History of St. Peter's Basilica: Orgies, murders, and family fun in the Vatican

Alexander VI in one of his more pious moments

Well, if you read yesterday’s entry and heard about the pope who died while eating melons and being sodomized by a page boy or the pope with sixteen illegitimate children who was worried about witchcraft in Germany or the one who was a pen-pal of Dracula’s, you may have thought they represented an all time papal low, but never think it can’t be worse.  (Actually go back to the entry about Pope Formosus and the entry about the lovely mother-daughter team of papal harlots, Theodora and Marozia,  on January 24 and 15 respectively and you will find what must be the all time low in papal morals—not to mention pontifical weirdness.)  Nevertheless, the debauchery and violence of the 9^th and 10^th centuries didn’t discourage 15^th century popes from trying for the distinction as we will see today.   We had left off with Innocent VIII—Innocent of the sixteen bastards and paranoia about German warlocks. Well, Innocent—bad as he was—was succeeded by Alexander VI  Borgia.  Borgia!  Does the name ring a bell?

the lovely Lucrezia

Born in Spain in 1431, Rodrigo Llançol y Borja was brought to Italy to study by his maternal uncle, Alfons de Borja, who had been made a Cardinal by Eugene IV in gratitude for Borja’s diplomatic efforts with the King of Aragon.  When the uncle became pope Callistus III (we spoke of him yesterday—he was the pope who was pushing the Portuguese Slave Trade and posthumously retrying Joan of Arc), Rodrigo was made a bishop, then a Cardinal, and then named vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, vice being the operative word and any illusions that the Roman Church was holy were soon dispelled by this fellow.  After his uncle’s death, Cardinal Rodrigo served the next four popes—while acquiring vast power and making himself quite wealthy. No one knows quite how much he spread around in bribes in order to be elected pope in the 1492 conclave, but his arch-rival, Giuliano de Medici was bankrolled ( by the King of France and the Republic of Genoa) to the tune of 300,000 ducats (which is worth almost fifty million dollars in today’s gold).  O well, as they say it takes money to make money.  Borja was supported by various kings as well, notably Spain and Portugal and it was he who issued the Bull  Inter Caetera in 1493, dividing colonization rights in the newly discovered worlds of Asia and the Americas between Spain and Portugal—which did not make the English, French, or others very happy.  

Alexander (Rodrigo’s’s regnal name as pope) had had a long-time lady friend, Vanozza dei Cattani, who lived just around the corner from the Borja palace and there raised his four children: Juan, Caesare, Lucrezia, and Gioffre.  They were real darlings—as we will see.  By the way you can still see both Vanozza’s home in the Piazza Sforza Caesarini and Rodrigo’s palace in the courtyard of the palazzo just the other side of the Via Sforza Caesarinni today.  Juan, the oldest son, was made Duke of Gandia in Spain—though he continued to live in Rome and was also given various fiefs in Italy.  Caesare was made a Cardinal, a singularly inappropriate choice for a budding young satyr with sociopathic tendencies.  Alexander carved out fiefs from the papal domain and stole others fromm neighboring states not only for the Duke of Gandia but for his youngest son, Gioffre as well.  Lucrezia was subjected to a series of political marriages. The first of her marriages, to an illegitimate scion of the Sforza family—rulers of Milan—ended in divorce and annulment when the husband proved to be a political liability.  Caesare didn’t want to bother with an annulment; murders were easier to arrange and much less expensive, but someone warned the husband (possibly Lucrezia) and he fled.  The second marriage ended with the husband murdered, presumably by his brother-in-law, Caesare, who was jealous because his sister was happy in the marriage and he, Caesare felt displaced in her affections.  He was such a sensitive soul!  The third marriage with the Duke of Ferrara lasted and she became a respectable Renaissance Duchess, though never a faithful wife, carrying on with a number of men—all men of quality, of course—she was a Duchess not a tramp.  Of course her being such a fine lady never dispelled allegations of incest between Lucrezia and both her father, the pope, and her brother Caesare.   The former are probably untrue, the affair with her brother—well, I wouldn’t rule it out.  When it comes to the Borja’s you can’t rule anything out.     

Caesare Borja was a first class sociopath. (By the way, the name in Italian is Borgia.)  A rageaholic, Caesare could make even his father quake in fear.   Named a bishop at 15 and a Cardinal at 18, both he and his brother Juan were lovers of the third brothers’ wife—Sancha of Aragon.  She was another one of those easy-going women in the family.  When Juan was murdered in 1497, Caesare was suspected of fratricide (because of his reputed jealousy of Juan for both his political power and the affections of sister-in-law Sancha).  The charges were never followed through; Caesare was protected by his father—whose favorite child he seemed to have been, although Alexander was way over-indulgent with each of his children.  Similarly if he were the father of a child born in 1497 and rumored to be Lucrezia’s illegitimate son, that too was covered up. Alexander acknowledged paternity of the child though Lucrezia’s maternity was not acknowledged.  It was also Caesare who organized the Banquet of the Chestnuts on October 30, 1501—a dinner in the Vatican palace where the diners were entertained by having the clothes of fifty prostitutes auctioned off their backs and then cheering on the same ladies—naked—as they scrambled along the floor of the banquet room in the Vatican for chestnuts thrown them by the guests.  The entire event turned—by design—into a huge orgy where prizes of expensive clothing and other gifts where handed out to those guests who showed the most sexual proficiency.   This was the jolly side of Caesare—far worse was the angry and vengeful side that caused a series of murders and disappearances among the Roman nobility and hierarchy with Caesare seizing their estates to finance his various plots and plans.   

At the same time Alexander was giving his children free reign for debauchery, fratricide, sacrilege, and murder, he was also busy trying to expand papal power in Italy by playing the French off against the Aragonese in Naples.  It was a disastrous policy.  The pope was not above handing out divorces and annulments to various royals and nobles in return for support in his military policies. All it ever led to was bloodshed, war, and violence.  When the Florentine Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola called for Reform of the Church, Alexander excommunicated the preacher and then turned on Florence and demanded the death of the critic.  Florence complied rather than risk war. 

In his papal years, Alexander dumped Vanozza dei Cattani for Giula (Giula Bella) Farnese—said to be the most beautiful woman in Rome, making her brother, Allesandro, a cardinal.  He would later reign as Paul III—one of the reforming popes, though he only became a reformer after a long life of decadence.  We will look at him some other time.

When Alexander died his body immediately began to rot in the most noxious fashion with gasses and foul smelling fluids emitting from every orifice.  The corpse swell so much that the papal master of ceremonies, John Burchard,  recorded in his diary that he had to jump on the body to squeeze it into its coffin.  The canons of St. Peter’s Basilica—the old basilica, still falling down—refused to allow the body to be brought into the church for burial.  The papal troops had to force their way into the church with the corpse.  His successor, Pius III, forbad masses to be said for the dead pope since he was “already damned.”  One good thing that can be said about the pope is that when the Jews were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, Alexander welcomed them to Rome and gave them freedom to practice their religion without harassment.  Of course that was good business practice, but he was one of the few rulers in Europe to treat the Jews fairly.  And through all the naked courtesans, rolling chestnuts, poisoned rings, unsolved murders, simonical bishops—the old Basilica kept crumbling down.    

De Maistre, the Savoyard philosopher-historian wrote the opinion that we only judge Alexander so harshly because he was a pope and had he been a secular prince his vices would be overlooked.  The popes, he wrote, “are forgiven nothing, because everything is expected from them, wherefore the vices lightly passed over in a Louis XIV become most offensive and scandalous in an Alexander VI.”  Well De Maistre would make a gentle confessor indeed and perhaps we are wrong to overlook vices in kings and presidents (I am going to do a Henry VIII series soon), but at the end of the day while we should expect more of our civic rulers than we do—except for Bill Clinton, of course—I do think it is fair to expect the pope to have some higher standards than we found with ol’ Al Borja.   At least he could have patched up that tumbling town church next door.    

A Ghoulish Tale of Popes and Pimps

We will come back to the history of anti-Catholicism in America in a few days but I am anxious to return to the topic of the Pornocracy of the late ninth and tenth centuries—the moral low point of the papacy when two women, Marozia and her mother, Theodora, controlled the papacy, being each the mistress of a pope, and Theodora being the grandmother of, and Marozia the mother of a pope. But it is not the sex scandal I want to talk about today but rather I want to backpedal a bit to a particularly ghoulish episode that predates the rise of Marozia but is still part of the story, a part of the story that is a Halloween sort of tale. Just to alert you to what this will build to, this period provides the backdrop to the Pope Joan story (was there really a lady pope???) as well as the origins of the Holy Roman Empire. And there is some remote—quite remote—background to the issue of Church and State. Stay tuned, but meanwhile…

As I had mentioned in that earlier blog on the pornocracy (January 11, 2011), in the ninth and tenth centuries there was struggle among several Roman factions to gain control of the papacy, not for spiritual reasons—nobody at this point was much interested in spiritual things—but because the papacy controlled vast estates in central Italy and even as far away as Sicily, and whoever controlled the papacy had huge economic and political power not only in Rome but various parts of Italy. Popes were elected at this point by an assembly of bishops and clergy who then would present their candidate to the Roman People for their approval. The approval of the people was essential and were a candidate not to receive it, the clergy would have to choose another candidate whom they would approve. The problem was complex. The clergy could be bought or, failing that, intimidated. The people—well they often degenerated into mob rule, following the lead of whoever controlled the mob. The Dukes of Spoleto often had the upper hand in papal elections, but there was at times some opposition that managed to get another candidate elected. In 891 a distinctly unworthy candidate, Formosus (the name is Latin for “handsome”) was elected pope. He double-crossed the Spoleto faction and supported Arnulf of Carinthia for political power and influence in Italy. he died shortly after he had crowned Arnulf. Arnulf himself died shortly afterwards and before he could crush the House of Spoleto. His successor, Boniface VI, was even more unlucky, reigning only fifteen days. The Spoleto faction then managed to get their candidate, Stephen VI, elected to succeed Boniface. The year was still 896—how time flies when there is intrigue.
Now the challenge was how to make sure that the supporters of Formosus did not engineer a return to power of the anti-Spoleto faction. What the Spoleto partisans needed to do was to get everyone of Formosus’ party out of power. To that end Stephen VI convoked a synod to “try” Formosus for various irregularities including alleged simony. They exhumed the body of Formosus, dead these several months, dressed it in papal robes and seated it on the papal throne with a deacon standing alongside to answer for the now cadaverous pope. The trial was a foregone conclusion, of course. Formosus was posthumously deposed, the fingers with which he gave his blessing were cut off, his body was stripped naked and thrown in the Tiber. Moreover all the acts of his papacy were annulled—including the ordinations he had performed. This meant, of course, that the various priests and deacons and minor clerics who had served in his administration and still held their positions—and the priests and deacons with the right to vote in papal electios—were all degraded from sacred office and their positions in the papal administration. The anti-Spoleto party had been disemboweled. Once Stephen had done the work he patrons wanted him to do and eliminated the opposition, the Spoleto faction had no need of him and arranged for his murder.
Before we go on, it might be worth our while to look at the matter of annulling ordinations or declaring orders invalid. There is a long history of this in the Church going back to the various schisms and heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries when various parties would declare the sacramental system of their opposition “invalid.” There were at the time no criteria for this procedure and it seems to have been more of a polemical tool of one faction to weaken the authority of another. In later times it might have been connected with simony (the buying or selling of ecclesiastical offices), the alleged simony invalidating the ordination because of various canons that declared simoniacs ineligible for office. It was sometimes alleged that heretical opinions of the ordinand, the ordaining prelate, or the community for which the candidate was being ordained, invalidated the Orders, but then the issue is is "what is heresy?" Certainly denial of the Trinity, or of the two natures in the one Person of Christ qualify as heresy, but is all theological difference a matter of heresy? How far does one have to depart from “orthodoxy” to be a heretic? What doctrines are open for difference of opinion, which are not? If this were simply a matter of theology, perhaps the knot could be undone, but history makes it a very complex issue as there has not been consistent practice on this issue over the centuries. To the historian it seems that validity of Orders is usually a question of polemics that disguises its malicious intent as substantive doctrinal points. Perhaps this topic is worth looking at in more detail in the future as the practice of declaring invalid the orders of one faction by another became a very serious issue at the Reformation and indeed remains a serious issue and block to Ecumenism.
In any case, Stephen’s successor, Romanus, was deposed by one or another Roman faction (read: mob) after only three months. His successor, Theodore II—the son of the once-schismatic Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius(and we have a story there) reigned only 20 days, but in those 20 days managed to annul the Cadaver Synod and restore Formosus to the list of popes, reburying his body and re-instating his clergy. His successor, John IX, reigned two years and confirmed Theodore’s restoration of Formosus. Benedict IV reigned three years, 900-903. His successor, Leo V was deposed and murdered by anti-pope Christopher who, in turn, was turn murdered by his successor, Sergius III. Sergius was the gentleman friend of Marozia—and thus we are into the pornacracy. Sergius, by the way, annulled the decisions of Theodore II and John IX and reinstated the decisions of the Cadaver Synod. He was, of course, tied into the Spoleto faction; his mistress, Marozia, was the fifteen-year-old daughter of the leader of the Spoleto party, Theophylact, Count of Tusculum. Sergius was the first pope, if not to wear the triregnum, the papal tiara (which at this point had only a single crown) to be depicted wearing it.
Here we see popes being deposed, exhumed, annulled, murdered, pimped, and almost any combination of the above. As one can image the papacy had no moral credibility at this period and it was a low point not only of papal morals but of papal authority. The papacy has had its ups and its downs; it did not always have the moral authority or actual power it has exercised in the twentieth century under men like Benedict XV, Pius XI or Pius XII. Bishops beyond the reach of papal authority—and that was most bishops in Europe of what was developing into both Eastern and Western Churches—governed their own dioceses without any reference to the papacy except—perhaps—the occasional prayer in the liturgical litanies where his name might be mentioned. There would be other episodes where papal power waned—the fourteenth century, for example—but it never waned as greatly as this period of the ninth and tenth centuries. There would be episodes as lurid—or even worse (just wait until we talk about the Banquet of the Chestnuts and the Borgias)—but not as prolonged and not as fundamentally corrupt. There is more than one lesson here and some of them are very profound, but let’s just take this one from the Cadaver Synod: the Office is only as respectable (I won’t say “holy”) as the man who holds it, and the Church is (historically) only as holy as its members.

the image today is the Jean-Paul Laurens depiction of the Cadaver Synod.