The Borgias
According to John Julius Norwich, “few years in all history proved to be more fateful than the year 1492” (263). In January, Spain was reconquered, ending the Moorish kingdom, and consolidating the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella. By March, Jews in Spain were once facing brutal Christian repression –they were forced to accept Christianity by the sword or else face banishment. It was yet another mark of the crude, intolerant spirit which dominated Europe for many centuries. In April, Lorenzo the Magnificent died at his family villa in Careggi; in July, Pope Innocent VIII died in Rome; and in early August, Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World.
Pope Innocent’s successor was Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard from Valencia who took the name of Alexander VI. “There can be little doubt that he owed his election principally to the huge bribes he shamelessly distributed… His principal rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, could not match his wealth and was obliged to contain his fury as best he could. His time would come” (263). Pope Alexander VI was a highly intelligent, eminently competent administrator, a charming, well-spoken man who easily earned the affections of women. If anyone could restore order to Rome, this was the man. However, privately, what he lacked was the slightest religious inclination. He had entered the church in search of power and prestige, celebrating his papal election with a bullfight in front of St. Peter’s, and he sired no less than eight children by several different women. Down the road, five of his family members would also eventually wear the red hat –not least of which was his son Cesare Borgia. In many respects, the Borgias represent a unique crossroads between ancient virtues of valor and pride while also wearing the garb of Christian humility and impoverishment of spirit as required by modern mores. They mark a ceaselessly fascinating epoch for the papacy –and perhaps even a remarkably revealing one, too.
After two years as pope, the possibly insane king of France (Charles VIII) invaded Italy over control of Naples. By this point, the old Angevin line had died out with the death of Queen Joanna II in 1435, and the Neapolitan throne had been seized by the king of Sicily, Alfonso V of Aragon, who was then succeeded by his illegitimate son Ferdinand and then Ferdinand’s son also named Alfonso. Could a bastard have a legitimate claim to power? Charles VIII of France, a descendant of Charles of Anjou, vociferously claimed “no.” And all of this posed a grave threat to Pope Alexander, whose son Goffredo was married to Ferdinand’s granddaughter, and whose arch-nemesis Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere quickly allied himself with the French king.
It was only the pope’s trademark charisma and charm that managed to save him when Charles stormed into Rome with French 20,000 soldiers. But that didn’t prevent rampant looting, violence, and rape in the city. The kind himself was a well-known libertine. After ten days, the French army finally departed Rome, taking with them young Cesare Borgia ostensibly brought along as a papal legate, but his real purpose was to serve as a French bargaining chip against Pope Alexander. On February 22, 1495, Charles arrived in Naples –King Alfonso immediately abdicated and fled to a monastery, and his son also fled in terror. The French forces were given a hero’s welcome, but the people of Naples would soon earn that one foreign occupier was hardy different from another. Unruly French soldiers were stationed in people’s homes throughout the countryside, and the situation was growing grim. Abroad, this brazen French invasion was cause for concern. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, this incursion would lead to seventy years of turmoil in the region. It drew the ire of Ferdinand and Isabella (and their alliance with Maximilian I) as well as Ludovico il Moro of Milan, who feared for his own tenuous claim to the throne. In this milieu, Pope Alexander found plenty of allies united in the “Holy League” against France.
With danger afoot, Charles was dismayed to learn that Cesare Borgia had escaped, and only a couple weeks after conquering and looting the kingdom of Naples, he returned northward to find the pope and almost all of his Curia had fled Rome. The French army continued northward over the Alps where they faced the bloodiest battle the region had seen in some two hundred years. In the end, it was a messy partial retreat of the French that left behind a great many valuables, including a “black book” of portraits featuring Charles’s many female conquests, but the Italians suffered immense casualties resulting from French mercenary soldiers and a newly emerging technology of warfare: the cannon.
Word soon reached Charles that Naples was about to fall once again to Alfonso’s son Ferdinand II. Thus, Charles mustered his forces and returned to Naples where he and his soldiers met something far deadlier than war. Columbus’s three ships had just returned from the Caribbean to Spain in 1493 and they brought with them the first known cases of Syphilis within Europe. It quickly spread to Naples where vast swaths of Charles’s army became infected. It was they who likely brought the disease north of the Alps –it should be noted that this Columbian theory of the disease remains very much open to debate.
Following the death of the French king in 1498, Pope Alexander returned to his grand mission of aggrandizing his family. At first, he tried to install his twenty-year-old son Giovanni on the throne of Naples, but before it could transpire, Giovanni was brutally assassinated, his body found in the Tiber, throat slit and stabbed no less than five times. His violent, erratic nature (coupled with his penchant for sleeping with married women) earned him many an enemy in the city. And while the true murderer remains a mystery, rumors suggest it may have been none other than his brother Cesare Borgia –perhaps the result of a lover’s quarrel (they may have shared infatuation for their sister-in-law Sancia and even their own sister Lucrezia) or else it may have been a struggle over power. Regardless, Cesare did not send out spies to hunt down his brother’s killer.
At this time, the papal coffers were once again in need of replenishing after years of war and vast reconstruction projects in Rome. The papacy was effectively saved by gaining control of a monopoly over alum which was used in both the cloth and leather trades. But on top of this, indulgences became an invaluable source of income, as well as the increasing sale of offices –more roles were invented out of whole cloth and paid for by wealthy patrons which greatly expanded the Curia (though many newcomers had absolutely nothing to do). Late into his reign, Alexander drafted some badly needed reforms –banning the pope from selling benefices and from transferring church property to laypersons, along with other prohibitions concerning simony, nepotism, bribery, and concubines. But the draft never really saw the light of day, and the Borgia family continued to extend its power over the papal states after Cesare Borgia –a great inspiration to Machiavelli– became the first man in history to lay down the red hat, abdicate his cardinalship, and pursue the life of a mercenary. He helped to convince his father, Pope Alexander, to ease the papacy’s anti-French policies and Cesare managed to eliminate the feudal lords over the papal states one by one, whether by banishment or poisoning.
With such blatant corruption, voices of opposition were bound to rise up. The loudest was a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery man who professed direct communication with God and apocalyptic prophecies. He delivered rhetorical tirades against the Medici and the Borgias alike. He sought to establish a “Christian republic” complete with regular “bonfires of vanities” such as mirrors, cosmetics, fine clothes, beautiful works of art by Botticelli and Michelangelo, musical instruments, games, and all things delightful –it was a strange flash of Puritan England in the middle of Renaissance Italy. Needless to say, the pope excommunicated this fanatic, but when that didn’t work, he called for the man’s execution. Thus, in April of 1498, a violent mob stormed his Convent at San Marco. Several of his supporters were killed and then Savonarola, along with two of his associates, were unceremoniously rounded up and tortured in the name of God in order to extract confessions. Then these three men were dragged out into the Piazza del Signoria, stripped naked, and chained to a single cross where they were hideously burned alive, their ashes were gathered and tossed into the Arno River so that no future relics would be fashioned for future veneration. These types of vicious atrocities were rather commonplace during the theocratic reign of the Christian Church.
In 1493, Pope Alexander made the fateful decision to grant territorial rights to Spain and Portugal for their discoveries in Africa and America –the Portuguese had explored the west coast of Africa under the voyage of Dom Henrique (or Prince Henry the Navigator) and this was followed by the voyages of Vasco de Gama and Bartolomeu Dias who rounded the Cape of Good Hope; while Spain planted the flag of Castile in the New World. With the world being carved up, the pope decreed that all foreign lands in the east were effectively to be granted to Portugal while the west was given to Spain. This was later slightly altered in 1500 when Portugal was allowed to claim Brazil.
During the latter four years of Pope Alexander’s reign, Cesare dominated his father’s pontificate by slowly appropriating the Papal States. It was a methodical process that necessitated numerous assassinations within the great Roman families, such as the Orsini, and this made Cesare Borgia both hated and feared.
“Yet, although he was hideously disfigured by syphilis –toward the end of his life he never showed himself in public without a mask—few who came into contact with Cesare failed to be impressed. His energy was boundless, his courage absolute. He appeared to need no sleep, and his speed of movement was astonishing; he was said to arrive at a new city before he left the last. At the same time he shared to the full his father’s love of women. In his short life –he was to die in battle in Navarre, at the age of thirty-one—he left at least eleven bastards” (271).
Regarding Donna Lucrezia, despite garnering a public reputation as a “femme fatale” among the Borgias, there seems to be scant evidence that she was a party to incest, apart from certain wild accusations leveled against her in divorce proceedings by her former husband, Giovanni Sforza. Their marriage had been arranged by Alexander (when Lucrezia was thirteen years old) in order to establish an alliance with Milan, however Giovanni soon became irrelevant to the pope and his existence was more of a nuisance. An attempt was made on his life and he fled Rome before a lengthy and humiliating divorce proceeding was foisted upon him. Lucrezia’s next marriage was to Alfonso of Aragon, but he was murdered by Cesare (perhaps out of jealousy). She married a third time to the Duke of Ferrara. In spite of having numerous affairs, she bore her husband many children, dying shortly after delivering the eighth.
By August 1503, the plague had struck Rome once again. Both Cesare and his father contracted the fever, and while Cesare recovered rather speedily, the seventy-two-year-old pope could not survive. He died six days later on August 18, 1503. Rumors of the pope being poisoned have continued to persist for centuries but these appear to be largely unfounded.
“Thanks to the two of them [Pope Alexander and Cesare], and in lesser to Lucrezia, the Borgias have become a legend for villainy and cruelty. Much of this was clearly justified; but all legends contain an element of exaggeration and often tend to obscure the truth. Moreover, because the Borgia legend concentrates on their crimes, the credit side tends to be forgotten. Alexander had been vice chancellor to five successive popes, he understood the ways of the Vatican as well as anyone alive. For the past fifty years, it had done its best to build up the reputation of the Holy See as one of the European superpowers, able to negotiate with France and Spain as a political equal. Unfortunately, as Alexander well knew, it was nothing of the kind. It lacked the money, it lacked the manpower, it lacked even the basic security of its own home ground, constantly threatened as it was by the Orsini and Colonna, as well as by the notoriously inflammable Roman populace. The ‘papal vicars’ –mostly condottieri who were, by definition, out for what they could get—were not to be trusted for a moment; equally faithless were the major Italian states, Venice and Florence, Naples and Milan, and other cities less important but equally independent. Then there were the French, forever threatening a new invasion, and in the background Spain and –now apparently on the crest of the wave—the Ottoman Turks.”
“In short, the Papacy had real or potential enemies on every side and no firm friends. To survive with its independence intact, it desperately needed adequate finance, firm administration, and astute diplomacy, and these Alexander was able to provide in full measure, however questionable his means of doing so. He proved it in only the second year of his pontificate, when he persuaded Charles VIII to leave Rome, thus saving himself and his successors from being nothing more than satraps of the French. For this alone, he deserves the gratitude of posterity. The fact that he has not received it is due largely to his private life and to the incessant vilification to which he was subjected both during his lifetime and after his death and which he tolerated with extraordinary equanimity. On more than one occasion he chided Cesare for not showing the same tolerance; it could be argued, however, that he might have done better to follow his son’s example. Many of the accusations leveled against him he could easily have disproved, had he bothered to do so; by leaving them unanswered, he contributed to his own unspeakable reputation” (274).
Pius III and Julius II
The death of Alexander brought chaos to Italy. While Cesare recovered from the disease, several cities fell into open revolt which was followed by invasions from both France and Spain. Too physically weak to muster a military response, Cesare sought to bribe the papal conclave in order to prevent his father’s arch-nemesis, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere (nephew of Pope Sixtus IV), from attaining the tiara he had so long lusted after. He was newly returned from his exile in France. Two other contenders for the throne of St. Peter included: Cardinal Georges d’Amboise (Louis XII’s chief counselor) and Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. However, neither managed to accumulate the votes needed, so the next pope was to be a compromise candidate, Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini, Archbishop of Siena, who took the papal name of Pius III (a tribute to his uncle Pius II). Despite being sixty-four, he appeared frail, elderly, and severely crippled by gout –he amusingly lasted a mere twenty-six days as pope, one of the shortest pontificates in history.
One of the shortest tenures was followed by one of the shortest conclaves –after only a few hours, Giuliano della Rovere managed to bribe the right people and secure the votes needed for his ascendancy. He was to be Pope Julius II, a ruler filled with contempt for his enemy’s son, Cesare, but since the papacy was always a relatively weak institution, he needed Cesare’s military prowess so he held off on assassinating the young man for now. In time, however, Cesare was exiled to Spain (his power much diminished in the absence of his father) where he died on the field of battle in 1507 at the age of thirty-one.
John Julius Norwich recounts an old story about Pope Julius II’s vision of his own military reputation –when Michelangelo asked if a book should be placed in the hand of the large fourteen-foot bronze statue he was creating, Pope Julius simply responded, “Nay, give me a sword, for I am no scholar!” Indeed, at age sixty-eight, Julius became the first pope in nearly five hundred years to lead an army into battle. He managed to push back the French and even forge an alliance with both France and Venice. While laying the cornerstone for the new St. Peter’s, he conquered Perugia and Bologna. In the north of Italy sat French Milan, to the south lay Spanish Naples. Julius’s vision was to carve out an immensely powerful and prosperous middle portion of Italy governed exclusively by the papacy. Like Alexander before him, Julius was a pope who was focused exclusively on temporal concerns, he had little time for spiritual or theological questions, and perhaps that is why he remains one of the more formidable and memorable popes.
“As both a pope and a man, Julius had many faults. He was impetuous –‘so impetuous,’ wrote the contemporary historian Francesco Guicciardini, ‘that he would have been brought to ruin had he not been helped by the reverence felt for the Church, the discord of the princes and the condition of the times”—mercurial, vindictive, a poor organizer, and a deplorable judge of character. Though an adept tactician, he had little sense of long-term strategy. Eaten up by worldly ambition, he was utterly unscrupulous in the pursuit of his ends. Certain qualities, however, he possessed in full measure. One was courage; another was indomitability of spirit” (283).
Having battled mightily –his conquests unleashed a wave of butchery and rape across Italy, killing tens of thousands in the name of God– Pope Julius II died on February 21, 1513. It was he who issued the fateful dispensation which allowed Henry VIII to marry his elder brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon. But by far his most enduring legacy has been as an eminent patron of the arts, growing the papal collection with such masterpieces as Apollo Belvedere and Laocoon (the latter having been accidentally unearthed by a man digging in his vineyard). And, of course, Julius II replaced the old basilica of St. Peter’s with an infinitely more magnificent celebration of human craftsmanship than its medieval predecessor. Entrusted to Donato Bramante, the new building wiped away all remnants of the crumbling mosaics, icons, and huge medieval candelabras. It was to be a triumph of the Renaissance. The Vatican Gardens were also significantly redesigned, and Julius commissioned a young Raphael for to complete a fresco at his apartments, while he bullied Michelangelo into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It has often been suggested that the two men, Julius and Michelangelo, were in fact lovers –both were undoubtedly homosexuals—but despite numerous stories which have come down to us from the era, the truth remains just another Renaissance secret.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.