Two days later, by means of the proofs kindly furnished by the
archbishop, the pope; in the presence of the governor of Rome, the
auditor of the apostolic chamber, the advocate, and the fiscal attorney,
pronounced sentence, condemning the archbishop to the loss of all his
benefices and ecclesiastical offices, degradation from his orders, and
confiscation of his goods; his person was to be handed over to the civil
arm. Two days later the civil magistrate entered the prison to fulfil
his office as received from the pope, and appeared before the
archbishop, accompanied by a clerk, two servants, and four guards. The
clerk unrolled the paper he carried and read out the sentence; the two
servants untied a packet, and, stripping the prisoner of his
ecclesiastical garments, they reclothed him in a dress of coarse white
cloth which only reached down to his knees, breeches of the same, and a
pair of clumsy shoes. Lastly, the guards took him, and led him into one
of the deepest dungeons of the castle of Sant’ Angelo, where for
furniture he found nothing but a wooden crucifix, a table, a chair, and
a bed; for occupation, a Bible and a breviary, with a lamp to read by;
for nourishment, two pounds of bread and a little cask of water, which
were to be renewed every three days, together with a bottle of oil for
burning in his lamp.
At the end of a year the poor archbishop died of despair, not before he
had gnawed his own arms in his agony.
The very same day that he was taken into the dungeon, Caesar Borgia, who
had managed the affair so ably, was presented by the pope with all the
belongings of the condemned prisoner.
But the hunting parties, balls, and masquerades were not the only
pleasures enjoyed by the pope and his family: from time to time strange
spectacles were exhibited. We will only describe two—one of them a case
of punishment, the other no more nor less than a matter of the stud
farm. But as both of these give details with which we would not have our
readers credit our imagination, we will first say that they are
literally translated from Burchard’s Latin journal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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