And so, reluctantly, Niccolo did as his friend advised. Although the result was palatable, he did not think he would go out of his way in the future to obtain any of Callimaco’s precious little golden apples. From inauspicious beginnings like these, it would be another full two centuries before the tomato would assume its rightful place in the Italian diet and in the pantheon of Italian culinary culture.
As they ate, the talk and the wine flowed freely. Niccolo filled Callimaco in on the events of his life and even supplied a few sketchy details about his relationship with Giuditta. Since he had never discussed these things openly with her, he thought it prudent not to go into the minutiae of feelings and emotions, to say nothing of future plans and commitments.
Callimaco, meanwhile, had begun what looked like a curious ritual, and he was fully aware that Niccolo and Giuditta were watching him with curiosity. He had fetched, from his endless store of odds and ends, several broad, wrinkled, heart-shaped leaves. Rolling them tightly together, he made a small tube and trimmed the ends with a knife. Going over to the fire, he held the tube in the embers until it caught. When he returned to the table, the brand was burning slowly, a lazy, sweet-smelling smoke curling up from its tip. Then Callimaco did a remarkable thing. He put the other end of the tube in his mouth and drew the smoke in. With a hiss, he let it out like a dragon or a fire-eater.
Both Niccolo and Giuditta were stupefied. “The pleasures of the New World,” said Callimaco, greatly amused at their consternation. “Care to try?”
Callimaco had finally prevailed upon his guests to sample the tobacco he had brought back with him. In answer to Niccolo’s strident objections, he had informed him that the natives of the New World customarily indulged their habit of smoking tobacco after eating because they believed it produced a beneficial effect on the digestion. And although Niccolo had agreed to try it for the sake of his digestion, afterward he wished he hadn’t.
When he left Callimaco later that evening, he was feeling a little nauseous, his stomach a little queasy. After accompanying Giuditta to the convent, Niccolo pleaded illness and returned to the Florentine colony.
Once back in the colony, Niccolo went directly to bed. As he drifted off to sleep, the envoy of the Florentine mercantile republic unconsciously began toting up in his imagination the fantastic balance of trade, as he understood it, between the New and Old Worlds—the one side offered tobacco, the golden apples, and the French disease. The other side took these goods in exchange for the grippe and the benefits of civilization, which included slavery, plunder, and, of course, conversion to Christianity.
As he drifted further off, visions of Callimaco filled Niccolo’s head. He saw his friend on some far shore with a strange, exotic woman. Both were dressed in unlikely beaded attire. Both were puffing on long tubes of tightly rolled tobacco leaves, blowing the smoke in each other’s faces and laughing, laughing, laughing . . .
Abruptly the laughing became shouting and the noise seemed to be reaching an urgent, hysterical pitch. Niccolo sat up with a start and realized that the noise was not coming from his dream. The house in which he was sleeping was filled with shouting, and cries rose up from the streets outside. He ran to the door and threw it open just in time to see a half-dressed Michelozzi come bounding down the staircase.
“Michelozzi, what is it?”
“The pope! The pope’s dead!”
Rumors poured into the Florentine embassy. There was wild talk—a devil in the form of a monkey had been seen crawling into the dying pope’s bedchamber, a gigantic black sow prowled the square of Saint Peter’s, another devil waiting to drag his soul down to hell. Just before expiring, Alexander was said to have muttered, “I’m coming, Satan, I’m coming.” And when his black spirit was finally released, his body began to swell hideously. Blood and rabid foam boiled from his mouth.
Gradually, more credible information began leaking in, although details were sketchy. The pope had entertained Cardinal Adriano di Corneto at a dinner the evening before. Both had fallen ill afterward. The cardinal was now hovering between life and death. The pope, burning with fever, had succumbed after a series of violent paroxysms. Inevitably, there was talk of poison. Toward morning, another piece of news reached the embassy that set off a whole new round of speculation and diplomatic scurrying: Caesar too had been at that fatal dinner.
By the next day, the forces of violence and retribution had been set in motion. Those who had been denied during the eleven long years of Alexander’s pontificate, the exiled, the proscribed, the wronged, came galloping furiously toward Rome from all over Italy.
In the city itself, looting had already begun. The Orsini and the Colonna, Rome’s two most powerful families, emptied the prisons to get the manpower they needed. They sacked the Spanish quarter, burning over a hundred shops and houses. Fabio Orsini, son of Paolo Orsini, who had been decapitated by Caesar at Sinigallia, satisfied his lust for revenge by washing his face and hands in the blood of a Borgia relative he had beheaded.
And where was Caesar? No one knew. That he was alive seemed probable. Immediately upon the pontiff’s death, Caesar’s lieutenant Don Micheletto had sealed off the Vatican and systematically removed over 500,000 ducats worth of coin, plate, and jewels. What Don Micheletto left behind was quickly snatched up by the servants, so that when the common looters finally gained access to the palace, there was nothing left. Their howls of protest and indignation filled the empty, ransacked papal apartments.
Niccolo, the cardinal, and the entire embassy staff had worked feverishly throughout the night, and it was not until midmorning of the following day, with the first batch of urgent dispatches well on their way to Florence, that the frenetic pace slackened a little. It was Michelozzi’s casual remark that they should perhaps go out and join some of the looting that caused Niccolo to take an abrupt leave of his colleagues and sent him hurtling into the streets.
He was in the grip of panic. It was inevitable that the pope’s death would trigger the decimation of the Borgia properties. No one expected any better or worse from the Romans. What had not occurred to Niccolo until that moment was that Giuditta might be affected! She presided over one of the pope’s properties! How could he have been so stupid? So remiss?
To his great relief, the Convent of the Fallen Angels was still intact. Inside, it was business as usual, as a few stragglers moped about, gathering together clothing discarded in the heat of last night’s revels, groaning and nursing their headaches. Giuditta looked a little worn, but pleased to see her lover so suddenly appear.
“You’re safe,” said the out-of-breath Niccolo.
“You came to rescue me?”
“I was terrified,” he said with emotion.
“It took you long enough.”
He had to bite his lip in silent shame, but Giuditta seemed untroubled by his lapse. “I told you we offer discretion here,” she said. “Not many people know about this place. And certainly no Orsini or Colonna has ever set foot in my establishment. We’ll be fine here. Besides, what’s there to steal? The girls?”
Giuditta called for warm milk and made Niccolo drink it to settle his stomach and calm him down. The brothel, like the Florentine embassy, had been a beehive of activity all night long, with contradictory rumors arriving faster than they could be digested and coordinated.
“It’s been quite a night,” said Giuditta.
“What have you heard?” asked Niccolo wiping the white moustache from his upper lip with the back of his hand.
“Everything. We’ve heard just about everything you could care to imagine here.”
“Was it poison?”
“That’s only the first question! And if it was poison, who poisoned whom? And was the poison in the wine or in the peaches? Or was it in the sweets? There are a lot of different versions of the story going around.”
“What do you think?” asked Niccolo.
“I don’t think it was poison.”
“Why?”
“There are two
possibilities: either the cardinal was trying to poison Caesar and the pope or they were trying to poison him. Since all three are sick and possibly dead, somebody made a serious mistake.”
Giuditta continued, “You’ve eaten with Caesar. You’ve seen how careful and suspicious he is. The pope is even worse. Now, does it seem likely they would inadvertently poison themselves while trying to kill someone else?”
“I see your point.”
“As for the cardinal, would he be foolish enough to try to poison the pope and Caesar in their own lair? Do you know how many tasters and guards there are in the Borgia kitchen? The security there is tighter than at the papal treasury.”
“What about the wine butlers? They could have made a mistake.”
“They’ve been with the Borgias since the old days in Spain. They don’t make mistakes. And anyone who’s a guest of theirs brings their own wine and wine butler. It’s not even considered offensive anymore.”
“So if it wasn’t poison, what was it?”
“Bad pork? Disease? Who knows what malevolent things breed in the air and water of this city?” Then she added, “You know, if you really want to know, there’s an easy way to find out.”
“How?”
“By taking a look at the body. Don’t you Christians have some barbarian funeral custom of exposing dead bodies to the public?”
“It’s not called exposing dead bodies to the public; it’s called lying in state,” said Niccolo. “It’s supposed to be dignified.”
“If I can get a look at Alexander ‘lying in state,’” she said sarcastically, “I can probably tell whether he was poisoned or not.”
“You can tell just by looking at the body?”
“Most of the time. Or by smelling it,” she said dispassionately.
“Alright,” said Niccolo. “Tomorrow, we’ll go see the body. Right now, I have to get back to the embassy. It’s extremely busy there.”
“You’re leaving me already? You’ve just arrived,” she said with an inviting smile.
“I have to go. There’s so much . . .”
“I’ll tell you about Caesar if you stay another hour,” said Giuditta coyly.
“What about Caesar?” said Niccolo. “What have you heard about him?”
“Stay an hour?”
“Alright.”
“I heard he’s been taken to the Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“Dead or alive?”
“Somewhere in between. He has his Spanish physician, Terella, with him.”
“What do you know about this Terella?”
“Not much. But they say that, like the master he serves, he’s a man of extremes.”
Extreme was indeed an apt characterization of the methods of Don Terella, and nothing less than extreme measures were required, for Caesar was on the point of death. Racked by violent chills and delirious from fever, he was carried to the Castel Sant’Angelo under heavy guard. The Castel Sant’Angelo was as safe a place for him as any in Rome could be. It was a massive, thick-walled fortress, built for defense. Manned by Caesar’s men, it was impregnable—at least for the time being. Inside, Don Terella was left to work his magic. With all the resources of the arcane sciences at his disposal, he set about his task with industry and imagination.
Later commentaries, no doubt inspired by literary evocations of the Borgia family emblem, insist that a live bull was slit open and eviscerated and Caesar was placed naked inside its still-warm body. In fact, it was a mule. Shivering uncontrollably, Caesar was wrapped in the disemboweled carcass in order to draw into himself its lifeblood and precious animal spirits.
In a burst of scientific, or perhaps poetic inspiration, Terella then had his illustrious patient plunged into a large jar of freezing water. Caesar emerged with his skin blistered and peeling, his face livid. When he lost consciousness and his seizures became all the more violent, another mule was brought in and the procedure repeated. Outside, Rome waited. The impassive castle walls gave no hint of the desperate medical measures being taken within.
The dead pope, meanwhile, was receiving little better treatment than his son. His corpse had been washed and dressed, placed between two lighted candles, and left alone. The cardinals had been summoned to pray over him, but no one came. Choristers were called to sing the offices of the dead, but they too declined. Burchardi, an intimate of the pope and the Borgia master of ceremonies was the only one to attend the body that evening. He brought with him a pair of crimson velvet slippers and put them, lovingly, but not without difficulty, on the swollen feet of the dead prelate. He attached two gold crosses to the slippers with pins and secured them with string tied around the pope’s ankles. Then he sat and wept.
The body was finally removed to a small chapel and secured behind a locked grating with its feet sticking out through the grillwork. By the time Giuditta and Niccolo arrived to pay their respects, the shoes with the gold crosses were already missing. The first thing Niccolo saw were the hastily penned epitaphs stuck to the grating. “A mass of cruelty, trickery, rage, fury, excess, lechery; a fearsome sponge soaked with blood and gold—I, Alexander VI, lie here.”
The body was so hideously swollen that it was on the point of bursting through the loose maniple in which it was wrapped. The dead man’s feet were bloated, his face bloated and black. His fuzzy, purple tongue was so large that it filled his whole mouth and kept it agape. From beneath the ceremonial vestments, a stink arose that even by Roman standards was unbearable.
“It wasn’t poison,” declared Giuditta flatly.
“But the body’s decomposing,” said Niccolo. “He’s only been dead about thirty-six hours, and he’s already rotting away. Doesn’t that indicate the working of poison?
“Just the opposite. Most poisons, like the cantarella, which is the one used in the Borgia household, contain arsenic. And arsenic prevents decomposition. Didn’t you know a thoroughly poisoned body will last days longer than one that succumbed to sickness or old age?”
“Then what did he die of?”
“I’d say a fever of some sort. The decomposition has been too rapid. Something must have been eating away at him even before he died.”
“And what are Caesar’s chances of survival, if he has the same fever?”
“Who can say?”
As they were leaving, Niccolo spied another one of the epitaphs that had been posted on the protective grating: “Here lies the carcass of a serpent who has filled the world with his venom.”
Shortly afterward, the faithful Burchardi came to pay his last respects to his master. Aghast at the disgusting and rapidly disintegrating state of the corpse, he covered it with a cloth and knelt to keep his vigil. At midnight, the gravediggers came for the body. A place had been prepared for it in one of the Vatican’s small chapels—Santa Maria delle Febbre, Saint Mary of the Fevers.
Burchardi watched in silence as six surly workmen went about their task, growling and joking. They freely insulted the pope as they finished the excavations for his grave. When the carpenters arrived with the coffin—a plain wooden one—it was found to be too small. Burchardi said nothing as they ripped the miter from the dead pope’s head and crushed it down into the coffin. He said nothing as they pummeled and punched the swollen body with their fists, beating it, forcing it into the too short, too narrow coffin.
The days following the little-mourned passing of Pope Alexander VI were busy, frantic days, and the machinations leading to the election of a new pope had already begun in earnest. The Florentine cardinal Soderini was an extraordinarily busy man during this interregnum, as was his special assistant, Niccolo Machiavelli. Negotiations continued around the clock. Votes among the Italians and French were bought and sold and bartered for future favors. Still there was an enormous question mark—the Spaniards. They were awaiting word from Caesar, but from the Castel Sant’Angelo, no word was forthcoming. It was a full ten days before doubts were dispelled. On August 27, Caesar sent for the Spanish cardinals. He was alive and ready to play the g
ame. Whether he had survived because of the bizarre ministrations of his physician, Terella, or in spite of them was never decided.
The contest for the papacy centered on the efforts of the French cardinal d’Amboise and those of the vitriolic Italian cardinal, Giuliano della Rovere. Caesar supported the Frenchman and had instructed his Spaniards to vote for him as a block. If the Italians had lined up solidly behind the contender, della Rovere, the election would have been his, but as so often happens they could agree to nothing among themselves and so, splitting their votes, the conclave reached an impasse.
When the white smoke finally rose from the chimney and the chamberlain stepped out on his balcony to announce, “Papam habemus—We have a pope,” he was referring to neither of the two principal aspirants, but to a compromise candidate instead, a sixty-four-year old invalid who took the name Pius III. His primary qualifications seemed to be that he was weak and he was inoffensive to all sides.
The coronation ceremony took place on October 8, and Niccolo attended as part of the official Florentine delegation. With him in the knot of soberly dressed Florentines was his friend and colleague Michelozzi. The city was in a festive mood, as willing to celebrate the accession of the new pope as the death of the former. Cheers greeted the papal caravan as it approached Saint Peter’s. “Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa!”
“Look at him,” said Michelozzi. “He’s more ancient and decrepit than I imagined.”
“You’re right,” replied Niccolo. “He can barely lift an arm to wave to the crowd. The weight of that gold brocaded cape is too much for the old man.”
“I give him a year,” said Michelozzi, and then, “Look there!”
Niccolo turned to see the captain general of the Papal Armies bringing up the rear of the procession. With the ascension of Pius III to the chair of Saint Peter, Caesar had reentered Rome, as in the old days, triumphantly. The pope had placed Caesar under his protection and strictly forbidden anyone, especially the angry Orsini, to harm his dear and beloved son, Caesar Borgia, duke of Romagna and Valentinois, standard-bearer of the church . . .
Machiavelli: The Novel Page 48