A new Medici is born amidst tragedy, Pope Leo struggles with the threats posed by France, Spain, and the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires and a deadly conspiracy close to home, and an obscure monk and university lecturer in Germany starts to inspire a bit of controversy.
Transcript
The last we saw Pope Leo X he had just betrayed his mentor and predecessor, Pope Julius, by ousting Julius’ nephew Francesco Maria from the duchy of Urbino and giving the duchy instead to Leo’s own nephew Lorenzo. But a few modern historians and Leo’s contemporaries agreed that he had also betrayed Julius by not doing enough to, as Julius would say, drive the barbarians out of Italy. But honestly while taking Urbino from its rightful duke was an undisputable blunder, I don’t think Leo can really be blamed for the rest of his foreign policy. He was stuck between a French rock and an imperial hard place, especially now that Spain and the Holy Roman Empire was practically ruled by the same family.
Instead of being the avenger of Italian freedom that Julius was, Leo took on the role of a fair weather ally to King Francois of France. He suggested that he would recognize Francois or another French candidate as King of Naples, but only if the French actually conquered the kingdom, a project to which Leo would only give lukewarm moral support. When the Italian Wars flared up again and it seemed like King Francois might lose Milan to an invasion by the Holy Roman Empire, Pope Leo cautiously put out feelers to Emperor Maxilimilian at the same time he sent excuses to Francois explaining why he didn’t send papal soldiers to reinforce the French defenders of Milan. Francois held on to Milan in the end, at least for the time being. But another time Leo had started talks to finally follow in Julius’ footsteps by forming a new Holy League, this time against France with Spain and England. The idea fell flat once Leo found out that the great European powers made their own arrangements behind their backs. Still, Francois was savvy enough to recognize that the Pope was playing the major powers against each other. The king complained that because his arrangements with the Pope didn’t work out whenever he was actually attacked by his enemies, he’d have to negotiate a new, separate treaty with the Pope that would work in times of peace. Still, it’s hard to see what other options Leo had. Italy was surrounded by the three major powers of western Europe – Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire – all of whom had a political claim and an interest in Italian territory. Any other great powers that might actually stand a chance against at least one of them in a war, like England or Poland, were too far away and had no stake in what happened in Italy. So Leo’s best option was to be a reluctant, less than trustworthy, and opportunistic friend and hope that one day an opportunity would present itself to reassert the independence of Milan or Naples.
Things were even worse closer to home. Leo had tried to keep Florence happy by appointing prominent Tuscans to positions at the papal court and to vacant cardinal seats, but this had a cost in stoking resentment among other members of the College of Cardinals. Worse, by striking down Francesco Maria della Rovere, Leo had turned a family with deep roots in the Church and the Roman aristocracy from being his supporters to his bitter enemies. This all came to a head when Leo managed to alienate another former ally, Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci from the city of Siena. He had played a role in convincing Julius II to support the Medici restoration to power and had backed Leo’s election. Unfortunately, his brother, Borghese Petrucci, had become the ruler of the Republic of Siena, or to use the Sienese’s own term, the primus of the Republic. As you might remember from earlier episodes, for centuries Siena had been one of Florence’s major political and economic rivals. With a Medici pope who was on good terms with the king of France, the leaders of the republic rightfully feared that sooner or later they would end up under Florentine domination just like neighboring Pisa. So Borghese Petrucci tried to set up an alliance between Siena and the French king’s biggest rival, Charles of Spain. This was an intolerable threat to Florence itself, so Leo backed a coup that deposed Borghese and put another, more pro-Florentine member of the Petrucci family, Raffaelo, into power. This was the final straw for Cardinal Alfonso, who found several of his fellow cardinals were receptive to his complaints about their boss.
The one cardinal who was the most enthusiastic about Alfonso’s heel turn on Leo was the elderly Cardinal Raffaele Riario. He was a great-nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s nemesis, Pope Sixtus IV, and had made a name for himself as one of the great artistic patrons of Rome. It was Riario, and not any of the Medici, who first lured Michelangelo to Rome. He also sponsored the construction of a luxurious residence that would become known as the Palace of the Chancellery, which is still one of the more famous examples of Renaissance architecture a visitor can find in Rome. Although he was related to Pope Julius, the two just didn’t get along, especially because Riario had been an ally of the Borgias during Pope Alexander’s reign, although Julius did appoint Riario as his vice chancellor. But Leo never forgave or forgot that Riario had been his biggest rival in his own papal election and, far worse, had been rightly or wrongly implicated in the Pazzi conspiracy that claimed the life of his uncle Giuliano. And Cardinal Riario was also another relative of Duke Francesco Maria of Urbino. So on top of having a personal vendetta against the Medici Pope, Cardinal Riario who had a tendency to build up large gambling debts had every reason to try to see a friendlier face if not himself become the new Pope. The cabal came to also include other cardinals, Adriano of Corneto, Bandinello Sauli, and finally Leo’s old rival, Francesco Soderini. These men were at least fully aware of what Petrucci and Riario would be up to, if not genuinely involved.
Alfonso Petrucci happened to know a shady surgeon in Rome named Gian-Battista da Vercelli. Apparently while listening to Alfonso rant about his boss, Gian-Battista volunteered to help him by poison the Pope. Unfortunately, it’s not clear at all why Gian-Battista would not only agree but initiate the plan. The most logical explanation is that once all was said and done Alfonso Petrucci tried to put as much blame on the helpless surgeon as possible. But I also wonder if Gian-Battista was hoping to string his wealthy new patron along, but without ever actually sticking his neck out to try to kill the Pope. Or perhaps he really was that desperate for a lucrative payday. In any case, Petrucci and Riario decided to take advantage of the fact that the Pope’s personal physician had taken ill and try to convince Leo to hire Gian-Battista to treat that anal fistula that kept tormenting Leo. Once Gian-Battista earned Leo’s trust, he would kill the Pope using bandaids coated with poison. However, a servant of one of the cardinals leaked the whole plot, either accidentally or deliberately. Acting with pure Medici guile, Leo played along and went so far as to ask Petrucci to come to the Vatican and speak with him personally, but this was just to give his enemies enough rope to hang themselves.
And hang themselves they did. In June of 1517, Gian-Batista and Marc Antonio Nino, Petrucci’s secretary, were arrested and interrogated under torture. By the time the College of Cardinals met with the Pope for a prearranged meeting, Leo had all the evidence he needed. With genuine anger he confronted the Cardinals, telling them that unless the guilty party came forward he would have the whole lot of them dragged off in chains. This was probably a show, since Leo already had an idea of who the cardinals were who participated in the plot or at least knew about the conspiracy and didn’t step forward. But Leo needed to be able to safely have Cardinal Riario, the richest and most politically well-connected out of the cardinals, detailed. Even in his rage and paranoia, Leo didn’t dare have the dangerous Cardinal Riario treated too badly. He was given closely watched but comfortable accommodations, while the other guilty cardinals were sent to dungeons in the imposing papal fortress of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, where they had to deal with a terrible stench and weren’t given food, water, or basic comforts. Leo was particularly vengeful toward Petrucci, who was clearly the leader of the plot, and Sauli, a cardinal whose career Leo had personally helped along. Yet Sauli still apparently gave the conspiracy his blessing for no reason other than raw, ruthless ambition. Leo ordered that they at least be threatened with torture, and Sauli was said to have shrieked at just the sight of the rack.
Leo called another meeting of the Cardinals, to discuss the legal proceedings against the conspirators. The Pope seemed genuinely distressed and broke out in tears, vowing that he would pardon all the cardinals. But when he left Mass, he had dramatically changed his mind or somebody had convinced him that such an act of forgiveness, while admirably Christ-like, would only invite further attempts on his life. Instead, he decided that all the cardinals would be tried in the secular courts, rather than by the Church itself.
Even so, though, as was usually the case, though, when it came time for punishments to be handed out the people outside the elite got the worst of it. When official proceedings against the guilty concluded, Gian-Battista, Marc Antonio Nino, and another underling of Cardinal Alfonso were torn apart using red-hot pincers and then publicly hung from gibbets off the bridge of Sant’ Angelo. Alfonso Petrucci was either quietly strangled or beheaded in his cell, perhaps as a favor to spare the Petrucci family the disgrace of a public execution. The other cardinals were luckier, even though they were all heavily fined and stripped of their rank. Although his betrayal seems to have stung Leo the most, Cardinal Sauli was after a period of house arrest fully reinstated as a cardinal that December. He did die a year later, which provoked rumors that he was poisoned in revenge, but that is the sort of story that would spread about anyone in a similar situation. Francesco Soderini, Adriano of Corneto, and Raffaele Riario were allowed to leave Rome and did not return until after Leo’s death. Leo also confiscated the disgraced cardinals’ properties, including the palace Cardinal Riario spent lavishly to build for himself. Leo had it turned into office space for the papal chancellery, and to this day the building is known as the Palace of the Chancellery, one of the city’s most famous examples of original Renaissance architecture. Because of how Leo raked in this and other goodies from the cardinals, the rumor spread that he made up the entire conspiracy as an excuse to eliminate his enemies in the papal court and restock the papal treasury with their money and property. Of course, there’s no real evidence of this, but it didn’t help Leo’s public image that he wasted no time in replacing the exiled cardinals with men who were either his nephews via his sisters or with those who had ties to foreign courts, namely Afonso, the son of King Manuel of Portugal; Louis de Bourbon, the French king’s cousin; and Adrian of Utrecht, Charles of Spain’s former Dutch tutor.
At the same time, things seemed to be doing better on the family front, at least at first. True, Leo’s nephew Lorenzo had turned out to be a total disappointment. He had no political acumen and had completely alienated the people of Florence. His personality was that of a stereotypical haughty aristocrat, treating even his prestigious cousin Cardinal Giulio with disdain just because he was born out of wedlock. Nor was Lorenzo that good at warfare, even though he loved to show off doing public military exercises that were so reckless his mother and Leo himself tried to convince him to stop. During the campaign in Urbino was because, against the advice of his own officers, he insisted on investigating the spot before the walls of a fortress his army was besieging where several of his soldiers had gotten killed operating the artillery and, surprise, he was shot too. Speaking of Urbino, even though his uncle had spent money and lives securing the duchy for him at his request, he rarely spent time there and did not put much effort into governing it. Instead he spent most of his time in Florence or Rome, attending alcohol-soaked banquets or carousing with women. At least Leo could take some comfort in the fact that Lorenzo was finally to be wed. Originally, Leo wanted Lorenzo to marry a woman from the Soderini family, as a gesture to make peace with the Medici’s biggest rivals in Florence. However, Lorenzo’s mother Alfonsina stepped in and instead pushed for a marriage between Lorenzo and Madeliene de La Tour d’Auvergne, a noble heiress from southern France and a distant cousin of King Francois. Francois signed off on the match, hoping to improve his ties with the papacy for the sake of his Italian ambitions.
It was the first match between a Medici and a member of the wider world of European royalty and high nobility. Leo was clearly anxious to prove that his family were good enough to marry into the French aristocracy. When Lorenzo arrived in the Loire Valley for the marriage on June 13, 1517 and of course to meet his bride in person for the first time, he led a procession that impressed even King Francois, with 300,000 ducats’ worth of gifts to the king including 36 richly adorned horses and a matrimonial bed for the couple constructed out of tortoiseshell and inlaid with gems and mother of pearl. It was a ceremony for the books. But one of the guests, the Seigneur de Fleurange, left behind in his memoirs the remark that Lorenzo’s young bride was “trop plus belle que le marié” – “much more beautiful than the groom.” Whether this referred to Lorenzo’s libertine lifestyle, the fact that he was already showing the symptoms of tuberculosis and possibly syphilis, or both, is unclear.
In any case, Lorenzo was dead a little less than a year after his marriage. He was only 26 years old. Lorenzo was likely killed by tuberculosis, the same disease that claimed his uncle Giuliano. If he did have syphilis as well, then that no doubt contributed to his death. Whatever it was, he shared his sickness, with his poor wife, who died over a month later. But before they died they did have a child, a daughter named Caterina, and to Lorenzo’s credit it was said he and Madeliene were as delighted with the girl’s birth as if she had been born a boy. Nonetheless, in cold, dynastic terms, Lorenzo dying before he could father a son was a disaster. Pope Leo and the infant Caterina were the only legitimate descendants of Cosimo de’ Medici left. As for the living Medici born out of wedlock, there was Cardinal Giulio, Giuliano’s little son Ippolito, and a boy named Alessandro, about whom we will hear much more later. For now, Leo had the infant Caterina brought to Rome, where he doted on the baby like any patriarch, Pope or not. Still, he could not help but make a bitter educated reference. Quoting Homer’s Iliad, he remarked sadly, ““She brings all the catastrophes of Hellas with her presence!” Sadly, this would not be the last time in her life that death would follow Caterina. She was called “Duchessina”, the “little duchess”, and named the rightful Duchess of Urbino, even though Leo also issued orders to begin administratively annexing Urbino to the Papal States. No one could have guessed that Caterina had a grander future in store than just being a figurehead duchess.
In the year 1518, Leo’s thoughts about the future were likely not optimistic for his grand-niece or for Italy itself. For the past several years news had been trickling into Rome about the reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Selim. In 1514, he crushed one of the few neighboring powers that could still challenge Ottoman might, the Safavid Empire of Persia, expanding the borders of the Ottoman Empire into Armenia and Mesopotamia. By 1517, Selim had also completely beaten the Mamluk Sultanate. This time, Selim claimed all of its territory, adding Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and northwestern Arabia to his empire. Compared to the Ottomans, even the French and Charles of Spain looked like mere nuisances. Leo threatened all the governments of Europe with excommunication if they did not stop fighting each other, and tried rallying the powers of Europe to put together the greatest army and navy Europe had ever seen for a crusade that would finally drive the Ottomans out of eastern Europe, if not destroy their empire completely.
All during this turbulent and tragic time, Leo was getting reports about some other problem, one that very likely didn’t occupy his mind nearly as much as his nephew Lorenzo’s antics or the Ottoman menace. A monk, who served as a university lecturer in theology at the town of Wittenburg in northeast Germany, was stirring up some controversy. A few loud voices in the Church even accused him of heresy. According to one source, Leo joked that this monk was just “a drunken German who will change his tune when he is sober.” So accordingly Leo just assigned the matter to Sylvester Mazzolini, a Dominican theologian who had dealt with heresy in the past, and then turned his attention to far more important matters.
Join us next time when we finally get around to meeting the drunken German and say goodbye to Pope Leo. Buona note.
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