SIXTUS V. AND THE NEW CHURCH
The Council of Trent, which had been convoked with the formal aim of
healing the great schism of Christendom, hardened that schism and made
it irremediable. I have already observed how natural it was that the
Papacy should refuse to make open confession of its decay, and in some
degree surrender its authority, by permitting the Church to reform,
not only its members, but its head. The inevitable conception of the
Popes was to retain the work of reform in their own hands and to use
the council, if council there must be,--we have seen that Popes had
reason to look with suspicion on councils,--to secure an agreement on
doctrinal standards by which the Inquisitors might judge, and secular
princes might exterminate, heretics. They miscalculated the power of
the northern rebels and the chances of an unselfish cohesion of the
Catholic princes against them. Nearly half of Europe adopted a new
version of the Christian faith, and, when the Thirty Years' War finally
proved the indestructibility of that creed, the task of the Papacy
was narrowed to the ruling and reforming of southern Europe and the
spiritual conquest of the new worlds which had appeared beyond the
seas. For this fourth phase of Papal development--the period from the
consolidation of the Reformation to the first outbreak of Modernism in
the French Revolution--the Pontificates of Sixtus V. and Benedict XIV.
are the most illuminating and significant.
Even the failure of Paul III. did not entirely banish from the Vatican
the levity which had been the immediate cause of its disaster. Julius
III. (1550-1555) at first resumed, somewhat reluctantly, the sittings
of the Council of Trent, but he again suspended its work in 1552
and entered upon a period of luxurious ease and frivolous enjoyment
which deeply shocked the graver cardinals. At his death the fiery
Neapolitan reformer, Cardinal Carafa, who had dictated the more
severe decisions of Paul III., received the tiara, and he spent four
energetic years (1555-1559) in a relentless attack upon heresy in
Catholic lands. He made vigorous use of the Inquisition, which Paul
III. had (largely at the instigation of St. Ignatius) set up in Rome,
and he published a complete Index of Prohibited Books.[312] But his
reforms, his heresy-hunts, and his hostility to Spain were enforced
with such harshness that the Romans almost cursed his memory when his
short Pontificate came to an end. It is a singular illustration of the
tenacity of abuses at Rome that even the austere Carafa was a nepotist,
and the nephews he favoured were of so unworthy a character that they
were executed--though one of them was a cardinal--by his successor.
Pius IV. (1559-65) was a more persuasive reformer: a Milanese of lowly
origin but of some distinction in canonical scholarship. He guided to
their close the labours of the Council of Trent,[313] and on January
26, 1564, put the Papal seal on the precise formulation of the Roman
creed. Pius V. (1565-72) brought to the Papal throne the austere ideals
of a sincere Dominican monk. He was not content with persecuting the
Italians who criticized the Papacy; he did much to reform the Papal
Court and the city. Gregory XIII. (1572-85), a scholarly Pope, mingled
in strange proportion the virtues and vices of his predecessors.
His name survives honourably in the Gregorian Calendar, and he did
more than any other Pope to encourage the spread of that network of
Jesuit colleges throughout southern Europe which proved so effective a
hindrance to the advance of Protestantism; but the _Te Deum_ he sang
over the foul "St. Bartholomew Massacre" (1572) and the condition of
infuriated rebellion in which he left the Papal States at his death
betray his defects. The Papal income had fallen considerably since the
loss of England and north Germany and Scandinavia, yet Gregory wished
to pay heavy subsidies to the militant Catholic princes. He imposed
such taxes, and aroused such fierce anger by seizing estates after
disputing the title-deeds of the owners, that Italy almost slew him
with its hatred.
In these circumstances the famous Sixtus V. mounted the Papal throne.
Felice Peretti had been born at Grottamare, in the March of Ancona, on
December 13, 1521. The unwonted vigour of his character is traced by
some to the Dalmatian blood of his ancestors, who, in the preceding
century, had fled before the Turks to Italy. They had preserved their
robust health, and attained no fortune, by work on the soil, and there
is not the least improbability in the tradition--which some recent
writers resent--that Felice at one time tended his father's swine.[314]
But at the age of nine he was sent to the friary at Montalto, where
he had an uncle, and he proved a good student. He became so excellent
a preacher that he was summoned to give the Lenten Sermons at Rome in
1552, and he attracted the notice of St. Ignatius and St. Philip Neri,
and of some of the graver cardinals. After presiding over one or two
convents of his Order, he was put in charge of the friary at Venice in
1556, and was in the next year made Counsellor to the Inquisition. His
ardent nature and strict ideals caused him to use his powers with such
harshness that both his brethren and the Venetian government attacked
him. He was forced several times to retire, and in 1560 Rome was
definitively compelled to withdraw him.
The fact that he had been thwarted by lax brethren and by an (from
the Roman point of view) irreligious government commended the fiery
monk still further to his reformer-friends. He received a chair at the
Sapienza (Roman University) and was made Counsellor to the Holy Office.
In 1565 Cardinal Buoncompagni was sent on a mission to Spain, and,
apparently to the Cardinal's disgust, the learned friar was included
in his train. The sincerely religious temper of Sixtus V. makes it
difficult for some of his biographers to understand his very original
character. In spite of his virtue he was quite clearly ambitious,--one
must live in the ecclesiastical world to realize how the ambition of
power and the ambition to do good fuse with each other in the clerical
mind,--he had an atrocious temper, and he retained what higher-born
prelates would call the rudeness of a peasant. He quarrelled with
Buoncompagni, and, as the mission was never really discharged, he had
no opportunity to distinguish himself. However, the new Pope (for whose
election Buoncompagni returned prematurely to Rome) was the friendly
Dominican colleague, Pius V. Padre Montalto was made Vicar Apostolic
over the Franciscan Order--the General having died--and he made a
drastic effort to reform the reluctant friars and nuns (1566-1568). For
this he received the red hat (1570) and was entrusted with the task of
editing the works of St. Ambrose.
Unhappily for the ambitious cardinal-monk, Pius V. died in 1572, and
Cardinal Buoncompagni ascended the throne and took the name of Gregory
XIII. He withdrew the pension which Pius had assigned to Felice, and
for the next thirteen years the Cardinal had to live in retirement
and comparative poverty. In this again the very original character
of Peretti reveals itself. One might expect that so stern a monastic
reformer would retire to a friary when the Papal Court no longer
required his presence, but he retired, instead, to his very comfortable
palace and garden on the Esquiline. He had brought his sister Camilla
and her son Francesco to live in this palace, and even romance and
tragedy entered the friar's home. Francesco had married a beautiful
and light-minded Roman girl, and her brother, Paolo Orsini, murdered
Francesco in order to set her free for a nobler lover. The uncle could
get no redress under Gregory XIII. He curbed his anger, quietly bent
over his books, and watched the rising storm in Italy which was to
close Gregory's reign.
Gregory died on April 10, 1585, and Cardinal Montalto was enclosed with
his colleagues in the Sistine Chapel on April 21st for the making of
a new Pope. He was in his sixty-fourth year, and his more malicious
biographer would have us believe that he disguised his robustness
under a pretence of decrepit age in order to deceive the cardinals.
The fact seems to be that he waited quietly, and without taking sides,
in his cell until the factions had worn themselves out and the hour
had come for choosing a man who had not been regarded as _papabile_.
Most assuredly he deceived the cardinals, though not by any dishonest
artifice. For three days the Medici and Colonna and Farnese, and the
French and Spanish factions, fought their traditional battle, and not
one of the aspirants could get a majority. Then one or two cardinals
bethought themselves of this quiet Cardinal Montalto, who had lived
away on the Esquiline with his rustic sister for so many years, and who
would surely be grateful to any for elevating him to the throne. They
visited Montalto and found him humbly and gratefully disposed: they
intrigued nervously and rapidly in the little colony: and presently
cardinals rushed to do homage to the former swineherd and applaud
the Pontificate of Sixtus V. He was duly grateful, for a few days.
Lucrative appointments were at once divided amongst his friends and
supporters; though some fear seized men when one of the cardinals
ventured to bring before the new Pope the murderer of his nephew, and
Sixtus, in sombre and terrible accents, bade the Orsini go and rid
himself of his cut-throats. He was crowned on May 1st, and he lost
little time in applying himself to the drastic schemes of reform which
he had, apparently, matured in his peaceful garden on the Esquiline.
Yet the first act of the reformer betrays a defect and compels us to
deal at once with the chief irregularity of his conduct. After the
unhappy nepotism of Paul IV., that ancient and disreputable practice
had been severely condemned, yet we find it flagrantly and immediately
revived by Sixtus himself. It was, as we shall see, an essential
part of his scheme to reform the College of Cardinals, and he would
presently enact that no one should be raised to the cardinalate under
the age of twenty-one, and no man with a son or grandson should attain
the dignity. Yet within a fortnight of his coronation he announced
that his grand-nephew, Alexander Peretti, a boy of thirteen, would
be raised to the Sacred College, and another young grand-nephew was
appointed Governor of the Borgo of St. Peter's and Captain of the Papal
Guard. Their sisters were similarly enriched by noble alliances in
later years. This grave impropriety is not excused by references to
the ambition and determination of the Pope's sister Camilla; indeed,
the wealth which that lady now obtained, and the notoriety with which
she invested it in Rome, rather increased the Pope's guilt. He was
assuredly not less strong of will than she. The defect shows how deeply
rooted the evil was at Rome, when so resolute a reformer yields to it
within a few years of the Protestant convulsion of Europe.
With this single concession to the older traditions, however, Sixtus
turned energetically to the work of reform. The condition of the
Papal States under Gregory XIII. had become scandalous. The leading
officials sold the lesser offices to corrupt men, and these in turn
recovered their money by receiving bribes to overlook crime. Brigandage
of the most licentious character spread over Italy, and even Roman
nobles supported bands of swordsmen who would with impunity rid them
of an inconvenient husband, force the doors of a virtuous woman's
house, or relieve the pilgrim of his money. A law prohibiting the use
of firearms had been passed, but it had become the fashion to ignore
law and police. The picture which Sixtus himself gives us in his early
Bulls is amazing when we recall that, only a few years before, the
future of the Church had depended in no small measure on the morals of
Rome and Italy.
Sixtus had no cause to spare the memory of his predecessor, and he
turned with truculence to the remedy of this disorder. Before the end
of April he had four young men belonging to high Roman families hanged
on gibbets, like common murderers, for carrying firearms in spite of
the decree. At the Carnival he erected two gibbets, one at each end
of the Corso, to intimidate roysterers from the use of the knife. On
April 30th he, in his Bull _Hoc Nostri_, enacted the most drastic
punishment for brigands and all who should support or tolerate them;
and on June 1st he caused the Roman government to put a price on their
heads. The nobles of Rome, who had included these picturesque criminals
in their suites, were ordered, under the direst penalties, to yield or
dismiss them, and even cardinals were threatened with imprisonment if
they retained servants of that character. Such was the amazement of
Rome that the wits are said to have dressed the statue of St. Peter
for a journey and put into its mouth the reply, when St. Paul was
supposed to ask the meaning of his travelling costume, that he feared
that Sixtus was about to prosecute him for cutting off the ear of the
high-priest's servant. From Rome the terror spread throughout the Papal
States. Thousands--including renegade monks and mothers who prostituted
their daughters--were executed or slain, and the bands fled to neutral
territory. Thither the merciless hand of the Pope pursued them, and a
few liberal concessions to the other Italian Powers induced them to
fling back the banditti upon the arms of the Papal troops or the knives
of those who sought blood-money.
That Sixtus pursued this very necessary campaign with absolute
truculence and a disdain of delicacy in the use of means cannot be
questioned, but, though the fact does not adorn his character, we know
too well the licentious condition of Italy to waste our sympathy on
his victims. The most stubborn and audacious outlaws fell in a few
years before his attack. At Bologna, for instance, the Pepoli and the
Malvezzi had for years sustained one of those terrible feuds which had
so long disgraced the central State of Christendom. They laughed at
Papal injunctions. Sixtus had Count Pepoli treacherously seized, tried
(in his absence) at Rome, and decapitated. His followers, and those of
the Malvezzi, scattered in alarm, and Bologna was not merely relieved
of oppressive criminals, but was adorned with new buildings and
enriched with educational institutions by the triumphant Pope. Later,
in order to extinguish the embers of animosity, he promoted one of the
Pepoli to the cardinalate. The feuds of the Gaetani, the Colonna, and
other old families were similarly trodden out, or healed by marriages
with grand-nieces of the Pope, and Italy became more sober and more
prosperous than it had been for ages. Unhappily, the reform died with
Sixtus and anarchy returned.
This campaign occupied a few years, but it had no sooner been launched
than Sixtus produced other of the plans he had prepared in his secluded
palace. I have shown how deeply the corruption of the College of
Cardinals affected the religious history of Europe, and Sixtus began
very quickly to reform it. It was, perhaps, not his misunderstood
promise of gratitude to the cardinals who had elected him, but
some feeling of incongruity with his own conduct in promoting his
boy-nephews, which restrained him for a time. However that may be, he
turned to the problem in the second year of his Pontificate, and his
Bull _Postquam Verus_[315] laid down severe rules for the sustained
improvement of the College. The number of cardinals was restricted to
seventy (as is still the rule); illegitimates, and men who had sons and
grandsons to favour, were excluded; and a cleric must have attained
an age of at least twenty-two years before he could be promoted. In
order to distribute and expedite the work of administration, he further
divided the cardinals into fifteen "congregations" (some of which
already existed), such as those of the Inquisition, of Public Works, of
the Vatican Press, and so on.
We can hardly doubt that in this division he had an ulterior aim.
The earlier procedure had been for the Pope to lay a question before
the whole body of the cardinals and discuss it with them. Sixtus
continued to do this, but the cardinals soon found that, although he
desired discussion, he turned fiery eyes, and even showered rough and
offensive epithets, on any who opposed his plans. He was essentially
an autocrat, and the impetuosity which was inseparable from so robust
a character made him an unpleasant autocrat. The advantage to him
of splitting the cardinals into small groups was that, on any grave
question, he had merely to take account of the consultative opinion of
a few cardinals. His more admiring biographers record that he rarely
dissented from the conclusions of his congregations; in point of fact,
he decided grave issues before consulting them, or made his will
unmistakably clear to them. His own promotions were generally sound,
though he at times strained his regulations in favour of a friend. But
he greatly improved the College of Cardinals, and made an admirable
effort to exclude from it nationalist influences.
We must not, on the other hand, suppose that these congregations of
cardinals count in any degree--except as the mere executive of his
will--in the great work of his Pontificate. His own teeming brain and
iron will are the sole sources of the mighty achievements of those five
years. He had studied the Papal problem on all sides and was prepared
at once to remedy a disorder or design a new structure. Agriculture
and industry were feeble and unprosperous throughout the Papal States.
Ruinous taxation, lawless oppression, and the ease with which one
obtained one's bread at the innumerable monasteries, had demoralized
the country and ruined the Papal treasury. Sixtus had some of the
qualities of an economist--we still possess the careful account book he
kept in his days of monastic authority--and he was especially concerned
to nurse the Papal income in view of certain grandiose plans which he
seems to have held in reserve, so that he applied himself zealously to
this problem. It is generally agreed that his work here is a singular
compound of shrewdness and blundering. By his restoration of public
security he lifted a burden from agriculture, and he made special
efforts to encourage the woollen industry and the silk industry.[316]
He, at great cost, brought a good supply of water, from an estate
twenty miles away, to Rome, and by this means and by the cutting of
new roads re-established some population on the hills, which had
long been almost deserted. We find Camilla speculating profitably in
this extension of the city, but the more important point is that the
population of Rome rose in five years from 70,000 to 100,000; still,
however, only one tenth of the population of Imperial Rome. The Pope
also gave a water-supply to Civita Vecchia and drained its marshes;
and he spent--with very little result in this case--200,000 ducats in
draining the marshes at Terracina, which he personally inspected in
1588.
Yet the admiration which his biographers bestow on his finance is
misplaced. It seems to have been chiefly in his native March of
Ancona that he granted relief from the heavy taxes and imposts of his
predecessor; the Papal States generally were still ruinously taxed,
even in the necessaries of life. His hoarding of specie, partly for
excellent but partly for visionary purposes, injured commerce; and
such measures as his prohibition of the sale of landed property to
foreigners were short-sighted. The rise of the Papal income, which
enabled him to store 4,500,000 scudi (about 8,000,000 dollars) in five
years, besides spending large sums on public works, was chiefly due to
deplorable methods. The income from the issue of indulgences had now
fallen very low--it had not wholly ceased, as some say, since they
are still issued in Spain--and little money came from Spain or France.
The fixed Papal income had fallen to 200,000 scudi a year, and in the
expenditure of this the friar-pope made an economy of 140,000 scudi a
year by reducing table-charges, dismissing superfluous servants, and
(as is often forgotten) giving to other servants church-benefices so
that they needed no salary. The result was still far too small for the
creation of a fund, and Sixtus sold honours and offices as flagrantly
as any Pope had done since Boniface IX. He sold positions which had
never been sold before, and he created new marketable titles. He
debased the coinage and imposed a tax on money-lenders. He carried
to a remarkable extent the new Papal system of _Monti_.[317] He
withdrew offices which Gregory XIII. had sold, and transferred them to
higher bidders; and he must have known how the officials would recoup
themselves.
By these means he raised his hoard, which seems to have been gathered
for some visionary grand campaign against the Protestants and the
Turks. We at once recall Julius II., but it is a comparison which
the work of Sixtus V. cannot sustain; he was not so great a ruler as
Julius, and he fell on less prosperous times. I must add, however,
that part of his reserve fund was destined for practical uses. In 1586
famine and Turks and pirates caused grave distress in Italy. Sixtus did
not even then abolish his heavy taxes on the necessaries of life and
the means of distributing them, but he bought 100,000 crowns' worth of
corn in Sicily, fixed the price of flour and punished unjust dealers,
and set about collecting a fund of a million scudi to meet such
emergencies. He was not economist enough to see the roots of the evil,
and fair, fertile Italy continued to suffer under the unhappy Papal
system.
The Pope's tenderness to the Jews was part of his crude financial
policy. A Portuguese Jew, who had fled from the Inquisition, was
his chief fiscal adviser, and Sixtus interpreted in the most genial
manner the current teaching of theologians, that, since the Jews
were irreparably damned on a greater count, they might lend money at
interest, and the Papacy might tax their wealth. Baron Huebner, in a
moment of unusual candour, corrects some of the less discriminating
biographers: Sixtus, he says, "protected the Jews in order to exploit
them."[318] Pius V. had expelled the Jews from all parts of the
Papal States except Rome and the March of Ancona, and Sixtus, by his
constitution _Hebræorum Gens_, cancelled the restriction and ordered
Christians to treat the Jews and their synagogues with respect. We
feel that interest led Sixtus on to a more human feeling. He dispensed
the unhappy Jews from wearing the odious yellow dress which Christian
princes and prelates imposed on them, and for a few years, in that one
corner of Europe, they enjoyed the life of human beings.
Sixtus was less lenient to the Jesuits than to the Jews. The primitive
fervour of the Society was already dimmed by prosperity or perverted
by casuistry, and complaints came to Rome from all parts. Having
been a Franciscan monk, Sixtus was not well disposed toward the new
congregation, which had aroused the hostility of the older religious
bodies. He used to observe, in his grim, meditative way: "Who are
these men who make us bow our heads at the mention of their name?" He
referred to the Catholic practice of inclining the head at the mention
of the name of Jesus, but he disliked the whole constitution of the
Society and resented the privileges it had won from his predecessors.
A prolonged quarrel of the worldly and degenerate Jesuits of Spain
with General Acquaviva gave him an opportunity to intervene, and he
ordered an inquiry into their rules. In 1590 he announced that he would
alter the name and the constitutions of the Society. Acquaviva stirred
such Catholic monarchs as were docile to his brethren to petition the
Pope in their favour, but Sixtus was not prepared to listen to the
suggestions, in ecclesiastical affairs, of worldly princes. Acquaviva
then persuaded Cardinal Carafa, to whom the inquiry had been entrusted,
to prolong his inquiry, and it became a race between the failing energy
of the Pope and the intrigues of the Jesuits. Rome witnessed the
contest with the interest it had once bestowed on the chariot-races
of the Blues and the Greens. The inquiry was transferred to other
prelates, and, when these also were suborned, Sixtus peremptorily
ordered Acquaviva to request that the name of the Society should be
changed. The petition was reluctantly made, the Bull authorizing the
change of name was drafted and--Sixtus V. died before he put his name
to it. In the circumstances it was inevitably whispered that Jesuit
poison had ended the Pope's life, but the legend was as superfluous as
it was familiar.[319]
The rest of the Pope's administrative work must be briefly recorded
before we pass to the consideration of his political activity. He
attempted to restrict the prodigality of the Romans in dress, food,
funeral and wedding expenses, etc., but this sumptuary legislation[320]
was not enforced. He found general and disgraceful laxity in the
convents of nuns, and enacted a death-penalty against offenders: the
same penalty he, with his habitual truculence, imposed for cheating at
cards or dice. He directed the police to cleanse Rome of prostitutes
and astrologers, reformed the prisons,[321] made provision for widows
and orphans, pressed the redemption of captives,[322] and constructed
ten galleys for the defence of the Italian coast against the Turks
and pirates. He cleared of debt the Roman University (Sapienza) and
restored it to its full activity. He engaged Fontana to crown St.
Peter's with its long-deferred cupola, and threw such energy into the
work that he almost completed in twenty-two months a task which the
builders expected to occupy ten years. He, with equal vigour, set up
the obelisks in front of St. Peter's, reconstructed the Lateran Palace
in part, and restored the columns of Trajan and Antoninus; though, in
a naïve desire to express the triumph of Christianity over Paganism,
he put statues of Peter and Paul on the ancient Roman pedestals.[323]
He also set up a press in the Vatican Library, which he restored and
decorated, and from this he issued the Latin version of the Bible
which the Council of Trent had ordered, as well as the works of St.
Ambrose and St. Bonaventure.
The magnitude of this domestic program and the vigour of the
sexagenarian Pope are enhanced when we further learn that his brief
Pontificate was, as usual, occupied with grave political problems.
With German affairs the Papacy had now little concern, but we must
record that Sixtus permitted some of the Catholic bishops to allow
the laity to communicate in both kinds. To England he devoted more
attention, though his violent and undiplomatic methods only made
worse the position of the Catholics in that country. Mary Stuart
contrived to write to him, after she had been condemned, and he spoke
of Elizabeth to the cardinals as "the English Jezabel." He urged Henry
III. to intercede for Mary and himself wrote a defence of her. When
she was executed, he spurred Philip I. in his designs against England
and promised him 500,000 florins when his fleet reached England and
a further half million when the Spaniards occupied London. When an
English spy was detected at Rome, Sixtus ordered his tongue to be cut
out and his hand struck off before he was beheaded. In defiance of
his own decree he bestowed the cardinalate on William Allen, and he
directed Allen to translate (for distribution in England) the Bull in
which he enumerated the dark crimes of Elizabeth, renewed the sentence
of excommunication against her, and declared her subjects released from
their allegiance. These measures, which only increased the sufferings
of the Catholics, betray again the limitation of the Pope's vigorous
intelligence, and, when the Armada sank, he turned from Spain to France
and realized the futility of his policy.
The chief political problem was, however, the attitude of Rome toward
the rival Catholic Powers, Spain and France, and the less important
action of Sixtus in Venice (which, as a bulwark against the Protestant
north, he sought, in spite of his old grievances, to conciliate), Savoy
(where he compelled the Duke to refrain from appointing bishops),
Besançon (where he forced upon the reluctant chapter a friar-friend
whom he had made Archbishop), Belgium (where he demanded a truce
between the University and the Jesuits), and Switzerland (where he
attempted in vain to restrain the secular authorities), need not be
considered at length. The French problem, complicated by the ambition
of Spain, might have given anxious hours to a more astute statesman
than Sixtus, and we shall hardly expect a man with so little subtlety
to reach a distinguished solution of it.
The ineptness of Catherine de' Medici and the folly and profligacy
of her diseased son, Henry III., had brought France to a dangerous
pass. Henry of Guise coveted the throne, under a pretence of zeal for
the Church: Henry of Navarre grimly awaited his natural succession
to it: and Philip of Spain dreamed of annexing France, as well as
England, to his swollen dominion. The Spanish representative at Rome,
Count Olivarez, who nourished a secret disdain of the peasant-Pope,
urged Sixtus to eliminate Henry of Navarre from the competition by
excommunication, for having relapsed to the Protestant creed, and,
on September 5, 1585, Sixtus issued against him and the Prince of
Condé the Bull _Ab Immenso_. Henry of Navarre retorted cheerfully
that the Pope was himself a heretic, and Henry III. angrily drove the
Pope's new Nuncio from France; to which Sixtus retorted by expelling
from Rome Henry's representative, the Marquis Pisani. To the great
delight of Philip and the Catholic League, Henry III., feeble and
distracted, humbly submitted, and was compelled to put pressure on
the remaining Protestants. Sixtus, in fact, promised Henry a Spanish
army from the Netherlands to assist in coercing the Huguenots, and
urged him to co-operate with Philip and with the League (under Guise).
In his exclusive, and entirely natural, concern for the orthodoxy of
the country, Sixtus failed to understand in any degree its peculiar
political condition or the utterly selfish designs of Guise and of
Philip. He was impelling the country toward civil war.
In 1587 the Germans invaded France, and Henry of Navarre in turn
confronted the troops of the League. Some small initial victories of
the League led the Pope to congratulate the Duke of Guise in the most
extravagant language, and it was only the fear of exasperating Philip
that restrained him from bestowing on the Duke's son the hand of one
of his grand-nieces. One cannot suppose that Sixtus failed to see that
Guise had ambition, but he showed little penetration of character in
admonishing the Duke to recover Paris for Henry III. and to assist that
monarch to set up the Inquisition in France and exterminate heresy.
The Nuncio's letters show that he was, under the Pope's instructions,
absorbed in a futile effort to reconcile the Duke and the King, and it
is said that Sixtus angrily advised the effeminate monarch either to
make a friend of Guise or to destroy him. Even Henry III. showed more
appreciation of the political situation.
Sixtus turned impatiently toward Spain and encouraged the designs of
Philip. On July 15, 1588, he signed a treaty with the League and Spain,
and the new alliance promised the complete eradication of heresy from
France. The failure of the Armada and the Pope's habitual distrust of
Philip clouded the alliance for a time, but Henry III. was not willing
to accept the Pope's terms for a transfer of his affections. Sixtus
was especially eager to have the decrees of the Council of Trent
published in France. To this the Gallican clergy objected, and Henry
himself declared that he would publish them only "salvis juribus regis
et regni": a phrase which Sixtus, to use his own words, "cursed." Even
when, to the Pope's extreme anger, Henry had the Duke and the Cardinal
of Guise assassinated, Sixtus remained too irresolute to derive
advantage from the King's remorse or apprehension, though the Spaniards
and the League gained ground at Rome. Henry III., indeed, entered into
alliance with the Protestant Henry against the League, and Sixtus was
content to issue a fresh threat of excommunication against the Huguenot.
But the assassination of the King in August (1589) simplified the
situation, and Sixtus definitely allied himself with Spain and the
League against Henry IV.: a very natural, but equally impolitic,
decision. Venice recognized Henry, and the Pope at first recalled
his Nuncio from Venice and then, hearing the success of the new
King, ordered him to return. Sixtus was beginning to appreciate the
situation, and, when the Duke of Luxemburg came to Rome to tell of
Henry's willingness to reconsider his religious position, he was
amiably received. The Spaniards made a last violent struggle, and even
threatened to arraign the Pope for heresy before a General Council, but
Sixtus now saw his way clearly. Throughout the year 1590 he braved the
threats of the Spaniards and watched the progress of Henry IV., but
the struggle against Spaniards and Jesuits was too exacting for a man
of his years and he succumbed to fever on August 24th.
Sixtus must unhesitatingly be included among the great Popes, but it is
perplexing to read, as one often does, that he was "one of the greatest
of the Popes." The work he accomplished in five years is far greater
than most of the Popes achieved, or would have achieved, in twenty
years, and at least the greater part of his reform-work in Rome and
Italy was of considerable value. Yet even here we must not overlook his
defects: he transgressed his own regulations when he would gratify his
affections, he enforced reforms with harshness and violence, and he
greatly lessened the value of his economic work by hoarding a vast sum
for the purpose (apparently) of conducting a visionary grand campaign
against Turks and heretics. His political attitude was, as I have
shown, injudicious and irresolute. Both in character and statesmanship
he falls far short of the greater Popes, and it is, perhaps, some
indication of the evil plight of the Church that Sixtus V. should be
the ablest man it could produce in a century of grave and persistent
danger.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 312: See Dr. G.H. Putnam's _Censorship of the Church of Rome_
(2 vols., 1907), i., 168.]
[Footnote 313: See, besides the work of Pallavicini already quoted,
Paolo Sarpi's _Istoria del Concilio Tridentino_.]
[Footnote 314: It is, however, true that the hostile Italian
biographer, Gregorio Leti (_Vita di Sisto Quinto_, 3 vols., 1693),
who tells this must be read with discretion; and we must use equal
discretion in reading Tempesti's _Storia della Vita e Geste di Sisto
V._ (1754), which is inspired by a contrary determination to praise
Sixtus. I need recommend only the full and generally judicious
biography of Sixtus which we owe to Baron de Hübner (_Sixte Quint_,
3 vols., 1870), remarking that in it the panegyrical tendency is
more conspicuous than the critical. For a smaller biography M.A.J.
Dumesnil's _Histoire de Sixte-Quint_ (1869) is excellent.]
[Footnote 315: December 5, 1586.]
[Footnote 316: Bull _Quum Sicut_, May 28, 1586. Bull _Quum Alias_,
December 17, 1585.]
[Footnote 317: Recent Popes had established what was, in effect, a
system of life assurance. A large money-payment secured an income for
life out of the proceeds of certain taxes. Sixtus multiplied these
_Monti_ (as the funds were called) in order to obtain a large sum of
money at once, and he thus mortgaged the resources of the Holy See.
Ranke, whose chapters on Sixtus are amongst his best, heavily censures
the Pope's finance.]
[Footnote 318: I., 349.]
[Footnote 319: See the author's _Candid History of the Jesuits_ (1913),
pp. 110-113.]
[Footnote 320: Bull _Cum Unoquoque_, January 1, 1586.]
[Footnote 321: Bull _Qugæ Ordini_, 1589.]
[Footnote 322: Bull _Cum Benigno_, 1585.]
[Footnote 323: This edifying mood of the Pope might have been fatal to
the ancient Roman remains if he had enjoyed a lengthy Pontificate. When
the cardinals timidly curbed his iconoclasm, he replied that he would
destroy the uglier of the pagan monuments and restore the remainder.
Among these "uglier" monuments were the Septizonium of Severus, the
surviving part of which he actually demolished, and the tomb of Cæcilia
Metella!]