Page:The Book of the Courtier.djvu/528

 NOTES TO THE FIRST BOOK OF THE COURTIER dominions, but died a few weeks later. He seems to have had no lack of cour- age; by his mere presence he once overawed a mob at Naples, and he was beloved by the nation in spite of the odious tyranny of his father and grand- father. Note 33, page lo. Pope Alexander VI, (born 1431 ; died 1503), was Roderigo, the son of Giuffredo (or Alfonso) Lenzuoli and Juana (or Isabella) Borgia, a sister of Pope Calixtus III, by whom the youth was adopted and whose sur- name he assumed. He was elected pope in 1492 through bribery, and while striving to increase the temporal power of the Church, directed his chief efforts towards the establishment of a great hereditary dominion for his family. Of his five children, two (Cesare and Lucrezia) played important parts in his plan. In 1495 he joined the league which forced Charles VIII to retire from Italy, although it had been partly at his instigation that the French invaded the peninsula. In 1498 Savonarola was burned at Florence by his orders. In 1501 he instituted the ecclesiastical censorship of books. He is believed to have died from accidentally taking a poison designed by him for a rich cardi- nal whose possessions he wished to seize. His private life was disgraced by orgies, of which the details are unfit for repetition. His contemporary Machia- velli says: "His entire occupation, his only thought, was deception, and he always found victims. Never was there a man with more effrontery in asser- tion, more ready to add oaths to his promises, or to break them." 'While Sis- mondi terms him "the most odious, the most publicly scandalous, and the most wicked of all the miscreants who ever misused sacred authority to out- rage and degrade mankind." Note 34, page 10. Pope Julius II, (born 1443; died 1513), was Giuliano, the second son of Raffaele della Rovere (only brother of Pope Sixtus IV) and Teo- dora Menerola. Made a cardinal soon after his uncle's election, he was loaded with sees and offices, including the legateship of Picene and Avignon, which latter occasioned his prolonged absence from Italy and afforded him an escape from the wiles of his inveterate enemy Alexander VI. The outrages with which Alexander sought to punish his sturdy opposition to the scandals of the Borgian court, aroused in him a fierceness of spirit that was alien to the seem- ing mildness of his early character and became the bane of his own pontificate. His younger brother Giovanni married a sister of Duke Guidobaldo, a union that cemented the friendship between the two families and furnished the Duchy of Urbino an heir in the person of Francesco Maria della Rovere. When Julius engaged Michelangelo to design his tomb, the old basilica of St. Peter's was found too small to contain it, whereupon the pontiff is said to have decreed that a new church be built to receive it, and blessed the laying of the first stone shortly before setting out on his campaign against Bologna in 1506. In 1508 he formed the League of Cambray for the recovery of certain papal fiefs appropriated by Venice at the time of Cesare Borgia's downfall, and in 1511 the so-called Holy League for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Italian unity was the unavowed but real goal at which his policy aimed. 328