In the last week of July in the year 1492, a group of small boys were led into a room in the Vatican. Somewhere past the guards, past the anti-chambers, past the doctors who had run out of ideas, an old man lay dying in an enormous bed, and he could no longer keep any food down. Not bread, not broth, not wine.
“His body had been shutting itself down for weeks, folding in on itself, refusing every kindness offered to it. And so a physician, whose name we only think we know, came up with something. He took the blood of these boys. What exactly happened after that is the whole reason people still whisper about this pope 500 years later.”
“And it’s a story that has been retold so many times and stretched so far past whatever actually occurred that pulling it apart is half the fun and half the tragedy. The boys did not survive. The pope did not survive either. And the man at the center of it all, Giovani Batista Sibo, who the world remembers as Pope Innocent VIII, went to his grave with a bronze tomb, a fortune handed to his children, and a reputation that no amount of gilding could quite cover up.”
That’s where his story ends, more or less, and it’s a bleak place to start. But that ending has swallowed everything that came before it. And there was a lot that came before it. A whole life. 60 years of a man climbing, spending, scheming, fathering children he shouldn’t have and acknowledging them anyway.
Taking money from a Turkish sultan, putting his seal on a document that would help kill tens of thousands of people he’d never meet. The blood story is the thing people remember and we’ll get there. We’ll take our time with it because it deserves care. But the strange truth of Innocent VIII is that the deathbed horror is almost the least interesting thing about him.
And by the time we get back to that room, I think you’ll see what I mean. Back to Rome and back to a man whose whole life was, in a strange way, a long, slow warm-up for the odd little horror show he became famous for. He was born in Genoa in 1432 on the 5th of November and the family name was Saibbo, sometimes spelled Sibo, and they were not nobodies.
Genoa in the 15th century was a maritime republic, a city of merchants and bankers and sailors, hard-edged and money-minded, forever squabbbling with Venice over trade and forever tearing itself apart in factional feuds at home. It was a good place to be born rich and a dangerous place to be born poor. And the Cybo family fell comfortably on the right side of that line.
His father, Arono, sometimes called Aaron, had been a viceroy of Naples and would end up as a senator in Rome. Old Genoese stock, some Greek somewhere back in the bloodline, the sort of family that produced sons who ended up in comfortable positions without having to fight too hard for them. His mother was Teodorina de’ Mari from another established Genoese house.
So the boy grew up with connections in two directions at once in his home city and down in Naples. And both of those threads would matter later because young Giovani Batista spent a good chunk of his youth in the orbit of the Neapolitan court, and Naples was, by every account we have, not a place designed to keep a young man out of trouble.
The court of the Aragonese kings was lively, worldly, full of ambition and pleasure, and the sort of casual moral flexibility that tends to come with money and power sitting close together. And into that, drop a good-looking, well-connected young man with no particular vocation for anything except enjoying himself, and you can guess how it went.
You have to understand the shape of a career like his to see how ordinary it actually was for its time and how little his loose youth was ever going to hold him back. A young man from a good family in that era didn’t necessarily choose the church out of any burning faith. The church was a career, one of the very few respectable and lucrative careers available to a well-born younger son who wasn’t going to inherit the family fortune outright.
It came with income, with security, with a ladder to climb, with the possibility of enormous wealth and power at the top of it. Whether you actually believed much of anything was frankly close to beside the point. What mattered was your connections, your patrons, your usefulness to powerful men, and your willingness to play the long patient game of favors and appointments.
Giovani Batista Cybo had the connections in both Genoa and Naples. He had a father who’d been a viceroy and would sit in the Roman Senate. And he had the easy, agreeable manner that made powerful men comfortable around him. That last quality would carry him a very long way, further than any amount of piety ever could have. People liked him.
That’s a real and underrated form of power, and he had it in abundance. His youth was, and I’ll use the polite word that the old Catholic writers used, licentious. He was not headed for holiness. Nobody looking at him at 20 would have picked him out as a future pope. He was a good-looking young man in a rich, loose city, and he did what young men in rich, loose cities tend to do, and the results of that would follow him for the rest of his life in a very literal walking around calling him father kind of way because he had children, at least two that he openly acknowledged: a son named Francescetto and a daughter named Teodorina named after his mother and probably several more. And this was all before he took holy orders.
“I want to sit on the acknowledgement part for a moment because it’s genuinely unusual and it tells you something about the man.”
Most churchmen with illegitimate children spent enormous energy pretending those children weren’t theirs. They called them nephews, wards, vaguely related young people who just happened to keep turning up at the papal court with excellent connections and a suspicious family resemblance. The whole institution ran on a polite fiction that men who had taken vows of celibacy were of course celibate, and everyone agreed to look at the nephews and nod along.
Cybo didn’t really bother with that fiction. He acknowledged his kids openly, called them his son and his daughter in the plain meaning of the words. For a man who would one day be pope, that was either a strange sort of honesty or a strange sort of shamelessness. And Rome could never quite decide which. And honestly, I’m not sure it’s fully decidable even now.
There’s something almost disarming about it. He wasn’t hiding. He just was what he was, and he saw no reason to lie about the two people he loved most in the world, even when the whole weight of the church’s dignity said he should. The rumor mill, of course, went much further than the two acknowledged children.
The gossip in Rome held that he had fathered 16 children in total, eight boys and eight girls, all of them by married women. A specific and suspiciously symmetrical number that should make you raise an eyebrow right away because real life is rarely that tidy. A poet even wrote a little Latin epigram about it that made the rounds of the city.
And it’s genuinely clever in a vicious way. The joke turned on his papal name, innocent in Latin, innocentis, carrying the sense of harmless, blameless, guiltless. And the poem said roughly that the noxious one, the harmful one, had produced eight boys and just as many girls, so Rome could fairly call him father.
The pun is nasty in Latin and it does not survive translation cleanly, but you get the shape of it. The man who took the name Innocent, they said, was anything but. And the city of Rome was in a sense full of his children. So calling him the father of Rome landed as both a formal compliment to a pope and a filthy insult at the same time folded into one line.
Renaissance Romans found that sort of thing hilarious. Two acknowledged kids is what we can actually stand on with confidence. Seven or so is plausible, going by the more sober sources. 16 is the sort of number that gets funnier the more people repeat it. And it stuck to him for centuries precisely because it was so quotable.
You’ll still see it cited today as fact: this pope with 16 bastards. And it may be an exaggeration built on a real foundation of a man who genuinely did have more children than a pope was supposed to have, which was any children at all. His path into the church once he finally took it was smooth in the way that paths tend to be smooth for the well-connected.
And it’s almost comical how little the earlier licentiousness slowed him down. He became a canon at the cathedral in Capua, a nice comfortable ecclesiastical post. After the Neapolitan king he attached himself to died, King Alfonso, things got awkward with the Archbishop of Genoa, and he drifted off to Padua, the great university town, and then to Rome, where he found a patron in Cardinal Filippo Calandrini, who happened to be the half-brother of a former pope, Nicholas V. Good patron to have.
And he became a priest around 1450 in the ordinary way. From there the ladder went up quickly, one rung after another, each one lifting him further from that loose young man in Naples and closer to the throne of St. Peter. Bishop of Savona in 1467, consecrated in January of that year, then transferred to the See of Molfetta in 1472, and then in May of 1473, Pope Sixtus IV made him a cardinal.
He held the title of Santa Balbina first, then Santa Cecilia, the old churches of Rome that gave cardinals their formal names. And he served as Camerlengo, the chamberlain of the college of cardinals, not a ceremonial post at all, but a genuinely powerful one. Because the Camerlengo runs the machinery of the church during the interregnum, the empty stretch after a pope dies and before a new one is chosen. It’s the office that manages the treasury, secures the property and organizes the conclave. Putting yourself in that chair means you’re standing at the exact spot where power changes hands. And that is a very useful place to stand. Nothing about this climb was remarkable for a man of his connections, and that’s part of what makes him such a revealing figure.
He wasn’t a brilliant theologian who rose on the strength of his mind. He wasn’t a saintly ascetic whose holiness pulled him upward against his will. He was a well-born, agreeable, capable enough administrator who knew the right people and made himself useful and never frightened anyone.
And in the church of the late 15th century, that combination was more than enough to carry a man from a comfortable canonry all the way to a cardinal’s red hat. The system rewarded exactly the qualities he had, the smoothness, the pliability, the talent for being liked, and it would keep rewarding them right up until they carried him past his own competence and onto a throne he was never remotely equipped to fill.
His whole rise reads in hindsight as a study in how an institution can promote a man to the precise level where his weaknesses do the most damage. His rise owed a great deal to one particular man, a cardinal named Giuliano della Rovere. And I want you to hold on to that name because della Rovere is going to keep showing up right to the very end, right to the deathbed itself.
And he is one of the most consequential figures of this whole era. Della Rovere was ambitious, sharp, physically imposing, hard as a nail, the sort of man who filled a room and made other men uneasy. He would eventually become Pope Julius II, the warrior pope, the one who put on armor and led armies personally, who commissioned Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling and terrified everyone in his path.
But in the 1480s, della Rovere was a kingmaker rather than a king. A nephew of the reigning Pope Sixtus, wielding enormous influence from behind the throne. And Giovani Batista Cybo was more or less his man. Cybo admired him ardently, the sources say, leaned on him, followed his lead, and when the moment came to actually pick a new pope, that relationship would be the entire game.
Once Cybo became pope, della Rovere didn’t fade into the background the way a mere sponsor might. He became, by many accounts, the real force behind a good deal of Innocent’s policy, the strong will steering the weak one. When Innocent got dragged into the war with Naples, into backing the rebellious barons, della Rovere’s influence was there in the background, pushing events along.
Because della Rovere had his own long feud with Naples and his own reasons for wanting that fight. It’s genuinely difficult looking back to draw a clean line between where Innocent’s own judgment ended and where della Rovere’s began. And that ambiguity is itself the point. Contemporaries said outright that Innocent was a tool of della Rovere, that the cardinal governed and the pope signed.
It’s an unkind assessment and probably an exaggerated one, but there’s real substance under it because Innocent genuinely didn’t have the iron in him to resist a man like that and della Rovere genuinely did have the iron to impose himself. The two of them would eventually cool toward each other and della Rovere would clash bitterly with the pope who came after, the Borgia, before finally seizing the throne himself years later.
But for much of Innocent’s reign, if you wanted to understand who was actually driving, you looked past the pope to the cardinal standing just behind him. Sixtus IV died in August of 1484 and Rome did what Rome always did when a pope died, which was fall apart at the seams almost the instant the news got out.
This is worth understanding because it happened again when Innocent himself died. So it’s a pattern you’ll see twice. The moment a pope’s heart stopped, all order went with it. Because in a very real sense, the pope was the state. And with the state suddenly headless, the city reverted to something close to raw violence. Mobs broke into the papal granaries and hauled off the grain.
They went after the banks run by the Genoese merchants. The great aristocratic families, the Orsini and the Colonna and the rest, armed their households and barricaded their palaces and prepared to settle old scores. The Colonna clans seized back fortresses they claimed had been stolen from them. For a few days, the city belonged to whoever had the most men with weapons on a given street, and the ordinary people of Rome shuttered their homes and prayed for it to be over.
Into that chaos, the cardinals shuffled off to lock themselves away and choose a successor, trying to conduct the solemn business of electing God’s representative on Earth while the city burned and looted itself down below. The favorite to beat going into that conclave was a Venetian Cardinal, Marco Barbo, a serious and rather austere man.
The sort who actually took the faith seriously and might have tried to reform things to clean up the corruption and the nepotism and the venality that had been building for decades. And that possibility, a genuine reformer on the throne, made a great many powerful and comfortable people extremely nervous.
Reform meant their arrangements might end. So the night before the vote, two cardinals went to work in the shadows: Giuliano della Rovere and Rodrigo Borgia, the Spaniard who would himself one day become the infamous Alexander VI. The most notorious pope of them all moved quietly from cell to cell inside the sealed conclave, buying votes, promises of benefices, of lucrative offices, of hard money, of positions and pensions for relatives, whatever it took to peel a cardinal away from Barbo.
This is Simony, the buying and selling of sacred offices named after Simon Magus in the book of Acts who tried to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit and got cursed for it. It was flatly, explicitly against every rule the church had. And it was also by this point in the 15th century simply how these elections worked.
An open secret, a routine. It helps to sit for a second with what a papal conclave in this era was really like. Stripped of the incense and the solemnity we tend to picture. Dozens of aging, ambitious, worldly men, most of them princes of great families in their own right, sealed together in a cramped and increasingly foul set of rooms, cut off from the outside world, sleeping in curtained-off cells, lined up in a row, eating food passed in through a turning hatch.
The theory was that isolation and the fear of God would concentrate their minds on choosing the holiest candidate under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The practice was a pressure cooker of dealmaking, threats, promises, and horse trading where the real negotiations happened in whispers in the dark between the cells.
And a man like della Rovere who understood exactly how to apply pressure and where could move through that sealed world like a fixer working a room. Cybo in all of this was not a driving force. He was the compromise, the safe pair of hands, the man everyone could live with precisely because he threatened no one and would owe everyone.
His ascension, as one modern reference dryly puts it, was not the result of his personal strengths. It was the result of his personal weaknesses which were exactly the qualities the men doing the actual choosing were looking for in a pope they could manage. Everyone involved signed a document beforehand, an election capitulation, a formal agreement meant to bind whoever won to a long list of promises about how he’d govern and what he’d share out.
Those documents were never ever worth the parchment they were written on because the first thing a new pope discovered was that he was now infallible in matters of faith and answerable to no earthly power. And the promises he’d made as a mere cardinal evaporated the moment the white smoke went up.
When the votes were finally counted, the man who came out on top was Cybo. Not because of any towering personal quality, not because anyone thought he was holy or wise or strong. He was pleasant, agreeable, weak, and above all controllable. Della Rovere wanted a pope he could steer, and Cybo was a man who could be steered. On the 29th of August 1484, Giovani Batista Saibbo became Pope Innocent VIII, taking the name in honor of a fellow Genoese, Innocent IV, who had held the office two centuries earlier.
The New Catholic Encyclopedia, which is not exactly a hostile anti-Catholic source, describes the whole election as “shameless bribery.” That’s the church’s own reference book in plain print describing how one of its own popes came to the throne. Now, the thing you notice immediately about Innocent’s papacy, the problem that would define the entire 8 years of it, is that he inherited an empty treasury and a very full set of appetites, both his own and his families, and squaring those two facts became the defining struggle of his reign.
Sixtus, his predecessor, had spent staggering sums on his own relatives and on wars and on building projects, and the papal coffers were scraped dry. There was no money. And yet here was a new pope with children to provide for, a court to maintain, allies to pay off, and the general standard of Renaissance papal magnificence to uphold.
So Innocent did what a man does when he desperately needs money and happens to hold an office that can at least in theory manufacture value out of thin air. He started selling things and not just the ordinary things that were already for sale. He got creative. He created brand new offices, positions that had simply never existed before in the history of the church.
Invented purely so that he could turn around and sell them to the highest bidder. The numbers here are real and they’re documented and they are genuinely a little breathtaking when you lay them out. He expanded the pool of papal secretaries to 26 and the new posts were sold off bringing in something on the order of 62,000 ducats.
He created and appointed 52 men called “plumbatores,” the officials whose job was to attach the lead seals to papal documents, the little disc of lead that made a bull official. And each of those 52 men paid 2,500 ducats for the privilege of holding that office. Think about what that transaction actually is.
He’s not raising money by taxing land or trade or by any productive activity. He’s raising it by conjuring up a job title, attaching a fee to it, and finding a wealthy man willing to pay. And once you’ve paid a small fortune to buy yourself a job, you don’t then sit in it out of the pure goodness of your heart and serve the church for free.
You make that money back and then a healthy profit on top by charging for every single thing you touch in the course of your duties. So the venality didn’t stay at the top. It flowed downward and outward through the whole system. Every office extracting its fee, every document costing something, every stamp and seal and signature having a price.
Everything in Rome, as one observer put it, seemed to be for sale. From a judge’s pardon in a criminal case all the way up to, well, the papacy itself, as he’d just demonstrated by buying it. And here’s where the story curdles from ordinary corruption which the Renaissance was frankly swimming in into something with a darker edge.
Two of these papal secretaries, men who’d bought their way into the office of writing and issuing papal documents were caught forging them. And not petty stuff, not a fudged date here or there. They confessed under questioning to having forged more than 50 papal bulls over the space of 2 years. 50 official documents complete with seals purporting to carry the authority of the pope himself sold to whoever would pay for a decree they wanted.
One of the forged documents, and I love this detail because it’s so oddly specific and it opens a little window onto how the trade worked, was a bull granting Norwegian priests permission to celebrate mass without wine, presumably because wine was genuinely hard to come by that far north.
And so there was real demand for an official looking exemption. And where there’s demand, there’s a forger willing to supply. The two men were caught and they were hanged. And then their bodies were burned afterward for good measure, which tells you that the punishment for corruption in Innocent’s Rome depended almost entirely on whether you were freelancing on your own account or whether you were paying your cut into the system properly.
“Sell offices from the throne. That’s governance. Forge the documents yourself and skip the middleman. That’s a hanging.”
There’s a dark comedy in the whole affair once you look at it squarely. The Pope was in effect running an enormous legal official forgery operation of his own, manufacturing offices out of nothing and selling the paper. And the men he’d sold those offices to simply took the logic one step further and started manufacturing the documents themselves, cutting out the Pope’s fee.
From their point of view, they were only doing what the whole system taught them to do, treating the sacred machinery of the church as a printing press for money. The difference between what they did and what Innocent did was really just a matter of authorization of who got to sign off and take the cut.
And they died for getting that distinction wrong. The church’s own instrument of authority, the papal bull, the document that could bind consciences and grant dispensations and reshape men’s spiritual lives, had become a commodity so thoroughly that people were counterfeiting it like coins.
And the counterfeits and the mint were doing more or less the same thing with a different letterhead. There’s a line that comes down to us supposedly overheard by a chronicler named Infessura. And we are going to talk a great deal about Infessura before we’re done where a papal official explains away the near total absence of real justice in the city with a grim little joke.
“God does not desire the death of a sinner,” the man said, twisting an old scriptural line, “but rather that he should live and pay.”
That was the machine Innocent was running, distilled into a single black joke. Sin in his Rome was not a thing to be punished and stamped out. Sin was a revenue stream. A man who sinned and could be made to pay for absolution was worth more alive and guilty than dead and forgiven. The whole apparatus of penance and pardon had been quietly bent into a collection system.
And you should understand what that actually meant for the ordinary business of living and dying in Rome under this pope because it wasn’t an abstraction. Rome in these years was a violent lawless place and Innocent’s administration did remarkably little to change that. In part because a peaceful city generates fewer fines than a turbulent one.
Murders were common, so common that the chroniclers noted them almost as weather. The great families ran the streets of their own districts as private thieves, settling scores with hired knives, and the papal justice that should have restrained them was for sale like everything else, so that a rich man could kill and pay his way clear while a poor one hanged.
Bandits worked the roads right up to the gates of the city. So that travel outside the walls, even a short distance from the safety of home, meant real risk of robbery or worse. And pilgrims coming to Rome for their soul’s sake were fair game for the men waiting along the way.
This was the city Innocent governed or failed to govern for 8 years. A place where the law was a price list and violence was a constant low hum under everything else and where the Pope’s own son was pulling a cut from the fines and carrying it to the card table. Call it orderly disorder, a system that had learned to profit from its own rot.
Moving from how he raised his money to how he spent it takes us straight to his family and specifically to his son because Francescetto was where an enormous amount of that money went. Francescetto Cybo. This is the boy from Naples, now a grown man in his late 30s. And he is, I have to be honest, one of the more thoroughly unimpressive figures to attach himself to a papal court.
And given the competition in that particular arena, that’s really saying something. He was, by every account we have, a gambler and a waster with no visible talents beyond the single accident of being the Pope’s son. And it turned out in that time and place that this one qualification was entirely enough. The nickname itself, Francescetto, is a diminutive of little Francesco, and he seems to have been small in stature, which the Romans, being Romans, noted and enjoyed.
Innocent showered him with everything the office could provide. Francescetto was made governor and captain general of Rome, given military and civil authority over the city. He was granted the fiefs of Cerveteri and Anguillara, castles and lands north of Rome that had been taken from the Orsini family, which of course made the Orsini furious and stored up trouble for later.
He was made a count, given the grand title of count of the Lateran Palace, and in a detail that really captures the flavor of the whole arrangement, he collected a personal cut of the fines levied in the ecclesiastical courts of the city. So when Rome caught and fined its wrongdoers, the money didn’t all go to the church or the poor.
A slice of it went straight into the pocket of the Pope’s gambling son, who then carried it off to the gaming table and lost it. Think about what that arrangement did to the incentives running through the whole city. The Pope’s own son had a direct personal financial stake in there being plenty of sin to fine.
Every gambler caught, every blasphemer, every man hauled before the ecclesiastical courts meant coin in Francescetto’s purse. It’s the venality of the whole papacy in miniature, distilled down into one grasping man. The idea that wrongdoing was not a problem to be solved, but a resource to be harvested, and the harvest went to the family.
And Francescetto was by all accounts not remotely up to the dignity of any of the offices heaped on him. Captain general of Rome is a serious military title, and it was held by a man whose only demonstrated talent was losing at cards. The Romans, who missed nothing and forgave less, took his measure quickly and held him in open contempt.
This small, luckless, entitled son of a pope given the keys to the city because of an accident of birth to a father who’d had him before he ever took holy orders. And the gaming table did not treat him kindly. In one single night, Francescetto is said to have lost 14,000 ducats to a cardinal, Raphael Riario, a nephew of the previous pope.
And then, wounded and sulking like a child, he went to his father to complain that he’d been cheated, that the game had been rigged against him. Some versions of the story put the loss much higher at 60,000 ducats, an almost unimaginable sum. Money that supposedly helped that same cardinal build one of the grand palaces of Rome, the Cancelleria, which still stands today.
A beautiful Renaissance building that may quite literally have been financed by the Pope’s son’s terrible luck at cards. I’d take the exact figures with a healthy grain of salt because these numbers have a way of swelling in the retelling. And 14,000 and 60,000 are very different amounts. But the gambling itself is well attested from multiple directions.
And the image of the Pope’s son whining to his father that a card game was rigged, apparently without a flicker of awareness that the entire system feeding him was rigged from top to bottom. That a man in his position complaining about unfairness was itself the joke is the sort of detail that stays with you.
Francescetto had one genuinely ugly moment that’s worth telling in full because it lays bare the loyalty running through that family. In September of 1490, a rumor swept through Rome that the Pope had died. He hadn’t. He was ill, as he increasingly was in those years, and the rumor got out ahead of the fact, the way rumors do.
And Francescetto’s very first instinct upon believing that his father was dead, his father, the man who had given him everything, was to try to rush the papal treasury and seize as much of it as he could carry before anyone could stop him. Not to grieve, not to pray, to loot. His own father supposedly lying dead in the next room, and the son’s immediate plan was to strip the place bare.
When Innocent turned out to be very much alive, the whole grasping business had to be quietly hushed up and walked back, and everyone pretended it hadn’t happened. It gives you an unsentimental picture of the affection running through that household. And Francescetto’s habits would prove consistent right to the end. To secure Francescetto’s future in a way that gambling and looting couldn’t, though, Innocent needed a proper marriage, a dynastic one.
And here he pulled off the single genuinely shrewd piece of statecraft of his whole reign. He married his gambling, treasury-raiding, card-cheating son into the most important family in all of Italy, the Medici of Florence. In January of 1488, Francescetto Cybo married Maddalena de’ Medici, the daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, the uncrowned prince of Florence, the greatest patron of the Renaissance, the man at the very center of the Italian world.
Maddalena was around 15 years old. She brought a dowry of 4,000 ducats. And Lorenzo…
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
