Medieval Rome

William Miller

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781537806457
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

No one who visits both Rome and Athens at the present day can fail to be struck by one remarkable difference between the two famous cities, which stand for so much in the history of the world. While Athens is composed of a very old group of ruins and a brand-new town, which was rapidly made to order in Germany; while every trace of that medieval splendour, which once distinguished the court of the Frank dukes, has vanished; in Rome, on the other hand, we have side by side the works of the kings, the memorials of the Republic, the monuments of the Empire, the remains of the Middle Ages, and the modern erections that have sprung up since 1870.

X. ROME DURING THE RENAISSANCE

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UP TO THE MOMENT OF his father’s death Cæsar Borgia had been master of Rome; the Sacred College contained a number of his friends, the strongest fortresses in the Campagna were garrisoned by his adherents; he had both money and mercenaries at his command; and, as he told Machiavelli, he had made all his calculations beforehand as to his policy on the demise of his father. But one thing he had omitted to foresee – his own illness, and that one omission upset all his plans. Still, he did what he could in his feeble condition. One of his followers obtained possession of the papal treasures, and then the doors of the Vatican were thrown open, and the news of the Pope’s death was proclaimed. The people went wild with excitement, and cries of joy and revenge were mingled when the glad tidings became known. But the scene inside the dead man’s chamber was even more extraordinary than that without. The ghastly spectacle of the discoloured corpse terrified the servants, and it was with difficulty that they were induced to put it in its grave-clothes. Beggars had to be heavily bribed to carry the body into St. Peter’s, and it was useless to expose the feet for the customary kisses of the pious, for no one revered the Sixth Alexander. But, if no one came to pay respect to the mortal remains of the late Pope, thousands flocked to feast their eyes on that enemy of mankind. At last the body was shoved into a coffin, and the coffin placed in a chapel without a single candle. A black dog, so ran the story, was the sole mourner, and that dog was supposed to be the devil.

Meanwhile Cæsar lay in the Vatican, strongly guarded by his retainers, who barricaded the Borgo and prepared to resist a siege. He was resolved to dominate the Conclave if he could, and tried to prevent the arrival of unfriendly Cardinals. But the fury of the people was such that he had to make a compromise with the Sacred College promising to obey its decision and receiving from it confirmation of the (dignity of General of the Church. He next separated by timely concessions the Orsini from the Colonna who were both thirsting for his blood, and secured French protection for himself and all his possessions. Then he left Rome in a litter, surrounded by armed men, for the castle of Nepi, which had lately been rebuilt by his father, and the Cardinals were able to meet for the election of a new Pope, while the Romans scrawled bitter epitaphs on the old one. After vowing that they would reform the Church, call a council, and make war on the Turks, the electors chose the Cardinal of Siena, Francesco Piccolomini, as Pope, and thus completely check mated the schemes of the King of France for the nomination of a French puppet in the person of the Cardinal of Rouen. The new Pope, who styled himself Pius III. in compliment to his uncle, the famous Pius II., was merely a figurehead put forward by others as a stopgap until their own time should come. But he was a man of honest purpose and pure morals, though an ordinary criminal would have seemed virtuous by comparison with Alexander VI. He owed his election, however, to his weak health, which prevented him from standing upright, and in less than a month he was dead. Every one knew that his successor would be the one strong man in the Conclave, Cardinal Della Rovere, nephew of Sixtus IV., who ascended the papal throne under the name of Julius II. – a name which he made eminent in the annals of the Papacy. A man of unbending character, made as it were of the oak which was his coat-of-arms, he was a great ruler, but not in any sense a divine. He cared as little for religion as for theology, and his one redeeming moral quality was his love of truth. Ambitious and unscrupulous in the choice of means to his end, he had let the French King, Charles VIII., loose upon Italy in order to overthrow his personal enemy, Alexander VI.; yet, in order to win the Papacy, he had made peace with Cæsar Borgia, whose still considerable influence he wanted so as to make quite sure of his election. But the end of that monster of crime and deceit, whom Machiavelli regarded with such admiration, was now drawing to a close. During the brief rule of Pius III. he had obtained leave to return from Nepi to Rome, where he desired, so his friends pretended, to die at peace with the world. Many of his towns in the Romagna had risen against him; in the capital the Orsini and the Colonna had forgotten their private feuds in their desire to wreak vengeance upon their common enemy. The gates of Rome were watched so that he could not escape a second time, and it was with difficulty that the Spanish Cardinals managed to smuggle him into the Castle of Sant’ Angelo. Julius II. found him a prisoner in that grim fortress, and was at first inclined to use him as a tool against the Venetians, who had entered the Romagna and were attacking one place after another in spite of papal protests that that province was the property of the Church. Cæsar at once announced that he had “found a second father” in Julius – Julius who had been his father’s bitterest adversary and whom, under more favourable circumstances, he would have sent into exile or suppressed. But his dear “father” did not trust him so far as to give him full powers in the Romagna; misunderstandings arose between them, and the Pope had Cæsar arrested and shut up in the Vatican under his own eye. The prisoner signed an agreement to deliver up various strong places in the Romagna within forty days, and to remain in custody until he had kept his promise. As a reward for performing it, he was to be allowed to go where he chose. In accordance with this arrangement, as soon as the chief Romagnole fortresses were surrendered, Cæsar was set at liberty, and at once betook himself to Naples, where he was arrested by Gonzalo de Córdoba in the name of the King of Spain. His arrest was an act of treachery, but the world acclaimed it as well deserved, and message after message was sent to the Court of Madrid, imploring the King to rid the earth of such a double-dyed villain. He was taken to Ischia, and there put on board a ship which had orders to transport him direct to Spain, the land whence the Borgia family had started on its career of crime. For two long years he lay in a Castilian prison, the now ruined castle of Medina del Campo; then he escaped to Navarre. A few months later, in 1507, he fell fighting at Viana, near Valladolid, in an obscure local war, a miserable ending for one who had aimed at the sovereignty of all Italy, perhaps at the Papacy itself. Caesar Borgia has been called “the greatest practical statesman of the age,” and in a sense the remark is true. For at a time when practical statesmanship consisted of every deceit and every crime, when poison and the dagger were the usual implements of policy and nothing was considered wrong, provided that the object were attained, no man excelled him in the arts of public life. He must be judged, of course, not by the standard of the nineteenth century, but by that of the fifteenth, not by comparison with constitutional English statesmen, but in connection with the morality of the Middle Ages as it was interpreted in Italy. Yet, even so, he has left an indelible impression as a great criminal, a worthy son of his infamous father. His chief service was the unification of the States of the Church by the destruction of a swarm of petty tyrants; but, in the light of later history, it may be doubted if even that exploit was a benefit to Italy. To restore the temporal power to its full extent was the great object of Julius II.; so, as soon as he felt himself secure in Rome, he set out in person to subdue Perugia and Bologna which had not yet submitted to his rule. Both cities received him within their walls, and he returned in triumph to the Vatican; arches and altars were raised in his honour, and the golden oak of the Rovere was represented, raising its branches as high as the roof of a church. But the Pope had now to complete his work by the humiliation of the Venetians, who still held Rimini and Faenza, and whose power was a constant danger to his States. “I will make your Republic,” he once told the Venetian Ambassador, “a fishing village again.” “And we,” replied the Ambassador, “will make you a small parson, unless you are sensible.” The answer to this retort was the famous league of Cambray of 1508, which united France, Spain, the Emperor, and the Pope against the City of the Lagunes. In the Doges’ palace at Venice may still be seen the painting which represents Venetia on the lion opposed to Europa on the bull, in memory of this unequal contest of half Europe against the Republic. The issue of such a struggle could not be doubtful; the Venetians relinquished one place after another; and when even these offerings failed to satisfy the ambition of the Pope, they took counsel as to whether it were not better to seek aid of the Turks. This threat and the growing discord among the allies induced the Pope to pause; he reflected that, as the Turks were now firmly installed in Bosnia, the destruction of Venice would remove the last bulwark between them and Italy, while in any case his foreign allies would be sure to seek influence over the States of the Church. After due deliberation he made his peace with the once proud, but now humbled, Republic of San Marco; and, armed with a golden rod, administered a light blow at each verse of the Miserere to the Venetian envoys, who crouched at his feet before the bronze gate of St. Peter’s. He then ordered them to atone for their sins by visiting the seven churches of the city. These shrewd men of the world were much impressed by his behaviour towards them. “The Pope,” wrote one of them to the Doge, “is a great statesman, who intends to be lord and master of the world.” Yet, if he was harsh to the proud, he could be generous to the weak. While he did not spare the Republic of Venice, he confirmed the liberties of her little sister of San Marino, assuring the people of his care and protection in those troublous times. His policy was, in fact, to play off strong powers against each other; and, having weakened Venice by the aid of France, he now sought to weaken France by the aid of Venice. Of spiritual things he thought not at all, and it was sarcastically said of him that he “threw the keys of St. Peter into the Tiber and kept only the sword of St. Paul.”

The breach between him and King Louis XII. of France grew wider every day. The French were furious with the Pope for deserting the league, and had no desire to see him predominant in Italy. Patriotic Italians hounded him on against “the barbarians” and urged him to become the saviour of the peninsula from foreign yoke. On the other hand, reformers of the Church saw with horror the head of Christendom, oblivious of abuses and careless of councils, hurrying to the battlefield and planning the conquest of fortresses and the capture of his enemies. A Synod met at Tours and denied the Pope’s right to make war for mundane objects, while Louis forbade any payments to be made by his subjects to Rome; a fresh schism seemed imminent. Yet, in spite of enemies and gout, Julius went on a litter to encourage his troops in the siege of Ferrara, then in possession of a protégé of the French king. He, at least, saw nothing inconsistent with his ecclesiastical position in thus taking active part in warlike operations. He let his beard row long, visited the trenches, and exposed himself to fire. Poets called him “a second Mars,” and he certainly seemed to have taken a pagan god rather than a Christian apostle as his model. When a fortress fell, he had himself drawn up through a breach in the walls in a wooden box, such was his eagerness to gloat over the vanquished. As his malady did not allow him to mount a horse, he was drawn along the rough roads of the Romagna in a bullock waggon such as may still be seen in the country round Rimini. He was unmoved by the horrors of war, and would not hear of peace. Then Bologna rose against him; his bronze statue, the work of Michael Angelo, which had been placed over the door of the Church of San Petronio, was smashed to pieces, and the fragments were melted down and made into a cannon; a papal favourite, suspected of having betrayed the city, was murdered by the Pope’s nephew in the streets of Ravenna. Fury and shame overwhelmed the bellicose Pontiff; and, to crown all, came the news that those Cardinals who had abandoned him had summoned a Council for the reform of the Church. Rumour even credited the Emperor Maximilian with the bold idea of making himself Pope, and so uniting the two greatest dignities of the Western World in the same person. There was the precedent of that Duke of Savoy who had mounted the chair of St. Peter as Felix V.; there was the scheme, attributed to Cæsar Borgia, of following his father on the papal throne. But if the Emperor really meditated such a step, his plan came to nothing. Julius was, however, sensible of the real danger that menaced him from the threatened Council, and tried to parry it by summoning a Lateran Council himself as soon as he reached Rome. There, at last, he collapsed; his death was announced, and his rooms were plundered; the people and the nobles made tumults in the streets; the Cardinals began to think of the Conclave. One of the Colonna family, angry at the refusal of Julius to select Cardinals from among the nobility of Rome, headed a rising, and held forth from the heights of the Capitol on the blessings of Republican freedom and the bane of papal despotism. He depicted the wickedness of the priests and the virtue of the people, and claimed a suitable number of seats in the Sacred College for his friends. Then came the news that the Pope was not dead but had only fainted. The agitation at once ceased, and the barons took a solemn oath to abstain from all feuds, and work together for the future in the public interest and to the honour of the Pope. This pax Romana, as it was called, marked an advance towards a civilised state of things, even if it was not a complete success. The Pope had a medal struck to commemorate it, and it was certainly worthier of commemoration than many of those quarrels and intrigues which make up so much of mediæval Roman history.

As soon as he had recovered, Julius worked hard at the formation of a “holy league” against France, and the adhesion of his late foes, the Venetians, and the King of Spain, enabled him to proclaim the league as a great fact in the Church of Sta. Maria del Popolo in 1511. He hired Swiss mercenaries, always at the service of the highest bidder, and the war began. But the first blow was a tremendous surprise for the Pope. About two miles outside Ravenna, not far from the Church of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, on the dismal plains of that swampy region, the French Commander, Gaston de Foix, inflicted a crushing defeat on the papal forces. Two future Popes took part in the battle, and the poet Ariosto was also among the combatants. But in the moment of victory the victor fell, and a column on the battlefield still commemorates his fall. All Romagna at once abandoned the papal cause, Rome was convulsed with the news, and the Cardinals urged Julius to make peace and escape. But the old warrior-Pontiff stood firm; “I will stake my tiara and a hundred thousand ducats,” he said, “on the attempt to drive the French from Italy.” A new league arose, as if by magic, from the ashes of the old; Henry VIII. of England joined it, and in three months the victorious army of Ravenna had retreated beyond the Alps. Julius ordered Rome to be illuminated in honour of his triumph, and posed as the saviour of Italy from the foreigner – he who, four years before, had called the foreigner into Italy to aid him in attacking an Italian Republic! Great was his anger against his enemies, and when one of them, the Duke of Ferrara, sent Ariosto as his envoy to pacify him, the furious Pope threatened to have the plenipotentiary drowned like a do in the Tiber, and the cautious poet hastily withdrew. The Romagna again submitted, and Parma and Piacenza became for the first time papal territory. The services of the venal Swiss were suitably rewarded, and it sounds like bitter irony to hear of the contemporaries of Zwingli receiving from the Pope the titles of “Allies and Defenders of the Church’s liberty.” In the meantime, Julius had assembled his Council in the Lateran, while the rival assembly had proved to be a failure. He stood at the zenith of his power; he had beaten the French, he had restored and increased the States of the Church, had evaded reform, and had made himself the first potentate in Italy. But Nemesis fell upon him in the hour of his triumph. Still scheming, planning the overthrow of the Spanish power in Naples, and thinking of other political successes, the old Pope died. When he felt his end approaching, he remembered the fate of some of his predecessors whose corpses had lain neglected and unclothed, and bade them bring him his best clothes and his richest rings. As he thought over all that he had done, he, too, like so many of his predecessors in their dying moments, wished that he had never been Pope. For the last time he summoned the Cardinals, and bade them pray for his soul, for he had been a bad man, he said, and needed their prayers. Then he died. For a whole generation there had never been such a crowd in Rome as at his funeral, for every one wanted to see the dead man who, when living, had filled the whole world with his name. Had he been a king or an emperor, he might have passed muster among those often dubious characters whom historians have decided to call great; but it is impossible to forget – though he often forgot it – that he ought to have behaved like a priest, and he must be judged accordingly. By his policy he unconsciously dealt a blow at the Church which was long felt, and his diplomacy was an unwitting cause of the Reformation.

On the external form of Rome he did not fail to set his mark. Under him began a new era of splendour, and the golden age of Augustus seemed to have returned. Like many great rulers, he wished to leave behind him grand buildings as a memorial of his reign, and the age was propitious to him, for there were geniuses in plenty to do his bidding. He had the traditional love for building which distinguished his family, and followed out the plans of his uncle, Sixtus IV. He widened the streets, under the guidance of Bramante, the greatest architect of the age, and the Via Giulia which became the favourite thoroughfare of Rome during the sixteenth century bears his name. He made the Via Lungara, and erected a’papal mint where the silver pieces, called after him Giuli, were coined. His banker, the famous Agostino Chigi – head of a Sienese family, settled in Rome, which resembled the Rothschilds of our own time – built the villa, which from a later owner has received its present name of Farnesina, and the architect of which is now believed to have been none other than Raphael himself, though the plan was originally ascribed to Peruzzi. Bramante was constantly employed by Julius on important buildings, and the circular chapel in the Court of San Pietro in Montorio, the Cancelleria, the Palazzo Giraud, the arcades in the first Court of the Vatican, and the Court of Sta. Maria della Pace, are all monuments of his genius. But his masterpiece was the plan for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, “the most glorious structure,” according to the admission of Gibbon, “that has ever been applied to the use of religion.” The first suggestion for this gigantic undertaking emanated from the Florentine, Giuliano di Sangallo, architect of the Castle at Ostia and of the Court of the Monastery adjoining San Pietro in Vincoli. In spite of considerable opposition from the Cardinals who wanted the Church preserved in its original shape, Bramante projected a structure in the form of a Greek cross with a magnificent dome over the centre, placed between two belfries. On April 18, 1506, the foundation-stone of the new building was laid. The Pope descended a ladder into the hole made to receive the foundations under the choir-pillar of Sta. Veronica; a goldsmith brought with him in a clay vessel twelve newly-coined medals, two of gold, the rest of bronze, which were buried at that spot. The foundation-stone was of white marble and bore a Latin inscription with the name of the Pope, and it is a curious proof of England’s international importance at the time, that on the same day Julius sent a despatch to King Henry VII., announcing that he had “blessed the first stone and signed it with the Sign of the Cross.” For eight years Bramante worked at the new edifice, while portions of the old Church were taken down to make room for it. It is impossible, however, to acquit the strenuous architect of the charge of vandalism brought against him by Michael Angelo. Like many other restorations, that of St. Peter’s did a great amount of harm to the fabric of the building and to the monuments which it contained. Even the tomb of Nicholas V. was broken in pieces, and beautiful columns were ruthlessly sacrificed. But Julius was “an old man in a hurry,” and he gave his architect no time to take proper precautions for the preservation of what was worth preserving. Yet, in spite of all this haste, neither Pope nor architect lived to see much progress made with the work. Bramante began some of the tribunes and finished the four colossal pillars of the dome, yet even that was not final, for later on Michael Angelo had to strengthen their foundations. But those who wish to study his plans in detail will find them in the Uffizi at Florence. Upon his death, Raphael was appointed, in accordance with Bramante’s desire, to carry on the work, and associated with himself Giuliano di Sangallo and Fra Giocondo of Verona. The original plan was abandoned, and Raphael substituted a Latin for a Greek cross. On his death, only six years after that of Bramante, Peruzzi and Antonio di Sangallo oscillated between the Greek and Latin styles, and then Michael Angelo returned to the ground-plan of Bramante, and one Pope after another ordered his design to be accepted as final. But in the early years of the seventeenth century Paul V. was persuaded by his architect to revert to the Latin cross, and at last, after being in the hands of the builders during the reigns of twenty Popes, the new church was formally consecrated by Urban VIII. on November 18, 1626, the thirteen hundredth anniversary of the consecration of the original building by Sylvester I. The cost was enormous, and the contributions towards defraying it, which were wrung by Julius and his successors from Christendom by questionable means, were one of the chief causes of the Reformation. In the words of an ecclesiastical historian, “Thus the material structure of St. Peter’s provoked the collapse of a large part of its spiritual structure.”

But Julius II. was not content to build his reputation as a Mæcenas of the arts on these great edifices alone. He was the founder of the Vatican Museum, and placed in the Belvedere which Bramante had constructed at his orders the newly-discovered Apollo Belvedere and the group of the Laocoon, the torso of Hercules, and the Ariadne, or Cleopatra. These lucky finds stimulated the zeal for excavation, and Agostino Chigi and other rich men imitated the Pope’s example. The great houses of Rome began to be filled with valuable antiquities, which not only gratified the taste of their owners but served as models to sculptors. Among these we may mention Andrea Contucci of Sansovino, who executed for Julius the tombs of Cardinals Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo Basso della Rovere in the choir of that Pope’s favourite church of Sta. Maria del Popolo, which had been enlarged by Bramante. The same artist has left another example of his work in the marble group of St. Anne, St. Mary and Jesus Christ, which is now to be seen in the Church of Sant’ Agostino. We have already mentioned the name of Michael Angelo in connection with St. Peter’s. That great genius was summoned by Julius to Rome in 1505, and entrusted with the task of designing his tomb. The artist at once set to work, and devised a plan so grandiose that it was never carried out. The monument, as it now stands in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, famous as it is, does not nearly represent all that Michael Angelo had intended. The “Moses,” its most striking feature, is known to every visitor to Rome, but the original design included allegorical figures of the provinces subdued by the Pope, representations of all the arts and virtues, genii and angels, and the statue of St. Paul, as well as those of Rachel, Leah, and Moses. Above them all, heaven and earth were to have been seen bearing aloft the sarcophagus of the Pope. Julius was delighted with the idea, and Michael Angelo went to the marble-quarries of Carrara to select the best material for the work. The huge blo...

Table of contents

• I. HILDEBRAND AND HIS TIMES
• II. ARNOLD OF BRESCIA
• III. INNOCENT III. AND THE ZENITH OF THE PAPACY
• IV. THE HERMIT-POPE AND THE FIRST JUBILEE
• V. ROME DURING THE “BABYLONISH CAPTIVITY”
• VI. THE RETURN OF THE PAPACY
• VII. THE AGE OF ÆNEAS SYLVIUS
• VIII. ROME UNDER SIXTUS IV.
• IX. THE PAPACY OF ALEXANDER VI.
• X. ROME DURING THE RENAISSANCE
• XI. THE SACK OF ROME
• XII. THE INQUISITION AND THE JESUITS
• XIII. ROME UNDER SIXTUS V.