Pope Leo X (1513-1521)

The Pope of the Protestant Rupture

No pontificate is as inseparably linked to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation as that of Leo X. When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther posted or circulated his Ninety-five Theses against indulgences on 31 October 1517, he was not at first addressing the pope: he was protesting against the abuses of one particular preaching campaign.^[13] But the movement he set off quickly escaped everyone, and it was Leo X who would have, first, to formulate the pontifical answer.

The stakes were not merely political. The Renaissance pope found himself facing a challenge that struck at the heart of the sacramental system: penance, the treasury of merits, the authority of Peter's successor, the relationship between Scripture and the Church. Leo X settled the matter by doctrinal condemnation, but he failed to understand that the German affair was not a passing monastic storm.^[14][15]

The Prince of the Roman Renaissance

Leo X is also the pope who embodies the worldly peak of the Renaissance papacy. Raised in Florence in the household of Lorenzo the Magnificent, educated by the greatest humanists — Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, Bernardo Dovizi (the future Cardinal Bibbiena) — he ascended the throne with a refined culture and an immense taste for the arts.^[16][17]

Johann Peter Kirsch reports that in 1518 an ambassador stationed in Rome wrote that the pope entrusted to Raphael everything touching art: the testimony, whose author Kirsch does not name, cannot serve as proof — it merely illustrates Leo X's reputation as a protector of the arts.^[18]

Under him, Rome shone. But this splendour had a price: a crushing lifestyle, considerable military expenditure, a financial machinery that turned spiritual offices and graces into resources, and which ended by handing Luther the occasion he was looking for.^[19]

The Pope of Two Medicis on the Throne

With Leo X, the Medici family settled at the summit of the Church. The pope made his cousin Giulio de' Medici Archbishop of Florence and then a cardinal as early as 1513: the latter would become Pope Clement VII (1523-1534).^[20] His nephew Lorenzo II de' Medici, whom he made Duke of Urbino, would be the father of Catherine de' Medici, the future Queen of France. Within a single generation, one Medici pontificate thus linked the Renaissance papacy, the second Medici pope and the French monarchy.

Notices and Great Encyclopaedias

The Holy See's official record places Leo X in the list of Peter's successors as the 217th pope.^[21] The Catholic Encyclopedia, from the pen of Johann Peter Kirsch, gives the detailed biography: birth in Florence on 11 December 1475, humanist education, early cardinalate, exile after the fall of the Medicis, captivity at Ravenna, the election of 1513, government, patronage, the Lutheran crisis, finances and death.^[22] Britannica and the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Treccani) complete and refine the Italian chronology of the pontificate.^[23][24]

The Great Critical History: Ludwig von Pastor

The scholarly reference remains Ludwig von Pastor's History of the Popes, whose volumes devoted to Leo X (vols. VII-VIII of the French edition) rest on a massive survey of the Vatican, Venetian and Florentine archives.^[25][26] Pastor, a Catholic historian, conceals none of the pope's weaknesses; but he sets his reign within the long history of a papacy that survives its mediocre pastors. It is this twofold demand — honesty about the facts, a perspective of faith — that the present article seeks to uphold.

The Pontifical Documents

The acts of the pontificate are to be read in their own texts: the decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council, the Concordat of Bologna (18 August 1516), the dogmatic bull Apostolici regiminis (1513) on the immortality of the soul, and above all the two bulls against Luther, Exsurge Domine (15 June 1520) and Decet Romanum Pontificem (3 January 1521).^{[27][28][29][30]} It is these documents, not later polemics, that establish what Leo X actually decided.

The Child of Lorenzo the Magnificent

Giovanni was born in Florence on 11 December 1475, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Clarice Orsini.^[31][32] Destined by his father for the ecclesiastical state in order to secure the family's influence in the Church, he received the tonsure at the age of seven, on 1 June 1483, and was provided with considerable benefices before he had even studied.^[33]

His education was that of a humanist prince. His teachers were Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino and Bernardo Dovizi, and he studied canon law at the University of Pisa from 1489 to 1491.^[34] This formation marked his whole life: Leo X would love letters, the arts and learned conversation as much as a churchman ought to love prayer.

Cardinal at Thirteen

On 9 March 1489, Pope Innocent VIII created Giovanni cardinal-deacon, at the age of thirteen — on condition that he not wear the insignia for three years.^[35][36] On 9 March 1492, at Fiesole, he received the red hat; on 23 March, he was admitted to the Sacred College in Rome.^[37]

This childhood cardinalate illustrates exactly the abuse the reformers would soon denounce: major ecclesiastical dignities distributed for family and political reasons. Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, in a famous letter, recommended to his young cardinal son moderation and virtue amid Roman corruption — proof that the most clear-sighted contemporaries already saw the danger.^[38]

Exile, Flight and the Captivity of Ravenna

The young cardinal's career was overturned in 1494. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1492) and the expulsion of the Medicis from Florence before the French invasion, Giovanni had to flee his city disguised as a Franciscan friar, in July 1494.^[39] He then knew years of exile and travel across Europe, before returning to Rome in 1500.

His fortune revived under Julius II. Appointed papal legate of Bologna and Romagna on 1 October 1511, he took part in the Holy League's campaigns against the French. At the Battle of Ravenna, on 11 April 1512, he was taken prisoner by the French; freed on 6 June, he returned triumphantly to Florence on 14 September 1512, bringing the Medicis back to power.^[40] The man who would be elected pope a few months later had thus known flight, exile and prison: his election was also a revenge.

A Brief Conclave and a Very Young Pope

Julius II died on 21 February 1513. The conclave that opened was dominated by the opposition between the elder cardinals, attached to the traditional factions, and a group of young cardinals who carried Giovanni de' Medici's candidacy. After a very short conclave, Giovanni was elected on 11 March 1513, at thirty-seven.^[41][42][43]

His canonical situation was unusual: elected pope, he was still only a deacon. He therefore had to be ordained a priest on 15 March, consecrated a bishop on 17 March, and crowned on 19 March 1513.^[44] He took the name Leo X, and his solemn entry, on 11 April, would be remembered for its pomp.

The Apocryphal Quotation "Let Us Enjoy the Papacy"

To this moment belongs the most famous phrase attributed to Leo X:

"Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it." — attributed to Leo X, apocryphal attribution^[45]

This formula, supposedly addressed to his brother Giuliano, is today regarded by historians as doubtful, if not forged. The only witness invoked is the Venetian ambassador Marin Giorgi: yet, as Ludwig von Pastor establishes, Giorgi took up his post in Rome only two years after the 1513 election — he is therefore not a contemporary witness — and, as a Venetian, he was not impartial; he merely repeats an antechamber anecdote.^[46] Pastor concludes that these words "rest on no authentic tradition", and Giovio and Guicciardini refused to take them up.^[47]

It would therefore be dishonest to open the pope's portrait with this phrase as though it were a confession. It says above all the reputation for worldliness that Leo X carried in his lifetime — a reputation partly deserved, but which Reformation propaganda then transformed into imaginary cynicism. The Catholic historian must expose the forgery as much as acknowledge the real weakness.

The Closure of the Fifth Lateran Council

Leo X inherited from his predecessor the Fifth Lateran Council, opened by Julius II in 1512 to answer the schismatic conciliabulum of Pisa backed by France.^[48] The Medici pope presided over its final sessions and closed it on 16 March 1517.^[49]

This council produced important acts, often overshadowed by what followed. As early as 1513, the bull Apostolici regiminis condemned the philosophers — in the wake of Pietro Pomponazzi — who denied the immortality of the individual soul, and required teachers to defend Christian truth.^[50][51] The council reaffirmed the superiority of the pope over the council against conciliarism — the doctrine that a council could judge and depose the pope —, regulated the nascent printing press, and voted decrees for the reform of the clergy and the Curia, that is, the central administration which assists the pope in governing the Church.^[52]

"The council issued numerous and very opportune decrees." — Johann Peter Kirsch, Catholic Encyclopedia, on Lateran V^[53]

The tragedy is that these reform decrees largely remained a dead letter. The council had diagnosed the ills Luther would denounce a few months after its closure; it lacked the strength to cure them. For doctrinal and disciplinary detail, see the dedicated article on the Fifth Lateran Council.

The Concordat of Bologna (1516)

The most lasting diplomatic act of the pontificate is the Concordat of Bologna, concluded on 18 August 1516 between Leo X and King Francis I of France, after the meeting of the two men at Bologna.^[54][55] The concordat abolished the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), which had enshrined Gallican liberties and the autonomy of the Church in France.

In exchange, the king obtained the right to nominate to the principal benefices of the realm — archbishoprics, bishoprics, abbeys, priories — the pope retaining canonical institution, that is, the official act by which the Church confers the office on the king's candidate, and the annates, that is, the tax paid to Rome levied on one year's revenue of the benefice.^[56][57] This compromise gave the French sovereign considerable hold over his Church, while bringing France back into Roman obedience.

The Concordat of Bologna would govern relations between the French crown and the papacy until the French Revolution — the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, voted on 12 July 1790, put an end to it in fact — nearly two hundred and seventy-five years.^[58][59] It was a Roman success with short sight and long reach: Leo X won France against Gallicanism, but durably armed the kings of France with a power over the Church that would weigh heavily in the following centuries.

The Failed Reform of the Curia

On 5 May 1514, Leo X promulgated a bull reforming the Roman Curia, the Church's central administration.^[60] On paper, he knew the abuses: venality of offices, that is, the sale of ecclesiastical offices for money, accumulation of benefices, the lax morals of part of the clergy. The Fifth Lateran Council was pressing in the same direction.

But reform ran up against the very logic of the system that financed pontifical pomp and wars. The pope who condemned venality in theory multiplied venal offices in practice to fill his coffers.^[61] This contradiction — wanting reform without giving up what made it impossible — is the key to the pontificate. Leo X was not a cynic; he was a man caught in a machine he had neither the strength nor the resolve needed to break.

Between France and the Empire

Leo X's reign was crossed by the Italian Wars, in which the France of Francis I and the House of Habsburg confronted each other. Pontifical policy was made of reversals: the pope sought above all to preserve the independence of the Papal States and Medici interests, even at the cost of changing alliances.^[62][63] He was credited with the maxim of never ceasing to negotiate with the enemy of an allied prince.^[64]

After the French victory at Marignano (1515), Leo X came to terms with Francis I — hence the Concordat of Bologna. But at the end of his reign, he sided with Emperor Charles V: the league between the papacy and the Empire was signed on 8 May 1521, and pontifical and imperial troops drove the French from Milan in November 1521, a few days before the pope's death.^[65]

The Imperial Election of 1519

A decisive moment was the imperial election of 1519. On the death of Maximilian I (January 1519), two candidates contended for the crown of the Holy Empire: Francis I and Charles of Habsburg, King of Spain.^[66] Leo X feared one as much as the other: an emperor already master of Naples to the south and of the Empire to the north would encircle the Papal States.

The pope therefore manoeuvred, supporting in turn a German prince, then Francis I, before resigning himself to Charles, elected as Charles V on 28 June 1519.^[67][68] This winding diplomacy reveals the structural weakness of the Renaissance papacy, which had become one Italian power among others, and too absorbed by the political chessboard to measure the religious fire smouldering in Germany.

The War of Urbino and Medici Nepotism

The most questionable affair is the War of Urbino (1516-1517). Leo X despoiled Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, condemned for felony on 14 March 1516, in order to give the duchy to his nephew Lorenzo II de' Medici, made Duke of Urbino on 18 August 1516.^[69] The war to subdue the city cost enormous sums — more than eight hundred thousand ducats — and emptied the pontifical treasury.^[70][71]

This is nepotism in its crudest form: a war waged with the Church's resources to enlarge a family. The advancement of Giulio de' Medici (cardinal in 1513) and the installation of Lorenzo at the head of Florence belong to the same dynastic policy.^[72] Leo X governed the Church like a Medici principality — and the Church would pay the moral price.

The Cardinals' Conspiracy (1517)

In 1517 there erupted an affair revealing the corruption of the Sacred College: the conspiracy of Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci. Discontented with the pope, the young cardinal plotted to have Leo X poisoned by a physician.^[73] The plot, discovered in late April, led to Petrucci's arrest on 19 May 1517; the cardinal would be strangled in prison.^[74][75] Other cardinals (Sauli, Riario, Soderini, Castellesi), suspected of having known without denouncing, were struck with enormous fines — Cardinal Riario paid 150,000 ducats.^[76]

Leo X's riposte was spectacular: on 1 July 1517, he created at a stroke thirty-one new cardinals, the most massive promotion in history up to that point.^[77][78] The gesture secured the pope's authority over a Sacred College reduced to obedience, but many of these red hats were granted for large sums of money, further aggravating the charge of venality.^[79] Among them, however, were also men of great quality, such as the future humanist cardinals.

Indulgences and Saint Peter's Basilica

The occasion of the crisis was financial and pastoral. To complete Saint Peter's Basilica, begun under Julius II, Leo X relaunched the preaching of a plenary indulgence. In Germany, it was tied to a particular affair: Albert of Brandenburg, to confirm his accumulation of the Archbishopric of Mainz, had to pay a heavy sum to Rome; he was authorized to preach the indulgence and to retain half of its proceeds.^[80]

The preaching, entrusted notably to the Dominican Johann Tetzel, degenerated into abuse: spiritual grace was presented almost as a transaction, particularly the "indulgences for the dead".^[81] For the Church's exact doctrine — what an indulgence is and is not — see the article on indulgences. The essential point, here, is that the practice supplied Luther with his starting grievance.

Luther: From Unknown Monk to Schism

On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther made public his Ninety-five Theses against indulgences.^[82] Leo X, absorbed by the imperial election and Italian politics, gravely underestimated the affair: he saw in it at first a quarrel of monks.^[83][84]

"He failed to recognize the gravity of the situation and let the imperial election overshadow the revolt." — Summary of the Catholic Encyclopedia on Leo X's reaction^[85]

The stages followed one another: the meeting with Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg (1518), the Leipzig debate with Johann Eck (1519), Luther's progressive hardening. The pope long left theologians and diplomats to act before deciding himself. Luther's biography and doctrine belong to the dedicated article Martin Luther; the systematic refutation of the Reformation theses, to the article on answers to Protestantism.

Exsurge Domine (1520) and the Excommunication (1521)

The doctrinal answer finally came. On 15 June 1520, Leo X promulgated the bull Exsurge Domine, which condemned forty-one propositions drawn from Luther's writings and gave him sixty days to retract under pain of excommunication.^[86] These forty-one propositions are listed in Denzinger's Enchiridion symbolorum, the reference collection of magisterial texts, under numbers DH 1451-1491.^[87] The incipit borrows from the psalm:

"Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause." — Leo X, bull Exsurge Domine, 15 June 1520^[88]

Luther answered with contempt: on 10 December 1520, at Wittenberg, he publicly burned the bull and the books of canon law.^[89] The rupture was henceforth consummated. On 3 January 1521, the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem pronounced Luther's excommunication.^[90] A few months later, the Diet of Worms (April-May 1521) added the imperial ban to the ecclesiastical sentence.^[91]

On the doctrinal substance, these acts were legitimate and well-founded: Exsurge Domine condemned propositions genuinely contrary to the Catholic faith on penance, purgatory, free will and the authority of the Church — with varied theological qualifications according to the proposition, as the very text of the bull indicates. Where Leo X failed was not in the condemnation, but in the slowness, the political blindness and the inability to pursue in parallel the interior reform the evil demanded. The answer came too late and without the conversion of morals that alone would have made it credible.

Raphael, the Arts and Saint Peter's

Leo X made Rome the artistic capital of Europe. He entrusted to Raphael the direction of the works at Saint Peter's, the decoration of the Vatican Loggia — the famous cycle known as "Raphael's Bible" (1513-1518) — and the cartoons for the tapestries of the Sistine Chapel depicting scenes of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.^[92][93] He commissioned from Michelangelo the facade, then the New Sacristy, of San Lorenzo in Florence.^[94]

The pontifical court attracted the greatest: Cardinal Bembo and Cardinal Sadolet, apostolic secretaries and men of letters of the first rank; more than a hundred Latin poets; musicians from across Europe.^[95] Leo X revived the Roman University (5 November 1513), encouraged Greek and founded a Medici academy, and enriched the Vatican Library, recovering notably the Medici family's library.^[96][97]

Splendour and Ambiguity

This patronage is one of the greatest in history; it bequeathed to the Church and the world imperishable masterpieces. But it raises a question contemporaries were already asking: must Peter's successor be first a prince of the arts, or a pastor of souls?

"In the general opinion, it was harmful to the Church that her Head should find his pleasure in plays, music, hunting and buffoonery, instead of seriously attending to the needs of his flock." — Sigismondo Tizio, a contemporary devoted to the Holy See, quoted by the Catholic Encyclopedia^[98]

Leo X was no infidel: he heard Mass daily, recited the breviary, fasted three times a week and distributed large alms — more than six thousand ducats a year.^[99] But his religion was that of a cultivated and benevolent man, not of a reformer. And it was precisely a reformer that the hour required.

The reverse of the splendour was financial. Leo X dissipated in two years the treasure amassed by Julius II; by the spring of 1515, the coffers were empty.^[100] For an annual revenue of 500,000 to 600,000 ducats, he spent without counting: the War of Urbino, the arts, festivities, the train of a sumptuous court.^[101][102]

The table below summarizes the pontificate's financial machinery, as reported by contemporaries and historians.

A pamphlet of 1521 cruelly summed up the reign by saying that Leo X had devoured three pontificates: the treasure of Julius II, the revenues of his own reign, and those of his successor.^[107] To fill these abysses, venal offices, jubilees and indulgences were multiplied — that is, financial necessity aggravated precisely the abuses that fed the revolt.

A Sudden Death, without the Last Sacraments

Leo X died suddenly in Rome, in the night of 1 December 1521, at forty-five, carried off by an intermittent fever: Pastor concludes that everything points to a violent attack of malaria — a diagnosis Kirsch phrases as a "malignant malaria" — malaria then raging around the Magliana where the pope had caught cold.^[108] Contrary to a tenacious legend, he did not die without the last sacraments: he had made his confession with great devotion, asked for extreme unction and died with the crucifix on his lips invoking the name of Jesus — viaticum alone was deferred in view of his extreme weakness — and Pastor declares absolutely false the contrary assertion repeated by Roscoe, Ranke and Brosch.^[109] As with every sudden death, there was talk of poisoning: the physician Severino, present at the autopsy, ruled out poison, and while Guicciardini and Giovio remained convinced of the crime, Vettori opposed it; after his death, his memory endured extravagant attacks and Roman pasquinades.^[110]

First buried in Saint Peter's, his body was later transferred to the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where his cousin, now Clement VII, had a tomb raised for him.^[111] The Sacred College, divided and ruined, elected on 9 January 1522 an unexpected successor: the austere Fleming Adrian VI, the last non-Italian pope before the twentieth century, who would attempt the reform Leo X had not made.

The Judgment of Historians

The verdict, among Catholic historians themselves, is severe but just.

"Leo X is in large measure responsible for the fact that faith in the integrity and merit of the papacy sank so low." — Alfred von Reumont, quoted by the Catholic Encyclopedia^[112]

This judgment does not make Leo X the sole culprit of the Reformation: its causes are long and deep, predating him. But he bears a responsibility of his own: having governed the Church as a worldly prince at the hour when it called for a saint, and having failed to see, in the monk of Wittenberg, the announcement of an earthquake.

Leo X's pontificate poses the believer a formidable question: how can the Church be holy when its supreme pastor is so worldly? The Catholic answer is precise and ancient.

The holiness of the Church does not lie in the moral perfection of each of its members, were he pope, but in its head, Christ, in its doctrine, its sacraments and the holiness it never ceases to bring forth in true believers. The pope enjoys the assistance of the Spirit so as not to teach error when he defines the faith; he receives no guarantee of being personally holy. History verifies this cruelly: under Leo X, the Church taught no error — Apostolici regiminis (dogmatic constitution of Lateran V, eighth session, 19 December 1513) defines the immortality of the individual soul, while Exsurge Domine censures forty-one of Luther's propositions with varied qualifications according to the proposition (heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears or seductive to the simple), not as a uniform definition — even as the pope's life was not equal to his office and the council's reform decrees remained a dead letter.

"But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of God, and not of us." — Saint Paul, 2 Corinthians 4:7

This is exactly the mystery of Leo X. The "earthen vessel" was cracked, sumptuous and fragile; the treasure — the faith, the Eucharist, Peter's succession — remained intact. Far from being an argument against the papacy, the reign of a bad pope who yet did not corrupt the deposit of faith is, to the eye of faith, a sign of divine assistance. The Protestant Reformation thought to refute the Church by pointing at the Medicis; it in reality showed that the Church survives even its worldly pastors.

This trial called forth the answer: the Catholic reform came, not through Leo X, but through the Council of Trent, the reforming saints and the new orders. On this counter-response, see the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent.

• Pope Julius II — Leo X's warrior predecessor, who opened the Fifth Lateran Council and launched the rebuilding of Saint Peter's.
• The Fifth Lateran Council — the last council before the Reformation, closed by Leo X: immortality of the soul, pontifical primacy, unfinished reform.
• Martin Luther — the Augustinian monk whose 1517 revolt opened the Protestant rupture under Leo X's pontificate.
• The Protestant Reformation — the movement born of the indulgences crisis, condemned by Exsurge Domine.
• Indulgences — the exact Catholic doctrine, distinct from the abuses of the German preaching.
• Answers to Protestantism — the systematic refutation of the Reformation theses.
• The Council of Trent — the great Catholic reform Leo X had failed to carry out.
• The Catholic Counter-Reformation — the Church's recovery after the rupture.