by G. J. Meyer
Everything known about Cesare’s eldest brother, Pedro Luis, suggests that he too must have been an impressive young man. Their father died in the early 1480s, possibly while his wife was still pregnant with Jofrè. Pedro Luis, as heir, was taken into the court of Ferdinand and Isabella and became a favorite there, serving while still a boy both as standard-bearer to the king and honorary chamberlain. As a young nobleman in the age of the conquistadores he naturally took up soldiering and was quick to win distinction, becoming the first of Ferdinand’s men to break into the besieged Muslim stronghold of Ronda. Things turned suddenly bad for him in 1484—he must have been in his early twenties—when a dispute over money caused Pope Innocent VIII to excommunicate Ferdinand and Isabella. The royal couple retaliated by confiscating the revenues of all the Spanish benefices held by the vice-chancellor’s family and imprisoning Pedro Luis. It was a petty quarrel and soon patched up, and afterward Pedro Luis was showered with new signs of favor. Ferdinand and Isabella raised him to the status of grandee, conferring the same honor on his younger brothers as they did so. In 1485 they made him duke of Gandía (he having inherited extensive properties in and around the town of Gandía at the time of his father’s death). His career reached its zenith when he was betrothed to Doña Maria Enriquez, a royal cousin and a stupendous marital prize. The girl was too young to be wed, but when she came of age, Pedro Luis was to be taken into a royal family as powerful as any in Europe.
It never happened. Pedro Luis died before it became possible, the place, year, and cause of his death being uncertain. Either not long before or not long after his death his mother Vannozza took the rest of her children—three daughters and three sons—to Rome. The two eldest girls, Isabella and Girolama, were married into the minor Roman nobility, their great-uncle Cardinal Rodrigo serving as their sponsor and helping to provide dowries. Juan, as the eldest surviving son not marked for the Church, inherited not only his brother’s ducal title and estates but his fiancée, the royal cousin Maria Enriquez de Luna. It can be assumed that he also underwent whatever education and training were deemed appropriate to the highest reaches of the nobility. The child Lucrezia had been remembered in Pedro Luis’s will with a bequest of eleven thousand Valencian ducats for her dowry. Cesare, financially independent thanks to his benefices, continued his studies, enrolling at age fourteen in Perugia’s prestigious Sapienza and advancing two years later to the university at Pisa. However impressive his talents and attainments may have been at this early stage, nothing but the influence of Vice-Chancellor Rodrigo can explain his appointment to the bishopric of Pamplona in Navarre in 1491.
Cesare’s precocious advancement was carried to the furthest possible extreme when Rodrigo became pope: he was immediately given the see of Valencia, which Innocent VIII had raised to archiepiscopal status, so that that prestigious benefice had now been held by three consecutive generations of Borgias. When, a year later, he was named to the College of Cardinals, he was not only not a uniquely youthful appointee but not even the youngest of the dozen men given red hats at that time. The one flaw in all this, and in whatever great plans Pope Alexander had for Cesare’s future, was the boy’s glaring unfitness for an ecclesiastical career and his refusal to pretend otherwise. He rarely wore ecclesiastical garb and persisted in a way of life that, though it would have been accepted as natural in any lively and highborn young layman of the time, in a prince of the Church was nothing less than scandalous.
Long afterward, when propagandists for enemies of the Borgias began finding it useful to assume that Cesare had murdered his brother, it came to be taken for granted that he must have seethed with jealousy at having been shunted into the Church while the less able Juan was left free to make war, marry royalty, accumulate noble titles and great estates, and indulge in wild behavior without being pointed to as a disgrace to his vocation. But even if it was at about this same time that Cesare decided to reject the future that had been laid out for him, it does not necessarily follow that he had ever seen his brother as an obstacle to his escape. It definitely does not follow that he decided to take his brother’s life in order to get him out of the way. It does not follow even though we know him to be capable of murder.
As a cardinal Cesare devoted himself mainly to amusements: racing horses, bullfighting, carousing, and pursuing the fair sex. It was hardly to be expected that he would show any interest in the affairs or the needs of the Church—in the work of Alexander’s reform commission least of all. He was drawn to politics, however, and to the winning and using of power. This led him to become deeply involved in the life of his sister Lucrezia. Pope Alexander had already, in spite of his love for Lucrezia, repeatedly used her as an instrument of diplomacy, first betrothing her to two Spanish noblemen when she was still a child, then marrying her to Giovanni Sforza when she was only just barely more than a child. Cesare, in cooperation with his brother Juan while the latter was still alive and then on his own, carried her exploitation a big step further by setting out to undo her marriage. His motives, so far as we can tell, were entirely political and entirely selfish.
This turned into a messy business. What Alexander or Cesare or both wanted—it is unclear who was the strategist in this matter—was a decree of annulment, a ruling that Lucrezia had never been validly married to Sforza and so was free to become someone else’s bride. The pope could have accomplished this by papal bull, simply declaring the marriage to be null, but he rejected this approach as insufficiently credible. He turned instead to the canon lawyers, suggesting that they might find it interesting to consider whether one or both of Lucrezia’s Spanish betrothals might have been sufficiently binding to leave her unfree to marry Sforza.
When the lawyers replied that this was an unpromising way of approaching the question, the Borgias decided to claim instead that the marriage had never been consummated because Sforza was impotent. The beauty of this approach was that it entailed an official confirmation of Lucrezia’s virginity, thereby fully restoring her value on the marriage market. The drawback was that it required Sforza to confess to something that any man would have found humiliating. He reacted in almost hysterical terms, pointing out that his first wife had died in childbirth and complaining that Alexander wanted to end the marriage in order to have Lucrezia for himself.
Thus was born the immortal legend of incest among the Borgias, with Lucrezia at its center. The story would expand over the centuries until Lucrezia was an international institution, a universal symbol of evil, not only a sexual wanton but a serial murderer, a poisoner of the most exquisite skill. In fact she was never anything of the kind. At the time of her final separation from Giovanni Sforza she was nothing more or less than a pretty, normally frivolous girl of about seventeen. She took a natural delight in her life as a princess, her beautiful gowns, and the attentions of the many young gallants who frequented the papal court. She took an equally natural pleasure in sharing center stage at that court with two close friends, her similarly pretty, distinctly less innocent sister-in-law Sancia and the stunningly beautiful Giulia Farnese Orsini, wife of the young lord Orsino Orsini, who was Lucrezia’s somewhat distant cousin by virtue of being the son, as noted earlier, of Adriana del Milà. (See this page for more on the alleged intimate relationship between Pope Alexander and Giulia Farnese and an explanation of why that part of the Borgia legend is omitted from the present narrative.)
Though the years ahead would be heavy with dark events, and though she was quite human enough to be changed by the misfortunes that befell her, Lucrezia would mature and improve rather than harden with the years. If by the end of her life not a great deal would remain of the fun-loving child-bride she had been when first married, neither would she bear the slightest resemblance to the monstrous Lucrezia of legend.
Be all that as it may, when Cesare returned from Naples, he had changed radically. He had awakened to a whole new world of possibilities—above all to the possibility, for himself, of an entirely new life. While idling at Don Fadrique’s court, h
e had become aware that the king had a grown but unmarried daughter. This princess, Carlotta by name, was a descendant of French royalty on her mother’s side, had been raised in France virtually as a member of the king’s family, and was living there still. It had occurred to him that she was a prize worthy of a prince and that whoever married her would become, by doing so, princely. He decided that he wanted this Carlotta. What he had to do first was get himself out of the Church.
15
Valentino
If anything is certain in the story of the Borgias, it is that the man who became Pope Alexander VI was not weak and not a fool. Raised at an improbably early age to the second-highest position in the international Church, left to shift for himself when his uncle died just two years later, he not only survived but went on to flourish through the reigns of four very different, often very difficult popes. Finally winning election himself in the face of powerful and richly financed rivals, he spent his first five years as pontiff dealing with invasion, betrayal, rebellion, heresy, and murder. He emerged from each crisis, even the spirit-crushing death of his favorite nephew, with his vitality and buoyancy unimpaired and his stature enhanced. At age sixty-five, operating effectively at the highest levels of European power politics, he was putting on weight but otherwise remained the same cheerily easygoing, life-loving bundle of energy he had been at twenty-five.
All of which says more than anything else can about the power of Cesare Borgia’s personality, the force of his will. Because from 1498 onward, from the point where he made up his mind that he was not going to stay in the Church but instead was going to transform himself into a great secular prince, Cesare began reshaping the mind and will of Alexander to conform to his own. Ultimately he would be astonishingly successful at this, appearing at crucial junctures to reduce the pontiff to a mere instrument and in the process putting all Rome at the service of his own ambition. It is necessary to remember just how formidable Alexander himself was in order to get some sense of just how much force the younger man projected.
Almost the last significant crisis of Alexander’s reign in which Cesare and his interests were not significantly involved was the climax of Savonarola’s story. In the aftermath of his confronting of Charles VIII at Poggibonsi in June 1495, even as half the French army withdrew beyond the Alps and the half remaining in Naples was destroyed piecemeal by Gonsalvo’s Spaniards, the friar had tirelessly predicted that in due course the king would return and do a proper job of purging Italy of its corruptions, including and even especially its corrupt pope. In this case as always, Alexander was indifferent to criticism of himself personally—it must be noted that even as his condemnations became almost insanely extreme, the friar never accused the pope of having mistresses or children—but the problems created by Savonarola’s preaching were more political than personal, and they were political in two ways. First, Savonarola’s embrace not only of France but of French ambitions in Italy was alarming to the members of the so-called Holy League, originally formed to force Charles to return home and surviving as an instrument for keeping him there. These members wanted Florence to break with France, join them, and become part of the deterrent to a second French invasion. They began to see Savonarola’s removal as the only possible way of making this happen.
Second, as Savonarola escalated his rhetoric, he was no longer merely calling Rome an evil place and the pope a bad man but denying the Church’s authority and Alexander’s right to the papal crown. He was proclaiming himself to be subject to no institution and to no one except God. This was more than shockingly bold in the Europe of his time. It was a direct challenge to the established order, a renunciation of that order, and easily seen as an invitation to chaos. Alexander found himself under growing pressure to respond. It came from the princes of Italy and the princes of the Church in equal measure.
What is remarkable is the restraint with which Alexander responded to the provocation and the pressure. He began, in July 1495, with a letter that, in unthreatening terms, directed Savonarola to come to Rome and explain his prophecies and preachments. When the friar replied that he was unable to comply because of illness and the mischief that the enemies of Florence might commit in his absence, Alexander allowed matters to rest. In the months following, however, Savonarola not only continued to attack the pope from his pulpit but did so in steadily more extreme terms. In September Alexander wrote again, not to the friar this time but to the Dominican monastery of Santa Croce in Lombardy, informing it of a reorganization in which Savonarola’s San Marco convent among others was now under its jurisdiction and that the “certain Fra Girolamo” who was San Marco’s prior was to be ordered to stop preaching until he visited Rome to explain himself. Savonarola, when he learned of this, sent Alexander a letter that amounted, behind its verbosity and rather fuzzy diction, to a declaration of defiance. For him to submit to the authority of Santa Croce, he said, would be tantamount to “making our adversary our judge.” As for a trip to Rome, that would be pointless because “it is now plain that I have not lapsed into error.”
By the final months of 1495 Savonarola was not only mocking the pope in his sermons but explicitly challenging the right of the ecclesiastical authorities to tell him to do anything. He announced that the vows of obedience that he had taken early in his career no longer applied because as God’s chosen messenger he was now on a higher plane than other clerics. It is of course legitimate to argue that Savonarola was behaving heroically, that his actions echo the earlier, similar courage of Jan Hus of Bohemia and foreshadow the later, more momentous rebellion of Martin Luther (who was, in 1495, an eleven-year-old schoolboy in Germany). Such arguments do not alter the fact that the nature and virulence of his attacks, especially when coupled with the wild enthusiasm of some of his followers, constituted too radical a challenge to be shrugged off indefinitely. Alexander’s forbearance was, under the circumstances, impressive. His attitude becomes all the more remarkable when one considers that states including Venice, Ferrara, and Bologna all regarded the friar’s preachments as an incitement to the French to invade and were demanding that he be shut up.
Nevertheless, when on October 16 Alexander next wrote to Savonarola, he withdrew his earlier subordination of the San Marco monastery to Santa Croce, and though he repeated his order that Savonarola stop preaching until he had visited Rome, he promised to receive him “with a father’s heart.” Savonarola responded with enigmatic silence, neither leaving Florence nor, at least for some weeks, returning to his pulpit. The situation hung in suspense until February 1497, when Florence’s ruling council took fright at reports that Piero de’ Medici was plotting a coup. Knowing that Savonarola’s hatred for the banished Medici was no less intense than his hatred for Rome, the council not merely encouraged but ordered him to resume preaching. He did so with relish, throwing off all inhibition in a round of Lenten sermons that went further than before in denouncing the Church as corrupt. “Oh prostitute Church,” he railed, “thou hast displayed thy foulness to the whole world, and stinkest up to heaven.”
This went on week after week, the Church decried as “lower than a beast, a monster of abomination,” until finally Savonarola was telling his listeners that it was necessary to accept what he was saying in order to be a good Christian. Florence’s council, weary now of the kinds of disturbances that it had earlier encouraged and less fearful of a Medici coup than of letting things get out of hand, used an outbreak of plague as an excuse to order not only Savonarola but all members of religious orders to desist from preaching. After all that had transpired, Savonarola’s response could have surprised no one: he declared that to oppose him was to oppose God. When his words failed to ignite the kind of public excitement to which he had become accustomed, he pulled back, sending a vaguely conciliatory letter to the pope and lapsing once again into silence. People who had earlier responded sympathetically to his demands for reform—people as respected as Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, who was known to have a good opinion of Savonarola and had been appo
inted vicar-general of the Dominicans of Tuscany as a gesture of goodwill on Alexander’s part—began to turn away in disgust or alarm. From every direction came demands that the pope do something.
Once again, Alexander did nothing. By March 1497 the friar was calling for a council to install a new pope. He was also writing to the kings of France, Spain, England, and Hungary and the Holy Roman emperor, informing them that Alexander had usurped the pontifical throne and that his position was “opposed to charity and the law of God.” Carnival time brought another Bonfire of the Vanities, followed by a series of Lenten sermons, delivered in Florence’s glorious Duomo, that in their extremism surpassed anything that had come before. On May 12, yielding to demands from all sides, Alexander signed a brief of excommunication. It charged Savonarola with having “disseminated pernicious doctrines to the scandal and great grief of simple souls” and forbade all Christians “to assist him, hold intercourse with him, or abet him either by word or deed.” He resisted making it known, however, until June 18, at which time, predictably, Savonarola denounced it as invalid. The friar also, however, obeyed the papal brief’s order to stop saying mass in public and for some months assumed an ambiguous posture somewhere between quiet obedience and passive resistance.
He burned with too much passion, however, to remain silent forever. On Christmas Day, sweeping aside the prohibitions imposed by his excommunication, he publicly said mass three times and distributed communion. The pope of course learned of this flagrant defiance but yet again did nothing. He continued to do nothing as, early in the new year, Savonarola resumed preaching in Florence’s cathedral (anyone opposing him was “supporting the kingdom of Satan”), thereby not only disobeying the pope but violating a municipal order to confine his oratory to his own friary church. Without question Alexander understood that the friar had become a real and present danger not only to him but to the Church and the security of Italy, but his continued passivity had political purpose. Rome was an enemy in the eyes of many Florentines, and aggressive action by the pope might not only have been defied but have cast Savonarola in the role of victim, causing the city to rally to his defense. Savonarola was on a path to self-destruction, and Alexander had no reason to get in his way.