The last phase is, in its way, not less repulsive. By heartless treachery and brilliant fighting Cæsar spread his sway over central Italy and Alexander watched and spurred his progress. The Pope's attendants had to endure unaccustomed fits of anger and abuse when his son did not advance rapidly enough. He treacherously arrested Cardinal Orsini; and the Cardinal's aged mother, who was ejected from her palace, had to send to the Pope (by Orsini's mistress) a magnificent pearl which Alexander coveted before she was allowed to provide her son with decent food. Cardinal Orsini died, and his property was confiscated. Cardinal Michiel died, and his fortune of 150,000 ducats was appropriated. The College of Cardinals trembled and the famous legend of the Borgia poison spread over Italy.[284] Nine new cardinals, mostly of unworthy character, were created and are said to have paid 130,000 ducats for the dignity, and 64,000 ducats were raised by inventing new offices in the Curia. Alexander, although seventy-two years old, was in robust health, and looked forward to years of pleasure under the protection of his victorious son. And one night in the unhealthy heat of August (the 5th or 6th) he and Cæsar sat late at supper with Cardinal Adriano da Corneto. Romance has it that the poisoned wine they intended for their host was served to them: modern history is content with the known malaria of an autumn night.[285] On August 18th Alexander died, and both Cæsar and Cardinal Adriano were seriously ill.
Of other actions of Alexander his connexion with Savonarola alone demands some consideration, and it must be treated briefly. On July 25, 1495, Alexander, in friendly terms, summoned Savonarola to Rome to give an account of the prophetic gifts he claimed. Alexander was very tolerant of criticisms of his vices, except where they might provoke kings to summon a council, and it is probable that he wished to silence the politician rather than the preacher; Savonarola vigorously supported the idea of an alliance of Florence with France, which the Pope opposed. Savonarola evaded the summons to Rome, and the Pope suspended him from preaching and endeavoured to destroy his authority by joining the San Marco convent to the Lombard Congregation. Savonarola defeated the Pope on the latter point, and on February 11, 1496, he returned to his pulpit, in defiance of the Pope's order and at the command of the Signoria of Florence. In explanation of his act he urged that Alexander's Brief was based on false information and invalid, and he denounced Roman corruption more freely than ever. Alexander, in November, directed that a new congregation should be formed out of the Roman and Tuscan convents,[286] and when Savonarola and his monks again defeated the project, the Pope had recourse to secular measures.
A mind like that of the exalted and feverish preacher was not likely to escape error and exaggeration in such circumstances, and his opponents in Florence made progress. Alexander now offered the coveted possession of Pisa to the Signoria if they would desert Savonarola and the idea of a French alliance. The monk was forbidden by the authorities to preach, and his defiance of the Signoria as well as the Papacy led to disorders of which the Pope took advantage to publish a sentence of excommunication (June 18, 1497). Alexander had meantime again listened to entreaties of delay and inquiry, but when he heard that the monk defied his anathema he said that the sentence must take its course. Up to this point the Pope had, in view of the very strong support which Savonarola had at Florence, proceeded with moderation, though we may resent the insincerity of his attack; it was not the prophecies, but the policy and the puritanism, of Savonarola which interested him. He complained bitterly to the Florentine ambassadors of Savonarola's attacks on himself and the cardinals, and was, as always, alarmed by the monk's demand of a General Council. However, the monk, not realizing the progress made by his enemies, struck a louder note of defiance, and on the plea of the public disorders to which he gave rise, he was arrested and put on trial. Alexander willingly granted the authorities a tithe on the ecclesiastical property at Florence when they announced the arrest. The sensitive monk was, by torture, driven into some vague disavowal of his supernatural pretensions, and he and two other friars were, on May 23, 1498, hanged by the Florentine authorities as "heretics, schismatics, and contemners of the Holy See." The sentence, however corruptly obtained, was technically just, since in the legislation of the time contumacious defiance of the Papacy implied heresy; but the respective positions of Savonarola and Alexander VI. in the history of religious progress are a sufficient monument to the bravery and inflexibility of the great Florentine puritan.
There are few good deeds to be put in the scale against the crimes and vices of Alexander VI. He made a considerable, though futile, effort to rouse Christendom against the advancing Turks. He fortified Sant' Angelo, and engaged Pinturicchio to decorate the Vatican apartments. He pressed the propagation of the faith in the New World, ordered the examination and authorization of printed books, endeavoured to check heresy in Bohemia, and vigorously defended the rights of the Church in the Netherlands. These things cannot alter our estimate of his character. He was a selfish voluptuary of—in view of his position—the most ignoble type; he countenanced and employed fraud, treachery, and crime; and the condition in which we shall soon find the Papacy will show that his policy had not the redeeming merit of effecting the security of the institution over which he ignominiously presided.
FOOTNOTES:
[271] The letter is given in Raynaldus, Annales Ecclesiastici, year 1460, n. 31, and is translated in Bishop Mathew's Life and Times of Rodrigo Borgia (1912), p. 35. It is misrepresented in Baron Corvo's Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901, p. 64). The chief apologist for Alexander, A. Leonetti (Papa Alessandro VI., 1880), made the easy suggestion that the letter was a forgery, but Cardinal Hergenroether found the original in the Vatican archives. See the able essay by Comte H. de L'Épinois (another Catholic writer) in the Revue des Questions Historiques (April 1, 1881), p. 367. He shows, by the use of original documents, that the apologetic efforts of Ollivier, Leonetti, and a few others, are futile. Of these efforts the leading Catholic historian of the Papacy, Dr. L. Pastor, observes: "In the face of such a perversion of the truth, it is the duty of the historian to show that the evidence against Rodrigo is so strong as to render it impossible to restore his reputation" (The History of the Popes, ii., 542).
[272] The decisive documents, from the archives of the Duke of Ossuna, are published by Thuasne in his edition of Burchard's Diarium (Appendix to vol. iii.). Dr. Pastor (ii., 453) has a good summary of them, and there is other evidence in the Lucrezia Borgia of Gregorovius. See also the essay of Comte H. de L'Épinois, quoted above, and "Don Rodrigo de Borja und seine Söhne," by C.R. von Höfler, in the Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bd. 73. The chief original authorities are J. Burchard (Diarium, edited by Thuasne, 3 vols., 1884) and S. Infessura (Diario, in Muratori, iii.), and the despatches of the Italian ambassadors at Rome. Burchard and Infessura are gossipy and hostile, and must be controlled. Recent works on the Borgias are too apt to reproduce lightly the romantic statements of later Italian historians or contemporary Neapolitan enemies. The work of Bishop Mathew, to which I have referred, is less judicious than his volume on Hildebrand. Bishop Creighton's History of the Papacy is rather too indulgent to Alexander and needs supplementing by the documents in Pastor and Thuasne.
[273] M. Brosch, the scholarly author of a study of Julius II. (Papst Julius II., 1878), observes that research in the Rovere archives has discovered no trace of the Paolo Riario who is assigned as the father of Sixtus's nephews, and concludes that they were his natural sons. But Paolo Riario is expressly mentioned in the funeral oration on Cardinal Pietro Riario, and is more fully described in Leone Cobelli's Cronache Forlivesi. There is no sound reason to impeach the chastity of this Pope, as even Creighton does.
[274] The gold ducat is estimated at about ten shillings of English money, but probably this does not express its full purchasing power.
[275] See the dispatches quoted in Thuasne's Burchard, vol. ii.