in will is to say something to which his
whole career gives the loud and derisive lie, as will--to some extent at
least--be seen in the course of this work.

1 Pasquale Villari in his Machiavelli i suoi Tempi

His honours as Cardinal-Deacon and Vice-Chancellor of the Holy See he
owed to his uncle; but that he maintained and constantly improved his
position--and he a foreigner, be it remembered--under the reigns of
the four succeeding Popes--Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent
VIII--until finally, six-and-twenty years after the death of Calixtus
III, he ascended, himself, the Papal Throne, can be due only to the
unconquerable energy and stupendous talents which have placed him where
he stands in history--one of the greatest forces, for good or ill, that
ever occupied St. Peter's Chair.

Say of him that he was ambitious, worldly, greedy of power, and a prey
to carnal lusts. All these he was. But for very sanity's sake do not let
it be said that he was wanting either in energy or in will, for he was
energy and will incarnate.

Consider that with Calixtus III's assumption of the Tiara Rome became
the Spaniard's happy hunting-ground, and that into the Eternal City
streamed in their hundreds the Catalan adventurers--priests, clerks,
captains of fortune, and others--who came to seek advancement at the
hands of a Catalan Pope. This Spanish invasion Rome resented. She grew
restive under it.

Roderigo's elder brother, Don Pedro Luis de Lanzol y Borja, was made
Gonfalonier of the Church, Castellan of all pontifical fortresses
and Governor of the Patrimony of St. Peter, with the title of Duke of
Spoleto and, later, Prefect of Rome, to the displacement of an Orsini
from that office. Calixtus invested this nephew with all temporal power
that it was in the Church's privilege to bestow, to the end that he
might use it as a basis to overset the petty tyrannies of Romagna, and
to establish a feudal claim on the Kingdom of Naples.

Here already we see more than a hint of that Borgia ambition which was
to become a byword, and the first attempt of this family to found a
dynasty for itself and a State that should endure beyond the transient
tenure of the Pontificate, an aim that was later to be carried into
actual--if ephemeral--fulfilment by Cesare Borgia.

The Italians watched this growth of Spanish power with jealous, angry
eyes. The mighty House of Orsini, angered by the supplanting of one of
its members in the Pref