Innocent VIII

Giovanni Battista Cibo was a Genoese who had grown up at the court of Naples, fathered two children before taking orders, acknowledged them, and risen through the patronage of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who managed his election on 29 August 1484 with promises of benefices that even contemporaries called simony. Della Rovere then ran the pontificate from behind the throne, and the amiable, ailing pope let him.

Money was the constant problem and the constant solution. Innocent created new offices in order to sell them, pawned the papal tiara, and in 1489 accepted a remarkable arrangement with the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II: the pope would keep the sultan's rival brother, Cem, in comfortable custody in the Vatican, and the sultan would pay forty thousand ducats a year for the service, adding in 1492 the gift of the relic of the Holy Lance. He married his son Franceschetto to Lorenzo de' Medici's daughter in 1488 and, as part of the bargain, made Lorenzo's thirteen-year-old son Giovanni a cardinal, the boy who would become Leo X.

Two documents outlived him. The bull Summis desiderantes affectibus of 5 December 1484 confirmed the authority of the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer to prosecute witchcraft in Germany, and was printed at the front of Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum three years later, lending papal color to the witch trials of the next two centuries. And in 1487 he condemned the nine hundred theses of the young Pico della Mirandola, the first time a pope had banned a printed book. He died on 25 July 1492, weeks after celebrating the fall of Granada, and the conclave that followed elected Rodrigo Borgia.