The Flowering of the Renaissance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 2

Julius II

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

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

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

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

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

The new Pope found a very grave situation in Italy. His independence was threatened from three different quarters. Profiting from disorders under Cesare Borgia, the key cities of Bologna and Perugia had rebelled against papal suzerainty, while the Venetian Republic had seized two more papal cities, Faenza, the majolica centre, and Rimini. Even graver was the French threat. In December 1503 the French lost the Kingdom of Naples to the Spaniards, but it soon became clear that they intended to make good that loss by expanding in northern Italy. Installed in the Duchy of Milan and controlling the politics of Florence, they were busy wooing Mantua from its suzerain the Emperor and Ferrara from its suzerain the Pope.

Julius decided to try and regain the papal cities first. In 1506 he ordered his vassal Guidobaldo of Urbino to raise 500 cavalry, but instead of entrusting them to a general Julius took command of them himself. It was a bold and startling step but, he believed, the only way to get results. Never before had a Pope ridden out of Rome at the head of an army in order to crush a rebellious city, and amid the general amazement none was greater than Gianpaolo Baglione’s, leader of the rebellion in Perugia. Though he was tough and unscrupulous—Machiavelli accuses him of parricide and incest—Baglione lost his nerve and rode forward to Orvieto, where he knelt before Julius, made his submission and offered a levy of troops. Julius forgave him: ‘But do it again and I’ll hang you.’

Julius then pressed over the Apennines for Bologna. It was bitter cold. As his mule-drivers stumbled through patches of snow, they swore and cursed; after each lapse Julius, who liked an oath himself, gruffly absolved them. The sixty-two-year-old Pope crossed torrents swollen by floods and clambered on foot over rocky slopes, but he would get up at dawn to lead the next day’s march. His energy was such that even the French king responded to his curt call for help against a rebel. Giovanni Bentivoglio, the rebel in question, reviewed his 6000 troops in the main square of Bologna and promised to fight to the death. But steadily the warrior Pope advanced, with his 500 cavalry and the aura of success at Perugia. It was too much for Bentivoglio. On 1 November 1506 he secretly slipped away, and ten days later Julius entered Bologna amid wildly cheering crowds. The following Palm Sunday the Pope returned to Rome, where he was welcomed by arches modelled on that of Constantine, decorated with statues and pictures. True, the arches were only of wood, but their inscriptions left nothing to be desired: ‘Tyrannorum expulsori’, ‘Custodi quietis’ and ‘Veni, vidi, vici.’

Julius next turned to Faenza and Rimini. First he tried diplomacy, but when he asked to see Venice’s title deeds to the two Adriatic cities, the Venetian ambassador replied with cool insolence: ‘Your holiness will find them written on the back of Constantine’s donation to Pope Sylvester of the city of Rome and the Papal State.’ Julius was furious and confided to Machiavelli, ‘To ruin the Venetians, I’ll join with France, with the Emperor, with anyone.’ This in fact is what he did. In December 1508 he united France, Germany and Spain in the League of Cambrai, ostensibly against the Turk, in fact against Venice, and on 14 May 1509 a powerful French army routed the Venetians near Cremona. Venice immediately handed over Faenza and Rimini to Julius.

The hardest part of Julius’s task now remained: to expel the French. Julius would repeatedly say how he longed for ‘Italy to be freed from the barbarians.’ If the term ‘barbarians’ savours more of the Roman Emperors than of a Pope, the concept of freeing Italy as a whole—not only the Papal States—was large-minded, and well in advance of most political thinking of the day.

Julius decided to join with Venice and attack the French through their main ally, Ferrara. He saw the war as a personal trial of strength between himself and Louis XII, ‘a cock who wants all the hens’. After wintering in Bologna, where he was struck down by serious illness and for a time lay delirious, Julius rose from his sickbed, mounted his horse and on 2 January 1511 rode out of the town in high spirits: ‘Let’s see who has the bigger testicles, the King of France or I.’

In a heavy snowstorm Julius joined his mainly Venetian army outside Mirandola, a key town of 5000 inhabitants 30 miles west of Ferrara, and defended by powerful walls, a moat and 900 troops, part French, part Ferrarese. Julius took command. Wearing armour under a white cloak with a fur collar, his head muffled in a sheepskin hood—‘he looks like a bear,’ wrote the Mantuan ambassador—Julius toured the lines in snow ‘half as high as a horse’, set up his nine cannon, and cursed the enemy: ‘Rebels! Robbers! That swine of a duke!’ He talked of nothing but capturing the town. Returning to his billet in a convent kitchen near the front line, he would chant over and over, ‘Mirandola! Mirandola!’, bringing a smile of admiration even to his half-frozen aides.

Twelve days later Julius was lying asleep when the convent kitchen received a direct hit from an iron cannon-ball ten inches in diameter. Two of his grooms were wounded but Julius was unhurt. He calmly changed his billet and sent the cannon-ball to the sanctuary of Loreto, where it is still preserved. When the second billet also came under fire, he moved back to the first. Meanwhile the English ambassador arrived and with all the innocence of a newcomer asked why Julius was fighting his compatriots and not the Turk. ‘We’ll talk about the Turk,’ Julius replied, ‘when we’ve taken Mirandola.’

Everything had to bend to the Pope’s iron will, even his gout-weakened body. In weather so cold that the Po had frozen hard, he was everywhere at once, cheering on his men, directing the cannon. At last the thick walls were breached. On 20 January the commander of Mirandola surrendered to Julius and was obliged to pay 6000 ducats for exemption from pillage. Not waiting to have the gates unbarred, Julius eagerly clambered in through the breach on a wooden ladder.

Julius’s success at Mirandola had a symbolic value out of all importance to the strategic value of the town. It showed that he was in deadly earnest about driving the French from Italy. He was thus able to secure allies. The end came in 1513, when 18,000 Swiss pikemen routed the French at the battle of Novara. The remnants of Louis’s army straggled home, while papal troops swept up the Po valley.

Julius had cleared Italy of the French and re-established his authority over the Papal States—two very important achievements. Furthermore, among the city-states abandoned earlier by the French were Parma and Piacenza, both rich, flourishing and strategically placed. Taking the measure of this new Pope who always seemed to win, they declared their wish to become papal cities. The Parmese ambassador addressed a speech to the consistory in which, with more emotion than logic, he recalled that Parma had originally been named Julia Augusta by Julius Caesar, and so ought to belong to the Pope, while a Parmese poet, Francesco Maria Grapaldi, made the same point hexametrically:

Te Regem, dominum volumus, dulcissime Juli:

Templa Deis, leges populis, das ocia ferro:

Es Cato, Pompilius, Cesar, sic Cesare major,

Sit qualis quantusque velit …

Julia Parma tua est merito, quae Julia Juli

Nomen habet, sed re nunc Julia Parma …

Sweet Julius, we want you for our king,

Instead of war you bring peace, religion and law:

Cato you are, Pompilius, a greater than Caesar,

Be whatever you choose to be …

Parma which once bore the name of Julius

Justly belongs to Julius the second …

—verses which won Grapaldi a laurel wreath from the Pope.

By annexing Parma and Piacenza Julius considerably strengthened the Papal States, while by expelling the French he brought a glow of pride to all Italians and especially to the Romans. On the evening of 27 June 1512 they celebrated the liberation of Genoa from French rule. The whole city burst into a flood of light. Fireworks shot up and cannon thundered from S. Angelo. The warrior Pope returned to the Vatican amid a procession of torches, while crowds shouted ‘Julius! Julius!’ ‘Never,’ said the Venetian envoy, ‘was any Emperor or victorious general so honoured on entering Rome as the Pope has been today.’

There were some, however, who refrained from cheering. They believed that by strengthening the Papacy in the things that are Caesar’s, Julius had weakened it in the things that are God’s. Michelangelo wrote a sonnet lamenting that ‘Chalices are turned into helmets and swords, Christ’s cross and thorns to spears and shields’, while Erasmus of Rotterdam, studying Greek in Bologna, had watched Julius’s triumphal entry in 1506 and described his feelings in The Praise of Folly, a book which was to be widely read in Germany:

Although in the Gospel the apostle Peter says to his divine Master: ‘We have forsaken all to follow you,’ the Popes claim that they possess a patrimony consisting of estates, towns, taxes, lordships; and when, driven by truly Christian zeal, they use fire and sword to hold on to this dear patrimony, when their holy, fatherly arm sheds Christian blood on all sides, then, elated at having humbled these wretches whom they call enemies of the Church, they boast of fighting for that same Church and defending the bride of Christ with apostolic courage.

The question was as old as the Papacy itself—should the Bishop of Rome imitate the lamb or the lion? If the former, he endangered the truth he had been commissioned to preserve; if the latter, he endangered Christian charity. Julius considered it imperative to preserve his political and economic independence, even by force of arms; others, like Erasmus, considered that the real challenge to the Papacy came over things that are God’s, and that the Pope should shame aggressive princes by turning the other cheek.