Pope Sixtus IV

Abstract

The humbly born Ligurian Francesco della Rovere (b. c. 1414–d. 1484) was entrusted to the Franciscan Order from the age of nine and educated in Chieri, near Turin, and at the university of Padua. By 1460 his distinguished academic career had taken him from Padua to Bologna, Pavia, Siena, Florence, and Perugia. He then served as Roman procurator and vicar general of the Friars Minor, and minister general from 1464, before being made a cardinal by Pope Paul II in 1467. His learning was demonstrated in three theological treatises: De sanguine Christi, De potentia dei, and De futuris contingentibus. If the cardinals reckoned on securing a meek scholar-pope when they elected him to the highest office in August 1471, they miscalculated, for what emerged from the Franciscan chrysalis was an enthusiastic player of papal politics who advanced the interests of his kinsmen with greater zeal than had any of his recent predecessors. Pope Sixtus IV was a rarity in the higher echelons of the Church precisely because he was of non-noble birth, and he clearly sought to compensate for this not only by promoting so many of his relatives, both clerics and laymen, but by commissioning numerous building projects that could be decorated with oak trees and acorns, the Della Rovere emblems. The holy year or jubilee of 1475 presented the ideal opportunity for such assertions of the family’s newly established status. Toward the end of the pontificate, Sixtus’s taste for entering political alliances embroiled the papacy in a sequence of peninsular wars, the first of which was triggered by the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. The broad outline of his pontificate can be traced in various Reference Works and Overviews, but attention should focus on the sheer quantity of Primary Sources, which are subdivided into Election Capitulations, Histories, Letters, and Panegyrics and Polemics in this article. Sixtus was first and foremost a Franciscan Pope, which was duly reflected in the visual and literary culture of Rome. Again reflecting the quantity of available publications, Culture is subdivided into Architecture and Sculpture, the architectural and artistic composite that is the Sistine Chapel, and Other Painting, before concluding with the literary culture of the Written and Spoken Word. Beyond the realm of culture, other facets of the pontificate are featured under Governing the Church and Prelates and Princes, though it should not be implied that there was a neat division between “internal” and “foreign” policies. All aspects of the pontificate are explored in Collections of Papers and Journals.