Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 39

[cahn]

Last post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)

Comments

Re: News from the Middle Ages

[selenak]

Oh yes. Lorenzo de' Medici would be a bishop's seat and the cardinal's hat for his son Giovanni, but still expect Giovanni to study in Pisa, and be good at it (and be rewarded if he did well). Rodrigo Borgia also sent his son Cesare to study in Pisa in addition to making him a bishop, and later a Cardinal, and just to round the budding theologians from Pisa off, Alessandro Farnese also studied in Pisa. (I thought they were all in the same class, so to speak, but liraen reminded me this is fiction; Alessandro studied a few years earlier, though Giovanni and Cesare were the same age and had some of the same professors.) That's two future Popes and the most notorious condottiere of the era, and I often wondered what their teachers later thought. :)

Rodrigo Borgia himself studied at the university of Bologna (the oldest and still one of the most challenging of the European universities - bear in mind here he was from Spain, so Bologna wasn't something nearby or easy to get into). What I'm getting at here, again: as a Renaissance prince of the church, you or your family probably bought that office or got through some wheeling and dealing, if you didn't have a mistress, you were probably Charles V's old teacher from the Netherlands and doomed to have a very brief papacy, and you better were a first class power player because between the French and the HRE duking it out on Italian territory, the Turks invading and that English guy starting his own shop, you needed to be - BUT the one thing even Luther could not have accused you off would have been a lack of proper education. Whereas the Popes during the Pornocracy seem to have been chosen at random by the two main Roman families on the principle of "who's available and will do what Marioza or Theodora tell him to do?"

as someone who was brought up in a largely Protestant culture my view was "weren't all the Popes evil?" :P

St. Peter: Thanks a lot.
Clement II/Bamberg-loving Suidger: *looks hurt*
Sylvester II: And me a more succesful clerical Voltaire; just ask Mildred. And a Judith Tarr main character.
Adrian VI: Are you a Cardinal determined to off me?

Re: News from the Middle Ages

[cahn]

That's two future Popes and the most notorious condottiere of the era, and I often wondered what their teachers later thought. :)

Heh, that does sound... very interesting for their teachers!

St. Peter: Thanks a lot.

Oh, you're okay, St. Peter! I only mean after 300 AD or so :P (actually, this might be my-church-specific)

Everyone else, sorry! :P :) (oh man, I still have to (re)read Ars Magica! I started it and gosh I remember absolutely nothing about it!)