The Flowering of the Renaissance

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Prologue (#ulink_d546c0c9-2ec2-5582-8e2b-7d32245577b9)

DURING the fifteenth century, in Florence, a small group of laymen cross-bred Christianity with the best elements of classical Greece and Rome to produce a new way of life which may be termed Christian humanism. This set high value on political freedom, public-spiritedness and free enquiry, on man’s will and imagination, on the beauty and power of the human body which, like all created things, was conceived not as God’s enemy but as His ally, and as an expression of His love. The Christian humanists took a new interest in man as a whole and, as a means of fathoming man’s nature, in literature and the arts, in history and in science. They viewed life no longer as a vale of tears, but as a quest for enlarging man’s powers, and so his awareness of God. They adopted a generous attitude to the views of pagan antiquity and to unorthodox thinkers such as Origen; they even drew near to tolerance in matters of conscience.

The Christian faith still came first with these early humanists, and in the most famous library of the day the Bible was bound in gold brocade, classical writers in silver. But inevitably there was tension. The pagan lion and Christian lamb do not lie down easily together, and though Plato and the Gospels may be made to harmonize, the balance is delicate. At the end of the fifteenth century Christian humanism came under attack from within, when Savonarola denounced it as a pagan way of life, a travesty of the Gospels, and from without, when the French invasion of Italy, culminating in their victory at Fornovo in 1495, showed up the political and military weakness of Florence.

Rome succeeded Florence as the political and intellectual leader of Italy, a development symbolized shortly before 1500 when, at the Pope’s bidding, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s favourite artist, Antonio Pollaiuolo of Florence, added figures of Romulus and Remus to the ancient bronze statue of the suckling She-Wolf. Julius II and Leo X, two of the most powerful and interesting of the Renaissance popes, sought to put into practice a modified version of Christian humanism. They strengthened Rome politically and made it the most civilized city in Europe.

What the popes did was disliked by many, particularly in Germany. When Luther attacked the notion of merit and rejected the popes’ teaching authority, Germans rallied to him; in 1527 a largely German army sacked Rome. These events brought to a head earlier doubts and plunged Italy into a crisis: intellectual, theological, moral and artistic. A period of heart-searching began. Could Italians summon up an adequate answer to the Lutherans? And could they, in face of so widespread a threat, save the principles of Christian humanism?

The answers lie in the texture of Italian life and civilization during the cinquecento. This is surveyed, with a particular eye to the crisis, first in Northern Italy generally, then more specifically in Venice which, after the Sack of Rome, emerged as the chief centre of Christian humanism. All the trends apparent in Venice and elsewhere found expression at the Council of Trent, the Church’s galvanic attempt to find an answer to the crisis posed not only by Lutheranism but in the very fruits of the Italian Renaissance itself. It is the tragedy of Trent that the Church, despite much goodwill on both sides, ultimately came down against the main principles of Christian humanism. The effects of this decision on Italian civilization and the resultant ‘conformism’ offer a striking parallel with events in the Communist world today. Venice alone preserved a measure of independence and artistic vigour and held alight the torch of freedom; her example was to prove an inspiration to those men of the nineteenth century who succeeded in liberating Italy and establishing once again the principles of Christian humanism.

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_7dc86fd4-3208-5e59-a687-02a77d8845aa)

The Awakening of Rome (#ulink_7dc86fd4-3208-5e59-a687-02a77d8845aa)

A PILGRIM arriving in Rome in the jubilee year of 1500 would have been surprised by the city’s appearance. Instead of close-knit streets and stone houses tightly belted by a powerful wall, he would have found a patchwork of fields, vineyards, gardens, marshes and ponds interspersed with clusters of wooden, single-storey houses with outside staircases and balconies, the whole lying loosely within a huge circuit of wall so broken-down that it was easier to pass through the gaps than the gates. This remains of a wall, fourteen miles long, had been built by Aurelian for a city of one million inhabitants; now there were only 40,000, less than in Florence or Venice or Naples. Cattle grazed among the four upright columns of the Forum, hence its name of Campo Vaccino, and the aqueducts had been so shattered by ten sets of invaders during the Dark Ages that even their purpose was forgotten by many: one pilgrim, a Douai draper, was told that ‘the aqueducts were used formerly to bring oil, wine and water from Naples.’

This city-amid-fields offered no arresting landmark: no cathedral, no town hall, no castellated palace. St Peter’s was merely one large church among 280 others, their shabby, often crumbling exteriors giving no hint of the gleaming mosaics within. Seven of them, the Stational churches, had to be visited by pilgrims claiming a plenary indulgence—remission of punishment due to past sins: according to Dom Edme, Abbot of Clairvaux, who went round them in 1521, the visit took eight hours, on poor tracks, sometimes through marshes ‘where the mules sank up to their tails.’

Whereas most Italian cities were famous for this or that product—Lucca for silk, Venice for ships, Milan for steel—Rome produced nothing at all. She had no industries, no raw materials. In 1500 she just about met her needs in corn, grown in the Campagna’s black, difficult soil, but as the century progressed, most of her bread was baked from imported grain. Romans disliked the flat wine of Latium, and so wine had to be imported too, mainly from Corsica, Crete and Naples. Cloth came in from Florence, paper from Fabriano, soap from Genoa, knives and swords from Milan, carpets from Turkey.

To meet the cost of these goods Rome had only her pilgrim trade. The town where St Peter had been crucified and St Paul beheaded attracted 50,000 pilgrims annually. According to the census of 1527, Rome had 236 inns, lodging houses and taverns, one to every 288 inhabitants, compared with one per 1488 inhabitants in Florence. The best of them, the Bear, Sun, Ship, Crown, Camel and Angel, stood close to the Pantheon, and their landlords would send boys to the city gates in order to solicit customers among the pilgrims, most of whom arrived in Lent, a third of them on their own horses. In order to gain the plenary indulgence Italians had to spend fifteen days in Rome, non-Italians eight. During this time they lived well—consumption of meat was extremely high—and they bought guide-books and souvenirs. To the Romans they were an indispensable source of income.

Even without foreign pilgrims, Rome was a cosmopolitan place. Most of its inhabitants had been born outside Rome, 20% were non-Italians, chiefly Spaniards and Germans, while only 16% or 6,400 were Roman born. Of these a handful possessed citizenship and though they claimed the right to rule their city, in practice it was the Pope who ruled, for not only was he by far the largest employer, but he collected and spent the revenue. It was the Pope who chose the Governor—a cleric—and he who paid all the magistrates. True, an ordinary Council met regularly, composed of the various municipal magistrates, and also less often a Great Council, which included the same persons and selected civic notables. The Councils sometimes passed bold decrees against the Pope’s will, but hardly ever dared put them to the test. A popular rising in 1143 had instituted 56 senators, but the Popes had whittled them down to one. This last senator dressed in fine sunset colours—crimson gown, brocade cloak and fur cap—he had the right to a page and four servants, he carried an ivory sceptre, but his power was nil. There was also a Colonel of the Militia of the Roman People—but no militia.

The Romans accepted this. There was no powerful leaven of craftsmen as in Florence, and therefore little republican feeling. Roman citizens were usually of noble or gentle birth and content with trappings of power that vaguely recalled imperial splendour. Yet what privileges they did possess—be it only the Conservators’ right to music at meals—they clung to tenaciously, and on tiny points of protocol they made many a petition to the popes.

The Romans of 1500 retained certain characteristics of their forebears. They loved ceremonies and spectacles. They responded to fine phrases and rolling sentences. They expected of their ruler dignity and largesse, and if they did not get it abused him with satirical and licentious songs. They had a cosmopolitan outlook, though this did not necessarily imply breadth of vision. But they were not grave like the classical Romans. They were turbulent, rowdy and changeable as their weather. When a new pope was elected, they looted, as though by right, his old palace, and when he died, the interregnum was bloodied with murder.

This unproductive half-decrepit city, swept in winter by the icy tramontana and in autumn by a sultry miasmal breeze that caused tertian fever, might long ago have been abandoned to wolves, nettles and ivy but for the fact that it was the see of St Peter, and therefore the seat of government of Catholic Christendom. Here the Curia kept archives and registers of appointments; here they administered justice and held final courts of appeal; it was here that a Flemish burgher applied if he wished to drink milk in Lent, here that a Spaniard who had traded with the Turk sought absolution. But behind the bustle of day-to-day business, much of it petty, lay a central, crucial fact: it was here in Rome that the man who claimed to be the Vicar of Christ sought to preserve and interpret to the world Christ’s message.

In order to accomplish this task the Bishop of Rome decided at a very early date that he required to be independent. It was perhaps the most far-reaching decision ever taken in the Church when the Bishop of Rome, like the bishops of other cities, agreed to accept estates bequeathed to him in the wills of fervent Christians. From being a property-owner, the Bishop of Rome gradually became a lord of towns and cities, and finally, through the Donation of Pepin, the lord of whole provinces. By 1500 the Pope ruled the largest part of Italy after the King of Naples. It comprised Latium, Umbria, Bologna, Romagna and the March of Ancona, with a population of over one million.

The Papal States provided the Pope with political independence, but not with economic independence. The States were in fact as much of an economic burden as Rome, which produced nothing and consumed much. Around 1500 Rome, through customs and excise, and the Papal States, through taxes, which were kept low, provided the Pope with 144,400 gold ducats, at a time when the purchasing power of the ducat was approximately that of one pound sterling today.

(#litres_trial_promo) Out of this the Pope had to pay costs of administration, as well as troops required to defend the States against other Italian powers, and to coerce any feudal prince who declined to pay his taxes.

It was his need to achieve economic independence that turned the Pope to tax Church property outside Italy. This happened in the reign of John XXII, when the Popes were living in Avignon and the Papal States were in revolt. In 1318 John decreed that in future the holder of a benefice must pay to Rome annates—his first year’s revenue—in order to defray costs of the Church’s administration. Annates and similar taxes provided the Pope with a ‘spiritual revenue’ equal in amount to the ‘temporal revenue’ from Rome and the Papal States. So the Pope achieved his goal of economic independence.

But this independence was constantly jeopardized. The French King, by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, reduced annates from France by four-fifths, and then played on the Pope’s need to get the Sanction lifted. A famous example occurred when Louis XI asked Pius II to give the red hat to his favourite, Jouffroy Bishop of Arras. Arras was a tall, handsome, ruddy-cheeked courtier described by the women of Rome, who had good cause to know, as Venus’s Achilles. The sacred college informed Pius that Arras was quite unsuitable, a know-all and a boaster, yet ‘influenced as easily as a child’, while the holy German cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, actually burst into tears at the proposal. Pius pointed out that Arras, who was Legate to France, had promised to get the Pragmatic Sanction lifted and, if rejected, ‘he will rage like a serpent and spit out all his venom on us.’ Pius was the most eloquent man of his day—eloquence he defined as saying the same thing three times over—and he finally convinced the sacred college. But not content with his red hat, Arras next asked for Besançon and Albi, two very rich sees. Pius said he could have one, but not both, for that would be a grave abuse. Arras flew into a rage, hurled insults and threats at the Pope and finally tried to bribe him, offering 12,000 ducats for both sees. Pius’s patience gave way. ‘Go to the devil,’ he said, and in a sense Arras did. He scandalized Rome with his debauchery and scenes of violence, hurling silver dishes at his servants and even overturning his dining-room table. The Pragmatic Sanction was, however, lifted. Such was the price Popes sometimes had to pay for economic independence. No wonder Pius’s dearest ambition was to see himself at the head of a crusading army, kings as his lieutenants, renewing papal authority with victories over the Turk. Pius’s crusade came to nothing but the economic problem for long continued to bedevil the Papacy.

In 1447 Tommaso Parentucelli, the son of a poor Tuscan physician, was elected Pope with the title Nicholas V. It is an important date because Nicholas was the first Pope for 150 years to spend his whole reign in Rome. During centuries of war with the Emperor and his Ghibelline allies, the Popes could seldom reside for long in so vulnerable a city, and since 1100 they had spent more time outside Rome than in it. But with Nicholas V there began that continual residence which was to make Rome and the Papacy almost interchangeable terms.

The physical return of the Popes coincided with the return to the past we call the classical revival. Nicholas, a modest, peaceable man, had spent much of his earlier life in Florence. He was a close friend of Cosimo de’ Medici, and had been commissioned by him to catalogue Niccolò Niccoli’s library for the Convent of S. Marco. In Florence Nicholas read the newly discovered classical authors. Many priests condemned this ‘pagan’ learning and said it was a mortal sin to read books by adorers of false gods. But Nicholas, like his Florentine friends, welcomed it and recognized at how many points the ancient Greeks and Romans had surpassed the Italians of his day. He saw Ghiberti and Donatello making sculpture according to classical models and Brunelleschi building the soaring dome of Florence cathedral.

Nicholas was the first Pope to patronize the new learning. He invited scholars to Rome to translate into Latin such newly discovered Greek authors as Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus and Appian. Though Lorenzo Valla had written a treatise discrediting the Donation of Constantine, Nicholas tolerantly made him a papal secretary and commissioned him to translate Thucydides at the handsome fee of 500 ducats. He paid 1000 ducats for the first ten books of Strabo and offered 10,000 for a translation of Homer. If an author showed scruples, the Pope would say kindly, ‘Don’t refuse: you may not find another Nicholas.’ He realized that he was breaking new ground and that later Popes might be less large-minded.

The city of Rome imposed a heavy burden on Nicholas, as on his predecessors. He had to patch up its seemingly endless wall, its old bridges and dozens of medieval churches. So it took an act of courage to decide to stretch already slender resources by beautifying the city. Nicholas called Fra Angelico from Florence to fresco his private chapel in rose and blue with scenes from the lives of St Stephen and St Laurence. He brought Renaud de Maincourt from Paris to found Rome’s first tapestry workshop. He planned to place the Egyptian obelisk near St Peter’s on four colossal figures of the Evangelists, as a spectacular symbol of the harmony between Christian and pagan thought. But his most ambitious plan concerned St Peter’s. The basilica was then 1100 years old, and its southern wall leaned outward to the extent of 3 braccia—4 feet 9 inches. After discussing the matter with the Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas decided completely to rebuild St Peter’s as a domed basilica with nave and double aisles. He got work started at once on foundations for a new choir, using 2500 cartloads of stone from the Colosseum, and although the foundations rose only six feet in his pontificate, a beginning had been made to a new conception of Rome. As Nicholas explained on his deathbed: If the faith of ordinary men is to be strong, ‘they must have something that appeals to the eye … majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God.’

Sixtus IV continued Nicholas’s work with all the determination of a Ligurian. He opened, straightened or paved many streets between the new papal residence in the Vatican and the civic centre on the Capitoline Hill. He built the bridge across the Tiber that still bears his name. He built the Sistine Chapel and decorated it with frescoes, notably Perugino’s Giving of the Keys to Peter, and Botticelli’s Old Testament scenes, chosen to show that the Pope was the successor of the priest-kings of Israel. He re-established the Sapienza, as the university of Rome was called, though the professors’ pay several times had to go to soldiers defending the Papal States. One of the professors was Pomponius Laetus, who had learned from Lorenzo Valla the importance of philology in reconstructing history; he made a large collection of Roman inscriptions—only a single Christian example was considered polished enough for inclusion.

Sixtus added 1000 manuscripts to the collection begun by Nicholas, mostly works of theology, philosophy and patristic literature. To house them he also built a splendid library in the new classical style, with round-headed arches on Corinthian columns; its walls were marble, and decorations included Sixtus’s family device, the oak-leaf and acorn. The library was heated in winter—an innovation at that time—and anyone might borrow books on deposit of a small sum. Sixtus got Melozzo da Forlì to paint a commemorative picture of himself in the new library, attended by the first librarian, Platina, and his nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II. Its inscription states that before Sixtus built the library, books had been stacked away ‘in squalor’.

The forty-odd cardinals whose role it was to help the Pope govern the Church also began to build. Raffaello Riario, another of Sixtus’s nephews, was lucky enough to win, in a single night’s gambling, the huge sum of 60,000 ducats, and sensible enough to spend it on what is perhaps the most beautiful of all Roman houses, later to be known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria. Though sparsely furnished, the cardinals’ new dwellings were hung with brocade draperies and their tables gleamed with heavy silver. Profiting from the recent improvement in textiles, the cardinals dressed in fine robes of red watered silk, adding for the street a red hood and their red tasselled hat; in Advent and Lent they wore violet. An innovation in the second half of the century was their right to a silk mitre and red biretta, as well as red caparisons and gilded stirrups for their genets and mules. With a retinue of between 80 and 100 servants each, the cardinals did on a smaller scale what the Popes were doing: built and stocked libraries, commissioned pictures embodying the recent discovery of perspective and took an interest in the city’s classical remains.

In the City of God St Augustine had described the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 as a punishment for sin, in particular for the continuance of pagan practices and, ever since, classical remains had been viewed with awesome guilt. But with the discovery of Latin texts and inscriptions, scholars began to take a closer interest in ancient history and to study the ruins of Rome for their own sake. The first man to do so seriously is known as Flavio Biondo—inexactly as it happens, because Flavio is just an Italian form of Flavus, which in turn is a Latin form of Biondo. He usually signed Blondus Forliviensis, being a native of Forlì in the Papal States, and is best called simply Biondo. Born in 1392, he received a good education and trained as a notary. In 1420 he began a close friendship with Guarino of Verona, a pioneer humanist schoolteacher, and in 1423 married Paola Michelini, a noble lady of Forlì, who bore him ten sons. In 1433 he moved to Rome, and the following year was named apostolic secretary. As well as being a scholar Biondo evidently possessed presence and initiative, for he was sent on diplomatic missions to Venice and to Francesco Sforza, then just an ambitious condottiere. Biondo loved Rome with all the passion of a provincial. In his spare time he measured old buildings and tracked down faded streets until he was able to reconstruct the topography of ancient Rome, publishing his results in 1444–6 in three books entitled Roma instaurata. During the pontificate of Nicholas V he travelled the length and breadth of Italy in order to compile a historical and geographical survey of the peninsula, Italia illustrata, the first of its kind since antiquity. He also sought to interest various rulers, notably the King of Naples, in uniting Italy against the Turk. He returned to Rome and in 1459, four years before his death, published his masterpiece, Roma triumphans.

Biondo’s idea, like all revolutionary ideas, was very simple. His aim was to explain how pagan Rome became triumphant, in the hope that the Pope by emulating Rome’s methods might himself become triumphant. He ascribed the greatness of ancient Rome to her administration, military discipline, customs and institutions, and, above all, to her religion. He began Book I with a quotation from Cicero: ‘Other nations may surpass the Romans in numbers, in the arts, in practical skills, but in religion, piety and theology we leave the rest of the world a long way behind.’ He also quoted Livy’s story about the praetor Gn. Cornelius who was heavily fined for daring to upbraid M. Emilius Lepidus, the Chief Pontiff: ‘the Romans,’ commented Biondo, ‘wished religion to rank above secular affairs.’

Biondo then sought to show that the Papacy, in structure, institutions and customs, was a continuation of the Roman Republic and Empire. Such Christian practices as virginity, fasting, vows, the placing of flowers on a grave had their origin in pagan Rome. After his death a Pope lay in state on a dais, just like the Emperors of old. But Biondo thought the Pope corresponded more to a Consul than to an Emperor, and the cardinals to Senators. Cicero had claimed that Rome was ‘the rock of all the world and all nations’, and that the world found joy and glory in being subject to her. This claim was still valid, but the aims of Christian Rome were higher: she ‘prepares souls for eternal glory as once the pagan Republic pursued ephemeral glory.’ However, in dedicating his book to Pius II Biondo dropped to a lower conception of glory: he expressed the hope that Pius would soon be celebrating ‘a most brilliant and glorious triumph’ over the Turk.

Biondo’s book was to prove enormously influential. His declaration that the Church of Rome was the natural successor of ancient Rome was basically a half-truth, but he accumulated such a wealth of illustrative detail that he made it seem convincing. The abiding effect of the book was to make Romans aware of their past no longer as a remote relic, but as a living presence interwoven in the fabric of daily life, not something to be guilty of but something to love. Just as Leonardo Bruni had awoken patriotism in Florence in 1400 with a panegyric praising his city as the successor of ancient republics, so Biondo awoke Roman patriotism and a healthy ambition to emulate the past. From now on classical Rome was to be an abiding influence.

Biondo’s book was not, however, without dangers. It played down the unique character of Christianity, which at times seems to be merely one more manifestation of the eternal city, and by ignoring the part played by Greek ideas and techniques in Roman civilization, it diverted attention from Greek authors, the study of which had proved so fruitful in Florence.

Biondo, as we have seen, compared the Popes to Consuls, and the cardinals to Senators. That is to say, he thought that the Church resembled and should continue to resemble the Roman Republic. However, since the Republic had given way to the Empire before becoming, in Biondo’s eyes, the Church of Rome, it was natural for any reader who believed in unlimited papal power to assume that the Church was the new Empire, the Pope the new Emperor. This in fact is what usually happened, and the effect of this kind of interpretation can be seen in the following incident, recounted by Pius II in his Commentaries, a book whose title and third-person style is modelled on the Commentaries of Julius Caesar.

One hot summer’s day Pius was travelling from Santa Fiora to Rome. Because of gout, he was carried on a gilded litter, accompanied by a colourful suite of courtiers and horsemen. Pius’s stern nature relaxed on such journeys. He noted the blue of flax fields, the scarlet of wild strawberries, the orange of beeches in autumn, and he liked picnics, especially if a fresh-caught trout was served. As the procession wound over the hills they came on a cowherd tending his beasts. The cowherd realized that some great lord was approaching, and thinking the dust and heat might have made him thirsty, he took out his gourd, squatted beside one of the cows and filled the gourd with milk. Then, excited but hesitant, he offered it to the man who sat in the gilded litter. Pius looked fastidiously at the gourd, which was very dirty and covered with grease. It would be easy to hand it to one of his cardinals or simply to order the procession forward. But suddenly there came to his mind a passage from Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes. Travelling in a distant land, Artaxerxes arrived at a stream where a peasant offered him water in his cupped hands, and Artaxerxes gratefully quenched his thirst. So finally Pius accepted the gourd and, to the cowherd’s great satisfaction, drank the milk.

This small event has a triple interest: it shows how men steeped in classical literature tended to see life as a palimpsest; it shows a humanist acting graciously in imitation not of Christ but of a pagan; and it shows the Pope to whom Biondo had dedicated his book identifying himself with an absolute monarch whose nod, like that of the Roman Emperors, could signify life or death.

If Biondo’s book awoke Rome to a sense of her own great past, it also therefore provided a new notion of the Papacy. Henceforth, and throughout the sixteenth century, the Pope was to see himself as in some sense the successor not only of Peter but also of the Roman Emperors. The medieval concept of the Pope as ‘priest-king’ no longer carried much weight, whereas this ‘historical’ theory of the Pope’s temporal power made an appeal to men enamoured of the classical world, though it was not calculated to please the Germans, who considered their own Holy Roman Emperor to be the lawful successor of the Caesars. The theory was further enhanced by the publication in 1470 of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. This provided portraits of Julius Caesar and eleven Emperors in unforgettable detail. The book was widely read and constantly reprinted. It was complemented by the publication of Tacitus’s Histories and books 11–16 of the Annals, the three works between them providing a picture of the early Empire much more vivid than any available picture of the Republic in its prime. It was probably Suetonius’s work that gave Sixtus IV the idea of commissioning from Platina the Lives of the Popes, in which Christ is referred to as ‘Emperor of the Christians’.

The new ideal had much in it of good. The early Roman Emperors helped to spread civilization throughout Europe, and Rome’s proudest title had been not Conqueror of Nations but caput mundi, Head of the World. Used with discretion and in the spiritual sense specified by Biondo, it could lead to a new sense of unity within Christendom.

But the ideal was also open to grave abuse, for the Emperors had tried and often succeeded in setting themselves above the law. The first to abuse the ideal was Roderigo Borgia. Elected Pope in 1492, he chose for himself the name of Alexander the Great, having already chosen for his son the name of Caesar. Pope Alexander VI seems to have considered himself, like a new Tiberius, wholly above the moral law. He kept a mistress, he decorated his apartments with such scenes as The Bath of Susannah, he entertained mixed company with the spectacle of stallions suddenly let loose among a herd of mares. His nepotism savoured more of the Caesars than of earlier Popes. On two occasions he handed over control of the Vatican palace to his daughter Lucrezia during his absence, with power to open his correspondence. For his son Juan he carved the dukedom of Nepi out of possessions of Roman barons, and to Caesar he made over much of the Papal States. There had been popes more depraved during the tenth century, but coming at a time of serious intellectual self-searching, Alexander’s behaviour caused general disgust and strengthened the hand of all who desired reform.

In Alexander’s pontificate occurred the decisive event that divides the fifteenth from the sixteenth centuries: the invasion of Italy by King Charles VIII of France—and the Pope’s meeting with Charles in 1495 aptly symbolizes the reaction of Italy as a whole to the French. Alexander was by no means a physically weak man; he liked bull-fights, and seems to have seen himself as a bull-like figure, the family blazon being a bull; yet when he met the tiny myopic youth of twenty-four Alexander quite literally collapsed. He fell into one of those deep faints to which he was subject, and had to be helped out of the garden. It was as though he foresaw, behind the youth with the nervous tic, his tough Breton, German and Scots mercenaries, the whole huge army of 60,000 which was soon to occupy Naples and defeat the combined Italian forces at Fornovo, as though he foresaw the four other invasions within his lifetime which were to divide Italy like surgeons dissecting a leg.

There in the Vatican garden the venerable papal ideal of a respublica Christiana, of collaboration between royal sword and papal crozier, was seen to be defunct. Europe had now fragmented into tough nation states bent on expansion. It was for Alexander’s successors, if they could, to keep the Papacy independent, politically as well as economically, in face of this new threat. It was for them to show whether, with tact and without hubris, they could make good their claim to be heirs of the Roman Emperors. It was for them to try and rally the hundred and one lordships of Italy to a common purpose. Only they now had the requisite authority for, by the first few years of the new century, Milan was occupied by the French, Naples by the Spaniards; Florence, impoverished, was still vainly trying to recapture her port at Pisa, stolen by the French. What power and hope that remained were centred in the city of Rome.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_d8d3d02f-f5ec-5975-9e17-ff96d669eede)

Julius II (#ulink_d8d3d02f-f5ec-5975-9e17-ff96d669eede)

ON THE LAST DAY of October 1503 thirty-eight cardinals entered the Vatican Palace in order to choose a new pope. It was the second conclave that year, for Pius III, the successor of Alexander VI, had died after a pontificate of only one month. Each cardinal had one servant and was allotted a cubicle containing a bed, hung with silk curtains and marked with his coat of arms. The windows of the hall had been bricked up and when the cardinals were inside the doors were locked. One of their number went round after dark with a torch in order to ensure that no unauthorized person had slipped through the three rows of guards who ringed the hall. At dinnertime servants placed food in special wooden containers: a senior official cut open the bread, carved the chickens, prodded the joints of meat and held the decanters of wine to the light before sending them in to the cardinals through a revolving hatch. Even so, messages sometimes passed in or out: at the conclave of 1513 the Englishman Bainbridge made known the name of the cardinal then in the lead by scratching it on the base of a silver platter.

The cardinals were obliged to elect one of their own number—that had been the rule since 769—and must do so by a two-thirds majority. Three-fifths of the cardinals were Italian, but so disunited that Louis XII, who held the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples, was convinced he could secure the election of Georges d’Amboise. The energetic Giuliano della Rovere argued that a French pope would move the Papacy back to Avignon. Rovere entered the conclave a firm favourite with the Romans, who betted heavily on papal elections, and he took a leading part in the discussions, arguments and bargaining that ensued. Later that night the cardinals sat down at the conclave table, on which lay paper, ink, reed and quill pens. Each cardinal wrote on a slip of paper one name only, then went to the altar on which stood a golden chalice. Removing the paten, he placed his slip in the chalice, then re-covered it with the paten. When the slips were counted, it was found that all but three cardinals—Amboise, the Neapolitan Carafa and Casanova, a Spaniard—had voted for Rovere. According to custom, Rovere then signed a document promising to hold a Council within two years. After that and homage by the cardinals the conclave ended. It had been the shortest in history.

The new Pope, who took the name Julius II, had been born in Albissola, near Savona, on 5 December 1443, his father, Raffaello della Rovere, being a brother of Sixtus IV, his mother, Teodora Manerola, of Greek origin. As a boy he was very poor and used to earn a little money by sailing onions in a small boat down to Genoa. He joined the Franciscans and took a law degree in Perugia. In 1471, when his uncle became Pope, he was made Bishop and Cardinal. He successfully administered and quelled rebellions in the Papal States and later, as Legate to France, got to know French ambitions first hand.

Julius was a fine-looking man. He had a big head, straight nose, powerful jaw and deep-set eyes with an awe-inspiring expression which Italians call terribile. His nervous energy was such that he was seldom still for a minute, and he said exactly what he thought—‘It will kill me if I don’t let it out.’ He had a quick temper and carried a stick with which he would beat those who incurred his anger. When annoying documents were submitted, he would throw his spectacles and the documents too at whoever had brought them. He was also a man who liked to do everything himself. When ill, he ignored his doctors and, to their horror, treated a high fever by chewing, without swallowing, quantities of plums, strawberries and small onions.

Julius kept a good table, his favourite dishes being chicken, game and sucking pig, while his Lenten fare consisted of prawns, tunny, lampreys from Flanders and caviar. He also enjoyed a good wine, especially those of Samos and Corsica. Though as a cardinal he had had three daughters, women no longer played any part in his life. He was essentially a serious person and had so loathed Alexander VI that he spent part of the Borgia’s reign in self-imposed exile in France. Only once was he heard to make a joke. Proto da Lucca, a member of his suite and an incessant chatterer, asked him for the bishopric of Cagli. ‘Impossible,’ said Julius. ‘In Spanish caglio means “I’m silent”.’