The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain

Vice-Chancellorship had given him enormous wealth; great capacity for affairs was associated in his person with long and intimate experience; the scandals of his private life counted for little in that age; and, although a Spaniard by birth, he might almost be regarded as a naturalised Italian. If, however, a foreign ambassador may be believed, haughtiness and the imputation of bad faith had ruined his chances at the last election; and it may have been thought that these causes would continue to operate. At all events, his name finds no place in the first speculations of the observers of the conclave. Two of its most respectable members, the Cardinals of Naples and of Lisbon, are apparently the favourites,—when, all on a sudden, on August 11 Rodrigo Borgia is elected by the nearly unanimous vote of the Sacred College, and takes the name of Alexander VI. Contemporary diarists and letter-writers leave us in no doubt as to the cause of this event. Cardinal Borgia had simply bought up the Sacred College. The principal agent in his elevation was Ascanio Sforza, a Cardinal of the greatest weight for his personal qualities and because of his connexion with the reigning house of Milan, but too young both as a man and a Cardinal to aspire as yet to the Papacy. Borgia’s election would vacate the lucrative Vice-Chancellorship, and Sforza was tempted with the reversion. Other Cardinals divided among themselves the archbishoprics, abbacies, and other preferments demitted by the new Pope; but Sforza’s influence was the determining force. His motives were unquestionably rather ambitious than sordid; he looked to the Vice-Chancellorship to pave his path to the Papacy; and the tale deserves little credence, that a man who in every subsequent passage of his life evinced magnanimity and high spirit was further tempted by mule-loads of silver. There is, in truth, absolutely no trustworthy evidence as to any money having passed in the shape of coin or bullion, and, although Alexander’s election was without question the most notorious of any for the unscrupulous employment of illegitimate influences, it is difficult to affirm that it was in principle more simoniacal than most of those which had lately preceded it or were soon to follow. If the bias of personal interest suffices to invalidate elections decided by it, the age of Alexander cannot be thought to have often seen a lawful Pope. If a less austere view is to be taken, no broad line of demarcation can well be drawn between the election of Alexander and that of Julius.

      Whatever the flaw in Alexander’s title, he seemed in many respects eminently fit for the office. At the mature age of sixty-two, dignified in personal appearance and in manner, vigorous in constitution, competently learned, a lawyer and a financier who had filled the office of Vice-Chancellor for thirty-six years, versed in diplomacy and well qualified to deal vigorously with turbulent nobles and ferocious bandits, he appeared the aptest possible representative of the Temporal Power, while his shortcomings on the spiritual side passed almost unnoticed in an age of lax morality, when religion had with most men become a mere form. Some of the far-seeing; indeed, shook their heads over the Pope’s illegitimate offspring, and predicted that the strength of his parental affection, and the imperious vehemence of his character, would lead him further and more disastrously than any predecessor on the paths of nepotism. To most, however, the experienced statesman and diligent man of business, genial and easy-tempered when not crossed, who knew how to combine magnificence with frugality, and whose deep dissimulation was the more dangerous from the perfect genuineness of the sanguine, jovial temperament beneath which it lay concealed, seemed precisely the Pope needed for restoring the Church’s tarnished* dignity. Nor was it long before Alexander justified a portion of the hopesreposed in him by his energy in reestablishing public order and in reinvigorating the administration of justice.

      It must always be a question how far Alexander can be said to have ascended the papal throne with a definite intention, either of aggrandising his children or of consolidating his authority as a temporal ruler by the subjugation of his petty vassals. That he meant to promote his children’s interests in every practicable manner may well be believed; but that he did not contemplate their elevation to sovereign rank seems manifest from his making the most able and promising of them, his second son Cesare, a Prince of the Church, by exalting him to the cardinalate at the age of eighteen. The Pope’s views for his family, however, had necessarily to be expanded in proportion as his secular policy became one of conquest; and, supposing him to have succeeded to the papal throne without any definite intention of subduing his turbulent barons, the need for such a course was soon impressed upon him. A seemingly quite harmless provision made by Innocent VIII for his natural son Franceschetto Cibo gave the first occasion for disturbance. Cibo, a peaceable and insignificant person, recognising his inability to defend the lands with which he had been invested, prudently sold them, and escaped into private life. But the purchaser was Virginio Orsini, a member of a great baronial house already far too powerful for the Pope’s security, and whose alternate quarrels and reconciliations with the rival family of the Colonna had for centuries been a chief source of disturbance in the patrimony of St Peter. What was still more serious, the purchase-money was believed to be supplied by Ferdinand King of Naples, whom Orsini had aided in his war with Innocent VIII, and who thus obtained a footing in the Papal States; and the Cardinal della Rovere espoused the cause of Orsini so warmly as to find it prudent to retire (January, 1493) to his bishopric of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, where he threatened to intercept the food supplies of Rome. Alexander naturally allied himself with Milan, Venice, and other States inimical to the King of Naples, and a general war seemed about to break out, when it was composed (July) by the intervention of Spain, which had penetrated the designs of the young French King, new to the throne and athirst for glory, for the conquest of Naples, and dreaded the opportunity and advantage that would be afforded him if Naples became embroiled with the Pope. A singular change of relations followed. The King of Naples became to all appearance the Pope’s most intimate ally. Alexander’s third son married a Neapolitan princess. He became estranged from his recent allies in Venice and Milan, and the Milanese Cardinal Sforza, till now apparently omnipotent at the papal court, lost all credit, notwithstanding the marriage of the Pope’s daughter Lucrezia to the despot of Pesaro, a prince of Sforza’s house. Yet within two months things took another aspect, when Alexander ignored Ferdinand’s wishes in a nomination of Cardinals which gratified the Sforza and drove the freshly reconciled Cardinal della Rovere into new enmity. The entire series of transactions reveals the levity and faithlessness of the rulers of Italy. Alexander had more excuse than any other potentate, for he alone was menaced with serious danger; and he might have learned, had he needed the lesson, the absolute necessity of fortifying the Pope’s temporal authority, if even his spiritual authority was to be respected.

      The signal for the woes of Italy was given by an event which at another time might not have displeased an Italian patriot,—the death of Ferdinand (or Ferrante), King of Naples, in January, 1494. Ferrante was a monarch after the approved pattern of his age, crafty, cruel, perfidious, but intelligent and well understanding how to make the most of himself and his kingdom. While he lived, the prestige of his authority and experience, combined with the youth of the King of France, may have assisted to delay the execution of French designs upon Naples. Upon his death they were carried forward with such warmth that, as early as February 3, Alexander, whose alliance with Naples remained unimpaired, thought it necessary to censure them in a letter to the French King. A bull assigned by most historians to this date, encouraging Charles to come to Naples in the capacity of a crusader, really belongs to the following year. Whether in obedience to the interests of the hour, or from enlightened policy, Alexander’s conduct at this time contrasted favourably with that of other leading men of Italy. Ludovico Sforza, playing with the fire that was to consume him, invited the French King to pass the Alps. The Florentine people favoured Charles VIII, although their unpopular ruler Piero de’ Medici seemed on the side of Naples. Venice pretended to espouse Sforza’s cause, but could in no way be relied upon. Cardinal della Rovere, whose old feud with the Pope had broken out anew, fled to France where, striving to incense Charles against the Pope, he unchained the tempest against which he was afterwards to contend when too late. Alexander alone, from whatever motive, acted for a time as became a patriotic Italian sovereign. Had he possessed any moral authority, he might have played a greater part. But papal dignity had been decaying since the days of Dante, and Alexander himself had impaired it still further. When his tone seemed the most confident, he secretly trembled at the weapons which he had himself put into his enemies’ hands by the scandals of his life, and the simony of his election.

      Nothing in Charles VIII, either in the outer or in the inner man, appeared to betoken the Providential instrument as which he stands forth