Leo X
Following the death of Pope Julius II came thirty-seven-year-old Giovanni de’Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent who took the papal name of Pope Leo X. “God has given us the Papacy,” he wrote to his brother Giuliano, “now let us enjoy it.” While the words may or may not have been apocryphal, they nevertheless accurately summarized the new pope’s attitude. However, this was not to be a repeat of Alexander VI’s reign, there would be no extravagant orgies held in open secrecy, though the sale of indulgences was to continue as it always had –for how else was the church to raise large sums of money except by exploiting the faithful?
Regarding Pope Leo X, John Julius Norwich offers the following remarks:
“The fact remains that he was less a pope than a Renaissance prince. Homosexual like his predecessor, he was a cultivated and polished patron of the arts, far more magnificent than his father, Lorenzo, had ever dared to be. A passionate huntsman, he would ride out with an entourage of three hundred; an insatiable gourmet, he gave lavish banquets and willingly attended those given by his friends. In 1494, when his family was exiled from Florence, he had traveled to France, Germany, and the Netherlands, where he had met Erasmus; but six years later he was back in Rome, rapidly acquiring political influence in the Curia, and by 1512 he had successfully reestablished Medici control in Florence, of which he was to be the effective ruler throughout his pontificate” (289).
Pope Leo oversaw an inordinately extravagant, ornate coronation ceremony for himself. In spite of suffering from fistula and piles, he rode through the streets from the unfinished St. Peter’s to the Lateran alongside 112 gold-plated equestrians and countless other cardinals and cavalry who tossed gold coins into the crowd. From here, the riches only seemed to endlessly pour out during his reign. He ordered tapestries of gold and silken thread from Brussels costing 75,000 ducats, shelled out handsomely for a princely expensive wedding for his brother, commissioned a new façade from Michelangelo for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, constructed a 120-mile road leading to a Tuscan quarry, and commissioned the Medici Chapel which was to be finished during the pontificate of his cousin Pope Clement VII. Leo entirely revived the world of academia through Rome’s university, the Sapienza, by hiring numerous professors and chairs, and he sponsored a rebirth of the theater in Rome which had been hitherto dormant since antiquity.
Naturally, Leo’s biographer Paolo Giovio painted the pope’s reign as a new golden age, however with such a binge of spending, the papacy had grown increasingly dependent on the bankers in Rome and Florence as it fell further and further into debt. With yet another nepotistic pope who became embroiled battles abroad, who was notorious for expanding the Spanish Inquisition into Portugal, and for excommunicating Martin Luther, Pope Leo X also faced a conspiracy by several cardinals, including Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci (widely believed to be the pope’s lover). Under pain of torture, they admitted to bribing a Florentine doctor named Vercelli to inject the pope with poison while treating him for fistula. In the aftermath, Vercelli was hanged, drawn, and quartered while Petrucci was mercifully strangled to death by a Moor (the other implicated cardinals simply had to pay large fines). In spite of their confessions, popular opinion in Rome continued to believe Leo had fabricated the whole affair in order to extract half a million ducats from his thirty-one cardinals and help resolve his spiraling debt crisis. But the papacy was facing a far greater crisis of legitimacy –cries for reform continued even as the Fifth Lateran Council failed to accomplish anything during Leo’s first five years on the throne, and the pope’s shameless marketing of offices and indulgences were called into question (since by now, the faithful could simply pay the church in advance forgiveness of sins yet to be committed, effectively building a balance of indulgence credit), not to mention the pope’s public flaunting of his male sexual conquests. It all gave Martin Luther’s challenge to the church a much stronger appeal in 1517. “By now, the Church was teetering on the edge of an abyss, yet still Leo failed to see that Luther’s crusade was more than a ‘monkish squabble’” (293). He issued a list of forty-one condemnations of Martin Luther, which the he publicly burned –he was then excommunicated. However, the pope praised Henry VIII of England for publishing The Defence of the Seven Sacraments Against Martin Luther.
On New Year’s Day 1515 King Louis XII of France died in Paris, and just over a year later, on January 23, 1516, King Ferdinand of Aragon died, as well. Their deaths brought two very different young men to the forefront of European affairs –the twenty-year-old intellectual King Francis I of France, and the timid, charmless Charles Hapsburg (Charles V), grandson of Emperor Maximilian, son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Whereas Francis I, Henry VIII, and Leo X found ways to enjoy their reigns, Charles inherited an austere and vast empire stretching from the Netherlands, Sicily, Spain, Naples, and the New World to Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Milan, Bohemia, and western Hungary. Surrounded on all sides, Francis found the Hapsburg empire a threat to France and this tension led to a long, protracted struggle for the western Mediterranean. The papacy quietly threw its support behind Emperor Charles V, but before further action could be taken following a riotous celebratory banquet, Pope Leo apparently caught a chill and died of a fever on December 1, 1521. “As a Renaissance prince he would have been superb; as a pope he was a disaster… Leo X had left Italy in its usual state of turmoil, northern Europe on the verge of religious revolution, and the Papacy in the lowest depths of degradation” (295).
Adrian VI
Following the death of Leo X, a conclave of men accustomed to luxury were forced to gather in dim light, with meager rations and minimal heat (the eldest cardinal had to be carried out on the sixth day nearly half-dead). It was to be a battle between Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and Cardinal Francesco Soderini, but eventually a “compromise” candidate emerged courtesy of a recommendation by Charles V –the next pope was to be a sixty-two-year-old German from Utrecht named Adrian Florensz Dedal who took the papal name of Pope Adrian (or Hadrian) VI. “He spoke no Italian, his Latin was incomprehensible, and before the end of the year he had antagonized everyone: the populace, who considered him a northern barbarian; the Curia, whose members were furious at his refusal to distribute the usual benefices; Charles V, who had expected him to join his league against Francis I; and Francis himself, who actually stopped the transfer of Church money from France to Rome…” (297). He lived like a monk, all the joy being vacuumed out of the papacy, he even threatened to whitewash the Sistine Chapel as an “effigy of heathen idols” and toss it into the Tiber. But all of his attempts at “reform” ended in disaster when he suddenly fell sick and died in September 1523 only a little more than a year after his arrival in Rome. His demise was a great relief to Rome, though it was to be another four and a half centuries before the next non-Italian pope would be elected.
Clement VII
Once again, the cardinals were unwillingly compelled to form a new conclave during a period of inclement of weather as meals were gradually reduced over a grueling fifty days before a new pope was finally selected –it was to be Giulio de’ Medici, the bastard sin of Giuliano, Lorenzo the Magnificent’s brother (who was assassinated by the Pazzi in Florence Cathedral forty-five years earlier). Giulio had benefitted from the pontificate of Leo X who legitimized him and elevated him to a leader in Florence –would fare the same under the new pope? Taking the papal name of Clement VII, he was known to be pious, morose, disagreeable, avaricious, and far from trustworthy –he was naturally disinclined to perform acts of kindness.
“Anyone who thought that his election signaled a return to the extravagant and easygoing days of Pope Leo was in for a disappointment. It might reasonably have been supposed that such a man would prove at least a competent pope. Alas, Clement was nothing of the kind. He was vacillating and irresolute, terrified when called upon to make a decision. He might have been a moderately good major; as a general he was a disaster. Leopold von Ranke, the great German historian, dubbed him the most disastrous of all the popes, which –if one remembers the Papacy in the tenth and eleventh centuries—seems a little unfair; the fact remains that the eleven years of his pontificate saw the worst sack of Rome since the barbarian invasions, the establishment in Germany of Protestantism as a separate religion, and the definite breakaway of the English Church over Henry VIII’s divorce” (299).
Clement clumsily dealt with the conflict between Charles V and the King of France, especially at the Battle of Pavia, “one of the most decisive engagements in European history” (299). It was the moment Europe turned from pikes to firearms, and by the end of the fighting the French army had been annihilated and a brave but exhausted King Francis I was captured and imprisoned until he agreed to relinquish control of Burgundy, Milan, and Naples. With widespread outrage, the pope formed the “League of Cognac” which was tasked with protecting a free and independent Italy, but the battle spread far and wide and even involved the two oldest families in Rome, the Colonna and the Orsini. Due to several missteps by the pope, he was forced to flee in the night via the same tunnel created by Alexander VI from the Vatican to the Castel Sant’Angelo, while the Colonna broke through the Gate of St. Lateran. They flooded into Rome in a wild barrage of looting and plundering –the papal palace was almost completely stripped, the windows of St. Peter’s were shattered, every residence was raided, the Sistine Chapel was picked over, along with Raphael’s tapestries, and many icons and ornaments were hauled off, never to be seen again.
Clement managed to survive, but only just. In a swing of popular opinion, the Colonna were rightly blamed for this desecration. But the lingering papacy was battered and, as per usual, it found itself at the mercy of its more powerful foes –in this case, the Hapsburgs. Conflicts with the French led the Duke of Bourbon to lead an invasion of Rome, which once again saw the papal troops defecting to the enemy save their own skin (as they were wont to do) and the pope was once again hustled out of St. Peter’s for the second time to the Castel Sant’Angelo while the city of Rome was completely massacred –down to every last hospital and orphanage, no one was spared. Even Cardinal Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, the future Pope Julius III, was strung up by his hair. Several cardinals were dragged out into the streets and tortured to death, monasteries were plundered, convents were raided, women were sold in the streets. The situation was as catastrophic as could be and the flailing papacy was mercifully rescued by the imperial army of Germans and Spaniards in a battle that has been dubbed “one of the most horrible in history.” By its end, thousands of corpses lined the streets of Rome and filled the Tiber. Within six months, a period of time which also saw widespread starvation and a long epidemic of the plague, the population of Rome was cut by more than half. But the true devastation came culturally as paintings, sculptures, and whole libraries which had been prized in the Renaissance era were either stolen or destroyed. And the poor, indebted pope was forced to melt down many of his treasures in order to find the money to pay the demoralized German and Spanish soldiers and prevent them from committing similar atrocities.
At the same time, the papal states were in disarray while the pope’s reputation was in tatters –his livelihood lay, quite literally, in ruins. To address the papal states, the pope snuck out in disguise and headed toward Orvieto when he was suddenly interrupted by ambassadors from Henry VIII of England who sought the king’s release from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The timing could not have been worse and the pope unfortunately dithered on the question. Meanwhile, peace between France and the Hapsburgs was finally negotiated between Emperor Charles’s aunt Margaret of Savoy and her sister-in-law Louise, the mother of King Francis (it became known as “The Ladies’ Peace”). It was a settlement that secured Spanish rule in Italy, but effectively banished France. Charles was then crowned Holy Roman Emperor in February 1530 by Pope Clement VII –it was the last time a pope would crown an emperor, a seven-hundred-year-old tradition that emboldened imperial rule and managed to prevent the natural destruction of theocratic rule. And this case was no exception –Pope Clement managed to salvage whatever meager reputation he had by preserving the peace in exchange for crowning Charles V Holy Roman Emperor.
There still remained the problem of Henry VIII’s annulment. One would have thought annulling Henry’s marriage was a small price to pay to keep England within the Catholic fold, however Catherine was the aunt of the emperor the pope had just crowned. Due to international politics, it was safer for this fragile pope to simply excommunicate Henry VIII, who then bombastically forced Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer to declare his marriage to Catherine null and void, and he promptly married Anne Boleyn. This was the clumsy beginning of the Church of England.
In closing, John Julius Norwich offers the following remarks on Clement VII:
“Yet, despite all his misfortunes –for many of which he had been himself responsible—the pope never forgot that he was a Medici and a Renaissance prince. He was a patron of Cellini and Raphael, and he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment on the east wall of the Sistine Chapel, as well as completing his work on the Medici tombs in San Lorenzo… Now, within a year of his death, Clement achieved the only real diplomatic success of his career: a double marriage, linking the Medici with the two most powerful –yet always bitterly opposed—royal houses of Europe, the Valois and the Hapsburg. The first of these was between Lorenzo II’s daughter Catherine and Henry, Duke of Orleans, son of Francis I and future King Henry II of France; the second was between Alessandro and Margaret of Austria, the natural daughter of Charles V” (308).
After traveling to Marseille, the pope fell sick and later died in Rome on September 25, 1534.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.