Sacred Haven of Debauchery

Rome was a theocratic dictatorship, but it was ruled not by Jesus Christ, but by lust. The lust for gold, property, beauty, fornication, food, and wine, the lust for titles, position, and influence, for intrigue and betrayal, and above all, for power. Unbridled lust in a myriad of forms—more than anywhere else in the world. Even piety was in demand and sold alongside other commodities. Unlike the industrial north or the Spanish domains in the south, Rome was a place of idleness, both among the hordes of beggars scavenging through the slums like toothless dogs, and among the insatiable legions of the wealthy in their luxurious palazzos. Vast sums of money—milked from believers in all corners of the Christian world, borrowed from the rising class of international bankers, and extracted from the rural economy through papal taxes—poured into Rome's maw in an endless bacchanal of carnal indulgence. Churches and cathedrals were theaters displaying art worthy of bathhouses and brothels: the genitals and buttocks of lustful sodomites were depicted on every wall. Martyrs, resembling boy-lovers, writhed in lascivious torments—these perverted fantasies were supposedly meant to inspire a pious spirit. Cardinals, barely twenty years old and barely able to recite a blessing without stumbling, strolled along the Via della Pallacorda—from the tennis court to the gambling den, from the gambling den to the brothel, and back—escorted by brazen gangs of hairy, thuggish bravos. In a city that could not boast a single major guild or craft, where shoeing a horse was a difficult task, only one business flourished—prostitution, and with it, the widespread prevalence of French disease and anal pustules; every girl with beautiful eyes and every boy with smooth skin seemed destined to end up on a semen-soaked mattress. Outside the city, a whole army of brigands—unemployed soldiers, dispossessed tenants, criminals of all kinds left over from the Franco-Spanish wars—ravaged the villages. And beyond the high Alpine passes, the poisonous sea of Protestantism lapped at the shores of the papal throne—Calvinists, Lutherans, Waldensians, Anabaptists, heretics of all kinds and varieties.