§ 54. POPE ALEXANDER VI — BORGIA. 1492-1503. 461
even to say the mass with his own lips. To measure his iniquity, as has been said, one need only compare his actions with the simple statement of the precepts, " Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal." Elevation to a position of responsibility usually has the effect of sobering a man's spirit, but JRodrigo Borgia degraded the highest office in the gift of Christendom for his own carnal designs. The moral qualities and aims of Gregory VII. and Innocent III., however much we may dissent from those aims, command respect. Alexander VI. was sensual, and his ability to govern men, no matter how great it was, should not moderate the abhorrence which his depraved aims arouse. The man with brute force can hold others in terror,- but he is a brute, nevertheless. The standards, it must be confessed, of life in Rome were low when Rodrigo was made cardinal, and a Roman chronicler could say that every priest had his mistress and almost all the Roman monasteries had been turned into lupinaria — brothels.^ But holy traditions still lingered around the sacred places of the city ; the solemn rites of the Christian ritual were still performed ; the dissoluteness of the Roman emperors still seemed hellish when compared with the sacrifice of the cross. And yet, two years before Alexander's death, October 31, 1501, an orgy took place in the Vatican by Caesar's appointment whose obscenity the worst of the imperial revels could hardly have surpassed. 50 courtezans spent the night dancing, with the servants and others present, first with their clothes on and then nude, the pope and Lucretia looking on. The women, still naked, and going on their hands and feet, picked up chestnuts thrown on the ground, and then received prizes of cloaks, shoes, caps and other articles. ^
1 Infessura, p. 287.
2 Burchard, III. 167, who reports the wild scene, was reticent about many of the evil happenings in the papal palace. The other authorities for the orgy may be seen in Thuasne's ed. of Burchard. See also Villari, MachiaveUi, I. 538. When we are taken to the square of St. Peter's, where the pope and the cardinals watched a feat of tight-rope walking, an expert walking with a child in his arms, we may easily applaud or tolerate the recreation, Burchard, III. 210 ; but the dark furies of evil seem at will to have had mastery over Alexander's soul.
462 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
To Alexander nothing,_w:as sacred,— -office, virtue, marriage, or life. As cardinal he was present at the nuptials of the young Julia Farnese, and probably at that very moment conceived the purpose of corrupting her, and in a few months she was his acknowledged mistress. The cardinal of Gurk said to the Florentine envoy, " When I think of the pope's life and the lives of some of his cardinals, I shudder at the thought of remaining in the curia, and I will have notliing to do with it unless God reforms His Church." It was a biting thrust when certain German knights, summoned to Rome, wrote to the pontiff that they were good Cliristians and served the Count Palatine, who worshipped God, loved justice, hated vice and was never accused of adultery. " We believe," they went on, "in a just God who will punish with eternal flames robbery, sacrilege, violence, abuse of the patrimony of Christ, concubinage, simony and other enormities by which the Christian Church is being scandalized." ^
It is pleasant to turn to the few acts of this last pontificate of the 15th century wliich have another aspect than pure selfishness or depravity. InJU94^_ALeximd^rc^ Anselm without, liowever, referring to the Sclioolman's great treatise on the atonement, or his argument for the existence of God.^ He promoted the cult of St. Anna, the Virgin Mary's reputed mother, to whom Luther was afterwards devoted.^ He almost blasphemously professed himself under the special protection of the Virgin, to whom he ascribed his deliverance from death on several occasions, by sea and in the papal palace.
In accord with the later practice of the Roman Catholic Church, Alexander restricted the^reedomof the press, ordering t]iatjio^_olume should be published without episcopal sanctioji.* His name meets the student of Western discovery in its earliest period, but his treatment of America shows that he was not informed of the purposes of Providence. _In_two Jbulls^
1 Burchard, III. 110. 2 Mansi, XXXII. 533 sq.
8 Calvin spoke of having been taken as a child by his mother to the abbey of Ounscamp, near Noyon, where a part of St. Anna's body was preserved, and of having kissed the relic.
* Decretum de libi-is non sine censtira imprimendis, 1501, Reusch, Index, p. 54.