The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Charles departed Naples on May 20, taking with him half of what remained of his army after six months of casualties, desertions, and disease. With him went also the perfect symbol of just what kind of expedition his foray into Italy had been: a vast procession of mules—estimates of their number run as high as ten thousand—each laden with treasure stripped from all the places through which the French and their mercenaries had passed. In Rome, meanwhile, an annoyed Alexander was calling the attention of the Holy League to the failure of every member state except Venice to provide the troops that all had pledged. Only two of the states of central and northern Italy had no reason to fear what might happen when Charles returned from Naples. One was Ferrara, whose Duke Ercole hated Venice far too much to enter any league to which it belonged. The other was Florence, now more than ever dominated by Friar Savonarola, who in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary continued to insist that the king of France was God’s own agent in Italy.

  The whole peninsula was in turmoil as the French retraced the path they had taken the previous year. In Rome, the question of whether the pope and his court should stay or go was debated ad nauseam. The consensus of the cardinals was that all of them should stay in place, and this opinion was reinforced when Charles wrote suggesting a meeting and promising to keep his troops under better control this time. Alexander, however, thought it a mistake to receive the king again, seeing no way to do so without arousing suspicion among the other members of the Holy League. He knew that the immense task of keeping the French troops fed would prevent Charles from halting them at Rome for more than a few days, so that eluding him would pose no great challenge. And so when Charles arrived on June 1, he was, in keeping with Alexander’s instructions, received with full honors and invited to take up residence in the Vatican once again. But the pope himself was not on hand; he had left for Orvieto. When Charles sent horsemen racing to bring him back, they arrived at Orvieto only to learn that Alexander had moved on again, this time to Perugia, well out of the way of the road back to France. Charles was as good as his word where the conduct of his troops was concerned; the now-infamous Swiss were not allowed near the city walls, and the others were confined to their encampments. And as the pope had foreseen, Charles moved out again less than forty-eight hours after his arrival. He knew that Venetian and Milanese troops were coming together in anticipation of a showdown, and that he would be lucky to get home without a fight.

  And so on they went, with speed now the priority and Charles making little effort to maintain the good order that he had imposed upon his troops while in Rome. French marauders all but wiped the town of Toscanella off the map. The Swiss did much the same to Pontremoli. Avoiding Florence and its tiresomely demanding republican government, Charles chose a route that took him first through Siena and then to Pisa, where he was obliged to pause long enough to permit a delegation of the city’s womenfolk, all weeping theatrically, to beg him to save them from falling back under Florentine control. He said just enough to give them hope that their appeals would not go unheeded, thereby contradicting his most recent assurances to Florence, and departed with as much haste as decorum allowed. Something worse than wailing ladies was awaiting him at Poggibonsi: the gallingly fearless and obsessed Savonarola, who had traveled from Florence so as not to miss the opportunity to berate Charles for failing to fulfill the mission on which God had sent him from France. Here we see Savonarola at the point when he is beginning to be tinged with madness, proclaiming himself the instrument through which God gives the rest of the human race its marching orders. The king’s divine assignment, Savonarola declared, had been not to make himself king of Naples, not to launch a crusade, but to cleanse Italy, the Church, and Rome. “You have incurred the wrath of God,” he told Charles, “by neglecting that work of reforming the Church which, by my mouth, he had charged you to undertake, and to which he had called you by so many unmistakable signs. This time you will escape from the danger which threatens you; but if you again disregard the command which he now, through me his unworthy slave, reiterates, and still refuse to take up the work which he commits to you, I warn you that he will punish you with far more terrible misfortunes, and will choose another man in your place.”

  This is the Savonarola who, back home in Florence, will soon be condemning even the most innocuous forms of petty gambling, not only immodest but costly dress, even racing. Who will be organizing the boys of Florence into vigilante gangs that bring to mind the Red Guards of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, sending them out to disrupt card games, confiscate musical instruments and diversions as innocent as magnifying glasses, and either attack or report whatever forbidden amusement they find. In time he will be advocating the death penalty for anyone who supports tyranny—which means anyone foolish enough to speak favorably of the Medici—and the stoning and burying alive of anyone found guilty of sodomy (for which the penalty had previously been a fine of fifty ducats). The carnival preceding Lent will be cleansed of drinking and revelry, becoming instead an occasion for Savonarola’s famous Bonfires of the Vanities—his public burning of great heaps of clothing, books, jewelry, games, and works of art deemed unacceptable. A visiting Venetian merchant will offer 22,000 ducats for the treasures laid on one of Savonarola’s pyres and will be scornfully refused.

  A noose, meanwhile, was tightening around King Charles’s frail neck. One after another the fortresses that had welcomed him on his way south locked their gates against his return, and he could spare neither the time nor the manpower to break down their defenses. The great worry was the high passes through the Apennine Mountains—the danger that his army would not get through them before being set upon by Holy League forces assembling on the Lombard Plain. Once clear of the passes, Charles would be able to make a run for Asti, where by merging his army with that of his cousin Louis of Orléans he would once again be strong enough to repel any attackers. Inexplicably, the league’s commander in chief, Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, held back until the French had put the passes behind them and were able to regroup in open country. Then, when Gonzaga finally attacked, he did so across the River Taro, throwing away all the advantages of having the larger, fresher army.

  The ensuing battle of Fornovo was the bloodiest to have taken place on Italian soil in two and a half centuries, but it lasted only a single hour: an initial clash that after only fifteen minutes left the French in command of the field, followed by forty-five minutes during which the victors ran down and butchered all the fleeing Italians they could catch. When it was over, as many as 3,500 Italian troops lay dead, against perhaps two hundred French. Both sides, however, would claim victory. The Italians would point to their capture of Charles’s thousands of mule-loads of booty, including the souvenir that King Charles was said to treasure most: an album of pictures of many of the ladies whose intimate favors he had enjoyed before, during, and after his brief reign in Naples. In the end Charles would take back with him to France little more than his own skin, still luckily intact.

  The people of Naples, impressed with the courage of their exiled young king and realizing that he could not possibly be worse than Charles of France, welcomed Ferrandino’s return with no less approval than they had showered on his enemies four months earlier. The speed of his return was made possible by support from the Holy League, the seasoned troops that Ferdinand of Spain was sending over from Sicily, and even by Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna, who had signed a condotta offered by Ferrandino almost immediately after their discharge by the French. The army of occupation that Charles had left behind under the command of the count of Montpensier, meanwhile, was broken up to garrison so many small and scattered strongholds that its doom was all but inevitable.

  One final drama remained to be played out. Fittingly, it involved yet another betrayal—another pair of betrayals, to be precise. First, soon after reaching the safety of Asti, Charles worked out a deal by which, in return for a substantial payment in gold, he abandoned Pisa to the Florentines. Next he moved on to Turin, where a s
urprising pair of guests came to call. These were Ludovico il Moro, his onetime host and ally and currently his enemy, and Ludovico’s wife Beatrice d’Este. The result, hastily arrived at, was the Peace of Vercelli. By its terms Charles restored the captured city of Novara to Milan, an essentially trivial concession because the French position there was untenable, and received in return an impressive number of good things. Ludovico abandoned Milan’s longstanding claim to Genoa, thereby providing the French with a solid foothold on Italy’s northwest coast. He also agreed that Louis of Orléans could keep Asti and pledged to support France in any conflict with Venice. What was most shocking, he promised to assist Charles in any future invasion of Italy.

  This separate peace reduced the Holy League to the shambles it had always been fated to become. Soon the Italians were at one another’s throats as before, with Florence, for example, sending out troops to attack not only Pisa but Siena as well. The concessions made by Il Moro and his strong-willed young duchess repaired Charles’s fortunes to such an extent that, his army replenished with freshly bought Swiss mercenaries and his fleet safe at Genoa, he might have found it possible to remain south of the Alps and begin rebuilding his position there. But he had had enough, at least for the time being. Before the end of the year he was back in France, and the first chapter in the long and tragic story that would come to be known as the Italian Wars had reached its ambiguous end.

  It is too easy to heap scorn on Ludovico and Beatrice Sforza for so eagerly coming to terms with a weakened and retreating French king. They could have done otherwise only by trusting that if Charles invaded again, he would not make an unfaithful and demonstrably unfriendly Milan his first target. And that, in the event of such an invasion, their neighbors would come to their aid. They would have had to be deeply foolish to believe that the Venetians would do any such thing, rather than satisfying their hunger for the great breadbasket that was Lombardy. Nor was it reasonable to expect that Ferrandino of Naples, remembering how the Sforzas had abandoned his father, would ever risk anything for the benefit of Milan. With the single exception of the pope, no prince in all Italy had shown himself inclined to risk anything, or for that matter forgo any possible gains, for the sake of a league holy or otherwise.

  Charles VIII’s great adventure had changed nothing and everything. Naples remained in possession of the House of Aragon and under the protection of Spain. Florence remained a client of France. Alexander had not been deposed, and a council of the Church had not been convened. But in the long run other things would prove to be more important. France had discovered Italy—had discovered the Renaissance—and would never be the same. Its nobles had seen what a treasure house Italy was and knew now how absurdly incapable it was of defending itself.

  The Italians, who should have learned that their survival depended on cooperation, instead decided that it was folly to trust one another. Alfonso II, a feared military commander, had run away without a fight. Venice had remained on the sidelines until it was safe to do otherwise and had joined the Holy League largely in the hope of poaching the land of its neighbors. The Orsini had changed sides, the Colonna had changed sides, and Florence and Milan had changed sides twice.

  One state only had taken a stand early and stood firm even as its situation came to seem hopeless. That state was Rome, the steadiness of which was entirely the work of Alexander VI.

  Having survived the first great crisis of his reign, Alexander now found himself able to turn his attention to other matters. That not all such matters would be of his choosing became clear in December, when another of the Tiber’s periodic floods transformed much of the city into a filthy lake, leaving hundreds dead and whole districts in ruins. It was a fitting conclusion to a gruesomely eventful year.

  Background

  THE PATERNITY QUESTION: AN “APOLOGY”

  FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS IT HAS BEEN PRETTY MUCH UNIVERSALLY understood—accepted is the better word—that Cesare Borgia and his siblings were Alexander VI’s children. The story of how the pope fathered these and other offspring during his decades as vice-chancellor of the Roman Catholic Church, schooling them to become moral monsters, has always been the cornerstone of the Borgia legend. More than half a century has passed since the last time anyone questioned it in print, only to be, like those few who had done the same thing earlier, almost completely ignored before being forgotten. It is nonetheless the opinion of the author of the present work, after examination of all the source materials of which he has knowledge:

  That although it long ago became impossible to establish the truth beyond possibility of doubt, it appears that Cesare and his siblings were not—indeed almost could not have been—the children of Rodrigo Borgia.

  That the familiar story of how over a period of some ten years the vice-chancellor of the Roman Catholic Church maintained an intimate relationship with a shadowy mistress named Vannozza, becoming the proud father of a large family while nobody took notice in even the most gossipy chronicles and diplomatic reports of the time, becomes all but incredible when evidence to the contrary is given its proper weight.

  That though there was a Vannozza, and though she was the mother of as many as four Borgia sons and three Borgia daughters (see this page for more on her), she was not Rodrigo’s mistress but the wife and then the widow of one Guillen Ramón Lanzol y de Borja, eldest son of Rodrigo’s sister Juana.

  That Vannozza and her children—most and probably all of whom were conceived and born in Spain while Rodrigo was in Italy—were taken into Cardinal Rodrigo’s care after Guillen Ramón’s death around 1481, and that in the years following all were brought to Rome except the eldest son, Pedro Luis (quite possibly so named in memory of Cardinal Rodrigo’s deceased brother), who remained in Spain to pursue a career at the royal court.

  And that, although much about Rodrigo’s personal life is unknown, it is unproven that at any point either before or after his election as pope he had a mistress, fathered a child, or was involved in even a brief sexual relationship with anyone male or female.

  This is not to say that no such thing ever happened, or that it was improbable considering the times, or that our understanding of Rodrigo would be radically altered if we learned that several such things had happened. It is simply to point out that, in connection with this as with so many other questions, where the Borgias are concerned too many things have always been assumed to be true for which satisfactory evidence does not exist. That having been said, it becomes necessary to acknowledge that the opinions expressed above, being so far at variance with what is generally believed of the Borgias, obviously require defense and explanation. The defense begins with the contents of a deeply obscure work with the intriguing title Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI, His Relatives and His Times, by a long-forgotten researcher named Peter De Roo.

  Anyone who does a good deal of reading in the history of the Borgias is sure to notice, sooner or later, scattered references to De Roo. Such references are uncommon and invariably brief and oblique; where the existence of Material is noted, it is almost always only noted, without comment. A rare exception is Michael Mallett, who includes in the bibliography of his 1969 book The Borgias two references to De Roo, describing his work first as “a vast collection of Vatican documents,” then, in a different context, as a “vast apologetic work in which useful material is often almost undetectable under the coat of whitewash.”

  Mallett’s repetition of “vast” is appropriate: at five volumes, three of them well over five hundred pages long, Material is a physically substantial achievement, without parallel in the literature of the Borgias. It seems unlikely that De Roo himself would have objected to the use of the word apologetic, defined in the traditional sense of a defense of a position and not as an offering of apologies. He says forthrightly that his researches into Alexander’s life and career, motivated in the beginning by curiosity about whether there was anything to be said in defense of a man assumed to be “totally depraved,” ultimately persuaded him t
hat his subject had in fact been “a man of good moral character and an excellent pope.” That is his thesis, and he makes no secret of it.

  Mallett is misleading, however, in calling Material a collection of Vatican documents—so wrong as to make one wonder if he examined it closely. The hundreds of documents that make Material so voluminous were found in archives across Europe, from Spain to Vienna, as well as in a number of Italian depositories. As for the comment about whitewash, it seems a dubious way of characterizing a work in which the author lays out what Mallett himself describes as “useful material” with exhaustive completeness, offering his own understanding of what that material means but also going to sometimes tiresome lengths to provide the reader with every possible means of drawing his own conclusions.

  De Roo’s conclusions are at odds with one aspect after another of the established Borgia myth. This is most strikingly true with respect to the personal life of Alexander VI, starting with the assumption that he was the father of Cesare and Lucrezia plus five or six or nine or whatever number of additional offspring. An answer to the question of why De Roo published only “material for” a life of Alexander, rather than writing that life himself, is suggested by what little is known of his own story. He was born in 1839, which means that he was eighty-five when Material was published in Belgium and the United States in 1924. He writes of spending some thirty years, off and on, gathering his documents. Perhaps he waited too long to begin a biography, finding himself at last unable to do more than organize what he had collected, add his commentary, and send it all off to be printed. In any case he was dead less than two years after publishing the fruit of his labors.