Giovanni left Pisa in March 1492 to take his seat in the College of Cardinals; on his way through Florence he saw his father for the last time. A month later Lorenzo died in his villa of Careggi, attended by his humanist friends Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and a Paduan doctor who pounded precious stones to make a potion which failed to save him. Contemporaries saw his early death at forty-one as a tragedy for Italy, since he more than any other politician had striven to keep peace. Ferrante of Naples remarked with gloomy foreboding: ‘This man has lived long enough for his own immortal fame, but not for Italy. God grant that now he is dead men may not attempt that which they dared not do while he was alive.’ From Pisa Cesare wrote a letter of condolence to Piero de’ Medici, mingling classical references to virtù and fama with pious references suitable to his ecclesiastical calling, but Lorenzo’s loss can hardly have affected him personally. Within a few months the death of another Italian political figure was imminent, an event of infinitely more interest to the Borgias.
Innocent VIII had been Pope for eight years, succeeding Sixtus IV in an election which had marked Rodrigo’s first serious attempt on the Papacy. The election was a setback for the Borgias; it was also a triumph for Rodrigo’s chief rival, Giuliano della Rovere, Cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli and nephew of Sixtus. Giuliano, born of a poor Ligurian family in the village of Abizzola near Savona in 1443, owed his career – like Rodrigo – to the elevation of his uncle to the Papacy. He had been made Cardinal at twenty-five, heaped with honours, benefices and abbeys by his uncle, and like Rodrigo he had pursued a policy of collecting strategic strongpoints round Rome. He was intelligent, devious and violent, altogether a formidable opponent.
In 1484, when Giuliano’s uncle Sixtus IV died, Rodrigo Borgia was fifty-three, della Rovere his junior by twelve years. The conclave which followed Sixtus’ death was Rodrigo’s first serious attempt on the Papacy; it was also the first round in a long struggle for power between Giuliano and the Borgias which was to play a part in the destiny of Rodrigo’s son Cesare. In the conclave of 16 August 1484, Giuliano and Rodrigo were the two main candidates, but the first ballot ended in stalemate, and Giuliano, recognizing that neither he nor Borgia would succeed in obtaining a majority, worked skilfully behind the scenes to secure the election of one of his party, the Genoese Cardinal Cibo, who spent the night buying votes with signed agreements promising rewards. Rodrigo, recognizing defeat, also came to terms, and on 29 August Gian Battista Cibo was elected as Pope Innocent VIII. It was clear to everyone that Giuliano della Rovere would be the power behind the throne. ‘Send a good letter to the Cardinal of San Pietro [della Rovere],’ the Florentine envoy Vespucci wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘for he is Pope and more than Pope.’ The first round in the contest had ended decisively in favour of della Rovere.
For Rodrigo it was a check, but in no way a final one, to the papal ambitions which he had no intention of abandoning. He spent the years of Innocent’s Papacy rebuilding his position, advancing his family, fortifying his Spanish connections and emphasizing his prestige in Rome in the most ostentatious manner. His household itself was indicative of his grand designs, befitting in every way his rank as a prince of the Church and an aspirant for its highest prize. He was the richest cardinal in Rome after the Frenchman d’Estouteville, and his palace on the Corso (remains of which can be seen today in the Sforza Cesarini palace) with its three-storied loggias and Tuscan columns was compared by Pius II with the Golden House of Nero. Jacopo da Volterra, describing Rodrigo’s wealth, wrote:
His papal offices, his numerous abbeys in Italy and Spain, and his three bishoprics of Valencia, Porto and Cartagena, yield him a vast income, and it is said that the office of Vice-Chancellor alone brings him in 8000 gold florins. His plate, his pearls, his stuffs embroidered with silk and gold, and his books in every department of learning are very numerous, and all are of a magnificence worthy of a king or a pope. I need not mention the innumerable bed-hangings, the trappings for his horses … nor his magnificent wardrobe, nor the vast amount of gold coin in his possession …
Rodrigo Borgia was a showman, but the object of all his magnificence was not mere display. It was to impress the world with his own importance and thus his suitability to succeed to the chair of St Peter.
Now, in 1492, his hour had come. Pope Innocent’s health began to fail in March, and by mid-July it was clear that he was dying. He was too weak to take any nourishment other than human milk, and horrible stories flew round Rome that a Jewish physician had injected the moribund Pope with the life-blood of three ten-year-old children, who had died as a result. The Mantuan ambassador sent home reports of bitter and unseemly rows between Rodrigo and Giuliano della Rovere, who quarrelled like schoolboys over the sickbed of the dying Pope. When Rodrigo urged Innocent to hand the keys of the fortress of Sant’Angelo over to the College of Cardinals for safe keeping, Giuliano insultingly reminded the Pope that Rodrigo was a Catalan. Infuriated, Rodrigo exploded: ‘If we were not in the presence of Our Lord the Pope, I would show you who is Vice-Chancellor …’ To which Giuliano angrily retorted that ‘if they had not been in His Holiness’ presence, he would show him he had no fear of him’. Both men knew that the second round in their struggle for the Papacy was about to begin.
Innocent died on 25 July 1492; on 6 August the twenty-five cardinals present in Rome went into conclave to elect a new Pope. Cesare, who was at Siena preparing his horse for the Palio races, would have been kept informed of events at Rome. He knew that his family’s future and his own hung upon the result of this election; Rodrigo was now sixty-one and this might well be his last chance of the Papacy. Cesare must also have been aware that his father’s prospects of success were not generally considered high. Rodrigo was not supported by any of the powers principally concerned in the election, France, Naples or Milan, and his Spanish blood was regarded as a handicap in what was traditionally an Italian contest. The College of Cardinals was split into two political alignments. The first, led by Giuliano, was primarily anti-Milanese, and was supported by the French, the Venetians, the Colonna and the Savelli families. Giuliano hoped to block Rodrigo Borgia at all costs and to repeat his previous success by securing the election of a candidate indebted to himself, either the Portuguese Costa or the Venetian Zeno. The second party represented the Milanese interest, led by Ludovico Sforza’s brother Ascanio, an old friend and political ally of Rodrigo’s, who was supported by the cardinals who opposed Giuliano’s pro-French stance, and by the Orsinis and Contis who automatically did the opposite to the Colonnas. Ascanio’s candidates were the Neapolitan Cardinal Caraffa and Rodrigo Borgia.
Suspense mounted in Rome during the five days of the conclave. Enemies profited by the interregnum to pay off old scores, while rumours flew as to the nature of the dealings going on within the Vatican, and the diarist Infessura reported that four mules loaded with silver had been seen going from Rodrigo’s palace to that of Ascanio. In fact, fear of France and mutual distrust between the two parties was influencing the election in Rodrigo’s favour. He was one of the leading candidates from the first scrutiny on; after the third scrutiny, Ascanio Sforza, probably influenced by the prospect of receiving the vice-chancellorship which would be vacated on Borgia’s election, switched the votes of his party behind Rodrigo. On the morning of 11 August, under a leaden sky lit by fitful summer lightning, the Romans waiting before St Peter’s heard a prelate declaim the traditional formula: ‘Pontificem habemus.’ Rodrigo Borgia was now Pope Alexander VI.
At four o’clock that afternoon, a sweating courier brought the news to Siena, having covered the distance from Rome in ten hours. Cesare did not wait to see his horse race, but hurried back to Pisa to wait his father’s orders and make his preparations for departure. Ten days later he left for the castle of Spoleto; he was not to attend his father’s coronation. But for Cesare, as he rode southward, a new life was about to begin.
III
The Pope’s Lieutenant
‘DIVINE Alexander, Alexander the Great!’ the Romans shouted as Alexander VI rode through the streets from the Vatican to the Lateran basilica for his coronation on 26 August. ‘Anthony was not received with as much splendour by Cleopatra as Alexander by the Romans,’ one observer commented. Preceded by thirteen glittering squadrons of men-at-arms, and the cardinals’ households dressed in a kaleidoscope of rich stuffs and colours, ‘lion-coloured’ velvet, crimson silk, cloth of silver, rose damask, Alexander proceeded to the Lateran through streets hung with tapestries, decorated with garlands and triumphal arches. Naturally the most prominent device was the Borgia bull, spouting water and ‘most delicate wine’ outside the church of San Marco, and proudly displayed on the Pope’s personal banner carried before him by Count Antonio della Mirandola, and on the huge papal standard, twelve metres long and four wide, floating over the fortress of Sant’Angelo.
The significance of this rampant family pride was not lost upon the Roman nobility, men like Virginio Orsini, head of his house, who played their traditional parts in the celebrations for the Borgia Pope with some misgiving. ‘The Romans and courtiers show little enthusiasm for this promotion,’ the Florentine envoy Filippo Valori reported. Proud, turbulent and grasping, the great Roman families, the Orsinis, Colonnas, Caetanis, Savellis, Contis and their adherents, feared a strong Pope above all things, and memories of the first Borgia Papacy were still alive in their minds. They knew Alexander well, as a man of great ability and ambition, with a large family whose advancement could only be at their expense. And accusations of simony flew round Rome, based on Alexander’s distribution of offices and benefices to his cardinal supporters, principally Ascanio, who as the man chiefly responsible for his election naturally received the lion’s share, the vice-chancellorship with Rodrigo Borgia’s own palace and other rich rewards, and moved into the Vatican to take up an honoured position in apartments near Alexander’s own. ‘He [Alexander] gave all his goods to the poor,’ the antipapal diarist Infessura commented sarcastically, while the satirist Sannazaro directed a telling epigram from the court of Naples: ‘Alexander sells the keys, the altars, Christ himself – he has the right to sell them, he had bought them first.’ But, as a recent historian has pointed out, the distribution of wealth and honours which followed Borgia’s election was in line with recently established practice, and Rodrigo differed from his predecessors only in that he had more to give.
In fact, reactions generally were favourable to Alexander’s election, and high hopes were entertained of him. The chronicler Sigismondo de’ Conti wrote:
It is now thirty-seven years since his uncle Calixtus III made him a Cardinal, and during that time he never missed a single Consistory unless prevented by illness from attending, which was rare. Throughout the reigns of Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII he was always an important personage; he had been Legate in Spain and Italy. Few people understood etiquette as well as he did; he knew how to make the most of himself, and took pains to shine in conversation and to be dignified in his manners. In the latter point his majestic stature gave him an advantage. Also he was just at the age, about sixty, at which Aristotle says men are wisest; robust in body, vigorous in mind, he was admirably equipped for his new position.
Wisdom, mental vigour, robust health, international and administrative experience, and a commanding presence – de’ Conti made no mention of saintliness or moral worth. The qualities he praised in Alexander VI were precisely those which today would be required of the chairman of a great multinational corporation.
Alexander commenced his Papacy with every sign of good intentions. Even Infessura admired the vigour of his provisions for law and order in the turbulent Eternal City, while the promises he made on his election, including the perennial and never-observed pledge to reform the Church, were designed to calm everyone’s fears. The Mantuan envoy Manfredo Manfredi wrote from Florence on 17 August: ‘The Pope has promised to do many things towards the reformation of the court, to dismiss the secretaries and many tyrannical officials, to keep his children away from Rome, and he will make many praiseworthy promotions, and it is said that he will be a glorious pontiff.’ However, despite Alexander’s promises, many seasoned observers like Valori preferred to suspend judgement: ‘The opinion that is held of the new Pontiff is various: many think that he will occupy this Chair with great majesty and pomp, since His Holiness is desirous of fame and glory: and to do this he will be the father of all and maintain peace. Many are of the opposite opinion: that to dominate everything properly he will be an intriguing Pope …’
As far as his children were concerned, Alexander kept to the letter, if not the spirit, of his election promises – at least for a few months. On his orders, Cesare remained out of sight in the papal castle of Spoleto, but his father had not forgotten him and within a week of his coronation he bestowed upon him his own former archbishopric of Valencia, worth 16,000 ducats a year. Cesare, aged seventeen, was quite aware of the change in his circumstances wrought by his father’s election; on 5 October he wrote from Spoleto to Piero de’ Medici, who had succeeded his father as virtual ruler of Florence, asking him for a professorship in law at Pisa for his follower Francisco Remolines, in return for which he promised to do all in his power for the Medicis ‘at the court of Rome’. Other members of the family also received their share in the distribution of offices and honours which traditionally followed the election of a new pope, and for the second time within a century Borgia relations and hangers-on swarmed in the Vatican. The Ferrarese ambassador Giovanni Andrea Boccaccio wrote sourly in November, three months after Alexander’s election: ‘Not even ten papacies would suffice to content this horde of relations.’
Indeed, within a few months of their father’s elevation the young Borgias were once again reunited with him in Rome. Cesare came from Spoleto to take up residence in a palace in the Borgo, the recently built quarter which had grown up round the Vatican. Boccaccio called upon him there early in March 1493 and wrote this description of the seventeen-year-old Cesare to his master, Duke Ercole d’Este:
The day before yesterday I went to find Cesare at his house in Trastevere. He was on the point of going out for the hunt; he was wearing a worldly garment of silk and had his sword at his side. He had only a little tonsure like a simple priest. I rode at his side and conversed with him at length. I am on intimate terms with him. He possesses marked genius and a charming personality. He has the manners of a son of a great prince; above all he is lively and merry and fond of society; being very modest, his bearing is much better than that of the Duke of Gandia, his brother …
Significantly he added: ‘The Archbishop of Valencia has never had inclination for the priesthood; but his benefices bring him 16,000 ducats.’
But if Cesare had the intelligence not to be seen to allow his newly acquired importance to go to his head, the same could not be said of his brother Juan Gandia, whose bearing, as Boccaccio remarked, was far from modest. Indeed Juan, the favourite, seems to have occupied the limelight of attention at this time. Burchard, the papal master of ceremonies, while making no references to Cesare, frequently recorded Alexander’s excursions with Juan, who was dressed in the fashionable Turkish style, and accompanied by Prince Djem, the brother of Sultan Bajazet. Bajazet, having defeated Djem in a struggle for the succession, paid Alexander 40,000 ducats a year to keep his brother as a pampered prisoner in the Vatican, provided with pastimes of all sorts, hunting, music, banquets and wine, of which he was particularly fond. The Mantuan painter Mantegna, who was working in the Belvedere villa of the Vatican when Djem arrived there in 1489, gave a description of him in which the Turkish prince appeared like a great caged wild beast, dignified, somnolent and full of a contained rage: ‘He walks like an elephant with a measured step … he often keeps his eyes half-closed. His nature is cruel, and they say he had killed four people: today he has severely maltreated an interpreter. His people are afraid of him. He takes little notice of what passes, as if he did not understand … The e
xpression of his face is ferocious, especially when Bacchus has been with him.’
While the Romans had become accustomed to the exotic presence of the Sultan’s brother in the Pope’s entourage, the circumstances of his daughter Lucrezia’s household provoked ribald comment. Vannozza was by now completely in the background, living with her husband Canale in her own house in the Regola quarter, and exercised no influence on Vatican affairs. The backstairs approach to the Pope used by ambassadors and supplicants for papal favours lay through the palace of Santa Maria in Portico at the steps of the Vatican, where Lucrezia lived with the two other women closest to Alexander, his cousin and confidante Adriana de Mila Orsini and her daughter-in-law Giulia Farnese.
Giulia Farnese was of a blonde beauty so dazzling that she was known as ‘La Bella’. She had been married at fifteen in 1489 to Orsino Orsini, the son of Adriana and her late husband Ludovico. Little is known of Orsini beyond the facts that he was blind in one eye, nicknamed ‘Monoculus’, soon became a notorious cuckold, and died an ignominious death in 1500, killed by a falling roof in the country castle where he was kept by his wife’s lover at a safe distance from Rome. But Giulia’s beauty was to be the foundation of her family’s fortunes, the source of the wealth that built the superb Farnese palaces and brought her brother Alessandro Farnese to the papal throne as Paul III. She was the last passion of Rodrigo Borgia’s passionate life, her wedding took place in his palace, and he was the first witness to the marriage contract. Their liaison must have begun soon afterwards, for in 1492 she bore a daughter, Laura, whom her brother-in-law Puccio Pucci openly asserted to be not Orsino’s but Rodrigo’s child. By 1493 the nineteen-year-old Giulia’s relationship with the sixty-two-year-old Pope was known all over Italy; contemporary diarists referred to her as ‘his concubine’ or ‘the bride of Christ’. The three women, Alexander’s daughter, his mistress and his cousin, lived in the closest intimacy. Adriana actively encouraged Alexander’s liaison with Giulia, and seems to have found nothing repellent in the fact of her cousin openly cuckolding her son. The relationship increased her own influence in the Vatican; moreover she was a Borgia by birth, an Orsini only by marriage, and where the Borgias were concerned, blood relationships came above all other ties.
Cesare Borgia Page 4