Popes in days of yore...

[Perfection]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Alexander_VI

I just read this article and it was OMG crazy, I also noted that it had NPOV stuff so I thought I'd share it with you in hopes of getting more straight answers. Did this crazy stuff really happen? If so, how do we know?

 

[Red Door]

Pope Alexander VI and Julius (II?) were the bottom years of the Church, and a leading cause of the Protestant Reformation because of his corruption and greed.

What a bad age for the Church.

 

[useless]

Pope Alexander VI and Julius (II?) were the bottom years of the Church, and a leading cause of the Protestant Reformation because of his corruption and greed.

What a bad age for the Church.

i thought up intill the end of the medieval times was the bad age for the church?

 

[Quasar1011]

When I lived in England in the 1980s, there was a TV series called The Borgias. The wikipedia article referred to it. It is probably available on DVD somewhere. Yah, what a wacky group.

 

[Red Door]

i thought up intill the end of the medieval times was the bad age for the church?

No, definetly the corruption, Babylonian Exile, Alexander VI, and basically that era was a lot worse.

 

[Perfection]

What about all them murders? It implies controversy, did they happen?

 

[GenMarshall]

This is also during the time when the Protestant Reformation happened. Which was the "Dark Ages" of the Catholic Church untill the Counter reformation and the Council of Trent that addressed the issues that were at the root of the reformation.

 

[Plotinus]

Alexander VI is notorious as one of the most "worldly" popes, although really I think the ninth century and tenth centuries were a lot worse. For most of the high Middle Ages, most of the popes were pretty good and concerned about high moral standards in the church, but they tended to get sidetracked by politics. The Renaissance papacy saw rather reprobate figures such as Alexander VI, but also some decent popes too such as Nicholas V or Paul II. It's worth remembering that an awful lot of the salacious stories about these figures are little more than Protestant propaganda: for example, I can find no reliable source for the sometimes repeated claims that Paul II used to get a sexual thrill out of torturing prisoners or that he died doing something ghastly to a page boy. Similarly, Lucrezia Borgia probably wasn't as bad as her reputation suggests. Cesare was truly awful though.

 

[Perfection]

Cesare was truly awful though.

What was so bad about him?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Precissely some weeks ago i went to the cinema to watch a Spanish movie about the Borgias. It seems that Rodrigo killed his first victim at the age of 11 or 12, stabbing another boy´s stomach repeatedly in a street fight. Now that IS a pope.

 

[Kafka2]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=107598

 

[FriendlyFire]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Alexander_VI

I just read this article and it was OMG crazy, I also noted that it had NPOV stuff so I thought I'd share it with you in hopes of getting more straight answers. Did this crazy stuff really happen? If so, how do we know?

Considering he achieved the papaulcy by means of subeafuge. (pretending to be GOD and whispering commands in the previous popes sleep) Its is more or less the standard behaviour at the time. Most historians found it rather ironic they way he died as a sort of divine payback for hes crimes.