R. A. Scotti Read Online Free PDF Page A

de’ Medici’s palace, Nicholas was a slight, nondescript man. By some accounts, he was as small as St. Paul, who may have stood just fifty inches, but he had two passions: books and building.
    Whether it was a naturally optimistic temperament, the profundity of his faith, or his zeal to build, after the sumptuousness of Avignon, Nicholas settled the papacy in the squalor of Rome. Previous popes had tried to return and been forced to retreat, but nothing would budge Nicholas. Because the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the traditional church of Rome and palace of the popes, was uninhabitable, Nicholas made the Vatican palace, once a guesthouse for visiting emperors and kings, the official seat of the Holy See. He resolved the Great Schism that had been threatening the unity of the Church since 1377 (at one point, three popes, each backed by a rival political faction, claimed to be the legitimate heir to Peter and excommunicated the other two), and he proclaimed 1450 a Jubilee or Holy Year.
    In spite of the desolation, pilgrims descended on Rome from all over Europe. Many journeyed for months. They came over land and sea, on foot, on horseback, by oxcart and river barge. They braved the Channel crossing, trudged over the Alps, and sailed down the Tiber to visit the five basilicas of Rome and earn a pardon from their sins.
    The perils multiplied as they neared the city. Pirate ships lurked along the riverbanks and coastlines, and the only law in the campagna, the rough countryside north of the city, was the outlaw. Bandits and thieves terrorized at will, and the city offered no sanctuary. The walls enclosed as many terrors as they excluded.
    For the pious travelers who survived the hazards, Rome was much more than its broken-down basilicas. It was the soul of Christendom, the rock on which Peter had founded his Church. The plot of earth marked by Constantine’s basilica was the most sacred soil. In their eagerness to reach the shrine of Peter, pilgrims swarmed across the single narrow bridge, Ponte Sant’Angelo. Two hundred were killed in the crush, and in the summer heat, thousands more died of the plague.
    In the Holy Year of 1450, the acts of God and man were terrible, yet the Jubilee was a success for Rome. As the Vatican treasury filled, Nicholas imagined an urban renaissance. “He had two soaring ideas,” his secretary and biographer Giannozzo Manetti wrote, “the Renaissance of the world by learning and the turning of the eyes of Christendom to a Vatican which should outshine in magnificence the Palatine of the Emperors.”
    Nicholas brought the Renaissance to Rome and sparked one of the most brilliant—and most libertine—epochs in its history. Out of the neglected city, which had shrunk to one tenth the size of imperial Rome, he envisioned the new Jerusalem of scripture—a papal Palatine * rising on the Vatican hill. At “the ideal center” would stand a reborn Basilica of St. Peter, “a temple, so glorious and beautiful that it seemed rather a divine than a human creation.”
    History overtook his plans. Political challengers conspired to assassinate him. Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the bishops of Byzantium sided against Rome. Nicholas V’s papal Palatine remained just a paper city until Pope Julius II made it the defining event of the new century.

CHAPTER THREE
IL TERRIBILIS
    J ulius II demands hyperbole. Everything about him—his personality, his ambitions, and his accomplishments, the art he commissioned and the Basilica he ordained—was outsized. He enters history in a fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, called The Founding of the Vatican Library by Sixtus IV. A more apt title might be Secularism and Nepotism in the Renaissance Papacy. The word nepotism comes from the Italian nipote, meaning “nephew,” and besides Pope Sixtus and his new librarian—the humanist and iconoclast Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina—there are