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These Deadly Jokes Were Not Too Funny for their Victims in the End

Khalid Elhassan November 30, 2022 29 min

The “Scourge of Princes”

Painting was not really Pietro Aretino’s thing, and he eventually gave up on that. As it turned out, his real talent lay in words – especially, dirty words. In 1516, he penned a satiric will of Pope Leo X’s recently deceased pet elephant. In it, Aretino mocked Rome’s most prominent figures, including the pope himself. The pope was a good sport about it. The satire was well received, and it launched Aretino’s career as a satirist. He eventually ended up with the nickname the “Scourge of Princes”.

After the death of Leo X, Aretino penned vicious satirical pamphlets in support of the candidature of cardinal Giulio de Medici for the papacy. They helped get him elected as Pope Clement VII in 1523. However, despite the patronage of the new pope, Aretino was forced to leave Rome in 1524 because he had grown too notorious. That notoriety peaked after he penned a dirty poetry collection known as the Lewd Sonnets. They were composed to accompany explicit drawings sketched by Giulio Romano, and engraved by Marcantonio Raimundo.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.