Yet none can calculate how far the scandal and indignation of
Christendom might have gone, before they became a source of pressing
danger to Alexander. 'He would,' says Panvinio elsewhere, 'have put all
the other rich cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their
property, had he not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been
struck down by death.' And what might not Cesare have achieved if, at
the moment when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a
sickbed! What a conclave would that have been, in which, armed with all
his weapons, he had extorted his election from a college whose numbers
he had judiciously reduced by poison--and this at a time when there was
no French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination
loses itself in an abyss.
Instead of this followed the conclave in which Pius III was elected,
and, after his speedy death, that which chose Julius II --both
elections the fruits of a general reaction.
Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II, in all
essential respects he was the savior of the Papacy. His familiarity
with the course of events since the pontificate of his uncle Sixtus had
given him a profound insight into the grounds and conditions of the
Papal authority. On these he founded his own policy, and devoted to it
the whole force and passion of his unshaken soul.
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