Every fresh writer who comes to the task appears to be mainly inspired by a desire to emulate his forerunners, allowing his pen to riot zestfully in the accumulation of scandalous matter, and seeking to increase if possible its lurid quality by a degree or two.

As a rule there is not even an attempt made to put forward evidence in substantiation of anything that is alleged.
Wild and sweeping statement takes the place that should be held by calm deduction and reasoned comment.
"He was the worst Pontiff that ever filled St.Peter's Chair," is one of these sweeping statements, culled from the pages of an able, modern, Italian author, whose writings, sound in all that concerns other matters, are strewn with the most foolish extravagances and flagrant inaccuracies in connection with Alexander VI and his family.
To say of him, as that writer says, that "he was the worst Pontiff that ever filled St.Peter's Chair," can only be justified by an utter ignorance of papal history.

You have but to compare him calmly and honestly--your mind stripped of preconceptions--with the wretched and wholly contemptible Innocent VIII whom he succeeded, or with the latter's precursor, the terrible Sixtus IV.
That he was better than these men, morally or ecclesiastically, is not to be pretended; that he was worse--measuring achievement by opportunity--is strenuously to be denied.

For the rest, that he was infinitely more gifted and infinitely more a man of affairs is not to be gainsaid by any impartial critic.
If we take him out of the background of history in which he is set, and judge him singly and individually, we behold a man who, as a churchman and Christ's Vicar, fills us with horror and loathing, as a scandalous exception from what we are justified in supposing from his office must have been the rule.

Therefore, that he may be judged by the standard of his own time if he is to be judged at all, if we are even to attempt to understand him, have we given a sketch of the careers of those Popes who immediately preceded him, with whom as Vice-Chancellor he was intimately associated, and whose examples were the only papal examples that he possessed.
That this should justify his course we do not pretend.