ABSTRACT

In 1492, Johannes Burchard, Pope Alexander VI’s Master of Ceremonies, left this account of a celebration at the papal palace:

The close of the fifteenth century has traditionally been seen as something of a nadir in papal history. In the writings of Renaissance contemporaries and modern historians alike, we find a well-established narrative of lamentation over the corruption, immorality, worldliness, italianization and secularization of the Quattrocento popes, and none more so than the Catalan Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, whose pontificate has attracted much prurient interest.2 Both implicitly and explicitly, it is

suggested that hedonistic Renaissance popes effectively brought the Reformation upon themselves. Alongside these allegations of moral and spiritual decay, the historiography of the fifteenth-century papacy has also painted it as an institution which was in serious political decline, a pitiful reflection of its high-medieval forebear, compromised by schisms and harried by conciliarists. Writers such as John Thomson and Anthony Black have suggested that the political weakness of the Quattrocento papacy was the principal reason for the emergence of ‘national churches’ in ultramontane Europe; in their accounts, cynical princes simply exploited the helplessness of their old rival in Rome.