Pope Alexander VI

4 Key excerpts on "Pope Alexander VI"

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  Dark History of the Popes

  • Brenda Ralph Lewis(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Amber Books Ltd

    (Publisher)

  This portrait (pictured) of Pope Alexander VI, formerly Rodrigo Borgia, was painted by Juan de Juanes (1500–1579), often called the ‘Spanish Raphael’.

  VTHE BORGIAS

  Power in the city-states of Renaissance Italy was frequently a family affair. And the families in question were truly formidable. The Visconti and Sforza of Milan, the Medici of Florence, the d’Este of Ferrara, the Boccanegra of Genoa or the Barberini, Orsini and della Rovere families shared some or, more often, all of the symptoms characteristic of their breed.

  Alexander was probably the most controversial pope ever to have reigned, and remains infamous today.

  T hey were intensely greedy for wealth and status, and could not resist enriching their relatives with high-ranking titles and the lavish lifestyles that went with them. Their power could frequently be secured by violence, murder and bribery and ruthlessness comparable only to the methods of the Italian families involved in organized crime centuries later.

  The greatest power of all resided, of course, in the papacy and the immense influence the popes exerted over both the religious and the secular life of Catholic Europe. Several rich and famous families, including the Medici, the Barberini, the Orsini and the della Rovere, provided the Church with popes from their own ranks, but the most notorious of them all were the Borgias. The first of the two Borgia popes was the aged Calixtus III, formerly Alonso de Borja, who was elected in 1455.

  From the start, Calixtus III excelled at nepotism. He set out to pack the Vatican bureaucracy with his relatives and place them in lucrative Church posts. Two of his nephews – Rodrigo was one of them – became cardinals in 1456. Such positions were normally occupied by mature or elderly men, but these two were had not yet reached 30, which both alarmed and astounded the College of Cardinals. They had agreed to the appointments under a false premise, expecting the elderly Calixtus to die soon, before the two young cardinals could be confirmed in their new positions. Instead, Calixtus stubbornly survived long enough for Rodrigo to be made Vice-Chancellor of the Church in 1457, which made him second in importance only to the pope himself. It also provided Rodrigo with the opportunity to acquire considerable wealth.

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  The Pope's Army

  The Papacy in Diplomacy and War

  • John Car, John Carr(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  papabili , or potential future pontiffs. He canvassed vigorously for the man who became Innocent VIII, bribing heavily where necessary, and was offered the post of archbishop of Seville; diplomatically, he declined the offer, as it would have put him in conflict with Ferdinand II of Spain, and the last thing he needed was a foreign policy problem of that kind. Besides, he preferred to be in Rome where the papal action was. By now his long and fruitful affair with Vanozza de’ Cataneis was history, but he had compensated her with considerable wealth and a new husband who worked in the Curia. In 1488 Rodrigo’s twenty-four-year-old eldest son Pedro Luis died, and three years later he arranged the marriage of his eleven-year-old daughter Lucrezia to a Spanish nobleman. Cesare, his son of sixteen, was sent to study law at Pisa, where he made himself quite objectionable.

  The year 1492 opened with good news from Spain, where Ferdinand and Isabella drove the last Moors out of Granada; in Rome the pope celebrated the event with a special thanksgiving mass and spectacular entertainments. In March the Spanish kingdom expelled its Jews, many of whom resettled in more tolerant Rome. Innocent VIII died just three weeks before Christopher Columbus set sail on his epochal transatlantic voyage; three days after that date the cardinals’ conclave met, and after five days of the usual horse-trading and backroom dealing in the Sistine Chapel, Rodrigo Borgia was transformed by near-unanimous vote into Pope Alexander VI. The reaction in the Catholic world was mixed, with praise for his diplomatic and social talents vying for prominence with condemnation of his lack of morals and scruples, plus a streak of cruelty; there was also some prejudiced sniffing at his Spanish background. He was now sixty-one and in good health, ‘majestically straight and tall’, but such was the heat on 26 August, the whole of which was spent in outdoor ceremonial, that he briefly swooned.

  Alexander VI threw himself into his task with characteristic energy. He was no spiritual heavyweight, but that didn’t matter much in the Rome of the time, as long as he got tough on crime, among other things. Murders in Rome were occurring at the rate of about seven a day; the pope not only hanged the first murderer caught, but also strung up the victim’s brother and razed his house to the ground. The streets became a lot safer after that.10

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  The Borgia Family

  Rumor and Representation

  • Jennifer Mara DeSilva, Jennifer Mara DeSilva(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1532), his reputation in personal matters was rather different. Although rumors and speculation abound as to whether he murdered his brother and committed rape, there is some discussion as to what extent this reputation was justified. 70 Nevertheless, the infamous Banquet of the Chestnuts is likely a case of the sins of the son being visited on the father. It served Alexander VI’s successors, especially Julius II, to amplify the rumors into a reputation for simony, nepotism, corruption, and immorality, but much of this reputation was, in the years immediately following his death, traceable back to the chapter devoted to him in Raffaelle Maffei’s Commentariorum rerum urbanarum libri XXXVIII (1506). 71 By embodying many of the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church and receiving such a scornful public remembrance, Alexander became an emblem of many ills that precipitated the Protestant Reformation. Vasari’s false condemnation of the portrayal of Giulia Farnese is a reflection of Alexander’s growing reputation. In a similar fashion, the suggestion even to this day that Bartolomeo Veneto’s image of a courtesan is a portrait of Lucrezia demonstrates how readily and widely that reputation has been accepted in popular culture. However, from this chapter’s analysis of the frescoes in the Appartamento Borgia, a different insight into Rodrigo Borgia emerges. His uncle, Pope Callixtus III, who elevated him to the cardinalate, was famous for his parsimony. 72 His titular (but unrelated) successors, Alexander VII (1655–1667) and Alexander VIII (1689–1691), would be found to have directly siphoned off substantial sums from the church for personal familial gain rather than for the benefit of the Church. 73 Once elected pope, Alexander VI spent heavily on church and related projects, rather than himself

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  Medieval Rome

  • William Miller(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Jovian Press

    (Publisher)

  IX. THE PAPACY OF ALEXANDER VI.

  ..................

  THE FIRST ACTS OF THE new Pope marked him as, at least, a strong ruler. He punished crime among his subjects with rigour, paid his officials punctually, and restored peace and plenty to the city. His own table cost but little, for he was a strict economist in matters of personal expenditure. But from the first moment he displayed the spirit of nepotism, which, in his case, caused such grave evils. For, in the desire to raise his children to posts eminence, he stuck at nothing. His first care was for Cæsar, who rushed from his studies at Pisa to Rome as soon as he heard the news of his father’s election. On the very day of his coronation, Alexander created him Archbishop of Valencia, a post which he had occupied himself, and a little later made him a Cardinal. Similar appointments followed, and soon no less than thirty relatives of the new Pope were holding high offices. The days of Calixtus III. had returned; the Borgia family had once more invaded Rome. For Lucrezia, by reason of her sex, there was no ecclesiastical preferment, for her age (she was twelve at her father’s accession) would have been no bar to such a career, seeing that Cæsar had been dedicated to the Church at six. But her father married the young lady, who had already been twice engaged, to the relative of a powerful Cardinal, the same who had received the four mules laden with gold. The wedding was celebrated in the Belvedere of the Vatican according to the precedent of Innocent VIII., in the presence of the happy father, but we must leave the description of the proceedings in “the decent obscurity of a foreign language.” As the King of Naples said, the Pope’s sole aim was the aggrandisement of his children.

  It is pleasant to turn from these petty acts of nepotism to the great deed of world-wide import, which Alexander was called upon to execute. In the same year which witnessed elevation to the Papacy, Columbus had discovered America, and during his pontificate Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope. The two great exploring Powers of that age, Spain and Portugal, appealed to his decision for the delimitation of their “spheres of influence” in the New World

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