Fragmenta

For two decades, Adrian Floriszoon was a professor at the University of Louvain. During this period he played an increasingly important role in church life in the Netherlands. He carried out crucial reforms in the Louvain theological faculty, steering it towards a more practical orientation. At the same time, he played a role in the foundation of the famous Standonck College for the training of priests. The generation of theologians he guided would become the storm troopers of the Counter-Reformation. In later life he maintained relationships with the institutions where he had worked during his Louvain period and the people he knew in those days.

Between 1515 and 1522, Adrian was an official in the service of the Habsburg in Spain. The article discusses how he achieved such important positions and how he helped to secure the Habsburg inheritance of Aragon and Castile. After the 1517 arrival of the new King (Charles V) whom he had served as tutor, he accompanied Charles on his travels through Spain and functioned as one of his main advisers. The nomination as governor of Castile in 1520 can be interpreted as the peak of his Habsburg service. However, it was a difficult post as he had to handle, until his departure for Rome, the rebellion of the Castilian Comuneros against the Emperor. He proved to be a cautious and skilled negotiator, who avoided military encounters as much as possible. Adrian’s political talents may have been limited but the imperfections of his governorship were mainly attributable to the absence of delegated power for decision making, a shortage of money, limited feedback from Charles V, showing the inadequacies of early modern dynastic states.

The article discusses Adrian’s election and evaluates his actual activities as pope. As soon as the conclave was over, the cardinals realised they had elected a dangerous man, as Cardinal Gonzaga commented: “one might even say that the Emperor will be the Pope and the Pope Emperor”. The new Pope’s chances for success quickly began to diminish. It can be concluded that Adrian did not accomplish the goals he had set for himself because, along with the plague and financial troubles, he was primarily incapable of winning over people to his cause. His Northern stubbornness did not help to conquer Italian hearts.

The paper explores the office and the power of the pope as reflected in Adrian’s own theological writings. He believed that the crisis of the church could be attributed to the transgression of canon law and the misuse of the so-called “plenitudo potestatis” by some Popes. For Adrian, real reform could only be possible by returning to canonical legislation and to the re-establishment of the original church, including a renewal of the value of the church’s laws and obedience to those laws.

How would Pope Adrian have experienced the ritual system of the Eternal City, a place he had never visited? Although the celebrations of the adventus were of “pompa mediocre”, as the source states, there was enthusiasm among the public for the triumphal arch, the thirty big statues near Porta San Paolo, the tapestries, papal coat of arms, and ephemeral altars with relics along the streets of the city. During Adrian’s pontificate the Sistine Chapel and the splendid Vatican palace halls were also fully functional as the theatre of palatine liturgy. The Pope scrupulously followed the liturgical calendar prescribed in the papal ceremonial, but if necessary he did not hesitate to tone down events because of the financial, political and precarious sanitary situations. Adrian was dedicated to the spiritual power of liturgy. At the same time he was fully aware that he had to play his ritual role as the Roman pontifex maximus.

In his Ephemerides Historicae, a hitherto little used diary, Cornelius de Fine covers his adventures in Rome from 1511 to 1548. Through his eyes, we look at Pope Adrian’s pontificate. De Fine ventures sympathy for his fellow countryman, and speaks positively about his character, attributing his foredoomed failure to the slowness and inaptness of his inexperienced Dutch employees. The main object of De Fines criticism is Willem van Enkenvoirt, the cardinal that Adrian appointed on his deathbed, envisaged by many as the head of the papal administration.

In the absence of family relations, Pope Adrian had to rely on his compatriots. Willem van Enckenvoirt was the central ‘spider’in the Dutch web in Rome in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Throughout the Dutch papacy, Van Enckenvoirt acted as the intermediary between Adrian and anyone who wanted access. Soon he was made datarius, responsible for the sale of offices in the papal bureaucracy and for the approval of ecclesiastical benefices. He knew his way around the Roman bureaucracy and was deeply embedded in local patterns of patronage. A reconstruction of his Roman network shows Van Enckenvoirt to have been a leading representative of a group of ecclesiastical entrepreneurs from the Low Countries, who participated fully in the mechanisms of distributing the Church’s resources. In fact, he embodied the Roman corruption that Adrian had set out to combat. Yet the Pope needed this ‘Romanized’ country man in order to hold his own in the intricacies of Curial politics.

This contribution describes in detail the 1999 restoration of Pope Adrian’s tomb in Santa Maria dell’Anima, the church of the German nation. This restoration concentrated on various elements. The removal of atmospheric particles, high in reactive pollutants, to whose action, marble is particularly sensitive; the traces of lime wash, repainting, modified substances, filling materials not ideal for conservation and stains due to the iron and bronze elements. The elimination of these elements revealed the delicate colouring and the transitions that the material and the passing of the years have given to this excellent piece of Renaissance sculpture by Baldassarre Peruzzi.

Cardinal Enckevoirt proved himself a true Roman: he became very wealthy thanks to the lucrative benefices bestowed upon him by Pope Adrian and others and he spent his riches on art. The resulting maecenatism was unrivalled by his Dutch peers, nor was it limited to Rome. The Pope’s funeral monument is only one out of his many donations made to the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima and its brotherhood. Van Enkenvoirt’s efforts were crucial to insuring Adrian’s memory. By paying a thousand ducats for a sumptuous monument, he made sure that the Pope’s mortal remains were moved to the Anima. Even as the monument was being built, the cardinal was already planning his own tomb as a pendant on the opposite wall. In fact, he was the moving spirit behind the construction of a whole new building on its premises, which was meant to include his cardinal’s palace.

This paper looks at the image of Pope Adrian VI as it developed in historiography. Starting with the contemporary accounts on the Pope and his pontificate, and ending in the twentieth century, it tries to reconstruct the way in which these diverging opinions influenced each other. Chronologically passing through, among others, Paolo Giovio and other contemporary and later authors such as Erasmus, Cornelius Aurelius and Gerard Morinck, positive and negative judgments have been alternately found. The chapters on Adrian in his history of the popes by the Catholic German historian Ludwig von Pastor (1907) are pivotal as the last comprehensive treatment based on archival sources. Later Catholic writings sometimes verge on hagiography. Since then, however, several detailed studies have been added to fill in gaps in Adrian’s biography. Over five centuries, there seems to be a remarkable continuity in describing Adrian as the embodiment of archetypal ‘Dutchness’, both in a positive and a negative sense: simple, sincere, frugal, and pious, as well as blunt, stingy, and lacking in civility and culture.