The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  As it happened, Louis had disliked Bentivoglio at least since the latter had been one of the few warlords to support Ludovico il Moro’s futile attempt to fend off the invasion of Milan. He could, however, see no advantage in allowing Cesare to add a prize as important as Bologna to his fast-growing list of conquests. He split the difference, forbidding Cesare to attack Bologna but ordering Bentivoglio to give up Castel Bolognese. In the settlement worked out by Cesare’s representatives and an angry Bentivoglio, Bologna not only ceded Castel Bolognese but pledged to provide the papal army with hundreds of troops for the next three years and to cooperate with its future incursions into the Romagna. Back in Rome, Alexander celebrated this success by bestowing on Cesare the title duke of Romagna—Duca Valentino di Romagna. With Imola, Castel Bolognese, Faenza, Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, and Pesaro all now firmly in his hands, Duke Valentino was master of more of the Romagna than anyone had been in centuries and was the region’s duke. Louis XII thought he should be satisfied.

  Pope Alexander evidently thought the same thing. Though summer had barely begun, he sent instructions for Cesare to post garrisons at his latest conquests and return to Rome. Cesare did as he was told—or nearly so. He marched his army out of the Romagna, but instead of taking the direct route to Rome, he headed westward into Tuscany, onto Florence’s home ground. This was a bold move, easily interpreted as an act of defiance of the French, and it delighted Cesare’s condottiere Vitellozzo Vitelli and his Orsini colleagues, who had not stopped hoping for a chance to assault Florence. Cesare, however, cannot have planned any such attack—the risks would have been too great. He must have been pleased, even relieved, to be still ten miles from the city when a delegation sent by the Florentine signori came riding up to greet him. Talks ensued, and a battle of nerves. The leaders of the republic were able to take small comfort, under these circumstances, from Louis XII’s promise of protection. The only French troops in the neighborhood were under Cesare’s command, and he was obviously using them for his own purposes, as usual telling no one what he intended to do.

  His objective, obvious in hindsight, was to frighten the Florentines and extract whatever concessions he could while the city was helpless. He knew that the French had more pressing concerns than the protection of Florence—Louis was on the verge of beginning his advance on Naples—and would hesitate to take a hard line with Rome at the exact point where their need for the papal army was greatest. Assuming of course that Cesare did not go so far as to attack the city of Florence itself, which the French could never have accepted.

  What Florence’s envoys wanted was simple: their instructions were to get Cesare out of Tuscany as quickly, and at as little cost, as possible. To this end they offered him a three-year condotta paying 36,000 ducats annually. It would have been a stiff price if accompanied by any intention to actually pay, but the Florentines appear to have had no such intention. It was their turn to be relieved when Cesare, eager to be on his way before King Louis got word of what he was doing and had an opportunity to object, accepted their offer and put his army back on the road. Moving down the Arno valley toward the sea, he freed his mercenaries to pillage at their pleasure. This was customary, a way of keeping mercenary troops satisfied, and Cesare saw no reason to care what the people of the area thought of him. He had no expectation of ever needing their loyalty.

  On June 4 he reached the little city-state of Piombino on the west coast and brought it under siege. It lay on the northwest frontier of Tuscany, so that if he could take it, he would have Florence virtually encircled. He was unable to tarry, however; word came that Louis XII was marching southward, wanted his troops back, and expected Cesare to join him. Cesare had no choice but to obey, but he detached enough troops to maintain the siege. Some of Piombino’s most valuable possessions, including the island of Elba with its iron mines, had already surrendered. The job of taking the city itself was assigned to Vitellozzo Vitelli, one of Italy’s first experts in the use of artillery. He could be relied upon to press the siege hard, not because he was trustworthy but because he was driven. He regarded the reduction of Piombino as a step toward the goal that obsessed him: the defeat of the Florentine Republic and the destruction of the men responsible for what in his eyes had been an unforgivable wrong. To the rulers of Florence, who were all too aware of his obsession, he seemed a kind of archfiend, an implacable and malignant force, and a traitor as well.

  They had good reasons for thinking so. Though at age forty-four Vitelli was as effective a soldier as was to be found in Italy, an innovator in the employment of artillery and infantry, he was also something very like a homicidal psychopath. He and his brother and partner Paolo, sons of the family that had held the little city-state of Città di Castello in a tight grip for generations, had in the late 1490s been hired by Florence to take command of the war on Pisa. They were an improbable choice, being related by marriage to the Orsini and therefore to the exiled Medici, but their military reputations must have made the risk seem acceptable. Their personal reputations were a very different matter. Paolo was a murderous brute of the classic warlord type, notorious for such acts as chopping off the hands and putting out the eyes of captured enemy musketeers because he thought it outrageous that common foot soldiers suddenly possessed the means of bringing down armored and mounted knights. Vitellozzo was not much better, taking undisguised pleasure in unleashing his troops on defenseless civilians, but as they brought Pisa under siege, all seemed well enough from the Florentine perspective.

  At the climax of that siege, in 1499, something occurred that was bizarre even by condottieri standards. When their men broke through Pisa’s defenses, the Vitelli brothers not only didn’t urge them on or lead them into the city but instead intervened bodily to force them back, enabling the defenders to regroup and seal the hole. The authorities in Florence, baffled and infuriated, decided that the Vitelli either had been bribed or had decided to keep the war from being won in order to continue being paid. Paolo was seized and taken to Florence for beheading. Vitellozzo escaped and from that point forward was sunk in bitterness and consumed by his hunger for revenge. His disposition was not improved—neither was his judgment—by a case of syphilis so debilitating that often he had to be carried about on a litter. He was a good enough fighting man to be a useful lieutenant when kept on a short leash, but devoid of scruples and dangerously unpredictable.

  Having given Vitelli his orders, Cesare postponed his rendezvous with the French army long enough to make a flying visit to Rome. He found Pope Alexander in a state of uncharacteristic agitation, upset by Venetian complaints about Cesare’s actions in the Romagna. The centuries-old fragmentation of the Romagna into a patchwork of quarrelsome petty fiefdoms had kept it too weak to be a problem even for neighbors as near as Venice. Those fiefdoms had been able to remain at least quasi-autonomous because neither Milan nor Venice would allow the other to seize them outright. But now, with Cesare pulling its pieces together, the Romagna had the potential to become a serious problem indeed—not least for Venice, and especially for Venice if a Borgia-Este marriage led to an alliance between Cesare’s new duchy and Venice’s old foe Ferrara. Such worries were making a mess of Alexander’s efforts to work with Venice in resisting the advance of the Turks. In May 1501 he had brought Rome, Venice, and Hungary together in a new anti-Ottoman league, but already the Venetians were threatening to pull out. It was becoming all too clear that Cesare’s ambitions might not always be compatible with the priorities of the pope from whom he drew his strength.

  Cesare was in Rome when Alexander issued a bull that approved the Franco-Spanish agreement to partition Naples and excommunicated Don Fadrique, declaring that he had forfeited his crown by attempting to ally himself with the Turks. The charge was true, but it was far from unheard-of for European and even Italian rulers to look to the Muslim world for help when finding themselves in difficulty, and such renegade behavior had never drawn such a harsh response. At about the same time, probably as a way of returning the fa
vor and possibly as the result of an explicit quid pro quo arrangement, Louis XII began pressuring Duke Ercole d’Este to agree to the Borgia marriage. When Alfonso d’Este persisted in refusing, his widower father threatened to marry Lucrezia himself. Ercole was prepared to accept the marriage if doing so would keep Ferrara in the good graces of France and if the price was right. With one additional proviso: it had to be established that Lucrezia’s personal history and conduct were not of such a nature as to disgrace the Este name. As negotiations proceeded and the pope remained almost foolishly eager, tough old Ercole focused on two things: learning as much as he could about Lucrezia’s character, and seeing how far he could raise his demands without mortally offending Alexander.

  Suddenly everything seemed to be happening at once. By the time Cesare and his troops joined up with the French army as it passed near Rome—for reasons unknown, he imprisoned Astorre Manfredi in the Castel Sant’Angelo before departing—Piombino was surrendering. A grimly triumphant Vitellozzo Vitelli was thus able to add most of his men to Louis XII’s invasion force. Yet another new league was formed, this one for the purpose of arranging the affairs of Naples once it had been taken. The members were France, Spain, and Rome, the two kings having included the pope in hopes of casting a veil of legitimacy over what was in fact a shamelessly cynical land grab. On June 24 the invaders stormed the city of Capua, which was under the command of Don Fadrique’s condottiere Fabrizio Colonna. Capua’s people were subjected to a sacking so savage that it has remained infamous ever since, and Cesare has often been blamed. It is fair to recall, however, that the army that took Capua was commanded not by him but by the French general Bernard Stewart d’Aubigny and that Cesare himself had charge of only some four hundred of d’Aubigny’s thousands of troops.

  Fabrizio Colonna fell into the hands of Gian Giordano Orsini, the late Virginio’s son and onetime fellow prisoner, now in the pay of the French. Cesare offered to pay Orsini handsomely if he would either hand Colonna over or do away with him. It is to Orsini’s credit that he permitted Fabrizio to buy his freedom and make his escape; it seems likely that he was motivated less by any wish to save a Colonna than by dislike of his own ally Cesare and the chance to turn a quick profit. Fabrizio, no doubt astounded by his good fortune, fled south to join his cousin Prospero, in charge of defending the city of Naples.

  Don Fadrique, meanwhile, was repeating the mistakes his brother Alfonso II had made in facing the invasion of Charles VIII almost a decade earlier: he was making a stand in scattered stone fortresses rendered obsolete by the invaders’ new artillery. The fate of Capua having showed that he, his tactics, and his kingdom were all doomed, Fadrique sent emissaries to the French in hopes of obtaining tolerable terms. The king and d’Aubigny were prepared to be generous. In return for his abdication, Fadrique was offered a comfortable retirement as duke of Anjou in France. He accepted on August 1 and two days later sailed from Naples to the island of Ischia, from which he was taken to Anjou, where he would live undisturbed for the three final years of his life. His son and heir, named Ferrante after the grandfather who had ruled Naples through three and a half turbulent decades, fell into the hands of the Spanish, now in possession of the southern half of the kingdom. Regarded as a rival claimant to the Neapolitan crown, he would be held a prisoner for fifty-four years, one of history’s numberless forgotten victims.

  With Il Regno now broken into halves and occupied by the troops of France and Spain, the Borgias were once again free to look to their own interests, Lucrezia’s marriage included. At this time as in most periods of her life, Lucrezia remains a distant and somewhat enigmatic figure. There is essentially no evidence of what she was thinking as her life entered another time of radical transformation, but it is safe to conclude that she had no objection to the proposed union. Whenever the negotiations seemed in danger of breaking down (usually because of Duke Ercole’s escalating demands), Lucrezia intervened to help smooth things over and persuade Alexander not to give up. She had obvious reasons to be attracted to a new life in the north—the prospect, which would have appealed to almost any lively young woman in a world in which all power was in the hands of men, of becoming the consort of a powerful duke and the mistress of a rich and beautiful city. It is impossible not to wonder if she also welcomed this way of escaping from the intrigues of her brother and the pope.

  We would have to conclude, if the most vicious gossip were to be believed, that this was the point in her life when Lucrezia’s conduct was sinking to the lowest depths of degradation. According to one famous story, she participated in a Vatican party to which Pope Alexander invited fifty prostitutes who stripped naked and entertained their hosts with lewd gymnastics involving chestnuts, all of this followed by a rollicking orgy. According to another, she and the pope amused themselves one evening by laughingly watching from a Vatican balcony as mares were led into St. Peter’s Square for the purpose of being mounted by a brace of excited stallions.

  Some of the stories did not find their way into print (and may not have existed) until Alexander, Cesare, and Lucrezia herself were all dead. Some, however, were in circulation not only during her lifetime but while Alexander was negotiating with Ferrara’s duke. They were retailed when not originated by the Borgias’ political enemies, among whom were some of the most influential men of the time, and they spread to every city in Italy. Even when the things being said did not provoke horror or disgust, as the ones alleging incest inevitably did, they raised questions about whether Lucrezia was better than a common whore. Duke Ercole found them troubling, understandably. But he had Lucrezia under close and sustained scrutiny and was receiving regular reports on her from his agents in Rome. That he ultimately not only assented to the marriage but bullied his son into it is rather persuasive evidence that his mind had been put at rest by what he learned.

  Which is hardly surprising. Believing the stories required believing other things as well. It required believing that Pope Alexander would participate in the corruption of a young woman to whom he had become little less than a father and whom he loved as a daughter. This is not impossible, of course. But neither is it consistent with what we know—what we actually know—about Rodrigo Borgia the man.

  Foremost among Duke Ercole’s agents in Rome was Gian Luca Castellini da Pontremoli, long one of his principal counselors, by 1501 an old and intimate friend. At a point when the negotiation of a marriage contract was nearly complete, Castellini advised Ercole that Lucrezia “is of an incontestable beauty and her manners add to her charm. In a word, she seems so gifted that we cannot and should not suspect her of unseemly behavior but presume, believe and hope that she will always behave well.… Your Highness and Lord Don Alfonso will be well satisfied because, quite apart from her perfect grace in all things, her modesty, affability and propriety, she is a Catholic and shows that she fears God.” Castellini could have had no reason to mislead the duke and would have put much at risk by doing so. And he was in Rome, where he would have had little difficulty in learning the truth if Lucrezia were merely pretending to be modest, affable, and proper et cetera and the rumors about her had a basis in fact.

  On August 6 a contract was signed at the Vatican. Its terms, when they became known, raised eyebrows across Italy and sparked indignation in the streets and palaces of Rome. Lucrezia’s dowry, greater than the one paid by the House of Sforza to marry one of its daughters to a Holy Roman emperor, included a round one hundred thousand gold ducats; an additional fortune in jewels; a sharp and perpetual reduction in the annual tribute that the duchy of Ferrara owed the papacy as a vassal state; the towns of Cento and Pieve (both of them actually the property of the archdiocese of Bologna, whose prelate was not consulted); and a number of valuable ecclesiastical benefices. Duke Ercole’s patience and cunning, the discipline with which he had maintained an air of indifference as to whether a wedding took place or not, had paid rich dividends. It had driven the pope, urged on by Cesare and encouraged by Lucrezia, to increase what he was offering and
increase it again until finally more was on the table than the proudest duke in Europe would have been able to refuse, especially now that the prospective bride had been examined and not found wanting.

  The invasion of Naples, meanwhile, was turning out to have been a costly affair for the Colonna and their junior partners the Savelli. Both clans, traditionally affiliated with the House of Aragon, had signed on to fight for Don Fadrique, and both had seen one after another of their estates and strongholds fall to Louis XII’s army as it plundered its way southward. When Fadrique departed for France, he left behind his generals Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna, who thus found themselves unemployed and vulnerable. Fearing the French, they moved south until they were in territory that now belonged to Spain. There they offered their services to Gonsalvo, Ferdinand and Isabella’s newly appointed viceroy, who promptly hired them. Their kinsmen up in the Papal States, meanwhile, were left to fend for themselves. Alexander reaped the benefits, sending units of the papal army to probe the Colonna defenses and seize whatever they could. By contrast the Orsini, having given good service both to Cesare in the Romagna and to Louis XII during the descent upon Naples, ascended to new heights of wealth, power, and prestige. A move against them was out of the question, especially as they continued to have France as an employer and patron.

  On September 17, upon returning to Rome from a visit to the south during which he had personally seen to the garrisoning and structural reinforcement of newly captured strongholds, Alexander issued a pair of breathtakingly ambitious bulls. The Colonna and Savelli were declared enemies of the Holy See and excommunicated, and the properties of the Savelli were given to the condottieri Paolo and Giulio Orsini in unavoidable—if regrettable, from the perspective of the Borgias—recognition of their contributions to the recent campaigns and their growing importance. The lands and castles of the Colonna were combined with the estates that had been “sold” to Lucrezia after being taken from the Gaetani in 1500 and that she now relinquished, having no need, as a future duchess of Ferrara, for papal territory. The districts thus made available became the basis for a papal revival of two ancient dukedoms. Lucrezia’s son Rodrigo, not yet two, was made duke of Sermoneta. A mysterious little character who had been christened Giovanni Borgia but would be known ever after as the Infant of Rome became duke of Nepi. Perhaps three years old at the time of his elevation to the highest noble rank, recently legitimatized by papal decree, this child was variously rumored to be Alexander’s, or Lucrezia’s, or Alexander and Lucrezia’s, even Alexander and Lucrezia and Cesare’s. It is not absolutely impossible that he was the illegitimate child that Lucrezia was rumored to have given birth to after the end of her marriage to Giovanni Sforza. His origins have never been uncovered, but the most reasonable guess is that he was a bastard of Cesare’s by a woman whose name is lost to history.