Rodrigo Borgia (with Patrick Wyman)

Trump is going to start knighting people because he's going to figure out that he maybe can.

You remember how much fun he had with the gigantic truck when he was sitting in the truck, just fucking yanking on?

Like, imagine him with a sword getting to knight people.

Oh, they're going to give him the big Air Force sword?

You know, the big monster sword at the head of the Air Force.

It's a cool trip.

You think I could get into it and just drive away?

You You think I could just drop the counterweight and launch myself into the castle walls?

I mean,

I'm thinking about all the European royals who are like, that's a cool crusade.

You think I could just get in that and just get away from all my problems?

Just go to Jerusalem, you know?

My life was great.

Yeah.

I'm going to Malta and I'm going to die.

Knights of Rhodes, very fine people, very fine people.

Some light corsairing, never hurt anyone.

I'm feeling very happy I listened to a podcast about this exact thing recently.

Hell yeah.

John Hunyati, he's very tall.

Yeah.

Big, strong guy.

The thing from history I most want to convince Trump of is that Prester John is real.

I think we could have a really good time.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

That would be so good.

He's coming out of the East.

He's fighting for Christendom.

He's a huge guy.

He's bigger than you'd ever believe it.

Huge guy.

Prester John, they call him.

Okay.

If given unfettered access to Trump, over under 25 minutes before you could convince him Prester John was real.

13 minutes.

Flat.

13 minutes.

Yeah.

I believe that.

Yeah.

I would just say he's he does the apprentice Ethiopia and

he'd be like,

he'd be a great guy to work with.

We're bringing back Abyssinia.

Look, it's it's they

have churches carved from single pieces of rock over there.

And you, all you have to, you're so, you're, you're so good at, you know, um, you're, you're so good at building.

You could like, and you never, all the people that built those churches, you never had to pay them in the first place.

You should check it out.

Mansamusa, they call him.

The richest man there ever was.

Folks, he likes gold even more than I do.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to No Gods, No Mayors.

It's the beautiful voice of Patrick Wyman, which we're all familiar with.

Look, years of yelling at children on sports fields and

incessant vaping over the last eight months has done a number on me.

Years of yelling to Bayezid II, please protect me from the French.

I just not did anything good to your voice.

No.

They're strangling them with bowstrings.

Anyway, look.

His own brother.

His own brother, folks.

Very nasty people.

They're saying he's.

That's okay.

They call him Suleiman the Magnificent.

They're going to call me Trump,

the tremendous, they call me.

Trump goes to Istanbul, comes back

after like 15 minutes in the first meeting, wearing the massive Silaman the Magnificent turban.

I would love to see him in that big hat.

Oh my god.

Oh, yeah.

Sullivan the Magnificent's like it was, it was easy.

That was the easiest forcible conversion that we've ever done, ever.

It's a tremendous sign of respect when they give you the big turban.

Nothing bigger.

The biggest turban, only the biggest turbans.

One of the biggest we've ever seen from the standpoint of turbans, okay?

And there's something really, there's a real darkness in the fact that I, of all people, who is bad at impressions, is getting slightly more dialed in on Trump just from exposure because he's president again now.

What I'm getting from this is really the man was born 500 years too late.

Like, he would have been such a fucking good Renaissance prince.

Like, because those guys were allowed to, like, there was no expectation that those guys wouldn't be fucking stupid and do and say stupid shit all the time.

But, like, because they were surrounded by courtiers, it was okay.

And you could always find some like down on as like humanist to write your biography and make you sound like you weren't quite that stupid.

Yeah.

Like, it's, it's, the Renaissance is just fail sons all the way down.

And there's, there's no, there's no other way around it.

And man, God, you know, it's just sad when you see somebody who would have been so perfect there and they just miss the window.

Yeah.

I think it's so important to learn lessons from history.

And I just, I want to ask you, Patrick, as a historian, how do I surround myself with dozens of courtiers at all times?

I just love to get that going.

So first thing, inherited wealth.

That's number one.

Really, a lot of inherited wealth.

Second, some lands in the Romagna.

Have you considered investing in the Romagna?

Oh, I don't.

Oh, man.

I think I fucked up on that one.

Yeah.

See, this is, this is the problem.

Unless you've got a villa at Prinesti,

you know, we're, we're already off to a poor start in trying to build a courtier culture.

I'll say there are some ways around this.

Do you have three stout ships and connections at trading houses in Venice and also in southern Germany?

Jesus Christ.

This is how every meeting with a mortgage advisor goes for me.

You know, it's like, no, I don't.

Of course I don't.

Who in their right mind at age 34 has like a fleet of stout trading trading ships.

At the age 34, you should have a fleet of stout ships.

You should have made one passage to the Orient, making you rich for life.

The economy is in shambles.

Okay.

Yeah.

Look, unless you're marketing bales of Fustian, I don't want to hear about it.

You spent all your gold on pineapples, exotic pineapples.

Yeah.

How did that pet elephant work out?

Was that a good investment?

Listen, I thought he liked me.

He's not in my life anymore.

All right.

That's a different chapter.

Oh, my God.

I'm cutting fake friends out of my life entirely.

All right.

I would rather be in a room full of sharks who are like hungry as fuck than with like one elephant who's pretending like he's my best friend.

Okay.

Let me just say, I think this is the thing that sort of ties it all together.

If your circle is talking about courtesans, if your circle is talking about music on the lyre,

if your circle is talking about frescoes or painted ceilings then like you're not going to make it but if your circle is talking about like um trade routes between the adriatic and the bosphorus if your circle is talking about circumnavigating africa and like you know um obtaining lucrative church offices then you are going to build generational wealth that's going to enable someone in 500 years to start wearing a lot of laurel piano and work at goldman sachs as a quote asset manager to fellow aristocrats.

Yeah,

bonus points, if you've got innovative ideas about overlapping fields of Arkabus fire, like then

you're really on track.

Like that's the that's the other one.

My circle is talking about nothing other than building the state capacity necessary to mass produce artillery.

And that's why Europe is going to be Muslim, basically.

So look, if you can't tell,

Patrick, if you've ever heard me talk talk to Patrick before, you would know that Patrick does a podcast called Tides of History.

And you would know that I listen to every episode of Tides of History as long as it's been going since episode one.

Same.

Yeah.

And

it's my workout.

Am I at the gym?

I'm learning about Bayezid II.

I'm learning about Pope Julius II.

I'm learning about the Italian Wars.

And all of that's going to come, well, various elements and more of that are going to come together today when we finally answer the question, can you reasonably consider a pope to be a mayor?

And the answer to that question is

sometimes yes, mostly in the Renaissance.

I mean, listen, like a mayor of a city is both a spiritual and a temporal power.

I'm pretty certain.

I don't actually know what a mayor does.

I should have checked.

And like, I mean, to really, to really, really part the veil here, right?

This is the point at which we begin to acknowledge something I had hoped to stave off until at least episode 500, which is that this is not so much a podcast about mayors as it is a podcast about us talking about whatever is inextricably on our minds at the time that it comes due for us to record an episode, right?

Can I tell you all something?

I have

about every week since we started this show, logged on to the Wikipedia page of R.

Bud Dwyer, checking to see if someone has added that he was mayor of somewhere for any amount of time.

Even if they made him a mayor retroactively, well, this is what's upsetting: is that we fucked up so bad is that the bonus episode last week was Stephen Arreed, the mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who was the mayor when that happened.

We could have talked about it and didn't.

So you're fucking a bit more.

Yeah.

Yep.

We're never going to be able to talk about old Double D himself, unfortunately.

Okay, so I have I have a question for the mayor experts right here.

When the mayor of Toronto, was that Doug Ford?

Was smoking crack.

Rob Ford, Rob Ford.

It's Doug Ford now, right?

It's hard to make it.

Doug Ford's the premier.

Doug Ford has passed out of our constituency.

He's a governor of a province.

Okay, so Rob Ford, when he was smoking crack,

was that exercising the spiritual or temporal dimension of his office?

Well, they're united in like one kind of policy-making apparatus, right?

Like, yeah, we always say that the mayor has two bodies, right?

But that's more of a, it's a metaphor, right?

Like, it's like

well, the thing is, as the mayor, you hold the crackpipe of spiritual authority, and then also

hold the gigantic beer flagon of temporal authority.

And that's what Rob Ford met.

It was just like, actually, ancient Egyptian mayors, they would be buried with their arms crossed with both the shepherd's crackpipe of central authority, but then wearing a let's go Blue Jays hat to symbolize that they married both the city of Toronto with the suburbs.

You know, it's upper and lower.

He's the king of upper and lower Toronto.

Yeah, Conclave Reference one as I'm thinking about Rob Ford dying and they're all Russian and chip the hat off his head to put it on to a new ring.

Okay, look.

Okay, now we get back to the next one.

Ultimately, let's go.

Okay, ultimately, right.

I want to almost disagree a little bit with November because ultimately this is a show about local power and how there's a weird little tide pool at the local level that brings out the oddness in people.

That is true.

On the other hand, let me just say that the mayoral master list of candidates contains the names Quimby and McCheese.

Yeah.

Look, look, they're also mayors.

Just because they're fictional,

right?

That doesn't mean they're not mayors.

There's often, what is it they say about art?

That there's often more truth in fiction than

in reality.

That's true.

Thank you so much.

That's right.

I often say, I'm always saying that.

That's wisdom right there for you all.

Also, I've come up with, based on what you said before, just before we get started, I've come up with a handy rhyme for us to all remember.

Okay.

Which is, if your pope be the mayor, the renaissance is there.

If mayor be not pope, modernity is your scope.

Thank you very much, Maddie.

We're talking about the period where the popes exercised control over the mayoral states, which extended over different parts of central Italy.

Yeah.

The mayoral Great Lakes region.

Now, before we get started, can we introduce ourselves and the podcast?

What?

No.

Oh, yeah.

I'm Riley.

I'm the mayor of this episode.

This is Maddie and Nova, my co-mayor.

This is Patrick from, who's the mayor of Tides of History, who is my co-mayor of this episode.

In Maya Dias Race, you know.

Yes.

I am so excited to do this.

I'm so excited to be here.

Thank you for having me.

This is on the free feed.

It's going to be confounding to people.

It is our pleasure.

Genuinely.

It is genuinely.

I've been looking forward to this for a while because, like I say, we talk about local power.

And most people, when they think, so when you think about the Pope now,

you think about someone who is like a the religious leader, obviously, in the head of a state that is so small, it might as well not have the normal functions of a city.

That's actually not true, but the pope has very little to do with the sort of day-to-day functioning of the Vatican City.

However, in the Renaissance, the Pope was as much a local Roman ruler and the ruler of Rome, taken from among a certain set of Roman families who passed the office around between themselves endlessly.

And so there is, in fact, in our scope of local power.

It's just that the way Renaissance Europe was set up would be like, for example, if the president of the United States wanted to get divorced, he'd have to ask Eric Adams first, basically.

Yeah, we all agree that the mayor of this one town is Christ's vicar on earth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's pretty much it.

Or if you wanted to, if all of the American state governors wanted to declare war on Iran, again, they'd have to ask Eric Adams first.

You know, we raised my hand here to ask a theoretical question, which is: what would be the best city to be American Rome?

You know, because I think it's better if you take a slightly unusual one, like Cleveland or something, you know, and like everybody's Tulsa.

The Holy Roman Emperor is like, you know, sort of meeting his road to Canassa on the way to like Tulsa, you know,

left standing barefoot in a cornfield.

I'll give you what I think is the actual answer.

I think it is, I mean, the boring answer is it's Los Angeles.

The fun answer is that it's Miami.

Oh.

Miami's already got enough Rookoco stuff going on that I think they're almost there.

We will talk about matters of Miami in the future.

Yeah.

I think it is Miami.

I honestly think it is.

Geographically, Miami is best viewed not as a part of Florida or even the United States, but as kind of the northernmost outpost of like the Afro-Caribbean world.

It's like Miami is every bit as much connected to the Caribbean and to

South America as it is to the rest of the United States, which is also true of Rome and the Renaissance, because Rome is where the Pope is, at least technically, supposed to live, and because it's the playground for all of the powerful Italian families that are that are important in their own localities.

It's where they go to compete with each other and to try to get some spoils for themselves.

I think that pretty accurately reflects Miami, where it's like the second child of a wealthy Brazilian family migrates to Miami to

make a career in club promotion.

That's the same thing as being a cardinal.

That's the same deal.

I'm paying for a plenary indulgence in Bitcoin.

Yeah, that's exactly.

Yes, yes, to go found a startup.

Like that's the, I couldn't possibly air quote that one hard enough.

Exact same deal as sending your idiot nephew to go, to go work for a papal legate.

Exact same deal.

It's a Jubilee year in Miami.

So if you go into the club via the special door, you get a special indulgence.

Yeah.

Now, here's the question.

Was sex work more highly valued in Renaissance Rome than it is currently in Miami?

That's the point of comparison.

Like, who, like, was it better to be an only fans?

Is it better to be an OnlyFans model in Miami in 2025 or a courtesan in Rome in 1512?

I guess it's one of those things where

you could maybe get higher in the latter, but you're probably safer on a day-to-day basis in the former.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah.

I want to talk about this, though, right?

So we've, we've, We have this theory, this is something Patrick and I have been talking about too, of understanding popes as essentially Roman leaders who have an additional pan-European role.

So, thinking about the Vatican City and the papacy in these terms, we can also talk about the mayorist pope.

But to do that, the mayorist pope, by the way, we think might be Alexander VI, if not Julius II, who we will also talk about.

That's a bad pope.

You picked a bad pope.

Like, out of a few hundred of them, we went with a guy who's like got a lot of shit going on, brackets negative.

Dude, this is both all of these guys.

Like, this is, but this is the whole thing about you can choose any one of these Renaissance popes.

And this would be the, and this would be the conversation.

Because like the, the kind of the baseline thing is from

about 1440, well, like 1440 or so is kind of the turning point.

After that, these guys are all extraordinarily venal.

They're all looking out for their families.

They're all trying to carve out one more nice little estate for themselves.

Like they want to make their nephew the Duke of some bullshit principal, like little, little thing in the Romagna.

Like, they're all doing this.

This is all of them.

There are no exceptions.

Every single one of them, except maybe the one weird Dutch guy that

they put in there was Adrian VI.

Like,

he's kind of a weird exception, but even he had like fail-son nephews.

So they're all invested in this dynamic.

Yeah.

And this is, when you think about the papacy, again, not as

a temporal office that was incidentally religious and that its religiousness was largely to do with collection of tax revenues and stuff, then it becomes there are elements of it that we will recognize and elements of Alexander VI's career that we will recognize in the mayoralties of people like Eric Adams

or even like Boris Johnson or Rob Ford.

Doing all of the like flag raisings at St.

Peter's

and being like, you know, New York,

the Vatican is is the padua of the Papal States or whatever.

I actually, can we come back to Boris Johnson for a second?

Because I actually think that's a great parallel.

Because Boris Johnson had his career as like a writer or a journalist or whatever.

And a lot of these popes kind of made their names or became or like gained a reputation for themselves.

through some facility with humanistic learning, which was very fashionable at this point in time.

So lots of them, you'll read it like, oh, yes, in this person's youth, they were a renowned scholar or

they were famed for their command of classical literature or something like that.

Like this is a huge selling point for them.

It makes them cultured and it makes them stand out among the morass of fail sons who populate the Curia and its various offices.

So there is an element to that where the cultural elites are like, hmm.

this guy knows his stuff.

And I think that that may be a Boris Johnson element there.

Yeah.

If you wanted to boil it down even further, really what we're looking at is the exercise of power on a relatively small scale because the papacy is such a local office, which is why a lot of the behavior of so many Renaissance popes is so funny because they are ultimately small-time guys who are put into big-time roles.

Again, much like the mayors of big cities.

So if you think about that to do this, we need to look at the brief history of the office of the papacy in terms of the terms you discussed above.

The Vatican City Pope that many of you are familiar with is actually a a relatively recent invention, only coming into being with the signing of the Lateran Treaty between Benito Mussolini and the Pope

in the 1920s.

Did he go on to do anything else?

Nope, not a thing.

Okay.

Was he ever mayor of something?

Well,

he built that one weird town that was like the monument to his homies.

Yeah, that's true.

I've been trying to get Riley to read M's Son of the Century for about 18 months at this point, but he's not a mayor in that.

Mayor starts with him.

He ended up as mayor of a gas station in northern Italy.

That's for sure.

That's a rough election procedure they've got at that gas station.

Tough to do your job upside down.

But the other thing is, before this, right, the Pope ruled an area of central Italy as an...

as a temporal prince.

And the way that, like, and so much of the way that being a quote-unquote prince worked in this time wasn't just that you have some kind of divine right to rule a certain amount of land, but rather you are a landlord to other landlords.

The idea, like you, these sort of larger obligate, these sort of more sort of almost like celestial, you might even say obligations come into place much higher up the chain.

So the Pope is just the inherent, is just someone whose office comes with owning.

a huge amount of central Italy that fluctuates quite a bit between like Constantine's donation towards in the sort of late Roman Empire, where the Christian church is de-prescribed as an organization, and then it is allowed to, instead of just having like individual Christian patrician families own houses that they use as churches and so on,

instead,

the church itself is allowed to be a corporate entity, own property, and then Constantine gives it a whole bunch of property also.

And then more power, and then power was to rule this land, not just as like,

I own a few latifundi or I own a bunch of farms, I own some towns, whatever, was granted initially by the Exarchate of Ravenna, sort of informally as an alliance with the Byzantines to contain the power of the Lombards.

Less equitable society, yeah.

Followed by formal agreements with Charlemagne to govern territory and profit from rents.

The reason I'm saying all of this is to emphasize the extent to which.

You said the word Ravenna, and my brain went somewhere else.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the reason I'm saying all of this is that, is to make the point that the extent to which the Pope is a temporal ruler largely depends on how useful that is to more powerful european rulers around them it seems to me what we think of as the medieval papacy as kind of an all-encompassing all-powerful institution is actually only the product of about at most two centuries between the late 11th century and the late 13th century so this idea of the pope as being the guy that everyone has to listen to is actually that actually only belongs to a pretty brief period of medieval history.

It's the

Pope as universalizing figure, as kind of

a figure of trans-European importance.

That only lasts for a little while.

It really peaks with the Fourth Lateran Council.

So this is 12, 15, Pope is Pope Innocent the,

God damn it, I can't keep my innocence straight.

much much like Anakin Skywalker.

It's a little

youngling killing reference for you there.

Yeah.

So

that's a a really, there's, it's this really brief period of time when when the papacy is extraordinarily important, when the pope can kind of push around European kings and get kings to do what they want.

That doesn't last for very long.

By the beginning of the 14th century, that that situation has more or less changed.

And as the popes' trans-European importance declines with the papal schisms of the 14th and early 15th century, they become increasingly invested in temporal power within Italy.

After the popes returned to Italy in the in the second third of the of the 15th century, the papal states become more important to them as a source of revenue on top of everything else.

So like what we think of as being kind of a Protestant Reformation development where

each king is doing their own thing with the church in their own lands,

this kind of rock, like what we think of as a rock-solid Protestant principle is actually a product of the later Middle Ages.

It's that late medieval kings who were perfectly orthodox,

you know, mainline Christians were clawing back every bit of power and revenue they could from

the popes.

And as this process becomes too advanced for the popes to stop with a decrease in prestige and authority in the 15th century, they become more and more and more concerned with central Italy and especially with the city of Rome.

And so we can say then, medieval popes, not mayors.

I'm dating.

Medieval popes are too powerful to be mayors.

And sort of ancient popes, religious leaders.

Medieval popes, genuinely too high up to be mayors.

That is not a cul-de-sac of like local weirdos.

But also, so we go back to it, though.

They focus on the Italian peninsula more when also just like powerful states emerge around them.

We're talking about central, like centralized or centralizing or like loot, even like loosely affiliated sort of political blocs that are forming in Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire.

the Ottomans as well play into this.

Like this is a, and Italy itself is ungoverned, ungovernable, and suddenly no one really cares so much about some sort of threat from the Pope because if you're a Holy Roman Emperor and you don't like the Pope, you can just decide that the Pope actually is

not that Christian.

Yeah, the Pope is a Christian.

Or French, you can decide we want a different Pope now.

You just pick up a friendly bishop and like plug him into this palace that you have in Avignon.

Yeah.

I mean, that literally is how 15th century kings more or less thought of the papacy is at most they were kind of a vague distant moral authority that you could use when it suited you and ignore when it didn't.

The circuit judge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And so, you know, the more imperial or the more state power there is concentrated outside of Italy,

but that depends on a pope to crown the emperor, the more local power the pope will then be able to wield, because he can call on, for example, a Holy Roman Emperor to prosecute a campaign for him against an enemy or to protect him from the French or whatever.

But then the Pope has to be kind of a de facto vassal, if not a peer.

Or it'll be removed entirely from Rome, as we mentioned earlier, under the protection of the French crown in Avignon.

And then the government of the city of Rome was basically just left non-existent.

So much of the rule of Rome as a city was left not largely to like gang violence between uh sort of prominent families who could not stop assassinating each other like in the in the in the like week-long conclave i want to see that guy ritchie movie though you know like i i i want to like if you're going to do you know king arthur or robin hood or whatever if we're putting historical guy ritchie movie on the table let me see uh like renaissance roman guy ricci you know Yeah, yeah.

So I have, I want to let Riley finish his, finish on this, but, but I want to come back to the issue of violence in Italy because it's, it is shocking shit for this period.

But continue.

Well, so I basically, right, this is, so this is like when the Pope isn't in Rome and isn't acting as Rome's sort of mayor, de facto mayor, so to speak, the government of the city of Rome falls to like the Orsini or the Colonna families or other like prominent aristocratic clans, all of whom are vying for power in Rome with one another, but where there is no authority above them to

you know keep them in line and so like in the week before Rodrigo Borgia Alexander VI the subject of the second half of this episode becomes pope there's I think there are 200 political assassinations recorded in Rome and that's just the recorded one Wow you would hate to have an unrecorded political assassination you're just not even important enough you're just like oh yeah he was stabbed or whatever cool some guy watching me get stabbed and he's like holding a pencil and he just kind of puts it down slowly like I don't know

Getting the Wikipedia-like subject of this article is not notable.

Box on your own assassination

on the scroll of the guy watching all the assassinations.

Yeah, sure.

He's shaking his head at me.

My last thing I see before I die.

As I'm being killed, he's doing the little so-so hand gesture.

I don't know.

Yeah, no, that does not meet, it does not meet random Italian humanist in 1492's criteria for notability.

That's the notice I want I want about my death.

But tell me about Rome.

Tell me about violence in Italy, especially Rome, and especially when there is no Pope, either because he's in Avignon or there's a conclave going on.

So one of the really striking things about Italy in the Renaissance is that its murder rate is shockingly high.

This is true almost everywhere in Italy during the 15th, 16th, and into the 17th centuries.

But the murder rate there is orders of magnitude higher than it is anywhere else in Europe at that time.

Italy at this point has some of the highest murder rates that have ever been calculated

for any place in human history where there is data to calculate murder rates.

Italy during this time is

as high as you can go.

It is one of the most dangerous places that you can possibly go.

You're doing this with like swords and daggers.

You know, no one's even invented the Kalashnikov yet.

And these guys are doing so.

Fun fact, the center of arms manufacturing, of gunpowder weapon manufacturing in Europe is Brescia in northern Italy.

And they literally just use whatever they have available.

So after the 1520s or so, when Brescia becomes this huge arms manufacturing hub,

the court records there are just full of like, this guy was mad at his neighbors.

So he took the Arkabus that he had been working on and went and shot at the guy.

It's like, this is just, this is just constant shit.

Keep that motherfucking thing on me.

And it's like four pieces of wood, one barrel, and like a bunch of loose gunpowder.

You joke, but yes, this is how dedicated the Italians were in the Renaissance to killing each other over the tiniest of slights is they would use whatever was at hand.

And so some parts of Italy are more violent than others, but at the heart of this is there are two factors.

One is the ubiquity of civil conflict.

So, internal conflict within any given city, region, whether it's rural or urban,

there was an immense amount of civil conflict.

That's largely because there is no overarching authority to whom you can appeal as peacemaker, right?

So, in France, like the king is not going to resolve disputes to everybody's satisfaction, but there is a king who can resolve disputes, right?

In the Holy Roman Empire, there are a whole bunch of different institutions that serve to mediate intergroup and interpersonal violence.

Those institutions in Italy are either weak or non-existent.

So that means that violence is the first thing that people turn to as a means of conflict resolution.

That's number one.

Number two is because Italy is so incredibly urbanized relative to the rest of Europe, that means that meetings between people who have conflicts with each other are also ubiquitous.

You cannot go around an Italian Renaissance city without meeting somebody that you don't like.

And in this period of time, words, simple gestures, whether you acknowledge someone's presence or not are all good enough reasons to pull out your sword and fucking get to stabbing.

If we want to understand the cultural moment that produces these people, you have to understand that this violence is ubiquitous.

It's everywhere.

These people hate each other.

Like they hate each other in a way that is almost impossible for modern folks to understand.

That just imagine you're walking down the street and three times a day, you're forced to see the person that you hate the most.

At some point, that one of you is going to say something and somebody's going to pull a sword because everybody carries weapons.

So

this is the dynamic that makes Italy so dangerous.

And Rome is even worse.

Rome is

as bad as it gets.

Rome and the Romagna are the worst spots in Italy for this.

Because again, those things,

as bad as they are in, say, Venice, you think of Venice, which has like a strong state, which which is, which has pretty, like pretty strong civic norms in the civil society.

Even Venice is extraordinarily violent.

Rome, which lacks those things completely,

is by far the worst.

It's just gangs of Warsini thugs, gangs of Kelowna thugs fighting each other in the streets.

Every cardinal who is resident in Rome has their own gang of thugs.

You can't be a cardinal and not have a and not have a few bravi.

Like you have to.

They could maybe bring that back.

I love Conclave as a movie, but I think it could have, you know, more scuffles.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've decided that Michael Mann is going to have another go at redirecting Conclave.

What's the diner scene in that version of Conclave?

That's my question.

The papacy is the juice in a lot of ways, I would say.

It is.

For me, the papacy is the juice.

It is.

So so if we if we think about this landscape of kind of incessant civic conflict and people who hate each other all the time, now you bring the papacy back to Rome and it becomes a prize for everybody to fight over for all of these shitty, thuggish families with their shitty, thuggish bravi.

Like the papacy is now a thing that you can fight over in those terms because it offers enormous material benefits.

I was gonna say, let's talk about actually some of the material benefits of the papacy, right?

Because again, big hat.

Yeah, you get the big hat and slippers.

Do you get the crackpipes?

The people freebasing regalia.

But if you, the other thing to remember, I think

this may be obvious to some of you who are more historically, historically minded, may not be to others, is that again, a religious office in the

a religious Christian office in like the Roman, in like the mid to late Roman Empire is very different from, is almost more akin to a religious Christian office now than it would have been in the Renaissance.

In the Renaissance, a religious office with the Catholic Church usually would come with a very large amount of tax revenue.

It would come with certain authorities over church lands.

You would also get to be an administer, an administrator of church business.

And the church was the richest, probably the richest single organization, perhaps in the world at some points.

And then you got to be the administrator of it.

And you got to do like short counts.

You got to be, you got to be like, all right, three for the church, three for me, when people would pay their taxes.

Like if you were, there were certain positions that allowed you to either legitimately or illegitimately massively enrich yourself.

And more importantly, without having to go kill someone, which is the other way to massively enrich yourself at the time.

Yeah, like people now could like manage graft off like building a bridge, but imagine if you were building a golden dome, how much money you could extract extract from that.

And every single thing that goes into the building of that golden dome is an opportunity for you to make money.

So you're going to, so not just that you're auctioning off, that you're taking, that you're taking bids with some graft involved for the building materials, you're going to auction off the right to, the right to be the one who's being bid to.

You're going to,

at every step along the way, in the Italian Renaissance, they got good at adding extra layers to these transactions.

So not only is

you're not, you're, you are granted this parish, right?

Let's, let's say you've got a hypothetical parish in some hypothetical Italian village.

So you don't have to go there to, if you are granted this parish, you don't have to go there to be the priest of it.

It is effectively a fine, it is, it is a financialized source of revenue that you can mortgage it.

You can divide it up, you can sell it to someone else and collect a little and collect a little bit of a finder's fee for that.

There are all of these different things that you can do with what are theoretically offices of pastoral care that in reality for

clerics in the Italian Renaissance are sources of revenue to be played with in the same way that you would play with any other source of revenue in an increasingly financialized world.

So this is the Italian Renaissance world is extraordinarily

financially sophisticated.

I think the average elite person would have had a much better idea of of how money worked and the things that you could do with money and how assets,

liabilities worked for you, how you could turn any tiny little thing that you've been granted by some higher authority into four different revenue streams.

They were really, really good at this.

But there's conflict over these because, okay, so I've granted, I've been granted this benefice, this parish, right?

I've been granted the revenues from this specific parish.

I got to pay some illiterate dipshit to actually conduct the masses there.

That's a tiny, tiny expense.

We don't really need to worry about that.

But now I've divided that up into two different things.

Let's say what goes along with this parish is the right to collect revenue from one village,

but also we're going to tax the salt that's going into the village.

Now, I've sold that to do to two different people, but both of them think they should have both pieces of that.

So now the next time those two guys see each other, one of them stabs the other.

That's this is like fog standard Italian Renaissance dispute.

And if you're pope, crucially, you don't get those revenues, but you decide who gets everything.

Yes.

So you just put your family in members of your family, trusted members of your family in different positions.

We're going to see some of that with Alexander VI, right?

Where he will have his, he will use his powers as pope to create like fake positions either in Spain, which is sort of like in hockey him a little bit.

or in just like more commonly in the Papal States, just subdividing them into smaller and smaller parcels so he can just keep on creating like aristocrats out of his nephews, essentially.

Yeah, this is this is the golden age of shitty nephews.

This is there has been

Umbria is like a big bucket of idiot nephews.

That's all it is.

Nephew generator, a nephew generating region, a net nephew exporter.

Yeah.

The nephew spawn point.

It is.

This is this is real.

I like we're joking, but this is what it is.

It is

basically, so you become a cardinal in the, let's say, you become a cardinal in the church, right?

Maybe you're the first one of your family to do this.

You've worked your way up by being a good humanist and you've learned your Greek and you've learned your Latin and you've written some poetry and shit.

Some powerful person is taking a liking to you and made you their secretary.

And now, as a benefit for all of your years of hard work and making them look like they're smart and not the idiot that they are, they have repaid you by making you a cardinal.

The first thing you do when you become a cardinal is to take your brother's idiot children and try to make them cardinals.

You try to secure them positions within this.

This is, we think of it as nepotism.

This is how business is done in this time and place.

Like you got nephews, you find a job for them.

Yeah, you think of it as nephew, nepotism, but I think where I come from, we call it simply nephewism.

Nephewism.

It's, it's like, it's like on Long Island when you get your dumbass nephew a job in the fire department.

That's what this is.

Like, if you, if you've got, if you know that fucking guido, I got to get him a job at Huntington.

Like, that's, this is, this is the, uh, this is the vibe.

This is fire chiefs driving Lamborghinis in New York, essentially.

Yeah.

Why did I just get run down by a Lamborghini that says Pope 2 on the license plate?

Essentially correct, yes.

So basically, right, yeah, control over central Italy is what the popes kind of have left to them.

And this is sucked by the by the Renaissance.

And this is something that they constantly have to negotiate, not just with their fellow temporal princes, people like the Holy Roman Emperor or people like the King of Spain or people like the King of France or even the Ottoman Sultan,

especially with like whoever controls Naples basically just gets to like, you know, has a dagger directed at the heart of the papacy.

But They also have to contend with the fact that all of their cardinals are going to be from this world of extreme violence that all hate one another.

And they're constantly either threatening, blackmailing, murdering, or bribing each other all the time.

They never stop doing one of those four things in every combination, all of them.

Yeah.

And

I got to, so there's a, here's a couple of statistics that'll, that'll help you make sense of this.

So there were, there were lots of non-Italian cardinals in most of the Middle Ages, especially when the papacy is in Avignon.

There are plenty of French cardinals.

You got English cardinals.

As time goes on,

the cardinalate becomes an increasingly Italian and especially an increasingly Roman institution, right?

So the proportion of Italians increased from approximately 50% at the election of Pius II in 1458 to 34 of 39 in 1523 when Clement VII was elected pope.

Much the same dominance was to be found among bishops appointed by the papacy and in the papal bureaucracy.

So

this is a noticeable trend.

It belongs to a specific period of time.

After about about 1450,

these dynamics become increasingly the case.

They're not so much the case before.

It becomes increasingly so as time goes on.

And so this is, again, why we talk about Renaissance popes, specifically from this period as local leaders, especially.

Now, when we get past the Renaissance, there's a story, again, of fluctuating papal control over these states that continues through the Italian wars and into modernity.

with popes having more or less temporal power over central Italy,

mostly less as the trend line goes, goes, ultimately culminating in Napoleon annexing the Papal States, largely breaking them as an independent power.

Yes, they get restored by the Congress of Vienna, which was basically a vain attempt to make Europe look as it did before Napoleon ended the entire material basis for feudalism forever.

And it was finally put out of its misery by the birth of the actual kingdom of Italy, with the Italian army, like almost bloodlessly.

Like they did kill a few papal troops.

Like again, papal troops is what kept the peace in Rome in the Renaissance.

I cannot,

the Pope was the top cop of Rome at the time.

Wearing like a blue windbreaker that just says Pope on it.

That's what the Swiss Guard was.

That's what they were.

That's, it's like, yeah, that's, that's exactly what the Swiss Guard was.

Yeah.

I, I hate to be, I hate to be trying to hold the line with my comrades and then hearing the horrible clip-clopping of all these guys approaching me.

Yeah.

Don't worry.

He can't use his halberd unless he fills out a halberd halberd discharge for.

Yeah,

give me your weird pants and your halberd.

You're off the forts.

Turn in your pantaloons.

I want your pantaloons on my desk tomorrow.

All right.

That's it.

That's it.

Give me your feather.

You're out of here.

We do things by the book here.

We're doing by the scroll here, man.

That's the book is the Bible.

That's the Bible.

Yeah.

So

the papacy as a temporal power is finally put out of its misery by the kingdom of a kingdom of Italy where the Italic, the sort of

like the red shirts and then the Italian army marches on the Iralian walls and then largely bloodlessly imprisons the Pope in what is now the Vatican City for like 50 years, while the popes more or less pretended that a great deal of modernization and rationalization just hadn't taken place and that they were going to be able to like be the direct ruler of Umbria and like the Romagna again anytime now.

They were going to get to be like, even like Rome now just like had normal mayors and like was a city that was sort of comparably functional to other European cities, unlike it had ever been in the past.

They were just like, no, no, any day now, the Vatican's going to

pour forth from beyond the walls and take back what's ours.

Until eventually Pius XI signs this deal I mentioned at the top of this segment with Mussolini, which basically says, you need to agree to stop pretending to be a territorial prince, and we will let you pretend to be a meaningful country with this collection of buildings in central Rome.

So with that in mind, are popes mayors?

I think the answer is sometimes popes have been mayors.

Sometimes they've been governors.

Occasionally they've been kings.

But right now, they're sort of like high-level diplomats and religious leaders.

Again, if anything, more like they were at the beginning of the church than any time in between.

So right now, There's a cardinal authority that handles things like garbage collection in the Vatican, which is called the president of the

governate, governorate, excuse me, of the Vatican City State.

But that only came

into being in 1939.

And for reference, the guy who currently handles the garbage collection in the Vatican, so to speak, is a Spanish cardinal named Verguez Alganza.

Although they weren't always cardinals, the first quote-unquote mayor of the Vatican was an Italian marquee and coin collector named Camillo Serafani.

A numismatist.

Yes, that's right.

But the long history of.

Actually, by the way, the guy you mentioned, the guy who was actually the functional mayor of vatican city it's alzaga by the way uh is uh like the first cardinal to have been a member of a kind of discredited cult called the legion of christ that was kind of this like

uh yeah it was this like mexican originated uh sort of cult of personality around uh a very bad guy uh who you know several allegations came out against subsequently uh so yeah an interesting guy interesting cardinal and that's the guy who's in charge of of the bins.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He can be in, he so he goes into the mayor master list.

Anyway.

Just under McCheese.

Just purely so I can talk about the Legion of Christ.

I mean, yeah, sure.

Look, if he handles the bin collections and he's got a weird history, that's enough for me.

Yeah.

But

in the long history of the government of the Papal States, we're focusing on Renaissance popes as the mayorist.

Perhaps Alexander VI might be the most typical Renaissance pope of them all.

And so much of what he does, or what he is said to have done, will be familiar to Ford Nation, the Palin Pilled, or Curly's cronies.

So without further ado, may your denigrators become your fornicators at the banquet of the chestnuts of success.

That's right.

It's Alexander VI, aka Rodrigo de Borja, the Valencian rattlesnake, the big guy himself, the father of Duke Valentino.

So we talked a little bit about the Renaissance popes and what made them distinctive versus medieval popes, early modern popes, or modern popes, or ancient popes.

And so what makes Alexander VI the quintessential Renaissance pope?

All the debauch, you know, the debauchery.

I will read a selected passage from a 1924 book entitled A History of Pope Alexander VI, His Relatives in Time, Volume 2, Roderick De Borgia from Cradle to Throne by the Reverend Peter DeRue for the American Catholic Society of Philadelphia.

This, by the way, is supposed to be like that book is trying to be an apologia for for Alexander VI, but he quotes some people who are, he thinks Mr.

Deroux are unfairly maligning him.

All the worst accusations that can be imagined against the public and private life of a sovereign or a pontiff have accumulated on the head of Alexander VI.

It seems to me, says Rod and Brown, that history has made use of the Borges as a sort of canvas whereon to depict all the corruption of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Panvinius denounces him as a man of inhuman fierceness, of immense avarice and rapacity, of an insatiable desire of procuring by right and wrong dominions for his sons, and as abandoning himself to all sorts of enjoyments.

He's also apparently, in every source, is described as absolutely like looks-maxed, as like the hottest pope that there ever was.

The hot pope?

Well, he wasn't hot when he was pope, but he was famously incredibly charismatic and ridiculously good looking.

Presumably, he kept some of that as pope.

So, presumably, like, even as Pope, even in the deadly, like crawling around on the floor after the chestnuts, you're like, the guy's kind of, he's got, he's got res.

Hottest pope, this is Benedict XVI erasure.

It's what that is.

November, here's the funny thing.

He famously kept none of it.

He was like, actually quite.

You hate to see Twink death.

You know.

So, as a young man, Rodrigo was described as tall and handsome.

How could this transition have saved her?

Okay,

keep that thought in mind because that does kind of come up a little bit upon his accession to the throne of St.

Peter.

Yeah, Jesus has sort of like a vagina thing on the side.

So if you get really deep into it, there's a lot about that.

So Sigismondo DiConti speaks of him as a large, robust man with a sharp gaze, great amiability, wonderful skill in money matters, with a tall figure, florid complexion, dark eyes, and a full mouth.

Full.

You could just say your homie had a full mouth back then.

What the?

He had DSLs.

So he was born.

Rodrigo de Gorgia was born in Valencia, Spain in 1431, but moved to Italy when his uncle Alfonso became a cardinal in 1444.

And then the Pope Calixtus III, that's the name he took, in 1455.

So this is that thing that Patrick was describing earlier, which is if you're a Renaissance pope, if you become a cardinal, you immediately just begin getting jobs for your nephews.

So his career in the church began at the age of 14 when he was appointed sacristan of the cathedral of Valencia as a favor called in by his newly minted cardinal uncle,

Alfonso.

So Alfonso didn't spend long as a cardinal before himself being made pope and again engaged in some classic nepotism by continuing to give his nephew more, yet more lucrative church offices.

This is a passage from Mary Hollingsworth's book, The Borgias, History's Most Notorious Dynasty, which itself is quoting contemporaneous sources.

During 1448, Cardinal Alfonso's nephew Rodrigo became a canon of the cathedral chapters of Valencia, Barcelona, and Segorbe, thanks to his uncle's influence in Rome.

In 1449, as a particular favor to Cardinal Alonso, Nicholas V granted Rodrigo Borgia the right to receive income from his benefices in absentia, whether when living in Rome or studying at University in Bologna, to allow now the 18-year-old.

So the 18-year-old who's like a canon in three different cathedrals, who has never been to any of them,

and who's just studying law at the University of Bologna?

Like, I wonder if, like, um, little Spains popped up in Bologna where, like, the Spanish students would live and you could get good tapas.

But

the Cardinal now sent his nephew to a school at the Vatican, where, together with several relatives of other church dignities, he was given a classic education by the humanist Gaspar de Verona.

He's very handsome, always smiling, good-natured, suave, and eloquent, judged the tutor, adding, quote, Everyone's talking about how hot he is.

It is quite remarkable how beautiful women are attracted to him more powerfully than even a magnet attracts iron.

He's so hot.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

I love when my teacher is like, number one,

so cut.

Yeah.

This guy, I look at this guy once.

I am rock hard, like one of the dutory, just like looking at him.

Ooh, baby.

Yeah.

What you want to hear back from

your nephew's tutor is that he is a quote certified dick slinger.

That's really the update that you're looking for.

Okay, so one quick note about Bologna here.

So he's a law student at the University of Bologna.

He's got these three benefices, which make him pretty wealthy.

By no means is that A, unusual.

B, he's probably not even in the top five or top 10 wealthiest 18-year-olds with benefices studying law at Bologna at that point.

Like he is very much one of a type of guy.

The only thing that sets him apart is that he's from Valencia and not from, and not from fucking Mantua or Venice or Milan or Genoa or wherever.

He probably doesn't even have a skyscraper like the other 18-year-olds do at this point.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Like, does he even have...

Yeah.

Maddie, that's more of a Sienna thing.

No, it's Bologna.

Oh, the towers.

I thought it was Sienna.

No, it was.

Never mind.

I'm wrong.

I'm checking in has been to Bologna in the last decade.

They had the towers there.

They did.

Oopsie daisy.

I made a mistake myself.

Anyway, so these he, but he is a normal, wealthy young man who's only, again, the only difference is he's from Spain.

I mean, Andy Fox.

We know this.

And he loves to fuck.

Andy Fox.

Oh, he loves to fuck his whole life.

The guy is like an Elon Musk number.

I'm sort of a lifelong fucker.

You'd think at some point that might interfere with your priesthood or your papacy, but it's the Renaissance.

I know that.

It's a common misconception.

Like, this is the only thing that sets Borgia apart is how blatant he is about this stuff, and especially about advancing the interests of

his illegitimate children, and how many there are.

Like, every other fucking guy has the exact same deal going.

He's just a little less subtle about it.

But he is, he is this relatively normal guy.

And I think probably one of the reasons that he is a Spaniard in this position, and it's unusual for there to be a Spaniard in this position, is the skyrocketing influence of Spain, which is then like

united under, I believe, Alonso, or is it him,

into the from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, which like kicks off a huge amount of dynastic consolidation across Europe.

So he's like, his presence there is a

like the ride, almost a byproduct of the rising influence of Spain.

So he's later made a cardinal at the age of 25 by his uncle Calixtus III.

Again, this is quite young for a cardinal.

Like usually you'd spend a little more time getting benefices for a bit.

Like, you don't get made a cardinal usually until a little later.

And this is, again, remarked upon frequently, that it's like, why is this guy whose frontal lobe isn't fully fused?

How come he's in conclave?

He should be in conclave.

Why is he walking around conclave tucking ducats in everybody else's socks?

But he is hot, so we let him get away with it.

Yeah.

He continues to accumulate these offices while acting as a papal legate to rest of provinces in the Vatican territories.

But mostly Calixtus III is not really concerned about that.

Calixtus III is largely concerned about the Ottomans.

And so he's concerned with like trying to muster support for John Hunyadi in Hungary against

the Ottomans, which fails.

He's got a bigger hat.

It's a lot scarier over there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the thing.

The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire has a way bigger hat than the Pope could ever dream of.

Yeah.

He's trying to to get that thing wider.

Yeah, you can't,

when you're, when, when the Sultan is hat maxing, you might as well just settle for second place.

Yeah, and this is when the Pope just has like the weird bullet metal metal looking one, right?

It's not even the big modern Pope hat.

Yeah, no, it's not, yeah, it's not even, not even a particularly impressive hat.

Europe's best guy has barely a hat.

This is why it should have fallen.

This is what the vaping cardinal in Conclave is most pissed off about.

But Calixtus also,

he's trying to fight the Turks in Southeast Europe, which fails, and again, tries to fight the Turks in the Mediterranean as well.

Like, again, he's not doing this as those armies.

He's mostly mustering support from largely the Holy Roman Emperor or the Spanish to try to send troops to fortify Europe against the Ottomans.

Yeah.

So what the church has.

that makes this possible is a vast financial network.

So basically the church is getting often quite small amounts of money from a huge number of places that are spread across Europe.

So despite the decline of the papacy as a moral authority or one that's really issuing a lot of religious directives, the financial infrastructure remains in place.

So there are really sophisticated mechanisms for transferring money from some small out-of-the-way parish in Saxony.

The money from that will eventually get to the papacy.

There are financial networks that make this happen.

This is a major spur to the development of banking in Europe, is the need to remit

papal revenue to the Holy See.

This is one of the driving forces behind that.

So the papacy has money, but trying to get people to do what it wants without much in the way of moral authority or temporal, actual temporal power outside central Italy is pretty difficult.

Yeah.

And so again, but remember, this financial network of

that will exist between different little towns in Saxony than running to Rome, that exists again, largely because

minor Spanish noblemen want to get on 19 sides of the same transaction so they can buy themselves another palace.

Yeah, they're getting like they're finding ways to get paid at.

every stage of the process.

Like the, the, one of the major complaints, right,

of the early reformers in the, in the Protestant Reformation and of Martin Luther is like, it's not just about indulgences.

It's that indulgences are the tip of the iceberg of an increasingly financialized church that has largely separated its financial functions from anything like pastoral care.

So what Luther and other reformers are mad about is a real thing.

Like, it's not like this is all some like weird Protestant propaganda that develops later.

Like this is something everybody was concerned about.

Like, it's pretty clear that by the early part of the 16th century, it's gotten out of hand.

And so

the office that's like Rodrigo keeps for basically his whole life, which is one of the most valuable offices in the whole Vatican.

He is created after his mission to Ancona, where he is, his uncle makes him the head of the chancellery of the Vatican.

So it's worth 6,000 ducats a year.

He is now one of the rich.

He's now like probably has the most economically advantage.

I'd say in terms of the sheer amount of killing you ordinarily have to do in Renaissance Europe to get 6,000 ducats a year, beyond maybe, I don't know, Jacob Fuger, he has the most economically advantageous position on the whole continent, or at least one of them.

6,000 ducats is a lot of money.

That's enough to hire a small army for about half a year just from that one office.

You could hire a small army.

Yeah.

And remember, he still has all his benefices.

He's still

in charge of different churches that are collecting cathedrals that are collecting money from churches that are sending money to him that he's spending on like silk slippers and courtesans.

Speaking of courtesy.

Which he doesn't even need to pull, by the way.

He's so hot.

I don't understand.

Yeah, but see,

as the saying goes,

what you're paying them for is to leave at that point.

That's the.

Many say, my religious network is my net worth.

So

he took mistresses

who would often bear him children.

His most famous, Cesara, who is interestingly, Cesara was called Duke Valentino because when eventually

when his father Rodrigo became Pope Alexander VI, Alexander switched from mostly having allegiances with the Spanish, German, and Neapolitan kings to mostly getting protection from France.

And his son was made the Duke of Valentinois largely because

it matched his nickname Valentino,

which is an Italian version of Valencian, which is where his father is from, which is a very tangled web that tells us not much.

And that actually tells us that that's a perfect example of how

the kind of financialization of these positions worked is that you don't have to be from any of these fucking places to get paid by them.

Like that's, and that right there, from my perspective, is the essence of what's happening in Europe around this time is that there's money.

You're finding clever ways to move it around.

It's disconnected from specific geographic points.

And other people are mad about it and want it.

That's, this is, this is the key stuff you got to grasp to make sense of this time.

So, but he, he has these, like all these kids, uh, Cesare and Lucrezia are some of his more famous ones, but by no, by no means any, all of his kids, and by no means even all of his famous ones.

And by the, but he also has like he keeps much younger mister instead of why are your parents names blue on Wikipedia it's like why are your illegitimate children's names blue on Wikipedia

why are your why have your illegitimate children's names been written in Tyrian purple on this scroll yeah

if they were assassinated it would be considered notable yeah

it's in Tyrian purple because I already looked at the other scroll that's more about them in particular

So anyway, by the late 1450s, the main concern of the papacy had become increasingly local and less global because these rivalries between Orsini and Colonna, between the Pope and Naples, between every northern Italian city-state and every other northern Italian city-state were ripping the entire peninsula to pieces.

And crucially, they were fucking with the money.

Because the more unstable Italy is, the harder it is to get those ducats to the Vatican so they can be distributed to your friends, basically.

right?

So the Pope becomes, the Pope is frantically trying to, but it's still Calixtus III, frantically trying to make alliances with powers outside of Italy to bring them into Italy to calm it down.

So this is about, this is from Hollingsworth again.

On the 12th of July, Calixtus III signed a bull claiming Naples as a lapsed fief of the church and repudiated the succession in the city.

He ordered all claimants to the Neapolitan throne to come to Rome, where he was going to make Pedro Luis his nephew the new king.

The Pope was reminded of his own mortality on the 21st of July when he suffered a violent attack of gout.

The condition was serious enough for Cardinal Rodrigo to return from Tivoli on 25th of July and to pray in St.

Peter's for his uncle's life.

A week later, a Mantuan ambassador reported the Pope had been ill for eight days with deposits in his food, with deposits in his urine, excuse me, and food goes in and out completely unchanged, which is, I think, very funny.

He eats a piece of bread and it just comes out as a piece of bread.

It slips right in.

Perfect subway sandwich is being extruded.

He's got like a Play-Doh disease.

He's like

fucking

extruders.

By the 30th of July, rumors were spreading through Rome that Calixtus III had died.

And

what we were talking to before, mobs of citizens were then venting their anger on any Catalan they could find, while rich merchants, apprehensive of rioting on a larger scale, locked up their goods and stopped trading.

On the 31st of July, the College of Cardinals met in an emergency session and appointed a commission of four cardinals, three of them French, to gather in the city the necessary troops to control the violence that was growing.

Quote, a reported at the time, His Holiness the Pope is so gravely ill that he has already been pronounced dead three times.

2 a.m.

going back from our death pronunciation.

Yeah.

It's just, it's just the one thing that actually heals him from his Play-Doh disease is hearing the like

The like the Last Rites.

And he's just like, fuck you.

Sits back up again.

This is insane Rob Ford energy right here.

Just throwing that out.

So at this point, though, right,

Calixtus, his uncle, Alfonso, is dead.

Rodrigo is 27 and knows he can't be poets.

Yeah, it took on the fourth try of reading of his last right.

Yeah, his third last rights, second last rights.

I've mixed two things there.

I've confused last rights and reading someone their rights, and now I'm back to the Swiss guard and windbreakers again.

Read of his last rights, boys.

You have the right to be forgiven.

If you cannot provide your own priest, a priest will be provided for you.

So at this point, Rodrigo is 27 and desperately needs to keep his do-nothing lucrative job as chancellor.

Because like now he is, because he's not Italian, italian he's relatively isolated in terms of his allies in the church and so like if a new pope comes up that's like not friendly to him that he's immediately going to lose that position and then the fail the foothold that the borgias gained in the church will be gone you're going to be exiled to spain with the rest of your family yeah you know to live only in moderately obscene wealth yeah you would become nothing but a historical footnote your assassination they'd be like eh maybe

uh so there's a conclave uh leading up to the election of Pius II in the movie.

Yeah, there's a conclave like from the movie.

Yeah.

There's a vaping cardinal somehow.

He has like the Arquebus version of a vape, like a black powder vape.

He's always walking into the room looking like Wily Coyote has been exposed to TNT.

He's a gunpowder cigarette.

But basically, Rodrigo uses his wealth.

to and again it's not clear what happens in the conclave that elects pious the second but rodrigo basically uses a gigantic amount of vote-purchasing blackmail and, you know, general Simony

to,

you know,

basically make sure that he gets to keep his do-nothing job.

So Pius is elected.

Rodrigo maintains his position despite being neither Italian nor French.

And here's a letter from Pope Pius II to Rodrigo.

Beloved son, we have learned that three days ago a large number of the women of Siena, adorned with all worldly vanity, gathered in the gardens of our well-beloved son, Giovanni de Bices, and that your eminent Giovanni de Bices gathered a bunch of women in Siena.

That's very funny.

And that your eminence, in contempt for the dignity of your position, remained with them from one o'clock until six o'clock in the afternoon, and that you had in your company another cardinal

should have recalled his duty.

We are told that the dances were immodest and the seductions of love beyond bounds, and that you yourself behaved as if you were one of the most vulgar men of the age.

In truth, I should blush to set down in detail all of what I have been told what happened.

Not only these things themselves, but the mere mention of them, are a dishonor to the office you hold.

In order to have more freedom for amusements, you forbade entry to the husbands, fathers, brothers, and relations who came with these young women.

You two with a handful of attendants, with the sole instigators and organizers.

It seems that at this moment, no other thing is spoken of in the town of Siena, and that you are the laughing stock of everybody.

Assuredly, here in the Bass, there's a great crowd of ecclesiastics and laymen.

You are on everybody's tongue.

We're all moving and talking about you right now.

So you know, we're all talking about you.

Well, I'm writing this letter nude, and we are all talking about you.

It's what a symposium is, isn't it?

Yeah,

if I was to say, but so bad.

Yeah, so I love that one of the objections there is that he didn't provide cuck chairs for the husbands.

You could have at least let them watch.

It's

a huge violation of papal etiquette in the mid-15th century, I'm told.

We are more angry than we can say, for it is a cause of dishonor to the ecclesiastical state and contempt for our ministry.

It gives pretext to those who accuse us of using our wealth and high office for orgies.

It is such things as these that cause the small esteem in which we are held by the princes and powers, the daily mockery of the laity, and the reprobation hurled at our own conduct when we undertake to reprove others.

The vicar of Christ himself is making us look bad.

Literally, yeah.

Everybody hates us, and you're just giving them fuel.

Yeah, I hate to see respectability politics like this.

It's really dark and nuts.

mats.

Let the man have his orgies.

Doesn't he work hard enough?

It's the Matt Gates defense is what that is.

But basically, right, it's his, there are a few things about this letter.

This is sort of a famous letter.

I'm not going to read all of it,

but this is a famous letter because it is kind of the thing that defines Rodrigo Borges' time in the church is everybody around him cannot stop talking about how much he's fucking and how corrupt he is and things like this.

As you say, Patrick, this is common for sort of for high-ranking churchmen of the age,

but it is something that is constantly leveled at him.

And partly the reason for, A, he probably did it.

That's why you would like fight to keep your office as the chancellor of the Vatican.

But also,

he wasn't one of them, right?

He wasn't an insider.

He wasn't beholden to the same kinds of Italian families that tend to protect one another.

Yeah.

So

this is exactly one of the dynamics that we need to nail down is like because he comes from Valencia, because

he doesn't have his own local network, it makes him more vulnerable to these kinds of charges, right?

Like, so there are there are tons of Italian families and they view these offices as belonging to them by right and they are actively going after them.

As this period is wearing on, I mean, the statistics I quoted earlier, like

these institutions are becoming increasingly Italian.

And so Borgia is their direct competitor.

This is a zero-sum game.

If Borgia gets the office,

then somebody else does it.

If he gets the courtesan, then somebody else does it.

Apparently, I would imagine that that was also a concern for these folks.

But so, yeah, it's not that

the things that he's doing, even the orgies sound pretty, pretty standard.

garden variety

papal orgies at this point in time.

I mean, they're missing cuck chairs, but yeah.

Yeah, like that's a huge faux pas, huge faux pas

to not provide cuck chairs.

But yeah, he's not really doing anything that's unusual.

It is the fact that he doesn't belong among them.

The these Italian families are growing increasingly used to these being their assets to divide up and fight over as they see fit.

So I'm going to do a little more of a time skip, right?

But because until he becomes pope, I mean, look, the thing is, there's a lot of various Italian Spanish, Italian German, Spanish German, French German, French-Italian political wangling.

And it's very interesting wangling, but mostly that's about Borgia's role as a diploma.

It's just wangling, interesting as fuck.

It's mostly about Borgia's role as a diplomat, both inside and outside the Vatican, basically using skullduggery to always make sure he was personally steering conclaves towards his favorite outcomes as popes come and go, and that he always stays chancellor, a bit like, I don't know Michael Applebaum in Montreal, right?

And therefore gets increasingly rich, as well as getting the church's dispensation yet to create the kingdom of Spain by marrying Ferdinand and Isabella he's also fathering children at an alarming rate so uh before so in 1488

that in itself is a as a great phrase like an alarming rate of child father

if trends continue all be this guy's child by 10 years from now

he's like the nf he's like the nfl wide receiver who who fathered more children in a single year than he had touchdown catches like that's the

that's rodrigo borgia and that's.

Yeah, he fathered more illegitimate children than celebrated masses.

That's that's actually, I would almost guarantee that that's the case for many of the years of Rodrigo Borgia holding these offices.

Yeah.

So

in 1492, Pope Innocent VIII dies, and we go back to conclave mode.

And there are three frontrunners, two of whom are Italian, one of whom is Rodrigo Borgia, who's basically basically, again, there's this is just a race to bribe or threaten or kill, if necessary, every other other cardinal as much as possible, as fast as possible.

So this is then

this period of time, as I mentioned at the top, there's a huge amount of violence in Rome because Rome briefly has no mayor.

There are no papal shock troops.

There's no pope directing the shock troops to like keep stuff steady because the papacy doesn't have shock troops.

The guy who becomes pope gets the shock troops.

Because you bring them with you.

But the bargaining was fierce.

But when the votes were counted.

let me do one quick note on that.

Part of the reason why this gets complicated violence-wise is that the leading Roman families are often themselves condottieri.

So they are they're like part of the way that they make their money and become rich is by using their local resources to bankroll hiring private armies, which they then hire out to other states in the Italian peninsula.

So this is like these guys are not like local pushovers.

They're pretty powerful folks.

And so the Rodrigo Borgia, and this is a quote from another sort of contemporaneous source, purchases the vote of a 96-year-old cardinal who no longer had all his faculties and was elected by one vote.

However, the conclave was the most expensive one in history, with over, I think, half a million ducats in bribes being paid.

We got to rein in this campaign finance stuff, you know.

Doing like moderate, moderate reform of the conclave.

At least that's what Vatican I is.

Yeah.

We need to overturn laity united.

Again, first Vatican Council.

Yes.

So

he then gets subjected to the traditional genital inspection before being satisfied that, yes, this is a man who can be Pope.

Yeah, they cut that out of Conclave, curiously.

I wanted to see Ray Fiennes, like, you know, really hang dong.

That's some interesting wangling.

My goodness, what wangling this is.

So Rodrigo takes the name Alexander VI, then goes to the window where he then is supposed to say, Volo, or I, or Wolo, I'm willing to serve as Pope.

Yolo.

Instead, unable to contain his excitement, he just simply yelled, I'm the Pope.

I'm the Pope.

Okay, that fucking rules.

That's

so hard.

So we're coming to the end of the episode, but I think the most interesting stuff is how people managed local power in Rome via the papacy in the Renaissance and how local of an office it really was.

But how was Alexander VI?

He's excited to be pope, but he has to take the bins out after this.

Yeah.

Like you got to, you got to imagine all of these guys.

And so

Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, his great rival is a guy named Giuliano della Rovere, who becomes pope after him as Julius II.

Della Rovere is from this noble family in northern Italy, but they also have interests in Rome.

And like Della Rovere is mad, like spends his entire, Alexander VI's entire papacy hating the Borgia pope and plotting against him and getting exiled.

But like these are, this is a local conflict within Rome, right?

Like these guys have their own gangs of thugs.

They are fighting over the Roman landscape.

Part of the way that they're proclaiming their power, Alexander VI does this, so do other popes, is they're beautifying the city of Rome.

It's like, it's extraordinarily Eric Adams.

Like,

I can't overstate the Eric Adams-ness of

these dynamics.

Well, I'll tell you this.

In 1494,

with the Spanish and Germans uninterested in helping him and the French bearing down on him, Alexander VI channels his inner Eric Adams and calls Bayezid II, Istanbul, always the first stop when you're seeking an alliance.

Hell Hell yeah.

Anyway, that doesn't go ahead, but you know, if only there was a, well, Patrick, there have been alliances of Pope and Sultan in the past, right?

That those alliances have actually occurred.

I know they were floated by

Alexander VI, but I don't know if one ever actually happened, if like the Pope cops and

the sort of Ottoman archivousers ever actually like drew swords together.

So they never drew swords together, but they did a lot of dealing.

And the dealing in this case is

murdering an exiled Ottoman prince named Prince Chem, who had taken up residence in Rome.

They were like, as always in these cases, Ottoman succession disputes were nasty.

This prince flees.

They're thinking they're going to use him as leverage against the Ottomans.

Eventually,

they end up murdering

this poor Ottoman prince who's taken up

refuge in Rome as a quid pro quo

in papal sultan dealings.

So that's very much the very much thing here is like, it doesn't matter who you are.

It doesn't matter what you've done.

It doesn't matter whether you're Muslim or Christian or something else entirely.

The popes will deal with you if it's going to help them in their in their pursuit of local and regional power.

Yep, that's right.

Well, you know what?

It doesn't matter if you're black, white,

green, gray, or purple, you're still going to bribe me to become pope.

I mean, in the church, it matters a lot whether you're

purple or red or white, but it's mostly about cassocks, you know.

All right.

Well, look, we've gone for an especially long conclave here.

Fuck, we should have said it was a conclave and we were cardinals rather than mayors.

Imagine we did that at the beginning.

Yeah, I want, go into your mind's eye and imagine, your mind's ear and imagine we said that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Eminence Patrick, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us today.

Thank you so much.

I'll expect my payment in courtesans, please.

It's a good thing you didn't introduce us, Cardinals, because I would just get distracted by like different articles of like clerical wear.

That was a hyperfixation for a while.

So I'm just going to be doing your bit about like naming places where Milo could be on tour.

I'm going to be wearing a Fariolo.

I'm going to be wearing an alb.

I'm going to be wearing a pallium.

Yeah, I just, I just had this occur to me.

I'm not sure why I didn't say this earlier, but hey, we're doing Simony over here.

That's right.

That's right.

I love Simony.

I hope I get to commit Simony one day.

It's the only sin that most normal people don't have access to.

I know, right?

Like, see, that's that's the reformation that I want to be a part of.

Fuck getting communion in both kinds.

Like, I want to be able to do Simony 2.

That's, that's, that is my demand as a member.

Yeah.

Simony 2, baby.

Not the first one.

Surely,

like, like a kind of universalized personal simony is just what happens when, like, a mega church owner gets two in bed with a local mayor and like

and gives like sort of like a million dollars to build an easement off of his like McMansion.

Surely that's simony, too.

Oh, that's, that's American Simony.

Yeah.

That's right.

American Simony.

You could do it better here, baby.

We should plug the Patreon before we head out because this is a free episode.

Yeah, we have one of those.

Listen, I got to pay for these Berettis somehow, you know.

Check out the Patreon Biretta, the little hat that looks like a kind of bakery

box with a bottom on top of it.

Can you grab me one too while you're out there?

Yeah, sure.

Hey, a whole round of Bioettis for all of us.

Oh, yeah.

I'm not going to turn one down.

That's the coffee machine.

Okay, well, get a round of them just in case.

All right.

It's the guys who make mocha pots.

So I want to thank, but I want to thank Eminence Patrick for coming on.

And I want to thank

all you, the flock, who have been enjoying our preaching.

Of course, we've been delegated this office by our very wealthy uncle who is living in Rome.

We can't read, but we're pretty sure we know what it says in the Bible.

And also to remind you to sign up for Simony3, which is our Patreon.

Nocause, no mayers.vatican.

We will see.com.

It's that calm.

It's dot com.

Who's our special guest next week, November?

Oh, so our special guest next week is Leona C.

Malberg, mayor of the city of Vernon, California.

And every time, you know how Donald Trump took that perfect phone call one time?

Well, I keep reading perfect articles about this guy, about like his relatives, about the people who ran against him, and about the city of Vernon itself.

So I'm super excited to talk about it.

Yeah, I would say to listeners, don't look up anything about this guy, but do look at a photo of Vernon, California.

It looks like the chemical plant zone from Sonic the Hedgehog.

And that'll pick your interest enough.

Hell yeah.

All right.

All right.

I think that's the closing Wikipedia page list of cardinal nephews.

That is a real page, by the way.

And I've been reading it.

Maddie Healy was the nephew of a cardinal?

What the hell?

All right,

we got to get out of here.

Thank you very much, everybody.

And

peace be with you.

Bye.

And also with you.

Bye.

And also with you.

No, it's with your spirit now.

No.

God damn it.

No.

Fuck.