I confess to a certain macabre fascination with the Renaissance Popes. Following hard on the heels of The Great Schism (with its scenes of dueling Popes and anti-Popes) came the seemingly secular and corrupt ambitions of the Borgias, the Della Rovere, and the Medici families. I found a striking passage on the topic of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia –  father to Lucretia and Cesare) in Charles Williams’ The Descent of the Dove:

The traditional figure of the Renascence used to be Alexander VI. It is impossible not a little to regret the rehabilitation of the Borgias. To remember that the family produced saints is one thing; to make their other members nothing more than respectable worldly princes is quite another. The magnificent and magical figure of Alexander had once, for those who could accept it, a particular attraction. And only morons were repelled by it from the theory of the Papacy. Romantics who were not morons were drawn to it precisely because of the theory of the Papacy. Wicked bishops and wicked kings were common enough. But that the concentration of wickedness – avarice, pride, murder, incest – should exist in the See; that the infallible Vicar should possess the venom and be in love with his own uncanonical daughter; that that daughter should be throned in the Chair itself over adoring Cardinals, and that the younger of her two brothers should assassinate the elder, and the awful three – the Pontiff and the two children – should wind the world into their own skein of lust and cunning . . . this was the kind of thing that demanded the implicit presence of the whole future Roman development. The incarnation of Antichrist (romantically speaking) must be in the See of Christ. The Scandal of the Church had to be a scandal of the True Church, or it lost half its lurid glory.

It seems it was not so. Lucrezia was less lovely and more moral than had been supposed, and Caesar, if as brilliant, was almost always excusable, and Alexander himself is no more than a great Renascence statesman, and it was most unlikely that he poisoned cardinals or even died of the venom himself; alas, only Christian rites took place in the Pontifical chapels, even if the tapestries were a little pagan. the myth, however, had this to be said for it – it was contemporary. It was no more a late Protestant invention than the other legend of the Lady Joanna, Pontifex Maxima in the Dark Ages. It was accepted by pious and credulous chroniclers of the day. It was the kind of fable the Renascence liked, and it was enjoyed as a myth of that new discovery of the Renascence – Homo, Man.

By a curious, but delightful, coincidence, the year 1492 has more significance for me as a historian of the Renaissance and the Reformation than it does as an American. 1492 is the year that Lorenzo de’ Medici (Il Magnifico) of Florence died. And it is the year that Rodrigo Borgia was elected Pope Alexander VI.

Oh.. and there was this Italian sailor who sent back an odd report after sailing off west into the Atlantic in a trio of raggedy Spanish ships.

– Rob Shearer