Leo XI
After the death of Pope Clement, the Sacred College awarded the papal hat to Cardinal Alessandrio de’ Medici who took the papal name of Leo XI. He was a close ally of the late Pope Clement in lifting the sentence of excommunication on Henry IV and attempting to heal the wounds with France. “Deeply devout and highly intelligent,” Leo XI could have made a great pope, but he was already sixty-nine years old and only days into his reign, he caught a sudden chill which killed him a mere twenty-six days later. King Henry of France was no doubt deeply disappointed since he had spent 300,000 scudi in securing Leo XI’s pontificate.
Paul V
Leo was then succeeded by a Sienese cardinal named Camillo Borghese who took the name of Paul V. At the spry, young age of fifty-two he was to reign for the next sixteen years. He was a devout man, like his brief predecessor, but he hardly possessed much in the way of intellect. “He failed absolutely to understand that the Papacy was now one of a number of European powers; it was no longer possible to uphold the ideal of absolute papal supremacy as it had existed in the Middle Ages.” His vision of reviving the absolute papal supremacy immediately ran into roadblocks amidst Rome’s uneasy alliance with the cosmopolitan Republic of Venice which demanded its own political sovereignty. Venice had already been found at odds with Rome under the reign of Clement VIII when the Venetians had chosen to defend religious pluralism against the injunctions of the church, as well as the ability to read and print controversial books which were listed on the dreaded Index of Prohibited Books courtesy of the Catholic Church. Things came to a head when the pope demanded Venice begin searching the bags of English Ambassadors under the fear they were smuggling Protestant prayer books into the city. This was simply one demand too many for the Venetians.
In 1606, in order to resolve brewing tensions between church and state, the Venetian senate summoned Paolo Sarpi, a fifty-three-year-old friar who was renowned for his scientific discoveries. Sarpi gently argued against church legal rule and for a separation between “temporal” and “spiritual” matters. The incensed pope, however, had no patience for such arguments, arrogantly suggesting these simple suggestions “reeked of heresy.” He issued a letter announcing that the doge of Venice would be excommunicated in a matter of days, but the doge responded that the pope was being entirely unreasonable. Venice then banished the pro-papist Jesuits, and a schism between Rome and Venice burst open.
“For Pope Paul and his Curia, there was now a terrible truth to be faced: the interdict had failed. The most dreaded weapon in the papal armory –the same weapon the very threat of which, in the Middle Ages, had been enough to bring kings and emperors to their knees—had lost its power. Worse, its failure had been revealed to the world” (331).
Finally, a year later in April 1607, the papal interdict was lifted but it was to be the last in papal history as papal authority over Catholic Europe would never claw back its power again. Pope Paul V had been publicly humiliated –only the most recent in a long history of papal humiliations—and the vengeful pope sought to destroy his enemies rather than love them as his hero-martyr would have wanted. He particularly plotted to attack the clergy sympathetic to Venice: he very likely set a trio of assassins upon Paolo Sarpi who stabbed the scholar in broad daylight in Venice. But amazingly, Sarpi recovered and survived two more assassination attempts. He eventually died in his bed in 1623 but when Venice planned to erect a monument in his honor, the church predictably threatened violent retribution. It wasn’t until 1892 that a small statue was erected in the middle of the Campo di Santa Fosca near the spot where he was nearly stabbed to death –a monument to sinister Catholic machinations.
“Paul V never recovered from the Venice affair, nor from the botched attempts on the life of Paolo Sarpi. In England, memories of the Gunpowder Plot, which took pace only five months before the interdict was pronounced, were reawakened; in France, blame for the assassination of Henry IV in 1610 was laid at the papal door; all over Europe, the pope’s ultimate weakness had been revealed. He continued, however, to act according to his convictions, forever tightening Church discipline and otherwise pursuing the narrow –and by now distinctly old-fashioned—conservatism that seemed to belong more to the sixteenth century than to the seventeenth. He it was, for example, who in 1616 first took issue with Galileo for his championship of the Copernican theory that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe” (332-333).
It was Paul’s own self-confidence that had held the fractured church together, from conflicts over book-banning to the disgraceful treatment of Galileo for merely re-examining the orthodoxy of Aristotle and Ptolemy, even as violent religious turmoil continued to rock the continent. The pope oversaw celebrations for the Battle of the White Mountain, a battle which saw a minor victory for the Catholics shortly before the hideous outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, a war which is rightly regarded as “the bloodiest European cataclysm known until the twentieth century.” The immediate outcome of the Battle of the White Mountain was to send Frederick V “The Winter King” into exile while Bohemia was absorbed into the Catholic Hapsburg Empire where it would remain for another three hundred years. It was in celebration of this battle that Paul V succumbed to two strokes which took his life in January 1621.
Gregory XV & Urban VIII
The next pope was Gregory XV whose pontificate lasted a little over two years as religious hostilities continued to explode with the Bohemian Revolt, but Catholic military victories continued well into successor, Urban VIII’s reign, but the war evolved from a vicious string of massacres between Protestants and Catholics, into a war between the Hapsburg Empire and the House of Bourbon. Pope Urban attempted to reconcile internal Catholic conflicts between France, Spain, and Hapsburgs, but the pope’s efforts were fruitless.
With a hopeless military situation unfolding, Urban unsurprisingly turned his attention to fine arts and evangelistic missionary support. His other great love was in enriching himself and his family in a remarkably shameless display of thievery. “Where the arts were concerned, his best-known contribution –perhaps the summation of all that is most vulgarly ostentatious in Baroque Rome—was the vast baldacchino that he commissioned from Gianlorenzo Bernini for St. Peter’s (which he consecrated in 1626), to mark the tomb of St. Peter and the high altar above it” (337).
At this time, Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which sent Galileo to prison for the rest of his life with his books being banned –the Christian church’s vindictiveness of Galileo continued long after his death when he his body was refused burial beside his family. Urban died just two and a half years after Galileo on July 29, 1644 –a death with “provoked open jubilation in the streets” (339).
Innocent X
The next papal successor was seventy-year-old Giambattista Pamfil who took the papal name of Innocent X. He hated France, shamelessly enriched himself, and favored Spain. He was yet another nepotistic pontiff, his infamous daughter-in-law Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, a woman of “nauseating greed,” became the pope’s trusted confidant whom he consulted on every issue. The exact nature of their relationship remains unclear, but it spawned numerous rumors in his day. We most fondly remember Innocent for a famous portrait by Diego Velazquez, but the pope died on New Year’s Day 1655.
Alexander VII, Clement IX, & Clement X
It took three months for the conclave to elect a new pope as a result of a French cardinal lodging an extensive objection to the most popular candidate Cardinal Fabio Chigi, but eventually he relented and the new pope was elected as Pope Alexander VII. “Quiet, scholarly, and deeply spiritual, he was designed for a gentle and contemplative life; the tough, aggressive statesmanship of the unforgiving seventeenth century was not for him” (340). Like so many popes before him, Alexander was humiliated by France, though the single event which likely gave him more pleasure than any other was the conversion of Queen Christina of Sweden on Christmas Eve 1654 during a luxurious ceremony in St. Peter’s. An often eccentric, garishly dressed queen, Christina adopted the name “Alexandra” (in honor of Pope Alexander VII) and remained in Rome for the next thirty-five years.
The pope died on New Year’s Day in 1655 and he was succeeded by two popes who both took the name Clement –Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi and Cardinal Emilio Altieri. Clement IX ascended in 1667 and reigned for two and a half years and addressed a minor agitation over Jansenism (named after Cornelius Jansen, a former bishop of Ypres) which concerned the usual theological issues –original sin, human depravity, predestination, the necessity of divine grace and so on. Both Clement IX and his successor Clement X sought to patch up relationships with France and Venice. Clement X was yet another pope who also embarrassed himself domestically by appointing Cardinal Paluzzi degli Albertoni in charge of the papal administration, and predictably, he used his position too enrich himself and degrade the pope’s reputation. France saw its moment to bully the beleaguered papacy and its eighty-five-year-old pope.
Innocent XI
With the succession of Innocent XI, the papacy attempted to reassert itself –Innocent was “a man of total integrity and by far the greatest pope of the seventeenth century” (343). During his papacy tensions mounted with France, as Rome formed a new Holy League against the rising power of the Turks, and the pope eventually excommunicated Louis of France and all his ministers. The fight did not stop there as insults were cast and bishoprics were left empty all across France.
“Innocent died on August 12, 1689. In his lifetime he had not been particularly popular among his flock; utterly incorruptible, stern, and uncompromising, he had lived austerely and parsimoniously… After his death, however, his many outstanding qualities gradually came to be recognized, and it was only a quarter of a century before Pope Clement XI began the process of canonization. But French memories were long, and French influence in Rome had lost none of its power: in 1744, at the insistence of louis XV, the process was suspended. Only in the mid-twentieth century, under Pope Pius XII, did the wheels begin to turn again. Innocent is now at last beatified; but sainthood is not yet his” (344).
Alexander VIII
The next pope was a seventy-eight-year-old Venetian (the first Venetian pope in two centuries) named Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni who took the papal name of Alexander VIII. “Blameless in his personal life, he was a fine scholar, possessed of one of the largest private libraries in Italy. In marked contrast to his predecessor, he was warm, generous, and endlessly charming to young and old alike. He carried his age well; his mind remained alert as ever it had been. And he cheered Rome up” (345). Alexander oversaw a return to papal extravagance with carnivals and operas and nepotism –and papal spending once again reached a pinnacle.
His goal was to restore good relations with France, and as luck would have it, King Louis XIV’s position had been greatly weakened by the Glorious Revolution in England. At first mutual concessions were made, when it came to sophistic matters of theology (namely, thee “Gallican Articles”) neither France nor the pope were willing to concede. In January 1691, while suffering on his deathbed due to an inflammation of the leg, the pope delivered his final parting shot by denouncing any chance at reconciliation.
Innocent XII
What followed was the longest papal conclave since 1305, lasting some five months, before a contingent of French resistance was made to relent and select the seventy-six-year-old Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Antonio Pignatelli who took the papal name of Innocent XII. He was a Neapolitan aristocrat –the last pope from South Italy and the last to grow a beard. He made the extraordinary move of issuing the Romanum Decet Ponteficem in 1692 which decreed that all relatives of reigning pontiffs would be forbidden from serving in offices except by merit alone. This was an incredible reform that was long needed across many centuries of brazen church abuses. In time, this papal bull would be sworn to by all future cardinals and popes. He also stood firm in elimination of another Catholic abuse –namely, the sale of church offices. It was a hard-fought struggle for reform since the sale of offices was a highly profitable within the church.
Here at last was a fairly impressive leader of the church. Innocent took great care in supporting the poor, homeless, and destitute. And he also managed to bury the hatchet with France. In both domestic and foreign affairs he found success. He fell ill in November 1699 but lingered on for another handful of months in time to celebrate the “Holy Year” of 1700 before dying in September 1700. “In the nine years of his pontificate he had achieved much: the end of nepotism, reconciliation with France. He may have even decided the whole future of Spain” (349).
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.