A Book of the Riviera

by S. Baring-Gould

SAVONA

“The plebeian violence of the Della Rovere temper,” says Mr. Addington Symonds, “reached a climax in Giovanni’s son, the Duke Francesco Maria, who murdered his sister’s lover with his own hands, when a youth of sixteen, and stabbed the Papal Legate to death in the streets of Bologna, when at the age of twenty, and knocked Guicciardini, the historian, down with a blow of his fist during a council of war in 1526.

“Christendom beheld in Sixtus the spectacle of a Pope who trafficked in the bodies of his subjects, and the holy things of God, to squander basely-gotten gold upon abandoned minions. The peace of Italy was destroyed by desolating wars in the advancement of the same worthless favourites. Sixtus destroyed to annex Ferrara to the dominions of Girolamo Riario. Nothing stood in his way but the House of Este, firmly planted for centuries and connected by marriage or alliance with the chief families of Italy. The Pope, whose lust for blood and broils were equalled only by his avarice and his libertinism, rushed with wild delight into a project which involved the discord of the whole peninsula. He made treaties with Venice and unmade them, stirred up all the passions of the despots and set them together by the ears, called the Swiss mercenaries into Lombardy, and when, finally, tired of fighting for his nephew, the Italian powers concluded the peace of Bagnolo, he died of rage in 1484. The Pope did actually die of disappointed fury, because peace had been restored to the country he had mangled for the sake of a favourite nephew.”

This Pope seemed unable to exist without some cringing favourite about his person. In 1463 he made his valet, a lad of no character and parts, of base birth, with nothing but his good looks and obsequiousness to speak for him—Cardinal and Bishop of Parma, when his age was only twenty.

Sixtus was always impecunious. To replenish his treasury he had two resources. One was the public sale of places about the Court, and of benefices and of ecclesiastical privileges. “Our churches, priests, altars, sacred rites, our prayers, even heaven and our God, are all purchasable,” is the exclamation of Baptista Mantuanus, a scholar of the period. His second expedient was the monopoly of corn throughout the Papal States. Fictitious dearths were created; the value of wheat was raised to famine prices, and good grain was sold out of the States of the Church and bad grain was imported, that the Pope might pocket the profits of the transaction. Sixtus forced his subjects to buy at his stores, and regarded their sufferings, and the disease bred of famine, with indifferent eye.

But, bad as he was, Sixtus did some good things. He laid the basis of the great Vatican library, built a bridge over the Tiber, and widened some of the streets.

To him is due the introduction into the calendar of the Feasts of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, also of the Presentation in the Temple, and of Ste. Anne, all three of which find their place in the Anglican calendar; also of S. Joseph.

Sixtus happily put an end to the cruel persecution of the “Spirituals,” a branch of the Franciscan Order which advocated absolute poverty, and adherence to the original mandates of the founder. Their prophet and theologian had been d’Oliva. Pope John XXII. had pronounced the writings of d’Oliva heretical, and had handed over the “Spirituals” to the Inquisition, to be dealt with as heretics. Between 1316 and 1352 as many as 114 of them were burnt at the stake; but Sixtus IV. reversed the judgment of John XXII. and declared this teaching of Oliva to be orthodox; so that those who had been burnt in accordance with the judgment of one Pope, were martyrs for the truth according to the decision of another.

Sixtus died in 1484.