Church-State Relations in Renaissance Italy

Katharine Muscalino

Professor David Peterson

R. E. Lee Summer Scholarship

ABSTRACT:

Initially interested in renaissance church-state relations, I began my project with an investigation of the church’s augmented power. Sources attested to the Church’s increasing influence in both the Italian state and society, and discussed the impact of such influence on issues including gender, sexuality, and justice. The mounting power of the

Church introduced political and financial corruption amongst Church leaders, which sources described both quantitatively and qualitatively. Reactions to such abuses were varied, encompassing the development of anticlericalism, internal reform, the Council of Trent, and lay confraternities. My examination of the Catholic Church throughout this period of change has enabled me to survey recent developments in Italian Renaissance historiography as well.

The R.E. Lee Scholarship and Professor Peterson’s guidance have enabled me to explore recent trends in Italian Renaissance and Reformation historiography. My project, "Church-State Relations in Renaissance Italy," unfolded into a pre-Reformation portrait of the Roman Catholic Church. My research began with an examination of the Church’s increasing power, both within the Italian state and the daily lives of common people. I then studied the evolution of this church power into papal abuses and church corruption, observing the variety and frequency of unethical practices amongst church leaders. Reactions to and results of such widespread corruption were my next area of interest, providing insight into the church’s endurance through the emergence of Protestantism and institutions of reform, both internally and externally from the church.

My ten-week study began with an investigation of the Church's augmented authority in the personal lives of Italians. Guido Ruggiero’s The Boundaries of Eros shows the regulation of citizens’ sexual practices while Samuel K. Cohn Jr. addresses the status of women and their affinity with the Church in Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power In Renaissance Italy. In A New World in a Small Place, Robert Brentrano reveals the Church to be the cornerstone of the small diocese of Rieti.

Through his examination of Venetian sex crime, Ruggiero reconstructs Renaissance Venice’s official vision of unacceptable sexuality and, after consideration of these sexual boundaries, the society’s perception of "normal" sexuality. By the fourteenth century, the family and peer group forfeited arbitration of sexual mores to the Church. Such a transition is evidenced by the courts’ abandonment of rhetoric regarding crimes against familial honor in favor of religious rhetoric describing crimes against God. Such crimes, including those disgraceful to God and the institution of the Church, were most rigorously prosecuted.

Sex crimes against God, as described by Ruggiero, involved a mix of clergy and lay people, holy places, or a mix of Christians and Jews and were thought to injure God himself. Prosecution of such crimes was seen as a form of prayer, showing praise and reverence for Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Sex with nuns (the brides of Christ) and sex with Jews received greatest attention in the fifteenth century. Sentences for fornication with nuns were more severe than penalties for rape. The councils became greatly concerned with fornication of Jews and Christians and by the middle of the fifteenth century, required Jews to wear yellow armbands.

While God was thought to be hurt but not vengeful from the crimes described above, Venetians believed sodomy to provoke the omnipotent wrath of God and they thus prosecuted it vigorously. Sodomy was expected to lead to the destruction of civilization, as described by the Old Testament’s tales of Sodom and Gomorrah. The reality of God’s vengeance to Venice reflects both the waves of the plague suffered by the city, and church’s increasing domination of society. More literally, sodomy threatened society’s basic structures, namely reproduction and the family. Society’s fear of this crime and its consequences is indicated by the brutal penalties assigned, usually death by burning. While all other sex crimes, even those against God, could be attributed to the passions of love, sodomy, as a sin against nature, God, and his creation, was considered solely the effect of a diabolical spirit. Michael Rocke echoes this fear of sodomy in his Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality in Male Culture in Renaissance Florence.

Analyses of court records, last wills and testaments, and tax records lead Cohn to argue that the quality of women’s lives declined as the renaissance unfolded and the Church became more prominent, particularly in Florence. Using court records, Cohn contends Florence offered women the least access to justice, in both the courts and the streets. Women appeared less frequently in court records, and those who did appear were from the most elite social class and represented by a mundualdus or procuratore, as prescribed by the Lombard system. Consideration of the types of crimes prosecuted further illustrates women’s limited access. Disproportionate ratios of prosecution of homicide and assault cases and homosexual and heterosexual rape cases suggest limited law enforcement on the behalf of women, narrowed community consciousness, and dwindling court access. . Rural crimes and assault and battery, crimes most commonly committed by women in the fourteenth century, had increasingly fewer female defendants as the renaissance progressed, illustrating women’s growing inability to redress grievances in the streets.

The Church’s domination of local life is also illustrated by Brentrano’s study of the cathedral chapter of Rieti. Changes regarding bishops, dioceses, boundaries, testaments, and ultimately, Christ and God illuminate the evolution of church-state relations in Rieti. His principle focus is the evolution of the cathedral chapter and manifestations of religion within Rieti. Brentrano traces the Rieti church through the offices of seventeen of its bishops, both curial and baronial. In terms of time spent there, it was the fifth most popular Italian papal residence, a status that both benefited and strained the city’s resources and the local church. Rieti was home to varying religious orders, including Fransicans, Dominicans, and Augustinian hermits. By the mid fourteenth century, the Rieti church was centralized and organized, evidenced by both its participation in the projection of synodal constitutions as well as the testimony of the local people.

Increases in power and influence led to greed amongst the papacy and College of Cardinals. Barbara Hallman’s Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property describes the papacy and cardinals’ exploitation of Church property and income. Hallman offers a grim portrait of a church preoccupied with personal advancement, luxury, and nepotism. She portrays the cardinals as having negligible interest in the spiritual affairs of the church and the development of Italian Catholicism. Rather, she presents Rome as an elite club where money flows and connections earn men secular and sacred power. Hallman’s findings are supplemented by Kate Lowe’s Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy, describing the life of Cardinal Francisco Soderini, the chief power-broker of papal Rome in opposition to the Medici.

Hallman explores the nature of property-related abuses including pluralism, simony, and nepotism and sixteenth century Catholic reform’s failure to effectively address them. Because popes used benefices to reward clients and relatives, benefices were regarded more as a source of income than as a sacred office. They were thus subject to barter and exchange and used for private needs and personal pride. Hallman bases her study on in depth examination of the activities, families, and expenditures of 102 Italian cardinals.

Pluralism, the possession of incompatible benefices due to one benefice requiring the full attention of the beneficiary (including the care of souls) or due to one benefice supplying all the income required to meet the needs of the holder, failed to be successfully reformed, despite the recommendations of the authors of the Consilium and other reformers. While the possession of multiple bishoprics, pluralism in its most visible form, was abolished, the abuse continued in other forms. Pluralism of multiple lesser benefices, collection of pensions from multiple benefices and the right to transfer them or bequeath them to heirs, and the right to rent out benefices continued throughout the century and beyond, adding to the wealth of and strengthening ties between popes, cardinals, and Italian bankers. While these practices must have been detrimental to the church, they became so widespread that revisionists after the Council of Trent failed to even address them as abuses.

Simony itself, the buying and selling of sacred office and graces, ended with the close of Clement VII’s pontificate. Arrangements, exchanges, pacts, and confidences regarding benefices, on the other hand, continued throughout the century. Popes and reformers recognized resignations in favor, the use of intermediaries, and appointments of coadjutors as simoniacal abuses, but failed to institute any real reform. Payment of compositions, whether for dispensations and indulgences or fines for criminal or wrong behavior, were equally criticized as simoniacal, though reforms only impacting the first type. Blatant simony was replaced with the new fiscal systems developed in the pontificate of Sixtus IV. Sale of venal offices, of cavalierati, and shares in the monti offered opportunities for investment to Italians through bankers, augmenting the dataria and the camera apostolica, enabling the popes to enhance their lifestyles and spoil their families.

Hallman suggest that pietas, devotion to one’s heritage and kin, as coined by Reinhard, blocked the success of reform. Nepotism and patronage were commonplace among the cardinals, who sought to reward their families and familiars, and augment their own status. Despite attempts of the Consilium to curb such abuses, Italian cardinals continued to protect the needs of their families, their status as princes of the church, and their growing familial legacies. The purchase of venal offices and intermarriage soon created a new elitist class of clerical rentiers, demanding a luxurious lifestyle financed by the fiscal practices and bureaucratic systems of the Roman curia. Reform in such a setting was out of the question.

Kate Lowe’s description of Francisco Soderini reveals the posh and unethical lifestyle common to cardinals. Soderini exemplifies the interplay between Florentine politics, influence at Rome, connections with European political systems, and patron-client relations necessary for political success in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Soderini was a man driven by need, inclination, habit, and duty, most often into politics and service of his family and Florence. Educated in law, he entered the church only when Lorenzo de Medici obtained the bishopric of Volterra for him 1478 as a reward for Soderini’s father, Tommaso’s loyalty. Soderini’s ecclesiastical career was driven not by spiritual vocation, but rather by the financial and political opportunities the post afforded him, including status, connections, and money. He was an absentee bishop and exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction through his diocesan officials only to protect old customs and privileges.

Soderini went to the papal curia in 1480, an especially viable candidate due to his humanist skills, legal training, oratorical gifts, and Tuscan background. A skilled speech on behalf of Florence following the Pazzi conspiracy attracted the favor of Sixtus IV, who honored Soderini with the position of assistente. In May 1481, he was made a referendary, or legal expert dealing with supplications to the pope on judicial matters and distribution of graces. His opportunities for political and ecclesiastical patronage were augmented in 1487 when Innocent VIII named Soderini an apostolic secretary and in 1488 when he became an auditor of contradicted letters. The combination of the three positions meant he had responsibility in the beginning and end of writing bulls, and total responsibility for creating briefs.

The political acquaintances, contacts, and allies made on diplomatic missions on behalf of the Florentine republic, particularly those to France, would become useful in his career as a cardinal. In response to Soderini’s ability to muster patronage of some of the most influential men in Europe, Alexander VI elevated him to the cardinalate in May 1503. As a non-Medicean Florentine cardinal, he would be especially useful to Florence in political and religious matters with the pope, the college, or a particular cardinal. While lacking the title, he also served as a supernumerary cardinal protector of France, maintaining correspondence with the French monarchy, exchanging favors, and even supporting the bid for a French pope.

The exploitation of sacred office by church leaders such as Soderini resulted in criticism of the church, anticlericalism, and, of course, the eventual establishment of Protestantism. To understand the emergence of anticlericalism and its importance to the evolution of the Renaissance Catholic Church, I consulted Peter Dykema and Heiko Oberman’s collection of essays entitled "Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe," on anticlericalism ranging across Europe and from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth. The editors define anticlericalism as attitudes and behavior manifested in literary, political, or physical forms against unjust legal, political, economic, sexual, or social activities and power of the papal, episcopal, sacerdotal, monastic, or ministerial clergy. William Monter describes Italian anticlericalism as weak, constituting mere grumbling from a people inseparable from the church despite the papal abuses in Rome. Silvani Seidel Menchi elaborates on this weak Italian anticlericalism.

Because Italian society was inextricably intertwined with the Church, Seidel Menchi draws a distinction between anticlerical words and deeds, conscience and comportment. Criticism was limited, as most of Italy’s greatest men of letters from the Trecento to the Cinquecento earned their living off the church. Communes drew support from religion and the same families controlled both the church and government. Italian anticlericalism was therefore not a call for change or an omen of a crisis so much as an outlet for the frustrations of those intimately involved in the church. Anticlericalism called attention to the excesses of the church, helping to stabilize the balance between the church and state and perpetuate that balance for centuries. Monaction in the absence of vocation and the jurisdictional conflict between the inquisition and the city received especial attention.

Interested in the reactions of the church’s members as well as its critics to such blatant abuses, I began to study Catholic Reform. Elizabeth Gleason insists in her Gasparo Contarini that some cardinals in Rome, including Contarini himself, were sincerely committed to reform. Gleason’s biography of Gasparo Contarini traces his path from Venetian ambassador and statesmen to cardinal and papal legate, highlighting the honor, diplomacy, sacrifice, and sincerity that shone through his career. Her analyses of his philosophical, political, and theological writing mark the development of his thought and underscore themes dearest to Contarini, including reason, love, and church reform. Genuinely concerned with corruption of the church, he urged the clergy and the papacy to embrace honest lives removed from the corruption of wealth and politics. His obedience to the pope, a matter of personal honor and conviction, limited the scope and effects of his call for reform.

William Hudon discusses another internal reformer in his Marcello Cervini and the Ecclesiastical Government in Tridentine Italy. Hudon focuses on Cervini’s significance as a contemporary of the Counter Reformation employing Renaissance ideology and as a reformer within the church. Study of Cervini’s career as priest, cardinal, and briefly Pope Marcellus II, reveals a bridge between the Renaissance and the Reformation of the church. His Renaissance humanist education enabled him to adopt his unique reform policy in the era of Reformation of the Church. His reform policy, sincere in its call for change but loyal to the church hierarchy, suggests Cervini was a blend of Paolo Simoncelli’s spitiruali and intransigenti.

Hudon suggests Cervini is a Humanist reformer, committed to the elimination of curial and clerical abuses including simony, absenteeism, pluralism, and nepotism. In a synthesis of humanist attention to the past, experience in curial administration, belief in the possibility of a fully reformed papacy, influence of the Farnese family, and an awareness of both the severity of the problems facing the church and urgency of their practical resolution, Cervini sought reform under the leadership of the papacy and application of the model of the apostolic church. He derived this model from existing church law, Scripture, patristic authors, and decrees of ancient councils. Implementation of the model required practical reform of the papal curia, real pastoral leadership at all levels of the church’s hierarchy, doctrinal clarity and consistency, and renewal of monastic and diocesan religious life. Hudon concludes Cervini’s reform policy, emphasizing the church’s return to the apostolic model, is especially significant as it was Cervini’s primary objective and as it became the model adopted for the sixteenth century reform of the church and institutionalization of the decrees of Trent. While Gleason and Hudon consider their studies to be evidence of the Catholic Reform movement, Hallman’s research suggests that campaigns such as Contarini’s and Cervini’s were weak and half-hearted at best.

Successful efforts reform stemmed not from individual heroes, but from the Council of Trent and lay religious organizations. Frederick McGinness examines the narrow policies of Tridentine reform and Rome’s reshaped self-image in Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome. Responding to the challenges of anticlericalism and Protestantism, Rome altered its methods in hopes of improving its reputation through the implementation of an absolutist ideology for both preachers and believers termed "right-thinking" by McGinness. Somewhat akin to a political party line, "right thinking" had its roots in the Renaissance humanist movement and selective elements of Roman Catholic tradition. It provided Catholics with a world outlook compatible with the dictates of Rome and the correct rhetoric by which to communicate right thinking to communities at large. McGinness considers the impact of the Counter Reformation’s right thinking on politics, church organization, and the post-Tridentine program for moral reform.

Right thinking, developed by the clerical elite, incorporated the work of Church Fathers, canonists, and theologians, Scripture, and ecclesiastical traditions with humanist rhetoric. The church highlighted Roman ethical and rhetorical traditions, reshaped its political and religious history, underscoring its role in salvation history, and restored the memory of early Christian martyrs. Like civic humanists of the Renaissance, Jesuits emphasized a commitment to politici trained in studia humanitatis, although the liberty sought by the Jesuits was not that of the Renaissance city-state but that of the Catholic Church currently under the attack of the Protestant Reformation. Right thinking prescribed new definitions for Renaissance humanist vocabulary, including ingenium, innovation, rebirth, and revival of antiquity. Preachers were formally trained in studia humanitatis, with the methods of classical rhetoric taught by Jesuits at the college Romano, in Rome’s seminaries, as well as at private institutions like the Sapienza. Gregory XIII’s pontificate especially emphasized workshops of the sacred oratory.

Centering on Christ and his Vicar, right thinking offered believers a strategy to confront intellectual, spiritual, and practical questions, providing the only path to salvation. This strategy rested in the concept of an ordered whole under God, ranging from the lowliest elements up to saints and angels. Such a hierarchy dictated a method of organization for society, tradition, government, and history. Rome’s sacred oratory prescribed guidelines for each Christian’s navigation of life, most basically encouraging contempt of heresy and love of the Holy Mother Church. The appeal of right thinking, considered "true" by believers, lay in its broad scope, championing of militant Christianity, and participatory character providing all men with love and personal relationships with God.

In his Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy, Simon Ditchfield examines the local implications of Tridentine reform through the study of the functions of hagiography between 1550 and 1700. Hagiography includes all written accounts of sanctity tied to reform of liturgy. Ditchfield believes the Catholic Reformation affirmed local religion and curbed its excesses. He portrays Tridentine liturgical reform as an effort for regularization, emphasizing its juridical character without assuming homogeneity. The alternative breviaries of religious order and churches (found most often in Rome and Milan) and variations in the recitation of saints’ offices on feast days within particular dioceses suggest such diversity. Regularization included efforts to staff parishes with priests trained to the standards of new Episcopal seminaries, and to police local devotions according to the guidelines of the Sacred Congregation of Rites after 1588. Reform of the Roman Breviary and its ramifications in the writing of hagiography and historiography reveals Trent’s central preoccupation with adequate preparation of priests, enabling correct performances of liturgy.

Ditchfield identifies two visions of the Church existing at the diocesan level, that of the permissive pre-Trent Church allowing local variation and that of the post-Trent Church focused on regularization of devotional practice. It is this latter vision that Ditchfield centers on, relying heavily on Campi’s description of Piacenza’s Proper Offices and local ecclesiastical erudition. These sources punctuate the stakes for individual churches facing Tridentine reform and highlight lay and ecclesiastical local attempts to integrate devotional practices and the new order. Campi’s description of individual saints’ lives shows a strong element of local cooperation with Rome in efforts to purify the Church.

Campi is especially valuable in his emphasis on the importance of regularization of liturgy to those on the receiving end of Tridentine reform. Local churches focused on conservation of their cults’ phenomena and devotions in terms acceptable to the criteria of Trent, evidenced by Campi’s documentation of and personal efforts in redrafting hagiographical lessons. He provides historical commentary on the Piacentine Breviary, documents his efforts to vindicate it in the face of invalidation by papal bull in 1568, dedicating himself to the justification of church cults and devotions in terms compatible with Rome. Campi’s detail and range suggests that most local churches considered demonstration of continuity with the early church to be the most effective means of vindication.

While Ditchfield’s analysis of Campi reflects local reaction to Tridentine reforms, it still fails to discuss institutional and public reactions to papal abuses. Tolerance of such abuses, I discovered, was in part due to Catholic Reform amongst the laity, cultivated in their confraternities. As illustrated by Christopher Black in Italian Confraternites in the Sixteenth Century, these religious societies offered Christianity and Catholic doctrine to the people, encouraging the Italian laity’s endurance of papal exploitation. Black claims confraternities held a key role in the religious, social, political, and cultural lives of a large number of Italians in the "long sixteenth century," encompassing the mid fifteenth century through the mid seventeenth century.

Confraternities were exclusive religious societies varying in practice and theory, based on criteria of sex and status, although confraternities existed for all conditions of men, women, and children. Some confraternities were internally focused and required lengthy commitments to flagellation and night vigils. Others were more open societies, permitting members to choose between minimal attendance with an annual communion or more extended alms-seeking or hospital visitation. Bigger cities offered more variety in confraternities, while poorer rural areas were limited to a Rosary or Sacrament confraternity.

Confraternities provided social and religious protection for their members. Societies provided a network of support for their members and the poor of their cities, in reaction to the devastation of French invasions, epidemics, and famines in the first half of the sixteenth century. Confraternities could constitute an exclusive extended family, strengthened by codes of secrecy and honor. Others achieved social protection by fusing families and social classes, thus establishing a patronage system of philanthropy. Philanthropy for members was far reaching with aid and prayer for the ailing, dowries for impoverished daughters, and support of widows. Charity in the form of alms, hospitals and prayers extended beyond confraternity membership to the city’s deserving poor, including those impoverished by old age, widowhood, illness, or enforced unemployment. Confraternities encouraged such philanthropy to insure the salvation primarily of the giver, and then that of the receiver.

Confraternities offer evidence of a Catholic reform movement independent of Protestantism. The societies share elements of the Christian reform movement of the fifteenth century, emphasizing Christ as "Man and Mediator," and encouraging use of the vernacular and lay participation in religious activity. The societies stressed the importance of the individual, rather than the Church’s institutions and clergy. At the same time, confraternities, serving as religiously protective societies, were decidedly Catholic and served as pillars of the Counter-Reformation. They supported Transubstantiation and the Eucharist, the cult of the Virgin and the doctrine of Immaculate Conception, the cult of saints, the miraculous power of relics, and prayer for the salvation of souls in Purgatory. The Politics of Ritual Kinship, edited by Nicholas Terpstra reiterates the importance of lay confraternities throughout Italy.

Konrad Eisenbichler’s The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785 discusses the activities and importance of youth confraternities. Confraternities, providing moral and spiritual guidelines for brothers, proved to be an important element in the lives of young men and of Florentine society in premodern times. Within membership, followers found a spiritually fulfilling life worthy of sacrifice. The confraternity of the Archangelo Raffaello provided its members with an extra-familial structure, enabling a corporate life with devotional, administrative, educational, and festive activities throughout its existence.

To conclude, my research this summer has evolved considerably. My initial focus on church-state relations indicated the Catholic Church’s remarkable gains in power and alerted me to the abuses of the newly powerful church elite. I then turned to examine reactions to such excess, including anticlericalism, individual reformers, the Council of Trent’s deeper implications, and the functions of lay confraternities. I am thankful for the unique opportunity the R.E. Lee Scholarship has provided me, an in-depth exploration of the Renaissance Catholic Church’s rise, challenge, and reform.

Works Consulted

Black, Christopher F. Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: 1989.

Brentrano, Robert. A New World in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188-1378.

     University of California Press, 1994.

Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: Johns

     Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Ditchfield, Simon. Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation

     of the Particular. Cambridge: 1995.

Dykema, Peter A. and Oberman, Heiko A. Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

     Leiden, 1993.

Eisenbichler, Conrad. The Boys of the Archangel Raphael. A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785.

     Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Gleason, Elisabeth. Gasparo Contarini. Venice, Rome, and Reform. Princeton, New Jersey, 1993.

Hallman, Barbara. Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property, 1492-1563. University of

     California Press, 1985.

Hudon, William V. Marcello Cervini and Ecclesiastical Government in Tridentine Italy. De Kalb, IL: North

     Illinois, 1992.

Lowe, Kate J. P. Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy: The Life and Career of Cardinal Franceso
     Soderini (1453-1524). Cambridge: 1993.

McGinness, Frederick. Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome. Princeton, NJ:

     Princeton University Press, 1995.

Niccoli, Ottavia. Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Studies

     in the History of Sexuality). Oxford University Press, 1998.

Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York:

     Oxford University Press, 1985.

Terpstra, Nicholas. Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna. Cambridge: 1996.

Terpstra, Nicholas. The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy.

     Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.