The Borgias (20 page)

It was necessary for the cardinals to return to Rome, for the burial of Pius and the election of the next pope.

Background
 
 IL PAPA

IN ROME IN THE FIRST CENTURY OR TWO OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA, the Church may or may not have been led by a man who functioned more or less as a bishop even if not yet bearing that title.

The first Roman bishops—assuming that there were such things in the generations following the death of Saint Peter—may have regarded themselves as the apostle’s successors and therefore as leaders not only of the local church but of all Christians everywhere.

Or they may not have. The idea of a single head of the whole Church may not have emerged until centuries later, inside the heads of Dark Age bishops eager to fill the vacuum created by the killing of Rome’s last emperor.

These questions have answers. The problem is that the answers vastly outnumber the questions. Catholics have their answers, various Protestant denominations have theirs, et cetera ad infinitum. It is inconceivable that these conflicting interpretations of early Christianity will ever be reconciled.

Anyone acquainted with the facts, however, is likely to agree that the story of how the papacy of the Renaissance came into existence is, for better or worse, one of the most colorful in all history. It can be inspiring and disgusting, exciting or depressing, beautiful or horrible, depending on which part of it is under examination and the preconceptions of the examiner. No one wanting to prove that the papacy is the Whore of Babylon will ever be embarrassed by a lack of supporting evidence. Much the same is true for anyone wanting to believe that the pope is everything he claims to be.

The story of the popes can be taken up, for our purposes, early in the fourth century, by which time there was indeed a bishop of Rome. When the Emperor Constantine departed to establish a new capital in the ancient Greek city of Byzantium (and rename it after himself), he left the Eternal City in the charge of its bishop and gave him the imperial palace, the Lateran, as his residence. Constantine being among the greatest of all
Roman emperors, and Rome at this point being still the capital of the world, this act of delegation radically increased the bishop’s prestige. It added to the stature he already possessed as prelate of the only apostolic church in the Western Empire—the only one established by one of the twelve apostles—at a time when Christianity’s birthplace, Jerusalem, was in ruins.

This prestige was further enhanced in the following century when the Western Empire collapsed. In the absence of an emperor, and with the European kingdoms of the Middle Ages not yet in existence, almost no unifying principle was available to the Church’s scattered bishops except their colleague in the old capital. And so Rome’s bishop, once not much more than the custodian of pilgrimage sites, became a unique source of support and guidance. Gradually he began to claim to be, and to be accepted as, the man in overall command.

Rome, helpless, was sacked three times in the fifth century. But even then the intruders from the north showed themselves to be in awe of the great city, if no longer terrified of its might, and to regard it as quasi-sacred. Their reverence grew rather than diminished with the passage of time. When the Lombards made themselves masters of much of Italy in the sixth century, they kept clear of Rome, putting it off limits even to themselves. When they were converted to Christianity, their respect for the place was extended to its overlord as well, and as the number of Christendom’s bishops increased, the title
Il Papa
was reserved for the one who presided in Rome.

When in the eighth century Pepin the Short led his Frankish warriors southward to supplant the Lombards, he did so not as just another barbarian intruder but at the invitation of Pope Stephen II, who had given him the title Patrician of Rome. Pepin then introduced a new element into history by bestowing an extensive portion of his newly conquered territories on the pontiff. He thereby transformed the bishop of Rome into what his successors would remain into the nineteenth century: one of the most important temporal rulers in Italy, monarch of the Papal States, capable of joining in the power games of Venice, Naples, and Milan. Papal prestige rose to unprecedented heights. When Pepin’s son Charles the Great—Charlemagne—was crowned as
imperator
in Rome in 800, he received his crown from Pope Leo III after approaching the pontiff on his knees and kissing his slippered feet.

The next seven centuries were a wild ride in which bursts of real glory alternated with episodes of appalling degradation. The prestige that had brought Charlemagne to his knees was taken away and recovered, thrown away and recovered again, lost and regained repeatedly in a cycle that seemed destined to continue to the end of time. Few things on earth were rarer than a happy and successful papal reign. Eight decades after the death of the pontiff who crowned Charlemagne, Pope Stephen VI was strangled in Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo by people infuriated at him for having his predecessor’s body dragged out of its tomb, put on trial, and thrown into the Tiber. In 974 Benedict VI died in the same way in the same place, and ten years later John XIV perished in the Castel of poisoning or starvation.

The deaths of Stephen VI and John XIV bracketed the so-called “Pornocracy,” a long and ugly interlude during which the papacy was virtually the property of a family of Roman consuls and senators called the Theophylacti. The tenor of the period can be inferred from the career of a member of this family named Marozia. She is alleged—by hostile sources, it must be acknowledged—to have been the lover first of Pope Sergius III (by whom she supposedly had a son who grew up to become Pope John XI) and later of John X (whom she is supposed to have had murdered). She was the grandmother of John XII (himself a murderer, elected at age eighteen and said to have made his niece his mistress and blinded his confessor), the great-grandmother of Benedict VIII and John XIX (who was a layman when elected), and the great-great-grandmother of Benedict IX. This last pontiff, no more than twenty when given the crown, has several distinctions. He is the first pope known with certainty to have been homosexual, and the only man ever to become pope three times. He was deposed in favor of an antipope twenty years after his election, was restored to his office a year later only to sell it, then changed his mind and took the crown back from the buyer. In the end he was deposed permanently.

Such depths were never to be reached again. The reigns of even the most admired and formidable popes, however, were invariably laden with grief if not outright tragedy. In 1077 the reformer Gregory VII, whose zeal for purging the Church of corruption bordered on fanaticism, triumphed so completely over his archenemy Emperor Henry IV that the poor man was reduced to donning a hair shirt and standing
barefoot in the snow for three days in a desperate bid to win release from a bull of excommunication. It was a never-to-be-forgotten display of papal power, but it did not save Gregory from later being deposed (as was Henry) and dying in exile. The tragic futility of the centuries-long struggle between papacy and Holy Roman Empire was again made clear in the mid-thirteenth century, when Innocent IV defeated and destroyed the spectacularly brilliant Emperor Frederick II, known to contemporaries as the Wonder of the World, only to find himself at the end of his life losing a war with Frederick’s illegitimate son. Another peak was reached in the reign of Boniface VIII, who at the dawn of the fourteenth century was so engorged with pride and self-importance that he would greet pilgrims in Rome by shouting
Ego, ego sum imperator!
(“I, I am the emperor!”) In 1302 he issued the bull
Unam Sanctam
, which declared that no one who failed to submit to the authority of the pope could achieve salvation. This sparked such a violent reaction—from the king of France, among others—that Boniface found himself languishing in prison.

Just seven years later the so-called Babylonian Captivity began, with the pope resident at Avignon and becoming almost an adjunct of the French crown. During this period 113 of the 134 appointees to the College of Cardinals were French, and so much Church money went into the French king’s treasury that German relations with the papal court were permanently poisoned. After that came the Great or Western Schism, which began in 1378 with the election of an antipope and over the next four decades never offered the faithful fewer than two men simultaneously claiming to be the rightful pontiff.

The papacy that Martin V brought back to the wrecked city of Rome in 1420 was itself, therefore, a scarred and tattered thing. It was virtually bankrupt, had barely escaped being discredited beyond possibility of repair, was unloved by the people of Rome, and controlled almost none of its supposed territories. Those of its neighbor states that were not its enemies were also not its friends.

It was from these wretched beginnings that the papacy of the Renaissance would rise for another period in the sun.

8

Paul II: The Poisoned Chalice

The conclave that followed the death of Pius II was the second in which Rodrigo Borgia took part, and it came at a time when his role in the hierarchy was subtly changing. He was entering his mid-thirties now, and he had proved himself as vice-chancellor and right hand to two successive pontiffs. Though still much too young to be considered
papabile
, a possible candidate for elevation to the throne, he was no longer either a green novice or quite the Spanish alien that he had seemed during the reign of his uncle.

He was, to the contrary, very much a Vatican insider and a consummately skilled ecclesiastical politician. Though the conclave of 1464 was the only one he would ever attend without playing a significant part, his passivity in this one instance was entirely the result of physical incapacity: he remained so debilitated by the bout of bubonic plague that had brought him low in Ancona that he was reported as attending one session of the conclave with his head bound up in cloths.

Fortunately for Rodrigo, there was no great need for him to exert himself because there was never much danger that anyone hostile to him would be chosen as Pius’s successor. Among the cardinals who appeared to have support as the conclave opened, two, Carvajal and Torquemada, were Spaniards and could be depended upon to embrace Rodrigo and his kin as allies if by some chance either of them was elected. Guillaume d’Estouteville, who had tried so hard to bluff, bribe,
and bully his way to the throne in 1458, remained France’s most powerful churchman and a highly visible presence in Rome, with apparently unlimited financial resources and a gnawing hunger for the papal tiara. He had reason to blame Rodrigo for the worst of his disappointments, his failure at the conclave that had turned Enea Silvio Piccolomini into Pius II, but his chances of pulling together a two-thirds majority were now smaller than ever. As for the bloc from which the new pope was almost certain to be chosen, the ten Italians who made up more than half of the cardinals present, there was only one among them whom Rodrigo had reason to fear. This was Latino Orsini, on whose family Calixtus III had made war. But Latino was not the fountain of energy and wrath he once had been, and in the six years of Pius’s reign the membership of the Sacred College had changed to such an extent that he no longer had the power either to elect a candidate of his own choosing or to veto anyone he disliked. As for his own election, like Estouteville’s it was out of the question.

Rodrigo, in eight years as a cardinal and seven in the most important post in the Church after the pope, had learned a good many things about papal conclaves and the papacy itself. Of conclaves he had learned that once the doors were locked anything could happen, that what did happen was often totally unexpected, that great wealth and power were not only no guarantee of election but if clumsily employed could be self-defeating, and that promises made in the pursuit of votes could safely be forgotten once the voting was done. Of the papacy he had learned that nepotism was not only acceptable but understood to be desirable if not carried to extremes, that popes never had enough money and therefore were well advised to be coldly self-interested in the management of their finances, and that as a general rule it was best not to trust anyone—certainly not the rulers of the Italian city-states or crowned heads anywhere.