From the religious institution that brought you "Anti-popes" and "Ignoring the Reformation
to make it go away" comes a groundbreaking innovation in Pontifical Memery.
So prepare yourself for debauchery, awful diplomatic skills, and rampant clerical misconduct
in "Pope Fights 3: The Italian Wars".
You see, it is a simple rule of history that, if given enough time, every institution will
get up to some hot nonsense.
And it follows that state power and longevity is directly proportional to the absurdity
of the shenanigans that ensue.
Case in point: The Papacy.
Easily one of the most significant organizations in human history, the Catholic Church has
seen its share of hilarious happenings.
We’ve talked elsewhere about some less-than-pious medieval mishaps, and we’ve seen how things
can escalate when a German monk gets hammer-happy — but today on Pope Fights, we’re going
to focus in on the Fights side of things, and take a look at the objectively bonkers
chapter in Renaissance History known as The Italian Wars.
So, to meet some of Rome’s most notorious and least-saintly Popes and see how they navigated
through this Great Italian Sh*skrieg, Let’s do some History.
The turn of the 1500s was a wild time in Italian history.
Venice remained the merchant lords of Europe, Florence was busy making art that I can’t
show on YouTube, other cities I care about less also existed, and Rome was… well, the
same hot mess it always was, but for new and exciting reasons this time!
See, the Popes had just gotten back to their ancestral home from a 70-year involuntary
field trip to France, long story, and they spent the 1400s trying to cover lost ground,
catch up on all that renaissance-y business, and pay more attention to the Not-Rome parts
of the Papal States — because these popes weren’t just clergymen with bigger hats,
these guys were kings with a land empire to profit from.
Speaking of that Cash Money, the Popes also raked in taxes from every church on earth,
and kept the profits coming with the threat of a little excommunication to anyone who
didn’t pay up.
Maybe it’s something about holding the keys to divine salvation, but the Renaissance Papacy
was absurdly powerful.
But maybe, just slightly possibly maybe, the power went to their heads.
That’s where our first Pope comes in, a Rodrigo Templar Borgia, a cardinal appointed
by the previous Pope, who just so happened to also be his uncle.
After three inconclusive votes to pick a new pope in the conclave elections of 1492, the
fourth round went unanimously to Rodrigo.
God just works in mysterious ways.
As Pope, Borgia ruled like a Roman Emperor, and didn’t worry about silly things like
morality or celibacy.
You know not having kids, that thing priests are supposed to do?
Nah, Rodrigo had a bunch of illegitimate children, and made his son Cesare commander of the papal
armies, then put him in charge of bullying the rest of the Papal States into being more
obedient subjects.
But life wasn’t all nepotism and a metric Game of Thrones of Vatican orgies, because
one day, responsibility rolled into town in the shape of a French Army.
So while Rodrigo was too busy banging his daughter to pay attention to his surroundings,
France and Spain got into a little tiff over control of Naples, and in 1494, France marched
down the peninsula to plop themselves on the Neapolitan throne, to the annoyance of Spain
and the collective horror of Italy.
Now, Italian warfare in this day and age was a game of mercenaries, which is to say, a
money fight.
Because for mercenaries, dying was bad business, so they’d do whatever they could to avoid
having to actually go out and fight.
They’re mercenaries after all, not soldiers.
So in practice, two rival cities would just hire progressively beefier and costlier bands
of mercs until one side threw in the towel, sometimes before anyone even drew a sword.
It was basically a competition to see which state could throw more money into a furnace
while some guys were off in the background having fencing practice.
This was more or less fine when it was just cities rattling sabres at each other for some
farmland here and there, but suddenly they had just witnessed the biggest army they’d
ever seen bulldozing their way through like it was no big deal, as if all of Italy realized
someone brought a claymore to their pool-noodle-fight.
So lots of panic later, Borgia helped assemble a League of Italian states and also Spain
to kick France out of Naples.
This debacle was a wake-up call to Italy, but also to France and Spain, because Italy
was rolling in 100 years of renaissance cash and suddenly looked like very easy pickings.
After Borgia died in 1503, the cardinals elected pope Pius III, who planned sweeping reforms
to the Papal States and the church in general, and then died of an infection one month later.
That’s some bad luck at best, and in this line of work, quite possibly a smiting.
The next Pope, Julius II, promised to kick ass and hire Michelangelo to paint the Sistine
chapel ceiling, and he’s all out of ceiling.
See, although our boy Julius is to thank for nearly the entire Vatican tourism circuit
— between the Sistine chapel fresco, the Raphael Rooms, the Vatican Museum, and the
reconstruction of Saint Peter’s Basilica — he’s best known as the Warrior Pope,
two words which really ought to be contradictory.
But with the looming threat of armies coming from all sides, Julius roused the Papal forces
against their single greatest danger…
Venice?
Well, Venice was the next biggest state in Northern Italy, and they shared a border,
so first I was thinking that, while not quite baseless, we’d need a microscope to appreciate
just how shortsighted Julius was being here.
But then I checked where Julius is from, and it all made sense: ya boi’s from Genoa.
So, in due course, Julius assembled a team of France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire
(Germany) to go beat up his ancestral archrival.
This League of Cambrai succeeded in ganking the entire Venetian terrafirma in no time
flat, but Julius had ignored the golden rule of Slow and Steady Gets The Spaghetti, so
when he looked at the map for two more seconds, he realized that France held half the Po Valley,
so he decided that now these Frenchmen were too dangerous to leave in Italy.
And he formed an alliance to defeat them, with Venice.
Soon enough, Spain and the HRE joined in on the fun to kick France out of town.
This had the obvious outcome that the Empire suddenly had free reign in Northern Italy,
because they had nominally owned the place for the last 500 years, but they only just
now remembered that the other side of the Alps exists.
Julius and the Emperor tried to strongarm Venice out of the land partition, so Venice
completed the trifecta of cursed alliances by teaming up with France, against the Pope.
The end result of this terrible teamwork rollercoaster was rewinding the map to before the war even
happened.
Which makes the War of the League of Cambrai, Italy’s biggest ever game of “Deck the
Leader”, literally all for nothing.
And before you go feeling bad for Julius, 1) this whole thing was his fault, and 2)
He was already dead.
Yup, old Julius went up to file his Heavenly Vacation Request right before France and Venice
gave the Germans the boot.
The new Pope Leo X was a Medici, and a son of Florence’s diet-king Lorenzo the Magnificent
at that.
He had the unfortunate luck of walking into the financial chasm left behind by all those
wars.
This was made even worse by Leo’s habitual bank-breaking purchases, including and not
limited to palaces, parties, the reinstallation of the Medici family as rulers of Florence,
and an elephant parade, in which Leo rode across Rome on an elephant gifted by Portugal.
Problem is, when he got to the bridge to cross the Tiber river, the elephant got spooked
and bucked poor Leo right into the drink.
But the Pope didn’t seem to mind, and later had his darling elephant buried with full
honors in the Vatican courtyard.
What were we talking about again?
Oh, yeah, wasteful spending and mind-numbing debt, let’s get to it.
Leo’s financial strategy included all the usual tricks of selling church offices and
a fast-pass through Purgatory, but even this constant moral depravity couldn’t balance
Leo’s budget.
And needless to say, some of the bigwigs who bought their way into the Papal bureaucracy
were less-than-admired by their Roman subjects, and often found themselves the topic of rude
graffiti around town, joking that the only insult worse than getting accused of promiscuity,
murder, and corruption was being called “Cardinal”.
But aside from precipitating the Protestant Reformation and pretending that ignoring it
would make it stop, Leo’s only other major blunder was in getting dope-smacked by France
and Venice.
To me, the most concerning thing about Leo X is that the disaster Popes around him almost
make his reign look passable.
But while we’re here, let’s take a second to appreciate, on a pure geopolitical level,
the nonsense of the Renaissance Papacy.
It’s a spiritual office, with complete political power over central Italy and an arsenal of
diplomatic weapons that include such tricks as excommunication; but also, it’s a position
that can be filled by basically anybody from any state — so the entire political trajectory
of the Vatican would flip overnight whenever they got a new Pope, oscillating between Borgia’s
rampant Spain favoritism to Julius’ hometown rivalry to Leo’s Florentine dynastic ambitions:
each of these guys used the Papacy as another arm of their native state.
In diplomatic terms, the papacy was a chaos fountain.
Now this is all well and confusing enough, but the European political balance got bent
way out of shape in 1519 when Spain and the Holy Roman Empire suddenly became ruled by
the same guy, and Emperor Charles found himself the most powerful man in Europe by a metric
Habsburg Jawline.
This is the Mondo Yikes that Pope Clement 7 found himself dealing with, effectively
boxed in by the Empire to the north and Spain to the south with no allies but France, Venice,
and Clement’s native Florence.
This matchup looks imbalanced because it is imbalanced, so Clement’s League immediately
met the underside of the Imperial-Spanish steamroller.
Charles’ armies confiscated Milan from France and stomped on any city vain enough to think
it deserved Existing privileges.
But one problem with these giant roving murder parties is that they’re dummy expensive
to staff and equip, so most armies were simply expected to collect their payment by way of
plunder.
And with most of Italy already wiped, only the biggest capitals could still cover the
bill, and Charles was aware of this.
So when his Spanish and fiercely-protestant German troops marched into Papal territories
in 1527, they “mutinied” and “accidentally” booked it 200 miles south to besiege Rome.
Now, while it might easy to get carried away and, say, eat an entire sleeve of Oreos, not
that I have any personal experience with this, there’s no whoopsies in bapping Rome and
stealing the shinies.
And sure the severity of the sacking left a stain on Charlie’s reputation, but what
did he expect?
Oh no, my army fought, how unforeseen!
Give me a break.
Now with the Pope as his vassal and Italy brought to heel, the only player left was
France.
They duked it out over the next few decades, and France pulled the objectively bonkers
move of inviting the Ottomans to help fight Charles, but eventually Italy was too busted
to be worth fighting over anymore, and overseas colonization became the new hotness.
Back to our poor old Clement, while most would consider his reign a disaster, he did accomplish
his personal goal of restoring Medici rule to Florence by installing them as dukes.
So… hey, one point for Clement.
The Renaissance Papacy is a wild ride — between the dissonance of Popes Who Fight Wars and
church-sanctioned depravity, it can be easier to imagine this time in the Papal States as
a mini Roman-Empire, with the added wrinkle of Way More Players and Popes with varying-loyalties.
And that’s what makes this period so wonky: these Popes bent Rome to their individual
wills at the expense of the Papal States itself.
And so at the end of the round it’s: Popes, 4; Papacy, 0.
Thank you so much for watching.
There are few things on this earth that delight me more than a good old-fashioned Pope Fight,
and one of those things is our community of Patrons!
If you’d like to be one of these people listed here on screen and support the channel,
hop on over to Patreon.com/OSP.