Read Online A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester - Free Book Online

they occurred; diplomats stationed there attest to that. An envoy from Lombardy wrote
of “murders innumerable. … One hears nothing but moaning and weeping. In all the memory of man the Church has never been in
such an evil plight.” That plight grew wickeder; a few years later the Venetian ambassador reported that “every night four
or five murdered men are discovered, bishops, prelates, and others.” If such slaughters were remarkable, so was the alacrity
with which the Eternal City forgot them. When the blood on killers’ knives had clotted and dried, when the graves had been
filled in and cadavers removed from the Tiber, the mood tended to be hedonistic. “God has given us the papacy,” Leo X wrote
his brother. “Let us enjoy it.” The prelates of that age had large appetites for pleasure. Pietro Cardinal Riario held “a
saturnalian banquet,” according to one account, “featuring a whole roasted bear holding a staff in its jaws, stags reconstructed
in their skins, herons and peacocks in their feathers, and”—there would be more of this later—“orgiastic behavior by the
guests appropriate to the ancient Roman model.”
    In previous centuries, when the cause of Christianity had met with some striking success, their predecessors had opened St.
Peter’s for Te Deums of thanksgiving. Now prayer had become unfashionable. Alexander VI caught the spirit of the new age in
the first year of his reign. Told that Castilian Catholics had defeated the Moors of Granada, this Spanish pontiff scheduled
a bullfight in the Piazza of St. Peter’s and cheered as five bulls were slain. The menu for Riario’s feast and the Borgia
pope’s celebration reveal a Church hopelessly at odds with the preachings of Jesus, whose existence was the sole reason for
its
existence. But sitting in the Piazza of St. Peter’s was more comfortable than kneeling at the altar within, and other diversions
were more entertaining than holy communion. Among them were compulsive spending on entertainment, gambling (and cheating)
at cards, writing dreadful poems and reciting them in public, hiring orchestras to play while the prelates wallowed in gluttony,
applauding elaborate theatrical performances. During the digestive process, the churchmen emptied great flagons of strong
wine, whereupon intoxication inspired their eminences and even His Holiness to improvise bawdy exhibitions with female guests
selected from the city’s brothels—which kept the papal master of ceremonies scribbling in his diary—until dawn brightened
the papal palace and hangovers gave its inhabitants some idea of how merciless God’s vengeance could be.
    It was Alexander, the Borgia pope, who first suppressed books critical of the papacy. He was either unaware of Burchard’s
diary or indifferent to it, though there is another possibility: he may have been incapable of appreciating it. Men accept
the values of their time and reject criticisms of them as irrelevant. Moreover, iniquitous regimes do not perpetuate themselves
in disciplined societies, nor does a strong, pure, holy institution, supported by centuries of selflessness and integrity,
abruptly find itself wallowing in corruption. Vice, no less than virtue, arises from precedents. Over the thirteen centuries
since Christianity’s rise to power the Church had lost its way because the wrong criteria had insinuated themselves into its
sanctuaries, turning piety into blasphemy, supplanting worship with scandal, and substituting the pursuit of secular power
for eternal grace.

    I RONICALLY , the purity of Christ’s vision had been contaminated by its very popularity. As Christianity expanded through mass conversions,
its evangelists had tempered their exhortations, accommodating their message to those whose souls they sought to save. Philanthropy,
one of the Church’s most admirable virtues, had become another source of vitiation. Donations poured in from the faithful,
and the unspent