The year 1500 was a Jubilee year in Rome, when thousands of pilgrims were expected to flock to the city, where, by visiting certain churches, fasting, praying, attending confession and Communion, and giving alms, they would receive pardon for all their sins. The tradition of the Christian Jubilee year was not an ancient one; founded by Pope Boniface XIII in 1300, as a means of raising funds to fill the papal coffers, it had initially been intended as a celebration for the beginning of each century, though Paul II had decreed in 1470 that it should be held every twenty-five years.
Burchard gives a lengthy account of the preparations made in the city for the Jubilee; provision for housing the pilgrims, sweepers to clear the litter from church floors, special patrols to prevent tramps loitering around the porches, and ‘large strong casks,’ added Burchard, ‘were to be provided for freewill offerings next to the Chapel of St Andrew in St Peter’s, and they were to be protected with three different locks and keys, one key to be kept by the Datary, a second by one of the confessors and the third in another official’s hand.’
In an attempt to attract more pilgrims than usual, Alexander VI announced that for the 1500 Jubilee, the Holy Door of St Peter’s would be reopened. This door, which had long been walled up, was by tradition the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, through which Christ himself had entered the city on Palm Sunday. It had reputedly been brought to Rome by Emperor Vespasian after the Roman conquest of the Jewish capital in 70 A.D., and it was widely believed that any sinner who walked through it, even a murderer, would have his sins forgiven.
Accordingly, on December 24, 1499, huge crowds assembled in the piazza in front of St Peter’s to watch the ceremonial opening of the Holy Door. The pope arrived amid much fanfare and celebration, and, according to Burchard, he was ‘handed an ordinary workman’s hammer’ by one of the builders, who had spent several days chiselling away at the Holy Door from inside the basilica to weaken it. The pope ‘gave three or more blows’ to the wall, thus creating a small opening, before retiring to his papal chair a few yards away to watch the workmen demolishing the rest. ‘On this task they spent half an hour, during which time our choir sang continually,’ the master of ceremonies reported.
Alexander VI, dressed in full pontifical robes and wearing the triple tiara, led the ceremonial procession through the Holy Door into St Peter’s, holding a candle in his left hand and Burchard’s colleague supporting his right elbow, followed by the cardinals and the papal court (the builders themselves had been forbidden, ‘under penalty of losing their heads,’ to go through the doorway while they were demolishing it).
The expected influx of pilgrims did indeed materialize, and so did their offerings. The Florentine diarist Luca Landucci reported large numbers of northerners, many from across the Alps, passing through the city on their way south to the Jubilee. From their lodgings in one of Rome’s many inns and taverns or, more cheaply, in the hospices that all Christian nations maintained in the city, the pilgrims thronged the streets of the capital of their faith as they walked from church to church, seeing and believing in the sights and sites of Christian legend.
At Santa Maria Maggiore they worshipped at the manger that had once been Christ’s own crib in the stable at Bethlehem; at San Giovanni in Laterano they marvelled at the swaddling clothes that had wrapped the baby Jesus and the table where he and his apostles had eaten their Last Supper; here, too, they could climb the stairs of Pontius Pilate’s house in Jerusalem, following, on their knees, in the footsteps of Christ himself. At St Peter’s they could see the lance that had pierced Christ’s body during the Crucifixion, a much-treasured relic that the basilica had acquired as recently as 1492, though Burchard recorded that several cardinals had noted that the same lance could also be seen in both Paris and Nuremberg.
Rome was, indubitably, the city where St Peter and St Paul had preached and died for their faith; the great basilicas of St Peter’s and San Paolo fuori le Mura marked their graves. And the heads of these great leaders of the early Church could be seen by the pilgrims, at certain hours, in a chapel in San Giovanni in Laterano; as one pilgrim noted with awe, they ‘still have their flesh, colour and beards as if they were still alive.’
The faithful, however, also provided easy pickings for the pickpockets and cutpurses who roamed the city streets. Burchard reported that on April 10, 1500, six men were hung on the gallows for the crime of robbing pilgrims. On May 27, the eve of the Feast of the Ascension, eighteen more were hung on the Ponte Sant’Angelo, where they would have been hideously visible to all those crossing the Tiber on their way to St Peter’s to walk through the Holy Door before saying their prayers in the venerated basilica and leaving their offerings in the casks provided. The first to be hung was a doctor from the hospital at San Giovanni in Laterano, who had been in the habit of leaving his wards each morning, armed with a crossbow, to kill and rob anyone he found; among the others were a band of highwaymen who had attacked a group of travellers in the hills outside Viterbo.
During the spring, news arrived in Rome that must have done much to lift the spirits of the pope and his son. On April 10 Louis XII had celebrated a great victory over Ludovico Sforza at Novara, after the Swiss mercenaries fighting for Ludovico refused to use their arms against the French. Landucci reported that twelve thousand were dead. Ludovico himself had been captured and taken to France; the fate of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza remained obscure, but early on the morning of Maundy Thursday, April 16, a courier arrived in Rome with the news that he had been found in a castle near Piacenza, where he had fled with six hundred horsemen and valuables worth 200,000 ducats. He, too, was now a prisoner, and the pope, according to Burchard, was so pleased with the news that he tipped the courier 100 ducats.
Far from offering help, or even support, to his erstwhile friend in this hour of need, Alexander VI took the opportunity to seize Ascanio’s valuable collection of artworks and jewels, including a set of twelve silver-gilt statues of the apostles; it took four hours for the carts, operating in secret under the cover of darkness, to transport the goods from the cardinal’s palace to the Vatican.
Meanwhile, Cesare was beginning to enjoy his enforced rest from the battlefield; and while his wife Charlotte d’Albret, who had given birth to his daughter, remained in France, Cesare spent much of his time with his mistress, an extremely pretty and entertaining young woman, Fiammetta de’ Michelis, whose accomplishments and complaisance as a
Lucrezia, however, was less happy, her enjoyment of the warmth of early summer marred by increasing friction between her husband, Alfonso of Aragon, and her father and brother, whose alliance with France was proving a problem for both Alfonso and his sister Sancia. When the news spread around Rome that a Burgundian had challenged a Frenchman to a duel, to settle an argument over a banner, Cesare tried, unsuccessfully, to bribe the Burgundian to withdraw: ‘He would prefer,’ so the rumour went, ‘to have lost 20,000 ducats rather than see a Frenchman beaten.’ Sancia, on the other hand, made a point of dressing her own squires in the Burgundian colours, to show where her loyalties lay.
Cesare was careful not to publicly display any sign of the growing friction between himself and his brother- in-law. When the two men were seen together, they appeared to be on perfectly amicable terms, riding about the city in evident amity. Yet there was noticed in Cesare’s manner a more than usual impatience, ‘as though he were anxious for important actions to unfold.’
Cesare also appeared in public during this summer of 1500 honing his skills as a bullfighter. On June 24, the Feast of St John the Baptist, he demonstrated his prowess with the sword in the piazza of St Peter’s, which had been cordoned off to prevent the bulls from escaping. On another occasion, so the Venetian envoy Paolo Capello reported, he killed ‘seven bulls, fighting on horseback in the Spanish style and cutting off the head of one of them with his first stroke, a feat which seemed great to all Rome.’
On June 29, shortly before sunset, the pope himself was lucky to escape with his life thanks to an act not of man, but of God. During an exceptionally violent storm, with ‘hailstones the size of broad beans and an extremely violent wind,’ reported Burchard, a chimney in the Vatican collapsed, breaking two beams in an upper chamber that brought down the ceiling of the room below, where Alexander VI was in discussion with a cardinal and one of his private secretaries. The two men were just closing the windows, as the pope had asked them to do, when they heard the thunderous crash and turned immediately to find the papal throne hidden under a pile of rubble: ‘They cried to the guards, ‘The Pope is dead! The Pope is dead!’ and the news quickly spread throughout the city.’ Alexander VI, however, was only unconscious; when they removed the plaster and bricks, they found him seated on his throne, with two small cuts to the head, two larger ones on his right hand, and another on his right arm, miraculously still alive. As one chronicler observed, this lucky escape ‘was seen as a great sign and omen for the Pope.’
Some two weeks later, on the evening of July 15, 1500, Alfonso of Aragon went to the Vatican to dine with the pope; after what seems to have been a pleasant evening, he took his leave of his fellow guests to walk the
