Rather than arrest the other sympathizers with Petrucci’s plot, the Pope now convoked the consistory, before whom he appeared in so unaccustomed a rage that some of his audience believed him to be playing a part in order to intimidate them. His obese body trembling and his voice so loud that it could be heard ringing round the adjoining corridors, he demanded the names of the other guilty men. Cardinal Soderini and Cardinal Castellesi both confessed their knowledge of the conspiracy, and knelt in humble submission at the Pope’s feet.
Castellesi managed to escape from Rome and disappeared into oblivion. Soderini, having paid a vast fine which helped to settle some of Leo’s more pressing debts, thought it best to follow Castellesi’s example. Riario was relieved of a sum even greater than that taken from Soderini and went to live in Naples. Sauli, who had powerful friends in France as well as in Italy, was allowed to leave his dungeon and to live under house arrest at Monte Rotondo, where he died in mysterious circumstances the next year. Petrucci was executed in his dungeon by the Pope’s Muslim hangman who either strangled him or cut off his head. The Vercelli quack, Petrucci’s secretary and his friend, were dragged by horses through the Roman streets; gouts of flesh having been nipped from their bodies with red-hot pincers, they were then gibbeted on the parapet of the bridge of Sant’ Angelo.
Although his finances had been much improved by the huge fines imposed on Riario and Soderini, the Pope still felt it necessary to bring in further sums of money to his treasury by creating numerous new cardinals to fill up the vacant places in the Sacred College, and by requiring the richer of those elected to make suitable contributions. Money, however, was not Leo’s only reason for the creation of thirty-one new cardinals. He hoped to create a far more reliable College than its predecessor, and one that would raise no objections to the advancement of Medicean interests. So, while there were several worthy men on the Pope’s list, there were also those who had been selected for more selfish reasons. Among these were young princes of the royal houses of France and Portugal; Ercole Rangone, the son of Bianca Rangone of Modena, Leo’s former benefactress; Pompeo Colonna, whose unruliness it was hoped a scarlet hat might serve to moderate; two Florentine nephews, Niccolò Ridolfi and Giovanni Salviati; and a third Florentine relation, Luigi Rossi.
With the Sacred College thus conveniently packed with Medici friends and relations and those who had cause to be grateful to the Medici, the Pope felt that the time was now propitious for the marriage of his nephew Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de la Tour Auvergne, cousin of Francis I, King of France. Accordingly, in March the next year, 1518, Lorenzo was sent north across the Alps with an immense train of crimson-clad attendants and his uncle’s lavish presents, amongst which were to be found thirty-six horses and an astonishing nuptial bed made of tortoise-shell inlaid with mother-of-pearl and enriched by precious stones.
Much as they were impressed by the evident riches of his family, the denizens of the French court were far from struck with the Duke of Urbino himself, whose arrogant nature they found objectionable and whose physique at the age of twenty-five was now pitiable. After a few months of marriage, indeed, it became evident that the Duke did not have much longer to live. Nor, as it happened, did his wife. She died at the end of April 1519 soon after the birth of a daughter, who was christened Caterina and was one day to be Queen of France. Her husband died a few days later of tuberculosis aggravated by syphilis. Even in the villas of Careggi and Poggio a Caiano, where he had spent the last months of his life in the company of a Pistoian secretary and another male companion of sinister reputation, there was little evidence of grief.
Ever since Lorenzo had returned from France, the Florentines had been grumbling about his increasingly lordly manner, his political ambitions that enfeebled health had in no way diminished, his mismanagement of the city’s finances and the influence of his haughty, greedy and domineering mother, Alfonsina, whose interests were wholly bound up in her son and whose death in Rome eight months after his was received with as little sorrow.
Well aware of Florence’s discontent, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who had hurriedly left Rome to secure the family’s hold upon the city, was careful to give no offence. He arrived just before the news of Lorenzo’s death became generally known, and was able to ensure that there was no unrest and that the people were prepared to leave the administration of the Republic to him, and to those leading citizens whose advice he tactfully sought, until the Pope’s future plans for Florence were settled.
It was fortunate for the Medici party in Florence that Giulio’s conduct of affairs was so conciliatory and astute, and that under his conscientious administration of its financial affairs the city enjoyed a period of prosperity. For the Pope seemed far from decided what to do about either Florence or Urbino now that the Medici heir was a half-French baby girl and the only boys on his side of the family were both bastards – Ippolito, the son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, by a sensuous lady from Pesaro; and Alessandro, presented as the son of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, but rumoured to be Cardinal Giulio’s son either by a Moorish slave from Naples or by a peasant woman from the Roman Campagna.
The Pope eventually decided to create Caterina de’ Medici Duchess of Urbino and to annex her Duchy to the states of the Church, calling upon the Florentines to contribute a large part of the money which had been expended on driving out della Rovere, while compensating the Republic with the fortress of San Leo and the conquered district of Montefeltro. There still remained, however, the problem of what to do about the government of Florence, a problem which was complicated at the beginning of 1519 by the long-awaited death of the Emperor Maximilian and by the subsequent election as his successor of Charles V.
Both the King of France and the Pope did their utmost to prevent this election of a young ambitious man who was not only the King of Spain and Naples, but master of the Netherlands and an Austrian Grand Duke; But having failed to prevent the election, Leo decided, after many tergiversations and vacillations, to abandon the French and to enter into secret negotiations with Charles V whose help he needed to settle a matter which could no longer be ignored, the matter of that tiresome Augustinian friar, Martin Luther.
For years the Pope had been endeavouring to dismiss from his mind all thoughts of Luther and of German demands for reform in the Church, hoping that the problems would eventually resolve themselves in the pettifogging arguments of German monks. But Luther would not go away; and the Pope had been driven to excommunicate him. He now hoped that Charles V as a good Catholic would finally settle the matter for him by having the heretic tried and executed. The Emperor had no particular objections to doing so; but the German princes, who listened with some sympathy to Luther’s impassioned declarations, were of a different mind. Charles could overrule them, of course; and, so the Pope was informed, he would overrule them. There was, however, to be a quid pro quo: in exchange for the condemnation of Luther, the Emperor would require the Pope’s support in his intended attack upon France’s remaining possessions in Italy, including Milan. Leo agreed to this on condition that once the French had been divested of the occupied territories, the Papacy could not only take back from them the towns of Parma and Piacenza, which Francis I had declined to return at the conference at Bologna in 1515, but also receive Charles’s help in taking Ferrara. So the bargain was struck and the Emperor’s army prepared to march.