Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who on October 13, 1534, was elected as Pope Paul III, was the senior member of the Sacred College. He was only sixty-six, but he had not worn well. Bent almost double, with a long white beard and hobbling on a stick, he gave the impression of being at least a decade older; it comes as something of a surprise to learn that he was elected unanimously after only two days and was to reign for the next fifteen years. Already in 1522, at the conclave which had elected Hadrian VI, he had been an early favorite, but his character assassination by Cardinal Egidio had utterly destroyed his chances. By now, however, he had distanced himself from his former life and Egidio’s objections had been forgotten; moreover, Farnese had made meticulous plans in advance to pave the way to the Papacy.
Paul had been known in former days as the “petticoat cardinal,” since—according to popular belief—he owed his red hat entirely to the fact that his sister Giulia had been a favorite mistress of Alexander VI. From the start, however, he made it clear that he was to be no petticoat pope. Like Giulia, he was a child of the Renaissance, reared in the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent; as Egidio had been at pains to point out, although a cardinal at twenty-five he had since cheerfully fathered a number of offspring. He was equally shameless in his nepotism, raising two of his grandsons to the Sacred College at the ages of sixteen and fourteen, respectively. He revived the Carnival in 1536; Rome resounded to the cheers of bullfights, horse races, and fireworks displays, the Vatican to the music of balls and banquets. Yet—and this is what makes Paul III one of the most interesting popes of the sixteenth century—he turned out to be a man of strong moral conscience and a reformer.
Let us look at his worldly side first. Architecturally, his supreme achievement is the Palazzo Farnese in Rome.1 He had begun it in 1517; but such were its size and splendor that it was not completed till 1589, forty years after his death. One of its four architects was Michelangelo, whom Paul also commissioned to redesign the Campidoglio (Capitol)—into which the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was now moved to provide a centerpiece—and to succeed Antonio da Sangallo as architect of St. Peter’s. Michelangelo worked on the new basilica for seventeen years, during which he designed the great dome, until his death at the age of eighty-nine. Throughout that time he refused all fees; it was, he said, an offering to God.
Dynastically, like all Renaissance popes, Paul III was determined to further his family fortunes. The Farnese were an old and distinguished family of condottieri with estates around Viterbo and Lake Bolsena, but they were not aristocrats like the Orsini or Colonna. Clearly, there was room for improvement: Paul first appointed his notoriously dissolute son Pierluigi as Captain General of the Church.2 Next he invested Pierluigi’s son Ottavio as Duke of Camerino; then, in 1538, he married Ottavio to Margaret of Austria, the fifteen-year-old widow of the assassinated Alessandro de’ Medici.3 Finally in 1545, he created Pierluigi Duke of Parma and Piacenza, a dynasty that was to continue for almost two centuries.
But these artistic and dynastic considerations, important as they were, took up relatively little of his time. Most of it was taken up by the Church and the perils that beset it. One of the greatest problems was posed by the Turks. Under their brilliant Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent they were not only steadily advancing through Central Europe, they were threatening the coasts of Italy as well as the remaining Christian outposts in the eastern Mediterranean. If they could be defeated at all, it could only be by a concerted effort of all the Catholic nations. Somehow, therefore, those two archrivals, Francis of France and the Emperor Charles, must be reconciled.
The other peril was Protestantism. It was by now far too late to eradicate it: most of northern Europe had already been engulfed in the tide. Paul could concentrate only on damage limitation. The more he considered how best to contain the surge, the more convinced he became that the prime necessity was for a General Council—and one that would include a strong contingent of Lutherans. Objections, inevitably, were raised on all sides. The cardinals saw any reform as a threat to their own comfortable lifestyles; the emperor, terrified that the proposed Council might take so rigid a stand on doctrine as to make a compromise with his Protestant subjects impossible, preferred that it leave aside all theological questions and confine itself to measures of reform; the Lutherans demanded a totally uncommitted meeting of all Christians and steadfastly refused to attend any assembly that was held on Italian soil or presided over by the pope. As for the King of France, he was only too pleased to see Charles enmeshed in religious problems and had no wish to see them resolved.
But Paul persisted; meanwhile he summoned a special commission, which he ordered to report on all the ills of the Church and to recommend measures that should be taken to remedy them. It was composed of a number of cardinals, specially admitted to the Sacred College for the task; they included the devout English humanist Reginald Pole, a cousin of Henry VIII, and Giampietro Carafa—the future Paul IV—an elderly Neapolitan who had served as papal nuncio in England and had subsequently founded the Theatine order.4 The commissioners submitted their report in March 1537. One of our leading church historians5 describes it in a single word: dynamite. It listed the current abuses and laid the blame for all of them—the sale of indulgences and Church benefices, the sinecures, stockpiling of bishoprics, and countless others—squarely on the Papacy. The result of all this had been the Protestant Reformation, and no wonder: had the Church kept its house in order, the Reformation would never have occurred. The horrified Curia—deliberately unrepresented on the commission—did all it could to sweep the report under the carpet; but a copy was leaked, and before long a German translation was going the rounds of the Lutheran churches.
Now at last reform—serious reform—was in the air, and Pope Paul did everything he could to encourage it. He gave an enthusiastic reception to the young priest Filippo Neri, whose mission was concentrated in the seedy inns and whorehouses of the Roman underworld; and a few years later he accorded a similar welcome to the rather older Ignatius Loyola, a Basque who had arrived with half a dozen like-minded colleagues from Spain, grouped together in what they called the Society of Jesus. In 1540 the pope issued a bull giving the Society his official approval. The Jesuits, with no distinctive dress for their order, no fixed headquarters, and no choral prayer, were bound together by two things only: strict discipline and unconditional obedience. As we shall see, they were to have a checkered history, but they were the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation.
Finally the pope had his reward: on December 13, 1545, the long-delayed Council opened at Trent, a city recommended by the emperor because it lay safely in imperial territory. It got off to a shaky start, its first sessions being attended by only a single cardinal, four archbishops, and thirty-one bishops, but it was gradually to gather momentum and continue on and off for the next eighteen years. It was overwhelmingly weighted in favor of the Italians; even when it was best attended, with over 270 bishops, the Germans never numbered more than 13. But the important thing about the Council was that—in the teeth of all the opposition—it actually happened; moreover, it showed itself ready to defy the emperor and fearlessly to debate the hoary old questions of doctrine: justification by faith, transubstantiation, Purgatory, and many more.
It was never to be more than a partial success. When it was at last dissolved, the Protestants, who understandably saw it as little more than a Roman puppet show, naturally remained unsatisfied—how could they have been anything else? Even for the Catholics its reforms were less radical and comprehensive than many had hoped for. Not a word was said, for example, about the reform of the Papacy, which was far more necessary than anything else. Owing largely to the undiminished mutual hostility of the emperor and the King of France (Francis I was succeeded by Henry II in 1547) it sat only intermittently, often without the French contingent. It never came near to being the ecumenical council of union for the whole of Western Christianity that had been for so long hoped and prayed for; it was simply the confessional council of the Counter-Reformation, with the purpose of re-Catholicizing Europe, if necessary by force. The results were all too evident: in France no fewer than eight civil wars against the Huguenots (more than three thousand of whom perished in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris in 1572); a war between Spain and the Netherlands that lasted for more than eighty years; and the nightmare Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which caused untold devastation through northern Europe.
But the Council nonetheless established a solid basis for the renewal of discipline and spiritual life in the Church, which emerged a good deal stronger and more focused than before. It was thanks to the Council of Trent that the Protestant tide was eventually halted and thanks to the vision and determination of Pope Paul III that it was held at all.
Had Pope Paul died at the end of 1545, he would probably have closed his eyes a happy man; sadly for him, he was to live another four years, during which personal tragedy struck. In September 1547 the people of Piacenza rose up against his son Pierluigi and assassinated him; then, to escape papal vengeance, they sought the emperor’s protection. Charles granted it; once Piacenza was under his guardianship it was virtually his, and if he played his cards right he might soon acquire Parma as well. For Paul this was a betrayal of trust. His initial reaction was angrily to reclaim Parma as papal territory, only to find that Pierluigi’s son Ottavio refused to give it up and that his other grandson—one of his own cardinals—had taken Ottavio’s side. Ottavio was beyond his jurisdiction; the cardinal was not so lucky. Summoned to the papal presence, he felt his biretta snatched from his head and hurled to the ground. But the pope was by now in his eighty-second year, and the emotion was too much for him. A few hours later he was dead.
PAUL III HAVING died in mid-November, the conclave to elect his successor was held during the following winter. Despite the hardships involved, it lasted nearly three months. In the fifteenth century conclaves had been attended only by those members of the Sacred College who formed part of the Curia and were consequently in Rome; by the sixteenth, cardinals were summoned from all over Europe—although this did not mean that their colleagues necessarily waited for them. During the early stages in 1548 the dominant figure was the Englishman Reginald Pole: on the first round he secured twenty-five votes out of the twenty-eight required. Had he been prepared to lobby in his own interest, he would probably have swept the board; but that was not his way. He made no effort to convince the xenophobe Italians, who were determined on one of their own number, and the conclave was still undecided when the French cardinals arrived. Horrified at the thought of an English pope, they accused Pole of heresy and managed to alienate several of his supporters. Pole’s principal champion, the former pope’s grandson Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, proposed the magnificently Machiavellian ploy of a late-night scrutiny during which the majority would be too sleepy (or drunk) to take much interest, but that was not Pole’s way either. If, he said, he was to enter the Vatican, he would do so through the open door, not like a thief in the night.
This conclave was probably the only one in papal history that incorporated a deliberate tease. The victim was Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, whose brother had already made a fool of himself by being caught scrambling over the roof of the Sistine Chapel in a vain attempt to eavesdrop on what was going on. The cardinal was at that moment suffering from an unfortunate condition in which his hair and beard were falling out in handfuls. The cause, as everyone knew perfectly well, was almost certainly alopecia, but he was arraigned before his fellows, who strongly hinted that the problem was due to syphilis. Indignantly, poor d’Este fell into the trap and protested that he had led a life of exemplary chastity for over a year. After that he was no longer considered a serious contender.
Finally, after the usual intrigues, the French and Italian factions agreed, despite the emperor’s opposition, on a relative nonentity. Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte—henceforth to be known as Julius III—was a competent canon lawyer who had suffered grievously during the sack of Rome a quarter of a century before6 and had later been copresident at the opening of the Council of Trent; he was, however, better known for his infatuation with a seventeen-year-old boy, somewhat inappropriately named Innocenzo, whom he had picked up in the streets of Parma two years before and whom on his accession he instantly made a cardinal.
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;8 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.
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,10 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.”11 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.
Clement VIII died on March 5, 1605. If he left the Papacy stronger than he had found it, this was largely due to the elaborate jubilee celebrations of 1600, which brought perhaps half a million pilgrims to Rome. The city was now at last—thanks to the sixteenth-century popes—worthy of its position as the capital of Christendom. In the past century the Catholic Church had sustained fearful blows: England and Scotland were now Protestant beyond redemption; in the Spanish Netherlands the Dutch Calvinists had defied all attempts by King Philip to crush them; in Germany the Emperor Rudolph II himself was showing alarming signs of Lutheran sympathies; in France, the effects of Henry IV’s conversion had been largely nullified by the Edict of Nantes. But Rome was now more magnificent than it had ever been; and the 80,000 faithful who watched when, at midnight on December 31, 1599, the pope ceremonially opened the Porta Santa—the Holy Door—bore witness to the extraordinary success of the Counter-Reformation.
1. It provides the setting of Act II of Tosca and is today the French Embassy.
2. In 1535 Paul sent Pierluigi to the court of the Emperor Charles V. Pierluigi was particularly enjoined to refrain from sodomy during his stay.
4. The Theatines were a reformist order, forbidden to own property or to beg. They would play an important part in the Counter-Reformation. “They observed the strictest austerity of life, and their habit was distinguished from that of the secular clergy only by their white socks” (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).
5. Duffy, Saints and Sinners.
7. The city has now grown to the point that it is a country villa no more. It now houses the National Etruscan Museum.
8. By a curious irony, another of the first books to appear on the Index was a work of which Paul IV had been the principal author. It was the report of the committee called by Paul III to investigate the principal abuses of the Church and the areas most in need of reform (see this page). The intention was to keep it secret, for the pope’s eyes only; after it was leaked to the Protestants it was immediately placed on the Index in an unsuccessful attempt to keep it out of Catholic hands.
9. Charles V had abdicated in 1556 and retired to the Monastery of Yuste in Extremadura.
10. St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Paolo fuori le Mura, San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, San Sebastiano fuori le Mura, and Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.
11. “Paris is well worth a Mass.”