Roman Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic Church appears in the work as a distinctive political organization whose authority rests on religious institutions rather than on ordinary systems of conquest, administration, or military defense. Its ecclesiastical principalities are described as uniquely secure: they possess territories that need not be defended and subjects who do not seek to withdraw their allegiance, because the foundations of rule are regarded as higher than ordinary human calculation. At the same time, the Church's temporal power is shown not as timeless or automatic, but as historically constructed through papal action, money, arms, factional management, and the appropriation of the achievements of individual rulers.

Ecclesiastical Authority and Political Security

The Roman Catholic Church governs through what the work calls ecclesiastical principalities. These states may be acquired through merit or fortune, but their maintenance requires neither, since venerable religious ordinances preserve the authority of their princes. Their territories are not lost merely because they are not defended, and their subjects do not rebel merely because they are not directly governed. The subjects are also said to lack the practical power to throw off their allegiance, making these principalities secure and, in the author's formulation, happy in a way that secular states are not.

This security marks a sharp contrast with ordinary acquired territories. A secular prince must reckon with inherited laws, local customs, language, the extinction of ruling dynasties, the memory of former freedom, and the danger that weak administration or foreign occupation will provoke rebellion. By contrast, ecclesiastical authority is presented as supported by religious agencies beyond the normal reach of political reasoning. The author therefore declines to analyze its ultimate foundation in the same manner as other governments, treating it as a power whose institutional and spiritual legitimacy exceeds ordinary human explanation.

Italy Before the Church's Expansion

The work nevertheless asks how the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church rose from a position once held in contempt by the principal powers of Italy to one capable of making the King of France tremble, driving him from Italy, and crushing Venice. Before Charles VIII of France entered Italy, the peninsula was divided among the Pope, Venice, the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan, and the Florentines. These powers sought to prevent both the invasion of Italy by an armed foreigner and the excessive territorial expansion of any one of their number.

The danger posed by Venice could be checked only through the combination of the other states, as in the defense of Ferrara. The Pope was restrained differently, through the Roman barons. The Orsini and Colonna families were divided into rival factions and maintained armed forces in the immediate presence of the Pontiff. Their feuds kept the Papacy weak and insecure, even when a courageous Pope such as Sixtus attempted to enlarge his authority.

The short lives of the Popes made this weakness structural. A Pope who nearly destroyed one faction could be followed by a successor hostile to the other, who restored the first faction before completing its destruction. Since a Pope could barely humble one of the two parties during the average span of his pontificate, the temporal authority of the Papacy remained little respected in Italy. The Church's later strength therefore emerged from the breaking of this recurring cycle rather than from an uninterrupted tradition of effective secular control.

Pope Alexander VI and the Reorganization of Power

Pope Alexander VI transformed what a Pope could accomplish by combining money and arms. He acted through Duke Valentino and exploited the French invasion of Italy, using the circumstances created by foreign intervention to produce the territorial successes associated with Duke Valentino's campaigns. His immediate purpose was to aggrandize the Duke rather than the Church itself, but the political result exceeded that personal objective. After Alexander's death, and after Duke Valentino had been removed from power, the Church inherited the gains that their enterprise had created.

The most important of those gains was the strengthening of Romagna. After conquering the province, Duke Valentino found it ruled by weak lords who were more interested in plundering their subjects than in correcting abuses. Their government produced division, robbery, tumult, and every kind of outrage. To make the country peaceful and obedient, he installed Ramiro d'Orco as a stern and energetic governor with full powers. Ramiro restored tranquillity and order in a short time, demonstrating how forceful administration could consolidate a newly acquired territory after military conquest.

Duke Valentino then converted that coercive achievement into a more durable political arrangement. Fearing that Ramiro's unlimited authority would become hated, he replaced it with a civil tribunal at the center of the province. Every town was represented by an advocate, and the new court gave the appearance that government had been separated from the arbitrary severity of the earlier minister. To remove popular resentment from himself, Duke Valentino publicly attributed the preceding cruelties to Ramiro's harsh disposition. He then had Ramiro beheaded and displayed in the market place of Cesena beside a block and bloody axe. The spectacle astonished and satisfied the populace, allowing the Duke to present himself as the corrector of an oppressive servant while retaining the political benefits of the order that servant had imposed.

These methods helped place Romagna and the Dukedom of Urbino under Duke Valentino's control and won him the good opinion of their populations, who began to believe themselves better off. The Church benefited from this consolidation even though the campaign had originally served the Duke's private advancement. Alexander's achievement was therefore organizational as well as territorial: he weakened local factions, created a foundation for papal power, and left behind an enlarged political inheritance that another Pope could use.

Pope Julius II and Institutional Consolidation

Pope Julius II inherited a Church strengthened by possession of the whole of Romagna. He also inherited Roman barons whose factions had been exhausted and shattered by Pope Alexander VI. In addition, Alexander had opened a route toward the accumulation of wealth that no one before him had successfully followed. Julius did not merely preserve these advantages; he expanded them through his own campaigns and political program.

Julius undertook the conquest of Bologna, the overthrow of Venice, and the expulsion of France from Italy, succeeding in all three enterprises. His victories carried a particular political meaning because they were represented as strengthening the Church rather than enriching a private person. Where Alexander's policy had worked through the advancement of Duke Valentino, Julius converted the resulting resources into openly ecclesiastical power. The same instruments of arms and territorial expansion therefore acquired a different legitimacy under his rule.

Julius also kept the Orsini and Colonna factions within the limits in which he had found them. Some seeds of insubordination remained, but two forces restrained them: the great power of the Church, which overawed the barons, and the absence of Cardinals from the factions, since Cardinals had previously been the chief source of their disorders. When the rival parties possessed Cardinals, those prelates fomented dissension in Rome and beyond it, drawing the barons into the resulting conflicts. By reducing that connection between ecclesiastical office, factional ambition, and armed noble rivalry, the Papacy gained a more manageable political environment.

Historical Significance and Limits

The Church's rise demonstrates that religious legitimacy alone does not exhaust the explanation of ecclesiastical power. Its durable position depended on concrete political work: exploiting the arrival of France in Italy, financing military action, using Duke Valentino to consolidate Romagna, weakening the Roman barons, accumulating wealth, and then allowing Pope Julius II to convert those foundations into further conquest. Religious institutions supplied exceptional continuity, but papal rulers still had to create the temporal conditions in which that continuity could operate.

The organization also exposes the tension between moral ideals and practical rule that governs the work's wider political argument. The author insists elsewhere that a prince must study the real truth of political life rather than an imaginary standard of goodness, and must learn when goodness can be used and when necessity requires another course. The history of the Roman Catholic Church illustrates this method through institutions and rulers rather than through abstract principle alone. Its power is sustained by religion, yet its temporal greatness is advanced through force, money, factional calculation, public authority, and carefully managed appearances.

At the end of the discussion, Pope Leo inherits a Papacy described as more powerful than it had been in the past. The hope expressed for him is not that he will enlarge it by arms as his predecessors did, but that he will make it greater and more venerable through benignity and other virtues. The Church thus reaches a moment in which military consolidation has prepared the ground for a different kind of authority: not the abandonment of power, but its refinement into a more respected and institutionally secure form.