Tradition holds that Martin V was the first Renaissance pope, but in truth it was his successor Eugenius IV (or “Eugene”) who brought the flower of the Renaissance to Rome. After spending nine months with the Medici in Florence, Eugenius returned to Rome where he began serious efforts to elevate the city and pull it out of its medieval decay. He sought to emulate the magnificence of great northern cities like Milan, Genoa, and Venice. John Julius Norwich offers the following reflections on this exciting epoch, the dawn of the Renaissance:
“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 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 itself felt. When in 1360 Bocaccio had wished to learn the language, he 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 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 and 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 the 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 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” (245-246).
Like Eugenius, Pope Nicholas V had spent time in Florence as a tutor to the Strozzi family where he befriended many humanist scholars who were clustered around the Medici. As such, he was a more worldly and political pope, at least more than the many bungling pontiffs who predominated the Middle Ages. Nicholas had a string of successes –he helped to restore a sense of order in Rome and within the Papal States, and he also managed to persuade the last antipope Felix V to abdicate. One of his great accomplishments was his declaration of 1450 being a “Jubilee Year” which brought perhaps 100,000 pilgrims flocking to Rome under the auspices of being granted indulgences for their sins. This act alone entirely restored the papal finances. However, there was also a certain degree of unnatural tumult in Rome at this time, including an outbreak of the plague which killed many pilgrims and packed the hospitals with sick and dying people. To top it off, this health crisis was followed by a wild stampede among the crowds which killed some two hundred pilgrims in the city. Nevertheless, “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 its 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” (247).
In 1452, Frederick III of the Hapsburgs (nephew of Frederick, Duke of Austria who served as protector for antipope John XXIII) led a grand procession over the alps, with some 2,000 soldiers and his new bride Donna Leonora (daughter of the King of Portugal), stopping at every Italian town along the way to great celebration. By March 1453, he entered the city of Rome to receive his crown as Holy Roman Emperor (“The Iron Crown of Lombardy”) along with his wedding ceremony officiated by the pope. It was to be the last imperial coronation to ever take place in Rome –it was the “apogee of Nicholas’s pontificate.” However, in the East after a brutal fifty-five-day siege on Constantinople, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered the city and brought an end to the Christian Empire of the East. After 1,123 years, and the disastrous Fourth Crusade two and a half centuries earlier, the Byzantine Empire had fallen. Refugees immediately began spreading westward spreading tales of heroism. Needless to say, Pope Nicholas was eager to rouse a new Crusade, but the spark of violent conquest that had so inspired many centuries of Christianity was no longer potent –“with the advent of Renaissance humanism the old religious fire had been extinguished” (248).
With the fall of the East, Pope Nicholas retreated into his architectural aspirations and books. Whereas many of his predecessors, like Martin, strongly disapproved of classical learning (outside the writings of St. Augustine), Nicholas was a devotee of the liberal arts. Being such a bibliophile, he effectively constructed the papal library from scratch (many of the old books had been lost or stolen in Avignon). These collections by Pope Nicholas, dutifully scribed into Latin and confiscated from all over Europe, led to the foundation of the present-day Vatican Library. With the influx of funds into the papal purse, Nicholas set about to refurbish many old churches, and he notably moved the residence of the papacy from the Lateran to the Vatican. He also commissioned a drastic expansion and architectural reconstruction of St. Peter’s, however these plans sadly lapsed upon his death. Pope Nicholas V died in March 1455 at the age of fifty-seven. He left behind an enormous influence, having refused to fearfully shy away from the growing influence of Renaissance humanism. To him, the arts were not frivolous, and he attempted to right at least some of the wrongs of the past –such as by ordering a retrial for Joan of Arc which was left to his predecessor to complete.
Of Nicholas V, John Julius Norwich presents the following concluding remarks:
“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 de Bisticci, as ‘a mere bel-ringing priest’; and that, in a very real sense, he remained” (251).
After the death of Nicholas V, the fifteen cardinals in Rome formed a conclave and unfortunately missed their chance to appoint an educated, cultured pope, however instead they appointed a seventy-seven-year-old Catalan jurist named Cardinal Alfonso de Borja (later italicized to Borgia) who took the name of Calixtus III. He was apparently “deeply pious, dry as dust, and crippled by gout” (251). His two chief ambitions were to spark a new Crusade to regain Constantinople, and to enrich his family and friends. Sadly, during his three-year tenure on Rome, the Renaissance was put on hold –great painters, sculptors, and thinkers were dismissed, and many of the priceless books in the Vatican Library were sold to sponsor the new crusade. The pope also levied taxes and pushed the sale of indulgences to fund the military venture, while returning the papacy to an era of nepotism (two of his great-nephews were given influential appointments and forced to use the name of Borgia, one of whom became Pope Alexander VI). Calixtus III died on August 6, 1458 and his demise was a great deliverance for the papal institution.
The next pope was a likable humanist from Siena named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. In the past he made a secret mission to Scotland in an effort to persuade James I to launch an attack on England, and after riding on stormy seas, he arrived and wrote down of his reflections on fifteenth-century Britain in his third-person book Commentaries, which conveys a land of crass men who stuff themselves full of meat and loose women, crime, and prostitutes. At any rate, he quietly rose through the papal bureaucracy, ingratiating himself with the right people, working as secretary to antipope Felix V and then as poet laureate under German King Frederick III (whose history he would later pen). He also wrote a collection of pornographic poetry and a book, Lucretia and Euryalus, about the amorous adventures. Indeed, he seems to have been personally fond of amorous adventures as several acknowledged bastard children confirmed. Aeneas later broke with the antipope and reconciled with Eugenius IV where he rose in rank from a priest, to Bishop of Trieste and Siena, before becoming a cardinal and appointed pope in 1458. In remembering the name of Virgil’s “pius Aeneas” he took the papal name of Pius II.
Almost immediately, Pius II set about issue a new “Holy War” against the Turks in Constantinople. However, by now the princes of Europe could not have cared less. No significant leader even attended the papal Congress at Mantua in 1459, but instead, Pius II rather foolishly blamed the conciliar movement. In time, Venice and Hungary agreed to lend support to leaders of Christianity and their centuries-long, feverish desire for Holy War. In great excitement, Pope Pius II set forth with the cross of St. Peter’s to march at the head of his mighty legions for a new crusade, but when he arrived in Ancona, he found only a few scattered disorganized infantrymen with little equipment, and instead of a fearsome armada from Venice, he received just twelve small galleys. In solemn disappointment, the pope turned his head toward the wall, fell sick and died two days later. “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” (255). Among his many accomplishments, he was a skilled administrator and a noted patron of the arts who managed to transform his birthplace of Corignano into a classical style city under the name of “Pienza” (named after his family).
Pius II was followed by yet another bungling, silly pope. Pietro Barbo was born into a wealthy Venetian family, a vain man who sought to dub himself Formosus (“the Handsome”) –a view which was difficult to reconcile with his portraits. Upon becoming Pope Paul II, he sought to expunge the Renaissance from Rome —“Shamelessly uncultured, he lost no time in getting rid of the humanists whom Pius had loved… what Paul liked was wealth and display” (256). At least he allowed for the restoration of some relics from antiquity, and he also allowed two Germans to set up the first printing press in Rome.
John Julius Norwich offers the following amusing reflections on Paul II:
“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” (257).
His successor was a deeply respected Franciscan, Cardinal Francesco della Rovere who took the papal name of Sixtus IV. Despite the Franciscan love of poverty, Sixtus was prone to spend money like a drunken sailor: “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” (257). He appointed many of his family members to prominent positions, and much of the new wealth flooding into the papal coffers went into vast architectural projects across Rome, helping the city to embrace the Renaissance with the likes of a new bridge across the Tiber, new churches, a revival of the Roman Academy, a hospital, and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol, as well as the library, new piazzas, and –above all else—the Sistine Chapel.
“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 was 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 Julius II to take over the east wall and the ceiling). It is ironic indeed that the originator of one of the beautiful buildings in the world should also have been the inspiration for one of its most odious institutions” (258).
While in Spain the Reconquista (or recovery lands that had been conquered by the Moors) had been nearly complete, anti-semitic rage once again reared its head, as it so often did in the history of Christianity. By this point, many thousands of Jews had been forcibly baptized and compelled into accepting the faith or else required to face brutal punishment (they were known as the “Marranos”). Under the reign of King Henry IV in Spain, the Marranos were allowed to serve in positions of government, finance, and even the church. However, popular racial anxieties quickly turned into violent hatred against the Jews, fearing they were still clinging to old beliefs rather than submitting fully to Christianity. As such, in 1478 Pope Sixtus IV issued a papal bull which was to become the beginning of the notorious Spanish Inquisition which enabled Dominican Friar Tomas de Torquemada –with full approval of Ferdinand II and Isabella–to unleash “a regime of brutality and terror unparalleled in Spain until the twentieth century and the Civil War” (there had been plenty of other Christian sponsored Inquisitions, such as the “Papal Inquisition” which eradicated the Cathars in a hideous genocide in the thirteenth century, but the ascendant Spanish Inquisition was on a scale all its own).
In addition to these innumerable moral failings, Sixtus stumbled his way into the extended internal politics of broader Italy –a dispute between Pazzi and Medici that ended in a murderous conspiracy—an act which did untold damage to the moral prestige of the Holy See. Once rounded up, the conspirators were shown no mercy, being hanged outside the tallest windows in Florence. Historians still debate the extent to which Sixtus was involved in the “Pazzi Conspiracy” but at the least very least he likely encouraged the plot and stood to strongly gain from the demise of the Medici.
At long last, Pope Sixtus IV died –unlamented– on August 12, 1484. His death set up a rivalry between his nephew Giuliano and Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. Despite massive bribes and promises, neither cardinal could secure the support of the Sacred College, so they orchestrated enough support for a “second rate puppet whom they could dominate.” The puppet was Genoese Cardinal Giambattista Cibo who took the name of Pope Innocent VIII –“a hopeless nonentity.” He was yet another frivolous man who gave into nepotism, appointing his children born by a mistress to various positions, trading political favors, gorging himself on expensive meals, and continuing the legacy of indebtedness within the Papacy. His financial troubles were only solved by turmoil within the Ottoman Empire when sons of the late Mehmet II (conqueror of Constantinople) warred with each other for the throne, sending one of them –Cem—into exile where he was kept under lock and key in exchange for a hefty sum of money by the Turks. It provided a handsome annual income to keep the pope fat and happy, however by now Pope Innocent VIII was not long for this life. He had ballooned up to an exorbitant size and slept all day long, being fed on women’s breastmilk and only given a last-minute blood transfusion which cost the sacrifice of three young men’s lives, but this hapless man finally died on July 25, 1492 having lived just long enough to learn of the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain.
“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” (262).
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.