CHAPTER IV.

SIXTUS IV. AND INNOCENT VIII.

A.D. 1471-1492.

 

 

While the popes were endeavouring, with but little success, to rouse the nations of Europe for the recovery of the east from the Mussulmans, important changes were in progress, which tended to strengthen the power of the crown in various western kingdoms. In England, this was the effect of Henry VII’s policy, following on the destruction which had been wrought among the ancient nobility by the long and bloody wars of the Roses. In France, Lewis XI was able to curb the nobles and the princes of the blood, and acquired the direct sovereignty over provinces which, under the forms of feudal tenure, had before been practically indepen­dent; and his son, Charles VIII, completed this work by marrying Anne, the heiress of Brittany (1491). In Spain, the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile were united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella; and the conquest of Granada by the “catholic sovereigns” extirpated the last remnant of the Moorish dominion. By these changes Spain rose for the first time to a place among the chief powers of Europe.

The empire, indeed, was still under the impotent rule of Frederick III., who had even the mortification of seeing that his neighbours, George Podiebrad of Bohemia, and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary—men raised from a lower rank to the sovereignty of countries to which he supposed himself to have a better title—were more powerful than he. Yet during this time the foundation of the greatness of Austria was laid by the marriage of his son Maximilian with Mary, the only daughter and heiress of Charles “the Bold” duke of Burgundy.

After the death of Paul II the cardinals assembled on the 6th of August 1471. Again it seemed as if Bessarion were likely to be elected; but the younger members of the college dreaded the severity of his character, and the election fell on Francis della Rovere, cardinal of St. Peter ad Vincula, who took the name of Sixtus IV. The voters who had contributed to this result were liberally rewarded for their support with offices and ecclesiastical benefices.

The new pope was born near Savona, in 1414. His descent was afterwards traced to a noble Piedmontese family of the same name, and when he had risen to great­ness, these were willing to admit the connexion; but it seems to be certain that his origin was really very humble. He had taught theology and philosophy in several univer­sities, had become minister-general of the Franciscan order, and through the friendly influence of Bessarion had been promoted to the cardinalate in 1467. He had published several works by means of the new art of printing—among them, one treating of a question which had raised violent quarrels between his own order and the Dominicans—whether the Saviour’s blood, which had been shed in his last suffer­ings, remained in union with the Godhead during the interval between his death and resurrection.

Like other popes of the age, Sixtus, at entering on his office, professed a great zeal for the war against the Turks, declaring that he was willing to spend not only his money, but his blood in the cause of Christendom. It was proposed that a general council of Christian powers should be held with a view to a crusade, but, as the pope and the emperor were unable to agree as to the place of meeting, Sixtus sent cardinal-legates into the chief European kingdoms, for the purpose of conferring with the sovereigns on the design, and of establishing peace among them. For the legation to France, Bessarion was chosen, at the desire of Lewis XI himself, who was acquainted with the Greek cardinal’s fame. But Lewis took offence, either at his having visited the court of Burgundy before that of the suzerain, or at his having desired the release of cardinal Balue, who, from having been the king’s most trusted counsellor, had suddenly fallen into disgrace, and for years had been confined in an iron cage within the castle of Loches. The legate had to wait two months for an audience; and when he was at length admitted into the royal presence, Lewis turned the scene into a farce by laying hold of his long beard, and quoting a verse of the Latin Grammar :—

                   “Barbara Graeca genus retinent quod habere solebant.”

It is said that vexation at the failure of this mission was the cause of Bessarion’s death, which took place at Ravenna, as he was on his way back to Rome. The legates who were sent into Germany and other countries met with no considerable success; and although some ships were sent into the east by the pope and the Vene­tian republic, the results were unimportant.

But the objects in which Sixtus felt the greatest interest lay nearer home. With his pontificate the papacy enters on a new phase, in which it appears chiefly as a great secular power, to which the spiritual character was merely attached as an accident. The system of providing for the pope’s near kindred by high ecclesiastical dignities, or by the lucrative offices of the court, is no longer found sufficient, but the “nepotism” (as it was called) of the popes now aims at the establishment of their relations as sovereign princes; and even where such schemes of terri­torial aggrandizement are not carried out, the “nephews” become founders of great and wealthy families, which are decorated with high titles of dignity, and rank as a new power in the Roman system, counterbalancing that of the cardinals. The excessive devotion of Sixtus to the interests of his family was shown as early as the first consistory of his pontificate, when, in defiance of the capitulations which he had subscribed at his election, he bestowed the cardinalate on two of his nephews, Julian della Rovere and Peter Riario—young men of humble birth, who had been educated as Francis­cans, but speedily threw off the restraints of their monas­tic profession. Julian, indeed, although his habits of life were by no means strict, maintained the dignity of his office, and continued to be prominent under the succeed­ing popes, until he himself at length attained the papacy. But Peter Riario, on whom his uncle heaped a prodigious accumulation of dignities and wealth (including the archbishopric of Florence and the titular patriarchate of Constantinople), plunged into excesses of prodigality and debauchery, which absorbed much more than. the vast income of his preferments, and with­in two years brought his life to an end, at the age of twenty-eight. Sixtus is said to have lamented him with demonstrations of the deepest grief, and commemorated him by an epitaph in which his extravagance is exalted into a virtue.

Other relations of the pope were brought forward, and by means of some of them he endeavoured to connect himself with royal or princely families. One nephew married a daughter of the count of Urbino, and was pro­vided with an endowment by the pope, while the count was rewarded with the title of duke. Another, who is described as “a very little man, and of intellect corres­ponding to his person,” married an illegitimate daughter of king Ferdinand of Naples; and in consideration of this alliance, Sixtus commuted for a white horse the tribute by which Naples was held under the apostolic see. But the most conspicuous of the lay nephews was Jerome Riario, who, like his brother cardinal Peter, was supposed to be in reality the pope’s son. Jerome, who according to some writers had been a cobbler in early life, but appears rather to have been a clerk in the tax-office at Savona, was summoned to Rome on the death of his brother, and succeeded to the favour which the cardinal had enjoyed. The pope endowed him out of the posses­sions of the church with Imola, Forli, and other territo­ries, and procured for him the hand of Catharine Sforza, an illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo of Milan, whose consent to the marriage was rewarded by the promotion of his son Ascanius to the cardinalate. With a view to the advancement of his relations, the pope plunged deeply into the intricacies of Italian politics; and for the same purpose he had recourse to all manner of disgraceful arts for raising money. Preferments, even to the highest ranks in the hierarchy, were openly sold, without regard to the qualifications of the purchaser; promises of pre­ferment were often broken, and those who had paid for them were cheated out of their money. New offices of court employment—some of them bearing oriental titles, such as Janissaries, Stradiots, Mamelukes,—were instituted for the purpose of sale. The college of abbreviators was revived, and the appointments to it were sold. The administration of justice was vitiated by the sale of pardons, even for capital offences. The pope’s taxation was oppressive; and the arts which he practised as to the market prices of provisions are said to have produced in some cases a famine among his subjects.

The jubilee, which Paul II had appointed to take place in 1475—twenty-five years from the last celebra­tion—was eagerly caught at by Sixtus as a means of gathering money. But the number of pilgrims and the amount of their offerings fell greatly short of the former jubilees—partly, it is said, because a pestilence was raging at the time, and partly because the pope’s evil repute had made its way even into distant countries. The personal character of Sixtus is painted by Stephen of Infessura in the darkest colours. He is charged with unnatural vices, and with abuse of his patronage in favour of those who ministered to his depravity; he is described as vainglorious, avaricious, pitiless, delighting in cruel spectacles. Under him, merit was discouraged, as it was no longer a help to preferment; he is said to have hated men of letters, and to have checked the cultivation of learning by withdrawing the salaries of professorships. But on the other hand he did much for the increase of the Vatican library, which he placed under the care of the biographer Platina.

In one instance the eagerness of Sixtus to promote the interests of his family led him to become an accomplice in a great and atrocious crime.

The government of Florence, although its constitution was still republican, had passed chiefly into the hands of Cosmo de’ Medici, whose munificent employment of his wealth on public objects, and in the encouragement of literature and the arts, procured for him great influence in his own time, both at home and abroad, and a high reputation with posterity. At his death, in 1464, Cosmo was succeeded in the headship of the family by his son Peter, who died in December 1469, leaving two sons—Lorenzo and Julian. Cosmo, while he possessed the reality of power, had always studiously preserved the character of a citizen; but his descendants had come to regard themselves as princes, and to disregard the repub­lican constitution. As they still kept up the mercan­tile establishment by which the greatness of their family had been founded, their agents in various countries assumed the pretensions of ministers; their commercial affairs suffered from negligence and wasteful mismanage­ment; and Lorenzo unscrupulously used the public funds to cover the deficiencies which naturally followed. At the same time he was careful to remove from his path, by procuring their banishment or otherwise, all who could have stood in the way of the ascendency of his family. Among these the most prominent were the Pazzi, a family of nobles who, like the Medici, were engaged in trade, and whom Cosmo had endeavoured to conciliate by means of matrimonial connexions. Francis Pazzi, in disgust at the exclusion of his kindred from the magis­tracy, and at other public and private wrongs which he traced to the influence of the Medici, removed from Florence to Rome, where he undertook the management of a bank established by the family; and to him Sixtus transferred the care of the papal accounts, which from the time of Nicolas V had been in the hands of the Medici. The pope’s nephew, count Jerome Riario, who had found the Medici an obstacle in the way of his ambition, was allied with the Pazzi by a common hatred; and a plot was concerted for the assassination of Lorenzo and Julian, with the design of effecting a revolution in favour of their enemies. The pope was privy to the conspiracy, and, although he professed to desire no bloodshed, he plainly signified that, if murder should be perpetrated in the execution of it, the crime would meet with his indulgence.

John Baptist of Montesecco, a condottiere in the papal service, was sent by Jerome to Florence, ostensibly on a mission to Lorenzo, but really in order that he might take part in the intended assassination. The assistance of all the pope’s forces was promised; and Raphael Riario, the pope’s great-nephew, who had just been made cardinal at the age of eighteen, was transferred from the university of Pisa to Florence, with the charac­ter of legate, chiefly in order that his palace might serve to harbour such of the conspirators as were strangers to the city. The young cardinal was charged to be guided by the directions of Bartholomew Salviati, who had been consecrated by the pope as archbishop of Pisa, but had been excluded from his see through the influence of his hereditary enemies, the Medici. When, however, after some other plans had been disconcerted by various accidents, it was resolved that the assassination should be perpetrated in the cathedral, the conscience of the condottiere Montesecco took alarm; he declared that he would not add sacrilege to treachery; and it became necessary to transfer the task of despatching Lorenzo to two priests, whose reverence for sacred things had been blunted by familiarity.

On Sunday the 26th of April, at the moment of the elevation of the host at high mass in the cathedral of Florence, the assassins fell on the brothers. Julian was slain on the spot; but Lorenzo, although slightly wounded, was able to escape into the sacristy, and was saved from his pursuers. The con­spirators rushed into the streets, and raised shouts of ‘‘Liberty! the people!”, but instead of responding to these cries, the citizens, whom the Medici had gained by their profuse liberality and their magnificent displays, rose in their defence. Some of the Pazzi and their accomplices were torn to pieces by the multitude; the archbishop of Pisa and Francis de’ Pazzi, who had endeavoured to seize the public palace and to overpower the magistrates, were hung from the palace windows by order of the gonfaloniere; the members of the Pazzi family were sought out everywhere, and many of them and of their adherents were executed. Montesecco, on being put to the torture, made disclosures which showed how deeply the pope had been concerned in the plot. Sixtus did not hesitate to show his partisanship by declaring Lorenzo de’ Medici and the magistrates of Florence to be guilty of treason and sacrilege, to be excommunicate, anathematized, infamous, outlawed, and incapable of making a testament. He ordered their houses to be demolished, their property to be confiscated; and Florence was to be placed under interdict, unless they were forthwith made over to the ecclesiastical tribunals, for having laid hands on the archbishop of Pisa and other ecclesiastics. In execution of the pope’s threat, the money of Florentine bankers was seized both at Rome and at Naples; and Sixtus, in concert with king Ferdinand, threw troops into the Florentine territory. The Florentines attempted to appease his wrath, and were willing to acknowledge their fault; but finding him implacable, they resolved to stand on their defence. They wrote to the pope, strongly denouncing his conduct, and plainly charging him with having employed assas­sins. They put forth a vindication, in which Montesecco’s confession was embodied; and by the circulation of this document, with other letters, they endeavoured to bespeak the sympathy of foreign potentates and prelates. After having consulted eminent canonists, they compelled the priests within their territories to say mass, in defiance of the papal sentence; and a synod of ecclesiastics, under the presidency of Gentile, bishop of Arezzo, repelled the excommunication, declared the pope himself to be excommunicate for having unjustly uttered it, and appealed against him to a general council.

The common feeling throughout Europe was adverse to Sixtus. The emperor and other princes threatened to withdraw from his obedience if he persisted in an unjust war. Lewis of France, who had special connexions with the Medici, spoke of assembling a general council by the authority of princes, if the pope’s consent were not to be obtained; he threatened to revive the pragmatic sanction in all its force, and to stop the payment of annates from his dominions, on the ground that the funds which were levied for war against the infidels were employed against Christians, or went to enrich the pope’s nephew Jerome.

Meanwhile the Florentines were hard pressed by the combined forces of the pope and of king Ferdinand, under the command of the king’s son Alfonso, duke of Calabria. They requested Ferdinand to state his terms of peace, but found them too humiliating; whereupon Lorenzo, in his distress, ventured on the bold expedient of going in person to Naples, where, by the power of his discourse, and by his repre­sentations as to the true interest of the kingdom, he was able to convert Ferdinand from an enemy into an ally. On the 6th of March 1480, an alliance was concluded between Naples and the Florentine republic, to the great indignation of the Venetians and of the pope.

While Italy was thus distracted, the Turks advanced in their career of conquest. They took Otranto, where 12,000 out of 22,000 inhabitants were put to the sword, and revolting acts of cruelty, outrage and profanity were committed; and they laid siege to Rhodes, which was defended by the knights of St. John. It was evident that they aimed at Rome, and terrible stories were told of vows which Mahomet had made for the ruin of Christendom. Sixtus was so greatly alarmed that he spoke of retiring to Avignon; he issued urgent bulls for the crusade; he declared that he would even give his golden crown and the ornaments of his palace towards the expenses of the holy war, and the fear of the infidels prevailed with him to grant peace and ab­solution to the Florentines. This was not, however, to be done without formalities suitable to the greatness of his pretensions; and the Florentines were not in a condition to dispute about such matters. Twelve of the most eminent citizens, with the bishop of Volterra at their head, appeared at Rome as representatives of the republic. They were admitted within the gates in the dark, and without any of the marks of honour which were usually bestowed on ambassadors; and, having expressed their penitence and their desire of reconciliation, they were on Advent Sunday brought into the presence of the pope, who was seated on a lofty throne in the portico of St. Peter’s. He addressed to them a rebuke “full of pride and anger” for the disobe­dience of which their countrymen had been guilty; and as they knelt before him, he lightly applied a rod to the shoulders of each, and chanted the verses of the Miserere alternately with the cardinals. The envoys were then admitted to kiss his feet and receive his blessing; the doors of the church were thrown open, and the pope was carried into it in state, and seated on the high altar.

The Florentines bound themselves to contribute a certain number of galleys for the Turkish war; and a force of papal and Neapolitan troops was sent to attempt the recovery of Otranto. The death of Mahomet “the Conqueror” (as his people styled him), and the contest which followed between his sons, prevented the reinforcement of the garrison; and the Turks, after having held the place for somewhat less than a year, were forced to capitulate to the duke of Calabria.

By this success the pope was extravagantly elated, and he plunged afresh into war, chiefly for the purpose of gaining Ferrara for his nephew Jerome. In conjunction with the Venetians, his troops contended with those of Naples, which, under the duke of Calabria, advanced to the very gates of Rome, until king Ferdinand contrived by large offers to gain Jerome to his side, and Sixtus, under his nephew’s influence, was led to enter into a Neapolitan alliance in exchange for that of Venice. He now invited the Venetians to join the league with a view to the pacification of Italy; and on refusal he sent forth bulls denouncing the heaviest punishments against them. Venice was placed under interdict; the chiefs of the republic were excommunicated ; all monks were charged to quit its territory; the offices of religion were to cease, without even the exception of communion on the bed of death; and there were the usual disabilities as to intercourse with faithful Christians, and other secular penalties by which the popes attempted to increase the spiritual terrors of their sentences. But the Venetians, whose subjection to the papacy was never very absolute, after having con­sulted learned jurists of Padua, took vigorous measures in opposition to the pope. The council of Ten ordered that a strict watch should be kept to prevent the intro­duction of missives from Rome. They required the patriarch to deliver to them any such document if it should reach him; and, through his compliance, they got possession of the bulls, and were able to prevent the publication of them within the territory of the republics They ordered the clergy to perform their functions as usual, and banished some Franciscans who resisted the command. They assembled all the bishops within their boundaries, and in their presence appealed to a future general council; whereupon the assembly accepted the appeal, and suspended the interdict. The titular patri­arch of Constantinople, who presided, ventured to cite the pope before the future council, and means were found to post up the summons on the bridge of St Angelo, and even on the doors of the Vatican. And in addition to the ecclesiastical appeal, the Venetians entreated the princes of Christendom to give them an opportunity of stating their grievances before a general congress.

The war was continued, and in addition to it the old feuds between the anti-papal Colonna and Savelli families on the one side, and the Orsini, who were favoured by the pope, on the other side, raged with a fury which desolated the country around Rome.

A peace was at length concluded between Naples and Venice at Bagnolo. In this agreement there was no reservation for the benefit of Jerome Riario; and the pope, who was already ill when the tidings of it reached him, was so deeply mortified by its terms that his vexation is supposed to have caused his death, which took place on the fifth day after the date of the treaty.

In the city of Rome the pontificate of Sixtus was marked by much building and rebuilding, in the course of which, however, it is to be lamented that there was great destruction, not only of classical remains, but of venerable churches which had come down from the early centuries of Christianity. His name is still preserved by the Janiculan bridge, which he rebuilt, and by the chapel in the Vatican, which derives its chief fame from the grandeur of the decorations afterwards added by Michael Angelo. But perhaps more important than any individual build­ings were his labours to render the city more habitable by paving and widening the streets, and by removing the porticoes and other projections which Ferdinand of Naples, at the Jubilee of 1475, pointed out to him as hindrances which prevented the popes from being fully masters of Rome. The hostile Stephen of Infessura tells us that Sixtus was followed to the tomb by the undisguised hatred and execrations of his people.

The death of Lewis XI of France preceded that of Sixtus by about a year (1483). At the instance of cardinal Julian della Rovere, he had con­sented to release cardinal Balue, after an imprisonment of fourteen years. In his last illness, when acute bodily sufferings awoke within him remorse for his long life of sin and crime, and rendered more intense the super­stition which had always been a part of his character, he gathered around him all the most famous relics which could be obtained,—among them the holy phial, which had never before been removed from Reims since the time (as was believed) of Clovis. He entreated the pope to send him any relics which might relieve his agonies; and Sixtus complied with the request so libe­rally that the Romans in alarm remonstrated lest their city should suffer by being stripped of such treasures. He sent for hermits and other devotees of noted sanctity, in the hope that their intercessions might prolong his life Of these the most renowned was one Francis, a native of Paola, in Calabria. Francis, it is said, was born with only one eye; but his mother vowed that, if the other eye might be granted to him, he should wear the habit of St. Francis for a year, at least, and her wish was fulfilled. He became a minorite friar, but, like Peter of Murrone in an earlier time, he withdrew to live in a cave, and, although utterly illiterate, was held in veneration for the austerity of his life and for his reputation of miracu­lous power. Lewis, having heard his fame, entreated the king of Naples and the pope that this holy man might be sent to him. The hermit, after having refused a request from his sovereign, was compelled by the pope’s authority to set out; and as he passed through Rome his appearance produced a vast excitement. Sixtus granted him leave to found a society of “Hermits of St. Francis,” and, with a view to the influence which he might be able through such an agent to exercise on the mind of Lewis, admitted him to long conferences. On reaching the French court, Francis was received with as much honour ‘‘as if he had been the pope himself.” While others were disposed to ridicule him, Lewis could not endure to be long without his company; he knelt before him in abject superstition, hung on his words, and entreated him to spare him yet a little, as if his life were at the hermit’s disposal; he bestowed rich rewards on him, and, in order to propitiate him, founded convents at Plessis and at Amboise for the new religious society, the members of which, not content with the name of minorites, desired to signify their profession of utter insignificance by styling themselves Minims.

Although Charles VIII, the son and successor of Lewis, had attained his legal majority, the administration was for some years in the hands of his sister Anne, a young princess of clear and firm mind, and of her husband the lord of Beaujeu. The beginning of the reign was marked by a manifestation of national spirit in opposition to the papacy. At the first meeting of the estates there was much com­plaint as to Roman exactions, and when memoirs for the redress of grievances were presented, the first subject in that which related to ecclesiastical affairs was the restora­tion of the pragmatic sanction. Some of the bishops, who were indebted to Rome for their promotion, pro­tested against the interference of the lay estates in such a matter; but, although the pragmatic sanction was not mentioned in the royal answer to the memorials, the parliaments of France continued to proceed as if it

The fury of the Roman factions burst forth with in­creased violence on the death of Sixtus, and the feelings of the populace towards the late pope were displayed in outrages against his favourites, his connexions, and his countrymen in general. The palace of Jerome Riario was sacked; its gardens and ornaments laid waste; and the stores of the Genoese merchants were plundered.

On the 26th of August—a fortnight after the death of Sixtus—the cardinals proceeded to the election of a successor. Intrigue was busy among them; and, accord­ing to the custom which had grown up, and which Innocent VI had in vain attempted to suppress, they endeavoured to secure advantages for themselves, and to prevent a recurrence of some late abuses, by entering into capitulations. The future pope was pledged to give one hundred gold florins monthly to every cardinal whose yearly income was under four thousand, to refrain from making more than one cardinal of his own family, and from entrusting to any of his kinsmen the fortresses of St. Angelo, Civita Vecchia, and Tivoli; and in all weighty matters he was pledged to take the advice of the sacred college. Borgia was so confident of success in the elec­tion, that he barricaded his palace in order to protect it from the spoliation which was usually committed on the dwelling of a new pope. But Julian della Rovere and Ascanius Sforza exerted themselves in opposition to him, and by special promises gained many votes for John Baptist Cibò, cardinal of St. Cecilia and bishop of Melfi, who was chosen on the fourth day of the conclave and took the name of Innocent VIII.

The family of Cibò was of Greek origin, but had been long settled at Genoa and Naples. The pope’s father had been viceroy of Naples under king Rene, and sena­tor of Rome in the pontificate of Calixtus III. Innocent was a man of handsome person and of popular manners. His earlier life had been lax, and under him Rome saw the novel scandal of seven illegitimate children, the offspring of different mothers, openly produced as the pope’s family, and the objects of his paternal favour. But, although Innocent may have wished to endow his son Francis with principalities, after the manner of Six­tus IV, the only course which he found practicable was that of enriching his children out of the revenues of the church; and for this purpose, and to defray the costs of his war with Naples, he continued without abatement the corrupt and simoniacal exactions of his predecessors. Offices were created for the sake of the price which might be got by the sale of them; and the purchasers sought to repay themselves by using their opportunities of exaction. Two papal secretaries were detected in forging bulls; and as they were unable to pay the sum which was demanded for a pardon, they were put to death. With these abuses in the administration was combined an increased licence of manners in the papal court, which did not fail to affect the habits of the Romans in general.

Although Innocent, after his election, had sworn a second time to the capitulations imposed by the cardi­nals, and had become pledged neither to absolve himself nor to accept a release, he held himself at liberty, when firmly established in his seat, to repudiate these obligations as being contrary to the interests of the holy see. And having promised to the Romans, with the other cardinals, and again after his election, that he would bestow the more valuable Roman preferments on none but citizens, he evaded the oath by admitting strangers to the freedom of the city, and afterwards promoting them as if they were qualified according to his promise. “But,” says the chronicler Stephen of Infessura, “it is no wonder if he deceived the Roman people, since he had deceived Him to whom he had vowed and promised chastity.” Throughout this pontificate Rome was distracted by the feuds of the Colonna and Orsini factions. And in 1485 the pope increased the disorders of his city by allowing all who had been banished, for whatever cause, to return. In consequence of this, Rome became a haunt of villains of every sort, who eagerly flocked to avail themselves of the papal clemency. Robbery and murder were frequent; churches were plundered of their plate and ornaments; every morning’s light discovered in the streets the bodies of men who had been assassinated during the night; and the perpetrators of these crimes found an asylum in the houses of cardinals. After a time, Innocent found it necessary to proclaim that murderers and other criminals should leave the city. But the spirit of his administration was expressed by the sarcastic saying of a high officer, that “God willeth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should pay and live”. Immunity from all punishment was to be bought, if only a sufficient price were offered.

Although Innocent had himself in earlier life been in the service of the Neapolitan crown, he speedily found an opportunity of quarrelling with Ferdinand, by requiring that tribute should be paid for Naples as in former times, and by refusing to accept the white horse for which Sixtus had commuted the payment. In order to maintain this claim (which is supposed to have been connected with a project for the advancement of his son Franceschetto) he allied himself with the dis­affected Neapolitan nobles, and put forward a grandson and namesake of king René as claimant of the throne. In the war which followed, Ferdinand’s son, Alfonso, duke of Calabria, occupied the Roman Campagna with his troops, and for months distressed the city by cutting off all communications from outside; but at length a treaty was concluded which was greatly in favour of the pope. The king was to pay tribute to Rome; the barons were free to acknowledge the pope and the church as their immediate lords; and the pope was to have in his own hands the disposal of bishoprics and other dignities in the Neapolitan king­dom. But hardly had this treaty been concluded when Ferdinand set its conditions at nought. He allowed the tribute to fall into arrear; he assumed the entire patronage of sees within his dominions; and, in defiance alike of honour and of humanity, he and his son put to death many of the nobles whose safety had been solemnly pro­mised. The pope complained loudly as to the tribute; but, after some feeble remonstrances, he did not venture to intercede for the allies who were exposed to the per­fidy and cruelty of Ferdinand and Alfonso. Hostilities again began, and were prolonged for some years.

Innocent anathematized Ferdinand for withholding the payment of tribute, and declared him to be deposed and the kingdom to be forfeited to the Roman church; but in 1492 a fresh treaty was concluded, on the same terms which had before been so little regarded.

In order to strengthen himself for this contest, Inno­cent found it expedient to seek the alliance of Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom he had formerly been opposed. He married his son Franceschetto to a daughter of Lorenzo by his wife, Clarice Orsini; and bestowed the dignity of cardinal on the Magnifico’s son John, who was then only thirteen years old. The promotion was to be kept secret until the boy should be old enough to take possession of his dignity; and when, at the age of sixteen, he repaired to Rome for this purpose, he was received with the pomp which was usually reserved for the visits of royal personages. Through his connexion with the Medici, Innocent was brought into friendly relations with the Orsini, who had formerly been so vio­lently opposed to him that Virginius Orsini, a brother of Clarice, had threatened to throw him into the Tiber.

Innocent, like his predecessors since the fall of the eastern empire, projected a crusade against the Turks. In the beginning of his pontificate he invited all Christian princes to take part in such an expedition, and he after­wards entered into negotiations and agreements for carry­ing it into effect; but without any considerable result. The death of Mahomet II had been followed by a contest for the throne between his sons Bajazet and Djem; the younger brother resting his claim on the fact that he had been born after his father’s accession. On being defeated by his brother, Djem took refuge in Rhodes with the knights of St. John, who transferred him for safety to the care of their brethren in France. Great offers were made by Bajazet to the order, in the hope of inducing them to put Diem into his hands ; while the kings of France and Hungary, of Aragon and Naples, and the sultan of Egypt, con­tended for him, with the view of setting him at the head of an expedition against his brother. But the pope was successful, and Djem, after a residence of more than six years in France, was escorted by cardinal Balue to Rome, where he was received as a sovereign prince, and was lodged in the Vatican palace. The master of the Hospitallers, D’Aubusson, was rewarded for the surrender of his guest by being promoted to the college of cardinals. At his first interview with the pope, Djem refused to perform the usual homage, and could only be persuaded to kiss him on the shoulder; and throughout his residence at Rome, he was careful to maintain his pretensions to dignity. Bajazet renewed his offers for the possession of his brother’s person, or for his death. It is said that at one time he employed an Italian to destroy both Djem and the pope by poisoning the water of which they drank; at another time he sent an ambassador to offer a yearly payment of 40,000 ducats for the maintenance and safe keeping of the prince; and this sum was duly paid. In order further to pro­pitiate the pope, Bajazet presented him with a relic of extraordinary sanctity—the head of the lance which had pierced the Saviour’s side. This gift was not the less valued because the sacred lance was supposed to exist also at Paris, Nuremberg, and other places of the west; and to this day it is revered as one of the four chief relics of St. Peter’s church.

While the project of a crusade against the Mussulmans of the east remained unexecuted, the last remnant of the Mahometan power in Spain was destroyed by the conquest of Granada, after a war of twelve years. The exultation produced at Rome by the report of this success was unbounded. The Spanish ambassador and the Spanish cardinal Borgia exhibited bull-fights and other spectacles, and for several days distributed food and wine to all who chose to apply.

Innocent VIII died, after a short illness, on the 25th of July in the same year. It is said that an attempt was made by a Jewish physician, although without the pope’s consent, to prolong his life, by injecting into his veins the blood of three boys, whom their parents sold with a view to the experiment; but, although it proved fatal to the children, it was unavailing for the intended purpose.

Three months before the death of Innocent, while Rome was engrossed by the reception of the young son of Lorenzo de’ Medici into the college of cardinals, the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of tidings that Lorenzo himself had died at his villa of Careggi, near Florence; and the circumstances of his deathbed lead us to trace the earlier history of a remarkable man, who, by the power of eloquence and by his earnest zeal for religion and morality, had acquired an extraordinary influence in that city.

Jerome Savonarola was born in 1452 at Ferrara, where his grandfather, a native of Padua, had settled as phy­sician to the court. It was the wish of the family that Jerome should follow the same profession; but he pre­ferred the study of theology, philosophy, and poetry. At the age of twenty-two, he was induced by the preaching of a friar, by some visions with which he supposed him­self to be favoured, and by disgust at the wickedness and disorder of the world, to enter into the Dominican Order—to which he was especi­ally inclined by his reverence for its great teacher, Thomas of Aquino. To the study of Aquinas he now added that of Cassian and other ascetic writers; but, above all, he devoted himself to the Holy Scriptures, of which his knowledge became very great, although he appears to have carried to an excess the caprices of the allegorical system of interpretation. After having spent seven years in the convent of Bologna, he was removed by his superiors to St. Mark’s, at Florence—a monastery which but a few years before had been governed by the saintly archbishop Antoninus, while its walls were adorned by the pencil of the “angelical” painter of Fiesole. But already its disci­pline had grievously decayed; and Savona­rola, when after some years he was elected prior, found it necessary to correct by strict and search­ing reforms a state of luxury and worldliness altogether inconsistent with the institutions of St. Dominic.

After some unpromising efforts, and notwithstanding serious natural disqualifications, Savonarola had burst forth into unequalled power as a preacher; and the vast cathedral of Florence was crowded by multitudes who eagerly hung on his words. His fervid and fluent language, his passionate gestures, his eyes glowing with enthusiasm, seemed to indicate a man possessed by the convictions which he expressed, and authorized to speak in the name of God. The chief aim of his preaching was to rouse men from the chill indifference to spiritual things which marked the character of the age, and was especially conspicuous amidst the material prosperity and the literary and artistic culture of the Florentines. He denounced the sins of all classes, including the pre­lates and clergy—as to whom he declared that the church had once had golden priests and wooden chalices, but that now the chalices were of gold and the priests were wooden—that the outward splendour of religion had been hurtful to spirituality. He was fond of expounding the Apocalypse, and confidently foretold chastisements as being near at hand. According to words revealed to him in a vision, the sword of the Lord was to come on the earth speedily and swiftly. A new Cyrus was to descend on Italy from beyond the Alps; the church was to be scourged and was to be renewed. In part, these prophecies did not pretend to be more than the result of a firm belief in a Divine government of the world, carried on according to the principles declared in the Holy Scriptures—a conviction that, as offences had been committed, the threatened punishments would surely ensue; and as to this, Savonarola’s error consisted in assuming too certainly the time when the punishment was to come. But in part his utterances claimed a higher source; for from an early stage of his monastic life he had supposed himself to be favoured with visions and revelations, communicated to his mind by angels, and commissioned to announce the designs of God to men. As some of his predictions were fulfilled, the general belief in him increased;1his followers spoke of him as “the prophet”; and by means of the press his writings and his fame were carried not only throughout Italy, but far beyond its borders. There were stories as to his being rapt from his senses while praying; that his face had been seen to shine with a celestial light; that he had contests with evil spirits.

To the family of Medici, Savonarola was inflexibly hostile. Himself a zealous republican, he regarded them as usurpers of the liberty of Florence; and he viewed with disgust and indignation the gross licentiousness and the pagan tendencies which were combined in Lorenzo with refinement of manners and high culture of tastes for literature and art. He refused to pay some marks of respect by which the priors of St. Mark’s had been accustomed to acknowledge the favours bestowed on their house by the Medicean family. The attempts of Lorenzo to alarm or to conciliate him were vain;  but when at length the Magnifico felt the approach of death, and when, amidst the terrors of his aroused conscience, he found himself unable to trust the spiritual counsels of his chaplains, he eagerly requested a visit from the friar who, alone of all the clergy, had spoken to him with unflattering frankness. He professed especial remorse for three things—the cruelties committed in the sack of Volterra; his interference with the funds of a bank instituted for the benefit of young women, of whom many had in consequence of his acts been driven to a life of vice; and the bloodshed which had taken place on account of the Pazzian conspiracy. To his request for absolution Savonarola replied by assurances of the Divine mercy and goodness; but it is said that he in his turn required of the penitent three things—that he should have a living faith in God’s will and power to forgive; that he should restore all he had unjustly taken; and that he should re-establish the republican liberties of Florence. As to the first of these conditions, Lorenzo made the required profession; and to the second he consented, although with some reluctance. But when Savonarola, rising from his seat, enounced the last demand with the sternness of a prophet, the dying man, gathering up his remaining strength, turned his back on the friar; and Savonarola left him unabsolved.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER V.

 

ALEXANDER THE SIXTH.

A.D. 1492-1503.

 

 

The death of Innocent was followed by disturbances such as had become usual during a vacancy of the pope­dom. The whole country around Rome was in arms; within the city itself it is said that two hundred and twenty persons were slain. The cardinals met for the election of a successor in the Sixtine chapel on the 6th of August. The practice of intrigue had been common on such occasions; but the manner in which members of the college now put themselves forward as candidates was without example. Among these the most promi­nent were Roderick Borgia, whose seniority, wealth, and frequent employment in the most important business of the church, gave weight to his pretensions; Ascanius Sforza, son of the great condottiere who had founded a new dynasty in the dukedom of Milan; and Julian della Rovere, the nephew of Sixtus IV. Although experience had amply proved the inefficacy of capitulations, an attempt was once more made to bind the future pope by engagements of this kind; among other things, he was required to promise that he would not make any cardi­nals without the consent of the existing members of the body.

The conclave was of unusual duration. Much bribery was practised. Sforza, after having ascertained that his own chance of election was little or none, transferred his interest to Borgia; and it is said that all the cardinals, except della Rovere, Piccolomini, and three others, were bought by the promise of money or preferments. At length, on the fifth night, the deliberations of the cardi­nals resulted in the election of Borgia, who exclaimed “I am pope, pontiff, and vicar of Christ!” and hastily put on the papal mantle, as if to assure himself of the reality of his success. The name which he took was Alexander VI.

Within a few days, Sforza, according to compact, received the office of vice-chancellor, which Borgia had held, together with his palace, and some churches and castles; while the preferments accumulated on other mem­bers of the college attested the value of their support, and the means by which it had been secured. But the consciousness of having attained his dignity by arts which might have vitiated the election—the dread of any inquiry, by a general council or any other tribunal, into the circumstances of his elevation—hung as a weight on the pope all his days, and affected his course of conduct.

Roderick Borgia (whose change of surname has been already mentioned) was born in 1431 at Valencia, of a family belonging to the lower grade of nobles. He had studied at Bologna, and in early life had been an advocate and also a soldier. To his uncle Calixtus III he was indebted for rapid ecclesiastical promotion; he became cardinal, archbishop of his native city, vice-chancellor of the Roman church; and his support of Sixtus IV at his election had procured for him the abbacy of Subiaco. By these preferments, and by inheritance from Calixtus, he had become very wealthy; and a mission as legate to Spain, for the purpose of gathering money for the crusade, had considerably increased his riches, although it had not improved his reputation. He was more esteemed for eloquence than for learning, but was especially noted for the craft, the perseverance, and the fertility of resources which marked his character as a negotiator. Fond as he was of pleasure, he never allowed the pursuit of it to inter­fere with business, to which he often devoted a large part of the night. And, although he hesitated at no crime for the attainment of his objects, he is praised for the placa­bility of his disposition, and for the patience with which he overcame the enmity of opponents..

In the earlier years of his ecclesiastical life, Borgia made great professions of piety and charity, visiting churches and hospitals, and distinguishing himself by the largeness of his almsgiving. One of the first indications of the qualities for which he afterwards became infamous is found in a letter of severe reproof which Pius II, while sojourning at the baths of Petrioli after the council of Mantua, addressed to him on account of his having witnessed, if he did not even join in, some dancing which is described as indecent, in a garden at Siena. At a later time—probably about 1470 —he entered into a connexion with a woman named Vanozza de’ Catanei, whom he regarded as a sort of wife, while he provided her with two husbands in succession, and found places for these men in some of the government offices. By Vanozza he became the father of five children, of whom three sons and a daughter were alive at the time of his elevation to the papacy. Yet it would seem that thus far Borgia’s laxity of morals had not in any remarkable degree exceeded such licence as the age allowed. His palace had not, like those of some other cardinals, been notoriously defiled by scandalous revels; nor was it until he had been raised to the most sacred office in Christendom that his infamy became conspicuous and signal.

The report of Alexander’s election excited various feelings. By some of the Romans, who looked to his dignified presence, his wealth, his expensive tastes, and who expected a splendid pontificate, the tidings were received with joy, and he was extolled in verses to which his later life gives the character of the bitterest satire. But those who saw farther into his character—among them the sovereigns of his native Spain—regarded his promotion with alarm; and Ferdinand of Naples, who, notwithstanding his treachery, cruelty, and other vices, was regarded as the wisest statesman of the age, is said to have shown his knowledge of Alexander by bursting into tears.

The spirit of secular ambition, and the undisguised licentiousness, which had been more and more displayed during the late pontificates, were now carried to a mon­strous excess. For the first time the bastards of a pope were brought forward as his acknowledged children; and the violence of his affection for them carried him into crimes of many sorts, tempted him to disturb the peace of the world, to make Italy, which for many years had enjoyed a tranquil prosperity such as had never before been known, a scene of violence and bloodshed, and to invite the fatal interference of foreign nations in her affairs.

For his eldest son, Peter Lewis, who died before Alex­ander’s elevation to the papacy, he had obtained from the king of Spain the title of duke of Gandia, which passed to the next brother, John. The third son, Caesar, was designed for the ecclesiastical profession, and was a stu­dent at Pisa, when a courier announced to him his father’s elevation to the papacy. On receiving the news, Caesar at once set out for Rome, where the pope received him with affection, but is said to have addressed to him a formal speech, in which, after adverting to the discredit which the first Borgia pope had incurred by his nepotism, he warned him that he must expect no promotion except such as his merits should justify. The hypocrisy of such a declaration was forthwith shown by Alexander’s pro­moting, in his first consistory, a nephew to be archbishop of Monreale and cardinal; and three other Borgias, besides Caesar, were afterwards raised to the cardinalate, while other relations of the pope were thrust into all manner of offices and preferments. On Caesar himself his father at once bestowed the bishopric of Pampeluna (which Innocent had designed for him), and to this he added, on the day of his coronation, his own archbishopric of Valencia. In the following year, he made him a cardinal; and as illegitimacy would have been a bar to such a promotion, the pope suborned false witnesses to swear that Caesar was the lawful offspring of Vanozza by her first husband.

The pope’s daughter, the beautiful Lucretia, who was in her fifteenth year, had been some time betrothed to a son of the count of Aversa; but Alexander, whose ambition had risen with his fortunes, now bribed him to sue for a dissolution of the engagement, in order that Lucretia might marry a suitor of more powerful connexions—Alexander Sforza, illegitimate son of the lord of Pesaro, and great-nephew of the first duke Sforza of Milan. The marriage was celebrated in the Belvedere, which had been added to the Vatican by Innocent VIII; and it was followed by a banquet, at which car­dinals and other high ecclesiastical dignitaries sat promis­cuously with ladies, and by the performance of comedies and other amusements, which lasted far into the night. Among the party was Julia Farnese, known as “la Bella” a married woman, for whose sake Alexander made her brother a cardinal; and the chronicler who describes the scene speaks indignantly of the effect which the examples of Innocent and Alexander had produced on the morals of the clergy, and even of the monastic orders.

For his youngest son, Geoffrey, the pope planned a marriage with a daughter of Alfonso, duke of Calabria. The duke’s father, king Ferdinand, was willing to con­sent to this marriage, but Alfonso himself was strongly opposed to it; and by this disappointment the pope was thrown into other connexions, which were full of disaster for Italy.

Lewis Sforza, who from his swarthy complexion was styled the Moor, a man of deep ambition and perfidy, administered the government of Milan in the name of his nephew, John Galeazzo, whom it is said that, for the sake of retaining power in his own hands, he allowed to grow up without any such training as might have fitted him for the duties of his position. Lewis projected a national league of the Italian powers, for the purpose of preserving their country from foreign rule, and endea­voured to gain the pope’s co-operation but, finding that a special alliance had been concluded between Alexander, the king of Naples, and the Florentine republic, he was led by jealousy to invite Charles VIII of France into Italy, for the purpose of asserting a claim to the Neapo­litan crown, which had been bequeathed by the last count of Provence to Lewis XI; and the conquest of Naples was represented as a step towards the recovery of Constantinople and Jerusalem from the infidels. The proposal was well fitted to attract the young king, who, although weak, sickly, and almost deformed in person, and yet more feeble in mind, had his imagination filled with visions of chivalrous and crusading exploits and renown. His wisest counsellors—such as his sister, the lady of Beaujeu, and Philip de Comines—endeavoured to dissuade him from undertaking an expedition into Italy, and urged him to accept the offers made by Ferdinand of Naples to hold the kingdom as tributary to the crown of France. But Charles listened to advisers of another kind—to Neapolitan exiles who were eager for vengeance on the Aragonese dynasty, and to his kinsman Lewis, duke of Orleans, who wished to use the king’s ambition for the furtherance of his own designs on Italy. He dismissed the Neapolitan ambassadors, and prepared for an expedition to Italy by making peace, on disadvan­tageous terms, with the kings of England and of Spain, and with Maximilian, who had lately succeeded his father Frederick as emperor.

The expectation of a French invasion brought about a connexion between the reigning dynasty of Naples and the pope. It was arranged that the youngest Borgia, Geoffrey, who was only twelve or thirteen years of age, should marry Sancha, an illegitimate daughter of the duke of Calabria; that he should receive the principality of Squillace, with other territory, and should be appointed lieutenant of the kingdom; that the duke of Gandia should be nominated to one of the chief offices, and that Caesar Borgia should receive high ecclesiastical preferment at Naples; while, on the other hand, the tribute payable by the Neapolitan crown to the papacy was to be reduced. Ferdinand died on the 25th of January, 1494, and it is believed that was hastened by the French king’s re­jection of his offers. His successor, Alfonso, who was eminent as a general, but was even more treacherous and cruel than his father, was crowned by the cardinal-archbishop of Monreale, and the marriage of Geoffrey Borgia with Sancha was celebrated at the same time. In their alarm, Alfonso and the pope applied for assistance to the Turkish sultan, whom they endeavoured to move by representing that the French king avowedly looked on Naples as only a stepping-stone towards Constantinople; but they failed to obtain any effective assistance. To ambassadors who urged the claim of Charles to Naples, Alexander replied that the kingdom was a fief of the holy see, and could be disposed of only by the pope; that the Aragonese princes had been invested in it, and that he could not dispossess them unless another claim could be shown to be stronger than theirs. And he threatened to pronounce the censures of the church if Charles should cross the Alps.

Charles had advanced as far as Lyons, where he remained a considerable time, engaged in tournaments and in voluptuous enjoyments. It was still uncertain whether the expedition to Italy were to take place, when the king’s vacillating mind was determined by the arrival of cardinal Julian della Rovere, the impla­cable enemy Of Alexander. After the election of the pope, Julian had withdrawn to the fortress of Ostia, where he was besieged and at length driven out. Alexander had attempted to conciliate him; but Julian declared that he would never again trust a Catalan; and, from having been the most zealous partisan of Naples in the college of cardinals, he transferred himself to the French interest in consequence of the pope’s having entered into a connexion with Alfonso. Arriving at Lyons when the king’s plans were altogether uncertain, his strong and impetuous eloquence, and the freedom with which he represented the disgrace of abandoning the enterprise, determined Charles to proceed; and in the end of August the king crossed the Alps at the head of a gallant, although undisciplined army. The money which he had raised, including a large loan from his Milanese ally, had been spent on the gaieties of Lyons, and on a fleet which was not turned to any account; and already his difficulties were such that he borrowed jewels from the duchess of Savoy and the marchioness of Montferrat, in order that he might procure money by pledging them.

After a stay of some weeks at Asti, which belonged to the duke of Orleans, Charles moved onwards. At Milan he saw the young duke, John Galeazzo; but this unfortunate prince died almost immedi­ately afterwards, and, although he left a son five years old, Louis the Moor, who was suspected of having caused his nephew’s death, assumed the ducal title. As Charles approached Florence, Peter de’ Medici, who had con­ceived the idea of imitating his father Lorenzo’s venturous and successful visit to Naples, appeared in the French camp, and, although others had been joined with him in the mission, he took it on himself to conclude a treaty by which four of the strongest places belonging to the republic were given up to France. Peter, who had been only twenty-one years old at the time of his father’s death, had already made himself obnoxious to the Florentines by his incapacity, his frivolity, his pride, his irregularities, and other faults; and the result of his negotiations with Charles exasperated them to such a degree that, on his return to the city, he and his brothers were driven into exile. The eloquence of Savonarola, who spoke of the “new Cyrus” as an instrument of Divine vengeance for the sins of the Italians, instead of rousing the citizens to resistance, tended to persuade them to submission. He reminded them that the sword which he had foretold had now actually come on them. After the expulsion of the Medici, the friar was sent at the head of an embassy which was received by Charles at Pisa. In the solemn tone of a prophet, he told the king that he must regard himself as an instrument in God’s hand; that if he should forget his calling—if he should neglect to labour for the reform of the church, and to respect the liberties and the honour of the Florentines—another would be chosen in his stead. Charles answered with courtesy, although in a way which showed that he did not apprehend the pecu­liarity of Savonarola’s character and position; but during his stay at Florence (where the citizens, who had agreed to admit him peaceably, were deeply offended by his entering with his lance on his thigh, as if assuming the character of a conqueror) the friar’s admonitions were repeatedly administered to him.

In the meantime Alexander was distracted by a variety of fears. In vain he entreated Maximilian to intervene as advocate of the church. He was alarmed by hearing that the Colonnas had openly declared for the French, and entertained designs of seizing him; that the Orsini, on whose support he had relied, had submitted to the invader; that the trading classes of his city were not dis­posed to stand by him; that the French were devastating everywhere, and that his concubine, Julia Farnese, had fallen into their hands. Cardinal Piccolomini and others whom he sent to Charles, returned without having been able to obtain an audience. He arrested the cardinals who were in favour of France, and even the French ambassadors; and almost immediately after he released them again. He spoke of leaving Rome, but was unable to carry out any resolution. He invited Ferdinand, duke of Calabria, to occupy the city with Neapolitan troops. But when Charles asked for leave to pass through Rome, in order to the crusade (for nothing was said of his designs on Naples), Alexander felt that he could make no effective opposition; and by his request the duke of Calabria withdrew, although with undisguised indignation, along the Appian way at the same time that the French made their entrance at the Flaminian gate. As at Florence, Charles affected to enter as a conqueror, by carrying his lance rested on his thigh. On his right and on his left rode the cardinals Julian della Rovere, Sforza, Colonna, and Savelli; and the multitude raised loud shouts in honour of France, Colonna, and the cardinal of St. Peter ad Vincula. It was night before the greater part of the troops could enter; and the gleam of torches and of lights from the windows heightened the impression made by their arms, their horses, and a train of artillery which far exceeded all that the Italians had yet beheld of its kind.

Alexander, a few days after the king’s arrival, withdrew into the castle of St. Angelo, from which he uneasily watched the lights and the sounds on the other side of the Tiber. He knew that importunities were addressed to Charles by eighteen cardinals for the assembling of a general council in order to his depo­sition; and he felt that neither the manner of his elections nor his personal character could endure the exami­nation of such an assembly. He was repeatedly urged by Charles to give up the fortress as a pledge; but he declared that he would rather place himself on the battle­ments, with the holy Eucharist and the heads of the two great apostles in his hands, and would abide the effect of an attack. The French, in their impatience at his obstinacy, twice pointed their cannon against St. Angelo; but a party among the king’s advisers, which had been drawn into the pope’s interest by the promise of ecclesi­astical dignities, was able to prevent any practical acts of hostility. During his stay at Rome, Charles daily visited some church, to hear mass and to inspect the sacred relics; and the Romans looked on with astonish­ment when he touched for the king’s evil in the church of St. Petronilla. But his soldiers, notwithstanding a solemn engagement to refrain from all violence, freely indulged their insolence and their love of spoil: even Vanozza’s house was plundered, to Alexander’s great anger and disgust.

A treaty was concluded, by which the pope was to put certain fortified towns into the hands of the French until the conquest of Naples should have been achieved. He was also to make over to them for six months the Turkish prince Djem, with a view to the proposed crusade; and he was to extend an amnesty to the cardinals and others who had offended him by taking part with France. After the conclusion of this agreement, Charles was more than once received at the Vatican, to which the pope had returned; and Briçonnet, bishop of St. Malo, one of his favourite coun­sellors, was promoted to the dignity of cardinal. The same honour was conferred on Peter of Luxemburg, bishop of Le Mans.

On the 28th of January the king left Rome, taking with him the Turkish prince, and accompanied by Caesar Borgia, who was decorated with the title of legate, but was really intended to serve as a hostage for the per­formance of his father’s promises. Caesar, however, on the second night of the march absconded from Velletri in the dress of a groom, so that the security which his presence had given was lost.

At Naples the approach of the French produced an outbreak against the reigning dynasty. Alfonso, know­ing that, both for his father’s sake and for his own, he was execrated by his subjects, and that by his atrocious cruelties and his detestable vices he had well deserved their abhorrence, resigned the crown in favour of his son Ferdinand, and withdrew to a Sicilian monastery, where he engaged in penitential exercises, and soon after died. The new king, finding himself unable, with a disheartened and mutinous soldiery and a disaffected people, to make head against the invader, retired to the island of Ischia; and on the fol­lowing day Charles entered Naples unopposed, and was received with joyful demonstrations of welcome.

But the popular feeling in favour of the French was soon changed into detestation. The strangers abused their fortune. They treated the Neapolitans with con­tempt and outrage. All offices were bestowed on foreigners, and sometimes two or three were accumu­lated on one person; even private property was invaded to gratify the rapacity of Frenchmen; and Charles avowed an intention of reducing the barons of the king­dom from their comparative independence to a like state of subordination with the nobility of France. He neg­lected business; to his new subjects he was inaccessible; and those who had steadily adhered to the Angevine interest were disgusted at finding that their past fidelity and sufferings did not exempt them from being con­founded with the partisans of the expelled dynasty. The young French nobles, after the king’s example, gave themselves up freely to pleasure; the mass of the army, in consequence of their indulgences, were enervated by a new and loathsome disease; the project of a crusade, which had been used to sanctify the invasion of Italy, was utterly forgotten. At Naples, Djem died on the 26th of February; and his death was attributed, not only by popular opinion, but by Charles himself, to a slow poison, administered (as was supposed) by the pope, who had corresponded with Bajazet as to the means of removing the unfortunate prince, and reaped the benefit of the imputed crime by receiving 300,000 ducats for his body.

While Charles was lingering in hurtful inaction at Naples, dangers were gathering behind him. Lewis Sforza, alarmed by finding that the duke of Orleans had asserted a claim to Milan, as being the sole legitimate descendant of the Visconti, and that in this he was countenanced by the French king, concluded at Venice a league with the pope, the emperor, the sovereigns of Spain, and the Venetian republic, which, although professedly intended for defence against the Turks, had evidently a further meaning. Charles, on receiving from his envoy at Venice, Philip de Comines, a report of this formidable combination, resolved to re­turn northwards. Before leaving Naples he wished to be formally inaugurated in his new sovereignty; but as the pope, notwithstanding an absolute promise which he had made during the king’s stay at Rome, refused to grant him investiture, even with a reservation of any rival claims, he resolved to act on his own authority. He therefore, on the 12th of May, proceeded in state to the church of St. Januarius, arrayed in the ensigns of eastern imperial dignity, and there solemnly bound himself by oath to maintain the rights and liberties of the Neapolitans. He then set out homewards, leaving a part of his force to maintain his authority in the south of Italy.

On his arrival at Rome, Charles found that Alexander had withdrawn two days before to Orvieto, and had taken with him all the cardinals, except Morton, archbishop of Canterbury, who was left to act as his vicar. At Poggibonsi the king was again visited by Savonarola, who rebuked him for having failed to perform fully the work to which he had been called, and intimated that a punishment was hanging over him, yet assured him of the Divine protection on his return. As Charles retreated northwards, the Italians, after having neglected earlier opportunities of attacking him, presented themselves in numbers far exceed­ing those of his army at Fornuovo on the Taro; and in this, the only battle of the whole campaign, the French gained the advantage, and the king had the satisfaction of distinguishing himself by personal valour. A peace was concluded with Sforza at Novara, and Charles, after an absence of about fourteen months, recrossed the Alps, and again found himself in France. In the meantime Ferdinand had returned to Naples; and, although he was at first driven out by Stuart of Aubigny, a skilful general of Scottish descent whom Charles had left in command of his troops, a second expedition put him into possession, of his kingdom, through the assistance of the “Great Captain” of Spain, Gonsalvo de Aguilar. Of the French who had been left at Naples, ill supplied with money and provisions, and exposed to the ravages of war and of disease, hardly any found their way home from the land of which their conquest had appeared so easy.

Gonsalvo also lent his aid to the pope for the reduction of Ostia, which had been left by Charles in the hands of Cardinal Julian, and, from its position at the mouth of the Tiber, was a place of importance for the Romans. For this service the great captain was rewarded by a triumphal reception at Rome. In the ceremonies of the holy week, he refused to receive the palm from the pope’s own hands, because the duke of Gandia had received it before him; but he condescended to accept the golden rose, which was regarded as a gift for sovereigns. But the freedom with which he expressed himself as to the disorders and scandals of the court, without sparing the pope himself, made Alexander glad to be speedily delivered from his presence.

The emperor Frederick III had been succeeded by his son Maximilian, who had already been chosen king of the Romans. In contrast to his father’s inertness, Maxi­milian displayed an excessive love of adventure, which continually led him to undertake great things without calculation as to the possibility of carrying out his designs. The need of money, which had reduced Frederick to inaction, and had brought on him the reproach of avarice, instead of restraining Maximilian from entering on arduous enterprises, compelled him to leave them unfinished; and the world, which had at first been dazzled by his brilliant and popular personal qualities, soon learnt to understand his “unstable and necessitous courses”, and to attach little value to his promises and engagements. His intervention in the affairs of Italy, in 1496, had little other effect than that of contributing greatly to the decline of his reputation.

Ferdinand II of Naples died at the age of twenty-seven, soon after the recovery of his dominions, which on his death fell to his uncle Frederick, an amiable and popular prince. The pope resolved to turn to advantage the restoration of the Aragonese dynasty; and he revived the schemes of Sixtus IV for the aggrandizement of his own family. An attempt to put down the Orsini, with a view to getting possession of their estates, was defeated by their vigorous resistance; and Alexander found it necessary to make the church bear the expense of the enrichment which he designed for his children. In a secret consistory on the 7th of June, 1597, the duke of Gandia, who had just been appointed standard-bearer of the church, was formally invested in the dukedom of Benevento, with Terracina and Pontecorvo; and it was supposed that the dukedom was intended as a step to a greater elevation in Naples. No one of the cardinals, except Piccolomini, ventured to object to this alienation of St. Peter’s property; for Julian della Rovere and cardinal Perauld, bishop of Gurk, who might probably have joined in the protest, had been driven into exile.

Two days later, Caesar Borgia was appointed to proceed to Naples as legate for the coronation of the new king; but before his departure a mysterious crime was per­petrated. On the evening of Wednesday, the 14th of June, the duke of Gandia and Caesar, with some others, had supped at the house of Vanozza, near the church of St. Peter ad Vincula. The brothers mounted their mules, and rode together towards the Vatican quarter, when, near the palace which the pope had bestowed on Ascanius Sforza, the duke took leave of the cardinal, saying that he wished for some further amusement before returning to the Vatican. He then took up behind him one of their companions at the supper—a masked person, who for some weeks before had been accustomed to visit him at the palace,—and he rode away attended by a groom. Next day the groom was found mortally wounded in the Piazza of the Jews, but could give no information, except that he had been left there, with orders to wait an hour, and, if his master did not re­appear within that time, to return to the palace. The duke’s prolonged absence excited his father’s alarm, and an inquiry was set on foot. A charcoal dealer gave evidence that, while watching on the Ripetta, about the fifth hour of the night, he had seen a body thrown into the Tiber by four men, acting under the orders of one on horseback, who had brought it hanging behind him as he rode; and on being asked why he had not informed the police, the witness made an answer which throws a dismal light on the state of Rome under Alexander’s government—that he had in his time seen a hundred corpses cast by night into the river, without having heard of any inquiry after them. When this evidence had been received, three hundred men were employed to drag the river; and the body of the duke was found, with the throat cut, and stabbed in eight other places. The hands were bound, and some money remained untouched in the pockets of the dress. The pope was for the time overwhelmed by his son’s dark and tragical end. As the body, after having been carried up the river in a boat, was landed at the castle of St. Angelo amidst the lamentations of the countrymen of the Borgias, one voice rose so loudly above the rest that persons standing on the neighbouring bridge could distinctly hear it; and it was believed to be the voice of the miserable father. For three days he neither ate, nor drank, nor slept; he remained shut up in his apart­ment, from which it is said that there were heard not only his lamentations, but cries that he knew the murderer. When, however, the matter was brought before the consistory, the pope declared that he suspected no one; but the inquiry was suddenly brought to an end, and it was believed that he knew the guilty secret only too well. Although men did not venture to utter their thoughts, no one doubted the guilt of Caesar Borgia. Finding himself cut off from the natural objects of his ambition by a profession for which he had neither fitness nor liking, while the circumstances of his birth excluded him from all hope of its highest dignity, it would seem that Caesar had been struck with envy of the position to which his more fortunate brother had been raised, and of the yet higher honours which the pope was scheming for the duke; and it is said that this motive, which of itself might have been sufficient for so depraved a nature, was exasperated by jealousy at find­ing his brother preferred by a mistress with whom both were intimate.

To the consistory of cardinals, to ambassadors and others who were admitted to his presence, Alexander professed himself so shattered by his loss that he could take no interest in worldly objects; he professed to feel remorse for his past life—to care for nothing but the reformation of the church, for which he appointed a commission of six cardinals; he even talked of resigning the papacy. But in no long time these dispositions passed away. A scheme of reform, which was drawn up by the commission, remained a dead letter; and Alexander plunged again into intrigue and vice and crime. For a time it was believed that the ghost of the murdered man was heard wailing by night about the Vatican; but the report died away, although the people continued to see proofs of demoniacal influence in some calamities which followed quickly on each other—storm and flood, and lightning, which caused an explosion of the powder- magazine in the castle of St. Angelo.

The path of ambition now lay clear before Caesar; and it would seem that already his plans were formed. His strength of will prevailed over the pope, who appears to have resigned himself to the loss of his elder son, and to have concentrated all his affections and his hopes on the supposed fratricide. Within a few weeks after his brother’s death, the cardinal proceeded on his mission to Naples, and placed the crown on the head of the king whom he was perhaps even then plotting to dethrone.

Under Alexander it has been truly said that the papacy changed from a theocracy to a tyranny. The Romans had lost all independence since the suppression of the Porcaro conspiracy. The college of cardinals, although it contained a few men of higher class, was chiefly filled with nominees of Alexander, who had bought their places, who too much resembled him in character, and in action were his slaves and tools.

The death of Charles of France, which took place on the 7th of April 1498, at the age of twenty-eight, opened new prospects for Alexander. The duke of Orleans,, who succeeded to the throne under the name of Lewis XII, needed the papal sanction in order that he might rid himself of his wife, who had been forced on him by her father, Lewis XI, and might marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne of Brittany, who by the death of Charles had again become the sole possessor of her hereditary duchy; while the pope saw in a French alliance the means of protecting himself against the threat of a general council. The question of the king’s marriage was investigated by a commission of bishops and doctors, who on false evidence and frivolous grounds pronounced it to be null, and reported this judgment to Rome.

Caesar Borgia had resolved to rid himself of the restraints of the clerical character. He appeared- before his brother cardinals, and de­clared that he had always been strongly inclined to the life of a layman; that he had entered into the ecclesiastical estate out of deference to the pope’s wishes alone; that he felt himself unfit for it, and desired a release from it; and that if this were granted, he would resign all his preferments. He entreated the cardinals to join with him in his petition; and they consented to do so. The pope willingly granted him the required dispensation, and the cardinal-archbishop was restored to the condition of a layman.

Caesar now prepared to go into France for the business of the king’s divorce and remarriage. The magnificence of his appointments was extraordinary; even the horses of his train were shod with silver. And, although the French privately indulged their wit in ridiculing him, he was received at Avignon and at Chinon with honours such as were usually reserved for sovereigns. He carried with him bulls for the divorce and remarriage of Lewis, and also one by which the dignity of cardinal was bestowed on the king’s favourite minister, George d’Amboise; but with the intention of exacting the highest possible terms from the king, he concealed the fact as to the matrimonial bull, and professed to have only that for the divorce. The secret was betrayed by the bishop of Cette to Lewis, who thereupon proceeded, without having seen the bull, to celebrate his marriage with Anne; and it is said that Caesar avenged himself for the bishop’s indiscretion by poison.

The pope, in his eagerness for the advancement of his family, had asked king Frederick of Naples to bestow on Caesar the hand of one of his daughters, with a consider able territory; but both Frederick and the princess had shown the strongest repugnance to such a connexion. In return for the favour which he had bestowed on the French king in the matter of the divorce, Alexander now engaged Lewis to support him in this project; but the feel­ings of the Neapolitan princess were not to be overcome. Lewis, however, had so far pledged his assistance that he felt himself bound to obtain for Caesar the hand of some lady whose birth might be suitable to the aspira­tions of the Borgias; and thus the ex-cardinal became the husband of Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the king of Navarre, and niece of Lewis. It was a condition of the marriage that one of her brothers should be created a cardinal; and on the other hand Lewis bestowed on Caesar the duchy of Valentinois, and promised to assist him in his schemes of Italian conquest.

Lewis had from the time of his accession declared his designs on Milan by assuming the title of duke, on the ground of descent through his grandmother, Valentina, from the first duke of the Visconti family. In the summer of 1499, a campaign of twenty days made him master of the duchy, while Lewis the Moor sought a refuge in the Tyrol, with the emperor Maximilian, who had married his niece and had borrowed large sums of him. The king entered Milan in triumph, on the 6th of October but a reaction speedily followed, and Sforza, within five months from the day when he had left Milan amid the curses of his subjects, was received back with extravagant joy. In the war which ensued, however, he was betrayed at Novara by his Swiss mercenaries, who entered into an agreement with their countrymen in the French service; and the last ten years of his life were spent in a narrow iron cage at Loches. His brother, the ambitious cardinal Ascanius, was also made a prisoner, and was closely imprisoned at Bourges.

But beyond Milan Lewis carried his views to Naples. Alexander had in 1497 invested Frederick in that king­dom ; but he had since been deeply offended by the per­sistent refusal of his son’s alliance in marriage, while he had become bound to the French king by ties of mutual interests There was, however, reason to apprehend op­position from Frederick’s kinsman, Ferdinand of Spain, who asserted that he himself was the rightful heir of the Aragonese line of Naples, inasmuch as Alfonso I had not been entitled to bequeath the kingdom to his illegiti­mate offspring. But the crafty Ferdinand professed that, for the sake of peace, he was willing to admit the con­current claim of Lewis, as heir of the line of Durazzo; and on this basis a flagitious scheme of joint conquest, to be followed by a partition of the Neapolitan territory between France and Spain, was agreed on at Granada on St. Martin’s day, 15oo. It was alleged against Frederick, not only that his title was defective, but that he had invited the Turks to attack a Christian power—a charge which might with equal truth have been made against the pope himself, with the addition that he had profited by his correspondence with the Turks, whereas Frederick had received no benefit from them. The ambassadors of France and Spain urged these considerations on the pope, and represented that their sovereigns (whose troops had already entered the States of the Church) desired the possession of Naples only with a view to the conquest of Constantinople. The pope, in addition to his wish to punish Frederick for his offence, saw that, if he were removed, the barons of the Campagna, whose subjugation Alexander meditated, would be deprived of all support from without. He therefore agreed to invest the French and Spanish sovereigns in their expected conquests, and pronounced Frederick to be deposed for his connexion with the infidels and for having fostered rebels against the church; but this sentence was to be kept secret until the result of the expedition should be known. Ferdinand’s general, the “great captain” Gonsalvo, who was already in Sicily for the purpose of assisting the Venetians against the Turks, crossed over to Naples at the invitation of the unsuspecting Frederick, and perfidiously turned against him. From the other side, Stuart of Aubigny, accompanied by Caesar Borgia as his lieutenant, advanced into the Neapolitan territory. Capua was taken by the help of treachery, and Caesar found an opportunity of signally displaying his cruelty, rapacity, and lust. It was clear that Frederick could have no hope of success against the combination of powerful enemies which had attacked him. In his extremity, he chose to surrender himself to the stranger rather than to the perfidious kinsman who had taken advantage of his unsuspecting faith to effect his ruin; and he received from Lewis the duchy of Anjou, with a pension of 30,000 ducats, on condition that he should not quit the soil of France.

With the countenance of the French king, and with some material aid from him, the duke of Valentinois entered on his campaigns in Italy in 1499. The design was to form for the Borgia family a large principality, and in the first instance to gain possession of some of the remoter territories belonging to the Roman church. These had formerly been committed to the care of papal vicars, whose descendants had gradually assumed the position of independent lords, paying their tribute to the Roman see irregularly, if at all, engaging themselves in the service of princes, without consideration of their obligations to the church, and acting in a general disre­gard of its superiority. Each of them had his palace and his court, at which, according to the fashion of the age, artists, poets, and men of letters were entertained. The expenses of these courts usually made it necessary to tax the subjects oppressively, even if worse means of raising money were not employed; the morals of the princes were commonly of the depraved type which in that age was characteristic of Italy; their courts and their territories were full of lawlessness and crimes; assassinations, poisonings, and other such atrocities were familiar matters of every day. By ejecting these petty tyrants, therefore, the pope intended not only to aggrandize his family, but to put into their place one who, instead of their rebellious defiance, would be guided by policy and interest to act in accordance with the papacy, and he had little reason to fear that they would be supported by any popular feeling among those who had suffered from their vices and their misgovernment. Their failure as to the payment of tribute afforded a pretext for confiscating their territories; and Caesar proceeded to carry out the papal sentence. At one place after another he was successful, the only considerable difficulty which he encountered was at Forli, where Catharine Sforza, the widow of Jerome Riario, vigorously defended herself for a time; but she was at last compelled to submit, and for a time was imprisoned in the castle of St. Angelo.

On his return to Rome, Caesar was honoured with a triumph, and with a public reception by the pope, who soon after bestowed on him the golden rose, and appointed him captain-general and standard-bearer of the church, in the room of his mur­dered brother. His success was celebrated with games and other festive spectacles; among which was a repre­sentation in the Piazza Navona of the victories of Julius Caesar. The alienation of the church’s patrimony to the Borgias was sanctioned by the college of cardinals; and Caesar joined to the title of Valentinois that of duke of Romagna. In order to counteract in some degree the impression which his crimes had made on the minds of men, he established throughout his dominions an ener­getic system of administration, which appeared in favourable contrast with the misrule of the ejected princes; but even as to this he delighted to employ that system of mysterious terror which was one of his chief instruments. Thus, when the province had been reduced to order by the stern rigour of a governor named Ramiro d’Orco, the people of Cesena were startled by discovering one morning in their market-place the body of the governor, with the head severed from it, and a block with a bloody knife between them,—a spectacle by which the duke intended to claim for himself the credit of his good government, to throw the blame of past severities on the officer who had thus been punished for them, and to strike a general awe by the manner of Ramiro’s end.

Having gained the greater part of the Romagna (al­though he found himself obliged to leave the Bentivoglio family in possession of Bologna), Caesar turned his attention towards Tuscany. But here he found that his ally the king of France, instead of assisting him, required him to give up his attempt; and he was obliged to content himself with receiving from the republic of Florence the office of condottiere, with a large income attached to it, and with the under­standing that no services were to be required of him. The countenance shown by the French king to a man so generally execrated as Caesar induced many complaints, which were laid before the king at Asti, with entreaties that he would deliver the church both from Alexander and from his son. It would seem that Lewis thought of deposing the pope, and that to this time is to be referred a medal which he struck, with the inscription, “Perdam Babilonis nomen”. But Alexander, who had already gratified the king by appointing his minister d’Amboise legate a latere for France, drew the cardinal afresh into his interest by promising to create additional cardinals, with a view to promoting his election to the papacy; and Caesar, on hurrying to Lewis at Milan, was  received with cordiality and confidence. The alliance with the king was confirmed, and Lewis soon after returned to France.

By the partition of the Neapolitan kingdom, the barons of the Campagna were deprived of the support on which they had relied; and Caesar proceeded to reduce them to submission. But in the course of this war, the duke’s condottieri and captains, of whom many belonged to the same class with the enemies against whom they were engaged, began to perceive that they were lending themselves as instruments for their own ruin. Caesar was suddenly surprised by a mutiny, and was shut up in the town of Imola, until the besiegers were driven off by the approach of some French troops, who advanced to his assistance. Caesar, after having treated with the leaders of the mutiny singly, was able to bring them together, as if for a conference, at Sinigaglia, where he had collected as large a force as possible; and, after having by a show of kindness led them to throw off all suspicion, and to disarm their followers, he caused them to be surrounded by his soldiery, arrested them, and put some of the most important among them to death. Such was the morality of the age, that this atrocious treachery was regarded with general admiration. Lewis XII himself spoke of it (apparently without sarcasm or irony) as “a Roman deed”; and Machiavelli repeatedly eulogizes Caesar as the model of a prince and a statesman.

Among those arrested at Sinigaglia were some of the Orsini—a family which Alexander had determined to ruin. After having disregarded many warnings against intended treachery, cardinal Orsini allowed himself to be decoyed into an interview with the pope, who com­mitted him to prison, seized his treasures, and gave up his palace to plunder. The cardinals in a body inter­ceded for their brother, but without effect. For a time Orsini was kept without suitable food, until his mother, by a large sum of money, and his mistress, by finding and giving up a very precious pearl which had belonged to him, obtained leave to send him supplies. But before this, the pope had caused one of his favourite powders to be administered, and the cardinal died in prison. As Caesar returned to Rome, marking his path by acts of cruelty in every town through which he passed, the Orsini made a desperate but ineffec­tual stand at the Ponte Lomentano. The Borgias had crushed all opposition;  but the pope himself stood in awe of his son, and professed to be shocked by the atrocity of Caesar’s measures.

For his daughter Lucretia, Alexander formed projects which became more and more ambitious. After a mar­riage of less than three years, her husband, Sforza of Pesaro, appears to have felt himself unsafe in Easter 1496—the connexion, and fled from Rome; where upon their union was dissolved under frivolous pretexts, and she was married to a youth of seventeen, Alfonso, prince of Bisceglia, an illegitimate son of Alfonso II, the late king of Naples. But this new husband appears in his turn to have suspected that mischief was intended against him, and secretly left Rome for Naples. The pope, however, persuaded him to return; and he had lived with his wife ten months longer, when, on the 15th of July, 1500, he was stabbed on the steps of St. Peter’s. The assassins were carried off in safety by a troop of horsemen. The authorship of the crime was inferred from the fact that no inquiry was allowed and, as the wounded man seemed likely to recover, he was strangled in his bed on the 18th of August. It is said that Caesar Borgia not only contrived but witnessed the murder, and that he justified it by charging the victim with designs against his life. A year later, Lucretia was again married, with great pomp, to a third or fourth husband—Alfonso, eldest son of the duke of Ferrara. By condescending to such a connexion (which was forwarded by the influence of the French king) the proud house of Este, which had been alarmed by Caesar Borgia’s progress, gained for itself the pope’s protection, security against the territorial am­bition of the Borgias, a large payment of money, and the free possession of some ecclesiastical fiefs in the Ro­magna; while for the Borgias, in addition to the dignity of the alliance, there was the advantage that the new duchy of Romagna was covered on its weakest side by the territory of a friendly power. Lucretia, who had not only exercised the government of Spoleto, but during her father’s absence from Rome had actually been en­trusted with the administration of the papacy, removed to Ferrara, where she lived until 1519. In her later years she cultivated the reputation of religion, and earned the celebration of poets—among them, of Ariosto. But although we may hesitate or re­fuse to believe, at least in their full extent, the foulest of the charges which have assailed her, it is impossible to disconnect her from the treasons and murders, the brutal licentiousness, the gross and scandalous festivities, amid which her earlier life was spent, and in some of which it appears that she took a conspicuous part. Nor are either poets or divines superior to the temptation of overlooking the faults of persons in high station whose patronage they regard as a benefit and an honour.

The moral degradation into which the papacy sank under Alexander has no parallel either in its earlier or in its later history, even if we make large deductions from the statements of contemporary writers on the ground of malice or exaggeration. The pope himself and his children are accused of profligacy which hesitated at nothing for its gratification, which never scrupled to remove obstacles by murder, or to violate the laws of nature. The Vatican was polluted by revels and orgies of the most shameless and loathsome obscenity, of which the pope and his daughter are represented as pleased spectators. A letter of the time, which is said to have been read in Alexander’s own hearing, paints the morals of the court in the darkest colours, and speaks of him as a man stained with every vice, a second Mahomet, the predicted antichrist.

For the expenses of this disgusting and costly wicked­ness, for the wars and pompous displays of Caesar Borgia, for the establishment of his other children in the rank of princes, Alexander needed money continually; and he raised it by means more shameless than anything that had before been practised. An epigram of the time (for epigrams and pasquils were the only form in which the Romans then ventured to express their discontent) speaks of him as selling all that was holiest, and as entitled to sell, inasmuch as he had previously bought. The most disreputable of the expedients to which earlier popes had resorted—sale of offices and benefices, creation of new offices in order that they might be sold, traffic in indul­gences, misappropriation of money raised under pretence of a crusade—these and such like abuses were carried to an excess before unknown. Cardinals were appointed in large numbers—at one time twelve, at another time eleven—with the avowed purpose of extorting money for their promotion. The jubilee of 1500 attracted a vast number of pilgrims to Rome: on Easter-day, 200,000 knelt in front of St. Peter’s to receive the pope’s bene­diction; and while these multitudes returned home, to scandalize all Christendom by their reports of the depra­vities of Rome, the papal treasury was enriched by their offerings, and by the commutations paid by those who were unable to make the pilgrimage in person. The “right of spoils” (jus exuviarum) received new develop­ments for the gratification of Alexander’s rapacity; he seized the property of deceased cardinals in disregard of their testamentary directions; in some cases he forbade cardinals to make wills; and it was believed that the deaths of those who had the reputation of wealth were sometimes hastened by poison. Property was largely taken from the great Roman families—often under false pretences—for the endowment of the pope’s children and kindred. Thus the Gaetani were charged with treason, because Alexander had fixed his desires on the duchy of Sermoneta. The duke was committed to the castle of St. Angelo, where he died, probably of poison. Others of the family were put to death, and the duchy was made over, by a pretended sale, to Lucretia, whose son by Alfonso of Bisceglia was decorated with the title attached to it. Another boy, the son of Alexander by a Roman mother (probably Julia Farnese), was made duke of Nepi, with a suitable endowment. The interests of the church were utterly disregarded, in order that the pope’s bastards might be enriched; thus Caesar, in addition to his fiefs in the Romagna, received the abbey of Subiaco with eighteen castles belonging to it; and nineteen cardinals signed the deed of alienation, while not one dared to object to it.

Rome was kept under a system of terror, so that no one dared to mutter his dissatisfaction. The dungeons of St. Angelo and of the Tor di Nona were crowded with prisoners, of whom many found an end by secret violence. Prelates whose wealth made them objects of sinister interest to the pope disappeared, and were not again heard of. Dead bodies were found in the streets, or were thrown into the Tiber. Hosts of spies and assassins lurked in secret, or audaciously swaggered about the city. The state of Rome can hardly have been made worse by an edict which allowed all persons who had been banished for murder, robbery, or other crimes, to return with impunity. The ruling spirit in this general terror was Caesar Borgia, with whom the pope remonstrated on his tyranny, while he extolled his own clemency by way of contrast.

The powers which had combined for the conquest of Naples soon quarrelled about the division of their prey. After a time, a treaty was arranged at Lyons, by which Naples was to become the endowment of a marriage between the French king’s daughter Claude, and Charles, the child of the emperor’s son Philip by Joanna, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isa­bella, and, until the parties should be of age to consum­mate the marriage, the partition of Granada was to be in force. But the Spanish general Gonsalvo, taking advan­tage of the weakness of the French in southern Italy, and professing that he had no official knowledge of the treaty, suddenly assumed the offensive, and made himself master of the whole Neapolitan territory, and Ferdinand, in order to gain the benefit of this treachery, disowned the treaty of Lyons, under the pretext that Philip, who had acted for him, had exceeded his instructions. The French king was preparing an expedition for the recovery of his Neapolitan territory, and for the chastise­ment of Caesar Borgia, who had been joined with Gonsalvo in the late campaign, when it was suddenly reported that the pope was dead.

At the age of seventy-two, Alexander still appeared full of vigour; the sonorous and musical voice with which he officiated in the mass at Easter 1503, excited the admiration of the Ferrarese ambassador. His schemes had all been thus far successful, and he was meditating yet further projects of ambition. On the 12th of August, Alexander supped at his vineyard, near the Vatican palace, with his son the duke of Valentinois and Adrian cardinal of St. Chrysogonus and bishop of Hereford. All three were seized with sudden illness; and it was commonly believed that the pope and his son had drunk, through a servant’s mistake, of poisoned wine, designed by Caesar for the cardinal, whose wealth had attracted the cupidity of the Borgias. Adrian, after a severe illness, during which it is said that the whole skin of his body was changed, recovered; Caesar, although with difficulty, was carried through by the immediate use of antidotes, aided by his youth and natural force of con­stitution; but the pope died within a week, after having received the last rites of the church. His illness appears to have been treated as a fever, and may perhaps have been no more than an ordi­nary disease of this kind. But it was reported that his body was black and swollen, as if from poison; and it was commonly believed at Rome that the devil, by whose aid he had attained the papacy, after having long attended on him in the form of an ape, had carried off his forfeit soul.

The circumstances of the time, after the expulsion of the Medici, had led the Florentines to look to Savona­rola for guidance; and he found himself inevitably drawn to mingle deeply in political affairs. The parties at Florence were three : the whites, or popular party, who, although far from being penetrated by Savonarola’s re­ligious principles, usually acted in accordance with him; the greys, or adherents of the Medici, who for the time found it necessary to disguise their opinions; and the oligarchical party, mostly composed of violent young men, from whom it got the names of arrabbiati (infuriated) and compagnacci. These were generally opposed at once to Savonarola’s political views and to his religious and moral strictness; and they derided his followers as piagnoni (weepers), fratteschi, and masticapaternostri. Agree­ably to the principles of the book ‘On the Government of Princes’, commonly ascribed to Thomas of Aquino, Savonarola held that, while monarchy was in itself the best form of government, different polities were suitable for various states; that the intelligence, advanced culture, and courage of the Florentines rendered them fit for a purely republican government;  and to his influence the establishment of a popular, yet not democratic, consti­tution was chiefly due. But while his political allies wished to use his religious influence for their own pur­poses, the Dominican’s great object was to make political reform subservient to the reformation of morals and religion. He proclaimed the sovereignty of Christ, and did not hesitate to deduce from this the sacredness of the laws which he himself set forth. His visions in­creased, partly through the effect of his ascetic exercises. He expected supernatural guidance in determining the subjects of his preaching, and even believed in the visions of a monastic brother named Sylvester Maruffi, although these were evidently nothing more than the offspring of a nervous temperament combined with a weak and ignorant mind. He frequently expressed his expectation of a violent death, and he carried a small crucifix in his sleeve, by way of preparation for a sudden end.

In the meantime the effects of his preaching had begun to appear in the graver dress and more decorous manners both of men and of women; in church-going, fasting, almsgiving, in the celebration of marriages with seriousness, instead of the levity which had been usual, in habits of family devotion, which were almost monastic, in the restoration of wrongful or questionable gains, in the reading of religious books, in the substitution of hymns for the licentious and half-pagan carnival-songs of former times, some of which had been composed by Lorenzo himself. The grosser vices seemed to have disappeared; the spectacles and games in which the Florentines had delighted were neglected. At the carnival of 1496, the boys of the city, whose disorderly behaviour at that season had formerly defied the au­thority of the magistrates, were brought by the friar’s influence to enlist themselves in the service of religion; and, instead of extorting money to be spent in riotous festivity, they modestly collected alms which were em­ployed in works of mercy under the direction of a charitable brotherhood.

Within the convent of St. Mark, Savonarola, as prior, had introduced a thorough reformation. There was a return to the earlier simplicity of food and dress. All use of gold or silver in crucifixes and other ornaments was forbidden. Schools were established, not only for the study of Scripture in the original languages, but for painting, calligraphy, and illumination; and the practice of these arts contributed much to defray the expenses of the society. The number of brethren had increased from about fifty to two hundred and thirty-eight, of whom many were distinguished for their birth, learning, or accomplishments; and among the devoted adherents, of the prior were some of the most eminent artists of the age—such as Bartholomew or Baccio della Porta, who after Savonarola’s death entered the brotherhood of St. Mark’s, and is famous under the name of Fra Barto­lommeo; the architect Cronaca; the painters Botticelli and Credi; the family of Della Robbia, eminent in sculpture; the sculptor Baccio of Montelupo; and, above all, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, who even to old age used to read the sermons of Savonarola, and to recall with reverence and delight his tones and gestures.

But Savonarola’s course was watched with unfriendly eyes. The partisans of the Medici were hostile to him for in a sermon he had plainly recommended that anyone who should attempt to restore the tyranny of the banished family should lose his head. The arrabbiati were bitterly opposed to him, and they enlisted on their side the power of Lewis the Moor, and his influence with the pope. The clergy, and especially those of high position in the church, were indignant at his assaults on their manner of life; monks and friars—some of them even of his own order—were exasperated by his reproofs of their degeneracy. Frequent complaints were carried to Rome, where one Marianus of Genezzano, a Franciscan, who in Savonarola’s earlier days had been his rival for fame as a preacher, was busy in representing him as a dangerous man; and as early as July 1495, prior of St. Mark’s was invited by Alexander to a conference on the subject of his prophetic gifts. But July 21, although the invitation was very courteously expressed, and was accompanied by compliments as to his labours, he was warned by his friends that it was not to be trusted; he therefore excused himself on the ground that his health had suffered from over-exertion, and that, in the circumstances of the time, his presence was considered necessary at Florence. Further correspondence took place, in which the pope’s blandishments were soon exchanged for a threatening tone, and Savonarola was denounced by him as a “sower of false doctrine”; while Savonarola, although he main­tained the reality of his inspirations, endeavoured to explain his claims to the prophetical character in an inoffensive sense.

He was charged to refrain from preaching, and for a time obeyed, employing himself chiefly in the composition of books, while his place in the pulpit was supplied by one of his most zealous adherents, Dominic of Pescia. But the solici­tations of his friends, and his own feeling as to the necessities of the time, induced him to resume his preaching, as he considered the inhibition to have been issued on false grounds, and therefore to be invalid. He now thundered against the vices of the Roman court, and denounced vengeance which was to come on them. He pointed to a general council as the remedy, and declared that it might depose unworthy prelates—even the pope himself, whose election, as it had been effected by notorious bribery, Savonarola regarded as null and void. He taught that property might lawfully be held by the church, for otherwise St. Sylvester would not have accepted it; but that the present corruptions of the church proved the expediency of resigning it. In the hope of silencing and gaining so formidable a man, Alexander employed an agent to sound him as to the acceptance of promotion to the cardinalate; but Savona­rola indignantly declared from the pulpit that he would have no other red hat than one dyed with the blood of martyrdom.

Among the charges against Savonarola was that of having surreptitiously procured a papal order by which the Tuscan Dominicans were separated from the Lombard congregation.. The matter was discussed until, feeling that on his independence depended the validity of his reforms, he avowed that, in case of extremity, he must resist the pope, as St. Paul withstood St. Peter to the face. Thus he was brought into direct conflict with the papacy : and he was ordered to refrain from preaching, either in public or within his convent, until he should have obeyed the papal summons to Rome.

At the approach of the carnival of 1497, Savonarola resolved to carry further the reform which he had at­tempted in the preceding year. For some days the boys who were under his influence went about the city, asking the inhabitants of each house to give up to them any articles which were regarded as vanities and cursed things; and these were built up into a vast pile, fifteen stories high—carnival masks and habits, rich dresses and ornaments of women, false hair, cards and dice, perfumes and cosmetics, books of sorcery, amatory poems and other works of a free character, musical instruments, paintings and sculptures—all surmounted by a monstrous figure representing the Carnival. A Venetian merchant offered the signory 20,000 crowns for the contents of the heap, but the money was refused, and he was obliged to con­tribute his own picture to the sacrifice. It is said that Baccio della Porta cast into the heap a number of his academic drawings from the nude figure, and that Lorenzo di Credi and other artists of Savonarola’s party imitated the act. On the morning of the last day of the carnival Savonarola celebrated mass. A long procession of children and others, dressed in white, then wound through the streets, after which the pyre was kindled, and its burning was accompanied by the singing of psalms and hymns, the sounds of bells, drums, and trumpets, and the shouts of an enthusiastic multitude, while the signory looked on from a balcony. The money collected by the boys and made over to the brotherhood of St. Martin exceeded the amount which that society usually received in a year. But although Savonarola was delighted with the success of his project, the errors of judgment which he had shown in investing children with the character of censors and inquisitors, in employing them to inform against their own relations, and otherwise introducing dissension into families, in confounding harm­less and indifferent things with things deeply vicious and sinful, in sanctioning the destruction of precious works of literature and art—such errors could not but tend to alienate the minds of men in general, while they furnished his enemies with weapons against him.

The opposition of these enemies was becoming more and more bitter, and showed itself in various forms— lampoons, charges of designs against the state, and attempts at personal violence. As he was preaching on Ascension-day, a violent attack was made on him; but he was saved by some of his friends, who closed around the pulpit, and were able to carry him off to his convent. In consequence of this he abstained from preaching for a time.

The pope’s anger against Savonarola became also more and more exasperated. On the 12th of May was issued a sentence of excommunication, grounded chiefly on the prior’s disobedience to the orders for the reunion of his convent with the Tuscan congregation; and on the 22nd of June this sentence was solemnly pronounced, with bells and lighted tapers, in the cathedral of Florence. Savonarola withdrew into his convent, while a conflict as to the merits of his case was kept up by preachers on either side. During this time he employed himself much in composition, and to it belongs his chief work, “The Triumph of the Cross”.

The death of the duke of Gandia soon after furnished him with an opportunity for addressing to the pope a letter of consolation and of admonition as to the reforms which Alexander, under the pressure of that calamity, professed a wish to undertake. But although the pope appeared to receive the letter favour­ably, it would seem that he afterwards regarded it as an offensive intrusion.

In the beginning of August a conspiracy in the interest of the Medici was discovered, and five of the principal citizens, among whom was Bernard del Nero, a man of seventy-five, who had held the highest offices in the state, were convicted and sentenced to death. An appeal to the great council was violently refused, because it was feared that in that body they might find interest sufficient to save them; and they were beheaded in the night which followed their condemnation. This was the work of Savonarola’s partisans, and both he and they suffered in general estimation by the refusal to the accused of the right of appeal, which had been allowed in the constitution established by Savonarola himself. But it would seem that, in his excommunicated and secluded state, he took no part in the affair beyond interceding—coldly, as he himself says—for one of the conspirators.

On Septuagesima Sunday, in the following year, he resumed preaching at the request of the signory. The archbishop’s vicar-general, a member of the Medici family, forbade attendance at his sermons, but was induced by a threat from the signory to withdraw his prohibition. But this body of magistrates was changed every second month; and, as its elements varied from time to time, Savonarola, after having often enjoyed its support, was at length to experience its fatal hostility. His preaching was now more vehement than ever; he launched out against the pope’s exaggerated claims, against the vices of the Roman court and its head, against the abuse of excommunication, as to which he even prayed in the most solemn manner that, if he should seek absolution from the unjust sentence pronounced against him, he might be made over to perdition. He urged strongly, as he had urged by letters to sovereign princes, the necessity of a general council as a remedy for the disorders of the church. It would appear from some of his expressions that he expected a miracle to be wrought in behalf of his doctrine. At the approach of Lent he repeated the “burning of vanities”; but, although the value of the things consumed was said to be greater than on the former occasion, the procession did not pass off so quietly, as the boy-censors, in the course of their move­ments about the city, were insulted and roughly handled by the compagnacci.

After the burning Savonarola’s followers returned in procession to St. Mark’s, where in front of the convent they planted a cross, around which they danced wildly in three circles, composed of friars, clergy, and laymen, young and old, chanting strange verses composed by one of the party. That Savonarola tolerated a repetition of these frantic scenes, by which his party had incurred just obloquy two years before, is a proof of the high state of enthusiasm to which he had been excited.

About this time one Francis of Apulia, a member of that division of the Franciscans which, from wearing wooden shoes, had the name of zoccolanti, challenged Savonarola to the ordeal of fire, as a test of the truth of his doctrine. For himself, he said that, being but a sinner, he must expect to be burnt, but that he would gladly give his life to expose Savonarola as a sower of scandals and errors.

The challenge was accepted by Dominic of Pescia, who had already been engaged in disputes with the Franciscan at Prato, and, in his devotion to Savonarola, believed him capable of performing miracles. Savona­rola himself discouraged the ordeal, because he con­sidered that the truth of his teaching and prophecies, and the nullity of his excommunication, were sufficiently proved by other means; he declared that he had other and better work to do; yet he evidently expected that, if such a trial should take place, it would result in the triumph of his cause. Objections were raised, but were silenced by a reference to the famous case of Peter the Fiery, of which Florence itself had been the scene four centuries earlier.

Francis of Apulia refused to encounter any other champion than Savonarola himself, to whom alone his challenge had been addressed; while, on the other side, not only all the Dominicans of St. Mark’s and of Fiesole, but a multitude of men, women, and even children, entreated that they might be allowed to make the trial. At length it was settled that a Franciscan named Rondinelli should be opposed to Dominic of Pescia, and that the ordeal should take place on the 7th of April—the day before Palm Sunday. The propositions as to which the Divine judgment was thus to be invoked were these : —that the church was in need of renewal; that it would be chastised and renewed; that Florence also would pass through chastisement to renovation and prosperity; that the unbelievers would be converted to Christ; that all these things would take place during that generation; and, finally, that the excommunication of Savonarola was a nullity.

On the appointed day, the Place of the Signory, where precautions had been carefully taken for the prevention of any tumult, was filled by an immense multitude of spectators. Two heaps of combustible matter had been piled up for the purpose of the trial; they were forty yards long, two yards and a-half in height, and separated by a passage one yard wide. But the eagerness of the crowd was to be disappointed. For hours a discussion was carried on in consequence of objections raised by the Franciscans that Savonarola’s party and their champion might make use of magical charms. The wearisome dispute was still in progress, when a heavy shower fell; and at length the signory forbade the ordeal. The multitude, tired, hungry, drenched, vexed by the tedious wrangling, and at last finding themselves baulked of the expected spectacle, while they did not know on whom to lay the blame, broke out against Savonarola. It was with difficulty that some of his friends were able to conduct him, carrying the holy Eucharist in his hands, through a crowd which loaded him with insulting language, to his convent.

Everything seemed now to turn against him. The secular clergy, as well as the monks, had been alienated from him. Two days later St. Mark’s was besieged by a mob, and, on its surrender, the prior and Dominic of Pescia were committed to prison. Savonarola’s partisans were attacked and proscribed; some of them were tumul­tuously murdered; a commission of men hostile to him was appointed to investigate his case; and throughout a month he was frequently sub­jected to torture. His nervous system, naturally delicate, and rendered more sensitive by his ascetic exercises, was unable to bear the agonies which were inflicted on him; he confessed whatever was desired, and, when the torture was over for the time, retracted the avowals which had been wrung from him. “When I am under torture,” he said, “I lose myself, I am mad; that only is true which I say without torture”. Many questions related to his claims to the character of a prophet; and as to these he talked wildly and inconsistently—insisting at first on the reality of his visions, but afterwards, in his despair, appearing to give up his pretensions.

While the pope repeated the request which he had before urged, that Savonarola should be sent to Rome, the magistrates of Florence, from a regard to the dignity of the republic, desired that his punishment should take place on the scene where his offences had been com­mitted. To this the pope at length consented, and sent the general of the Dominicans and another as his com­missioners, before whom the examination was resumed. It was impossible to convict the accused of unsoundness as to faith, and it appears that, in order to give a colour for charges of heterodoxy, the acts of the process were falsified.

But the judgment of the court had been predetermined. On the 22nd of May, Savonarola, with Dominic of Pescia and Sylvester Maruffi (who had been associated with them in prison), was sentenced to be hanged and burnt. Domniic, with his characteristic zeal, declared himself eager to be burnt alive; but Savonarola, on being in­formed of this, reproved him for wishing to exercise his choice in such a matter.

On the following day the sentence was carried out in the Place of the Signory, which was occupied by crowds as numerous as those which a few weeks before had gathered there for the expected ordeal. The duty of degrading the victims was imposed on Pagagnotti, bishop of Vaison, who had formerly been a friar of St. Mark’s. In his grief and agitation the bishop mistook the form, and said to Savonarola, “I separate thee from the church triumphant”. “From the militant”, said Savonarola, correcting him, “not from the triumphant, for that is not thine to do”.

After the execution of the sentence, such remains of the bodies as could be found were thrown into the Arno : yet relics of Savonarola were preserved with veneration among his adherents, who even believed them to work miracles, and eagerly traced in the events of the follow­ing years the fulfilment of their master’s prophecies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

FROM THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER VI TO THE END OF THE FIFTH COUNCIL OF THE LATERAN.

A.D. 1503-1517.

 

 

Caesar Borgia had supposed himself (as he told Machiavelli) to have provided for all the contingencies which might occur on his father’s death, with a view to con­trolling the election of the next pope, and of securing for himself the power which fortune and skill had combined to put into his hands. But his calculations were frus­trated by the circumstance that, at the time of Alexan­der’s death, Caesar was himself disabled for action by the illness which had seized him in the vineyard of the Vatican. He contrived, however, while on his sick-bed, to enter into an agreement with the Colonna family, for the purpose of strengthening himself against the oppo­sition of the Orsini, who had seized the occasion to make threatening demonstrations. In the meantime the Roman populace, in vengeance for the insolence of the Spaniards under the late pontificate, attacked their houses and destroyed their property; and the city was a scene of tumult, plunder, and slaughter. As the Vatican quarter and the fortress of St. Angelo were occupied by Caesar’s soldiery, the cardinals, thirty-eight in number, met in the Dominican church of St. Mary sopra Minerva, and refused to go into conclave until they were assured that these troops should be removed, and that the French army should approach no nearer than Nepi. Their wish as to the French was effected through the influence of cardinal d’Amboise, who avowedly put himself forward as a candidate for the papacy, and brought with him to the election Ascanius Sforza, whom he had gained to his interest by releasing him from his French prison, and by entertaining him honourably for the last two years. But it soon appeared that d’Amboise could barely reckon on a third part of the college as his supporters; and the cardi­nals, surprised and perplexed by the suddenness of the late pope’s death, resolved to choose one who should not only be free from party ties, but whose age and infirmity might seem to promise another speedy vacancy. On the 22nd of September the election fell on Francis Piccolo­mini, who, in memory of his uncle Pius II, styled him­self Pius III. The new pope was sixty-four years old; he had been promoted to the cardinalate by his uncle in 1460, and was regarded as the most respectable member of the college, which had been greatly sunk in character by Alexander’s simoniacal and scandalous appointments. Rome and the ecclesiastical states were still in a condi­tion of disturbance. Nobles of the Campagna repossessed themselves of lands which had been taken from them by the duke of Valentinois; the cities of Romagna invited their expelled lords to return, or these returned uninvited to resume their power. The Venetians invaded Romagna, and made themselves masters of Faenza and other places. By entering into an alliance with the French, Caesar Borgia provoked the Spanish general Gonsalvo to order that all the Spaniards who were in his service should leave it. The duke renewed the contest with his old enemies the Orsini, but was driven to withdraw into the Vatican and the adjoining quarter, where he en­deavoured to fortify his position. By these disorders the pope was compelled to take refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, where he died after a pontificate of six-and-twenty days.

This short interval between two vacancies of the papacy had sufficed to ascertain the strength of parties in the college. D’Amboise, finding that he could not hope to be chosen, exerted himself in favour of the cardinal who was supposed to be the most devoted to the French interest, Julian della Rovere. Ascanius Sforza was gained to the same side by the hope that his family might recover the duchy of Milan; and, notwithstanding the long and open enmity between Julian and the Borgias—although Caesar had made the eight Spanish cardinals swear that they would elect no one but a partisan of his family—even Caesar was induced, by expectations of recovering his territories, of confirmation in his office of standard-bearer, and of marrying his daughter to the future pope’s nephew, to throw his influence into the scale of Julian. Capitulations were drawn up, and an oath was taken to observe them; among other things, the future pope was within two years to assemble a general council for the reformation of the church. With­out having been shut up in conclave, thirty-seven out of thirty-eight cardinals voted for Julian, who, as pope, took the name of Julius—a name which had been borne by only one of his predecessors, the contemporary of Constantine and Athanasius. The pope, whose earlier career has been noticed from time to time, was now sixty years old. He was regarded as a man of sincere and open character; even Alexander VI allowed him this merit, while censuring him in other re­spects. But it would seem that he sometimes traded unfairly on his reputation for honesty, as when, at the election, he recommended himself to the French party by referring to his past conduct, and to the Spaniards by promising a different policy for the future. His manner of life was not immaculate; he had an illegitimate daugh­ter, whom he married to one of the Orsini; his amours had affected his constitution, and his love of wine was notorious; but, as compared with some of his late pre­decessors, his character and conduct might almost be styled decorous and respectable.

Caesar Borgia had believed that, although not powerful enough to dictate the choice of a pope, he was able, through his influence with the Spanish cardinals, to pre­vent the election of any individual to the papacy; and he professed to regret the support which he had given to Julius as the only mistake that he had ever committed. But, as in his prosperity he had never scrupled at any treachery, he was now to be the victim of other men’s deceit. Although his army was scattered by the Orsini and others, he still retained about 400 or 500 soldiers, and formed a wild scheme for the recovery of Romagna by means of this little force. But, as he was about to embark at Ostia for Spezzia, he was arrested by the pope’s order, and was detained in the Vatican until he consented to sign a document by which some fortresses, which still held out for him, were made over to Julius. He then made his way by sea to Naples, and repaired to the camp of Gonsalvo, with whom he had secretly carried on negotiations. But, although he was received with a great show of honour, he was carefully guarded until the general should learn the Spanish king’s pleasure respecting him; and, agree­ably to Ferdinand’s usual perfidy, he was arrested in defiance of the safe-conduct which he had received, was sent as a prisoner to Spain, and was imprisoned in the fortress of Medina del Campo. From this confinement, after two years, he made his escape, and he was invested with a military command by his brother-in-law the king of Navarre, who had vainly interceded for him with Ferdinand. But in March 1507, his adven­turous life was ended in a skirmish near Viana, within the diocese of Pampeluna, of which he had formerly been bishop, and on the anniversary of his institution to the see. So utterly was the terror of the Borgias extinct (although Lucretia still lived as duchess of Ferrara), that a “Comedy of Duke Valentino and Pope Alexander” was acted in the ducal palace of Urbino, and that other scenes from the family story were already represented on the stage.

As Alexander’s great object had been the establishment of his family in the rank of territorial princes, that of Julius was to extend the temporal power of the papacy by recovering for it all that it had ever possessed, or could pretend to claim. And to this end he employed great skill, energy, tenacity of purpose, and even the talents of a general and the endurance of a soldier. He desired to reunite under the papacy all those fiefs which had been taken by Caesar Borgia from their hereditary lords, and which since Caesar’s fall had again for the most part reverted to the old dominion, while part had been seized by the Venetians. The Venetians offered to give up all their acquisitions except Faenza, and to hold that terri­tory under the same conditions of tribute as its former lords. But the pope for a time refused even to admit their ambassadors to his presence; and he utterly rejected their Proposals. In the end of August 1506, he set out from Rome for the purpose of re­ducing the fiefs of the church to obedience. Baglioni, a condottiere who had got possession of Perugia, submitted, and was allowed to continue. The Bentivogli were driven from Bologna; on St. Martin’s day the pope made his triumphant entry into that city; and his return to Rome was greeted with a yet more imposing triumph.

The French had been driven out of Naples by Gon­salvo of Cordova, and the whole kingdom was now subject to Ferdinand. The death of Isabella of Castile (November 26th, 1504), and that of her son-in-law the archduke Philip (September 25th, 1506), brought into nearer prospect the vastness of the power which was likely to be concentrated in the hands of the young Charles, the heir of Spain, Naples, Austria, and the Netherlands; and Lewis of France was bent on averting the danger which seemed to threaten him from this cause.

Maximilian, at a diet which assembled at Constance, told the German estates that it was necessary for him to be crowned as emperor at Rome, if the empire were to retain any influence in Italy. The promise of men which he received from the assembly—8000 horse and 27,000 foot for half a year—was unequal to his wishes and was imperfectly performed; but he set out on his expedition. The Venetians, although they professed themselves willing to allow his passage through their territories, refused to admit his army. There were signs of opposition from other quarters, and on entering Italy from the Tyrol he found himself compelled by enemies who beset his way to engage in a warfare which did not result in his favour. The pope, in his desire to keep him at a distance, allowed him, by a special privilege, to assume the title of emperor without having gone through the ceremony of a coronation. The army, ill-fed and unpaid, broke up; and Maximilian, after having concluded a treaty with the Venetians, returned to Germany.

The republic of Venice was now at its greatest height of wealth and power, and the success of its prudent, selfish, and grasping policy had long excited a strong feeling of jealousy in other states. Thus when Pius II invited the Florentines to take part in the crusade, they had declined on the ground that whatever might be taken from the Turks would fall to the Venetians. Julius, in a letter to Maximilian, spoke of them as encroaching, as aiming at supreme domination in Italy, and even at re­establishing for themselves the old imperial power; and he had been especially offended by their rejecting one of his nephews, whom he had nominated to the see of Vicenza, and substituting a Venetian citizen, whom they required to style himself “bishop by the grace of the senate”. The emperor considered that the Venetians had formed their territory at the expense of the empire. The French king was angry with them for having crossed his designs, for having craftily favoured the interest of Spain, and for having got possession of some places which had belonged to his duchy of Milan. In December 1508, a treaty was concluded at Cambray between the archduchess Margaret, regent of the Netherlands, on the part of her father the emperor, and by cardinal d’Amboise as representative of France. Spain was to take part in the treaty, and d’Amboise, as legate, took it on him to promise the pope’s concurrence.

The treaty began by stating that the emperor and the French king, having resolved, at the pope’s request, to make war against the Turks, held themselves bound to restrain the Venetians in their aggressions on the holy Roman empire and other Christian states; and it pledged the allied powers to hold by each other until each should have recovered whatever had been taken from it by the Venetians. For a time this treaty was kept secret from the power against which it was directed.

Although Julius had special reasons for dissatisfaction with the republic, he yet felt strongly the inexpediency of admitting foreigners to exercise dominion in Italy. And the evil was the greater in proportion to the power of the French and the Spanish sovereigns, who had re­spectively possessed themselves of Milan and of Naples. He dreaded the pretensions which might be advanced on the part of the empire as to Italy; he dreaded d’Amboise as one who was intriguing to succeed him—whom Lewis, by interfering in Italian affairs, might help to attain the papacy, in order that a French pope might transfer the imperial crown from Germany to France. Hence, although in his enmity to pope Alexander he had himself been the first to bring the “barbarians” into Italy, the policy of his later years was directed chiefly to their expulsion. He therefore privately offered to make peace with the republic on condition that certain terri­tories should be yielded up to him. But the Venetians, in reliance on their power of raising mercenary troops, and in the expectation that a league between parties widely differing in interests would soon break up of itself, de­clined the proposed terms; and Julius thereupon joined the league, undertaking to utter the censures of the church against the Venetians, so that Maximilian should be set free from the engagements which he had lately contracted with them.

In the spring of 1509 Lewis began hostilities, and within seventeen days his forces had made themselves masters of all that he was entitled to claim under the treaty of Cambray. The pope about the same time sent forth a “monitory” bull, in which he reproached the Venetians for encroachments and usurpations, for interfering with the rights of the church as to jurisdiction over clerks and as to patronage of bishoprics, and for har­bouring enemies of the apostolic see. He allowed them twenty-four days for submission and restitution; in case of their neglecting this opportunity he declared them to be under interdict, and that their persons and property might be seized and sold. The Venetians appealed to a general council, and found means to display their appeal on the doors of St. Peter’s at Rome; and Julius pro­nounced an interdict against them.

But the pope did not confine himself to the use of spiritual weapons. His troops, under the command of his nephew Francis della Rovere, duke of Urbino, marched into northern Italy, where they reduced Faenza, Rimini, Ravenna, and other places. The Venetians, pressed by this invasion, by the French king, who in­flicted on them a severe defeat near Agnadello, and by the fear of preparations in which Maximilian was supposed to be actively engaged, made overtures to the pope for peace; but these were so ill received that the republic hesitated between submission to the father of Christendom and an alliance with the Grand Turk. But Julius dreaded lest the destruction of the republic should give the French king the sovereignty of all northern Italy; he was softened by the compliance of a power which had usually been so haughty; and, although the ambassadors of France and of the empire opposed a reconciliation, he listened to the intercession which Henry VIII of England addressed to him through Bainbridge, archbishop of York. The Venetians agreed to abandon their appeal, to give up all pretensions to ecclesiastical independence and to jurisdiction over the clergy. Six citizens of high dignity were sent as ambassadors to Rome, where they were required to enter by night, and were not greeted with any of the usual marks of honour. Yet they were not obliged to submit to the full humiliation which had sometimes been inflicted on penitents. On prostrating themselves before the pope in the porch of St. Peter’s, they were absolved with a simple injunction to visit the seven basilicas of Rome, and were at once received, “not as excommunicate or interdicted, but as good Christians and devoted sons of the apostolic see.” The pope himself had struck out the usual flagellation from the scheme which had been drawn up by his master of ceremonies.

Julius had quarrelled with the French king about the see of Avignon, which had become vacant by the death of a bishop while in attendance on the papal court. The pope attempted to exercise the patronage, but as Lewis declared this to be contrary to a late treaty, he was compelled to yield ungraciously. The death of cardinal d’Amboise, in May 1510, increased the ill-feeling which had arisen, as Julius claimed for the church the treasures which the minister-legate had accumulated. The pope resolved to destroy, if possible, the French king’s in­fluence in Italy. He endeavoured to stir up troubles against him on the side of England and on that of Switzerland; and in the violence of his self-will he insisted that others, with whom he had hitherto acted, should follow him in his change of policy. Hence, when Alfonso, duke of Ferrara, who was a feudatory of the papacy and had been one of his generals, refused to break off from the alliance against Venice, Julius declared that he had forfeited his fief, and refused to accept his tribute. He issued against him a bull of extraordinary violence, repeated its denunciations in the customary curses of the holy week, and professed that for the ruin of this enemy he would risk his tiara and his life. He declared that Lewis had forfeited his claim to the kingdom of Naples, and granted investiture in it exclusively to Ferdinand, whom he hoped by this favour to secure to his party. He negotiated through Mathias Schinner, bishop of Sion in the Valais, with the Swiss, whom Lewis had offended by resisting their demands of increased pay and by speaking of them with disparagement; and he was allowed by their diet to raise as many soldiers as he might require from the confederation.

Lewis, although unwilling to quarrel with the pope, both from his own feeling and yet more on account of his queen’s influence over him, found it necessary to act in self-defence. Falling back on a suggestion of his late minister d’Amboise, he convoked at Orleans a national assembly of prelates, doctors, and other learned men, which continued its deliberations at Tours. The chancellor opened the proceedings by denouncing Julius as having attained the papacy by uncanonical intrigues, and having cruelly troubled Chris­tendom by his love for war; and the king submitted to the council eight questions, bearing on the lawfulness of resisting an aggressive pope by force. The answers were favourable to his wishes: it was declared that a pope might not make war on a temporal prince except within the church’s territory; that a prince might, in self-defence, invade the pope’s territory, although not with a view of depriving him of it; that if a pope should stir up other powers against a prince, the prince might withdraw from his obedience, although only so far as might be necessary for the protection of his own rights; that in case of such withdrawal he ought to fall back on the ancient common law of the church and on the pragmatic sanction; that any censures unjustly uttered by popes were not to be regarded.

While Lewis was thus endeavouring to fortify himself by the sanction of ecclesiastical law, the pope continued to proceed by forcible means. Neither age nor sickness could check his impetuosity. At Bologna, where he had made his entry with great pomp on the 23rd of September, he ordered that all who were able and willing to fight should be assembled in the market-place; and on being informed that their numbers amounted to 15,000 foot and 5000 horse, although he was suffering from a violent attack of fever, he rushed from his bed to a balcony, and pronounced his benediction on them. Towards the end of October his life was despaired of; but he recovered, and notwithstanding the remonstrances of cardinals and ambassadors, who endeavoured to restrain him by a regard for his spiritual character, he set out in a litter for the siege of Mirandola. Arriving there on the 2nd of January 1511, he took up his abode in a peasant’s hut, under the guns of the fortress. He disregarded the frost, the heavy snow, the roughness and scantiness of his fare. He reproved the officers around him for their slowness; and while his pioneers fled from the discharge of the enemy’s artillery, he himself superintended the pointing of his cannon, and gave orders for the discharge. On returning to Mirandola, after a short intermission of the siege, he established himself in a little chapel, still nearer to the walls than his former quarters. A plan laid by the famous Bayard for his capture would probably have been successful, but that a sudden snowstorm drove the pope and his party back to their cover before they had reached the point at which the French ambush was posted; and, on finding himself pursued in his return, Julius with his own hand assisted in raising a drawbridge over which he had just made his escape. Undaunted by hardships or danger, he per­severed in the siege; and when at length Mirandola was taken, he refused to enter by the gate, and desired that a breach might be made in the wall, so that he might make his entry in the style of a conqueror, arrayed in helmet and cuirass.

In Germany, as well as in France, there had been manifestations of discontent against the papacy. A paper of ten “Grievances” had been drawn up, setting forth, among other things, the abuses of the Roman court as to dispensations, as to the ejection of bishops who had been duly elected, as to the reservation of the greater dignities and benefices for cardinals and papal protonotaries; as to expectancies, annates, patronage, and indulgences; as to the exaction of tenths under pretext of crusades which never took place; as to drawing of causes to Rome which ought to be decided on the spot. A list of suggested “Remedies” followed; and a paper of “Advices to the Imperial Majesty” was annexed—recommending the establish­ment of a pragmatic sanction, similar to that of Bourges. In consequence of these representations Maximilian took it on himself to issue an edict forbidding pluralities and simony, and desired James Wimpheling, a learned jurist, who was supposed to be the author of the Gravamina, to draw up a pragmatic sanction adapted to the circum­stances of Germany.

Negotiations were attempted between Maximilian and the pope through Matthew Lang, bishop of Gurk, who appeared at Bologna as imperial ambassador, and was received with great marks of honour. But Julius was offended by the assumptions of the bishop, who, when three cardinals were sent to him, employed three gentlemen of his suite to meet them, as if no one but the pope himself were worthy to treat with the representative of the emperor; and Lang, on with­drawing from the court, complained of the impossibility of moving the pope’s “obstinate and diabolical perti­nacity.”

In consequence (it is said) of the death of a cardinal at Ancona, five of his brethren, among whom Carvajal, a Spaniard, was the leader, refused to join the pope at Bologna, and obtained from the government of Florence permission to remain in that city. By this the pope was greatly incensed, as he supposed their conduct to imply a charge of poison against him, and he expressed his dissatisfaction to the Florentines. The cardinals removed from Florence to Milan, where they openly declared themselves in opposition to the pope. The French king had drawn the emperor into his wish for a general council; the two sovereigns applied to the pope, reminding him of the promise which he had made at his election, and telling him that, in case of his refusal, they would endeavour to accomplish their object by means of the cardinals; and they acted accordingly.

There was some discussion as to the place where the council should be held; for while Maximilian wished it to be at Constance, Lewis proposed Lyons, and the Italian prelates insisted that, as reform was needed not only in the members, but in the head of the church, some Italian city would be most suitable. On the 16th of May, three cardinals, in the name of themselves and of six others (by some of whom the act was afterwards dis­avowed), issued a document summoning the council to meet on the 1st of September at Pisa—a place which was considered of good omen, as having been the scene of the council which deposed the antipope Anacletus, and of that which, after deposing the rivals Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, elected Alexander V. They announced this step to Julius, and charged him in the meantime to refrain from creating any new cardinals. The emperor and the king of France severally issued their citations;  but it was in vain that they endeavoured to gain the cooperation of Ferdinand, and Henry of England wrote in strong terms to Maximilian, expressing his horror at the possibility of a schism.

In the meantime an insurrection broke out at Bologna. The bronze statue of Julius, lately executed by Michael Angelo, and erected in front of the cathedral, was thrown down, dragged about the streets with insult, and afterwards given to the duke of Ferrara, by whom it was melted into cannon. The Bentivogli returned under French protection. The cardinal-legate, Alidosi, whose government had been greatly detested, fled in disguise by night, and made his way to Ravenna, where, on reporting his arrival, he was invited to the pope’s table. But as he was on his way to the banquet, he accidentally met the pope’s nephew, the duke of Urbino, who, after a vehement complaint that the legate had calumniated him to Julius as inclining to the French interest, drew out a dagger, and stabbed him mortally. The pope, although greatly distressed by the murder, was afraid to inflict any punishment on his nephew, lest he should go over to the enemy. He set out in deep grief for Rome, and on arriving at Rimini, he found the announcement of the Pisan council placarded on the door of the convent where he lodged.

On the 16th of July the pope sent forth a bull sum­moning a rival council to meet in the church of St. John Lateran on Monday after Easter-week in the following year. In this document he defended himself as to his performance of the engagements made at his election, professing to have been always zealously desirous of a general council, and to have endeavoured to gain the concurrence of temporal princes towards that object, although the fulfilment of his wishes had been prevented by public troubles. He compared the opposing cardinals to “acephalous locusts”, threatened them with deposition from their dignities and preferments unless they would submit within sixty-five days, and interdicted Florence, Pisa, and all places in which the schismatical council should meet. He laboured to stir up his allies against it, and at the expiration of the time of grace pronounced the refractory cardinals to be deposed, and subject to the penalties of heresy and schism.

It soon became clear that the council of Pisa would be a failure. The emperor’s promises of support proved to be delusive. In laying the subject before a meeting of German prelates at Augsburg, he found that they were present at the opening, the members of the council were almost exclusively Frenchmen, who acted under con­straint of their sovereign. No confidence was placed in the cardinals, whose conduct in summoning the council was attributed to motives of personal ambition. The French king himself is said to have afterwards avowed that the assembling of it was merely a device for rendering the pope more tractable. The number of members was never considerable; it is said not to have exceeded four cardinals, who held proxies for three of their brethren; two archbishops, thirteen bishops, and five abbots; some doctors of law, among whom the most famous was Philip Decius (or Dexio), who vigorously defended the council with his pen; and a few repre­sentatives of universities. On attempting to enter the cathedral of Pisa for the performance of the opening mass, they found the doors closed, and were obliged to resort to another church, although an order from the Florentine magistrates afterwards procured them admission to the cathedral. The clergy of Pisa refused to lend them vestments, and left the city in obedience to the papal interdict. In the face of these circumstances the council, under Carvajal as president, affected to assert its authority by declaring that all that might be attempted against it by the pope or his cardinals should be null, and that it was not to be dissolved until the church should have been reformed in head and in members. But the Florentines, alarmed by the pope’s sentences and threats, became weary of allowing the rebellious assembly a place within their territory; and after three sessions the council took occasion from a street-affray between some servants of its members and some young men of Pisa, to remove to Milan.

About this time Maximilian, whose mind was singularly fertile in wild designs, conceived the strange idea of getting himself elected to the papacy. This project appears to have been suggested by an illness of Julius, which was so serious that for a time he was believed to be dead, and cries were raised at Rome for the establishment of a republic. But as the old man recovered in defiance of medical warnings and prescriptions, Maximilian wished to be appointed his coadjutor, as a step towards being chosen as his suc­cessor. In order to obtain the consent of the Spanish king, he professed himself willing to resign the empire in favour of Charles, the grandson of both; and he was ready to pledge his jewels and robes with the Fuggers, of Augsburg, the great money-dealers of the age, in order to raise funds for securing the votes of the cardinals. But the plan found no favour with Julius and appears to have come to nought through its mere extravagance.

The pope offered terms of reconciliation to Lewis; but, as he had foreseen, they were not accepted, and he entered into a new alliance with Aragon and Venice. Of this “holy league” (as it was called), the declared objects were, to preserve the unity of the church against the pretended council of Pisa, to recover Bologna and other fiefs (among which Ferrara was understood to be included) for the Roman see, and to drive out of Italy all who should oppose these designs. The concurrence of England is said to have been partly gained by a cargo of presents more novel than costly,—Greek wines, southern fruits, and other provisions, intended for the king and the chief persons of the kingdom, and conveyed on board of the first papal vessel that had ever anchored in the Thames.

 

1511-12. BATTLE OF RAVENNA.

 

The French troops poured into Lombardy under Gaston de Foix, duke of Nemours; and it is at this time that Lewis is commonly supposed to have met the papal threats of interdict by striking the medal which bears the motto Perdam Babilonis Nomen. The council, which was sitting at Milan, professed to authorize Gaston, through its legate the cardinal of St. Severino, to occupy the States of the Church until St. Peter’s chair should be filled by a lawfully-chosen pope. Brescia, which had risen against the French, was taken, and the capture was followed by extraordinary excesses of spoliation, cruelty, and brutality. But at the great battle of Ravenna, fought on Easter-day 1512, although the French general gained a brilliant victory over the allied Spanish and papal troops, he himself fell, at the age of twenty-four. Among the prisoners taken by the French was the cardinal-legate of Bologna, John de’ Medici, whom they carried off to Milan. But there, when he offered the absolution which the pope had authorized him to bestow on all who would promise never again to bear arms against the church, his captors crowded around him, entreating his pardon and blessing; while the members of the antipapal council could not show themselves in the streets without being pursued with jeers, curses, and insulting gestures. The French army, weakened by an order which the emperor had issued for the recall of the Germans who were serving in it, and by the desertion of many soldiers who had returned to their own country after sharing in the plunder of Brescia, was needed at home for defence against the English; and as it retreated through the Milanese territory, before a force of 20,000 Swiss, which had entered Italy by the Tyrol for the service of the pope and of Venice, the inhabitants rose against the stragglers, and slaughtered many in revenge for the late outrages. The sentence of sus­pension which the council affected to issue against the pope, after attempts to draw him into summoning another general council, and after several delays and extensions of the time of grace allowed him, was received with general mockery; and the residue of the unfortunate assembly, after having removed to Asti and thence to Lyons, vanished so obscurely that its end was not observed.

Julius had treated all the messages of the opposition council with contempt. He had not been dismayed by the successes of the French, and had rejected, even with anger, a suggestion that he should withdraw for safety to Naples. And three weeks after the battle of Ravenna—only a fortnight later than the time originally appointed—he assembled the fifth Lateran council. The proceedings were opened by Giles of Viterbo, general of the Augustine friars, and afterwards a cardinal, who, in a discourse which was greatly admired, spoke of the evils and dangers of the time, of the benefits of synods, the providential care which had been shown in the protection of the pope, the mischiefs of schism, the necessity of ecclesiastical and moral reformation, and the duty of arming against the general enemy of Christendom.

The first and second sessions were chiefly occupied by formal business. At the third session, Matthew Lang, bishop of Gurk, appeared, and produced a commission from Maximilian, with whom the pope had lately concluded an alliance. In this document the emperor signified his adhesion to the council, and authorized his repre­sentative to do all that might be possible for the resto­ration of unity. The bishop then declared that in the emperor’s name he revoked and annulled all that had been done in the conciliabulum of Pisa, for which, he said, the emperor had never given any mandate; and he and a lay envoy of Maximilian reverently kissed the pope’s feet. At the same session was read and accepted a bull, reprobating and annulling all the pro­ceedings of the refractory cardinals, and renewing an order by which Julius, in the preceding August, had interdicted all France, with the exception of Brittany, and had even condescended to gratify his enmity against the French by so petty an act of vengeance as the removal of a fair from Lyons to Geneva.

At the fourth session the question of the pragmatic sanction was brought before the council. After a reading of the instrument by which Lewis XI had abrogated it, the advocate of the coun­cil, Melchior Bardassini, requested that the pragmatic sanction should be revoked and annulled, and that a monition should be addressed to such ecclesiastical and lay persons of eminence in France as might be inter­ested in it, requiring them to appear and to show cause why it should not be abolished. Two bulls of the proposed tenor were thereupon produced, and received the approbation of the council.

Julius had quarrelled with his Venetian allies, partly as to some territories which he claimed on the Po; and while the republic concluded a treaty with France, the pope, as we have seen, allied himself with the emperor. But whereas Maximilian set up pretensions to the duchy of Milan for himself or one of his grandsons, the pope, who could endure no foreign dominion in Italy, favoured the claims of Maximilian Sforza, son of Lewis the Moor. This claimant entered the capital on the 29th of December; and it appeared as if Julius were on the point of completing his work of expelling the “barba­rians” from Italy, when he was seized with an illness which seemed likely to be fatal. In consequence of this he was unable to be present at the fifth session of the Lateran council, which was held on the 16th of February 1513; but he got from it a confirmation of a bull which he had sent forth eight years before, and had since republished, with a view to checking the practice of simony in elections to the papacy. The pope retained to the last his clearness of mind and his strength of will. With regard to the cardinals who had been concerned in the council of Pisa, he declared that as a private man he forgave them, and prayed that God would forgive the injuries which they had done to the church, but that as pope he must condemn them; and he ordered that they should be excluded from the election of his successor. On the night of the 21st of February Julius breathed his last, at the age of seventy.

On the 4th of March twenty-five cardinals met for the election of a successor to the papacy. The warlike ambition of Julius had produced so much of trouble that there was among them a general wish to fill the chair with a pope of very opposite character. The younger cardinals especially resolved to make their influence felt, and among them the most active was Alfonso Petrucci, cardinal of St. Theodore, and son of the lord of Siena. Raphael Riario, the senior and richest member of the college, whom some cardinals were disposed to choose in the hope of sharing in the great preferments which would become vacant by his election, was soon set aside—partly on account of his relationship to Sixtus IV and the late pope, and partly from doubts as to his capacity; and on the 11th of March the election fell on John de’ Medici, who had entered the conclave two days later than the other cardinals. He had been detained on his journey from Florence by an ailment which is supposed to have induced some of his brethren to vote for him on the ground that it seemed likely to shorten his life. It is said that Petrucci, in announcing the election of the new pope, as Leo the Tenth, to the people, shouted out, “Life and health to the juniors!” The result was hailed with general acclamation.

Leo at the time of his election was only thirty-seven years of age. His early promotion to the cardinalate, and his expulsion with the rest of his family from Flo­rence, have been already mentioned. During his exile from his native city he had travelled with a party of friends in Germany, France, and the Low Countries, and had lived some years at Genoa, where his sister and her husband, Franceschetto Cibò, had established themselves. There he became intimate with Julian della Rovere, who, like himself, was under the disfavour of pope Alexander; and when his friend became pope, cardinal de’ Medici removed to Rome. Under the pontificate of Julius he lived in splendour, and showed that he had inherited the tastes of his family by his patronage of literature and art. He threw open to all a noble library, including as many of the manuscripts collected by the Medici as he had been able to recover by purchase after the troubles of Florence; his palace became a resort of painters, sculptors, mu­sicians, and men of letters; but so far did the expense of indulging his tastes exceed his means of gratifying them, that he is said to have been sometimes reduced to pledge his silver plate in order to procure a supply of the most necessary materials for an intended banquet.

The cardinal had been sent as legate to Bologna, at the head of a force which was intended to reduce the city after the revolt of 1511; and when the Spanish general Cardona, who commanded the besieging troops, through disregarding his advice, had allowed the French to advance to the relief of the Bolognese, the legate appeared at the battle of Ravenna, where, as we have seen, he was made prisoner. From this captivity he was able to make his escape; and within a short time he shared in the resto­ration of his family to Florence—for which he had contributed to pave the way by the attention which he was accustomed to bestow on Floren­tine visitors during his residence at Rome.

As the pope had not yet advanced beyond the order of deacon, he was ordained as priest on the 15th of March, and as bishop on the 17th; and he was hastily enthroned on the 19th, in order to avoid interference with the rites of the holy week. But Leo was not content with this imperfect ceremony, and a more splendid coronation was celebrated at the Lateran on the 11th of April. In the great procession the gods of Olympus and other heathen elements were mingled, according to the taste of the age; and the pope rode the same Turkish horse which, on the same day of the preceding year, had carried him at the battle of Ravenna. The cost of this second coronation amounted to 100,000 ducats; and such an outlay for such a purpose contrasted strongly with the practice of Julius II, who, while he incurred enormous expenses on account of his wars, had spent very little on display. Magnificence and expense were characteristic of Leo’s court, and in order to find the necessary means he had recourse to the disreputable expedients of promoting cardinals for money, and of creating offices for sale. Even the luxury of his table was extraordinary. He encouraged invention in the culinary art; the flesh of monkeys and crows, and other unusual kinds of food were served up before him by way of experiment; and the discovery of peacock sausages was regarded as the highest triumph of genius in this department. His ban­quets were enlivened by the brilliant conversation of wits, and by the follies of bad poets, whom he conde­scended to entertain for the sake of the amusement which their vanity and their absurdities afforded him. The court was a scene of continual diversions, which were not always of the gravest character. The pope’s favourite companions were gay, and for the most part highly-born, young cardinals. One of them, Bernard Dovizi, who from his birthplace was called Bibbiena, wrote comedies of a somewhat free character, which were acted by young performers in the Vatican; and every year a party of comedians, known as the “Academy of the Roughs”, was brought from Siena for the diversion of the father of Christendom. Card-playing for heavy stakes was a common sequel of the pope’s banquets; and, whether a winner or a loser, he was in the habit of throwing gold pieces among the spectators of the game. He con­demned the practice of dice-playing, however, as danger­ous to fortune and morals. Painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, and artists of all other kinds, found Leo a munificent patron; nor was literature neglected in the distribution of his favours, although it seems to have received but an inferior share of them. Before leaving the conclave at which he had been elected, he appointed as his private secretaries two elegant scholars, Bembo and Sadoleto, who afterwards became cardinals. He also promoted to the cardinalate some eminent divines, such as Thomas de Vio (known by the name of Cajetan), Sylvester Prierias, and Giles of Viterbo. But the learning which he chiefly favoured was not theological. His own acquirements in theology were confessedly scanty; while, as might have been expected in a pupil of Politian, he delighted in the writings of the Greek and Roman poets. His favourite amusement was hunting, in which he en­gaged with a zeal regardless of season, of weather, and of unwholesome air; and nothing disturbed his usually placid temper more surely than any breach of the laws of sport.

That Leo had little of piety or devotion in his cha­racter appears unquestionable. But his defects as to religion may be described as those of a man of the world too much addicted to its objects and enjoyments. The charges which have been brought against his morals appear to have been greatly exaggerated and maliciously darkened; and the tales which represent him as an unbeliever in the Christian revelation may be regarded as utterly groundless. Good-natured as Leo usually was, he sometimes showed himself stern. He beheaded Baglioni, who (as we have seen) had made himself tyrant of Perugia, for acts of tyranny, robbery, and murder, notwithstanding the intercessions of the Orsini; he hanged a doctor of laws for producing forged documents in a suit; and he punished with unsparing severity the conspiracy of cardinal Petrucci.

Leo was desirous, like his predecessor, to exclude the rule of foreigners from Italy; but his ambition was of a lower kind than that which had thrown a sort of grandeur over the schemes of Julius, and had in some degree covered the unscrupulous nature of the means which he employed. It was not for the church, for the papacy, or for Italy that the Medicean pope laboured, but for his own family. His eagerness to forward the interests of his relations was shown immediately after his election by his appointing his cousin Julius, a knight of Rhodes, and son of the victim of the Pazzian conspiracy, to the archbishopric of Florence; and to this were soon added the dignity of cardinal and the lega­tion of Bologna. At a later time great troubles arose out of his endeavours to provide a principality for a nephew by uniting Parma and Piacenza with Reggio, and, on the failure of that plan, by bestowing on him the duchy of Ferrara, which was for that purpose to be taken from Alfonso d’Este; and in a lower degree the pope was noted for his partiality for his countrymen in general,—so that Rome, to the disgust of its native citizens, swarmed with Florentines who were employed in all sorts of offices and occupations.

 

1514-15. BATTLE OF MARIGNANO.

 

Leo had followed Julius in his hostility to France; and he was a party to a new league which was concluded against that power at Mechlin, in April 1513, between the emperor, the king of England, and the king of Spain, although neither the pope nor Ferdinand formally signed it. But the course of events speedily induced him to change his policy. The French, after some successes in northern Italy, were defeated at Novara by Swiss troops in the interest of Maximilian Sforza, and were driven back across the Alps, while the fortresses which had been held for them in Italy surren­dered, and by the disasters of France the power of Spain became more alarming, as the vast dominions of that country (including its acquisitions in the new world), of Austria, Naples, and the Netherlands, with the dignity of emperor, were likely to be soon united under the young Charles, the grandson of Ferdinand and of Maximilian. The pope, therefore, was disposed to con­ciliate the French king, who, partly from his own regard for the papacy, and yet more in consequence of his con­sort’s importunities, was ready to abandon the unsuccess­ful council which he had assembled in opposition to Leo’s predecessor. An agreement was easily concluded ; and at the eighth session of the Lateran council it was declared that Lewis adhered to that council, and undertook to expel the rival assembly from Lyons or any other place in his dominions, while the pope recalled all the censures which had been uttered against France. The schismatical cardinals Carvajal and San Severino, who had been arrested in Tuscany on their way to the conclave, had at the seventh session petitioned the council for pardon, and, on making their humble submission to the pope, and abjuring the council of Pisa, had a few days later been reinstated in their dignity.

Within three weeks after the reconciliation of France with the papacy, queen Anne of Brittany died; and on the first day of the year 1415, her death was followed by that of Lewis XII, who in the meantime had married a third wife—the young princess Mary of England. The crown of France descended to Francis, duke of Angouleme, the first prince of the blood, and son-in-law of the late king. At the time of his accession, Francis was only twenty years old. He was possessed of showy qualities, personal and mental, which won for him admiration and popularity; but he was thoroughly selfish and hard-hearted, voluptuous, un­steady, and faithless; and these grave faults were more and more developed with advancing years.

The new king at once signified his intention of prose­cuting his predecessor’s designs on Italy by assuming the title of duke of Milan; and in August he crossed the Alps into Lombardy—a country devastated, exhausted, and reduced to misery by the sufferings of years, during which it had been the battleground of French and Spanish, German and Venetian, armies. The glory acquired by Gaston de Foix during his brief career stimu­lated the emulation of the young Francis. At the battle of Marignano, the greatest action of the age, which the veteran general Trivulzio declared to be a battle of giants, in comparison of which all his former engagements were but as children’s play, the king’s desire of glory was gratified by a signal victory over the Swiss, who until then had been regarded as in­vincible; and when the fight was over, he distinguished the “fearless and blameless knight”, Bayard, by asking and receiving knighthood at his hands. In consequence of this battle, Maximilian Sforza, who had never been able to gain a firm hold on the Milanese, gave up all pretensions to the duchy of Milan, and withdrew to a life of privacy in France.

After some negotiation Leo sought a conference with Francis, and the two potentates met at Bologna. Francis showed the pope all ceremonious marks of reverence by kissing his feet, his hand, and his mouth, holding his train, and serving him at mass. And the result of the conference was greatly in favour of Leo. He obtained the king’s consent to his designs on the duchy of Urbino; he put off his request for investiture in Naples by holding out hopes of the changes which might follow on the expected death of Ferdinand of Spain. But the most important business of the conference related to the pragmatic sanction, which for three-quarters of a century had been a subject of contention between France and the papacy. The late pope, at the fourth session of the Lateran council, had cited the king, the princes, the bishops, and the parliaments of France, to show cause why the law should not be abrogated. At the ninth session (May 5, 1514) the procurator of the council reported that the French had not obeyed this summons; but the bishop of Mar­seilles explained that the prelates of France had been unable to procure a safe-conduct from the duke of Milan. On this, the Milanese ambassador said that his master had not refused a safe-conduct, but had required time for consideration; and the subject was further discussed at the following session.

Leo now succeeded in arranging with Francis that that sanction should be abolished, and a new concordat should be substituted for it. The blame of this conces­sion was laid by the French on the king’s chancellor, Duprat, whom the pope had gained to his interest by the hope of the cardinalate and of other rewards. In re­turn for his concessions the king obtained the dignity of cardinal for Adrian de Boissy, bishop of Coutances and brother of the grand-master of France, with a discharge as to certain moneys which had been collected as if for a crusade, and had been detained by Lewis XII; and in addition to these favours, the pope professed to bestow on him new privileges with regard to ecclesiastical elec­tions.

The terms of the concordat were settled at Bologna in August 1516, and were ratified by the Lateran council at its eleventh session, on the 19th of December—one bishop only expressing any difference of opinion. Elec­tions in cathedrals and monasteries were abolished, on account of the alleged evil consequences. In case of the vacancy of a see, the king was within six months to present to the pope a person not under twenty-seven years of age, and having certain other qualifications. If he should present one not so qualified, he might within a further time of three months present another; and in case of delay, the pope might appoint a bishop, as he was also authorized to do when a vacancy was caused by the death of a prelate at the Roman court. Exceptions were, however, made as to some of the qualifications in the case of persons of royal or high birth, and of friars who by the statutes of their order were unable to take the prescribed degrees. A like rule was established as to monasteries, where the heads were to be chosen from persons of the same order to which the monks belonged, and not under twenty-three years of age. The bull of Boniface VIII known as Unam Sanctam, with the slight modification of it introduced by Clement V, was reenacted, and the pragmatic sanction—which was spoken; of as “the Bourges corruption of the kingdom of France”—was abolished. Thus the pope, in order to conciliate the king, had made over to the crown a large part of the privileges which were taken from the French church. The Roman practices of reservation and expectative graces were given up, but the pope found his compensa­tion in the recovery of the annates.

The report of the concordat was received in France with general indignation and disgust. The students of the university of Paris broke out into tumult, and dragged about the streets a figure of the chancellor Duprat, whom they regarded as the betrayer of the national church. Preachers loudly denounced from the pulpit the sacrifice of ecclesiastical liberty. When Francis convened at the Palace of Justice a great assembly of the parliament, the bishops, the chapter of the cathedral, and the chief doctors of the university, the concordat and the chancellor’s explana­tions of it, with his statement that it must be regarded as a remedy for worse evils, were received with loud cries of disapprobation. When the king sent forth letters patent, by which the courts were ordered to take the concordat for the basis of their future judgments, the advocate-general, instead of re­quiring that the concordat and the letters should be registered by the parliament, desired that the pragmatic sanction might be maintained, and appealed “against the congregation which claimed the title of Lateran council.”

The parliament of Paris blamed the re-imposition of annates as a measure which would beggar the kingdom, and also as simoniacal. It appealed “to the pope better advised, and to the first lawfully assembled council”; and in this it was followed by pro­vincial parliaments. The university of Paris appealed in like manner, and forbade all printers and booksellers to circulate the obnoxious document under pain of being rejected from the academic body.

Francis, in no less indignation, met these demonstra­tions by threats, and by high-handed measures. He imprisoned some members of the university who had made themselves conspicuous in opposition to the con­cordat. But the parliament still carried on a long war of formalities, in the hope of delaying, if not of prevent­ing, the enforcement of the new system. Chapters and monastic bodies continued to elect their heads, and the parliaments maintained the men so chosen, to the ex­clusion of the king’s nominees. The courts affected to act and to decide as if the pragmatic sanction were still in force, until Francis, in 1527, by transferring the cognizance of ecclesiastical causes from them to the great council of state, procured a reluctant submission to the concordats The chief remaining trace of the Gallican liberties was to be found in that freer tone of thought by which the French church was until very recent times distinguished from other portions of the Roman communion.

The Lateran council, although more considerable as to numbers than that of Pisa, had never been largely attended, and the greater part of its members (who at the utmost did not exceed sixteen cardinals and about a hundred bishops and abbots) were Italians or bishops in partibus, although there were also representatives of England, Spain, and Hungary. Under Leo it had become merely an instrument of the papal policy. A few decrees for reform of the curia and other such objects were passed in later sessions; but they were so limited by exceptions and reservations that little effect was to be expected from them. There was also a project of an alliance between Christian sovereigns against the Turks. There was a condemnation of some sceptical opinions which had been vented as to the eternity of the world and the mortality of the soul; and, in order to check the indulgence in such specula­tions, it was decreed that no student in any university should spend more than five years in philosophical and poetical studies without also studying theology or canon law, either instead of such subjects or together with them.

The council broke up at its twelfth session, on the 16th of March 1517, having enabled the pope to triumph over the threatened schism, and to gain a victory over the church of France which placed his authority higher than it had ever stood in that country. On the 31st of October in the same year, Martin Luther began the great movement against the authority of Rome by pub­lishing his ninety-five propositions at Wittenberg.

 

 

  

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII.

PROPAGATION OF THE GOSPEL—MEASURES AGAINST JEWS AND MAHOMETANS IN SPAIN—WITCHCRAFT—SECTA­RIES—FORERUNNERS OF THE REFORMATION.

 

 

 

Christianity was now professed throughout the European countries, although in the Byzantine empire it had been forced to stoop under the ascendency of the victorious Turks. We also meet with occasional notices of missions to some of the regions which had been the chief scenes of such enterprise in the ages immediately preceding—as when Eugenius IV, in 1433, sent a bishop and twenty Franciscans into the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea. But the progress of geographical discovery opened new fields for missionary labour.

Thus the Portuguese, carrying their explorations along the coast of Africa, made settlements in Congo, where many of the natives were brought to receive baptism. In 1497, the passage to India round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered by the same nation; and in their intercourse with the east they were brought into acquaintance with the church of Abyssinia, which they supposed to be the country of Prester John, and with that of Malabar, which traced its origin to St. Thomas.

But the discoveries of the Spaniards, which revealed a new world to Europe, were yet more important. Christopher Columbus, himself a Genoese, after fruitless endeavours to recommend to various potentates the pro­ject which he had conceived of reaching the Indies by a western course, gained with difficulty the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He set sail on his first voyage in August 1492, and returned in March 1493, having discovered the West Indian islands; and by him and his successors in adventure, a large portion of the great western continent was explored within the following years. The newly-found territories, according to a principle which the popes had succeeded in estab­lishing, were supposed to belong to the apostolic see; and Alexander VI was requested to decide between the claims of the two neighbouring nations which had been foremost in the work of discovery. In May 1493, Alexander VI issued a bull, by which the boundary line was fixed at 100 leagues west of the Cape de Verde islands and of the Azores, all new discoveries within this line being assigned to Portugal, while all beyond it were to belong to Spain. But the Portuguese were dissatisfied with the award; and in the following year the Spaniards and the pope consented that the boundary should be drawn 370 leagues westward of the Azores.

In dealing with such questions, the pope inculcated on the discoverers the duty of spreading the gospel in the countries which had come under their dominion; and some missions to the natives were very early set on foot. But it would be of little use to enter on any account of these missions, when all but the very beginning of their work belongs to a later period of history.

While it was desired and intended that the knowledge of the Christian faith should be propagated by peaceful and gentle means among the heathens of the newly-discovered countries, measures of a very different kind were employed in order to force it on the Jews and the Mahometans of Spain. For this purpose the inqui­sition, which during the schism of the papacy seemed to have been dormant, was now revived in that country, with new circumstances of iniquity and cruelty, which have made the Spanish inquisition an object of espe­cially profound and deserved abhorrence.

The union of Aragon and Castile under Ferdinand and Isabella suggested the idea of establishing entire unity of religion among their subjects; and, while with Ferdinand religion was commonly little better than a pre­text for a selfish and treacherous secular policy, the mind of his more estimable consort was much under the influ­ence of the clergy. Thomas de Torquemada, who had acquired a power over her by having been her confessor in early life, is said to have exacted a promise that, if she should inherit the crown, she would devote herself to the extirpation of heresy, for the glory of God. The earnest­ness with which Torquemada and others now urged the fulfilment of this promise overpowered the queen’s natural tenderness, and she was reluctantly persuaded to request of Sixtus IV that an inquisition might be estab­lished in Castile. On All Saints’ day, 1478, the pope issued a bull for this purpose. The new inquisition was distinguished by its peculiar connexion with the state; the members of the tribunal were to be appointed by the sovereigns, and might be dismissed by them; and the property of the victims was to be confiscated to the crown. The bishops had no share in the management of the inquisition, but were themselves subject to the action of this new and irresponsible power. Even the papacy, after a time, found itself unable to cope with the inquisi­tors on their own ground.

In 1483, the organization of the tribunal was com­pleted by the nomination of Torquemada as chief in­quisitor for Castile, and he was confirmed in his office by Innocent VIII, in 1486. Four years after his original appointment, his power was extended to Aragon, where an inquisition had been established by Gregory IX for the suppression of the Albigensian doctrines, but had latterly differed little from an ordinary ecclesiastical court. The new institution speedily gave signs of ac­tivity. It surrounded itself with a host of “familiars”—spies, and ministers of its tyranny; indeed the machinery was so extensive that the cost of it almost absorbed all the funds which were obtained by confiscations and fines. Every year, in the beginning of Lent, the clergy were required to declare from the pulpit the duty of informing against any who might be suspected of religious error— even the nearest relations; and the information thus obtained by secret, and often anonymous, accusations, was used against the persons denounced, with more than all the injustice which had marked the proceedings of the inquisition in other countries and in its earlier stages. No fair opportunity of defence was allowed; and torture was employed to wring out confessions. The severities of the inquisition began on the Epiphany of 1481, when six victims were committed to the flames at Seville; and within the following ten months, 298 were burnt in that city alone. During the first few years of its operations, 2000 were burnt alive in Spain, and a still greater num­ber were burnt in effigy, having been driven to seek their safety in exile. Torquemada, by proclaiming an offer of pardon to all who should voluntarily surrender themselves, induced about 17,000—“men and women of all ages and conditions”—to seek reconciliation with the church, although this commonly involved such penalties as heavy fines, or total confiscation of property, civil disabilities, or imprisonment, which in many cases was for life.

In Aragon—a country which had enjoyed much of liberty, and where many of the chief families, from inter­marriage with persons of Jewish descent, were likely to fall under the suspicion of the new tribunal—a spirit of indignation was aroused. The cortes remonstrated against the inquisition, both at the Spanish court and at Rome; they protested that the practice of confiscation, and the denial of a fair and open trial, were violations of their hereditary privileges. The chief inquisitor of the pro­vince, Peter Arbues, was mortally wounded while attending a midnight office in the cathedral of Saragossa; and it was found that the assassins had been hired by the contributions of many nobles, and of many converts from Judaism. The crime was immediately punished; but there were serious tumults throughout the kingdom. The cortes renewed their remonstrances from time to time against the horrible tyranny which had been imposed on their country.

Torquemada himself lived in constant fear of a violent end. It is said that he endeavoured to fortify himself against poison by having always on his table a horn, which was supposed to be that of an unicorn, and to be an infallible test of its presence; and he never stirred abroad without a strong body-guard. He was thrice obliged to send his colleague Badaja to defend him at Rome, where charges had been preferred against him; and in 1494 Alexander VI appointed four bishops to be his coadjutors, under the pretext that his age required assistance, but in reality to mitigate his severity. The Roman court, in its eagerness to get money by all means, attempted to sell exemptions from the authority of the inquisition and pardons for offences condemned by it; but the tribunal was too strong, and Alexander was obliged to give up this source of gain.

The first objects of the inquisition’s zeal were the Jews, who in Spain had advanced more than in any other coun­try as to wealth, culture, and general prosperity. Many of them from time to time had professed Christianity; many noble houses had sought to improve their fortunes by alliances with these “new Christians”; and not a few of them had attained high dignities, as well in the hier­archy as in the state. The inquisition now set itself to search out any symptoms of Judaism among the descendants of converts, and to punish it with unsparing severity, as a relapse. The old stories of outrages against the holy Eucharist, of administering poison in the charac­ter of physicians, of stealing and crucifying Christian children, were revived against the Jews, and a more general measure for the suppression of Judaism in Spain was designed. The unfortunate people endeavoured to avert this by offering largely towards the expenses of the Moorish war; but while the matter was under considera­tion, Torquemada burst into the royal council, holding the crucifix in his hands; he told the sovereigns that to accept such an offer would be like the bargain of Judas, who sold his master; and dashing the crucifix on the floor, he indignantly departed. After the capture of Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella issued from that city an order that all Jews should before the end of July either submit to baptism or go into exile. They were allowed to sell their property, and to carry away the value of it in bills of exchange, but were forbidden to take with them gold, silver, or precious stones.

The Jews disposed of their possessions at a grievous loss, and at the appointed time they left the land which for many generations had sheltered their forefathers. The greater part sought a refuge in Portugal, where king John II was willing to admit them on payment of a tax for each person; but his successor, Emanuel, pledged himself, as a condition of marrying a Spanish princess, to imitate the policy of Ferdinand and Isabella by requiring the fugitives to choose between baptism and exile. Such of them as refused to be baptized were shipped off to Africa, where they suffered extreme miseries. Many died of hardship or of ill-usage; some struggled to a Spanish settlement, where they made profession of Christianity, in the hope of being allowed to return to Spain. Of those who sought a refuge elsewhere, some repaired to Rome, to appeal to Alexander VI against an intolerance of which the popes themselves had given no example; and Ferdinand remonstrated with Alex­ander for having (for the sake of money, as it appears) allowed them to pitch their tents on the Appian way, near the tomb of Caecilia Metella.

At the conquest of Granada, the catholic sove­reigns had promised to the Moors by treaty the free exercise of their religion, with other privileges which might mitigate the loss of their independence. But in this case too it was regarded as a duty to establish unity of religion. Francis de Talavera, the first arch­bishop of Granada, wished to pave the way for the acceptance of the Christian faith by means of convic­tion and with this view he himself, although no longer young, undertook to learn the language of the Moors; he encouraged his clergy to do the like, and promoted the compilation of vocabularies, and the translation of some parts of Scripture into Arabic.

But a different course was taken by the most prominent ecclesiastic of the Spanish church in that age, Francis Ximenes de Cisneros. Ximenes, who was born in 1436, of a family belonging to the poorer class of nobility, had in earlier life given many proofs of a resolute character and of a burning ecclesiastical zeal. After having spent six years in study at Rome, he had obtained from the pope a presentation to an “expected” archpriestship in the diocese of Toledo. The archbishop, Carillo, to whom the patronage ordinarily belonged, regarding this as an invasion of his rights, endeavoured to make him relinquish it, and on his refusal committed him to prison; but, as Ximenes at the end of six years showed no disposition to yield, the archbishop set him at liberty, and allowed him to take possession of his benefice. Ximenes, however, exchanged it for one in the diocese of Siguenza, where, under the bishop, Mendoza, he was speedily promoted, and appeared to have a prosperous career before him, when he suddenly resigned his pre­ferments and entered the Franciscan order, exchanging his baptismal name, Gonsalvo, for that of the founder. He plunged into a course of the severest austerities, and after a time withdrew to a remote and lonely chestnut forest, where he built himself a little hut with his own hands. From this retreat he was drawn forth by his monastic superiors; and in 1492, through the recommendation of his old patron Mendoza, then archbishop of Toledo, he was appointed confessor to the queen. The reluctance with which he undertook this office appears to have been sincere, and he was yet more unwilling to accept the archbishopric of Toledo after the death of Mendoza, in 1495. The large revenues of his see were spent on ecclesiastical and charitable objects; he even undertook at his own expense a crusade in Africa; while his own habits were of the most rigidly simple kind. As provincial of his order in Castile, he had carried out a reform of the Franciscan convents, where discipline was greatly de­cayed; and under the authority of papal privileges he had extended his reforms, with characteristic resolution, to other monastic orders and to the secular clergy.

Arriving at Granada in 1499, while the king and queen were visiting that city, Ximenes vehemently urged on them the duty of extirpating the Mahometan religion from their dominions. The capitulations he set aside with scorn, as a compromise with evil which could have no validity. While Talavera was for awaiting the results of instruction, Ximenes held that baptism should be administered at once, on the ground that, if the pro­fession of Christianity were insincere on the part of the recipient, it would become real in the next generation. He was willing that there should be catechisms and popular elementary books in the vernacular tongue, but held that, until converts should have been brought by these to a love of the gospel, they were not fit to receive the Scriptures, but were likely rather to dishonour them; nor would he allow the sacred books to be in any other tongue than those of the originals and of the Vulgate. He entered into conferences with Moorish doctors, and discoursed with fiery vehemence on the doctrines of the faith. He even burdened his see in order to find the means of bribing the Moors to embrace the gospel, and his zeal is said to have been rewarded by vast numbers of conversions, so that in a single day he baptized more than 3000 proselytes by aspersion. Where the milder methods of persuasion were ineffectual, he did not scruple to make use of chains and other forcible means. Although he was noted for his munificent patronage of learning, his religious intolerance led him to order the destruction of all Arabic books except such as related to medical science; and it is said that 80,000 volumes—among them 5000 copies of the Koran, of which many were enriched with splendid illuminations and with precious ornaments—were committed to the flames. The exasperated people of Granada broke out into insurrection and besieged the primate in the archiepiscopal palace; and after having been rescued, chiefly through the mediation of Talavera, he repaired to the court at Seville, where he pressed on Ferdinand and Isabella the necessity of dealing with the Mahometans as they had dealt with the Jews.

On the 12th of February 1502, a decree was published by which all male Moors above fourteen years of age, and all females above twelve, were required either to receive baptism or to leave the kingdom before the end of April. Like the Jews, they were forbidden to carry with them gold, silver, or jewels, and they were charged not to betake themselves to the dominions of the Grand Turk, or of any enemy of Spain.

In consequence of this edict multitudes left the country. Some were imprisoned, and children under the ages named were forcibly tom from their parents. But many submitted to baptism and remained; and these new Christians, whose profession was justly sus­pected, were watched by all men with jealousy, and continually furnished victims for the tyranny of the inquisition.

As in former times, the inquisition concerned itself not only with heresy, but with witchcraft—a thing which Gratian, in his ‘Decretum,’ had spoken of as a pagan delusion, but which had come to be more and more a matter of popular belief. Witchcraft was regarded as more detestable than heresy, because, in addition to impiety, it included malignity and hurt to mankind; and for the same reason, as being a civil offence, it was liable to prosecution by the secular magistrates, as well as by the clergy. Many cases of such prose­cution are found during this time in Italy, Germany, France, and other countries; but the most remarkable was that which occurred at Arras, in 1459. The first person who was brought to trial was a woman of disre­putable life; but gradually the victims were taken from higher and higher stations, and were chosen with an evident regard to their wealth. The offence imputed to them was styled Vauderie; yet, although this word appeared to connect them with the Waldensian sectaries, the charges and the evidence seem to relate wholly to the practice of sorcery; indeed, their story is a proof how readily the imputation of heresy might run into the yet more odious suspicion of witchcraft. Some of the accused, on being put to the torture, confessed mon­strous things—that they had been conveyed by the devil to the meetings of the party, riding through the air on an anointed stick, and that at those meetings they had practised obscene, revolting, and absurd rites and abominations. On these avowals they were condemned, and were made over to the secular arm; whereupon they burst out into loud complaints against their counsel for having led them to suppose that, by confessing whatever might be laid to their charge, they might save their lives ; and they steadfastly declared their confes­sions to be entirely false. It was in vain that Giles Carlier, dean of Cambray, endeavoured to bring them off with a slight penance; the bishop of Berytus, who was suffragan of Arras and had been a papal penitentiary, urged on the trial with rigour. Many were put to death by fire; some were sentenced to imprisonment for life, or to the payment of heavy fines.

The excitement produced by these trials was immense, and for a time general uneasiness and suspicion reigned throughout the north of France. But some of those whom the inquisitors had ventured to accuse appealed to the parliament of Paris, which in 1461 put a stop to the processes as groundless. It was not, however, until thirty years later, when Artois had re­verted to the French crown, that the parliament of Paris gave its final decision, by which the processes were de­clared to be abusive and null, and the heirs of the duke of Burgundy, and of the chief persons concerned in them, were condemned to make reparation to the representa­tives of the sufferers. The use of torture in such cases was forbidden, and in consequence of the indignation excited by the Arras trials, the inquisition disappeared in France.

In 1484 Innocent VIII addressed a letter to the Germans, in which he set forth the rifeness of magical practices, and the manifold dangers with which society was threatened by them. In order to check these evils, he appointed two Dominicans, James Sprenger and Henry Kramer (in Latin called Institor), inquisitors for Ger­many, and invested them with powers which trenched on the province of the secular magistracy. These learned personages, by way of warning, published at Cologne in 1489 a book entitled ‘The Hammer of Witches’, which is a strange compendium of the superstitions of the age. From this time prosecutions for witchcraft became more frequent than before; and, after the pope’s formal ac­knowledgment of the reality of the crime, any doubt as to its existence was regarded as impious. The fifth Lateran council forbade all magical practices, whether by clergy or by laity, under severe penalties.

 

REGINALD PECOCK

 

During this period we often meet with notices which show that opinions, which had been the cause of serious commotions in earlier ages, continued to exist, although more obscurely than before. Thus, about the middle of the fifteenth century, we find mention of Manicheans or cathari in Bosnia, where the king’s father-in-law and many other persons of high station were among the followers of the heresy. The eloquence of John of Capistrano is said to have converted multitudes from this form of error in Transylvania and the Danubian coun­tries,—among them the chief of the sect, whom he baptized. We read of fraticelli “of the opinion”, as they are sometimes styled, who lurked about Italy, and even of attempts to spread the doctrines of the party in Ireland. We find turlupins put to death at Lille in 1465, and, while the charges against them are mostly of the usual kind, one article relates to a denial of the Holy Ghost. The Waldenses in the valleys of Dauphiny and northern Italy attract from time to time the notice of the ecclesiastical authorities; and the same party appears in Bohemia as connected with the Hussites. Prophecies continued to be circulated and to affect the minds of men. Strange preachers appeared, with apocalyptic oracles and predictions of Antichrist, whom some of them declared to be already born; and not uncommonly such preachers, after a short career of success, ended their lives at the stake. Some taught that all things were common, that the married state was unlawful and inconsistent with salvation, or other such fantastical and mischievous notions. And sometimes a great excitement was pro­duced by the appearance of a brilliant and mysterious adventurer, whose variety of learning and accomplish­ments seemed inconsistent with his years, and suggested the suspicion that he might be no other than the very Antichrist himself.

In England, during the earlier part of the fifteenth century, charges of lollardism frequently occur, and the persons accused of this offence are usually treated with­out mercy. This severity may have arisen in part from the fact that the dangerous political elements of lollardism became more and more conspicuous; that members of the party advocated community of goods, that they were busy in agitating against taxation, and vented doctrines hostile to all civil government.

A general decay of discipline at this time pervaded the English church. The bishops were commonly unpopu­lar, and there was much outcry against them for their neglect of the duties of preaching and residence. Against such complaints their cause was strenuously maintained by Reginald Pecock, bishop of St. Asaph, in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, and after wards in a long and elaborate treatise, entitled ‘The Repressor of over-much Wyting [i.e. Blaming] of the Clergy’.

Pecock was probably a native of the diocese of St. David’s, and is supposed to have been born about the end of the fourteenth century. He studied at Oxford, where he became a fellow of Oriel College, and in 1444 he was promoted to the bishopric of St. Asaph. The merit of his honesty of intention was somewhat marred by vanity and self-confidence, and by a tendency to a style of argument rather subtle than solid; and these defects appeared in his sermon at St. Paul’s Cross and in the ‘Repressor’. He maintained that bishops, as such, are not bound to preach, and that for reasonable causes they may be non-resident. He asserted that the pope, as successor of St. Peter, was head of the church. He held that the pope was the universal pastor, and was entitled to the whole revenues of the church, so that the sums paid by bishops, by way of first-fruits and the like, were merely a partial restoration of that which was his own—like the payments made by a steward to his lord. He not only maintained the episcopal order and vindicated the right of church-property against the attacks of the Wyclifites, but defended images and relics (in behalf of which he alleged stories of miracles performed by them), pilgrimages, the monastic system, the splendour of con­ventual buildings, the adoration of the cross, and many questionable ceremonies of the church. The excitement produced by his sermon was very great; instead of quelling the popular odium of bishops, it further exaspe­rated it. And in addition to this, he was charged by adversaries of a different kind with setting reason above Holy Scripture, with treating in the vernacular language subjects too deep for the understanding of the multitude, and with disrespect to fathers, councils, and the authority of the church.

Notwithstanding these circumstances, Pecock was translated in 1450 to the see of Chichester, which had become vacant through the murder of the late bishop. For this promotion he was indebted to the duke of Suffolk and to queen Margaret’s confessor, the bishop of Norwich; but, when Suffolk had been overthrown, Pecock was left without powerful protectors. When he appeared at the king’s council, in October 1457, with many spiritual and temporal lords, there was an outburst of indignation against him, as having vented novel doc­trines and even as having incited the people to insurrec­tion; and he was compelled to leave the assembly. His books—of which he declared that he would be answerable for such only as he had set forth within the last three years—were, by order of the archbishop, Bourchier, committed for examination to twenty-four doctors. Their report was that his writings contained many errors and heresies, and, after several examinations, the archbishop desired him to choose between retracta­tion and delivery to the secular arm, “as the food of fire, and fuel for the burning”. Utterly unmanned by terror, Pecock submitted to make an abjuration, which he publicly performed at St. Paul’s Cross—the same place in which his obnoxious sermon had been preached—on the second Sunday in Advent, in the presence of the primate, three bishops, and 20,000 people; with his own hands he delivered his censured books to be thrown into the flames; and it was believed that, if the multitude could have reached him, he would have shared the fate of his writings. “He retracted errors which he had never uttered, and he retracted utter­ances which he knew to be truths”. By a representation of his case to the pope he obtained three bulls, ordering the archbishop to restore him; but Bourchier refused to receive the bulls, as being contrary to the statute of provisors. Whether Pecock resigned his see, or was deprived of it, is uncertain; his last days were spent in rigorous seclusion at Thorney Abbey, and the time of his death is unknown.

Although Pecock was so far from agreeing with the Lollards that his main object was to confute them, and that his ingenuity was exercised in defending points of the existing system which were the objects of their attacks, he was popularly confounded with them, so that the contemporary statutes of King’s College, Cambridge, require the members to swear that they will not favour the opinions of Wyclif or of Pecock. The books of the two became together the objects of a search and of a burning at Oxford in 1476, and many writers, both on the Roman and on the Protestant side, have repeated the mistake of supposing their doctrines to have been nearly akin. In some respects Pecock may be regarded as standing midway between the doctrines of Rome and those of the English reformation. He was an advocate of toleration in an age when intolerance was regarded as a duty to the truths In the endeavour to distinguish between the provinces of reason and of Scripture—in maintaining that the warrant of Scripture need not be sought where reason is sufficient—he has been character­ized as a forerunner of Hooker. Although ignorant of Greek, and although he was deceived by forgeries such as the pseudo-Dionysian books, he has the merit of having exposed the donation of Constantine by a clear historical argument, independent of his contemporary Valla’s more famous treatise. That he was led into error by an excess of confidence in his judgment, is not to be denied; but of some of the opinions imputed to him he was wholly or partly guiltless. As to the fallibility of the church, he said nothing beyond what had before been said by Marsilius of Padua, by Nicolas of Clemanges, and others of the Paris academics; indeed it would seem that the opinions for which he was accused under this head were merely put forward by way of suppositions on which he was willing to argue. The charge that he denied the Holy Ghost was false; and his omission of the Descent into Hell from the creed was probably not a denial of the article as it is now generally understood, but of the gross construction which was put on it by the popular mind in the middle ages.

 

BOHEMIA

 

The religious ferment in Bohemia gave rise to some extreme manifestations in addition to those already mentioned. John of Trittenheim tells us of a party who were styled fossarii, from their custom of meeting by night in ditches and caves. He describes them as prac­tising promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, as despising the church and its ministers, as mocking at the sacra­ments, and “full of errors without end”. Their numbers had increased rapidly, so that in the year 1501 they were more than 19,000, and among those who had joined them were many men of rank and influence. But perhaps we may question the accuracy of a statement which in its worst features so closely resembles the charges imputed to many denominations of heretics in one generation after another.

On the death of George Podiebrad, the Bohemian estates chose for their king a Polish prince, Ladislaus, who, as the see of Prague was still vacant, was crowned by two Polish bishops. Although the pope, Sixtus IV, refused to acknowledge any other king of Bohemia than Matthias Corvinus, of Hungary, Ladislaus, by the aid of his father, king Casimir, was able to make good his claims; and eventually he succeeded Matthias in the kingdom of Hungary also. In 1478 the Roman party endeavoured to compel the utraquists to relinquish their peculiar usages; but in the following year a peace was concluded, by which the utraquists obtained a confirma­tion of the compactata, and an acknowledgment that it was not heretical to receive the holy Eucharist under both kinds. Further troubles ensued; the utraquists, not content with their late gains, spoke of requiring the king to attend their churches, and to receive in both kinds; and in other respects their violence was such that Ladislaus found it necessary to banish some of their leaders, and even to put some of them to death In 1485 a fresh treaty was concluded, by which each of the great parties was to enjoy perfect freedom of religion. It was provided that, on a vacancy in any parish, a new incumbent should be chosen from the same party to which his predecessor had belonged; and the king consented that the utraquists should on their side elect an administrator for the archbishopric of Prague. The peace thus established continued in force, although not without occasional disturbances,11 throughout the reign of Ladislaus, who died in 1516.

 

JOHN OF GOCH

 

About the middle of the fifteenth century, some divines appeared in Germany who may be said, in their views of nature and grace, of justification and kindred subjects, to have anticipated the Saxon reformation. Of these the most noted were John of Goch, John of Wesel, and John Wessel.

John Pupper, who was commonly named after his birthplace, Goch, near Cleves, was born in the beginning of the century, and is supposed to have been educated at the university of Paris; but nothing is known with certainty as to the history of his early life. In 1451, when he was about fifty years old, he founded a convent for canonesses at Mechlin, and entered into holy orders. The remainder of his days was spent in the office of prior of this institution, and he died in 1475. During his lifetime he was never molested on account of his opinions, which seem to have been then known only to a narrow circle of persons who agreed with him; nor can any distinct influence of them be traced in the reformers of the following century.

The second of the teachers above named, John Richrath or Ruchrath, of Wesel, was born at Oberwesel, on the Rhine, at some time between the years 1400 and 1420. He studied, and afterwards taught, at Erfurt; and the continuance of his influence in that university appears from Luther’s speaking of himself as having prepared himself for the degree of master of arts by the study of John of Wesel’s books. While at Erfurt, John was roused to indignation by the preaching of indul­gences in connexion with the jubilee of 1450. He wrote not only against the grosser abuses of the system, but against the principle on which it was founded; yet he was allowed to proceed to the degree of doctor of divinity in 1456, and was appointed preacher at Worms in 1461-2. In this office he gained great popularity; but he excited enmity by attacking the faults of the clergy, and by inconsiderate language—as when he declared that if St. Peter instituted fasting, it was probably with a view to getting a better market for his fish; so that his friend Wessel, while admiring his learning and ability, was com­pelled to lament his extravagance and indiscretion.

In 1479 John was brought by the bishop of Worms before a court at Mayence on a charge of heresy. He was accused of intimacy with Jews and Hussites, and even of being secretly a Hussite bishop; of denying the authority of the church as to the exposition of Scripture; of deny­ing the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son; of denying original sin; of denying the powers of the Christian ministry, and the distinction of presbyters from bishops and popes; of opposing many rites of the church, the celibacy of the clergy, the use of ecclesiasti­cal vestments, the practice of fasting, and the sacrament of extreme unction. Archbishop Diether, who felt him­self obliged to take the matter up lest he should again lose his see, requested the assistance of doctors from Cologne and Heidelberg for the inquiry. The accused was old, was weak from illness, and was hard pressed by the members of the court. He declared that he had said nothing against the authority of the church, and dis­avowed some other things which were imputed to him ; but he expressed a wish to retract all errors, and, on the sixth day of the examination, he submitted to make a general retractation. His writings were burnt, and he was committed to the convent of Augustinian friars at Mayence, where he soon after died. The reporter of the case expresses an opinion that, except as to the proces­sion of the Holy Spirit, John, if time had been allowed him, might have defended himself with success; that as a secular and a nominalist he suffered disadvantage from a tribunal of monastic and realistic judges : and he mentions some divines of note as having been disgusted by the unfairness of the process.

John Wessel, who was styled by his admirers “The light of the world”, while his opponents styled him “The master of contradictions”, was born at Groningen about 1429, and was educated for a time under the Brethren of the Common Life at Zwolle, where it has been supposed that he was known to Thomas of Kempten. From Zwolle he went to the university of Cologne, where he studied theology, the oriental lan­guages, and ancient philosophy. He complained that the ordinary course of reading was confined to the works of Thomas of Aquino and Albert the Great; and he pre­ferred Plato to Aristotle. For sixteen years he taught at Paris, where, from having been a realist, he became a nominalist; and he afterwards visited Italy, where he renewed an acquaintance formed in France with pope Sixtus IV. It is said that, on being desired by Sixtus to choose a gift, he made choice of a Bible in the original tongues, from the Vatican Library; and when the pope laughingly asked why he had not rather desired a bishopric, he answered that he did not need such things. In 1477, Wessel was invited by Philip, elector-palatine, to Heidelberg; but the theological faculty of the univer­sity refused to admit him as a member, because he had not taken the degree of doctor, and declined to qualify himself for it by receiving the tonsure. He therefore taught as a philosophical lecturer, and was much engaged in disputes with the party whose opinions he had aban­doned. The prosecution of John of Wesel led him to expect a like attack on himself; but this fear was need­less, and his last years, during which most of his extant works were written, were spent in quiet at his native town, where he was sheltered from the malice of enemies by the favour of the archbishop of Utrecht and the bishop of Munster. Wessel died in 1489. Luther said of him, “If I had read his works earlier, my enemies might have thought that I derived everything from him, so much does the spirit of the two agree”. Yet as to the doctrine of the Eucharist, Wessel seems to have been a forerunner rather of the Zwinglian than of the Lutheran reformation.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VIII.

SUPPLEMENTARY.

             

The Hierarchy.

 

(The councils of Constance and Basel, by asserting the supremacy of general councils, and by endeavouring to reestablish the independence of the episcopate, appeared to overthrow the power which the popes had gradually built up ; and by the rules which they laid down for the regular meeting of general councils at short intervals, it seemed as if the right of control which they had asserted over the papacy were secured. But in the event, these apparent victories proved nugatory. The popes were always ready to act, and able to take advantage of all circumstances, while councils must in any case have been rare and unwieldy. The pope chosen at Constance, Martin V, from the very time of his election asserted the claims of his office in a manner which reduced much of the council’s acts to a nullity. The council of Basel, by its imprudent assumptions and its mismanagement, allowed its adversary Eugenius to triumph over it. The decrees for periodical councils were never carried into execution; the appeals which were frequently made to future general councils were fruitless; for the popes always found some pretext for eluding not only the decree of Constance, but the solemn promises which they .themselves had made on this subject at their election. And against the councils of Constance and Basel they were able to set those of Florence and the Lateran, by the last of which the prag­matic sanction of Bourges, the only result of the council of Basel which had remained until then, was abolished. The fathers of Basel, indeed, in their attempts to reduce the papacy to its proper limits, felt themselves hampered by the system in which they had been trained, and were unable to rid themselves of its restraints, as a larger acquaintance with Christian antiquity would have enabled them to do.

The critical spirit of Valla and others had opened men’s eyes to the spuriousness of such documents as the donation of Constantine and the false decretals. Yet these exposures seem to have as yet had less effect than might have been expected, and to have been little urged to their consequences as affecting the authority of the church in whose interest the forgeries had been executed. At Basel the pope had been spoken of as the “mini­sterial head of the church”—a term by which it was meant that he was not entitled to give laws to the church, but that these ought to proceed from councils. But in opposition to such doctrines, some writers in the papal interest now vented extravagances even greater than those which we have had occasion to notice in earlier ages. It was maintained that the pope was infallible and absolute.1All power, temporal as well as spiritual, was ascribed to him; it was said that he might not only depose emperors and kings, but might extinguish empires and kingdoms, even without cause; that, as being the source of all spiritual power, he was entitled to do, by his immediate authority, whatever the local bishop might do in any diocese; that appeals ought to be carried, not from a pope to a council, but from a general council, to the pope. It was asserted that Constantine’s sup­posed donation was not a gift, but a partial restitution, inasmuch as the pope is rightly lord of all and while in France such opinions were condemned by parliaments, and universities, the sovereigns of other countries some­times found their account in admitting them—as the Spaniards and Portuguese were glad to avail themselves of the papal sanction for their conquests in the countries which they had discovered.

Popes now began to bestow complimentary titles on kings as tokens of their favour. Thus, after the repeal of the pragmatic sanction, Lewis XI of France was styled by Pius II (or, according to some authorities, by Paul II) “Most Christian”. Alexander VI was disposed to trans­fer this title to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, but at the request of his cardinals he bestowed on them instead of it the epithet of “Most Catholic”. Julius II con­ferred on James IV of Scotland the title of “Protector of the Christian Faith ; and as is well known, Henry VIII of England was rewarded for his book against Luther by being styled “Defender of the Faith”.

The secular power of the popes entered during this time on a new stage of its development. This advance began, as we have seen, with Sixtus IV, and it was carried further by his successors. The dominion which Caesar Borgia had gained for himself by the acquisition of the Romagna, and by the subjugation of the unruly barons, fell, on the collapse of his power, to the Roman church; and Julius II further extended the temporal sovereignty of the papacy. Thus, in addition to his spiritual pretensions, the pope became a great Italian prince; and, as Italy was now the chief subject of con­tention between the greatest sovereigns of the continent, his alliance in that character was very important, and he acquired much political influenced

While the papacy was thus for a time triumph­ing over all hindrances, the empire continued to sink. Sigismund, indeed, had been enabled by circumstances to assert his office as advocate and protector of the church at Constance and at Basel; but he was unable to maintain throughout the elevation which he had thus attained. The long and inglorious reign of Frederick III reduced the imperial dignity to the lowest point; and Maxi­milian’s attempts to restore it were foiled by his want of means for carrying them out, and by his own rash and inconstant character. The emperors were without any adequate provision for the expenses of their position. The crown lands, the tolls of the Rhine, and other sources of revenue had been alienated by capitulations with the electoral princes, or by other improvident grants. The taxes on Jews and on the cities of the em­pire had been redeemed. For the means of supporting his dignity, and for the expenses of war, the emperor was obliged to rely on the diet of the empire; and thus he found himself in an unseemly condition of dependence. At the same time the other chief sovereigns of Europe—the kings of France, England, and Spain—by the union of territories, by the subjection of great feudatories and nobles, or otherwise, had become much stronger than before; so that the emperor, although bearing a far loftier title, although it was for him to bestow royal and ducal dignities, was really inferior in power to them, and even to his vassal duke Charles of Burgundy, or to the trading republic of Venice. Yet while his real authority and importance were thus waning, the theory of his grandeur was elaborated more than ever by jurists, whose invention was stimulated by the doctrines of canonists as to the papacy. The empire, according to the jurists, was “holy” and independent of the ecclesi­astical power; the emperor was lord paramount and “monarch” of all the world, so that from him all secular dominion was supposed to be derived.

The popes continued to interfere with ecclesiastical patronage of all sorts, and their interference was often resented.. In England, by appointing resident legates a latere, and by inducing the archbishops of Canterbury to accept the office, they acquired a new power over the church, as the government of it appeared thenceforth to be exercised by delegation from the Roman see. In Scot­land there were some demonstrations of independence; but the popes at their own will erected the sees of St. Andrew’s and Glasgow into archbishoprics, and granted such exemptions from the archiepiscopal authority as they thought fit. James IV is found expressing great thankfulness to Julius II for having appointed his ille­gitimate son, Alexander Stuart, while yet a boy, to the primacy of Scotland, and requesting that a bishopric may be bestowed on a Dominican who was employed in the administration of the province during the archbishop’s minority. There were continual endeavours on the part of sovereigns to prevent the occupation of benefices in their dominions by alien and non-resident incumbents, whom the pope took it upon himself to nominate. But the same argument from practical results by which Frederick Barbarossa had endeavoured to show that the disposal of bishoprics was better placed in the hands of sovereigns than of chapters, was used by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini in behalf of the papal patronage. And when raised to the papacy he introduced the new abuse of charging preferments with the payment of pensions to cardinals, or to officials of the Roman court.

As the crown became stronger in various countries, the sovereigns showed a disposition to limit the power of the church in various ways. Thus they forbade appeals to Rome, and the introduction of Roman documents into their dominions, except with their previous know­ledge and licence. Old grievances are found continually recurring; as when the popes and the English clergy complain of the statutes of praemunire, and the popes complain that their collectors are arrested and imprisoned. The immunities claimed by the clergy, and the boundaries of secular and spiritual jurisdiction, are also frequent subjects of contest. Thus we find that spiritual courts are forbidden to meddle with the suits of laymen, that the secular affairs of the clergy are brought before secular tribunals, and that such courts exercise criminal juris­diction over ecclesiastics. The parliament of Paris took it on itself to commit bishops to prison. The control exercised by the Venetian republic over its clergy has appeared in the course of our story. Henry VII of England enacted that clerks convicted of crimes should be burnt in the hand; and for this he was afterwards denounced by Perkin Warbeck as an invader of the rights of holy church.

But where the popes were masters, the clerical im­munities were jealously preserved. Thus, on Ascension day 1487, the gonfaloniere and another magistrate of Bologna did penance in St. Peter’s at Rome, for having exceeded their jurisdiction by hanging a Franciscan and a secular priest. The gonfaloniere was deprived of all office and dignity. He and his companion were flogged by the penitentiaries of the church while the psalm Miserere was chanted, and after this they were solemnly rebuked by the pope. The deposed chief magistrate was required to build and endow a chapel at Bologna, and on every . Sunday and holy-day to attend mass in it, kneeling from the beginning to the end of the service with a burning taper in his hand, and to pray for the souls of the ecclesiastics on whom he had presumed to execute justice.

Complaints as to the defects of the clergy are as loud and as frequent as before. We read of the greed and corruption of the Roman court, of simony in all quarters, of neglect of spiritual duties, of the ignorance and rudeness of the lower clergy, of their seeking to eke out their income by farming, keeping shops or taverns, and other unsuitable occupations; and the effects of enforced celibacy were scandalously evident. As the church would not relax its rules on this point, notwith­standing the opinion of some of its most enlightened members, the great mass of the clergy lived in a state of concubinage. It was in vain that the councils of Constance and of Basel forbade this, and that their decrees were echoed by provincial councils. The example of the popes, in openly bringing forward their illegitimate children, in heaping church-preferment or lands on them, and in labouring to connect them by marriage with reigning families, could not but produce an effect. The contagion of evil spread to the lower clergy, and from the clergy to the laity, so that a general demoralization ensued. Yet after all the over­whelming evidence which experience had afforded as to the mischievous effects of compulsory celibacy, it is remarkable that, when the authorities of the Roman church were driven by the success of the protestant movement to attempt an internal reformation, this point of discipline was one as to which no reform or modification was introduced.

 

Monasticism.

 

Of the orders which arose in the fifteenth century, the most remarkable was that of Eremites of St. Francis, or Minims, founded, as we have already seen, by St. Francis of Paola, and approved by Sixtus IV in 1474. It was a branch of the Franciscan community, and was distinguished by extraordinary strictness—as that the members were to observe the severity of Lenten diet throughout the whole year. There were sisters and tertiaries attached to the order—the last under a milder rule in respect of food. From the founder’s native Italy, and from France, where his last years were spent, this order spread into Spain, and it is said to have num­bered about 450 houses in the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The mendicant orders continued to enjoy much popularity, and endeavoured, as before, to supplant the secular clergy utterly in the respect and affection of the laity. They were thoroughly devoted to the papacy, except, indeed, when it failed to favour them; and this it seldom ventured on with such resolute and valuable allies. Alexander VI is reported to have said that it was safer to offend any powerful king than a Franciscan or a Dominican. The mendicants did not scruple to use pretended visions, miracles, and other such tricks for the furtherance of their purposes. For a time the Fran­ciscans were ordered to refrain from setting forth their founder’s stigmata, and the Dominicans were forbidden to represent St. Catharine of Siena with similar marks. But the flights of the Franciscans in honour of their great saint became, if possible, more extravagant than before; and, if more active than other orders, they directed most of their labours to the advancement of popular super­stitions and of papal assumptions, or to the exclusive glorification of their own brotherhood. It was believed that Paul II was about to publish letters, drawn up by Calixtus III, depriving the mendicants of all their special privileges; but nothing came of this, and Sixtus, by bulls of 1474 and 1479, granted the Dominicans and the Franciscans a confirmation of all former favours.

The Carmelites even outdid the Franciscans in their pretensions, asserting that the blessed Virgin every Satur­day released from purgatory all those who had died in the scapulary of the order during the preceding week. For this they professed to have the authority of bulls of John XXII and of Alexander V; and, although both these bulls were forgeries, the persistent audacity of the Carmelites extorted confirmations of the privilege from later popes.

The chief check to the pretensions of the mendicants was opposed by the university of Paris, which condemned their invasion of the rights of the secular clergy, com­pelled them to conform to its terms, and would not allow any of them to teach until he had gone through a course of study prescribed by its own authority. And when the friars procured bulls in their favour from Eugenius IV and Nicolas V, they were required to swear that they would make no use of these documents.

Complaints of a decay in monastic discipline, and attempts at a reformation, are found throughout the period. The council of Constance projected a large scheme of reform; but it remained without effect. The council of Basel was more successful in this respect.

In northern Germany a reformation was begun by the regular canons of Windesheim, and was so satisfactory that these were employed, under a commission from the legate Nicolas of Cusa, to carry out a similar work elsewhere. But in this they met with much difficulty. Monks were not more seriously in need of reform than determined to resist any attempt to reform them. In some places they had recourse to violence. One monk threatened to stab the visitor, John Busch, with a knife; another, to cut his throat with a pair of scissors; and it was sometimes necessary to put down opposition by the help of the secular power. Some communities appealed to Rome against the visitors, but met with no success. The nuns (as to whose morals and discipline the report is usually very unfavourable) were yet more intractable than the men. In one place, although the visitors were supported by the authority of the duke of Brunswick, the nuns repeatedly declared that they had sworn not to reform, and that they would not become perjured. They threw themselves down on the pavement of the choir, with their limbs stretched out in the form of a cross, and shrieked out the anthem, “In the midst of life we are in death!”. They arranged the images of the saints in order, and placed lights between them, as if by way of defence against the supposed pro­fanation. At another convent the sisters not only sang the same ominous strain, but hurled their burning tapers at the commissioners and pelted them with earth and stones. Even miracles were alleged in opposition to reform, while on the other side there are stories of judg­ments which befell the refractory.

The English Benedictines underwent a reform under Henry V about the year 1421. A reform of those of Germany was begun at the monastery of Bursfeld, and was carried out elsewhere in imitation of the model which had been there established. But these reforms were only partial; and sometimes, when monasteries which had accepted a reform found that their order in general held out against it, they formed themselves into separate congregations.

Reforms were sometimes forced on reluctant commu­nities by princes or bishops, and sometimes by distress consequent on the extravagance of some gay young abbot, who had wasted the revenues of his church, and thus indirectly became the means of bringing his brethren to a better mind.

Among the greatest obstacles to reform was the practice of dividing the monastic income—a practice utterly con­trary to the principle of monachism, but recommended by the independence and freedom from discipline which it encouraged. At the council of Constance a Cistercian failed in an endeavour to get this system acknowledged as lawful but it was too firmly rooted to be easily extirpated.

 

Rites and Usages.

 

The increase of festivals and ceremonies, of pil­grimages, relics, and fabulous legends, was not to be checked by the protests of those who had succeeded to the opinions of Gerson and his associates. The alleged miracles of bleeding hosts, in particular, became more frequent, because they now served not only to prove the doctrine of transubstantiation in its coarsest form, but to justify the withdrawal of the eucharistic cup from the laity. In some cases, however, these miracles seem to have been produced merely for the sake of gain; and hence cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, when legate in Germany, forbade the display of such hosts, and ordered that they should rather be consumed by the priests at mass. But this superstition was not to be so readily put down. Occasion was not uncom­monly taken from stories of outrages done by Jews to the consecrated host to set on foot a persecution against that people.

Indulgences became more frequent than before, although the council of Constance had endeavoured to mitigate the abuse of them. They were now offered for a great variety of objects : for the crusade against the Turks, which the popes continually dangled before the eyes of western Christendom, although without ever carrying it out; for any other expeditions, whether against heathens or against Christians, to which the popes, might give the character of a crusade; for the jubilee, for visiting certain places, for performing certain devotions, for celebrating festivals, and for the rebuilding of churches, especially for that of St. Peter’s at Rome, which was undertaken by Julius II in 1506. The indig­nation which these indulgences naturally provoked in the more discerning, was swelled by the impudent pretensions of the preachers who set them forth; and this, on the occasion of the indulgence for St. Peter’s, when renewed by Leo X became the immediate occasion of Luther’s defiance of Rome.

That indulgences were applicable to souls departed, had been maintained by some of the schoolmen,—as Alexander of Hales, and Aquinas. The doctrine re­ceived a practical application from Sixtus IV in 1477, and from Innocent VIII in i49o. But the most re­markable exemplification of it was in the bull issued by Alexander VI for the jubilee of 1500, when the faithful were invited to pay money towards the repair of St. Peter’s, in order that indulgences might be bestowed on the souls of their friends in purgatory, by the way of suffrage. And this was imitated by Julius II in his bull of 1510, for the rebuilding of the great church.

The reverence for the blessed Virgin, which had already been excessive, was in this time carried yet further. It was now that the fable of the “holy house” took form, and attracted multitudes of pilgrims to Loreto. The festival of the “Compassion of the Blessed Virgin”, in remembrance of her sufferings at the cross, was insti­tuted on account of the outrages of the Hussites. The festival of her Visitation was sanctioned by the council of Basel, which also decreed in favour of the immaculate conception. But this decree, as it was passed after the breach between the council and the pope, was not re­garded as authoritative. Sixtus IV, after having in earlier life written in defence of the immaculate conception, sent forth as pope two bulls in favour of the doctrine. Yet the Franciscan pope was so far influenced by a regard for the power of the Dominicans that he did not venture to proscribe their contrary doctrine, but contented himself with forbidding the partisans of either opinion to denounce their opponents as guilty of heresy or of mortal sin, forasmuch as the matter had not yet been determined by the Roman church and by the apostolic see.

Some universities, however, took a more decided line as to this matter. At Paris, a doctor named John le Ver (or Véry), in consequence of having preached at Dieppe against the immaculate conception, was required to retract; and it was resolved that in future no theological student should be admitted, and no degree should be given, except on condition of swearing to maintain the immaculate conception. This example of Paris was followed by similar decrees of the universities of Cologne and Mayence.

The Dominicans, while they opposed the doctrine of the immaculate conception, were yet unwilling to lose the credit of devotion to the blessed Virgin. They therefore instituted the brotherhood of the Rosary, the members of which were bound to perform certain de­votions in her honour while telling their beads. But towards the end of the period the Dominicans attempted to support their doctrine by the help of an audacious imposture. The occasion grew out of a quarrel which took place at Frankfort between a member of the order, named Wigand Wirth, and the chief secular priest of the town; but the Dominicans resolved that Berne should be the scene of their intended operations, as at Frank­fort they had reason to fear the opposition of the archbishop of Mayence, whereas they reckoned on finding at Berne a people simple enough to be deceived and strong enough to maintain any opinion which they might embrace. A young man of weak and credulous char­acter, who had lately forsaken the trade of a tailor to enter into the order, was deluded by pretended visions, in which figures personating the blessed Virgin and other saints appeared to him, and professed to entrust him with revelations. Among other things, the repre­sentative of St. Mary charged him to inform pope Julius that she had been conceived in sin; and by way of a token, she impressed the stigma on one of his hands with a nail. At length the dupe’s eyes were opened; and on his threatening to publish the deceits which had been practised on him, the Dominicans attempted to poison him. The bishop of Lausanne and the magistrates of Berne interfered in the matter. A commission, com­posed of two bishops and the provincial of the Domini­cans, was sent by the pope to investigate it; and the prior and three other monks of the convent at Berne, who had been most active in the imposture, were convicted, degraded, made over to the secular arm, and burnt. The detection of this abominable trick gave a triumph to the opposite party, and redounded to the advantage of the doctrine against which the Domini­cans had employed such discreditable means.

             

Arts and Learning.

 

Although the highest perfection of pointed archi­tecture had passed away before the time with which we are now concerned, a development of the style continued to prevail in the countries north of the Alps, and was displayed in many splendid and celebrated works,— among them a great part of the church of St. Ouen, at Rouen, and the chapel of King’s College at Cambridge. To this time are due many of the loftiest and most majestic towers—such as the spires of Chartres and Antwerp, and, in the very end of the period, the central tower of Canterbury. In our own country the fifteenth century produced a multitude of buildings of all classes, from the abbey or cathedral (although in these the work of this age was mostly limited to alterations and additions) down to humble parochial churches and chapels. Where architects were at liberty to indulge their fancy, they became more and more disposed to overload their work with ornament, as in Henry VII’s chapel at West­minster, and in the church of Brou in Bresse, erected by Margaret of Austria in memory of her husband, Phili­bert of Savoy. A comparison of these typical examples is said to show that the faults of the late Gothic style were exaggerated far more in France than in England.

But south of the Alps an entire change came over the prevailing taste in architecture. In the great cathedral of Milan, indeed, an attempt was made to borrow Gothic art from Germany; but the result, however wonderful in itself, is something greatly vitiated from the purity of the pointed manner. The revolution which took place in literature had its parallel in art. Brunelleschi, a Floren­tine, is regarded as the great connecting link between the earlier and the later architecture. In company with his countryman Donatello, who holds a similar place in the history of sculpture, he lived among the ruins of Rome, both supporting themselves by working as gold­smiths, while each, with a view to his own art, was deeply studying the remains of classical antiquity. Brunel­leschi applied mathematical science to architecture in a degree unknown to his predecessors; and, discarding the use of buttresses, which had been necessary and characteristic features in the buildings of the middle ages, he completed the work of Arnulf by raising into the air the vast cupola of the cathedral at Florence. In this there is still much of the Gothic element; but from the date of it Italian architecture bears the character of the “renaissance”—an eclectic style, in which the details are taken from Greek and Roman models, while the general design is not closely imitative, but, disregarding the bondage of ancient rules, is accom­modated to the actual purpose of the building.

At Rome, where the pointed architecture had never taken root, the victory of the new manner was easy. All the popes, from Martin V to Leo X, were more or less engaged in building and restoration, while many cardinals and others followed their example by erecting churches and palaces. Baccio Pontelli, of Florence, the architect employed by Sixtus IV, was the chief agent in the transition between the medieval style of Rome and the fully-developed modern architecture of which Bramante was the most famous master. Although a rebuilding of the venerable basilica of St. Peter had been projected, and even begun, by Nicolas V, the greatness of the enterprise seems to have deterred his successors from prosecuting it; and the decaying walls underwent a con­tinual process of repair, until at length Julius II, partly with a view to provide a fitting shrine for the monument which he had commissioned Michael Angelo to prepare for him, began the erection of the new St. Peter’s under the superintendence of Bramante.

While the architecture of the middle ages had a perfection and completeness of its own, the art of paint­ing was still in a far less mature stage; but in this time it reached the greatest excellence which it has ever attained. The study of the antique was introduced, and was encouraged by the discovery of such masterpieces of ancient art as the Apollo, the torso of the Belvedere, and the Laocoon. The study of the anatomical structure of the body, and various technical discoveries, contributed to the advancement of art; and the object proposed was to employ these elements of improved culture on Christian themes.

The first impulse to a new manner was given by Masaccio, of Florence, who was born in 1402 and died in i443. Florence was, in art as in literature, the head-quarters of the movement of the age; but schools of painting grew up in all parts of Italy. Rome itself did not produce any great master in any branch of art, but sought to draw to itself the most eminent talents from other quarters—from Lombardy, Tuscany, Umbria, or wherever genius and skill might be found. Sixtus IV, having resolved to decorate his chapel in the Vatican with paintings, employed the Tuscans Signorelli, Botti­celli, and Ghirlandaio, with the Umbrians Perugino and Pinturicchio, and others; but their works in that place were afterwards eclipsed by the grander creations of Michael Angelo Buonarroti. Fresh from the religious lessons of Savonarola, the great Florentine appeared at Rome in 1496, at the age of twenty-one, and four years later he executed the group of the Virgin-mother with the dead Saviour, which now adorns one of the chapels in St. Peter’s. Julius, struck with his ability, invited him to return to Rome about 1505, and entrusted him with the preparation of a monument for himself, which was designed on a vast and magnificent plan, but, after having for many years been the cause of infinite vexa­tion to the artist, was so dwarfed and marred in the execution (which is chiefly by other hands), that it may be said to have resulted in little beyond the awful figure of Moses.

At the age of thirty-three Michael Angelo began his labours on the roof of the Sixtine Chapel. It is said by Vasari that he undertook the task unwillingly, as one alien from what he regarded as his true profession of sculptor, and even that it was imposed on him by the pope through the unfriendly influence of Bramante, who expected the result to be a failure. The same writer tells us that, although Michael Angelo had to overcome the difficulties of fresco-painting, which was new to him, and dismissed all assistants on finding that they were unequal to his requirements, this gigantic work was executed by him between the 10th of May 1508 and the 1st of November in the following year. But the story is incredible, and the truth appears to be that, although on All Saints’ day 1509 the artist allowed the scaffolding to be removed so that his impatient patron might see the amount of his progress, the labour which gave being to “the most ma­jestic forms that painting has yet embodied”, continued to occupy him during the following three years.

In the meantime Raphael Sanzio, of Urbino, eight years younger than Michael Angelo, was introduced by his kinsman Bramante to the papal court, and at twenty-five began his series of pic­tures in the chambers of the Vatican, where, while the doctrine of the church is represented by the Miracle of Bolsena and the Dispute on the Sacrament, the revived classicism of the age appears in the School of Athens and the Parnassus. At the time of Julius’s death Raphael was engaged on his Heliodorus, a work intended to symbolize the expulsion of the “barbarians” from the sacred soil of Italy, and under Leo he continued to paint subjects which have a like reference to the history of his new patron. Thus the Attila, which again signified the repulse of the barbarian invaders, the Fire of the Borgo, the Defeat of the Saracens at Ostia, the Coronation of Charlemagne, were all commemorative of older popes who had borne the same name with their reigning successor.

Admirable as were the advances of this time in art, they were too commonly accompanied by a decay of that religious feeling which had animated the older Christian painters, and which the statutes of the artistic guilds in some places had enjoined their members to cultivate. Of Angelico of Fiesole, who, although he lived in the days of the classical revival, remained unaffected by it, it is said that he never took up his brush without prayer; but in many of those who came after him the influence of the paganizing opinions and of the corrupted society which surrounded them is only too evident. The spiritual qualities which are expressed in their works came in too many instances from the power of the artist’s mind and hand, rather than from any kindred elements in himself.

In German and Flemish art the influence of the classi­cal revival was as yet hardly felt. Albert Durer, although his works excited the admiration of Raphael, remained to the last intensely German, and his Christianity has little in common with the new spirit which had transformed the art of Italy.

The invention of printing coincided, in a manner which cannot fail to suggest a variety of reflections and speculations to every mind, with that revival of ancient literature to which the new art lent itself as a powerful agent The first complete book produced by the press is supposed to be the Bible published by Gutenberg and Schoffer at Mayence, in 1455—a vast effort for an art which was as yet only in its birth. From Mayence the great discovery was carried, chiefly by Germans, into other countries, and within a few years it was widely diffused. The Jews took advantage of it to produce a complete edition of the Old Testament at Soncino (a little town of Lombardy), in 1488, some portions of their Scriptures having already appeared in a detached form; but it was not until nearly thirty years later that the New Testa­ment was published in the original language. Cardinal Ximenes, whose zeal for the promotion of religion and learning contrasts brightly with the intolerance which led him to persecute the Jews and the Moors of Spain, con­ceived the idea of publishing, as an antidote to heresy, a Bible which should contain the original Scriptures with the chief ancient versions. With a view to this he collected manuscripts, including some which were supplied from the papal library; he employed a band of scholars in editing the book, and imported type-cutters and founders from Germany; and, after fifteen years of labour, he had, shortly before his death, the satisfaction of witnessing the completion of the great work, on which he had expended enormous sums, and which he had watched in its progress with unremit­ting interest and care. The printing was executed at Alcalá de Henares, where the cardinal’s munificence had founded an university; and from the Latin name of the city, Complutum, the book is known as the Complutensian Polyglott. Its six volumes, dedicated to pope Leo contain the Old Testament in Hebrew, with the Chaldee paraphrase of the Pentateuch; the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, the New Testament in Greek, and the Latin Vulgate translation of the whole, with literal Latin versions of the Septuagint and of the Chaldee, a Hebrew dictionary, and other supplementary matter.

The Complutensian New Testament was finished in 1514; but as the publication of the Polyglott was delayed by the death of Ximenes, in November 1517, and the copies were not sent forth until 1522, the Greek New Testament of Erasmus, published at Basel in 1516, was the first edition in which the original text of the Christian Scriptures was given to the world.

The press was largely employed in producing ver­nacular translations of the Scriptures. It is remarkable that in England the labours of Wyclif, instead of promoting such works, deterred men from undertaking them on account of the obloquy which was attached to his name, so that no printed English Bible existed until the time of the Reformation. But in Germany there were many complete editions in various dialects before the end of the fifteenth century, besides separate publi­cations of particular books. There was also a complete Italian translation; and portions of the Scriptures had been printed in French, Bohemian, and other languages. All these were rendered from the Latin Vulgate.

It is supposed that such translations found their circu­lation in great part among persons of a mystical tendency or of suspected orthodoxy. The ecclesiastical authori­ties, in alarm at the operations of the press, endeavoured to control them by establishing a censorship. The first attempt of this sort was made in i486, by Berthold of Henneberg, archbishop of Mayence, who forbade the print­ing and sale of books without a licence, and complained of the translation of works on “Divine offices and the high points of our religion” in German,—a language which he considered inadequate to express the higher religious matters, and likely to expose them to disgrace. In 1501, Alexander VI sent forth a bull with special reference to the provinces of Cologne, Mayence, Treves, and Magdeburg, denouncing the printing of books “containing various errors and pernicious doctrines, even hostile to the Catholic faith”, and ordering that for the future nothing should be printed except with archiepiscopal licence, and that the obnoxious books already in existence should be destroyed. In 1502, a censorship was estab­lished in Spain, at first under royal authority, from which it was afterwards transferred to the inquisition; and the Lateran council, at its tenth session, approved a bull by which a censorship was instituted for the prevention of publications dangerous to faith or morals.

In addition to Alcalá, several universities were founded during this time,—among them, Wittenberg, in Saxony, which was soon to become famous in con­nexion with the Reformation; Buda, Copenhagen, St. Andrew’s, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. By thus bringing home the opportunities of academical education to various countries, the great mass of students were spared the cost, the labour, and perhaps something of the moral temptations connected with a resort to Paris, Bologna, or Oxford; but on the other hand there was a disad­vantage in the decrease of intercommunication between the nations of Europe.

The university of Rome, after having been dormant during the great schism, was refounded in 1431 by Euge­nius IV. Alexander VI erected new buildings for it, and was a benefactor to it in other ways; and it was more fully organized under the patronage and by the bounty of Leo X.

In England, this period was marked by many founda­tions for the purpose of education. Among them were the royal school of Eton, the colleges founded at Cam­bridge by Henry VI and his queen, by the mother of Henry VII, and by Alcock, bishop of Ely, with those of archbishop Chichele, and bishops Fleming, Waynefleet, Smith, and Fox at Oxford. Yet learning, at least during the earlier part of the time, made little progress. Poggio, who visited this country about 1420, finds fault with the barbarous and obsolete nature of our university studies. There are great complaints as to the decay of Oxford, which was such that at one time Paris suspended corre­spondence with the English university. This decay was in part traced to the uncertainty of ecclesiastical promo­tion, in consequence of which the universities are found petitioning archbishop Chichele and others, that in the disposal of patronage a regard may be had to the claims of graduates in such matters. Erasmus, in 1513, speaks of a great revival and extension of studies as having taken place at Cambridge within the last thirty years, so that the university might then “compete with the first schools of the age” ; and there can be no doubt that Oxford had shared in the improvement.

At Paris the university was for a time distracted by a continuation of the old feuds between mendicants and seculars, between nominalists and realists; but these were now superseded by a change which furnished new sub­jects and causes of dispute.

From Italy, where the revival of Greek learning began, it spread into the countries north of the Alps. The first German who distinguished himself in the new study was Rudolf Haussmann (or Agricola), who, under the patronage of a bishop of Worms, lectured there and at Heidelberg. In France the cultivation of Greek was encouraged by Lewis XI, who was favourable to all progress which did not conflict with his despotism; and in the beginning of the sixteenth century, Budé taught with great fame at Paris. In England, where the Greek language was introduced by Sellyng, prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, after a visit to Italy in 1480, there soon grew up a band of zealous scholars, among whom Grocyn, Linacre, William Latimer, Colet, and Thomas More were conspicuous.

In Italy, the merits of Aristotle and Plato were dis­cussed by their respective partisans, both Greek refugees and Italians, with the same eagerness which had marked the contests between the nominalists and the realists. Platonism—or rather the later Alexandrian philosophy which was mistaken for it—was taught at Florence by Marsiglio Ficino, who, although a canon of the cathedral and an admired preacher, is said to have been so devoted to the Greek sage that the only image admitted into his study was one of Plato, before which a lamp was continually burning. This eclectic system associated Orpheus with Moses, Plato with the Saviour, classicism with Christian faith, while it contained much admixture of superstition and mysticism; and by such doctrines it was that Ficino proposed to overcome the repugnance which the men of letters of his day too commonly felt for Christianity—that as they had been led away by philosophy from the Christian faith, they might by a truer philosophy be brought back to it. The Florentine Academy founded by Cosmo de’ Medici, and patronized by Lorenzo, celebrated the festival of Plato’s birth and death on the 29th of November; and we have already met with the similar association at Rome, over which Pomponio Leti presided, and which perhaps deserved the suspicions of pope Paul II in a greater degree than Platina would allow. Leti and others of the Italians, provoked by the exclusiveness of the votaries of Greek literature, and regarding themselves as representatives of the ancient conquerors of the world, betook themselves in opposition to asserting the claims of Latin; and some of them, discarding the free and expressive, although inelegant, Latinity of the middle ages, made it their study to imitate the purity and graces of Cicero. The absurdi­ties which resulted from this pedantic affectation were exposed at a somewhat later date by the keen satire of Erasmus, who defined the true Ciceronianism to be that the modems should speak as Cicero would have spoken in their circumstances. Erasmus does not spare the pagan tendencies which found a shelter under the profession of Ciceronianism, and which in many places showed themselves in a strange mixture of heathen with Christian ideas. The classical revival had, indeed, produced much unbelief, and many of the worst corruptions of heathen morality. Even in the papal court, a light and sceptical tone prevailed; nay, as we have seen, even some popes were not above the suspicion of disbelieving the very elements of Christian faith.

In Germany the “humanist” movement took a different course; for, as the cultivation of the new learn­ing had begun in such institutions as the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, it was brought into the service of religion, and issued, not in a contempt for the Christian faith, but in a desire of reform. In Germany, however, as elsewhere, the old academics, far from origi­nating or welcoming the classical movement, looked down with the contempt of superior knowledge on those whom they styled grammarians or poets, while these in turn regarded the doctors of the earlier school as antiquated and barbarous.

The most eminent humanists of Germany were Reuchlin and Erasmus. Reuchlin, who was born in 1465, at Pforzheim, studied at the new university of Freiburg, and through the patronage of Eberhard, count of Wurtemberg, was enabled to continue his studies at Paris, and to travel in Italy, where, according to the fashion of the age, he grecised his name into Capnio. He became an advo­cate, was much employed by count Eberhard in political missions, and enjoyed the favour of the emperor Frederick; and after Eberhard’s death, in 1496, he settled at Heidelberg, where he found a new patron in Philip Count Palatine. By Reuchlin the study of classical lite­rature was greatly promoted in Germany; but he is more especially noted as the first of his countrymen who culti­vated Hebrew learning. Unfortunately he took up from his Jewish teachers much of the mysticism which was prevalent among them; he dabbled in astrology, and endeavoured to reconcile Judaism and Christianity by means of the Cabbala. Reuchlin, although he had been appointed advocate of the Dominican order, had already offended the monastic party by a satirical comedy, when he was involved in a quarrel with John Pfefferkorn, a Jew of Cologne, who, at the age of fifty, had professed Christianity. Pfefferkorn had published sundry writings for the purpose of converting his brethren, without success; when, finding argument useless, he petitioned the emperor Maximilian that all Jewish books except the Bible might be destroyed, in order to deprive the Jews of support for their unbelief.

By this petition he obtained an imperial order, authorizing the destruction of Jewish books which attacked the Christian religion; but Pfefferkorn proceeded to confis­cate all Hebrew writings without distinction, and the archbishop of Mayence, Uriel of Gemmingen, suggested to the emperor that Reuchlin and other competent autho­rities should be consulted on the subject. With the emperor’s sanction, Reuchlin was requested to state his opinion; and he replied by an argumentative treatise.

He distinguished the books of the Jews into seven classes; among the lighter sort, he said, might be a few in mockery of the Christian religion, but these were condemned by the Jewish doctors themselves as false and calumnious. The rest ought not to be destroyed, but might be studied by Christians, as Moses, Solomon, and Daniel had studied the wisdom of the heathen. He insisted on the utility of Hebrew for Chris­tian theologians, and recommended that during the next ten years it should be taught in universities, as a means of furnishing them with better weapons against the Jews than those which Pfefferkorn wished to employ.

Pfefferkorn furiously assailed Reuchlin in a book to which he gave the name of ‘Handspiegel’ (‘Hand-glass’); to which Reuchlin rejoined with vehemence in one entitled ‘Augenspiegel’ (‘Eye­glass’), professing to convict his adversary of thirty-four untruths. The matter was taken up by the Dominicans of Cologne, who frightened Reuchlin into an apology; but when they went on to require that he should retract, he refused, and stood on his defence. The inquisitor of the province of Cologne, James Hoogstraten, or Hochstraten (who had already written against Reuchlin), went to Mayence, and there, although beyond his jurisdic­tion, set up a court, by which Reuchlin, notwithstanding his protestations on the ground of irregularity, was con­demned for the publication of the ‘Eye-glass.’ But the proceedings were stayed by the archbishop of Mayence, and Reuchlin appealed to the pope. The matter was referred by Leo to the bishop of Spires, who appointed a commission of doctors to investigate it; and these condemned Hoogstraten to pay Reuchlin damages for the irregularity and injustice of his pro­ceedings towards him. Meanwhile, the Dominicans at Cologne had publicly burnt the ‘Eye-glass’ and had obtained opinions in their favour from. Paris and other universities. Again the case was carried before Leo, and Reuchlin’s cause was supported by the recommenda­tions of a multitude of princes and prelates. Leo, at once unwilling to condemn the humanists and to provoke Dominicans, committed the investigation to cardinal Grimani and, although the Dominicans were greatly annoyed, Reuchlin was but imperfectly satisfied by the issue of a mandate which, instead of pronouncing for either party, superseded the suit.

In 1519, however, the quarrel was decided after the manner of the age and country. Francis von Sickingen, a gallant but somewhat lawless noble, threatened that unless the judgment of Spires were carried out within a month, he would lay waste the territory of Cologne. In consequence of this threat, Hoogstraten and his party paid the damages, and although they made underhand attempts to excite the Roman court against Reuchlin, and even procured a fresh condemnation of his book, it appears that he suffered no actual molestation until his death in June, 1522.

In this controversy Reuchlin was supported by the friends of intellectual progress throughout Europe, who, indeed, learnt from it to acknowledge a common interest, so that some of them even spoke of themselves as Reuchlinists. There were writings on both sides, both serious and satirical; and of these by far the most effect­ive was the collection of letters entitled ‘Epistolse Obscurorum Virorum’, of which the first part appeared in 1515 and the second in 1517. The chief authors of these letters are supposed to have been John Jager, a professor of Erfurt, who styled himself Crotus Rubianus, and Ulric von Hutten, a young literary adventurer of noble family and brilliant talents, of loose morality and strong reforming zeal.

The title of this famous satire was suggested by the ‘Letters of Illustrious Men’ to Reuchlin, which some of his friends had published in 1514, with the intention of supporting him in his contest with the Dominicans. To these is opposed a set of ‘Letters of Obscure Men’, addressed to Ortuinus Gratius (Ortwin von Graes), of Cologne, who was supposed to have helped Pfefferkorn in his Latin, and was obnoxious to the Reuchlinists from having taken the side opposite to that on which, as a pupil of the school of Deventer and as a professor of “humane” literature, he might have been expected to range himself. The ‘Obscure Men’ display, with an air of entire unconsciousness, the characteristics of the vulgar monkish party—their stupidity, narrowness, and igno­rance, their hatred of improvement and enlightenment, their intolerance, their obtuse self-satisfaction, their absurd pedantry, their coarse and shameless sensuality. They dispute in scholastic form about nonsensical ques­tions; they look down with the contempt of professed theologians on Reuchlin, as a lawyer who had irregularly intruded into their province; they would prohibit Greek and the “new Latinity”; and their barbarous Latin has an air of verisimilitude which is irresistibly comical. The audacity of the book is astounding; the writers are not restrained by any considerations of decency or reverence, and the liberties taken with Ortwin, with Pfefferkorn and his wife, with Hoogstraten and others, must appear to a modern reader outrageous. Among the letters of imaginary persons, whose vulgar German names are rendered more ridiculous by Latin terminations, are some which are impudently ascribed to Ortwin, to Arnold of Tongres, who had been concerned in the affair of Reuchlin, and to the formidable Hoogstraten himself, whose adventures in pursuing the suit against Reuchlin at Rome are represented as having ended in the exhaustion of his purse, so that he had to plod his way homewards on foot, exposed to all the inclemency of the seasons.

The effect of these letters was immense, and was not to be counteracted by any publications on the other side. It is indeed said with apparent seriousness (although we may find it difficult to believe the statement) that the imitation of the monkish style was so successful as to deceive some of the satirized party, who lauded and circulated the book as a precious contribution to the cause of orthodoxy. But those against whom it was more immediately directed applied at Rome for a condemnation of it; and in March 1517 Leo issued a pro­hibition, which, however, had no other result than to increase the celebrity and the effect of the work.

The fame of Erasmus was more popular and more widely extended than that of Reuchlin. He was born at Rotterdam in 1465, the offspring of a connexion which had become unlawful because the paternal grandfather had determined that one of his many sons should become a monk, and on this account refused to allow his son Gerard to marry the object of his affections. Gerard, who had gone to Italy, was persuaded to enter into the priesthood by information sent by his parents that the mother of his son was dead; and when the irrevocable step had been taken, he discovered that the story was false. Erasmus received the greater part of his early educa­tion under the Brethren of the Common Life at Deven­ter. At the age of thirteen he lost both his parents, and was left to the care of guardians, who made away with his property and endeavoured to cover their dishonesty by persuading him to enter a cloister. The influence of his teachers at Deventer was used for the same pur­pose; but he withstood all solicitations until at length he was overcome by the importunity of a pretended friend, who represented in delusive colours the advantages of the monastic life, and whose treachery and worthlessness he afterwards discovered. At the age of seventeen or eighteen he became a novice; after a year of probation he made his profession among the Augustinian canons of Stein, and in 1492 he was ordained a priest. The circumstances of his history were not likely to impress him with a favourable opinion of the monastic system, and his experiences of the conventual life were repulsive. We cannot wonder that his tainted birth, his solitary position, the frauds of which he had been the victim, the hard­ships and uncertainty of a scholar’s profession, the pre­tensions of patrons and the slackness of their perform­ance, with his nervous temperament and the delicate health which was partly the effect of the monastic diet, tended to produce in him a spirit of distrust and caution, which even resulted in something of selfishness.

After having been drawn from his monastery by the bishop of Cambray, he pursued his studies at Paris; and there he met with a pupil, Lord Mountjoy, by whom he was invited to England. His first visit to this country, in 1498, was followed by others in 1505, 1511-14, and 1515, during which, (although he disdained to learn the language, and on that account resigned a benefice be­stowed on him by archbishop Warham), he became acquainted with many eminent men—among them Warham, Wolsey, Fisher bishop of Rochester, Tonstal, after­wards bishop of London and of Durham, Linacre, and the young king Henry VIII, of whose early promise he speaks in extravagant terms. But his chosen associates were John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s and founder of St. Paul’s School, by whom his opinions were not a little affected, and Thomas More. With these two he lived on terms of familiar intimacy and in a close sympathy of thought. He resided at both the universities, and during his third and longest visit was professor of Greek at Cambridge.

In 1508 he was able to fulfil a long-cherished desire to see Italy, where he was received by scholars and by high ecclesiastical personages with flattering respect. His ‘Adagia’, first published in 1500, and afterwards much enlarged, had laid the foundation of a great reputa­tion for ability and learning. His ‘Praise of Folly’, medi­tated during his return from Italy to England, and completed in the house of Sir Thomas More, acquired a vast popularity,—twenty-seven editions, at least, having been published during his lifetime. In this, after a long exordium, in which pedantry is perhaps more conspicuous than wit, he keenly attacks the pre­vailing follies of all classes, but especially the faults of the clergy and the superstitions which they fostered. His ‘Colloquies’, of later date (1527), were so eagerly received that in one year 24,000 copies were sold; and in these he again assailed with especial force the mis­taken devotions which the monks inculcated, with the intrusiveness and rapacity of the mendicants in connexion with death-beds, wills, and funerals.

In addition to his original writings, Erasmus, who about the year 1515 established himself at Basel, where his works were printed by Froben, was diligently employed on labours of other kinds—editions of classical works, of St. Jerome, and other fathers; and in 1516 he produced his Greek New Testament, with a corrected Latin version—the earliest edition, as we have seen, in which the original of the Christian Scriptures was offered to the world.

His old associates at Stein had chosen one of his friends as abbot, and were induced by the renown which Erasmus had acquired to attempt to regain him for their society; but he had been released by the pope from his monastic’ obligations, and expressed in his answer an inflexible resolution to be no more ensnared in a way of life which his reason, his feelings, and his experience condemned.

A career so brilliant, and at the same time so contrary to the common ecclesiastical manner of thinking, could not be without opposition. His New Testament was attacked: why should the language of the schismatic Greeks interfere with the sacred and traditional Latin? How could any improvement be made on the Vulgate translation? There was a college at Cambridge, especi­ally proud of its theological character, which would not admit a copy within its gates; and from many other quarters there was an outcry against the dangerous novelty. But the editor was able to shelter himself under the name of pope Leo, who had accepted the dedication of the volume.

At the time which we have reached, Erasmus was acknowledged as the chief among scholars and men of letters. He had been patronized, invited, pensioned, tempted with offers of promotion, by all the chief princes of Europe, and by prelates innumerable. And thus far he was regarded by the opponents of innovation as a dangerous reformer. A different state of things was to follow, when, finding himself unable to advance with the movement of popular opinion—unable, from his critical and somewhat indecisive temper, to take part thoroughly either with the reformers or with their adversaries, be­cause he saw, as he believed, the errors of both parties—reproached by those who had left him behind, and distrusted by those wh6m he had once opposed, but to whose interest he had fallen back,—he spent his last years in disquiet and in the turmoil of bitter controversy, a mark for obloquy from both sides, and at last left as his epitaph the melancholy words, “The Lutheran tragedy loaded him with intolerable ill-will; he was torn in pieces by both parties, while he endeavoured to consult the good of both.”

Powerful as scholarship had been in preparing the way for a reformation, the great change which was actually at hand—a change which not only rent from the papacy a large portion of its dominion, but compelled it to under­take new and vigorous measures of internal reform—was not to be accomplished by the efforts of scholars or men of elegant learning, but by ruder and perhaps more earnest labourers.

 

 

 

THE END