The good, the bad and the morally ambivalent

Gerard Noel's new study cleverly dismantles many myths about the Borgia popes, says Allan Massie The Renaissance Popes by Gerard Noel, Constable £25 4 G od has given us the Papacy; let us enjoy it."
Leo X's remark, four years before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, has often been quoted as evidence of the decadence and spiritual corruption of the Church in the 15th and early 16th century. Certainly Leo, the Medici pope, was himself scarcely a Christian, showing, according to Gerard Noel, no inclination to receive the sacraments on his deathbed. "A practising sodomite ... he made no pretence of piety or reverence, and publicly embraced Aretino and Ariosto, the most licentious poets Italy had ever known."
Nevertheless, Ariosto is second only to Dante among Italian poets, and Leo, Noel admits, "restored Rome as cultural centre of the western world". If he provoked the Reformation by the liberal sale of indulgences, the money raised went to the building of the new Basilica of St Peter.
Noel covers the history of the papacy from the election of Nicholas V in 1447 to the death of Pius V in 1572, and the result is a book almost as entertaining as Suetonius's account of the first 12 Caesars.
The comparison suggests itself, inevitably, for these popes were indeed Caesars, extraordinary men, some of great, others of negligible, ability; men granted the opportunity, as few have been, to develop their personalities almost without restraint. Some were soldiers and crafty politicians. Many were aesthetes, a few devout. Some combined spirituality with self-indulgence. They practiced nepotism and simony. Few were disturbed by scruples. Murder was not unknown to them. Some enjoyed watching torture being inflicted. Most were antiSemitic.
In all of them, ambition for temporal power ran counter to what we may regard as the duty of the head of the Church. This desire was not wholly culpable. They were Italian princes as well as priests, and the memory of the Avignon papacy and the schism that followed fostered the belief that only by securing their domination of the Patrimony of St Peter could they maintain their independence. It was their misfortune that from 1494, the year of the French invasion, Italy became a battleground where the two Great Powers, Spain and France, struggled for supremacy. All accounts of the Italian Wars are necessarily tortuous. Noel guides the reader through this labyrinth extremely skilfully.
His book has the subtitle: "Culture, power and the making of the Borgia myth". and one of his purposes, perhaps his chief purpose, is to scotch what he calls that myth.
In his view the first Borgia pope, Alexander VI, far from being "the worst of popes", was a man of remarkable ability and many admirable qualities, a victim of circumstance and calumny. He makes his case well, often convincingly, partly because he is at the same time ready to admit that his hero was "an unabashed sensualist, with a scandalous private life", devoted to the advancement, by any means, of his family.
Alexander was "a multifaceted individual of great complexity ... the arch political fixer, who scrambles into his papal vestments with childish delight". His evil reputation, in Noel's opinion, owes more to the slanders of his enemy and successor, the della Rovere Pope, Julius II, than to the facts. He makes the point, fairly enough, that-the Borgias have been the victims of unsubstantiated rumour and calumny, good stories which he calls "on dits".
Yet Noel is ready enough to admit such scandalous "on dits" about other popes. Can it really be true that at Leo X's banquets, "naked boys would appear from puddings", or that Paul II, "expired, after an immoderate feasting on melons" and prolonged carnal indulgences?
Noel carries the story into the late Renaissance and the popes of the Counter-Reformation. These were themselves a mixed bunch. Paul Ill, Alessandro Farnese, had been known as "the petticoat cardinal" because he owed his elevation to his beautiful sister Giulia who, aged only 18, had been Alexander VI's mistress. Accounts of his debauched early life were Stendhal's source or inspiration for the character of Fabrizio, hero of The Charterhouse of Parma.
But he reformed, and, as pope, summoned the Council of Trent and authorised the establishment of the Society of Jesus.
Noel is severely critical of Pius V's excommunica tion and pronounced deposition of Elizabeth of England, because this transformed patriotic English Catholics into traitors.
This is doubtless a reasonable view for a member of an old recusant family to hold, but it disregards the political realities of the time. Elizabeth wasn't excommunicated until 1570 because, for the first years of her reign, she enjoyed the support of Philip II of Spain, who still saw England as a possible ally against France. But the events of 1567 — the outbreak of the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands and of the French Wars of religion, along with the flight of the Catholic Mary Stuart from Scotland and her imprisonment in England — converted the dynastic struggles of the first half of the century into an ideological war, in which England, if hesitantly and at first ineffectively, was ranged on the Protestant side. It was inevitable that the Pope should no longer recognise Elizabeth as the rightful queen of England.
Noel makes the point that Catholics who suffered in England were executed as traitors, not burnt as heretics. But, since an Act of Parliament had declared that the celebration of the Mass was itself treasonable, the argument is at best c asuistic.
I enjoyed this book greatly and learned much from it. The narrative is sometimes repetitious and not always easy to follow, but this merely reflects the confusion of the times.
The writing is vigorous (though I wish Noel wouldn't write "amount" as in "an amount of people" when he means number) and it is full of illuminating and amusing anecdotes .
Bes.t of all it offers a lively picture of a fascinating time and extraordinary nun and, occasionally, women.