SIXTUS IV

With the advent of Sixtus IV, in 1471, the flood does, indeed, seem to pour over the edge of the abyss; the failures and the surrenders are suddenly more grossly material -- and, being this, they are more evidently shocking, shocking now to the least reflective, and perhaps, to these, the most shocking of all. The age of the della Rovere, Borgia, and Medici popes has become, in popular repute, the most scandalous age of all. But sinfulness of this kind -- whether, in the manner of old- fashioned Protestant controversy, we gloat over it as a final proof that the papacy is the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, or whether, horror stricken, we strive to minimise it in a new apologetic -- was chiefly important in its distraction of the ruler from activities that would have made Protestantism impossible, from the devising of ways, for example, through which good bishops would have filled the sees of Christendom, a true philosophy and a live theology informed its universities, and a clergy, spiritually trained and equipped with professional knowledge been provided for all its parishes. It is a very easy mistake, and a fairly fatal mistake, to concentrate on the dramatic details of these personal sins of la papaute princiere [ ] while their graver, if more humdrum, faults of omission go by unconsidered. Such concentration -- as common as it is natural -- wrecks the real proportions of the event.

When Paul II died, so suddenly, July 26, 1471, there was not any obvious successor to him among the cardinals. They were fairly evenly divided into two rival parties and it was only after a certain amount of manoeuvring that, on August 10, they managed to agree on Cardinal Francesco della Rovere. The conclave had begun on the feast of St. Sixtus II, the pope who was the patron of the great Roman martyr St. Lawrence, and the new pope, appropriately, called himself Sixtus IV. He was now fifty-seven years of age, a Friar Minor (but not one of the new Observants) from the Genoese town of Savona, and sprung from so poor a family that it had not even a surname. In his order the friar had had a great career, as lecturer in theology in various Italian universities, as a preacher and administrator. Bessarion had followed the lectures he gave at the university of Pavia and had brought him to the notice of Paul II. In 1464 the Franciscans had chosen him for their minister- general, and in 1467 he had been created cardinal. As minister-general of the Friars Minor, Francesco della Rovere had shown himself a reformer, and in the great theological dispute of the day -- the question of the Immaculate Conception -- he had risen high above the ordinary level of the controversy with his thesis that the views of Duns Scotus and St. Thomas were complementary rather than antagonistic.

It was a curious combination of forces that had secured his election as pope. Bessarion's high opinion of him as a scholar and a religious had done much. The wishes of the Duke of Milan -- Galeazzo Maria Sforza -- had been no less effective. And of a like nature with this political influence was the support of the cardinal vice-chancellor, Rodrigo Borgia, who now, forty-one years of age, after fifteen years of comparative seclusion in the routine of his office, makes his first steps in the public policies of the Holy See. A further element was the skill as negotiator of Francesco's young Franciscan nephew, Piero Riario, whom he had taken into the conclave as a kind of secretaryattendant. It was this young friar who, at the critical moments, did the actual work of binding together and keeping together the heterogeneous majority that made his uncle pope.

Francesco della Rovere, whose strong, intelligent face the genius of Melozzo and Pollaiuolo have made familiar to us, had immense energy; as pope he was to show himself strongwilled, and even imperious, but to be betrayed, time and again, by his lack of knowledge about the political world in which, almost exclusively, he now chose to be active. The one-time reformer of the Friars Minor was determined to make the Papal State secure, once and for all, against the princes who threatened its life, by developing its political resources to the full, and by making the papal sovereignty a reality everywhere within it. But over and over again he blundered, and after thirteen years of rule he left the papacy hated as a power, where before it had merely been mistrusted, and saddled with a new and most disastrous precedent of nepotism, aggressive war and even crime, to say nothing of unconcealed luxurious living and moral laxity. No charge against the pope's own morals -- in the narrow sense of that word -- has ever been seriously sustained. He was regular and attentive to his priestly duties, and noted indeed for his deep devotion to all that affected the cult of the Mother of God. But banquets of a crazy extravagance, hunting parties, gambling bouts, nightly revels began, in his time, and without any interference from him, to be part of the common order of high ecclesiastical life in Rome; and in all this departure of new unseemliness and wickedness the pioneers were the pope's own near relatives, young friars for the chief part, upon whom throughout his pontificate, he heaped one undeserved promotion after another. Never had pope such a horde of needy, insignificant, and incompetent kinsfolk for whom to provide; and never was any pope so lavish in the provision.

Sixtus IV was one of five children, and it was his eleven nephews and two nieces who were the main instruments through which whatever ideals he began with were brought to nought, and through whom a new poison was injected into the none too healthy system of the Renaissance papacy. Of the eleven nephews six were clerics -- it was a simple matter to make five of them cardinals, while the sixth became Bishop of Ferrara and Patriarch of Antioch. Two of his lay nephews the pope married to daughters of the King of Naples, a third to the heiress of the reigning Duke of Urbino, and a fourth to a daughter of the Duke of Milan. A sixth red hat went to one of his niece's sons.

The ablest of this small army -- the only one in fact who proved ultimately to have any real ability at all -- was Giuliano della Rovere, but far more influential in the policies of the reign were the two brothers, Girolamo and Piero Riario. To Piero, the manager of the conclave, a young friar of twenty-five, the pope gave the see of Treviso within a month of his election (September 4, 1471); on December 15 he made him a cardinal; in September 1472 next he gave him the see of Valence, and in 1473 the archbishoprics of Spoleto (April 28), Seville (June 25), and Florence (July 20), with the wealthy French see of Mende (November 3) -- all of which sees the young cardinal was allowed to hold simultaneously. [ ] He was, by now, as nearly the equivalent of a millionaire in the life of the time as it is possible to conceive. The story of his extravagances, and his profligacy, is writ large in all the diaries and diplomatic correspondence of the time, a subject of cynical mirth, where it does not provoke disgust. But Cardinal Piero did not last long. The pace soon killed him, and he died, "while he gave promise of still better things," said his uncle, in the first days of 1474. But in the two short years or so of his course he had been the pope's most confidential adviser and agent. This place was now taken by his brother Girolamo, one of the worst men of all this bad time, a typical Renaissance bravo and bully, for whom the moral law can scarcely be said to have held any meaning at all. For Girolamo, his uncle, when he married him to Caterina Sforza, had established a little principality in the north of the Papal State, centring round the episcopal city of Imola. The territory was small, but it was meant to extend, and its strategic importance was already considerable.

The Papal State [ ] could hardly have been less conveniently designed for popes who meant to be effective rulers. It may be described as made up of two roughly rectangular territories, one to the south based on the Mediterranean coast of Italy, and the other to the north based on the Adriatic. From the southern tip of the southern rectangle where it touched the kingdom of Naples, to the northernmost point of the state is, in a direct line, 260 miles. The Apennines, in their steepest and least easily traversable masses, are a prohibitive natural barrier between the rectangles in the central part of the state where, for seventy miles, these overlap. During the whole of the Middle Ages, down to the time when the Avignon residence began, the popes were never really masters of much beyond the southern rectangle, the district whose natural centre is Rome and that runs from, say Orvieto to the neighbourhood of Gaeta. By the time of Sixtus IV they were also, fairly securely, masters of the district beyond the Apennines called the Marches, the southern half of the northern rectangle, a region whose chief cities were Fermo Camerino and the port of Ancona. But the richest part of the State, and the wealthiest cities, were in the district to the north of the Marches, the territory called Romagna, the lands to the south of the Po, the ancient Roman Aemilia. Here was Bologna, the most important city of the whole State after Rome -- always violently anti-papal -- and Ferrara, and Ravenna. All this valuable territory was parcelled out into half a score of city states, some republican in their form of government, others ruled by families descended from the successful condottieri. The most important of these states was the Duchy of Ferrara, held by the d'Este family, who were also lords of Modena and Reggio, territories that formed a buffer state between the pope's territory and the Duchy of Milan. Imola lay twenty-five miles to the south-east of Bologna, and almost midway in the narrow part [ ] of the long neck that joined the Romagna to the half of the Papal State where the popes were really masters. Imola in strong, trustworthy hands would be a check to Ferrara, a good starting point if ever the pope planned to reduce Bologna, and an excellent centre from which to conduct the lengthy business of destroying the petty tyrants of the Romagna, at Faenza for instance, or Forli, Cesena, and Rimini. [ ] Hence the determination of Sixtus to plant his nephew at Imola as its lord, his insistence that Milan (in whose power it then lay) should restore it, and his willingness to pay the Milanese the heavy price asked, 100,000 ducats. And as the pope thus secured -- or hoped to secure -- this key city at the northern end of the " neck," so, by marrying another nephew, Giovanni della Rovere, brother of Cardinal Giuliano, to the heiress of the Montefeltre, he meant to make sure of the entrance to the " neck " from the south, their ducal city of Urbino. Giovanni's son did, in fact, live to inherit Urbino; he is the duke, Francesco Maria, who plays a part in the history of the second della Rovere pope, his uncle, Julius II. And Girolamo, the Count of Imola, lived to make himself master of Forli, and Cesena, and Rimini, and even of Sinigaglia, before, in 1488, some of his subjects found the courage to avenge a hundred crimes by assassinating him.

The other princes of Italy were not slow to realise that a new spirit was influencing the policy of the ruler of the Papal State. At the death of Paul II, Naples, Florence and Milan had stood leagued together against Rome. Now, by his marriage alliances, the pope had detached Naples and was, seemingly, about to make himself master of the all-important lands in the north. It was Florence -- the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici -- that first grew definitely uneasy about this unmistakable threat on her north-eastern border; there was a succession of " incidents " between Lorenzo and the pope and then a great crime, a terrible repression, and war (1478). Florence was still, in name, a republic where the Medici family were no more than private citizens, but in fact they had now, for half a century, been its all-powerful rulers, through their immense wealth and their skilfully exercised technique for the secret management of public affairs. Lorenzo was much more truly the ruler of Florence, than the pope was ruler of Rome. When the reign of Sixtus IV opened, relations had been friendly, and presently the pope made the Medici the Holy See's banking agents. But he would not consent to make Lorenzo's younger brother Giuliano a cardinal, and then Lorenzo made difficulties about advancing the money that Sixtus needed to buy Imola from Milan for Count Girolamo; he even did his best to prevent the sale, not at all wanting to see the pope's nephew strategically installed on his flank. Then Sixtus changed his financial policy. The Medici were dismissed, and the papal business was given to their rivals, the Pazzi. Next, in 1474, there came a vacancy in the see of Florence. The pope named one of his own kinsmen, Francesco Salviati, but the Medici protested so strongly that he had to give way. When, some months later, he named the disappointed candidate to the vacant see of Pisa, the Medici again protested. This time, however, the pope held firm; but the Medici kept the new bishop out. Now came the conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the Medici regime in Florence in which Count Girolamo, the Pazzi, and the Archbishop of Pisa were the ringleaders. They also proposed to murder Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano. And, such was the pitch to which six years of the political game had brought the Roman mind, the conspirators, as a matter of course, laid the whole matter before the pope for his approval.

Sixtus was not at war with Florence, but he had only one objection to make to the plot -- there must be no murder of the two Medici. The count, the banker, the archbishop, and the assassin whom they had hired, laboured long to convince the pope that their death was unavoidable in the kind of thing that a revolution is, and argued that, since the Medici were bound to die, it could not much matter how exactly this happened. But Sixtus would have none of it. He did not indeed countermand the plot, but he explicitly commanded that the princes should not be murdered; it is, nevertheless, hard to believe that, after the interview as we have it recorded, he can have been under any illusion about what the conspirators were determined to do.

The visit to Florence of Count Girolamo's nephew, the newly-created Cardinal Raffaelle Sansoni (a lad of seventeen) provided the opportunity. The cardinal, brought to Florence by his desire to see the wonders of the Medici palaces, was to preside at a High Mass in the cathedral on Sunday, April 26, 1478, and afterwards be entertained by the Medici. The mass seemed to offer a most suitable moment for the murder; the two victims and all the notables of the city would be safely contained and held by the confusion in the great church while, outside, the main body of the conspirators would seize the seat of government and all the controls. At the last moment the bravo hired to do some of the killing -- Montesecco -- did indeed object, some scruple about the place and time of the deed was, it seems, troubling him. But a couple of priests, "patriotic" enemies of the Medici tyrants, were found to take his place. The cardinal entered and the mass began. Then -- at the elevation, or the priest's communion -- the signal was given and the murderers made for their victims. Giuliano de Medici, was killed with a dozen wounds or so in his body, but Lorenzo, only slightly wounded by the clerical enthusiasts who had undertaken to despatch him, managed to gain the sacristy and to barricade himself. Meanwhile in the church there was the expected pandemonium, but the fury was all against the assassins, and the young cardinal -- thought to be in the plot -- came so near to death that, in all the forty years of life that remained to him his face never lost the pallor which came into it that day. While, in the cathedral, the murderers were taken, the chiefs of the conspiracy outside had also failed. Something in the manner of the archbishop as he essayed to bluff the Gonfaloniere into surrender put that officer on his guard. He arrested the archbishop and those with him, and when, presently, the mob came streaming by, mad with the news, he acted very promptly, putting ropes round the necks of the prisoners and thrusting them out from the windows of the palace. When the ropes were cut the mob amused itself with the corpses, [ ] as we have seen happen again in that same land within these last few years. All that day, and the next, the vengeance continued. Whoever was thought a supporter of the Pazzi was mercilessly slain. Scores were thus hanged out of hand and thrown to the mob. The cardinal, meanwhile, was kept under close arrest.

The conspiracy then had failed, and except Count Girolamo, who all this time had not stirred from Rome, the conspirators had all of them been taken and executed. When the news reached him the count was beside himself, and the Florentines in Rome were for a time in great danger. The pope took no immediate public action. He regretted the crime of Giuliano's murder and wrote to Florence a letter, which has disappeared, to say so. He also demanded the release of the unoffending cardinal. The Florentine envoy in Rome wrote to support the pope's demand, and Naples and Venice gave their advice that Florence should not add fuel to the fire by keeping the prelate in prison. On May 24 an envoy from Sixtus appeared in Florence with a formal written demand and the threat that, unless the cardinal were released, the pope would punish the republic. The Florentines were, however, not to be moved, and eight days later the bull appeared excommunicating Lorenzo and all who adhered to him, and threatening the republic with an interdict if, within three weeks, it had not obeyed the pope's commands. The pope's case is set out fully: all the political grievances of the years before the conspiracy, the excessive vengeance for the conspiracy itself, the hanging of an archbishop and other ecclesiastics, the imprisonment of the cardinal; the republic must accept the pope's sentence that neither Lorenzo nor anyone who supported him should be capable of ever holding any office in Church or State, or of performing any legal acts; their property must be confiscated, their houses torn down, and Lorenzo handed over to the pope; all this within a month. Again the Florentines refused to be moved, and on June 24 the interdict was declared.

The Pazzi Conspiracy, scandalous as is its history, is of course no more than one of a score of similar events in the complicated story of fifteenth-century Italian politics. It needs, however, to be told in some detail not only because, in this particular feud, the pope was one of the protagonists, but also because of the contrast between the high tone of the pope's demands before he knew he was going to be beaten, and his subsequent tacit surrender of all but the appearances of submission. Here is something which is, for a time, going to pass into the political habits of the papacy, and to be yet another potent cause of that alienation from the popes of their greatest natural resource, the sympathy of instructed Catholic opinion. No power has so rightly been expected to make war on the haughty and successful, to yield to none but the needy. With these political popes the Roman maxim began to be reversed, to the great hurt of their spiritual hold on their children everywhere.

Florence replied to these anathemas by skilfully-written manifestos which all Italy read. The clergy acknowledged that Sixtus was indeed helmsman of the barque of Peter, but complained that it was to Circe's island that he was steering it; while the republic broadcast the confession of Montesecco, in which that scrupulous assassin told the story of the ambiguous interview with the pope. The finished irony of the humanist is now, for the first time, set to mock the solemnities of the papal remonstrance and its awful sentence, and to call in question, by its reasoned moderation, the assumption that the pope is telling the truth. "Collect yourself, we pray you, Holy Father," say the Florentines, " and return to those sentiments which become the gravity of the Holy See."

In August the war began, Florence isolated and the pope leagued with Naples and Florence's eternal foe Siena. The Florentines turned for help to Louis XI of France, and not in vain. The king, already bitter because Sixtus had refused the red hat to the prelates he had nominated, was only too happy at the chance of harassing the pope into new concessions of jurisdiction in ecclesiastical affairs. He had already, in 1475, begun to proclaim himself the champion of the "liberties of the Gallican Church" and begun to speak of the need of a General Council to reform the Church and to elect a lawful pope in the place of the simonist Sixtus IV. [ ] Then, in March 1476, he had ordered all the French cardinals and prelates in Rome to return home for a great national council that would discuss the best way of bringing about the needed General Council. Now, upon the Florentine appeal, the French envoys to the Holy See were instructed to join with those of Florence, Milan, Venice, and Ferrara in a protest that the pope's conduct towards Florence and Lorenzo was a scandalous hindrance to the unity of Christendom. Since the pope would not listen to the ambassadors' petition for a removal of the interdict from Florence, a General Council must be summoned (July 11, 1478). [ ]

The pope did not find it hard to answer Louis XI, but the emperor -- Frederick III -- was no less pressing that Florence should be treated more mercifully, and most of the cardinals were anxious for peace. But Florence would not accept the only terms the pope offered and presently, her allies not venturing more against Sixtus than threats of a General Council, and her territories ravaged by the papal and Neapolitan armies, the situation of the republic grew desperate indeed. It was saved by the boldness and diplomatic skill of Lorenzo. In December 1479 he made his way uninvited, unannounced, to Naples and won over the king. The terms were hard, but Florence was delivered from the dilemma it faced of destruction or a humiliating submission to the pope. Some submission indeed there was to be, but it came now from the initiative of the republic, and at a time when all other questions were stilled by the recent descent of the Turks on the Italian mainland and their capture of Otranto. [ ] On Advent Sunday, 1480, [ ] twelve leading citizens of Florence knelt before the pope in the portico of St. Peter's, acknowledged the city's guilt, and humbly besought forgiveness. The pope lectured them, mildly enough, and absolved the city from all the spiritual censures laid upon it. As a penance Florence was to provide fifteen galleys for the war against the Turks. But not a word was said about the position of Lorenzo de' Medici, who, and not Florence, so Sixtus had repeatedly declared, was the real enemy and the reason for the war. Nor, of course, was Lorenzo among the twelve who knelt before the pope.

For a short eighteen months there was peace, but Count Girolamo, who had opposed the peace party in Rome in 1479, now made himself master of Forli on the death of the last of the Ordolaffi who had ruled it for a century or so (1481). And he planned to take Faenza also. In this he had the support of Venice; and the great republic was willing to encourage also a much bolder design, nothing less in fact than that Girolamo should make himself King of Naples. Venice, as payment for its aid, was to be allowed to take Ferrara.

The King of Naples [ ] began the war, invading the Papal State (April 1482) when the pope's preparations had scarcely begun, and at a moment when a miniature civil war -- Orsini against Colonna -- was raging. Soon Rome itself was threatened with siege, and though the arrival of a Venetian general, Roberto Malatesta, to command the pope's troops, and his victory over the Neapolitans at Campo Morto (August 21, 1482), delivered the city, the general’s death three weeks later, and the departure of the Venetian contingents, soon renewed the danger. For the next few months the Neapolitans ravaged the pope's lands with little hindrance, while in the north the pope's allies conquered Ferrara almost at their ease. To add to the papal misfortune a half-mad Dominican archbishop had re-inaugurated (if that be the word) the Council of Basel, and though, as yet, he was the only bishop present, Florence and Milan were beginning to wonder whether they had not here a useful weapon with which once more to beat the pope. It was Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, seemingly, who finally decided the pope to break with Venice and make peace. On December 12, 1482, the treaty was signed between Sixtus and the King of Naples. All conquests were to be restored and the Duke of Ferrara was to be reinstated; also a pension was guaranteed to Count Girolamo. The Venetians -- with whom the war was going well -- had not been consulted about all this, but the pope now informed them of what had been done, and ordered them to ratify the treaty. Not very surprisingly they utterly refused, and warned the pope not to use spiritual weapons to coerce them, threatening, if he did so, to call in the Turks and plunge all Italy into war.

The pope's diplomacy had not brought him peace. Instead of fighting Naples as the ally of Venice, he was now to fight Venice as the ally of Naples. Immense sums had to be raised and a fleet equipped -- an essential condition for success against the great naval power, the pope declared. [ ] The 50,000 ducats needed were got by the creation of new posts, and the sale of the appointments. The immediate problem was to relieve Ferrara, and meanwhile (May 25, 1483) the Venetians were excommunicated, and their state placed under an interdict.

The war went very slowly. The Venetians used their sea power to capture towns on the Apulian coast of Naples, but they failed to take Ferrara. Soon, feeling the strain of their isolation, for the pope's diplomacy had momentarily leagued all Italy against them, they sued for peace (March 1484); but Count Girolamo succeeded in hardening the pope against them. Then the Colonna troubles burst out afresh in Rome, with greater violence than ever (April-June). The pope was successful against the great clan in Rome itself, but the incompetent Girolamo was baffled time and again in the fights for their various strongholds in the surrounding country. Sixtus IV was beginning to feel his age, the unlookedfor strength of the rebels depressed him, and then the great league began to break up -- after all, it had held together for nearly eighteen months. At what seemed the last hour for Venice, the Duke of Milan withdrew, and secretly came to the aid of the republic, and presently the Peace of Bagniolo was arranged (August 7, 1484). Once again all conquests were mutually restored; and this time without any gain at all to Count Girolamo. The news was brought to the pope as he lay dying, and the disappointment of such a peace finished him. On August 12, the feast of St. Clare, one of the two greatest saints of the order he had once governed, he passed away.

So died this first of the popes who showed what a difference the pope could make as a prince in this delicately balanced world of petty Italian states. Sixtus IV had indeed established his family among the reigning houses of Italy, but with all these years of war and of realist diplomatic practice he had not really developed the pope's hold on his own state, nor given that state any new security against the greedy and treacherous princes who surrounded it; while, in Rome itself, the habit of war and the sudden new insistence on the material aspects of the papal office, had given new life to the old habits of riot and feud and had indeed "revived a barbarous past." The cardinals' palaces were now strongholds where each lived surrounded by his own guards, centres of bloody tumult only too often, sanctuaries for bravoes and assassins. The degree of this sharp return to the ages of violence was shown very markedly during the interregnum that now followed the death of Sixtus IV, and the proceedings in the conclave are evidence how greatly he had secularised the college of cardinals.

No sooner was it known that the pope had died, than the mob rose, and with shouts of "Colonna for ever," stormed and sacked the palace of Count Girolamo, and the houses of all his hated Genoese compatriots. The count hastened back to Rome from his operations against the Colonna fortresses, and while he lay encamped outside the city, his wife, Caterina Sforza, the classic type Or the Renaissance virago, boldly installed herself as commandant of the all-important stronghold of Castel St. Angelo. Then, for a fortnight nearly, the rival bands of soldiery fought and plundered in the streets of the city. The Colonna had returned in force, and the different cardinals sent out in haste for reinforcements for their private armies. The funeral services of the dead pope began with hardly a cardinal present; few could have made their way to St. Peter's without fighting their way through the armed forces of their colleagues. Finally the strong statesmanship of one of the few cardinals whom all respected, the Venetian Marco Barbo, a nephew of Paul II, brought peace. He prevailed on the count to surrender St. Angelo, and to leave Rome; and he prevailed on his ally Virginio Orsini, the count being magnificently compensated in money and promises. The Colonna, the Savelli, and the Conti also agreed to march out from Rome. There was to be a truce, not to expire before two months from the day of the new pope's coronation. This was on August 22, and four days later the conclave began.

Sixtus IV had created cardinals lavishly, thirty-four in all, [ ] and in the conclave of 1484 no fewer than nineteen of the twenty-five present were of his naming. All but four of the twenty-five were Italians. [ ] The short-lived period of a more or less international college was over: [ ] even had the other seven cardinals then living [ ] been present, the Italians would have been twenty-two to ten. On the other hand, there was not between these Italians, subjects of half a dozen distinct and independent sovereign states, the modern bond of a common national feeling. The twenty-one were fairly evenly divided between the states only lately at war, and always mutually hostile. Venice had five cardinals, Milan four, Naples two; there were four Romans (Colonna, Orsini and Savelli), one from Siena, a Genoese and -- a new element -- four nephews of the late pope who formed a faction apart.

This is the first conclave of the type to be classic henceforward for a good three hundred years and more, where political considerations played a leading part, the first to which different princes sent instructions through their agents and at which, through cardinals who were their subjects, they even felt strong enough to declare to the Sacred College that there were certain cardinals who must not be elected. It was also a conclave in which bribery played a great part. The cardinals began by making a pact that whichever of them was elected would give the poorer cardinals -- those whose income from benefices was below 4,000 ducats -- an allowance of 100 ducats a month, and that he would compensate them for any benefice they lost through failing in their votes to oblige the various princes. The two leading figures in the conclave were Giuliano della Rovere and Rodrigo Borgia. The first wanted a pope he could control, and so maintain the influence on affairs he had begun to possess during his uncle's last years. The other wanted to be pope himself. All were agreed that the new pope must be acceptable to the league whose action had recently imposed the Peace of Bagniolo, and so a friend to Venice. Borgia was the leader of the cardinals who stood actively by the league, a small group that included such powerful personages as Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan, and Giovanni of Aragon, a son of the King of Naples. Borgia made certain he would be elected. But his actual following was small, and he was not trusted. The other leader was hardly more fortunate. In the first scrutiny a Venetian, Marco Barbo, came within five votes of election. Whereupon the skill of Giuliano della Rovere prevailed upon Borgia, and his associates, to abandon his candidature. The election of Barbo would mean an era of reform, and a restoration of ecclesiastical discipline. So Borgia and della Rovere combined forces, and through the night of August 27-28 they worked hard upon their colleagues, directing their minds towards the most complete nullity of them all, Giovanni Battista Cybo. They managed to secure for him eighteen votes in all, and on August 28, at nine in the morning, he was proclaimed as Innocent VIII. [ ]