Many women have I courted and loved: and as soon as I had possessed them, I was filled with loathing for them."
(The Infallible Pius II. lived in the 15th century.)
Inasmuch as the courtesans raised one boy of eighteen, and another of twelve, to the "throne of Saint Peter," you can imagine what sort of lives they led in that gilded brothel, the Pope's palace.
(Pope John XII. was 18 years of age. Pope Benedict IX. was a lad of 12 years. Both were monsters of lust.)
This being the general picture of the Popes, after they quit taking wives, we are not surprised to learn that their mistresses and their bastards were as well known, and as socially respectable, as those of the kings and emperors, who married because it was a duty, and Lotharioed because they found pleasure in it. The illegitimate children of the Vicars of Christ were as undenied and undeniable as were those of Henry of Navarre, Augustus of Saxony, Louis XIV. of France, and Charles II., of England. Don John of Austria, was not more proudly the "woods colt" of Charles V. of Germany, than was Cæsar Borgia the son of His Holiness, Alexander VI. The Duke of Berwick was not better known as the bastard of James II. and Arabella Churchill, than were two of the reigning belles of Rome, not many years ago, recognized as the winsome daughters in the flesh of His Holiness, Pope Pius IX.
To complete the picture, history tells us that Pope John XII., who was made God-on-earth at the age of eighteen, met his death by the hand of an outraged husband, at the age of twenty-five. The furious husband broke into the Pope's bed-room, in the Lateran palace, and slew the adulterer in the arms of the faithless wife.
Even Platina mentions this horrible fact, in his Lives of the Popes, written at the request of Pope Sixtus IV., and published in the year 1479.
Platina was a devout Catholic and was Superintendent of the Vatican Library, Rome, Italy.
In the biography of Petrarch by Jerome Equarciafico, we learn that this poetic dawn-bird of the Renaissance had a beautiful sister, named Selvaggia. Upon this lovely girl, Pope Benedict XII. looked with the eyes of desire. He made infamous proposals to Petrarch, while the poet scornfully rejected. Then His Holiness caused it to be whispered to Petrarch that the Inquisition felt inclined to question him concerning the orthodoxy of his faith. "The Question," meant torture, and Petrarch fled from Avignon for his life. But a younger brother of Selvaggia was more of "a man of the world," as the world went in those days of all-powerful popery; and this brother gave ear to the Pope's temptings. By his connivance, the girl was seized one night, as she slept, and carried into the bedroom of the Vicar of Christ.
When this girl of sixteen realized what was intended, she fell on her knees, and piteously begged the Pope, the Holy Father, to take pity on her.