garded his religious thunderbolts as little as his
physical prowess. "Vexation at this hastened the death of the Pope, who
was hated as much as he was despised."

Ranke, on the authority of Alegretti, relates of Pope Sixtus IV: "The
Colonna family, opponents of the Pope's nephew Riario, was persecuted by
him with the most savage ferocity. He seized on their domain of Marino,
and causing the prothonotary Colonna to be attacked in his own house,
took him prisoner, and put him to death. The mother of Colonna came to
St. Celso, in Banchi, where the corpse lay, and lifting the severed head
by its hair, she exclaimed: 'Behold the head of my son. Such is the
truth of the Pope. He promised that my son should be set at liberty if
Marino were delivered into his hands. He is possessed of Marino, and,
behold, we have my son--but dead. Thus does the Pope keep his word.'"

His successor, Innocent VIII, "in defiance of the conditions of his
election, sought with a still more profligate vileness to exalt and
enrich his seven illegitimate children." He had been elected on the
condition that he would make only one blood relative a cardinal, and
that certain other benefices of the Church should not be given to any
one related to him. The people called him Nocens (the Guilty One, or the
Harmful One) instead of Innocent, and immortalized the prolific
paternity of this saintly celibate in the following epigram:

Octo Nocens genuit pueros totidemque puellas,
Hunc merito poterit dicere Roma patrem,

that is,

Nocens begat eight boys and an equal number of maidens;
Rightly, then, Rome will be able to call this gentleman father.

"He carried on two wars with Ferdinand, king of Naples, until the year
1492, and brought forward Renatus, duke of Lorraine, as pretender to his
crown. True, he proceeded, as his predecessors had done, to encourage
princes and people to undertake expeditions against the Turks; but when
Dschem, the brother and rival of the Turkish Sultan Bajazet, was
delivered over to him at the head of an army against the Turks, he chose
rather to detain him in prison on consideration of an annual tribute
from the Turkish Sultan." The story how the Pope got possession of the
Turkish prince and refused 200,000 ducats ransom for him because he had
received an offer of 600,000 from another party, reads like a story of
professional brigandage.

Alexander VI, "the most depraved of all the Popes, likewise recognized