Durants' SoC
The Renaissance Vol V
pages 623-626
Amid these tribulations he faced as honorably as he could the critical problems of foreign policy. He restored Urbino to Francesco Maria della Rovere, and left Alfonzo undisturbed in Ferrara. Ousted dictators took advantage of the pacific Pope and again seized power in Perugia, Rimini, and other Papal States. Adrian appealed to Charles and Francis to make peace, or at least accept a truce, and join in repelling the Turks, who were preparing to attack Rhodes. Instead Charles signed with Henry VIII of England the Treaty of Windsor ( June 1522 ), which pledged them to make a concerted assault on France . On December 21 the Turks took Rhodes, the last Christian stronghold in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was rumoured that they were planning to land in Apulia and conquer disorganized Italy.
When Turkish spies were captured in Rome the trepidation mounted to a point that recalled the city’s fear of invasion after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216 BC. To quite fill Adrian’s cup of gall, Cardinal Francesco Soderini, his chief minister and confidante, and a principal agent in his negotiations for a European peace, plotted with Francis a French attack on Sicily. When Adrian discovered the plot, and learned that Francis was massing troops on the border of Italy, he abandoned neutrality, and leagued the papacy with Charles V. Then, broken in body and spirit, he fell sick and died( September (14 1523 ) His will left his property to the poor, and his last instructions were that he should be given a quiet and inexpensive funeral.
Rome greeted his death with more joy than if the city had been saved from Capture by the Turks. Some believed he had been poisoned for art’s sake, and a wag attached to the door of the Pope’s physician an inscription “ Liberatori patriae SPQR”--- expressing the gratitude of the “Senate and People of Rome to the Liberator of the Fatherland.” The dead Pontiff was blackened by a hundred satires; he was accused of greed, drunkenness, and the grossest immorality, and every act of his career was transformed into wickedness by malice and ridicule; now the surviving freedom of the “press” in Rome prepared by its excesses its own unmourned demise. It was a pity that Adrian could not understand the Renaissance; but it was a greater crime and folly that the Renaissance could not tolerate a Christian pope.
CLEMENT VII:
The conclave that met on October1, 1523 fought for seven weeks over the selection of Adrian’s successor, and finally named a man who by universal opinion was the happiest possible choice. Giulio de’ Medici was the illegitimate son of that amiable Giuliano who had fallen a victim to the pazzi conspiracy, and of a mistress, Fioretta, who soon disappeared from history. Loenzo took the boy into his family and had him brought up with his sons. These included Leo, who as pope, dispensed Giulio from the canonical impediment of bastardy, made him archbishop of Florence, then a cardinal, then the able administrator of Rome, and the chief minister of his pontificate. Now forty-five, Clement was tall and handsome, rich and learned, well mannered and of moral life, an admirer and patron of literature, learning, music and art. Rome greeted his elevation with joy as the return of Leo’s golden age. Bembo prophesied that Clement VII could be the best and wisest ruler the Church had ever known.
He began most graciously. He distributed among the cardinals all benefices that he had enjoyed, entailing a yearly revenue of 60000 ducats. He won the hearts and dedications of scholars and scribes by drawing them into his service or supporting them with gifts. He dealt out justice justly, gave audience freely, bestowed charity with less than Leonine, but with wiser, generosity, and charmed all by his courtesy to every person and class. No pope ever began so well, or ended more miserably.
The task of steering a safe course between Francis and Charles in a war almost to the death, while the Turks were overrunning Hungary, and one third of Europe was in full revolt against the Church, proved too much for Clements's abilities, as for Leo’s too. The magnificent portrait of Clement in his early pontificate, by Sebastiano del Piombo, is deceptive: he did not show in his actions the hard resolution that there seemed limned in his face; and even in that picture a certain weak weariness shows in the tired eyelids drooping upon sullen eyes. Clement made irresolution a policy. He carried though to an excess, and mistook it as a substitute for action instead of its guide. He could find a hundred reasons for a decision, and a hundred against it; it was as if Buridan’s ass sat on the papal throne. Berni satirized him in bitter lines prophetic of posterity’s judgment:
A papacy composed of compliment,
Debate, consideration, complaisance,
Of furthermore, then, but, yes, well, perchance
Haply, and such like terms inconsequent.....
Of feet of lead, of tame neutrality........
To speak tame truth, you shall live to see
Pope Adrian sainted through the papacy.
He took as his chief councillors Gianmatteo Giberti who favoured France, and Nikolaus Schonberg who favoured the Empire; He allowed his mind to be torn in two between them, and when he decided for France-- only a few weeks before the French disaster at Pavia-- he brought down upon his head and his city all the wiles and forces of Charles, and all the fury of a half Protestant army unleashed upon Rome.
It was Clement’s excuse that he feared the power of an Emperor holding both Lombardy and Naples; and he hoped by siding with Francis, to secure a French veto on Charles troublesome idea of a general council to adjudicate the affairs of the Church. When Francis came down over the alps with a new army of 26000 French, Italians, Swiss, and Germans, seized Milan, and besieged Pavia, Clement, while giving Charles assurances of loyalty and friendship, secretly signed an alliance with Francis ( December 12 1524 ), brought Florence and Venice into it, and reluctantly gave triumphant Francis permission to levy troops in the Papal States and to send an army through Papal territory against Naples. Charles never forgave the deception. "I shall go into Italy”, he vowed "and revenge myself on those who have injured me, especially on that poltroon the Pope. Some day, perhaps, Martin Luther will become a man of weight.” At that moment some men thought that Luther would be made pope; and several of the Emperor’s entourage advised him to contest the election of Clement on the ground of illegitimate birth.
Charles sent a German army under Georg von Frundsberg and the Marquis of Pescara to attack the French outside of Pavia. Poor tactics nullified the French artillery, while the hand firearms of the Spanish made a mockery of Swiss pikes; the French army was almost annihilated in one of the most decisive battles of history ( Feb. 24-5, 1525 ) Francis behaved gallantly: while his troops retreated he plunged forward into the enemies ranks, making royal slaughter; his horse was killed under him, but he kept on fighting; at last, thoroughly exhausted, he could resist no more, and was taken prisoner along with several of his captains. From a tent among the victors he wrote to his mother the message so often half quoted: “All is lost save honour -- and my skin, which is safe.” Charles, who at this time was in Spain, ordered him sent as a prisoner to a castle near Madrid.
