The Ugly Renaissance (43 page)

F
AMILY
M
ATTERS

Aeneas would have had the opportunity to see the moral degeneracy of the papal court firsthand in his early years in Rome, but the debt, drunkenness, and debauchery he would have encountered in the grand palaces of popes and cardinals told only part of the dark story behind the papacy’s patronage of the arts. In addition to causing a sudden and dramatic increase in the level of greed, gluttony, and lust in the Curia, the papacy’s resumption of power in the
Papal States had prompted a much more insidious transformation in the way in which the popes used their power and—by extension—in the way in which ambition shaped the character of the papal court.

It was not long before Aeneas caught his first glimpse of this even uglier side of the Renaissance papacy. Only two years after Aeneas was made a cardinal, Callixtus III died, and he was called upon to take part in the conclave summoned to elect the new pope. It was at this most important of Church gatherings that the internal politics of the Curia began to become clear.

Convened in accordance with the dignified traditions of the Church,
it looked like a very solemn occasion. As soon as the funeral was over, the College of Cardinals—dressed in their finest vestments—processed into a small suite of rooms in the Vatican Palace, where they would remain in secretive isolation until the election had been concluded. As the doors were locked behind them, all eighteen swore themselves to secrecy and obedience (the eight other living members of the College were unable to attend) and, after praying for divine guidance, began their deliberations in earnest. In
Pinturicchio’s later depiction of the proceedings for the Piccolomini Library in Siena, everything is presented as having been conducted with high-minded decorum, and although several cardinals were
papabili
,
Aeneas himself seems to have regarded the whole affair as a foregone conclusion.

The conclave was anything but decorous, and it only took one round of voting for things to turn nasty. Given that none of the candidates had secured a clear majority, a victor would emerge only as a result of negotiation. But rather than considering the piety and holiness of the
papabili
, the cardinals threw themselves into a bout of un-priestly horse-trading. No sooner had the inconclusive results been announced than

the richer and more influential members of the College summoned others to their presence. Seeking the papacy for themselves or their friends, they begged, made promises, even tried threats. Some threw all decency aside, spared no blushes, and pleaded their own cases, claiming the papacy as their right.

Meeting secretly in the latrines, Cardinal d’Estouteville—the most fiercely ambitious member of the Sacred College—did his utmost to cajole others with threats and bribes. He promised to distribute a whole host of lucrative benefices to anyone who would vote for him, and made it clear that, if elected, he would dismiss those who did not support him from any Church offices they might hold. Even the redoubtable
Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia—the vice-chancellor of the Church—was momentarily scared into offering his backing.

Despite d’Estouteville’s efforts, however, the second round of voting only produced another deadlock. He received only six votes, while Aeneas—whose own techniques of “persuasion” are shrouded in mystery—garnered nine. It was clear that another vote would only drag things out, and since neither candidate had the requisite
two-thirds majority (twelve votes), the College decided to give the process of “accession” a try. This method allowed the cardinals to change their votes and “accede” to a different candidate. Rather than helping things run more smoothly, however, this only served to push the standard of behavior even lower still.

Sensing that d’Estouteville was unlikely to succeed, Rodrigo Borgia was the first to stand up and switch his support to Aeneas.
Cardinal Giacomo Tebaldi followed suit. Aeneas now only needed one vote to take the throne. But at this point, the conclave descended into farce:

Cardinal Prospero Colonna decided to seize for himself the honor of acclaiming the next pontiff. He rose and was about to pronounce his vote … when the cardinals of Nicaea and Rouen [Bessarion and d’Estouteville] suddenly laid hands on him and rebuked him sharply for wanting to accede to Aeneas. When he persisted, they tried to get him out of the room by force, one seizing his right arm and the other his left … so determined were they to snatch the papacy from Aeneas.

Prospero was, however, determined. As he was being dragged out of the chapel by two of the most august personages in the whole of Christendom, he shouted his support for Aeneas. With the faint thud of ecclesiastical punches being thrown and d’Estouteville’s cries of despair ringing in his ears, Aeneas found himself the new pope.

It was not an auspicious beginning for a papal reign. Far from being a model of Christian decorum, the conclave had been a violent, corrupt, and angry brawl that would shame even a modern rugby club. But it was certainly not anything out of the ordinary. Tempers at conclaves throughout the Renaissance always ran high, and shouts and punches were not unusual. What was more, bribery—or “
simony,” to give it its proper name—was quite normal. Baldassare Cossa had, after all, borrowed 10,000 florins from
Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici in 1410 to ensure that he could become an antipope. After the reunification of the Church, things got worse, despite repeated attempts to stamp out simony at conclaves. D’Estouteville’s attempts at bribery were, in fact, to pale by comparison to the
simony practiced in 1492 by Rodrigo Borgia, when the successful Spanish cardinal was reputed to have offered four mule loads of silver and benefices worth over 10,000 ducats a year
to Ascanio Sforza alone. By the standards of other conclaves, Pius II’s election had actually gone fairly smoothly.

But it was not merely as a consequence of the papacy’s spiritual prestige that Renaissance conclaves were so habitually fierce and crooked. The papal throne had become a prize of almost incalculable material and political value.

After the papacy’s return to Rome, it was in a position to have a dramatic impact on the balance of power in Italy. As a matter of course, the pope was a major player in international politics, and his influence overshadowed the calculations of every other state. Any alliances into which he entered or any campaigns he undertook could threaten the stability of communes, kingdoms, and
signorie
throughout the peninsula. But the pope could also have a serious effect on the internal politics of individual states by directly interfering in the fortunes of individual families. He could make or break a family’s hold on its territory by appointing a particular potentate to the vicariate of a particular city or by dismissing him from his post. He could confer titles of nobility on whomever he wished. And he could dramatically increase or decrease a family’s revenues depending on the manner in which he distributed benefices or Church incomes.

This wouldn’t have mattered all that much if the Curia had been an institution insulated from national and familial concerns or if the cardinals themselves were decent and upright men devoted to the spiritual well-being of the Church. But it wasn’t, and they weren’t. The popes not only clung to the interests of their native lands but were also very definitely “family” men, regardless of whether they hailed from established ruling dynasties or sprang from up-and-coming new clans. No sooner had they been crowned than they began using the immense authority that had been entrusted to them to favor the fortunes of their country, to fill their family’s coffers (which often went hand in hand with “national” interests), and to build up networks of personal power.

Naturally, anyone who had a shred of ambition did his utmost to curry favor with the popes in the hope of receiving some of the crumbs that fell from the papal table, and the kings of France, England, Spain, and Hungary—as well as Italy’s leading signorial families—all tried to have “their” men appointed cardinals. But perhaps the most obvious sign of the papacy’s role as a rather shady source of money and power was the far more corrupt practice of nepotism.
Although popes had
made a habit of appointing relatives to the College of Cardinals since the Middle Ages, the Renaissance papacy took it to new extremes, and the creation of “cardinal-nephews” reached epidemic proportions. Martin V, for example, not only gave his nephew Prospero Colonna a red hat but also used his influence to make sure his family had a stranglehold on Rome itself. Eugenius IV (who had been made a cardinal by his uncle Gregory XII) elevated two of his nephews to the Sacred College.
Callixtus III had followed suit with such shamelessness that one of his protégés,
Bernardo Roverio, was to condemn him as an “iniquitous pope” who had “befouled the Church of Rome with corruption.” Even the redoubtable Nicholas V had raised his half brother to the cardinalate. In later centuries, things got even worse. Since he was absolutely determined to make the comparatively obscure della Rovere one of Italy’s foremost noble families, Sixtus IV’s propensity for elevating his relatives to the Sacred College surpassed that of even his most nepotistic predecessors. As Machiavelli recorded, he was “
a man of very base and vile condition … the first to show how much a pontiff could do and how many things formerly called errors could be hidden under pontifical authority.” No fewer than six direct kinsmen were elevated in the space of just under seven years and accounted for almost a quarter of the cardinals present at the conclave after his death. Similarly, Paul III did the same for two of his natural grandsons, one of whom—Ranuccio—was only fifteen at the time. Even worse,
Alexander VI—who was himself a cardinal-nephew of Callixtus III—raised a grand total of ten of his kinsmen to the College, including his son (
Cesare Borgia) and two grandnephews. Between 1447 and 1534, six out of ten popes had previously been made cardinals by one of their relatives.

Every cardinal-nephew was loaded with lucrative benefices and grants of land, and this did much to enhance the power and prestige of the families from which they sprang. It was no coincidence that the
della Rovere family owed its prominence in the later Renaissance entirely to the riches lavished on cardinal-nephews, and it is telling that Pietro Riario—who had received his cardinal’s hat from Sixtus IV— was one of the wealthiest men in Rome.

But this was not all. Quite apart from their willingness to pack the College of Cardinals with their relatives, popes who harbored strong family ambitions were more than prepared to give substantial support to kinsmen outside the Church, too. Not long after the Schism had
ended, Martin V set the tone for the rest of the Renaissance by giving his Colonna relatives a free hand in Rome and by securing vast estates for them in the kingdom of Naples.
So extreme did this become that even Machiavelli was appalled by the secular
nepotism of Sixtus IV. Later, Julius II (a nephew of Sixtus IV’s) secured the duchy of Urbino for his nephew Francesco Maria della Rovere in 1508; Clement VII made his illegitimate son, Alessandro de’ Medici, duke of Florence; and Paul III made his bastard child, the condottiere Pier Luigi Farnese, duke of Parma. Most notorious of all, however, was
Alexander VI. As Guicciardini observed, he possessed

neither sincerity nor shame nor truth nor faith nor religion, [but] insatiable avarice, immoderate ambition, … and a burning desire to advance his many children in any possible way.

Going well beyond the already excessive ambitions of his predecessors, Alexander aimed at nothing less than the creation of a Borgia empire in northern Italy.
He made his second son, Juan, captain general of the Church and persuaded the king of Spain to create him duke of Gandia; on Juan’s death, Cesare was permitted to leave the College of Cardinals to become duke of Valentinois and to conquer the Romagna. Even Alexander’s daughter Lucrezia was used as a pawn and was married off three times to leading Italian families.

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was no exception to the rule. Despite his protestations of piety and humility, he was every bit as devoted to nepotism as every other pontiff of the period. He, too, wanted to ensure that his family would profit from the papacy’s growing wealth. Some of his earliest actions as pope, in fact, concerned his own kinsmen.
After elevating
Siena to the status of an archdiocese, for example, he made
Antonio d’Andrea da Modanella-Piccolomini its first archbishop, and on Antonio’s death Pius named his sister’s son, Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, as his successor. The new pope then went on to make Francesco a cardinal, alongside Niccolò Forteguerri (a relative on his mother’s side) and
Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini (an adopted member of a cadet branch of the family), whom he had previously made the bishops of Teano and Pavia, respectively. If this were not enough, he made his cousin
Gregorio Lolli one of his most trusted secretaries and appointed his nephew
Niccolò d’Andrea Piccolomini commander
of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. To cap it all, Pius even sent Niccolò Forteguerri to Naples on a secret mission to arrange the betrothal of yet another nephew,
Antonio Todeschini Piccolomini, to the daughter of King Ferrante.

Given the enormous opportunities for familial enrichment, it is not difficult to see why competition for the papacy was so ferocious after the papal court returned to Rome. It was a prize worth fighting for, and since so much was at stake,
simony and even violence were regular features of conclaves. It was a rare cardinal who did not aspire to the papacy, and it was almost unheard of for a cardinal with a good chance of election not to offer bribes to his colleagues. And while there is no direct evidence to suggest that Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini actually offered any financial inducements to his fellow cardinals in 1458, his subsequent nepotism makes it hard to believe he did not sneak the odd bribe to well-placed individuals to improve his chances of acceding to the papal throne and reviving the Piccolomini’s flagging fortunes.

If the papacy’s resumption of power in the
Papal States led to the abuse of papal power and the
corruption of papal elections, these insidious changes had the collective effect of transforming the papacy itself into the plaything of Italy’s great noble families. Despite the massive expansion of the College of Cardinals during the Renaissance (it would increase in size from twenty-six in 1458 to thirty-two in 1513 and fifty-four in 1549) and the continuing influx of cardinals appointed at the request of European monarchs, it was dominated by a relatively small number of Italian clans determined to use the Church—and the papacy—to further their own interests. The della Rovere, the Borgias, the Medici, the Farnese, and, thanks to Pius II, the Piccolomini accounted for a dizzying number of red hats and sucked millions of florins out of the Church’s coffers as a result. And the more they jockeyed for money, power, and influence, the more they each conspired to keep the papacy “in the family.” Of the eighteen popes who reigned between 1431 and 1565, twelve were drawn from just five families, and no fewer than four pontiffs (Innocent VIII, Leo X, Clement VII, and Pius IV) were either direct members of or indirectly related to the
Medici family alone. Pius II’s election was merely the beginning of yet another attempt to make the elective monarchy that was the papacy into as hereditary an institution as possible.