Chapter Five—
The Patronage of Northerners at St. Peter's

Northern musicians who sought employment in Italy, or in other areas away from their native lands, were lured by a variety of financial enticements. Salaries may have provided little more than pocket money for some singers. Success was often measured by other types of remuneration: benefices, gifts of property, lucrative administrative posts, and the like.^[1] Occasionally an employee could argue successfully for a higher salary due to the absence of a benefice, or conversely, a patron could dispense with a salary altogether when nonsalary incomes were high; indeed, Paulo Cortesi advised cardinals to give familiars benefices as part of their salaries.^[2] In considering the economic aspects of music patronage at St. Peter's, it should be remembered that the most visible type of financial support, salary payments, was likely to be the least consequential.

However, patronage cannot be defined solely in terms of monetary transactions. Perhaps more important at St. Peter's, and more revealing

about the attractions of Rome to northerners of many callings, was the variety of patronage sources available to them. With the papal chapel as a career pinnacle reached only by a few, singers coming to Rome had several other options: On a corporate level there were churches, confraternities, and hospitals; on an individual level there were the families of cardinals and other highly placed ecclesiastics. Salaries, benefices, shifting political alignments far from Rome, and changes in the national makeup of the curia—all of these had an impact on the number and nationality of singers seeking employment at St. Peter's. Finally, the limitation of measuring patronage in terms of income from salaries or benefices is most telling in the type of patronage that is easiest to overlook because the singers were usually not paid at all (or not paid through conventional channels) or even named: the patronage of northern boys in Rome. This likely had a considerable impact on the slow development of educational opportunities for Roman boys.

Salaries

Singers at St. Peter's began to receive a regular wage only from the papacy of Nicholas V. For 1447 and 1448 the small salaries of Rubino and Hervé grew from just 8 carlini (about 0.8 ducat) to 1 ducat, thanks to a raise in February 1448 made effective the preceding October. Then, as a measure of Jubilee prosperity, salaries and the number of singers increased substantially in 1450. Monthly disbursements of 11 ducats were probably split among six singers, though the accounts mention twelve in April (doc. 1450c). This would have provided salaries of 1½ to 2½ ducats each month, the rates still paid in the 1460s. In comparison, under Nicholas V the salaries of papal singers rose from 5 to 8 florins (or 5 to 8 ducats) per month, roughly three to four times as much as at St. Peter's.^[3] Nevertheless, these lower wages were sufficient to attract northern singers capable of meeting the musical needs of the basilica.

Over the last half of the Quattrocento these wages changed infrequently. Three decades later the figures were the same. However, for

nearly sixteen of the intervening years (1462 to fall 1478), the basilica grew more competitive and offered selected musicians, usually the tenor, 3 ducats a month; the tenor Gregorio and the contra Johannes Fede even received 4. While this raise initially affected just one or two of the singers, it was accompanied by the expansion of the choir from four voices to seven. Both events followed the apparent loss of the basilica's organ late in 1461. The impression that more and better singers were required to compensate for the lack of organ is supported by the gradual decline in wages in 1478, returning salaries to the earlier scale within two years after a new organ had become operational. The same pattern recurred in the 1490s. There were new raises in the fall of 1495, after the 1475 organ seems to have ceased functioning, yet before another was built; and slight cuts again when the new "Alexander VI" organ was completed.

These cuts were more sophisticated than before. Novel and strict accounting procedures, in place by March 1497 at the latest, caused wages to decline slightly for the members of the choir. That is when the basilica began to pay its singers in carlini instead of ducats, and, rather than the fixed wages customary for the previous half century, the amounts began to rise and fall slightly each month. Francisco Scarafanfara, for example, collected 22 carlini (a little more than 2 ducats) in April 1497 and then 24, 23, 23, 20, and 22.3 carlini in the following months. In previous years he had regularly received 2 ducats, 30 bolognini , roughly 24 carlini . Thus during that half year the St. Peter's chapter shaved an entire ducat off of his earlier salary, a figure they repeated with nearly every singer in the choir. Over a full year these accounting procedures saved the basilica the annual salary for one singer, at least. Evidently in response to absenteeism among its singers, the basilica chapter had instituted a "points" system, whereby singers would forfeit a portion of their salary for each service, or partial service, that they missed. The account books state this explicitly in the August payments: "pay the singers named below for their salaries for the month of this past August, retaining points [punctis ] for their absences" (doc. 1497c).

Wages rose definitively just months before the start of the Jubilee Year 1500. A completely new group of singers was in place by October 1499, now paid 30 carlini (or 3 ducats) monthly; moreover, because

this sum did not waver, the "points" system utilized through April 1499 had been jettisoned. These singers quickly received a second raise during the Jubilee Year. Probably in April 1500 salaries for three of the singers and the organist Aloviso de Spiritu reached 40 carlini (4 ducats), while three others got 3 ducats each—a considerable improvement over the 2½-ducat maximum singers claimed as late as April 1499.^[4] This time the wages of the Sistine Chapel musicians did not climb. According to the new balance of salaries the best St. Peter's singers had a salary half the size of those in the papal chapel. The accelerating salary increases around the turn of the century must have been part of the chapter's preparations for the expanded role Alexander VI assigned to St. Peter's in the Jubilee festivities.

Curial Patrons

Whatever the correlation between fluctuations in salary and changes in the numbers of northerners in the choir, salaries reveal little about the large-scale shifts in the northern presence at St. Peter's during the fifteenth century. If salaries and wages might be termed "direct" patronage, then in this case it is a type of "indirect" patronage that helped draw northerners to the basilica: the chance to work in a city with many resident patrons—preeminently the pope and the cardinals—as well as a continual flow of visiting patrons from Italian and northern courts. The numbers supported by cardinals alone were substantial. Paolo Cortesi prescribed 150 members as the ideal size for the family of a cardinal, this at a time when Plus III (1503) kept 370 in his own. By the census of 1527 the average household of a cardinal numbered 150.^[5] Although Cortesi identified palazzi for forty cardinals, the

number resident at any given moment was probably between twenty and thirty during the latter decades of the fifteenth century, judging from the number of cardinals present in conclaves to elect a new pope.^[6] At the very least, curial cardinals therefore must have supported some 2,000 persons. Among the desired types of familiars that Cortesi recommended for cardinals were silversmiths, artists, sculptors, and musicians.^[7]

For its high visibility and proximity to the pope, a job at St. Peter's must have compared favorably to many other prospects in Rome. If this is a polite way of saying that employment at St. Peter's was desirable because a job there could provide an entree into a more lucrative position, there is ample evidence for that conclusion. This view of short-term service at the basilica is exactly that of Cortesi on the merits of low-paying jobs with a curial cardinal. In his evaluation of which nationalities made the best employees, Cortesi criticized Neapolitans for their sloth and the Florentines their avarice; northerners, however, were willing to "serve in any capacity in a cardinal's household, even without salary," simply to get a foot in the curial door.^[8] For them the hope of acquiring northern benefices in Rome was not idle. Short-term servitude could be tolerated for long-term profit. Although formulated in the early sixteenth century, Cortesi's description of the eagerness that prompted northerners to accept any low-paying job reiterates a similar opinion written during the pontificate of Eugenius IV. Lapo da Castiglionchio also discusses the willingness of these stranieri to do virtually anything—even cook—in a brief treatise, his Dialogus super excellentia et dignitate curiae Romanae (1438). Often bitingly ironic

and sarcastic, Lapo is quite earnest when he identifies the "great honors and benefits" given to northern priests in their own lands as the reason why so many came to Rome.

And for this reason from France, Germany, England, and other nations, because great honors and benefits are given to priests in those nations, many of them converge on the curia who undertake the vilest jobs, nor do they refuse any servile condition; but they especially exercise the art of cooking cheerfully and they are very good at it. For this reason this kind of man, almost totally barbaric, is in the curia; and there are no Italians, or very few, who would be found there.^[9]

The paths of northern singers to and from St. Peter's indicate that a job there was a stepping stone or a way-station. Easiest to document are the fifteen singers who went on to careers in the papal chapel, not counting Johannes Fede, whose employment at St. Peter's followed by two decades his papal service. These singers, listed in Table 9, generally seem to have sung at the basilica for two, three, or four years before moving directly into the papal choir. But some, like Guillaume Rose and Georgius de Dunis, had a hiatus between these positions, perhaps in the service of a curial cardinal. Except for Archangelo Blasio and Hieronymus Beltrandus de Verona, all were northerners. And although he joined the papal bureaucracy rather than the chapel, Nicholas Rembert should be mentioned as one who successfully used St. Peter's as a springboard to a much sought-after position as a notary of the Sacred Rota and a papal abbreviator.^[10]

Other St. Peter's singers were willing prey to Italian patrons from outside of Rome. Guillelmus da Francia managed in the 1450s to move back and forth between St. Peter's and Padua. When Ercole d'Este set about building up his cappella of musicians in the early 1470s, St. Peter's provided several, all of them contras: Jachettus di Marvilla in 1472

and 1473, and then probably also Johannes Marescalli and Rainaldus de Meis (if he is Rainaldetto Cambrai), who both arrived at St. Peter's in the fall of 1472 and then apparently sang together at Ferrara from 1474 to 1476.^[11] Some years later Rome was the goal of Sienese talent scouts. After his departure from St. Peter's in 1478, Matheus Gay copied a polyphonic manuscript for the Siena Cathedral. The month after Gay finished, Alberto di Francesco Aringhieri, overseer of the cathedral, sent to Rome for several singers: some "sopranos, a contra, and tenorista for our cathedral church."^[12]

For the average singer in Rome the variety of potential employers was probably as often a question of simultaneous patronage as successive. Many St. Peter's singers enjoyed a shared patronage with the basilica and a pope, cardinal, or other ecclesiastical official. Those identified as members of the papal household include Ludovicus d'Armelli and Johannes Brunet.^[13] And Winochus de Oudenorde and Nicholas de Furnis may have become papal familiars after arriving at St. Peter's.^[14] For a few singers there is evidence that they traveled with the pope. The timings of the on again, off again presence of Guillaume Rose in the 1460s suggest an involvement with Pius II or someone near him. Guillaume arrived at St. Peter's in mid-December 1462; Pius had just returned to Rome on 13 December following a six-month absence. Guillaume then left the basilica in March 1465 and returned in

mid-May; Pius journeyed to and from Siena from 4 April to 19 May. And Guillaume left again for June through September; Pius took his final trip to Ancona on 18 June, dying there in August. For Matheus Gay, this kind of connection need not be inferred. He explained his absence between June and October 1476 in a receipt: "I, Matheus Gay, receive from Dns. Dominico Pauli my [salary] for part of June, when the pope left Rome" (doc. 1476d). As the result of the Tiber overflowing in January 1476, the plague broke out in March. By June Sixtus IV decided to retreat to Viterbo, taking with him the cardinals Borgia, d'Estouteville, and Carafa, among others. Leaving Rome on 10 June, they did not return until 23 October.^[15] Though other singers also chose this moment to leave St. Peter's, Matheus is the only one with a tangible connection to the papal entourage, both because of his receipt and because he reappeared at the basilica just when the pope returned.

The following list is representative of the variety of officials who had musicians in their care. By February 1477 Nicholas Corel, a contra and a cleric from Cambrai, was a familiar of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere.^[16] The organist Johannes de Montibus (October 1492) served with Giuliano de Cesarinis, for many years an apostolic protonotary and chamberlain of St. Peter's.^[17] Hieronymus Beltrandus de Verona sang in 1492 while in the family of another Veronese, Francesco Maffei, then a papal scribe and later a deacon of the Verona Cathedral.^[18] For at least a portion of the time that Aloviso de Spiritu played the organ from circa 1497 until his death in 1508, he was a familiar of Cardinal Johannes Antonius de San Giorgio, since 1478 an auditor of the Sacred Palace and from 1493 to 1509 titular Cardinal of SS. Nerei and Achillei.^[19] And in 1458 Johannes de Castiglione (or Piccardus), known in the papal chapel for thirty-five years as Johannes Monstroeul, was probably a familiar of Cardinal Johannes Castiglione. Appointed bishop

of Coutances (in Normandy) in 1444, he came to Rome in 1447 as an envoy of the English King Henry VI, bringing with him four singers, including Robinet de la Magdalaine. After Castiglione served as bishop of Pavia in 1453 and papal nuncio to the Imperial Court of Frederick III in 1456, Calixtus III made him cardinal of San Clemente in 1457.^[20]

Finally, two classes of cardinals deserve mention because their patronage involved, in the first instance, extraordinary flexibility from familiars and, in the second, special connections for St. Peter's musicians: namely, cardinal legates and cardinal archpriests. Papal legates may have been key contributors to Rome's fluid market of talent. As emissaries of the pope to a particular city, they had to travel periodically between Rome and their stations. Such illustrious patrons as cardinals Johannes Castiglione, Guillaume d'Estouteville, and Giuliano della Rovere doubtless brought northerners with them on their return trips from France and the Imperial Court. For a northern cleric who had reason to seek patronage in Rome, musical or otherwise, this was an advantageous way to make the trip south. The northern humanist and historian Mattheus Herbenus went from Maastricht to Rome in 1469 in the company of the papal legate Onufrio and then remained in his service until the death of his patron two years later. Herbenus then did what many singers did in the same situation; he found a new patron in Rome, this one Italian.^[21] Lhéritier traveled to Ferrara in 1506 with the cardinal legate to Avignon, and in 1480 Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, legate to Bologna, kept the poet Angelo Poliziano in his family.^[22] One of Gonzaga's predecessors, Cardinal Angelo Capranica, was for a time a patron of the singer Jachettus di Marvilla in the years immediately before Jachettus came to St. Peter's in 1469.

Jachettus's service with Capranica has been overlooked, eclipsed by his years with better-known Italian employers. The cities, courts, and

churches on this journeyman's resume stretch up and down the Italian peninsula, covering the entire second half of the fifteenth century. Roughly in order, he is known to have served in Naples beginning in about 1455, and then Siena (1468), Rome (1469-71), Ferrara (1472-73), and Milan (1474), settling finally in Ferrara (1476-99).^[23] But he did not remain in Naples until his brief stop in Siena. There is more to glean from a letter he had written to Lorenzo de' Medici seeking his patronage (15 September 1466). In this letter it is plain that Jachettus had already left Naples, since he wrote from Bologna, where he said he served the bishop of Rieti, who was then Angelo Capranica. No mere bishop, Capranica had become a cardinal in 1460. More important, in 1458 he was named papal legate of Bologna, the governatore di Bologna e della provincia .^[24] Since Jachettus claimed to have come to Bologna recently with Cardinal Capranica, and to have passed through Florence on the way, he must have referred to the most recent of Capranica's periodic trips between Rome and Bologna, one that had begun in Rome five months before in early May 1466.^[25]

In this same letter of 1466, Jachettus further claims to have sung "in the chapel of the Pope (so that seeing me your most honoured Lordship would recognize me)."^[26] His assertion is revealing of the close relations between musicians of popes and the cardinals traveling with them. Papal records, complete for this period, contain no reference to him; yet because Jachettus also implies that Lorenzo had seen him in the papal chapel, and would therefore recognize him, some credence must be given to his account. Before 1466 there are only two occasions when Lorenzo could have heard the papal singers: in 1459 when Pius II stayed in Florence from 25 April to 5 May on his way to Mantua, and on his return trip in January 1460, when, however, the papal entourage paused only for a night en route to Siena. On the former

visit the elaborate entertainments included "theatrical performances, combats of wild beasts, races and balls."^[27] It is possible that the papal choir was augmented for the journey, but if so, this probably occurred on an informal basis, by drawing on singers who traveled with a cardinal. Among those cardinals making the trek to Mantua with Pius was Guillaume d'Estouteville, archbishop of Jachettus's native Rouen. But so too, at least for the return trip, was Capranica.^[28]

Whether with Capranica, d'Estouteville, or some other church official, Jachettus's recollection of being in the "chapel of the pope" at a time when Lorenzo de' Medici would have seen him must refer to an incident from 1460 at the latest. Thus Jachettus did not remain long in Naples, perhaps leaving as early as 1458, after the death (in June) of his first known patron Alfonso I of Aragon. The following November in Rome, Plus II made Capranica the papal legate of Bologna.

The cardinal archpriests of St. Peter's have already been discussed with regard to their possible assistance in acquiring organs for the basilica. Because of their dual loyalties—to the basilica and also to their familial city—cardinal archpriests were well situated to influence the hiring of acquaintances in both locales. After Cardinal Ippolito d'Este became archpriest in 1501, two relatives of Philippo de Primis de Fano joined the choir. A papal singer from 1491 to 1502, and probably until his death circa 1507, Philippo had sung in Ferrara in 1491 for Ippolito's father, Ercole d'Este. His defection to the papal chapel had caused Ercole no small consternation, as a series of letters between him and his Roman ambassador attest.^[29] Ippolito, who became bishop of Modena in 1507, is also the probable agent for bringing the theorist-composer Lodovico Fogliano from Modena to the Cappella Giulia in 1513; during this same period Ippolito arranged for Lodovico's brother Giacomo to teach organ to Giulio Segni.^[30]

The regional connections of a cardinal archpriest could work in two directions. During the tenure of the Venetian Pietro Barbo as archpriest, the singer Lupo worked at the basilica (1458-59). If he was the French priest Johannes Lupo who subsequently sang at St. Mark's from 1460, then this may be an instance in which an archpriest served as a conduit from St. Peter's to his ancestral home rather than from it. Much more direct is the connection between one of the first singers in the Cappella Giulia, Johannes Lourdel, and Ippolito d'Este. At St. Peter's in 1514 and presumably 1515 (though records do not survive), Lourdel joined the familia of Ippolito and worked for him in 1516-17 and 1520 in Ferrara and Hungary.^[31]

Aspects of Benefice Patronage

In describing the willingness of northerners to work for little in Rome, both Cortesi and Lapo da Castiglionchio refer to the hope of acquiring northern benefices. The essential workings of this system and many of the implications for music patronage are by now common knowledge.^[32] But the extent to which political considerations shaped the conferral

of benefices is less well understood. Because papal privileges were sensitive to political changes, especially in the north, the regions from which foreigners came to Rome did not remain constant, with the exception of the diocese of Liege and, to a lesser extent, Cambrai. Certain of these changes can be detected in the makeup of the St. Peter's choir.

The prominence of northerners at the curia described by Lapo relates directly to a distinction between ecclesiastical patronage for Italians as opposed to northerners. It cannot have helped that benefices in Italy were generally far less lucrative than those in the north, if only because it increased the competition among the Italian aristocracy for those that did pay.^[33] Although there were some 700 bishoprics in Europe at this time, they ranged greatly in size and wealth. France, for instance, had only 131 sees, while the kingdom of Naples had 138; and the thirty-three bishops in England, Wales, and Scotland generally presided over far wealthier sees than the 125 who served in northern and central Italy. In contrast to prized northern sees like Rouen, most of those in the south of Italy were small and desperately poor. Incomes from the smallest have been estimated at less than a 200th of the wealthy bishoprics in the north.^[34] Put in other terms, a good canonry in the north yielded more than many Italian sees. When Leo X promised the papal musician Gaspar van Weerbecke the next canonry worth 200 gold ducats in the dioceses of Cambrai or Tournai, he promised an income equal to or greater than that of many Italian bishoprics. Italian church salaries for canons and lower officials diminished commensurately.

As was typical for a large church in Italy, benefices at St. Peter's rarely went to musicians, and then usually to individuals who were first of all chapter officials—some of the thirty canons, thirty-six bene-

ficiaries, or twenty-six clerics—who like Loysio de Diano (beneficiary and regens chori ) by 1450, Christoforo Sancti (beneficiary and from 1481 to 1489 also a soprano), and Cambius (cleric and from 1476 off and on until 1489 a soprano) also sang.^[35] In the 1450s at least three singers were awarded benefices, Robinetto (beneficiary) and Andreas de Palermo (beneficiary and tenor) in 1450-51, and Nicholas Volfardo, a northerner who was made a cleric and then forced to resign it in 1459.^[36] By the second half of the century, popes conferred benefices at St. Peter's on their familiars or local residents with complete freedom, and not only popes, but papal relatives. Alexander VI's son Cardinal Cesare Borgia saw to it that Nicola di Canosio received one in 1497.^[37] In the absence of a pope, even the papal master of ceremonies could wield power over chapter officials.^[38] Exceptionally, two musicians who became canons after 1460 were both organists, Bartholomeo de Ferrara and Aloviso de Spiritu. They held one of the two Sistine canonries that Sixtus IV had created in a bull of 1 March 1482.^[39]

In part because desirable Italian benefices were the prey of the upper class, in part because he had compelling economic and political reasons for doing so, Martin V hired northern rather than Italian musicians, even before he reached Rome in 1420.^[40] Northern musicians helped Martin fulfill his obligation to broaden the international makeup of the curia; they also made it possible for him to award comparatively lucrative northern benefices to his familiars, benefices that then contributed much-needed tax revenues into papal coffers. The taxes they generated may have amounted to a trickle, but with all of the papacy's financial reserves depleted, Martin was compelled to exploit every potential source of income.^[41] This papal need to benefice (as opposed to the desire of a singer to be beneficed) may well explain the difference between the speed and abundance with which benefices were awarded by Martin as opposed to popes in the latter decades of the fifteenth century. Within two or three months of becoming pope, Martin V liberally rewarded several singers with canonicates and prebends. Northerners who subsequently joined his choir in Rome also received provisions with equal haste. Richardus de Bellengues came to Rome in January 1422 and by March was provided with a benefice in Antwerp, despite his inability to speak Flemish. Nicholas Grenon apparently received a benefice in Cambrai as soon as he arrived in June 1425. In contrast, Josquin may have waited three-and-a-half years before Innocent VIII gave him a provision. That singers under Martin did not have to wait also helps to explain the rapid turnover in his choir. From the standpoint of the singers, the quick rewards may have been necessary to offset the poor condition of the

city.^[42] Much later Pope Clement VII vainly tried to persuade Michelangelo to become a cleric by arguing that "there is money of the church that one spends within the church."^[43] Until the discovery of the alum mines in 1462, this money lay largely in the north.

Following this early period when the papacy sought to reclaim its right to benefices throughout Europe, northern rulers began to impose various restrictions to defend their own claims. Papal rights in France declined markedly with the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438, according to which the king and the French clergy reserved to themselves most of the relevant powers to confer benefices and to settle grievances previously handled in papal courts.^[44] Not until Louis XI revoked it in November 1461 were popes able to award and, just as crucially, to tax many French benefices. This moment constituted one of the great political triumphs of Pius II, despite subsequent French threats to restore the sanctions (as Louis XII eventually did in the 1490s). From then on musicians from France had more incentive to come to Rome.

St. Peter's may have become a particular goal because of one well-connected French cleric. At the head of the large delegation that Louis XI sent to Rome to renounce the Pragmatic Sanction were two cardinals, including Richard Olivier de Longueil, bishop of Coutances.^[45] Originally from Normandy, de Longueil had proven ties to the king of France. Before his service for Louis XI, he had been Charles VII's am-

bassador to the duke of Burgundy in 1459.^[46] As noted above, with the accession of Paul II in 1464 de Longueil became cardinal archapriest of St. Peter's. And since the papal chapel had scant openings during these years, it is to St. Peter's that Johannes Fede came from France, where he had been serving Marie Anjou, her husband Charles VII, and then Louis XI between 1461 and 1464. Other Frenchman in these years include Carulo Britonio, Gilles Crepin (Egidius Crispini), and Molinet's friend, Johannes Cornuel.^[47]

Even during the 1450s and 1460s many singers and clerics came to Rome from one particularly embattled region of France: Normandy. The conclusion of the Hundred Years War between France and England in the early 1450s gave way to more fighting in the 1460s and 1470s as Charles the Bold and Louis XI struggled for control of the region. Cardinals d'Estouteville, Johannes Castiglione, and Olivier de Longueil were the most prominent of those who found refuge in the curia, but the number of Normans living in Rome in the 1450s and 1460s was such that a cleric in England could reasonably argue that it was unnecessary for him to prove the legitimacy of his birth by going to Normandy (where it was dangerous); instead, among the "many Normans" living in the papal court there were "sufficient witnesses."^[48] Normans filled positions from the upper echelons of the curia to the lowest. Among the fifteen potentially Norman singers listed in Table

10, the papal singers have been identified by benefice records and those at St. Peter's by name.^[49]

Northern political realignments occasionally led to precipitous changes in the sources of patronage available to musicians in search of jobs. The death of Charles the Bold in 1477 and the subsequent partitioning of his Burgundian territories had an immediate impact on where singers could hope to find benefices, and this in turn sharply affected the paths musicians took in search of patronage. To take singers known, or likely, to have had ties to Bruges as an example, those with foreign affiliations between 1452 and 1477 (Table 11) differ markedly in their destinations from those who left in the next twenty-five years, 1477-1502 (Table 12). Once Bruges became part of the empire, the identifiable journeys of musicians to St. Peter's (Table 13) and the Sistine Chapel dwindled from eight singers out of eleven to just three out of thirteen. Among those in the papal chapel during the 1470s, Johannes Margas left in 1483, shortly after the Peace of Arras (December 1482) had determined exactly which territories belonged to Archduke Maximilian, and Johannes Raat left the next year. The decline in the number of Rome-bound musicians is all the more dramatic because a succession of disasters between 1481 and 1492 hit the Low Countries all at once: plague, rebellion, currency troubles.^[50]

With the Peace of Arras the courts of Maximilian I and Philip the Fair in Vienna and Spain were easily the most promising foreign sources of patronage—that is to be expected given their political power in the Netherlands. What is surprising is how poorly Rome fared in comparison. After 1483 the only resident of Bruges admitted to the

papal chapel, Frater Anthonius Waltherus, is also evidence of the serious difficulty papal singers had gaining or holding benefices in Bruges. Despite identifying himself as a musician from Bruges on the tomb he left himself in the Roman church San Giuliano dei Fiaminghi, Anthonius received no benefices in Bruges.

Patronage of Boys

The ongoing flow of northern adult singers and their clerical patrons doubtless affected the need for choir schools in Rome. Nevertheless, one of the most remarkable aspects of Julius II's concern to create a school for Italian boys is that none of his fifteenth-century predecessors had thought to take the same action, not Eugenius IV when he provided for a series of cathedral schools in Florence (1436), Treviso (1437-38), Padova (1439), and Verona (1440), not Pius II when he established a similar school at Vicenza, not even Sixtus IV when he founded his own chapel at St. Peter's.^[51]

Julius did not lack precedents. He had himself previously founded a school for the teaching of plainchant to boys at Avignon Cathedral. As the first archbishop of the new archdiocese created by Sixtus IV, Cardinal della Rovere revealed to residents of Avignon the same trait as an ecclesiastical patron that he later demonstrated to the world: a concern for building. He renovated both the papal palace at Avignon and the palace of the archbishop, he sponsored repairs at the cathedral and elsewhere in the city, and he completely reorganized the administrative structure of the cathedral.^[52] When he had first visited Avignon in 1476 he founded the Collège du Roure, providing a building and the revenues necessary to support thirty-six students, one rector, and four priests or chaplains. On his second visit in 1481, Giuliano also created a school for the musical training of the youths of Avignon, a maîtrise

for six boys and one instructor of chant. One stipulation he placed on them was a daily Mass sung by the boys.^[53] These previously unnoticed precedents for the educational mission of the Cappella Giulia come from the early years of Julius's career. While the maîtrise followed Sixtus IV's establishment of a music chapel at St. Peter's by one year, it is independently conceived: Sixtus made no provisions for a school, and Giuliano clearly was not at a place or stage in his career to be concerned with providing himself with a burial chapel.

The oldest Roman predecessor of the Cappella Giulia was the medieval schola cantorum, which dated at least from the papacy of St. Gregory (590-604).^[54] An institution with a different organization and a greater international prominence than the Cappella Giulia, the schola had several functions and two residences, one at San Gregorio in Cortina near St. Peter's, and its principal one at San Stefano near St. John Lateran. Both as performers and educators, the members of the schola were an elite group of musicians, perhaps the earliest polyphonic ensemble outside of Byzantium. And in the face of Julius's intent to educate Roman youths to lessen the dependence on northerners, it is ironic that by the twelfth century northern clerics regularly came to the schola cantorum for a musical education.^[55] In this century and the next the schola was one of the most durable agencies of the papacy in Rome. While the papal court camped for several years at a time in cities from Viterbo to Lyon—it lived away from Rome more often than not—the papal choir school remained behind.

Thus when Clement V presided over the first years of papal residence in Avignon, the schola cantorum survived independently, as it was accustomed to doing. How quickly its standards slipped and when it ceased functioning are not known. However, by the time Pope Urban V reassigned the financial assets of the schola in 1370, it had undoubtedly disintegrated along with the rest of the city from too many

decades of papal neglect.^[56] Its continued existence became irrelevant to the French popes and cardinals in Avignon who came to depend on musical clerics educated in Flanders and northern France. These clerics relied in turn on the system of patronage with benefices that reached new heights of accessibility early in the Babylonian captivity, under popes Clement V (1305-14) and John XXII (1316-34).^[57] During the Great Schism the Roman popes were unable to rebuild St. John Lateran, let alone the schola. And the return of the papacy to Rome in the fifteenth century did nothing to diminish the advantages of the system developed in Avignon.

If the preference shown to northern adults in the papal choir helped make the expense of a new Roman schola cantorum unnecessary, it is probably also true that a choir school at St. Peter's was not founded much earlier because the availability of northern boys in Rome during the 1400s and early 1500s was adequate to meet the needs of the pope, of Roman cardinals, and their churches. The superiority of northern training is indicated both by the popularity of northern boys in Italian choirs throughout the Renaissance and indirectly by the number of Italian choir schools headed by French or Flemish teachers. Northern boys are documented in Rome already in the 1420s. The choir of Martin V had as many as six of them affiliated with it by 1425 or 1426, all apparently under the care of Nicholas Grenon, Du Fay's friend from Cambrai. One of these boys, the composer Bartholomeus Poignare, joined the papal choir himself in 1427. Grenon was doubtless one of the first northerners to arrive in Italy accompanied by boys, but he was assuredly not the last. Jean de la Fage did so when he came to Rome in 1516, and the French cardinal Jean du Bellay brought two with him to Rome in 1548.^[58]

At St. Peter's, reports of boys are infrequent in the fifteenth century (Table 14). In this case there is no way of knowing whether the lack of archival references accurately reflects an absence of boys or simply

means that boys would not have been paid and that their adult guardians were normally paid without any mention of this responsibility. Early in the papacy of Nicholas V, the singer Rubino twice collected extra wages to cover the expenses of two boys (docs. 1447a and c). The next reference is not until August 1485, when the choir lost six singers in three months, suffering with all of Rome from a particularly virulent plague. Under these extreme circumstances, Johannes Purro Parvo appeared for two weeks, when he was paid for singing "with the voices of the boys" [cum voce pueribus ]. Whether he brought the boys with him or they were present all along is not stated.^[59]

In addition to the presence of boys in the care of adult singers, there was at least one more stable source of trained youths in Rome. Cardinal d'Estouteville provided for the instruction of boys at Santa Maria Maggiore, where he served as archpriest from 1443 to 1483. According to the contemporaneous report by. Gaspar of Verona, d'Estouteville had also rewarded musicians at Santa Maria Maggiore "with very high salaries" and benefices to teach music and grammar.^[60] One of these has been identified as Johannes Tondrif, a Flemish musician, Carmelite friar, and "expert in the musical arts" [in arte musice peritus ]. Cardinal d'Estouteville hired him in 1472 to direct the choir and instruct the boys.^[61] As protector general of the Augustinian Order from 1446,

d'Estouteville also had responsibility for San Agostino during the last years of his life. In addition to completely rebuilding the church from 1479, he probably also provided for the musical needs of the church. A reference to Baptista de Papia, magister puerorum , in 1482 indicates that his "other" Roman church also had a choir of boys.^[62]

Italian boys evidently first began to sing at St. Peter's around the turn of the century, anticipating not only the practices of the Cappella Giulia by more than a decade but also the papacy of Julius II. During the final years of Alexander VI, the Italian organist Aloviso de Spiritu regularly played with individual singers, apparently Italian boys in his familia. Vincentio adolescenti (1497-98), Gabriele de Gabrielis (1499-1501), and Minico puero (1502-3) sang with the organ. To judge from the rapidity of their turnover, they performed with Aloviso until their voices changed. Minico, the last of these boys, overlapped with Alexo puero de Primis and Paulo de Primis, who sang in 1502-3. Both doubtless related to the papal singer Philippo de Primis de Fano, they were paid as actual members of the choir, and thus presumably performed with the choir and not with Aloviso or Minico puero. According to the phraseology of the account books, Vincentio and Minico sang "in organo," Gabrielo "cum organis," a designation that probably signifies a simple, nonpolyphonic style of music such as the lauda . It is likely related to performances in Florentine churches of the time at which a boy sang with organ "in sul' organo." In Florence this phrase was used interchangeably with "cantare le laude," a type of performance that always involved boys singing with organ from the first citation of it at the Annunziata in 1488 through the next century. There a contrast of singing "in sul' organo" with singing "figural music" underscores the monophonic (or soloistic?) nature of the performance. But "in organo" at St. Peter's and "in sul' organo" in Florence also seem to indicate something of the physical arrangement of the performance, that the boys sang with the organist in the loft above the altar.^[63]

In the few records from the papacy of Julius II—from 1506 and 1507—the St. Peter's choir anticipated the founding of the Cappella Giulia in two important respects: Italian boys in the choir and, to teach them, a pair of choirmasters. Pay records identify Nicholas de Furnis as magister in 1506, just as he started to collect supplementary wages for the care of two boys. The records never identify the boys by name, but the first two may have been Hieronymus Florentinus and Julio Romano, because both their names and the 4 ducats they were paid disappear from the account books just as Nicholas de Furnis started to receive 4 ducats each month for two unnamed boys.^[64] Along with Nicholas de Furnis the basilica also designated Bernardino di Modena (Mutinensis) as magister. Although their duties are nowhere stated, the pairing of a northerner and an Italian suggests a division of labor that would recur in the Cappella Giulia forty years later, when François Roussel taught music and Verzelino taught grammar. Thus the essentials of the Cappella Giulia were in place even before April 1506, the month that Julius laid the first stone of the new St. Peter's.

In its choice of northerners (Rubino, Nicholas de Furnis, François Roussel) to teach Italian boys polyphony, St. Peter's was very traditional. The number of Italian ecclesiastical and court music chapels headed by foreign musicians up until the Counter-Reformation was substantial, rivaling in our own century the legions of foreign conductors leading American orchestras. Willaert and Tinctoris are hardly the only northern teachers "who can be adduced as links between north and south" in support of the primacy of northern contrapuntal skills.^[65] From the mid-1400s until the 1550s and beyond, French and Flemish instructors were much in demand. As a boy in the 1530s, Palestrina studied with Robin Mallapert and Firmin Lebel; Pietro Gaetano, a

singer and theorist at St. Mark's in Venice later in the century, acknowledged Lhéritier as his praeceptor . Northern instructors were more often than not undistinguished composers, if indeed they composed at all. Men like Desiderius Babel at San Luigi dei Francesi (1515-19) and Adrien Valent at Santa Maria Maggiore (?1553-61) are much more representative than the towering figures of Willaert and Tinctoris. In Rome the influence and presence of these northern teachers persisted until the middle of the sixteenth century, when it nearly—but not entirely—disappeared within the space of twenty-five years.

Elsewhere, generations of boys in the musical heartland of Italy, the Veneto, learned about music from northern masters. In Venice the identifiably northern chapel masters include Willaert's immediate predecessors at St. Mark's, Albertus Francigena (1485-91) and the Fleming Petrus De Fossis, entrenched from 1491 to 1527. At Treviso Raynaldus Odenoch and then Petrus Bordonus de Flandra were preceded and followed by the Flemish singer and printer Gerardus de Lisa (1463-76 and 1488-96); during his second tenure the choir was composed entirely of Italians, and his duties included teaching the zaghi [ragazzi] del domo canto figurà . Similar figures taught at Padua (including Johannes Marescalli in 1492 after he had sung at St. Peter's and the Sistine Chapel), Vicenza, Loreto, and Rieti (the magister Rainaldus at the cathedral in 1472 is perhaps the Rainaldus de Meis at St. Peter's immediately after).^[66] While this list could continue, it is enough to document the sustained popularity northern teachers enjoyed long after Italian teachers were available.

It is therefore striking that well into the sixteenth century, after the foundation of the Cappella Giulia and other Italian choir schools, and

despite decades of hiring northern choirmasters, there is ample evidence that popes, cardinals, and many secular leaders from Sicily to Milan still preferred to seek out northern boys. Given the common presence of northern teachers in Italy, the methods of an education in the north cannot have been so different from those available to many Italian boys. So why did French and Flemish youths still come to Rome with other singers, with the families of cardinals, and also as gifts, as when Louis XII sent three to Leo X when he became pope in 1513? And why after the Sack of Rome in 1527 did Pope Clement VII recruit a new trio of French rather than Italian boys?^[67]

There remains a crucial difference between the training a child would receive in any Flemish cathedral school and that available in the Cappella Giulia. The advantage of a northern education is not that there were more schools or better instructors in the north: French, Flemish, and German boys had significantly more opportunities to practice and perform simply by virtue of the greater number of services requiting polyphony north of the Alps. Tinctoris touches on this point at the end of the Liber de arte contrapuncti :

For, as Cicero says in his Ad Herennium , in every discipline the teaching of art is weak without the highest constant effort of practice, since it is constant effort alone and unique which, after a certain general knowledge of pitches, notes, quantities and concords, and having relied upon the arithmetical rather than the musical training of Boetius, has made numerous singers and those men particularly whom I have mentioned above as most outstanding and most celebrated composers. Nor must it be thought that the former or the latter have completely devoted themselves to a constant effort in this kind of composition or in singing super librum from advanced age, like Socrates studying the lyre, but rather from childhood.^[68]

While the "certain general knowledge" of musical grammar may have differed little between north and south, the same cannot be said about the opportunities for "constant effort of practice" in reading and improvising polyphony. The daily rounds of services in northern

churches gave Flemish and French boys a life-long advantage by providing them with regular chances to apply in practice the rules they had learned in study. For the sake of comparison, the charter of the boys' choir established in 1485 at Florence Cathedral required them to sing every Saturday morning and on "every solemn occasion, day of indulgence, and holy day," a stipulation that D'Accone has shown generally added only nine more services per year; and within a matter of months, these nine services were sung by adults.^[69]

Even as late as 1517-18, the astonishment of one Italian visitor to France and Flanders indicates how drastically the regimen of services in the north differed from what he was accustomed to in Italy. In Flanders every parish church had two Masses sung each day as well as a Salve "sung each evening," all assisted by "a great number of servers of from ten to twelve years old"; while in France they "often have fine churches, where divine worship is well performed; and there is not a cathedral or main church anywhere which does not have polyphony [musica figurata ] and more than one sung mass daily, led by six to eight choirboys who are learning to sing and who serve, tonsured like little monks, in the choir, receiving free food and clothing in return."^[70] This reaction is all the more pertinent since it comes from the familiar of a curial cardinal. It is therefore the opinion of an ecclesiastic intimately acquainted with the everyday practices of Roman churches during the papacy of Leo X, by all accounts one of the golden eras of sacred music in Rome, an era that encompassed the first years of the Cappella Giulia.

Italian singers in the fifteenth century were twice disadvantaged as children: there were fewer schools for them than in the north and

fewer opportunities for them to develop in performance. By the time they matured and began competing with northerners for jobs in the major courts and churches, these handicaps were compounded by the poorer treasuries of Italian churches and by their inability to profit from one of the most lucrative forms of ecclesiastical patronage: northern benefices granted by the pope.