Rome’s new streets, and especially their names, could be read like a book that recounted Rome’s violent and nepotistic recent history. Just as Roman emperors had left their mark with a new set of baths or a new forum, Renaissance popes – who could behave very much like Roman emperors – did so in more functional ways. The habit was inspired by a disaster. One evening during the 1450 Holy Year, when the Sant’Angelo Bridge was crowded with people leaving the Borgo for their inns across the river, a mule started bucking. In the panic that followed almost two hundred pilgrims were crushed to death or fell into the Tiber and drowned. Afterwards a number of measures were taken to remove the city’s worst bottlenecks and to make it more easily traversable for pilgrims. In time for the 1475 Holy Year, Sixtus IV – a worldly, power-player pope, whose nephew was the assassin of baby Giulio de’ Medici’s father – built Rome’s first new bridge for more than a thousand years. It was intended to ease pressure on the Ponte Sant’Angelo and, naturally, Sixtus named it after himself, as the Ponte Sisto.
After the Ponte Sisto came new roads. For the 1500 Holy Year, Pope Alexander VI (previously Rodrigo Borgia) built the Via Alessandrina, which cut through the Leonine City. Alexander VI’s successor, Pope Julius II, was in many ways even more alarming than his Borgia predecessor. The nephew of the Sixtus IV who had built the Ponte Sisto, he had a foul temper, suffered from syphilis and dressed in armour to lead his troops in battle. Julius built the Via Giulia, that linked the Ponte Sant’Angelo with his uncle’s Ponte Sisto. Across the river Julius built another new road, the Via Lungara, which linked the Vatican with Trastevere, each of which had their own walls, and which until then had only been reachable from one another by passing across the river twice and going through the main part of Rome. Finally, Julius’ successor, Clement’s cousin, Leo X, built the Via Leonia that extended halfway across the city, from Porta del Popolo in the north to the centre of the city.
Yet if Renaissance Rome’s popes built new bridges, palaces and streets, they were responsible for comparatively few new churches. In the 1470s Pope Sixtus IV built Santa Maria del Popolo, a traditional Renaissance design − octagonal with a small dome − which, like his Ponte Sisto, had pilgrims in mind: it lay just inside the city’s northern gate where most of them first entered Rome. Sixtus also built the beautiful Santa Maria della Pace, near Piazza Navona. However, most churches of this era were built not by the papacy but by professional guilds or fraternities of foreign nationals. The city’s German community built Santa Maria dell’Anima, close to what is now Piazza Navona, and the Spanish of Rome created San Pietro in Montorio on the Gianicolo Hill.
The great majority of Rome’s churches in the 1520s were still medieval. Many dated from the glory days of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the city had thrived and drew Italy’s finest artists, from Pietro Cavallini to Jacopo Torriti, to create magnificent mosaics, frescoes and statues. Yet there was something a little odd about Rome’s high medieval churches. When they were built the Gothic style held sway and across Europe churches rose up with tall, pointed arches; but not in Rome. Roman church builders refused to bow to fashion and remained uniquely conservative. Arches stayed Romanesque and mosaics were so closely modelled on the city’s earliest church decoration that they included imagery that had nothing to do with Christianity: shepherds, dolphins, and rural scenes. Today’s visitors to Rome’s medieval churches may struggle to find a sense of passing time, as their decorations seem strangely alike.
If early sixteenth-century popes built few churches at least they had a good excuse: they were engaged on building one church that was Europe’s greatest construction project since classical times. It is a change that a visitor from 1081 would have found profoundly shocking. In 1527 Rome’s greatest and most famous church, St Peter’s, which had drawn pilgrims from across Europe for more than a thousand years, was half demolished. Only the cathedral’s frontage, which faced on to Saint Peter’s Square, and the eastern part of the nave, remained standing. The rest was in chaos, with giant new pillars rising out of a construction site. In its midst, a temporary building had been put up to shelter the altar and Saint Peter’s tomb beneath.
In some ways St Peter’s was a victim of its own success. Three centuries earlier it had quashed its old rival the Lateran Basilica once and for all, when Innocent III had ‘Mother of all churches’ – a title the Lateran had long claimed – written in giant letters on the archway above in its nave. As if stung by its demotion the Lateran Basilica burned down not once but twice, in 1308 and 1361. Saint Peter’s corpse had won a crushing victory, drawing the whole city westwards towards it, while his head, allegedly in the Lateran, was left increasingly remote, exiled to a kind of village with a cathedral and a palace surrounded by empty fields. Naturally, Renaissance popes wanted to be buried near Saint Peter’s body, and they also wanted to be buried in proper style. The demolition of St Peter’s, which many Romans regarded as an act of gross vandalism, was first set in motion by the warrior pope, Julius II, who claimed the old building was unsafe. It was true that a leaning nave wall was cause of concern, but Julius’ real reasoning seems to have been less selfless: demolition allowed him to build himself a splendid tomb.
The building that was to replace the old St Peter’s had been designed, like many of Rome’s new buildings in the early sixteenth century, by Bramante, who declared it would be as if the Basilica of Maxentius – one of the largest buildings of the late Roman Empire – were topped by the dome of the Pantheon. Romans replied by naming him Bramante Ruinante (Bramante the wrecker). It was not by chance that no building on this scale had been attempted since late antiquity. Bramante used moulded concrete techniques that had remained forgotten or misunderstood for a thousand years. It was only in the previous decades that Renaissance scholars had studied these methods, which had been described by the classical architect and writer Vitruvius, and brought them back into use.
The popes had, of course, also completed another great church, though this was not for the Romans but strictly for their own private use: the Sistine Chapel. Constructed rather hurriedly between 1477 and 1481, its walls were then decorated with paintings by some of the greatest artists of the era: Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino and Filippino Lippi. As for the chapel’s ceiling, it might never have been touched if the building had been better constructed. In 1504 a huge crack appeared in the roof above the altar. It was made safe by placing large metal rods beneath the floor and the roof. Pope Julius II was not prepared to leave his uncle’s Sixtus’ chapel ugly and so, for a huge fee, he hired a 33-year-old artist named Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint over the mess. At first Julius wanted Michelangelo to depict the twelve apostles but when Michelangelo complained that this would be ‘a poor sort of thing’, Julius – at least according to Michelangelo – let him paint whatever he liked. The result, twelve years later, was 1,200 square metres of extraordinary imagery, most of it by Michelangelo’s own hand, that revolutionized Western art.
That Renaissance popes had devoted their resources to a private chapel is not surprising. Compared to their medieval predecessors, who were constantly rubbing shoulders with their Roman subjects, Renaissance popes were aloof and princely. The great processions of the Middle Ages, in which popes rode or walked barefoot among crowds of Romans, mostly vanished during the Avignon years, when the popes abandoned Rome for Provence. By 1527 only one or two processions were still held, such as those that marked the lavish feasts of Corpus Christi and Saint Mark. The most splendid procession was the rarest: the possesso, where a new pope paraded through the city to claim it as his own. Likewise, most papal ceremonies were now held behind closed doors before a select audience of high churchmen and foreign ambassadors. In medieval times popes had frequently celebrated mass and preached but in the Renaissance they became increasingly mute. Monks now did most of the preaching and services were dominated by laborious rituals, such as the vesting – dressing – of the pope.
Yet, if the Sistine Chapel had been costly to
build and decorate, its expenses were dwarfed by those of rebuilding St Peter’s. It was this vast outlay, in fact, that was largely to blame for the dire predicament in which the Romans found themselves in 1527. Julius II’s successor, Leo X, who had numerous other expenses, from banquets and elephant pageants to predatory wars, began a fund-raising campaign to pay for the building work. In 1517 he sent a monk named Johann Tetzel to tour Germany selling indulgences, which supposedly had the power to release one’s dead relatives from purgatory, or reduce the length of one’s stay there. Tetzel’s salesmanship – he used the memorable catchphrase, ‘The moment a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs’ – caught the eye of another monk, named Martin Luther, who was so incensed that he wrote a denunciation of Church corruption, the 95 Theses. It was the first of a series of memorably pithy, irate pamphlets which, thanks to printing, rapidly went viral across Germany. As has been seen, Luther’s writings had inspired the Landsknechte with loathing for the Roman Church. Luther also gave them a sense of divine destiny by prophesying that it was God’s will that Rome should be destroyed.
It was not only Tetzel’s marketing campaign that had offended Luther. Luther had visited Rome in 1510, arriving full of idealism and departing thoroughly disillusioned. It was not very surprising. Romans were expert at fleecing every kind of visitor, including German monks, while the papal court was very far from the Christian simplicity Luther admired. It was a place of superficiality and fashion, where success came to those who could charm the right people, or had a talent for ad-libbing poetry in Latin. Life at the pinnacle of the Church was also luxurious. The two papal dining halls employed a wine steward, three bakers, five chief cooks, six stewards and numerous assistant cooks. As well as the pope, the Vatican Palace was home to several dozen high churchmen, each of whom had his own large household of servants.
The papacy was gaudily splendid abroad, too. Like Europe’s princes in this era, popes had to spend big and look the part, to be heard. The papacy operated a network of nuncios, legates and revenue-seeking apostolic collectors, who travelled to every corner of Europe and whose lifestyle was calculated to impress. The papacy even had its own postal system, which, at least by Renaissance standards, was fast and efficient, and made Rome Europe’s communications centre.
Naturally, all of these arrangements were expensive, and eleventh-century church reformers such as Gregory VII would have turned in their graves had they known how their successors raised money. The rot began at the end of the Avignon years, during the Great Schism, when Europe had three rival popes, each of whom was painfully short of funds. By the sixteenth century highly dubious money-raising techniques had become the norm. As well as taxing the Papal States to the hilt, and borrowing vast sums from a network of bankers – whose relatives they appointed as cardinals – Renaissance popes, like Renaissance princes, made an art of selling Church positions, and there was hardly a post, religious or bureaucratic, that was not up for sale. Bishoprics and cardinals’ posts were routinely sold. So was the income from profitable abbeys, cathedrals and churches. One reason the papacy needed an efficient postal service was so that it could learn quickly when some distant bishop had died, whose post the papacy could give to a supporter or sell. When short of cash – as they always were – popes created new positions that were sold like a modern annuity: the buyer would pay a large sum and then be reimbursed with annual income over time. There were even low-ranking posts calculated to appeal to small investors, and places in the papal police force, the servientes armorum, were bought by Rome’s smiths, bakers and barbers.
Almost everyone in the papal court had rights to the income of an abbey or cathedral or church that kept them financially afloat. Favoured high churchmen sometimes had as many as two dozen, which yielded huge sums. Having purchased positions, courtiers were entitled to sell them or bequeath them to their relatives. This leads us to something else that medieval church reformers would have found profoundly disturbing. If in the eleventh century the Church had a problem with procreating priests, in the Renaissance it had a problem with procreating popes. Under the reign of Innocent VIII in the 1480s it not only became acceptable for popes to have illegitimate children, but for popes to openly acknowledge and promote their progeny. Alexander VI – previously Rodrigo Borgia – legitimized his son Cesare, made him a cardinal and then helped him conquer an Italian state for himself (which Cesare was prevented from doing only because his father died before he could finish the job). Alexander’s daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, married members of no fewer than three of Italy’s best families: Giovanni Sforza, Alfonso of Aragon the duke of Bisceglie (murdered by Cesare in the Vatican) and finally Alfonso d’Este, son of the duke of Ferrara.
By comparison the two Medici popes were examples of virtue, as neither had children. Claims that Clement VII was the real father of his nephew Alessandro were almost certainly false, while rumours at the time suggested that his cousin Leo X’s main interest was in his own gender. However, childlessness was no safeguard against nepotism. Leo made four of his close relatives cardinals and, as we saw earlier, he used papal forces to expel the duke of Urbino from his lands to try and provide a state for his cousin, Giuliano. Clement, who wanted to be a good pope, refused to appoint any new cardinals, despite the fact that he was desperately in need of the cash, which a sale or two would have provided. Yet, as will be seen, when he was in deep trouble even Clement weakened.
That the Church was run along these lines cannot be defended, but from its very earliest days Western European Christianity had always been something of a nut of two halves. For every self-denying austerity churchman there was another who was happy to enjoy some worldly pleasures, and the Church went through regular cycles in which each of these forces gained ascendancy over the other. The real difference between Christianity in the eleventh century and five centuries later was one of power. In the eleventh century, thanks to the intervention of the Church reformer Emperor Henry III, purists took control of the Church. By contrast, in the 1520s the new purists – Martin Luther and his supporters – remained firmly outside. If Charles V had intervened and made Martin Luther pope, as was not inconceivable, there would have been no Reformation.
The Romans had no illusions about their rulers. They frequently became the subject of that scathing, world-weary humour which was so distinctively Roman, and which – thanks to the wealth of documentation available – becomes visible at this time. In the 1520s a high-class Roman prostitute was referred to as ‘an honest courtier’. Popes and members of their court were routinely reviled in foul-mouthed writings placed on a battered ancient statue, which Romans called Pasquino, in the Parione district. In one of these Pasquino complained that he had been insulted in a most offensive way. Another talking statue asked what the insult had been. Had he been called a liar or a thief? A cuckold or a forger? A fornicator who had knocked up some girl? No, replied Pasquino, the insult was far, far worse. He had been called a cardinal.
Yet it was not papal extravagance that aggravated the Romans, but rather its absence. High-spending Leo X was immensely popular, so much so that on his death he became the first pope to have his statue set up on that bastion of civic, anti-papal Rome, the Capitoline Hill. By contrast his short-lived successor, the Dutchman Adrian VI, who tried to clean up the Church and cut extravagance, was loathed, and his death was greeted with a classic example of Roman black humour. The morning after Adrian died a note appeared on his doctor’s door, thanking him for saving the nation. One can see the Romans’ point of view. Austere popes may have been good for the reputation of the Catholic Church but they were no use to the Romans. Adrian’s brief reign saw a halt to all the city’s building projects and caused an exodus of scholars and artists. By contrast under high-spending Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X, the city thrived.
After Adrian VI, the news that another Medici had been elected was greeted with excitement but well-meaning Clement soon disappointed. Conscious of the financial black hole his cousin had
left, Clement spent frugally and taxed heavily, even taxing clergymen, who had previously been exempt. Clement, like Adrian VI, was unlucky in having inherited a huge financial mess, but both popes were also plain unlucky. Leo X’s eight-year reign had been free of sudden and unexpected disasters but he was hardly cold in his grave when things started going wrong. The humanist Piero Valeriano joked grimly Adrian VI arrived in August 1522 with the plague, which was almost true: the disease preceded him by three months. It struck again two years later, now under Clement, and again in September 1525, when it ravaged the city for five months. These outbreaks may have been less lethal than the earlier and far greater bubonic plague epidemic – the Black Death – but they still caused numerous deaths, especially among children who had no immunity, while the city was struck by other problems too. Clement’s war with Charles V caused food prices to leap in 1526 and in the same year the Tiber broke its banks and Rome was disastrously flooded. Plague, war and famine – three Apocalypse horsemen out of four – caused Rome’s population to fall sharply in the years before 1527, perhaps by as much as a third.
These disasters tell us a surprising truth about Renaissance Rome. A visitor from 1081 would have found that in many respects the city had been far more comfortable to live in during the eleventh century. Certainly, its infrastructure had been in a far better state. Many of Renaissance Rome’s sewers, which had been one of the city’s first achievements, had become blocked and, as the street level rose thanks to fires and floods, were all but unreachable to repair. A stinking open sewer, the Chiavica di San Silvestro, ran right across the city, from the Trevi area to the Tiber. The aqueducts were no better. In the 1520s, when Rome had far more inhabitants than it had had for a thousand years, only a single aqueduct still worked – the Acqua Vergine – and it produced a feeble flow of water. Attempts to repair it were hampered by the fact that the Romans appeared to have to have forgotten where its underground course began.
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