• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 922 0

and celebrate communion and the spiritual rites—though some of them might be. Those appointed from the episcopate, the highest level of the priesthood, continued to hold their sees, but the majority belonged to the officialdom of the Church without priestly function. Drawn from the upper ranks of the hierarchy, who were increasingly involved in administration, diplomacy and the financial business of the Church, they came from the Italian ruling families or, if foreigners, were usually more courtier than cleric. As secularization advanced, appointments went more frequently to laymen, sons and brothers of princes or designated agents of monarchs with no ecclesiastical careers behind them. One, Antoine Duprat, lay chancellor of Francis I, made a Cardinal by the last of the Renaissance six, Clement VII, entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.

As the popes of this period, using the red hat as political currency, enlarged the number of cardinals both to increase their own influence and to dilute that of the College, the cardinals collected plural offices—each involving another case of absenteeism—to augment their incomes, accumulating abbeys, bishoprics and other benefices, although by canon law only a cleric had the right to revenues and pensions derived from the goods of the Church. Canon law, however, was elastic like any other, and “by way of exception” allowed the Pope to grant benefices and pensions to laymen.

Regarding themselves as princes of the realm of the Church, the cardinals considered it their prerogative, not to mention their duty, to match in dignity and splendor the princes of the lay realm. Those who could afford to lived in palaces with several hundred servants, rode abroad in martial attire complete with sword, kept hounds and falcons for hunting, competed when they paraded through the streets in the number and magnificence of their mounted retainers, whose employment provided each prince of the Church with a faction among Rome’s persistently riotous citizens. They sponsored masques and musicians and spectacular floats during Carnival; they gave banquets in the style of Pietro Riario’s, including one by the opulent Cardinal Sforza which a chronicler said he could not venture to describe “lest he be mocked as a teller of fairy tales.” They gambled at dice and cards—and cheated, according to a complaint by Franceschetto to his father after he had lost 14,000 ducats in one night to Cardinal Raffaele Riario. There may have been some substance to the charge, for on another night the same Riario, one of Sixtus’ many nephews, won 8000 ducats gaming with a fellow Cardinal.

To arrest the thinning of their influence, the cardinals insisted as a condition of Innocent’s election on a clause restoring their number to 24. As vacancies appeared, they refused consent to new appointments, limiting Innocent’s scope for nepotism. The pressure of foreign monarchs for places, however, forced some openings, and among Innocent’s first selections was his brother’s natural son, Lorenzo Cibo. Illegitimacy was a canonical bar to ecclesiastical office which Sixtus had already overlooked on behalf of Cardinal Borgia’s son Cesare, whom he started on the ecclesiastical ladder at age seven. Legitimizing a son or nephew became routine for the six Renaissance popes—yet another principle of the Church discarded.

Of the few he was allowed, Innocent’s most notable appointment to the Sacred College was Franceschetto’s new brother-in-law, Giovanni de’ Medici, age fourteen, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. In this case it was not Innocent’s desire but the great Medici’s pressure that made a Cardinal of the boy for whom his father had been procuring rich benefices since he was a child. Tonsured, that is, dedicated to the clerical life, at age seven, Giovanni had been made Abbot at eight with the nominal rule of an abbey conferred by the King of France, and at eleven, named ad commendam to the great Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, since which time his father had pulled every wire at his command to secure a cardinalship as a