Read The Borgias for Free Online Page B

citizens, men and women; he himself listened to their complaints and rendered justice in an admirable manner.’ It was not long, therefore, before order was restored; and the Romans could look forward to the pontificate of a man with a highly developed taste for ceremony and pageantry.
    ‘There was an incredible crowd of prelates,’ wrote Bernardino Corio, the Milanese chronicler, describing the scene outside St Peter’s on August 27, 1492, the day of Alexander VI’s coronation. ‘It was a most wonderful thing to see for each prelate was wearing his mitre and each was clothed according to his particular office; one after another the cardinals approached the Pope to kiss his feet, his hand and his mouth.’
    Led by the papal cavalry, the prelates, cardinals, and foreign ambassadors then took part in the possesso , the ceremonial procession through the streets of Rome out into the uninhabited area and on through fields and orchards to the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano. Ascanio Sforza, the new vice-chancellor, was attended by twelve pages, ‘each dressed in doublets of crimson satin and purple capes, carrying batons and bearing the arms of his family.’ Altogether there were ‘seven hundred priests and cardinals with their retinues in splendid cavalcade with long lances and glittering shields.’
    Riding a snow-white horse sat Alexander VI, ‘serene of countenance and supremely dignified,’ wrote another witness of the parade with fulsome hyperbole. ‘How wonderful is his tranquil bearing, how noble his face, how open, how frank. How greatly does the honour we feel him increase when we behold the dignityof his bearing . . . He showed himself to the people and blessed them . . . His glance fell upon them and filled every heart with joy.’
    It was a stiflingly hot day; the crowds lining the route were described as immense; the air was thick with dust that the street sweepers had vainly tried to allay with bucketfuls of water; it was ‘almost impossible to see the sky.’ The route from the Castel Sant’Angelo to the Lateran took the procession past the ruins of the Colosseum, the great amphitheatre built by Emperor Vespasian, where once audiences of fifty-five thousand had thrilled to gladiatorial games and other spectacles; its cavernous vaults now converted into workshops and storerooms. They passed through enormous triumphal arches specially erected for the occasion and decorated with representations of a huge black bull grazing on a golden field, the striking emblem of the Borgia family, which could also be seen on the flags, pennants, and gonfalons waving in the hands of the cheering crowds.
    The festivities over, Alexander VI surveyed his achievements. He was now ‘Sovereign Pontiff, servant of the servants of God, supreme Lord of Rome and of the Papal States.’ As pope and Vicar of Christ, he was also president of the Roman Rota, the court of appeal for the ecclesiastical affairs of Christendom, and one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. His own realm stretched north of Rome as far as Bologna and Ravenna, from Civitavecchia, on the shores of the Mediterranean, to Ancona and Rimini on the Adriatic coast. The Patrimony of St Peter would yield him an annual income of some 100,000 florins a year, a sum that had recently been much increased by the discovery of rich deposits of alum (a sulphate of aluminium and potassium essential to the tanning andclothing industries) in the hills north of Rome at Tolfa near Civitavecchia.
    These Tolfa deposits had been discovered by a Florentine, Giovanni di Castro, who had written to Pius II of his belief that this discovery would save enormous sums in the way of tolls that Italian merchants had hitherto been obliged to pay to the authorities in Asia Minor ever since the European alum mines had been exhausted.
    Holy Father [Giovanni di Castro had written], today I bring you victory over the Turks. Every year they extort more than 300,000 ducats from the Christians . .