It was at first decided that the easiest way to dispose of the present Pope would be to pay an assassin to stab him while he was out hunting. But then a more subtle plan was devised: His Holiness would be dispatched by means of poisoned bandages which a quack doctor from Vercelli, aided by Petrucci’s secretary and a Sienese friend of his, would in some way find reason to apply to the Pope’s anal fistula. Having satisfied himself of the likely efficacy of this complicated plot, Petrucci left to discuss its consequences with Francesco Maria della Rovere, the deposed Duke of Urbino. In his absence the conspiracy was uncovered through the indiscretions of a page; and the quack, Petrucci’s secretary and his Sienese friend were all handed over to the attentions of the papal rack-master.
Soon afterwards Petrucci was asked to return to Rome to discuss certain matters with the Pope who at the same time sent him promise of safe conduct. Either trusting in this guarantee, or supposing that the Pope had repented of his previous conduct to his family, the ingenuous Petrucci returned immediately to Rome where, in company with Cardinal Sauli, he presented himself at the Vatican. Both men were promptly arrested and thrown into ‘the most horrible dungeon’ of Sant’ Angelo, Petrucci cursing the treacherous Leo at the top of his voice, Sauli furiously tearing his rochet to pieces. Like their minions, they, too, were tortured on the rack. Their confessions having been duly elicited, orders were given for the arrest of Cardinal Riario, who was discovered in a state of such abject terror that he had to be carried to his place of confinement in a litter.
Rather than arrest the other sympathizers with Petrucci’s plot, the Pope now convoked the consistory, before whom he appeared in so unaccustomed a rage that some of his audience believed him to be playing a part in order to intimidate them. His obese body trembling and his voice so loud that it could be heard ringing round the adjoining corridors, he demanded the names of the other guilty men. Cardinal Soderini and Cardinal Adrian both confessed their knowledge of the conspiracy, and knelt in humble submission at the Pope’s feet.
Adrian managed to escape from Rome and disappeared into oblivion. Soderini, having paid a vast fine which helped to settle some of Leo’s more pressing debts, thought it best to follow Adrian’s example. Riario was relieved of a sum even greater than that taken from Soderini and went to live in Naples. Sauli, who had powerful friends in France as well as in Italy, was allowed to leave his dungeon and to live under house arrest at Monte Rotondo, where he died in mysterious circumstances the next year. Petrucci was executed in his dungeon by the Pope’s Muslim hangman who either strangled him or cut off his head. The Vercelli quack, Petrucci’s secretary and his friend, were dragged by horses through the Roman streets; gouts of flesh having been nipped from their bodies with red-hot pincers, they were then gibbeted on the parapet of the bridge of Sant’ Angelo.
Although his finances had been much improved by the huge fines imposed on Riario and Soderini, the Pope still felt it necessary to bring in further sums of money to his treasury by creating numerous new cardinals to fill up the vacant places in the Sacred College, and by requiring the richer of those elected to make suitable contributions. Money, however, was not Leo’s only reason for the creation of thirty-one new cardinals. He hoped to create a far more reliable College than its predecessor, and one that would raise no objections to the advancement of Medicean interests. So, while there were several worthy men on the Pope’s list, there were also those who had been selected for more selfish reasons. Among these were young princes of the royal houses of France and Portugal; Ercole Rangone, the son of Bianca Rangone of Modena, Leo’s former benefactress; Pompeio Colonna, whose unruliness it was hoped a scarlet hat might serve to moderate; two Florentine nephews, Niccolò Ridolfi and Giovanni Salviati; and a third Florentine relation, Luigi Rossi.
With the Sacred College thus conveniently packed with Medici friends and relations and those who had cause to be grateful to the Medici, the Pope felt that the time was now propitious for the marriage of his nephew Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de la Tour Auvergne, cousin of Francis I, King of France. Accordingly, in March the next year, 1518, Lorenzo was sent north across the Alps with an immense train of crimson-clad attendants and his uncle’s lavish presents, amongst which were to be found thirty-six horses and an astonishing nuptial bed made of tortoise-shell inlaid with mother-of-pearl and enriched by precious stones.
Much as they were impressed by the evident riches of his family, the denizens of the French court were far from struck with the Duke of Urbino himself, whose arrogant nature they found objectionable and whose physique at the age of twenty-five was now pitiable. After a few months of marriage, indeed, it became evident that the Duke did not have much longer to live. Nor, as it happened, did his wife. She died at the end of April 1519 soon after the birth of a daughter, who was christened Caterina and was one day to be Queen of France. Her husband died a few days later of tuberculosis aggravated by syphilis. Even in the villas of Careggi and Poggio a Caiano, where he had spent the last months of his life in the company of a Pistoian secretary and another male companion of sinister reputation, there was little evidence of grief.
Ever since Lorenzo had returned from France, the Florentines had been grumbling about his increasingly lordly manner, his political ambitions that enfeebled health had in no way diminished, his mismanagement of the city’s finances and the influence of his haughty, greedy and domineering mother, Alfonsina, whose interests were wholly bound up in her son and whose death in Rome eight months after his was received with as little sorrow.
Well aware of Florence’s discontent, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who had hurriedly left Rome to secure the family’s hold upon the city, was careful to give no offence. He arrived just before the news of Lorenzo’s death became generally known, and was able to ensure that there was no unrest and that the people were prepared to leave the administration of the Republic to him, and to those leading citizens whose advice he tactfully sought, until the Pope’s future plans for Florence were settled.
It was fortunate for the Medici party in Florence that Giulio’s conduct of affairs was so conciliatory and astute, and that under his conscientious administration of its financial affairs the city enjoyed a period of prosperity. For the Pope seemed far from decided what to do about either Florence or Urbino now that the Medici heir was a half-French baby girl and the only boys on his side of the family were both bastards-Ippolito, the son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, by a sensuous lady from Pesaro; and Alessandro, presented as the son of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, but rumoured to be Cardinal Giulio’s son either by a Moorish slave from Naples or by a peasant woman from the Roman Campagna.
The Pope eventually decided to create Caterina de’ Medici Duchess of Urbino and to annexe her Duchy to the states of the Church, calling upon the Florentines to contribute a large part of the money which had been expended on driving out della Rovere, while compensating the Republic with the fortress of San Leo and the conquered district of Montefeltro. There still remained, however, the problem of what to do about the government of Florence, a problem which was complicated at the beginning of 1519 by the long-awaited death of the Emperor Maximilian and by the subsequent election as his successor of Charles V.
Both the King of France and the Pope did their utmost to prevent this election of a young ambitious man who was not only the King of Spain and Naples, but master of the Netherlands and an Austrian Grand Duke. But having failed to prevent the election, Leo decided, after many tergiversations and vacillations, to abandon the French and to enter into secret negotiations with Charles V whose help he needed to settle a matter which could no longer be ignored, the matter of that tiresome Augustinian friar, Martin Luther.
For years the Pope had been endeavouring to dismiss from his mind all thoughts of Luther and of German demands for reform in the Church, hoping that the problems would eventually resolve themselves in the pettifogging arguments of German monks. But Luther would not go away; and the Pope had been driven to excommunicate him. He n
ow hoped that Charles V as a good Catholic would finally settle the matter for him by having the heretic tried and executed. The Emperor had no particular objections to doing so; but the German princes, who listened with some sympathy to Luther’s impassioned declarations, were of a different mind. Charles could overrule them, of course; and, so the Pope was informed, he would overrule them. There was, however, to be a quid pro quo: in exchange for the condemnation of Luther, the Emperor would require the Pope’s support in his intended attack upon France’s remaining possessions in Italy, including Milan. Leo agreed to this on condition that once the French had been divested of the occupied territories, the Papacy could not only take back from them the towns of Parma and Piacenza, which Francis I had declined to return at the conference at Bologna in 1515, but also receive Charles’s help in taking Ferrara. So the bargain was struck and the Emperor’s army prepared to march.
A dispatch from Cardinal Giulio with news of the Emperor’s victory over Francis I, the fall of Milan, and the flight of the French army towards the Alps was awaiting the Pope at Villa Magliana where, despite a recent operation on his anal fistula, he had gone for a day’s hunting. The day had been humid; the night was cold and windy; and as Leo sat in his bedroom in front of a blazing fire, with his back to an open window to which he moved from time to time to watch a celebratory bonfire blazing in the courtyard below, he caught a severe and feverish cold. Two days later he was carried back to Rome where he was told of the capture of Piacenza and Parma.
On Sunday, the first day of the month of December [1521] at about the seventh hour, Pope Leo expired of a violent chill without anyone warning him that his sickness was mortal, since the physicians all protested that he was but slightly indisposed owing to the cold he had taken at the Magliana.
Immediately on receipt of the news of the Pope’s sudden death, Cardinal Giulio hurried back for the conclave, which began on 28 December, evidently hoping to succeed his cousin. But Cardinal Francesco Soderini had also made haste for Rome and, having arrived first, had already succeeded, with the help of Cardinal Pompeio Colonna, in forming so strong an opposition to Giulio’s election that he decided to support the candidature of Charles V’s former tutor, an obscure, virtuous and ascetic Flemish cardinal, Adrian Dedel, of whom many members of the Sacred College had scarcely even heard. The subsequent election of this modest scholar, which had been engineered to thwart the ambitions of more powerful candidates such as Alessandro Farnese and Thomas Wolsey, caused no one more surprise and consternation than the new Pope himself, who received the news with horror. Choosing the title of Adrian VI – tardily to fulfil the prophecy of the soothsayer whose prognostications had so excited the English Cardinal Adrian of Corneto – the Pope reluctantly left for Rome where he contrived to live, spending a ducat a day, upon frugal meals served to him by an old Flemish harridan of whom he seemed unaccountably fond. The failure of his forlorn attempts to reform the Church, the struggle to make stringent economies in the papal household and the deep enmity of those whose previously enjoyable lives were transformed by his parsimony, all proved too much for him. He contracted a kidney disease, and this, combined, so it was inevitably said, with poison, resulted in his death in just over a year. The thankful citizens of Rome, who never since have been required to put up with a Pope who was not Italian, laid festive garlands at the door of his doctor, naming him their liberator.
Satisfied that Florence – where the bastards, Ippolito and Alessandro, as well as Caterina de’ Medici were all now living – was securely in the hands of the Medici party, Cardinal Giulio had set up house in Rome in the fine palace which had been wrested from Cardinal Riario for condoning the plot against the life of Leo X. Without undue ostentation he had lived there as a generous Medici was expected to live, a patron of artists and musicians, a protector of the poor, a lavish host. Neither his cold manner nor his saturnine appearance fitted him for such a part; but it was as well that he had played it, for in the tedious conclave which followed the death or Adrian VI he needed all the friends he could muster. At first it seemed impossible that he could win the election. The French were strongly opposed to him, and his other enemies were many and implacable, none more determined to thwart him than the powerful Cardinal Pompeio Colonna, who hoped to secure the election himself. Weeks passed; a month went by, two months; there were demonstrations and riots in Rome. There had never been a longer conclave in living memory. Then at last, after many bribes had changed hands, when many secret promises had been made, when Cardinal Colonna removed his objections for fear that in the impasse his rival, Cardinal Orsini, might be chosen, and when it was known that a Medici election was acceptable to both Charles V and to Henry VIII as well as to Francis I – who thought it unlikely that the Medici would remain loyal to the Emperor – Cardinal Giulio emerged from the conclave, after sixty days’ incarceration as Pope Clement VII. He was twenty-five years old. Few of his opponents in the conclave had been converted to friendship, but there were many in Rome who wished him well and ‘trusted to behold again a flourishing court, a liberal Pontiff and a revival of the arts and letters which had been banished under the late barbarian rule of Adrian’.
Certainly Pope Clement did prove himself both a generous and a discriminating patron. He was not open-handed by nature, and far from convivial or gregarious: he preferred to spend his time listening to music or discussing theological and philosophical questions to the more ebullient pursuits of Leo X. But he understood the value and rewards of liberality. He was as munificent in his almsgiving as Leo, and quite as bountiful a patron. He continued his family’s patronage of Raphael, asking him to submit designs for a villa to be built on the cypress-covered slopes of Monte Mario.1 He gave several commissions to that most versatile, most quarrelsome and most boastful of Florentines, Benvenuto Cellini. He gave his encouragement to the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Koppernigk, known as Copernicus. He put Giulio Romano and Gian Francesco Penni to work in the Vatican, where he had already arranged for Leonardo da Vinci to be provided with his own apartments. And he confirmed the commission which Leo X had already given to Michelangelo to design a chapel at San Lorenzo in Florence to house the tombs of their fathers, Giuliano and Lorenzo, and of their two cousins, Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, and Giuliano, Duke of Nemours.2 Michelangelo was also asked to design a library at San Lorenzo to which the family’s collection of books could one day be returned.3
As Francis I had foreseen when withdrawing his objections to his election, Pope Clement soon proved himself a far from faithful ally of the Emperor; and towards the end of 1524, after many tortuous turns of policy, he had allied the Papacy once more with France, whose army was again on the march. No sooner had this decision been taken than Clement, more indecisive and irresolute with each passing month, began to regret it. He had due cause to do so, for in February 1525 news reached Rome that the Emperor, in alliance with the Duke of Milan, had defeated the French army at Pavia and that Francis I had been taken prisoner. The Pope, now virtually a prisoner of Charles himself, endeavoured to extricate himself from his unfortunate position not by openly coming to terms with the Emperor, as sensible men expected him to do, but by entering into secret negotiations with Francis who, released from imprisonment, determined to cross the Alps once more.
These negotiations, secret as the papal agents endeavoured to keep them, did not long remain hidden from the Emperor, who well understood what the Pope was trying to do and took appropriate measures to forestall the formation of an anti-imperial alliance. In September 1526, abetted by Don Ugodi Moncada, the Emperor’s envoy, Cardinal Pompeio Colonna with a strong force of retainers and hired men-at-arms fell upon Rome, occupied the suburbs around St Peter’s, and pillaged the apostolic palace from which the Pope was forced to flee to the greater safety of Castel Sant’ Angelo. There he was constrained to sign a treaty by which he undertook to abandon the league against the Emperor and to pardon Colonna for his insulting attack.
It was a treaty which Clement had no intention of
keeping. A few weeks after signing it, papal troops were dispatched to the Colonna estates with orders to destroy their strongholds and castles, to intimidate their tenants, and to serve notice upon the family that they were to be declared outlaws and deprived of all their titles. In a rage so furious that he was seen to tremble at the very mention of Pope Clement’s name, Cardinal Colonna offered his services and that of all the men he could muster to Charles de Lannoy, Charles V’s Viceroy at Naples, who now landed at Gaeta with a strong army dispatched to ‘teach the Pope a lesson he would never forget’.
Even more alarming threats had already come from Germany where the old warrior, George von Frundsberg, had assembled an immense army of Landsknechte, mostly Lutherans from Bavaria and Franconia, fired with a missionary zeal to have their revenge upon the Roman Anti-Christ and with a more practical but no less intense desire to relieve him of his valuable possessions. This intimidating force, undeterred by torrential rains and Alpine snowstorms, descended into Lombardy. And although the Pope’s other enemies, Colonna and Lannoy, were checked in their advance on Rome at Frosinone, nothing seemed capable of halting the further progress of von Frundsberg’s tough Germans.
The House Of Medici Page 25
