The Rothschild of Rome, Chigi lived sumptuously in a pleasure dome that rivaled Kubla Khan’s. It was outfitted with an ivory bedstead and solid silver bathroom fixtures. Built by Peruzzi, the riverside villa, now known as Palazzo Farnesina, was on Via della Lungara, just down the river from the Vatican. It was the poshest neighborhood in Rome. The suave powerbroker Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III, lived directly across the Tiber. Another neighbor across the river was the cardinal-chamberlain Raffaele Riario. Compared with his solidly imposing Palazzo Riario, Chigi’s villa was a greenhouse.
Adapting the architectural idea that Bramante had pioneered in the Belvedere Court, Peruzzi had merged the building with its surroundings so that one flowed into the other—house to garden to riverbank. To extend the illusion, Raphael had frescoed the loggias with fruits and flowers.
A banker’s wealth depended on the goodwill of the pope and the apostolic chamberlain. As long as he needed the Church to make him wealthy, Chigi had been careful never to outshine a cardinal or deny a pontiff. Now that he was a man of property, the circumspect banker turned flashy prince and flaunted his fabulous wealth even at the risk of offending the pope himself. His dinner parties were sumptuous, and one in particular that he gave for Leo became the talk of Rome.
Lofted in the air by brawny servants, Agostino Chigi’s gold dinner plates sailed across the garden like discuses. Glowing for an instant in the torchlight, they hung over the river, then, one by one, began to drop into the black water, each one hitting with a flat thud.
Conversation stopped abruptly. A shocked gasp turned to awed whispers, all eyes fixed on the river. The wine had been flowing so freely that when the first plates floated over the Tiber, several cardinals wondered if the last goblet had been too much, and their eyes were deceiving them. But as they finished the nightingale pies and pheasant tongues, one dirty golden dish flew after another, until the night sky was raining Agostino il Magnifico’s entire dinner service.
“Save the servants the work of cleaning up,” the host quipped. Wearing a Sphinx-like smile, he sauntered from table to table, enjoying the expressions of disbelief and awe on the faces of his illustrious guests. Long colorful tapestries hung from the rafters and swayed gently in the evening breeze. Chigi was a slender man of medium height, supremely confident but still careful not to be overbearing. His dress and grooming were impeccable, sure indications of his status. Renewed interest in classical Roman culture had brought bathing into vogue again, at least among the enlightened elite. Personal hygiene was much improved from the pungent Middle Ages, and the well-heeled were also the well scrubbed.
Pope Leo loved spectacles. Anything odd, exotic, or offbeat caught his fancy, and Agostino il Magnifico had obliged with his own singular display. This was entertainment for a pope who had everything, from dwarfs to entertain him with ribald antics to his own zoo.
Leo stared as plate after plate sank into the river, stunned by such nonchalant largesse. If his host was dumping his own gold dinner service, could the papal tiara be far behind? The coronation loan was only the first of many Agostino il Magnifico had advanced the pope. The tiara and papal jewels were locked in his countinghouse, held in escrow against the hefty outlays.
The river smoothed. The servants brought out platters of fruits and cakes. As conversation resumed, fixed on the sunken treasure, Chigi surprised his guests again. At his signal, the servants pulled down the tapestries, revealing rows of stalls. Agostino il Magnifico had been entertaining Pope Leo and a dozen cardinals in the stables that Raphael had designed shortly before he died. You know you’ve arrived when Raphael builds your stables and the pope wines and dines there.
Later that night, after the last guest had staggered home, the servants brought in the horses and retrieved the gold dinner service. Chigi had taken the precaution of spreading nets on the river bottom. He always secured his investments. Although the Church condemned usury and Chigi considered himself a devout Christian, he was profiting handsomely by acting as pawnbroker to Leo and his friends. His personal loans to the extravagant Medici were made at rates that can only be described as usurious. That Leo paid without complaint and Chigi cashed in without compunction reflects the mood of the time. He would never have imposed such an unconscionable interest rate on a loan to Julius—and il pontefice terribile would never have let himself be bilked.
Julius had left the Church not just solvent but flush. Leo had no hesitation in spending its wealth. The average cardinal had fewer than two hundred in his household, or famiglia. Leo’s swelled to almost seven hundred. The Medici* were a banking family, yet Leo “could no more save a thousand ducats,” a friend of Machiavelli said, “than a stone could fly through the air,” and the papacy suffered as a consequence.
Careless of the damage that his extravagance was doing to the Church, Leo continued his spending spree, dispensing funds recklessly to beautify the city, reward his favorites, and pamper himself. Like his father, Lorenzo, he had an eye for beautiful objects but no head for business, and even less interest in it. He squandered fortunes with benevolence and emptied the Vatican treasury in two years. When the coffers were bare, he came up with ever more creative and corrosive ways to pay for his largesse. Leo sold more cardinal’s hats. He also increased the number of venal offices by almost one thousand, bringing some six hundred thousand additional ducats to his treasury and prompting one critic to complain, “Everything is for sale—temples, priests, altars…prayers, heaven, and God.”
When Leo had exhausted the wealth of the Church, he hawked indulgences like tickets to paradise.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SALVATION FOR SALE
For my intent is only pence to win,
And not at all for punishment of sin.
When they are dead, for all I think thereon
Their souls may well black-berrying have gone!
—Geoffrey Chaucer,
“Pardoner’s Prologue,”
The Canterbury Tales
In the theology of the Church, only confession and contrition can bring about the forgiveness of sins. A contrite sinner admits his errors, receives absolution through the sacrament of penance, and is given prayers to say or a task to perform in reparation. An indulgence doesn’t buy forgiveness. It only lessens the penance imposed.
The process is roughly analogous to a civil court proceeding. A person turns himself in, admits his crime, is granted a hearing, and receives a sentence or penalty. The judge can suspend the sentence or order community service in lieu of prison time. Granting an indulgence is comparable to commuting a sentence. From the Latin indulgeo—“to be kind or tender”—it derives from Roman law and from the Old Testament book of Isaiah (61:1). The prophet says, “The Lord hath anointed me…to heal the contrite of heart.”
Indulgences are a quid pro quo. A confessed sinner performs good works or makes a charitable offering in exchange for a reduced penance now, or a shortened purgatory in the next life. When motives are pure, both sides benefit. The Church raises revenue for its capital expenses. The contrite Christian feels good, because he has a direct route to heaven with no detour to purgatory, and he is helping his neighbor and supporting his Church.
As early as the eighth or ninth century, “redemptions” were given for good works: feeding the hungry, tending the sick, any of the corporal works of mercy. In the free-and-easy years before the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Church also dispensed redemptions for making a pilgrimage, giving alms, joining a crusade, or endowing a hospital—all eminently worthy causes, it was thought.
Even if the intention were as pure as a shriven soul, misuse was endemic. As always, the abuse came when money changed hands.* Julius had issued a redemption in 1513, offering an indulgence with a contribution to the Basilica fund. Leo renewed and expanded it. As his money troubles worsened through poor management and personal extravagance, the sale of indulgences became a way of keeping the papacy solvent.
Mass r
uns of indulgences rolled off ecclesiastical printing presses. The man behind the marketing blitz was the pope’s friend and fellow Florentine Lorenzo Pucci—the same Pucci who would mishandle Henry VIII’s divorce appeal and lose the English Church. Pucci’s preachers crossed the Alps and spread throughout Europe. Many of them were as corrupt as Chaucer’s Pardoner, and they peddled the indulgences like eternal annuities, speculations against the Day of Judgment. Absolution was bartered for building funds, and a wholesale fleecing of the faithful ensued.
To a young Augustinian monk in Saxony, the trafficking in indulgences to finance an enormous new Basilica was the tipping point. Martin Luther had been profoundly shaken by the decadent behavior he saw when he visited Rome in the summer of 1511. “If there is a hell, then Rome is built upon it,” he said. Now, six years later, he questioned the increasingly mercenary Church. From the perspective of a penurious friar, a Medici prince did not need the pennies of the working poor to finance an opulent new church.
“Why does the Pope not build this Basilica with his own funds instead of with the money of the poor faithful?” Luther asked.
Over several autumn nights, he wrote out a long list of grievances railing against the expense of the new St. Peter’s and the spurious indulgences that were financing it. Among his theses:
#50: Christians should be taught that, if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence-preachers, he would rather the church of St. Peter were reduced to ashes than be built with the skin, flesh, and bones of the sheep….
#82: Why does not the pope liberate everyone from purgatory for the sake of love (a most holy thing) and because of the supreme necessity of their souls? This would be morally the best of all reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build St. Peter’s church, a very minor purpose.
All Hallows’ Eve, October 31, 1517, five years to the day after Michelangelo unveiled the Sistine ceiling, Luther tacked his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SWEET REVENGE
Leo had been pope for four exorbitant years, and the Church was about to discover the true cost of his profligacy. For now, though, the constant hectoring by his own cardinal-chamberlain was more annoying to the pope than the distant caviling of an insignificant friar. To the young Medici prince, Raffaele Riario was not a voice of reason and fiscal restraint. He was a mean-spirited old man, too long in the same job, more than thirty years, and acting as if he were more important than the Holy Father. Riario lectured the pope as if he were the supreme pontiff and Leo an errant sinner, and his criticism grew louder as Leo’s questionable schemes escalated.
Helpful advice, the cardinal called it. Leo called it feigned concern. He saw it as more della Rovere treachery against the Medici. Vengeance is never forgotten, just laid aside until it can be exacted. Leo’s manner was amiable, but his memory was long. He remembered Riario, younger but just as cagey, lurking in the background on the Sunday that his uncle Giuliano de’ Medici was murdered in the Florence cathedral and the della Rovere–Pazzi plot to destroy his family was foiled.
Two of Sixtus IV’s nephews were implicated in the conspiracy. One was clearly guilty. The other was Raffaele Riario, now the Vatican’s chief financial officer and the second most powerful man in Rome. The incident had sparked a tit-for-tat feud between the della Roveres and the Medici, with Riario claiming that he was an innocent bystander who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and Lorenzo imprisoning him for conspiracy. Sixtus had countered by excommunicating the Medici prince. No secular prince possessed a weapon of comparable power, and rather than risk eternal damnation, Lorenzo capitulated. Riario was released after two months but never exonerated in the eyes of the Medici.
A political animal, schooled in the papacies of three artful pontiffs, Cardinal Riario conducted himself like a prince, traveling with a retinue of three hundred and attracting a coterie of intellectuals. His palace across the Tiber was one of the grandest in Rome, and his art collection rivaled his cousin’s, which became the basis of the Vatican collection.
Riario was shrewd, prudent, and one of Leo’s most persistent critics within the Curia. To add to the intrigue, he was the cardinal protector of the Augustinians, the monastic order to which Leo’s other irksome critic, Martin Luther, belonged.
Like his cousin Julius, Riario had a flair for drama and an appetite for risk. He was a gambler by nature as well as a conservative fiscal force within the Vatican. He had built Palazzo Riario with the fortune he pocketed in one memorable night of gambling against another cardinal and papal nephew, the dissolute Franceschetto Cibo.
Riario always chose his game shrewdly. Having learned the cost of profligacy in the pontificate of Alexander VI, he had worked closely with his cousin Julius to solve the fiscal crisis inherited from the Borgias, rebuild the city, and improve living conditions. They had made Rome a power center and the Church not only solvent but wealthy. Now the self-indulgence of the Medici pope threatened to bankrupt it again. The old cardinal sought to stop him but he underestimated Leo’s wiles.
Leo, who was always scrambling for new revenue sources, uncovered a novel one: an assassination plot against his own august person, hatched quite conveniently by Riario and another equally wealthy cardinal. Whether it was paranoia, extortion, or a cunning case of sweet revenge, the cardinal-chamberlain and his accomplice, Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci, were charged with conspiring to assassinate “by poison and poignard” His Holiness the Medici pope. They were arrested, taken away in ropes, and imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo.
At first, Riario was defiant. Even from his prison cell, he was scornful of the intemperate, undisciplined pope. Confident of his position in the Curia and the city, he was more critical than ever of Leo. Riario was demanding release and an apology when Cardinal Petrucci was strangled in his cell. Fearing the same fate, the seventy-year-old Riario signed away everything except his life. He ceded ownership of his palazzo to the Medici, and agreed to pay an exorbitant price for his freedom.
Leo’s demands exceeded even the old cardinal’s substantial personal wealth. When he couldn’t meet the pope’s ransom, Agostino il Magnifico, whom Julius and Riario had made the Midas of Rome, stepped up and paid the Medici piper.
Raffaele Riario would die the same year as Leo, poor, alone, and forgotten by the many “friends” who had once curried favor with him. On the façade of his sumptuous palace, now called La Cancellaria, Leo had ordered the Medici balls emblazoned over the della Rovere oak tree.
Silencing Riario did nothing to quiet the storm gathering in the north. Copies of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses were flying off the new printing presses as fast as the indulgences. Gutenberg did not introduce mass communication—the masses were illiterate—but his inky miracle was revolutionizing communications as dramatically as the computer would more than five hundred years later.
Scribes were becoming obsolete. The meticulous work that had kept scribbling monks laboring for months by candlelight could be replaced in minutes by the multiple printed copies that rolled off the presses. Italy had one press in 1465. By 1500, there were 150. The Vatican had Arabic and Hebrew presses, as well as Latin, Greek, and vernacular Italian.
Without the power of the printing press to spread his message and the encouragement of German princes hoping to break free of Rome, Luther would have been just another lone, if irksome, voice carping in the wilderness. But printed pamphlets disseminated the complaints of the obscure Augustinian monk far beyond Saxony.
Pesky priests had gotten under the skin of princes before. When Henry II of England asked, “Will no one rid me of this priest?” Thomas à Becket was murdered the next night in Canterbury Cathedral. More recently, Alexander VI had answered the Florentine friar Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities with his own bonfire and tossed the friar on the pyre. Luckily for Luther, when he began decrying Rome, a gentler Medici was pontiff.
Although he could compose clever verses in Latin and Greek, Leo could not parse the message from Wittenberg Cathedral. The monk’s screed was a veiled attack on the authority of the pope. Martin Luther did not emerge from a void or preach to a hostile audience. German princes were abetting him, and disgruntled Catholics, already paying the priest from cradle to grave, were growing restive. When Luther’s Theses reached Rome, the Curia warned that the fuss over the indulgences was just the smoke. But Leo’s interest in what was happening north of Rome stopped at Tuscany. Instead of curbing his feckless tax-and-spend habits, the pope ignored the growing protest.
Ensconced in his golden cocoon, Leo continued to scandalize. On the feast of St. Augustine, August 28, 1519, he officiated at the wedding of Agostino Chigi to Francesca Ordeaschi, a grocer’s daughter from Venice. Fourteen cardinals and most of Roman society attended the wedding, which was the most lavish event of the summer. The bride had been Chigi’s mistress for eight years, and the loving couple was attended by their four children.
Luther’s attacks grew more rancorous. Branding the pope the Antichrist and Rome the whore of Babylon, he denounced the indulgences as “pious frauds of the faithful” and the Basilica of St. Peter as an outrage.
Like Nero fiddling as Rome burned, Leo dithered as the Church sundered. He spent more time on pageants and boar hunts than on the annoying monk and his laundry list of complaints. The clamor echoing across the Alps had less urgency than the horn of his huntsman, Domenico Boccamazza, or the baying of his hounds. Leo kept seventy or eighty prize hunting dogs in kennels near the Vatican. The hounds lived better than many of the poor souls who were spending their pennies on the spurious indulgences.
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