Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  For, paradoxically, this was also a period in which the cardinals were increasingly excluded from papal policy-making, and declined from being papal counsellors to being pensioned courtiers. Tensions between pope and cardinals had existed since at least the time of Gregory VII, and the custom of making electoral pacts had grown up during the Avignon papacy. These were agreements entered into by the cardinals in Conclave, which imposed restrictions on the new Pope’s freedom of action – limiting the number of new cardinals he could create, or the types of decisions or policies he could make without the agreement of the Sacred College. Human nature being what it is, however, such pacts were easier to make than to enforce. A duly elected pope was a monarch, and could do more or less as he pleased. The first Pope after the Great Schism, the steely Colonna Martin V, had acted without the slightest pretence of consultation, and the cardinals were reduced to quivering, stammering children in his presence. Yet cardinals had played a crucial role both in beginning and in ending the schism – the Council of Constance had been convened by cardinals – and many hoped that some at least of the objectives of the Conciliar movement might be attained through the pressure placed by cardinals on successive popes.

  All this was so much huff and puff, however, for the cardinals had no sanctions against the Pope, and depended on him for their security and wealth. Eugenius IV, Pius II, Paul II and Sixtus IV all accepted such pacts at the Conclave, but none of them kept them once they were elected. When in 1517 Leo X discovered a plot against him among the cardinals, he executed the ringleader and swamped the Sacred College by creating thirty-one new cardinals in a single day. In the process he not only overwhelmed his enemies by sheer numbers, but drastically reduced their income, much of which came from shares in a fixed pool of revenues.

  The one place where the cardinals were supreme was in Conclave, when they elected the new Pope. Locked into the Vatican, the cardinals ate and slept in dark and airless wooden cells erected for the occasion, and were officially cut off from the outside world. Renaissance conclaves were hotbeds of intrigue, the outcome of which was rarely predictable. We have an eyewitness account of the 1458 Conclave from Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, who emerged as Pius II. He recalled the endless plotting in the lavatory block – ‘a fit place for such elections!’6 Religious considerations alone seldom dominated the choice of popes. Rivalries between France and Spain, or between Milan,Venice and Naples, or more local rivalries like those of the Orsini and Colonna families, all played a part, as did internal tensions within the Sacred College. In 1458 Pius II was elected partly because of his personal amiability, but mainly because violent resentment of the Spanish domination of the previous pontificate combined with fear of French political influence to rule out any foreigner, and hence the likeliest candidate, the French Cardinal d’Estouteville. In 1464, a conclave at which the favourite candidate was the formidable Spanish Dominican defender of papal infallibility, Juan de Torquemada, the successful candidate was the worldly papal nephew Pietro Barbo, elected because he was felt to be a loyal member of the Sacred College, who would be pliant – as it transpired, a sadly misplaced assumption.

  The spread of nepotism and of venal appointments to the cardinalate, in return for money or favours, made the outcome of elections towards the end of the century even less likely to reflect a simple search for ‘God’s candidate’. In the 1484 conclave which elected Innocent VIII (1484–92) there were a record twenty-five cardinals present, many of them scandalously secular men. Proceedings were stage-managed by Giuliano della Rovere, nephew of the dead Pope. When it became clear that he himself was unelectable, he saw to it that a manageable nonentity was chosen. The successful candidate, Cardinal Cibo, bribed electors by countersigning petitions for promotion brought to him in his cell the night before the decisive vote.

  Roderigo Borgia’s election as Alexander VI in 1492 was accompanied by even more naked bribery. A new pope had to resign all his benefices, and so had gifts to distribute. Borgia, a gifted administrator and diplomat with a long and successful curial career behind him, was one of the most spectacular of pluralists, and had at his disposal literally dozens of major plums – bishoprics, abbeys, fortresses, fortified towns. They were allocated in advance to consolidate the majority he needed. It is in fact quite likely that Alexander’s political shrewdness and administrative experience would have won him the support he needed to become pope, and the bribery at his election was not much worse than at many others. Yet, for all his ability, Roderigo was a worldly and ruthless man, and at the time of his election was already the father of eight children, by at least three women. That such a man should have seemed a fit successor to Peter speaks volumes about the degradation of the papacy.

  Before the Great Schism, the papacy had derived much of its funding from the vigorous exercise of its spiritual office – payments from suppliants at the papal court, revenues derived from papal provisions, annates on benefices, Peters Pence. The erosion of papal prerogatives during the schism and Conciliar era, however, drastically reduced such payments, and the papacy was increasingly thrown back on the secular revenues derived from the Papal States – a fact which accounts for the papal wars in defence of those States. A major addition to papal income came in 1462 with the discovery of an alum-mine at Tolfa in the District of Rome. Alum was a vital chemical for both the cloth industry and the leather trade. Till 1462, however, there was no significant European source, and most supplies came from Muslim west Turkey. The popes were now able to forbid Christian use of Turkish alum, and to establish a monopoly of European supplies. The resulting income was officially earmarked for war to recover Constantinople and the Holy Places, and to turn back the Turkish advance in eastern Europe. By 1480 alum profits made up a third of the Pope’s secular revenue.

  Nevertheless, the mounting cost of papal wars, and the lavish building programmes of successive popes, made the search for new sources of revenue unending. The most notorious of these was the sale of indulgences, especially the indulgence for the rebuilding of St Peter’s. More significant still, however, was the growing dependence of the popes on the sale of office. Essentially, this was a form of public funding by floating loans. Investors bought a position in the papal Curia for a large cash payment: they recouped their capital investment and a life interest in the form of the revenues of the post they now owned. This meant that in real terms a large proportion of papal income was mortgaged to repaying office-holders, and successive popes resorted to inventing new layers of bureaucracy to raise further capital: the conscientious Pius II did this to fund his Crusade. The result was the multiplication of virtually useless offices. Innocent VIII, for example, established fifty-two pulumbatores, officials responsible for fixing the lead seals on official documents. Each pulumbator paid 2,500 ducats for his post – about a hundred times the annual salary of a country priest.

  The sale of office paralysed reform, for it created a huge class of officials with a vested interest in preventing the streamlining of the papal administration or any attempt at removing financial abuses within the Curia. It also edged out talent: from the 1480s it was increasingly difficult for low-born men of ability to secure a post within the Curia without the necessary purchase-price. More and more offices became soft billets for idle drones. By the time of the death of Leo X in 1521 it was calculated that there were more than 2,150 saleable offices in the Vatican, worth in the region of 3,000,000 ducats. They included even the highest offices within the papal court, like the post of Cardinal Camerlengo.

  The secularising effects on the papacy of all this can be seen most clearly in the collapse of papal commitment to the Crusading ideal. Pope Urban II had invented the Crusade, and his successors placed Crusading high on the list of fundamental papal priorities. Papal leadership of a united Christendom launched against the enemies of the cross remained a seductive vision. In the fifteenth century, however, it was one that had less and less appeal to the rulers of Europe, who preferred to fight each other. The fall of Constantinople in
1453 horrified the popes – the future Pius II wrote that ‘one of the two lights of Christendom has been extinguished’ – and successive popes from Nicholas V onwards tried to galvanise the princes into action. Callistus III poured all the energies of his pontificate into the project, sending legates throughout Europe to preach a Crusading Indulgence, taxing the clergy, and turning the Tiber into a shipyard for a Crusading fleet. The main effect of all this was to antagonise the already resentful national churches, and to trigger calls for a general council to put a stop to unreasonable papal demands. Pius II, equally committed to the Crusade, had no better luck. Confronted with princely indifference and by Venetian reluctance to jeopardise trade by antagonising the Turks, the dying pope went himself to Ancona to lead an expedition. ‘Our cry to “go forth”’, he declared, ‘has gone unheeded. Perhaps if the word is “Come with me” it will have more effect.’ He died at Ancona waiting for support which never came or, in the case of Venice, which came too late.

  Under Innocent VIII, however, four centuries of papal commitment to the pushing back of Islam was abandoned. In 1482 the Turkish Prince Cem, younger son of Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, presented himself before the Knights of St John at Rhodes. Naively, he asked their help in overthrowing his brother Bayezit, who had succeeded Mehmet II. Instead of helping him, the Knights negotiated a deal with Bayezit, who paid handsomely to have his dangerous brother kept under lock and key. In 1486 Innocent VIII placed Cem under papal protection (having bought the prisoner from the Grand Master of the Knights of St John by making the latter a cardinal), and three years later established him in some style in the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

  The Pope now became chief gaoler to the Sultan. Bayezit sent Innocent a gift of 120,000 crowns (almost equal to the total annual revenue of the papal state), and the relic of the Holy Lance which had pierced Christ’s side on Calvary. A special shrine was built for it in St Peter’s. Thereafter the Pope received an annual fee of 45,000 ducats to keep Cem in custody. These sophisticated proceedings were more than equalled by Innocent’s successor, Pope Alexander VI. He actively discouraged the Crusade, and applied to Bayezit for a further subsidy of 300,000 gold ducats, which he explained would help him keep France out of Italy, and so prevent it being used as the launching-pad for a French Crusade against Constantinople, now renamed Istanbul. The subordination of religious zeal to political pragmatism could go no further.

  II THE CRISIS OF CHRISTENDOM

  The Renaissance papacy, for all its glories, had shown itself again and again chronically resistant to reform. Yet everywhere in the Christian world, ever more urgently, reform was being called for. In Italy, that call was sounded most emphatically at the end of the fifteenth century by the Prior of the Dominican house of San Marco in Florence, Girolamo Savonarola. A revivalist preacher in the mould of john Capistrano or Vincent Ferrar, Savonarola announced apocalypse, and saw in the French invasion of Italy and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence the purifying scourge of God. Under his preaching, a heady mixture of biblical prophecy, cloudy political comment and moral fiilmination, Florence plunged into an extraordinary experiment in theocratic republicanism. Most forms of public amusement were banned, membership of the Dominican priory rocketed from 50 to 238 friars, married women left their husbands and entered convents, and outside the Palazzo Vecchio there were bonfires of vanities – jewels, lewd books, immodest clothing. With his own hands, the great Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli burned his own ‘pagan’ pictures.

  Savonarola identified the Rome of Alexander VI with the forces of Antichrist, whose downfall he predicted: ‘I saw in a vision a black cross above the Babylon that is Rome, upon which was written Ira Domini [the wrath of the Lord] … I say to you, the Church of God must be renewed, and it will be soon.’ Rome was a moral pig-sty, where everything, including the sacraments, was for sale. And in what everyone recognised as a reference to the Pope he lamented that ‘Once, anointed priests called their sons “nephews”; but now they speak no more of nephews, but always and everywhere of their sons … O prostitute Church.’7

  Alexander excommunicated Savonarola in 1497, after two years of increasingly frustrating attempts to silence him by less drastic means. In 1498 the city, disillusioned by adversity, turned on its prophet, and he was hanged and burned in the square where he had presided over the bonfires of vanities. His attack on Alexander continued to resonate, however. At the height of their confrontation he had declared Alexander to be no true pope, because he was an immoral atheist, and had called for a general council to reform the Church, starting with the papacy. This revival of the demands of the Conciliar movement was widely seen as playing into the hands of the French, who would later try to convene just such a council to unseat Alexander’s successor, Julius II (at Pisa in 1511). It touched a chord, nonetheless. Savonarola’s memory continued to be venerated even by ardently pro-papal religious leaders like the English theologian Bishop John Fisher, who would go to the scaffold in defence of papal authority in Henry VIII’s England. All good men recognised that something would have to be done about the popes.

  From the north, a cooler voice than Savonarola’s was calling for reform, the voice of Erasmus of Rotterdam. In northern Europe the Renaissance was a more sober and more exclusively Christian movement than in Italy, deeply influenced by late medieval religious movements such as the ‘Devotio Moderna’ and the search for a more authentic personal piety. For the northern Humanists, the quest for a return to the pure sources of human culture included Plato and Cicero, but focused on Christian classics – the writings of the early Fathers of the Church, and above all the scriptures. Erasmus poured his energies into producing editions of the works of St Jerome, St Augustine, St Ambrose. Above all, his edition of the Greek New Testament with a modern Latin translation (1516) aimed to bring before his contemporaries ‘Christ speaking, healing, dying and rising’.

  Erasmus was more than a pious scholar. He was also Europe’s wittiest satirist, and in a stream of lacerating comic works, like The Praise of Folly of 1509, he poked savage fun at the corruptions of the Church. He detested violence, and he had no desire to stoke the fires of revolution. He did want to use laughter to expose absurdity and corruption, however, to tickle the Church into reforming itself. He became the most celebrated man in Europe, and kings and cardinals competed for his friendship. Between 1506 and 1509 he lived in Italy, absorbing the glories of the Italian Renaissance, and casting a sardonic eye on the activities of Julius II.

  Erasmus and the many reform-minded Catholics who thought like him hated the. belligerent and worldly Julius, for the warrior-pope represented everything they thought a priest should not be. After Julius’ death an anonymous satire appeared entitled Julius Exclusus, which everyone assumed was the work of Erasmus, though he himself always resolutely denied it. Whoever its actual author was, it was saturated with the spirit of Erasmus’ angry mockery, a devastatingly funny but deadly indictment, in which the late pope was accused of every crime from sorcery to sodomy. The heart of the satire was the encounter at the gates of heaven between St Peter and the dead Julius, still clad in his armour and accompanied by an army of noisy ghosts created by his wars. Peter refuses to recognise this murderous thug as his successor, or to admit him to heaven, and in the ensuing argument Julius unwittingly betrays the sordidly materialistic vision of the papacy which many men feared underpinned the glories of Renaissance Rome. In reply to Peter’s demand whether he has been his true successor by teaching true doctrine, gaining souls for Christ, being diligent in prayer, Julius rebukes the presumption of the ‘beggarly fisherman’ and replies:

  You shall know who and what I am … I raised the revenue. I invented new offices and sold them. I invented a way to sell bishoprics without simony … I annexed Bologna to the Holy See. I beat the Venetians. I drove the French out of Italy … I have set all the princes of the Empire by the ears. I have torn up treaties, kept great armies in the field. I have covered Rome with palaces, and I have left
five millions in the treasury behind me.8

  This bitter satire was rooted in disappointment at the failure of reform, above all, the failure of the popes to call a reform council. In 1511 a group of disgruntled cardinals supported by Louis XII of France had tried to reinvent the Conciliar era by summoning a council against Julius at Pisa. Quite obviously a French political ploy, this assembly received almost no support, but it forced Julius to reply in kind. In May 1512 he opened the Fifth Lateran Council in Rome, destined to be the last papal Council before the break-up of Western Christendom. In terms of reform, Lateran V was toothless, composed mainly of Italian bishops, its officials appointed by the Pope, its agenda dictated by him, its decrees published in the form of a papal bull. The summary of its proceedings which Julius Exclusus put in the dead pope’s mouth – ‘I told it what it was to say … We had two Masses, to show we were acting under Divine Inspiration, and then there was a speech in honour of myself. At the next session I cursed the schismatic cardinals. At the third I laid France under an interdict… Then the Acts were drafted into a bull and sent round Europe’ – is a caricature, but not all that far wide of the mark.9

  Julius died before Lateran V had completed its work, and the advent of the new Medici Pope Leo X, young (he was only thirty seven), cultivated, peaceable and free from the grosser vices, led to a surge of expectation. He had signed an electoral pact which bound him to continue the Council, but nothing happened. A few of the milder reform measures found their way into the papal bull Supernae Dispositions Arbitrio, but nobody, least of all the Pope, paid any attention. From the Pope’s point of view the most satisfactory outcome of the Lateran Council was the discrediting of the schismatical Council of Pisa, and the French monarchy’s abandonment of Conciliar theory, a stick it had brandished over the heads of the popes for the best part of a century. While the Lateran Council was still sitting he signed the Concordat of Bologna (1516) with the French crown. This gave the King the right to appoint to bishoprics, abbacies and major benefices in his territories. But it restored the payment of annates to the Pope, permitted appeals to Rome (forbidden by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, which was now annulled), and formally acknowledged the Pope’s supremacy over a general council. In practice, the Concordat made the French King master of a French national church, over which the Pope had little control. Leo considered this a price worth paying for the abandonment of the Pragmatic Sanction, the theoretical recognition of papal prerogatives and the actual restoration of a substantial part of papal revenues.