These disputes fettered the efforts of the Pope to unify Europe against the Turks. On the very day of his coronation he expressed his horror at the advance of the Moslems along the Danube to Vienna, and through the Balkans into Bosnia. Greece, Epirus, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia were falling to the enemies of Christianity; who could say when they would leap across the Adriatic into Italy? A month after his coronation Pius issued an invitation to all Christian princes to join him in a great congress at Mantua and lay plans to rescue Eastern Christendom from the Ottoman tide.
He himself arrived there on May 27, 1459. Arrayed in the most gorgeous vestments of his office, he was borne through the city on a litter held up by the nobles and vassals of the Church. He addressed great throngs in one of the most moving orations of his career. But no king or prince came from beyond the Alps, and none sent representatives with powers to commit his state to war; nationalism, which was to achieve the Reformation, was already strong enough to make the papacy an ineffectual suppliant before the thrones of the kings. The cardinals urged the Pope to return to Rome; neither did they relish the thought of yielding a tithe of their income to the crusade; some decamped to their pleasures; some asked Pius to his face did he wish them to die of fever in Mantua’s summer heat? The Pontiff waited patiently for the Emperor, but Frederick III, instead of coming to the aid of the man who in the past had served him well, declared war on Hungary in an effort to add to his realm the very nation that was most actively preparing to resist the Turks. France again made its co-operation conditional on papal support of a French campaign against Naples. Venice held back for fear that her remaining possessions in the Aegean would be the first sacrifice in a war of Christian Europe against the Ottomans. At last, in August, an embassy came from Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy; in September Francesco Sforza appeared; other Italian princes followed his lead, and on the 26th the Congress held its first sitting, four months after the arrival of the Pope. Four months more passed in argument; finally, by agreeing to the division of Turkish and formerly Byzantine territory in Europe among the victorious powers, Pius won Burgundy and Italy to his plan for a holy war. All Christian laymen were to contribute to the cause a thirtieth of their income, all Jews a twentieth, all clergy a tenth. The Pope returned to Rome in almost complete exhaustion; but he gave orders for the construction of a papal fleet, and prepared, despite gout and cough and stone, to lead the crusade himself.
And yet his nature shrank from war, and he dreamed of a peaceful victory. Perhaps encouraged by rumors that Mohammed II, born of a Christian mother, had secret leanings toward Christianity, Pius addressed to the Sultan (1461) an earnest appeal to accept the Gospel of Christ. He had never been more eloquent.
Were you to embrace Christianity there is no prince on earth who would surpass you in glory or equal you in power. We would acknowledge you as emperor of the Greeks and the East; and what you have now taken by violence, and retain by injustice, would then be your lawful possession…. Oh, what a fullness of peace it would be! The golden age of Augustus, sung by the poets, would return. If you were to join yourself to us the whole of the East would soon turn to Christ. One will could give peace to the entire world, and that will is yours!37
Mohammed made no reply; whatever his theology, he knew that his final protection against Western arms lay not in the promises of the Pope but in the religious ardor of his people. Pius turned more realistically to collecting the clerical tithe. A windfall sustained him in 1462 when rich deposits of alum were found in papal soil at Tolfa in western Latium; several thousand men were put to work mining the substance so valued by dyers; soon the mines were yielding 100,000 florins per year to the Holy See. Pius announced that the discovery was a miracle, a divine contribution to the Turkish war.38 The Papal States were now the richest government in Italy, with Venice a close second, Naples third, then Milan, Florence, Modena, Siena, Mantua.39
Venice, perceiving the resolute earnestness of the Pope, accelerated its preparations. The other powers held back, or offered merely token aid; the collection of taxes for the crusade met with formidable resistance almost everywhere. Francesco Sforza cooled to the enterprise as promising to strengthen Venice by redeeming her lost possessions and trade. Genoa, which had pledged eight triremes, withheld them. The Duke of Burgundy urged the Pope to wait for a better day. But Pius announced that he would go to Ancona, expect there the union of new papal and Venetian fleets, cross with them to Ragusa, join Skanderbeg of Bosnia and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and lead in person the advance against the Turks. Nearly all the cardinals protested; they had no appetite for marching through the Balkans; they warned the Pope that Bosnia was reeking with heretics and plague. The ailing pontiff nevertheless took the cross of a crusader, bade farewell to Rome, not expecting to see it again, and sailed with his fleet for Ancona (June 18, 1464).
Meanwhile the armies that were supposed to meet him faded away as if by Oriental magic; the troops originally promised by Milan did not come; those which Florence sent were so poorly equipped as to be useless; when Pius reached Ancona (July 19) he found that most of the crusaders who had assembled there had deserted, weary of wating and worried for food. Plague broke out in the Venetian fleet as it left the lagoons, and caused a delay of twelve days. Brokenhearted by the vanishing of his armies and the nonappearance of the Venetian armada, Pius languished at Ancona, sick to the verge of death. Finally the fleet was sighted; the Pope sent his galleys to meet them, and had himself carried to a window from which he could see the harbor. As the combined navies came in sight he died (August 14, 1464). Venice recalled her vessels, the remaining soldiers dispersed, the crusade collapsed. The brilliant and versatile climber who had craved success after success had reached the throne of thrones, had graced it with urbane scholarship and Christian benevolence, and had drunk to the dregs the gall of failure, humiliation, and defeat; but he had redeemed the errors of his youth with the devotion of his maturity, and had shamed the cynicism of his peers with the nobility of his death.
V. PAUL II: 1464–71
The lives of great men oft remind us that a man’s character can be formed after his demise. If a ruler coddles the chroniclers about him they may lift him to posthumous sanctity; if he offends them they may broil his corpse on a spit of venom or roast him to darkest infamy in a pot of ink. Paul II quarreled with Platina; Platina wrote the biography upon which most estimates of Paul depend, and handed him down to posterity as a monster of vanity, pomp, and greed.
There was some truth in the indictment, though not much more than might be found in any biography untempered with charity. Pietro Barbo, Cardinal of San Marco, was proud of his handsome appearance, as nearly all men are. When elected pope he proposed, probably in humor, to be called Formosus—good-looking; he allowed himself to be dissuaded, and took the title of Paul II. Simple in his private life, yet knowing the hypnotic effect of magnificence, he kept a luxurious court, and entertained his friends and guests with costly hospitality. On entering the conclave that elected him he, like the other cardinals, had pledged himself, if chosen, to wage war against the Turks, to summon a general council, to limit the number of cardinals to twenty-four and the number of papal relatives among them to one, to create no man a cardinal under thirty years of age, and to consult the cardinals on all important appointments. Paul, elected, repudiated these capitulations as nullifying time-honored traditions and powers. He consoled the cardinals by raising their yearly revenue to a minimum of 4000 florins ($100,000?). He himself, coming of a mercantile family, relished the security of florins, ducats, scudi, and gems that held a fortune in a ray of light. He wore a tiara that outweighed a palace in worth. As cardinal he had kept the goldsmiths busy with orders for jewels, medals, and cameos; these, and costly relics of classic art, he had collected in the sumptuous Palazzo San Marco which he had built for himself at the foot of the Capitol.* With all his acquisitiveness he stooped to no simony, repressed the sale of indulgences, and governed Rome with justice if not with mercy.
/> He is worst remembered by his quarrel with the Roman humanists. Some of these were secretaries to the pope or the cardinals; most of them filled less dignified positions as abbreviatores— writers of briefs, or keepers of records, for the Curia. Whether as a measure of economy, or to rid the Collegium Abbreviatorum of the fifty-eight Sienese whom Pius II had appointed to it, Paul disbanded the whole group, gave its work to other departments, and left some seventy humanists jobless or reduced to less lucrative posts. The most eloquent of these dismissed humanists was Bartolommeo de’ Sacchi, who took the Latin name Platina from his native Piadena near Cremona. He appealed to the Pope to re-employ the dismissed men; when Paul refused he wrote him a threatening letter. Paul had him arrested, and kept him for four months in Sant’ Angelo, bound with heavy chains. Cardinal Gonzaga secured his release; but Platina, Paul thought, would bear watching.
The leader of the humanists in Rome was Iulio Pomponio Leto, allegedly the natural son of Prince Sanseverino of Salerno. Coming to Rome in youth, he attached himself to Valla as a disciple, and succeeded him as professor of Latin in the university. He became so enamored of pagan literature that he lived and had his being not in the Rome of Nicholas V or Paul II, but in that of the Catos or the Caesars. He was the first to edit the agricultural classics of Varro and Columella, and he sedulously followed their precepts in tending his vineyard. He remained content in learned poverty, spent half his time among the historic ruins, wept at their spoliation and desolation, Latinized his name to Pomponius Laetus, and walked to his classroom in ancient Roman dress. Hardly any hall could hold the crowd that gathered at dawn to hear his lectures; some students came at midnight to secure a place. He despised the Christian religion, denounced its preachers as hypocrites, and trained his scholars in the Stoic rather than the Christian morality. His home was a museum of Roman antiquities, a meeting place for students and teachers of Roman lore. About 1460 he organized them into a Roman Academy, whose members took pagan names, gave such names to their children in baptism, exchanged the Christian faith for a religious worship of the genius of Rome, performed Latin comedies, and celebrated the anniversary of Rome’s foundation with pagan ceremonies in which the officiating members were termed sacerdotes, and Laetus was called pontifex maximus. Some enthusiastic members dreamed of restoring the Roman Republic.40
Early in 1468 a citizen laid before the papal police a charge that the Academy was plotting to depose and arrest the Pope. Certain cardinals supported the charge, and assured the pontiff that a rumor in Rome was predicting his early death. Paul ordered the arrest of Laetus, Platina, and other leaders of the Academy. Pomponius wrote humble apologies and professions of orthodoxy; after due chastening he was released, and resumed his lecturing, but with such careful conformity that when he died (1498) forty bishops attended his funeral. Platina was tortured to elicit evidence of a conspiracy; no such evidence was anywhere found, but Platina, despite a dozen letters of apology, was kept in prison for a year. Paul decreed the dissolution of the Academy as a nest of heresy, and forbade the teaching of pagan literature in the schools of Rome. His successor allowed the Academy to reopen reformed, and gave the penitent Platina charge of the Vatican Library. There Platina found the materials for his graphic and elegant biographies of the popes (In vitas summorum pontificum); and when he came to Paul II he took his revenge. His indictment might with more justice have been reserved for Sixtus IV.
VI. SIXTUS IV: 1471–84
Of the eighteen cardinals who met to choose a new pontiff, fifteen were Italian, Rodrigo Borgia was Spanish, d’Estouteville was French, Bessarion was Greek. One participant later described the election of Cardinal Francesco della Rovere as due to “intrigue and bribery” (ex artibus et corruptelis)41 but this seems to have meant only that various offices were promised to various cardinals for their votes. The new pope illustrated the admirable equality of opportunity (among Italians) to reach the papacy. He was born of a peasant family at Pecorile, near Savona. Repeatedly ill as a child, he was consecrated to St. Francis by his mother in prayer for his recovery. At nine he was sent to a Franciscan convent, and later entered the Minorite order. For a while he served as tutor in the della Rovere family, whose name he took as his own. He studied philosophy and theology at Pavia, Bologna, and Padua, and taught them there and elsewhere to classes so crowded that almost every learned Italian of the next generation was said to have been his pupil.
When, at fifty-seven, he became Sixtus IV, his reputation was that of a scholar distinguished for learning and integrity. Almost overnight, by one of the strangest transformations in papal history, he became a politician and a warrior. Finding Europe too divided, and its governments too corrupt, for a crusade against the Turks, he decided to confine his secular efforts to Italy. There too, of course, he found division—in the Papal States the authority of the pope largely flouted by local rulers, in Latium a rule by noble violence ignoring the papal power, and in Rome a mob so disorderly that at his coronation it stoned his litter in anger at a crush caused by a stoppage of the cavalcade. Sixtus proposed to restore order in Rome, to reinvigorate legatine authority in the Papal States, and to bring Italy under the unifying rule of the pope.
Surrounded by chaos, distrustful of strangers, and subject to family affection, Sixtus appointed his avid nephews to positions of power and revenue. It was the prime curse of his pontificate that those whom he loved best proved worst, and took such venal advantage of their place that all Italy came to despise them. The favorite nephew was Pietro (or Piero) Riario, a youth of some charm—cheerful, witty, courteous, generous—but so fond of luxury and sensual delights that even the rich benefices bestowed upon him by the Pope failed to finance the tastes of this formerly mendicant friar. Sixtus made him a cardinal at twenty-five (1471), and gave him the bishoprics of Treviso, Senigallia, Spalato, Florence, and other dignities, with a total income of 60,000 ducats ($1,500,000?) a year. Pietro spent all, and more, on vessels of silver and gold, fine raiment, tapestries, embroideries, a pretentious retinue, expensive public games, and the patronage of painters, poets, and scholars. The festivities—including a banquet that lasted six hours—with which he and his cousin Giuliano welcomed to Rome Ferrante’s daughter Eleonora marked a height of extravagance hardly equaled there since Lucullus or Nero. Dizzy with power, Pietro made a triumphal tour of Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, and Milan, enjoying regal honors everywhere as a prince of the blood, displaying his mistresses in costly attire, and making plans to become pope on or before the death of his uncle. But on his return to Rome he died (1474) of his excesses at the age of twenty-eight, having spent 200,000 ducats in two years, and owing 60,000 more.42 His brother Girolamo was made commander of the papal armies and lord of Imola and Forli; we have already disposed of him there. Another nephew, Leonardo della Rovere, was made prefect of Rome; and when he died his brother Giovanni succeeded him. The ablest of these innumerable nephews was Giuliano della Rovere, who will require a chapter as Julius II; his life was reasonably decent, and he rose to the papacy over every obstacle by force of intellect and character.
The plans of Sixtus to strengthen the Papal States disturbed the other governments of Italy. Lorenzo de’ Medici, as we have before related, schemed to get Imola for Florence; Sixtus outplayed him, and replaced the Medici with the Pazzi as bankers for the papacy; Lorenzo tried to ruin the Pazzi, they tried to kill him. Sixtus agreed to the conspiracy but deprecated murder; “go and do what you will,” he told the plotters, “provided there be no killing.”43 The result was a war that lasted (1478–80) until the Turks threatened to overrun Italy. When that danger subsided, Sixtus was free to resume his liberation of the Papal States. Late in 1480 the Ordelaffi line of dictators died out at Forli, and the people asked the Pope to take over the city; Sixtus bade Girolamo govern Imola and Forli together. Girolamo suggested taking Ferrara next, and persuaded Sixtus and Venice to join in war upon Duke Ercole (1482). Ferrante of Naples sent troops to defend his son-in-law; Florence and Milan also helped Ferr
ara; and the Pope, who had begun his reign with plans for European peace, found that he had plunged all Italy into war. Harassed by Naples in the south, by Florence in the north, and by disturbances in Rome, Sixtus came to terms with Ferrara after a year of chaos and bloodshed. When the Venetians refused to follow suit he excommunicated them, and joined Florence and Milan in war upon his late ally.
The nobles of the capital had felt justified, by the example of a warlike pontiff, in renewing their exhilarating feuds. It was one of the polite customs of Rome to plunder the palace of a cardinal just elected to the papacy. In so handling the palace of one of the della, Rovere cardinals, a young aristocrat, Francesco di Santa Croce, had been wounded by a member of the della Valle family. The youth revenged himself by cutting the tendon of della Valle’s heel; della Valle’s relatives revenged him by cleaving Francesco’s head; Prospero di Santa Croce revenged Francesco by killing Piero Margani. The feud spread through the city, the Orsini and the papal forces supporting the Santa Croce, the Colonna defending the Valle. Lorenzo Oddone Colonna was captured, tried, tortured into a confession, and put to death in Sant’ Angelo, though his brother Fabrizio surrendered two Colonna fortresses to Sixtus in the hope of having Lorenzo spared. Prospero Colonna joined Naples in war on the Pope, ravaged the Campagna, raided Rome. Sixtus engaged Roberto Malatesta of Rimini to come and lead the papal troops, Roberto defeated the Neapolitan and Colonna forces at Campo Morto, returned to Rome victorious, and died of fever contracted in the Campagna swamps. Girolamo Riario took his place, and Sixtus officially blessed the artillery that his nephew directed against the Colonna citadels. But while the Pope’s spirit willed war, his body collapsed under the strain of successive crises. In June, 1484, he too came down with fever. On August 11 news came to him that his allies had made peace with Venice over his protests; he refused to ratify it. The next day he died.