THE PAPACY DURING THE RENAISSANCE 73 



on the claim of divine interest. At the Papal election of the 

 year 1455 the haughty Roman families who contended for 

 the prize reached a sullen deadlock, and a pious old Spanish 

 cardinal, who would not live long, it was thought, was 

 permitted to grasp the tiara. This was Alfonso Borja, 

 the founder of the Borgia dynasty in Italy. Alfonso, or 

 Calixtus III, was devout and virtuous, but he was a 

 doddering old man of seventy-seven, and a swarm of 

 ambitious relatives and needy compatriots crossed the 

 Mediterranean and sunned itself in the shower of Papal 

 gold. Calixtus mumbled his prayers in the Vatican, 

 surrounded by a group of monks, while his lusty and 

 handsome young Spanish nephews donned the highest 

 dignities of the Church and enlivened Italy with their 

 gallantries. Among them was Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, 

 the father of Lucrezia and Csesar, who at once set about 

 the corrupt accumulation of wealth with which he would 

 one day buy the Papacy and the creation of his numerous 

 and notorious family, 



At the election of 1471 another deadlock of the fierce 

 rivals put upon the throne a very industrious friar-cardinal, 

 Francesco della Rovere. There is some serious doubt 

 whether the friar had been quite as virtuous as is commonly 

 represented ; but, however that may be, he shared the criminal 

 folly of Calixtus III. He drew his nephews from their obscure 

 villages and squalid monasteries, and made them princes of 

 the Sacred College. Among them was a young Franciscan 

 monk, Pietro Riario, whose banquets, amours, and other 

 vices emulated those of the worst of the old Roman nobles. 

 In two years for the young man destroyed himself by 

 vice within that brief period Cardinal Pietro spent nearly 

 a quarter of a million ; and the memory lingered long at 

 Rome of his household of five hundred servants in scarlet 

 silk, his pretty mistress Tiresia who wore five hundred 

 pounds worth of pearls on her slippers, his gold robes and 

 jewels, his superb banquets and tournaments. His cousin 

 Cardinal Guiliano della Rovere, another friar, was more 

 sober in his immorality, for he had ambition and would one 

 day be Pope one of the greatest of the medieval Popes. The 

 new Rome became so wealthy and free that the Papacy drew 

 ; 10,000 a year by a tax on its 7,000 courtesans, and the 

 succeeding Pope had to control the zeal with which the 

 clergy augmented their incomes by the ownership of taverns 

 and brothels. 



