That Time a Parrot Brought Down the Papacy

Alright, buckle up, you magnificent degenerates, because we’re diving face-first into the filthiest, most feathery scandal of the High Renaissance. The year is sometime in the late 1490s—don’t ask me for specifics, I’m three negronis deep—and Pope Alexander VI, the OG Rodrigo Borgia himself, is living his best, most sinful life. We’re talking orgies in the Apostolic Palace, promoting his bastard son Cesare to Cardinal at seventeen, and generally treating the Chair of Saint Peter like a fuckin’ throne made of money and mistresses. His favorite mistress, the drop-dead gorgeous Giulia “La Bella” Farnese, gifted him an exotic green parrot from the New World. His Holiness, being the sentimental old pervert that he was, named the bird “Garrulus” and taught it Latin. Big mistake. Huge.

See, popes don’t have NDAs. They have confessionals and, apparently, very chatty pets. Garrulus wasn’t just repeating Hail Marys; he was soaking up every sordid whisper, every treasonous plot, every grunted pet name for Giulia that echoed through the papal bedchamber. And Garrulus had a perfect, horrible memory. The problem started when a Venetian envoy—let’s call him Luigi “The Eavesdropper” Gradenigo, because that sounds about right—was waiting for an audience. As he’s sitting there, sweating in his silk tights, he hears this parrot squawking from the Pope’s private study. But it’s not just squawking. It’s yelling, in flawless ecclesiastical Latin, *“No, not the cantarella poison, you idiot! It makes the figs taste bitter!”* followed by a pretty solid imitation of the Pope making the beast with two backs. Luigi’s jaw hit the floor so hard it cracked the marble. He bribed a stable boy, nicked the bird, and got it back to Venice, where the *Gazzetta*’s printing press was about to get the workout of its life.

The headlines were glorious. *“PAPAL PET SPILLS THE BEANS ON POISON PLOTS!”* and *“‘BELLA’S PERFECT PEACHES’: POPE’S PILLOW TALK REVEALED, SAYS PARROT!”* and my personal favorite, *“CARDINALS’ BRIBES: A FULL TRANSCRIPT!”*. The Vatican went into full-blown panic mode. Alexander VI was losing his goddamn mind, accusing everyone from his son to the Swiss Guard of treason. The entire College of Cardinals was side-eyeing each other, wondering who was next on the poison list that a goddamn bird had just published. It was chaos. Beautiful, unholy chaos. According to the (completely fabricated) diary of a Vatican chambermaid, the Pope was seen screaming at a pigeon on his windowsill, demanding to know what it knew.

Of course, the whole thing blew over, sort of. The Venetians used their feathered informant to blackmail the Holy See for better trade routes for years. Garrulus the parrot was eventually “retired” to a monastery, where legend says he taught the monks a litany of swears that would make a sailor blush and a few new positions for their illicit romps. Up in Germany, some monk named Martin Luther was reading the Venetian papers and nodding along, his thesis list getting longer by the day. The Reformation probably would’ve happened anyway, but a horny, tattletale parrot pouring gasoline on the fire? That’s the kind of divine intervention I can get behind. Garrulus was a hero, a menace, and a gossip columnist all in one. A true Renaissance man. Bird. Whatever.