The steel doors of the Vatican open to admit the week’s supplies for the thousand citizens living within its hundred acres. For over a century, the kingdom and republic of Italy have surrounded this tiny independent state. We think of the Pope today as above all a spiritual leader. But behind St.
Peter’s, hidden among the fountains and quiet courtyards, are the offices of a vast diplomatic network. We expect the Vatican to exert pressure on governments, but we would be shocked if it went to war. Those hundred Swiss guards look like decoration, yet they are the remnant of an army of Swiss mercenaries who once fought real battles for the Papal States, the large territory in central Italy over which the Popes claimed full princely authority. When the keys of St.
Peter flew on the papal banner at the head of a hired army, it was clear the Pope was as much a prince as a prelate. In the fourteenth century, the Popes adopted their triple crown and built themselves a fortified palace at Avignon in France, where seven French Popes in succession ruled as absentee landlords of the Papal States, sending armies to fight for them. Soon their armies were fighting not only other princes but other Popes. Rome resented having no Italian Pope.
After rival elections, there was an embarrassing result: a Pope in Rome and a Pope in Avignon, each claiming the other was a fraud. A council deposed both and elected a third, but neither of the first two would stand down. So there were three Popes, each with his own cardinals and bureaucracy, each excommunicating the others. Ugly rumors swirled about their private lives.
One had been accused of fornication, heresy, corruption, blasphemy, and murder. Another would face charges of sodomy, and murder. Little seemed to be changing in papal affairs, except one crucial thing—more and more people were protesting that the Popes had betrayed Jesus Christ and had lost their authority as his representatives on Earth. John Wycliffe in England was among the first to make his voice heard.
He called the Popes “ limbs of Satan and the cardinals “incarnate devils. ” He claimed there was only one true authority:the scriptures. His manuscripts reached Prague in 1401, carried by a Czech scholar who had copied them in Oxford. Wycliffe was already dead nearly thirty years, but his ideas struck a far brighter spark here than they ever had in England.
In Prague’s central square stands a statue of the man who developed Wycliffe’s ideas and died for them:Jan Hus. Hus preached in the Bethlehem Chapel, founded specifically for sermons in the Czech language so people would understand. The chapel’s central feature was not an altar but a pulpit. On its walls, Czech texts were written with music above for people to sing, and paintings contrasted the humility of Christ washing the feet of his disciples with the pride of the Popes, and showed Christ throwing money changers from the temple.
If Christ rejected such wealth, what would he have thought of three rival Popes? When the Emperor Sigismund called a council to deal with the mess, Hus was summoned to explain himself. His friends warned him not to go, but Sigismund personally guaranteed his safety. With great courage, Hus set off.
He should have been warned by the great astronomical clock, where every hour the twelve apostles came on parade. The papacy regarded Hus as a heretic, and the penalty was death. Hus had accused the Popes of deadly sins—vanity, avarice—and denied their authority. Trusting the emperor, he went anyway.
The Council met at Constance, a lakeside German town, chosen by Sigismund who insisted it be held outside Italy. People came in 1414 from all over Europe—up to seventy thousand clergy, ambassadors, merchants, and curious locals. The bakers couldn’t cope, so portable ovens were brought in. Butchers worked overtime, and fishmongers stocked snails and frogs for exotic foreign tastes.
Only one of the three rival Popes, Pope John, dared come. He handed out candles to the faithful and quickly lost the limelight. On Christmas Day, the Emperor Sigismund rode through the Rhine Gate to the cathedral, staging a theatrical ceremony in which he received the homage of the papacy—at least a third of it. Meanwhile, with far less pomp, Hus arrived and lodged with a widow.
He was ready to defend his ideas, saying he would recant if the Council could prove him wrong from the scriptures. But the bishops cared more about his defiance than his theology. His safe conduct was brushed aside, and he was thrown into a prison cell atop a small tower—today part of Constance’s best hotel. While the Council tried to prove him a heretic, accusing him of errors he didn’t actually hold, the underlying clash remained:he did not accept the authority of an unworthy pope, of corrupt priests, or of a church more interested in politics than in Christ.
Although the emperor had guaranteed his safety, it was only a matter of time. Condemned as a heretic, there was only one penalty. Hus was burned at the stake. The Council also ordered that Wycliffe, dead forty years, be dug up from his English grave, his bones broken and burned, his ashes thrown into a river.
But his supporters noted that as the river flowed to the ocean, so his ashes, like Hus’s cast into the Rhine, had spread through the entire world. The Council built a new hall to elect a replacement. All three existing Popes were deposed, and on November 11, 1417, the rafters rang with shouts of “Habemus Papam. ” There was a Pope:an Italian who would reign as Martin V.
But he wasn’t even a priest yet. On successive days, he was made deacon, ordained priest, consecrated bishop, and finally received the papal crown. The circus left town:. Three years before, they had arrived with three Popes and two heretics.
They left with one Pope and no heretics. It seemed satisfactory. But what was merely the end of a heretic in Constance was seen in Bohemia as the making of a martyr. And making martyrs does not suppress heresy.
Five years after Hus’s death, some of his more extreme followers founded the fortress town of Tábor, where the people of God could hold out against the world—above all against the papacy. They believed the second coming was close, so they shared all possessions and the running of the town. No book was to be read except the Bible, and every man took his turn inthe army. Between 1420 and 1434, no fewer than five crusading armies were sent against Tábor—and every one was defeated.
Their leader was Jan Žižka, who fought under the banner of the chalice, following Hus’s teaching that the wine of the mass should be shared by all, not just the clergy. He sent his men into battle in armored carts—a sort of fifteenth-century tank—armed with primitive but highly effective weapons. Enemies were terrified. But even friends found it hard to live with people so convinced of being chosen by God.
They enjoyed slogans like “The just will now rejoice washing their hands in the blood of the sinners. ” It was more moderate followers of Hus who finally suppressed them. An Italian cardinal who visited later reported,”This malignant race has only one good point:their love of education. ” That cardinal became Pope as the humanist Pius II, who wrote,”Among the Taborites, you will hardly find one young woman who is not versed in both the Old and the New Testaments.
Our Italian priests may well be ashamed, for not one among them has once read even the New Testament. ”
Rome had a lot to learn when it pulled itself together after the Council. But it chose the more exclusive learning of the Italian Renaissance. When Pope Martin returned to Italy, he came first not to Rome but to Florence, then a liveliest town in Europe of about fifty thousand people.
Florence’s bankers had made her rich, her artists famous. Rulers borrowed money here, and her gold florin was the currency against which others were measured—the dollar of its day. Tiny Florence held great kingdoms in pawn. Here, better than anywhere, Martin could see what the future held.
Florence’s rebirth was already underway. Man was discovering a new image of himself and of God. Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo would soon grow up in this same city. At the cathedral, Martin no doubt inspected Giotto’s colorful bell tower, completed sixty years before, but beside it stood at still-unfinished dome, the most ambitious feat of engineering since classical times.
On the walls below, artists and sculptors were celebrated. The building known as Orsanmichele brought many sides of Florence’s life together. It was headquarters of the guilds but also a marketplace, grown up around a miraculous painting of the Virgin. As the guilds grew richer, they provided her with a more impressive shrine, leading the eye upward to the creator of all wealth—and above to the warehouses of their prosperity.
The bankers claimed her favor, but there was contradiction in their piety. Usury was a sin; lending money on interest was considered an unholy perversion of God’s arrangements for procreation. The richest banking family became Florence’s greatest patrons of art:the Medici. A lavish fresco showing the procession of the three wise men decorated their private chapel, with one rider a portrait of the man who secured their wealth:Cosimo de Medici.
Guilt over the family’s usurious fortunes gnawed at him, they said, so he consulted the bank’s best customer, who happened also to be the Pope. The Pope suggested God might look more kindly on the family if Cosimo founded a monastery. It was a perfect arrangement for both sides. When Pope Eugenius IV moved Dominicans into Florence, Cosimo built them the convent of San Marco.
The cells were decorated by a friar who was one of the geniuses of the Renaissance:Fra Angelico. His Annunciation stands at the top of the stairs, his Crucifixion in Cosimo’s own cell—just like any other monk’s cell, except twice as large. Humility has its limits. Fra Angelico’s paintings have that sense of exuberant yet dignified humanity which was Florence’s new discovery.
The open faces of Renaissance humanism were here. Botticelli above all expressed the origin of this new inspiration. His Virgins were even more enchantingly human than Christian figures elsewhere, but their beauty was shared by distinctly un-Christian characters. In his allegorical painting of Spring, Venus was described as a nymph of excellent comeliness, born of heaven, more than others beloved by God.
Even fierce Mars, god of war, could be tamed by her charms. Entering the Laurentian Library, designed by Michelangelo to house the Medici manuscripts, felt like coming into church. The scholar slid into his pew, the manuscripts chained to the desk beneath. Instead of bringing the book to the student, the student sat before it.
The great treasures were classical texts. This was no dusty burrowing—it was a liberation, a rediscovery of the classical idea of man’s dignity. The Middle Ages had never quite dared believe what the Bible said:that God created man in his own image. The Renaissance reveled in it.
Michelangelo’s fresco of the Creation shows God extraordinarily human, Adam confident of being almost divine. As Michelangelo wrote in a sonnet,”If my rough hammer makes a human form and carves it in the hard unyielding stone, my hand is guided, and follows where that other worker came. ” In his unfinished sculptures known as the Captives, the human body seems to struggle to free itself from shackles into its full perfection, achieving a form justifying Hamlet,’s words:What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god
While man acquired almost divine dignity, the Holy Family became more human. Renaissance Virgins had the appeal of beautiful young girls.
The Della Robbia family dotted Florence with colored terracotta madonnas, each with everybody’s ideal of a plump cheerful baby. Renaissance man could at last hear the laughter of the Holy Family. Luca della Robbia captured that same cheerful celebration on the gallery which once held the cathedral’s choir. But the beauty of the world was being threatened.
How dare anyone try to end this beauty? Walking in its face, we find the purpose of peace, the beauty of life you can no longer hide. Our eyes are open. Why?
When Pope Martin moved on to Rome, he found it almost derelict after years of neglect. Cows grazed in the Forum, giving its ancient splendor the look of a small market town. But the Popes over the next two centuries would turn Rome into the most spectacular city in Europe. First came a practical task:repairing the fountains that provided drinking water.
But the people’s minds were to be dazzled as well. One of Martin’s successors gave the cue:”To create solid and stable conviction in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye. If the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, their belief would grow. ” Mighty St.
Peter’s would not be completed for two hundred years, but such buildings were perfectly designed for that purpose. For the cultured few, there were delights in private papal villas like the Villa Giulia, the summer palace of Pope Julius III. Every time the Pope sunk foundations for a new palace or church, they unearthed evidence of Rome’s ancient greatness:a statue of Venus, the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön. These distinctly pagan statues, reveling inthe human body, suited perfectly the humanism of the Renaissance.
By the time they were dug up, there had been several humanist Popes. One of the most distinguished was Pius II, who had been a man of the world before entering the church. A series of paintings shows highlights of his career. He first won a place in a great man’s retinue setting off to a council, then was sent as envoy to Scotland, where he found the king’s daughters eager to seduce a young Italian—at least one succeeded, though he was sad to hear the son he left behind died as an infant.
Then came his career as an author; the emperor crowned him poet laureate, then sent him as ambassador to negotiate with the Pope. Soon he was ordained priest, then bishop, introducing his old friend the emperor to the future empress. But he had written a saucy classical play and a novel about two lovers. Within a few years he was cardinal, and at the very next conclave, elected Pope.
The Romans expected a lively time. They were disappointed:. Pius became one of the more respectable Renaissance Popes, even trying to suppress his own naughty novel. I read it to find out what was so shocking.
Like Lady Chatterley,’s Lover, it takes many pages to get going. But at last, the big love scene:”They went into a room, where they passed so sweet a night that both said Mars and Venus could not have been better together. And sometimes, raising the blankets, he gazed at those secret parts he had not seen before,and cried,”Thus, when she bathed in the spring, must Diana have appeared to Actaeon. ” Classical literature, it turns out, was rather less liberating for writers than classical sculpture was for artists.
Pius was moderate, making only one nephew a cardinal. But soon the papacy got into its stride with Pope Sixtus IV, who gave seven nephews the red hat. Machiavelli wrote of him:”He was the first who began to show how far a Pope might go,and how much, which was previously regarded as sinful, lost its iniquity when committed by a pontiff. ” The sculptor of Sixtus’s tomb caught him with brutal realism.
But Sixtus did at least build the Sistine Chapel, named after him. And he could sympathize with family problems of others. Young Cesare Borgia had struggled to become priest because illegitimate, but Sixtus ruled:”The normal rules needn’t apply, for Caesar’s father was a distinguished cardinal, and his mother a married woman. ” Caesar’s father soon became Pope as Alexander VI, who broke all records in papal corruption.
He shamelessly bribed cardinals to elect him Christ’s vicar, then created new cardinals willing to pay thousands of ducats each. At the wedding feast for his daughter Lucrezia, the papal master of ceremonies noted dryly that part of the fun featured fifty naked prostitutes crawling about looking for chestnuts under the furniture. Gossip soon whispered that there were nightly orgies in the Vatican apartments, decorated with cupids and the Borgia bull. “Every evening twenty-five or more women, between Ave and one o’clock, are brought to the palace,to such an extent that the whole palace has openly become a brothel.
”
A reaction was inevitable, and it happened in Florence. In 1497, rumors spread of yet another secret son born to Alexander VI. That same year, a long procession of boys came singing psalms into the square below the town hall, carrying a wooden structure piled high with all the immoral objects they had collected from house to house:playing cards, dice, obscene pictures and books, women’s false hair and cosmetics, even dolls. As they sang to God, the pile of worldly vanities was set alight with righteous excitement.
The man behind it was a friar:. Savonarola. Florence listened, mesmerized by his terrible voice prophesying God’s punishment. “All you cities of Italy, now is the time for all your sins to be punished.
Oh Italy, for your lust, your avarice, your pride, your ambition, your thieving and extortion, there will come upon you many scourges. ” His chief target was the Pope himself. Alexander didn’t mind being accused of fornication and corruption—he was used to that. But when Savonarola drew the same conclusion as earlier reformers—that if a Pope was corrupt, there was no need to obey him—the Pope excommunicated him.
Florence paid little attention, until Alexander threatened to seize the goods of all Florentine merchants in Rome. That hurt. Support drained away. Savonarola was arrested, tortured, and then, in that same piazza where the vanities had gone up in smoke, he was hanged with two of his friars above the flames.
The last bonfire of his lifewas his own. Many times he had prophesied disaster for wicked Rome. Now it must have seemed a hollow prophecy. First Venus ruled, then came god of war—so ran a joke about the change from Alexander VI to his rival, Pope Julius II.
Julius actually marched into battle as Pope in armor. But he loved art as much as war. He laid the foundation stone for the new St. Peter’s, planning to place his own tomb at its center.
He commissioned Michelangelo and Raphael to beautify the Vatican, hired six thousand Swiss mercenaries, and persuaded Michelangelo to design the uniform the Swiss Guards still wear. Inside the Vatican, papal policy was built on shifting sands of power politics. Military alliances were made with foreign rulers, hastily canceled for better ones. Not long after Julius’s campaigns, Raphael’s workshop painted great frescoes to give historical basis for this military papacy, showing the Battle of Milvian Bridge, when a cross appeared to Constantine who won and converted.
The Pope who commissioned them was a Medici, Clement VII, who had himself painted as the fourth-century Pope baptizing Constantine. Finally, there was the myth on which papal temporal power was based:the Donation of Constantine, supposed to give Popes princely control over wide territories. In fact, the precious document had been proved a forgery centuries before Clement commissioned this painting. But the Popes were about to be paid out for playing at soldiers.
In 1527, Clement, having recently deserted Emperor Charles V once again, found himself a prisoner in his own castle. Rome came under attack from an Imperial army full of heretical German Lutherans who had no love for the Pope. Clement was praying in the Vatican when the army broke through the walls and began to sack Rome. He hurried along a raised way into the Castel Sant’Angelo.
“Had he tarried three creeds more, he would have been taken prisoner in his own palace,” wrote a contemporary. The siege made for sleepless nights, though Clement had already decorated his apartments therein the style to which a Medici Pope was accustomed. To critics, the fall seemed a prophecy fulfilled. It was a hundred years since Taborites had defeated five papal armies and predicted Rome’s destruction.
Ten years since Luther began prophesying disaster. There were Lutheran troops who’d marched south encouraged precisely by the idea of slaughtering Roman priests. For years, whoremongering Renaissance Rome had been identified with the scarlet woman of Revelation, the whore of Babylon. Some felt she got what she deserved.
After weeks of violence, Rome was largely in ruins again, so recently rebuilt. But politics rises above such matters. Negotiations withdrew the army, and soon pope and emperor found new grounds for alliance. The emperor would prop up the Medici in Florence.
In return, the Pope would crown Charles emperor. A deal was cemented by arranging the emperor’s illegitimate daughter should marry the Pope’s son. In the Sistine Chapel, housing Michelangelo’s confident Creation, a new fresco went up, more in keeping with the times. Clement commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment as a solemn warning after the Sack.
Here were still the naked, realistic human bodies of the Renaissance, but not the languid nakedness of Adam, not the heroic nakedness of David. Instead, the massive nakedness of this avenging Christ, the tense nakedness of even the blessed, the utter nakedness of the damned. Michelangelo described how he was haunted while painting by the voice of the dead Savonarola, whose prophecies had now come true. What a piece of work is a man.
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In action, how like an angel. In apprehension, how like a god. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me.
