Despite the hostile stance of Venice, the risks as far as Cesare was concerned were diminished by his conviction that the Romagna would remain loyal to him as it had during his time of trouble the previous autumn. His government there was strong and popular, and after the punishment of Ramiro de Lorqua there had been no further complaints of corruption or extortion. The cities were no longer plagued by the factionalism that had been rife under their former lords, or the petty ward politics backed up by thuggery which had characterized Perugia under the Baglionis, where even their partisan Matarazzo admitted that their departure had ushered in a period of most unwonted peace and justice. Indeed, Cesare, probably because he was a strong overall power aloof from local politics, had no trouble with the grandi, the leading local families. Civil government was largely in the hands of local officials appointed by him; military control was the responsibility of four Spanish commissioners on whose loyalty he could count absolutely. While civil government remained essentially local in character, with the communes enjoying their ancient privileges and systems of taxation and exemption, Cesare took one step towards administrative unity for his state by the institution of a supreme court of appeal, the Rota, modelled on the Vatican court. The Romagnol Rota, presided over by a man of character and ability, Antonio da Monte, sat in the seven principal cities – Fano, Pesaro, Rimini, Cesena, Faenza, Forlì and Imola – its seven auditors or judges were nominated by the seven cities and approved by Cesare, and its expenses paid by a levy of 200 ducats per annum on each judicial circuit, the only known instance of a common impost levied uniformly on the Romagna. The revolt of the condottieri had postponed the setting up of the court, but the situation was now peaceful enough for its inauguration, amid great festivities, at Cesena on 24 June. The one seemingly justified accusation levelled against Cesare in the Romagna by Machiavelli and other observers was that he tended to favour the troops over the civilian population, and allowed his soldiers too much licence. Otherwise even hostile contemporaries such as Guicciardini admitted that Cesare’s government of the Romagna was a point in his favour, and attributed the cities’ continuing loyalty to him to the fact that ‘he had placed in the government of those peoples, men who had governed them with so great justice and integrity, that he was greatly loved by them’.
Confident in the possession of the Romagna, and with his mind on new horizons of power, Cesare went ahead with his plans in order to be ready when the moment came. The most pressing need was to raise money, both to recoup the heavy expenses of the previous winter and the Orsini war, and to maintain his present forces while recruiting new troops. It has been estimated that Cesare’s army cost him over a thousand ducats a day, and while Alexander was an excellent money manager, and spent less on his household than either his predecessors or successors, the ordinary papal revenue from the Camera Apostolica could not cover the huge sums involved in military expenditure, and it was obvious that, as before, extraordinary measures would have to be resorted to. Alexander’s cupidity was ridiculed by his contemporaries, who sneered at the shameless avidity with which he seized the possessions of cardinals who died intestate, forbade them to make wills so that their wealth should fall into his hands, ransacked the house of the disgraced Ascanio Sforza, and sold cardinal’s hats for exorbitant sums. But to Alexander money meant power, and his son’s extravagance and taste for luxury constantly pained him – money was to be spent not on costly and useless objects, but on gunpowder, cannon and troops, the sinews of Cesare’s career.
Every possible means was employed to raise funds. As the Venetian envoy remarked, Alexander showed the world that the income of a Pope could be just what he wanted it to be. On 29 March in secret consistory eighty new official posts were created, to be sold to candidates at 760 ducats apiece. Alexander, although a Spaniard, had hitherto shown remarkable tolerance towards the Jews, but now, in time of necessity, he too resorted to the time-honoured practice of religious blackmail. Edicts were promulgated against Jews to raise money in fines and confiscations; armed Borgia troops, it was alleged, forced entrance into citizens’ houses and arrested them on the pretext that they were marrani, secret Jews. In the urgency of their need, the Borgias did not hesitate to resort to the use of poison, probably the famous cantarella, or white arsenic, for which they have become notorious down the ages. In fact, the use of poison, as Guicciardini pointed out, was an Italian custom, and Cesare’s normal method of disposing of his enemies was the Spanish garrotte. Contemporaries accused the Borgias of wholesale poisoning of wealthy cardinals for their money, among them Cardinals Orsini, Ferrari of Modena, d’Almeida of Ceuta, and Juan Borgia of Monreale; but Italians were prone to suspect poisoning in the deaths of prominent people, and the number of cardinals who died during Alexander’s long reign did not proportionately exceed the average deaths under previous pontificates. In only one case, that of the Venetian Cardinal Michiel, can deliberate poisoning be held to have been established beyond reasonable doubt.
Cardinal Giovanni Michiel, nephew of Pope Paul II, Bishop of Porto and Patriarch of Constantinople, died during the night of 10 April after three days of violent vomiting. On the morning of 11 April, a few hours after his death, his nephew, Don Angelo Michiel, told Giustinian: ‘Two days ago there came upon him a distemper of the stomach with great vomiting; and some diarrhoea; there is considerable suspicion that he may have been poisoned, and obvious conjectures are not lacking.’ As to the ‘obvious conjectures’ he went on to say that ‘as soon as the Pope heard of his death, he sent the governor to the house, and before it was day, it was completely plundered. The death of this Cardinal gives him more than 150,000 ducats.’ The late Cardinal’s secretary estimated Alexander’s loot at 50,000–60,000 ducats in cash, with the remainder in silver, tapestries, horses, cattle and grain.
What may well have been the true story emerged almost a year later when on 6 March 1504 sentence was pronounced against the late Cardinal’s major-domo, Asquino de Colloredo, on the charge of having poisoned his master. Asquino’s story, according to the process against him, was that in March of the previous year he had been approached in the Vatican by a certain nobleman whose name he did not disclose with the suggestion that he poison the Cardinal. In April the same man had given him a sweet white powder enclosed in paper to be mixed with the Cardinal’s food or drink. Asquino gave the powder to Michiel’s French cook, Désiré, who added it to his master’s food for the first time on 7 April, when he was seized with pains and vomiting, and then again the following Friday, when he again vomited, lost consciousness and died three days later. At his public degradation in the piazza of St Peter’s, Asquino repeatedly cried out, according to Burchard, ‘that that violent deed had been commanded of him by Pope Alexander, and that the true delinquent was Duke Valentino …’ Asquino’s evidence was suspect on two grounds: first, the dates he gave did not agree with Angelo Michiel’s account of his uncle’s death, and secondly his examination was part of a general campaign at that time to discredit Cesare. Nonetheless the circumstantial evidence against him is damning: the Cardinal’s illness showed every symptom of poisoning, and Cesare’s campaign chest profited by his death to the tune of 150,000 ducats.
Once again Cesare had recourse to the Sacred College as a source of funds. On 31 May the nomination of nine new cardinals was announced. Giustinian reported on the same day:
Five of these are Spaniards, Giovanni Castelar of Valencia, Francesco Remolino, Francesco Sprats, Jacopo Casanova and Francesco Lloris; three are Italians: the Count of Lavagna, Francesco Soderini and Adriano da Corneto; one is German, Melchior Copis von Meckau, Bishop of Brixen. Most of them are men of doubtful reputation; all have paid handsomely for their elevation, some 20,000 ducats and more, so that from 120,000 to 130,000 ducats have been collected …
Giustinian was justified in his aspersions on the qualities of the new cardinals. Of the nine, only Adriano Castellesi, called da Corneto, was an outstanding churchman; he was a classical scholar, a man of upright life, who had bee
n papal Nuncio to Henry VII of England, from whom he had received the see of Hereford and other benefices. But his chief advantage in Cesare’s eyes was that as secretary to the Pope he was a Borgia dependant, a quality which he shared with all the Spanish nominees: Francisco Remolines was an intimate of Cesare’s, Casanova was confidential chamberlain to the Pope, and Castelar also a papal familiar, while Sprats and Lloriz were family connections. Soderini, Bishop of Volterra, was known personally to Cesare from the time of his mission at Urbino in June 1502, and he probably hoped to have in him a friend well placed in Florentine circles, since the Bishop was brother to the Gonfalonier of Florence, Piero Soderini. As before, the nominations and the scale of contributions were all made by Cesare, who again entertained the new cardinals to dinner after their investiture. And indeed, beyond the obvious financial profit, the nominations could have been said to have been made entirely in his interest. The fact that six out of the nine new cardinals were committed Borgia partisans reflects his constant preoccupation with his future after his father’s death. If he aimed, in his role as Gonfalonier, to exercise some form of permanent control over the Papacy, as seems probable, then a reliable block vote in the election of his father’s successor would be vital to him. The nationalities of the nominees revealed the changing pattern of Borgia alliances: the lone German, the Bishop of Brixen, was included to please the Emperor Maximilian with whom Alexander was negotiating for the investiture of Pisa for Cesare; above all five of the nine were Spaniards, and there was not one Frenchman.
Ten days before the announcement of the new nominations, official Rome was startled by the news of the sudden and mysterious flight of one of the Borgia inner circle, Francesco Troches of Avila, the Pope’s secret cubiculario, a man hitherto entrusted by Alexander and Cesare with their most secret and delicate diplomatic missions. The story of the Troches affair is extremely revealing of the methods used by Cesare in dealing with men who had become dangerous or even no longer useful to him, the subtle, careful pleasure which he took in devising a trap for his victim, and the ruthlessness with which he eliminated him when he had fallen into it. Troches left Rome on 18 May. On the 19th he was at Siena, delivering the strange message to Pandolfo Petrucci that neither Cesare nor Alexander intended to undertake anything in regard to Pisa, which a puzzled Pandolfo retailed to Florence on the 21st, adding that Troches had left for Rome again on the 19th. On the same day that Troches was conferring with Pandolfo, apparently on Cesare’s behalf, Cesare himself was issuing letters from Rome ordering his arrest, and stating that he had left without permission for an unknown destination. Somewhere on the road back to Rome two days after he had left Siena, Troches got wind of the danger threatening him and was panicked into precipitate flight, as indeed it was intended that he should be. Reaching Civita Vecchia on the 22nd, he fled by sea to Genoa pursued by papal briefs ordering his detention, and from thence via Sardinia to Corsica, where he was caught and brought back to Ostia on a papal galley. Reaching Ostia on the night of 8 June, he was escorted to Rome by Michelotto, who placed him under heavy guard on a boat moored on the Trastevere bank. A few hours later Cesare arrived to interview the prisoner, then, according to the Ferrarese envoy Costabili: ‘His Excellency placing himself in a spot where he could see and not be seen, Troches was strangled by the hand of Don Michele.’ Alexander admitted that Troches was dead, but at first said vaguely that he had been thrown into the river at Ostia and drowned, but later, again according to Costabili, he told Cardinal Sanseverino ‘the truth of the matter, saying that the Duke had had him killed, by that tower, in the boat, and that His Holiness has had no part in it’.
As the curious envoys struggled to find an explanation for yet another of Cesare’s mysterious executions of a formerly trusted henchman, Cesare as usual said nothing and left the talking to his father. Some attributed Troches’ death to his bitter disappointment at being left out of the nominations for the cardinalate, which had led him into wild talk against Cesare. Costabili wrote to Ercole d’Este on 11 June: ‘I understand that later he complained even more to the Pope of the Lord Duke. And that His Holiness told him he was a madman to speak like that, and that if the Duke came to hear what he was saying, he would have him killed. And it was through the words of His Beatitude that, terrified, in the morning he took flight.’ However, the most plausible explanation for Cesare’s punishment of Troches was held to be that he had revealed to Louis the extent of Cesare’s negotiations with Spain, which undoubtedly gathered momentum as the failure of the French in the Kingdom became apparent after Gonsalvo’s entry into Naples on 13 May. Ludovico della Mirandola, one of Cesare’s captains, wrote to Francesco Gonzaga that one of Louis’ valets de chambre, sent by the King to discover the Pope’s intentions, had shown Alexander a letter written by Troches warning Louis ‘to have a good care for his own affairs; since His Holiness the Pope was allied to the Most Serene King of Spain, at which the Pope appeared like a dead man’. Yet Louis had been informed by the Venetians as early as 4 April of the Pope’s attempts to make an alliance with themselves and Spain. Whether Troches played the informer or not, Cesare probably suspected him of treachery, since for the past few months he had not employed him on important missions. Troches was known to be pro-French, and as such was not only expendable but, with his intimate knowledge of Cesare’s affairs, positively dangerous. The elaborate plan to frame Troches was probably intended to convince the Pope and everybody else of his treachery, and to justify his subsequent elimination. The ruthless manner of his death was a deliberate act of terror on Cesare’s part, intended as a warning to possible traitors, following the pattern of his action in the murder of Bisceglie and the execution of Ramiro de Lorqua.
As if to underline his message, Cesare had Jacopo di Santa Croce, a leading Roman nobleman generally regarded as a Borgia familiar, executed at dawn on the same day, and his body exposed on the bridge of Sant’Angelo. Santa Croce had been suspected of acting as the Borgias’ instrument in the arrest of Cardinal Orsini, but appears to have changed sides during the Orsini war and to have urged Giangiordano to join the others against Cesare. He had been arrested, released on payment of a large sum a week before his death, then suddenly rearrested. No reason was given for his punishment, and the mysterious execution of the two men on the same day sent a shiver of terror through Rome. Giustinian commented maliciously and inaccurately: ‘Now they are without those servants who used to execute their affairs. The Duke is left with Remolines and Don Michelotto, who await the same end shortly.’
By midsummer things were going splendidly for Cesare. In Naples the two castles had fallen to the Spaniards and Gonsalvo de Cordoba had moved in person to besiege Cesare’s old comrade-in-arms Yves d’Alègre at Gaeta. Cesare’s own military preparations were almost complete, and he had an army consisting of some 600 men-at-arms, an equivalent number of light cavalry and over 4000 foot, including bodies of Romagnol infantry whom even Giustinian had to admit were very fine men. His troops were dressed in his livery quartered in red and yellow, with ‘CESAR’ embroidered in huge letters on their breasts and backs. Matarazzo wrote of him that he was at this time the first captain in Italy: ‘All the flower of the soldiery was with him, since he had all the famous condottieri for him … and he was much followed by the soldiery. And also he was most fortunate and he had so much treasure accumulated and possessions that it seemed there was not as much anywhere in Italy, nor were there in Italy as many soldiers so well ordered in horses and cloth of gold, in infinite number.’ On the political front matters were equally satisfactory. Cesare now felt himself strong enough to throw off the pretence that his conquests had been made not for himself but for the Church, and on 8 July Alexander issued a bull conferring the vicariate of Città di Castello on Cesare and requested the Perugians to offer him their lordship. Negotiations with Emperor Maximilian for the investiture of Pisa, Siena and Lucca for Cesare in return for the money raised for the abortive crusade were nearing completion, and the Pisans had offered themselves to
him. Arriving in Rome on 3 July, the envoys ‘ran like madmen to the palace to have audience of the Pope and the Duke’. In the first week of July Cesare accelerated the pace of his military preparations and over the following days large bodies of troops moved out of Rome bound for Perugia, strategically placed on the borders of Tuscany.
Giustinian, anxiously observing Cesare’s activity and straining every nerve to discover his objectives, noted ominously that, although Pisa and Siena were much spoken of, the preparations were for greater undertakings. Everyone, he wrote, ‘affirms that, when the Spaniards have taken Gaeta, the Pope must reveal himself, and then, on the wave of such a victory, with many troops, with the preparations they are making here, that all will be in order at one point, so that on the spur of the moment they will be able to make such an attack and proceed so far, that not without the greatest difficulty will it be possible to remedy so great an evil’. No doubt he remembered that after Sinigallia Alexander was reported to have said: ‘What has happened up till now is nothing to that which will soon be seen.’ Indeed it seemed to everyone that Cesare was poised for some great coup, perhaps the final achievement of his objectives, to which the intermittent negotiations with Pisa and the raids into Tuscan territory had been leading up. Cesare appeared invincible. Anything could be believed of him. Never before had he appeared so dominant as in this high summer of 1503, acting as if he were an independent power, with the entire weight and resources of the Papacy behind him. Alexander seemed more than ever obsessed with his son’s career, to the point where he appeared to make no distinction between Cesare’s interests and those of the Church. Even the pretext that his conquests were made only for the Church was now finally discarded. As the month of July drew to a close, Cesare’s departure was reported to be imminent, but no one knew when he was going or where. It was officially given out that he was going to review his troops in Umbria but no one believed it and fears of his intentions reached panic proportions. ‘Everything is in a panic,’ Giustinian wrote on 22 July, ‘and everyone hangs on the enterprise of Gaeta, the end of which, which is expected soon, seems to everyone must be the beginning of some novelty.’
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