splendid reception and escorted by Franceschetto to the Vatican, where he and his suite were lodged in magnificent apartments and lavishly entertained.
The subsidy, however, continued to be payable, and the following year the pope received a Turkish embassy which presented him with 120,000 ducats—almost the total annual income of the Papal States—for the prince’s maintenance over the next three years. He also brought, as a present, the Holy Lance which had pierced Christ’s side at the time of the Crucifixion; a special chapel was built for it in St. Peter’s. Cem had by this time settled contentedly down with his court in the Vatican, where the appearance of groups of Muslims in their caftans and turbans must have caused even more raised eyebrows than the sight of the papal grandchildren playing in the gardens.
By this time, however, the pope was sinking fast. To quote a recent authority:
He slept almost continuously, waking to gorge himself on gargantuan meals.… He grew grossly fat and increasingly inert, being able, toward the end of his life, to take for nourishment no more than a few drops of milk from the breast of a young woman. When he seemed to be dying, an attempt to save his life was made by sacrificing the lives of three healthy young men to provide a blood transfusion. (Ironically, this attempt was made by a Jewish doctor.) The young men supplying the blood were paid one ducat each. They perished in the process and, with the onset of rigor mortis, the coins had to be prised from their clenched fists.8
Innocent himself died on July 25, 1492, having lived just long enough to learn of the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain. His had been a deeply undistinguished pontificate. Under his governance Rome, which always needed a firm hand at the helm, had subsided into hopeless disorder, and the Papal States were not far off anarchy. On his deathbed he begged the assembled cardinals for their forgiveness for his shortcomings and enjoined them to choose a worthier successor.
Alas, they did not do so.
1. Frederick was the nephew of his namesake Frederick, Duke of Austria, the protector of the antipope John XXIII. (See chapter 16.)
2. There were as yet no printed books. The invention of printing cannot be ascribed to a single year, but 1450 is as good a date as any.
3. Giorgio Vasari tells us that the latter was destroyed when Paul III put in a new staircase. The only survivor of Nicholas’s work is his chapel. In the fresco depicting the ordination of St. Lawrence, the representation of the third-century Pope Sixtus II is said to be a portrait of Nicholas himself.
4. Much of his verse was inspired by the poet Francesco Filelfo, who had been commissioned by Nicholas V to write a book of stories later described as “the most nauseous compositions that coarseness and filthy fancy ever spanned.” Nicholas, we are told, had much enjoyed them.
5. There had been earlier Inquisitions, such as the so-called Papal Inquisition that ultimately eradicated the Cathars in the thirteenth century. The Spanish Inquisition was on an altogether different scale.
6. Giovanni was not new to Church preferment. An abbot at the age of eight, he had been nominated to the great Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino at eleven. Later he was to become Pope Leo X.
7. This is the modern Turkish spelling. The name is pronounced Gem.
8. Noel, The Renaissance Popes, p. 62.