NEPOTISM. – Term used to designate the excessive favor shown by some popes toward members of their own family by granting ecclesiastical dignities, privileges, temporal dominions or lucrative revenues in the Papal State and elsewhere in Italy.
The practice, which has its roots in human propensity to favor one’s own relatives, also responded at certain historical moments to the need for defense against intrigues of internal factions or foreign powers, by turning to capable members of one’s family for support or by making them powerful for this purpose. Examples are found as early as the 10th century, and even Innocent III, though so austere, made use of the influence of his family, the Conti, and in particular of his brother Riccardo, to curb the Roman commune in its pretensions against the papacy after the revolution of 1142. Dante’s bitter invective against Nicholas III, “eager to advance the Orsini,” is too well known; yet it is also true that the pope was following a political plan of pacification and reorganization of his State and of Italy. The same can be said of Boniface VIII, whom Dante so tragically associated with Nicholas III, and who sought cardinals and men of government from his own kin to carry out his designs and combat his adversaries, particularly the Colonna.
Nepotism flourished under some of the Avignon popes, especially Clement V and Clement VI, who provoked Petrarch’s indignation in the *Epistulae sine titulo*. Hence, in the Conclave of 1352, a special capitulation was drawn up to exclude the relatives of the future pope from the Curia and from the administration of the State. Yet in the disorders of the Great Schism, Urban VI resorted to his relatives the Prignano, and Boniface IX to his Tomacelli; similarly, Martin V relied on the Colonna and their clients in his work of restoring and purifying Rome and its environs and in keeping the condottieri in check. Once the troubles of the Schism and its consequences had passed, a group of popes can be seen concerned with placing their relatives in the Curia: thus Callistus III with the Borgia, summoned from Spain to Rome. With Sixtus IV a further step was taken, for he not only lavished favors on his Della Rovere, Sansoni, and Basso relatives, but also promoted the ambitions of Girolamo Riario in forming a lordship in Romagna at the expense of the regional signori. Nepotism then reached its most notorious expression in Alexander VI, who made his son Cesare Borgia gonfalonier of the Church, strove to secure for him an eminent position, even forming for him a hereditary state in central Italy, which Julius II later ruthlessly overthrew. Leo X worked to secure the duchy of Urbino, within the Papal States, for his nephew Lorenzo de’ Medici, wresting it from Francesco Maria della Rovere, and entertained even greater designs in