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much action and activity into a pontificate of less than, ten years. It was exhausting work for a man in his late sixties to launch out into so many new schemes, and in Raphael’s portrait, probably of 1512, the Pope’s eyes are downcast and tired, and his powers seem beginning to fail. In the following February he was prevented by illness from attending the fifth session of the Lateran Council. He lay in the room Raphael had decorated for him, close to the new Belvedere, close also to the Sistine Chapel. He could claim to have fulfilled his task of reasserting papal authority and proclaiming Christianity in contemporary terms through the techniques that had most advanced in his day: sculpture, painting and architecture. Indeed the new Christian Rome could now compare favourably with the classical, hence the title of Albertini’s little book, published in 1510: The Marvels of Modern and Ancient Rome. Only the great tomb was not ready. Julius left 10,000 ducats for its completion, and finally, thirty-one years later, in a much reduced form, it was to hold his mortal remains, not, as he would have liked, in St Peter’s, but in S. Pietro in Vincoli.

      On 20 February 1513 Julius II died. He was described by the Florentine historian Guicciardini, no lover of the Papacy, as ‘worthier than any of his predecessors to be honoured and held in illustrious remembrance.’ The Romans agreed. ‘I have lived forty years in this city,’ wrote Paris de Grassis, his master of ceremonies, ‘but never yet have I seen such a vast throng at a Pope’s funeral. The guards could not control the crowds as they forced their way through to kiss the dead man’s feet…. Many even to whom the death of Julius might have been supposed welcome for various reasons burst into tears, declaring that this Pope had delivered them and Italy and Christendom from the yoke of the French barbarians.’

CHAPTER 3

       After Caesar, Augustus

      I HAVE THREE SONS,’ Lorenzo de’ Medici used to say, ‘one foolish, one good and one clever.’ The clever son was born in the Palazzo Medici on 11 December 1475 and christened Giovanni Romolo Damaso. He was ‘brought up in a library’—the phrase is his own—learning Latin and Greek from Poliziano, imbibing the broad-minded philosophical ideas of Pico and Ficino, laughing at Pulci’s burlesque Morgante, watching Michelangelo shape a block of marble in the Palazzo garden. Destined by Lorenzo for a career that would bring Florentine principles to the capital of Christendom, at seven he received minor orders, at twelve the abbey of Monte Cassino, at seventeen a Cardinal’s hat. He studied canon law at the University of Pisa but before he could graduate or learn theology Charles VIII rode in. With his ‘foolish’ brother Piero he was driven from Florence and spent an unhappy period wandering in Germany and France. In 1497 he returned to Rome and three times served as Legate, on the last occasion being captured by the French at the Battle of Ravenna. He was imprisoned in a pigeon-cote from which, however, he escaped hidden in a basket. He attended the conclave on a litter, suffering from an anal fistula, which between scrutinies his doctor lanced. In a long, commendably unsimoniacal election, during which the sacred college was reduced to a vegetable diet, he was chosen in preference to Raffaello Riario—whom Lorenzo had saved from lynching at the time of the Pazzi plot—mainly by the younger cardinals, who did not want a second nephew of Sixtus IV. He took his name in evident allusion to Leo the Great, who had kept the Hun from Rome—but by diplomacy, not arms. He was still in minor orders and was ordained priest four days after his election.

      The new Pope was above middle height, broad-shouldered and portly. His head was set on a short neck, and the cheeks were puffy. He was short-sighted—hence the magnifying-glass in Raphael’s portrait, and his enemies’ quip: ‘Blind cardinals have chosen a blind Pope.’ He had shapely white hands and liked to show them off, as the fashion was, with diamond rings. He perspired easily and during long ceremonies would be seen mopping his face and hands. He also suffered from the cold, and in severe weather would wear gloves, even to say Mass.

      Though he was not robust, Leo was a happy man who liked to make others happy. He was generous to a fault and whenever he could grant a favour did so. He had inherited Lorenzo’s easy, tactful manner, but not his daring. In politics, for instance, Leo moved cautiously—hence the nickname given him by Julius: ‘Your Circumspection’; and once when fire broke out in the Vatican his alarm was judged excessive. Otherwise he had plenty of self-control. He fasted twice a week, and his name was never associated with any woman. He took his religious duties seriously, said his office every day, and once, on ascending the Scala Sancta, was heard to beg God’s indulgence for not climbing it on bended knee like the poor women of Rome. As his papal motto he chose the first verse of Psalm 119: ‘Happy those who are irreproachable in their life, who walk in the way of the Lord.’ The linking of happiness and virtue is typical of the man.

      Soon after his election Leo is reported to have said to his brother, ‘Let us enjoy the Papacy since God has given it to us.’ Though first recorded by a Venetian two years after the event, the mot may well be authentic; if so, it is much less ingenuous than it sounds. Leo had been raised in a civic-minded and civilized Republican family, and enjoyment for him meant extending through patronage the principles of Christian humanism. His ambition as Pope was to renew Christianity through learning, literature and the arts. Rome in particular he intended to become a great civilized city, a worthy successor to the Rome of Virgil and Horace. The humanists understood this when they hailed Leo on the morrow of his election with the phrase: ‘After Caesar, Augustus.’

      To civilize Rome was no small ambition. Despite Julius’s building, the city was still an inhumane and bloodthirsty place. Within memory a Pope’s son had been stabbed to death, and when someone who had seen the body being thrown into the Tiber was asked by the magistrates why he had not revealed the fact, he replied that murder was an everyday occurrence and it had never dawned on him to go to the authorities. With advances in medicine poison was now being increasingly and more subtly used; indeed it was a Florentine cardinal, Ferdinando Ponzetti, who in 1521 published the first handbook on poisons. Leo himself was to be the object of a plot headed by Alfonso Petrucci, who disapproved of papal policy in Siena, and five other cardinals. They planned that Leo’s fistula should be treated with ointment containing poison. Through an intercepted letter the plot was discovered and quashed, but the incident puts into relief the ambitious nature of Leo’s programme.

      As an essential condition for civilizing Rome, Leo had to preserve the peace won for Italy by Julius II’s wars. Under their ambitious young king, François I, the French again crossed the Alps in 1515, while the election of Charles V as Emperor in 1519 united in a formidable coalition Spanish with German strength. Applying Lorenzo’s principle of the balance of power, Leo skilfully got the Emperor to expel François from Milan and thereafter played off the two rulers against each other. He also forestalled any future French schism by the Concordat of 1516. This laid down that the Pope and the King of France were jointly to appoint bishops; it made the King to a certain extent overlord of the French Church, but also at the same time its natural protector. For three hundred years Leo’s Concordat was to ensure that French kings would, if only from self-interest, remain loyal to Rome.

      Leo began his work of civilizing Rome by refounding the Sapienza, which because of war had been inoperative for thirty years. He did so on a lavish scale. He appointed no less than 88 professors at salaries totalling 14,490 ducats, part of which, in case of sickness, was payable to their dependants. With his usual broad-mindedness he increased the range of faculties: civil law was the largest—Leo lifted the ban on clerics studying this subject—then came rhetoric, philosophy and theology, medicine, canon law, Greek, mathematics, astronomy and botany. Leo rejected the chauvinism implicit in Pomponius Laetus’s boast that he declined to learn Greek for fear of spoiling his Latin accent; the new Pope summoned Giovanni Lascaris, Lorenzo’s former librarian, to strengthen the Greek faculty, and subsidized Varino Favorino, who had once taught him Greek, in his task of composing an important Greek lexicon. Leo also founded a Greek press, attached to the Sapienza, which published scholarly editions of Didymus’s Commentaries on Homer, Porphyry’s Homeric Questions, and the Scholia of Sophocles’s tragedies. He encouraged Cardinal Ximenes in his five-language edition of the Bible, and shipped to him

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