by G. J. Meyer
Prudent or not—the 1490s would provide reason for doubting that he was—Il Moro had much cause for satisfaction as it became clear that Charles of France was serious about attacking Naples. Now it was Ferrante’s turn to be frightened—he and Pope Alexander as well. Il Moro meanwhile had a bride with whom he was delighted, the lovely and vivacious Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the duke of Ferrara. Since her arrival in Milan in 1491, Beatrice had, almost inevitably under the circumstances, developed a poisonously hateful relationship with the frustrated Duchess Isabella. Still only sixteen, Beatrice became a determined advocate of the use of French power to drive her rival’s family out of Naples.
In the year following Il Moro’s marriage, the resolution of issues that had long put the French crown at odds with the Holy Roman Empire made it possible for him to form a friendship with emperor-elect Maximilian of Hapsburg without offending France. The two worked out a deal. The cash-strapped Maximilian got, in addition to Duke Gian Galeazzo’s sister as his bride, something that probably mattered to him far more: a dowry in the amount of four hundred thousand ducats. Il Moro got the prestige of linking the Sforza family to the highest level of European royalty and also (what mattered to him far more) the promise that upon becoming emperor Maximilian would invest him as duke of Milan, stripping the title from Gian Galeazzo.
Ludovico il Moro was no longer isolated. To the contrary, his position as de facto French agent in Italy, coupled with the expectation of an imminent French invasion, made him an enemy to be feared and an ally to be coveted. Thus even his old rival Venice, wanting no trouble with France, joined with Milan and Rome in the newly formed League of St. Mark and accepted Ludovico as its head. And Beatrice’s family connections now proved their value. Her father Ercole d’Este brought his duchy of Ferrara into the league, followed by Francesco Gonzaga marquess of Mantua, who was married to Beatrice’s sister Isabella.
To cap it all off, Milan had as its representative in Rome none other than the vice-chancellor of the Church, Ascanio Sforza, cardinal since 1484 and pivotal figure in the election of Alexander VI. Comfortably back in his old place at the papal court now that Milan and Rome were allied in the league, Ascanio was prepared to do everything in his power to persuade Alexander to support the French claim to Naples. He was no less willing, if that proved impossible, to join the chorus of voices urging Charles to depose the pope as he passed through Rome on his way to Naples.
Of all the princes in Italy, Ludovico Sforza seemed best positioned to profit from the drama that was beginning to unfold.
12
The Coming of the French
The rush of hungry relatives and hangers-on to Rome whenever a new pope took office appears to have been no less a spectacle in the case of the Borgias than at the start of other pontifical reigns.
This was true in part simply because the family was so large and so fast-growing. At a time when infant mortality rates were heartbreakingly high, the ability to produce healthy babies in abundance and bring them to maturity was one of the Borgia family’s gifts. Most of the Borgia couples of whom we have record were survived by impressive numbers of daughters and sons, who were prolific in their turn if they did not go into the Church—and no doubt occasionally even then. They were a vigorous and hearty lot, ready to go wherever opportunity beckoned.
The family tree was not only thick with branches but maddeningly tangled—a trap for genealogists ever since. As happens in many families, baptismal names were handed down from generation to generation: Rodrigos and Jofrès, Juans and Juanas, Pedros and Isabellas appear again and again, sometimes more than once in a single generation. The confusion to which this gave rise was compounded twice over by a practice somewhat more unusual: the tendency of the offspring of Borgia daughters to discard their father’s surname because their mother’s, belonging as it did not merely to a pope but to two popes, had come to carry so much more weight.
The confusion spread everywhere and has been long-lasting. Even today one sees it asserted that the Rodrigo Borgia who became Alexander VI was actually not a Borgia at all in the male line but a Lanzol (or Lançol). This particular misunderstanding is not only unnecessary but inexcusable, there being no possible doubt, as we saw in Part One, that Rodrigo’s father and his mother were de Borjas. It grew out of the marriage of Rodrigo’s sister Juana to a Valencian baron named Pedro Guillen Lanzol, and the fact that their children bore, in keeping with Spanish practice, the name Lanzol y de Borja. The first members of this branch of the clan to migrate to Rome created the impression that all Borgias were actually Lanzols, and this assumption—valid with respect to all the Roman Borgias except the two popes and Rodrigo’s short-lived brother Pedro Luis—came to be attached, incorrectly, to Rodrigo. It clung to him even as his relatives gradually discarded the Lanzol patronym because being Borgias marked them as people not to be taken lightly.
Some of the Roman Borgias remain mysteries to this day. When Cardinal Scarampo took a fleet of warships off to fight the Turks in 1456, two of his galley captains were named Juan and Miguel Borgia. We have no idea where these two came from, but their name and the fact that both later turn up as administrators in the Papal States make it impossible not to suppose that they were related to Calixtus and Alexander. More strikingly, no one has ever been able to explain the parentage of a certain Francesco Borgia who was a prominent figure at the papal court throughout Alexander’s reign, was repeatedly given responsibility for handling important family business, and would become a cardinal in 1500. Speculation that he was Calixtus’s illegitimate son is supported by no evidence and has to be considered improbable. Perhaps it needs to be added that he was no more than a decade younger than Alexander VI and therefore was not his son. One hypothesis—not implausible considering that he is believed to have been born in Játiva—is that he was Alexander’s younger brother.
Young Borgia clerics found themselves rising even higher and faster after Rodrigo became pope than they had before, and the family’s laymen too found doors opening for them in delightful ways. Some of the most dazzling opportunities were in the dynastic marriage market. We have already seen the lofty unions arranged by Sixtus IV for his nephews and nieces, and by Innocent VIII for his son and granddaughter. By the early 1490s, with Italy in turmoil and a French invasion seemingly inevitable, the desperation with which the peninsula’s rulers were looking for allies had brought that market to a rolling boil.
Pope Alexander, attractive as an ally himself and as needful of friends as any of his fellow rulers, had four especially fine pieces of merchandise to put on offer in Rome. They were the quartet of Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè Borgia, siblings who at the time of Alexander’s election ranged in age from about ten or eleven to seventeen. They had an older, closer connection to the pope than any of their cousins, having been part of Cardinal Rodrigo’s household for at least four or five years, in some cases possibly longer. We have already seen Ferrante, at the end of 1492, send his son to Rome in search of an alliance, offering both a daughter and a granddaughter as brides for Borgias and being turned down. Just weeks later, as part of the agreement by which Rome, Milan, and Venice all came together in the League of St. Mark, Alexander and Ludovico il Moro jointly decided that Lucrezia, still not thirteen years old, was to be married to Ludovico’s cousin Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro and a twenty-six-year-old widower.
It was Alexander’s policy, from which he never deviated except when circumstances made consistency impossible, to seek friendly relations with all the major powers and try to keep any of them from feeling isolated. Thus the creation of the Italian League, because it excluded Naples, became the pope’s cue not only to restore his lines of communication with the excluded Ferrante but to respond, if belatedly, to the latter’s proposal that the Borgias and the royal House of Aragon should become linked through matrimony. The result, abetted by Ferdinand of Spain’s envoy to Rome Diego López de Haro, was a pair of significant betrothals. Jofrè, who could not have been more than eleven
years old, was promised to Ferrante’s illegitimate granddaughter Sancia, then about fifteen. Jofrè’s elder brother Juan, then in his late teens, was to return to Castile to be married into the Spanish royal family. The youngest of the Borgia brothers would not have been Ferrante’s choice as bridegroom for Sancia, his brother Cesare being not only more suitable in age but clearly the brightest, liveliest, and most promising of the young Borgias. But Alexander had long since assigned Cesare to a career in the Church, and though his young ward had not yet taken any clerical vows, the pope had no interest in changing his plans. Jofrè too was in the earliest stages of being groomed for the clergy, but in his case the pope was willing to make adjustments. He certainly understood that Cesare was made of stronger stuff than his younger sibling—that he had far more of what it would take to become a third Borgia pope.
By the end of the summer of 1493, the futures of Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè seemed to be assured. Juan, who had inherited from a deceased elder brother (more about him later) the Spanish dukedom of Gandía, was married in Barcelona to a young cousin of Ferdinand and Isabella (who were themselves cousins, as we have seen). The monarchical couple attended the wedding, though Isabella was skeptical about the bridegroom—presciently doubtful about the kind of husband and courtier he was likely to be. At almost the same time Cesare became one of the dozen new cardinals appointed by Alexander VI, and in a ceremony at the Vatican, young Jofrè was quietly married by proxy to Sancia of Aragon, becoming thereby prince of Squillace in the kingdom of Naples and lord of extensive Neapolitan estates. Two months later, in a secret ceremony, Lucrezia was married to Giovanni Sforza and became countess of the city-state of Pesaro on the Adriatic coast. The sensitivities of Milan, Venice, and the other northern states made it seem prudent to defer making these arrangements public, and in light of the extreme youth of Lucrezia and Jofrè there was certainly no need to hurry. At Alexander’s insistence it was agreed that Lucrezia would remain in Rome and the consummation of her marriage would be deferred even after the performance of a public wedding ceremony.
All too soon it became clear that things were not working out as planned. Juan duke of Gandía, a difficult character under the best of circumstances, had been sent off to Spain in the care of a guardian appointed by Alexander and under a deluge of papal admonitions to behave himself. The first reports to reach Rome showed that he was already out of control. His tactless arrogance had offended the king and queen, and immediately after his wedding he went off on such a wild spree of drinking, gambling, and whoring that it was said to be improbable that he had bothered to consummate the marriage. Sent to Spain to cement the pope’s relationship with the dual kingdom’s royal family, beautifully positioned to reap the rewards of Ferdinand and Isabella’s indebtedness to Alexander, Juan was becoming instead a threat to the survival of the connection.
Though Lucrezia eventually had a grand public wedding, a lavish spectacle used by Alexander to express the importance of the event and indulge his love of ceremony and display (the bride was escorted by 150 daughters of Rome’s leading families), it did not appear to be leading her into a happy or even a stable future. In the weeks following, Lucrezia’s husband became so dissatisfied with their sexless “white marriage,” and so uneasy about the way the pope appeared to be cooling in his friendship with the Sforzas and inching toward Naples instead, that he departed Rome alone and without explanation, sending back an insulting demand for money. He appears to have been an unusually ordinary Sforza, colorless in personality and devoid of ambition, but he was not wrong to be worried. The political landscape had changed considerably since he and Lucrezia were first betrothed, his marriage was losing its political value for the Borgias as a result, and his presence in Rome had become a nuisance for everyone concerned. His departure for Pesaro, by setting the tongues of Rome wagging, accomplished nothing except to create frenzies of speculation and embarrassment. The pope tried to show himself still friendly to the Sforzas of Milan, but his gestures in that direction were thin in substance and impressed no one.
In May 1494, when the Jofrè-Sancia marriage was made public and the youngest Borgia brother was sent off to Naples to take up his new life as a husband and prince, his situation was little less awkward than Giovanni Sforza’s. The problem in this case was that Jofrè, physically attractive like his siblings but scarcely out of childhood and already showing himself to be passive and as bland as Lucrezia’s husband, had been given as his wife a headstrong and recklessly pleasure-hungry young woman whose character had been shaped in the morally lax court of her grandfather Ferrante. She showed herself to be less than delighted with a spouse significantly younger and less lively than herself. The fact that Jofrè was by all accounts a well-behaved youth did nothing to ease her restlessness; good behavior never had much appeal for her. The marriage, ill conceived from the start, was already troubled and rich in potential for more of the same.
As for the eldest of the four, Cesare, in him there was potential not just for trouble but for calamity. Not yet twenty, he was already high in the Church and had been so from early childhood: appointed an apostolic protonotary at the preposterous age of seven, he became archdeacon in the Borgia hometown of Játiva and rector of Gandía not long afterward. He was bishop of Pamplona at about sixteen (this is not quite as appalling as it sounds, as Cesare got the title and the income that went with it, but was not expected and indeed would not have been allowed to actually function as bishop). Only a year after that, upon Rodrigo’s election, he was given the see of Valencia, and by the time another year had passed he was a teenage cardinal.
The problem was not just grossly premature advancement but the fact that, though intelligent, ambitious, educated in canon and civil law, and attractive both physically and in personality, Cesare never had and never pretended to have the slightest aptitude for an ecclesiastical career. There survives a unique early description from about this time, written by the duke of Ferrara’s ambassador to Rome Giovanandrea Boccaccio, who exclaims that though only about seventeen Cesare “possesses marked genius and a charming personality; he bears himself like a great prince; he is especially lively and merry, and fond of society. Being very modest, he presents much better than his brother, the duke of Gandía, although the latter is also highly endowed.” Boccaccio’s words make it understandable that Alexander VI could come to dote on a youth of such promise, but even he, astute as he was, must have seen that this high-spirited, strong-willed, and lavishly talented youth, fearing nothing and no one, was not going to be easily kept on the path that had been laid out for him. He was not likely to be even briefly satisfied with the gift of a red hat, or to see in it any reason to moderate his behavior.
For a while things settled down, and the careers of all four young Borgias appeared to be coming right. Alexander rejoiced when word arrived from Spain that Duke Juan’s bride was pregnant: not only had the marriage been consummated, but an heir to the duchy of Gandía was possibly on his way. Not long afterward Cesare submitted to taking “minor” orders, first as a subdeacon and then as deacon. These were steps toward priestly ordination but did not involve the taking of permanent vows. It was not at all unusual for cardinals to be deacons only, and it was not unheard of for newly elected popes to be ordained shortly before their coronation. One rationale for this was the demands that ordination put on a man’s time and the wish to keep senior Curia officials focused on their bureaucratic responsibilities. Rodrigo Borgia himself had been a cardinal for years before finally being ordained.
Jofrè and Sancia too were giving no great cause for worry. They appeared to be settling contentedly enough into their new life as married Neapolitan royalty—a grandiose life that provided the boy-prince with scores of attendants and his bride with almost as many. As for Lucrezia, she in company with her mother and her best friend and companion Giulia Farnese Orsini, the beautiful daughter-in-law of Pope Alexander’s cousin and housekeeper Adriana del Milà, had joined her husband at Pesaro, presumably now shari
ng with him the conjugal bed. All seemed to be well on the domestic front.
In the wider world things were not at all well. January 1494 brought a momentous event, the death from cancer of Ferrante of Naples. As shrewd as he was cruel, as treacherous as he was skilled in statecraft, through his three and a half decades as king Ferrante had remained always at the center of Italian power politics, constantly in search of opportunities to make trouble for his rivals and frequently succeeding. His last months, however, had been steeped in dread and the expectation of ruin, the fear that everything he had spent his life preserving and everything he had accomplished was soon to be laid waste. He knew of course that Charles of France was preparing an invasion, knew that Naples was Charles’s prime objective, and foresaw all too clearly that this meant disaster. At a less troubled time the demise of such a man might have given rise to jubilation, in Naples no less than elsewhere. But not now, and especially not in Rome. With the death of Ferrante it became impossible for Alexander to continue dancing on a diplomatic tightrope between Naples and Milan—and, beyond them, between Spain and France. Suddenly all eyes were on Rome, and the question being asked was who Alexander would recognize as Ferrante’s successor. It was a repeat of what had happened in the last days of Calixtus III’s reign, with the death of Ferrante’s father.
The most obvious choice was Ferrante’s eldest son, Alfonso duke of Calabria, whom Innocent VIII had pledged to invest with the crown when Ferrante was gone. On the personal level Alfonso was unpromising material. He was at least as objectionable as his father in moral terms; Renaissance historian Jacob Burckhardt would describe him as “a savage, brutal profligate.” But he was already in place as de facto ruler of his father’s and grandfather’s kingdom, understood the precariousness of his position, and was taking swift action to get himself firmly entrenched.