LEO X., GIOVANNI DE Mentor, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was born in December 1475. He was made a cardinal at the unusually early age of thirteen, by Pope Innocent VIII., who was very intimate with his father Lorenzo. After the death of Lorenzo in 1492, Cardinal de' Medici shared in the expulsion of his brothels, Piero and Giuliano, from Florence, in November, 1494. [Mmes.] After fruitless endeavours to effect their restoration, Cardinal de' Medici gave up the attempt, and quitted Italy, which country was then ravaged by foreign arms, and betrayed by the wretched policy of Alexander VL Cardinal de' Medici travelled through Germany and France, courting the acquaintance of men of learning, and displaying his own taste for literature and the liberal arts. After the death of Alexander VL in 1503 he returned to Rome, where Julius II. employed him as legate with the army against the French. Being taken prisoner by the latter at the battle of Ravenna in April 1512, he was sent to Milan, but soon after effected his escape. The French being driven out of Lombardy, and the Florentine republic, with the Gonfaloniere Soderini at its head, being charged with partiality towards the foreigners, Cardinal de' Medici contrived to employ the arms of the allied powers in replacing him and his family in their former supremacy over their native country. A body of 5000 Spaniards, brave to ferocity, were marched under Raymond de Cardona against Florence in August 1512. On their way they stormed the town of Prato, and massacred the citizens, which so intimidated the Florentines that they immediately amitnlated ; and Cardinal de' Medici and his brother Giuliano soon alter entered Florence, and forced the Signoria, or executive, to call a 'parlamento,' or general assembly of the people, in the great square, on the 16th of December. This general assembly of the sovereign people had repeatedly been used by ambitious men as a ready instru ment of their views, and it proved such on this occasion. All the laws enacted since the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 were abrogated. A balls., or commission, was appointed, consisting of creatures of that family, with dictatorial powers to reform the state. No bloodshed
however accompanied the re-sction, but Soderini and other citizens opposed to the Medici were banished. Soon after, in March 1513, news came of the death of Julius II. et Rome, and Cardinal de' Medici hastened to the conclave, leaving his brother Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo, son of Piero, at the head of the affairs of Florence.
Cardinal de' Medici was elected pope In March, 1513, at the early age of thirty-seven, when he assumed the name of Leo X. One of his first acts was to appoint two men of learning, Bembo and Sadoleto, for his secretaries. He next sent a general amnesty to be published at Florence, where a conspiracy had been discovered against the Medici, for which two individuals were executed, and others, with the celebrated Islachiavelli among the rest, were arrested and put to the torture. Leo ordered Giuliano to release the prisoners, end recall those that were banished, and Soderini among the rest. Giuliano being invited to Rome, where he was made Gonfaloniere of the Holy Church, Leo appointed his nephew Lorenzo governor of Florence, and his cousin, Cardinal Giulio de Medici, archbishop of the same. Florence was now a dependency of Rome, and such it contioned during the remainder of Leo's life.
The pontificate of Leo X., though it lasted only nine years, forma one of the most memorable epochs in the history of modern Europe, whether we consider it in a political light as a period of transition for Italy, when the power of Charles V. of Spain began to establish itself in that country ; or whether we look upon it as that period In the history of the Western Church which was marked by the momentous event of Luther's Reformation. But there is a third and a more favourable aspect under which the reign of Leo ought to be viewed, as a flourishing epoch for learning and the arts, which were eueourage1 by that pontiff, as they had been by his father, and indeed as they have been by his family in general, and for which the glorious appella tion of the ago of Leo X. has been given to the first part of the 16th century.