Miles Pattenden,Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome

Reviewed by: Oliver Logan, University of East Anglia, UK

The Neapolitan Gian Pietro Carafa, founder of the Theatin order and first head of the Congregation of the Holy Office (the supreme coordinating body of the Inquisition in Italy) and pope as Paul IV (1555–59), was famed for his austere piety and doctrinal intransigence. Ironically, the reputation of his pontificate was tarnished by the violent actions of his nephews whom he had promoted to high office, notably the brutal condottiere Carlo and the uxoricide Giovanni, albeit, at one stage, he temporarily disowned them. The prosecution of Paul IV’s nephews and affiliates and the executions of Carlo and Giovanni in 1560–61, at the instance of his successor Pius was a cause célèbre. Pius IV (the Milanese Gian Angelo Medicini, who was allowed to call himself ‘De’Medici’, pope 1559–65), was a man of the world with expensive tastes, who managed to acquire a certain reputation for reform, largely due to his re-convocation of the Council of Trent and to the religious zeal of his nephew Carlo Borromeo.

Earlier historians, notably Ranke, Pastor, Ancel and Jedin, saw the prosecution of the Carafa as an attack on nepotism by a reforming pope. However, Wolfgang Reinhard and Volker Reinhardt have shown that, in the early seventeenth century, grand papal nepotism was an accepted and routinized system. The family strategies of Gregory XV, Paul V or Urban VIII were significantly different from those, earlier, of the Borgias or the Farnese (Paul III’s family), who had sought to carve out principalities within the Papal States or on their margins; the objective of the now less aristocratic popes was the foundation of princely dynasties within the specifically Roman aristocracy, supported by massive financial enrichment. So what had happened between the 1560s and the end of the century? Unfortunately there has been little study of papal nepotism in this intervening period and Pattenden’s monograph is a contribution to filling the gap. It also broaches the question of the strengthening of papal autocracy in the second half of the sixteenth century. The author notes the paucity of the historiography on Pius IV, who has rather tended to be discounted by historians.

Pattenden argues that Pius IV’s attack on the Carafa was a matter of Realpolitik, not reform, an episode in the long-term struggle between popes and the College of Cardinals. The objective was to intimidate the latter by attacking a soft target; the Carafa had certainly made themselves unpopular. In due course, he himself was to engage in massive enrichment and promotion of his own family. The prosecution of the Carafa was without precedent and involved high risks. Cardinals, as a whole, were liable to look askance at an attack on one of their number, while Philip II, notwithstanding the Carafas’ previous anti-Habsburg policy, was an interested party, since Carlo was his vassal. It was important not to bring the papal office into disrepute by condemning the actions of a previous pope. Moreover, the prosecution of a deceased pope’s family created a dangerous precedent which might be turned against Pius’s own relatives after his demise. The prosecution carefully evaded the issue of Paul IV’s authorization of his nephews’ actions. Pattenden depicts Pius IV as a consummate tactician, able to outwit the inexperienced Carafa nephews who had failed to secure their positions. He worked to create a favourable political context for the prosecution, gaining the support or acquiescence of cardinals alongside the neutrality of Philip II and of Italian potentates. Furthermore, he worked to secure the future of his own family by an intelligent and systematic nepotism which far outstripped that of Paul IV, who had actually been rather niggardly towards his nephews when it came to financial enrichment and who had no dynastic marriage policy. Pius IV gave his relatives the financial resources needed to build up clienteles and married them into Italian princely families.

Pius IV’s zealot successor, the inquisitor Michele Ghisleri, Pope Pius V, a creature of Gian Pietro Carafa, sought to reverse the Medici pope’s policies. He quashed the condemnations of the Carafa, as well as resuming the harsh inquisitorial policy of his mentor, which Pius IV had curbed.

In his marriage policy for his relatives, Pius IV followed a dynastic strategy already successfully pursued by the Farnese. Pattenden suggests that his eschewal of a territorial dynastic policy in favour of one based on wealth and marriage alliances marked a stage in the long-term evolution of the seventeenth-century pattern of papal dynasticism. The function accorded to Carlo Borromeo did mark an important stage in the evolution of the veritable office of the papal nephew as the chief delegate of a pope’s power. With regard to the question of the growth of papal autocracy, however, Pattenden concludes that ‘the process of establishing personal authority had to be revisited by each new pope at the start of his pontificate in a way that was even more marked than in other early modern courtly systems’ (135).