Christopher - The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

Raphael, a native of Urbino, had already been set to work on the decoration of the official apartments of the apostolic palace by Julius II to whose notice he had been recommended by Bramante. Pope Leo asked Raphael to continue with the work; and under their combined direction the Loggie di Raffaello and the lovely halls known as the Stanze di Raffaello were completed. 5

AS OFTEN as he could Pope Leo rode out of Rome to the Villa Magliana, his country house on the road to Porto. Here, continuing to use the advice of the court physicians as his excuse for a flagrant breach of canon law, he indulged to the full his passion for hunting, hawking and ferreting. Huge tracts of land around the villa were reserved for his use. In the grounds an immense netted enclosure was filled with the doves, jays and herons which provided the hawks with their prey, and there was also a conigliare well stocked with rabbits for the ferrets.

At the Villa Magliana, where the Pope would remain for six weeks at a time, he abandoned his stole and rochet, and to the consternation of the papal master of ceremonies actually put on ‘long riding boots, which is most improper, seeing that the people consequently cannot kiss the Pope’s feet’. His poor eyesight did not permit him to participate in the early stages of the hunt, so he rode out on his favourite white horse to watch the killing through his spy-glass from a high mound or specially constructed platform.

The ground to be hunted had already been sealed off by tall strips of tough sail-cloth attached to poles. To prevent any animals inside the pen escaping into nearby thickets or marshes, soldiers of the Swiss guard and mounted gamekeepers assisted by peasants were drawn up in ranks around it. When the grooms holding the greyhounds and mastiffs in leash were ready, and the cardinals, gentlemen the papal court and all their friends had also taken up their positions, the Pope raised a white handkerchief as a signal for the horn to be sounded. Then the under-keepers, shouting, blowing trumpets and exploding charges of gunpowder, entered the pen and began to drive the game towards a gap in the canvas screen. Soon a torrent of animals came rushing out into the open, stags and boars, hares and rabbits, wolves, goats and porcupines. The waiting sportsmen would then eagerly fall upon their chosen target with spear or sword, axe or halberd, or gallop away after the greyhounds in pursuit of any animal that might have escaped their swinging blades.

The Pope would watch these scenes of slaughter through his glass, laughing at the antics of Fra Mariano, who would usually contrive to get into some sort of ludicrous difficulty, or admiring the strength of the enormous Cardinal Sanseverino who, on these occasions, habitually wore a lion skin across his shoulders. If an animal became entangled in a net or rope, the Pope would then proceed closer and, holding his glass to his left eye and taking up a spear, he would kill the struggling creature, cheerfully acknowledging the congratulations of his attendants.

The Pope especially enjoyed one day, according to the poet Guido Silvester. It was a day of many accidents. First a member of the papal court killed a hound in mistake for a wolf, which appears to have much amused the Pope when shown the result of the man’s stupidity. Then there was a fight over the carcass of a boar in which one of the disputants lost an eye. Finally one of Cardinal Cornaro’s kennel-men, notorious for his drunkenness, made a lunge with his spear at a wounded boar running for safety into the woods, missed his aim, killed his favourite hound, and, infuriated, threw himself onto the back of the boar which he tried to throttle. The boar shook the drunkard from his back and gored him to death. His companion carried the body back to Cardinal Cornaro who ordered the face to be washed with the best old wine while he composed an epitaph to commemorate his servant’s fate. As the Pope rode back, followed by the carcasses slain, he was heard to observe, ‘What a glorious day!’

To his description of these violent events, Guido Silvester adds the comment that after such a day’s hunting, the Pope would invariably be in so good a mood that he would happily agree to anything that was proposed to him, sign documents with contented smiles, grant requests with genial words; whereas a bad day’s hunting would produce only growls and complaints. A courtier or churchman with some special favour to ask would accordingly wait until the Pope’s return from a successful hunt in the Campagna, or from a happy day’s fishing in the artificial salt-water lake he had had constructed near Ostia, or from a visit to Cardinal Farnese’s estate at Viterbo where pheasants, partridges and quails could be bagged in their thousands and flocks of ortolans, thrushes, larks and goldfinches could be snared in the cardinal’s uccellari .

Well liked as the Pope was by those country people upon whom he extravagantly bestowed his largesse when riding out to hunt or fish, and by those churchmen and members of his court to whom he had granted some ambitious request, there were cardinals in Rome who had cause to feel dissatisfied with his behaviour. The costly war with Urbino was not the only Medicean cause which was straining the resources of the papal treasury; nor, when it became plain that Leo was attempting to arrange a marriage between his nephew, Lorenzo, and a French princess, was Francesco Soderini the only cardinal who felt outraged by a broken promise.

Cardinal Raffaele Riario had never forgiven the Pope for driving his kinsman Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino to provide a duchy for the wretched Lorenzo; nor had Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci overcome the anger that had swept over him when Leo had helped to remove his brother Borghese Petrucci from the governorship of Siena. They and many other cardinals had been further offended when Leo raised to the cardinalate various intimate friends and relations, ignoring the claims of more worthy members of their own families. Within months of his election he gave Bernardo Dovizi a scarlet hat; he also gave one to another Tuscan friend, Lorenzo Pucci; a third went to his nephew, Lorenzo Cibò. And, so as to do equal honour to Giulio de’ Medici, whom he had already appointed Archbishop of Florence, he established a commission to inquire into the circumstances of his cousin’s birth, making it clear enough to its members that he wished them to find – as dutifully they did find – that his uncle, Giuliano, had been secretly married to Simonetta Gorini and that Giulio was their legitimate son. This might not have been so objectionable had Giulio been better liked; but as Francesco Guicciardini observed

he was rather morose and disagreeable, disinclined to grant a favour, reputedly avaricious and very grave and cautious in all his actions. Perfectly self-controlled, he would have been highly capable had not timidity made him shrink from what he should have done.

By no one in the Sacred College was Giulio more disliked than by Alfonso Petrucci, the handsome, arrogant, dissolute, twenty-two-year-old cardinal whom the Pope had so deeply offended by interfering in his family’s affairs at Siena. His outspoken attacks on Leo, whom he had helped to elect, met with a good deal of sympathy in Rome, particularly from Cardinals Riario and Soderini, from Petrucci’s rich young friend, Cardinal Sauli, and from Cardinal Adriano Castellesi, formerly Cardinal Protector of England. Castellesi had no family grudge against the Pope, but he was said to have taken so seriously the prophecies of a soothsayer, who foretold that the next pope would be ‘Adrian, a learned man of humble birth’, that he had conceived it his sacred duty to do all he could to bring about the prophecy’s fulfilment as soon as possible.