If Isabella reacted to these embarrassing slights, or if Ferdinand sought to set the record straight, it is unrecorded. Perhaps the new discoveries were more comfortable for everyone if they believed a man had been author of them. That perception allowed Isabella to focus on the work at hand. The task ahead was immense: she had to find a way to ensure that the benefits of the expedition would accrue to her kingdom and her people. She had to make sure the lands would belong to Castile, and she had to be able to appeal for final judgment to the highest kind of arbiter.
And so once again, she reached out to Rome, to the Vatican, where her ally, the Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia, had just been enthroned as pope and had taken the name Alexander VI.
SIXTEEN
BORGIA GIVES HER THE WORLD
As luck would have it, Rodrigo Borgia had been elected pope in August 1492, the same month that Columbus set off on his voyage of discovery. It was only the second time in history that a Spaniard had been named to the church’s highest office, and his tenure was to be memorable in many ways.
It started with the most sumptuous pontifical ceremony that veteran Vatican-watchers had ever seen. Thirteen contingents of men in armor marched in procession, commanded by the mercenary soldiers known as condottieri. Next came the households of the cardinals in brightly colored uniforms. The cardinals themselves promenaded on horseback, wearing their miters and silken robes. Twelve white horses, conducted at the bridle by twelve handsome youths, preceded the pope. Shops and homes along the parade route were decked in colorful banners; cannons were fired in thundering celebration; frenzied crowds roared “Borgia, Borgia” to welcome the new pontiff.
Borgia made his way by horse or mule from the Vatican Palace to St. Peter’s Basilica, taking a seat in a gilded chair while court officials came forward to kiss his feet. Then he climbed to the Chapel of St. Andrew and positioned himself on St. Peter’s golden throne. The triple crown of the pope was placed on his head.
Borgia had the highest expectations for his pontificate. He had taken the name of the great Greek conquerer, styling himself Alexander VI. And he was ecstatic. “It was said he put on the papal vestments with an almost childish enthusiasm,” writes one historian.1
Not everyone in Europe shared this enthusiasm. Already rumors were circulating that the process of selecting the pope had been more secular than spiritual—that Borgia’s election had been the result of blatant bribery of the other cardinals, with gifts and church benefices changing hands in exchange for secure votes. Four stout mules had reportedly been needed to move treasure from Borgia’s home to that of a key swing vote, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who was promptly named to the prestigious post of vice-chancellor of the church.
Buying the papal tiara, if that was what he had done, was not unique to Borgia, however. The purchase of high ecclesiastical office was frowned upon but nevertheless endemic in the Vatican of the Renaissance. It was a world where earthly rewards paid for spectacular pomp and display, and where clerics racked up benefices to enable themselves to indulge in ostentatious shows of wealth.
Some of this wealth was poured into the creation of great artworks to glorify God. On a commission from Pope Sixtus IV, Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio had created frescoed panels depicting the life of Moses for the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Cardinal Jean de Bilhères de Lagraulas paid Michaelangelo to chisel Jesus and Mary in marble, the poignant Pietà. The family of Cardinal Sforza paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s rendition of Christ’s Last Supper. But the more elevated the physical manifestations of spirituality on Vatican Hill became, it sometimes seemed, the lower the moral quality of its inhabitants.
Church corruption was not new. Decades earlier, in 1458, after Calixtus III, Rodrigo’s uncle Afonso de Borgia, died, politicking had been rife as well. Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini met with then-young Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia in the Vatican latrines at dawn, and Borgia told him he had pledged to give his vote to the French cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville in exchange for a written promise that he could keep his lucrative post as vice-chancellor of the Vatican. Piccolomini told Rodrigo that he was a “young fool,” and that Guillaume’s promise was worth less than the paper it was written on. Guillaume’s loyalties would be to his fellow Frenchmen in the College of Cardinals, he told Borgia; by voting for him, Borgia would end up losing the vice-chancellorship and damaging the church to boot. The next day Borgia shifted his vote to Piccolomini, who had gathered the other necessary votes. Piccolomini assumed the papal tiara as Pope Pius II, and Rodrigo retained his vice-chancellorship and became the elder cleric’s favored protégé.
In the next thirty-four years, as three more popes wore the Ring of the Fisherman, Rodrigo prospered. When Pius II died, Rodrigo was again fortunate: his friend Pietro Barbo, who had stayed with him during the anti-Spanish rioting when Calixtus died, became Pope Paul II. Rodrigo had been ill during the consistory in which Pietro Barbo was chosen, but his longtime alliance with the future pope left him in good stead nonetheless.
Two more popes had followed—Sixtus IV, the one who sent Rodrigo to Spain as a papal legate when he had proved so helpful to Isabella and Ferdinand; and then Innocent VIII, who had served as the Holy Father from 1484 to 1492. As Innocent VIII lay dying, he bemoaned the woeful state of the church and told the cardinals gathered around his deathbed that he bitterly regretted that he had himself been such a disappointment. His pious views were noted, but his change of heart came too late to correct the ruinous course of events he had set in motion by urging investigations into witchcraft in northern Europe, selling ecclesiastical posts to the highest bidders, and inviting King Charles VIII, with the assurance of papal support, to invade Italy and take possession of the Kingdom of Naples.
During those years when he was a high-ranking functionary, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had continued to perform as a trusted official of the Catholic Church, known for his intelligence, perceptiveness, and diligence in performing his assigned tasks. He was also notable for his adroit maneuvering within the Vatican, and his steady accumulation of lucrative church benefices and posts. Rodrigo was given the bishoprics of Albano, Porto, Valencia, Cartagena, and Majorca. He had possessions in Italy, too, including Nepi, Civita Castellana, and Soriano, strongholds controlling the Via Cassia and Via Flamina, main arteries to the north of Rome. In 1482, he received the rights to the revenues generated by the Abbey of Subiaco, which controlled twenty-two villages. He similarly received the revenues from the Abbey of Fossanova, on the route to Naples. This meant that he controlled key properties on the entry and exit roads to the north and south of Rome.
Some of his expanding empire of benefices came to him with the blessing of King Ferdinand of Aragon. Valencia, Cartagena, and Majorca were all parts of Ferdinand’s dominions. Then with Ferdinand’s acquiescence, Rodrigo became the first archbishop of Valencia, when the city was elevated to a higher ecclesiastic status.
Rodrigo’s rise at the Vatican occurred in parallel with that of his countrymen back home in Spain, whose prestige was growing almost daily. The conquest of Granada was viewed throughout Europe as the most significant military achievement of Christian forces in centuries. It was even viewed as partial compensation for the loss of the great Christian capital of Constantinople. Rodrigo Borgia had played up those associations to the hilt, staging an elaborate celebration in the streets of Rome when Isabella and Ferdinand completed the seven-hundred-year-long Reconquest in January 1492: “The event was celebrated in Rome by illuminations and bonfires and diversions of every kind, including a bull fight, in which five bulls were slain, the first entertainment of its kind that had ever been seen in Rome, and which was the special contribution of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia.”2
The resounding victory in Granada was no small thing for Cardinal Borgia, because the Italians who predominated in the church hierarchy were disposed to look upon foreigners with contempt. Rodrigo’s high position left him vulnerable to criticism as an outsider, and he valued his ties and support from home. Spain’s
increased prestige increased his own as well.
But the relationship between Rodrigo Borgia and the Spanish sovereigns had encountered some stumbling blocks. When Isabella heard about Rodrigo’s rise to the papal tiara in the early fall of 1492, she was conflicted. Borgia was a subject of theirs, which was of course advantageous to Ferdinand and Isabella, and she knew him personally. He had helped her obtain the throne, and she had reason to be grateful to him. He started off on a good note, promising to reform the church and cleanse Rome of its rampant street crime. Taking a leaf from Isabella’s playbook, he initiated a thorough search for gang leaders and murderers, and when wrongdoers were apprehended, they were promptly hanged until dead, their bodies left rotting on the gallows along the Tiber River.3 He also proposed some important reconstruction work in the now-faded capital of the Roman Empire. He built a roadway, the Via Alessandrina (later called the Borgo Nuovo), to make a grand approach from Castel Sant’Angelo to St. Peter’s and the Vatican.4 He also initiated some beautification projects at the holiest of Rome’s shrines, something Isabella warmly applauded.
But Isabella also had some serious concerns about Pope Alexander VI’s morality and fitness for a post of such importance. Publicly she and Ferdinand expressed pleasure at the news of his elevation, but privately they indicated their reservations. According to the Italian humanist Peter Martyr, who had worked at the Vatican before moving to Castile to join Isabella’s court, the sovereigns feared that although Rodrigo was brilliant and had great potential for good, he also demonstrated troubling character flaws and possessed ferocious ambition in seeking to advance the fortunes of his many illegitimate children. To Martyr, the parentage of the children, who were becoming young adults, was undisputed. He referred specifically to Borgia’s sons in numerous letters over more than a decade, and his opinion was shared by others in the pope’s inner circle in the Vatican.
“There is no movement of the mind in my Sovereigns for joy on account of this thing, no serenity of brow,” Peter Martyr wrote soon after Borgia had been named pope. “They seem to foretell rather a tempest in the Christian world than tranquil ports and they are more grieved because he basely boasts that he has sacrilegious children than [glad] because he is a subject of theirs. They suspect that there will be a disruption of Peter’s tiara.” But they would hope for the best, he wrote: “If perchance Christian charity should overcome the paternal power of nature he will establish a bridge to heaven for all Christians stronger than a pillar of stone.… God grant that we may hear that he has turned his ability, in which he very much abounds, to the better part.”5
To his friends in Rome, Peter Martyr expressed concern about the rumors circulating that Rodrigo had paid bribes to secure the papacy, something Martyr feared would injure the Christian faith if it were to be exposed. “Someone has whispered in my ear… base, sacrilegious and criminal things, as that your patron had built the steps to that height of affairs not by letters or continence or fervor of charity, but that he has made himself a ladder of gold and silver and great promises,” he wrote to Franciscus Pratensis Griolanus, a friend of the pope. “If that is so, this ladder is placed against the walls of Paradise, so that Christ may be thrown down, not worshipped, for the acquiring of glory.” Moreover, the balance of power in Italy and Europe could be upset if Rodrigo persisted in his “insane desire to raise his sons to the highest.”6
Peter Martyr took the extraordinary step of expressing his concerns to one of the men alleged to have benefited most directly from Borgia’s bounty, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, a childhood friend of Martyr’s from Milan who had supported Borgia’s campaign for the papacy and was raised by him to the position of vice-chancellor.
But take this, Most Illustrious Prince, that my Sovereigns are neither pleased at the death of Pope Innocent [n]or that the Pontificate should have come to Alexander, although their subject. For they fear lest his greed, his ambition, and what is worse his softness toward his children should drag the Christian church headlong. Nor are you free from a mark because you are said to have helped the man to be raised.… May God turn it well and grant that he may keep a grateful mind toward you and your family.7
Similar concerns were being raised by idealistic and pious Christians across Europe, who believed that the church was becoming dangerously corrupt and that the secular power of the papacy was growing. Many deeply devout Spaniards, including Isabella, were disturbed by this state of affairs. She was doing much to try to elevate the morals and standards of the Catholic Church in Spain, so it was particularly disheartening to see serious misconduct at the apex of the church hierarchy in Rome.
Isabella’s ambassador to the Vatican, the Castilian Bernardino López de Carvajal, had been invited to address the assembled cardinals for Holy Mass on August 6, 1492, as the men entered the conclave to choose the new pope. He used the opportunity to deliver a fiery sermon on what he saw as a spiritual crisis in the church and the need to select an upstanding man to replace Pope Innocent VIII:
It is fallen, it is fallen, that glorious majesty of the Church of Rome, which used to stand so high!… At the present time, we are suffering from even deeper wounds. These vices expose us to the disobedience of our inferiors, to the contempt of peoples and princes, to the mockeries and plunder of the Turks; for while we are engaged in our pleasures, our ambitions and our cupidities, the majesty of the ecclesiastical throne vanishes, and all vigilance of pastoral care is thrust aside.
He called for the election of a pontiff who would lead and inspire, holy enough to perform what he said would be “little short of a miracle to lift the Church from so deep a ruin, almost from a dunghill.”8
One particular concern was that cardinalships and other high church positions were being filled by relatives of powerful prelates, nobles, and kings, not by learned people with a true religious vocation. These coveted posts generated substantial amounts of revenue, without a specific requirement that the holder perform any work on behalf of parishioners. Many people who held high ecclesiastical offices therefore never even bothered to set foot in the dioceses given to their care. Previous efforts had been made to stop this plague of nepotism. In 1458, for example, the cardinals gathered in the conclave had attempted to use the passing of Pope Pius II as an occasion for improving and cleansing church administration. They gave almost unanimous support to a petition that called for structural changes at the Vatican. Every cardinal promised that, if he were elected, he would institute specific reforms. The pledge called for the Sacred College of Cardinals to be limited to twenty-four members, so as to give each of them a greater voice. It called for a ban on appointing cardinals younger than thirty and those who were uneducated. It limited each pope to naming only one nephew as cardinal. It called for the pope to govern more democratically, requiring him to seek approval from the College of Cardinals before entering into political alliances or disposing of church property. It required a promise to make war on the Turks. It was agreed that soon after the election, the new pope would announce this pledge and all that it entailed.
But these pledged reforms were never enacted. When Rodrigo’s friend Pietro Barbo was elected pope, taking the name Paul II, his first act was to quietly repudiate the pledge. In exchange for retaining the power held by the pope, however, he upgraded the cardinals in status. He ordered them to wear silken robes that were red, the most costly color of dye. He ordered them to travel with corps of retainers, and he made sure that those who had limited funds received payments from the church to boost their incomes. He in essence transformed them into princes of the church. This new emolument made the repudiation of the pledge more palatable to the Sacred College, but it also accentuated the perception of unseemly clerical worldliness and avarice. Then Paul II named three of his nephews as cardinals.
The role of nephews in the Vatican was particularly vexing. Being pope was a difficult job, typically undertaken by a man in advanced years, and new pontiffs naturally would want some people standing at their side who had only their be
st interests at heart. Aging people typically turn to their adult children to perform that role. In the presumptive absence of children, nephews were the next best thing. But many of the nephews who got appointed were simple loyalists that the church supported in luxury, having little apparent religious calling.
Several popes in fact had children of their own, but usually they had been born before the men joined the priesthood, or they had died before the cleric assumed a high-visibility position. Innocent VIII had two illegitimate children, conceived before he entered the clergy. Others may have had children but discreetly concealed their parentage by calling them nephews or cousins.
Concealing the existence of children was considered necessary because one of the key tenets of advancement in Christian leadership was the vow of celibacy. In the early church, almost all clerics had been married men. Christ is believed to have been unmarried, but most of his apostles had wives. As the Roman Catholic Church grew wealthier, however, celibacy was required in the belief that it represented an institutionalized disdain for earthly pleasures and made it easier for clerics to concentrate on the work at hand. It also ensured that the church could maintain better control of its financial resources, without fear that funds would be siphoned off for the children of church officials.
Once Rodrigo Borgia became pope, however, a group of about a half dozen young people emerged in close association with him. These young adults have attracted avid attention among generations of historians. Rodrigo himself was mysterious on the subject of their parentage. Some scholars have chosen to believe that they were his nieces and nephews. To the Spanish, however, their parentage was no secret and unquestionable. Rodrigo’s growing brood of illegitimate children were not concealed to them because he was busy seeking positions of wealth and power for them in Spain. No one is sure exactly how many there were, or how old they were, or who their mothers were, but certainly there was a crew of young people over whom he kept a careful eye, and whose advancement he seemed to value as his own.
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 33
