But could it be that this spasm of good news was merely preparation for the end?
In midsummer 1492, as Columbus made his final preparations, as the Jews boarded their ships, as the Christianization of Al Andalus went forward, the news from “the capital of the world” was bleak. Rome remained the fulcrum of European geopolitics. When events shook the Eternal City, all of Europe shook with it. Now came the report of the deteriorating health of Innocent VIII. As the public perception grew that the pope was dying, lawlessness broke out. Murders and assassinations became commonplace around the Piazza del Popolo and near the Spanish Steps. The Church feared for its treasures. Finally, things grew so desperate that rival factions took the extraordinary step of declaring a truce to quell the disorders.
The more important tournament went forward ferociously behind the scenes. As the pope dwindled, the cardinals jockeyed for position. In the early going, as Innocent VIII moved into his death throes, the Spanish cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia, ran a feeble fourth. His greatest liability was his Spanishness, for in Rome, Spaniards were considered barbarians by the cognoscenti. But Borgia had considerable advantages. As vice chancellor, virtually the second pope, he had been a powerful and capable, if controversial, force in Rome for thirty years. His roots were in Valencia, where the Borgias hailed from mixed Moorish stock, and he had been well educated in law at the University of Bologna. His head for business had been evident from an early age. His uncle had been Alfonso de Borgia, the pope Calixtus III, whose achievements were an unsuccessful crusade against the Turks to recapture Constantinople and the cleansing of Church history by declaring St. Joan of Arc officially innocent twenty years after her burning. Calixtus had made his nephew a cardinal at the age of twenty-four and the commander of papal forces.
For a cardinal, Borgia was a wild and rambunctious roué. He was tall, with an athletic build, and his face was full and fleshy, dominated by a curved, aristocratic nose, sparkling eyes, and a full mouth that broke easily into a mischievous smile. While his manner was amiable, he exuded a certain animal energy. He had a honeyed, mellifluous voice, and his words were often laced with well-turned phrases. And he was, in the words of a contemporary, the “most carnal of men.”
“He attracts beautiful women to love him and draws them to him like the magnet draws iron,” his teacher, Gaspar of Verona, wrote. But Borgia was also a cad. “He leaves them as he found them.” In 1460, two years after Calixtus’s death, the new pope, Pius II, felt compelled to issue a stern rebuke to the young Spanish cardinal for scandalous behavior.
“My dear Son:
“We have learned that your Worthiness, forgetful of the high office with which you are invested, was present four days ago in the Gardens of Giovanni de Bichis, where there were several women of Siena, women wholly given over to worldly vanities. Your companion [another cardinal] was one of your colleagues whom his years, if not the dignity of his office, ought to have reminded of his duty. We have heard that the dance was indulged in with much wantonness. None of the allurements of love were lacking, and you conducted yourself in a wholly worldly manner.
“Shame forbids mention of all that took place, for not only the things themselves but their very names are unworthy of your rank. You and a few servants were leaders and inspirers of this orgy. It is said that nothing is now talked of in Siena but your vanity, which is the subject of universal ridicule! We leave it to you to decide whether it is becoming to your dignity to court young women and to send those whom you love fruits and wine, and during the day give no thought to anything but sensual pleasures.”
Though he clearly had no intention to change his rakish behavior, Borgia apologized, and the pope forgave him. “So long as you do good and live becomingly, you will find in me a father and a protector whose blessing will also fall on those who are dear to you,” the foolish old pope replied.
Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia would never lose his passions; but at least in the year of this rebuke he settled into a permanent, though scarcely exclusive, relationship with a shrewd and voluptuous beauty named Vannozza Cattanei. She was said to be a lusty combination of Venus and Juno, and she parlayed her relationship with the cardinal into a substantial commodious house on the Via del Pellegrino, the Street of the Pilgrim. Predictably, it was not far from the cardinal’s own magnificent palace, known as the Palazzo Sforza-Cesarini, located aptly enough on the Via Banchi Vecchi, the Street of the Ancient Banks. With its tower and three-story loggia overlooking a courtyard, and its staff of two hundred minions, the Borgia palace was compared to the golden house of Nero.
In the years ahead, Vannozza bore the cardinal five children, including his favorites, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. Between these notorious villains of history, they were alternately rumored to be masters of the poison cup, the incest bed, fratricidal dagger, garrote, and, in Cesare’s case, the model, even more than King Ferdinand of Spain, for Machiavelli’s ruthless Prince, partly because he terrorized his own father and thus harnessed the power of the pontificate.
If Rodrigo Borgia’s lifestyle was lurid, it differed from the other princes of the Church only in minor degree. All the eminent cardinals lived lavishly and extravagantly in the great palaces of Rome, accompanied by musicians and mistresses, guarded by scores of braves. They strutted about in martial garb, dangling elaborately decorated swords from their belts. Treating the red cape of their office merely as the garb of nobility and commerce, they vied with one another in the splendor of their entourage. The children of popes populate pages of Catholic history, but Innocent VIII may have been the first to acknowledge his children openly. His illegitimate son was worthy enough to marry the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, and the marriage ceremony was held in the Vatican. This was, as one wag put it, “the golden age of bastards.”
Meanwhile, over the years in which Ferdinand and Isabella took charge of the Spanish monarchy, Cardinal Borgia made himself the wealthiest man in Rome. As vice chancellor of the Holy See, he assigned to himself the wealthiest abbeys and bishoprics and towns across the southern Mediterranean from Oporto to Majorca to Naples, and raked in their taxes and revenues greedily. In Spain alone he possessed sixteen episcopal sees, including the greatest and richest of them all, Valencia, which he would eventually turn over to Cesare Borgia. Despite the Inquisition and the War Against the Moors, he had cut a number of lucrative business deals with Moors, Jews, and Turks over the years.
His lavish Sforza-Cesarini palace was considered the finest house in all of Italy. Its loggia and great hallways were decorated with scenes from history; its side rooms filled with gorgeous tapestries, sumptuous objects of art, elaborate furnishings and draperies of velvet, brocade, and silk. At his extravagant banquets, the table was set with plates of gold and silver, and if the Spanish cardinal sometimes forgot the words of the ceremonial blessing before the feast, his eminent guests did not seem to mind.
By mid-July 1492, Innocent VIII hovered near death, and knowing the end was near, he summoned his cardinals to his deathbed. In a weak and halting voice, the pontiff apologized to them for his shortcomings and pleaded with them to choose a more worthy successor than he. In the following few days, the most extraordinary measures were applied to revive the dying man. Reportedly, the pope’s Jewish physician had consulted a most unusual source for his last desperate measure. It was the writings of the early Christian writer, Tertullian, who in the second century A.D. had prescriptions for everything from arguing with heretics (never use scripture) to rejecting idolatry (it is the principal crime of mankind) to the mistake of the Jews (they had voluntarily rejected God’s grace and thus it was offered to gentiles). In the ninth chapter of his Apology, he had also addressed the matter of human blood. At gladiator games, Tertullian had pointed out, there were those who drank the blood of brave slain fighters to cure epilepsy.
And so, as the story goes, three boys, ten years old, were purchased for 1 ducat each, killed, and their blood brought for the dying pope to drink. Whether or not Innocent VIII took the ghastly
potion, the measure failed, the doctor fled, and the patient died on July 25.
Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was now sixty years old and ready to throw his considerable clout into achieving his life’s ambition. Whoever succeeded Innocent VIII was likely to be the pope to carry the Holy Church through the Jubilee of 1500. For that distinction, the millennial pope was sure to be remembered forever, a goal Borgia certainly achieved. On the more prosaic level, the Jubilee was sure to be a monetary bonanza for the Church, and for whomever led it, in the emporium of selling indulgences.
As the late pope lay in state in St. Peter’s and the cardinals rendered their obsequious eulogies, the streets of Rome degenerated into mayhem. It was estimated that some two hundred assassinations took place in the two weeks after the pope’s death. The scourge abated only when the cardinals finally gathered in the Sistine Chapel.
The envoys of foreign powers entered the contest with gusto. The Papal States of Milan and Naples squared off with opposing candidates. Charles VIII of France offered 200,000 ducats in support of Giuliano della Rovere as Innocent’s successor, while the duke of Genoa sweetened the offer with another 100,000 ducats. But money alone was no guarantee: the support of France was as much a liability as an advantage, and della Rovere was resented for his influence over Innocent VIII. “The intrigues are innumerable and change every hour,” wrote the envoy from Florence, whose lord, Lorenzo the Magnificent, had died two months earlier.
On August 6, the Conclave began. Of the twenty-three cardinals, a two-thirds majority was required for election. Della Rovere led with eleven votes, but stalled there a few votes short, and he soon faded. Ascanio Sforza looked strong, as did a Portuguese cardinal, but when Sforza too saw that he would fall short, he began to listen to Borgia’s sweet propositions. Mysteriously, four cartloads of silver were delivered to Sforza’s palace, with the excuse that perhaps in the unrest the silver would be safer there.
Very quickly the gathering resembled not so much a holy Conclave as a grubby bazaar, and in the trading Rodrigo Borgia had the best goods. To Sforza, he offered the lucrative vice chancellery, his Roman palace, and castles and episcopal sees outside Rome. To the other eminences, he offered estates and abbeys and fortified towns only slightly less valuable, until he found himself one vote short. This last vote was secured by strong-arming a ninety-six-year-old cardinal who had seemed confused by the whole proceeding.
On August 11, the window of the chapel was thrown open and Rodrigo Borgia’s election was proclaimed to the world. Two weeks later, he was invested as Alexander VI. Rome had rarely seen a papal ceremony more lavish or outlandish, and it was soon being compared to a Bacchanalian orgy.
“I think,” said one chronicler, “that Cleopatra was not received with greater magnificence by Mark Anthony.”
Everywhere the Borgia coat of arms, a bull grazing on a gold field, was on display. Flowers and velvet hangings were draped from the buildings, and triumphal arches proclaiming the coming golden age spanned the route from the Vatican to the Lateran Basilica where the investiture took place. Huge crowds lined the procession route, as the resplendent pope-designate rode past on a snowy white stallion. At the Basilica of St. Mark’s, one of the ancient titular churches of Rome, an immense sculpture of a bull was erected. From its horns, eyes, ears, and nostrils streamed water, and from its forehead gushed sweet wine. Poets waxed eloquent and profane. “Rome was great under Caesar, greater under Alexander,” wrote one. “The first was only mortal, but the latter is a God.”
So overwhelming was the pageantry that it went to the head even of the new pope himself. At the Lateran, under the weight of his magnificent and heavy robes, in the sweltering heat, he fainted and had to be revived by splashes of water. Two stalwart cardinals hoisted him up and held him by the armpits for his investiture.
After the official hoopla died down, the backlash over this bought election came immediately. The details of the bribes quickly became public knowledge, evoking widespread disgust and outrage. “Oh, Jesus Christ, it is in punishment for our sins that Thou hast permitted Thy vice-chancellor to be elected in so unworthy a manner!” moaned a Roman notary. It was reported that the King of Naples burst into tears when he heard, even though he had never been known to weep before, even at the death of his own children.
The legitimacy of the election was widely questioned, even by his countrymen Ferdinand and Isabella. The obedience and authority of the Vatican was in jeopardy, and, no doubt, this contributed to Alexander’s tolerance and promotion of the tactics of terror so monstrously practiced later by his son, Cesare Borgia. The Catholic monarchs would dispatch one of their most distinguished warriors, Gonzalvo of Córdoba, to Rome to express the indignation of Europe at the election; and still later, a joint delegation from the kings of Spain and Portugal came to protest against papal scandals. Alexander received the envoys in the presence of five cardinals, brandished the threat of excommunication against their kings, and still more menacing, threatened to unleash Cesare Borgia against them.
The disgrace of his simoniacal election would come to define Alexander’s twelve-year pontificate. It seemed in character that the new pope soon turned on the very cardinals who had assured his election, banishing a few, imprisoning others, and ensuring the death of others. “Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious perhaps that this world has ever seen,” remarked the scion of the Medicis, Giovanni de Medici. “And if we do not flee, he will inevitably devour us all.”
A second theme was also prominent in his rule: the pope’s relentless efforts to promote and enrich the House of Borgia. His relatives descended on Rome like starlings to feed on the papal berry tree. So rampant became his nepotism that a noble was heard to say,
“Ten papacies would not have sufficed to provide for all these cousins.”
No multitude of complaining Roman notaries or teary-eyed despots or indignant ambassadors could inspire fear or anxiety in the brazen new pope. There was one who could. He was the prior of the Dominican monastery in Florence called San Marco, and the yelping of this dog of God had already shaken kings and potentates. Through the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Florence lay beyond the reach of the Roman Curia. And thus, Girolamo Savonarola could preach his fiery sermons from the high pulpit of the fabulous Duomo without fear of interference from a meddlesome, corrupt pope.
The friar had begun to preach his sermons promoting fundamental reform of the Church and freedom for the people of Florence as far back as Lent in 1485. Indeed, it was the occasions of Lent and Advent that became his stage, and it became his habit to preach on the book of Genesis during Advent. His popularity was immense, his sermons much anticipated. Pico della Mirandola, the brilliant savant of the High Renaissance, spoke of the cold shivers that ran through him and of how the hackles on his neck stood up when he listened to Savonarola preach. Like all demagogues, Savonarola fed on the emotional and psychological impact of his preaching on his listeners. The cavernous Duomo was packed for his riveting performances, which blended charismatic rhetoric with Christian theology, homey pastoral advice, and magical prediction. He had opposed Lorenzo de Medici without fear, excoriating Lorenzo’s tyranny and greed, as he advocated for democracy to the masses. Nor did he spare Rome. It was, as his standard reference of Psalm 73 mentioned, a slippery place, where the wicked were prosperous. He cared not for them, for “”they that are far from Thee shall perish. Thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from thee.‘“
“We are living in evil days,” he proclaimed. “The devil has called his followers together, and they have dealt terrible blows on the very gates of the temple. It is by the gates that the house is entered, and it is the prelates who should lead the faithful into the Church of Christ. Therefore the devil hath aimed his heaviest blows at them, and hath broken down these gates. Thus it is that no more good prelates are to be found in the Church. See how in these days prelates and preachers are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things. The preachers preach for the pleasure o
f princes to be praised and magnified by them. The new church is no longer built on living rock, but built of sticks, by Christians dry as tinder for the fires of hell.”
Besides his passion, Savonarola’s courage and honesty and austerity were much admired.
In 1492, a new element came into his arsenal, which scared princes and commoners alike even more. Savonarola prophesied the deaths of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Innocent VIII. In the spring, the first of these “conclusions” came about with the demise of Lorenzo. As the Magnificent One languished on his deathbed in April 1492, he shocked his satraps by calling for Savonarola to administer the last rites.
“I know no honest friar save this one,” he murmured, scarcely able to speak.
Though astonished at the summons of one he had so pilloried, Savonarola came dutifully. God is good, God is merciful, he said, but for the Magnificent’s soul to rise to heaven, three promises must be given. First, he must truly believe in God’s mercy. That was easy. Lorenzo nodded. Second, Lorenzo must return all his ill-gotten wealth to its rightful owners. Still strong enough to feel shock and dismay, Lorenzo reluctantly muttered his agreement. And then, as the legend is told, Savonarola rose and towered ominously above the deathbed. And lastly, the friar said, Lorenzo the Magnificent must grant liberty to the people of Florence. At this, Lorenzo turned his back to the friar. So be it. Savonarola left the room without receiving the prince’s confession and without granting him absolution for his sins. His doctor then gave Lorenzo a potion of dissolved diamonds, and he died, his soul left to languish in brilliant limbo.
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