Meanwhile, with the matter of his sister’s divorce successfully concluded, Cesare was energetically cooperating with his father in the plan for his secularization and marriage. On Christmas Eve Ascanio reported to Ludovico a long conversation he had had with the Pope on the subject, lasting four hours: ‘The principal content was briefly as follows: Cesare is working every day harder to put off the purple. The Pope is of the opinion that, if it does come to pass, it must do so with the least possible scandal, under the most decorous pretext possible.’ For Alexander and Cesare, however, the fabrication of a decorous pretext for putting off the purple was of less moment than ensuring that it would be worth his while to do so. He could not take the irrevocable step of renouncing his great ecclesiastical position and the 35,000 ducats in yearly revenue which it brought him, without being sure of a secular position with at least an equivalent income, and a wife to enable him to found a dynasty.
Somewhat to their surprise, the Borgias found King Federigo to be a major stumbling-block to their ambitions. Federigo, who knew both the Borgias well, recognized their takeover plan for what it was. Although he was prepared to sacrifice an illegitimate member of his house to the Borgia bull, and offered Sancia’s brother Alfonso, with the title of Duke of Bisceglie, as a second husband for Lucrezia, dynastic pride and political common sense made him obdurate in his refusal of his legitimate daughter for Cesare. Behind Federigo stood his powerful patron Ferdinand of Aragon, who had absolutely no intention of allowing the Borgias to annex the kingdom of Naples, which he meant to regain for the Aragonese crown. By mid-June the Venetian ambassador in Rome reported that there was no more talk of marriage between Cesare and Carlotta, since King Federigo had said publicly: ‘It seems to me that the Pope’s son, the Cardinal, is not in a condition for me to give him my daughter to wife, even if he is the son of the Pope,’ adding: ‘Make a cardinal who can marry and take off the hat, and then I will give him my daughter.’
As a sop to the Borgias, whom he bitterly described as ‘insatiable’, Federigo sent Alfonso to Rome to marry Lucrezia. His arrival on 15 July was supposed to be secret, but Ascanio wrote dryly to his brother that ‘the secret of the Duke’s presence here is known all over Rome’, noting that Cesare’s reception of his new brother-in-law was especially cordial and affectionate. Cesare had every reason to be kind to Alfonso, whose wedding to Lucrezia was generally regarded as a stepping-stone towards the greater object of his own marriage to Carlotta of Aragon.
Lucrezia herself was delighted with her new bridegroom, a handsome boy who charmed everyone who met him, and it was soon obvious that the young couple were genuinely in love. The wedding, celebrated in the Vatican on 21 July, was a family affair. The ambassadors, who were not invited, were naturally avid to pick up any titbits of information about the festivities which they could retail to their masters. As usual the Borgias did not disappoint them; the Mantuan envoy reported that an unseemly brawl between Cesare’s and Sancia’s servants marred the happy occasion. Swords were drawn in the presence of the Pope in the room outside the chapel where refreshments were to be served before the wedding breakfast, and two bishops exchanged fisticuffs. The scuffle caused such confusion that the servitors were unable to bring in the traditional sweetmeats and sugared almonds. When the turmoil eventually died down, the family party were able to sit down to a breakfast that lasted three hours until dusk. In the tableaux presented during the course of the feast, Cesare himself appeared in the strangely inapposite role of a Unicorn, the symbol of Chastity!
As he danced behind the horned mask at his sister’s wedding, Cesare’s thoughts must have turned optimistically to his own marriage projects. Despite King Federigo’s continuing obstinacy, the Borgias had found a new and powerful ally. In fact the summer of 1498 marked a dramatic reorientation of Borgia policy, as Alexander, in his search for a state and a wife for his son, turned away from his traditional friendship with Ferdinand of Aragon towards alliance with France. As spring passed into summer it had become increasingly apparent that Ferdinand represented the main obstacle to the plans for Cesare. Not only did he support Federigo, who was now entirely dependent upon him, in his obstinacy over the Neapolitan marriage, but he had expressed his strong opposition, and that of Isabella, to Cesare’s proposed renunciation of the cardinalate, and had adamantly refused to consider the Borgias’ demands that Gandia’s estates should be transferred to him to compensate for the loss of his ecclesiastical revenues. On 2 March Cristoforo Poggio reported: ‘I hear also that the Cardinal of Valencia will not put off the cloth, because he has not received the answer he wanted concerning the state of the late Duke of Gandia, which the King and Queen intend to go to his son, and as catholics are against such a deposition.’ Three weeks later he wrote that ‘the Most Reverend Valencia’ intended to pursue his plan to renounce that cardinalate, despite the opposition of the King and Queen of Spain and their refusal to grant him Gandia’s estates, since he was hoping to get what he wanted from Federigo.
The disparity between the two reports is indicative of the hesitations which Cesare felt at the prospect of crossing his personal Rubicon from the safe niche of the cardinalate to the uncertain shore of a secular future. Since the beginning of the year he had been seen more often in the practice of arms than in the exercise of his ecclesiastical duties. ‘Monsignor of Valencia every day exercises the practice of arms, and seems resolved to be a gallant soldier,’ Poggio wrote to Mantua on 19 January. His appearances in church were so rare as to cause Burchard to note with surprise on 21 April: ‘Cardinal Valentino attended the solemn mass in the papal chapel, he has not been seen since Passion Sunday.’ It was to be his last appearance: from then on he no longer attended ecclesiastical functions, nor wore the robes of a churchman. But at one point in the summer of 1498 the difficulties raised by Ferdinand and Federigo seem to have made him lose heart and wish to draw back. He was only driven on by the will of his forceful father. In June Ascanio wrote to Ludovico that Alexander was ‘every hour more ardent in his desire that this Valentino should change the habit; although Valentino does not want to, His Holiness has decided that he will do so …’
For the relentless Alexander had found a new avenue which he hoped would lead to a brilliant future for his son. Already in March, faced with Ferdinand’s antagonistic attitude, he had sent a friendly mission to Charles VIII of France. Charles made accommodating noises, but negotiations were interrupted by his sudden death at Amboise on 7 April 1498. Charles’ demise was a stroke of good fortune for Alexander: his successor, Louis XII, the former Duke of Orleans, had pressing domestic and external reasons for seeking the Pope’s friendship. First, he wanted to divorce his wife, Jeanne de France, in order to marry Charles’ widow, Anne of Brittany, so as to keep Brittany as an appanage of the French crown, and for this he urgently needed a dispensation from the Pope. Secondly, he had inherited not only the Angevin claims to Naples but also the Orleanist rights to Milan, and his assumption of both titles on his accession made it abundantly clear that he intended to assert them, in which case the Pope’s blessing on his enterprise would be essential to him.
Alexander was not slow to see the advantages which could be extracted from this new situation. As Machiavelli wrote: ‘The times served him well, since he found a king who, to separate himself from his old wife, promised and gave him more than any other.’ Although contemporaries like Machiavelli saw Alexander’s increasingly pro-French stance as motivated solely by his ambitions for Cesare, this was an oversimplification. Alexander was essentially a pragmatist, his policies always adapted to the realities of the Italian and international situation. By 1498 the League that had chased Charles VIII out of Italy lay in ruins. Within three months of Fornovo, in October 1495, Ludovico had hastened to make his separate peace with Charles at Vercelli, a typically turncoat reaction which did not endear him to his former allies. Venice, now violently anti-Milanese, was moving ever closer towards France; Naples, shattered and impoverished, was totally dependent on the arms
and support of Spain; while Florence, debilitated and now hardly to be counted as a major power, was equally reliant on France for existence. It was clear to anyone as experienced in international politics as Alexander not only that another French invasion was imminent, but that from henceforward the physical presence in Italy of two foreign powers, France and Spain, was equally inevitable. For Alexander to oppose the French this time as he had in 1494 would have been unrealistic, to do so would have been to place the Papacy squarely in the arms of Ferdinand of Aragon. His aim was to increase the power and influence of the Papacy by playing the two powers off against each other, meanwhile extracting the greatest advantages for himself from either side. In 1498 it was obvious that there was nothing to be gained from Ferdinand, while an alliance with Louis offered a wide range of interesting possibilities.
In June Louis and Alexander exchanged missions. The French envoys were charged by their master to ask for dissolution of his marriage to Jeanne de France on the grounds of his having been constrained to it against his will by Louis XI, and that due to his wife’s deformity he had been unable to consummate it. In the last days of the month Alexander’s secret envoy, Francisco d’Almeida, Bishop of Ceuta, left Rome for France, where he arrived at court on 21 July. On 29 July, as a token of his goodwill, the Pope signed a rescript constituting the tribunal to examine the case for nullification of the King’s marriage. The outcome of d’Almeida’s mission is revealed in a document found in the archives at Pau, the text of a secret agreement under which Louis promised to support Cesare’s Neapolitan marriage project, and made several important undertakings in his favour:
1 The grant of the counties of Valence and Diois, the former to be raised to the rank of duchy, and the revenues of these estates to be made up to 20,000 gold francs.
2 The appointment of Cesare to the command of a corps of 100 lances fournies, to be maintained at the King’s expense at Cesare’s orders in Italy or elsewhere; this corps to be increased at the King’s option to 200 or 300 lances – an army of nearly 2000 heavy cavalry.
3 A personal subsidy to Cesare from the crown of 20,000 gold francs per annum.
4 Upon the conquest of Milan Cesare was to be invested with the feudal lordship of Asti.
5 Cesare would be invested with the collar of the Order of St Michael.
Cesare was to go to France, where Carlotta of Aragon was residing at the French court, for the marriage. To compensate the Pope for the loss of his presence, Louis promised to place at Alexander’s disposal in Rome a force of a thousand men, or alternatively 4000 ducats a month to pay for them, a proposal which indicated the extent to which Alexander already relied upon Cesare for security at Rome, especially in face of the renewed hostility from the Roman barons which manifested itself in July 1498.
This document is a significant illustration of Borgia aims and policy in the summer of 1498. Beyond the Neapolitan marriage and the provision of a high secular state and revenues for Cesare, he was to be launched on a career of military conquest in command of a significant body of troops. In return, Alexander tacitly abandoned Milan, Naples and his former friendship with Ferdinand, and held out to Louis the almost certain prospect of the dissolution of his marriage. In August d’Almeida returned to Rome with the news that Louis was sending an envoy, Monsieur de Trans, to Rome with the patents investing Cesare with Valence and Diois, and ships to escort him to France.
For Cesare, the die was cast. On Friday, 17 August 1498, he publicly announced his decision to put off the purple. Burchard reported:
There was a secret consistory, in which the Cardinal Valentino declared that from his early years he was always, with all his spirit, inclined to the secular condition; but that the Holy Father had wished absolutely that he should give himself to the ecclesiastical state, and he had not believed he should oppose his will. But since his mind and his desire and his inclination were still for the secular life, he besought His Holiness Our Lord, that he should condescend, with special clemency, to give him a dispensation, so that, having put off the robe and ecclesiastical dignity, he might be permitted to return to the secular estate and contract matrimony; and that he now prayed the most reverend lord cardinals to willingly give their consent to such a dispensation.
Cesare made his dramatic announcement to a half-empty house. Many of the cardinals, foreseeing an unpleasant confrontation with their consciences or their allegiances (the Spanish cardinals in particular), had absented themselves from Rome on the excuse of villeggiatura, the annual escape to the country from the heat and pestilence of the city. Relentlessly, Alexander rounded them up to give the stamp of their consent to this unprecedented step. He arranged for a further consistory to be held on 23 August, and, as the Venetian envoy reported, ‘wrote to all the cardinals who were in the neighbourhood of Rome, that they must come to the city, because matters were to be discussed touching the good of the Church and Christianity!’ Browbeaten thus by the Pope, the cardinals yielded. ‘The Pope,’ wrote the same envoy two days later, ‘with all the cardinals’ votes, has given licence that the Cardinal of Valencia, son of the Pope, could put off the hat and make himself a soldier and get himself a wife.’ The news caused scandal in Italy, France and Spain, but Cesare cared little for the world’s opinions. On the day of the consistory on the 17th, the French King’s envoy, de Trans, Baron de Villeneuve, arrived in Rome bearing the letters patent that would entitle the former Cardinal of Valencia to call himself duc de Valentinois. For Italians, the two foreign titles sounded almost the same; and ‘Valencia’ became ‘il Valentino’.
The parade sword made for Cesare Borgia in 1498
(face)
(reverse)
Cesare, at twenty-three, had crossed his Rubicon. His own consciousness of the importance of the step he was taking and its implications are embodied in the design of a magnificent parade sword made for him during the summer of 1498. The sword is decorated with Borgia emblems, bulls, and the downward-pointing rays, with the name CESAR arranged as a monogram, and its central theme is illustrated in six classical scenes engraved on the blade. The first represents the worship or sacrifice of a bull, standing on an altar inscribed ‘D.O.M. Hostia’ – Deo Optimo maximo hostia: ‘a sacrifice to the most high god’; underneath it runs the significant inscription: ‘Cum Numine Caesaris Omen’, ‘a favourable omen with Caesar’s divine good will’. The second shows Caesar crossing the Rubicon and inscribed beneath it his famous comment, ‘Jacta est Alea’, ‘the die is cast’. The third depicts the triumphs of Caesar, riding in a chariot inscribed D. Cesar (‘Divus Caesar’, ‘Divine Caesar’, which could also be a reference to Cesare’s own Spanish name and title, Don Cesar); beneath runs the motto ‘Benemerent’, to the well-deserving’. The other three vignettes represent Faith, the Roman Peace, and the worship of Love, frequently used as a symbol in Borgia decoration; while on the equally elaborate leather scabbard made for the sword (but never used) there is a scene representing the worship of Venus, who as a planet goddess was associated with the zodiac sign of Taurus, and thus with the Borgia emblem. Classical imagery as used in the Renaissance was never meaningless decoration; the scenes representing Caesar’s life were clearly of great personal significance to Cesare, symbolizing his own renunciation of the cardinalate and his hoped-for triumph in the secular world. For him, as for Caesar, arms would be the road to power. And with the motto ‘Cum Numine Caesaris Omen’, Cesare invoked his great namesake’s protection and help in his new career.
He now concentrated on preparing himself physically for his future as a man of action. His preparations included bullfighting on horseback, a Spanish sport which amazed contemporary Italians. Cattaneo reported on 18 August, the day after the consistory in which he had announced his decision to lay down the cardinalate: ‘In these days Valencia, armed as a janissary, with another fourteen men, gave many blows and proofs of strength in killing eight bulls in the presence of Don Alfonso, Donna Lucretia and “his Princess” [Sancia], in Monsignor Ascanio’s park where he ha
d taken them remote from the crowd for greater privacy. In a few days’ time I hope to see him fully armed on the piazza.’ On at least one occasion, however, his physical exercises ended less gloriously; Cattaneo reported on 29 August that the previous evening Cesare had been practising in the gardens of the Pope’s vigna (the Belvedere in the Vatican garden) leaping astride horses and mules in one bound without touching the harness. He then ‘tried to leap in that manner onto a somewhat taller mule and when he was in the air, the mule took fright and gave him a couple of kicks in the ribs, one on the right shoulder, and the other on the back of his head. He was unconscious for more than half an hour.’
Cesare Borgia Page 10