Alexander VI’s attending physicians said he died of malaria, and most responsible historians agree. He and some others dined in the open air at the house of a cardinal on the fifth of August, 1503 and stayed outside until around midnight because it was too hot to go indoors. Some of the others who dined with the Pope also contracted malaria, though none of the others died. He seemed to recover after a few days, being able to arise, see to diplomatic matters and play cards. His doctors bled him; something believed to be good at the time, and probably did so to the extent that it weakened him. That, too, was pretty common in those days. Hundreds of people (many, no doubt innocent of any serious wrongdoing) died of malaria in Rome that summer. Rome has always been subject to that disease due to the proximity of the Pontine marshes, and some even believe malaria was responsible for the final decline of the Roman Empire.
Malaria can be a very mean disease, and it, like any destructive infection, can cause accelerated decomposition of the body of one who dies from it, because of tissue damage. When one considers that Alexander VI died in August, a very hot, steamy month in Rome, it would not be at all surprising if his body decomposed rapidly. Summer decomposition of any creature as large as a man is a dreadful sight every time, and happens very quickly. Still, those reports are not necessarily worthy of belief either, being based on the reports of two men. His body lay in state for a short while; something that seems unlikely if he was as ghastly as some claim.
Many, perhaps most, of the stories about Alexander VI are bogus, including many written in his own time. He was a powerful man, a Spaniard much envied by Italian rivals. The Renaissance was much given to slanderous writings, overstatement and rash judgments. Protestant writers, of course, have invented a great number of stories, vying with one another to see who could write the worse slanders. He did have two illigitimate children, but they were born before he was even a priest. He didn’t seem a bit ashamed of them; openly admitted his parentage of them and liked having them around him; something many irresponsible parents in our own time might do well to emulate. He was a red-blooded man; no question about that, but responsible historians consider him guilty only of excessive promotion of the fortunes of his children; a not unusual thing for a father to do, though blameworthy in a Pope, and of acting in some ways more like a secular ruler than a Pope.
The environs of Rome were quite dangerous when he became Pope, and the city was given to internal warfare something like the private militia warfare going on in Baghdad today. He suppressed that, and was much hated for it by the warring factions and their partisans; the same way American troops are hated by the warring factions in Baghdad for trying to impose peace. He brought peace and unprecedented prosperity to the Papal States. The Venetian ambassador, who observed him in his last years, described him as “cheerful and active, apparently quite clear of conscience…he seems to grow younger every day…” It is instructive that the main warring families, the Orsini and the Colonna entered the city with armed troops four days after his death, over the impotent protests of the College of Cardinals, and resumed their street fighting.
He can rightly be accused of being too worldly, though modern historians mightily doubt the stories of debauchery told about him. He enjoyed life to a degree considered by many to be too robust for a cleric. Calvinists, it has been said, cannot stand the thought that someone, somewhere might be having a good time, and it would not be fair to judge Alexander VI by the puritanical standards of those who wrote about him later. He did not hesitate to financially and diplomatically support his warlike son in pacifying papal territories. Though this would be considered totally justified in a secular ruler, it seems to us today to be unseemly for a Pope.
I am not trying to make a saint of him. He was a man of his time, with all the good and bad that entailed. But he was certainly not the worst of them. He went to confession shortly before his death. I think it would be an exceedingly rash judgment to suppose that God hated him or punished him either in the manner of his death or what came after it.
