Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  In Rome Julius was of course highly delighted at Cesare’s arrest and showered the Spanish envoy with favours – ‘It is thought,’ Giustinian commented, ‘perhaps to induce them to the death of Valentino …’ Julius remained obsessed with Cesare almost to the exclusion of other business. ‘The Pope’, wrote Giustinian contemptuously, ‘makes a considerable demonstration of every little thing or nothing at all, neglecting that for which he should have a care.’ Attempts were made to trap Alessandro Spanocchi, Cesare’s treasurer; his mother’s house was searched, and his goods and messengers pounced upon by the papal agents wherever they could be found.

  Meanwhile throughout June Cesare refused to surrender Forlì, despite constant pressure from Gonsalvo. The castle was not only his last remaining possession in the Romagna, and as such of a desperate symbolic significance to him, but it also contained valuable goods which the Pope refused to promise to restore to him. On 29 June the Florentine envoy in Naples reported Cesare as more obstinate than ever on the question of Forlì. Then suddenly in the first week of July he gave in, perhaps because he realized the hopelessness of holding out any longer; on 4 July the castellan’s nephew was dispatched to Venice to fetch the 15,000 ducats for the surrender of the castle, and on the 29th the capitulation agreement signed by Cesare reached Forlì. On 11 August, Cesare’s loyal castellan Gonsalvo de Mirafonte marched out of the fortress, riding in the defiant stance of a conqueror with his lance at rest on his thigh, preceded by a herald proclaiming the Duke of Romagna. As he rode out, the heavens opened in a deluge of torrential rain, due, says Bernardi, to an eclipse of the sun and other ‘malign celestial aspects that occurred during the day’. For Cesare, the celestial aspects were indeed malign: Guidobaldo, with tears in his eyes, entered the castle to receive, among other things, his beloved library; Julius’ agents seized the rest; for the Duke of Romagna nothing was left.

  Cesare did not regain his liberty in return for the Rocca di Forlì. Within a few days of its surrender he was put in the charge of Prospero Colonna and, with only a page for company, placed aboard a galley bound for Spain. Julius had won, but his fear of Cesare was such that he could not bring himself to be generous in victory towards his fallen enemy. Although he had promised Cesare’s cardinals to write a brief recommending Cesare to Ferdinand, he told Giustinian that after further consideration he had rescinded the brief, since the King might misinterpret it and favour Cesare too greatly and think of restoring him to his states. Cesare’s enemies hoped that he was going to Spain to answer criminal charges concerning Gandia and Bisceglie which would bring him to his death, but none of them, knowing il Valentino as they did, could be sure that he would not return.

  XVI

  ‘Either Caesar or Nothing’

  IT was ironic that Cesare should disembark at the very same Valencian port, Villanueva del Grao, from which his great-uncle, Alonso de Borja, had set off sixty-two years before, launched on the career that brought him to the Papacy and the Borgias to Italy.

  For Cesare it was a wretched return to the land of his fathers; there was no triumphal reception for Alonso’s great-nephew. He disembarked ‘very poorly’, an observer reported, at the end of September, and was immediately transferred under heavy guard to the fortress of Chinchilla, 700 feet up in the mountains of Valencia. Here, in strict confinement, with only his squire Juanito Grasica to attend him, he had plenty of time to reflect on the destiny which had brought him for the first time, as a prisoner, so near to the lands from which his family had sprung, to Jativa, where his father was born, and to Gandia, where Juan’s widow Maria Enriques nursed her hatred of the brother-in-law whom she regarded as the murderer of her husband.

  The shadows of Juan and Alfonso Bisceglie lay darkly across Cesare’s future as he saw it from within the walls of his prison. Even before he left Naples it had been reliably reported that the Catholic Kings intended to put him on trial for his life for their murders. He cannot have been unaware of his sister-in-law’s vindictive feelings towards him, and moreover he knew that she was a favourite at court, where the sovereigns regarded him with extreme hostility. ‘We have always abhorred him for his crimes,’ they had written to de Rojas in May. Nor could he hope for help from France, where Louis in his anger at Cesare’s last betrayal had stripped him of his titles to the duchy of Valentinois and the lordship of Issoudun. Moreover, since France and Spain had signed a truce over Naples he could no longer play his usual game between them. For both sovereigns, Cesare, a prisoner, the enemy of the Pope, and without an army at his back, had lost both his credibility and his usefulness. And although Cesare spoke Spanish as he spoke Italian, Spain for him was a foreign land. Never can he have felt so isolated as in the first months of his lonely confinement in Chinchilla.

  However, his friends had not forgotten him. His Spanish cardinals, his sister Lucrezia and his brother-in-law Jean d’Albret, King of Navarre, bombarded the Spanish court with pleas for his release. Their efforts at least succeeded in easing the severity of the conditions under which he was held. At the end of October Giovanni Vera received letters from Cesare’s major-domo Requerenz reporting that he had now been allowed eight servants. Requerenz had spoken to the King about his master’s liberation, and Ferdinand had answered that he had not ordered the Duke’s imprisonment but was holding him because of the things of which Gonsalvo had accused him, and when these were proven groundless he would doubtless accede to the Spanish cardinals’ pleas for his release. Everything, however, must wait until Queen Isabella regained her health.

  In fact it was clear to everyone that Isabella, Cesare’s implacable enemy, was on her deathbed, and the news of her death at Medina on 26 November 1504 raised the Borgia party’s hopes that he would be released. Ferdinand had no love for Cesare, indeed he was largely indifferent to his fate, but he was essentially a pragmatist and saw him as a possible instrument to serve his own ends in Italy. As Giustinian, who shared the Pope’s nervousness about Cesare, divined: ‘It seemed to him that il Valentino would be the perfect instrument to upset the affairs of the Florentines, and at the same time to give the Pope such embarrassment that the troubles he would have on his hands would prevent him from meddling in the affairs of others …’ Early in 1505 rumours were current in Rome that Cesare had been honourably received at court, and that Ferdinand intended to ‘make use of his person in Italy’. At Ferrara, Lucrezia received letters to the same effect. Cesare’s partisans in Italy were overjoyed, but it soon became clear that their hopes, like Giustinian’s fears, had been exaggerated. Hard on the heels of the reports of his release came definite news that he was even more strictly confined than before. Cesare, typically, had taken matters into his own hands and attempted to escape.

  The most widely told story of his escape attempt was a colourful one. Cesare invited the governor of the castle, Don Gabriele de Guzman, to join him on the ramparts of the tower in which he was imprisoned. While the governor was occupied in pointing out various landmarks on the horizon, he attacked him and put his arms around him with the idea of throwing him off the tower. However, his famous strength had been impaired by long imprisonment, and de Guzman, no mean wrestler himself, succeeded in pinning him to the ground. Recognizing himself beaten, Cesare attempted with sang-froid to gloss over the incident as a simple trial of strength, a temptation he had been unable to resist. While it might have amused Cesare to test his pent-up energy on a man with a reputation for strength, he would not have been stupid enough to have thought that a murderous attack on his jailer would have led to his own escape. In fact the true account of his abortive escape was probably that given out by the Spanish envoy in Rome, who told one of Isabella d’Este’s correspondents that Cesare had used the more prosaic but no less dangerous method of knotting his sheets together and lowering himself out of the window, but the improvised lifeline broke and he fell heavily into the fosse of the castle, fracturing his shoulder, whereupon he was carried back to his room and kept under strict surveillance. But whatever the manner of his at
tempt at escape, the fact that he tried to do so indicates that he saw a future for himself outside the walls of Chinchilla. Even under the isolated conditions in which he lived, he had still not lost his hope nor his courage – nor it seems any of his effrontery, for in May 1505 he authorized his brother-in-law d’Albret to request the payment of Charlotte’s dowry from Louis XII.

  Some time after midsummer of 1505, Cesare was taken from Chinchilla and imprisoned in the great keep, the Torre de Homenaje, of the castle of La Mota at Medina del Campo in the heartland of Castile. La Mota was considered a maximum security prison, a Spanish Colditz; no one, it was thought, could either escape or be rescued from the castle with its central keep, four enceintes, single access gate and deep defence ditches. The castle stood across the River Zapardiel facing the town of Medina, the great emporium of Castile, where the fairs held four times a year brought merchants, bankers and traders from all over Europe to barter for the precious spices which came from the East via Portugal, and the fine Merino wool of Castile. More important from Cesare’s point of view, Medina was also one of the seats of the Spanish court, and indeed his arch-enemy Isabella had died there the previous November.

  According to a Venetian report, Cesare passed the time watching the falcons from the windows of his room in the keep, symbolic perhaps of his dreams of freedom. For his thoughts, like the falcons, were soaring beyond the fierce walls of La Mota. The circumstances of Spanish internal politics after the death of Isabella had opened up interesting possibilities for him, avenues which led beyond the frontiers of Spain, through his brother-in-law’s kingdom of Navarre, to the courts of the Emperor Maximilian in Germany and of his son, the Archduke Philip, in Flanders. Even from the isolation of Chinchilla he had succeeded in maintaining contact with his friends outside; the document of procuration for d’Albret’s requisition of Charlotte’s dowry, which had been drawn up in Navarre in May, had been authenticated by a signature executed by Cesare at Chinchilla, and carried, no doubt by secret messenger, to Navarre. At Medina, within a bowshot of the busy town and the court, communication between the prisoner and his partisans was easier, and Cesare was soon back at his old game of high political intrigue.

  Isabella’s death left her daughter Juana, the wife of Maximilian’s son the Archduke Philip, as heiress to the throne of Castile. But Juana, called ‘La Loca’, the Mad, was mentally unstable, a melancholic, deeply neurotic and obsessively in love with her handsome husband, whose life she made impossible with her psychopathic jealousy. The Venetian envoy described Philip in June 1506: ‘He was twenty-eight years old, handsome in body, gay and happy, an apt jouster, a skilful horseman, prudent and skilled in war, and capable of supporting all manner of fatigue. His character was good, moreover he was magnificent, liberal, affable, and sweet, familiar with all and opposed to etiquette.’ Juana, said the envoy, although she was very beautiful, of the highest lineage and heiress to a great kingdom, tormented her husband with her jealousy to such an extent that he never succeeded in contenting her. She was silent, withdrawn from the world, never addressed a word to anybody, and, avoiding feasting and pleasure, consumed herself in her jealousy, and never allowed any woman round her, whether Flemish or Spanish, young or old. Nonetheless, he said, she was intelligent, spoke well when she wanted to, and had great dignity. In the absences of her husband she would retreat into one of the huge chimney places in the palace kitchens at Medina del Campo, plunged in melancholy and tortured by her obsessive jealousy. Only Isabella had had any influence over her, and her death aggravated her daughter’s illness. Isabella, aware that Juana would probably be incapable of ruling, had in her will appointed her husband Ferdinand as Regent of Castile, with the proviso that this should be so as long as he did not remarry.

  But Ferdinand was appalled by the prospect of a Habsburg takeover of Spain, implied by the fact that Juana’s son, the future Charles V, was heir not only to the Spanish throne but to the Empire and the Netherlands as well. Moreover his own position as Regent was insecure; the great Castilian nobles had always resented their Catalan King, and followed Philip as representing the interests of Castile. Thus the court was split into two parties, one for Philip, led by the Count of Benavente, the other for Ferdinand, headed by Fabrique de Toledo, Duke of Alba. Ferdinand’s reaction to the threat of the Habsburg interest had been to draw closer to Louis of France. Negotiations between the two powers were carried on through the summer of 1503. They culminated in the signing of a treaty at Blois on 12 October 1505 which provided not only an ingenious solution to the question of Naples but also a young bride for Ferdinand who might give him the male heir he desired and thus turn the political future of Spain in his favour and against the Habsburgs. Louis promised the fifty-four-year-old Ferdinand the hand of his niece, the beautiful eighteen-year-old Germaine de Foix; her dowry was to be the half of the kingdom of Naples ceded to France under the Treaty of Granada, which was anyway in the de facto possession of Spain. Louis further promised to help Ferdinand conquer the kingdom of Navarre, which on his death should go to the crown of France through Gaston de Foix, the brother of Ferdinand’s bride Germaine. On 18 March 1506, Ferdinand married Germaine at Dueñas, near Valladolid, the Spanish Cortes having set aside the remarriage clause in Isabella’s will. But Philip had already declared his rights to the Regency from Flanders and set sail for Spain, where he arrived at Corunna six weeks after his father-in-law’s marriage. On 27 June Ferdinand surrendered his government of Castile to Philip and Juana, with the proviso that Juana should not be allowed to govern on the grounds of her instability. On the face of it Philip had won hands down.

  But Ferdinand, the cunning old Catalan, had no intention of allowing the Habsburgs to rule Castile. His attitude to political trickery is well illustrated by the story that, when he heard that Louis had complained that he had cheated him once, Ferdinand promptly riposted: ‘He lied, the drunkard, I cheated him three times.’ On the same day that he signed the treaty with Philip, he indited a private statement to the effect that the agreement was invalid since it had been extracted from him under compulsion, and that he would never consent to deprive his daughter of her rights as heiress to Castile. Clearly the old fox intended to leave the way open for his government of Castile through his daughter should the occasion arise. But for the moment he was content to leave Castile to Philip while he journeyed to Naples to ensure his hold on that kingdom, which by rights belonged to the crown of Aragon. For some time past Ferdinand had been increasingly jealous and suspicious of his viceroy Gonsalvo, whose loyalty had been to Queen Isabella and not to himself. He again suspected Gonsalvo of acting independently of himself in Tuscany, as he had the previous year, and of entering into correspondence with his arch-enemy the Emperor Maximilian. He contemplated using Cesare against Gonsalvo should the necessity arise, and he certainly did not want to leave such a dangerous weapon as Duke Valentino in the hands of his son-in-law Philip.

  Philip, however, had every intention of using Cesare himself, and his transfer to Medina in midsummer 1505 was probably connected with the Archduke’s arrival in Castile. A struggle then developed between Philip and Ferdinand for possession of the prisoner. Ferdinand sent Don Pedro de Ayala to Medina to demand that Cesare should be handed over to him against the assurance that he would hold him prisoner in the castle of Ejerica in Valencia until his own departure for Naples, when he would take Duke Valentino with him. Philip refused to surrender him, and referred the question to the Council of Castile, which decided that Cesare should remain in the custody of the Council until the decision of the Gandia process against him. Ferdinand refused to accept this and made a direct request to Don Bernardino de Cardenas, in whose charge he had placed the prisoner, to release Cesare into his hands. De Cardenas was tempted to obey, but told Ferdinand’s messenger that if he tried to hand over Cesare without Philip’s consent, then Philip would remove him by force. Ferdinand did not consider himself beaten; he appointed an envoy to make a formal request for the prisoner to Juana’s court, and set
sail for Naples on 6 September, still determined to have him.

  Cesare was far from being a helpless pawn in the struggle between Ferdinand and his son-in-law, and had already made up his mind which party he would support. He did not trust Ferdinand, whose cunning and political cynicism easily matched his own, and who would never allow him free rein for his adventurous spirit. Between Ferdinand and his new ally Louis, who had definitively turned against his former protégé, Cesare knew that he would indeed be helpless, and might easily be offered as a political sacrifice to his old enemy Pope Julius. He was therefore in close touch with Philip’s party at court, and furthermore an active participant in an intrigue with the Emperor Maximilian and his own staunchest supporter, his brother-in-law Jean d’Albret, King of Navarre.