Nor, apparently, did the pope have the faintest comprehension of how much that prestige needed restoring. Like many of his predecessors, he paid lip service to the idea of reform; reading of his pontificate, one tends to forget that for the first four years of it the Fifth Lateran Council was in progress. But the Council achieved virtually nothing. There was no sense of urgency in its deliberations nor any sign that it received any firm direction from the pope. Meanwhile, the shameless extravagance, the blatant marketing of indulgences and offices, the sexual shenanigans—for Leo had long since given up any attempt to conceal his preferences and was now positively flaunting his latest catamite, the singer Solimando, son of Prince Cem—all these abuses, and many others besides, had given still greater strength to the reform movement, and it was by now plain to any unprejudiced observer that, unless the Church quickly buckled down and cleaned out its own stables, a serious rebellion could not be long in coming.
It was on October 31, 1517—just at the time when, in the aftermath of the Petrucci conspiracy, Pope Leo was appointing his thirty-one new cardinals—that Martin Luther nailed his notice to the church door at Wittenberg, announcing that he was prepared to defend, in open debate, ninety-five theses which claimed to establish the invalidity and illegality of indulgences. It would not have been a difficult task. The idea that a spiritual grace could be sold commercially for hard cash was obviously nonsense, and in recent times new and improved indulgences had come onto the market. It was now possible, for example, to acquire them in respect of sins not yet committed—to lay up, as it were, a credit balance of advance absolution; alternatively, indulgences could be bought on behalf of deceased relatives: the more money paid, the shorter their time in Purgatory.
By now the Church was teetering on the edge of an abyss, yet still Leo failed to see that Luther’s crusade was more than a “monkish squabble.” The man was clearly an irritant; but Savonarola had been a good deal worse and was now almost forgotten. This tiresome German would doubtless go the same way. Meanwhile, in November 1518 the pope published a bull: all who denied his right to grant and issue indulgences would be excommunicated. But no one in Germany took any notice. Reverence for the Papacy, as Guicciardini lamented, “had been utterly lost in the hearts of men.” Halfheartedly, Leo tried to enlist the help first of the General of the Augustinian Order and then of Luther’s protector, the Elector Frederick III of Saxony, to bring the monk to order; but neither attempt was successful. Then, in 1520, he published another bull, Exsurge Domine, condemning Luther on forty-one separate counts. This Luther publicly burned—and was consequently excommunicated. On October 11, 1521, the pope bestowed the title Fidei Defensor1—Defender of the Faith—on King Henry VIII of England, in recognition of his book The Defence of the Seven Sacraments Against Martin Luther.
ON NEW YEAR’S Day 1515 King Louis XII of France died in Paris. Just over a year later, on January 23, 1516, King Ferdinand of Aragon followed him to the grave. These deaths brought two young men, still relatively unknown, to the forefront of European affairs. They could hardly have been more unlike. King Francis I was twenty years old at the time of his succession and in the first flush of his energy and virility. He was already an accomplished ladies’ man—not particularly handsome, perhaps, but elegant and dashing, with a quick mind, a ready wit, a boundless intellectual curiosity, and an unfailing memory which astonished all who knew him. He loved spectacle and ceremonial, pomp and parade; and his subjects, bored out of their minds by a long succession of dreary, colorless sovereigns, took him to their hearts.
Charles of Habsburg, born in 1500 to the Emperor Maximilian’s son Philip the Handsome and Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Joanna the Mad, had inherited neither of his parents’ primary attributes. His appearance was ungainly, with the characteristically huge Habsburg chin and protruding lower lip; he suffered also from an appalling stammer and showered his interlocutors with spittle. He had little imagination and no ideas of his own; few rulers have ever been so utterly devoid of charm. What saved him was an innate goodness of heart and, as he grew older, a tough sagacity and shrewdness. Though by far the most powerful man in the civilized world, he never enjoyed his empire in the way that Francis I and Henry VIII enjoyed their kingdoms—or Leo X his pontificate.
At the age of sixteen, Charles, already ruler of the Netherlands, had assumed the regency of Aragon and the Two Sicilies on behalf of his mother, now hopelessly insane. Three years later came the death of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian. The empire remained elective, and the succession of Charles was by no means a foregone conclusion. There were still many who preferred his younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand. A still more formidable rival was Francis I—who, in the early stages of his candidature, had the enthusiastic support of Pope Leo. (Henry VIII of England also, at one moment, threw his cap into the ring, but no one took him very seriously.) Fortunately for Charles, the German electors hated the idea of a French emperor; the Fuggers—a hugely rich banking family from Augsburg—lined as many pockets as was necessary, and at the last moment Leo withdrew his opposition. On June 28 Charles was elected, and on October 23 of the following year he was crowned—not in Rome but in the old Carolingian capital of Aachen—as the Emperor Charles V. In addition to the Netherlands and Spain, Naples and Sicily, and the New World, there now devolved on him all the old empire, comprising most of modern Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Milan, Bohemia, and western Hungary were to follow a little later. For a man of modest talents and mediocre abilities, here was an inheritance indeed.
It is uncertain whether Pope Leo, when he withdrew his opposition to Charles’s coronation, entirely understood that by doing so he was giving his approval to the last stage of the polarization of continental Europe. The King of France was now trapped in a vise, virtually encircled by the empire; conversely, the emperor now found himself the sovereign of a divided dominion, its two parts cut off from each other by a hostile state. The result was inevitable: a long and deadly struggle between the two men for dominance in Europe and mastery of the western Mediterranean. The part the Papacy was to play in this struggle would be largely concerned with maintaining the balance of power, but Leo’s own sympathies, despite his earlier support for Francis, were now firmly with Charles.
It was plain from the start that the young emperor was not going to accept the presence of the French in Italy. He himself had no Italian ambitions except to maintain his hold on Sicily, Naples, and Sardinia, all of which he had inherited from his grandfather Ferdinand; these he was determined to pass on to his successors. For the rest, he was only too pleased that the native rulers remain in possession of their states, provided only that they recognized his position and showed it due respect. French influence, on the other hand, could not be tolerated. King Francis, for as long as he remained in Italy, constituted a challenge to the imperial hold on Naples and seriously endangered communications between the empire and Spain. In 1521 the emperor signed a secret treaty with Pope Leo, as a result of which a combined papal and imperial force expelled the French from Lombardy once again, restoring the House of Sforza in Milan. This victory enabled the Papacy to recover Parma and Piacenza, lost six years before.
For Pope Leo, here was a reason for celebration; but in the course of the ensuing banquet, which seems to have been more than usually riotous and lasted all night, he caught a chill, which rapidly became a fever, and on December 1 he died. As a Renaissance prince he would have been superb; as pope he was a disaster. In seven years he is estimated to have spent some 5 million ducats, and at his death he was well over 800,000 ducats in debt. At that time it was calculated that there were more than 2,150 salable offices in the Vatican, worth some 3 million ducats. Leo X had left Italy in its usual state of turmoil, northern Europe on the verge of religious revolution, and the Papacy in the lowest depths of degradation.
SUCH WAS THE state of the papal treasury after Leo’s death that the candles used at his funeral were the leftovers from that of Cardinal Gianantonio di
Sangiorgio, held the day before; and such was the state of popular feeling against the Church that the thirty-nine cardinals who assembled for the conclave on December 28 needed a bodyguard to protect them.
Conclaves were well known to be uncomfortable things, but this was one of the worst. In the depths of a bitter winter, the Vatican was entirely unheated; several windows had lost their glass and had to be roughly boarded up. Most of those present had spent the greater part of their lives in conditions of extreme luxury; now they found themselves herded together, shivering in a dim half-light, with little to eat—their food was passed to them “at a round turning wheel made in the wall”—and only the most rudimentary sanitation. On the sixth day, by which time one elderly cardinal had been carried out half dead, the meager rations were still further reduced. Few better ways, one might have thought, could be devised to encourage a quick decision; but almost at once there was deadlock. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, with fifteen avowed supporters, at first seemed the favorite, but the sinister Cardinal Francesco Soderini turned the remainder firmly against him; Giulio then declared himself in favor of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese—upon whom, however, a similar hatchet job was now performed by Cardinal Egidio di Viterbo. As Egidio happened to be Alessandro’s confessor, the propriety of his diatribe was questioned; but the damage was done.
At that moment a letter was produced from the Emperor Charles V, warmly recommending his erstwhile tutor, a sixty-two-year-old Dutchman from Utrecht named Adrian Florensz Dedal. Hardly anyone in Rome had ever heard of him, but there: he had no enemies in the city, and given his age he was unlikely to last too long. After Pope Leo, perhaps a compromise candidate of—as far as anyone knew—a spotless reputation would be no bad thing. And did not a vote for him represent the best chance of escaping from a freezing Vatican back to their own warm palaces? And so, after fourteen nightmarish days, Dedal was elected on January 9, 1522.
Having deliberately delayed his departure owing to an outbreak of plague and then having traveled to Rome by sea, Pope Adrian (or Hadrian) VI—he made no attempt to change his name in the traditional manner—arrived only in August. He spoke no Italian, his Latin was incomprehensible, and before the end of the year he had antagonized everyone: the populace, who considered him a northern barbarian; the Curia, whose members were furious at his refusal to distribute the usual benefices; Charles V, who had expected him to join his league against Francis I; and Francis himself, who actually stopped the transfer of Church money from France to Rome when the pope arrested and imprisoned Cardinal Soderini for secretly plotting to hand over Naples to the French. Meanwhile, he lived like a monk. Gone were Alexander’s courtesans, Julius’s armies, Leo’s catamites and banquets. Hadrian spent precisely one crown a day on catering and employed as domestic staff only his old Flemish housekeeper, who did all his cooking, washing, and cleaning. For the art and architecture of the Renaissance he cared not a jot: he threatened to have the Sistine Chapel whitewashed and the Laocoön—“an effigy of heathen idols”—thrown into the Tiber.
It need hardly be said that his promised reforms came to nothing. He failed to control the cardinals, who continued to live like fighting cocks, nor could he do anything to check the sale of indulgences, without which the Church would have faced bankruptcy. All his initiatives ended in disaster: his attempts to form a European coalition against the sultan; his handling of the Reformation (whose importance he consistently failed to recognize, just as Pope Leo had before him); even his proposal—after the Turkish capture of Rhodes and the eviction of the Knights of St. John—for a three-year truce over the whole of Christendom. When he fell sick and died in September 1523, little more than a year after his arrival in Rome, there was nothing but relief. It would be another four and a half centuries before the election of the next non-Italian pope.
The cardinals’ relief was tempered, however, by the realization that they would have to face another conclave. Fortunately, it opened in the autumn—October 1—rather than the depths of winter, but as usual the conditions worsened as time went on. From the beginning there was no heating, fresh air, or natural light; then, toward the end of the month, the midday and evening meals were reduced to a single course; shortly afterward the cardinals were given only bread, wine, and water. Once again, the argument for a quick election could hardly have been more persuasive; but feelings ran high, much was at stake, and it was fifty remorseless days before the choice was made.
The obvious candidate was Giulio de’ Medici, who was supported by the emperor and consequently by the Spanish contingent; but there were many Italian cardinals, including Soderini (who had been instantly released on Hadrian’s death) and the powerful Pompeio Colonna, who were determined to do him down. The English were stubbornly and somewhat ridiculously backing Cardinal Thomas Wolsey; the French were divided. Back and forth went the arguments; devious conspiracies were hatched, and dark intrigues; intricate deals were planned, compromise candidates proposed and rejected. As it turned out, the cardinals could have saved themselves a lot of trouble, to say nothing of physical misery, because on November 19 the majority choice finally fell on the favorite, Cardinal Giulio, who somewhat surprisingly took the name of the brutal antipope of the Great Schism, Clement VII.2
GIULIO DE’ MEDICI was the bastard son of Giuliano, Lorenzo the Magnificent’s brother, who had been assassinated by the Pazzi in Florence cathedral forty-five years before. Lorenzo had tracked down the mother and had persuaded her to allow him to bring up the boy as his own. Then, when Lorenzo himself died in 1492, Giulio was placed under the guardianship of his second son, Giovanni. Since the guardian was only three years older than the ward, the two became close friends, and when Giovanni became Pope Leo X one of his first acts was to legitimize his cousin, making him a cardinal and effective ruler of Florence.
Despite their mutual affection, the two could hardly have been more different. Leo was unusually ugly, with a huge head and a fat, red face, but he possessed a charm which many found irresistible. Clement, now forty-eight, was tall and slim; he might have been good-looking but for his thin, tightly compressed lips, haughty expression, and almost perpetual frown. He was pious, conscientious, industrious; but nobody, with the single exception of his friend Benvenuto Cellini, liked him much. Guicciardini went so far as to describe him as “somewhat morose and disagreeable, reputed to be avaricious, far from trustworthy, and naturally disinclined to do a kindness.” Anyone who thought that his election signaled a return to the extravagant and easygoing days of Pope Leo was in for a disappointment.
It might reasonably have been supposed that such a man would prove at least a competent pope. Alas, Clement was nothing of the kind. He was vacillating and irresolute, terrified when called upon to make a decision. He might have been a moderately good major; as a general he was a disaster. Leopold von Ranke, the great German historian, dubbed him the most disastrous of all the popes, which—if one remembers the Papacy in the tenth and eleventh centuries—seems a little unfair; the fact remains that the eleven years of his pontificate saw the worst sack of Rome since the barbarian invasions, the establishment in Germany of Protestantism as a separate religion, and the definitive breakaway of the English Church over Henry VIII’s divorce.
Finding himself, as Hadrian had before him, caught in the whirlpool caused by the rivalry between Charles V and the King of France, Clement dealt with the situation even more clumsily than his predecessor. His first loyalty should clearly have been to the emperor, to whom he largely owed his election; but in 1524 he joined with Venice and Florence in a secret alliance with France, and Francis, with an army of some 20,000, marched back over the Mont-Cenis pass into Italy. In late October he recaptured Milan, then turned south to Pavia, where he spent the winter trying unsuccessfully to divert the Ticino River as a means of taking the city. He was still there four months later when an imperial army arrived. Imperialists and Frenchmen met just outside Pavia, and on Tuesday, February 21, 1525, battle was joined.
The Battle of
Pavia proved to be one of the most decisive engagements in European history. It was also the first to prove conclusively the superiority of firearms over pikes. When the fighting was over, the French army had been virtually annihilated; Francis himself had shown, as always, exemplary courage: after his horse had been killed under him, he had continued to fight on foot until at last, overcome by exhaustion, he had been obliged to give himself up. A prisoner, he was sent to Spain, where he remained for a year in not uncomfortable confinement until Charles released him in return for his signature to what was known as the Treaty of Madrid, by which he renounced all claims to Burgundy, Naples, and Milan. When he returned to Paris, however, and the terms of the treaty were made public, there was a general outcry. Pope Clement in particular was aghast: without a French presence in Italy, how could he hope to defend himself against the emperor? Hastily he recruited Milan, Venice, and Florence to form an anti-imperialist league for the defense of a free and independent Italy—and invited France to join. Though the ink was scarcely dry on the Treaty of Madrid, and though he and the pope held widely differing views on Milan—the pope favoring the Sforzas, while Francis wanted the city for himself—on May 15, 1526, the king, with his usual flourish, signed his name.
The League of Cognac, as it was called, introduced an exciting new concept into Italian affairs. Here, for perhaps the first time, was an agreement dedicated to the proposition that Milan, and so by extension all other Italian states, should be free of foreign domination. Liberty was the watchword. It need hardly be said, however, that Charles V did not view the League in quite this light. To him it was a direct and deliberate challenge, and over the next few months relations between himself and the pope steadily deteriorated. Finally, in September, two letters from the emperor were dispatched to Rome. They could hardly have been more outspoken if they had been written by Martin Luther himself. The first, addressed personally to the pope, accused him of failing in his duties toward Christendom, Italy, and even the Holy See. The second, to the cardinals of the Sacred College, went further still. If, it suggested, the pope refused to summon a General Council for the reform of the Church, it was the responsibility of the College to do so without his consent. Here was a clear threat to papal authority. To Pope Clement, indeed, it was tantamount to a declaration of war.
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