Had their horror been honest, had it sprung from true principles, had it been born of any but a desire to befoul and bespatter at all costs Roderigo Borgia, it is not against him that they would have hurled their denunciations, but against the whole College of Cardinals which took part in the sacrilege and which included three future Popes.( 1) 1 Cardinals Piccolomini, de'Medici, and Giuliano della Rovere.
Assuming not only that there was simony, but that it was on as wholesale a scale as was alleged, and that for gold--coined or in the form of benefices--Roderigo bought the cardinal's votes, what then?
He bought them, true.

But they--they sold him their sacred trust, their duty to their God, their priestly honour, their holy vows.

For the gold he offered them they bartered these.

So much admitted, then surely, in that transaction, those cardinals were the prostitutes! The man who bought so much of them, at least, was on no baser level than were they.
Yet invective singles him out for its one object, and so betrays the aforethought malice of its inspiration.
Our quarrel is with that; with that, and with those writers who have taken Alexander's simony for granted--eagerly almost--for the purpose of heaping odium upon him by making him appear a scandalous exception to the prevailing rule.
If, nevertheless, we hold, as we have said, that simony probably did take place, we do so, not so much upon the inconclusive evidence of the fact, as upon the circumstance that it had become almost an established custom to purchase the tiara, and that Roderigo Borgia--since his ambition clearly urged him to the Pontificate--would have been an exception had he refrained.
It may seem that to have disputed so long to conclude by admitting so much is no better than a waste of labour.

Not so, we hope.