Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (33 page)

Julius faithfully and spectacularly served the interests of the papacy as he understood it, including its financial interests. Though he was the most lavish of art patrons, and poured money into his wars, he left the papal treasury full. Yet there is no escaping the utterly secular character of such a pope. It was said of him that there was nothing of the priest about him but the cassock, and he did not always wear that. The last portrait by Raphael shows the fierce old man in a ragged beard, the first Renaissance Pope to wear one. Julius had grown the beard not for piety or fashion, however, but in imitation of his pagan namesake Julius Caesar, who had stopped shaving as a pledge of vengeance on the Gauls, for their massacre of his legions. Pope Julius’ beard was a pledge of vengeance against his many enemies – the French, the Turks, the Bolognese, and even the Romans.

One of the most striking features of the Renaissance papacy was the extent to which successive popes promoted their own relatives.
This was not necessarily in itself a moral failing. The papacy was an elected monarchy, and newly elected popes inherited from their predecessors a labyrinthine bureaucracy and a college of cardinals who were often hostile and obstructive. The existence of such complex loyalties within the Sacred College was formally recognised and signalled at papal conclaves. During the election period, the rooms of cardinals created by the dead Pope were draped in violet, the rooms of others in green.

In such circumstances, the promotion of a kinsman to the cardinalate might be the only way to ensure colleagues and collaborators who could be relied on. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cardinal nephews routinely took on the role of secretary of state. But the Renaissance popes pushed these things to extremes. The Spanish Pope Callistus III not only promoted two nephews to the cardinalate (one of them the future Alexander VI) but made a third nephew commander in chief of the papal armies, and he flooded the papal household and the Curia itself with Catalan officials. It may be that a foreign pope needed more in the way of family backing if he was to master the Curia than a native Italian did. At any rate, Pius II was more restrained, making just two nephews cardinals, one of whom later reigned for twenty-seven days as Pius III (1503).

Once again, however, Sixtus IV raised the stakes. He made six of his nephews cardinals, and married other nephews and nieces into some of the great Italian dynasties – Naples, Milan, Urbino. Not content with this, he heaped benefices on them, giving his cardinal nephews the incomes of princes. Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II, was Archbishop of Avignon, Archbishop of Bologna, Bishop of Lausanne, Bishop of Coutances, Bishop of Viviers, Bishop of Mende and Bishop of Ostia and Velletri, and Abbot of Nonantola and of Grottaferrata, and he had scores of lesser benefices.

The inevitable outcome of all this was the creation of a wealthy cardinalatial class, with strong dynastic connections. At Eugenius IV’s election in 1431, half the twelve cardinals came from outside Italy. At Alexander VI’s election in 1492, only one out of twenty-three cardinals (Alexander himself) was non-Italian. As the papal families intermarried with the princely houses of Italy, the Sacred College and the papacy itself came to resemble a rollcall of the great – Farnese, Medici, Gonzaga, Este. Innocent VIII, having married his son into the Medici family, obligingly made Lorenzo the Magnificent’s son
Giovanni a cardinal – at the age of thirteen. In due course, as we have seen, this Cardinal Medici would be elected Pope Leo X. Aristocratic infiltration of the cardinalate was in part a function of the increasing politicisation of the papacy. The rulers of Italy, France and Spain needed tame (though mostly Italian) cardinals to exert pressure on papal policy, or at any rate papal elections.

For, paradoxically, this was also a period in which the cardinals were increasingly excluded from papal policy-making, and declined from being papal counsellors to being pensioned courtiers. Tensions between pope and cardinals had existed since at least the time of Gregory VII, and the custom of making electoral pacts had grown up during the Avignon papacy. These were agreements entered into by the cardinals in Conclave, which imposed restrictions on the new Pope’s freedom of action – limiting the number of new cardinals he could create, or the types of decisions or policies he could make without the agreement of the Sacred College. Human nature being what it is, however, such pacts were easier to make than to enforce. A duly elected pope was a monarch, and could do more or less as he pleased. The first Pope after the Great Schism, the steely Colonna Martin V, had acted without the slightest pretence of consultation, and the cardinals were reduced to quivering, stammering children in his presence. Yet cardinals had played a crucial role both in beginning and in ending the schism – the Council of Constance had been convened by cardinals – and many hoped that some at least of the objectives of the Conciliar movement might be attained through the pressure placed by cardinals on successive popes.

All this was so much huff and puff, however, for the cardinals had no sanctions against the Pope, and depended on him for their security and wealth. Eugenius IV, Pius II, Paul II and Sixtus IV all accepted such pacts at the Conclave, but none of them kept them once they were elected. When in 1517 Leo X discovered a plot against him among the cardinals, he executed the ringleader and swamped the Sacred College by creating thirty-one new cardinals in a single day. In the process he not only overwhelmed his enemies by sheer numbers, but drastically reduced their income, much of which came from shares in a fixed pool of revenues.

The one place where the cardinals were supreme was in Conclave, when they elected the new Pope. Locked into the Vatican, the cardinals ate and slept in dark and airless wooden cells erected for the occasion,
and were officially cut off from the outside world. Renaissance conclaves were hotbeds of intrigue, the outcome of which was rarely predictable. We have an eyewitness account of the 1458 Conclave from Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, who emerged as Pius II. He recalled the endless plotting in the lavatory block – ‘a fit place for such elections!’
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Religious considerations alone seldom dominated the choice of popes. Rivalries between France and Spain, or between Milan,Venice and Naples, or more local rivalries like those of the Orsini and Colonna families, all played a part, as did internal tensions within the Sacred College. In 1458 Pius II was elected partly because of his personal amiability, but mainly because violent resentment of the Spanish domination of the previous pontificate combined with fear of French political influence to rule out any foreigner, and hence the likeliest candidate, the French Cardinal d’Estouteville. In 1464, a conclave at which the favourite candidate was the formidable Spanish Dominican defender of papal infallibility, Juan de Torquemada, the successful candidate was the worldly papal nephew Pietro Barbo, elected because he was felt to be a loyal member of the Sacred College, who would be pliant – as it transpired, a sadly misplaced assumption.

The spread of nepotism and of venal appointments to the cardinalate, in return for money or favours, made the outcome of elections towards the end of the century even less likely to reflect a simple search for ‘God’s candidate’. In the 1484 conclave which elected Innocent VIII (1484–92) there were a record twenty-five cardinals present, many of them scandalously secular men. Proceedings were stage-managed by Giuliano della Rovere, nephew of the dead Pope. When it became clear that he himself was unelectable, he saw to it that a manageable nonentity was chosen. The successful candidate, Cardinal Cibo, bribed electors by countersigning petitions for promotion brought to him in his cell the night before the decisive vote.

Roderigo Borgia’s election as Alexander VI in 1492 was accompanied by even more naked bribery. A new pope had to resign all his benefices, and so had gifts to distribute. Borgia, a gifted administrator and diplomat with a long and successful curial career behind him, was one of the most spectacular of pluralists, and had at his disposal literally dozens of major plums – bishoprics, abbeys, fortresses, fortified towns. They were allocated in advance to consolidate the majority he needed. It is in fact quite likely that Alexander’s political shrewdness and administrative experience would have won him the
support he needed to become pope, and the bribery at his election was not much worse than at many others. Yet, for all his ability, Roderigo was a worldly and ruthless man, and at the time of his election was already the father of eight children, by at least three women. That such a man should have seemed a fit successor to Peter speaks volumes about the degradation of the papacy.

Before the Great Schism, the papacy had derived much of its funding from the vigorous exercise of its spiritual office – payments from suppliants at the papal court, revenues derived from papal provisions, annates on benefices, Peters Pence. The erosion of papal prerogatives during the schism and Conciliar era, however, drastically reduced such payments, and the papacy was increasingly thrown back on the secular revenues derived from the Papal States – a fact which accounts for the papal wars in defence of those States. A major addition to papal income came in 1462 with the discovery of an alum-mine at Tolfa in the District of Rome. Alum was a vital chemical for both the cloth industry and the leather trade. Till 1462, however, there was no significant European source, and most supplies came from Muslim west Turkey. The popes were now able to forbid Christian use of Turkish alum, and to establish a monopoly of European supplies. The resulting income was officially earmarked for war to recover Constantinople and the Holy Places, and to turn back the Turkish advance in eastern Europe. By 1480 alum profits made up a third of the Pope’s secular revenue.

Nevertheless, the mounting cost of papal wars, and the lavish building programmes of successive popes, made the search for new sources of revenue unending. The most notorious of these was the sale of indulgences, especially the indulgence for the rebuilding of St Peter’s. More significant still, however, was the growing dependence of the popes on the sale of office. Essentially, this was a form of public funding by floating loans. Investors bought a position in the papal Curia for a large cash payment: they recouped their capital investment and a life interest in the form of the revenues of the post they now owned. This meant that in real terms a large proportion of papal income was mortgaged to repaying office-holders, and successive popes resorted to inventing new layers of bureaucracy to raise further capital: the conscientious Pius II did this to fund his Crusade. The result was the multiplication of virtually useless offices. Innocent VIII, for example, established fifty-two
pulumbatores
, officials responsible for
fixing the lead seals on official documents. Each pulumbator paid 2,500 ducats for his post – about a hundred times the annual salary of a country priest.

The sale of office paralysed reform, for it created a huge class of officials with a vested interest in preventing the streamlining of the papal administration or any attempt at removing financial abuses within the Curia. It also edged out talent: from the 1480s it was increasingly difficult for low-born men of ability to secure a post within the Curia without the necessary purchase-price. More and more offices became soft billets for idle drones. By the time of the death of Leo X in 1521 it was calculated that there were more than 2,150 saleable offices in the Vatican, worth in the region of 3,000,000 ducats. They included even the highest offices within the papal court, like the post of Cardinal Camerlengo.

The secularising effects on the papacy of all this can be seen most clearly in the collapse of papal commitment to the Crusading ideal. Pope Urban II had invented the Crusade, and his successors placed Crusading high on the list of fundamental papal priorities. Papal leadership of a united Christendom launched against the enemies of the cross remained a seductive vision. In the fifteenth century, however, it was one that had less and less appeal to the rulers of Europe, who preferred to fight each other. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 horrified the popes – the future Pius II wrote that ‘one of the two lights of Christendom has been extinguished’ – and successive popes from Nicholas V onwards tried to galvanise the princes into action. Callistus III poured all the energies of his pontificate into the project, sending legates throughout Europe to preach a Crusading Indulgence, taxing the clergy, and turning the Tiber into a shipyard for a Crusading fleet. The main effect of all this was to antagonise the already resentful national churches, and to trigger calls for a general council to put a stop to unreasonable papal demands. Pius II, equally committed to the Crusade, had no better luck. Confronted with princely indifference and by Venetian reluctance to jeopardise trade by antagonising the Turks, the dying pope went himself to Ancona to lead an expedition. ‘Our cry to “go forth”’, he declared, ‘has gone unheeded. Perhaps if the word is “Come with me” it will have more effect.’ He died at Ancona waiting for support which never came or, in the case of Venice, which came too late.

Under Innocent VIII, however, four centuries of papal commitment to the pushing back of Islam was abandoned. In 1482 the Turkish Prince Cem, younger son of Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, presented himself before the Knights of St John at Rhodes. Naively, he asked their help in overthrowing his brother Bayezit, who had succeeded Mehmet II. Instead of helping him, the Knights negotiated a deal with Bayezit, who paid handsomely to have his dangerous brother kept under lock and key. In 1486 Innocent VIII placed Cem under papal protection (having bought the prisoner from the Grand Master of the Knights of St John by making the latter a cardinal), and three years later established him in some style in the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

The Pope now became chief gaoler to the Sultan. Bayezit sent Innocent a gift of 120,000 crowns (almost equal to the total annual revenue of the papal state), and the relic of the Holy Lance which had pierced Christ’s side on Calvary. A special shrine was built for it in St Peter’s. Thereafter the Pope received an annual fee of 45,000 ducats to keep Cem in custody. These sophisticated proceedings were more than equalled by Innocent’s successor, Pope Alexander VI. He actively discouraged the Crusade, and applied to Bayezit for a further subsidy of 300,000 gold ducats, which he explained would help him keep France out of Italy, and so prevent it being used as the launching-pad for a French Crusade against Constantinople, now renamed Istanbul. The subordination of religious zeal to political pragmatism could go no further.