Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  The cardinals of the opposition were beside themselves at the sight of this honeymoon between Pope and King. History does not record Giuliano’s reaction, but no doubt he fell into one of his fits of bellowing rage; Ascanio and the other Milanese Cardinal, Lunati, left Rome precipitately the day after the agreement. Charles, as if bewitched by Alexander, seemed to have quite forgotten all his propaganda about the reform of the Church. Alexander, the wily diplomatist, had used the only weapons he had, his own personality and the aura of the Papacy, to outwit the inexperienced young King with all his troops and artillery at his back.

  On 28 January, Charles came to take his leave of the Pope before setting off for Naples. Burchard described the scene:

  King and Pope remained closeted together for a short while, and were then joined for a further quarter of an hour by Cardinal Cesare Borgia, after which His Majesty was escorted by the Pope and Cardinals through the halls as far as the passage leading to the upper apartments of the palace. There the King knelt down, bareheaded, and the Pope, removing his biretta, kissed him, but refused quite firmly to allow him to smother his feet with kisses, which His Majesty seemed to want to do. The King then departed, mounting his horse at the steps of the gate of the private garden, after waiting for a brief period for Cardinal Cesare Borgia to join him. The Pope and the cardinals meanwhile watched everything from the windows of the secret corridor [the passage leading to the castle of Sant’Angelo]. At last Cesare appeared, wearing his Cardinal’s cape, and with His Holiness’ permission, mounted horse beside the King. To His Majesty he presented six exceedingly beautiful horses which stood ready at hand with bridles but no saddles, and thus both the King and the Cardinal departed, leaving the others watching.

  In splendid weather, Charles and his hostage Cesare set off for Naples down the same Roman road taken by Charles of Anjou 220 years before. They spent the night at Marino, where they were joined by the pro-French Cardinals Giuliano, Savelli and Colonna, who obviously preferred not to remain in Rome with a triumphant Alexander, and by Djem with a numerous Turkish retinue. Here Charles received the welcome news of the abdication of Alfonso of Naples. Alfonso, it was reported, thrown into a state of abject terror by the approach of the French, would start up from his sleep crying that he heard the French coming, and all the rocks and trees calling ‘France’. Leaving his doomed kingdom to his son Ferrantino, he fled to Sicily, ‘out of true cowardice’ wrote de Comines, ‘for never was a cruel man brave’.

  Two days later, however, at Velletri, where the royal party were guests of its titular Bishop, Giuliano della Rovere, Charles received a most unwelcome surprise. ‘On January 30th,’ Burchard reported, ‘news came that Cardinal Cesare Borgia had escaped from the King’s hands at Velletri, disguised as a groom of the royal stables, and that he travelled so swiftly that he slept that night in Rome, at the house of Don Antonio Flores, a judge of the Rota.’ In order not to compromise his father, Cesare left Rome the next day for the castle of Spoleto. At Velletri, Charles’ rage knew no bounds: ‘All Italians are dirty dogs and the Holy Father is as bad as the worst of them!’ he is reported to have exclaimed. Alexander immediately denied complicity in the escape and all knowledge of his son’s whereabouts, although Cesare was in the papal castle of Spoleto. But the escape had almost certainly been arranged between them before Cesare left Rome, and the deception had been carefully planned, as Burchard reported:

  In his departure from Rome with King Charles, he had arranged for nineteen mules to follow him, laden with his goods and wearing rich trappings; amongst them were two beasts carrying credenzas [chests] with all his valuables. On the first day out, however, when His Majesty and the Cardinal were still on their way to Marino, these beasts had remained behind and returned to the city in the evening, whilst the Cardinal’s servants made the excuse at the King’s court that the mules had been seized and despoiled by some thieves …

  When the remaining seventeen were examined at Velletri after Cesare’s flight, the chests they carried were found to be empty. Cesare’s daring escape bore all the hallmarks of his later no less dramatic coups – his fondness for disguise, for secrecy and swiftness of movement. It was also in character that, out of devilry, he should have chosen Velletri for his escape, thus cocking a snook not only at the King of France but at Giuliano, its titular Bishop.

  Cesare remained out of the public eye at Spoleto until the end of March, when he returned to Rome to take part in the negotiations for an international alliance between the Pope, Venice, Milan, Spain and the Empire against France. He also found the time to organize a personal vendetta against the Swiss troops of Charles VIII who had remained in Rome; on 1 April a number of Swiss in the piazza of St Peter’s were attacked by 2000 Spaniards who killed twenty-four of them and manhandled the rest. Burchard reported: ‘Some said afterwards that all these violent acts were ordered by Cardinal Valentino against the Swiss for revenge, because Swiss soldiers in the service of France, with violence and without any cause, had sacked and plundered the house of his mother, robbing her of 800 ducats and other possessions of value.’ Cesare never forgot an injury or forbore to repay a wrong; he was already beginning to earn his reputation for vengefulness. And he could now afford his vendetta; on 31 March the alliance of the powers against France known as the Holy League was signed.

  Meanwhile Charles, against whom this formidable alliance was directed, was enjoying the delights of the new kingdom he had so easily conquered, which he himself described in a letter to his brother-in-law the Duke of Bourbon as ‘an earthly paradise’. ‘This King,’ reported a Venetian observer, ‘was one of the most lascivious men in France, and was very fond of copulation, and of changing his dishes, so that once he had had a woman, he cared no more about her, taking his pleasure with new ones …’ And while the King abandoned business for pleasure, his soldiery did their best to make themselves thoroughly hated by the Neapolitans. According to another Venetian report:

  The French were clownish, dirty, and dissolute people; they were always to be found in sin and in venereal acts; the tables were always kept laid, nor did they remove the cloths nor sweep beneath them; whichever of them entered the house of a Neapolitan first, took the best room and sent the master of the house to sleep in the worst; they stole wine and grain and sold it in the market; they violated the women, with no respect whatsoever, then they robbed them and took the rings from their fingers, and if any woman resisted they cut off her fingers to have the rings; [nonetheless] they spend much time in church at their orations …

  Wine, women, and a new and terrifying disease, syphilis, which the French called le mal de Naples, were destroying the discipline of the French army.

  Still Charles lingered on, unable to tear himself away, although the armies of the League were gathering in the north of Italy to cut off his retreat to France, and his position in Naples was becoming untenable. He had lost the support not only of the population, but of the barons who had at first welcomed him and then been disappointed in their hopes of honours and rewards. His plans for an expedition to the East had been shattered by the death of Djem on 25 February. (There were rumours that Alexander had him poisoned, but even Sanuto, normally hostile to the Borgias, thought it unlikely, since the Pope would thus have lost his annual pension of 40,000 ducats.)

  It was not until 20 May that Charles reluctantly set off homeward, intending to have audience of the Pope en route in the hope that he would grant him the investiture of Naples. But for Alexander there was nothing to be gained this time from a personal interview with Charles, which could only be embarrassing. Determined not to be caught in Rome, he and Cesare left the city on 27 May for Orvieto, accompanied by nineteen cardinals and a considerable body of papal, Milanese and Venetian troops. Four days later Charles arrived in Rome to find the Pope gone; as he marched northward, Alexander and Cesare retreated from Orvieto to the more inaccessible Perugia. Charles, with all hope of the Neapolitan investiture finally gone, was obliged to make for home as fast as he coul
d. On 5 July at Fornovo on the River Taro he met the forces of the League commanded by the Marquis of Gonzaga. It was a hard-fought engagement, in which both Charles and Gonzaga displayed great personal courage, but the result was indecisive. The Italians suffered the heavier casualties, over 2000 men, but took more prisoners and an immense amount of plunder, including all the booty gathered by the French on their progress through Italy, Charles’ helmet, sword and golden seal, together with a book containing portraits of the ladies whose favours he had enjoyed in the cities through which he had passed. Gonzaga claimed a brilliant victory and commissioned Mantegna to paint the Madonna della Vittoria (now, ironically enough, in the Louvre). But a more accurate view of the battle was that taken by the contemporary poet Antonio Cammelli: ‘And he [Charles], like a journeying dog, biting now this one, now that, got clean away.’

  At the end of June the Borgias returned to Rome in triumph from Perugia where, according to the local chronicler Matarazzo, they had made an unsuccessful attempt to unseat the Baglionis. In July Alexander, to give his son a taste of civil government and strengthen the family hold on a key papal city, nominated Cesare governor and castellan of Orvieto, with the powers of a legate a latere. Young and inexperienced as he was, Cesare made several mistakes in his government of Orvieto, dismissing citizens from their posts and substituting them with Spanish familiars. In response to angry protests, he hastened to write the Conservators of the city a honeyed letter of apology, blaming the trouble on false informants, and admitting that ‘he knew he was only a man and could thus easily err and be deceived. But on another occasion he intended to use the citizens of Orvieto as brothers and dear companions …’

  The events of the past twelve months had indeed been instructive for Cesare, providing him with first-hand experience of international politics, of the bluff and counter-bluff of diplomacy, and of war. For Cesare, no less than for Italy, the year 1494–5 had been a momentous one. He had witnessed the power of the French army, and the weakness of the Italian political system in the face of force. He had seen the established dynasties of Medici and Aragon fall before the mere threat of French arms. As his father’s chief confidant he had played a part at the centre of complex political negotiations, and above all he had watched Alexander, with consummate skill and all the odds against him, outwit the inexperienced young King with a great army behind him, and turn disaster into triumph. Cesare Borgia, aged just twenty, felt himself mature, and for him the game of power, politics and war now exercised an irresistible fascination.

  IV

  The Envy of Brothers

  WITH the crisis past, Alexander settled himself firmly in the seat of power. By the spring of 1496 the danger from the French was clearly over, although isolated bodies of troops still hung on in the Abruzzi and at Ostia. The Pope’s chief enemies were either reconciled or discomfited. Ascanio and the Colonnas had made their peace with Alexander, Giuliano della Rovere had retired to France, and the Orsinis, fighting desperately in the lost cause of France, were hemmed in by ‘the Great Captain’ of Spain, Gonsalvo de Cordoba, in Calabria. Without Giuliano, the College of Cardinals, packed with friendly or uncommitted cardinals, was an amenable body which Alexander and his son could manipulate more or less as they liked. Their hold over the College was increased by the creation on 19 February of four new cardinals, all Borgia henchmen, including Cesare’s cousin Giovanni Borgia, and their connection with Cesare was made clear to all in that they waited in his apartments during their nomination and dined there with him afterwards. Cesare, as befitted his acknowledged position as his father’s right-hand man, had his own suite of apartments in the Vatican, now known as the Raphael Stanze, directly above Alexander’s rooms in the Borgia apartments.

  Upon his accession in 1492, Alexander had commissioned Pinturicchio to decorate his apartments on the first floor of the Vatican palace built by Nicholas v between 1447 and 1455, and by 1495 the frescoed rooms were completed. It is in these apartments, the only personal monuments to the Borgias which have survived, that Alexander has left his mark on the Vatican. In contrast to the serene piety of Nicholas v’s chapel by Fra Angelico nearby, and to the High Renaissance beauty of the rooms on the floor above painted by Raphael for Julius II, the Borgia apartments are an arrogant demonstration of the Spanish origins, personal ambitions and family pride of the Borgia Pope. Nearly five centuries have passed since the Borgias ruled Rome, but these rooms are still alive with their flamboyant personality. Here, covering walls and ceiling in an almost megalomaniac repetition, are the two Borgia devices, the Aragonese double crown, symbol of the royal house of Aragon, from which they quite fictitiously claimed descent and to which they added sun rays or flames pointing downwards, and the grazing ox of their original emblem, transformed from a peaceful animal into a rampant, virile, pagan bull. Pagan imagery is paramount: lunettes depict the planets, signifying Alexander’s interest in astrology; a central plaque shows him as the elect of the sungod; the wild bull, ridden by a cupid, is used as an allegory of bridled force and passion; in other scenes the Borgia device appears in the form of the Egyptian bull-god Apis. Above all, the rooms have an alien, Spanish feeling: the tiled floors blaze with the double crown of Aragon, Pinturicchio’s frescoes are inserted in stucco frames of a multicoloured geometric design recalling the Moorish work of Granada and Seville. No Italian passing through these rooms could have failed to be aware of their strangeness in the heart of the Vatican, nor of the family pride and ambition which they represented.

  For in that triumphant year of 1496, Alexander no longer attempted to hide his affection for his children. Indeed he proudly and shamelessly flaunted them in the public eye. The Romans were used to papal nepotism, even to papal bastards, but Alexander was the first Pope to live a life of unabashed carnality and pleasure in the full limelight of the Vatican, in the company of his young and beautiful mistress and his handsome, arrogant children. It was this outrageous openness which shocked and amazed contemporaries, and the scandalous rumours which have made the Borgias’ lives a byword began to gain momentum as Alexander’s children gathered round their father in Rome.

  Cesare, in his role as palace Cardinal, was already installed in the Vatican. In April, Lucrezia returned from provincial life at Pesaro to her old palace of Santa Maria in Portico by the Vatican steps. No doubt she was glad to be back in Rome after the confinement of the small court and the unrelieved company of her unloved husband Giovanni Sforza. Far from being the poisoning Messalina of legend, she was a gay, charming, pleasure-loving girl, whose high spirits made her, rather than the beautiful Giulia, the centre of the Vatican circle. Alexander was still infatuated with Giulia, whom even Sanuto described as ‘gentle and gracious’, and whose obscure young husband Orsino he took care to keep at a safe distance from Rome as governor of Carbognano and Bassanello. But everyone remarked on his passionate affection, and that of Cesare, for Lucrezia; it was to be the basis of the ugly rumours of incest which later circulated so freely.

  The arrival of Jofre and Sancia from Calabria in May contributed much to the gaiety, and to the scandal, of the papal court. Their entry into the city was organized by Alexander and Cesare with all the showmanship of which they were past masters. Entering by the Lateran Gate, they were greeted by the households of all the cardinals, the commander of the Vatican guard at the head of 200 soldiers, the ambassadors of Spain, Milan, Naples, Venice and the Empire, with the senators, nobles and leading citizens of Rome, and by Lucrezia, gorgeously dressed in order not to be outshone by her sister-in-law. Followed by twenty-eight mules carrying their baggage, Jofre, on a magnificent bay horse, and Sancia rode to the Vatican, where, says Burchard, the Pope peeped at their approach through a half-closed shutter before going down with Cesare to greet them. It was Cesare’s first sight of his sister-in-law. The atmosphere of sexuality surrounding Sancia, and indeed the Borgia court, comes out clearly in this description of her arrival by the Mantuan ambassador Gian Carlo Scalona:

  In truth she did not appear a
s beautiful as she had been made out to be. Indeed the lady of Pesaro [Lucrezia] surpassed her. However that may be, by her gestures and aspect the sheep will put herself easily at the disposal of the wolf. She has also some ladies of hers who are in no way inferior to their mistress, thus they say publicly it will be a fine flock … She is more than twenty-two years old, naturally dark, with glancing eyes, an aquiline nose and very well made up, and will in my opinion not give the lie to my predictions …

  Scalona thought little of Jofre, whom he described as ‘dark in complexion and otherwise lascivious-looking, with long hair with a reddish tinge … and he is fourteen or fifteen years of age’. Neither, it would appear, did Sancia; already in June 1494, one month after their marriage, rumours had reached Rome of the extravagance and disorderly behaviour of the young Squillaces’ court. The harassed master of Sancia’s household had even found it necessary to testify that no man had been seen entering the Princess’ chamber but for ‘Messer Cecco, companion of the lady, a worthy man and old, who is above sixty years of age …’ Sancia, brought up in the sensuous atmosphere of the Neapolitan court, could not have been expected to be content with a boy husband several years younger than herself, and she soon found a man more to her taste in his elder brother. As Sanuto reported a year later: ‘Jofre, younger than his wife, had not consummated the marriage; he is not a man and, I understand, for many months past the lady Sancia has given herself to the Cardinal of Valencia.’ If, as some writers have alleged, Lucrezia’s love for Cesare was incestuous, she seems to have displayed no jealousy whatsoever towards his mistress Sancia, and the two girls, whose vivacity and carelessness for outward appearances made them ideal companions, soon became close friends. At a service in St Peter’s on 22 May their irreverent behaviour scandalized the congregation when during a long and tedious sermon, which made Alexander restive, Sancia and Lucrezia climbed to the choir reserved for the canons and sat there laughing and chattering with their ladies.