by prescription, but based on neither force nor legal right. Italy, however, regarded the Papacy as indispensable to her prosperity, while Rome was proud to be called the metropolis of Christendom, and ready to sacrifice the shadow of republican liberty for the material advantages which might accrue from the sovereignty of her bishop. How the Roman burghers may have felt upon this point we gather from a sentence of Leo Alberti's, referring to the administration of Nicholas: 'The city had become a city of gold through the jubilee; the dignity of the citizens was respected; all reasonable petitions were granted by the Pontiff. There were no exactions, no new taxes. Justice was fairly administered. It was the whole care of the Pontiff to adorn the city.'[1] The prosperity which the Papal court brought to Rome was the main support of the Popes as princes, at a time when many thinkers looked with Dante's jealousy upon the union of temporal and spiritual functions in the Papacy.[2] Moreover, the whole of Italy, as we have seen in the previous chapters, was undergoing a gradual and instinctive change in politics; commonwealths were being superseded by tyrannies, and the sentiments of the race at large were by no means unfavorable to this revolution. Now was the proper moment, therefore, for the Popes to convert their ill-defined authority into a settled despotism, to secure themselves in Rome as sovereigns, and to subdue the States of the Church to their temporal jurisdiction.
[1] See history of Porcari's Conspiracy (Muratori, vol. xxv.).
[2] Lorenzo Valla's famous declamation against the Donation of Constantine, which appeared during the pontificate of Nicholas, contained these reminiscences of the 'De Monarchiá': 'Ut Papa tantum vicarius Christi sit et non etiam Cæsaris … tune Papa et erit et dicetur pater sanctus, pater omnium, pater ecclesæ.'
The work was begun by Thomas of Sarzana, who ascended the Chair of S. Peter, as Nicholas V., in 1447. One part of his biography belongs to the history of scholarship, and need not here be touched upon. Educated at Florence, under the shadow of the house of Medici, he had imbibed those principles of deference to princely authority which were supplanting the old republican virtues throughout Italy. The schisms which had rent the Catholic Church were healed; and finding no opposition to his spiritual power, he determined to consolidate the temporalities of his See. In this purpose he was confirmed by the conspiracy of Stefano Porcari, a Roman noble who had endeavored to rouse republican enthusiasm in the city at the moment of the Pope's election, and who subsequently plotted against his liberty, if not his life. Porcari and his associates were put to death in 1453, and by this act the Pope proclaimed himself a monarch. The vast wealth which the jubilee of 1450 had poured into the Papal coffers[1] he employed in beautifying the city of Rome and in creating a stronghold for the Sovereign Pontiff. The mausoleum of Hadrian, used long before as a fortress in the Middle Ages, was now strengthened, while the bridge of S. Angelo and the Leonine city were so connected and defended by a system of walls and outworks as to give the key of Rome into the hands of the Pope. A new Vatican began to rise, and the foundations of a nobler S. Peter's Church were laid within the circuit of the Papal domain. Nicholas had, in fact, conceived the great idea of restoring the supremacy of Rome, not after the fashion of a Hildebrand, by enforcing the spiritual despotism of the Papacy, but by establishing the Popes as kings, by renewing the architectural magnificence of the Eternal City, and by rendering his court the center of European culture. In the will which he recited on his death-bed to the princes of the Church, he set forth all that he had done for the secular and ecclesiastical architecture of Rome, explaining his deep sense of the necessity of securing the Popes from internal revolution and external force, together with his desire to exalt the Church by rendering her chief seat splendid in the eyes of Christendom. This testament of Nicholas remains a memorable document. Nothing illustrates more forcibly the transition from the Middle Ages to the worldliness of the Renaissance than the conviction of the Pontiff that the destinies of Christianity depended on the state and glory of the town of Rome. What he began was carried on amid crime, anarchy, and bloodshed by successive Popes of the Renaissance, until at last the troops of Frundsberg paved the way, in 1527, for the Jesuits of Loyola, and Rome, still the Eternal City, cloaked her splendor and her scandals beneath the black pall of Spanish inquisitors. The political changes in the Papacy initiated by Nicholas had been, however, by that date fully accomplished, and for more than three centuries the Popes have since held rank among the kings of the earth.
[1] The bank of the Medici alone held 100,000 florins for the Pope. Vespasiano, Vit, Nic. V.
Of Alfonso Borgia, who reigned for three years as Calixtus III., little need be said, except that his pontificate prepared for the greatness of his nephew, Roderigo Lenzuoli, known as Borgia in compliment to his uncle. The last days of Nicholas had been imbittered by the fall of Constantinople and the imminent peril which threatened Europe from the Turks. The whole energies of Pius II. were directed towards the one end of uniting the European nations against the infidel. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, as an author, an orator, a diplomatist, a traveller, and a courtier, bears a name illustrious in the annals of the Renaissance. As a Pope, he claims attention for the single-hearted zeal which he displayed in the vain attempt to rouse the piety of Christendom against the foes of civilization and the faith. Rarely has a greater contrast been displayed between the man and the pontiff than in the case of Pius. The pleasure-loving, astute, free-thinking man of letters and the world has become a Holy Father, jealous for Christian proprieties, and bent on stirring Europe by an appeal to motives which had lost their force three centuries before. Frederick II. and S. Louis closed the age of the Crusades, the one by striking a bargain with the infidel, the other by snatching at a martyr's crown. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini was the mirror of his times—a humanist and stylist, imbued with the rhetorical and pseudo-classic taste of the earlier Renaissance. Pius II. is almost an anachronism. The disappointment which the learned world experienced when they discovered that the new Pope, from whom so much had been expected, declined to play the part of their Mæcenas, may be gathered from the epigrams of Filelfo upon his death[1]:—
Gaudeat orator, Musæ gaudete Latinæ;
Sustulit e medio quod Deus ipse Pium.
Ut bene consuluit doctis Deus omnibus æque,
Quos Pius in cunctos se tulit usque gravem.
Nunc sperare licet. Nobis Deus optime Quintum
Reddito Nicoleon Eugeniumve patrem.
and again:—
Hac sibi quam vivus construxit clauditur arca
Corpore; nam Stygios mens habet atra lacus.
Pius himself was not unconscious of the discrepancy between his old and his new self. Æneam rejicite, Pium recipite, he exclaims in a celebrated passage of his Retractation, where he declares his heartfelt sorrow for the irrevocable words of light and vain romance that he had scattered in his careless youth. Yet though Pius II. proved a virtual failure by lacking the strength to lead his age either backwards to the ideal of earlier Christianity or forwards on the path of modern culture, he is the last Pope of the Renaissance period whom we can regard with real respect. Those who follow, and with whose personal characters, rather than their action as Pontiffs, we shall now be principally occupied, sacrificed the interests of Christendom to family ambition, secured their sovereignty at the price of discord in Italy, transacted with the infidel, and played the part of Antichrist upon the theater of Europe.
[1] Rosmini, Vita di Filelfo, vol. ii. p. 321.
It would be possible to write the history of these priest-kings without dwelling more than lightly on scandalous circumstances, to merge the court-chronicle of the Vatican in a recital of European politics, or to hide the true features of high Papal dignitaries beneath the masks constructed for them by ecclesiastical apologists. That