The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [39]
The internal health of the Church did not interest Sixtus, and all calls for a Council, which were rising insistently, he roughly rejected on the precedent of Exsecrabilis. Denial did not end the demand. In 1481 the noise of reform sounded close at hand. Archbishop Zamometic, an envoy of the Emperor, arrived in Rome, where he voiced harsh criticisms of Sixtus and the Curia. Imprisoned by order of the Pope in Castel Sant’ Angelo, he was released by a friendly cardinal and, though knowing the risk, relentlessly returned to his theme. He published a manifesto calling on Christian princes to summon a continuation of the Council of Basle in order to prevent the ruination of the Church by Pope Sixtus, whom he accused of heresy, simony, shameful vices, wasting Church patrimony, instigating the Pazzi conspiracy and entering into secret alliance with the Sultan. Sixtus retaliated by placing the city of Basle under anathema, effectively closing it off to outsiders, and by once more throwing the defiant Archbishop into prison, where, apparently severely treated, he died, an alleged suicide, two years later.
Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom. In the last year of his life, Sixtus turned aside a reasonable program submitted to him by the Estates General of Tours in France. Agitated by the eloquence of a passionate reformer, Jean de Rély, the assembly proposed reform concerning fiscal abuse, plural benefices and the hated practice of ad commendam, by which temporary appointments, often of laymen, could be made “on recommendation” without the appointee’s being required to fulfill their duties. One of those issues that arouse passion peculiar to their ages, ad commendam was a device that Sixtus could easily have prohibited, thereby earning himself immense credit with the reform movement. He was blind to the opportunity and ignored the program. A few months later he was dead. So rancorous had been his reign that Rome erupted in two weeks of riot and plunder led by soldiers of the Colonna faction he had attempted to smash. Unlamented, Sixtus IV had achieved nothing for the institution he had headed except discredit.
2. Host to the Infidel: Innocent VIII 1484–92
Amiable, indecisive, subject to stronger-minded associates, Sixtus’ successor was a contrast to him in every way except in equally damaging the pontificate, in this case by omission and weakness of character. Originally named Giovanni Battista Cibo, the son of a well-to-do Genoese family, he was not at first designated for an ecclesiastical career, but he entered it after a normally misspent youth during which he fathered and acknowledged an illegitimate son and daughter. No sudden conversion or dramatic circumstances propelled him into the Church, other than the accepted fact that to someone with the right connections the Church offered a substantial career. Cibo reached a bishopric at 37 and office in the Papal Curia under Sixtus, who, appreciating his malleable nature, made him one of his stable of Cardinals in 1473.
Elevation to the Papacy of this rather dim and mediocre person was the unplanned outcome, as often occurred when two fiercely ambitious candidates blocked each other’s chances. The two, each of whom was subsequently to realize his ambition, were Cardinal Borgia, the future Alexander VI, and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the most able of Sixtus’ nephews, the future Julius II. As domineering and contentious as his uncle, but more effective, Giuliano, known as the Cardinal of St. Peter in Vincoli, could not as yet gather the