A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [39]
BUT THAT CAME later. During the early sixteenth century lust, and particularly noble lust, seethed throughout Europe. In France this was the age of Rabelais, and across the Channel the lords and ladies of Tudor England were establishing a tradition of aristocratic promiscuity which would continue in the centuries ahead. Yet Rome, the capital of Christendom, was the capital of sin, and the sinners included most of the Roman patriciate. Among the holy city’s great families, each of which was represented in the sacred College of Cardinals, were the nouveau riche Delia Roveres, whose cupidity matched their enthusiasm for illicit public coupling in all its permutations. They occupied the epicenter of Roman society. Two Delia Roveres became popes (Sixtus IV and his nephew Julius II), their names were on every guest list, and if an invitation to their satyrical parties was ever refused, the fact is unrecorded.
They had not, however, been pacesetters. That questionable distinction belongs to the notorious Borgias. So many bizarre stories have been handed down about this hot-blooded Spanish family that it is impossible, after five centuries, to know where the line of credibility should be drawn. Much of what we have is simply what was accepted as fact at the time. However, a substantial part of the legend was documented—enough to set it down here with confidence that, however extraordinary it may seem now, what was believed then was, in the main, undoubtedly true. The tale is a long one. The Borgias had been acting scandalously at least two generations before Giuliano Cardinal della Rovere, taking the name Pope Julius II, assumed the chair of Saint Peter in October 1503. He was lucky to have lived that long. Ten years earlier, when the papal tiara had been placed on the brow of his great rival, Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, Alexander had plotted Cardinal della Rovere’s assassination. At the last moment Giuliano had eluded the cutthroats by fleeing to France. Then he—himself a future Vicar of Christ—had taken up arms against the papacy.
The Borgia name had become notorious a half-century earlier, when the reigning pontiff was Pius II. Pius was hardly a prig —as Bishop Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini he had fathered several children by various mistresses—but when elected pontiff he had put all that behind him, telling his court, “Forget Aeneas; look at Pius.” In 1460 he himself had been watching twenty-nine-year-old Cardinal Borgia—the future Alexander—in Siena. Troubled by what he saw there, he sent Borgia a sharply worded letter, rebuking him for a wild party the prelate had thrown. During the festivities, Pius dryly observed, “none of the allurements of love was lacking.” He further noted that the guest list had been odd.
Pope Julius II (1443–1513)
Siena’s most beautiful young women had been invited, but their “husbands, fathers, and brothers” had been excluded.
In the context of that place and time, this was ominous. It could only have been done, as Pius II wrote, “in order that lust be unrestrained.” Women were accustomed to doing what men told them to do. Lacking the protection of any males in her family, and intimidated by a formidable cardinal, a girl was unlikely to survive an evening with her maidenhood intact. The mature woman guest would feel free to ignore the proprieties, particularly when that course was being urged upon her by a prince of the Church.
Pius warned that “disgrace” and “contempt” would be the lot of any Christ’s vicar who “seems to tolerate these actions.” So, eventually, it was, but Pius was in his grave four years after the Siena orgy, and a century would pass before another pontiff agreed with