Absolute Monarchs
Page 40
The blame for some of the pope’s actions, especially where Spain was concerned, can perhaps be laid at the door of his two worthless nephews, Carlo—on whom he also bestowed a red hat—and Giovanni, whom he made Duke of Paliano. Both were deeply venal, but he trusted them both implicitly—until, some six months before his death, the scales at last fell from his eyes. He immediately stripped them of all their offices and honors and expelled them from Rome, but it was too late; the damage was done. He himself never recovered from the shock. He died on August 18, 1559, a broken man and the most generally detested pope of the sixteenth century. As the news was carried through Rome, the populace exploded with joy. First they attacked the headquarters of the Inquisition, smashing the building to pieces and releasing all its prisoners; then they marched to the pope’s statue on the Capitol, tore it down, knocked its head off, and threw it into the Tiber.
There followed a long conclave. For four months the French and Spanish cardinals were deadlocked, and it was not until Christmas Day that the new pope was finally elected. Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Medici—he was a humble notary’s son from Milan, no relation to his grand Florentine namesakes—took the name of Pius IV and proved as different from his alarming predecessor as any pope could possibly be. Paul, for all his faults, had been a figure of irreproachable integrity; Pius took little trouble to conceal his three natural children. Paul’s austerity had been such that when he strode through the Vatican, sparks were said to fly from his feet; Pius was convivial and relaxed. He restarted the Council of Trent; he mended his fences with the Habsburgs, opening up friendly relations with Charles’s son Philip II of Spain and his brother the Emperor Ferdinand I;9 he restricted the powers of the Inquisition; he cut the Papal Index, which had already proved itself unworkable, down to size; Paul’s two dreadful nephews, one of whom, the Duke of Paliano, had his wife strangled on suspicion of adultery, personally stabbing her presumed lover, he arrested. After the wife had been proved innocent, both were executed.
Not that Pius scorned a little nepotism himself; but he was a good deal luckier in his nephew. Charles Borromeo, later to be canonized, whom he created Cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, was to prove one of the greatest reformers and administrators of his day, dominating the final sessions of the Council of Trent. In Milan his firm discipline aroused a good deal of hostility, but he worked tirelessly among the poor and the sick, notably during the terrible plague year of 1576. Nowadays the nephew’s reputation tends to overshadow that of the uncle, but Pius’s own achievements were impressive enough. It was he who, through the archbishop, guided the Council to its conclusion, who confirmed its decrees in the bull Benedictus Deus, and who was largely responsible for its acceptance throughout the Catholic world. He also began a compilation of the catechism and a reform of the missal and breviary, though these were still unfinished at his death. Last but not least, he revived the Renaissance tradition, encouraging artists and scholars, founding universities and printing presses, and enriching Rome with more fine buildings, including the Porta Pia and (in the Baths of Diocletian) the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
Pius’s principal failure was in his attempts to check the spread of Protestantism in England and France. In England he refused to excommunicate Queen Elizabeth in the vain hope that he could persuade her to maintain the fanatical Catholicism of Mary. Meanwhile, he sent large subsidies to the King of France for use in his struggle against the Huguenots. He was naturally disappointed when Elizabeth continued to uphold her father’s Church of England staunchly and when the strength of the Huguenots continued to grow; but when he died in December 1565, he could nevertheless look back on six remarkably successful years—and congratulate himself on having left the Church in a considerably better state than he had found it.
THEN, ALAS, THE pendulum swung again. Archbishop Charles Borromeo, having made it clear that he was not interested in the Papacy for himself, eventually recommended the formidable Cardinal Michele Ghislieri. Ghislieri had begun life as a shepherd—which was, metaphorically at least, a suitable qualification for the Papacy. Later, however, Paul IV had appointed him inquisitor general, which was not. Pius V—one is somehow surprised that he did not take the name of Paul—was cast very much in the Carafa mold. Deeply ascetic himself—he continued as pope to wear a hair shirt and the rough habit of a Dominican friar under his papal robes, regularly walking barefoot and bareheaded in penitential processions—he expected a similar asceticism from all those around him. In a whole series of decrees he sought to stamp out blasphemy—rich blasphemers were heavily fined, poor ones flogged—and to ensure the proper observance of holy days and fasts. Doctors were forbidden to treat patients who had not confessed or lately received the sacraments.
Sex was, as always, a particular bugbear. Finding that he could not abolish prostitution altogether, the pope decreed that all unmarried prostitutes must be whipped and all men found guilty of sodomy burned at the stake. He was only with difficulty persuaded not to make adultery a capital offense. As it was, no bachelor might employ a female servant; no nun might keep a male dog. Women were barred from the classical sculpture in the Vatican collections. The figures of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel were chastely overpainted. After a few months of this the Romans were complaining that he wanted to turn their city into one enormous monastery.
While perhaps lacking the worst of Paul IV’s extremism, Pius had spent long years as an inquisitor; and an inquisitor, essentially, he remained. He continued his predecessor’s tradition of personally attending all sessions of the Roman Inquisition and frequently extended his visits to include the torture chamber, from which he would emerge utterly unmoved. Those found guilty of heresy he had no hesitation in sentencing to death. The general commanding the small papal army which he sent to France to help the king in his religious war had special instructions to kill all Huguenot prisoners. With the Jews, too, he kept up Paul’s policy of persecution; outside the Roman ghetto and another small one in Ancona, they were banned from all papal territories.
Throughout his pontificate, the pope had one overriding objective: to keep the dread infection of Lutheranism out of Italy. And in this, whatever may be said of his methods, he was remarkably successful. Across the Alps in Germany, it was true that the fighting had been more or less over since the Peace of Augsburg; but over half of Germany was now Lutheran. France was being torn in two, as was the Spanish Netherlands, where the Dutch Calvinists were steadily increasing their hold. England and Scotland were lost; Pius’s excommunication and “deposition” of Queen Elizabeth in 1570 succeeded only in making life more difficult for her Catholic subjects. Outside Italy, only the Spain of Philip II stood firmly for the faith. Besides, Protestantism was not the only enemy. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, Venice was forced in 1570 to cede Cyprus to the Turks, and even when in October of the following year the combined fleets of Spain, Venice, and the Papacy destroyed the Ottoman navy at Lepanto—the last great naval engagement in history to be fought by oared galleys—the victory was to have no lasting effect: only seventeen years later came the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and in the following century Crete was to go the way of Cyprus.
Pope Pius V lived for just seven months after Lepanto. He had been a dedicated reformer, and he had done much to impose upon Christendom the findings and decisions of the Council of Trent; but he was too extreme, too narrow-minded, too bigoted for the good of his flock. Not, on the other hand, for his own: he is the only pope between the mildly ridiculous Celestine V (1294–1296) and the wholly admirable Pius X (1903–1914) to have been made—unaccountably—a saint.
CARDINAL UGO BONCOMPAGNI, who after an unusually short conclave now mounted the papal throne under the name of Gregory XIII, was a seventy-year-old Bolognese of still-undiminished energy. Starting his career as a lecturer in canon law, he had soon found himself a leading figure at the Council of Trent; in recognition of his services there he had received his red hat and had been sent as legate to Philip II in S
pain. There he had once again distinguished himself, winning the confidence and trust of the pathologically suspicious Philip II, and on his return to Rome he was generally agreed to be the obvious choice for pope.
Gregory’s name is chiefly remembered today in the Gregorian calendar, which he introduced in a bull of 1582. The old Julian calendar, which dated from 46 B.C., was now ten days behind the solar year; the Gregorian therefore cut ten days out of the year 1582, so that October 4 was followed immediately by October 15. Fine-tuning was provided by naming as leap years only years of centuries divisible by four. (Thus 1600 had 366 days; 1700 did not.) Desirable as it was, the reform could hardly have been worse timed. With Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox already at one another’s throats, it was at first adopted only by the states in the Roman obedience. Broadly speaking, the Protestants accepted the reform at various times during the eighteenth century—Great Britain and her American colonies in 1752—while Russia, Greece, and the Balkan States delayed until the twentieth.
To Gregory, however, the calendar would have seemed of relatively minor importance. From the outset he made it clear that the principal objective of his pontificate would be the fight against Protestantism, together with the steadfast promotion of the decrees of the Council of Trent; he would, in other words, continue the policy of his predecessor. Since he was a far more amenable and easygoing character than Pius, he was considerably more successful. It had been proved again and again at Trent that far-reaching reform was impossible without a clergy properly trained in theology and the art of disputation, so he set about building colleges and seminaries. First he enlarged the Jesuit College in Rome, originally founded by Julius III; it now became known as the Gregorian University. The Jesuits were also entrusted with the running of the German College, which proved so effective that more colleges were built in other cities of the empire, including Vienna, Prague, and Fulda in Germany. Rome also saw the establishment of an English seminary, from which a steady stream of missionaries made their perilous way to Elizabethan and Jacobean England, where several found martyrdom. Other colleges were established for Greeks, Maronites, Armenians, and Hungarians.
Had he contented himself with the intellectual and doctrinal training of the new generation of priests and missionaries, Gregory’s record as pope would have been a good deal more distinguished than it was. One could wish, for example, that he had not reacted to the news of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Huguenots by ordering a special Te Deum to be sung and personally attending a Mass of Thanksgiving at the French Church of St. Louis; or that he had not tried to persuade King Philip of Spain to launch an invasion of England from Ireland or the Netherlands; or, when these dreams collapsed, that he had not given active encouragement to a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth of England—“the Jezebel of the North.” Such an act, he had declared, would be hailed as the work of God.
In other enterprises, however, he was more enlightened—and more successful. He replaced the old legates, previously the pope’s official representatives abroad, with a new order whom he called nuncios, normally of archiepiscopal rank, trained diplomats who were henceforth to be the chosen instruments of papal policy in every Catholic country, where they were expected to work long and hard to ensure that their master’s will was done. He won over Poland for the Church, though in Russia his unfortunate nuncio to Tsar Ivan the Terrible was lucky to escape with his life; he sent Jesuit missionaries around the world: westward to Brazil, eastward to India, China, and even Japan. He spent vast sums on the restoration and further improvement of Rome, adorning the city with several new churches including the tremendous church of the Gesù, one of the most spectacular examples of the High Baroque in Europe. In 1578 his scholarly mind was fascinated by the discovery of the Roman catacombs, and he insisted that the early Christian remains which had now suddenly come to light should be subjected to proper scientific study.
By this time, however, Gregory’s extensive building programs and his subsidies to Catholic rulers in their struggle to hold the Protestants at bay—to say nothing of the cost of running all his colleges and foundations—were rapidly emptying the papal coffers. In an effort to remedy the situation, he took to claiming the reversion to himself of any property on papal territory whose occupier could not produce cast-iron evidence of his title; this practice, however, resulted only in a furious body of dispossessed landowners, who took their revenge by resorting to open brigandage. When Gregory died, aged eighty-three, after a thirteen-year pontificate, he left the Papacy almost penniless, the Papal States faced with near anarchy.
Morale, on the other hand, was probably higher than it had been for half a century. The Roman Church was now fighting back. Given new spirit by the Council of Trent, it had launched its own Counter-Reformation, symbolized above all by the city itself: by the new St. Peter’s, not yet finished but not a whit less impressive for that; by the quantity of other great churches springing up on every side; by the vast numbers of seminarists of every race and nation, living proof of the sheer vitality of the new Catholicism. The tens of thousands of pilgrims who flocked to Rome to celebrate the Jubilee Year of 1575, making their solemn visits to the seven great basilicas of the Holy City,10 could not have failed to be impressed, encouraged, and strengthened in their faith.
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POPE SIXTUS V, who was elected on April 24, 1585, exactly a fortnight after Gregory’s death, continued where his predecessor had left off, with still greater energy and determination. As Felice Peretti, a farmworker’s son from near Ancona, he had joined the Franciscans at the age of twelve and, thanks to his high intelligence and brilliant gifts as a preacher, had rapidly risen through the Church ranks. In 1557 Paul IV had recognized him as a kindred spirit and sent him to Venice, first to reform the Franciscan monastery of the Frari and then, from 1557, as inquisitor. It was in this last capacity that he had seriously overstepped the mark. The Venetians were devout, conscientious Catholics, but they had always resisted papal attempts to limit their freedom of action. They were merchants; their life was trade, and their commercial prosperity depended on good relations with Protestants and Muslims alike. They refused to allow the pope to tell them what to do. They could not keep out the inquisitors altogether, but they insisted that their own representatives should sit alongside them and when necessary exercise a moderating influence.
This arrangement had worked successfully enough until the appearance of Peretti. He, however, had tried to bully and browbeat them, and their indignation at his severity and arrogance had led to his recall; but Pius IV had characteristically reappointed him three years later, and Pius V had promoted him to vicar general of his order, grand inquisitor, and cardinal. Out of favor under Pope Gregory, he had languished in his villa on the Esquiline Hill preparing what is described by the Oxford Dictionary of Popes as “a distinctly uneven edition of St. Ambrose”; but with Gregory’s demise his sheer force of personality made him the obvious choice as successor. He was elected unanimously.
Of all the popes of the Counter-Reformation, Sixtus V was the most alarming. Stern and inflexible, utterly ruthless, brooking no opposition to his will, he ruled Rome as the autocrat he was. The power of the Sacred College was drastically reduced. He fixed the maximum number of cardinals at seventy, at which it remained for the next four hundred years. He then instituted fifteen separate congregations—or, strictly speaking, fourteen, since one of them, the Holy Office, was already in existence—to be concerned with every aspect of government, religious and secular alike. These too would endure well into the twentieth century. One of them was responsible for the university, another for the Vatican printing press, which in 1587 produced a copy of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Testament. This was to be followed by a revised text of the whole Latin Bible, the Vulgate. Sixtus entrusted the task to a special committee of learned cardinals, but their progress was so slow that he eventually took it over himself. Alas, as he had already shown with St. Ambrose, textual analysis was never
his strong suit. When the work finally appeared, all serious scholars were horrified; on his death it was immediately withdrawn and was heavily revised before being re-published by Clement VIII in 1592.
The pope was a good deal more successful where Church discipline was concerned. One of the principal issues that had dogged the final sessions of the Council of Trent had been the question of the divine right of bishops: did they derive their authority through the pope or directly from God Himself? This was not a question that many people dared to put to Sixtus V: he now laid it down that every new bishop must submit himself to the pope in Rome before taking up his appointment and must make regular return visits to report on the state of his diocese.
Within two years, thanks to a reign of terror, Sixtus had restored law and order throughout the papal lands. No fewer than seven thousand brigands were publicly executed; there were, we are told, more heads impaled on spikes along the Ponte Sant’Angelo than melons in the market. Meanwhile, to restore the Vatican finances, expenditure was pared to the bone—Sixtus was not a Franciscan for nothing—while food prices were rigidly controlled. New taxes were raised, new loans floated, agriculture encouraged, marshes drained, the wool and silk industries subsidized. His sale of offices—but only bureaucratic and administrative, never ecclesiastical—earned the pope some 300,000 scudi a year. Long before his death, he had become one of the richest princes in Europe.