Let us remember this, and that such was the end which that tax, levied upon those newly elected cardinals, went to serve.

The aggrandizement of the House of Borgia was certainly one of the results to be expected from the Romagna campaign, but we are not justified in accounting it the sole aim and end of that campaign.
Alexander had this advantage over either Sixtus IV or Innocent VIII--not to go beyond those Popes whom he had served as Vice-Chancellor, for instances of flagrant nepotism--that he at least served two purposes at once, and that, in aggrandizing his own family, he strengthened the temporal power of the Church, whereas those others had done nothing but undermine it that they might enrich their progeny.
And whilst on this subject of the "sale" of cardinals' hats, it may not be amiss to say a word concerning the "sale" of indulgences with which Alexander has been so freely charged.

Here again there has been too loud an outcry against Alexander--an outcry whose indignant stridency leads one to suppose that the sale of indulgences was a simony invented by him, or else practised by him to an extent shamefully unprecedented.
Such is very far from being the case.

The arch-type of indulgence-seller--as of all other simoniacal practices--is Innocent VIII.

In his reign we have seen the murderer commonly given to choose between the hangman and the purchase of a pardon, and we have seen the moneys so obtained providing his bastard, the Cardinal Francesco Cibo, with the means for the luxuriously licentious life whose gross disorders prematurely killed him.
To no such flagitious lengths as these can it be shown that Alexander carried the "sale" of the indulgences he dispensed.