The Renaissance Papacy by Myron P. Gilmore

 

The economic and political changes in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries produced serious strains in that most comprehensive of all government institutions, the Christian church. The growing powers of secular states made compromise inevitable. Economic pressures and expanding standards of wealth accelerated the scramble for the accumulation of benefices. The resulting decline in moral and institutional standards was felt in all parts of the great ecclesiastical organizations, but was most dramatically apparent at the apex of the system in the papacy itself. To the long history of opposition to Roman financial extractions and papal control of appointments was now added an increasing lack of respect for the head of the church and his immediate court. Never had the gap appeared so wide between the pretensions of the incumbents of the see of Peter and their actual performance.

The two humanist popes of the mid-fifteenth century, Nicholas V and Pius II, had maintained a high sense of the responsibilities of their position, and if their patronage of the new learning had created precedents that in the long run might be dangerous, yet their pontificates had been free from serious scandals. Beginning, however, with the pontificate of Sixtus IV in 1471, the decline was rapid.

Sixtus IV, born Francisco della Rovere, was the son of a poor and very large family. He distinguished himself in the Franciscan order and in theological disputes on the currently debated doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Strong, intelligent, ambitious, he embarked on a career of political activity motivated in part by the desire to provide in a suitably splendid way for his eleven nephews and two nieces. Melozzo da Forli’s celebrated picture of the pope receiving Platina, the papal librarian, shows us, symbolically enough, Sixtus attended by his favorite nephews, whose faces reveal their greed, complacency, and ruthlessness. It was a family which had ‘arrived.’ During his pontificate significant steps were taken towards enlarging the papal control of Romagna, where lordships were created for various nephews. In pursuit of these political claims the pope his name and position in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478.

[1479 drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of hanged Pazzi conspirator Bernardo Bandini dei Baroncelli].

The  ensuing war failed to bring him the extensive gains for which he had hoped and when he died in 1484 he left the inheritance of a papacy increasingly dedicated to its position as a princely power in Italy. The tone of his court had become more and more magnificent and an extravagant luxury the common order of high ecclesiastical life in Rome.

His successor, Giovanni Cibo, who took the title of Innocent VIII, was elected at a conclave distinguished for the openly political struggle between rival candidates. He was weak, compliant, undistinguished, and dominated by the influence of Guiliano della Rovere, who was considered pope in all but name. Innocent’s pontificate was notable because of the extent to which the pope’s own children were avowed and openly provided for. His death in 1492 fell at a critical turning point in Italian political history, but it can hardly be supposed that if he had continued to live he would have had a very great influence on the evolution of the system of alliances.

 

Roderigo Borgia came to the throne in 1492 and took the name of Alexander VI. He reigned for eleven years. Although many of tye famous scandals associated with his name and pontificate are highly colored versions of the truth, yet he has long since ceased to have any serious defenders. One of the most ambitious and aggressive of all the popes, he centered his hopes on the position of his family rather than on the institution which he presumably served. For over a decade his maneuvers, bargains and shifts of alliance occupied the center of the stage of European diplomacy, but in the end his favorite son, Caesar, failed to hold the position it had cost so much to win. This disastrous pontificate marked the lowest point of corruption and immorality in the Vatican itself.

After the short reign of Pius III, who died less than four weeks after his election, Guiliano della Rovere at last came to the papal throne as Julius II. The most famous of Renaissance popes, the ‘papa terrible’ devoted himself to the enlargement of the states of the church on lines laid down by his predecessors. By a tremendous effort of energy and will he triumphed over a series of crisis and lived to see the defeat of the French and the failure of the attempted Council of Pisa.. He had in a sense delivered the church, but at the price of opening the way to Spanish domination of the Italian peninsula.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIt2QkRjGDI&list=RDCMUCA_f3kSgF7Dejj6lOgbAVnQ&index=3

 

One of the greatest patrons in the whole history of the arts, Julius commissioned the work of Michelangelo , Bramante and Raphael, Indeed, the sudden flowering of the style of the High Renaissance in Rome has been attributed to his personal inspiration. It has been suggested this style was the appropriate expression of the pontiff’s religious ideals, the product of a sincere conversion. Whatever the personal religious belief of Julius II and their relationship to the artistic achievements of his age, there were many contemporaries who considered the pope’s career and ambitions far removed from Christian example.

 Perhaps no document better illustrates this aspect of contemporary opinion than the satire Julius Exclusus, attributed to Erasmus. This indictment was written, if Erasmus was the author, after his return from Italy in 1509 when he became a member of the circle of Sir Thomas More. Early in his journey in 1506 Erasmus had been at Bologna and had stood in the crowd to watch the pope’s triumphal entry into the city after its fall. In way the satire may be taken as a measure of the gulf that divided the northern observer educated in the atmosphere  of the devotio moderna, the very same ideals of the Renaissance papacy. Although the satires not published until 1514 and was always denied by its author, it had a rapid circulation and made a profound impression on all who read it. It was cast in the form of a dialogue between Julius II and Saint Peter, in which the former, contrary to his expectation, finds himself excluded from Heaven.

Every resource of the author’s irony is directed to making manifest the incompatibility between the aims and achievements of this greatest of Renaissance popes and the ideals of the founder of Christianity. Julius finds that he is only equipped with the keys to his money box and of his political power, no with those of the Kingdom of Heaven. Saint Peter refuses to recognize  in the warlike figure with his magnificent tiara and pallium the representative of the apostolic succession he had established. The success of this satire, and others like it, is an indication of the degree to which the prestige of the papacy was declining among the intellectuals

Julius’s successor, Leo X, the eldest surviving son of Lorenzo de Medici, brought to their culmination the classical and secular tastes as well as the religious irresponsibility of the Renaissance papacy. Leo had been brought up in the most cultivated circles in Italy and had been tutored by Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino. Surrounded by a brilliant and sophisticated group of humanists and litterateurs, he was sensitive, pleasure-loving and easygoing. The interests of the pope and his circle centered on music and the theater – especially on the comedies of Plautus, on the collection of books, manuscript and gems, as well as on hunting parties and al fresco lunches accompanied by classical masques. In the midst of all this the serious business of the papacy was neglected and it is not surprising that the court was unprepared to meet the great blow that fell at the end of Leo’s pontificate.

Yet in spite of all this ,the ‘pagan’ atmosphere of the papacy on the eve of religious revolution has been much exaggerated. The performance of tye comedies of Plautus did not necessarily mean a rejection of the Christian religion. Sarpi’s celebrated description of Leo as possessed of all the equalities to make a perfect pope if he had the slightest interest in religion is unfair. Leo was the product of the religious thought of the neo-Platonic circle in Florence and within the terms of this tradition it is probably true that he thought of himself as entirely a Christian. Yet his  was not a type of Christianity which could be understood or even tolerated by most of the members of the church over which he presided. What was needed was a pope who would take a literal and serious\s interest in the need for reform within the Christian community. This Leo utterly failed to supply.

During the first years of Leo’s pontificate the fifth Lateran council, originally summoned by Julius II, continued to sit. It met infrequently and was attended principally by the Italian clergy. The reform decrees of earlier councils were reaffirmed and solemnly issued by papal bull. Simony and plurality were condemned, and it was insisted that candidates for ecclesiastical office should fulfill the canonical; qualifications. But at the very time when these old formulas were being reiterated, some of the most important sees in Christendom were being conferred on princely children and the practice o multiplying great benefices in the hands of a single person had never been more widespread. The council promulgated some interesting decrees on usury, condemned current heresies on immortality and managed to settle some of the longstanding controversies within the Franciscan order. On the whole, however, its work was negligible in the face of the need which it confronted, and it perhaps chiefly served to demonstrate that the highest organs of the church were so caught up in a network of vested interests that only lip service could be paid to the cause of reform.. Leo X might congratulate himself in 1517 on the successful conclusion of the council, which was celebrated with ceremonies of characteristic magnificence, but nothing ha been done to restore the moral prestige of the papacy or to make a real attack on the whole system of ecclesiastical abuses. The hour when reform might have met a successful response was slipping away while Leo enjoyed his pontificate, the last to preside over a united Christian community.

The question how far and in what ways that community was affected by conditions in Rome is difficult to answer with any precision. The great majority of inhabitants of Christendom remained ignorant of the realities of the situation at the papal court very much as the vast framework of the Roman Empire had been undisturbed by the corruption of a Nero or a Caligula. The complicated machinery of the curia’s business continued, and those pious communities and individuals who received dispensations, indulgences, privileges and confirmations from even an Alexander VI had little or none of the information even then being recorded by Roman diarists and diplomats which was to fix the character of these popes in history.

Even a first hand view of the Renaissance papacy did not always produce a revolutionary impact on the northern observer. It is extremely doubtful whether Luther’s visit in 1510 and 1511 gave him the impression he afterwards  described. If a serious Augustinian monk on the business of his order could have returned from an winter in Rome in these years  with only so much sense of shock as could be recollected later, when it served his purposes, rather than registered at once, how much less affected must be those who had never made the Italian journey art all. To subsequent historians the papacy of this period has become a symbol for all the evils that  afflicted the church universal. Yet to the minds of most men, Rome was still remote and the papacy remained an institution of final appeal. Unhappily the very conditions which led to such appeals were the same as those which were corrupting the church at the center. Secularism, extravagance and immortality were not confined to Rome but appear at all levels of the hierarchy and in all parts of the Christian world.


Chapter 6 Part One; The World of Humanism 1453-1517 by Myron P. Gilmore