Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  And, as usual, the Borgias had several important family projects in hand at the same time. A new and brilliant marriage had been planned for the widowed Lucrezia; the bridegroom was to be Alfonso d’Este, son and heir of one of the oldest and most prestigious princely families in Italy. The Borgias wanted Alfonso not so much for the glamour of his name but in the interests of the security of Cesare’s state of the Romagna. As Machiavelli later wrote in The Prince, it was Cesare’s policy to make allies of his neighbours if he could, and Ferrara, on his northern border, traditionally nervous of Venice, would be a useful buffer between his own lands and the predatory Republic. Negotiations had been going on since early in the year, but Duke Ercole was lukewarm about the match, while his children, including the prospective bridegroom Alfonso, whose first wife had been a Sforza, and his brilliant and forceful sister Isabella, married to Francesco Gonzaga, positively opposed it. With royal blood in their veins, inherited from their mother Leonora of Aragon, they were shocked at the prospect of the upstart Borgia as Duchess of Ferrara. Moreover Lucrezia, whose previous marriages had ended in a spectactular blaze of scandal, had a far from unblemished reputation.

  However, political survival counted for more than the claims of blue blood. Ercole, in disgrace with Louis for his support of Ludovico Sforza in 1500, was anxious to ingratiate himself with the all-powerful King, and at this time, as far as Louis was concerned, what the Pope wanted, within reason, he could have. ‘The marriage will be made at the will of the King,’ commented a Venetian observer. Moreover, in view of il Valentino’s ambitious plans and his dangerous proximity, it seemed more politic to be friendly with him. As Buonaccorsi noted acutely in his diary: ‘Having seen so many happy successes of Duke Valentino in Italy, and knowing the Pope’s unrestrained ambition to dominate Italy … by means of this marriage, he [Ercole] secured himself from being molested.’ Nonetheless Ercole was determined to set a high price upon his son: 200,000 ducats as Lucrezia’s dowry, with remission of his dues as vicar of Ferrara for himself, and the bishopric of Ferrara, which Alexander had bestowed upon a nephew, for his son Cardinal Ippolito. In league with Amboise and Giuliano della Rovere, who had arrived in Milan, Cesare threw his whole weight into the negotiations, and by July it was clear that they would soon be finalized.

  When Cesare arrived in Rome in mid-June, Alexander had opened a new round in his campaign to rid himself of the threat of the Roman barons. The previous year he had dispossessed the Caetani family of Sermoneta; this time it was to be the turn of the Colonnas. While the Orsinis, leagued with France and the Borgias, were untouchable, the Colonnas, fighting for the doomed King of Naples, were clearly in a weak position. On 6 June, Alexander announced in consistory the conclusion of a league between the Papacy, France and Spain. The official justification for his taking part was that the alliance was directed against the Turk; of course the fact that the unfortunate King of Naples whom the three powers proposed to attack was a Christian prince, who had only sought infidel help in the face of the threats of the Most Christian and Catholic Kings, was not mentioned. Within a week of the announcement, Alexander had forced Cardinal Colonna to hand over the keys of the family castles to him, and had dispatched papal chamberlains with a force of crossbowmen to take over the citadel and monastery of Subiaco, held in commendam by Colonna, with eighteen other strongholds and abbeys belonging to the monastery.

  But while the announcement of the league presented the Pope with a happy opportunity to lay hands upon the Colonna lands, the prospect of a renewed French military presence in Rome did not fill him with enthusiasm. Without Cesare’s reassuring presence he showed distinct signs of nervousness. The Florentine orator Pepi reported in cipher on 6 June: ‘The Pope is ill-content in the absence of his close and trusted people,’ and a week later: ‘The Pope attends to the fortifying of the Castle as much as he can, and within two or three days he will have put everything in a state of defence, and reinforced the artillery: and he is furiously making cannon balls, and yesterday afternoon had a review of his guard which is numerous, and his every action tends to a demonstration of fear …’ While contemporaries continually stressed the extent to which Cesare was dependent for his power on his father’s position as Pope, it was perhaps insufficiently realized how much Alexander was reliant on his son’s abilities and his troops to maintain that position. With Cesare away from Rome, he felt himself unprotected, exposed to possible retaliation from the Colonnas, while historical precedents for French seizure of the person of the Pope cannot have been far from his mind.

  Meanwhile, everything had been prepared for the reception of the French, who were to pass through on their way to take Naples. Shelters were set up for them outside the city walls beyond the Ponte Milvio, where according to Burchard they were to be provided with 150 butts of wine, bread, meat, eggs, fruit and other necessaries, including the services of fourteen prostitutes, which seems somewhat inadequate for a force of 14,000 men. The Florentine merchants in Rome anxiously paid the city governor 200 ducats so as not to have the French nobles billeted in their houses, but, says Burchard, they found that the officers were billeted on them just the same and the governor kept the money. Yves d’Alègre arrived with the advance guard on 19 June. Four days later the commander of the expedition, Berauld Stuart d’Aubigny, made his formal entry into the city to be received by Alexander with a cordiality as exuberant as it was feigned. As the French chronicler Jean d’Auton commented acutely:

  The Pope, notwithstanding that he was Spanish and a bad Frenchman, all the same dissimulated his feelings and with joyous countenance received the captains of the army of France, and talked merrily with them on various subjects. To Messire Berauld Stuart, the King’s lieutenant, he gave a grey charger, very powerful, and very light at hand, with harness so rich and beautiful that all marvelled at it … In the evening Cardinal San Severino, brother of the Count of Caiazzo [the Italian commander of the expedition], gave the French captains a magnificent banquet, with exquisite dishes and pleasures. The banquet was held in the garden which belonged to Cardinal Ascanio, where there were groves of oranges, lemons and pomegranates, and other fruit trees of singular esteem, and scented flowers of various species. And singers, jugglers, tragedians and comedians all in turn exercised their art there …

  Cesare did not appear at the reception of d’Aubigny, who was met at the city gate by Jofre; indeed he was not seen in public until 28 June, when the entire French force of 12,000 infantry, 2000 horse and 36 cannon marched through the streets of Rome to the roll of kettle-drums and the blare of trumpets, to take formal leave of the Pope before marching south for Naples. It was rumoured that he would follow them on 1 July, but he did not, and the delay in his departure was not improbably connected with negotiations for the release of his captive Caterina Sforza.

  Caterina had now been a prisoner of the Borgias for well over a year, and in the most miserable circumstances. At first she had been lodged in the luxury of the Pope’s beautiful garden villa of the Belvedere, with its loggias frescoed by Pinturicchio, and here the Mantuan envoy Cattaneo had seen her ‘in a devilish mood and very strong in spirit’ when he visited her at the end of February. Three months later, at the end of May, he found her household in the greatest distress and was refused admission; Madonna, he was told, ‘during all this day had done nothing but weep and still refused to eat’. The cause of her distress, he discovered, was an unpleasant interview she had had with Cesare, who had come into possession of certain incriminating letters she had written. A month later Cattaneo reported that the Pope had shut her up in one of the segrete, solitary dungeons, of Castel Sant’Angelo, and that she was ‘sick at heart’. Alexander pressured her to make a formal renunciation of her rights to Imola and Forlì and to reimburse him for the costs of the war, promising in exchange a pension that would enable her to live in style for the rest of her life. From her dungeon in Sant’Angelo, Caterina defied him, as she had defied Cesare from the walls of her citadel of Forlì. Despite craven letters f
rom her spiritless children by Riario, Cesare and Ottaviano, who seemed only interested in obtaining pensions and an archbishopric for themselves from the Pope, whom they described as ‘just and clement’, she steadfastly refused to sign away their rights. Indeed, she might have remained a prisoner indefinitely, had it not been for her former champion Yves d’Alègre, who on his arrival in Rome went straight to the Vatican and demanded her release. As Cesare told Soderini fiercely a year later, the fact that she was a woman made no difference to him, and if it had been up to him he would never have let her out of Sant’Angelo. But a demand made in the name of the King of France could not be refused, especially at a time when Rome was full of French troops. And so, on 30 June, after sixteen months’ imprisonment, Caterina was led out of Sant’Angelo by the Borgias’ confidential servant Troches to the house of the Cardinal of San Clemente, where in return for her liberty she signed away her rights to her cities and to the tutelage of her children. Alexander wrote a hypocritical letter to the Signoria of Florence commending ‘his beloved daughter’ whom he had ‘graciously set at liberty’, and some weeks later Caterina, afraid to travel by land ‘because of her enemies of Imola and Forlì’, left by boat for Florence, the home of her late husband Giovanni de’ Medici, to spend the remaining years of her life at the Villa Medici in Fiesole. Despite her dark hints as to maltreatment by the Borgias – ‘If I could write of anything, I would stupefy the world,’ she told a Dominican friar – it seems that she kept her looks to the end. A visitor to the Villa Medici six years after her release from captivity reported her as ‘tall of stature and very well proportioned, with a fair and fine complexion, great eyes, and white hair’. Caterina died there two years later, on 28 May 1509, at the age of forty-six.

  But as the gates of Castel Sant’Angelo opened for Caterina Sforza, so they closed upon another Borgia political prisoner, Astorre Manfredi. On 20 July, the Mantuan Calandra reported: ‘The Madonna of Forlì has been permitted to leave Rome and has retired to Florence. The lord of Faenza has been placed in the castle of Sant’Angelo, and they keep him there locked up and well guarded.’ The unfortunate Astorre put his own head into the noose when he took service with Cesare after the surrender of Faenza, but perhaps he had had no alternative. Cesare can have had nothing personally against the sixteen-year-old Astorre, but he was a political animal, and where politics were concerned he had no time for considerations of humanity. The former lord of Faenza, unlike the signori of Forlì, Rimini and Pesaro, was loved by his people; he represented a possible threat to Cesare’s hold on the city, and as such, since Cesare was about to depart for two months’ compaigning in the kingdom of Naples, he could not be allowed to remain at large.

  The exact date of Cesare’s departure was the subject of puzzled speculation by Vatican observers. As usual his movements were mysterious. Although he rode out of Rome on 3 July with the main body of his troops, he apparently left them on the road to Naples and returned that same evening to the Vatican. A week later, on 9 July, according to a baffled Burchard, he did the same. He was certainly still in Rome on the 10th, as is evidenced by his signature on an administrative edict for the Romagna of that date, and he probably finally left for Naples within the next two days, although there is no report of his departure. It is hardly surprising that Cesare should have been reluctant to leave Rome when he had so much important business on hand, and he must have regarded the expedition as an irritating interruption to the pursuit of his own plans. And campaigning conditions in the southern kingdom in the high summer months of July and August can hardly have been considered ideal for men wearing full armour weighing around 25 kilos. But go he must – Naples was the price of the Romagna. Cesare joined the French camp at San Germano (Cassino) riding with Vitellozzo, Gian Paolo Baglioni and Giangiordano Orsini, at the head of his own troop of 400 Romagnol infantry wearing his colours of scarlet and yellow. He was, said d’Auton, very splendid, clad in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, a strange choice for high summer in southern Italy, with four lackeys and numerous gentlemen dressed like himself.

  The Naples campaign of 1501 proved as brief and almost as easy for Louis’ army as it had been for that of Charles VIII. Only at Capua, commanded by Prospero and Fabrizio Colonna, did the invading French force meet with any resistance, and here the taking of the town, apparently by treachery, ended in an appalling sack, during which the German and Gascon infantry ran wild through the streets of the town, killing, raping and looting. Cesare has been unfairly blamed for the bloody sack of Capua. The source for his guilt are the chronicles of Jean d’Auton, who was not present and heard the story later from French officers who, not unnaturally, were eager to shed the responsibility onto the shoulders of a man whose ruthlessness was well known. In fact, the Count of Caiazzo, not Cesare, was in command of the operation, and the chief culprits appear to have been units of the French army. It was Guicciardini who first produced the story of Cesare locking the women of Capua in a tower and choosing forty of the most beautiful for himself – a colourful picture of cruel depravity which has appealed hugely to anti-Borgia historians and nineteenth-century painters alike – but contemporary Venetian accounts of the taking of Capua make absolutely no mention of the incident. Cesare entered Naples with the French army on 3 August, King Federigo having withdrawn to Ischia on the same day, leaving his kingdom to be a bone of contention for the future between France and Spain. Cesare can hardly have felt compassion for Federigo, whose stubborn refusal to accept him as a son-in-law had wounded his pride two years before, and he had every reason to be satisfied with the outcome of the Naples expedition. Louis sent his valet de chambre, Edouard Bouillon, to thank Cesare personally for his services, promising that he would soon see the effects of the royal goodwill in his affairs thereafter, and would be treated as a good kinsman and friend. He received a more concrete reward in the form of 40,000 ducats, half of which were to be paid from Louis’ revenues in the Kingdom and half from Ferdinand’s, with the title of Prince of Andria. At the same time the ever-provident Alexander negotiated with Federigo to buy the major part of his artillery; neither of the Borgias emerged from the Naples campaign empty-handed.

  For the moment, the apparent unity between France and Spain over Naples offered no opportunities for the profitable sport of fishing in the troubled waters of international politics. With projects of further conquest thus temporarily in suspension, Cesare returned from Naples to concentrate on family affairs. Arriving back in Rome on 15 September, he found the Vatican en fête for the signing of Lucrezia’s marriage contract with Alfonso d’Este at Ferrara on 4 September. Alexander, despite his seventy years, showed no abatement in his zest for life. One of his particular pleasures was to watch beautiful women dancing, and he took great pride in his daughter’s grace. One evening he called the Ferrarese ambassadors to him to watch her, remarking laughingly ‘that they might see the Duchess was not lame’. Both Lucrezia and Cesare were exhausted by the constant round of entertainments organized by their indefatigable father. On 23 September, Gherardo Saraceni, one of the Ferrarese envoys, reported that Cesare had received them fully dressed, but lying on his bed: ‘I feared that he was sick, for last evening he danced without intermission, which he will do again tonight at the Pope’s palace, where the illustrious Duchess [Lucrezia] is going to sup.’ Two days later he wrote of Lucrezia: ‘The illustrious lady continues somewhat ailing, and is greatly fatigued … The rest which she will have while His Holiness is away will do her good; for whenever she is at the Pope’s palace, the entire night, until two or three o’clock, is spent at dancing and at play, which fatigues her greatly.’ Only Alexander seemed unwearied; one day when he was suffering from a bad cold and had lost a tooth, he remarked to the Ferrarese envoy: ‘If the Duke [Ercole] were here, I would, even if my face is tied up, invite him to go and hunt wild boars.’ The ambassador commented primly that, if the Pope valued his health, he had better change his habits and not leave the palace before daybreak and return before nightfall. At night the f
ever-carrying mosquito, the cause of malaria, was abroad, but Alexander was never a man to worry about his health.

  Between 25 September and 17 October, festivities were temporarily suspended as Alexander and Cesare made two tours of inspection of the recently acquired Borgia strongholds in the vicinity of Rome, lands seized from the Gaetanis and the Colonnas which Alexander had transferred to the two young Borgia children. Rodrigo, Lucrezia’s two-year-old son by Alfonso Bisceglie, was made Duke of Sermoneta, while Giovanni Borgia, the mysterious ‘Infans Romanus’, aged three, was honoured with the title and lands of Duke of Nepi and Palestrina. His investiture, on 2 September, was preceded by his legitimization. On 1 September, Alexander, in a manner curiously reminiscent of Cesare’s own legitimization, issued two bulls, one public, the other secret. The first described Giovanni as Cesare’s son by an unmarried woman, while in the second, secret bull, Alexander admitted himself to be the father.

  Control of the Roman Campagna and the access roads to the city was regarded by the Borgias as vital to the strengthening of their position. At Civita Castellana, dominating the Via Flaminia some forty miles north of Rome, one of the great military architects of the century, Antonio di Sangallo, was building a fortress on Cesare’s orders, its vaulted rooms adorned with images of the Borgia bull rampant, bearing the proud motto ‘Viva Borgia’. In the absence of her father and brother on these tours of inspection, Lucrezia, who seems to have shared her family’s administrative ability, was left as regent in the Vatican, with full authority to open all the Pope’s correspondence. That Alexander could appoint his bastard daughter to act in his place as Head of Christendom is a supreme example of the carelessness for public opinion which outraged his contemporaries. As far as their public reputation was concerned, the Borgias had only themselves to blame in that sowing the wind, they reaped the whirlwind.