certainly gave away its temporal estates to his children
as though they belonged to him. The secularization of the
church was carried to a pitch never before dreamed of, and
it was clear to all Italy that he regarded the papacy as an
instrument of worldly schemes with no thought of its religious
aspect. During his pontificate the church was brought to its
lowest level of degradation. The condition of his subjects was
deplorable, and if Cesare's rule in Romagna was an improvement
on that of the local tyrants, the people of Rome have seldom
been more oppressed than under the Borgia. Alexander was not
the only person responsible for the general unrest in Italy
and the foreign invasions, but he was ever ready to profit by
them. Even if we do not accept all the stories of his murders
and poisonings and immoralities as true, there is no doubt
that his greed for money and his essentially vicious nature
led him to commit a great number of crimes. For many of
his misdeeds his terrible son Cesare was responsible, but of
others the pope cannot be acquitted. The one pleasing aspect
of his life is his patronage of the arts, and in his days a
new architectural era was initiated in Rome with the coming of
Bramante. Raphael, Michelangelo and Pinturicchio all worked
for him, and a curious contrast, characteristic of the age,
is afforded by the fact that a family so steeped in vice and
crime could take pleasure in the most exquisite works of art.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The chief contemporary authorities for this
reign are: the diary of Alexander's master of ceremonies,
Johannes Burchardus, edited by L. Thuasne (Paris, 1883-1884),
which is characterized by accuracy and extraordinary candour
often amounting to gross indecency; the despatches of
Giustiniani, the Venetian ambassador, edited by P. Villari
(Florence, 1876), which show great insight and are based on
the most accurate information; and Paolo Cappelli's ``Diarii''
in E. Alberi's Relazioni, series ii., iii. Among modern
works the most important are: F. Gregorovius's Geschichte
der Stadt Rom (3rd ed., Stuttgart, 1881), a work of immense
research and admirable synthesis, giving a very unfavourable
view of the Borgia; A. von Reumont's Geschichte der Stadt
Rom (Berlin, 1867-1870), also a valuable book; M. Creighton's
History of the Papacy (London, 1897) is very learned and
accurate, but the author is more lenient towards Alexander; F.
Gregorovius's Lucrezia Borgia (Stuttgart, 1874) contains a
great deal of information on the Borgia family; P. Villari's
Machiavelli (English translation, new ed., 1892) deals
with the subject at some length. Of the Catholic writers L.
Pastor, Geschichte der Papste (Freiburg i. B, 1886) should
be consulted, for although the author tries to extenuate
the pope to some extent, on the whole he is fair. (L. V.*)
ALEXANDER VII. (Fabio Chigi), pope from 1655 to 1667, was
born at Siena on the 13th of February 1599. He was successively
inquisitor at Malta, vice-legate at Ferrara and nuncio in Cologne
(1639-1651). Though expected to take part in the negotiations
which led in 1648 to the peace of Westphalia, he refused to
deliberate with heretics, and protested against the treaties
when completed. Innocent X. subsequently made him cardinal
secretary of state. When Innocent died, Chigi, the candidate
favoured by Spain, was elected pope on the 7th of April
1655. The conclave believed he was strongly opposed to the
nepotism then prevalent. In the first year of his reign
Alexander VII. forbade his relations even to visit Rome; but
in 1656 he gave them the best-paid civil and ecclesiastical
offices, also palaces and princely estates. Alexander disliked
business of state, preferring literature and philosophy; a
collection of his Latin poems appeared at Paris in 1656 under
the title Philomathi Labores Juveniles. He also encouraged
architecture, and in particular constructed the beautiful
colonnade in the piazza of St Peter's. He favoured the
Jesuits, especially in their conflict with the Jansenists,
forbade in 1661 the translation of the Roman Missal into
French, and in 1665 canonized Francis of Sales. His pontificate
was marked by protracted controversies with France and
Portugal. He died on the 22nd of May 1667. (W. W. R.*)
ALEXANDER VIII. (Pietro Ottoboni), pope from 1689 to 1691,
was born in 1610 of a noble Venetian family, was created
cardinal, and then successively bishop of Brescia and datary.
The ambassador of Louis XIV. succeeded in procuring his election
on the 6th of October 1689 as successor to Innocent XI.;
nevertheless, after months of negotiation Alexander finally
condemned the declaration made in 1682 by the French clergy
concerning the liberties of the Gallican church. Charities
on a large scale and unbounded nepotism exhausted the papal
treasury. He bought the books and manuscripts of Queen Christina
of Sweden for the Vatican library. Alexander condemned in 1690
the doctrines of so-called philosophic sin, taught in the Jesuit
schools. He died on the 1st of February 1691. (W. W. R.*)
ALEXANDER I. (ALEKSANDER PAVLOVICH) (1777-1825), emperor
of Russia, son of the grand-duke Paul Petrovich, afterwards
Paul I., and Maria Fedorovna, daughter of Frederick Eugene of
Wurttemberg, was born on the 28th of December 1777. The
strange contradictions of his character make Alexander one
of the most interesting as he is one of the most important
figures in the history of the 19th century. Autocrat and
``Jacobin,'' man of the world and mystic, he was to his
contemporaries a riddle which each read according to his own
temperament. Napoleon thought him a ``shifty Byzantine,''
and called him the Talma of the North, as ready to play
any conspicuous part. To Metternich he was a madman to be
humoured. Castlereagh, writing of him to Lord Liverpool,
gives him credit for ``grand qualities,'' but adds that he
is ``suspicious and undecided.'' His complex nature was, in
truth, the outcome of the complex character of his early
environment and education. Reared in the free-thinking
atmosphere of the court of Catherine II. he had imbibed from
his Swiss tutor, Frederic Cesar de Laharpe, the principles
of Rousseau's gospel of humanity; from his military governor,
General Soltikov, the traditions of Russian autocracy; while
his father had inspired him with his own passion of military
parade, and taught him to combine a theoretical love of
mankind with a practical contempt for men. These contradictory
tendencies remained with him through life, revealed in
the fluctuations of his policy and influencing through him
the fate of the world. Another element in his character
discovered itself when in 1801 he mounted the throne over
the body of his murdered father: a mystic melancholy liable
at any moment to issue in extravagant action. At first,
indeed, this exercised but little influence on the emperor's
life. Young, emotional, impressionable, well-meaning and
egotistic, Alexander displayed from the first an intention of
playing a great part on the world's stage, and plunged with all
the ardour of youth into the task of realizing his political
ideals. While retaining for a time the old ministers who
had served and overthrown the emperor Paul, one of the first
acts of his reign was to appoint a secret committee, called
ironically the ``Comite du salut public,'' consisting of
young and enthusiastic friends of his own--Victor Gavovich
Kochubey, Nikolai Nikolaevich Novosiltsov, Paul Alexandrovich
Strogonov and Adam Czartoryski--to draw up a scheme of internal
reform. Their aims, inspired by their admiration for English
institutions, were far in advance of the possibilities of
the time, and even after they had been raised to regular
ministerial positions but little of their programme could be
realized. For Russia was not ripe for liberty; and Alexander,
the disciple of the revolutionist Laharpe, was--as he
himself said--but ``a happy accident'' on the throne of the
tsars. He spoke, indeed, bitterly of ``the state of barbarism
in which the country had been left by the traffic in men.''
``Under Paul,'' he said, ``three thousand peasants had been
given away like a bag of diamonds. If civilization were more
advanced, I would abolish this slavery, if it cost me my
head.''1 But the universal corruption, he complained, had
left him no men; and the filling up of the government offices
with Germans and other foreigners merely accentuated the
sullen resistance of the ``old Russians'' to his reforms.
That Alexander's reign, which began with so large a promise of
amelioration, ended by riveting still tighter the chains of
the Russian people was, however, due less to the corruption and
backwardness of Russian life than to the defects of the tsar
himself. His love of liberty, though sincere, was in fact
unreal. It flattered his vanity to pose before the world as
the dispenser of benefits; but his theoretical liberalism was
mated with an autocratic will which brooked no contradiction.
``You always want to instruct me!'' he exlaimed to Derzhavin,
the minister of justice, ``but I am the autocratic emperor,
and I will this, and nothing else!'' ``He would gladly have
agreed,'' wrote Adam Czartoryski, ``that every one should be
free, if every one had freely done only what he wished.''
Moreover, with this masterful temper was joined an infirmity
of purpose which ever let ``I dare not wait upon I would,''
and which seized upon any excuse for postponing measures the
principles of which he had publicly approved. The codification
of the laws initiated in 1801 was never carried out during his
reign; nothing was done to improve the intolerable status of
the Russian peasantry; the constitution drawn up by Speranski,
and passed by the emperor, remained unsigned. Alexander, in
fact, who, without being consciously tyrannical, possessed
in full measure the tyrant's characteristic distrust of men
of ability and independent judgment, lacked also the first
requisite for a reforming sovereign: confidence in his people;
and it was this want that vitiated such reforms as were actually
realized. He experimented in the outlying provinces of his
empire; and the Russians noted with open murmurs that, not content
with governing through foreign instruments, he was conferring
on Poland, Finland and the Baltic provinces benefits denied to
themselves. In Russia, too, certain reforms were carried
out; but they could not survive the suspicious interference
of the autocrat and his officials. The newly created council
of ministers, and the senate, endowed for the first time
with certain theoretical powers, became in the end but the
slavish instruments of the tsar and his favourites of the
moment. The elaborate system of education, culminating in the
reconstituted, or new-founded, universities of Dorpat, Vilna,
Kazan and Kharkov, was strangled in the supposed interests of
``order'' and of orthodox piety; while the military colonies
which Alexander proclaimed as a blessing to both soldiers
and state were forced on the unwilling peasantry and army
with pitiless cruelty. Even the Bible Society, through which
the emperor in his later mood of evangelical zeal proposed
to bless his people, was conducted on the same ruthless
lines. The Roman archbishop and the Orthodox metropolitans
were forced to serve on its committee side by side with
Protestant pastors; and village popes, trained to regard any
tampering with the letter of the traditional documents of the
church as mortal sin, became the unwilling instruments for
the propagation of what they regarded as works of the devil.
