Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  From ambassadorial reports it appears that Alexander was deeply worried by the first attempt on Alfonso, perhaps because of its effect on his relations with Ferdinand, perhaps also because he suspected Cesare of complicity in it. Cappello wrote on 18 July: ‘This affair of the Duke has greatly displeased him, and he is in the worst possible disposition.’ Cesare needed the justification of the Aragonese plot to convince his father of the necessity of his action, and Alexander seems to have gratefully accepted it. Eager as he was to embrace Cesare’s cause wholeheartedly and to close his eyes to an unpleasant past, Lucrezia’s incessant tears for her dead husband irritated him, and early in September she was packed off to Nepi. On 4 September Cattaneo reported that the Pope ‘has sent away his daughter and daughter-in-law and everyone except Valencia because at the end they were wearisome to him’. Cesare had won. Raphael Brandolin was correct in his final diagnosis of the Bisceglie case; it was, he wrote, motivated by ‘the supreme lust for dominion of Cesare Valentino Borgia’.

  The assassination of Alfonso Bisceglie marked a new phase in Cesare’s reputation for ruthlessness, an intensification of the fear he inspired throughout Italy as the ‘terrible’ Duke Valentino. ‘All Rome trembles at this Duke, that he may not have them killed,’ Capello reported dramatically to the Venetian Senate. From that day on any murder of importance was attributed to him, while the belief that he had in fact murdered Gandia gathered strength and echoed down the ages. ‘Cesare murdered his brother, slept with his sister, spent the treasure of the Church, and was the terror of his father Alexander,’ a contemporary wrote of him. He brought this sinister reputation upon himself, for one cannot escape the conclusion that the murder of Alfonso was a deliberate act of terror. He could easily have eliminated his brother-in-law less publicly, by the use of poison, but he did not, possibly because it suited him to have men fear him. The atmosphere which he created emerges in the cipher letter reporting Bisceglie’s death sent by the Florentine envoy to his government: ‘I pray Your Lordships to take this for your own information, and not to show it to others, for these [the Borgias] are men to be watched, otherwise they have done a thousand villainies, and have spies in every place.’

  But the Borgias, father and son, clearly cared little for public opinion as long as they got what they wanted. The retiring Venetian ambassador, Capello, gave an interesting if highly spiced picture of Alexander and Cesare, a confident, ambitious partnership in this autumn of 1500, in his official report to the Venetian Senate on his Roman embassy. Alexander’s natural resilience had left him quite unmarked either by his recent narrow escape from death or the murder of his son-in-law. Giulia Farnese, who seems to have been absent during the summer, had returned in mid-August, shortly after her husband, the wretched Orsino Orsini, had been killed by a falling roof, and was once again at Alexander’s side. ‘The Pope,’ reported Capello, ‘is seventy and grows younger every day. Worries never last him a night; he loves life, and is of a joyful nature and does what suits him.’ In his natural exuberance and talkativeness, Alexander could keep nothing secret, Capello said. He remarked on his easy-going tolerance; the eighty-four-year-old Cardinal of Portugal, da Costa, spoke openly against the Pope, ‘and the Pope laughs and doesn’t answer’. His power was absolute: ‘The cardinals without the Pope can do zero.’ Only Giuliano della Rovere was singled out as ca very dangerous man’. As far as international politics were concerned, the Pope thought ‘more of the Signoria [Venice] than any other power in the world’; he was, Capello said, the enemy of the King of France, and described his relations with Ferdinand of Aragon as ‘bargaining from Catalan to Catalan’.

  Capello gave his view of Alexander’s relationship with Cesare: ‘The Pope loves and fears his son, who is twenty-seven [he was just twenty-five], physically most beautiful, he is tall and well-made, better than King Ferrantino … he is munificent, even prodigal, and this displeases the Pope …’ It is interesting to note that Capello, who must have seen Cesare on innumerable occasions, stressed his physical beauty; the historical picture of Cesare as a monster skulking behind a mask, concealing features hideously ravaged by syphilis, is a lurid fiction based on Paolo Giovio’s later description of him as swarthy and disfigured by blotches. After the disappearance of the rash caused by the secondary stage of syphilis, the chances of physical disfigurement would have been very small, and in any case would have appeared many years later. Hostile contemporaries would have been quick to point out any hideous deformation of Cesare’s looks, as they did in 1498, but no such accounts exist for this period, and Capello’s portrayal of him as a strikingly handsome man seems to have been the true one. Cesare gave the impression of being mature for his age; the Venetian thought him two years older than he actually was. Capello went on to depict him as a sadistic murderer, stabbing Perotto as he cowered under the Pope’s cloak so that the blood spurted up in Alexander’s face, ordering the death of Gandia, and wholesale assassinations: ‘Every day in Rome one finds men murdered, four or five a night, bishops, prelates and others …’

  As to Cesare’s relations with Lucrezia, Capello hinted: ‘And they say this Duke [sleeps with] his sister.’ Lucrezia, formerly the Pope’s favourite, was ‘wise and generous, but now the Pope does not love her so much, and sends her to Nepi, and has given her Sermoneta which has cost 80,000 ducats, although the Duke has taken it from her, saying “She is a woman, she could not keep it.” ’

  Capello’s account of Cesare dominant was unconsciously coloured by the recent sensation of the Bisceglie murder – ‘The Pope loves and fears his son …’ Alexander may have feared his son’s ruthlessness, but there is absolutely no evidence that he was dominated by him at this point, and Capello’s own portrayal of Alexander as powerful and full of life gives the lie to this theory. The relationship between the two men was one of mutual reliance and interdependence, and in fact Cesare at this point in his career depended totally on his father as the source of his power. It was a partnership in which Alexander was the senior member, although Cesare’s influence had grown to such a point that they could be considered equals. The crunch would come when their individual outlooks and policies clashed. For the moment they were identical: the furthering of Cesare’s career of conquest could be regarded as an extension of the temporal power of the Papacy.

  And the time had come for a resumption of that career. In August, five days after Bisceglie’s death, a special envoy from Louis XII arrived in Rome, the same M. de Trans who had brought Cesare his letters patent as Duke of Valentinois on the day he renounced the cardinalate two years before. Once again de Trans was the bearer of good tidings, news so important that Cesare could not wait to hear it. De Trans was at an inn outside the city walls when, as Burchard reported: ‘There came a certain horseman, masked and riding fast, with one on foot, who dismounted at the inn, and keeping on his mask which he did not lower, embraced the orator and spoke with him: after a short while the masked man returned to the city. They say it was Duke Valentino.’ De Trans was the bearer of a formal agreement whose terms must already have been discussed. In return for the Borgias’ political and military help in the conquest of Naples, Louis promised to send 300 lances and 2000 infantry under the command of Yves d’Alègre to help in the forthcoming Romagna campaign. Moreover he would instruct the lords under his protection such as Bentivoglio of Bologna to give free passage and assistance to the papal army.

  This meant that Cesare could now go confidently ahead with his military preparations; he had already signed contracts with some of the leading Italian condottieri – Paolo and Giulio Orsini, and Vitellozzo Vitelli – and was negotiating a condotta with Gian Paolo Baglioni. There was a desperate need for money. He would require at least a thousand ducats a day to pay his troops on the campaign, and the Venetian envoy reported that he was engaging soldiers and ‘getting money like a madman’. Alexander had contributed funds from the Jubilee income, and some of the tithe imposed on the clergy for the Crusade against the Turks, but still more would be needed. I
n their necessity the Borgias resorted to the simple expedient of milking the College of Cardinals. No secret was made of the fact that nominations of new cardinals would be made for cash; Cesare himself conducted the negotiations, and drew up a scale of payments, while Alexander browbeat the cardinals into acceptance. When the nominations were made on 28 September, among the new cardinals were several members of the Borgia connection, including Cesare’s tutor Juan Vera and his brother-in-law Aymon d’Albret, and the sum raised was calculated at about 120,000 ducats. The new creations were not only profitable for Cesare but provided him with still more adherents in the Roman court, as Sanuto recorded: ‘After their investiture they went to the Duke, offering themselves to him, and dined there, and settled their accounts and swore fealty to him.’

  One of the new cardinals was a Venetian, Marco Cornaro, a sop to the Republic. In fact, by early September the Borgias had the Venetians where they wanted them. Throughout August Alexander continued to press the Republic to withdraw its protection from the vicars of Rimini and Faenza, whom he had recently excommunicated, with Giovanni Sforza thrown in for good measure. He wanted an alliance and a condotta for Cesare, holding out the use of the Spanish fleet against the Turks as token of his goodwill. The Venetian situation vis-à-vis the Turks in the Adriatic was becoming increasingly critical, and the shock of the fall of Modone on 9 September impelled them to lay down their diplomatic arms unconditionally to the Borgias. ‘Shocked, terror-stricken and amazed’, the new envoy Giorgi, accompanied by Capello, hurried to the Vatican to appeal to the Pope for help without waiting for a formal appointment. Alexander was disposed to aid them but made his position quite clear. He told them, wrote the Florentine envoy Cappello, that:

  The Signoria had until now acted ungratefully towards His Holiness, never having wished to allow him to carry on the enterprises of Rimini and Faenza, favouring rebels and excommunicates … and if they wished to please His Holiness they should act differently in future. The two orators answered that they were minded to do anything for His Holiness, and to embrace the Duke Valentino, and hold him as their good son, and to give him a condotta on the best and most convenient conditions, and [as to] Rimini and Faenza … they would be most content for him to carry out his enterprises. The Pope answered that he wanted no more of their fine words, that he had already had too many of them, but now he wanted deeds …

  On 16 September, the desperate Venetian government gave Alexander the deeds he wanted: although they still had the sense to temporize over the condotta, Rimini and Faenza were sacrificed to Cesare, and they promised to make him a gentiluomo, hereditary gentleman, of Venice – an honour which brought with it the gift of a palace in the city.

  Thus, by the end of September, Cesare was ready to take the field. Capello reported on the 26th: ‘I understand that the order has been given that, after the cardinals have been created, Duke Valentino will depart within two or three days, according to what the astrologer indicates as the favourable moment.’ The envoys at the court of Rome watched his departure with foreboding. As Cattaneo had written in July, rumours were already abroad about the scope of the Borgias’ ambitions for Cesare. ‘The Pope plans to make him great and king of Italy, if he can; nor am I dreaming,’ he added, ‘but everything can be described and written down, and so that others will not think my brains are disordered, I will say no more …’ Few seasoned observers would have thought Cattaneo mad; opinions as to Cesare’s capabilities had changed considerably over the past twelve months. Paolo Capello declared: ‘He will be, if he lives, one of the first captains of Italy.’

  IX

  Lord of Romagna

  ON 30 September Cesare and Alexander watched a review of 800 of his Spanish infantry from the loggia above the piazza of St Peter’s; the next day the army moved out of Rome, bound for the Romagna. Cesare himself followed on 2 October, riding northward up the Via Flaminia. He was accompanied by his personal staff of young Roman noblemen, many of whom had been with him in France, three bishops who were to assist him in the administration of his new state, his confidential secretary Agapito Geraldini, his doctor Torella, his treasurer Alessandro Spanocchi, Ramiro de Lorqua the master of his household, and the usual signorial retinue of poets, artists and men of letters, including Vincenzo Calmeta, Pier Francesco Giustolo, Francesco Sperulo and the sculptor Torrigiano. The army which he was to command numbered some 10,000 men – 700 men-at-arms, 200 light horse, and 6000 Spanish, Italian, Gascon and Swiss infantry, with an artillery train under Vitellozzo Vitelli. His captains were Spanish professionals – Cesare’s sinister familiar Miguel da Corella, Juan de Cardona, Ugo de Moncada – and Italian condottieri Vitellozzo Vitelli and Bartolomeo da Capranica accompanied him from Rome, while Paolo and Carlo Orsini, Gian Paolo Baglioni and Ercole Bentivoglio waited for him in Umbria and the Romagna. It was a professional, mercenary army, and for the first time under Cesare’s supreme command.

  Cesare moved slowly northward, stopping to visit the disconsolate Lucrezia at Nepi, where she had spent the past two months in deep mourning for Alfonso, signing her letters ‘la infelicissma’, ‘the most unhappy woman’, and pointedly crossing out her title ‘Princess of Salerno’. For Lucrezia, who was still in disgrace for her public grief at Alfonso’s death, the visit was a reconciliation with the brother who had made her ‘the most unhappy woman’, and some time before Christmas she was allowed back to Rome. Cesare’s leisurely progress was due partly to the weather, as the artillery trains floundered in thick mud and heavy rain, partly to deliberate timing. As in the previous campaign he had laid his plans well beforehand so as to obtain the maximum advantage with the minimum of costly military action, and as he made his way northward his agents were fomenting trouble for Giovanni Sforza at Pesaro, and negotiating with Pandolfo Malatesta for the cession of Rimini. On 11 October mobs headed by the leading citizens of Pesaro marched through the streets and arrested Giovanni Sforza’s brother Galeazzo. Giovanni himself fled from the citadel the next night, and made his way to refuge in Venice, preferring not to remain to face his terrible ex-brother-in-law. On the 15th the town opened its gates to Ercole Bentivoglio in Cesare’s name, and on the 18th the ducal commissioner Olivieri, Bishop of Isernia, arrived to take over the government. Cesare himself entered Pesaro on 27 October in pouring rain, ‘very proudly, both in himself and his company’, a Gonzaga correspondent reported. Over their streaming armour the 150 men-at-arms wore the red and yellow of his personal livery, worked with a new device on chest and back, the seven-headed hydra, an apt symbol for future victims of il Valentino’s aggression.

  At Pesaro Cesare lodged in Giovanni Sforza’s apartments in the palace which Lucrezia had occupied during her first two years as Countess of Pesaro. Here he was visited by the first in a series of acute observers who from now on were to watch his every move. Pandolfo Collenuccio, the envoy of the Duke of Ferrara, was favourably impressed by the affability of Cesare’s manner: ‘With great frankness and amiability His Majesty first made excuses for not granting me an audience the preceding day, owing to his having so much to do in the citadel and also on account of the pain caused by his ulcer’ (Collenuccio reported him to be suffering from a sore in the groin the previous day). As a man of letters Collenuccio remarked on the eloquence and precision with which he spoke: ‘He answered me in carefully chosen words, covering each point, and very fluently.’ He remarked also the eccentricity of Cesare’s nocturnal habits, which exasperated his father and were the despair of ambassadors seeking audience of him:

  The Duke’s daily life is as follows: he goes to bed at the eighth, ninth or tenth hour of night [3–5 a.m.]. Consequently the eighteenth hour [midday] is his dawn, the nineteenth his sunrise, and the twentieth his time for rising. Immediately on getting up he sits down at table, and while there and afterwards he attends to business.

  Collenuccio ended his report with a summing-up of Cesare’s character:

  He is considered brave, strong, and liberal [by which he meant munificent], and it is said
that he sets great store by straightforward men. He is hard in revenge, so I have been told by many; a man of soaring spirit, thirsting for greatness and fame, he seems more eager to seize states than to keep and administer them.

  Collenuccio had recognized in Cesare the qualities of a conquistador. The Gonzagas’ anonymous correspondent at Pesaro had meanwhile come to the same conclusion. It was no longer, he wrote, merely a question of Cesare taking Faenza, but, if fortune favoured him, Bologna, and even Florence. ‘Now,’ he added ominously, ‘anything is believable …’

  After two days in Pesaro, spent inspecting the citadel, of which he commissioned a painting to be sent to Alexander, who shared his interest in fortifications, Cesare moved on to Rimini, which he entered on 30 October. It was a purely ceremonial entry. Sigismondo Malatesta’s grandson Pandolfo had already handed over the city to Cesare’s representative Olivieri on the 10th, turning a quick profit by selling the citadel and its artillery, and had loaded his goods onto a boat to take refuge in Venetian territory. The sinful Sigismondo, depicted by Pisanello as a man of reptilian attraction, strong-featured, falcon-nosed, with glittering flat-lidded eyes which gave a snake-like impression, had been a brilliant if unreliable soldier, and an intelligently passionate patron of philosophy and the arts. His son Roberto had been a celebrated condottiere, but his grandson, Pandolfaccio as he was contemptuously known, was no more than a rapacious thug, and his subjects welcomed Cesare as a liberator. But the ease with which he had taken possession of Rimini and Pesaro caused a state of near panic in the neighbouring powers, Florence and Bologna. The Florentine government noted with anxiety that his leading Italian captains were their sworn enemies; Vitellozzo Vitelli had vowed to avenge himself on them for their execution of his brother Paolo, and the Orsinis were linked by marriage with the Medicis and pledged to their restoration. It was known that at the end of October Piero de’ Medici had arrived in Pisa from France, giving out that he had been called to Rome by the Pope, while Alexander for his part began a mounting campaign of protest against Bologna and Florence on the grounds of their sending help to Astorre Manfredi at Faenza.