I have not tried to speak with the Duke, not having anything to tell him that is new, and the same things would bore him. You must recall that nobody speaks with him except three or four of his ministers and some foreigners who have to deal with him about matters of importance, and he does not come out of his antechamber except at about 11 or 12 at night or later; and for this reason there is no opportunity to speak with him ever except through an audience appointed; and when he knows that a man brings him nothing but words he never gives him an audience.
But the Florentine government insisted that he remain to spy on Duke Valentino and give them first-hand information as to his intentions. Despairingly Machiavelli pointed out to them the difficulty of such a mission:
… this Lord is very secretive, and I do not believe that what he is going to do is known to anybody but himself. And his chief secretaries have many times asserted to me that he does not reveal anything except when he orders it, and orders it when necessity compels and when it is to be done, and not otherwise. Hence I beg that Your Lordships will excuse me, and not impute it to my negligence if I do not satisfy Your Lordships with information, because most of the time I do not satisfy even myself.
It was no use. On 10 December in heavy snow Cesare and all his army left Imola, ‘which they have devoured down to the very pebbles’, as Machiavelli put it, for Cesena. Machiavelli, still complaining about the hardships and discomforts of camp life, followed in their wake. He was quite mystified as to what Cesare intended to do with the considerable forces now at his disposal – some 5000 infantry, 800 armed cavalry and 400 light horse. With Urbino, which had been abandoned by Guidobaldo on 8 December, once more in his possession, and negotiations for the surrender of Camerino on the point of finalization, what could be his next objective? There were rumours of an attack on Sinigallia, or that Cesare would march to Naples with the French, and scattered hints of vengeance: ‘It is thought that he cannot wish to do other than secure himself of those who have done him this villainy,’ Machiavelli wrote from Cesena on 14 December. In Rome, Alexander seems to have been equally in the dark as to his son’s intentions; he complained of having no letters from him, and increasingly showed his discontent and even suspicion as Giustinian reported on 2 December: ‘Speaking of the French, he said that their troops would go to the Kingdom [of Naples], then with a certain sign of pain he said: “And also we strongly suspect that the Duke will go, although he writes nothing of it.” And he added: “It is bad to deal with young men! If he really wishes to go, we do not want to know anything of it, nor have a word in the matter, because he will not do it on our account.” ’ Alexander was nervous that Cesare was committing himself too deeply on the side of the French in a cause whose outcome was far from certain, and dragging the Papacy along in his wake. He was worried by the continual expense which showed no obvious profit; Cesare’s treasurer Spanocchi told Machiavelli that in the two months up to December Cesare had spent over 60,000 ducats, while on the 17th Giustinian wrote that the Pope had spent the entire day counting money to send to his son, and would forward 14,000 ducats in cash and letters of remittance. Yet still Cesare made no move: ‘The Duke is still at Cesena with the army, to the displeasure of the Pope: and it is most unwillingly that he sends him more money, because it almost seems to him like throwing it away: but he does not know how to say no to the Duke …’ The days wore on, Christmas approached, and the worried Alexander was reduced to asking every courier for news of Cesare; when on the 23rd a Venetian courier reported him to be still at Cesena, he could not contain his rage and exclaimed loudly at least three times: ‘Son of a bitch, whore, bastard! and other words in Spanish, all angry ones.’
But even as, in Rome, Alexander passionately cursed Cesare for his expensive and enigmatic inactivity, two events occurred at Cesena – inexplicable and apparently unconnected as they seemed to observers – which proved to be the sparks of an explosive underground train precipitating him into action. On the evening of 20 December, Machiavelli observed all the French officers in a body come to interview Cesare; by their gestures and excited conversation they appeared to be angry. Interested, he waited for one of the officers of his acquaintance to emerge from the interview, who told him that the cause of the disturbance was that they had received sudden orders, with no reasons given, to return to Milan. The reason for their departure given out by Cesare’s officials, and backed up later by the French, though with a slightly different emphasis, was that he no longer had need of their services, and since they were expensive to maintain had dispensed with them. Privately, Cesare’s confidants told Machiavelli that ‘the Duke could no longer support them, and that if he kept them, he would be more distressed by the arms of his friends than by those of his enemies; and that without them the Duke had enough soldiers left for doing everything …’ The news caused a sensation not only at Imola but in Rome, as Cesare must have known that it would; there was a general sense of relief, and Giustinian reported: ‘The suspicions that the Duke can do anything of great moment have ceased …’ Although Machiavelli on the spot was half-inclined to agree with this opinion, he could not help noting Cesare’s continual strengthening of his forces; 600 Romagnol infantry had arrived the previous day from the Val di Lamone, and a thousand of the long-awaited Swiss had now reached Faenza. Moreover the artillery had been sent on ahead and not recalled; he therefore concluded that Cesare did not intend to abandon any plan made up to now.
On the evening of 22 December, the day the French left for Lombardy, five gentlemen of Cesena gave a ball in Cesare’s honour, at which he led the dance and appeared to be enjoying himself immensely. According to a local chronicler, he danced many times with Cleofe Marescotti, the wife of one of his hosts, ‘with whom he was greatly taken, and it seems that his feelings were returned’. While Cesare flirted imperturbably with the lovely Cleofe under her husband’s nose, his chief lieutenant, Ramiro de Lorqua, military governor of the Romagna, who had returned from Pesaro that evening, was summarily arrested and thrown into prison. Three days later, at dawn on Christmas Day, Ramiro, gloved and dressed in a brocade robe, was decapitated in the piazza at Cesena, and his body left exposed, the head displayed on a lance, the bloodstained blade and execution block left by its side. Ramiro, aged about fifty, a stocky taciturn Spaniard with a black beard and a habit of standing with his right hand stuck aggressively into his belt, was unpopular in the Romagna for his ruthless severity, but nonetheless he had been a faithful follower of Cesare’s since his student days, and Machiavelli was at a loss to explain his dramatic downfall. ‘The reason of his death is not known,’ he wrote, ‘if not that thus it pleased the Prince, who shows that he knows how to make and unmake men at his will, according to their merits.’
This somewhat feeble explanation cannot account for Cesare’s decision to dispense with a competent and trusted official in such a melodramatic fashion. It seems more likely that as far as Cesare was concerned not only was Ramiro’s usefulness to him suspect, but his loyalty as well. As early as September he had deprived Ramiro of the civil government, and his official explanation for de Lorqua’s disgrace, issued on 23 November, was that the governor was guilty of grave corruption, extortion and rapine in the administration of justice, and also of trafficking in grain. This alone would have been enough to justify Cesare’s making a public example of him, but there were rumours that his disgrace was due to other, more secret reasons. On the eve of his execution, the Bolognese chancellor Fileno Tuate wrote that Ramiro had been arrested, it was rumoured, because he had plotted with Messer Giovanni Bentivoglio, the Orsinis and Vitellozzo against the Duke. But of this intrigue Cesare, for the time being, breathed not a word.
For Cesare knew that the time had come for the final round in the contest with his condottieri, and it was vital to the success of his plans that that knowledge should be concealed from them. The stage for the last scene in the drama was already set: it was Sinigallia, a small town on the Adriatic coast fifteen miles south of Fano, which the condott
ieri had agreed to take in Cesare’s name and where they were all encamped with the exception of Gian Paolo Baglioni, who had prudently retired to Perugia. Cesare guessed that the condottieri thought him greatly weakened by the departure of the French contingents, also that they were unaware of the present strength of his forces. He intended that they should remain in confident ignorance; before leaving Cesena he ordered his commanders to proceed southward with small bodies of troops by different routes, while he himself with his personal staff of men at arms set off on 26 December, marching south down the Via Emilia. On the same day Oliverotto da Fermo entered Sinigallia in Cesare’s name. Guidobaldo’s sister, Giovanna della Rovere, who ruled Sinigallia as regent for her twelve-year-old son Francesco Maria, had already fled, leaving the citadel in charge of the Genoese Andrea Doria.
At Pesaro, which he reached on the 28th, Cesare received the news of the surrender of the town, with the seemingly innocent message that the castellan, Doria, would only hand over the citadel to the Duke in person. From Fano, where he arrived on the 29th, Cesare sent word on the 30th that the next day he would join the condottieri at Sinigallia, and required them to withdraw all their troops from the town to quarters several miles away, leaving only Oliverotto’s garrison in Sinigallia, so that he should have room to billet his own men. He also ordered all the gates of the town to be locked, except the one through which he intended to enter. His scattered troops were commanded to rendezvous with him the next morning at the Metaurus river a few miles to the south of Fano. Only then, on the eve of his arrival at Sinigallia, did he reveal his plans to a few trusted henchmen, the indispensable Michelotto among them – plans which depended on a detailed knowledge of the layout of the town. Only then did he let his father into the secret. Alexander, who had been gloomy and fretful over Christmas, suddenly regained his spirits on 30 December, talked of setting up courier staging posts for Sinigallia, and, with ominous cordiality, invited Cardinal Orsini to a private supper party with women and gambling. On the 31st he chatted gaily of Cesare’s arrival in time for Carnival; nobody, he said fondly, knew how to celebrate Carnival without him: ‘He will do a thousand follies and throw away several thousands of ducats …’
At dawn on the same day Cesare rode out of Fano down the Via Emilia. It was noticed that he wore full armour, although no fighting was expected. In the cold light of the winter afternoon on that last day of the year 1502, Cesare, surrounded by his armed men, approached Sinigallia with the long sad Adriatic shore to his left and the bare grey hills to his right. His army in their colourful livery of red and yellow, with the polished armour of the men-at-arms and the pikes of the Swiss glittering in the winter sun, made a rare spectacle according to one observer, but it must have been an unpleasant surprise for the condottieri who straggled out to meet him three miles from the town. The Orsinis were the first to come up with him, then Vitellozzo, who had been hanging back, gloomy and apprehensive on his mule. Not seeing Oliverotto, who had remained with his troops in the Borgo, or new town, before Sinigallia, Cesare made a sign to Michelotto, who rode off to fetch him. Cesare received his captains with the utmost cordiality, touching them on the hand in the French manner before embracing them, and having been joined by Oliverotto he rode towards Sinigallia conversing easily with them. A single wooden bridge led across the River Misa to the square of the Borgo before the gate by which Cesare intended to enter the town. His advance guard of heavy cavalry crossed it then divided and wheeled to face each other, forming two lines guarding the bridge through which the rest of the army would pass, and effectively cutting communication between Oliverotto’s troops in the town and Vitellozzo’s men in the country to the south and east. The infantry, a thousand Swiss and Gascons, marched through into Sinigallia, followed by Cesare and his staff with the condottieri. Behind them, the gate was quietly shut. The only troops in the inner town, apart from Oliverotto’s escort, were Cesare’s own infantry.
The condottieri, by now extremely nervous and apprehensive, rode as if mesmerized with Cesare to a house which Michelotto had already picked out for him. Here, before dismounting, they made an attempt to take their leave, but Cesare told them he wished them all to come to his room, to consult with him what action should be taken on the morrow and afterwards when this undertaking was finished. Somewhat reassured by the friendliness of his manner, and seeing that they had no alternative, surrounded as they were by his armed men, the captains dismounted and followed him. Accounts vary as to the exact sequence of events which then took place. According to one, they dismounted and went into an inner courtyard, where Cesare began to mount a small stair, and when he was half-way up made a sign with his eyes upon which the soldiers seized the condottieri. ‘Paolo Orsini turned towards the Duke calling out to him in a high voice and asking the grace of being able to talk to him before he mounted the stair, but he turned his back and went to the chamber arranged for him.’ A Florentine account reported that they had seated themselves in a room with Cesare who, ‘having remained a while with them, said that for necessities of nature he must withdraw but would soon return. Hardly had he left the room, than there entered the men deputed for the work, who bound their hands behind their backs and took them prisoner.’
Machiavelli, arriving from Fano as evening fell, found the town in an uproar; the excited Borgia soldiery, out of control, were plundering and killing every citizen presumed to be a partisan of Oliverotto or the della Roveres. Somehow, he contrived to send off a courier to Florence with the news of the condottieri’s arrest, adding: ‘In my judgement, they will not be alive tomorrow morning.’ As far as Oliverotto and Vitellozzo were concerned he was right: at two o’clock on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1 January 1503, they were garrotted at Michelotto’s orders, seated back to back on a bench. According to Machiavelli, ‘They both behaved in a manner unworthy of their past life; for Vitellozzo implored that they ask the Pope to give his sins plenary indulgence; and Oliverotto blamed all the injuries done the Duke on Vitellozzo.’ As for the three Orsinis, Paolo, Francesco and Roberto, in Cesare’s words, ‘we are taking them as prisoners to a similar end.’ Cesare himself, riding out in full armour to restrain his troops from sacking the town, caught sight of Machiavelli, and in a few words put the whole Sinigallia affair in its logical perspective. ‘This,’ he told him, ‘is what I wanted to tell the Bishop of Volterra, when he came to Urbino, but I never trusted the secret to anyone, thus, the occasion having come to me, I have known very well how to use it …’
On the very night of his arrest of the condottieri, Cesare sat down to write the first of a series of letters giving his version of the affair to the world. In a letter to the Doge Leonardo Loredano, which must have given him a good deal of malicious satisfaction since he knew Venice to be secretly in sympathy with his enemies, he recalled their first rebellion against him, and their reconciliation, after which, he said, they planned a second betrayal of him:
Believing that, by the departure of the French troops who returned to Lombardy, they would be able to effect their former designs, there joined me in my undertaking of Sinigallia, the Duke of Gravina, Paolo Orsini, Vitellozzo da Castello and Liverotto da Fermo, with all their forces, and under the colour and pretence of aid, [they] had plotted against me that in which I, having foreseen and discovered [it], forestalled them and made them prisoner, to put an end to their infinite perfidity and malignity.
The condottieri, it appears, had plotted with the castellan of the citadel, Andrea Doria, who as a della Rovere partisan was naturally hostile to Cesare, to trap him in the inner city and fall upon him on the night of his arrival. The message which Cesare had received from them at Pesaro on the 28th, concerning the castellan’s refusal to surrender, was intended to ensure that he came to Sinigallia in person.
Alexander, in a conversation with the Venetian ambassador in Rome, led the trail back from Sinigallia to the execution of Ramiro de Lorqua:
He began by saying that, being already sentenced to death, Ramiro said that he wished to ma
ke the Duke understand something for his own ease, and told them how, having plotted with the Orsinis to give them Cesena, which did not come to pass by reason of the accord between His Excellency and the Orsinis, Vitellozzo had resolved to kill the Duke, and Oliverotto da Fermo was party to this (he mentioned no other names); and, seeing no other way to carry out this intent he had planned with a crossbowman, that when the Duke was riding, he should kill him …
He went on to say that Vitellozzo, under examination at Sinigallia, had admitted that Ramiro’s confession was the truth, and confirmed that Oliverotto was with him in the plot. Giustinian thought that Alexander was lying, but his version of the plot and Ramiro’s treachery was given wide credence, and appears in the account of the chronicler of Cesena, Fantaguzzi. It is feasible that Ramiro, burning with resentment at his demotion in September and aware of Cesare’s discontent with his administration, knowing his master as he did, might have plotted against him with Vitellozzo to save himself from inevitable retribution. Cesare’s knowledge that Vitellozzo and Oliverotto intended to have him murdered may account for his summary execution of them; the seizure of the Orsinis was part of the overall Borgia plan for their destruction, which Alexander immediately followed up with the arrest of Cardinal Orsini in Rome on 3 January.
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