The Borgias | Page 5

threatening to fall in about 1440,
and Nicholas V, artistic forerunner of Julius II and Leo X, had had it
pulled down, together with the temple of Probus Anicius which
adjoined it. In their place he had had the foundations of a new temple
laid by the architects Rossellini and Battista Alberti; but some years
later, after the death of Nicholas V, Paul II, the Venetian, had not been
able to give more than five thousand crowns to continue the project of
his predecessor, and thus the building was arrested when it had scarcely
risen above the ground, and presented the appearance of a still-born
edifice, even sadder than that of a ruin.
As to the piazza itself, it had not yet, as the reader will understand from
the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini, or the
dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to Pliny,
was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome by
Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till 1586.
Now, as Nero's Circus was situated on the very ground where St.
Peter's now stands, and the base of this obelisk covered the actual site
where the vestry now is, it looked like a gigantic needle shooting up
from the middle of truncated columns, walls of unequal height, and
half-carved stones.
On the right of this building, a ruin from its cradle, arose the Vatican, a
splendid Tower of Babel, to which all the celebrated architects of the
Roman school contributed their work for a thousand years: at this
epoch the two magnificent chapels did not exist, nor the twelve great
halls, the two-and-twenty courts, the thirty staircases, and the two
thousand bedchambers; for Pope Sixtus V, the sublime swineherd, who
did so many things in a five years' reign, had not yet been able to add
the immense building which on the eastern side towers above the court
of St. Damasius; still, it was truly the old sacred edifice, with its
venerable associations, in which Charlemagne received hospitality
when he was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III.
All the same, on the 9th of August, 1492, the whole of Rome, from the
People's Gate to the Coliseum and from the Baths of Diocletian to the

castle of Sant' Angelo, seemed to have made an appointment on this
piazza: the multitude thronging it was so great as to overflow into all
the neighbouring streets, which started from this centre like the rays of
a star. The crowds of people, looking like a motley moving carpet, were
climbing up into the basilica, grouping themselves upon the stones,
hanging on the columns, standing up against the walls; they entered by
the doors of houses and reappeared at the windows, so numerous and so
densely packed that one might have said each window was walled up
with heads. Now all this multitude had its eyes fixed on one single
point in the Vatican; for in the Vatican was the Conclave, and as
Innocent VIII had been dead for sixteen days, the Conclave was in the
act of electing a pope.
Rome is the town of elections: since her foundation down to our own
day--that is to say, in the course of nearly twenty-six centuries-- she has
constantly elected her kings, consuls, tribunes, emperors, and popes:
thus Rome during the days of Conclave appears to be attacked by a
strange fever which drives everyone to the Vatican or to Monte Cavallo,
according as the scarlet-robed assembly is held in one or the other of
these two palaces: it is, in fact, because the raising up of a new pontiff
is a great event far everybody; for, according to the average established
in the period between St. Peter and Gregory XVI, every pope lasts
about eight years, and these eight years, according to the character of
the man who is elected, are a period either of tranquillity or of disorder,
of justice or of venality, of peace or of war.
Never perhaps since the day when the first successor of St. Peter took
his seat on the pontifical throne until the interregnum which now
occurred, had so great an agitation been shown as there was at this
moment, when, as we have shown, all these people were thronging on
the Piazza of St. Peter and in the streets which led to it. It is true that
this was not without reason; for Innocent VIII--who was called the
father of his people because he had added to his subjects eight sons and
the same number of daughters--had, as we have said, after living a life
of self-indulgence, just died, after a death- struggle during which, if the
journal of Stefano Infessura may be believed, two hundred and twenty
murders were committed in