not his life. Porcari and his associates were
put to death in 1453, and by this act the Pope proclaimed himself a
monarch. The vast wealth which the jubilee of 1450 had poured into the
Papal coffers[1] he employed in beautifying the city of Rome and in
creating a stronghold for the Sovereign Pontiff. The mausoleum of
Hadrian, used long before as a fortress in the Middle Ages, was now
strengthened, while the bridge of S. Angelo and the Leonine city were so
connected and defended by a system of walls and outworks as to give the
key of Rome into the hands of the Pope. A new Vatican began to rise, and
the foundations of a nobler S. Peter's Church were laid within the
circuit of the Papal domain. Nicholas had, in fact, conceived the great
idea of restoring the supremacy of Rome, not after the fashion of a
Hildebrand, by enforcing the spiritual despotism of the Papacy, but by
establishing the Popes as kings, by renewing the architectural
magnificence of the Eternal City, and by rendering his court the center
of European culture. In the will which he recited on his death-bed to
the princes of the Church, he set forth all that he had done for the
secular and ecclesiastical architecture of Rome, explaining his deep
sense of the necessity of securing the Popes from internal revolution
and external force, together with his desire to exalt the Church by
rendering her chief seat splendid in the eyes of Christendom. This
testament of Nicholas remains a memorable document. Nothing illustrates
more forcibly the transition from the Middle Ages to the worldliness of
the Renaissance than the conviction of the Pontiff that the destinies of
Christianity depended on the state and glory of the town of Rome. What
he began was carried on amid crime, anarchy, and bloodshed by successive
Popes of the Renaissance, until at last the troops of Frundsberg paved
the way, in 1527, for the Jesuits of Loyola, and Rome, still the Eternal
City, cloaked her splendor and her scandals beneath the black pall of
Spanish inquisitors. The political changes in the Papacy initiated by
Nicholas had been, however, by that date fully accomplished, and for
more than three centuries the Popes have since held rank among the kings
of the earth.

[1] The bank of the Medici alone held 100,000 florins for the
Pope. Vespasiano, _Vit, Nic. V._

Of Alfonso Borgia, who reigned for three years as Calixtus III., little
need be said, except that his pontificate prepared fo