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June 2, 2007
As Opposed to a Pleasant One
The first Medici pope was Giovanni de' Medici, who, as I mentioned last time, is reported to have written to his brother, "God has given us the Papacy--let us enjoy it," when in 1513 he learned he'd be able to change his name from Giovanni to Leo X. (Leo X just doesn't sound as good as Malcolm X, does it.)
But Leo had to help God a little along the way in getting Him to give him the papacy. The pope before Leo was Julius II, a particularly bellicose and belligerent man who shocked absolutely everyone by riding out before the armies of the Vatican and who, in the words of Tuchman,
is ranked among the great popes because of his temporal accomplishments, not least his fertile partnership with Michelangelo--for art, next to war, is the great immortalizer of reputations.... He achieved important results in both these endeavors, which, being visible, have received ample notice as the visibles of history usually do, while the significant aspect of his reign, its failure of concern for the religious crisis, has been overlooked as the invisibles of history usually are.
After Julius II's very martial papacy, many were glad to have a lazy hedonist on the papal throne, particularly one who might die early and so give all the other cardinals a chance to be pope before too long. According, once again, to Tuchman, Leo's
health was a major concern because, although only 37 when elected, he suffered from an unpleasant anal ulcer which gave hm trouble in processions, although it aided his election because he allowed his doctors to spread word that he would not live long--always a persuasive factor to fellow cardinals.
Now, the fact that letting everyone think you'll die soon could aid your chances of being elected pope is interesting, but what really caught my attention in that passage is the phrase "unpleasant anal ulcer." Maybe it's just my lack of experience with anal ulcers, but I have trouble imagining a pleasant anal ulcer. The "unpleasant" there seems superfluous, about like mentioning a "tall giant" or a "short dwarf."
But in 1517 the story of Leo's ass gets every weirder, and here it is:
The Petrucci conspiracy was an obscure and vicious affair that has baffled everyone from that day to this. Leo professed to discover through betrayal by a servant a conspiracy of several cardinals to assassinate him. Led by the young Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci of Siena, who nursed a personal grievance, the plot depended on poison to be injected by a suborned doctor in the course of lancing a boil on the Pope's buttock. Arrests were made, informers tortured, suspect cardinals grilled. Lured to Rome on a safe-conduct, Petrucci and others of the accused were imprisoned, the violation being condoned by Leo on the ground that no poisoner could be considered a safe risk. Hearings produced awful revelations; confessions were induced; whispered reports of the proceedings bewildered and terrified Rome. Forced to plead guilty, Cardinal Petrucci was executed by strangling with an appropriately red silk noose at the hand of a Moor because protocol did not permit a Christian to put to death a Prince of the Church. Faced with this example, the other accused cardinals accepted pardons at a cost of enormous fines, up to 150,000 ducats from the richest, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, yet another of the nipoti of Sixtus IV, in this case a grand-nephew.So far-fetched was the plot that the inference could not be avoided that the Pope, perhaps seizing upon some informer's tattle, had promoted the whole affair for the sake of the fines. Recent investigations in Vatican archives suggest that the plot may in fact have been real, but what counts is the impression made at the time. Coming on top of public indignation at Leo's war on Urbino, the Petrucci conspiracy further discredited the Papacy, besides alarming and antagonizing the cardinals. Whether to nullify their hostility or to fend off bankruptcy, or both, Leo in an act of astonishing boldness created 31 new cardinals in a single day, collecting from the recruits over 300,000 [which is simony, or selling a religious office for profit, a very great sin]. The wholesale creation is said to have been conceived by [Leo's cousin] Cardinal Guilio de' Medici as a paving stone on his own path to the Papacy.
Leo died in 1521; he was succeeded by Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, a Dutch-born reformer who actually wanted to be a proper pope and a true religious leader, and therefore got no cooperation from the cardinals. His death in September 1523 was unmourned, and made way for Guilio de' Medici to become Pope Clement VII. Clement's major claim to fame is that he so mismanaged what was already fucked up, failing to respond at all to what was obviously a crisis, that the sack of Rome occurred during his reign.
And all of that is really interesting and good to know, but I still find myself horrified and fascinated by the idea that people would try to assassinate a pope by injecting poison into a boil on his ass.
Posted by Holly at June 2, 2007 11:45 AM
Comments
In an unrelated story but a related part of the anatomy, I went to see Martha Chaves at a comedy club a few nights ago. She spoke about appearing in a movie with rapper 50 Cent. She said that she tried to play it cool and said to him 'Hey Mr. Half Dollar, that's a really cute dimple on your cheek' to which he replied 'that's not a dimple, it's a cap'.
Not wanting to lose her 'street credibility', she consulted her hip-hop dictionary and learned that a cap is a bullet. She went back to him and said 'I've got lots of caps too...they're all over my ass'.
Cue the laughter.
Posted by: Dale at June 2, 2007 5:31 PM
Hi Dale; the laughter came right on cue.
Holly, thanks for the thoughtful and interesting posts. The folly and dangers of religious institutions getting involved with politics have just been brought out again in this part of the world. Maybe "folly and danger" is too strong: after all, to take the example I'm about to give, the Catholic church provided some of the most able and courageous opponents of the war in Central America back in the 1980s; I learned a lot from the nuns who were still travelling to El Salvador even after the four nuns were murdered by the army. And they have brought very helpful pressure to bear on the question of third world debt in more recent times.
But on Friday, Scotland’s Cardinal O’Brien compared abortion in Scotland to “two Dunblanes a day” (Dunblane was the site of a school shooting rampage a few years ago) and challenged pro-choice members of the Scottish Parliament. In a move sufficiently reminiscent of the Church’s tactics for John Kerry to make it seem like an institutional tactic, O’Brien questioned whether members of Parliament who do not oppose abortion could continue to receive communion.
Part of the response here has been to recognize that the Church is a free institution with as much right to lobby as a trade union. Fair enough. But this anti-abortion stance is anti-democratic. Even if one is willing to concede the point that even the smallest grouping of embryonic cells was made in god’s image and destroying them denies their right to life (and I would not make that concession, myself), anti-abortionists refuse to recognize that this would be a competing right to life with that of the woman who must bear the pregnancy. Political society is ordered in large part around competing claims to rights and the defence of democracy is that it is a good way to adjudicate between these competing claims. But the Church wants to take this question out of the public and political realm where it can be deliberated: the decision has already been taken within the Church hierarchy that abortion is a sin, end of story. The woman who finds herself pregnant loses her say over what her interests and needs might be; the right of the foetus trumps. And even though the Church does not represent society as a whole, the hierarchy would reserve to itself the right to make this determination about the priority of foetal rights for society as a whole.
Maybe the Cardinals today are not a venal today as they were in the sixteenth century and maybe the Church is not as corrupt an institution as it was. And maybe its political power today is very different from what it was then. But the danger feels palpable as women’s status as full citizens and human beings is undermined so insidiously and pervasively.
Posted by: spike at June 3, 2007 6:01 AM