§ 54. POPE ALEXANDER VI — BORGIA. 1492-1503. 443
be dying, the cardinals found 1,200,000 ducats in his drawers and chests. They now granted his request that 48,000 ducats should be taken from his fortune and distributed among his relatives,
§ 54. Pope Alexander VI— Borgia. 1492-1503.
The pontificate of Alexander VI., which coincides with the closing years of the 15th century and the opening of the 16th, may be compared with the pontificate of Boniface VII I., which witnessed the passage from the 13th to the 14th centuries. Boniface marked the opening act in the decline of the papal power introduced by the king of France. Under Alexander, when the French again entered actively into the affairs of Italy, even to seizing Rome, the papacy passed into its deepest moral humiliation since the days of the pornocracy in the 10th century.
Alexander VI., whom we have before known as Cardinal Rod rigo Borgia, has the notorious distinction of being the most corrupt of the popes of the Renaissance period. Even in the judgment of Catholic historians, his dissoluteness knew no restraint and his readiness to abase the papacy for his own personal ends, no bounds.^ His intellectual force, if used aright, might have made his pontificate one of the most brilliant in the annals of the Apostolic see. The time was ripe. The conditions offered the opportunity if ever period did. But moral principle was wanting. Had Dante lived again, he would have written that Alexander VI. made a greater refusal than the hermit pope, Coelestine V., and deserved a darker doom than the simoniac pope, Boniface VIII.
At Innocent VIII. 's death, 23 cardinals entered into the conclave which met in the Sistine chapel. Borgia and Julian Rovere were the leading candidates. They were rivals, and had
1 Pastor, III. 278, says that, " from the moment he received priestly consecration to the end of his life, he was a slave to the demon of sensuality." Hefele-Knopfier, Kirchengesch., p. 485, speaks of his career before he reached the papal office as having been " very dissolute " — sehr dissolut. Prof. Villari, Machiavelli, 1.219, callsAlexanderthe worst of the popes, whose "crimes were sufficient to upset any human society." Gregorovius and Pastor have carried on the most notable researches in this period, and rivalled one another in the brilliant description of Alexander's reign and domestic relations.
44-1 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
been candidates for tlie papal chair before. Everything was to be staked on success in the pending election. Openly and without a blush, ecclesiastical offices and money were offered as the price of the spiritual crown of Christendom. Julian was supported by the king of France, who deposited 200,000 ducats in a Roman bank and 100,000 more in Genoa to secure his election. If Borgia could not outbid him he was, at least, the more shrewd in his manipulations. There were only five cardinals, including Julian, who took nothing. The other members of the sacred college had their price. Monticelli and Soriano were given to Cardinal Orsini and also the see of Cartagena, and the legation to the March ; the abbey of Subiaco and its fortresses to Colonna ; Civita Castellana and the see of Majorca to Savelli ; Nepi to Sclafetanus ; the see of Porto to Michiel ; and rich benefices to other cardinals. Four mules laden with gold Avere conducted to the palace of Ascanio Sforza, who also received Rodrigo's splendid palace and the vice-chancellorship. Even the patriarch of Venice, whose high age — for he had reached 95 — might have been expected to lift him above the seductionof filthy lucre, accepted 5,000 ducats. Infessura caustically remarks that Borgia distributed all his goods among the poor.^
The ceremonies of coronation were on a scale which appeared to the contemporaries unparalleled in the history of such occasions. A figure of a bull, the emblem of the Borgias, was erected near the Palazzo di S. Marco on the line of the procession, from whose eyes, nostrils and mouth poured forth water, and from the forehead wine. Rodrigo was 61 years_^f age, had beeij_cardinal for 37 years, having received that dignity whenjifi W'liiS ^5. Ills fond uiuU', Calixlus III., had made him archbishop of Valencia, heaped upon him ecclesiastical offices, including the vice-chancellorship, and made him the heir of his
1 P. 281 . In his despatch to the duchess of Este, published by Pastor, 1st ed., III. 879, Giovanni Boccaccio, bisliop of Modena, gives an estimate of Borgia's ability to pay for the tiara, the vice-chancellorship worth 8,000 ducats, the cities of Nepi and Civita Castellana, abbeys in A(iuila and Albano, each worth 1,000 ducats a year, two large abbeys in the kingdom of Naples, the abbey of Subiaco, worth 2,000 a year, abbeys in Spain, l(i bishoprics in Spain, the see of Porto, worth 1,200 ducats, and numerous other ecclesiastical places.