76 THE PAPACY DURING THE RENAISSANCE 



young cardinal loved to invent. The Pope's daughter, 

 Lucrezia, was present ; and the dance was followed by a com- 

 petition in vice for which the Pope awarded rich prizes that 

 Burchard minutely describes. As the male servants of the 

 Vatican assisted in the dance and orgie, Burchard was in a 

 position to know the facts ; and his narrative is fully confirmed 

 by letters written from Rome at the time. 



These letters of the foreign ambassadors and agents 

 enforce and augment Burchard's account of life in the 

 Vatican. The mistake has been made sometimes of relying 

 on the Pope's Neapolitan enemies for information. I do not 

 follow that indiscreet practice. The darker charges (incest, 

 etc.) which these writers bring against the Pope may or may 

 not be true the time so reeked with license that anything 

 was possible and it is not easy for us to determine, save in a 

 few cases, whether it was the Pope's poison or malaria that 

 brought about so many profitable deaths. But the evidence 

 of men who lived in and about the Vatican is a different 

 matter, and it consistently, to the end of the Pope's life, pre- 

 sents a man entirely devoid of moral sentiment. " The pretty 

 Giulia," as Rome calls the Pope's mistress, assists at indecent 

 comedies in the Vatican, and even stands in the pulpit during 

 a grand ceremony in St. Peter's ; the Pope's daughter, 

 Lucrezia, has an illegitimate son, apparently by Cardinal 

 Ippolito d' Este ; the Pope's cardinal-son introduces loose 

 women in crowds into the Vatican at night ; the Pope's 

 chamberlain is found in the river, with his daughter roped to 

 him, suspected of seeking too much favour ; a man's head is 

 found stuck on a pole with the inscription, "This is the head 

 of my father-in-law, who prostituted his daughter to the 

 Pope"; new "favourites" appear and disappear at the 

 Vatican. And so on. They are glimpses of an exotic world. 

 And "the Holy Spirit," the pious Catholic says, was not con- 

 cerned with these things, since it was his business only to 

 keep the Popes out of heresy ! 



Julius II closed with an oath the painted chambers of his 

 unscrupulous predecessor. He had had to wait long for the 

 tiara, and the day of his own irregularities was over. If we 

 believe the Roman nobles, he had, in his time, done worse 

 things than Borgia. But I do not wish to belittle Julius II. 

 He was the greatest maker of artistic Rome. Let it not be 

 supposed, however, that Roman art flourished in an atmo- 

 sphere of virtue and piety. It was, on the contrary, an atmo- 

 sphere of scepticism and extraordinary license that favoured 



