The Death of Contarini and Paul III's Politics
At Bologna Contarini died five months after his arrival. Religious policy grew more obscure and clouded than ever. Paul feared that if the Protestants were reconciled with the Church, Emperor Charles V, free of worry about the unity and peace of Germany, would turn with all his power to the south; then, occupying the Papal States, he would join his northern and southern possessions in Italy and bring the worldly authority of the popes to an end. Francis I, too, fearing that Germany would grow calm, accused Contarini of having humiliatingly submitted to the will of the heretics, and sent word to Paul III that if he broke the peace with the Lutherans, he would support the papacy with all his strength. At the same time Francis was trying to conclude an alliance with the followers of Luther.
It appears that Paul finally concluded that a religious compromise with the Protestants would cost him politically. In 1538, with a shrewd policy, he got Charles and Francis to sign the truce of Nice; having thus made Charles safe on his western front, he encouraged him to crush the Lutherans and promised him help. When Charles was close to a decisive victory in the war with the Protestants (1546), Paul withdrew his auxiliary forces, because he again shuddered at the thought that a victorious emperor, freed from the Protestant enemy, might be tempted to conquer Italy. Thus the great pope for a time sided with the Protestants and counted Lutheranism a means of saving the papacy, exactly as the attack of Suleiman the Magnificent had been the means of saving Lutheranism.
Meanwhile, as the other shield of the pope against Charles's sharp sword, Francis I was negotiating an alliance with the Turks, who at every opportunity repeated the threat of Islam to take Italy and enslave Rome. Amid this confusion some of the hesitations and weaknesses of Paul III, who had fallen into such an impasse and distress, must be excused; for in his own defense he had no ally but a handful of soldiers and a faith that had taken root only in the hearts of the weak and humble. To see how small a part religious faith played in these power struggles, it is enough to note that when Emperor Charles V learned that Pope Paul III had held out a hand of friendship to France, he told the papal nuncio in Germany that the pope in his old age had caught a bad illness that usually belongs to the young, namely the "French disease."
The Renaissance Pope to the End
Paul III neither suppressed the Protestant movement nor made basic reforms in the Church's organization, but he restored the power of the papacy and brought it back to its former grandeur and influence. To the last moment of his rule he remained a Renaissance pope. He encouraged and financed the works of Michelangelo and other painters and sculptors, adorned Rome with fine new buildings, decorated the Vatican with the "Sala Regia" and the "Pauline Chapel," took part in lavish banquets, and admitted musicians, jesters, dancers and singers to his court. Even at eighty he was still a pope equal to every game.
Titian left a series of masterly portraits of him. The best, in the museum at Naples, shows the pope at seventy-five, still strong, and although worries over affairs of state and of his family have clawed his face, his head is not yet bowed before the hardships of the time. Three years later Titian made another picture of Paul with his grandsons Ottavio and Alessandro (also at Naples), which has more of a prophetic character: the pope, now worn and bent, questions Ottavio with a suspicious look. In 1547 Paul's son Pier Luigi was killed; in 1548 Ottavio rebelled against his grandfather and made an agreement with Paul's enemies to make Parma a fief of the emperor. The old pope, beaten even by his own children, welcomed death with open arms (1549).
Julius III
Julius III (1550–1555) took a misleading name, for the manliness, strength and lofty aims of Julius II were wholly absent in him; on the contrary, he imitated the easy-going, comfort-loving manner of Leo X and spent his reign in lavish popularity-seeking, as though, with Luther dead, the Reformation seemed to him finished.
He went hunting, kept court jesters, wagered huge sums at gambling, encouraged bullfighting, and raised an unworthy favorite of lowly origin to the cardinalate. On the whole he gave Rome a taste of the last morsel of the Renaissance's artistic and moral irreverence. In 1553 Julius III commissioned Vignola and a number of artists to build, outside the Porta del Popolo, the handsome "Villa of Pope Julius," which he made a gathering place for artists and poets and for festivities. In politics he calmly submitted to the leadership of Charles V. He suffered unduly from gout and tried to cure it by fasting; and it seems that this pleasure-loving pope died of the strictness of his diet, or, as some say, of excessive indulgence.
Marcellus II
Pope Marcellus II lacked nothing of a saint. His moral life was beyond reproach and his faith deep; his services and acts were all exemplary in their kind and his efforts to reform the Church sincere; but on the twenty-second day of his pontificate he died (5 May 1555).
Paul IV
Then, as if to prove that the Catholic reform movement had reached even the papal office, the cardinals elected as pope the austere Giovanni Pietro Carafa, the spirit and voice of the reform movement in Italy, with the name Paul IV (1555–1559). He was now seventy-nine and firm in his convictions, and set about carrying out his ideas with a resolute will and inward faith so unexpected in a man of that age that the ambassador of Florence said of him, "The pope is a man of iron, and wherever he sets his foot, sparks fly from the stone."
Carafa, born near Benevento, had the heat of southern Italy in his blood, and a fire seemed always to burn in the depths of his sunken eyes. His temperament was like a volcano, and only the Spanish ambassador, emboldened by the seasoned troops of the Duke of Alba, dared cross it. Paul IV hated the Spaniards who had come to dominate Italy; and just as Julius II and Leo X had dreamed of driving the French out of Italy, the first aim of this zealous octogenarian was to free Italy and the papacy from the power of the Spanish empire. He called Charles V a secret unbeliever, called him the mad child of a mad mother and "a cripple in body and soul," and swore never to recognize Philip II as viceroy of Milan. (The source also has him insulting the Spanish people with a slur on their descent; this is omitted here.)
The War with Spain
In December 1555 he made a treaty with Henry II, king of France, and Ercole II, ruler of Ferrara, to help one another drive all the emperor's troops out of Italy. In case of victory the pope would add Siena to his domain, France would take Milan, and Naples would be held as a papal fief; they further agreed to depose both Charles and Ferdinand from their thrones for having accepted the Protestants' terms at the Diet of Augsburg.
In one of those farces seen from a safe distance in the midst of historical disasters, Philip II, one of the most fanatical champions of the Church, suddenly found himself at war against the papacy. Reluctantly he ordered the Duke of Alba to lead his Neapolitan army into the Papal States. Within a few weeks the duke, with 10,000 picked troops, overcame the pope's weak forces and captured town after town as he advanced; he plundered Anagni, settled at Ostia, and threatened Rome (November 1556). Paul approved the alliance of France and the Ottomans, and at the same time his secretary of state, Cardinal Carlo Carafa, appealed to Suleiman the Magnificent, who attacked Naples and Sicily. Henry II sent an army to Italy under François, duke of Guise, who took Ostia back from the Duke of Alba and pleased the pope; but at that moment the French defeat at Saint-Quentin forced Guise to hurry back to France with his soldiers, and the Duke of Alba, facing no resistance, marched toward the gates of Rome.
The Romans broke into wailing and terror and wished for the death of their fearless pontiff. Paul understood that continued enmity might renew the catastrophe of the sack of Rome and even cause Spain to turn wholly away from obedience to the Roman Catholic Church. On 12 September 1557 he signed a peace treaty with the Duke of Alba.
The Peace and Its Meaning
The duke offered very peaceful terms, expressed shame at his victory, and kissed the foot of the defeated pope. The papal possessions that the duke had seized were returned to him and the legitimacy of papal rule was confirmed; but Naples and Milan remained in Spanish hands. This victory of state power over Church power was so complete and decisive that when Ferdinand received the imperial title from Charles V (1558), his coronation was carried out by the electors alone, and none of the pope's representatives was allowed any part in any stage of the ceremony. So the pope's power to crown the "Holy Roman Emperors" came to an end; in other words, Charlemagne finally prevailed over Leo III in their quarrel.
Reform at Last
Paul IV, freed, willy-nilly, from the burden of war, spent the rest of his reign on the Church and moral reforms described earlier. His highest reforming acts, though late, were the dismissal of his unworthy secretary of state, Cardinal Carlo Carafa, and the banishment of two other nephews whose improper conduct had stained his pontificate. The practice of favoring relatives, which had prevailed in the Vatican for a century, was at last expelled from it.