Giuliano grew rapidly worse, and on 17 March he died. He had no children by his wife, Philiberte of Savoy; but, like his uncle and namesake, he left an illegitimate child, Ippolito.
A month before Giuliano’s death, the Pope had left Florence never to return. He had been recalled to Rome by the death of King Ferdinand of Spain, and the accession to power in Spain and Naples of the Archduke Charles. This supremely important event, which brought an end to the series of wars initiated by the League of Cambrai, gave Lorenzo and the Pope their opportunity to deal with the Duke of Urbino, which they had been reluctant to do while Ferdinand and Giuliano were both still alive.
First of all a dreadful, half-forgotten scandal was raked up: five years before, the savage-tempered Duke had attacked and killed in a street in Ravenna his arch-enemy, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi. At the time a court of inquiry, of which the Pope himself had been a member, had decided that the Duke’s provocation by the unpleasant Alidosi – supposedly Julius II’s catamite – had been virtually irresistible. The Duke was now informed, however, that the murder, whether pardonable or not, made it impossible for him to hold Urbino any longer in the name of the Church. At the same time he was reminded of his refusal to comply with Pope Julius II’s request to assist in the restoration of the Medici to Florence and of his subsequent refusal to help to defend Italy against the invading army of King Francis I. He was summoned to Rome to explain his disgraceful conduct.
When he declined to go, the Pope excommunicated him and Lorenzo de’ Medici marched out of Florence to take Urbino from him. Lorenzo experienced little trouble in doing so. The Duke was forced to flee from Mantua, and Lorenzo entered Urbino in May. Less than a year later, however, the dispossessed Duke returned with Spanish troops to take his Duchy back. The short but arduous campaigns in the mountainous districts of Urbino cost the Florentines and the Pope a great deal of money. They aroused lasting resentments and resulted in Lorenzo’s being so badly wounded by an arquebus that he was gradually to waste away both in body and in will. The Pope, however, was for the moment well satisfied. Lorenzo was proclaimed Duke of Urbino and Lord of Pesaro, and seemed well on the way to becoming master of that large, unified, Medici-dominated state in central Italy which Leo dreamed of creating.
With Italy at peace and his family established in Urbino, Leo settled down happily to enjoy the pleasures of the Vatican. His expenditure was prodigious. It has been claimed that within a year he had got through not only all the savings of his parsimonious predecessor, but the entire revenues of himself and his successor. He ‘could no more save a thousand ducats’, Machiavelli’s friend, Francesco Vettori, remarked, ‘than a stone could fly through the air.’ Soon deeply in debt to almost every banking house in Rome, some of which were charging him interest at forty per cent, Pope Leo made not the slightest attempt either to reduce the enormous number of his household or to curtail the extravagance of his almost constant entertainments and banquets.
The cardinals followed his example. ‘Yesterday,’ the Marquis of Mantua was informed by his wife’s secretary,
Cardinal Riario gave us a dinner so extraordinarily sumptuous that it might well have sufficed for all the queens in the world. We sat for four full hours at table, laughing and chatting with those most reverend cardinals.
‘The meal was exquisite,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, describing another dinner at the palace of Cardinal Cornaro.
There was an endless succession of dishes, for we had sixty-five courses, each course consisting of three different dishes, all of which were placed on the table with marvellous speed. Scarcely had we finished one delicacy than a fresh plate was set before us, and yet everything was served on the finest of silver of which his Eminence has an abundant supply. At the end of the meal we rose from the table both gorged with rich food and deafened by the continual concert, carried on both within and without the hall and proceeding from every instrument that Rome could produce – fifes, harpsichords and four-stringed lutes as well as the voices of a choir.
Cardinals and Roman patricians alike vied with each other to provide entertainments of unparalleled splendour. The immensely rich Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, whose bathroom fixtures were all of solid silver, once invited the Pope to dinner in a magnificent room hung with the most exquisite tapestries. The sumptuous meal was served to the guests on plate specially engraved with their individual crests. When the last course had been served the Pope congratulated Chigi on the excellence of the meal and the beauty of his new dining-hall. ‘Your Holiness, this is not my dining-hall,’ replied Chigi giving a signal to his servants to pull down the tapestries which concealed rows of mangers. ‘It is merely my stable.’ On another occasion Chigi invited the entire Sacred College to dinner and placed before each of the assembled cardinals food specially brought from his own district or country. Chigi had even been known to order his servants to toss his silver into the Tiber after every course to show that he had so much he never had to use the same piece twice – though afterwards other servants were seen pulling up nets in which the discarded dishes had been caught.
The Pope’s own dinners were noted for their rare delicacies, such as peacocks’ tongues, of which he himself, however, ate but sparingly. They were also noted for their jocularity, for such surprises as nightingales flying out of pies or little, naked children emerging from puddings. Dwarfs, buffoons and jesters were nearly always to be found at his table where the guests were encouraged to laugh at their antics and at the cruel jokes which were played upon them – as when, for instance, some half-witted, hungry dwarf was seen guzzling a plate of carrion covered in a strong sauce under the impression that he was being privileged to consume the finest fare. The Pope himself derived a peculiar pleasure from watching his favourite jester, Fra Mariano Fetti, a Dominican friar who had once been a barber and was eventually appointed to the office of Keeper of the Papal Seals. Quick-witted, shrewd and outrageously coarse, Fra Mariano could make the Pope laugh more heartily than any other member of his court, not merely by the wit of his vulgarity, but also by his celebrated capacity to eat forty eggs or twenty chickens at a sitting and by the apparent relish with which he savoured pies specially prepared for him at his master’s instigation containing ravens cooked complete with beaks and feathers.
No practical joke in Leo’s entire pontificate seems to have afforded him more amusement than that played upon poor Baraballo, an elderly priest from Gaeta, who seems to have persuaded himself that his feeble and even ludicrous attempts at verse were the products of commanding genius. It was suggested to him that he ought to press his rightful claim to a public coronation on the Roman Capitol, an honour once accorded to Petrarch. The Pope eagerly entered into the spirit of the enterprise, assuring Baraballo that his verses undeniably merited such a mark of distinction and offering to make available to him His Holiness’s beloved elephant, Hanno, which had recently arrived in Rome as a present from King Manuel I of Portugal and which was housed in the Belvedere. On this creature, suitably caparisoned, Baraballo was to make his stately progress from the Vatican to the Capitol, clothed in a scarlet toga fringed with gold. ‘I could never have believed in such an incident if I had not seen it myself and actually laughed at it,’ wrote the Pope’s first biographer, Paolo Giovio: ‘the spectacle of an old man of sixty bearing an honoured name, stately and venerable in appearance, white haired, riding upon an elephant to the sound of trumpets.’