Former Popes had preached crusades against the Turk, languidly or energetically according as the coasts of Italy were threatened.  Alexander frequently invited Bajazet to enter Europe and relieve him of the princes who opposed his intrigues in the favor of his children.  The fraternal feeling which subsisted between the Pope and the Sultan was to some extent dependent on the fate of Prince Djem, a brother of Bajazet and son of the conqueror of Constantinople, who had fled for protection to the Christian powers, and whom the Pope kept prisoner, receiving 40,000 ducats yearly from the Porte for his jail fee.  Innocent VIII. had been the first to snare this lucrative guest in 1489.  The Lance of Longinus was sent him as a token of the Sultan’s gratitude, and Innocent, who built an altar for the relique, caused his own tomb to be raised close by.  His effigy in bronze by Pollajuolo still carries in its hand this blood-gift from the infidel to the High Priest of Christendom.

Djem meanwhile remained in Rome, and held his Moslem Court side by side with the Pontiff in the Vatican.  Dispatches are extant in which Alexander and Bajazet exchange terms of the warmest friendship, the Turk imploring his Greatness—­so he addressed the Pope—­to put an end to the unlucky Djem, and promising as the price of this assassination a sum of 300,000 ducats and the tunic worn by Christ, presumably that very seamless coat over which the soldiers of Calvary had cast their dice.[1] The money and the relique arrived in Italy and were intercepted by the partisans of Giuliano della Rovere.  Alexander, before the bargain with the Sultan had been concluded by the murder of Djem, was forced to hand him over to the French king.  But the unlucky Turk carried in his constitution the slow poison of the Borgias, and died in Charles’s camp between Rome and Naples.  Whatever crimes may be condoned in Alexander, it is difficult to extenuate this traffic with the Turks.  By his appeal from the powers of Europe to the Sultan, at a time when the peril to the Western world was still most serious, he stands attained for high treason against Christendom, of which he professed to be the chief; against civilization, which the Church pretended to protect; against Christ, whose vicar he presumed to style himself.

    [1] See the letters in the ‘Preuves et Observations,’ printed
    at the end of the Memoires de Comines.

Like Sixtus, Alexander combined this deadness to the spirit and the interests of Christianity with zeal for dogma.  He never flinched in formal orthodoxy, and the measures which he took for riveting the chains of superstition on the people were calculated with the military firmness of a Napoleon.  It was he who established the censure of the press, by which printers were obliged, under pain of excommunication, to submit the books they issued to the control of the Archbishops and their delegates.  The Brief of June 1, 1501, which contains this order, may be reasonably said to have retarded civilization, at least in Italy and Spain.