Great responses. I love the historical examples and quotes. I read a book once about a Pope everyone hated so much when he died they left his body on the floor naked for like, days, because his servants stole everything including his clothes and no one wanted to spend the money to bury him. I think it was Innocent Xth.
On his deathbed in 1513, Julius II granted an audience to Paride de Grassi, the papal master of ceremonies. The pope recalled “
having seen many popes, who, once dead, were immediately abandoned by relatives and servants, and preyed upon even for indispensable things, such that they were left lying there in a shameful way, downright nude with their private parts exposed, a thing which, for someone of authority - of majesty - as elevated as that of the papacy, was scandalous and degrading.” In order to prevent something similar from happening to his body, the pope wanted to pay de Grassi in advance and discussed with him how he would be buried.
When Sixtus IV died in 1484, then master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard complained how the abbot of San Sebastiano, who acted as sacristan, quickly stole the bed and all the furnishings as soon as the corpse had been taken out of the room, that Burchard had to (unsuccessfully) hunt for items such as a clean shirt with which to dress Sixtus’ body for hours. As an aside, Burchard later admitted to having made a
faux pas in dressing the corpse: as Sixtus was a Franciscan, he should have been dressed in the habit of the order instead of the pontifical under his vestments.
A little later, upon the death of the infamous Alexander VI in 1503, his son Cesare, too ill to attend to the business himself, sent Don Michelotto da Corella, his chief
bravo, to seize the Pope’s treasures before the death was publicly announced. Burchard (still master of ceremonies) recalls how da Corella and a number of people went to close the doors of the papal palace, but one of the crowd drew a dagger and threatened a cardinal to hand over the keys. The mob then went through a back room and looted all the plate and two chests containing a hundred thousand ducats. When the announcement of the pope’s death was made, it was the servants’ turn to pillage the storerooms, so that only the papal throne and some cushions and hangings were left at the end of the day. Furthermore, when the funeral ceremonies were beginning, some guards of the Papal palace broke into the chapel and tried to loot the candlesticks. In the ensuing pandemonium, the corpse was left abandoned - Burchard and three others had to step in to save the pope’s bier. In the end, the bier had to be transferred into another chapel, with only two torches for company.
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