Pope Alexander VI - Lucrezia Borgia

I well know that as you are now to reside at Rome in that sink of all iniquity, the difficulty of conducting yourself by these admonitions will be increased. - Lorenzo the Magnificent in a letter to his son Giovanni, the future Pope Leo X, March 12, 1492.

In 1492, Lucrezia Borgia was a child of twelve, living in the palace of the Orsini on Monte Giordano overlooking the Tiber River. It shocked no one that her father already had been a cardinal of the Church of Rome and her mother his long-time mistress when Lucrezia was born. In the more than 1,100 years since the Western church had imposed a mandatory celibacy upon the clergy, the majority of priests ignored that vow. For a long time after marriage was forbidden, they had continued to take wives. When the laws against marrying grew stricter, they kept mistresses.

So widespread had the practice of taking a mistress become that a high Roman prelate reported in 1490 hardly ever finding a priest or a member of the Curia without one. King Ferrante of Naples complained that the Holy City was filled with the sons and daughters of cardinals. In addition to Lucrezia, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had fathered six other children - three by Lucrezias mother and three by other mistresses. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, Rodrigos foe in the Sacred College, had several illegitimate daughters and at least one son. Giuliano owed his cardinals hat to his uncle, the late, unlamented Pope Sixtus IV . Although Sixtus was openhanded with his nephew, he was more openhanded with two other young men who, although he also referred to them as his nephews, were commonly believed to be his sons. One author attributed sixteen illegitimate children to the then reigning pope, Innocent VIII , and considered it fitting that Rome should call him father. A more conservative writer said the pope had sired seven children. In reality, Innocent seems to have had only two. Rather than refer to them as his niece and nephew, he was the first pontiff to publicly acknowledge his children. The popes son received numerous honors and emoluments. An anonymous Veronese chronicler reported seeing Innocents daughter ride through Rome in great pomp, not incognito, but as the daughter of the Pope.

Two of Innocents granddaughters were married in the Vatican . After the wedding of one of them, the popes master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard, wrote in his diary that the rule forbidding the presence of women at a papal banquet had been violated. Although Burchard described the affair as widely noted and not kept secret, few appeared to share his dismay. Perhaps it was because, like Stefano Infessura , another indefatigable diarist, the rest believed that nothing good was done in Rome in those days. Countless, Infessura wrote, were the acts of sacrilege, robberies, and murders committed in the city.

Nor was this lawless behavior limited to any one class or group. After the servants of one of the cardinals had a fistfight with some Roman youths, members of the cardinals household went through the neighborhood armed with crossbows and stones, assaulting everyone they encountered. The retainers of another cardinal joined in the fracas over a Greek courtesan that resulted in the wounding of forty people and the burning to death of an elderly man. For a price, a group in the Curia headed by two apostolic secretaries would forge papal bulls granting dispensations to all who needed them. When the forgers were discovered and sentenced, the relatives of one of them offered to pay the Curia the 12,000 ducats that their kinsman had earned from his forgeries in exchange for a pardon. But the case had attracted so much attention abroad that the pope, fearful of the scandal a pardon would cause, ordered the young man hanged. Usually, however, Innocent was only too eager to accept financial settlements for the most heinous crimes. God desires not the death of the sinner, but that he pay and live, Cardinal Borgia, the popes vice chancellor, was believed to have said.

The precarious state of papal finances had compelled the Holy Father to pawn his miter and to omit the distribution of palms on Palm Sunday. In an effort to replenish his exhausted treasury, Innocent not only sold pardons, he also resorted to the creation and sale of offices. Emulating Sixtus IV, who had declared that a pope needed only paper and ink to get the sum he wanted, the Holy Father created a college of fifty-two plumbatores (or sealers of papal bulls) and charged each of them 2,500 ducats for his office. Since the plumbatores intended to make up this sum by charging exorbitant fees for their services, they had no objection to paying. The pope gained another 62,400 ducats by increasing the number of papal secretaries to twenty-six. As one of them wrote, Henceforth, this office which had hitherto been bestowed as a reward for industry, faithfulness and eloquence became simply a marketable commodity.

In truth, there was little in Rome that wasnt marketable. Our churches, priests, altars, sacred rites, our prayers, our heavens, our very God are purchasable, moaned one young scholar.

With the exception of a small minority, the members of the clergy were men who had entered the church not because of any special calling to the priesthood, but because they were second sons earmarked for a religious life since birth. And every great Italian family was prepared to offer gifts and bribes to get its second son named to the College of Cardinals . During Innocents reign, as during the reigns of most of his predecessors, there was a Cardinal Orsini, a Cardinal Colonna , a Cardinal Savelli , and a Cardinal Sforza . When the news that the fourteen-year-old Giovanni de Medici was to be made a prince of the church became public, an epigram accused the pope of giving the purple to un ragazzetto, (a little boy) in order to unite the Medici to his son Franceschetto, which was, of course, true. The appointment followed the marriage of the popes son to Giovannis sister Maddalena . What the writer neglected to mention, however, was that Innocent had at first objected to the extreme youth of the future cardinal. Whereupon Lorenzo de Medici , one of the most outspoken critics of the depravity of Rome, added two years to his sons age.

Other cardinals entered the Sacred College under equally dubious circumstances. Following an unsuccessful attempt to wrest the Turkish crown from Sultan Bajazet II , the sultans brother Prince Dschem fled to the Isle of Rhodes . Soon afterward, the sultan offered the grand master of the Knights of Rhodes an annual stipend of 45,000 ducats if he would retain Dschem indefinitely. By bestowing a cardinals hat upon the grand master, Innocent managed to have the valuable prisoner transferred to the Vatican. Although the sultan was at first nonplussed - he financed an unsuccessful attempt to poison the popes drinking water - he later sent the Holy Father 135,000 gold ducats to defray the cost of keeping Dschem for three years. As a further token of his appreciation, he offered to send the pope a fragment of the holy lance that had pierced the side of Jesus.

The majority of the cardinals doubted the relics authenticity and advised the pontiff to receive it with a minimum of fanfare. Innocent, however, chose to ignore their advice. On May 31, 1492, the Feast of the Ascension, he bore the crystal casket containing the relic in a solemn procession from the Porta del Populo to the Vatican. Standing upon the loggia of the portico, the Holy Father blessed the thousands massed in the square below while Cardinal Borgia held the lance high above his head for the crowd to behold.

The reception of the holy lance was Innocents last public act. He had suffered from gout and urinary infections during much of his reign. By the middle of July 1492, he was dying. Invariably, the death of a pope meant the breakdown of public order in Rome. After the death of Sixtus IV, barricades had sprung up all over the city, and as was the norm on such occasions, the great Roman barons tried to seize control of the city. The powerful Colonna family raised a force of more than 2,000 men. They marched across the city to their palace on the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles shouting Colonna, Colonna! Not to be outdone, their rivals, the Orsini, armed two squadrons of horsemen, who rode through the neighborhood surrounding their headquarters on Monte Giordano shouting