The entry into Bologna, at the end of the 'Iter Julii
Secundi' by the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendor of its own,
and Giovan Antonio Flaminio, in one of the finest elegies, appealed to
the patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to Italy.
In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly denounced
the simony of the Papal elections. After his death in 1513, the money-
loving cardinals tried to evade the prohibition by proposing that the
endowments and offices hitherto held by the chosen candidate should be
equally divided among themselves, in which case they would have elected
the best-endowed cardinal, the incompetent Raphael Riario. But a
reaction, chiefly arising from the younger members of the Sacred
College, who, above all things, desired a liberal Pope, rendered the
miserable combination futile; Giovanni Medici was elected --the famous
Leo X.
We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of the
Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under him the Papacy
was again exposed to great inward and outward dangers. Among these we
do not reckon the conspiracy of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Sauli,
Riario, and Corneto (1517), which at most could have occasioned a
change of and to which Leo found the true antidote in the un-heard-of
creation of thirty-one new cardinals, a measure which additional
advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real merit.
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