Read The Borgias for Free Online

vice-chancellor, an office that he was to hold in five pontificates.
    ‘It is now thirty-seven years since his uncle Calixtus III appointed him a cardinal and in that time he never missed a Consistory except when prevented by illness, and that was rare indeed,’ his secretary was to write in 1492. ‘[For almost forty years] he was at the centre of affairs . . . He well knew how to dominate, how to shine in conversation and how to impose his will on other men. Also, majestic in stature, he had the advantage over other men.’
    He also became steadily richer and more influential, well able to afford the bribes that he would need to offer discreetly at the next conclave. ‘Altogether it is thought,’ wrote Jacopo Gherardi da Volterra, ‘that he possesses more gold and riches of every kind than all the other cardinals combined, excepting only d’Estouteville,’ the wealthy cardinal of Rouen.
    Rome, however, under the easy going and unassertive leadership of Innocent VIII, known as ‘the Rabbit,’ had relapsed into the kind of anarchy that had been all too familiar a century before. Armed men again roamed through the city at night, and in the mornings the bodies of men who had been stabbed lay dead and dying in the streets; pilgrims and even escorted ambassadors were regularly robbed outside the city gates; cardinals’ palaces became fortified strongholds with crossbowmen and artillery at the windows and on the castellated roofs.
    Justice had become a commodity to sell, like every other favour in this corrupt city. A man who had murdered his two daughters was permitted to buy his liberty for 800 ducats. Other murderers purchased their pardons from the Curia, the papal administration, as well as safe-conduct passes that allowed them to walk the streets with armed guards to protect them from avengers. When an important official was asked why malefactors were not punished, he answered with a smile in the hearing of the historian Stefano Infessura, ‘Rather than the death of a sinner, God wills that he should live – and pay.’
    During the unpleasantly hot summer of 1492, Innocent VIII fell seriously ill, unable to keep down any nourishment other than mother’s milk. Among the cardinals who had gathered, as was the custom, at his bedside were Rodrigo Borgia and Giuliano della Rovere, who were soon involved in a heated argument. Rodrigo voiced his disapproval of the pope’s decision to distribute the reserves of cash in the papal coffers – some 47,000 ducats – to his relatives, and Giuliano defended the action, which, after all, had been agreed by the college, and made an insulting remark about Rodrigo’s Spanish heritage. The vice-chancellor retorted that, were they not in the presence of the pope, he would show Giuliano who he was, and the unseemly quarrel would have quickly deteriorated into a fight had the two not been restrained by some of their colleagues.
    It was soon clear that Innocent VIII was dying, and the sacred college was much preoccupied with the choice of a suitable successor. No scholar was needed now, still less a saint. The next pope, they agreed, must be one of strong personality rather than moral worth, a man who could protect the Patrimony of St Peter from itsrivals and enemies, and one who could restore order to Rome and inject some vigour into its artistic and scholarly life. Innocent VIII died on July 25, 1492, and it was with these thoughts in mind that the cardinals entered the Vatican on August 6 in order to elect his successor.

— C HAPTER 4 —
     

Servant of the Servant of God
    ‘I AM P OPE ! I AM P OPE !’
     
    F OR FOUR GRUELLING DAYS , the cardinals plotted and negotiated and placed their voting slips in the gilded chalice, locked, in the intolerable summer heat, inside the Vatican and living, in considerable discomfort, in the tiny cubicles that had been erected for each cardinal in the Sistine Chapel. In the evening of the fourth day, rumours began to seep out of the Vatican