These were bold words, and they propelled the papacy onto a new course. "Today we think of popes as spiritual leaders, but in the 15th and 16th centuries they could actually command divisions," says Fordham University historian David Myers. "In terms of actual power the pope is much less powerful today than he was in the Renaissance."
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Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
But the power of the popes created a backlash, says Myers. As the popes became more politically active, respect for the church's spiritual authority plummeted. It reached its lowest depths in the 16th century—ironically, at the height of the Renaissance. Scholars agree that the worst of the worst was Alexander VI, who bought the papacy in 1492. "Although the new pope seemed to make a strong beginning," McBrien writes in Lives of the Popes, "it soon became evident that the consuming passions of his papacy would be gold, women and the interests of his family"—and not necessarily in that order.
A member of the Borgia family, one of the richest in Europe, Alexander fathered illegitimate children before and after he became pope. He threw massive parties in the Vatican featuring dozens of Rome's most celebrated whores. Servants kept score—the winners, wrote the pope's master of ceremonies, were the guests "who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times."
When he wasn't throwing parties, Alexander kept himself busy advancing the careers of his illegitimate children. He was rumored to sleep with his daughter Lucrezia, even while arranging and annulling a string of politically advantageous marriages for her; when she began sleeping with her half-brother, the infamous Cesare Borgia, one wag wrote that she was "the daughter, wife and daughter-in-law of Alexander."
Niccolò Machiavelli—a man whom history has not treated kindly—was well aware of the Spanish pope's reputation. Indeed, much of Machiavelli's The Prince was inspired by Alexander VI and his infamous bastard, Cesare. Observing the church at one of its lowest points, Machiavelli made his opinion known. "The nearer people are to the Church of Rome, the more irreligious they are," he wrote.
The excesses of the Borgias had plunged the papacy to an unprecedented low. No tears were shed when Alexander was poisoned in 1503. Yet before long, the papacy would usher in a golden era, as Julius II became a noted patron of the arts, commissioning some of the greatest works of the era, including Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and the majestic basilica of St. Peter's. But financing those works of art, as well as his many military campaigns, meant offering indulgences, or forgiveness of sins in exchange for donations. To a certain young monk from Germany on his first visit to the holy city in 1510, the excesses of Julius ii were a shock—and a call to action.
That monk was Martin Luther, who returned to his native Germany to teach theology—until an aggressive sale of indulgences prompted him to post his 95 Theses on a church door in protest, setting off the first sparks of the Reformation.
The cataclysmic rift in the church was in many ways a direct response to centuries of excess on the part of the popes. "Luther pitted the Bible and the pope against each other, and the popes came out on the wrong side," says Yale University historian Carlos Eire.
But the Reformation was met with anger and arrogance in Rome. "Things like this had happened before, but the popes had such a high opinion of their office that it took 30 years to hold a council" to discuss reforms, Eire says. The Council of Trent, begun in 1545, was convened to counter the Protestant heresy; Luther's anger forced the church to clean house. "After the Renaissance, the popes were pretty moral," says Gerald Fogarty, a history professor at the University of Virginia. They addressed abuses and regained a large measure of their spiritual authority, but by the end of the 18th century, the pope's political power had all but evaporated.
Today the pope is a moral and spiritual authority with limited political power. But considering the seismic changes of the past 20 centuries, it is an institution that has stayed remarkably the same.
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