Christopher Hibbert - The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

Emerging from the church wearing his mantle, scarlet hat and sapphire ring, the sixteen-year-old boy had not presented a prepossessing appearance. He was tall enough and looked both good-natured and intelligent; but his face was pasty and flabby, his body already extremely fat, and his eyesight evidently failing. His nose was markedly snubbed and he kept his mouth half open. Nor did his appearance belie his nature. He was intelligent, his tutors all agreed; he was of a happy and generous disposition; but they had due cause to complain of his laziness, his precocious and excessive predilection for good food, good drink and pleasure. In Rome he had ample opportunity to indulge these tastes, and he did not stint himself. ‘He will not get out of bed in the morning,’ one of his tutors reported. ‘And he will sit up late at night. I am most concerned, since these irregular habits are likely to injure his health.’

Well aware of these faults, his father had thought it as well to write him a long letter of advice in the hope that he might be persuaded to lead a life more befitting his exalted rank:

The first thing that I want to impress upon you is that you ought to be grateful to God, remembering always that it is not through your merits, or your wisdom that you have gained this dignity, but through His favour. Show your thankfulness by a holy, exemplary, and chaste life… During the past year I have been much comforted to see that, without being told to do so, you have often of your own accord gone to confession and to Holy Communion. I do not think mere is a better way of keeping in God’s grace than to make this a regular practice. I know only too well that in going to live in Rome, which is a sink of iniquity, you will find it hard to follow this advice because there will be many there who will try to corrupt you and incite you to vice, and because your promotion to the cardinalate at your early age arouses much envy… You must, therefore, oppose temptation all the more firmly… It is at the same time necessary that you should not incur a reputation for hypocrisy, and in conversation not to affect either austerity or undue seriousness. You will understand all this better when you are older… You are well aware how important is the example you ought to show to others as a cardinal, and that the world would be a better place if all cardinals were what they ought to be, because if they were so there would always be a good Pope and consequently a more peaceful world…

You are the youngest cardinal, not only in the Sacred College of today but at any time in the past. Therefore, when you are in assembly with other cardinals, you must be the most unassuming, and the most humble… Try to live with regularity… Silk and jewels are seldom suitable to those in your station. Much better to collect antiquities and beautiful books, and to maintain a learned and well regulated household rather than a grand one. Invite others to your house more often than you accept invitations to theirs; but not too often. Eat plain food and take plenty of exercise… Confide in others too little rather than too much. One rule above all others I urge you to observe most rigorously: Rise early in the morning . This not only for your health’s sake, but also so that you can arrange and expedite all the day’s business…

With regard to your speaking in the Consistory, I think it would be best for the present while you are still so young, to refer whatever is proposed to you to His Holiness, giving as your reason your youth and inexperience. You will find that you will be asked to intercede with the Pope for many small objects. Try at first to do this as seldom as you can, and not to worry him unduly in this way. For it is the Pope’s nature to pay the most attention to those who bother him least… Farewell.

Lorenzo’s reference to Rome as a sink of iniquity was not unjust. There were reckoned to be almost seven thousand prostitutes in a population of less than 50,000, most of them working in brothels licensed by the papal authorities and many of them suffering from syphilis, ‘a kind of illness very common among priests’, according to Benvenuto Cellini, who caught the disease himself. There were almost as many professional criminals as prostitutes, many if not most of whom avoided punishment by paying bribes. There were alleged to be an average of fourteen murders a day; and although the stench from the rows of rotting corpses of executed men hanging from the battlements of the Castel Sant’ Angelo made it an ordeal to cross the bridge beneath, most murderers, if caught, were soon released. Roderigo Borgia, one of the richest cardinals, explained when asked why so many malefactors escaped execution, ‘The Lord requires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may pay and live.’ It was this Roderigo Borgia who, on the death of Innocent VIII, secured his own succession as Alexander VI by disbursing the most lavish gifts to all his rivals and potential supporters. Five asses laden with gold were believed to have entered the courtyard of the one cardinal, Ascanio Sforza, whose own riches and influence might have defeated him.

The young cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici seems to have enjoyed his early years in Rome to the full; but once a price had been placed on his head by the government of Florence he thought it advisable to go abroad for a time. So, having obtained permission from Alexander to travel beyond the Alps, he left for Venice en route for Bavaria in company with his cousin Giulio, who had been studying at the university at Pisa. From Bavaria they went to Brussels, then travelled up to the Flemish coast with the intention of sailing for England. Changing their minds, they rode south for Rouen instead, then to Marseilles whence they took boat for Genoa to stay with Giovanni’s sister Maddalena. From Genoa, they returned at last to Rome where Alexander VI, having himself by then quarrelled with Florence, greeted them kindly.

They settled down in a palace in the city where, disregarding the meagreness of his resources, Giovanni determined to enjoy life to the full, surrounding himself with genial mends and a constant stream of guests. As well as his cousin Giulio, there lived in the palace Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, brother to Piero Dovizi, a brilliant, amusing and wily man, five years older than Giovanni, formerly his tutor and soon to become his secretary. Often to be seen there also was Giovanni’s younger brother, Giuliano, a well-mannered, kind, rather feckless though not unambitious young man whose cheerful good nature had endeared him to the families of the Duke of Urbino and the Marquis of Mantua, his hosts during his years of exile. Another frequent guest was the Pope’s favourite nephew, Cardinal Galeotto Franciotto, whom Giovanni had at first chosen to cultivate for selfish reasons but whom he grew to love so much mat, after Franciotto’s early death; he could not hear his name mentioned without tears starting to his eyes.

With Franciotto on one side and Dovizi on the other, with Giuliano and Giulio, with various cardinals and visitors from Florence whose good opinion he was anxious to cultivate, and with numerous artists by whom the name of Medici was still revered, Giovanni played the part of host with such lavish generosity that he was frequently in debt His guests became used to the constant disappearance and reappearance of his most valuable pieces of silver, which made their way between his dining-room and the shops of the Roman pawnbrokers.

Yet although he spent long evenings at the dining-table, long mornings discussing the several arts in which he took a lively interest, and long afternoons hunting and hawking in the Campagna – explaining that such exercise, incongruous though it might be for a cardinal, was a necessary duty for one so corpulent – Giovanni was far from content to devote all his life to the pleasures he so obviously enjoyed. He seemed always to have one pale, short-sighted eye turned in the direction of the thin, bearded, restless figure of the newly elected Pope.