The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [63]
Defenders of Julius II credit him with following a conscious policy based on the conviction that “virtue without power,” as a speaker had said at the Council of Basle half a century earlier, “will only be mocked, and that the Roman Pope without the patrimony of the Church would be a mere slave of Kings and princes,” that, in short, in order to exercise its authority, the Papacy had first to achieve temporal solidity before undertaking reform. It is the persuasive argument of realpolitik, which, as history has often demonstrated, has a corollary: that the process of gaining power employs means that degrade or brutalize the seeker, who wakes to find that power has been possessed at the price of virtue—or moral purpose—lost.
5. The Protestant Break: Leo X, 1513–21
“God has given us the Papacy—let us enjoy it,” wrote the former Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, now Pope Leo X, to his brother Giuliano. There is some question whether the remark is authentic but none that it is perfectly characteristic. Leo’s principle was to enjoy life. If Julius was a warrior, the new Pope was a hedonist, the only similarity between them being that their primary interests were equally secular. All the care of Lorenzo the Magnificent for the education and advancement of the cleverest of his sons had produced a cultivated bon vivant devoted to fostering art and culture and the gratification of his tastes, with as little concern for cost as if the source of funds were some self-filling magic cornucopia. One of the great spenders of his time, undoubtedly the most profligate who ever sat on the papal throne, Leo was much admired for his largesse by his Renaissance constituents, who dubbed his reign the Golden Age. It was golden for the coins that rained into their pockets from commissions, continuous festivities and entertainment, the rebuilding of St. Peter’s and city improvement. Since the money to pay for these came from no magic source but from ever-more extortionate and unscrupulous levies by papal agents, the effect, added to other embittering discontents, was to bring Leo’s reign to culmination as the last of united Christianity under the Roman See.
The luster of a Medici on the papal throne bringing with him the glow of money, power and patronage of the great Florentine house, augured, as it seemed, a happy pontificate, promising peace and benevolence in contrast to the blood and rigors of Julius. Consciously planned to reinforce that impression, Leo’s procession to the Lateran following his coronation was the supreme Renaissance festival. It represented what the Holy See signified to the occupant of its last undivided hour—a pedestal for the display of the world’s beauties and delights, and a triumph of splendor in honor of a Medici Pope.
A thousand artists decorated the route with arches, altars, statuary, wreaths of flowers and replicas of the Medici “pawnshop balls” sprouting wine. Every group in the procession—prelates, lay nobles, ambassadors, cardinals and retinues, foreign dignitaries—was richly and resplendently costumed as never before, the clerical as magnificent as the lay. A brilliant symphony of banners displaying ecclesiastical and princely heraldry waved over them. In red silk and ermine, two by two, 112 equerries escorted the sweating but happy Leo on his white horse. His mitres and tiaras and orbs required four bearers to carry them in full view. Cavalry and foot soldiers enlarged the parade. Medici munificence was exhibited by papal chamberlains throwing