A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [99]
Nevertheless an excuse for a celebration was a temptation Leo could not resist. On the last evening in November 1521 he held an all-night banquet at the Vatican, complete with fine wines, champagne, gambling, music, theatricals, acrobats, fireworks, and his many nipoti, including three nephews and two cousins, all wearing the cardinals’ hats he had bestowed upon them. As always, he had a marvelous time, though the price turned out to be extravagant, even by his standards. At dawn, as his guests departed, he withdrew, explaining that he felt ill. He had caught a chill. By noon he was running a fever, which, by nightfall, had killed him.
He was forty-six years old. He was also bankrupt. Armellini found there wasn’t enough money in the pontiff’s vaults to provide candles for Leo’s coffin; he had to use melted-down stubs from the last cardinalate funeral. Had the dead pope been spared, Roman wags said, he would have sold Rome, then Christ, then himself. He had sponsored magnificent painting and sculpture, which should have counted for something, but there were few kind words for him that bleak December. Because he had mishandled the Protestant apostasy, wrote Francesco Vettori, a contemporary historian, Leo had left the papacy in the “lowest possible repute.” In the streets of Rome men hissed the sacred college on its way to choose his successor.
Their contempt was unjustified. For the first time in nearly a century their eminences chose well. They hadn’t meant to; the outcome was unexpected, the consequence of a three-way deadlock. In a move to break it, someone nominated Adrian Cardinal Boeyens of Utrecht, the emperor’s childhood mentor, who wasn’t even present. Rival blocs, trying to outmaneuver one another, wound up outfoxing their own interests; to their horror, they found they had actually elected the unknown prelate, who thereby became Adrian VI, the only Dutch pope in history—“the Barbarian,” as Romans immediately began calling him. * That is precisely what he was not. A former professor of the University of Louvain, Adrian was exactly what Catholicism desperately needed: a reformer.
In his first speech to the cardinals he bluntly told them that corruption in the Church was so rife that “those steeped in sin” could “no longer perceive the stench of their own iniquities.” Under his predecessor, he said, “sacred things have been misused, the commandments have been transgressed and in everything there has been a turn for the worse.” They eyed him stonily. He moved decisively to end the sale of indulgences, outlaw simony, cut the papal budget, and assure that only qualified candidates for the priesthood were ordained, but his orders always miscarried. Unable to bridge the cultural barrier with the Italians around him—only two of his aides were Dutch—he was thwarted at every turn by the entrenched Curia, and after a year in office he died, unmourned, having been, wrote Vettori, “a little and despised pope.”
THE ITALIAN CARDINALS, grateful for the chance to rectify their mistake so soon, now turned to one of their own: Giulio de’ Medici, a cousin of Leo X, who became Pope Clement VII (r. 1523-1534). Weak and vacillating, Clement tried to play Charles V and Francis I off against one another. He entered into secret treaties with each, and was exposed, thereby earning the distrust of both. Italy became a bleak