ntirely for their own prosperity and not at all for that of
Christianity, and you may realize how, by levying it, Alexander laid
himself open to harsh criticism.

The only impugnable matter in the deed lies, as has been said, in the
number of cardinals so created at a batch. But the ends to be served
may be held to justify, if not altogether, at least in some measure,
the means adopted. The Romagna war for which the funds were needed was
primarily for the advancement of the Church, to expunge those faithless
vicars who, appointed by the Holy See and holding their fiefs in trust
for her, refused payment of just tribute and otherwise so acted as to
alienate from the Church the States which she claimed for her own. Their
restoration to the Church--however much it might be a means of founding
a Borgia dynasty in the Romagna--made for the greater power and glory of
the Holy See. Let us remember this, and that such was the end which
that tax, levied upon those newly elected cardinals, went to serve. The
aggrandizement of the House of Borgia was certainly one of the results
to be expected from the Romagna campaign, but we are not justified in
accounting it the sole aim and end of that campaign.

Alexander had this advantage over either Sixtus IV or Innocent VIII--not
to go beyond those Popes whom he had served as Vice-Chancellor, for
instances of flagrant nepotism--that he at least served two purposes
at once, and that, in aggrandizing his own family, he strengthened the
temporal power of the Church, whereas those others had done nothing but
undermine it that they might enrich their progeny.

And whilst on this subject of the "sale" of cardinals' hats, it may not
be amiss to say a word concerning the "sale" of indulgences with which
Alexander has been so freely charged. Here again there has been too loud
an outcry against Alexander--an outcry whose indignant stridency leads
one to suppose that the sale of indulgences was a simony invented by
him, or else practised by him to an extent shamefully unprecedented.
Such is very far from being the case. The arch-type of
indulgence-seller--as of all other simoniacal practices--is Innocent
VIII. In his reign we have seen the murderer commonly given to choose
between the hangman and the purchase of a pardon, and we have seen the
moneys so obtained providing his bastard, the Cardinal Francesco Cibo,
with the means for the luxuriously licentious life whose gross disorders
prematurely ki