"cenci11" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dumas Alexandre)

of Luther, with instructions which give a vivid notion of the manners
of the time.

"Candidly confess," said he, "that God has permitted this schism and
this persecution on account of the sins of man, and especially those
of priests and prelates of the Church; for we know that many
abominable things have taken place in the Holy See."

Adrien wished to bring the Romans back to the simple and austere
manners of the early Church, and with this object pushed reform to
the minutest details. For instance, of the hundred grooms maintained
by Leo X, he retained only a dozen, in order, he said, to have two
more than the cardinals.

A pope like this could not reign long: he died after a year's
pontificate. The morning after his death his physician's door was
found decorated with garlands of flowers, bearing this inscription:
"To the liberator of his country."

Giulio di Medici and Pompeo Colonna were again rival candidates.
Intrigues recommenced, and the Conclave was once more so divided that
at one time the cardinals thought they could only escape the
difficulty in which they were placed by doing what they had done
before, and electing a third competitor; they were even talking about
Cardinal Orsini, when Giulio di Medici, one of the rival candidates,
hit upon a very ingenious expedient. He wanted only five votes; five
of his partisans each offered to bet five of Colonna's a hundred
thousand ducats to ten thousand against the election of Giulio di
Medici. At the very first ballot after the wager, Giulio di Medici
got the five votes he wanted; no objection could be made, the
cardinals had not been bribed; they had made a bet, that was all.

Thus it happened, on the 18th of November, 1523, Giulio di Medici was
proclaimed pope under the name of Clement VII. The same day, he
generously paid the five hundred thousand ducats which his five
partisans had lost.

It was under this pontificate, and during the seven months in which
Rome, conquered by the Lutheran soldiers of the Constable of Bourbon,
saw holy things subjected to the most frightful profanations, that
Francesco Cenci was born.

He was the son of Monsignor Nicolo Cenci, afterwards apostolic
treasurer during the pontificate of Pius V. Under this venerable
prelate, who occupied himself much more with the spiritual than the
temporal administration of his kingdom, Nicolo Cenci took advantage
of his spiritual head's abstraction of worldly matters to amass a net
revenue of a hundred and sixty thousand piastres, about f32,000 of
our money. Francesco Cenci, who was his only son, inherited this
fortune.