Cajetan

Extract

Giacomo Tommaso Del Vio named Caietanus from his birthplace, Gaieta, died in the autumn of 1534. He had been a Cardinal for the last seventeen years, had been chosen as the Dominican Master General when he was only thirty-nine, and had been employed as Papal legate in Hungary and at the Imperial Diet. His influence upon church policy had been exercised through four pontificates; he had been the councillor of Julius II, the intimate of Leo X, had helped to achieve the election of Adrian VI and had been the minister of Clement VII in the last years of his reign. Much of his public life had been marked by the conventional felicity of that of a high curial official in Medicean Rome; a Neapolitan by birth, barely noble and quite without inherited influence he would seem to have been first marked for preferment by the favour of Duke Ludovico Sforza; he had come to the Roman court as a familiar of the Caraffa, had owed his Cardinalate to the almost personal friendship of Leo X and then slowly earning the confidence of Charles V he had gained the sometimes hesitant support of the Imperialist grouping in the sacred college.

Throughout he had possessed that recognition as a genius so valuable to a Renaissance statesman, for he had shared in precisely those qualities that the men of the Renaissance valued; a subtle sense of words, a fluent scholarship, distinction as a diplomatist due to a careful recognition of the realities of each situation, and a plastic memory, that favourite prodigy of the 16th century.