Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/525

Rh ALEXANDER 487 excommunication under -which he had been placed ten years previously. There seems to be no historical autho rity for the common story that during the ceremony Alexander placed his foot upon the emperor s neck. In England the papal supremacy was strenuously main tained against Henry II by Thomas a Becket, Here, as in the case of Germany, the struggle was protracted and severe, but in the end the victory lay with the pope. A. Becket was canonised soon after his assassination, and Henry II. was compelled to submit to a humiliating penance. A contest with William the Lion of Scotland, who insisted on instituting his chaplain Hugo, and not the papal nominee, into the see of St Andrews, ended in the excommunication of the king in 1181. Alexander introduced several important changes in the organisation and administration of the church. Chief among these were the restriction of the right of canonisa tion to the pope alone, the still-existing law requiring the votes of two-thirds of the cardinals for a valid papal elec tion, and the exemption of the clergy from civil control and of church lands from civil burdens. Several of these measures were ratified by the third general council of the Lateran, summoned by Alexander in 1179. ALEXANDER IV., Count Rinaldo de Segni, cardinal- bishop of Ostia, occupied the papal chair from December 1254 till his death in May 1261. He seems to have been of a weak character, and in the struggle against the house of Hohenstaufen, which he inherited from his predecessors, he did little to strengthen the position of the papacy. The opposition which he offered to Manfred, natural son of Frederick II., proved unavailing, although he obtained the aid of England by promising the disputed sovereignty of the Two Sicilies to the English Prince Edward. Manfred was crowned king at Palermo in 1258, and in 1260 he invaded the States of the Church, and compelled the pope to recognise him as legitimate sovereign. The ecclesiastical administration of Alexander was signalised by his efforts to unite the Greek and Latin churches, by the establish ment of the Inquisition in France (1255), and by the support he gave to the orders of Mendicant friars. The last years of his pontificate were passed at Viterbo, where he was compelled to take refuge on account of the violent struggles at Rome between the factions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. ALEXANDER V. (Pietro Pkilargi), a native of Candia, enjoyed the dignity of Pope for only ten months, from the 26th June 1409 to the 3d May 1410. Born of poor parentage, he owed his admission to a religious house to a Franciscan monk, who noticed him begging. He studied at Paris and Oxford, where he acquired such reputation for scholarship, that on his return to Italy he was rapidly promoted from dignity to dignity. In 1402 he was appointed, through the influence of Galeazzo Visconti, to the archbishopric of Milan, and in 1405 he was made a cardinal by Innocent VII. The council of Pisa, after deposing Benedict XIII. and Gregory XII., elected him pope on the understanding that he would set himself to reform the abuses of the church. The weakness of his character and the shortness of his pontificate, however, prevented anything effectual being done. He died, as was generally believed, of poison administered by Balthasar Cossa, who became his successor under the title of John XXIII. ALEXANDER VI. (Rodrigo Borgia), memorable as the most characteristic incarnation of the secular spirit of the papacy of the 15th century, was born at Xativa in Valencia, 1st January 1431. His biographers all but unanimously assert his patronymic to have been Lenzuoli (in its original Valencian form, Llanol), and the name of Borgia (or more properly Borja) to have been assumed on his adoption by his maternal uncle. Francisco Escolano, however, a compatriot, positively affirms (Cronica, lib. vi. cap. 33), that Llangol was his mother s name, and that his father was Giofre Borja. It is also disputed whether he originally followed the legal or the military profession ; the former appears more probable. In either case, his career was determined by his uncle s elevation to the papacy as Calixtus ILL, 8th April 1455, and his own immediate summons to Ptome, where he was reserved in petto as cardinal in the ensuing February, publicly pro moted in September, and by an unparalleled act of nepotism elevated to the lucrative and dignified office of vice- chancellor in the following July. He also succeeded his uncle as archbishop of Valencia. An elder brother, Pedro Luis, was made generalissimo of the papal forces by land and sea. The animosity created by so invidious an exalta tion prepared Rodrigo s subsequent feud with the Roman patriciate. For the moment he was all-powerful, and the letters of that dexterous courtier ^Eneas Sylvius attest the importance attached to his good word. &quot;VYe must here notice the ridiculous fiction concerning the parentage of Borgia s natural children, which owes its currency to the uncritical credulity of Gordon, his first formal biographer. An anonymous MS. romance, professing to record the secret history of the Borgia family, exists in many Italian libraries ; a copy is in the British Museum. Gordon fell in with this fiction, and whether from lack of judgment or love of marvel, adopted it into his narrative. According to this version, Rodrigo, when summoned to Rome, was living with a beautiful Valencian courtesan, Rosa Vanozza, by whom he had already had several children. Despatch ing his family to Venice under the care of a major-domo, he entered upon a .course of austere hypocrisy, designed to secure his exaltation to the papacy, thus remaining apart from his mistress and children for a period of nearly forty years ! This legend, originally circulated as a prime piece of scandal, has been accepted as a vindication by Rodrigo s apologists. Vanozza, they contend, was not his concubine but his wife, and her decease must have preceded his ordi nation : Caesar and Lucretia were consequently legitimate. The Abbe Ollivier goes a step further still, and disposes of two scandals at a stroke by identifying Vanozza with Giulia Farnese, whose charms, during Alexander s pontifi cate forty years afterwards, notoriously procured her brother s elevation to the cardinalate. It is sufficient to reply that in this case the beautiful Lucretia must have espoused the Duke of Ferrara at forty, and have borne him children at sixty. The date of Caesar s birth, more over is known to an hour, being fixed by the horoscope preserved in Junctinus (torn. i. p. 171) at 18th September 1475. Nor is the history of Vanozza any longer a secret. It is known that her family name was De Cattanei ; that after bearing five children to Alexander she was twice married, on each occasion to a petty official about the papal court ; that she possessed houses and other property in Rome ; that she survived Alexander many years, and made use of the name of Borgia (Reumont, Bd. 3, pp. 202, 203). The fortune of the Borgia brothers seemed menaced with eclipse on the death of their uncle, 8th August 1458. Pedro Luis, who had incurred the bitter enmity of the Orsini family, escaped under the escort of Cardinal Barbo to Civita Vecchia, where a fever soon carried him off. Rodrigo remained for the conclave. No papal election is more dramatically narrated in that edifying collection, Condavi de Pontcftci Romani, than the one which resulted in the choice of JEneas Sylvius (Pius II.) Borgia s share in it had earned Pius s gratitude ; he was, nevertheless, compelled to submit to some diminution of the authority and emoluments of the vice-chancellorship ; and a subse quent indiscretion in the too public indulgence of his