Paul III
On October 13, 1534, the senior member of the Sacred College (“the petticoat cardinal”), Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, was elected as Pope Paul III. He was only sixty-six, but gave the impression of being decades older since he used a cane, had a stoop, and bore a long, white beard. Over time in his career, he meticulously plotted his strategic advancement to the papacy and was bolstered when his sister Giulia became a favorite mistress of Pope Alexander VI. He was, by all accounts, a child of the Renaissance. He was reared in the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and fathered numerous illegitimate children while being shamelessly nepotistic, ultimately elevating two of his grandsons to the Sacred College while they were still teenagers.
“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” (310).
Architecturally, his supreme achievement was the construction of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome (begun in 1517 but not completed until 1589, forty years after his death). One of its four architects was Michelangelo who was also commissioned to redesign the Campidoglio (Capitol) where the magnificent statue of Marcus Aurelius was moved, and Michelangelo was also commissioned to work on a redesign of St. Peter’s which included the great dome) until his death at age eighty-nine.
“Dynastically, like all Renaissance popes, Paul III was determined to further his family fortunes” (310), however much of his time was spent addressing the march of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (of Turkey) through Europe, and the need to reconcile the rivalry between Francis I of France and Emperor Chares V of the Hapsburgs. “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” (311). Paul III organized a controversial new commission, riddled with scandal from the start, but it carried the promise of long-awaited reform not least of which by the arrival of a Basque named Ignatius Loyola, whose followers called themselves the “Society of Jesus,” or Jesuits, who were to spur on the Counter-Reformation.
Finally, the Council of Trent kicked off in December 1545 and it was to continue for the next eighteen years where all the usual Christian theological questions were discussed –justification by faith, transubstantiation, purgatory, and many other issues. The council managed to put a halt to the spread of Protestantism, however, it did not offer the substantive reforms that many of the faithful had prayed for, and so Christian violence and corruption continued to spread unabated across Europe –in France alone the coming years brought an onslaught of violence including no fewer than eight civil wars against the Huguenots (where more than three thousand people were hideously slaughtered during the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris in 1572); plus a war between Spain and the Netherlands lasted for some eighty years; and the nightmarish Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) caused untold devastation through northern Europe and displayed the merciless, bloodthirsty nature of Christianity divided between Lutherans and Catholics.
In his later years, Paul III faced great tragedy in the Papal States. His son Pierluigi was assassinated by a mob in Piacenza, and this was followed by a string of betrayals among Paul’s grandchildren who had been appointed cardinals. Depressed by the deceit of his own family members, Paul III died in November of 1549.
Julius III
Over a period three months and during a cold winter, a conclave met and deliberated over an Englishman, Reginald Pole, who lobbied heavily for himself; and a Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, who was arraigned by his cardinals after his hair and beard began falling out. The cardinals accused him of contracting syphilis (like most religious figures he was hardly chaste) but his loss of hair was actually due to alopecia. At any rate, the competing factions settled elsewhere on Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte for the next pope who took the papal name of Julius III. He had served as co-president at the opening of the Council of Trent, but he was better known for his infatuation with a seventeen-year-old boy named Innocenzo whom he picked up on the streets of Parma two year earlier (naturally, he was immediately made a cardinal).
“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; 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” (314-315).
Marcellus II
The next pope was a humanist and a scholar named Cardinal Marcello Cervini, a man who translated Greek works into Latin and Italian. He was a reformer who served as one of three co-presidents at the Council of Trent, and he reorganized the Vatican library. Following a short conclave, he was elected and took the papal name of Marcellus II –but alas at age fifty-five, he suffered a stroke a mere twenty-two days after ascending to the papacy, and his only lasting memorial is Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli.
Paul IV
Next came a seventy-eight-year-old Giampeitro Carafa who took the papal name of Pope Paul IV –“the oldest pope of the sixteenth century and by far the most terrifying” (315). Tragically, the hedonism of most Renaissance popes was replaced with Paul’s joyless, austere, restrictive, regressive conservatives which hearkened back to the failed popes of the Middle Ages.
“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; 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” (316).
Anti-semitism had manifested itself on a widescale from the moment Constantine the Great adopted Christianity in Rome in the fourth century, and it grew exponentially worse in the ensuing centuries throughout the Christian world. Under Paul IV, Jews were rounded up into ghettos and forbidden from trading in any commodity other than except food and secondhand clothing, only one synagogue was allowed in each city (in Rome alone, seven synagogues were demolished). Jews were instructed only to speak in Italian or Latin, and they were forced to wear yellow hats in the streets to identify themselves among many other restrictions which remained in force for the next three centuries.
Paul also despised Spaniards and spurred an ill-fated war between Henry II of France and Hapsburg Spain which naturally ended in disaster, and even led to a quarrel with Mary I of England which helped solidify the future Elizabeth I to return her country to Protestantism. The pope blamed his failures on his “worthless” nephews. He died in August of 1559, “a broken man and the most generally detested pope of the sixteenth century” (317).
Pius IV
What followed was a four-month long conclave, largely a deadlock between the French and Spanish cardinals, until they finally settled on Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Medici, a humble notary’s son from Milan of no relation to his grand Florentine namesake. He took the papal name of Pius IV. A relaxed, convivial man, he had three natural children, restarted the Council of Trent, repaired the papal relationship with the Hapsburgs, restricted the powers of the Inquisition, cut the Papal Index, and arrested the late Pope Paul IV’s two dreadful nephews (one of whom had his wife strangled on suspicion of adultery and stabbed her presumed lover). Both nephews were summarily executed in public –the woman in question was then exonerated of any wrongdoing. Pope Pius’s own nephew, Chares Borromeo, was later canonized for his tireless support to the poor and sick during a terrible plague in 1576. He supported his uncle’s efforts to conclude the Council of Trent, catechism and missal reforms, and a praiseworthy revival of the Renaissance tradition, supporting artists and scholars, founding many universities and printing presses, and building fine new works of architecture including the Porta Pia and 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” (318).
Pius V
When it became clear that Archbishop Charles Borromeo was not personally interested in the Papacy, he recommended that the cardinals consider a former shepherd named Cardinal Michele Ghislieri who took the papal name of Pius V. He was an odd, ascetic little man who often strode barefoot and expected the same from his Curia. He sought to stamp out blasphemy, punishing rich blasphemers with heavy fines, and flogging poor blasphemers, while forcing the faithful to observe holy days and fasts. Even doctors were forbidden from treating patients who had not confessed or received sacraments. Unmarried prostitutes were publicly whipped, men found guilty of sodomy were burned at the stake, adultery was very nearly regarded as a capital offense, no bachelor was allowed to employ a female servant, no nun was allowed to keep a male dog, women were prohibited from entering the classical sculptures section of the Vatican collections, the figures of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel were tragically painted over in a grotesque display of vandalism –this was but a taste of the general misery rife throughout the Christian world at the time. “After a few months of this the Romans were complaining that he wanted to turn their city into one enormous monastery” (319).
To top it off, Pius had served as a former inquisitor, delighting in visits to the torture chambers, and casually condemning people to death with no remorse. He commanded the general of the papal army to enter France and help the King of France callously murder any and all Huguenots without cause. Once again, the papacy found itself a proponent of mass extermination. And with regard to Jews, Pius continued Paul IV’s hideous policies of outright persecution, expanding upon centuries of abuse –along with an already established ghetto in Roman and another cramped ghetto in Ancona, Jews were barred from entering all other papal territories. The cruelty continued without abatement.
Above all other objectives, Pius sought to prevent the dreaded infection of Protestantism from spreading into Italy. At this time, Germany held to a tentative peace (the Peace of Augsburg) in the ongoing religious war, France was split in two, along with the Spanish Netherlands, while England and Scotland ultimately fell to the fashionable wave of Protestantism (Pius’s excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570 only made things more difficult). Outside Italy, only Philip II of Spain stood beside the pope. Militarily, in 1570 Venice was forced to cede Cyprus to the Turks even after the joint naval engagement with Spain, Venice, and the papacy who were all united against the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto (which was the last great naval engagement in history to be fought by oared galleys). Seventeen years later, the Spanish Armada was defeated, and Crete then went the way of Cyprus.
After Lepanto, Pope Pius V lived a mere seven months before leaving behind a mild record of reform, but a much more significant record of extreme bigotry and narrow-minded policies. Naturally, with such an abysmal record he was the only pope to have been made a saint between the “mildly ridiculous” pontificate of Celestine V (1294-1296) and “the wholly admirable” reign of Pius X (1903-1914).
Gregory XIII
After an uncharacteristically short conclave, a seventy-year-old Bolognese Cardinal Ugo Boncompagni became pope under the name Gregory XIII. He had earned a name for himself at the Council of Trent and by garnering the trust of Philip II when he served as legate in Spain.
“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 46B.C., was now ten days behind the solar year… 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” (320-321).
Gregory viewed his chief objective as fighting Protestantism, he expanded the Jesuit College which was later known as the Gregorian University, as well as an English Seminary which fed a steady stream of missionaries to England, many of whom found martyrdom under the harsh repression of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Unsurprisingly, the pope celebrated the gruesomeness St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Huguenots by ordering a special Te Deum at a Thanksgiving Mass at the French Church of St. Louis, he persuaded Phillip of Spain to launch an invasion of England, and he supported a failed plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth of England (whom he dubbed “the Jezebel of the North”).
He replaced the old papal legates, previously the pope’s representatives abroad, with a new order whom he calls “nuncios.” He sent Jesuit missionaries around the world who helped to elevate the tattered reputation of the church in places like China, Brazil, India, and Japan. He instituted an extensive building program and took an interest in newly discovered early Christian physical remains. With papal coffers dwindling, the pope attempted to strip away land from anyone unable to prove their title of ownership, but this only bred a bitterly resentful underclass of people who turned to criminal brigandage and rejected the authority of the papacy.
Gregory died at age eighty-three after a thirteen-year pontificate, and he left the papacy almost penniless with many of the papal states in open rebellion. Somehow, the papal tradition managed to continue clinging to power.
Sixtus V
With the Counter-Reformation in full swing by this point, Felice Peretti, a farmer’s son and Franciscan, ascended to the throne and he took the papal name of Sixtus V. Up until now, Venice was mostly Catholic despite being generally more liberal-minded. As merchants and commercial tradesmen, the Venetians favored friendly relations with both Protestants and Muslims alike, and so they either disobeyed or merely tolerated the pope’s injunctions but only when it suited them. The Venetians could not ban the incoming inquisitors, so they simply insisted on having a Venetian presence within the torture chambers where they might hopefully serve as a moderating influence. Earlier in his career once Peretti arrived in Venice as an inquisitor, he tried to “bully” and “browbeat” Venice and his arrogance led to a temporary recall, but in spite of being a generally cruel figure, he was characteristically reappointed shortly thereafter and elevated within the church bureaucracy all the way to position of pope.
“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” (323).
Among his accomplishments, he reduced the power of the Sacred College, produced a copy of the Septuagint and the Vulgate, albeit heavily revised editions of both and of St. Ambrose’s writings. Additionally, he instituted a “reign of terror” throughout the papal states, publicly executing no fewer than seven thousand alleged criminals, with their heads placed on pikes lining the marketplaces, as was often the Christian way. Meanwhile, the pope levied heavy taxes and issued loans that promised a huge annual income, making Sixtus V one of the richest princes in Europe.
Like all Counter-Reformation popes, Sixtus was filled with a deep hatred of Protestantism in pursuit of the Catholic vision of a unified, universal theocratic regime. He promised vast sums of money to Philip II of Spain in exchange for an invasion of England, but the expedition ended in a demoralizing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Of course, when the mission failed the pope refused to pay up and tensions with Spain grew. He then betrayed Philip again by relaxing his opposition to the Huguenot King Henry IV of France (whom he had previously excommunicated in 1585) in exchange for Henry agreeing to convert to Catholicism. As per usual, the papacy continued to weave through various alliances in Europe, cleaving to the coattails of those who were stronger, wealthier, and more powerful.
Despite reigning for a mere five years, Sixtus and his extravagance led to a variety of baroque Counter-Reformation edifices in 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” 325).
Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX
The next sixteen months saw no fewer than three popes –“In any history of the Papacy, the names of Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX can be very largely ignored” (325). Urban VII died a fortnight after being elected and bequeathed his sizable personal fortune to a group of Roman girls he had come to know, Gregory XIV is often remembered as another conservative killjoy who banned one of the most popular amusements among the citizens of Rome (betting on papal elections, durations, and cardinal appointments), and Innocent IX lasted a mere two months before falling ill while attempting to make the traditional pilgrimage to the seven basilicas.
Clement VIII
Stability finally returned to the papacy with the election of Ippolito Aldobrandini, the son of a distinguished Florentine barrister, who took the name of Clement VIII. He was known to have proudly encouraged the Inquisition which sent some thirty alleged heretics to be burned at the stake, including Dominican Giordano Bruno whose statue still stands in Campo dei Fiori.
“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” (326).
His most important decision was to officially recognize Henry IV of France in spite of Henry’s policy of tolerance toward the Huguenots. This capitulation greatly angered Spain and the conflict between Madrid and Rome was left largely unresolved throughout Clement’s reign. However, the bright spot in Clement’s pontificate came in 1600 when the pope welcomed some half million pilgrims to Rome for the jubilee celebration, an event which handsomely filled the papal coffers and temporarily left the papacy in good financial standing. It also served to display the extraordinary Renaissance art and architecture which had been commissioned over the past century. Clement VIII died on March 5, 1605.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.