The humbly born Ligurian Francesco della Rovere (b. c. 1414–d. 1484) was entrusted to the Franciscan Order from the age of nine and educated in Chieri, near Turin, and at the university of Padua. By 1460 his distinguished academic career had taken him from Padua to Bologna, Pavia, Siena, Florence, and Perugia. He then served as Roman procurator and vicar general of the Friars Minor, and minister general from 1464, before being made a cardinal by Pope Paul II in 1467. His learning was demonstrated in three theological treatises: De sanguine Christi, De potentia dei, and De futuris contingentibus. If the cardinals reckoned on securing a meek scholar-pope when they elected him to the highest office in August 1471 they miscalculated, for what emerged from the Franciscan chrysalis was an enthusiastic player of papal politics who advanced the interests of his kinsmen with greater zeal than had any of his recent predecessors. Pope Sixtus IV was a rarity in the higher echelons of the Church precisely because he was of non-noble birth, and he clearly sought to compensate for this not only by promoting so many of his relatives, both clerics and laymen, but by commissioning numerous building projects that could be decorated with oak trees and acorns, the Della Rovere emblems. The holy year or jubilee of 1475 presented the ideal opportunity for such assertions of the family’s newly established status. Toward the end of the pontificate, Sixtus’s taste for entering political alliances embroiled the papacy in a sequence of peninsular wars, the first of which was triggered by the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478: one of the pope’s lay nephews, Girolamo Riario, supported the plot against Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, and another, Cardinal Raffaele Sansoni-Riario, witnessed the murder of Giuliano in the Florentine duomo. The Pazzi War was followed by a realignment of the Italian powers, which then went to war over the duchy of Ferrara in 1482–1484. Sixtus’s death on 12 August 1484 was said to have been caused by his fury at the peace terms agreed between Milan and Venice. Relations between Sixtus and the secular powers beyond Italy are perhaps best approached via the ecclesiastical policies of the relevant princes. The broad outline of his pontificate can be traced in various Reference Works, but attention should focus on the sheer quantity of Primary Sources, which are so numerous that they are divided between Histories, Letters, and Panegyrics and Polemics in this article. Collections of Papers also form so rich a resource that relatively few individual articles have been selected for individual treatment. Lives and Times can be consulted for the political, diplomatic, and military history of Sixtus’s pontificate, while A Franciscan Pope addresses some aspects of its ecclesiastical history. Again reflecting the quantity of available publications, it seems appropriate to allow Culture to be subdivided into Architecture, the architectural and artistic composite that is the Sistine Chapel, and other Painting and Sculpture, before concluding with the literary culture of the Written and Spoken Word.
