a Pope had been made who would prove most pestilent to the whole Christian commonwealth.’  The young Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, again, showed his discernment of the situation by whispering in the Conclave to his kinsman Cibo:  ’We are in the wolf’s jaws; he will gulp us down, unless we make our flight good.’  Besides, there was in Italy a widely spread repugnance to the Spanish intruders—­Marrani, or renegade Moors, as they were properly called—­who crowded the Vatican and threatened to possess the land of their adoption like conquerors.  ’Ten Papacies would not suffice to satiate the greed of all this kindred,’ wrote Giannandrea Boccaccio to the Duke of Ferrara in 1492:  and events proved that these apprehensions were justified; for during the Pontificate of Alexander eighteen Spanish Cardinals were created, five of whom belonged to the house of the Borgias.

    [1] See Michael Fernus, quoted by Greg. Lucrezia Borgia, p.
    45.

    [2] Jason Mainus, quoted by Greg, Stadt Rom. p. 314, note.

    [3] Gasp.  Ver., quoted by Greg. Stadt Rom. p. 208, note.

It is certain, however, that the profound horror with which the name of Alexander VI. strikes a modern ear was not felt among the Italians at the time of his election.  The sentiment of hatred with which he was afterwards regarded arose partly from the crimes by which his Pontificate was rendered infamous, partly from the fear which his son Cesare inspired, and partly from the mysteries of his private life, which revolted even the corrupt conscience of the sixteenth century.  This sentiment of hatred had grown to universal execration at the date of his death.  In course of time, when the attention of the Northern nations had been directed to the iniquities of Rome, and when the glaring discrepancy between Alexander’s pretension as a Pope and his conduct as a man had been apprehended, it inspired a legend which, like all legends, distorts the facts which it reflects.

Alexander was, in truth, a man eminently fitted to close an old age and to inaugurate a new, to demonstrate the paradoxical situation of the Popes by the inexorable logic of his practical impiety, and to fuse two conflicting world-forces in the cynicism of supreme corruption.  The Emperors of the Julian house had exhibited the extreme of sensual insolence in their autocracy.  What they desired of strange and sweet and terrible in the forbidden fruits of lust, they had enjoyed.  The Popes of the Middle Ages—­Hildebrand and Boniface—­had displayed the extreme of spiritual insolence in their theocracy.  What they desired of tyrannous and forceful in the exercise of an usurped despotism over souls, they had enjoyed.  The Borgia combined both impulses toward the illimitable.  To describe him as the Genius of Evil, whose sensualities, as unrestrained as Nero’s, were relieved against the background of flame and smoke which Christianity had raised for fleshly sins, is justifiable.