Pope Alexander VI
Rodrigo de Borja was born at Xàtiva, near Valencia, in 1431. His uncle became Pope Callixtus III, and the young man’s advancement followed with indecent speed: a cardinal at twenty-five, vice-chancellor of the Roman Church at twenty-six, and for thirty-five years thereafter the wealthiest and most capable administrator in the curia.
He was elected pope on August 11, 1492 — the same summer Columbus sailed. The election was widely reported at the time to have been bought, and the charge of simony was never satisfactorily answered. What followed did nothing to quiet it. Alexander acknowledged his children openly, advanced them shamelessly, and made the papal states a family enterprise. Cesare Borgia was made a cardinal at eighteen and later laid down the hat to become a soldier; Lucrezia was married three times in the service of her father’s diplomacy.
Two acts of his pontificate reached beyond Italy. In 1493 the bull Inter caetera drew a line down the Atlantic and divided the newly discovered world between Spain and Portugal — an assertion of papal authority over continents no European had yet mapped.1 And in 1497 he excommunicated the Dominican preacher of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola, who had denounced the corruption of Rome from his pulpit at San Marco. Savonarola was hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in May 1498.
Alexander died in August 1503. Even Roman chroniclers of his own communion wrote of his pontificate with embarrassment, and Catholic historians have never attempted much of a defense.
Why does he belong on a Reformation site? Not because Rome was uniquely wicked in those years; sin is no respecter of institutions, and there were godly men in orders throughout this period. He belongs here because his reign shows what the papal office had become: a dynastic prize, contested by great families, defended by armies, and funded by the sale of spiritual goods. Martin Luther was nine years old when Alexander was crowned. The Europe into which he grew up had learned to expect this of Rome — and had no vocabulary with which to object, because the authority that would have had to judge the papacy was the papacy itself. See Traditions.
