French King Charles VIII & Pope Alexander VI Find Way For French To Leave Rome: late January 1495

"On Sunday, January 18th, I was summoned to the pope's presence by his groom, and told by His Holiness that on the following day there was to be a public consistory to receive the King of France, and that he was going to carry out the reception himself. I replied that such an arrangement as ordered by His Holiness was unique and came outside the usual ceremonial order...". [p.110]

This is what Burchard is known for. Calling out the pope for stepping out of regular ceremonial proceedings is the reputation you should get for being the Master of Ceremonies. But over the next couple days Charles VIII, the King of France and Pope Alexander VI - the Spanish pope - sat down next to each other and worked out the details for the French passage through, and finally, out of Rome. But it was all quite out of the ordinary and a sui generis occurrence.

So many details were worked over and then were delightfully lain down by Johann Burchard, that these dozen pages give a wonderful window into their place and time. The pope and Burchard were walking and talking and the King arrived to 'review the articles earlier concluded'. There arose a dispute over how many French guards should go along 'as sureties' to either protect the Ottoman prince, or act as 'hostages for good behavior' as was commonly done in those days. After a long discussion they came to an agreement and then had the articles of agreement read out in french and in latin.

The following Monday, the scheduled public gathering of cardinals and officials was carried out. The King appeared and in this public occasion the King kissed the pope's feet and swore his allegiance to him. But first the King and his retinue had to be gathered and brought to the Vatican for the long sought ceremony. Burchard himself was sent with the Bishop of Concordia and a number of cardinals to escort the King from his 'apartments' at the Palazzo Venezia back to the church. But the King said he wanted to hear mass first in St Peter's Church and then to dine, and then to go see the pope. And he could not be dissuaded from that.

Burchard returned to still another consistory at the Vatican 'on urgent matters' without the King, and then returned to the King's Palazzo where he was still dining but who received them. After a half hour, the King began questioning Burchard on what the pope wanted he and his men to do. Then the king would retire to innner rooms and discuss them with his ministers and then return and ask more questions. After awhile Burchard was allowed into the inner rooms to be further queried and explain things again a second time. Only after all this did the procession to the Vatican begin.

Once there the King knelt in reverence three times before the pope and 'lastly, before the papal throne, he knelt and kissed the foot and hand of the pope who lifted him up for the kiss on the cheek'. [p.114] The King did as he was instructed but there followed a couple of his men who immediately rose and addressed the pope. Jean Ganay, President of the Paris Parlement, then rose and knelt and asked for three favors. Thet the King should receive every privilege with every specified grants in deeds that the pope could confirm, that he should also be invested with crown of Naples, and that article agreed to the previous day should be struck out. This agreement involved the 'safe return' of Prince Djem the Ottoman Sultan's brother who had been under the protection of the pope, and placed into the hands of the French.

Of these three requests, the pope's reply, as related by Burchard, seems both proprietarily responsible and also, plainly evasive. For the first request of 'privileges', pope Alexander VI agreed to 'immediately' confirm any any 'held valid'. Concerning the crown of Naples, he had said, this 'involved another person' and so needed more deliberation with the cardinals. As for the prince, this needed 'harmony between the King and the College of Cardinals'.

The King humbly stated he wanted to offer his homage to the pope as his predecessors had done. Then Ganay stood up and 'amplified' this by offering 'all that was his, that is, all that was the king's,' to the pope.  [p. 115] So many cardinals crowded around with so many of the 'french mob and its insolent behavior' surrounding them that the pope tried to lead the King away, and then, he even asked the King to accompany him further. But the king refused this and simply returned to his own apartments without any papal or any cardinal escort.

Next day, Tuesday 20 January, was the Feast of San Sebastian. The pope celebrated High Mass in the Basilica after waiting for the King and his retinue. That day they had already been there but had left to eat breakfast,

"... and for this, all the food, pots, flagons and other utensils had been carried through the church." p 116

The rest of the proceedings were carried out, with many details supplied by Burchard including minor deviating mistakes of the pope.

A week later, Prince Djem was, after all, escorted to the Palazzo Venezia and the King in residence there. On Wednesday, January 28, by Burchard's account, the King then came to the Vatican to give his farewells. They also waited for and then received Cardinal Cesare Borgia, acting as our editor tells us, as a kind of hostage to ensure the pope's good behavior. [p. 119]
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quotes and noted pagination from Johann Burchard: At The Court of the Borgia translated for english, with introduction, notes by Geoffrey Parker, The Folio Society, Ltd, 1963

Imperial Strength In Fifteenth Century Europe: Overview of HRE Frederich III

What was left of empire? The old idea was no longer applicable in the 15th century. The Holy Roman Empire was a monarchy, a sacred office and its servitors, charged with and responsible for defending the Church Universal. But actual power was quite limited. For one thing, the Emperor could call his princes but they need not respond affirmatively. Many stayed in active rebellion. Thomas A Brady tells the story of many turbulences between those princes, or the burghers and merchants, and the small handful of emperors in the years 1430-1520. Brady also writes much about the idea of reform for both the Empire and the Church, in these years, from a German perspective. But an overview here of a number of things Frederich tried and accomplished will give some idea of his influence, in the relations of his office and the lack of power he had, despite his vaunted reputation, in those days. But to get this sense of scale you have to go back to when there were two popes.

The Church Councils of Constance (1414-18) and then Basel (1431-49) resolved the schism of the previous century involving rival popes. The Counsel in Basel established that the council itself - literally a group of cardinals called consiliars - was able to overrule any figure standing or acting as pope. But to do this they needed external powers who would agree and legitimize this claim. This oversimplifies the knotty problems involved, but is only merely mentioned as backdrop here. The reason for including or seeking the opinion of an emperor is that this was just the sort of thing an emperor had the authority to do. He could also add leverage like any sovereign might attempt when the Church or its members could not decide.

This was the other shoe, as it were, announcing the arrival of Archduke Frederick of Styria as more than just another archduke and protector of a famous line and instead, gave him a grand entrance onto the European stage. Briefly, he and his advocate Ennea Silvio Picolomini (later pope Pius II) made requests in exchange for agreement with the Council's conclusions. They asked for, and in 1446, gained permission to nominate six bishoprics in Austria and in a number of other abbeys there.[p.92]

Six years earlier, in another dramatic story, Frederich had become protector of the heir to the Imperial throne after King Sigismund and his heir had died. [pp. 87-8] In six more years, 22March 1452, Frederich himself would become the last emperor to be crowned by a pope in Rome. [p.93] In this position, housed in Innsbruck, Frederich III would watch the changes in Europe of the fifteenth century for some forty years.

"The fundamental problem of Frederick's long life was not his rule over the Empire but his struggle to become master in his own Austrian house." [p. 90]

There were the Hussite wars in Bohemia in the 1430's, the Austrian civil wars in the 1440-50's, numerous cities revolted, egged on by local princes, burghers and others, especially in the 1470's. There were feuds over the partition of duchies and other inherited lands. German and Imperial forces could and did go and fight, often for the right price. The Wars of the Roses in England and the Burgundian wars under Charles could rage on, all with little personal involvement from Frederich.
They took their toll but his own son would go on to glorify himself in them.

Frederich and his son did leave Austria for Trier once, to meet Charles the Bold of Burgundy. They sought a greater peace with Burgundy in 1473. War subsequently broke out and in just a few years, Charles achieved peace in 1477. He was cut down in battle with a Swiss pike splitting his head. His daughter and sole heir, Mary of Burgundy was married to Maximilian in short order, thus uniting two powerful houses, if still somewhat separate by a great number of small principalities and duchies in between. She would live only five years more.

Later, after so many wars, with so much longstanding uncertainty, Frederich would call a Diet for Public Peace. But this had to be addressed some nine years later under Maximilian in 1495, two years after Frederich's death and with the French army in Italy. Later still, this problem wasn't solved a generation later, as Brady reminds us, as merchants and burghers would petition young Emperor Charles V when he visited in 1521 to quell the bandits and roving bands that were destroying trade on the empire's roads.

Even so, while Frederich III managed to accomplish only a few things in his long life and rule, these few all had a great impact. One was his sole heir, Maximilian who would succeed him as another Habsburg emperor, for twenty-six more years. Another was the familial Habsburg control over Tyrol, Outer, Inner and both Upper and Lower Austria.[p.91] This took, all told, nearly 65 years. Once secured, the Habsburg name would then be able to hold Austria as its power-base for the next 400 years. As Brady puts it,

"Frederich nevertheless achieved the crucial preconditions - unity and indivisibility - of Austria's passage from a gaggle of medieval patrimonial principalities into an early modern territorial state. Austria's importance to this story lies less in the priority or strength of its state formation than in the timing of it. It occurred at precisely the right moment to underpin the monarchy's role in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation." p. 106

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quotes and pagination from: Thomas A Brady Jr: German Histories in The Age of Reformations, 1400-1650;  University of California, Berkeley for the Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2009

Burchard Loses Horses As French Occupy Rome: January 6, 1495

As example of the kinds of personal injuries and inconveniences suffered during the French occupation of Rome, even by those of high position and the well connected, Johann Burchard Master of Ceremonies to pope Alexander VI, gave this quick anecdote. Dated from January 6:

"When I returned to my house after Mass, I found that the French had entered it, against my wish and yet with the knowledge and permission of Don Marco Tebaldi, our regionary captain. They had taken out seven of the eight horses, mules or asses which I had in my stable, and had quartered there instead seven of their own beasts which were busily eating up my hay. My room had been requisitioned for the Comte de Rouen, whilst that of my physician, Don Andrea Ondorp, a Doctor of Arts and Medicine, who had lived with me for many years, was taken for another nobleman who, a few days later, died of the plague in the house of Don Jacopo Galli. Another lower room in the house, where all my servants were quartered - since other poeple still occupied the rest of the apartments - was handed over to the households of these same Frenchmen. I was greatly upset by such an injury and accordingly approached the king himself to complain of what had happened. He sent me on to the Grand Marshal to whom I similarly protested, in company with Cardinals Savelli, Colonna and de la Grolaye, who had other complaints. I asked that the Frenchmen should be assigned other quarters in the house of Don Jacopo Galli, and this was done. Apart from the seven horses stabled at my house, nobody else made an appearance, and the horses themselves remained only until the following evening, when they were taken elsewhere." [pp 105-6]

Here we learn just a bit about some different parts of Burchard's household construction. A question of whether Burchard kept a multi-story in-town structure or something else, I'd like answered. Did his neighbors have horses too? Some probably did. He had a stable with horses and transport mules and probably kept on a first floor. Burchard also reveals he had a live-in Doctor of Medicine, someone he knew and lived with for many years. Was this also common in his neighborhood? But it seems Burchard didn't get the worst of it.

Over the next couple days, several houses of notable people were ransacked and pillaged by 'the French'. That of Paolo Branca whose sons were killed, or those unnamed others, 'including Jews who were murdered and homes ransacked'. The house of the mother of Cesare Borgia, Donna Vanozza Catanei was pillaged too. On the ninth of January Burchard says, a great number of thieves were hung, conspicuously, out in the open. From windows, on streetcorners. The pope had been moved to the Castel San Angelo, but there were disasters there, too.

On the twelfth of January, the French King was given a tour of the city by Cardinal de la Grolaye.

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quotes and pagination from Johann Burchard: At The Court of the Borgia translated for english, with introduction by Geoffrey Parker, The Folio Society, Ltd, 1963

Occupation of Rome Breeds Insecurity Despite Promises: Johann Burchard: up to January 6, 1495

As the French poured through the city of Rome after Christmas week, Johann Burchard found himself in the middle of the action. As the numbers of Frenchmen grew and more crimes were reported, Pope Alexander VI tried to accomodate, but found his attempts at conciliation thwarted, or even, outside of his sizable control. Whether in trying to mold the nature of negotiations swirling about the actual entrance of the French King into the city, or in receiving the many French guests to meet the pope, matters had grown increasingly chaotic.

Before Vespers and after, at the Sala del Papagallo in the Vatican and at the papal throne, Monday, January 5, 1495, many Frenchmen came and kissed the foot of the pope. They thronged says Burchard, 'in great numbers, excitedly and in great disorder, for an hour, at the throne.' Something similar happened again when the pope returned again to the Sala del Pappagallo.

Some eleven days before, on Christmas, and earlier in that day, this pope Alexander VI had formerly named the captain from Naples, Ferrante as the duke of Calabria. After a touching scene where the pope in his vestments received the kiss from the new duke 'in full body armor with both sword and dagger', the duke took his leave along with several cardinals, to return to the forces of Naples. They were unable to help the situation much.

But as the night of Christmas came upon them, ("On the preceding night" to the Feast of St Stephen, according to Burchard), some lay French envoys had arrived 'on the steps of the papal throne' along with a swelling number of attendants. Two envoys from Naples then withdrew and then returned upon specific directions from the pope, as delivered, by Burchard himself.

"A great many other Frenchmen also entered with these envoys, many of them sitting down quite indiscriminately next to the ecclesiastics on their benches. I moved them away and assigned them more suitable seats, but the pope disliked this and summoned me angrily to say that it would destroy all his work, and that I was to allow the French to stand where they wanted to quite freely. I answered His Holiness soothingly, saying that before God he was not to upset himself over the matter since I knew what his wishes were and would not say another word to the Frenchmen, whatever places they occupied in the chapel." [p 102]

On Wednesday, 31 December, the date of arrival for the king, Burchard himself rode out, he says, to give the king instructions on how to make his royal entrance into the city. These were instructions detailed by the pope, and based on the pope's wishes, of course. Despite these entreaties, they were ignored as the massed hordes of soldiers and attendants arrived. The king himself continued to say he wanted to enter Rome without any pomp.

Yet, Burchard says, he rode on horseback for four miles discussing these matters alongside the French king himself. In that day's rain and mud, along the way he was peppered with questions from the young foreign monarch. What ceremonies did the pope want, Burchard has the King ask, how was this pope's health and what of the power and rank of young Cardinal Cesare Borgia of Valencia (Borgia's son)? Burchard said he was "... scarcely able to give appropriate answers."  [p, 103]

Beginning on new year's day and for the days following says Burchard, 'all the cardinals in Rome paid visits in turn, to the French King'. The French continued to arrive en masse in all parts of the city.

"On Friday, January 2nd, the Colonna seized two horses outside Cardinal Sanseverino's house, two more belonging to Geremia Contugi above the Ponte Sant' Angelo, and yet another horse that was the property of Cardinal Riario; their riders were roughly thrown down on the public paths. Other horses were seized ... where many Frenchmen had their quarters." [p. 104]

By the next day the French and the Colonna had moved on from horses to houses. They were capturing and sacking the houses of still more notables, and even that of the pope's chamberlain, Don Bartolomeo de Luna. Succeeding days saw even more personally awkward inconvenience and affrontery as well as destruction of property. On January 6, Burchard lost 'seven out of eight of the horses & mules at his own house' and found Frenchmen staying there instead. All manner of rumor and hearsay ran wild all over the city. It was too late to secure valuables and many notable people had already fled.

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quotes and pagination from Johann Burchard: At The Court of the Borgia translated for english, with introduction by Geoffrey Parker, The Folio Society, Ltd, 1963

late December 2014 news brief, updated

People are slowly turning their shoulders into the New Year of 2015. A few things stay the same.

UPDATE: After months of bombing Gaza and a turbulent end of 2014, in the new year, Israel wants to hold onto tax revenue gathered  for the Palestinian Authority. In a rare disagreement, the US officially rebukes them.

The US sides with the Palestiniains, criticizing Israel's withholding of PA tax revenue. http://t.co/ypsHYbmOb3 pic.twitter.com/kSBRd8ySzQ
— AJE News (@AJENews) January 6, 2015

Who knew this happened?

A nuclear plant leaked oil into Lake Michigan for two months straight http://t.co/4Pb5unGLCL pic.twitter.com/NJvomCCOMZ via @thinkprogress
— Shawna (@S_WhiteBear) January 6, 2015

First on the Republican led agenda of the incoming 114th US Congress, is a vote on the KXL pipeline.

DOW Drops 300 Points As Oil Falls Below $50 Barrel http://t.co/WHLpfZLwMI WTF? Republican Solution: PUSH KXL. pic.twitter.com/IEI4Gsk4Of
— Captain Clarion (@citizensrock) January 5, 2015

 Today's Pope Francis spent part of the Christmas week blasting Vatican bureaucracy. Listing fifteen such problems with the Curia were the members being boastful, carrying out a "terrorism of gossip" and maintaining a kind of 'spiritual Alzheimer's". On new year's eve, he called for global action on climate change.

#PopeFrancis Calls for Action on Climate Change, Environmental Damage Caused by Capitalism http://t.co/stu0yRPmoX pic.twitter.com/Rbr8TDoGbV
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) January 5, 2015

This is still happening:

The shining city on a hill. pic.twitter.com/pq7yRP7F1n
— Captain Clarion (@citizensrock) January 5, 2015

In the US, in a seasonal dump of information, the GOP admit it's House investigations found that problems with the IRS don't in fact extend to the White House. It took many years and several more months to find that out and now, as Darrell Issa loses his Ethics Commission Chairmanship, what was a great political plum for the right, is lost as well.

In an odd twist, Turkey's President has a new 110- room 'White Palace'.

An interview on CBC with Nick Broomfield talking about his documentry on the slayings of maybe as many as 100 women in Los Angeles over a 25 year period. "Tales of the Grim Sleeper" will debut as a feature film on HBO in early 2015 and a trailer is here.