Extremes, however, lead to revolution. A period of great asceticism is always followed by an era of licentiousness, and in Italy this era was synchronous with the age of the Borgias.
It is no part of the present writer’s purpose to palliate the crimes of the Borgia; recent attempts which have been made to show that Alexander VI. and his son Caesar were gentle and impeccable beings, maligned and slandered, are inspired chiefly by a love of paradox, or occasioned by a motive not unlike that which actuates the great criminal lawyer whose chief victories consist in securing, not the acquittal of the innocent but of the guilty. These efforts, therefore, should not be taken too seriously.
Like other princes, the Borgias were human, and the same passions that prevail among the laity also rule among the priesthood. Theoretically the cardinals were the Pope’s advisers, an ecclesiastical senate, charged with the salvation of humanity, but actually they were a body of powerful and astute politicians, appointed by the Pope on his own initiative or at the request of some reigning sovereign or great family whose support his Holiness was anxious to secure. The cardinalate was bestowed in precisely the same way, and for the same reasons, as a minister’s portfolio is at the present time—that is, without any regard to the fitness of the beneficiary, and as a reward for services rendered or to come, and sometimes for even baser reasons: Alexander VI. raised Farnese to the purple in return for the complaisance of his sister, the beautiful Giulia.
Youths were made cardinals at a tender age. Giovanni de’ Medici, a precocious prelate of eighteen years, on the conclusion of the conclave that elected Alexander VI. was wise enough to flee from Rome; and Caesar Borgia was seventeen when his father discovered he had need of his counsel in conducting the affairs of the Church.
The great houses vied with each other for the honour, prestige, and power. It was no small matter to sit in the ecclesiastical senate and have a voice in directing the conscience of civilised humanity, at a time when the masses did not dare even to think; and to have a vote in the election of the greatest potentate on earth, who could make and unmake kings and emperors, and consign them to eternal punishment at will. The vast emoluments of the great office, the enormous revenues of the various prebends and livings the cardinals enjoyed need not be mentioned.
Their power and wealth knew no bounds. Surrounded by their kinsmen and retainers, they maintained princely courts. They rode about the city in the garb of condottieri, encased in steel, with swords clanking at their sides. In their palaces they maintained hundreds of men, whose number was increased, when occasion demanded, by the addition of gangs of paid bullies and ruffians. Every palace was a stronghold, and in addition those of the cardinals possessed the right of sanctuary—a right, it may be observed, which was not generally respected unless it was backed by might, as is shown by the frequent murders in churches in Italy in the period of the Renaissance, one of the most extraordinary of which was the stabbing to death of Giuliano de’ Medici by Bernardo Bandini and Francesco de’ Pazzi, assisted by a priest, who “being accustomed to the place, was less superstitious about its sanctity,” at the steps of the altar in the duomo of Florence in 1478, under the very eyes of Cardinal Raffaele Riario, the raising of the Host being the signal for the attack. The palaces were great stone fortresses with towers and battlements; the portal was closed with doors barred and studded with iron, capable of resisting almost any force; within were vast courts and living quarters for the swarms of retainers. Many of these strongholds were even supplied with artillery. A criminal often secured the protection of some cardinal who, with the aid of his “family,” his armed followers, would rescue and save him from prison. On one occasion a number of playful young Romans having assaulted some of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza’s servants, the good prelate’s “family,” armed to the teeth, sallied forth, fell upon the jokers, and slashed and hacked about twenty of them. At another time when a certain Savelli, Captain of the Curia, was about to proceed with an execution in the vicinity of the palace of Cardinal Balue, that worthy ecclesiastic called to him from a window and commanded him to stop, as the place was in his own jurisdiction. On the captain’s refusal to do as he was commanded the cardinal ordered his “family” to storm the prison, which they did, liberating all the captives and destroying the records. That night Cardinals Savelli and Colonna dispatched their own forces against their colleague. Subsequently all the belligerents were summoned to appear before the Pope on the charge of contumacy, but the only notice which Cardinal Balue took of the order was to fill his lair with armed men.
In a world of rapid change human life, honour, and the higher sentiments are held in slight esteem; material success is the goal men strive to reach and few question the means they employ. During the late Renaissance the despot did not hesitate to remove any obstacle in the way of his progress, even when that obstacle was a near kinsman; and the act was generally connived at by the other members of the family, conscious that in those unsettled days their own position and safety depended upon the strength and astuteness of their chief.
Italy was then divided into a hundred petty dukedoms and principalities, each struggling to preserve itself by annihilating its neighbour. Coalitions were constantly formed for the destruction of a state whose growing power threatened to disturb the balance, and these compacts often were broken as soon as made. Deception became a fine art, and diplomacy and duplicity were synonymous. It was this keen struggle for existence which made the Italians the most perspicacious politicians of the day.
Every ruler sought to attract to his court the artist and the literary man, for he knew that the prestige gained thereby was no slight adjunct to his power, and this explains why many of the most brutal and egotistical of the princes became famous as patrons of the arts and sciences. This protection was repaid with flattery, and to what depths of sycophancy men will descend is attested by the nauseous dedications of books of the day. In 1488, when Caesar Borgia was fourteen years of age, and by the grace of Innocent VIII. a prothonotary of the Apostolic See, Paolo Pompilio dedicated his “Syllabica,” a work on rhetoric, “to the ornament and hope of the house of Borgia, the Illustrious Caesar, whose love of letters foretells the greatness that is to be his.”