Far from Holy Fathers
Paul Johnson
THE RENAISSANCE POPES by Gerard Noel Constable, £25, pp. 403, ISBN 1845293436 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 It is curious that despite Spain’s immense services to the Roman Church — expelling Islam from Western Europe over half a millennium of hard fighting, then opening up the Western hemisphere to Catholicism — only two Spaniards have become pope, and both were Borgias (Alfonso de Borja, who reigned as Pope Calixtus III, 1455-8, spelt his family name the Spanish way). The year after his election, Calixtus gave his nephew Rodrigo Borgia, then aged 24, a cardinal’s hat and in 1457 made him vice-chancellor of the Holy See. As such, he played an important role in the election of four popes, Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII, before becoming pope himself in 1492 and reigning 11 years as Alexander VI. In some ways the Borgias set the pattern for the pontificates that followed, up to the time of Pius V (1566-72), whom Gerard Noel calls the last of the Renaissance popes. He designates Nicholas V (1447-55) the first of them, and his book surveys the 18 pontificates which span the entire Renaissance period. His aim, in writing lustily about these jolly, disgraceful and creative times is to rescue the Borgias from the hostile mythology which has encrusted itself around them and, in particular, to show that Alexander VI does not deserve his reputation as the worst pope in history. In the process he has written a wellresearched, painstakingly honest and hugely entertaining book.
Does he achieve his object? The reader must judge. Noel certainly, in my view, clears Alexander of simony in buying his way into the papal chair, one charge often laid against him even by Catholics. But the great vice of the Borgias was nepotism, and there Alexander followed in the footsteps of his uncle Calixtus, who descended to new depths, even by 15th-century papal standards, in giving benefices to his family (and other Spaniards). Alexander not only favoured his family and his own numerous illegitimate children but stuck by them when they behaved outrageously, as when his son Cesare murdered (so it was believed) Alfonso, husband of his sister Lucrezia. It was Alexander’s children, rather than the pope himself, who earned him his lasting reputation for infamy. I recall Harold Macmillan, returning from his first visit to Washington after Kennedy was elected president, summing up the new regime: ‘It is rather like watching the Borgia Brothers take over a respectable northern Italian town.’ Noel’s principal defence of Alexander is the indirect one of placing him in the moral context of his predecessors and successors. The Renaissance popes were an extraordinary blend of cupidity and austerity, of materialism and spirituality and of infidelity and religious enthusiasm. Calixtus, founder of the Borgia fortunes, sold the papal silver and used earthenware to eat off, in order to raise funds for fighting the Turks. He dined sparingly and had a simple mitre made of linen. Pius II, the most accomplished of the Renaissance popes, had numerous affairs as a young man, and wrote novels and poetry most ages would have judged pornographic. Sixtus IV, who built the Sistine Chapel and much else, was a monster of nepotism and, according to Noel, was a bisexual and incestuous. Two of his handsome young ‘nephews’, Pietro Riario, believed to be his son by his own sister, and Giuliano della Rovere (later Pope Julius II), were, according to one authority, ‘the instruments of his infamous pleasure’. One chronicler recorded:
The family of the Cardinal of St Lucia, having presented to him a request that it should be permitted to commit sodomy during the three hot months of the year, June, July and August, the pope wrote on the bottom of the petition, ‘Let it be done, as requested.’
Sixtus was also responsible for sanctioning the creation of the Inquisition in Castile and the appointment of the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor. I am not sure that I accept Noel’s state ment that Torquemada ‘had 114,000 people tortured to death’, but certainly Sixtus’s Bull was a fatal step. On the other hand, there survives the superb fresco by Melozzo de Forli, later transferred to canvas, showing Sixtus inaugurating the Vatican library and appointing the humanist scholar Platina its head, watched by four of his ‘nephews’. This civilised and domestic scene well illustrates the paradoxes of the Renaissance papacy.
Platina, Noel notes, had previously been thrown into the dungeons of the Castel San Angelo, and tortured there on the orders of Pope Paul II. This pontiff was notorious for reviving the use of the triple crown, and having an especially jewel-encrusted one made for himself at the cost of 120,000 ducats. It was also very heavy, and rumour had it that its weight helped to bring about Paul’s death by apoplexy. Other versions are that he was strangled, or died from a surfeit of melons. Noel says that ‘what almost certainly happened’ is that Paul, ‘after an immoderate feasting on melons, expired from the excessive effect of being sodomised by one of his favourite boys’.
Noel has even harsher things to say about Innocent VIII, who issued the notorious Bull Summis Desiderantes in 1484, which ordered the Inquisition in Germany to proceed against witches with the greatest severity. This was the beginning of the witch-hunting craze which lasted for the next quartermillennium, and Noel claims ‘was arguably the most evil official document ever signed by any sovereign or leader in history’. Noel portrays him as a chronic sinner, especially in sloth and gluttony, who in age grew inert, ‘being able, towards the end of his life, to take for nourishment no more than a few drops of milk from the breast of a young woman’.
So the litany of anti-saints continues. The warlike Julius II, says Noel, was ‘the bisexual father of a family, and a hard-drinking, hardswearing, swashbuckling pederast’, described by the Emperor Maximilian as ‘a drunken and wicked pope’. Leo X, alleged author of the saying immediately after his election, ‘God has given us the papacy — let us enjoy it!’, was a sodomite who suffered from a fistula and piles, a condition, says Noel, ‘made worse by vigorous homosexual activity’. One of his lovers, Alfonso Petrucci, whom he made a cardinal, subsequently engaged in a plot against his life, and was horribly tortured in the Castel San Angelo dungeons, and later strangled by a Moorish executioner. Leo, says Noel, ‘was to all intents and purposes an atheist’. He seems to be lining up Leo, under whom, of course, Luther’s revolt came to a head, for Alexander’s vacated place as the worst pope of all. However, Noel also points out that the period abounds in scurrilous stories, and ‘few, if any, can safely be accepted at their face value’. So perhaps much of his own book should be taken with a degree of scepticism. Certainly it ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of people like ‘Hate God’ Dawkins.
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