But Christendom beheld in Sixtus not merely the spectacle of a Pope who trafficked in the bodies of his subjects and the holy things of God, to squander basely gotten gold upon abandoned minions.  The peace of Italy was destroyed by desolating wars in the advancement of the same worthless favorites, Sixtus desired to annex Ferrara to the dominions of Girolamo Riario.  Nothing stood in his way but the House of Este, firmly planted for centuries, and connected by marriage or alliance with all the chief families of Italy.  The Pope, whose lust for blood and broils was only equaled by his avarice and his libertinism,[1] rushed with wild delight into a project which involved the discord of the whole Peninsula.  He made treaties with Venice and unmade them, stirred up all the passions of the despots and set them together by the ears, called the Swiss mercenaries into Lombardy, and when finally, tired of fighting for his nephew, the Italian powers concluded the peace of Bagnolo, he died of rage in 1484.  The Pope did actually die of disappointed fury because peace had been restored to the country he had mangled for the sake of a favorite nephew.

[1] This phrase requires support.  Infessura (loc. cit. p. 1941) relates the savage pleasure with which Sixtus watched a combat ‘a steccato chiuso.’  Hearing that a duel to the death was to be fought by two bands of his body-guard, he told them to choose the Piazza of S. Peter for their rendezvous.  Then he appeared at a window, blessed the combatants, and crossed himself as a signal for the battle to begin.  We who think the ring, the cockpit, and the bullfight barbarous, should study Pollajuolo’s engraving in order to imagine the horrors of a duel ’a steccato chiuso.’  Of the inclination of Sixtus to sensuality, Infessura writes:  ’Hic, ut fertur vulgo, et experientia demonstravit, puerorum amator et sodomita fuit.’  After mentioning the Riarii and a barber’s son, aged twelve, he goes on:  ’taceo nunc alia, quae circa hoc possent recitari, quia visa sunt de continuo.’  It was not, perhaps, a wholly Protestant calumny which accused Sixtus of granting private indulgences for the commission of abominable crimes in certain seasons of the year.

The crime of Sixtus which most vividly paints the corruption of the Papacy in his age remains still to be told.  This was the sanction of the Pazzi Conjuration against Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici.  In the year 1477 the Medici, after excluding the merchant princes of the Pazzi family from the magistracy at Florence and otherwise annoying them, had driven Francesco de’ Pazzi in disgust to Rome.  Sixtus chose him for his banker in the place of the Medicean Company.  He became intimate with Girolamo Riario, and was well received at the Papal Court.  Political reasons at this moment made the Pope and his nephew anxious to destroy the Medici, who opposed Girolamo’s schemes of aggrandizement in Lombardy.  Private rancor induced Francesco