Few years in all history have proved more fateful than the year 1492. It began dramatically enough, with the completion on 2 January of the Spanish conquest of Granada, ending the Moorish Kingdom and consolidating the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella; in March, the Jews in Spain were given three months to accept Christianity or leave the country; April saw the death, in his family villa at Careggi, of Lorenzo the Magnificent; in late July, Pope Innocent VIII died in Rome; and in early August Christopher Columbus sailed, all unwittingly, for the New World.
Innocent’s successor Rodrigo Borgia, now sixty-one years old, took the name of Alexander VI (1492–1503). His great-uncle Calixtus III had given him a good start: a cardinal at twenty-five and already in possession of a whole clutch of bishoprics and abbeys, at twenty-six he had become Vice-Chancellor of the Holy See, an office that guaranteed him the vast income which he was to hold over the next four pontificates. There can be little doubt that he owed his election principally to the huge bribes that he shamelessly distributed: it is said that four mule-loads of bullion were carried from the Borgia palace to that of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. His principal rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, could not match his wealth and was obliged to contain his fury as best he could.
Alexander was, however, known to be highly intelligent and an experienced administrator, almost certainly better able than any of his rivals to restore order to Rome, which under Innocent had been allowed to fall dangerously out of control. He was said never to have missed a consistory (the cardinals’ regular meeting), except when he was ill or absent from Rome; no one had a deeper understanding of the workings of the Curia. He was also witty, charming and excellent company: ‘women,’ wrote an envious contemporary, ‘were attracted to him like iron to a magnet’. What he lacked was the slightest glimmering of religious feeling. He made no secret of the fact that he was in the Church for what he could get out of it – and he got a very great deal. By the time of his election, which was celebrated with a bullfight in the piazza in front of St Peter’s, he had fathered no fewer than eight children by at least three different women, earning him a severe rebuke from Pius II, which had had no effect whatsoever. Those of his offspring who remained closest to him were his four children by the aristocratic Roman, Vannozza Catanei: Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia and Goffredo (or Gioffrè; in Catalan Jofré). No fewer than five of his family were to receive the red hat: Cesare at the age of only eighteen, by which time he was already an archbishop.
Alexander had occupied the papal throne for only two years when King Charles VIII of France – described by the historian H.A.L. Fisher as ‘a young and licentious hunchback of doubtful sanity’ – led an army of some 30,000 into Italy, inaugurating a whole series of invasions, which over the next seventy years were to put much of the peninsula under foreign domination. The casus belli was Naples. The old Angevin royal line had died out in 1435 with Queen Joanna II, and the Neapolitan throne had been seized by the King of Sicily, Alfonso of Aragon, who had been succeeded by his illegitimate son Ferdinand1 and then by Ferdinand’s son, another Alfonso. But, the bastard grandson of a usurper, it was generally agreed, had only a tenuous claim to the throne; and Charles, as a descendant of his namesake Charles of Anjou, believed that he had a very much better one. All this was bad news indeed for Pope Alexander. In 1493 he had married his son Goffredo to Ferdinand’s granddaughter, and on Ferdinand’s death had immediately recognised and crowned the young Alfonso. He was not encouraged by Charles’s repeated threats to depose him, or by the news that his bitterest enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had declared for the French king and had headed north to join him.
For Charles, the invasion began promisingly enough. With his cousin, the Duke of Orleans, he crossed the Alps without incident, his heavy cannon having been shipped separately to Genoa. Milan, now under the brilliant Ludovico Sforza (Ludovico ‘il Moro’), received him with enthusiasm, as did Lucca and Pisa. In Florence, welcomed as a liberator by the Dominican firebrand Savonarola, the King took the opportunity to expel Piero de’ Medici – who displayed none of the statesmanship of his father Lorenzo, dead two years before. On 31 December 1494 Rome opened her gates and Charles installed himself in what is now Palazzo Venezia, while Alexander (who had unsuccessfully appealed to the Sultan Bayezit for assistance) briefly took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo; but a fortnight later King and Pope met for the first time – and Alexander’s famous charm did the rest. On 17 January 1495 he said Mass before 20,000 soldiers of the French army in the great piazza in front of St Peter’s, with Charles himself acting as server.
The French remained in Rome for another ten days. Already, like all armies of occupation, they were becoming increasingly unpopular. They showed little respect for the local people; every day brought new stories of violence, robbery and rape. Even the palace of Vannozza Catanei was ransacked. It was with unconcealed joy and relief that on 27 January the Romans watched them march away to Naples, accompanied by Cesare Borgia – ostensibly as Papal Legate, but in fact as a hostage for his father’s good behaviour. With them too went Prince Cem, the only man in the whole immense company whom they were sorry to see depart.
On 22 February Charles entered Naples. King Alfonso immediately abdicated and entered a monastery; his son Ferrante fled for his life. The Neapolitans, on the other hand, who had never looked on the House of Aragon as anything other than usurping foreigners, gave the French king a hero’s welcome. On 12 May he was crowned for the second time. But, as he was soon to discover, there is all the difference in the world between a lightning offensive and a sustained programme of occupation. The Neapolitans, delighted as they had been to get rid of the Aragonese, soon discovered in their turn that one foreign oppressor was very much like another. Unrest also grew among the inhabitants of many of the smaller towns, who found themselves having to support, for no good reason that they could understand, discontented and frequently licentious French garrisons.
Beyond the Kingdom of Naples, too, men were beginning to feel alarm. Even those states, Italian and foreign, who had previously looked benignly upon Charles’s advance were asking themselves just how much further the young conqueror might be intending to go. Ferdinand and Isabella, who wanted Naples for themselves, made an alliance with the Emperor Maximilian, cementing it by offering the hand of their daughter Joanna – later to be known, with good reason, as ‘the Mad’ – to Maximilian’s son Philip, and preparing an invasion fleet; and even the King’s former ally Ludovico Sforza ‘il Moro’ of Milan, by now as alarmed as anyone, was further disconcerted by the presence at nearby Asti of the Duke of Orleans, whose claims to Milan through his grandmother, the Duchess Valentina Visconti, he knew to be no less strong than his own, or than those of Charles to Naples. Pope Alexander, who had by this time recovered his sangfroid, found plenty of support for his anti-French alliance, the so-called Holy League, which was ostensibly pacific, but in fact had a single objective: to send the new King packing.
When news of the League was brought to Charles in Naples, he flew into a fury, but did not underestimate the danger with which he was now faced. To make matters worse, he had lost both his distinguished hostages. Cesare had simply slipped away; Cem had contracted a high fever at Capua and died a few days later. Thus it was that only a week after his Neapolitan coronation Charles left his new kingdom for ever and headed – together with 20,000 mules loaded with loot from Naples – back to the north. Rome was panic-stricken at the thought of his return. Alexander and most of his Curia slipped away to Orvieto, leaving just one unfortunate cardinal to greet the King.
Fortunately, on this occasion the French army proved surprisingly well behaved – probably because Charles was reluctant to waste any more time before getting safely across the Alps. He would have liked an audience with the Pope, to discuss the possible dissolution of the Holy League and obtain full papal recognition of his Neapolitan coronation; but in the face of Alexander’s determination to avoid him, there was nothing he could do. The march, which involved dragging his heavy artillery across the Apennines in midsummer, proved a nightmare; and on 5 July he reached the little town of Fornovo near Parma to find himself facing some 30,000 soldiers of the League under the command of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. The only battle of the whole campaign, fought on the following day, was over in a flash; but it was the bloodiest that Italy had seen for 200 years. Gone were the days of the old mercenary condottieri, whose object was always to prolong a war as far as possible and to live to fight again; they often tended to see a battle as little more than a stately pavane, with fighting – such as it was – hand-to-hand and artillery-fire too weak and inaccurate to do much serious harm. The French had introduced a warfare of a very different kind: they, together with their Swiss and German mercenaries, fought to kill – and the heavy iron balls that burst from the mouths of their cannon inflicted hideous wounds.
Gonzaga managed to present the battle of Fornovo as a victory; few dispassionate observers would have agreed with him. The French admittedly forfeited their baggage train – which included Charles’s sword, helmet, gold seal and a ‘black book’ containing portraits of his female conquests – but their losses were negligible compared with those of the Italians, who had utterly failed to stop them. They continued their march that same night and reached Asti unmolested a few days later. There, however, bad news awaited them. Alfonso’s son, Ferrantino, had landed in Calabria where, supported by Spanish troops from Sicily, he was rapidly advancing on Naples. On 7 July he reoccupied the city. Suddenly, all the French successes of the past year evaporated. A week or two later Charles led his army back across the Alps, leaving the Duke of Orleans behind to maintain a French presence as best he could.
But the soldiers whom he disbanded at Lyons that November carried something far deadlier than any dream of conquest. Columbus’s three ships, returning to Spain from the Caribbean in 1493, had brought with them the first cases of syphilis known to the Old World; through the agency of the Spanish mercenaries sent by Ferdinand and Isabella to support King Alfonso the disease had quickly spread to Naples, where it was rife by the time Charles arrived. After three months of dolce far niente, his men must in turn have been thoroughly infected, and it was almost certainly they who were responsible for introducing the disease north of the Alps.
With Charles safely out of the way, Alexander was free to settle down to his principal task, the aggrandisement of his family. His eldest son Giovanni, already Duke of Gandia, he had destined for the throne of Naples; this ambition, however, came to nothing when in June 1497 Giovanni disappeared. Two days later his body was recovered from the Tiber. His throat had been cut, and there were no fewer than nine stab wounds. Who was the murderer? Giovanni was only twenty, but his violent, unstable character and his penchant for other men’s wives had already made him countless enemies.
Of all the possibilities, the likeliest seems to have been his brother Cesare; there were ugly rumours that the two had been rivals for the love of their sister-in-law, Goffredo’s wife Sancia, or even of their sister Lucrezia. Cesare was well capable of fratricide – three years later he almost certainly murdered his brother-in-law Alfonso of Aragon, second husband of Lucrezia – and his jealousy of his elder brother was well known. There is also the curious fact that although Pope Alexander was genuinely shattered by the assassination of his favourite son (he is said to have touched neither food nor water for three days) he seems to have been content that no one was ever formally accused, far less convicted, of the crime. Cesare too, had he been innocent, would surely have moved heaven and earth to find his brother’s murderer.
For a time, it seemed that Alexander was a reformed character. Indeed, he said as much. ‘The blow that has fallen upon us,’ he declared:
is the heaviest that we could possibly have sustained. We loved the Duke of Gandia more than anyone else in the world. We would have given seven tiaras to be able to recall him to life. God has done this as a punishment for our sins. We for our part are resolved to mend our own life and to reform the Church.
It certainly needed reforming. The cost of the wars required to maintain the Papal States and the ambitious building programmes of successive popes meant that there was a constant search for new sources of income. The discovery in 1462 of an alum mine near Tolfa had come as a godsend to the papal treasury. Alum was indispensable for both the cloth and leather trades. Heretofore it had to be imported at considerable expense from Asia Minor; henceforth the popes could declare a ban on supplies from the Muslim world and establish their own monopoly. But alum alone was nowhere near enough. Indulgences were another invaluable source of income, as was the sale of offices. More and more sinecures were invented; these were bought for large sums and guaranteed an income for life. The result was a vast increase in the membership of the Curia, many of whose members had absolutely nothing to do.
As part of his proposed reforms, Alexander now nominated a commission of six of the most pious cardinals; and less than two months later a draft Bull of Reformation had been prepared. The Pope was banned from selling benefices and from transferring Church property to lay persons. As for the cardinals – who were to be drawn from all the nations – none should possess more than one bishopric; their households were limited to eighty people and thirty horses; they were banned from hunting, theatres, carnivals or tournaments; and their funeral expenses were not to exceed 1,500 ducats. The lesser clergy were similarly reined in: they must refuse all bribes and put away their concubines.
Who, however, was expected to enforce these new rules? Only those who stood to lose by them. And so the draft Bull remained precisely that, and Pope Alexander soon slipped back into his old ways. Cesare – who had never renounced his – gradually replaced Giovanni in his father’s affections, and in 1498 persuaded Alexander to release him from the cardinalate and his religious vows and allow him to return to the outside world. As a layman once again (he was the first man in history to lay down the red hat) he soon became the Pope’s éminence grise. It was largely thanks to his influence that by the end of that same year Alexander had abandoned his anti-French policies and had willingly given his consent to the annulment of the marriage of the new French king Louis XII, assuring him at the same time that he would not oppose Louis’s claims to Milan and Naples. In doing so, he opened the way to new French adventures in Italy; but such considerations were of minimal interest to Cesare, who travelled in magnificent state as papal envoy to France, where he was made Duke of Valentinois and given as a bride Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the King of Navarre. On his return to Italy he directed his energies to the Papal States, eliminating one by one – by expulsion or poisoning – the feudal lords of Umbria and Lazio, Romagna and the Marches until the whole area had become a personal fief of the Borgia family.
The year 1498 also saw the solution of a problem that had plagued Pope Alexander since the beginning of his pontificate. It was personified by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. Originally from Ferrara, since 1490 Savonarola had lived in Florence, preaching fierce and fiery sermons, delivering apocalyptic prophecies and claiming direct communication with God. The chief objects of his wrath were the Medici, the Duke of Milan and – particularly after Alexander’s accession – the papacy; and he did not mince his words:
Popes and prelates speak against worldly pride and ambition, and are plunged in it up to their ears. They preach chastity and keep mistresses … They think only of the world and worldly things; for souls they care nothing … They have made of the Church a house of ill fame … a prostitute who sits upon the throne of Solomon and signals to the passers-by … O prostituted Church, you have unveiled your abuse before the eyes of the whole world, and your poisoned breath rises to the heavens.
The overthrow of the Medici and their expulsion from Florence in 1494 was, as we know, the simple result of the French invasion; but to the Florentines it was Savonarola’s doing, and he emerged as the new leader of the city, setting up a ‘Christian and religious republic’ and ordering regular ‘bonfires of the vanities’ – mirrors, cosmetics, fine clothes, secular books and pictures (including paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli), musical instruments, gaming tables, even chessmen. While it lasted, the general atmosphere must have been more like that of Puritan England in the seventeenth century than of Renaissance Florence in the fifteenth.
Already by 1497 the Pope had had enough. He excommunicated the turbulent friar and, when Savonarola took no notice, called for his arrest and execution. By this time the Florentines were sick of him too. On 8 April 1498 a mob attacked the convent of S. Marco, of which he was prior; in the ensuing struggle several of his supporters were killed and, along with his two closest associates, he finally surrendered. All three were tortured to exact their confessions; and on 23 May they were led out into the Piazza della Signoria, where they were stripped of their friars’ robes and hanged in chains from a single cross. A huge fire was lit beneath them, so that Savonarola should burn just as the vanities had burned before him. The ashes of all three were then flung into the Arno, to ensure that no relics would be rescued for future veneration.
Outside Italy, Pope Alexander’s most fateful decision was taken in 1493, when he made the all-important adjudication between Spain and Portugal over their recent territorial discoveries in Africa and America. For most of the century the Portuguese, inspired and encouraged by their Infante, Dom Henrique – better known as Prince Henry the Navigator – had been steadily exploring the west coast of Africa; and during the last decade Vasco da Gama and Bartholomew Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened up the Cape Route to the Indies. In these achievements the Spanish monarchs had shown markedly little interest; their time came only when Columbus returned from his first voyage in 1493 and announced that he had planted the flag of Castile in the New World. At their request, therefore, Pope Alexander drew a line of demarcation from north to south 100 leagues west of the Azores, decreeing that all zones of exploration to the east of that line should be allotted to Portugal, all those to the west to Spain. In 1494, after protests by the Portuguese, the line was moved further westwards by the Treaty of Tordesillas; this made it possible in 1500 for Portugal to claim Brazil, and explains why Brazil remains Portuguese-speaking today.
The last four years of Alexander’s pontificate were largely taken up with his own and Cesare’s ambition to appropriate the entire Papal State and turn it into a Borgia family fief. The programme was mapped out and put into execution by Cesare, who by now utterly dominated his father. It involved the crushing of many of the great Roman families – above all, the Orsini; it necessitated several assassinations, which were normally followed by seizures of property, and was further financed by the open sale of the highest offices of the Church, including that of cardinal. Cesare Borgia was hated and feared for his violence and cruelty. ‘Every night,’ the Venetian Ambassador reported to his government, ‘four or five men are discovered assassinated, bishops, prelates and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the Duke.’
And yet, although he was hideously disfigured by syphilis – towards the end of his life he never showed himself in public without a mask – few who came into contact with Cesare failed to be impressed. His energy was boundless, his courage absolute. He appeared to need no sleep, and his speed of movement was astonishing: he was said to arrive at a city before he had left the last. At the same time he shared to the full his father’s love of women. In his short life he left at least eleven bastards; and the diary of the Papal Master of Ceremonies, Johannes Burckhardt, leaves us in no doubt of how Cesare spent his leisure:
On Sunday evening, 30 October [1501], Don Cesare Borgia gave a supper in his apartments in the apostolic palace, with fifty decent prostitutes or courtesans in attendance, who, after the meal, danced with the servants and others there, first fully dressed and then naked. Following the supper, too, lampstands holding lighted candles were placed on the floor and chestnuts strewn about, which the prostitutes, naked and on their hands and knees, had to pick up as they crawled in and out amongst the lampstands. The Pope, Don Cesare and Donna Lucrezia were all present to watch. Finally, prizes were offered – silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats and other garments – for those men who could perform the act most frequently with the prostitutes.
At this point it might be useful to say a word about Donna Lucrezia. She has been cast as the femme fatale of the Borgia dynasty; but to what extent she deserved the role remains uncertain. She was certainly not just a pretty face: on two occasions her father handed over to her complete control of the Vatican Palace, with authority to deal with his correspondence. As for her reputation, there is absolutely no evidence for the rumours of incest with one or more of her brothers – or, indeed, with her father – apart from that given by her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, during the divorce proceedings, during which several other baseless accusations were levelled in both directions. She seems to have been very largely the hapless instrument of her father’s and brother’s political ambitions. Her marriage to Sforza in 1493 at the age of thirteen (after two earlier betrothals) was due to Alexander’s eagerness to establish an alliance with Milan; before long, however, the Sforza were no longer necessary and the Pope’s son-in-law became an inconvenience. In 1497 there seems to have been a plot to assassinate him – though which of the three Borgias was implicated we shall never know – but he escaped from Rome just in time, and it was then decided that a divorce would be sufficient. Giovanni (who stood to lose not only his wife, but also her dowry and the city of Pesaro, which he held in fief from the Pope) fought hard, but was eventually forced to agree on the humiliating grounds of impotence, despite his testimony that the marriage had been consummated more than a thousand times. There was the additional embarrassment that at the time of the divorce Lucrezia was actually pregnant; but the paternity of the child Giovanni, who was born in secret, has never been established.
Lucrezia’s next marriage was even more ill-starred; her second husband, Alfonso of Aragon, whom she genuinely loved, was murdered by Cesare – quite possibly out of jealousy, though there were also political overtones. She was, we are told, broken-hearted; but Alexander soon had a third marriage lined up: to another Alfonso, the Este Prince of Ferrara. The attendant festivities, on the usual sumptuous scale, were paid for by the sale of eighty new offices in the Curia and the appointment of nine new cardinals (five of them Spaniards) at 130,000 ducats per red hat. (At about the same time the Pope also appropriated the entire fortune of the Venetian cardinal Giovanni Michiel, who had recently died in agony, almost certainly poisoned by Cesare.) This marriage was also ostensibly successful, in that Lucrezia bore her husband a number of children; but it did not prevent her from having passionate affairs with the poet Pietro Bembo and her bisexual brother-in-law, Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. Despite these profligacies, she achieved comparative respectability and outlived the rest of her family, dying in Ferrara in 1519 after giving birth to her eighth child.
The month of August 1503 saw Rome at its hottest and most unhealthy. The nearby Pontine marshes had not yet been drained; malaria was rife and several cases of plague had also been reported. It was a time of year when all those who could afford to do so left the city; but these were critical times – a French army was on the march to Naples – and the Pope had remained in the Vatican. On the 12th, both Alexander and Cesare were stricken with fever. Cesare recovered, but the seventy-two-year-old Pope could not fight the infection, and six days later he was dead.
The fact that father and son had collapsed on the same day inevitably aroused suspicions of foul play. It was pointed out that on 3 August the two of them had dined with the recently appointed Cardinal Castellesi in his nearby villa; the rumour rapidly spread round Rome that they had intended to poison their host, but had inadvertently drunk the poisoned wine themselves. For some reason this mildly ridiculous story has survived and found its way into a number of serious histories; it ignores the fact that although by this time the Borgia father and son had a good many murders to their credit, they had no ascertainable motive to kill Castellesi. Nor are there any known poisons that take over a week to have their effect. The likelihood is that Alexander and Cesare were simple victims of the epidemic, and that the Pope – improbable as it may have seemed – died a perfectly natural death.
Thanks to the two of them (and in lesser measure to Lucrezia), the Borgias have become a legend for villainy and cruelty. Much of this was clearly justified; but all legends contain an element of exaggeration and often tend to obscure the truth. Moreover, because the Borgia legend concentrates on their crimes, the credit side tends to be forgotten. At the time of his election Alexander had been Vice-Chancellor to five successive popes; he understood the ways of the Vatican as well as anyone alive. For the past fifty years it had done its best to build up the reputation of the Holy See as one of the European superpowers, able to negotiate with France and Spain as a political equal. Unfortunately, as Alexander well knew, it was nothing of the kind. It lacked the money, it lacked the manpower, it lacked even the basic security of its own home ground, constantly threatened as it was by the Orsini and the Colonna, as well as by the notoriously inflammable Roman populace. The ‘papal vicars’ – mostly condottieri who were, by definition, out for what they could get – were not to be trusted for a moment; equally faithless were the major Italian states, Venice and Florence, Naples and Milan, and other cities less important but equally independent. Then there were the French, forever threatening a new invasion, and in the background Spain and (now apparently on the crest of the wave) the Ottoman Turks.
In short, the papacy had real or potential enemies on every side, and no firm friends. To survive with its independence intact, it desperately needed adequate finance, firm administration and astute diplomacy; and these Alexander was able to provide in full measure, however questionable his means of doing so. He proved it in only the second year of his pontificate, when he persuaded Charles VIII to leave Rome, thus saving himself and his successors from being nothing more than satraps of the French. For this alone, he deserves the gratitude of posterity. The fact that he has not received it is largely due to his private life and to the incessant vilification that he received both during his lifetime and after his death, and which he tolerated with quite extraordinary equanimity. On more than one occasion he chided Cesare for not showing the same tolerance; it could be argued, however, that he might have done better to follow his son’s example. Many of the accusations levelled against him he could easily have disproved, had he bothered to do so; by leaving them unanswered, he contributed to his own unspeakable reputation.
Despite his eventual recovery, the sickness that struck Cesare Borgia on that fateful 12 August was to destroy his life. The disappearance of Alexander from the scene created a vacuum that brought chaos in its train; several cities rose in open revolt. A French army under Francesco Gonzaga had already reached Viterbo, only forty miles from Rome; meanwhile a Spanish army under its brilliant young general Gonsalvo de Córdoba was hurrying northwards from Naples. In normal times Cesare might have been able to deal with the situation; but now, desperately ill in the Vatican, he was powerless to take the swift military measures necessary to save his career. Political action was his only hope; and that meant ensuring the support he needed from his father’s successor. He managed to secure some 100,000 ducats from his family’s private treasury; and with this considerable sum, from his sickbed, he hoped to bribe the coming conclave. At all costs he was determined to prevent the election of his most dangerous enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere – nephew of Pope Sixtus IV – who had been living in exile in France during the greater part of Alexander’s pontificate. The surest way of achieving this was, he knew, to block the Cardinal’s return to Rome.
He failed. Della Rovere arrived unscathed, together with Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, Louis XII’s chief counsellor, who was as ambitious for the tiara as he was. A third determined candidate was Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who had broken with Alexander over his pro-French policies; now released from prison by d’Amboise in order to cast his vote for the Frenchman, Sforza found himself unexpectedly popular and began lobbying on his own account. In fact d’Amboise was soon effectively eliminated: a French pope at such a moment seemed almost as bad an idea as another Spanish one, particularly after della Rovere had spread the word that it would mean the second removal of the papacy to France. The struggle seemed to be between della Rovere and Sforza; neither, however, could accumulate the votes necessary to carry the day, and the choice of the cardinals finally fell on a compromise candidate, Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini, Bishop of Siena, who took the name of Pius III (1503) as a tribute to his uncle, Pius II. He was already sixty-four, but looked and acted a good deal older and was crippled by gout. There was a general feeling that he would not last long.
In fact, he lasted just twenty-six days – one of the shortest pontificates in history. He had been a fine, upstanding churchman of unquestioned integrity, and had been the only cardinal brave enough to protest when Alexander transferred papal territories to his son, the Duke of Gandia. There were strong indications that, had he lived, he would have summoned a General Council and driven through the reforms that were so desperately needed. With his death on 18 October 1503 the opportunity was lost – and it was the Church that paid the price.
One of the shortest pontificates was followed by the shortest conclave. It lasted for only a few hours on 1 November. Giuliano della Rovere had done his work well, and had spread his money astutely; he had even managed to secure the vote of Ascanio Sforza, the only other serious potential contender. And it was plain to all that he was born to command. In the words of the Venetian envoy:
No one has any influence over him and he consults few or none. It is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult he is to manage. In body and soul, he has the nature of a giant. Everything about him is on a magnified scale, both his undertakings and his passions. He inspires fear rather than hatred, for there is nothing in him that is small or meanly selfish.
It might have been thought that the election of this terrifying figure as Pope Julius II (1503–13) – he had scarcely bothered to change his name – would spell the end for Cesare Borgia. It did not. Just two weeks before the Orsini had stormed Cesare’s palace in the Borgo, and he (by now fully restored to health) had taken refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo. He was still there when messengers arrived from della Rovere assuring him of his protection in the event of his being elected. Accordingly, the moment he heard of the election, Cesare had returned to his old quarters in the Vatican. But, as he well knew, he was only there on sufferance. It was in Julius’s interest to string him along, simply because his power base was the Romagna, where Venice was helping herself to more and more cities; Julius for the moment had no army, and consequently needed Cesare’s. When he had no further use for the Duke of Valentinois, he would unquestionably ditch him.
As of course he did. Cesare Borgia still retained much of his old fire, but without his father’s protection and support, the days of power and glory were gone and he fades out of our story. Exiled to Spain in 1504, he died in 1507, fighting for his brother-in-law, King John of Navarre, at the siege of Viana. He was thirty-one years old.
There is a story that when Michelangelo was working on his fourteen-foot bronze statue of Pope Julius II and suggested putting a book in the Pope’s left hand, Julius replied, ‘Nay, give me a sword, for I am no scholar!’2 He spoke no more than the truth; he was indeed a soldier, through and through. Not since Leo IX (at Civitate in 1053) had a pope led his army personally in battle; Julius did so, on several occasions – notably when, in January 1511, in full armour and aged sixty-eight, he personally trudged with his army through deep snowdrifts to capture Mirandola from the French. His world, like that of his enemy Alexander VI, was exclusively temporal; for the spiritual he had no time or inclination, and to establish the papacy firmly as a temporal power was the primary task to which he devoted his pontificate. This involved, inevitably, a good deal of fighting. Already by the autumn of 1504 he had succeeded in bringing both France and the Empire into an alliance against Venice – another instance of foreign armies being invited into Italy to settle what are essentially domestic differences; and in April 1506, immediately after laying the cornerstone of the new St Peter’s, he led his entire Curia on an expedition to regain Perugia and Bologna from the local families who saw themselves as independent despots and ruled accordingly. The Baglioni in Perugia surrendered – one suspects rather to the Pope’s disappointment – without a fight; the Bentivoglio in Bologna put up rather more resistance, but eventually the paterfamilias Giovanni (who had ruled there for more than forty years) fled to France and the Pope made his triumphal entry into the city.3
Venice, however, remained the Pope’s arch-enemy. Five years before he had been her most trusted friend in the whole of the Sacred College; but she had recently seized several cities in the Romagna that had previously fallen to Cesare Borgia. These cities, which had traditionally belonged to the Holy See, Venice had refused to surrender; so now Julius was determined on her destruction. Italy, as he saw it, was divided into three. In the north was French Milan, in the south Spanish Naples. Between the two there was room for one – but only one – powerful and prosperous state; and that state, Julius was determined, must be the papacy. A new stream of emissaries was despatched from Rome: to France and Spain, to the Emperor Maximilian, to Milan, Hungary and the Netherlands. All bore the same proposal, for a joint expedition by western Christendom against the Venetian Republic, and the consequent dismemberment of its empire.
The states of Europe could not be expected to feel much sympathy for such a policy. Their motive for joining the proposed league was neither to support the papacy nor to destroy Venice, but to help themselves. However much they might try to present their action as a blow struck for righteousness against iniquity, they knew perfectly well that their own conduct was more reprehensible than ever Venice’s had been. But the temptation was too great, the territories promised them irresistible. They accepted. So it was that the death-warrant of the Venetian Empire was signed, at Cambrai on 10 December 1508, by Margaret of Austria on behalf of her father Maximilian and by Cardinal d’Amboise for the King of France. Julius himself, though his legate was present at Cambrai, did not formally join the League until the following spring; he seems to have been uncertain whether the other signatories were in earnest. But when in March 1509 King Ferdinand II of Aragon announced his formal adherence, he hesitated no longer. On 5 April Julius openly associated himself with the rest and placed Venice under an interdict, and on the 15th the first French soldiers marched into Venetian territory. A month later, on 14 May, the French met the Venetians just outside the village of Agnadello. For Venice, it was a catastrophe. Her casualties were about 4,000, and her entire mainland empire was as good as lost. Before the end of the month the Pope’s official legate received back those fateful lands in the Romagna with which the whole tragedy had begun.
In early July the Pope agreed to accept a six-man Venetian embassy in Rome, and it was soon clear that he had done so only in order to inflict still more humilation on the Republic. On their arrival in early July the envoys had been forbidden, as excommunicates, to enter the city until after dark, to lodge in the same house or even to go out together on official business. Only one was granted an audience, which rapidly deteriorated into a furious diatribe by Julius himself. Not, he vowed, until the provisions of the League of Cambrai had been carried out to the letter and the Venetians had knelt before him with halters around their necks would he consider giving them absolution. Then, very soon, the pendulum began to swing. Less than two months after Agnadello came the first reports of spontaneous uprisings on the mainland in favour of Venice; and on 17 July, after just forty-two days as an imperial city, Padua returned beneath the sheltering wing of the Lion of St Mark. There had as yet been no sign of Maximilian in Italy, but the news of Padua’s defection quickly brought him down with an army. His siege began on 15 September; for a fortnight the German and French heavy artillery pounded away at the walls, reducing them to rubble. And yet, somehow, every assault was beaten back. On the 30th the Emperor gave up.
When Pope Julius was told the news from Padua he flew into a towering rage; and when, after Maximilian’s failure to recover it, he heard that Verona too was likely to declare for Venice, he is said to have hurled his cap to the ground and blasphemed against St Peter. His hatred of Venice was as vindictive as ever, and the war continued. At first Venice had rejected the Pope’s terms outright; she had even appealed to the Turkish sultan for support, requesting as many troops as he could spare and a loan of not less than 100,000 ducats. But the Sultan remained silent, and by the end of the year the Venetians saw that they must capitulate. And so, on 24 February 1510, Pope Julius II took his seat on a specially constructed throne outside the central doors of St Peter’s, with twelve of his cardinals around him. Five Venetian envoys, dressed in scarlet (the sixth had died a few days before), advanced towards him and kissed his foot, then knelt on the steps while their spokesman made a formal request on behalf of the Republic for absolution, and the Bishop of Ancona read out the full text of the agreement. This must have made painful listening for the envoys – not least because it lasted for a full hour, during which time they were forced to remain on their knees. Rising with difficulty, they received twelve scourging rods from the twelve cardinals (the actual scourging was mercifully omitted), swore to observe the terms of the agreement, kissed the Pope’s feet again and were at last granted absolution. Only then were the doors of the basilica opened, and the assembled company proceeded in state for prayers at the high altar before going on to Mass in the Sistine Chapel – all except the Pope, who, as one of the Venetians explained in his report, ‘never attended these long services’.
The pendulum, it seemed, was swinging again. The news of the Pope’s reconciliation with Venice had not been well received by his fellow-members of the League; at the absolution ceremony the French, imperial and Spanish ambassadors to the Holy See, all of whom were in Rome at the time, were conspicuous by their absence. Although Julius made no effort to dissociate himself formally from the alliance, he was soon afterwards heard to boast that by granting Venice absolution he had plunged a dagger into the heart of the King of France – proof enough that he now saw the French, rather than the Venetians, as the principal obstacle to his Italian policy and that he had effectively changed sides. By the high summer of 1510 his volte-face was complete, his new dispositions made. His scores with Venice had been settled; now it was the turn of France.
By all objective standards, Pope Julius’s action was contemptible. Having encouraged the French to take up arms against Venice, he now refused to allow them the rewards that he himself had promised, turning against them with all the violence and venom that he had previously displayed towards the Venetians. He also opened new negotiations with the Emperor in an attempt to turn him, too, against his former ally. His claim, regularly resurrected in his defence by later apologists, that his ultimate objective was to free Italy from foreign invaders would have been more convincing if he had not invited in these particular invaders in the first place.
There was, in any case, another motive for the Pope’s sudden change of policy. Having for the first time properly consolidated the Papal States, he was now bent on increasing them by the annexation of the Duchy of Ferrara. Duke Alfonso, during the past year, had become little more than an agent of the French king; his salt-works at Comaccio were in direct competition with the papal ones at Cervia; finally, as husband of Lucrezia Borgia, he was the son-in-law of Alexander VI – a fact that, in the Pope’s eyes, was alone more than enough to condemn him. In a Bull circulated throughout Christendom, couched in language that St Peter Martyr said made his hair stand on end, the luckless Duke was anathematised and excommunicated.
In the early autumn of 1510 Pope Julius had high hopes for the future. A joint papal and Venetian force had effortlessly taken Modena in mid-August, and although Ferrara was strongly fortified, there was good reason to believe that it would not be able to withstand a well-conducted siege. The Pope, determined to be in at the kill, travelled north by easy stages and reached Bologna in late September. The Bolognesi gave him a frosty welcome. Since the expulsion of the Bentivoglio in 1506 they had been shamefully misgoverned and exploited by papal representatives and were on the verge of open revolt. The Governor, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi, had already once been summoned to Rome to answer charges of peculation, and had been acquitted only after the intervention of the Pope himself – whose continued fondness for a man so patently corrupt could be explained, it was darkly whispered in Rome, only in homosexual terms. But the tension inside the city was soon overshadowed by a still graver anxiety. Early in October a French army under the French Viceroy of Milan, the Seigneur de Chaumont, marched south from Lombardy and advanced at full speed on Bologna. By the 18th it was just three miles from the gates.
Pope Julius, confined to bed with a high fever in a fundamentally hostile city and knowing that he had fewer than a thousand of his own men on whom he could rely, gave himself up for lost. ‘O, chè ruina è la nostra!’4 he is reported to have groaned. His promises to the Bolognesi that they would be exempted from taxation in return for firm support were received without enthusiasm; and he had already opened peace negotiations with the French when, at the eleventh hour, reinforcements arrived from two quarters simultaneously: a Venetian force of light cavalry and a contingent from Naples, sent by King Ferdinand as a tribute after his recent papal recognition. The Pope’s courage flooded back at once. There was no more talk of a negotiated peace. Chaumont – who seems to have felt some last-minute qualms about laying hands on the papal person – was persuaded to withdraw: a decision that did not prevent Julius from hurling excommunications after him as he rode away.
It is hard not to feel a little sorry for the Seigneur de Chaumont. He was dogged by ill-luck. Again and again we find him on the point of a major victory, only to have it plucked from his grasp. Often, too, there is about him more than a touch of the ridiculous. When Julius was besieging Mirandola, Chaumont’s relief expedition was twice delayed: the first time when he was hit on the nose by an accurately aimed snowball which happened to have a stone lodged in it; and then again on the following day when he fell off his horse into a river and was nearly drowned by the weight of his armour. He was three days recovering, only sixteen miles from the beleaguered castle; as a result, Mirandola fell. A month later his attempt to regain Modena failed hopelessly; and on 11 March 1511, aged thirty-eight, he died of a sudden sickness, which he – though no one else – ascribed to poison, just seven hours before the arrival of a papal letter lifting his sentence of excommunication.
But by this time the Duke of Ferrara, on whom the ban of the Church weighed rather less heavily, had scored a brilliant victory over a papal army that was advancing towards his city along the lower reaches of the Po, and Julius was once again on the defensive. In mid-May Chaumont’s successor, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, led a second march on Bologna; and on his approach the inhabitants, seeing their chance of ridding themselves once and for all of the detested Cardinal Alidosi, rose in rebellion. The Cardinal panicked and fled for his life, without even troubling to warn the Duke of Urbino, who was encamped with the papal troops in the western approaches, or the Venetians, a mile or two away to the south; and on 23 May Trivulzio entered Bologna at the head of his army and restored the Bentivoglio to their former authority.
Cardinal Alidosi, who in default of other virtues seems at least to have possessed a decent sense of shame, barricaded himself in the castle of Rivo to escape the papal wrath; but he need not have bothered. Julius, who had prudently retired a few days earlier to Ravenna, showed not a trace of anger. Even now, in his eyes, his beloved friend could do no wrong: he unhesitatingly laid the entire blame for the disaster on the Duke of Urbino, whom he summoned at once to his presence. The interview that followed is unlikely to have diminished the Duke’s long-standing contempt for Alidosi, for whose cowardice he was now being made the scapegoat. When, therefore, on emerging into the street he found himself face-to-face with his old enemy – who had left his castle and had just reached Ravenna to give the Pope his own version of recent events – his pent-up rage became too much for him. Dragging the Cardinal from his mule, the Duke attacked him with his sword; Alidosi’s retinue, believing that he might be acting under papal orders, hesitated to intervene, and moved forward only when the Duke remounted his horse and rode off to Urbino, leaving their master dead in the dust.
The grief of Pope Julius at the murder of his favourite was, we read, terrible to behold. Weeping uncontrollably, waving aside all sustenance, he refused to stay any longer in Ravenna and had himself carried off at once to Rimini in a closed litter, through whose drawn curtains his sobs could plainly be heard. But there were further blows in store. Mirandola, for whose capture he had always felt himself personally responsible, was within a week or two to be lost to Trivulzio. The papal army, confused, demoralised and now without a general, had disintegrated. With the recapture of Bologna, the way was open to the French to seize all the Church lands in the Romagna for which he had fought so hard and so long. All the work of the last eight years had gone for nothing. And now, at Rimini, the Pope found a proclamation nailed to the door of the church of S. Francesco, signed by no fewer than nine of his own cardinals with the support of Maximilian and Louis of France, announcing that a General Council of the Church would be held at Pisa on 1 September to investigate and reform the abuses of his pontificate.
Both as a pope and a man, Julius had many faults. He was impetuous – ‘so impetuous,’ wrote the contemporary historian Francesco Guicciardini, ‘that he would have been brought to ruin had he not been helped by the reverence felt for the Church, the discord of the Princes and the condition of the times’ – mercurial, vindictive, a poor organiser and a deplorable judge of character. Though an adept diplomatic tactician, he had little sense of long-term strategy. Eaten up by worldly ambition, he was utterly unscrupulous in the pursuit of his ends. Certain qualities, however, he possessed in full measure. One was courage, and another was indomitability of spirit. On his journey back to Rome, at the age of nearly seventy, he was already contemplating a new league, headed by himself and comprising Venice, Spain, England and if possible the Empire, whose combined forces would drive the French once and for all from the Italian peninsula; and by the beginning of July 1511 negotiations had begun.
They presented no serious problems. Ferdinand of Spain had already gained all he could have hoped for from the League of Cambrai and had no desire to see any further strengthening of the French position in Italy. In England, Ferdinand’s son-in-law Henry VIII willingly agreed to keep his rival occupied in the north while his allies did the same in the south – although he was obliged to point out to the Pope, while accepting his proposals, that it would have been better if they had not been carried by an obvious double-agent (recommended, it appears, by the late Cardinal Alidosi) who was regularly reporting all developments to King Louis. Venice, which throughout the negotiations was fighting hard – and on the whole successfully – to resist French offensives in the Veneto and Friuli, asked nothing better. Maximilian, as usual, dithered; but even without him, the new league promised to prove a force to be reckoned with.
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 4 October 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 take 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 to recover Bologna by a papal army; 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 former Venetian allegiance. They were quickly proved wrong. Marching night and day in bitter weather – and incidentally smashing a Venetian division that tried to intercept him, in a battle fought by moonlight at four o’clock in the morning – Nemours was at the walls of Brescia before the defences 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 to 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, 11 April 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 de la Palice, who was possessed of none of his speed and 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 and restoring King Louis to the Neapolitan throne; but la Palice was cast in a more cautious mould. 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.
And now there suddenly occurred one of those extraordinary changes of political fortune that 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 demoralised 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 rumours, 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 2 May, 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, 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 21 February 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 was dominated by politics and by war; his strictly ecclesiastical activities were largely confined to routine matters – though it was he who issued the fateful dispensation that authorised Henry VIII to marry Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother Arthur.
Julius’s most important legacy by far 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 vineyard.) 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 Bramante5 – 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 Bramante fully employed for the rest of his life, but Julius made him additionally 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, the so-called Stanze (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 more than 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 S. 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 of Spain, husband of Isabella.
2 Shortly afterwards the statue was toppled by the Bolognesi. 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 21 January of that same year that the Swiss Guard was founded – a permanent corps of mercenary soldiers to protect the person of the Pope. 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 jobs for himself.