| #### LEO X |

| #### #### The new pope was only thirty-seven, but a chronic invalid, operated on in the very conclave for a fistula, popular for his easy-going ways and his generosity, likely to strengthen the international position of the papacy for the next few years since he was virtually the ruler of Florence. Pomponius Laetus, Poliziano, and Marsilio Ficino had been his tutors, and in the wealthy cultural palaces of Lorenzo de' Medici he had been fashioned after all the literary and artistic ideals of the age. Though he was not yet a priest he had been a churchman from babyhood. At eight he had been given an archbishopric, [ ] at thirteen he was a cardinal. Then, when he was barely nineteen, the revolution of 1494 had driven his family from Florence, and the cardinal for some years wandered about France and Germany. Alexander VI's court he had only known in the last two or three years of the reign. To Julius II he had been of great political importance, once the Florence dominated by his family's enemies had supported the schismatical Council of Pisa. It was Julius II who had restored the Medici rule in Florence, and now Giovanni, the eldest surviving son of Lorenzo, was pope. #### Only twelve days after the election the threatened alliance between France and Venice (against the new Papal-Imperial pact made by Julius II) was published. How would Leo X react? Muratori has well described his general line of conduct, saying that he always steered by two compasses. A more recent Italian scholar, more familiarly, sees him as an eel slippery beyond belief, ever writhing and twisting to escape the hand that would grasp it. Hardly ever, in fact, was Leo X to make an agreement with any power without simultaneously coming to an understanding with its rivals. He realised fully how weak in resources his state really was, and even at the last extremity he shrank from definitely committing himself to political action. Even in the last agonies of a crisis, he would decide and reverse his decision, and reverse yet again. Secretive, bland, affable, every one's friend, he strove to maintain himself by smiling in silence as the inevitable awkward questions were put. #### So now, when Henry VIII and Maximilian formed a new league that would check the Franco-Venetian alliance, the pope did not join it at once, although he approved, and sent subsidies. Whichever side won he proposed to have claims on its gratitude. On June 6, 1513, the French were heavily defeated on that field where so many armies met, at Novara, and their armies were once more driven out of Italy. Leo exerted himself to prevent their foes from being too completely victorious. But the English also had invaded France. They had taken Terouanne and Tournai, and they had won the battle of Spurs, and also, against the French king's Scots allies, the bloody fight of Flodden. Then in the autumn, Louis XII made his peace with the pope, repudiated the schism and acknowledged the council in session at the Lateran (December 19, 1513). #### But when Louis, exhausted now, proceeded to make with Spain a peace that was definitive, and to offer Ferdinand, as dowry with one of his daughters, the French claims on Milan and Genoa, and to renounce in his favour the French claim on Naples, the shock to the pope was paralysing. The sole result for him would be King Stork in place of King Log. The Spaniards would be masters of Italy in the North as well as in the South. Hence the eagerness of the pope, now, to see peace made between Louis and Henry VIII, his despatch to England and to France of the most experienced diplomatist in his service, [ ] and his joy at the treaty that followed, the peace sealed by the marriage of Henry's youngest sister to the French king. Louis was now tied to the English instead of to Spain (October 1514). But by this treaty of London the English king acknowledged his brother-in-law's rights in Italy ! So, once again, a new anxiety for the pope. Would Louis XII plan yet another invasion of Italy, with the security, this time, that the English would not attack his rear? However, on New Year's day, 1515, Louis XII died, killed by his endeavours to live up to the gaiety of a wife thirty years his junior; and it is on record that the superficial, short-sighted politician in the Vatican rejoiced. In the nature of things no relief could be more than momentary to so folly-ridden a ruler. Louis XII had no son, and so it was that, instead of that elderly broken man, Leo X had now to face a young king of twenty, valorous, ambitious, and capable, Francis I. #### There is not space here to set out in detail all the sinuous writhings of the pontifical diplomacy in these years. The pope's chief confidant was Bernardo Dovizzi, called the Cardinal Bibbiena, his one-time tutor and secretary, a humanist of distinction, but utterly inexperienced in affairs of state, and as cocksure as he was incompetent. While Francis I was preparing a greater army than ever for the conquest of Italy the cardinal laughed at the news as mere gossip, and spoke of the lesson which his new league would soon be teaching the king. But when Francis moved, in July 1515, the pope, whose squandermania had already in two years exhausted the treasure Julius II had left behind, was soon at his wits' end. As to the league, Leo had at last brought himself to sign the pact, but would not have it published, in a desperate hope that he might still, somehow, charm away the advancing French. On August 12, however, by the victory of Villa Franca, they drove a wedge between the Swiss armies that were Italy's only hope. Ten days later Alessandria fell to them; and still the pope, while writing urgent commands to advance, to Bibbiena's twin in incompetence, the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici -- legate with the army -- was sending secret apologies to the French. First he sent an envoy to Francis, and then he hoped the legate would detain the envoy; and then the envoy, and his papers, fell into the hands of the pope's allies. Never was there such incompetent tergiversation since first priests set themselves to play the politician and the soldier. #### But on September 8 the crushing victory of Francis I in the bloody two days' battle of Marignano tore these preposterous activities to shreds. All the north and centre of Italy lay at the mercy of the French, and the pope knew it. The king's terms were hard, but Leo had no choice. In December the two met at Bologna. What passed between them in their several long interviews has never transpired. But the pope lost all the conquests of Julius II, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio, and Modena. He had to forbid the Swiss to molest the king in his duchy of Milan, and he even offered the king a hope of the succession to Naples -- Ferdinand of Aragon lay dying at this moment [ ] -- Francis pledging himself to maintain the Medici in Florence; and the pope came to that arrangement about French ecclesiastical affairs, the Concordat of 1516, which practically placed at the king's mercy the whole system of appointments to abbeys and sees; that the pope also gave the king the right to tax the clergy -- a crusade tithe ! -- to the tune of 400,000 livres in two years is, beside this, a detail. To such disaster had the Medici finesse brought the Church in three short years. [ ] #### Leo's own war was not yet over, however. His vassal the Duke of Urbino had failed to support him against the French, being in secret communication with Francis. At Bologna the victorious king had to leave him to the mercy of the pope. Leo -- despite the debt his family owed the duke, who had given them shelter in the days of their exile from Florence -- determined to destroy him, and to give the duchy to his nephew Lorenzo. The duke, Francesco Maria della Rovere, did not wait to be defeated by the combined forces of the pope and Florence, but fled to Mantua, where the duke his father-in-law took him in. By the end of June 1516, the Medici were lords of Urbino and Pesaro and Sinigaglia. The King of France had been too caught up with other affairs to be able to prevent it, but he warned Leo not to make any attempt on the other great papal vassal at Ferrara, reminding him that Reggio and Modena were to be surrendered to Ferrara. Then, in January, 1517 the dispossessed Duke of Urbino returned, with a force of Spanish and German mercenaries, unemployed since the recent general peace. Everyone helped him who hated the Medici, the French viceroy in Milan, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara too. The pope was by now all but bankrupt, his army mutinous for lack of pay, and he had no real generals. Nor did Cardinal Bibbiena avail greatly as a peacemaker among the papal mercenaries. And at this moment, at Rome, a plot was discovered to murder the pope, and the chief plotters were cardinals. #### Leo X had been pope now (April 1517) for a little more than four years; he was half-way through his reign. The whole spirit of the papal court had already, in that short time, been transformed. Under Julius II, if it had not been religious and spiritual, it had at least become decorous. The wild scandals of the previous twenty years had been checked, and the pope's understanding of the gravity of the tasks before him effected a certain seriousness everywhere. With the election of Giovanni de' Medici there was a rapid return to the days of Alexander VI, and the young pope led the rout. He had indeed been born, and he now showed it, one of the spoiled darlings of fortune. The years of wandering and exile that had followed upon his brilliant introduction to the high places of life, were now to find their compensation. "Everything unpleasant was removed as far as possible from him, for an insatiable thirst for pleasure was his leading characteristic." [ ] His chosen friends were the young cardinals who had brought about his election. Hardly one of them led a life that was not disreputable, and of the friends whom later he himself promoted to the Sacred College the greater part were, like himself, worldly triflers, wealth-devouring amusement hunters. [ ] Leo was passionately fond of music, and he loved equally that newest of cultural amusements, the theatre. In the Vatican the revels were indeed more seemly than in the heyday of the Borgia -- sexual irregularity was not among Leo's vices -- but the comedies performed before the pope could include such indecencies as the Mandragola of Machiavelli and the Calandria of Leo's bosom friend Cardinal Bibbiena. In the summer the pope would leave Rome for the country, and sport was now the all-absorbing occupation. To give, to scatter money indiscriminately to all who asked for it, was one of his greatest pleasures. Merit, well-studied needs, played little part in the directing of this largesse. Buffoons, comedians, the chance passer-by, the beggar who happened to move his sympathy, the servant who attracted his notice, all these were welcome to whatever the pope had in his pocket. And others too, with real claims upon the money, if they happened to be there at the lucky moment. #### This was the setting against which the new papal game of false and double-dealing diplomacy was played which, to the great world of Christendom, was now the papacy in action. The pope, says Pastor, "was not a man of deep interior religion." This would seem likely. But he fasted three days each week, and if he said mass more rarely than, for generations now, has been the normal practice of all priests, he was careful to hear mass every day, and whenever he did celebrate he prepared himself by first making his confession. #### The Petrucci conspiracy of 1517 is a violent reminder of the truth that morality is a single whole, and that to tamper with one particular precept is to risk bringing down the whole arch. . .One of the many mischievous novelties in papal practice since the election of Sixtus IV was the way in which the kinsmen of reigning princes were made cardinals simply as an act of favour to the prince. At the death of Alexander VI, in 1503, there was hardly a state in Italy whose ruler had not a son or brother who was a cardinal. Siena was one of the few states to lack such a court cardinal, and Julius II brought Siena into the system when, in 1512, he gave the red hat to Alfonso Petrucci, twenty years of age, the brother of the lord of Siena. Petrucci, a few months later, played a great part in the election of Leo X and he was soon one of the new pope's intimates. But Leo, who was nothing if not false, was soon intriguing to displace Petrucci's brother in Siena, and to instal in his place another member of the family, who would be less of a hindrance to the Medici ambitions. [ ] The revolution succeeded, and the cardinal turned against the pope (1516). #### He began to intrigue with the dispossessed Duke of Urbino, and to express his mind to other cardinals already discontented with Leo X. In 1516 he left Rome for the country, but continued to keep his party together, it would seem, through his steward in Rome, Marco Nino. Suddenly the steward was arrested, suspected of being a link in intrigues with the Duke of Urbino. A letter in cipher was found on him, and when put to the torture the steward surrendered the key. Cardinal Petrucci, so it was alleged the cipher made known, was arranging with a physician to poison the pope. This doctor was, or claimed to be an expert in the treatment of fistula. He was to be introduced to the pope as a specialist and then make away with him. By a trick the pope now induced Petrucci to come back to Rome. He was immediately arrested and with him another cardinal, his friend Sauli, also young, and a one-time intimate of Leo. This was on May 19, 1517, and that same day the pope explained to the consistory what had happened and appointed three cardinals to study and report on the findings of the enquiry that would now open. The enquiry itself was in the hands of the pope's law officers. #### Meanwhile Florence had obligingly arrested the physician and handed him over to the pope. He was speedily put to the torture, and so, it would seem, were the two cardinals. On May 29 there was a second consistory, to hear the interim report of the three cardinals; and now a third cardinal was arrested and thrown into St. Angelo. This was Riario Sansoni, that great- nephew of Sixtus IV whose life had already been so tragically interwoven with that of Leo X. Petrucci and Sauli had confessed that he was in the business too. Ten days later still, there was a third consistory. The pope had now before him fresh admissions from the prisoners, and the names of two more cardinals. He did not immediately announce these, but craftily tried by promises and threats and a general accusation -- "Some of you sitting here were in it too, and I know who," was the line he took -- to gain yet more information. None was forthcoming, however, and the names of the two new accused had to be read out. They were Soderini and Adriano de Castello, two cardinals of Alexander VI's last promotion in 1503. Soderini, with tears, confessed his guilt and asked for mercy. The other admitted that Petrucci had spoken to him of his wish to see the pope put out of the way, but said that from the way the young man spoke he had not taken it seriously. The three cardinals of the commission decided that these two should be fined, each of them, 12,500 ducats; and on their pledging themselves to pay this, and not to leave Rome until they had done so, the pope forgave them. #### This seems an extraordinary way for a sovereign to deal with accessories in a plot to murder him. But still stranger was the fact that, when the cardinals paid the enormous fines, they were told that the pope now wanted as much again from each of them. This was on June 18, and two days later the two cardinals, no doubt unable to raise the new fines, fled from Rome. #### On June 22, in a fourth consistory, the result was announced of the trial [ ] of the three cardinals imprisoned in St. Angelo. The pope declared that they had been found guilty of treason: for plotting during a pope's lifetime to make one of their number pope, for plotting the pope's murder, and for their dealings with the Duke of Urbino. The debates in the consistory were very long and stormy. For nine or ten hours pope and cardinals remained together, the sound of their voices, as they shouted and interrupted one another, heard by the attendants in the anticamera without. Finally the cardinals [ ] voted that the guilt of the three accused had been proved, and asked the pope to show them mercy. But Leo was inexorable, and confirmed the sentence demanded by the prosecution. Their goods were to be confiscated, they were to be degraded, and to be put to death. #### Five days after this scene the lesser fry of the plot, the physician and the steward, were put to death, their flesh torn from their bones with red hot pincers at intervals during the procession to the place of execution, where finally they were hanged, drawn and quartered. On July 4 Petrucci was secretly put to death in St. Angelo, a Moor being employed for the purpose. #### Now came another strange circumstance. The other two cardinals who lay under the same sentence were pardoned, and even restored to their dignities, and all in a generous, even lighthearted way, confessing their guilt and that they were even more guilty than they had told already, but agreeing to pay enormous fines cash down. Sauli paid 25,000 ducats; but Riario, one of the wealthiest of the cardinals -- as he was one of the most venerated -- entered into a bond to pay really staggering sums. There was a fine of 150,000 ducats [ ] -- 50,000 of it to be paid immediately and the rest within six months -- and a bail of like amount to be found that he would not leave Rome without the pope's permission. These bonds [ ] were signed on July 17 and in a consistory seven days later Riario was restored, Leo receiving him almost affectionately. But Riario was finished. He lingered on in a kind of chronic melancholia until he died, July 7, 1521. Five months later Leo also died, so deeply in debt, so well and truly plundered in the short interval between death and burial, that the only lights they could find to burn round his coffin were the remains of the candles that had served for Riario. [ ] #### The conspiracy, and the judicial proceedings at Rome, extremely scandalous surely, have also this interest that they fall between the closing scenes of the General Council and the appearance of Luther. [ ] They are, indeed, almost the last thing to occupy the pope's attention before the Reformation came to force purely religious questions violently upon it. But one last political problem there was. It coincided with the beginnings of Luther's demonstration, and such was its importance that the politically-minded pope hoped, by solving it, to settle also the little matter of Luther. The problem was who should be emperor when Maximilian, old beyond his years and now obviously breaking up, should come to die. In many respects the high office had, for centuries now, been little more than a great ceremonial distinction. An emperor was effective just to the extent that he could persuade the myriad princes of Germany to support him. The dignity was not hereditary, but for the last eighty years it had remained in the family of Habsburg, which as yet was not of any great territorial importance. It was indeed so poor a family that the contrast between Maximilian's pretentions and his resources had been one of the jokes of Europe during all the time he reigned (1493-1519). His only son had died in 1506 and the old emperor greatly desired, and was actively working for, the election of his eldest grandson Charles. This was the young man of eighteen who, since 1506, had been Duke of Burgundy, ruler that is of the Low Countries and of Franche Comte, and since 1516 King of Spain and of Naples. Upon Maximilian's death he would inherit the German domains of the Habsburgs, not only Austria proper but provinces which, for a hundred miles or more, had a common frontier with Venice. Were a prince so splendidly dowered with hereditary possessions to become emperor, who could say what new reality might not be infused into the ancient title? And how could the future of Italy not lie entirely in his hands? No pope could be indifferent to such a possible menace, nor could the Medici pope be indifferent to the effect upon his family's precarious hold on Florence of the appearance of an emperor who was already such a power in Italy. #### It was, then, inevitable that Leo X should work against the candidature of the young King of Spain. The event was a striking demonstration how weak was the pope's political influence. Maximilian died on January 20, 1519, there followed six months packed with diplomatic manoeuvre, and on June 28 Charles was unanimously elected. As the emperor Charles V he was to reign for thirty-seven momentous years. #### In these manoeuvres Leo played his wonted part. The new King of France, Francis I, was also a candidate for the succession, and when, in April 1518, it became evident that there was some opposition in Germany to the election of the King of Spain, the pope began to negotiate with Francis and to persuade him to offer himself in opposition to Charles. On January 20, 1519, he made a treaty with Francis that was really a pledge of support; and, characteristically, he made a secret treaty, of the same kind, at the same time, with Charles. But from the moment when Maximilian's death made the matter urgent, Leo gave up his pretence and began strongly to oppose the King of Spain. He still, however, had a double game to play. The pope did not in reality wish to see the imperial prestige in the hands of France. This would have been as dangerous a combination as the other. The pope had a candidate of his own, the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, ever since, in September 1518, this prince had declared himself opposed to the election of Charles. And since that date Leo had been secretly working for him. He still, in the spring of 1519, worked for Francis, offering the cardinalate to two of the electors should the King of France be chosen, and a legateship for life to the third archbishop-elector -- the Archbishop of Mainz -- who was already a cardinal. He even went so far as to say that if they alone should vote for Francis -- three out of the seven electors -- he would recognise the election as valid. But he only received snubs from these ecclesiastical princes, who denied his power to interfere with the procedure of the election. #### By the end of May the pope realised that there was no chance for Francis I. By now it was hardly safe for a Frenchman to show himself in Germany, and the pope's nuncio had to flee for his life from Mainz. Leo turned to work for his own candidate. On June 7 he wrote declaring that if the Elector of Saxony could persuade two others to vote for him, and would add to these his own vote, the pope would recognise him as emperor. The Elector was Luther's sovereign, and nine months before this he had firmly refused the pope's request to arrest Luther and send him to Rome. The imperial dignity was now to be his through the pope's intervention -- such was Leo's really childish plan -- and Frederick, in gratitude, would hand over the heresiarch. And to keep Frederick in good humour all these nine critical months, the pope had, to all seeming, let the business of Luther fall into the limbo of forgotten cases. #### Nevertheless Frederick was not to be caught. By June 17 Leo understood how powerless he was. He would not, he said, run his head against a stone wall. He removed the long-standing papal prohibition -- it went back to Clement IV and the now far- off days of Charles of Anjou -- that his vassal the King of Naples should accept the imperial crown, and when the news of the election reached him, he offered the accustomed words of approbation and good will. What had he effected, except to root in the young king's mind an idea which he would never lose that popes were politicians, to be treated as such? and in the minds of Catholics in Germany a suspicion that religion, for the pope, was secondary to the needs of politics? Nor was this, even yet, the end of Leo's duplicity. In September (1519) he made yet another secret treaty with France, pledging himself not to recognise Charles as King of Naples so long as he retained the imperial crown. Then, relations with Francis -- youthful, arrogant, bullying, and as crafty as the pope -- growing steadily worse, the pope again negotiated simultaneously contradictory treaties with him and with the emperor (January-April 1521). The problem of Luther could not possibly be solved without the emperor's cooperation. The Spanish ambassador in Rome explained to Charles how useful the pope's fear of "a certain monk known as Brother Martin" might be to extort concessions; and, indeed, for the last eighteen months of the pope's life, anxiety about the new heretic wholly filled his mind. #### Leo's death found him again at war, despite all diplomacy, and the ally of Charles V against France. The war began in the summer of 1521, and after some setbacks and delays that greatly tried the pope's anxious soul, the French were driven from Milan, and Piacenza and Parma were reconquered. This was better news, said Leo, than even the news of his election as pope. Arrangements were in progress for a great thanksgiving service, when the pope fell ill (November 26). He had taken a chill as he sat watching the fireworks with which his Swiss were celebrating the victory. In the evening of December 1 he suddenly collapsed, and by midnight he was dead, at forty-six. #### The pope's sudden death caused a financial panic. For nearly nine years he had lived with the utmost extravagance; there had been the expenses of the war of Urbino to meet; and now the still heavier expenses of the war against France. To cover the deficit every expedient had been used. Over 1,300 new offices and distinctions had been created, the sale of which brought in a sum equal to two years of the annual revenue. By 1521 the total number of these saleable offices was 2,150, their capital value 3,000,000 ducats -- seven times the annual revenue. [ ] Great sums had been raised at the creation of the numerous cardinals, there had been the astronomical fines of the cardinals involved in the conspiracy of 1517. Then the pope borrowed -- from his friends, his officials, his cardinals, and the banks, paying as high an interest as 26 per cent for six months. And he pawned whatever he could, plate from his table, jewels, the silver statues from his chapel. Meanwhile the troops went unpaid, the brilliant corps of scholars recruited for the pope's university, the artists, even Raphael and San Gallo. The pope died 850,000 ducats in debt, owing amongst others the Bini bank 200,000, and -- one is glad to know it -- his friend and kinsman, and evil genius, Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci [ ] 150,000. ####  |