The sacred office to which Alexander VI. was thus elevated had no salutary effect upon his unholy passions.[*233] The power he had attained he administered by intrigue. Simony and poisoning were the instruments of his administration; nepotism was its end. His temporal policy was equally selfish, unstable, and dishonest. He was resolute in nothing but his breaches of good faith. In the broils which he fomented he sold his adherence to the best bidder, but ever kept himself open for a higher offer. His contemporary, Machiavelli, thus stamps his character, which he had carefully studied:--"His entire occupation, his only thought, was deception, and he always found victims. Never was there a man with more effrontery in assertion, more ready to add oaths to his promises, or to break them; yet did his deceit ever succeed to his heart's content."[*234] Sismondi terms him "the most odious, the most publicly scandalous, and the most wicked of all miscreants who ever misused sacred authority to outrage and degrade mankind." No ecclesiastical writer has undertaken to defend his reputation; most of them have treated him as a disgrace to the papacy. Tommasi has termed him a "perfidious, sanguinary, and most insatiable wolf, capable of insinuating himself like a fawning and attached spaniel." [Footnote *233: All that Dennistoun says of the Borgia must be accepted with care. He takes the Puritan point of view in a country where such a thing as Puritanism has happily seldom existed. Pastor, to whom it seems natural to refer the reader [_A History of the Popes_] is almost equally censorious though more discerning in his condemnation. He, apparently holding a brief for the Papacy, felt it incumbent upon him to restore the balance of some of his judgments by denouncing Alexander VI. It is strange that the only two sane historians of the Borgia should be Protestants. I gladly refer the reader with every confidence to the work of CREIGHTON [_A History of the Papacy from the Great Schism to the Sack of Rome_, vols. IV. and V.] and of GREGOROVIUS [_Lucrezia Borgia_].]