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The new pope was a Genoese, fifty-two years of age, a bishop since
1467, created cardinal by Sixtus IV in 1473. All contemporaries agreed
to praise his kindly nature, his inability to refuse requests, but the
different ambassadors noted also -- what events soon showed to be
equally true of him -- that he had no judgment of his own, and little
understanding of the problems that faced him. It was Giuliano della
Rovere who would really reign, "the cardinal of St. Peter. . . pope and
more than pope." Innocent VIII, it has also to be recorded, has the
unfortunate distinction in the history of this time that he made no
secret of the fact that he was the father of a family. [ ] "He was the
first of the popes," says the grave Augustinian, Giles of Viterbo, [ ]
" openly to make a show of sons and daughters, the first who openly
arranged marriages for them, the first to keep up the weddings in his
own palace. His predecessors had left him no such example. Would that
he had not found successors to imitate him." As Sixtus IV had used the
marriages of various nephews to assist his diplomacy, so Innocent VIII
now made play with the marriage of his son and his granddaughters.
The pope was all but bankrupt as a result of the wars of his
predecessor, the bitter Colonna-Orsini feud was still seething and yet,
in the first twelve months of his reign, he, or his adviser-in-chief,
drifted into yet another war. The enemy this time was Naples, and once
again the papacy was almost without allies, while the rest of Italy
stood by, neutral towards the pope and sympathetic to his foes. The
cause of the war was the refusal of Naples to pay the annual tribute
due to the pope as suzerain of the kingdom. It was another grievance
that the king -- Ferrante -- was filling vacant sees without any
reference to Rome. The war dragged on for nine months or so (October
1485-August 1486), each side helping the rebels in the territory of the
other. Innocent appealed to one after another of the Catholic
sovereigns for help, but all were deaf to him. Then Giuliano della
Rovere revived the ancient remedy of calling in the French claimant to
the Neapolitan kingdom. He went to Genoa to negotiate with the claimant
-- Rene II of Anjou -- and to arrange a naval alliance with the
republic. But by the time he returned Innocent, terrified by the
disorders in Rome, and the damage done his territory by the marauding
Neapolitans, scenting disapproval and treachery everywhere among his
own commanders, had made peace. Ferrante too was alarmed, at the
prospect of a Franco-Genoese invasion. He gladly made terms, giving way
on all points to the pope -- it was merely a matter of making promises
-- and then going home to glut his vengeance on the Neapolitan barons
who had been the pope's allies.
For the next twelve months -- while Cardinal Giuliano sulked in his
fortress at Ostia -- the papal diplomacy feebly plunged hither and
thither, seeking allies, until it fell under the strong influence of
Lorenzo de' Medici. The new alliance was sealed by the marriage of the
pope's son Franceschetto to Lorenzo's daughter Maddalena -- a marriage
where there was twenty years' difference between the age of bride and
groom; and Innocent consented to give the red hat to Lorenzo's second
son, Giovanni, a boy of thirteen. It was, however, provided that the
young cardinal should not wear the insignia of his rank for another
four years, nor be admitted to consistories. Meanwhile the disorders in
the Papal State mounted higher and higher. In April 1488 at Forli,
Count Girolamo, the once all-powerful bravo, was murdered, and a few
weeks later the lord of Faenza met the same fate. At Perugia and
Foligno, Ancona and Ascoli there were like troubles, and everywhere the
King of Naples was busy aiding the rebels.
The one gleam of success that relieved the tale of ignoble drifting and
its sorry fruit was the pope's securing, in the face of great
competition, the person of the brother of the Sultan, Prince Djem.
Here, it was felt, was a hostage possession of whom could be used to
keep the Turks quiescent. The Turks, for their part, were willing to
pay the pope handsomely [ ] to keep Djem under lock and key. He cost
the pope a cardinal’s hat to the grand-master of the Knights of St.
John, and another to the French king's counsellor, the Archbishop of
Bordeaux, and also a promise not to grant without delay the
dispensation that would enable Alain d'Albret to marry the heiress or
Brittany -- a bride desired for the boy king of France. The story of
Djem's adventures, of his reception by the pope, his haughty,
undisguised contempt for the whole paraphernalia of the Vatican
etiquette, and the spectacle it all was for years to come, to Rome and
all its visitors, makes pleasant reading after the petty, sordid
chicanery to which the public activities of the papacy had now shrunk.
Towards 1488 a new kind of scandal was discovered, when high officials
of the Chancery were arrested on a charge of forging papal bulls. The
whole administration of justice had fallen into a bad way. It was a
rare crime indeed that could not be atoned for by a money payment. The
semi-bankruptcy in which Innocent had found the administration never
really improved. Continually the pope created new posts to sell to the
highest bidder, twenty-six new secretaryships in 1486, and fifty-two
plumbatores whose duty was to affix the leaden seals to the bulls.
These last paid, each, [ ],500 ducats on appointment: an immense sum
which they would recoup from the fees paid by those for whose affairs
the bulls were issued. There were obviously better ways still of
compensating oneself, and in September 1489 two secretaries and four
minor officials were arrested. In two years, they confessed, they had
put out fifty bogus bulls, liberal grants and dispensations. For which
the pope had them burned alive.
To the very end of the reign, the King of Naples continued to sap and
mine the weak pope's authority. Innocent even spoke of leaving Rome,
and taking refuge at Avignon. Then suddenly, in the last weeks of 1491,
Ferrante veered round completely. Once more he made a treaty in which
he accepted the pope's terms, and sealed it with an offer to marry his
grandson Luigi of Aragon to the pope's granddaughter, Battistina.
The new year 1492 thus opened well, but in March, Innocent -- rarely
free from illness -- began to fail. On April 18 Lorenzo de' Medici
died, and all Italy waited in apprehension, for the son who succeeded
him had none of his father's political genius. By the end of June it
was known that Innocent was slowly dying, and the end came on July 25.
[ ] Just nine days later one of his fellow countrymen set sail from
Pelos on that voyage which was to discover the New World.
Innocent's reign left the papacy in worse case even than he had found
it. He had been cautious in one respect, the creation of new cardinals,
though in this he was yet again his own yielding, compliant self. For
the existing cardinals had strongly objected to any substantial
increase in their numbers. Innocent VIII had had but one creation,
March 9, 1489, and added only eight cardinals to the college. Thirteen
cardinals had died during his reign, and at his death the total number
was twenty- seven. Of these, twenty-three made up the conclave that was
to elect his successor, all but two of them Italians; and of the total
there were still twelve of the creation of Sixtus IV.
In this conclave of 1492 there was hardly any unity of national groups.
There was no Cybo faction, and the four della Rovere cardinals were
almost the only party when the election began (August 6, 1492). But
there was a strong reaction against Giuliano della Rovere, held
responsible for the disasters of the late reign. His rival of 1484,
Rodrigo Borgia, so an ambassador hinted to his sovereign, might now
achieve much, through the great array of wealthy benefices which h s
election would cause to be vacant. The spoil, to a share in which his
electors might look, would be tremendous. For four days the election
hung fire, three scrutinies taking place without any sign which way the
election would go. Then Ascanio Sforza, one of the undoubtedly bad men
among the cardinals, doubting his own chances of election, went over to
Borgia. Bargains were struck, the spoil apportioned out, and gradually
-- counting Borgia's own vote -- he was only short of one vote to make
the needed sixteen. Finally the confederates gained the promise of the
ninety-six years old Patriarch of Venice, "hardly in possession of his
faculties". [ ] Rodrigo Borgia was pope, at sixty years of age,
Alexander VI. Such is the story as Pastor tells it, [ ] and it seems to
be the true story.
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