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The Renaissance Popes: Statesmen, Warriors and the Great Borgia Myth

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Awful book. Very poorly written. This is junk scholarship at its best. Claims to dispel myths about the Renaissance Popes, and to "carefully identify...rumors and legends," but then provides only 150 footnotes in a 342 page volume, with many repetitions. Again, there are five footnotes for the last three chapters. If you want to find out the sources of the rumors, forget it. With friends like this, the Renaissance Popes don't need enemies.

This is one of the worst - if not the worst - work of history that I have ever read. It is dreadfully written, often comically so. It is repetitive, contradictory in its many moralizing judgements, and highly subjective in its usually unsubstantiated (by respected historical authority) conclusions. The editors where either asleep at the wheel or non-existant. It is a shameful comment on its publishers that it ever went to press. The Da Vinci Code of non-fiction, without the commercial success. Save your money. Do not buy this book.

Disjointed, repetitive, full of the embarrassing kind of parenthetical phrases used in a grade-school term paper, this is the poorest writing I have ever seen in actual, published form. I bought the book because the subject matter sounded fascinating. The author may indeed have a scholarly opinion to put forth -- in this case, regarding the spurious nature of the "Borgia myth" -- but the abysmal quality of the writing negates any credence you might give to the theory. But it's not all the author's fault -- I ask the publishing house, "Where was the editor?" Phrases such as "a threat to the instability of Italy and the papacy was no more" (hardcopy p. 145) and "nepotism had always been Paul's Achille's heel" (p. 298) should have been caught by any competent copy editor. I was SOOOO disappointed in this book! I held on until the end, hoping to glean some insight, but ultimately ended up feeling the need to write this review instead. A fascinating time in history, if you can close your eyes to the writing quality of this particular work.

Although this was not a particularly long book, it took me several weeks to read it. In part, this is because I kept getting the popes mixed up. Between 1447 and 1572, there were eighteen popes. I have discovered that reading about Renaissance popes is not unlike reading about 3rd-century A.D. Roman emperors: there are a few memorable and important figures, and everyone else kind of blurs together. I had to re-read a couple of chapters to keep things straight. Another reason it took me so long to finish this book is because I kept having to look things up on the internet in order to understand the historical context in which events occurred. The author, Gerard Noel, absolves himself of the responsibility of providing any substantive background information about Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries by saying that it's beyond the scope of his book. Historical information about the Catholic Church before 1447 is also beyond the scope of his book. He briefly notes that papal fortunes were at a low ebb in the early 15th century thanks to the schism and a century of exile in France; then, without further ado, he leaps into the post-Avignon pontificate of Pope Nicholas V. Because the book is intended for a general audience, the author really should have clarified some basic issues. For example, it would have been helpful to know which territories were under papal temporal power (as opposed to ecclesiastical power) during the time period under discussion. I also would have liked to know how much authority the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire wielded vis-à-vis the pope and the various European secular rulers. The book would have been much less confusing if Noel had, from the onset: 1) defined the boundaries of the Papal States; 2) compared the territorial holdings of the papacy to those of the Empire; and 3) provided a more detailed explanation of the relationships that existed between popes, emperors, European kings, Italian republics and oligarchies, and various family factions such as the Medici.

Having said that, certain parts of this book are very interesting. For one thing, in light of the extraordinary amount of killing perpetrated by the Renaissance popes, it is instructive to be reminded in the opening chapter that the first Christians were pacifists: "Jesus' mission for them was to bring peace to the world." Early Christians refused, on pain of death if necessary, to kill anyone, to fight in any war, or to join any army. It was not until the 4th century that killing became sanctified under certain circumstances, with St. Augustine's introduction of the concept of a `just war.' As Noel observes, the `just war' theory led to "a virtual revolution in the Christian overview of right and wrong, and ushered in centuries of mass killing and destruction." The pontificates of Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Innocent VIII were especially notable for loss of human life. Sixtus IV issued the papal bull that authorized the Spanish Inquisition, which lasted for three centuries. During Sixtus' lifetime alone, hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Jewish men, women and children died in dungeons across Spain, and 114,00 were tortured to death, including 10,200 who were burned alive. (Noel comments: "Such accuracy in citing actual numbers is possible because of the exactitude of records kept by the self-righteous officials who authorized the deaths. The same curious phenomenon occurred in the course of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.") The legacy of Innocent VIII is even more horrific. He signed the papal bull authorizing the persecution of "witches," a persecution which also lasted for centuries and during which hundreds of thousands were tortured, mutilated, and then killed. Innocent gave his papal blessing to the "Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches' Hammer)," a work authored by "two savagely misogynistic Dominicans." This book claimed, among other things, that men's penises were disappearing at an alarming rate in the 15th century because witches "collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves, like living members, and eat oats and corn."

What is striking about the Renaissance popes is how shameless they were. For example, Leo X did not even try to hide the fact that he was, for all intents and purposes, an atheist. Noel writes: "Leo remarked to Cardinal Bembo how lucky, through the ages, had been `the fable' of Christ in that it had `profited us and our associates.'" Leo threw lavish parties that bankrupted the papacy. He also ran a papal brothel and "lifted simony to a new height" by selling cardinals' hats to atheists for the right price. Other popes were no better. The bodies of Alexander VI's enemies regularly were found floating in the Tiber. Julius III was a practicing pederast. Throughout the Renaissance, nepotism was rampant. The selling of indulgences became more and more widespread. The Church's claim that a cash payment would guarantee the donor deliverance from purgatory was the thing that finally pushed Martin Luther over the edge, according to Noel. A 16th-century satirical couplet summarized it neatly: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings / the soul from out of the fire springs." Occasionally, through some fluke, a pope would be elected who was actually unworldly, pious, and ascetic (for example, Pope Hadrian VI), but the systematic corruption of the Church was resistant to reform. The people who benefited from the corruption - the cardinals who lived in luxury; the "mendicant friars who infested Rome and the provinces," spending most of their time in taverns or brothels; and the Roman mob, which wanted the party to continue - vehemently opposed the efforts of Hadrian and other popes who tried to bring God back into the Catholic Church.

I really enjoyed Noel's descriptions of the papal conclaves, meetings in which the cardinals gathered to elect a new pope. During the Renaissance, these fiercely contested elections took place in a claustrophobic atmosphere rife with factionalism. The deliberations were supposed to be kept secret from the outside world - the Roman mob clamored outside, feverishly placing bets on the winner - but in fact the conclave always "leaked like a sieve." To speed the election process along, the cardinals were cloistered in unsanitary conditions and kept on a bread-and-water regime. Tempers flared in such an environment, and sometimes the politicking degenerated into brawling. Since each cardinal nursed his own political ambitions and longed to be pope himself, the man elected was often the sickliest specimen, someone likely to die quickly and keep the field open for other contenders. Poor health was spun into an advantage, Noel notes. For example, Paul III was elected solely because he appeared to be "a man at death's door" -- though he confounded the cardinals by recovering miraculously as soon as the election was secured; he lived for another 15 years. Noel's wry writing style is perfectly suited to his descriptions of these conclaves.

All in all, this is a difficult book to wade through, but it has its rewards. Particularly worthwhile are the sections on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; the rise of the Jesuits; the Catholic Church's treatment of Jews; and the chapters on the Borgias (Noel claims that history has done this family a disservice).