Free The Sistine Secrets by Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner

day, was poisoned by a platter of figs served to him by a beautiful young boy dressed as a girl. If true, the figs were probably sent by Charles II, the king of France, who had been trying for some time to take over the Catholic Church and thereby obtain unchallenged rule over all Christendom. What we know for certain is that the very next pope, Clement V, immediately moved the papal court to France. He set up his new palace in Avignon, where the papacy would have its headquarters for the next seventy-three years. This period is referred to by the Italians as the Vatican’s “Babylonian exile.”
    The poet Dante Alighieri, furious at this perceived betrayal of Italy, placed Clement and other pro-French popes in hell in his epic poem Inferno. There he describes Clement as “ un pastor sanza legge ”—an illegitimate pastor—and his supporters as always ready to “ puttaneggiar coi regi ”—to prostitute themselves to earthly kings. In fact, Dante likens Pope Clement to Jason, the illegitimate ruler of Israel, crowned by the pagan Seleucid enemies of the Jews, as described in the book of the Maccabees.
    This period of the Avignon popes was one of the lowest points in the history of the Church, tarnished by horrendous scandals, violence, intrigues, and assassinations. Finally, in 1377 Pope Gregory XI brought the papacy back to Rome. Still, the French royalty tried to force the Church back to Avignon, continuing their political intrigues and poisonings and elections of French popes (called the antipopes by Rome) until the middle of the next century. In addition to these problems, plagues, and scandals, the growth of the Turkish Muslim Empire seriously threatened the future of the Vatican.
    Renewed hope came with the papacy of Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere (1414–1484), the uncle of the future Pope Julius II, who started the rebuilding of Rome. Even though Sixtus’s motives were to glorify himself and his family—and to make all his clan obscenely wealthy along the way—he was the first to begin a serious urban renewal of Rome since the fall of the empire about a thousand years before. From Sixtus onward, Rome would be considered the undisputed capital of the Catholic world.
    It was during this period of frenetic construction that many treasures of ancient pagan Rome were accidentally rediscovered. Just from the excavations for new foundations in one area of Rome, two priceless statues were found: the Belvedere Torso and the Belvedere Apollo, both of which were destined to have an enormous impact on the young Michelangelo. By bringing lost works like these back to light, the rebuilding of Rome also brought back the Classical arts to the Western world. Soon, among the wealthy and powerful, there was a mania for anything of ancient Greco-Roman design. The next logical step was finding talents who could approximate the beauty of the original artworks, but within the rigorous confines of acceptable Christian thought.
    THE FALL OF BYZANTIUM
     
    The last vestige of the vast Roman Empire in the Middle Ages was Constantinople (today Istanbul, Turkey), founded by the emperor Constantine. Constantine had proclaimed Christianity a state-sponsored religion in the year 313, when he reunited the empire and became the one unchallenged emperor. In spite of church legends, according to most Christian historians, Constantine himself never became completely Christian, remaining part pagan until being baptized against his wishes on his deathbed in 337 CE. Ironically, he chose to make the empire reflect his somewhat schizophrenic religious life. He permanently split it into the Christian West, ruled spiritually by Rome and the pope, and the pagan Orient (East), ruled politically and militarily from his new Christian capital city Constantinopolis (Constantinople), named for himself. Less than a century later, the barbarian hordes overran Rome in the horrific sack of 410. Rome never recovered from this trauma, but staggered along until its