Читать книгу The Flowering of the Renaissance - Vincent Cronin - Страница 11

IN 1515 Giangiorgio Trissino, a highly cultivated patrician of Vicenza, visited Germany as the Pope’s nuncio and was deeply struck ‘by the horror of huge forests, deep marshes and barren plains. Winds and snow whip that unhappy land; the soil is like iron and encrusted with ice…. A barbarous people shut themselves up in warm houses and laugh at the Arctic blasts, gaming and drinking far into the night.’

Trissino is stating, rather unsympathetically perhaps, the basic truth that Italy and Germany are profoundly different lands. Wittenberg, in central Germany, lies nine degrees north of Rome, and here nature is not a friend but a wolf to be kept at bay. The people of such a region are physically robust, steeled by hard occupations like mining and forestry. They make brave soldiers. It was Germans who inflicted their most serious defeat on Augustus’s legions and, first in tribes and now in innumerable principalities, they had waged war often and bitterly. They were familiar with suffering, took it indeed for granted. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century German art abounds in Pietàs and St Sebastians dripping with blood, teeth bared in agony. But there was genuine piety as well as horror. German artists emphasized the unjust suffering of Christ because, in their harsh world of violence and torture, this allied him with them.

Where Italians suppressed or embellished the dark side of life, Germans fixed attention on it. When depicting the Trinity, Raphael showed Christ standing in triumph, but Dürer placed him agonizing on the Cross. Dürer was the first artist to depict a syphilitic. His portraits of himself and of Oswald Krell reveal men who are disturbed. Their eyes are burning, their hands, one senses, are restless. They are subject to nightmarish dreams such as one which left Dürer ‘trembling all over’. They look inward, finding themselves ‘fools’, experiencing doubts as terrible as that described by Ulrich von Hutten in a youthful poem with the significant title of ‘Nobody’. They find the world not tidily terraced, but craggy and baffling. In Melencolia I Dürer depicted a new archetype of human inadequacy: a winged female figure, hand on chin, brooding darkly amid unsolved problems. But the problems demanded solution, because over this awesome world stood a God even more awesome, severe as their climate, a God who was a Judge. This God was represented in The Last Judgment—a subject much commoner in Germany than in Italy—towering over the damned, who suffer torments terrible as those being inflicted in real life on German witches: whip, thumbscrew, rack and studded chair slowly heated from below.

These people were deeply religious. But they could never feel at one with nature in quite the same way as the Italians. And so their piety took a different direction. John of Wesel in Erfurt and Conrad Summenhardt in Tübingen had tended, often excessively, to depreciate the value of works and to emphasize inwardness, faith in the suffering Christ. Inwardness was fostered by the reading of spiritual books, for the Germans, leading a largely indoor life, read much more than did Italians. They were particularly devoted to the Bible: it is no accident that this was the first considerable work to issue from Gutenberg’s press. The first Bible to appear in the vernacular was also a German publication, and no fewer than fourteen German Bibles appeared before 1522. In his inaugural address at Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon described his joy in the text of Scripture: how its true meaning lights up ‘like the midday sun’, adding ominously, ‘All the countless dry glossaries, concordances, discordances and the like are only hindrances for the Spirit.’

Study of the Bible, especially of the early Church, brought into relief existing evils and intensified a desire for reform. Between 1450 and 1515 Germans held four provincial councils and no less than a hundred diocesan synods in order to try and correct abuses such as simony and appointment of unsuitable bishops, without, however, any noticeable effect. Yet there remained a thirst for reform, for a pure religion like that of the early Christians.

Differences of land and climate, of physiology and psychology, of language and aesthetics, as well as different individual and collective experiences had created if not a radically different soul, at least radically different spiritual needs and forms from the ones obtaining in Italy. This in itself was no bad thing. The one Gospel is recorded in very different ways by the four Evangelists, and Christendom had gained not lost from being polyphonic. But such a situation clearly called for understanding, and this in turn for communication. Now, communication had seldom been worse. Fighting in Lombardy had reduced trans-Alpine travel to a trickle. Of fifty-four cardinals under Julius II and Leo X, only two were Germans, and of these the interests of one were exclusively political. Roman Legates in Germany were merely diplomats, and they seldom spoke German. If German reform plans ever reached Rome, too often they were ignored because the officials concerned had only a sketchy knowledge of actual conditions.

Desire for reform crystallized therefore in a growing antipathy to Rome. Germans disliked the fact that Alexander VI had kept a mistress, that Julius took part in battles, and that Leo attended comedies and banquets. They disliked the Pope’s claim to be heir of the Roman Emperors, and the seizure of Piacenza and Parma, which since the eleventh century had owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the German Emperor. They disliked the Italian domination of the Church which followed on the Popes’ return to Rome. They disliked papal domination of the Fifth Lateran Council, the petty reforms it proposed, and the loopholes therein: a cardinal’s funeral must cost no more than 1500 crowns ‘unless there is just cause’. Above all, they disliked the ‘spiritual’ taxes and dispensations, whereby, they believed, they footed the bill for Leo’s poets and artists, musicians and goldsmiths—all the expensive business of this new Christian humanism. The taxes were constantly increasing—the one on briefs had risen fivefold in sixty years—and on this whole matter several diets during the fifteenth century had gone so far as to break with Rome.

Into this world and sharing many of its values Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483. He was the son of a peasant who had risen to be a well-off mining operator in Eisleben, a town, incidentally, which lies 770 miles from Rome but only 100 miles from heretical Bohemia. Physically strong, his craggy face marked by high cheekbones and a firm jaw, Luther described himself as ‘rough, boisterous, stormy and altogether warlike, I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils.’

The Devil loomed large for Luther and, when he came to write his Greater Catechism, he was to cite the name of the Devil sixty-seven times, compared to sixty-three citations for the Saviour. As a law student he was one day caught in a thunderstorm and almost struck by lightning. This near escape from death impressed him deeply, and he vowed to enter religion. In 1505 he joined the Augustinians, two years later receiving the priesthood.

Luther attended the recently founded university in Wittenberg, a town of 2000 inhabitants, mainly brewers. Here degree requirements were lenient, and Luther took his doctorate in theology in five years instead of the usual twelve. He therefore skipped scholastic niceties and stuck to what he calls ‘the kernel of the grain and the marrow of the bones’, by which he meant Scripture. In 1512 he became Professor of Scripture at Wittenberg.

Luther was a deeply religious man who sought perfection in his chosen life: ‘I would have martyred myself to death with fasting, prayer, reading and other good works.’ But try as he might he could never attain his own ideal of goodness. This puzzled and troubled him deeply, for the whole trend of the age was to emphasize man’s will, his powers of achievement. But always Luther felt his complete unworthiness before God, whom he had been brought up to believe was above all a Judge. ‘We grew pale at the mention of Christ, for he was always represented to us as a severe judge, angry with us.’ ‘When will you do enough,’ Luther asked himself, ‘to win God’s clemency?’ And it became clear that the answer was, Never.

How then could he be saved? As a Professor of Scripture, Luther sought an answer in the New Testament, and as an Augustinian, in the commentaries of the founder of his Order. Now it so happened that a complete edition of St Augustine’s works, in nine volumes, had for the first time become available in 1506. Augustine had started life as a Manichaean, and the Manichaean battle between matter which is bad and the spirit which is good marks nearly all his writings. Moreover, in a fight to the death with the heresy of Pelagius, who denied original sin, Augustine had laid a sometimes excessive emphasis on man’s need for grace, and his incapacity to do good unaided. Both characteristics appealed to something deep in the German character, and notably in Luther’s. To the question, How then could he be saved? Luther found an answer in the 17th verse of the first chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans as interpreted by St Augustine. Not efforts of will, but faith alone could justify man before God, and this faith was not something to be toiled for, not a result of virtus, but a free gift from above, a grace. Grace, moreover, was granted to man irrespective of his merit, and God’s decision to grant or withhold it lay completely beyond the range of human understanding. This discovery comforted Luther, who believed that formerly he had been on the wrong track.

In 1510 Luther visited Rome on business for his Order. ‘I fell on my knees,’ he says, ‘held up my hands to heaven and cried “Hail, holy Rome, sanctified by the holy martyrs and by the blood they shed here.”’ Luther was not a humanist save in so far as he valued sound texts of Scripture and the Fathers, and he took no interest in the Sistine ceiling or the Laocoön. He was annoyed by the speed at which Roman priests said Mass: ‘By the time I reached the Gospel the priest next to me had already ended and was shouting “Come on, finish, hurry up.”’ But this was hardly a scandal to Luther, whose own life had become so hectic by 1516 that he wrote: ‘Rarely do I have time for the prayers of the breviary or for saying Mass.’

What did profoundly shock Luther in Rome was the Renaissance itself. Aristotle’s Ethics was a prime text in Rome and it figures in Raphael’s Stanze; Luther abhorred the book, declaring it ‘grace’s most dangerous enemy’. Italians, particularly since the revival of Platonism around 1460, held the created world to be both good and beautiful. Luther did not find the world either good or beautiful. He was shocked by the way clergy and laity alike had reconciled the spiritual with the physical, the pursuit of salvation with the pursuit of happiness here and now. While remaining spiritual beings directed towards the life beyond, they had completely adjusted themselves to the world below. Hence Luther’s complaint that the Italians were ‘Epicureans’. ‘If, they say, we had to believe the word of God in entirety, we should be the most miserable of men, and could never know a moment’s gaiety.’

Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1511 to resume teaching and his study of St Augustine. Presently one of the great German princes, Albert of Hohenzollern, decided to acquire the archbishopric of Mainz. Since he was only twenty-four and thus well below the prescribed age, and furthermore was already Bishop of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, he applied to Rome for a costly dispensation. In order to help Albert, Pope Leo agreed that the St Peter’s indulgence should be preached in North Germany on special terms. The great banking family of the Fuggers would advance the dispensation payment in return for administering the indulgence, half the proceeds of which would go to Albert, half to building St Peter’s. As part of the ensuing campaign in 1517 a Dominican named Johann Tetzel began preaching near Wittenberg. He was somewhat imprudent in his methods, especially regarding indulgences for the dead, and a famous verse was attributed to him:

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,

The soul into heaven springs.

Luther watched in dismay as the brewers of Wittenberg trooped across the Elbe to buy Tetzel’s indulgence: those earning 500 gold guilders a year paid six guilders, those earning 200, three, and so on. For one who believed that man was justified by faith alone, the notion of achieving forgiveness by works, still more by work in the form of money, was utterly repugnant. Luther decided to protest. By nature conservative in his attitude to society, he did so in the approved manner, by writing letters describing the abuse to four local bishops. The result proved disappointing. Some scoffed at his scruples, others pointed out that this indulgence was the Pope’s and outside their control.

Luther then drafted 95 theses stating his views on indulgences and other matters, and posted them on the door of the university church: a usual way of inviting discussion and in no sense a gesture of defiance. The first four theses are related and evidently express what was then uppermost in Luther’s mind:

1. Our Lord and Master Christ, in saying ‘Do penance’, intended the whole life of every man to be penance.

2. This word cannot be understood as referring to penance as a sacrament (that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the ministry of priests).

3. This word also does not refer solely to inner penitence; indeed there is no penitence unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.

4. Therefore punishment [of sin] remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inward penitence), namely until entering the kingdom of heaven.

The key words in the 95 theses—‘tribulations’, ‘fear’, ‘punishment’, ‘despair’, ‘horror’—would have puzzled an Italian. Indeed, they are conspicuous by their absence from Italian writings of the day. Partly they reflect the national temperament, but to a larger degree they reflect Luther’s own spiritual crisis and the solution to it he had found in St Augustine. Luther makes plain in the 95 theses that what counts in Christianity is inner disposition, not rites and sacraments. In February 1518 he made the point more forcefully still by addressing to Rome a highly critical Resolution concerning the Virtue of Indulgences.

Rome was now directly involved. At this time the city had only one topic of conversation: whether or not Roman citizenship should be conferred on Christophe Longueil, a French resident who had changed his name to Longolius and made stirringly Ciceronian speeches in praise of the city. Longolius had once compared Augustus unfavourably with Charlemagne: Leo thought this youthful indiscretion should be overlooked, but others held that it marked Longolius as an irredeemable barbarian. It is one of the tragedies of history that the large-minded Leo, who knew Germany at first hand from his years of exile, had never studied theology, and was therefore incompetent to treat with Luther, as he did with Longolius. The Luther affair passed to the Master of the Sacred Palace, a highly intransigent Dominican named Sebastiano Prierias, who once stated that ‘anyone who denies that the doctrine of the Roman Church and of the Roman Pontiff is virtually infallible, so that even Holy Scripture draws its force and authority therefrom, is a heretic.’ Shocked by Luther’s Resolution Prierias dashed off a reply, abusing the German roundly, calling him a son of a bitch, and centring his arguments less on Luther’s statements than on the fact that a humble friar had dared to question the teaching of the Pope.

Leo, however, did not leave it at that. He had a friend in the leading Italian philosopher of the day, a man of the same moderate temperament as himself. This was Tommaso de Vio, known as Cajetan, a Dominican who at the time of the Council of Pisa had written a sensible defence of the Papacy, marred, however, by a failure to probe the metaphor underlying his description of the Pope as ‘head of the Church corporate’. Leo instructed Cajetan, who was then in Germany, to hold an interview with Luther.

‘I was received,’ writes Luther, ‘by the most reverend lord cardinal legate both graciously and with almost too much respect, for he is a man in every way different from those extremely harsh bloodhounds who track down monks among us … I immediately asked to be instructed in what matters I had been wrong, since I was not conscious of any errors.’ Cajetan began by pointing to a statement by Luther that the merits of Christ do not constitute the treasure of merits of indulgence; this, he said, contradicted an Extravagante¹ issued by Clement VI (1342–52). He did not expect Luther to know the Extravagante, which was absent from some editions of canon law. But Luther did know it and replied that it did not impress him as being truthful or authoritative, chiefly because ‘it distorts the Holy Scriptures and audaciously twists the words into a meaning which they do not have in their context.’ The Scriptures, he concluded, were in every case to be preferred to the Extravagante, which merely trotted out the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas. Further discussions then took place ‘but in no one point did we even remotely come to any agreement.’

Agreement was precluded by the fact that Luther differed radically from Cajetan on the nature of the Pope’s teaching authority. Luther began to see that there was more than a fortuitous link between Clement VI’s attitude in the Extravagante and the behaviour of Popes in his own lifetime. Both tried to mould God to man’s needs. So Luther’s next move was to criticize the way papal authority was exercised by such Popes as Julius II and Leo X. In a letter to Leo dated 6 April 1520 Concerning Christian Liberty, Luther attacks the Petrine office less as an institution based on canon law than against its ‘excessive’, imperialistic claim to power, and its abandonment of the notion of service to the Church as the community of the faithful. In a passage which shows how sensitive he was to the actual language employed in Rome, Luther writes: ‘Therefore, Leo, my Father, beware of listening to those sirens who make you out to be not simply a man, but partly God—mixtum Deum—so that you can command and require whatever you will. This shall not be, nor will you prevail. You are the servant of servants, and the most wretchedly and dangerously placed man alive.’

Later in the same year Luther rejected the teaching authority of the Pope altogether and, putting himself at the head of the movement which saw in Rome the chief obstacle to reform, appealed to a Council to be summoned by the Emperor Charles V: a new Nicaea presided over by a new Constantine, at which not only clergy but laity too would hammer out a pure religion like that of the early Christians.

In Rome the machinery for dealing with revolt now slipped into action. Luther’s appeal to a Council was rejected on the basis of Pius II and Julius II’s prohibition of any such move. A commission presided over by Cajetan pronounced heretical 41 propositions in Luther’s writings, most of them already condemned by the University of Louvain, a body which Luther himself had named as being impartial. Among the views condemned were Luther’s conception of all-powerful sin (‘In every good work the righteous man sins,’ ‘A good work done very well is a venial sin,’ ‘No one is certain that he is not always sinning mortally, because of the truly hidden vice of pride’), his interpretation of the role of faith, and of the sacraments, and finally his rejection of papal authority. On 2 May Leo examined a draft of the bull Exsurge at his hunting-lodge, and it was then submitted to the sacred college at no less than four consistories; it is noteworthy that the German episcopate was excluded altogether from proceedings against Luther, and this was later to have an adverse effect on Rome. In June 1520 Exsurge was published, condemning the 41 propositions, ordering Luther’s writings destroyed, forbidding him to teach or preach, and threatening him with excommunication if he did not recant within two months. Copies were sent for enforcement to the Emperor and the German princes.

But Rome was already one move behind. In July Luther had published his Letter to the Christian Nobility of Germany in which, drawing on the views of John Huss and the Bohemians, he moved beyond an attack on the papacy to a complete rejection of tradition, in place of which he set up the holy word of Scripture. By taking his stand on Scripture Luther hoped to re-establish the sovereignty of God alone, over against anything the Church had said or might say. In December Luther publicly burned the bull Exsurge. On 3 January 1521 Leo excommunicated Martin Luther: cut him off ‘as a dead branch’.

But Luther was hardly ‘a dead branch’. As a Saxon and a Wittenberg Professor, he belonged to a vigorous community conscious of its independence and protected by the swaggering, moustachioed Frederick, Elector of Saxony, absolute lord in his own domain and the founder of Wittenberg University, whose professors he looked on as his own children. Frederick had no intention of handing Luther over to be burned at the stake, like poor John Huss a century earlier. Intellectually, too, Luther belonged to a flourishing band of scholars, notably Philip Melanchthon, the armourer’s frail son who was the best humanist in Germany, and Ulrich von Hutten, a tough knight errant steeped in Tacitus’s Germania, finding in that book the purity of morals and manliness he ascribed to the German character. And behind Luther stood the men of Germany, disliking and sometimes hating Rome, conscious of their new strength as a people. Roman cardinals might be rich, but they banked with the Fuggers; German mercenaries in Charles VIII’s invasion army had scattered the Italians, thus proving themselves worthy successors of Arminius, the tribal leader who decisively defeated Varus in 9 A.D. The late Emperor, Maximilian, had confided to his sister that one day he intended to add the papal tiara to his iron crown: was it so impossible an ambition?

These were the men who read Luther’s writings, and were stirred by his extremely powerful, scathingly witty style derived from Lucian. As so often happens, their reactions were at variance with the author’s intention, and by sheer weight of numbers they were to drag Luther in directions he did not always want to go. What appealed to the average reader was less the corruption of man than the corruption of Rome: that Babylon where Christian blood was shed with St Paul’s sword, Plato and Aristotle were painted opposite the Blessed Sacrament, and Bembo advised Sadoleto to ‘avoid the Epistles of St Paul, lest his barbarous style should spoil your taste’. In vain did Leo’s representative, Girolamo Aleandro, argue that abuses committed by Rome should not be confused with Catholic truth; as a scholar, he could not see that it is love and hate, not calm reason, that determine most men’s view of truth. In place of the authority of Rome Luther’s followers erected the authority of Scripture interpreted by the individual Christian according to the light of the Holy Spirit. This had a profound appeal at a time when the printed word, so recent an invention, still wore something of a halo. And so the rift widened: Scripture against Church, Grace against Works, Predestination against Free Will, communion service against sacrifice, the priesthood of every Christian against the teaching authority of the Pope.

In the early 1520’s it became evident in Rome that Exsurge had neither silenced Luther nor checked Lutheranism, which was beginning to erect itself into an organized Church, styled Apostolic and declaring the Roman Church heretical. An answer would have to be found, and found quickly: preferably a dogmatic answer to what was primarily a dogmatic challenge. But precisely here Rome found herself ill-prepared. Ever since 1380 when John Wycliffe first challenged traditiones humanae and William of Waterford made the mistake of defending unwritten traditions by arguing from the insufficiency of Scripture, a false antithesis had been set up: Tradition and Scripture, each envisaged separately. This had sufficed to condemn Huss, but not to provide refutation of his arguments. The Vatican had no books defending Tradition, only Raphael’s painted defence of the Real Presence.

In method also Rome found herself at a disadvantage. As Erasmus remarked, Ciceronian Latin was useless for answering heresy, since it did not contain the necessary vocabulary. There was no chair of Scripture in the Sapienza, and in the words of the Augustinian General, ‘Rome, the prince of cities, is the world’s dunce in Biblical studies.’ Sante Pagnine’s translation of the Old Testament into Latin, made in Lucca in 1518, did not find a publisher until 1528, and then only in Lyons. On his return in 1522 even Aleandro, one of Italy’s foremost humanists, sadly and belatedly had to return to school: ‘I have begun to extract from ancient authors passages which condemn the new enemies of the Church. Since the heresiarchs are always objecting that Latin authors are suspect to them, I have taken these passages from Revelation, from authors who cannot be attacked and from the Holy Councils of the early Church.’

It became obvious to the Pope and his advisers that a complete dogmatic answer could be neither quick nor easy. Meanwhile some other course must be found. The first and most obvious was to call a Council, for Luther had said, ‘I know the Church virtually only in Christ, representatively only in the Council.’ Only a Council could issue a decision which all concerned would regard as undoubtedly binding. Why then did none of the Pope’s best advisers with first hand experience of Germany—Cajetan, Campeggio, Aleandro—recommend a Council?

They were, to start with, victims of the false antithesis Papacy-Council, given new life by the recent Council of Pisa. They could not rid themselves of the fear that the rulers of Europe, acting through their bishops, would destroy the Pope’s independence by whittling away his financial and temporal power. That is why the mere rumour of the summons of a Council caused a sudden fall in the price of all saleable offices. Secondly, and perhaps even more important, they realized that Rome was insufficiently prepared to enter the arena against the new, well-trained, well-armed German gladiators, and that tactical defeat before the assembled prelates of Europe might still further rend Christ’s seamless robe. Twenty-five frustrated years were to pass before a Council would meet.

A third course presented itself: so thorough a Reform in Rome that the Lutherans’ catchword would ring hollow. Here there were hopeful signs. As early as 1515, two years before Luther’s 95 theses, a group of Roman priests and laymen had formed the Oratory of Divine Love in order to sanctify themselves by the sacraments and prayer, and so bring a reforming influence on others. Members set special value on humility: Gaetano di Thiene dwells in his letters on his unworthiness to offer Mass, wherein he, ‘a poor worm of earth, mere dust and ashes, passes, as it were, into heaven and the presence of the Blessed Trinity.’ The Oratory soon numbered more than fifty influential Romans, and from it in 1524 were to issue the Theatines, a new Order of regular clergy vowed to stringent poverty.

To members of the Oratory it seemed nothing less than a direct intervention by the Holy Spirit when the conclave held in 1523 to elect a successor to Leo chose in absentia Adrian Dedal of Utrecht, the son of a poor shipwright who had made his way by intellectual brilliance to become tutor to the Emperor and later his viceroy in Spain. ‘His face is long and pale,’ wrote the Venetian envoy of Adrian VI, ‘his body is lean, his hands are snow-white. His whole bearing impresses one with reverence; even his smile has a tinge of seriousness.’ The new Pope arrived in Rome bent on reform. When told that Leo had employed 100 grooms, he made the sign of the cross and said that four would suffice for his needs, but as it was unseemly that he should have fewer than a cardinal, he would appoint twelve. When Cardinal Trivulzio asked for a bishopric to relieve his poverty, Adrian asked, ‘What is your annual income?’ ‘4000 ducats.’ ‘Mine was 3000, yet I lived on it and even saved.’ It was not meant as a boast. ‘All of us, prelates and clergy, have gone astray, and for long there is none that has done good; no, not one.’

Adrian celebrated Mass daily—and this for a Pope was an innovation. His meals, which he ate alone, were Spartan: a dish of veal or beef, sometimes a soup. When the Laocoön was proudly shown him, he observed dryly—and inexactly: ‘They are only the effigies of heathen idols,’ and ordered all the entrances to the Belvedere walled up save one, the key to which he kept himself. Leo’s poets and painters he would not even see, far less employ. All his time he gave to economies and the appointment of holy, hard-working bishops, who might do something to improve the Italian clergy, only two per cent of whom understood their Latin breviary.

But Adrian lacked warmth and a knowledge of the Italian mind. A Venetian applied to him Cicero’s remark on Cato: ‘He acts as though he were living in some republic of Plato’s, not among the dregs of Romulus.’ The ‘dregs’ hated Adrian. Starved of the pomp which filled their pockets and made their eyes brighten, they jeered at the Pope as a barbarian and mocked at the tongue-twisting names of his advisers: Enkevoirt, Dietrich von Heeze, Johann Ingenwinkel. They composed bitter pasquinades:

Caduto è a terra il gran nome romano

a dato in preda al barbero furore

The great name of Rome has tumbled

And become a prey to the furious barbarian

—little knowing that the lines held a tragic prophecy. At every turn the Romans opposed reform, the whole idea of which they ridiculed. As a result Adrian lived a lonely, wretched life, taking stringent precautions against poison. Then, only thirteen months after entering Rome, he fell ill of a kidney disease induced by the climate—it too was hostile. After asking that no more than 25 ducats be spent on his funeral, this would-be reformer left a world he could not reform. While the Romans facetiously gave thanks to his doctor, an epitaph was cut for his tomb: ‘Alas! how much do the efforts [virtus], even of the best of men, depend upon time and opportunity.’

It now remained to be seen whether Adrian’s successor could achieve the reform for which all Christendom waited. Giulio de’ Medici, who took the name Clement VII, was the son of Giuliano de’ Medici, stabbed to death in Florence Cathedral, and a first cousin of Leo X. Blameless in his personal life, the new Pope possessed a long handsome face, cultivated tastes and the Medici intelligence, without, however, the Medici drive. He had been born an orphan and illegitimate, and all his life he remained to an extreme degree timid and vacillating. He seemed to lack a core.

Clement was, however, full of good intentions and decided to cut the ‘spiritual’ taxes so hated abroad. This was less easy than it sounds. The taxes were payment for legal and secretarial work involved in issuing briefs, dispensations and so on, performed by more than 2000 Curia officials who had bought or inherited their jobs; that is, they or their fathers had put up capital on which they were entitled to a 10% return. If Clement reduced taxes, he would reduce the return, and would have to make good the difference from some other source. But there was no other source: in fact, as certain German princes embraced Lutheranism, income fell sharply. But Clement did make one useful discovery. He saw that the remuneration of Curia officials was being confused with what was in effect the Papacy’s public debt and, banker’s nephew that he was, began to clear up the confusion. When he had to raise money in 1526, he did so not with the creation of new offices but by issuing under the name Monte della Fede