In the Conclave it was soon apparent that neither Rodrigo nor Giuliano could command the necessary two thirds of the votes, and they agreed to adopt Cardinal Cibò, a Genoese noble who had outburned the passions of youth before he entered the service of the Church. During the night of August 28-29, when the supporters of Cardinal Barbo (who seemed to be sure of election) had confidently retired to their cells, Rodrigo and Giuliano, by intrigue and bribery, secured a majority for Cibò.[275] He became Innocent VIII. the next morning, and during the eight years of his amiable and futile Pontificate the College of Cardinals steadily sank. Innocent's natural son was drawn from his decent obscurity and made one of the richest and fastest nobles of Rome; and women were hardly safe even in their own homes when Franceschetto Cibò roamed the streets at night, with his cut-throats, in one of his wine-flushed moods. He took so ardently to the new cardinalitial pastime of gambling that in one night he lost 100,000 ducats to Cardinal Riario. Cardinal la Balue left at his death a fortune of 100,000 ducats. Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of the ruler of Milan, was the leading sportsman of Roman society. Cardinal Lorenzo Cibò owed his red hat to the fortunate circumstance that he was an illegitimate son of the Pope's brother. Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, who was one day to be Leo X., had received the tonsure in his eighth year and the title of cardinal in his fourteenth. Cardinals Savelli, Sclafenati, and Sanseverino were members of the fast and luxurious group. Each cardinal maintained a large palace, with hundreds of gay-liveried servants and ready swordsmen, and the wealthier seem to have studied with care the pages in which Macrobius describes the exquisite or colossal banquets of the older pagans. Each—apart from the minority of grave and virtuous cardinals—had his faction in the city, and, as carnival time approached, they were engrossed for weeks in the preparation of the superb cars and brilliant troops of horse by which each sought to prove his superior fitness for the chair of Gregory I. and Gregory VII. Innocent VIII. smiled; and the thunders gathered beyond the Alps.
The state of Rome was in accord with the state of the Sacred College. We may hesitate to believe Infessura when he tells us that, if criminals were by some chance arrested, they bought their liberty at the Vatican; but we have in Burchard's Diary a sombre, incidental indication of the condition of Rome. There is in modern literature some tendency to look with indulgent eye on the coloured gaiety of late mediæval Rome, but—to say nothing of the ideals which the cardinals professed—the insecurity of life and property and the widespread brutality show that this license was far removed from genuine Humanism. Some years later, when Rodrigo's son Juan was murdered, a boatman said, when they asked why he had not reported seeing a body cast into the river, that it was not customary to have any inquiry made into a nightly occurrence of that kind. Rodrigo Borgia, the Vice-Chancellor, paid no heed to this condition of the city. He added year by year to the long list of his bishoprics and emoluments, and prepared to renew the struggle for the tiara. He lost, or discarded, Vannozza when she married her third husband in 1486 and entered upon a more sordid and equally notorious liaison. His cousin, Adriana Orsini, had charge of a young orphan, Giulia Farnese, a very beautiful, golden-haired girl. She married Adriana's son, Orso Orsini, in 1489—her fifteenth year—and at the same time became the Cardinal's mistress. Adriana was rewarded with a considerable influence and the charge of the young Lucrezia Borgia.[276]
The death of Innocent on July 25, 1492, led to fierce intrigue and passionate encounters. There were more than two hundred murders in Rome during the fourteen days before the Conclave, for which twenty-two cardinals were, on August 6th, immured in the Sistine Chapel. Giuliano della Rovere had spoiled his prospect by too patent a use of his influence on Innocent VIII., and Borgia set himself to win the next most important rival, Ascanio Sforza. Historians sometimes smile at the statement of Infessura, that four mule-loads of silver passed from Borgia's palace to that of Sforza, but it is not improbable. For some centuries there had been a custom (abolished a few years later by Leo X.) of sacking the palace of the cardinal who was elected Pope, and it was not unusual to take precautions. Borgia may have sent the silver on this pretext, as Infessura suggests, and he would hardly expect it to be returned. It is, in fact, now certain that Sforza was bribed with gifts far more valuable than Borgia's table silver; Borgia offered, and afterwards gave him, his splendid palace, the Vice-Chancellorship, the bishopric of Erlan (worth 10,000 ducats a year), and other appointments. The sober Cardinal Colonna accepted the abbey of Subiaco (or 2000 ducats a year). Eleven cardinals seem to have sold their votes, and Borgia already had three supporters and his own vote. He secured his majority and hastily retired behind the altar, where Papal vestments of three sizes were laid out, and the genial Romans presently roared their greetings to Alexander VI.[277]
Rome and Italy then sustained their parts in the comedy. Alexander, although now sixty years old, was a vigorous and capable man, and some advantage would be expected from his Pontificate. But one's sense of humour is excited when one reads in Burchard's Diary, or in the letter (reproduced by Thuasne) written by the General of the Camaldolite monks, the description of the rejoicings at Rome. After the coronation at St. Peter's on August 27th, Alexander received, on the steps of the great church, the greetings of the orators who represented the northern cities. One wonders what was the countenance of the massed prelates and nobles when the Genoese orator read: "Thou art so adorned with the glory of virtue, the merit of discipline, the holiness of thy life ... that we must hesitate to say whether it is more proper to offer thee to the Pontificate or to offer that most sacred and glorious dignity to thee." And, as Alexander passed in stately procession to the Lateran, he read on the triumphal arches which adorned the route, such maxims as "Chastity and Charity," and "Great was Rome under Cæsar, now is she most great. Alexander the Sixth reigns: Cæsar was a man, this is a God."
I make no apology for inserting these apparently trivial details in so condensed a narrative. They, most of all, illumine the next momentous phase of the history of the Papacy. In that year, 1492, a little German boy, named Martin Luther, sat at his books in the remote town of Mansfeld.
Infessura records that Alexander opened his Pontificate with large promises and small instalments of reform. He was going to improve the condition of Rome and the Church, to pacify Italy, and to check the Turks; he would remove his children from Rome and reduce the number of sinecures at the Curia. He did, in fact, make a drastic beginning of the administration of justice, and even appointed certain hours during which he would himself hear grievances. Possibly he had a sincere mood of reform; though we are not disposed to be charitable when we recall the appalling levity with which, a few years later, after the murder of his son, he returned to vicious ways. Whatever his initial mood was, he soon entered upon courses which made his Pontificate one of the most degraded in the annals of the Papacy. Modern research has discredited some of the most romantic crimes attributed to him, but it leaves on his memory an indictment which no eager search for good qualities can materially lessen.
He sustained the scandal of his personal conduct until the end of his life, and I will dismiss it briefly. During the first four years of his Pontificate, the youthful Giulia Orsini was his chief favorita—others are occasionally mentioned with that title by the ambassadors—and she was known to the wits of Rome as "the Spouse of Christ." She and Adriana Orsini and Girolama (the Pope's elder daughter) are described as "the heart and eyes of Alexander," and suitors had to seek their favour. When Giulia's brother Alexander received the red hat (Sept. 20, 1493), Rome gave the future Pope—who was by no means without personal merit—the name of "The Petticoat Cardinal." When her daughter Laura was born in 1497, the Pope was generally believed to be the father; though that remains a mere rumour. Pucci, in one of his dispatches, gives us a quaint picture. Giulia lived in Lucrezia's palace, apart from her husband, and, when the ambassador called one day in 1493, she dressed her long golden hair in his presence, and insisted that he must see the baby; and he remarks that the baby was "so very like the Pope that one can readily believe he was the father." Giulia was an almost indispensable figure for some years at the domestic (and even greater than domestic) festivities in the Vatican, laughing with the cardinals at the prurient comedies and still more prurient dances which enlivened the sacred palace.[278]
The last child attributed to him, though not accepted by all the authorities, seems to have been born in 1496 (his sixty-sixth year). There is a document dated September 1, 1501, legitimizing a certain Juan Borgia, but there are two versions of this document.[279] The first version describes him as the child of Cæsar Borgia: the second says that he was born "not of the said Duke, but of us [Alexander] and the said married woman." Creighton made the singular suggestion that possibly Alexander was giving prestige to an illegitimate offspring of his son, but it is now agreed that the second version is the more authentic; it was to be kept in reserve for some grave dispute of his rights. The distinguished Venetian Senator Sanuto tells us[280] that, according to letters received from the Venetian ambassador at Rome and from private persons, the Pope had, about this time, a child by a married Roman lady, with the connivance of her father, and that the angry husband slew his father-in-law and stuck his head on a pole, with the inscription: "Head of my father-in-law, who prostituted his daughter to the Pope." These concurrent testimonies are grave. Most historians now rightly reject the charge that Alexander was intimate with his daughter Lucrezia, since it rests only on bitterly hostile Neapolitan gossip; but we cannot so easily set aside the persistent statements of the ambassadors that a new favorita appears at the Vatican from time to time. These were sometimes ladies of Lucrezia's suite.
Lucrezia, a merry, childish-looking, golden-haired girl, with her father's high spirits and constant smile, is not likely to have remained virtuous in such surroundings, but there is no serious evidence of incest. Before her father's election she was betrothed to a Spanish youth of moderate family, but her father cancelled the espousals and married her, at the Vatican, in 1493, to Giovanni Sforza. She was then, it is calculated, fifteen years old. Twelve cardinals and a hundred and fifty of the great ladies of Rome attended the wedding; and some of the prettier ladies remained to sup with the Pope and cardinals, and applaud the loose comedies he provided. Giulia and Lucrezia were present. When the Pope's policy estranged him from Milan, he forced Lucrezia's husband to swear that the marriage had not been consummated, and dissolved it. It seems probable that Giovanni, in revenge, then put into circulation the suggestion of incest. Lucrezia married Alfonso of Naples, who was murdered by her brother in 1500. She then married the son of the Duke of Ferrara: and there is perhaps no more terrible indictment of the Papal Court under Alexander than the fact that, when his daughter was removed from it to Ferrara, she earned, and kept until her death, a just repute for virtue and benevolence.
These marriages introduce us to Alexander's political activity, on which some recent historians have passed a somewhat lenient judgment. Apart, however, from the treachery and brutality with which his aims were often enforced, we shall find that at his death he left the Papacy almost landless and impoverished, and we must conclude that his chief objects were his personal security and the aggrandizement of his children.