CHAPTER II.
A Franciscan Pope and a Franciscan Cardinal.—A notable illustration of the proverb concerning mendicant's rides.—The Nemesis of Despotism.
The first news that reached the Court of Milan, after the return of the Duke, full of gratified vanity and glorification from his progress, was that of the death of Pope Paul II.,—that superb old man, who, if he had none other of the qualities befitting the head of the Church, yet at least looked every inch a Pope; of whom one of the chroniclers of the time says, that not having succeeded very well in his attempts at literary culture, "he determined to make his pontificate reputable by ornamental pomp, in which his majestic presence, and pre-eminently tall and noble person helped him not a little, giving him, as it did, the appearance of a new Aaron, venerable and reverend beyond that of any other Pontiff."
And the tidings of the death of this magnificent lay-figure Pope were very shortly followed by the yet more interesting news of the election of his successor, on the 9th of August, 1471.
A FRIAR POPE.
This successor was Francesco della Rovere, who had risen from the cell of a Franciscan friar by his merit as a scholar and theologian, and by his eloquence as a preacher, to be first, General of his order, then Cardinal; and now reached, as Sixtus IV., the highest aim of an ecclesiastic's ambition. He was the son of a poor fisherman of the coast near Savona. For the fiction of the heralds, who found for him a place in the genealogy of the noble family of the same name, was an afterthought of the time, when such a relationship was acceptable to all the parties concerned. For though the Borghesi decidedly objected, as we have seen, to own any connection with a roturiere saint, the Della Rovere were well pleased enough to find a kinsman in a Pope, whose greatness manifested an immediate tendency to take a quite terrestrial and tangible shape.
For this barefooted mendicant friar—the vowed disciple of that St. Francis whom no degree of poverty would satisfy short of meeting his death naked and destitute on the bare earth—this monk, sworn to practise an humility abject in the excess of its utter self-abnegation, was the first of a series of popes who one after the other sacrificed every interest of the Church, waded mitre deep in crime and bloodshed, and plunged Italy into war and misery, for the sake of founding a princely family of their name.