The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [37]
Through visible beauties and grandeur, they believed, the Papacy would be dignified and the Church exert its hold upon the people. Nicholas V, who has been called the first Renaissance Pope, made the belief explicit on his deathbed in 1455. Urging the Cardinals to continue the renovation of Rome, he said, “To create solid and stable conviction there must be something that appeals to the eye. A faith sustained only by doctrine will never be anything but feeble and vacillating.… If the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings … all the world would accept and revere it. Noble edifices combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions would immensely exalt the chair of St. Peter.” The Church had come a long way from Peter the fisherman.
1. Murder in a Cathedral: Sixtus IV 1471–84
Until the election in 1471 of Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, former General of the Franciscan Order, who took the name Sixtus IV, the popes of the early Renaissance, if without zeal for spiritual renewal, had maintained on the whole nominal respect for the dignity of their office. Sixtus introduced the period of unabashed, unconcealed, relentless pursuit of personal gain and power politics. He had attained prominence as a preacher and lecturer in theology at the universities of Bologna and Pavia, and as General of the Franciscans had acquired a reputation as an able and severe administrator. As a friar, he was supposedly chosen Pope in reaction to the worldliness of his predecessor, Paul II, a Venetian patrician and former merchant. In fact, he owed his election rather to the skillful maneuvering of the ambitious, unprincipled and very rich Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to acquire the papal tiara for himself. Borgia’s support of Sixtus was in itself something of a character reference, and history has recognized the link by calling them, together with Innocent VIII, who came in between, the “three evil geniuses.”
The Franciscan’s gown concealed in Sixtus a hard, imperious, implacable character; a man of strong passions and a large, poor and exigent family. He proceeded to enrich its members and, using all the resources now at his command, to endow them with high office, papal territories and titled spouses. Upon taking office, he shocked public opinion by appointing as Cardinals two of his eleven nephews, Pietro and Girolamo Riario, both in their twenties, who rapidly became notorious for mad and spendthrift behavior. Before he had finished, Sixtus had conferred the red hat on three more nephews and a grandnephew, made another a Bishop, married four nephews and two nieces into the ruling families of Naples, Milan, Urbino, and to Orsinis and Farneses. Non-clerical relatives were placed in high positions of civil power as Prefect of Rome, Governor of Castel Sant’ Angelo and to governorships of several of the Papal States with access to their revenues. He raised nepotism to a new level.
He packed the College of Cardinals with his personal appointees, creating no fewer than 34 in his thirteen-year papacy, although the College had been fixed at 24, and leaving at his death only five not beholden to him for their appointment. He made an established practice of political selection for the purpose of favoring this or that prince or sovereign, often choosing lords or barons or younger sons of great families without regard to merit or clerical qualification. He gave the archiepiscopal see of Lisbon to a child of eight and the see of Milan to a boy of eleven, both sons of princes. He so thoroughly secularized the College that his successors followed his example as if it were the rule. In the twenty years under Innocent VIII and Alexander VI, no fewer