One reason, apart from his natural temperament, for the emperor’s ambivalent attitude was the proposed Church Council at Pisa which he and King Louis had jointly sponsored. Already Louis was beginning to regret the idea, and support for it was rapidly falling away. After two short sessions, local hostility was to force its removal to Milan; and there, although under French protection, it was openly ridiculed to the point where a local chronicler forbore to record its proceedings because, he claimed, they could not be taken seriously and anyway he was short of ink.
Meanwhile the pope, having almost miraculously recovered from an illness during which his life had been despaired of, was able to proclaim the Holy League on October 4 and begin preparations for war. He soon found, however, that King Louis also held an important new card in his hand: his nephew Gaston de Foix, Duc de Nemours, who at the age of twenty-two had already proved himself one of the outstanding military commanders of the day. Courageous, imaginative, and resourceful, this astonishing young man could make a decision in an instant and, having taken it, could move an army like lightning. A dash from Milan in early February 1512 was enough to thwart an attempt by a papal army to recover Bologna; unfortunately, it also suggested to the citizens of Bergamo and Brescia that with the French forces away on campaign this was an opportune moment to rise in revolt and return to their old Venetian allegiance. They were quickly proved wrong. Marching night and day in bitter weather—and incidentally, smashing a Venetian division which tried to intercept him in a battle fought by moonlight at four in the morning—Nemours was at the walls of Brescia before the defenses could be properly manned, and he and his friend Bayard led the assault, fighting barefoot to give themselves a better grip on the sloping, slippery ground. Brescia was taken by storm, the leader of the revolt was publicly beheaded in the main square, and the whole city was given over to five days’ sack, during which the French and German troops fell on the local inhabitants, killing and raping with appalling savagery. It was another three days before the 15,000 corpses could be cleared from the streets. Bergamo hastily paid 60,000 ducats to escape a similar fate, and the revolt was at an end.
The campaign, however, was not. Nemours, determined to give his enemies no rest, returned to Milan to gather fresh troops and then immediately took the field again. With an army that now amounted to some 25,000, he marched on Ravenna and laid siege to the town. As a means of drawing out the papal army, the move was bound to succeed. Its commander, the Spanish viceroy in Naples, Ramón de Cardona, could not allow a city of such importance to be captured under his nose without lifting a finger to save it. And so on Easter Sunday, April 11, 1512, on the flat, marshy plain below the city, the battle was joined.
Of all the encounters recorded in Italy since Charles VIII had taken his first, fateful decision to establish a French presence in the peninsula nearly twenty years before, the Battle of Ravenna was the bloodiest. When at last the papalists fled from the field they left behind them nearly 10,000 Spanish and Italian dead. Several of the leading Spanish captains, some of them seriously wounded, were in French hands, as was the papal legate, Cardinal de’ Medici. Ramón de Cardona himself, who had taken flight rather earlier in the day—he is said not to have drawn rein until he reached Ancona—was one of the few to survive unharmed. But it had been a Pyrrhic victory. The French losses had also been considerable, and, worst of all, Nemours himself had fallen at the moment of triumph, in a characteristically impetuous attempt to head off the Spanish retreat. His place was taken by the elderly Seigneur Jacques de La Palice, who was possessed of none of his speed or panache. Had the young man lived, he would probably have rallied what was left of the army and marched on Rome and Naples, forcing Julius to come to terms; but La Palice was cast in a more cautious mold. He contented himself with occupying Ravenna, where he was unable to prevent an orgy of butchery and rape which surpassed even that suffered by the Brescians a few weeks before.
Now there suddenly occurred one of those extraordinary changes of political fortune which render Italian history as confusing to the reader as it is infuriating to the writer. When the news of Ravenna reached him, Julius, foreseeing an immediate French advance on Rome, prepared for flight. Just before he was due to leave, however, he received a letter from his captive legate, whom La Palice had unwisely permitted to correspond with his master. The French, wrote Cardinal de’ Medici, had suffered losses almost as great as those of the League; they were tired and deeply demoralized by the death of their young leader; their general was refusing to move without receiving instructions and confirmation of his authority from France. At about the same time the Venetian ambassador in Rome sought an audience with the pope to assure him that, contrary to widespread rumors, the republic had not accepted any French proposals for a separate peace and had no intention of doing so.
At once Julius took new courage. Overpowered, at least temporarily, in the military field, he flung all his energies into the Church Council that he had summoned for May 1512. This had now become more necessary than ever, since King Louis’s renegade Council of Milan had taken advantage of the victory of Ravenna to declare the pope contumacious and suspend him from office. It was true that even in Milan itself few people took the findings of so transparently political a body very seriously; nonetheless, this open split in the Church could not be allowed to go unchecked or unanswered. On May 2, with all the state ceremonial of which the papal court was capable, the Supreme Pontiff was borne in his litter to the Lateran, followed by fifteen cardinals, twelve patriarchs, ten archbishops, fifty-seven bishops, and three heads of monastic orders: a hierarchical show of strength that made the handful of rebels in Milan seem almost beneath notice, precisely as it was intended to do. At its second session this Lateran Council formally declared the proceedings of the Council of Pisa/Milan null and void and all those who had taken part in it schismatics.
On that very same day Pope Julius also proclaimed the adhesion of the Emperor Maximilian to the Holy League, and Maximilian now gave orders that all subjects of the empire fighting with the French army should immediately return to their homes on pain of death. To La Palice, this was disastrous news. He had already suffered a serious depletion of his French troops, most of whom had been recalled to deal with the impending invasion of Henry VIII in the north; the precipitate departure of his German mercenaries now left him in the ridiculous position of a general without an army—or at least without any force capable of holding the Swiss and Venetians whom he suddenly found ranged against him. Meanwhile, the Spanish and papal forces were also back in the field and, although only a shadow of what they had been before their recent defeat, were able to advance virtually unopposed on all fronts. By the beginning of July the pope had not only regained all his territories but had even extended them to include Reggio Emilia, Parma, and Piacenza. La Palice, with what was left of his army, had no choice but to return to France, where Louis XII, who only three months before might have had the entire peninsula within his power, now saw all his hopes annihilated.
Pope Julius II died on February 21, 1513, of a fever, probably brought on by the syphilis from which he had suffered for many years. There had been little of the priest about him apart from his dress and his name. His pontificate had been dominated by politics and by war; his strictly ecclesiastical activities had been largely confined to routine matters, though it was he who had issued the fateful dispensation which authorized Henry VIII to marry Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother, Arthur.
By far Julius’s most important legacy was as a patron of the arts. He had a passion for classical statuary, enriching the Vatican collections with masterpieces such as the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön. (The latter had been accidentally unearthed in 1506 by a man digging in his vine-yard.) But he is nowadays chiefly remembered for his decision to replace the old Basilica of St. Peter with a new building, infinitely more magnificent than its predecessor. The plans for this he eventually entrusted to Donato Bramante,5 who, abandoning his original design for
a Greek cross-in-square church with the tomb of St. Peter directly beneath a vast dome, eventually decided on a more traditional Latin basilica with nave and aisles, together with a portico derived from the Pantheon. Away went the ancient mosaics, the icons, the huge medieval candelabra; it was not long before the architect had acquired a new nickname, Il Ruinante. The work on St. Peter’s alone would have kept him fully employed for the rest of his life, but Julius also made him responsible for a radical redesign of the Vatican Gardens.
The pope also gave encouragement and employment to the twenty-six-year-old Raphael, whom he commissioned to fresco his own apartments—he refused absolutely to inhabit those of the hated Alexander—and to Michelangelo, whom, as we know, he had to bully mercilessly (“I’m a sculptor, not a painter,” the artist protested) into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It has been suggested that, despite the bullying, the two men were lovers. Both, certainly, were homosexual, and Julius, although he had engendered three daughters while still a cardinal, was widely accused of sodomy. On the whole, the idea seems improbable; but we shall never know.
Excessive modesty was never one of the failings of Pope Julius II, and as early as 1505 he also commissioned Michelangelo to design his tomb. This was originally intended to stand thirty-six feet high and to contain forty statues, all of them over life size; according to Vasari, the principal reason for his decision to rebuild St. Peter’s was in order to provide suitable accommodation for it. Unfortunately, the money ran out and the project had to be radically revised. A far more modest version can now be seen in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome; but Julius was actually buried in what there was of his new St. Peter’s—as, doubtless, he would have wished.
1. Not to be confused with Ferdinand, husband of Isabella.
2. Shortly afterward the statue was toppled by the Bolognese. They sold it for scrap to the Duke of Ferrara, who recast it into a huge cannon which he affectionately christened Julius.
3. It was on January 21 of that same year that the Swiss Guard, a permanent corps of mercenary soldiers to protect the person of the pope, was founded. During Julius’s pontificate they certainly earned their keep.
4. “Oh, what a ruin is ours!”
5. His real name was Donato d’Angelo Lazzari. He was nicknamed “Bramante”—the word means “soliciting” in Italian—since he was constantly seeking out jobs for himself.
CHAPTER XIX
The Medici Pair
Pope Leo X, who followed Julius after a short and trouble-free conclave untinged for once by simony, was born Giovanni de’ Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. “God has given us the Papacy,” the thirty-seven-year-old pope is said to have written to his brother Giuliano soon after his accession, “now let us enjoy it.” The words themselves may or may not be apocryphal, but they are an accurate enough summing up of the new pope’s attitude to his office and indeed of his whole outlook on life. At the same time, they are open to misconstruction. It was not in Leo’s nature to enjoy his pontificate as Alexander VI had done. There were to be no orgies, no unseemly roistering. The sale of indulgences and Church appointments went on as it always had—money had to be raised somehow—but for all that Leo remained genuinely pious: he took his religious duties seriously and fasted twice a week.
The fact remains that he was less a pope than a Renaissance prince. Homosexual like his predecessor, he was a cultivated and polished patron of the arts, far more magnificent than his father, Lorenzo, had ever dared to be. A passionate huntsman, he would ride out with an entourage of three hundred; an insatiable gourmet, he gave lavish banquets and willingly attended those given by his friends. In 1494, when his family was exiled from Florence, he had traveled to France, Germany, and the Netherlands, where he had met Erasmus; but six years later he was back in Rome, rapidly acquiring political influence in the Curia, and by 1512 he had successfully reestablished Medici control in Florence, of which he was to be the effective ruler throughout his pontificate.
He began as he meant to continue—with a procession from the still-unfinished St. Peter’s to the Lateran, a procession which for sheer sumptuous extravagance surpassed anything Rome had ever seen. Though suffering agonies from fistula and piles, he rode on a snow-white horse escorted by 112 equerries—to say nothing of countless cardinals, prelates, ambassadors, and detachments of both cavalry and infantry, while papal chamberlains flung gold coins into the crowd. But even that was only the beginning. He ordered tapestries of gold and silken thread from Brussels—based on Raphael’s cartoons now in the Victoria and Albert Museum—at a cost of 75,000 ducats, then willingly paid out double that sum for the festivities attendant on the wedding of his brother Giuliano to Filiberta of Savoy, aunt of King Francis I of France. He commissioned from Michelangelo a new façade for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, where three generations of his family were already buried, building a road running for 120 miles to a Tuscan quarry; and when this project had to be abandoned—the money ran out, and Leo complained, understandably, that the artist was impossible to work with—instituted another: the Medici Chapel in the same building, which was finally to be completed during the pontificate of his cousin Pope Clement VII.
And there was intellectual and scientific work also to be done. Leo revived Rome’s university, the Sapienza, which had not functioned for the past thirty years, appointing nearly a hundred professors and substantially increasing the number of subjects offered—which now included medicine, mathematics, botany, and astronomy. He founded chairs of Greek and Hebrew, each with its own printing press. He even encouraged the theater—till now nonexistent in Rome—staging, among much else, a surprisingly sexy comedy by his close friend Cardinal Bernardo Bibbiena.
Leo’s biographer Paolo Giovio saw his reign as a golden age. The city’s most powerful banker, Agostino Chigi, had erected a huge triumphal arch beneath which the procession passed, inscribed with the words “The time of Venus has passed, and the time of Mars. Now is the rule of Minerva.” The Romans had no difficulty in identifying the reigns of Alexander VI and Julius II; the reference to Minerva, goddess of wisdom, was perhaps rather more problematical. Leo, highly educated and sophisticated as he was, could hardly have been described as wise. However many indulgences he sold, however many new offices he created, he remained permanently in hock to the bankers of Rome and Florence, and the Papacy fell further and further into debt.
Politically, too, Leo was an incorrigible waverer. When in 1515 King Francis marched on Milan, the pope joined the Holy League to resist him, but in the ensuing Battle of Marignano—in which the French army destroyed that of the League—the papal troops, though entrenched only fifty miles away, took no part, and Leo subsequently hurried off to meet the victorious king at Bologna. The result, which he hardly deserved, was a concordat in which the Papacy surrendered Parma and Piacenza but the continuation of Medici rule in Florence was assured.
Florence, however, was no longer enough. Leo had benefited from unbridled nepotism in his own youth, and did all he could to continue the tradition to the next generation. Two of his cousins and three of his nephews he had made cardinals; but for his favorite nephew, Lorenzo, the son of his deceased elder brother, Piero, he intended something more: the Duchy of Urbino. The present duke—he was Francesco della Rovere, nephew of Julius II—had rebelled in 1508 against his papal suzerain; now, in 1516, Leo simply excommunicated him, seizing and torturing the envoy whom he sent to Rome to protest. The war that followed lasted for two years and cost 800,000 ducats; by the time it was finished Lorenzo, its intended beneficiary, was dead. (His daughter, Catherine, however, was to win a far greater prize than Urbino: she married Henry, son and successor of Francis I, and became Queen of France.)
IN THE SUMMER of 1517 Rome was rocked by the most scandalous, but at the same time the most mysterious, chapter in Leo’s pontificate. The pope suddenly announced—and the announcement itself must have been embarrassing enough—that he had discovered a conspiracy by several cardinals, led by Cardina
l Alfonso Petrucci (who was widely believed to be the pope’s lover) to assassinate him. They had, it seemed, bribed a Florentine doctor named Vercelli to inject him with poison while operating on his fistula. Interrogated under torture, Vercelli not surprisingly confessed and was immediately hanged, drawn, and quartered. Petrucci suffered similar treatment and implicated a number of other cardinals. He too was sentenced to death. Because it was unlawful for a Christian to lay hands upon a prince of the Church, he was strangled by a Moor with a cord made of crimson silk. The lives of the other cardinals were spared—on payment of huge fines.
The accusations seem improbable in the extreme. Each of the accused cardinals had small grievances against Leo, but none had any that could be accepted as a motive for assassination. And even had they wished to murder the pope, would they really have selected that particular method of doing so? Of them all, only Petrucci had made any attempt to flee, yet, curiously enough, they all confessed. We shall never know the truth; popular opinion in Rome, however, persisted in believing that there had in fact been no conspiracy and that Leo had fabricated the whole thing for the sake of the fines he was able to exact. At all events the Papacy was still further discredited, and Leo’s subsequent creation of no fewer than thirty-one new cardinals, who together paid him half a million ducats for their red hats, did little to restore its prestige.
Absolute Monarchs Page 36