Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  It is not surprising that Cesare felt himself strong enough to cock a snook at Venice; as the winter of 1500 wore into the spring of 1501 French support for the Borgias became increasingly evident, and Cesare’s thoughts were already soaring beyond Faenza. The next victim was to be Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna, whose aid to Astorre Manfredi was partly responsible for Cesare’s failure to overawe Faenza. But Cesare wanted more than the cessation of aid to Manfredi, he wanted the frontier fortress of Castel Bolognese, strategically situated on the Via Emilia between Faenza and Imola, to round off his Romagna conquests, and there is no doubt he would have liked Bologna itself. From the Vatican and the court of France the big diplomatic guns pounded away at the unfortunate Bentivoglio, who was well aware that only Louis’ expensive protection, which he had purchased the previous summer, stood between him and the threat from Cesare. The arrival of Louis’ envoy de Trans on 18 December left Bentivoglio in no doubt as to the danger of his position; de Trans warned him that the King was displeased by his support of Astorre. The Pope, de Trans said, was demanding that Bologna should be restored to the Church, and if he continued to press his claim Louis, despite his promise of protection, would feel himself bound to give the Pope armed assistance. This body-blow was followed up by a letter from Louis at the end of January requiring him to assist ‘our dear and beloved cousin the Duke of Valentinois’ with arms, men and provisions, and to provide lodging for the French troops who were marching to join him. The opening of the spring campaigning season was approaching and Cesare was beginning his preparations for the final assault on Faenza. Time was pressing: he knew that it would not be long before Louis would recall the French troops to join in the coming campaign against Naples.

  All attempts at suborning the defiant citizens of Faenza into surrender having failed, Cesare had no alternative but a direct assault. At the end of February the promised French troops, 2000 horse and foot with artillery, arrived at Forlì. (They were the price of Rouen’s Legateship of France, which Alexander forced through an unwilling but cowed College of Cardinals on 5 April.) A month later Cesare set up his batteries round the walls of Faenza while the rest of Italy watched, hoping against hope that the brave Faventines would give the arrogant young Borgia his first bloody nose. As Isabella d’Este wrote on 12 April, their courageous defiance had ‘recovered the honour of the Italians’, and she prayed God would give them the grace to persevere. Indeed the first assault by the Borgia troops on 18 April was repulsed with heavy casualties on both sides, and only a prolonged bombardment of the town coupled with the desperate supply situation of the defenders induced the citizens to capitulate on the 25th. Cesare, who appreciated their courage and had even gone so far as to hang a Faventine traitor before the walls as a tribute to the citizens, treated them honourably and forbore to make his usual triumphant entrance into the town. The young lord of Faenza, Astorre, and his brother, flattered by the honours Cesare accorded them, took service with their conqueror.

  The ink on the documents for the surrender of Faenza was barely dry before Cesare was off in pursuit of his next objective. He had resolved on a swift show of strength against Bologna to wrest Castel Bolognese from Bentivoglio. Having sent a herald to Bologna demanding cession of the fortress, he marched northward up the Via Emilia without waiting for an answer, while Vitellozzo rode on ahead to seize Bolognese strongpoints on the way. The citizens of Bologna were resolved to resist Cesare, but Bentivoglio, intent on saving his personal position, advised them to give in gracefully. On 29 April Paolo Orsini rode into the city to sign an agreement in Cesare’s name; Bologna agreed to hand over Castel Bolognese to Cesare and to provide him with a force of a hundred men-at-arms at the city’s expense to be employed in any undertaking he might specify, while he for his part promised to return the fortresses he had seized, to remove his troops from Bolognese territory, and to persuade the Pope to confirm the Bentivoglios in their privileges.

  On the face of it, Cesare had won hands down; in four days he had forced Bentivoglio to give up the fortress which he had steadfastly refused him over the past four months. However, one condition of the agreement implied a possible future threat to his freedom of action. On Bentivoglio’s express stipulation three of the Borgia condottieri, Giulio and Paolo Orsini and Vitellozzo Vitelli, were made parties to the agreement as guarantors of their employer’s good behaviour. In simple terms the condottieri were promising to restrain Cesare from a future attack on Bologna, but behind the formal clauses of the treaty there was evidence of a closer understanding between Bentivoglio and the Orsinis which was potentially dangerous for Cesare. As a pledge of this understanding a marriage was arranged between Giacoma, daughter of Giulio Orsini, and Ermes, one of Bentivoglio’s sons. And as Cesare marched away from Bologna, Bentivoglio, who had arrested the leading members of the Marescotti family on 27 April on suspicion of being Cesare’s partisans, had them brutally murdered.

  By early May 1501, after the agreement with Bologna, Cesare felt entitled to call himself Lord of Romagna’. His lordships stretched in an unbroken line down the Via Emilia from Imola to Fano in the south; on 1 May Alexander had issued a bull confirming Cesare as hereditary vicar not only of Pesaro but also of Fano, hitherto under the direct rule of the Church. A fortnight later he invested him with the title of Duke of Romagna, and sent him the Golden Rose, for the second year in succession. In effect the Pope had transferred to his son the perpetual overlordship of one of the most important provinces of the Papal States; the first major step towards the achievement of a hereditary Borgia dominion in Italy had been successfully concluded.

  But already in the autumn of the previous year, Machiavelli had described the Borgias as ‘insatiable’, and now it seemed that Cesare, far from being satisfied with his conquests to date, was determined to ride the tide of fortune to the limit. In fact the next throw in the game had been decided upon months ago should the opportunity arise to take it – Tuscany. With true killer instinct the Borgias had recognized the weakness of Florence, and were determined to take advantage of it. As early as January 1501 Alexander had begun to put pressure on Florence for an alliance and a condotta for Cesare. As Buonaccorsi reported:

  At that time the city was in dire enough straits since it was destitute of money and still without men-at-arms; and the request made to her by the Pope was for no other end than to demonstrate that the power to attack us lay with him, our not having the wherewithal to defend ourselves, which he knew very well; and moreover we had the army of il Valentino near our borders and openly hostile to us, and the King of France dissatisfied because certain sums of money owed him by the city had not been paid.

  (Louis claimed that Florence owed him money for the war against Pisa in June–July 1500.) Indeed the Borgias guessed that Louis might not be averse to using the threat of il Valentino’s army to frighten Florence into paying up, although they also knew that he would never allow a direct attack on the city itself. Over the past months the Borgias had been preparing the way for a Tuscan raid, putting pressure on Florence by threats of encirclement. In March Cesare sent one of his condottieri, Oliverotto da Fermo, with two hundred horse to beleaguered Pisa; and on 2 April he signed a league with another Florentine enemy, Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena, while it was public knowledge that he intended to take Piombino on the Tuscan coast. The Florentine government had scented danger as soon as they heard of Borgia flirtations with the Medicis the previous autumn, and the preponderance of the Orsinis among Cesare’s captains only underlined the threat. Alexander and Cesare had obsolutely no intention of replacing the weak Republican government with that of the Medicis, a move which would have only served to increase the power of the Orsinis, but they were perfectly prepared to use Medici hopes and Medici partisans as camouflage to further their own designs in Tuscany.

  Within a few days of the agreement with Bentivoglio, Cesare, it was said, received orders from his father to return to Rome by the eastern route down the Via Flaminia. According to his own account given to the
Florentines a year later, Cesare was on the point of obeying when Vitellozzo, weeping and on his knees, implored him to march through Tuscany, swearing that he intended no violence to the Tuscan cities and that no thought of restoring the Medicis was in his mind, only that he wished to obtain satisfaction from Florence in the release of his dead brother’s chancellor Carbone. To content Vitellozzo and the Orsinis, who had borne the brunt of his Romagna campaign, Cesare therefore turned his army westward across the Apennines, in direct disobedience to the Pope’s orders. In view of the documentary evidence of the Borgias’ intrigues over the past months, the story simply does not ring true; moreover the game of Cesare’s ‘disobedience’ was one which the Borgias were to play over and over again, whenever they planned some risky undertaking, as a simple means of getting what they wanted while leaving the Pope in the clear. In any case Cesare had intended from the start to take Piombino, whose lord Jacopo d’Appiano had already been deprived of his vicariate by the Pope, and it would simply not have been feasible to do so by returning to Rome and doubling back up the western coast.

  Time was running short for Cesare; if he wanted to blackmail Florence into accepting his demands he would have to move fast. On 3 May Yves d’Alègre with the French contingent left to join Louis’ forces massing in Lombardy in preparation for the attack on Naples, and Cesare knew that he would soon be called upon to fulfil his pledge to take part in that campaign. He also knew that there was a limit to which Louis could be pushed in his desire to accommodate the Borgias; there were already reports of his displeasure over Bologna, as Buonaccorsi wrote: ‘These methods of the Duke and the Pope begin to displease him, considering their importance.’ Florence must be terrorized into subjection before her appeals for help could reach the French court.

  Cesare, therefore, was careful not to disclose his demands until the last minute. All he wanted was free passage for his army through Tuscany, he told the Florentine envoy Galeotto de’ Pazzi soothingly. While de’ Pazzi hurried back to Florence with this unwelcome piece of news, Cesare swiftly crossed the Apennines. The three envoys Soderini, Salviati and Nerli, dispatched from Florence on 10 May to concede the Duke free passage on limited conditions, found him already on their borders. Cesare complained of Florentine help to his enemies in the campaigns of Forlì and Faenza, and warned the envoys enigmatically that he would make his mind known to them when he reached Barberino and not before, hinting ominously ‘that he wanted some condotta, by friendship or by force … or some of our places in the Romagna near his …’ At Barberino on the 12th, he disclosed his demands: alliance and a condotta for himself, the restitution of the Vitelli chancellor Carbone, and some sort of satisfaction for the Orsinis. These demands were accompanied by deliberately vague threats, according to Buonaccorsi, ‘either to put back the Medicis, or to reduce the present state to a miserable condition, or “to pluck out some evil weed from the present government” ’. In fact Cesare had no intention of changing the government, which he knew Louis would never allow, least of all in favour of the Medicis. His real object, here as with Venice, was the condotta, the thin end of the wedge, which would enable him to maintain a standing body of troops at someone else’s expense, and give him a measure of control over Florentine affairs.

  News of Cesare’s approach threw the Florentines into a panic, described by Buonaccorsi: ‘The city was in the greatest disorder and with very few armed men, and many citizens fled from fear. The colleges every day produced new rumours, every day new negotiations were begun without any conclusion. Recourse for help was had to the King [of France] who was too distant in so present a danger. The King wrote letters to the Duke and none of them were obeyed. And everything was in suspense and great tumult …’ By 14 May Cesare had reached Campi, some ten miles from the city, and here on the 15th the Florentines capitulated, agreeing to all his demands. An alliance of mutual friendship and defence was signed, by which each promised to help the other against any hostile person or state excepting the Pope and the King of France, while the allies of each were to be permitted to join the league with the specific exception of the Pisans, other enemies of Florence, or of Cesare’s. Cesare obtained his condotta for 300 men-at-arms for a period of three years at an annual salary of 36,000 ducats. The Florentines agreed not to aid d’Appiano at Piombino, and finally, as a sop to Vitellozzo, to release the Vitelli chancellor Carbone.

  The terms of the treaty must have come as an unpleasant surprise to Cesare’s condottieri, and to the Orsinis in particular. Not only was there no mention of the Medicis, but under the terms of the alliance Cesare had promised that no one in his pay should offend Florence, a clear prohibition of any future Orsini – Vitelli initiatives in that direction, while they knew that they themselves came under the heading of ‘enemies of Florence’ in the agreement. The Treaty of Campi brought home to them the realization that they had been first used and then deserted by Cesare in the pursuit of his own interests, and sowed the first seeds of distrust between them and their commander which were to grow into dangerous dragon’s teeth just over a year later.

  Campi was worth no more than the paper it was written upon: the Florentines, in Buonaccorsi’s words, had signed it ‘for no other end than to get him off our backs’. Cesare was no doubt aware of this; as he marched off on the 17th he allowed his troops free rein to sack and burn as they liked, and sent back peremptory demands for an advance cash payment on his condotta. The next day, 18 May, one of the Borgias’ most trusted henchmen, Francesco Troches, arrived in camp with a message from the Pope. Louis, bound to protect Florence by his predecessor’s treaty of 1494, had commanded d’Aubigny at Parma to take 300 lances and 3000 foot to get Cesare out of Tuscany. On the 22nd letters arrived at camp from the King, ordering Cesare to leave. The game was up. Plundering and pillaging his way through Florentine territory, Cesare turned westward for the Tuscan coast; by 4 June he had set up camp near Piombino. The Tuscan raid was over.

  On the face of it Cesare had earned nothing by his gamble; in return for an empty treaty he had made enemies of the Florentines, revealed the direction of his ambitions to the King of France, who was bound to oppose them, and earned himself the resentment of the Orsinis. Nonetheless he had probed the depths of Florentine weakness, tested the limits of initiative which the King of France was prepared to allow him, and led his army unopposed through Tuscany, which the powerful Venetians had failed to do only two years before. Above all, his experience with Bologna and Florence had shown him the results that could be produced by the swift and unexpected use of force.

  The check at Campi was followed by success at Piombino. Situated on a rocky promontory, with its satellite islands of Elba and Pianosa, Piombino was a desirable possession, both financially and strategically. It commanded one of the busiest sea routes in the Mediterranean from the great port of Genoa down the western coast of Italy, and dues levied on visiting shipping had made the d’Appiano family rich. With Piombino in addition to the Romagna, Cesare had to a certain extent encircled Florence, while it provided easy access not only into Tuscany in general but to Pisa and Siena in particular, two cities which he had for some time considered as possible lordships for himself. Cesare set up the seige by seizing Elba and Pianosa, thus cutting off Piombino from reinforcement by sea, but he had not time to continue operations in person. By mid-June the advance guard of the Naples-bound French contingent which he was to join had reached Tuscany, and he had much official and family business to attend to in Rome before riding south with the French.

  On 17 June Burchard reported: ‘About the third hour of night there came to the city the Duke of Valentino, who remained secretly in the Palace.’ This time there was no triumphal entry, no cheering crowds or salvoes of artillery. Cesare now had no need of such things to boost his self-confidence or underline his successes. Aged only twenty-five, he had, in the past eight months, ousted Giovanni Sforza from Pesaro, Pandolfo Malatesta from Rimini, Astorre Manfredi from Faenza and Jacopo d’Appiano from Piombino, threatened the grea
t cities of Bologna and Florence into submission, thumbed his nose at Venice and tested the patience of the King of France with impunity. Small wonder that the lords of Italy, in Francesco Gonzaga’s graphic phrase, compared themselves with condemned men who watch their friends hanged one by one without being able to help. The question in the forefront of all of their minds was – who would be next?

  X

  The Terrible Duke

  ‘DUKE VALENTINO has already been in Rome six days, and he has not yet shown himself,’ the Venetian envoy at Rome reported disappointedly to his government – the only news he was able to glean as to Cesare’s activities. In fact, although all projects of conquest were in temporary suspension, Cesare spent a busy three weeks in the Vatican before his departure with the French for Naples.

  As Duke of Romagna he had to regulate the civil and military affairs of his new duchy, the appointment of lieutenants, commissioners and civil officials, the drawing up of charters for the conquered towns, the repairing and strengthening of fortifications. With the resources of Vatican bureaucracy at his command, Cesare used trained administrators, invariably prelates, as his lieutenants in the civil government of the province – men like Giovanni Olivieri, Bishop of Isernia, and his beloved former tutor Juan Vera, Cardinal of Salerno, whom he made governor of Fano. He entrusted military government to his fiercely loyal Spaniards, such as Ramiro de Lorqua, who would be unlikely to fall into the trap of local intrigue, and most of the Romagna castles were garrisoned by Spaniards. Yet Cesare regarded castles as a relic of a more static form of warfare, expensive in time of peace and dangerous in time of war, and in July he ordered Castel Bolognese, ‘the finest castle in Romagna’, to be razed and permanent barracks for troops to be erected on its site. As for local government, he forbore to make innovations, confirming municipal charters and using local officials as far as he could. With the wealth of the Vatican behind him, he could afford to be generous in the matter of taxation, a sure road to popularity; in the case of Faenza he gave 2000 ducats to the peasants of the contado to pay for damage suffered during the campaign.